Sounds to me like Mate is currying favor with the left authoritarians. Funny how that works! :-D
And I'll add: "We each have a Nazi within" is utter bull. That sort of conviction goes right along with "everybody is good deep down." These sweeping nonsensical statements seem to be linked to the profound cultural dysfunction we are witnessing these days.
Yes, Mate seems to be very focussed on staying in the far left's good graces lately ... which is too bad because his early work had a broad appeal and insights and he has (or had?) fans from across the political spectrum. I was surprised by this particular essay though, and even wonder if something is going on with him. He's a smart man, and these are obvious mistakes and oversights.
Agreed re "Nazi within" -- there are many people who grew up in extremely abusive circumstances who don't become abusive, controlling, or authoritarian themselves. But if I recall correctly that was pulled from another author he quoted, not Gabor himself, and he probably didn't write the headline.
Sigh, yeah, maybe. I've read quite a few of his books though and he tends to lean more on anecdotes than scientific literature and he's a family physician, not specifically trained in neuroscience or psychology, so I think it's possible he's unfamiliar with the research. But he also clearly didn't bother to check whether his assertions were correct, and could have done so in like an hour.
A more generous reading of "we each have a Nazi within" is that the need to punish, dominate, hate, and blame the outgroup is on a spectrum. Some people have it more than others, and there might be a reason for it rooted in genetics and early childhood experiences, which also makes high scoring people similar in some other traits. Same with "everyone is good deep down": whatever traits we consider "good" are on a spectrum, such as ingroup altruism, bravery, kindness, etc. I would add "we are all virtue signalers", with the same wanting to curry favor with our ingroup, but some more than others. And another variable is value tradeoffs: some people care much more about truth than fitting into one's ingroup, so they are less likely to virtue signal than people who care more about fitting in than truth. Another tradeoff that conservatives seem to make more than liberals is the amount of resources going to underdogs vs the ones better off: liberals favor the underdog almost no matter what, even if giving resources to them means there are less resources to the better off who might thus suffer more. So, according to liberals, giving resources to a death cult is the thing to do if the death cult is an underdog, even if doing so means the death cult kills many people and destroys many lives. Or, according to liberals, giving finite resources to the mentally ill is the thing to do, even though by doing so the mentally healthy are going to suffer more. Conservatives seem to be more aware of finite resources and the tradeoffs that have to be made within those constraints. But extreme conservatives (e.g. Nazis) are also not good at tradeoffs, willing to give up some social cohesion and human lives by disposing of the mentally ill, and they are not always correct in their assessment of who is mentally ill.
> And I'll add: "We each have a Nazi within" is utter bull.
Especially since he twists it into "and when I say everybody, I mean except us good people on the left of the political spectrum".
The very opposite of the actual wisdom going "The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being" (which implies that both right and left authoritarianism can exist, and of course its author had actual experience with the latter).
I believe childhood trauma can also lead to pathologically naive people who just want to help the "poor victims" without noticing whether those "poor victims" are actually abusive. Speaking from personal experience.
Indeed! The reason public life has been taken over by the personality-disordered is in part due to the fact that enough people on the opposite part of the spectrum (the neurotics) are enabling and submitting.
It may be neurotics as well but for me being “nice” and “supportive” and believing having any needs was the greatest sin and the greatest good was to be there for others--a belief deeply programmed into me as a child--was at the root of my naivety.
When he claims that we all have a hateful extremist inside of us, I can nod and express solidarity with shared human nature. But when he tries to connive a political dictate using my head-nod to massage my will to his partisan needs and some kind of agreement that Trump is the real authoritarian, it makes me want to vilify Mate, instead.
It’s frustrating that some people’s political beliefs can cloud their judgements and lead them to totally bizarre conclusions. I like his videos on how abuse affects us. But, yeah, I’ve noticed people on the left tend to fit into the Drama Triangle more than those on the “right” politically speaking. People on the left look to the government as their “Savior” to protect them, and that’s because of early childhood drama games going on in their families. People don’t learn that as much in families that believe in taking personal responsibility which comes out of those Libertarian households or more Republican ones.
If you learn to take personal responsibility and don’t learn to wait for someone to save you, then you don’t long to control others (which is the authoritarian desire).
Great piece Meghan. Enjoyed it. I've found some value in Mate, but find him increasingly annoying and divorced from reality as time goes on. The Trump as Hitler comparison is so preposterous and cliche (and embarrassing) that even now, after hearing it so many times, it still shocks me that anyone with an IQ over 70 would continue to parrot it..
