As we see the various “outsider” GOP frontrunners like Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina continue to dominate over the far more experienced field of actual legislators and governors, It’s hard not to notice a pattern of grandiose behavior that seems to be common among many conservatives. But it seems even more pronounced among those particular candidates.
Let’s consider, for a moment, just how well the behavior of Trump, Carson, and Fiorina resembles this description of narcissistic personality disorder from the Mayo Clinic:
If you have narcissistic personality disorder, you may come across as conceited, boastful or pretentious. You often monopolize conversations. You may belittle or look down on people you perceive as inferior. You may feel a sense of entitlement — and when you don't receive special treatment, you may become impatient or angry. You may insist on having "the best" of everything — for instance, the best car, athletic club or medical care.
At the same time, you have trouble handling anything that may be perceived as criticism. You may have secret feelings of insecurity, shame, vulnerability and humiliation. To feel better, you may react with rage or contempt and try to belittle the other person to make yourself appear superior. Or you may feel depressed and moody because you fall short of perfection [emphasis added]
It’s generally a good idea to avoid remotely diagnosing people you’ve never met, or only briefly met as have Trump and Carson, but all of that does seem rather hauntingly familiar. The shoes, in these cases, do seem to fit.
Scientists have begun to find that there really is more than just difference of opinion between liberals and conservatives: There actually are physiological and psychological differences between them. That’s the conclusion of a study published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences:
A large body of political scientists and political psychologists now concur that liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology, and even traits like physiology and genetics.
That's a big deal. It challenges everything that we thought we knew about politics—upending the idea that we get our beliefs solely from our upbringing, from our friends and families, from our personal economic interests, and calling into question the notion that in politics, we can really change (most of us, anyway).
The occasion of this revelation is a paper by John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska and his colleagues, arguing that political conservatives have a "negativity bias," meaning that they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments. (The paper can be read for free here.) In the process, Hibbing et al. marshal a large body of evidence, including their own experiments using eye trackers and other devices to measure the involuntary responses of political partisans to different types of images. One finding? That conservatives respond much more rapidly to threatening and aversive stimuli (for instance, images of "a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it," as one of their papers put it).
In other words, the conservative ideology, and especially one of its major facets—centered on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns—would seem well tailored for an underlying, threat-oriented biology.
This basic threat-based biology issue goes a long way toward explaining GOP hopefuls who bang on the warning bells of danger incessantly. There’s mass immigrant invasion a la Trump, Planned Parenthood’s “fetus on the table with its heart beating, legs kicking, about to have it’s brain harvested” a la Fiorina, and Carson’s continued litany of biographical gaffes while he argues the evils of dreaded liberals and the biased media.
Another factor which seems common to people like Carson, Fiorina, and Trump seems to be the complete inability to correct a mistakes or false impressions when challenged with more up-to-date information. That seems to closely resemble confirmation bias.
A confirmation bias is a type of cognitive bias that involves favoring information that confirms previously existing beliefs or biases. For example, imagine that a person holds a belief that left-handed people are more creative than right-handed people. Whenever this person encounters a person that is both left-handed and creative, they place greater importance on this "evidence" supporting their already existing belief. This individual might even seek out "proof" that further backs up this belief, while discounting examples that do not support this idea.
Confirmation biases impact how people gather information, but they also influence how people interpret and recall information.
For example, people who support or oppose a particular issue will not only seek information that supports their beliefs, they will also interpret news stories in a way that upholds their existing ideas and remember things in a way that also reinforces these attitudes.
Even when presented with evidence of President Obama’s long form birth certificate, conservatives continue to claim that he is still, even today, some kind of illegal alien, Kenyan, Muslim interloper with no legitimate claim to the presidency. That’s a key indicator of confirmation bias. It doesn’t matter what evidence you present to a person like that—they will continue to deny, ignore, and excuse it all away, whether it’s the issue of climate change and the importance of transitioning to clean energy, or the need to expand Medicaid, or a woman’s right to control her own body, or pretty much anything they don’t already believe.
