What is the reactionary mind?

Many people identify the reactionary mind with conservatism or, more generally, right-wing ideology. It tends to be defined by such facets as dominance hierarchy, power disparity, nostalgia, obfuscation, etc; maybe also things like alienation as well. And the overlap with all things right-wing might be largely correct in the most extreme cases, at least in present WEIRD society.

Still, one might note that this reactionary mind is the complete opposite of the traditional mind. The recuperation of traditionalism is a superficial facade, and progressivism or anything else can just as easily be recuperated (more about this further on). Within the reactionary worldview, there is a ‘radical’ impulse to remake the world and then to erase all evidence of what came before — or rather counter-radical that, in reacting to the radical, takes on much of the radical style; in any case, often more destructive of the traditional than any radical.

With constant misdirection, this is how ideological realism operates in the Burkean moral imagination, along with related to what I call symbolic conflation (“Why are you thinking about this?”). Reactionaries are mercurial shapeshifters and so can appear in various guises (Reactionary Revolutionaries, Faceless Men, and God in the Gutter). It’s a socio-ideological version of a personality disorder.

When someone goes reactionary, it’s like a fairy abduction. They look and sound like the person you knew, but they no longer act like them. Something about them seems off, distorted, or deranged. Their psyches are thrown off balance where certain aspects are suppressed and others exaggerated. I’ve personally known people who this has happened to. In some cases, it was the standard pattern of right-wing media remaking a person (Fox effect, cultivation theory) and erasing the memory of who they used to be (kind, tolerant, easygoing, etc) and replacing it with something else (mean world syndrome).

But I’ve also seen people go reactionary just from general overwhelming stress.

It can be quite disturbing when the old personality collapses and shatters with something new forming out of the remnants. In talking to the individual, you keep looking for the person they used to be and you briefly might get in the groove of the kinds of conversations you once had. Yet something is now off. It feels wrong, disturbing. Who they were before wouldn’t respond in the way they do now. Some fundamental piece of them is gone or utterly transformed.

The stress of their life has completely taken over and there is a permanent edginess they carry with them. A wall has been raised that you can’t penetrate, that maybe even they can’t penetrate either. It’s a person who has become so scarred that all that is left of them is defense reaction and survival mode. It’s one of the saddest things to experience, especially when you used to like the person they once were. It requires mourning a loss, even as they remain alive — similar to seeing a loved one slip away into dementia.

One way to think of the reactionary is as a psychological complex. In Jungian terms, a complex is a constellation of emotionally-driven, unconscious ideas and ways of thinking, perceptions and narratives, tendencies and impulses. They’re organized around a common theme or mood. It’s a psychological pattern that hangs together, in how it can get deeply and powerfully entrenched. It locks into place a set of personality traits and behaviors.

Once you’ve identified a complex, then the outward expressions of it can start to make sense. This allows you to sense motivations and predict what follows from them. In being observable across individuals, societies, and times, the reactionary mind could even be considered an archetype. It represents a deeper but common potential in human nature, if exaggerated.

In the following, we won’t attempt a technical analysis, rather just a meandering exploration of its causations and implications in the real world.

How is the reactionary expressed and enacted?

Let’s return to defining the phenomenon in more conventional terms.

In Corey Robin’s theory, the reactionary seems more or less equivalent to social dominance orientation (SDO). But there is also a clear element of low ‘openness to experience’ (FFM), that is to say social conservatism and right-wing* authoritarianism (RWA). As SDOs tend to be authoritarian leaders, RWAs are typical authoritarian followers (see note at end).

When combined, SDO and RWA form what’s called a Double High. These are the people found on the far right, from Adolf Hitler to Steve Bannon. Hence, I’d argue that it’s this mix that most strongly defines the reactionary overall. But admittedly, the most potent aspect seems to be SDO, as it corresponds to dark personality (Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, sadism) and low ‘honesty-humility’ (HEXACO). On the other hand, the RWA component pushes toward the driven edginess of a true believer. A reactionary wants something to believe in, if they might randomly grasp whatever is available in trying on different beliefs.

More important is the act of believing than exactly what is believed. They have a talent for acting with conviction, acting as if something is true.

Yet SDO and dark personality is where the tricksiness and shiftiness comes from. This is the constant game-playing, manipulations, deceptions, and shit-fuckery. It’s why they’re extremely hard to pin down. And it’s what makes reactionary fantasizing so potent and mesmerizing. They have a way with not only nostalgia but also moral panic, culture war, folk devils, scapegoating, and such. They know how to reach deeply into the psyche and grab it by the balls.