We are trying to disentangle all this with surveys right now! Mate is not a scientist, and he is not to be taken seriously in any scientific pronouncements.
Ultimately, we would like to have a model that goes beyond correlations, that is causal (but not deterministic), relying on both genetics, developmental experiences, and possibly later life-changing experiences. And also some things which might be partially random, like "my ingroup adopted this policy, sometimes in opposition to the outgroup, so I will too, but the initial policy could have been reversed". We would like to understand more precisely than Haidt and Moral Foundations theory what makes for people's political view (which is more complex than a one dimensional spectrum, especially in the US and Canada), and such phenomena as the horseshoe effect that you alluded to, where certain traits are more similar between left/right extremes than between left extremes and left moderates, or right extremes and right moderates.
“We used physical punishment in childhood as a marker of dysfunctional family environment,” Milburn said. -- What does he mean by physical punishment? I think it would be a mistake to equate spanking with a dysfunctional family environment when there is research showing emotional abuse can have a greater negative impact. If he's talking about severe beatings then this makes more sense but it's not really worded that way.
This is also kind of racist given that there are cultural differences in the use of physical punishment for disciplining children and white parents are less likely to use spanking when compared to non-white parents.
Thanks for this, good to see more balanced approach to his work. TBH this is classic guardian so I’m not surprised, only sad the readers will only see that one perspective.
I think it was last year when he did a recorded therapy session with prince harry and my alarm went off. Very unethical, but as you mention, he is not actually a therapist.
I generally find statements such as "X thing mediates Y behavior" to be unsatisfactory, because they provide no model to trace how different factors interact and co-exist to produce certain effects. This is particularly true of models that try to make the brain this static structure, from which you can isolate different parts and make conclusions about the whole organism.
In general, I think it's helpful to delineate between relational strategies and temperament/personality. Temperament/personality has more do with the endocrinology and neurology of an individual across the whole body – thus including digestion, metabolism, hormone profiles, etc.
Relational strategies are a lot more modular and in some sense are 'built on top' of personality and temperament. I consider things like narcissism and psychopathy to fit the category of relational strategies much more than inherent personality and temperament, e.g., being a psychopathic professor, banker, mechanic, or artist all look very different.
I'm not sure I quite understand where 'authoritarianism' fits into that delineation and, thus, I've never been able to find a good answer on what the concept of 'authoritarianism' is supposed to capture. It seems that a lot of scientists want to characterize authoritarianism as temperamental or relational depending who they want to ostracize politically.
You mention a possible distinction between 'authoritarian' and 'totalitarian' in your footnote, the latter perhaps being an explicit political stance, but I'm not even sure what that term captures as compared to say, 'dictatorial'. Does the totalitarian wish to be dictator himself or does he just wish for someone else to be a dictator that treats him favorably?
There is a construct called Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) that seems to correlate with Low Openness and Low Agreeableness on the Big 5 Scale. But, this says nothing about how a given individual who scores high on SDO would orient in a political/interpersonal sense. For the longest time, it was assumed that SDO correlated highly with Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA), but if you look more deeply, that link is a bit more tenuous, in my opinion.
A high-SDO individual with high conscientiousness will probably end up being your run-of-the-mill conservative. Whether that means he becomes a trains-run-on -time fascist versus a dogmatically loyal capitalist neoliberal comes down to circumstances, social ecology, relationship strategy, ability to user power directly, etc.
Similarly, a high-SDO individual with high neuroticism is potentially more likely to be leftish. That means he could end up being a Stalin-eqsue secret police media head versus a school-board principal slavishly devoted to Civil Rights policies; again, depending on a billion other factors.
Consider also that relational strategies can emerge, develop, or disappear based on how easily a person is able to naturally express the desires and idiosyncrasies of their temperament – and that the expression exists on a spectrum. Someone who can show up as who they are 'directly' and 'uninhibited' has uncomplicated relational strategies.
Someone who is more on the repressed side of temperamental expression will pick up strategies that are more compensatory and shadow-like. (That's, for example, why someone like Hitler who loved animals became such a psycho. Our mutual friend Johnathan wrote that whole four-part series on how the Germanic spirit, due to gut issues, possess the propensity to devolve into that black-and-white approach.)
