Conservative Motivations and Magical Thinking

Posted on Monday 25 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Recalling how conservative motivations echo Hutson’s 7 laws of magical thinking;
  • Examples of banning flag burning, removing the rainbow crosswalk in Orland, and French Gallic culture;
  • Hemant Mehta examines why the Jehovah’s Witnesses have relaxed their prohibition against higher education;
  • And Frank Bruni and why Trump is bleeding American campuses dry;
– – –

 

My discussions the past two or three days about what really motivates conservatives, especially the MAGA folks, not being principles like the Constitution or even everyday law and order, made me recall a nonfiction book I read several years ago, Matthew Hutson’s THE 7 LAWS OF MAGICAL THINKING (review here). As I’ve noted before, many of these books about psychology and human nature overlap in topics even if they use different terminology. Thus the protocols of tribal thinking are analogous to the naive ways of perceiving the world (Bering) and to the intuitive ways of perceiving the world that Hutson calls “magical thinking.” Recalling his seven:

  1. Objects carry essences;
  2. Symbols have power;
  3. Actions have distant consequences;
  4. The mind knows no bounds;
  5. The soul lives on;
  6. The world is alive;
  7. Everything happens for a reason.

The conservatives mindset essentially incorporates these elements of “magical thinking,” in that these elements are prioritized over secular principles. Examples from today:

AP News, 25 Aug 2025: Trump moves to ban flag burning despite Supreme Court ruling that Constitution allows it

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Frightened Conservatives’ Paranoid Fantasies

Posted on Sunday 24 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Tribal thinking: Jan 6 rioters: good, pardoned; prosecutors following law and order: bad, fired;
  • Troops for Chicago, New York, Baltimore? It’s the revolt of the rubes;
  • With a US map showing the concentrations of blue and red;
  • How Gavin Newsom is spoofing Trump, and the right hasn’t yet quite gotten it. Insight from Tom Nichols.
– – –

At some point you have to stop giving these people the benefit of the doubt, because of their presumed high-minded holiness, since in this country at least we’re supposed to be deferential to religious faith; and call them out for what they are — cultists, driven by ignorance, tribal loyalty, and a quest for power. Certainly not law and order. Or principles.

NY Times, 24 Aug 2025: Reframing Jan. 6: After the Pardons, the Purge, subtitled “In its campaign of ‘uprooting the foot soldiers, the Trump Justice Department has fired or demoted more than two dozen Jan. 6 prosecutors, even as those they sent to prison walk free.”

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Working Definitions, and Examples

Posted on Saturday 23 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Reviewing basic definitions of evil, sin, morality, woke, and fake news, with examples:
  • The Trump admin and MAGA would like to take over all the big cities;
  • How the far-right agenda is entering the mainstream;
  • Do Republicans actually believe in anything? Apparently not the Constitution, or law and order;
  • David Brooks pities sports fan who have to endure progressive TV ads;
  • And MAGA solutions for unruly kids, adulterers, and LBGTQs.
– – –

 

In the spirit of MAGA, let’s suggest a few more simplistic definitions to characterize the political/cultural divide.

We already have, from yesterday’s post:

Evil is that which would kill us, or disturb the capacity for the tribe’s survival.

So then, Sin is the committing of any act which might be construed as evil, even very indirectly.

(Like all morality, it’s relative to circumstances and viewpoint. There’s no fixed list of things that are good or evil, moral or not.)

Anything that doesn’t support or conform to the (simplistic) worldview of the conservative tribe is dismissed as ‘woke’ or ‘fake news.’ Or ‘evil.’

Just glance through the news and see how well this thumbnail definitions works. The matching to these examples is left as an exercise for the reader.

\\

The Oregonian, 22 Aug 2025: Donald Trump Jr. calls Portland, Seattle ‘craphole cities,’ hints at federal takeover of police forces (via)
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Secular Values, and Reality as Evil

Posted on Friday 22 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Two thematic follow-ups to yesterday’s post.

OnlySky, Bruce Ledewitz, 20 Aug 2025: Can people thrive in a secular society?, subtitled “Are secular values the cause of our malaise?”

Yesterday’s post extended a theme on this blog concerning a range or divergence in human nature that I’ve previously characterized (following Lakoff) as conservative vs. progressive. Red vs. blue, tradition vs. change, and so on. Even, emotion vs. logic. That’s the simplex take. The complex take is every single person is a mix of various positions along multiple dimensions of human nature, and it requires such mixes and blends for optimal survival, given that circumstances change. Iron everyone down to a single traditional way of thinking, as the current administration and MAGA are trying to do, and society will suffer in the long run. Attacking diversity is self-defeating, if only because other societies that value diversity will then prevail.

Yet there are many who think traditional values are essential and secular values are actively harmful. This piece at OnlySky responds to a recent piece by David Brooks on that idea.
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Everything Old and Simple; Conservatives, the Conceptual Ceiling, and Cognitive Dissonance

Posted on Thursday 21 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Conceptual ceiling and conservatives;
  • Thoughts about how humanity might survive, via deliberate cognitive dissonance: “One mindset to maintain the tribe and ensure near-term survival; another to solve problems that threaten long-term survival.” Which one is right? Both are, in different contexts.
  • Can people thrive in a secular society?;
  • Items about the anti-vaxx playbook; Trump and the Smithsonian; Trump and heaven; Gavin Newsom’s trolls; and several others.
– – –

 

I’ve written before about how maybe humanity may have hit a sort of conceptual ceiling, where not enough of us are able, or willing, to understand the complexities of the modern world and would prefer to turn the clock back to simpler ways of life, or reject reality entirely in favor of the local mythology or religion.