Reactionaries naturally think in simplistic and punchy narratives. That is in contrast to the liberal mind that tends to fall back on abstractions and facts, on principles and ideals, on analysis and argument. Though to give credit where it’s due, if the non-reactionary narratives of liberals may have be less immediate impact, they work their magic over the long term. But reactionaries are more concerned about the here and now. They can be quick on their toes.

Also, this slipperiness is why reactionary rhetoric and narratives are more convenient than fundamental. Consider an observation made of Nazis. A visitor to Germany noted that Nazi propaganda was all over the place. There was no consistency and coherency to it. Everything was tailored to the audience, to what was going on in the world, and to the topic or issue at hand. There is a sensitivity of sorts to the reactionary mind, even while it’s often used toward blunt ends of tugging and inciting emotions.

The reactionary mind cares only about the effect and result. What holds it all together is simply authoritarianism itself (RWA + SDO).

Understand that authoritarianism is, first and foremost, a mentality and worldview. This is a deeper understanding of ‘ideology’. It might make more sense with familiarity of Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation. It’s about a voice of authority that hails the individual, in attempting to command and compel them.

But one is only actually hailed if one turns toward the voice, in acknowledging it has any claim over you. Assuming one is conscious, informed, and attentive, a hail can be identified and then treated with care, either to accept it or ignore it. Of course, ignoring an authoritarian hail might end badly, if you’ll have the satisfaction of maintaining your liberty of the soul to the bitter end. Authoritarians, once in power, are known to imprison, torture, banish, and kill those who fail to be properly interpellated into the authoritarian identity.

Yet interpellation can be a perfectly innocent process as it underlies all social identities, including those that are happy and beneficial. In a liberal and egalitarian society, one wouldn’t mind being hailed into an identity of mutual support, collective action, and public good.

Please, I beg you. Find a voice of authority that can hail the American population into functioning liberal democracy and egalitarian justice. Stop for a moment to contemplate the words of those like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, or following the death of his brother the last haunting speeches of Robert F. Kennedy. These people put their lives on the line because, through the power of oratory, they hoped to hail in a new vision for society.

That is why they were assassinated. Their voices of authority were too powerful and persuasive, too radical and dangerous. They represented a non-reactionary alternative to the reactionary system and those who ruled it.

The reactionary and what it’s reacting to

As one would expect, the reactionary is defined by what it’s reacting to in any given moment.

In Western countries like the United States for several generations, reaction has focused on both what has been dominant in the West (or at least in the Western imaginary, if not always in political practice), from liberal democracy to economic progressivism, and what has been dominant among the West’s Cold War enemies, primarily ‘communism’ (or rather what went for it: state capitalism? red fascism? neo-feudalism?).

So, reactionaries sometimes, as an instinct, take up opposing positions or else an oppositional attitude. On this level, they can’t help but be contrarians, often rather trollish. But their reaction isn’t arbitrary and random.

In reacting, they are still defined by what they’re reacting to. They never escape the gravity well of the dominant paradigm. And so they endlessly co-opt from the focus of their reaction, the shadow of their own mania falling back upon themselves (The Many Stolen Labels of the Reactionary Mind). Reaction is their only core motivation and so they need something exciting to react against, without which they are overtaken by boredom and ennui (Boredom in the Mind: Liberals and Reactionaries; Violent Fantasy of Reactionary Intellectuals; & The Fantasy of Creative Destruction).

Along these lines, this explains why reactionaries constantly try to elicit reaction from others (Reactionaries Seeking Reaction). It’s not only that Donald Trump needs to foment violence to justify violence. More than anything, he needs to stage a performance of violence, whether or not it erupts into real violence. The purpose is for narrative spin and, in the reactionary imagination, the only worthy narrative is melodramatic and over-the-top (e.g., Fox News falsely portraying Portland, Oregon as a post-apocalyptic hellscape ravaged by antifa hordes burning down the city).

The reactionary mind needs to be constantly fed with its hunger is never sated.

About being shaped by the object of reaction, they put their mark on everything, like a muddy dog shaking mud about as it runs through the house. This is true in relation to classical liberalism and libertarianism, what some right-wingers claim as being right-wing. Both of these once were radical ideologies on the left in representing a degree of extremism never before seen. Or consider that free trade was once seen as democratic and liberatory in being anti-authoritarian, anti-elitist, and anti-imperialist (Marc-William Palen, Pax Economica). The initial adherents challenged the reactionary dominance hierarchies of their own era.