All of this food for thought just to say: thank you for calling out incomplete, or poorly conducted 'science', especially when it takes certain labels for granted. Good science should point at underlying realities in a dynamic and predictive way, regardless of historical contingencies.
>Research has also found that liberals—and in particular those with extreme left-wing views—have higher rates of diagnosed mental illness than conservatives.
Of course there this giant confounding factor that conservatives are much, much less likely to get diagnosed. I mean for them, mental illness is basically an insult or an intolerable weakness, or the result of poor character. It would be useful to look at the usual coping mechanisms: alcohol, recreational drugs, domestic violence etc.
Oh, crud, did I not include that point? I know I acknowledged it when I left a comment on Dr. Mate's Instagram, but I wrote this essay fairly quickly and it's not as polished as some of my other work. Yes, you're absolutely right, liberals are far more likely to seek mental health care than conservatives and that's a huge confounding factor. But available evidence still suggests conservatives are happier / more mentally well overall than liberals.
I love Mate`, but he has a kind of monomania around trauma as well as a very limited understanding of politics, economics, and related phenomena. I therefore find that, no matter how deeply satisfying I find his passion and compassion, I have to take his conclusions and reasoning with a salt lick. Alas.
I enjoyed reading this, interesting that he did not choose the behaviour/cognitive style, such as dichotomous thinking to address, and chose a part of the brain.
I have heard Andrew Hartz identify the psychological construct as ‘splitting’, when people can’t entertain anything other than either/or.
I think if someone’s thinking was so rigid that everything was either/or, the content of their thinking would be less relevant than their lack of flexibility.
A terrific piece. Thanks for your take on Mate's conclusions, including all the research to show his faulty assumptions. I just want to add that human behavior is far more complex than the sum of its biological parts. With all our "advanced knowledge," we still can't possibly understand the miraculous combination of body, mind and spirit.
Sounds to me like Mate is currying favor with the left authoritarians. Funny how that works! :-D
And I'll add: "We each have a Nazi within" is utter bull. That sort of conviction goes right along with "everybody is good deep down." These sweeping nonsensical statements seem to be linked to the profound cultural dysfunction we are witnessing these days.
Yes, Mate seems to be very focussed on staying in the far left's good graces lately ... which is too bad because his early work had a broad appeal and insights and he has (or had?) fans from across the political spectrum. I was surprised by this particular essay though, and even wonder if something is going on with him. He's a smart man, and these are obvious mistakes and oversights.
Agreed re "Nazi within" -- there are many people who grew up in extremely abusive circumstances who don't become abusive, controlling, or authoritarian themselves. But if I recall correctly that was pulled from another author he quoted, not Gabor himself, and he probably didn't write the headline.
Not mistakes. Virtue signals. :-(
Sigh, yeah, maybe. I've read quite a few of his books though and he tends to lean more on anecdotes than scientific literature and he's a family physician, not specifically trained in neuroscience or psychology, so I think it's possible he's unfamiliar with the research. But he also clearly didn't bother to check whether his assertions were correct, and could have done so in like an hour.
I follow some loony lefties and they love him.
Nuff said. :-)
Sounds pretty cringe to me, the whole article...
It's a disaster!
But I should add, I have not read anything by him, so I am running on vibes here....
A more generous reading of "we each have a Nazi within" is that the need to punish, dominate, hate, and blame the outgroup is on a spectrum. Some people have it more than others, and there might be a reason for it rooted in genetics and early childhood experiences, which also makes high scoring people similar in some other traits. Same with "everyone is good deep down": whatever traits we consider "good" are on a spectrum, such as ingroup altruism, bravery, kindness, etc. I would add "we are all virtue signalers", with the same wanting to curry favor with our ingroup, but some more than others. And another variable is value tradeoffs: some people care much more about truth than fitting into one's ingroup, so they are less likely to virtue signal than people who care more about fitting in than truth. Another tradeoff that conservatives seem to make more than liberals is the amount of resources going to underdogs vs the ones better off: liberals favor the underdog almost no matter what, even if giving resources to them means there are less resources to the better off who might thus suffer more. So, according to liberals, giving resources to a death cult is the thing to do if the death cult is an underdog, even if doing so means the death cult kills many people and destroys many lives. Or, according to liberals, giving finite resources to the mentally ill is the thing to do, even though by doing so the mentally healthy are going to suffer more. Conservatives seem to be more aware of finite resources and the tradeoffs that have to be made within those constraints. But extreme conservatives (e.g. Nazis) are also not good at tradeoffs, willing to give up some social cohesion and human lives by disposing of the mentally ill, and they are not always correct in their assessment of who is mentally ill.
