Libertarian Abnormal Psychology

My aptitude, education, and experience in the field as a counselor, and as the father of a Psy.D. son, has contributed to my development of an intuitive awareness and sensitivity to manifestations of psychopathology.

Thus I was not at all surprised when I read the following article, as I had long ago come to similar conclusions: What's The Matter With Libertarianism? It's Models of Human Nature and Society are TERMINALLY DEFICIENT

The libertarian model of individual psychology is grounded in the utilitarian, neo-classical economics model of "Homo economicus" (economic man). Our motivations can be reduced to the single-minded pursuit of our (mostly material) self-interests. Accordingly, mainstream economists seem to consider it their mission in life to help us do so more "efficiently." The Nobel economist Amartya Sen many years ago scathingly characterized this simplistic model as "rational fools who are decked out in their one, all-purpose preference function."

One problem with this (utopian) model is we now have overwhelming evidence that the individualistic, acquisitive, selfish-gene model of human nature is seriously deficient; it is simplistic, one-sided and in reality resembles the pathological extremes among the personality traits that we find in our society.

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So the doctor is basically saying here that the political ideology of libertarianism is a pathological projection.


He goes on to say:

Indeed, libertarians generally have no model of society as an interdependent group with a common purpose and common interests.

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Indeed, the antisocial aspect of libertarianism is clearly evident.

Many libertarians seem to be myopic about the prevalence of self-interested "organizations" in the marketplace, from the many millions of mom-and-pop businesses with only a few employees to mega-corporations with hundreds of thousands of workers (whose freedom they may severely restrict). These "corporate interests" sometimes oppose the common interest and perpetrate malfeasance. (Do we need to rehearse the recent examples of Enron, Capital Management, Countrywide, Goldman Sachs, BP, Massey Energy and other disasters?) So-called free markets are routinely distorted by the wealthy and powerful, and the libertarians' crusade for lower taxes, less regulation and less government plays into their hands. Perhaps unwittingly, anti-government libertarians would have us trade democratic self-government for an oligarchy.

A more serious concern is that the libertarian fixation with individual freedom distracts us from the underlying biological purpose of a society.

So why is libertarianism unfair? It rejects any responsibility for our mutual right to life, where we are all created approximately equal. It would put freedom and property rights ahead of our basic needs, rather than the other way around. It is also oblivious to the claims for reciprocity, an obligation to contribute a fair share to support the collective survival enterprise in return for the benefits that each of us receives. And it is weak on the subject of equity (or social merit) as a criterion for respecting property rights. It presumes a priori that property holdings are deserved, rather than making merit a precondition. Imposing a test of merit would put strict limits on property rights. Finally, it is anti-democratic in that it rejects the power of the majority to restrain our freedom and limit our property rights in the common interest, or for the general welfare.

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This exemplifies the libertarian dogma of freedom over security, liberty over justice, to an extreme pathological degree. The entire article is most intriguing.


In this article, Inside The Cold Calculating Libertarian Mind, the writer presents the obvious, that the ideological mindset of liberals, libertarians, and conservatives is uniquely identifiable with regard to common predisposition, traits, and manifestation of the particular mindset of each, in and of itself a fascinating topic.

With regard to libertarians:

But ideology does not have to be bipolar. It need not fall on a line from conservative to liberal. In a recently published paper, Ravi Iyer from the University of Southern California, together with Dr. Haidt and other researchers at the data-collection platform YourMorals.org, dissect the personalities of those who describe themselves as libertarian.

These are people who often call themselves economically conservative but socially liberal.

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Yes, no surprise there as to this modern-day tip-of-the-iceberg observation that libertarians are schizoidly left and right wing simultaneously.


So what did the study researchers find about libertarians?

... libertarians strongly value liberty, especially the "negative liberty" of freedom from interference by others.

... libertarians are also individualistic, stressing the right and the need for people to stand on their own two feet, rather than the duty of others, or government, to care for people.