Early liberals were egalitarian and anti-authoritarian in advocating for positions that, in many ways, remain radical to this day: direct democratic self-governance (even majoritarianism), broader suffrage, feminism, abolitionism, low inequality, access to commons, reparations for stolen commons (e.g., Thomas Paine’s citizen’s dividend), opposition to aristocracy and plutocracy, fear of corporate capitalism, secularist separation of church and state, critique of organized religion and a priestly class, etc.

And early libertarians were anti-statist socialists (Property is Theft: So is the Right’s Use of ‘Libertarian’). Once upon a time, libertarianism actually meant liberty for all (as free markets meant freedom for all), not dishonest rhetoric used in defense of liberty as a privilege of the few. Reactionary recuperation is how, in practice, elite claims of ‘liberty’ so easily morphed into the oppressive reality of neoliberalism (e.g., Ronald Reagan), techno-feudalism (e.g., Peter Thiel), and on and on.

Reactionaries can and will claim anything, or otherwise leave ideological and rhetorical chaos in their wake. We need to learn to ignore words and claims.

You know someone’s true nature by what they do and support, who they work and ally with, and what are the the consistent results. We should distrust those who speak of equality of opportunity and positive freedom, yet the policies and systems they promote always end with increasing oppression, disadvantage, and inequity. Actions and effects are how we observe and measure, determine and judge the reality of motivations and causes.

In co-opting and recuperating ideological labels and rhetoric, reactionaries are posturing. They  don’t actually adhere to liberalism and libertarianism of any kind (or ‘free markets’ and such), but in the Western mainstream those are the only respectable positions. So, they put on these ideologies like costumes to hide their true ideologies of authoritarianism and domination.

But once they think they’re in a strong position, the masks come off (e.g., the fascism of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and cronies). To paraphrase Maya Angelou, when you see their true face, believe it the first time. Watch carefully and don’t ignore it. Take heed and take it seriously.

Reactionary (pseudo-)leftists

This reactionary tendency, though, applies more broadly. It’s a psychological potential in everyone.

In general, reactionaries are unprincipled because that is simply how reactionary psychology operates. This is why, for anyone seeking to be principled, creeping reaction in the psyche can be one of the greatest concerns. It’s hard to defend against the enemy within, but it’s necessary.

A certain kind of leftist, for example, reacts to liberalism and so embrace an illiberalism that easily becomes anti-leftist as well (Does Liberalism Matter to Leftism?) — one could argue that, ultimately in practice, there is no illiberal leftism as there is no inegalitarian liberalism. On a left-wing Reddit group I recently visited, the commenters were so obsessed with opposing and owning the libs that, in reaction, they ended up voicing views that sounded surprisingly right-wing. What they were reacting to is what really mattered to them.

And in the past, I’ve been attacked and blocked on the largest left-wing subreddits for advocating leftist principles like practical egalitarianism in the real world, full and direct worker control of the means of production, and such (Leftists For Leftism Against Leftists). To these (pseudo-)leftists, there is a taint to everything liberal: socially liberal tolerance and inclusivity, liberal proceduralism and democratic process, open-minded cooperation and collaboration — what seems like a basic good society to my mind.

Apparently, the only authentic leftism would be authoritarian and totalitarian. Somehow, tankies have come to dominate left-wing groups and forums. But I’d argue tankies aren’t really leftists in any meaningful sense. [One might wonder if they’re controlled opposition, maybe promoted in the way the CIA did with postmodernists to suck out the air from leftist debates and to silence Marxists.] They’re just authoritarians who are nostalgic for old authoritarianism like the USSR, if that is just something convenient to project upon. Even Stalinism, one suspects, would be gladly sacrificed when the moment demanded something else. Authoritarianism is the means and end. All else is details.

Their supposed leftism, one could argue, has become more of a posture and maybe always was. The leftist paraphernalia is incidental, as it’s not based on any leftist principle.

A centralized economy alone does not leftism make since an economy could be similarly centralized by a monarchy, empire, theocracy, or fascist state; or even ‘privately’ by monopolistic inverted totalitarianism. But in a leftist system, the economy would be controlled by the workers and the people, not by a ruling elite, no matter the ideological garb they wear and the rhetoric they hide behind. Real world leftism would require democratic (i.e., liberal) processes, transparency, accountability, and separation of powers that would tend toward decentralization. It would liberate and empower local populations (e.g., workers operating their own workplaces).