> And I'll add: "We each have a Nazi within" is utter bull.
Especially since he twists it into "and when I say everybody, I mean except us good people on the left of the political spectrum".
The very opposite of the actual wisdom going "The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being" (which implies that both right and left authoritarianism can exist, and of course its author had actual experience with the latter).
I believe childhood trauma can also lead to pathologically naive people who just want to help the "poor victims" without noticing whether those "poor victims" are actually abusive. Speaking from personal experience.
Absolutely, 100%.
Indeed! The reason public life has been taken over by the personality-disordered is in part due to the fact that enough people on the opposite part of the spectrum (the neurotics) are enabling and submitting.
It may be neurotics as well but for me being “nice” and “supportive” and believing having any needs was the greatest sin and the greatest good was to be there for others--a belief deeply programmed into me as a child--was at the root of my naivety.
That's what George Simon terms the neurotic part of the spectrum. Me too.
Jordan Peterson talks about some of us being too agreeable, and getting hurt thereby. So true.
When he claims that we all have a hateful extremist inside of us, I can nod and express solidarity with shared human nature. But when he tries to connive a political dictate using my head-nod to massage my will to his partisan needs and some kind of agreement that Trump is the real authoritarian, it makes me want to vilify Mate, instead.
It’s frustrating that some people’s political beliefs can cloud their judgements and lead them to totally bizarre conclusions. I like his videos on how abuse affects us. But, yeah, I’ve noticed people on the left tend to fit into the Drama Triangle more than those on the “right” politically speaking. People on the left look to the government as their “Savior” to protect them, and that’s because of early childhood drama games going on in their families. People don’t learn that as much in families that believe in taking personal responsibility which comes out of those Libertarian households or more Republican ones.
If you learn to take personal responsibility and don’t learn to wait for someone to save you, then you don’t long to control others (which is the authoritarian desire).
Same. I used to like Mate and read this articles and books and now he is just a sufferer of TDS. The guy is lost.
Great piece Meghan. Enjoyed it. I've found some value in Mate, but find him increasingly annoying and divorced from reality as time goes on. The Trump as Hitler comparison is so preposterous and cliche (and embarrassing) that even now, after hearing it so many times, it still shocks me that anyone with an IQ over 70 would continue to parrot it..
We are trying to disentangle all this with surveys right now! Mate is not a scientist, and he is not to be taken seriously in any scientific pronouncements.
Ultimately, we would like to have a model that goes beyond correlations, that is causal (but not deterministic), relying on both genetics, developmental experiences, and possibly later life-changing experiences. And also some things which might be partially random, like "my ingroup adopted this policy, sometimes in opposition to the outgroup, so I will too, but the initial policy could have been reversed". We would like to understand more precisely than Haidt and Moral Foundations theory what makes for people's political view (which is more complex than a one dimensional spectrum, especially in the US and Canada), and such phenomena as the horseshoe effect that you alluded to, where certain traits are more similar between left/right extremes than between left extremes and left moderates, or right extremes and right moderates.
“We used physical punishment in childhood as a marker of dysfunctional family environment,” Milburn said. -- What does he mean by physical punishment? I think it would be a mistake to equate spanking with a dysfunctional family environment when there is research showing emotional abuse can have a greater negative impact. If he's talking about severe beatings then this makes more sense but it's not really worded that way.
This is also kind of racist given that there are cultural differences in the use of physical punishment for disciplining children and white parents are less likely to use spanking when compared to non-white parents.
Thanks for this.
Thanks for this, good to see more balanced approach to his work. TBH this is classic guardian so I’m not surprised, only sad the readers will only see that one perspective.
I think it was last year when he did a recorded therapy session with prince harry and my alarm went off. Very unethical, but as you mention, he is not actually a therapist.
I generally find statements such as "X thing mediates Y behavior" to be unsatisfactory, because they provide no model to trace how different factors interact and co-exist to produce certain effects. This is particularly true of models that try to make the brain this static structure, from which you can isolate different parts and make conclusions about the whole organism.
In general, I think it's helpful to delineate between relational strategies and temperament/personality. Temperament/personality has more do with the endocrinology and neurology of an individual across the whole body – thus including digestion, metabolism, hormone profiles, etc.