Perhaps more intriguingly, when libertarians reacted to moral dilemmas and in other tests, they displayed less emotion, less empathy and less disgust than either conservatives or liberals.

They appeared to use "cold" calculation to reach utilitarian conclusions about whether (for instance) to save lives by sacrificing fewer lives.

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Again, the antisocial aspect of libertarianism is clearly evident, which is why some have not too surprisingly referred to the very strong libertarian Ayn Rand as a narcissist/sociopath.

Individualism, far different from the healthy psychological growth process of individuation, is an egocentric defensive reaction to past/present real/imagined threats/damage. Individualism is an "antibody", the degree of which classifies a list of abnormalities. Libertarians apparently exhibit this condition more than other ideological types.


To continue:

The researchers found that libertarians had the most "masculine" psychological profile, while liberals had the most feminine, and these results held up even when they examined each gender separately, which "may explain why libertarianism appeals to men more than women."

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Indeed, to be specific, libertarianism reflects the mindset of young, single, mostly Euro-Caucasian today in America, males. This is an evolutionary genetic manifestation, as young males thousands of years ago who went out on the hunt needed all the freedom in the world to bring home the saber-toothed bacon and stay alive any way they could and enjoy the compensatory spoils at the justice expense of others (rape women, steal coveted possessions, etc.), and they could not be successful if tied down to rules of justice and consideration for others that would hinder their efforts and place them at risk, justice and consideration for others that women, understandably with respect to history, tend to champion.


Yes, when it comes to choosing between the dynamic complementary forces of liberty and justice:

But for libertarians, liberty is an end in itself, trumping all other moral values.

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Obviously for libertarians, liberty is everything, and justice, "all other moral values", may be indiscriminately and idiosyncratically sacrificed in the name of excesses of liberty. That's an extreme psychology.

Dr. Iyer's conclusion is that libertarians are a distinct species—psychologically as well as politically.

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Obviously.


So I decided to take a closer look at this study conducted by Iyer, Koleva, Graham, Ditto, and Haidt: Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians.

The study is lengthy but absolutely edifying as to the etiology of the obvious abnormal psychology projected onto libertarianism by its adherents.

Some highlights:

But what might explain the libertarian focus on liberty to the exclusion of other moral concerns? Recent work in moral psychology suggests that moral attitudes arise, at least in part, from low-level “dispositional traits” [23], emotional reactions [8], [24], social function [17], and the moralization of preferences [10]. These moral attitudes have, in turn, been found to be associated with ideological self-identification [3], [9].

This work suggests that one explanation for the unique moral profile of libertarians is that they feel traditional moral concerns less than do most other people.

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Considerable affective detachment, a psychologically/emotionally unhealthy state.

Big Five Personality Inventory

The Big Five Personality Inventory [55] is a 44-item measure of five personality traits often said to be the most fundamental traits in personality psychology: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The measure was completed by 29,043 participants (14,091 men; 19,106 liberals, 3,991 conservatives, and 2,615 libertarians).

Results.

Table 3 shows that libertarians scored lower than the other two groups on agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion. They scored low (similar to conservatives) on neuroticism, and they scored quite high (similar to liberals) on openness to experience.

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Which helps to explain why there's a higher than normal occurrence of libertarians participating in the solitary activity of political board posting and proselytising.

Interpretation.

The libertarian pattern on the Big 5 complements our findings on their explicit values in Study 1. Libertarians report lower levels of the traits that indicate an orientation toward engaging with and pleasing others (i.e., extraversion and agreeableness). Low scores on agreeableness in particular have been said to indicate a lack of compassion and a critical, skeptical nature [51]. In addition, as in Study 1, we see that libertarians share traits with liberals (high openness to experience) as well as conservatives (low neuroticism).

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Such unhealthy affective detachment is generally oriented in childhood as idealization or contempt for a parent(s) who was physically/emotionally distant/abusive, though similarly-behaving siblings/peers/teachers can also contribute. This state can be exacerbated by normal economic challenges in early adulthood that, for these people, can trigger their associated fears of abandonment and to an ideologically reactive degree.