This subject has also been well investigated by former Nixon White House counsel John Dean in his book Conservatives Without Conscience.
Sparked by Goldwater, Dean continued to research on the subject with various scholars looking into the psychology of authorianism and found a wealth of information on the subject.
According to his findings, a vast majority of Conservatives are drawn into the Leader/Follower archetype, where the Leaders are considered infallable, and the loyalty of the Followers is completely unshakable. About "23% of the populace falls into the follower category" said Dean. "These people are impervious" to fact, rationality and reality. And their "Numbers are growing"
Which directly explains the fawning fan bases particularly for Trump and Carson, they truly love men (and the occasional woman) of “action” even if what the actions and policies their proposing are largely ridiculous and potentially disastrous.
Although none of these three candidates has any political experience, they do have the claim of professional and financial success as part of their underlying appeal. All three claim to be very “smart people,” particularly Carson, who many consider a brilliant surgeon. But even in this area, “smart” is somewhat relative, as fellow kossack (and coincidentally, neurologist) neuroguy has pointed out.
“Smart” is a multifaceted cognitive feature composed of excellent analytical skills, possession of an extensive knowledge base that is easily and frequently augmented, possession of a good memory, and being readily curious about the world and willing, even eager, to reject previously accepted notions in the face of new data. Being smart includes having the ability to analyze new data for validity and, thinking creatively, draw new insights from existing common knowledge.
As a neurologist in practice for 20 years and one who has worked closely with many neurosurgeons I can assure you, Dr. Ben Carson does not meet the above criteria. Not even close. He is a painfully ignorant person. This is an easy point to defend. From his statements on the pyramids as grain silos, his rejection of extensive, confirmatory evidence of climate change, to his glaringly unworkable alternative to Medicare, most Americans out of the conservative media bubble are familiar with the litany of uninformed, intellectually shabby statements he has made over the last few months.
My point is that neurosurgeons are not automatically smart because they are neurosurgeons. To get through training and have any sort of practice they must be disciplined, have immense ego strength, a reasonably good memory, and have mental and physical stamina. However, like many other doctors, they are not always smart. Neurosurgeons, like other surgeons, can be outstanding technicians but that is different than being intellectually brilliant. A truly brilliant internal medicine specialist once told me that “you can train anyone to perform a procedure”. I’ve seen surgical assistants perform technically difficult procedures with stunning alacrity. It’s the old rule: do something enough times and you will get damn good at it.
Donald Trump attended the Wharton School of Business and was able to parlay his father’s $1 million loan and political connections (that granted him a tax abatement for acquisition and construction) into a real estate empire. Fiorina is a former head of Hewlett-Packard. That doesn’t automatically mean that either of them, or Carson, is suited to lead the most powerful nation on earth.
Some people just have a knack for failing upwards.
One other issue to consider in cases similar to these is the likelihood that people like Trump, Carson, and Fiorina may be outwardly “successful,” but they also may be mired in what therapist John Bradshaw has termed toxic shame.
Toxic shame is John Bradshaw’s name for what happens when shame is felt so repeatedly and deeply that it transforms from a feeling into a state of being. He describes it in Healing the Shame that Binds You (from which nearly all the information in this series comes): “To be shame-bound means that whenever you feel any feeling, need or drive, you immediately feel ashamed.” What you feel ashamed about is not something you’ve done, but who you are.
As I mentioned in the previous article, toxic shame likes to hide in the subconscious. Once internalized there, the hate and scorn one feels for oneself causes ruptures to occur within the self; parts of the personality are rejected or cut off. This hatred of the self is painful, and so it is very difficult for shame-based people to look inward at what’s going on within themselves.
Bradshaw argues that once a person has begun to form internalized toxic shame, it can manifest itself in a variety of ways. The two most common are outward expression of their own internal sense of worthlessness, what Bradshaw describes as “worm-like or less-than-human” behavior; or for them to try to suppress these feelings by becoming a hyperactive overachiever, which Bradshaw calls “god-like/more-than-human” behavior.