These illiberal left-wingers (or pseudo-leftists) are the kind who could switch to being right-wingers without missing a beat. And there are many such ‘conversions’ (Why do you think people become ex-leftists?). Their criticism of the right-wing, be it corporate capitalism or fascism, is not a disagreement over authoritarianism and dominance. They  simply want totalitarian power of their own preferred variety, one that would privilege and embolden people like them, maybe as a vanguard elite.

Were they to gain such a ruling position, they’d never give up that power. As demonstrated in Stalinism, the Leninist vanguard elite became a permanent ruling class who existed separate from and above the masses. It was never going to be a temporary, transitional elite who would eventually usher in real communism of, for, and by the people.

A left-wing vision was never the plan. Or else it’s just that some reactionaries are so unconscious that they don’t know themselves what motivates them. A few of them might sort of believe the lies they tell others, in the way that a successful con artist first cons himself. But such a con is merely method acting. Once the end is achieved, the act is no longer needed.

Reacting to reactionaries makes one a reactionary

As part of a reactionary society, we are immersed in all things reactionary and surrounded by reactionary forces. If we aren’t careful, it’s easy to fall into reaction. Then we internalize the reactionary and our behavior feeds into it. We become vectors of its spread. The reactionary is a virulent mind virus.

In hoping to get more involved as a leftist, I’ve come across leftists — or at least those claiming to be leftists — who seize control of left-wing activist groups and online forums. They demand that others submit to their identities, interests, needs, and agendas. This is not what it means to be an ‘ally’. In reality, an alliance is a relationship of mutuality, and that requires egalitarianism on a pragmatic level of how people relate to one another as genuine and worthy equals.

But to a reactionary, everything is about others submitting to them or to their preferred authority, no matter how they rationalize it. Inverting a dominance hierarchy still leaves us with a dominance hierarchy. Just as a victim becoming a victimizer keeps the wheel of the victimization cycle spinning.

This is why, after declaring ‘Never Again’, the Holocaust can’t be used as an eternal get out of jail free card that rationalizes all horrors Israelis commit against others. As Zionism was founded on fascism, it can never be made into liberal Zionism. There is no such thing as liberal fascism, as there is no such thing as illiberal and inegalitarian leftism.

Besides blatant hypocrisy, there are more subtle expressions of reaction.

In a discussion, Jimmy Dore was talking with Chris Hedges (The Liberal Class’s Ultimate Betrayal (w/ Jimmy Dore) | The Chris Hedges Report). They’re both alternative political commentators, if of far different calibers. The former, as sort of leftist in a confused way, opposes the Democratic Party. And so he dismisses anything related to Russia, since the DNC elite are against Russia.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend, so goes the thought process.

So, he waves away Russiagate and makes excuses for Russian actions. This is in spite of decades of overwhelming evidence tying Donald Trump to Russian oligarchs and organized crime, along with evidence of Trump having laundered money through foreign casinos and property sales. Plus, there were the weird happenings like the collusion between the Republican Manafort Firm, the Democratic Podesta Firm, and Putin-related figures who were meddling in Ukraine prior to the war.

By the way, Trump was one of the first clients of the Manafort firm back in the 1980s. So, he and Paul Manafort had long been in the same social, economic, and political network of cronies. Trump wasn’t directly tied into Manafort’s Ukranian activities that led to prosecution and imprisonment. But Manafort did later work as a campaign adviser for Trump. Then as president, Trump pardoned him because that is what friends do.

Whether or not Russiagate was simply devious political machinations and maneuverings by the DNC elite, no informed and honest person could deny that something important was going on there. And without doubt, the entire Trump family has been criminally corrupt for generations (Trump Family And Elite Corruption; Trump is Innocent of the Crime of Liberalism; & A Deep Dive Into the Deep State).

This is a case where, when there is smoke, there is fire.

Dore ends up being a pseudo-leftist version of Tucker Carlson. Dore and Carlson, while both anti-Zionists, are strangely quite friendly and forgiving toward Russia. They’ll both repeat Kremlin talking points, for whatever reason. So, it’s not a principled opposition to violent and brutal tyranny. It just depends, in each situation, exactly what they’re reacting to.