.. shows that libertarians scored slightly higher than liberals and moderately higher than conservatives on Need for Cognition

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A typical coping mechanism with the psychological pain associated with affective detachment is to hide in the mind/world from the pain in the soul/body.

... libertarians scored lowest on both forms of collectivism, and highest on horizontal individualism

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The "I am a rock, I am an iiiiiisland" syndrome the Simon and Garfunkel song laments.

shows that libertarians are less identified with their community compared to both liberals and conservatives.

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Thus libertarians generally do not comprehend/value social justice and the need to keep young/innocent members of society safe from the understandable harm that extremes of freedom/liberty at the reduced expense of security/justice causes.


Indeed, a most fascinating study.


A bit harsh, but as one reader of the study pretty much summed it up: Libertarianism and Psychopathology

I knew I disagreed with most of what “Libertarians” believe, but it had never occurred to me until I read this article that their misguided beliefs stemmed from their stunted emotional development.

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As Albert Einstein so wisely admonished:

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.”

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This statement simply confounds most libertarians.

My experience with libertarians is they're scared stiff.

This isn't always threatening, but it is difficult to relate with them.

You'd probably get more respect and attention if you actually tried to debate against libertarian views instead of trying to label it as a mental disease.

You don't label conservatives as being psychopaths for being fiscally conservative, or liberals as such for being socially liberal, why is a combination of the two suddenly a disease?

I think you're letting your own hate and bias influence you. You might want to see a real shrink.

@OP:


Yeah, freedom is BAD!

His article is too long to make his (very opinionated) point, and so is your OP.

1) Libertarians can damn well acknowledge that we evolved as social organisms cooperating to get our needs met. What the author fails to successfully examine more closely is that the same model of, as he himself puts it, "small, close-knit" groups can simply be "widened" as a "circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures." We are inherently selfish and, at the same time, we cooperate with as many others as our survival instincts tell us we need to in order to get our immediate needs met. There is nothing which demonstrates that our tribal-level instincts can simply be extrapolated out to include billions of people. That is not in our nature.

2) There is nothing necessarily psychopathological about a libertarian approach to government. The author himself acknowledges that a libertarian could be some extreme anarchist or he could simply be an advocate of a small federal government. If he takes off down the bunny trail on the premise that libertarians are all Randian or anarchists, he's simply created a verbose straw man argument.

3) I identify as Libertarian and can acknowledge a weakness in it... and that's an environmental tragedy of the commons, i.e. an ecosystem collapse triggered by unrestrained population growth and resource exploitation. Most libertarians I've seen don't have much of a plan for where that can lead, environmentally. But then again, I know of no other political philosophy which successfully addresses this either.

Trying to peg political philosophies into mental/personality disorders is a very amateur way to go. It's been done repeatedly by mental health/psychology professionals who can't keep a lid on their political opinions, as well as by politically minded people who are looking for a clever way to pathologize their opponent's arguments.

Lame.

Absolutely correct.
I moonlight as Hannibal Lecter.

Thank you Ontologuy for this excellent thread. It is filled with great information and insight into the libertarian personality and personna.

RabidAlpaca said:

You'd probably get more respect and attention if you actually tried to debate against libertarian views instead of trying to label it as a mental disease.

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Would sociological pathology be more acceptable?

Many of those "observations" seem to equate Libertarian and pure Anarchy. Libertarians do not believe in no gov't, just the least restrictive possible gov't. You can hold BP responsible for an oil spill, monopolistic price fixing and to using safe business/labor practices without dictating what color their trucks may be, what additives they must add in CA vs. NY. E.g. do we need 80K+ pages of FIT code to "tax income from all sources" - I think not.