Less-than-human behavior is easier to pick out, because it is something we are not used to admiring. While we might look at an overachiever and admire his success, we look at addicts and shake our heads sadly.
If more-than-human people must be in control of everything around them, less-than-human people are completely out of control. Here we see addicts and criminals, and those filled with rage and self-contempt and hatred. While those who project godlike personas blame others for everything, these people feel everything is always their fault. They will fail deliberately, over and over, victims who are convinced they can’t do anything right. These people feel like they are nothing, and they act like it. They are objects of scorn to themselves, and they mistreat themselves accordingly.
Partly, these godlike or wormlike behaviors are meant to cast up colorful scarves, to fool the world and create distraction. But partly, they are necessary for the shame-based person to fool himself. Less-than-human behavior is what results when shame-based people act out the shame they feel, in order to displace its source: “I feel shame because I vomited all over my friend.” Acting shamelessly allows them to imagine that it is their actions that make them feel ashamed, and not something wrong with them at the core of their self. More-than-human people want to deny their shame, cover it up and pretend they don’t feel it: “What’s to feel shame about? I’m perfect,” and they get very upset every time something happens to remind them of their humanity. [emphasis added]
In the life story that Carson presents, he starts out an angry, violent, out-of-control young man who suddenly turns himself around with the help of God to become a world renowned neurosurgeon. That’s a classic case of someone first acting out shamelessly in a worm-like manner, then simply re-channels that into a grandiose, god-like behavior pattern. The internal toxic shame that drove Carson to try and stab his friend/relative/whatever and (luckily) hit his belt buckle instead functions in the same manner as his drive to become a surgeon. He’s like an addict who went from one one extreme to another, from rage to neo-Christianity without a proper internal sense of balance that would prevent him from repeatedly overdosing on his new drug.
These obviously aren’t definitive diagnoses—they’re just possible explanations for some of the oddball behavior and statements we’ve seen from these three. They could also apply to some of the other GOP hopefuls, not to mention conservative personas including Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh.
During George W. Bush’s presidency, it was often debated whether those in his administration really believed that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of WMDs that he was willing to provide to al Qaeda, or that he had trained Mohammad Atta on chemical weapons use as Dick Cheney claimed. Or were they simply lying in order to justify and rationalize their long desired war with Iraq? When you consider the above pathological behaviors, it ultimately may not matter whether they consciously realized that certain aspects of their rationale for war were based on a lie. In the end, they were compelled to engage in a willful delusion where only the information that reinforced their preconceived goals was considered and all contrary information (such as the State and Energy departments' extended dissents over the validity of the yellowcake story, and the aluminum tubes-to-centrifuges theory in the Iraq NIE, and Joe Wilson’s op ed on “What I didn’t find in Africa”) could not even be seen by these people, let alone seriously considered. Contrary information like this had to be buried under layers of classification, or discredited by the outing of Wilson’s wife, who was a covert CIA agent. All that’s on top of blatantly ignoring repeated warnings by the CIA about imminent attacks by Bin Laden and al Qaeda because clearly that couldn’t be true as far as they were concerned.
And thus died 3,000+ at the Trade Center and Pentagon then another 4,000 U.S. soldiers and 150,000 Iraqis in the clusterfuck that ultimately led to the rise of ISIL. That is the kind of existential failure that we can’t afford to repeat. Ever.
People functioning under a willful delusion can’t be reasoned with. They can’t be presented with an argument that will convince them of the “truth,” unless that truth is something they’re already personally invested in believing. That axiom may not be the case for every conservative, but it does appear to be a key component in the makeup of many of the people currently appearing on the GOP’s presidential debate stage.
And It’s not to say that any of these traits and pathologies are exclusive to conservatives—because they certainly are not, we all need to be on the lookout for being blinded by our own ideological dogma—but rather that it seems based on these studies and research those that have several of these tendencies in abundance may also tend to be more rigidly and doggedly conservative.