Relational strategies are a lot more modular and in some sense are 'built on top' of personality and temperament. I consider things like narcissism and psychopathy to fit the category of relational strategies much more than inherent personality and temperament, e.g., being a psychopathic professor, banker, mechanic, or artist all look very different.
I'm not sure I quite understand where 'authoritarianism' fits into that delineation and, thus, I've never been able to find a good answer on what the concept of 'authoritarianism' is supposed to capture. It seems that a lot of scientists want to characterize authoritarianism as temperamental or relational depending who they want to ostracize politically.
You mention a possible distinction between 'authoritarian' and 'totalitarian' in your footnote, the latter perhaps being an explicit political stance, but I'm not even sure what that term captures as compared to say, 'dictatorial'. Does the totalitarian wish to be dictator himself or does he just wish for someone else to be a dictator that treats him favorably?
There is a construct called Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) that seems to correlate with Low Openness and Low Agreeableness on the Big 5 Scale. But, this says nothing about how a given individual who scores high on SDO would orient in a political/interpersonal sense. For the longest time, it was assumed that SDO correlated highly with Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA), but if you look more deeply, that link is a bit more tenuous, in my opinion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_dominance_orientation
A high-SDO individual with high conscientiousness will probably end up being your run-of-the-mill conservative. Whether that means he becomes a trains-run-on -time fascist versus a dogmatically loyal capitalist neoliberal comes down to circumstances, social ecology, relationship strategy, ability to user power directly, etc.
Similarly, a high-SDO individual with high neuroticism is potentially more likely to be leftish. That means he could end up being a Stalin-eqsue secret police media head versus a school-board principal slavishly devoted to Civil Rights policies; again, depending on a billion other factors.
Consider also that relational strategies can emerge, develop, or disappear based on how easily a person is able to naturally express the desires and idiosyncrasies of their temperament – and that the expression exists on a spectrum. Someone who can show up as who they are 'directly' and 'uninhibited' has uncomplicated relational strategies.
Someone who is more on the repressed side of temperamental expression will pick up strategies that are more compensatory and shadow-like. (That's, for example, why someone like Hitler who loved animals became such a psycho. Our mutual friend Johnathan wrote that whole four-part series on how the Germanic spirit, due to gut issues, possess the propensity to devolve into that black-and-white approach.)
All of this food for thought just to say: thank you for calling out incomplete, or poorly conducted 'science', especially when it takes certain labels for granted. Good science should point at underlying realities in a dynamic and predictive way, regardless of historical contingencies.
>Research has also found that liberals—and in particular those with extreme left-wing views—have higher rates of diagnosed mental illness than conservatives.
Of course there this giant confounding factor that conservatives are much, much less likely to get diagnosed. I mean for them, mental illness is basically an insult or an intolerable weakness, or the result of poor character. It would be useful to look at the usual coping mechanisms: alcohol, recreational drugs, domestic violence etc.
Oh, crud, did I not include that point? I know I acknowledged it when I left a comment on Dr. Mate's Instagram, but I wrote this essay fairly quickly and it's not as polished as some of my other work. Yes, you're absolutely right, liberals are far more likely to seek mental health care than conservatives and that's a huge confounding factor. But available evidence still suggests conservatives are happier / more mentally well overall than liberals.
I love Mate`, but he has a kind of monomania around trauma as well as a very limited understanding of politics, economics, and related phenomena. I therefore find that, no matter how deeply satisfying I find his passion and compassion, I have to take his conclusions and reasoning with a salt lick. Alas.
Yes, sorry, I exaggerated based on something I read and didn't check. It was isolation that Chomsky
called for, though he did add "that's their problem" when asked how the exiled would feed themselves.
I enjoyed reading this, interesting that he did not choose the behaviour/cognitive style, such as dichotomous thinking to address, and chose a part of the brain.
I have heard Andrew Hartz identify the psychological construct as ‘splitting’, when people can’t entertain anything other than either/or.
I think if someone’s thinking was so rigid that everything was either/or, the content of their thinking would be less relevant than their lack of flexibility.
All the best
A terrific piece. Thanks for your take on Mate's conclusions, including all the research to show his faulty assumptions. I just want to add that human behavior is far more complex than the sum of its biological parts. With all our "advanced knowledge," we still can't possibly understand the miraculous combination of body, mind and spirit.