What the current Libertarians wish is for no more gov't than is needed, at the lowest possible level, and more honest and healthy competition among both the citizens and businesses. If a private service provides good trash collection then why have the gov't do that? The gov't may set some standards for dumps, but why go overboard? If trash company A goofs up then trash company B will get its business. What possible reason does our federal gov't need 24% of GDP simply to accomplish its 18 constitutionally limitted powers?

If you divide total annual federal welfare spending, by the total number of recipients it comes to $61K each, yet I live on less than $30K and do quite well. Something is wrong with our current huge "need" for gov't. I don't see the U.S. population as needing cradle to grave gov't "direction" to accomplish much.

It was business, not gov't, that gave us the industrial revolution, super productive agriculture and great medical facilities. One need only look at other nations that have much more gov't to see that they are not "better" or "more advanced".

Oh hey look, another defamatory retard post. This sure is worthwhile. :roll:

One giant generalized ad hom about an entire class of people. The haymarket "liking" it is about the only part of it that makes sense.

haymarket said:

Would sociological pathology be more acceptable?

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Nope, and this is exactly why people like you hide behind an "undisclosed" lean, so that you wont be lumped into a group by an idiot who is incapable of debating the issues and has to resort to hate threads.

ttwtt78640 said:

Many of those seem to equate Libertarian and pure Anarchism. Libertarians do not believe in no gov't, just the least restrictive possible gov't. You can hold BP responsible for an oil spill, monopolistic price fixing and to using safe business/labor practices without dictating what collor their trucks may be, what additives they must add in CA vs. NY. E.g. do we need 80K+ pages of FIT code to "tax income from all sources" - I think not.

What the current Libertarians wish is for no more gov't than is needed, more honest and healthy competition among both the citizens and businesses. If a private service provides good trash collection then why have the gov't do that? The gov't may set some standards for dumps, but why go overboard? If trash company A goofs up then trash company B will get its business. What possible reason does our federal gov't need 24% of GDP simply to accomplish its 18 constitutionally limitted powers?

If you divide total annual federal welfare spending, by the total number of recipients it comes to $61K each, yet I live on less than $30K and do quite well. Something is wrong with our current huge "need" for gov't. I don't see the U.S. population as needing cradle to grave gov't "direction" to accomplish much.

It was business, not gov't, that gave us the industrial revolution, super productive agriculture and great medical facilities. One need only look at other nations that have much more gov't to see that they are not "better" or "more advanced".

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The haters gonna hate. The militant haters, such as haymarket and Onto, will listen to no argument. All they want to do is spew their vitriol and anger. Best to ignore it. This form of lowest denominator propaganda is not made to encourage thought or debate; it's for the opposite I'm afraid. It's an intellectually dishonest route full of hyperbole, assumption, and delusion all bent upon perpetuating some image that more often than not is inaccurate. But that can be true of most forms of propaganda. The best thing to do is to ignore the stupid. It's hard, there's a lot of business majors out there (heheh); but playing down to stupid rarely ends in a good place.

RabidAlpaca said:

Nope, and this is exactly why people like you hide behind an "undisclosed" lean, so that you wont be lumped into a group by an idiot who is incapable of debating the issues and has to resort to hate threads.

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I have no lean becuse nothing truly identifies me. I vote democratic. I am very liberal about some issues like labor issues, consumer protections and civil rights. I am very conservative when it comes to other issues like the death penalty and crime and punishment. I lead the most conservative life style and am a strong advocate for the good old fashoned Norman Rockwell virtues.

That is why I post no lean.

In the end, if you suffer through the tripe, you see that this is the same old socialist repackaging, Keynesian BS. The guy brings up Hayek, and then falsely claims that Hayek had a strict dichotomy; which is not true in the least. Hayek never said no government interaction or regulation; in fact he argued that there should be proper amounts of those. Then launches to Ann Rand like she was the inventor and sole intellectual contributor to libertarian political philosophy.

There's a reason why this article is in a blog and not in a peer reviewed medical journal.

haymarket said:

I have no lean becuse nothing truly identifies me. I vote democratic. I am very liberal about some issues like labor issues, consumer protections and civil rights. I am very conservative when it comes to other issues like the death penalty and crime and punishment. I lead the most conservative life style and am a strong advocate for the good old fashoned Norman Rockwell virtues.