The reactionary makes us stunted and stupid

This is typical of one variety of leftist that still identifies with the Stalinism and Maoism, in spite of the fact that both Russia and China are now capitalist economies (i.e., market economies with corporate ownership and without worker control of the means of production). In their hatred of Western imperialism, they’ll embrace non-Western imperialism, as if the problem isn’t imperialism itself but the entirety of Western civilization that must be destroyed by any means necessary.

These leftist or pseudo-leftist reactionaries want good imperialism that is supposedly just and effective, whatever they think that means. They’ll praise Stalinist USSR and Maoist China as having lifted millions out of poverty while ignoring the millions starved to death. So, justice according to whose benefit and effective to what end?

They’ll support almost anyone and anything that represents a challenge to the hegemonic West. Their stance is simply about this anti-Western reaction without it being clear, maybe even in their own minds, what they’re ultimately for.

There are no clear inherent principles underlying why one kind of imperialism and/or capitalism is good and another bad, why American and Israeli oppression (War On Terror, CIA covert operations, Zionist genocide of Palestinians, etc) is evil but Russian and Chinese oppression (police-surveillance states, multiple wars of aggression including in Ukraine, persecution of Uyghurs, etc) is great.

But it’s not only what they support and oppose or their supposed motivation for doing so. We need to look past the ideological window dressing. In the end, all reactionaries, no matter their words and outward appearance, are more alike than not.

When under the thrall of the reactionary mind, people become unconsciously stupid, clueless, and obtuse, sometimes willfully and shamelessly so. It comes down to suppression of ‘openness to experience’ (and its twin trait ‘intellect’), which means the stunting and compromise of difficult cognitive abilities requiring greater cognitive load, nuance, complexity, flexibility, curiosity, and cognitive empathy.

Then these cognitively deficient individuals are likely to get stuck in dogmatic positions that are polarized.

This is what happens when people are severely and/or chronically stressed, alienated, oppressed, subjugated, shamed, disenfranchised, impoverished, overworked, exhausted, malnourished, sickly, media-saturated, and a thousand other forms and factors of harm and hopelessness, of degradation and desperation. Much of this is cumulative and transgenerational, systemic and environmental, structural and institutional, pervasive and inescapable.

At the worst extreme, it’s what’s referred to as shit life syndrome. It’s a totalizing hell on earth. Think of American Jim Crow, Nazi ghettoes, South African apartheid, and Israeli occupation. It can also merely be economic abandonment, such as in American Appalachia and the Global South.

The saddest part is how these bad conditions can bring out the worst in people, all across a society. There is a strong link between such things as poverty and inequality on one hand and low IQ and racism on the other. We humans didn’t evolve to handle such extreme levels of stress, conflict, and desperation. It warps the mind in a thousand different ways.

For those of us who are more fortunate, as we resist the reactionary mind and its allure, we should strive toward compassion in understanding what drives people into that mentality. But for the grace of God goes I.

Non-reactionary leftism depends on better conditions

That is where we get a certain strain of the reactionary mind that includes but goes beyond the MAGA demographic. It’s not enough to disparage the ‘basket of deplorables’.

What we need is understanding, so as to alter the conditions that elicit it. People are simply responding as best they can to sometimes impossible situations. The reactionary is one possible outcome of what happens when people get overwhelmed, when they give into cynicism. It’s better to judge the conditions that cause it than to judge those caught up in it. It’s only at the level of conditions that we have the leverage of influence.

As with the reactionary right, many people drawn to left-wing politics do so because they’ve had hard lives. Being damaged, it’s unsurprising that they’re often more than a bit illiberal (and inegalitarian), especially as they identify liberalism with classism. The fact of the matter is liberal-mindedness, indeed, is a privilege of optimal (or at least relatively better) conditions.

But if this were a liberal society, be it social democracy or democratic socialism with greater public good (public welfare, public health, etc), that liberal-mindedness and the conditions that support it would be a birthright for all. Until then, we have to deal with the world as it is and hence people as they are. Those negatively affected by these liberal-suppressing conditions, however, are the last to have the self-awareness and psychological insight to grasp the state they’re in or how to change it.

Knocking out ‘openness to experience’ weakens cognitive empathy, of which is essential for understanding oneself as much as understanding others. With extreme stress, people tend to look for risks, threats, dangers, and competitors outside of themselves. And that might be fine if they looked in the right places, such as among the elite who are the actual cause of their problems.