But today’s thought, distilling dozens of examples of political behavior every day, is that — of course, since humanity is a spectrum along many dimensions and not everyone is the same — is that many people have already hit this ceiling. To them, everything old and simple is better than anything new and complex. Raw milk, good. mRNA vaccine, or any vaccines at all, bad. The Nazis were the good guys after all, because they hated the same icky people, more or less, that MAGA and ICE hate. Our authoritarian president is preferred by millions who claim to venerate the principles of the Constitution, but by doing so show that they don’t. The flat earth is intuitive–just look out the window. Don’t believe anything you can’t see with your own eyes. Climate change is unreal, because the evidence is too complex to understand, and anyway, father god will take care of us.

These are the conservatives.

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Liberal and Conservative Goals

Posted on Wednesday 20 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Why conservatives inculcate young thinkers, and liberals don’t (need to);
  • Christian pastors in Kentucky want to shield children from LGBTQ books; why not shield them from the Bible? Which influence is worse? It depends on your goals, which are driven by evolution;
  • Thoughts about what clear thinking gets you;
  • The Onion [a satire site!] about a conservative “proudly frightened of everything.”
– – –

Now why would this be?

Vox, Zack Beauchamp, 20 Aug 2025: How conservatives help their young thinkers — and why liberals don’t, subtitled “Liberalism has a serious pipeline problem.”

Let me guess before even reading the article. It’s the flip side of “reality has a liberal bias.” Ideology, including religion, must be taught; it is not out there in the objective world to be discovered. Thus, the children need training, or inculcation. Get them while they’re young.

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Eugene Burdick & Harvey Wheeler: FAIL-SAFE

Posted on Wednesday 20 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

(First published 1962. Edition show here: HarperCollins/Ecco, trade paperback, 1999, 286pp.)

Here’s another book that begs categorization; is it really science fiction? I’ve grouped this book with two previously discussed, Pat Frank’s ALAS, BABYLON and Nevil Shute’s ON THE BEACH, because each involves nuclear war in some fashion. And since nuclear war is about the most drastic kind of change that the human race might ever experience, it fits into our broad take of science fiction being about the effects of change on the human race.

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Further Reports on the Current Crisis

Posted on Tuesday 19 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Robert Reich on groveling and inept and unprincipled people;
  • Heather Cox Richardson on our idiot-child president;
  • By wanting to banish mail-in ballots nationwide, Trump attacks states’ rights, a conservative principle for centuries;
  • On the same theme, Thomas B. Edsall looks at the mind-boggling intrusiveness of the Trump administration;
  • Similarly, a demand in Texas that all citizens stand for Christian prayers; a charge that naturalized citizens “are not Americans”; a complaint that teaching that slavery existed (and was bad) is “woke”; and two know-nothings agree that science says nothing about climate change;
  • The Week wonders if medical science will survive RFK Jr., with comments by Andrew Egger.
    – – –

     

    This can’t go on indefinitely; it hasn’t before.

    Robert Reich, 18 Aug 2025: Why Trump will fail, subtitled “The iron law of grovelers and those to whom they grovel”
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The Ultimate Cognitive Bias, and Political News

Posted on Monday 18 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Steve Stewart-Williams about an attempt to identify the one cognitive bias to rule them all: the confirmation bias;
  • Political notes: How Trump claims victory yet again; how even Fox News noticed that not much was accomplished at that summit;
  • And Salon’s Amanda Marcotte on why MAGA calls Trump “Daddy”.
– – –

Via Jerry Coyne:

Steve Stewart-Williams, The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter, 9 Aug 2025: One Bias to Rule Them All, subtitled “All cognitive biases = one of a handful of fundamental beliefs + confirmation bias”

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Distracted by Politics, Again

Posted on Sunday 17 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Eventually I’ll get to more serious subjects. Though arguably politics is the most serious subject, because politics is about psychology and that involves how humans perceive and believe everything else. But there is a reality beneath politics (or should it be ‘beyond’), and even psychology, which is what I’m trying to get at.

  • Summaries and takes on the Trump/Putin meeting in Alaska. No one thinks it went well, except for Trump and MAGA and Fox News;
  • A piece about Trump’s speaking style: “many such cases”; “many people are saying this” and so on;
  • Gavin Newsom mocks Trump’s full-caps posts;
  • And a late Arvo Pärt piece: Symphony #4.
– – –

 

For the record. Trump went to Alaska this past weekend to meet Putin, to discuss the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Trump had two goals. He got neither. He came home and declared victory, the meeting a 10 on a scale of 10. As he does.

NY Times, news analysis by Peter Baker, 16 Aug 2025 (on today’s front page): Trump Bows to Putin’s Approach on Ukraine: No Cease-Fire, Deadlines or Sanctions

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