That is why I post no lean.

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Lets say then for instance there were a "haymarkian" party that you generally identified with. You would probably be disgusted if some random idiot tried to categorize everything you believe as a mental disease because he lacks the brainpower to debate you on the issues.

You know Ontologuy, if you took some time to actually talk to some libertarians instead of antagonizing them on the Internet, you might find that we are actually pretty normal people. A good friend of mine is probably the nicest, most generous person I know, and he's an anarcho-capitalist.We have a different view of the world. That doesn't make libertarianism some kind of mental illness.

RabidAlpaca said:

Lets say then for instance there were a "haymarkian" party that you generally identified with. You would probably be disgusted if some random idiot tried to categorize everything you believe as a mental disease because he lacks the brainpower to debate you on the issues.

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Point taken.

Do you think that nothing in the OP is accurate of provides food for further research and consideration?

DrunkenAsparagus said:

You know Ontologuy, if you took some time to actually talk to some libertarians instead of antagonizing them on the Internet, you might find that we are actually pretty normal people. A good friend of mine is probably the nicest, most generous person I know, and he's an anarcho-capitalist.We have a different view of the world. That doesn't make libertarianism some kind of mental illness.

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He ain't interested. It's been done, this is experimentally verified. Militant haters want nothing to do with debate or intellectual honesty; they want to spread their propaganda as far as they possibly can. It's just monkeys throwing poo.

I think libertarianism is generally naive, and - if implemented to any significant degree - would be disastrous to our economy and our society as a whole, but characterizing it as a mental illness is a bit ridiculous.

haymarket said:

Point taken.

Do you think that nothing in the OP is accurate of provides food for further research and consideration?

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There's not much of worth in that article. The author oversimplifies as much as possible, makes inane assumptions about libertarian political philosophy, incorrect assessment of other philosopher's arguments (such as with Hayek) all to promote his vision of libertarians. It is neither fair nor accurate assessment. Which is why I said, there's a reason this is in a blog and not a peer reviewed medical journal.

haymarket said:

Point taken.

Do you think that nothing in the OP is accurate of provides food for further research and consideration?

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I lost all respect for the OP long ago. I do think that our psychological state can individually shape our views on life, but saying that someone has a mental disorder for aborrhoring violence and coercion, admiring fiscal responsibility, and treating all human beings as equal is simply absurd.

Aderleth said:

I think libertarianism is generally naive, and - if implemented to any significant degree - would be disastrous to our economy and our society as a whole, but characterizing it as a mental illness is a bit ridiculous.

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What aspects of liberty would be disasterous for the nation and why?

Ontologuy said:

a lot of stuff

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WOW! Are you OK? You probably want to see a doctor to check for rectal bleeding after all of that. You took psychology where it should not go, and you did it really wrong. You did not get the true libertarian philosophy right either. That came out all sorts of wrong and sideways and I am pretty sure it caused a lot of damage somewhere. Take a break and work on yourself. You are really losing it.

Aderleth said:

I think libertarianism is generally naive, and - if implemented to any significant degree - would be disastrous to our economy and our society as a whole, but characterizing it as a mental illness is a bit ridiculous.

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I fully acknowledge that, if implemented to a significant degree in this country, there would be social and economic changes coming with it that would, by some people's standards, seem "disastrous," especially those who have become accustomed to our current mixed economic system (primarily those who benefit from social and corporate welfare).

But that's primarily just a reflection of how very, very far from a libertarian society we are right now, and so changing into one would not be without some serious adjustment pains. It would be revolutionary... economically, socially and culturally. There's no reason to deny that.

On this note, the fact that the author of the article referred to libertarianism as "utopian" is just one of his many ridiculous assertions. If I had more time I would chew this author apart. He makes thinking errors all throughout his little diatribe.