It’s too bad that there aren’t more people, particularly American leftists, who understand this (We Need To Talk About Health; Social Science As Intellectual Self-Defense; Sick Individuals = Authoritarian Societies; Filth of Rome, Health of Alexandria; & Life History Theory and Strategies: Part 1).

I know some hardcore, radical left-wingers who have hardscrabble working class lives. Everything about their modern lives is out of sync with evolutionary norms of human flourishing. Unsurprisingly, such people tend to have physical and mental health issues. And their behavioral patterns aren’t necessarily constructive by most measures.

Besides overall unhealthy lifestyles, such as drinking and smoking or drug abuse in some cases, they often eat a poverty diet and that typically means a Standard American Diet (SAD). Or else they have horrible sleep patterns with their circadian rhythm being off, from excess blue light at night and other problems such as working odd shifts or multiple jobs. And like so many others, nature deficit disorder is the norm.

Ideas like this, that nature is healing, can sound like liberal self-improvement or new agey woo-woo; in either case, a distraction from the supposed real issues of economics and politics (i.e., historical materialism). Who has time for mere health when there is class war going on and we’re fighting for survival?

In their concern for material problems, most leftists have a superficial conception of the material world. They launch themselves into battle without first surveying the battlefield. Or else they only look in one direction, not seeing the terrain behind them.

Old school leftism and public health

Interestingly, that wasn’t always the case.

Earlier last century, democratic socialists, in backing Milwaukee municipal socialism or Scandinavian social democracy, tended to prioritize public health in terms of practical improvements of living conditions. If they probably didn’t intellectually know that disease and dis-ease causes malignant psychology and society, they did see firsthand how mass sickliness could rip apart a society.

They had the advantage, in living in that first moment of mass urbanization and industrialization, to sense what had been destroyed and lost. There was still a living memory, if declining quickly, of what the previous collective and communal health looked like and felt like. Whereas today, we are simply lost in mind-numbing sickliness at a level that debilitates us with psychotic disconnection from reality, where the abnormal has become the new norm.

It’s ideological realism as mind virus.

That doesn’t have to be the case, though. There are factors under our control, most of the time. For instance, one can eat healthily by focusing on low-carb, nutrient-dense whole foods that typically are cheaper than ultra-processed foods (pork, chicken, lard, butter, etc; and, before prices rose, eggs). I get that many in the lower classes simply eat for convenience as life is already difficult enough. And preparing a meal from scratch is unattractive when collapsing at home after a day’s work.

It’s easier than it might seem (e.g., put a beef roast in a slow cooker before work). And it would pay off in the long-term. A better diet would increase energy, mood, and motivation. If stuck in a vicious cycle, one has to actively intervene to reset one’s situation into a virtuous cycle. But it might be hard for people in such a situation to imagine life could ever be different so as to take that first step.

Certainly, the entire system engenders pessimism and cynicism, apathy and resignation. And, besides, it’s hard for most people to think of the food system as part of social control (Ancient Dietary Ideology Persists). Underestimating this factor is common, if some leftists have long known that who ever controls the food supply controls a population, similar to who controls the vote counting controls elections and hence controls voters.

This is why leftists speak of worker control of the means of production. Basically, there is no freedom without control, without autonomy and agency, without self-determination and self-governance. It’s not only the means of production but the means of anything and everything (e.g., the need to democratize the education and media systems).

What could be added is that it’s not just control of people physically but also mentally, both psychologically and neurocognitively.

What few understand is how powerfully diet and nutrition can alter psychology and behavior (Mark Hyman, Food Fix; Georgia Ede, Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind; Christ Palmer, Brain Energy; Weston A. Price, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration; & Mary Ruddick, “The Sherlock Holmes of Health”). This includes in relation to morality, ethics, and prosociality.

Revolution of mind as an expression of public health

The typical leftist is so narrowly obsessed with conventional left-wing literature, political actions, and organizing that they have little other knowledge. Some of them commit themselves to the activist cause to the detriment of their own health, sometimes as self-conscious martyrdom. All that is likely to achieve is to make them even more illiberal or otherwise inconsistent, in reactionary style. Or else simply weaken their capacity to maintain the fight in the long run.

Without realizing it, they undermine their own leftist project.

If we had a healthier left-wing movement and a healthier society overall, we might have not only a more liberal and egalitarian leftism but also a less fractured and divisive leftism, a more functional and effective leftism (Magic Trick). I’ve repeatedly argued there is a simple reason that the American colonists successfully revolted as the English did not at the time (even when Thomas Paine returned home to England with the intention of inciting revolt), that the American Revolution avoided a vengeful and punitive bloodbath as happened in the French Revolution.

My theory is that it all has to do with American colonists having been among the healthiest people in the West at the time. Besides low infectious disease rate, Americans were the tallest Westerners in the world at the time. That is partly what made George Washington so impressive, as only some Native Americans had greater stature than him.

Unlike in the British Isles and the European mainland, most Americans had low population density, much open space to farm, and access to an abundance of natural resources: clean water, wild plants, seafood, wild game, beef, pork, chicken, eggs, dairy, etc — and, as a side note, beef consumption has an interesting history behind it (Ancient Dietary Ideology Persists). Continuing into the 1800s, the average American ate animal foods, often meat, with every meal. To put it another way, for breakfast, they didn’t slice up a banana with corn flakes and pour soy or rice milk on it, nor did they eat candy-like granola bars.

That extremely superior health gave them strength, endurance, and confidence. But it also probably made them more liberal-minded. As the revolutionary veteran Levi Preston put it, they knew they could govern themselves, they intended to do so, and they were willing to kill anyone who tried to stop them (Spirit of ’76).

It’s the same potent sense of virility and machismo that led Genghis Khan and the Mongols to conquer much of Asia and Europe, that drove Geronimo and the Apaches to outfight, outmaneuver, and outpace US cavalry even when crossing deserts on foot. It’s not just the willingness to fight but the capacity to do so and win, no matter that the opposing force may be larger.

Americans, Mongols, and Apache were regularly confronted by larger forces and yet repeatedly were able to overpower and outlast them. A population at peak health wouldn’t tolerate Donald Trump’s regime of MAGA, DOGE, and ICE. There would already be bloody fights in the streets or maybe heads rolling. That was what happened at other times in American history, long after the American Revolution.

Think of the Coal Wars. Those coal miners were still eating a nutrient-dense and animal-based diet from hunting, trapping, fishing, and subsistence farming. It’s not merely that those coal miners had guns and numbers, along with solidarity, for they also had the bravado to stand up to corporate goons, Pinkertons, and the US military. They refused to act as if they were defeated because defeat wasn’t an option, wasn’t allowable.

If they hadn’t been willing to fight and die, we wouldn’t today have many of our workers rights. Will future generations be able to say that about us? So far, it’s not looking like it.

What underlies the health of the non-reactionary?

Obviously, much else is involved. We need to understand not only that people were different in what they did but what made that possible and probable.

The health-induced liberal-mindedness means that, far beyond merely being able stand their ground and fight, they also were able to organize and act collectively toward a constructive goal of betterment for all. That’s prosocial behavior, a culture of trust. Rather than bickering and splintering into identity politics, those prior generations of left-wingers had something we now lack. No matter how hard we try, we can’t regain that special quality without re-establishing the healthy conditions that made it possible in the past.

This health factor constantly gets overlooked. This is partly because conventional views of health are likely incorrect, as we’re in the middle of a replication crisis in numerous fields like nutrition studies. In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam discussed the Italian-American residents of Roseto, Pennsylvania. In the immediate post-war period, they were the healthiest population in the US.

But they didn’t fit the profile of how health was understood then and now.

Many worked in a nearby toxic factory. Drinking alcohol and smoking tobacco was common. And they ate a diet that supposedly everyone knew was death-dealing: plenty of noodles, lots of animal foods, traditional processed meats (probably with ground organ meats), and lard used to cook everything in. The Rosetans, on average, even had a fair amount of belly fat, one of the supposedly greatest indicators of health risk.

If all these were factors that should’ve sent the Rosetans to an early grave, then it must’ve been something else that was saving them. Putnam speculated it was their close-knit communities, regular socializing, and civic organizations. As the title suggests, these people were bowling in leagues, rather than alone.

Without a doubt, that was a major influence. We are social creatures, after all.

But as others have noted, all those animal foods might also have been a saving grace (Research On Meat And Health; & Blue Zones Dietary Myth). These Italian-Americans, unlike most other Americans at the time, were still eating a traditional diet of nutrient-dense foods. They were eating a diet closer to the early American coal miners and American Revolutionaries, Apaches and Mongols.

Maybe there is something to the traditional diet, along with a traditional lifestyle in general. As an ethnic immigrant population, those Rosetans had maintained much of their old world customs, way of life, and social relations.

I bet they had large extended families and multigenerational households. Without a doubt, many of them still gardened, hunted, and fished. In general, they likely spent a lot of time outside and often walked to places, as it was a period when there still were neighborhood churches, stores, schools, and parks. It would’ve been a real community, more similar to how humans had been living for millennia.

Relative to today, their lives were super unstressed and little time was spent consuming (or rather being consumed by) manipulative, propagandistic media. They probably only worked 40 hour work weeks and so had lots of free time to spend with family, friends, neighbors, and fellow congregants. Because of the highest labor membership in US history, they surely had great pay, lifetime job security, awesome benefits, great healthcare, and a guaranteed retirement.

All of that was on top of the social democracy and welfare state established by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and progressive leadership across the country: anti-poverty programs, nutritional fortification of foods, Social Security, Medicare, GI Bill, nearly free college education, massive funding into R&D, and on and on and on.

To be self-aware and wary but not fearful

It was an era of optimism, positive feeling, progress, and public good. Indeed, basic metrics of health and prosperity were improving on all accounts, with even a growing black middle class. Post-war Americans were already well into the liberal consensus that would last some more decades before being dismantled.

If our present personality tests had been around at the time and a researcher had gotten data, one suspects that most post-war Americans would’ve been higher on ‘openness to experience’ (and possibly ‘honesty-humility’) with those like the Rosetans being among the highest. That would’ve contributed to the success of organized labor at the time. If Putnam doesn’t talk about it, Roseto probably had been a labor union stronghold.

The point to all of this goes back to my original observations.

As with MAGA on the far right, the extreme illiberal and authoritarian leftism we see dominating many activist circles would be far less of a thing under better conditions. But we also wouldn’t see the reactionary attitudes among the DNC elites and Democratic partisans. This reactionary mind in all its forms, rather than being limited to a single group like MAGA, has become a contagion that has taken over our society.

We on the broad left shouldn’t get too self-righteous. In these hard times, we need to humble ourselves to see our situation with clear eyes, so as to be on guard. We can’t fight what we don’t understand. Otherwise, we’ll tire ourselves out while swinging at shadows. That is when we can slip into the reactionary mind without realizing it.

We need to be on guard so as to better defend what matters most. But we simultaneously must avoid falling into fear. That is yet another reactionary trap. Our concern is what we’re striving toward, not merely what we’re fighting against. Even as the reactionary is an obstacle, reactionaries aren’t our primary concern. Defeating them won’t alone get us to where we want to go.

Our lodestone is the hopeful vision of a better society. It’s about remaining open. It’s the power of radical imagination, to see beyond what is to what might be. One has to fall in love with possibility.

* * *

*Note:

According to the researcher Bob Altemeyer, the ‘right-wing’ in RWA doesn’t only refer to recent history of the political right. Instead, it’s based on the original definition from revolutionary era France. To be on the right side of power means that one believes perceived legitimate authority, however defined, should have their total domination submitted to or else enforced.

Hence, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong were right-wing leaders in this sense. The Russian and Chinese people weren’t give a democratic choice of self-determination and self-governance. All the decisions were made in top-down fashion by a ruling elite.

Even as as Stalinism and Maoism are conventionally described as left-wing, the authoritarianism they represent is both inegalitarian and illiberal. Sure, some might argue (if I’d argue otherwise), a left-winger possibly might be illiberal and still genuinely be far on the left. But for certain, there is no such thing as leftism without egalitarianism. Intrinsically, dominance hierarchies and power disparities are anti-leftist, by definition.

If an elite — private and plutocratic or public and political — controls the economy (means of production, natural resources, etc) and in particular controls capital (i.e., fungible wealth), then that is the capitalist class by definition. This is why Stalinism is often called state capitalism or red fascism. China has become even more fascist in that there are semi-privately-owned corporations, but the ‘owners’ are entirely beholden to and controlled by the state. That is similar to how capitalism operated in Nazi Germany.

So, the Soviet and Chinese ruling elite having wielded or still wielding a centralized economy were or are acting as capitalists, if the capitalism was or is monopolized by the state instead of by corporations. Ironically, many communists have predicted that capitalism always results in monopolies. Stalinism and Maoism proved that to be true, as they resulted in a monopoly of state capitalism. The communist alternative is still waiting to be attempted at the large scale.