Are "liberal" minds actually better, or are they just easier to manage for those in power? A challenge to the paradigm of "backwards conservative" brains vs "educated liberal" brains.
A summary of prior musings with some minor edits, condensed into one article
What makes a modern western liberal?
There is a subtle undercurrent to western political psychology which I will refer to as “liberal primacy”. What this means is that there is an axiom of the default state of a healthy mind as “liberal”, while divergences are classified as problematic. I intend to challenge and flip this paradigm on it’s head. We have an entire school of thought to demonize the political abuse of psychiatry in the former Soviet Union, what about the potential abuse in the Western world?
Dynamics of Western political affiliation may not simply be a matter of “differing beliefs”, at least in the traditional sense. I’ve found that the public face of psychological research in the Western world actually has a disturbing undercurrent, examining the possibilities of psychology and neuroscience to shape public behavior.
One such infamous piece from the Independent examined the impact of cognitive stimulation on faith and attitudes to immigration.
Specifically, research like that published in The Independent – which demonstrated the ability to temporarily weaken faith through targeted magnetic stimulation of the threat-processing center – highlights an alarming phenomena: the deliberate exploration of neurological pathways linked to belief systems and political leadership compliance.
This individual study has little relevance to the Western populations because the methodology used can’t realistically be replicated or used for society at large. But the underlying concept – the potential for researchers to investigate and, perhaps, influence behavioral conditioning via such studies– warrants attention in itself. It could be found that protracted partisan engagement could, in some individuals, contribute to either altered amygdala development (if an abnormality was found in western right-wingers) or an overactive Anterior Cingulate Cortex (if an abnormality was found in western left-wingers). The ACC is involved in conflict monitoring and error detection; excessive activation can lead to heightened anxiety, increased reactivity to perceived threats, and ultimately, a narrowing of perspective – potentially contributing to the observed differences in brain function between partisan Democrats and Republicans.
Most research I have found portrays the focus on conservatives being the “abnormal” ones due to an alleged issue with the amygdala. This persistent “amygdala-conservatism” narrative in research – portraying conservatives as inherently driven by fear – is too reductionist and fails to account for the nuanced relationship between political ideology and brain function, and doesn’t even appear to line up with non-politically-charged research.
A fascinating study examining “party position congruency” – measuring an individual’s openness to novel ideas versus their adherence to party lines – provides a valuable insight. The study demonstrated that the model Democrat partisan, when confronted with incongruent party positions, exhibit increased activation in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC), a region associated with conflict monitoring and potentially rigid adherence to established frameworks. Conversely, the model Republican partisan showed less pronounced ACC activation when faced with challenging viewpoints, suggesting a greater willingness to consider alternative perspectives.
This finding resonates with my own observations, and it’s crucial to move beyond broad correlations and explore more specific mechanisms. While the initial study is admittedly small, it aligns with broader trends suggesting that partisan environments may subtly shape neural pathways, fostering a tendency for “left-wing” Democrats to seek guidance from leadership while “right-wing” Republicans possess a greater capacity for independent thought.
It’s important to acknowledge, as Schumacher points out, that the brain isn’t neatly divided into “blue” and “red” categories. My theory is that “blue brains” seem to be specifically localized in parts of the “progressive left” in Western nations.
As evidenced by the example of the Socialist Party (SP) of the Netherlands – a party with historically Marxist roots yet employing “left-conservative” positions on immigration – ideological affiliation is shaped by a multitude of factors, including economic policies and social values, yet the neurological difference seems limited specifically to a western style progressive left set of social values.
Their platform combines left-wing economic objectives with a pragmatic, heterodox approach to social issues. Their focus on “class struggle” instead of “race struggle” – articulated in their core slogan – reveals a crucial element: the significant difference in brain development is actually isolated to alignment on generic “culture war” issues rather than any sort of abstract economic ideology.
Most political research framing is presented on the underlying assumption that the “heroic progressive” narrative represents some sort of ultimate truth, while the “right-wing neanderthals” are holding back human progress. But that analysis frame is based on the assumption that the progressive side is inherently the justified and ultimate moral authority by virtue of it currently possessing the position of authority, rather than any objective metrics.
What if we had this assumed relationship on “forward thinking progressives” vs “reactionary conservatives” backwards? What if progressives represented the culmination of social engineering the likes of which the CIA’s MKUltra project could only dream of? Let’s investigate by asking some objective questions on the matter.
One fascinating difference between the research-rationalization world and the results based real world is that objective measures of “liberals” vs “conservatives” behavior seem to favor the conservatives. Since this distinction does not appear outside of the western world, we will define it as “liberal progressives” vs “peasants”.
Take for example this study measuring a strange difference between the two groups, that the liberals are objectively less able to regulate their emotions as shown by facial expression.
This behavior is framed as being “emotionally repressed”. Is this the “emotional and sexual repression” we’ve heard so much about? Because impulse control is actually a positive attribute. While liberals report greater emotional expressivity and a perceived inability to control emotional displays, research demonstrates that a capacity for controlled emotional expression – a hallmark of temperament – is, in fact, a sign of enhanced cognitive capacity.
Findings, published in Politics and the Life Sciences, highlight this distinction. Professor Kevin Smith’s research, utilizing four distinct studies, conclusively demonstrates that facial emotional expressivity is a significant biological marker differentiating liberals and conservatives. As Smith states, “People can, with greater-than-chance accuracy, figure out whether you’re liberal or conservative just by looking at your face.” But human beings grow and change overtime, so this variance surely isn’t predetermined, despite the implication one will find in research.
Importantly, conservatives exhibited a greater ability to independently regulate emotional expression, a demonstration of superior cognitive control. Smith’s observation, “Liberals reported being less able to stop from expressing emotions, while conservatives were a little more buttoned-down,” captures this critical difference. This suggests a neural architecture prioritizing reasoned, measured responses, a characteristic linked to successful problem-solving and strategic thinking specific to people described as “conservatives”.
No scientific study has ever dared to ask why this difference exists, why conservatives have a “larger amygdala and are more sensitive to fear and disgust”, yet exhibit an ability to regulate their own expressions of emotions.
While it is hypothetically possible that a larger Amygdala can cause problems, Amygdala deficit issues are seemingly intentionally not well studied.
I’d argue the research into Amygdala deficits is understudied to a suspicious degree.
One little known fact is that pedophiles have observable brain differences than non pedophiles, and researchers themselves acknowledge their superiors don’t seem interested in expanding the data on the topic.
An NIH study from 2008 goes on:
Abnormal amygdala activation profile in pedophilia - PubMed
Despite considerable public interest research in neurobiological correlates of pedophilia is scarce. Since amygdala activation is central for emotional valuation, arousal, and salience, we investigated the activation profile of this structure in 10 male subjects with pedophilia (exclusively attracted to boys), all convicted sex-offenders and sentenced to forensic psychiatric treatment along with ten male heterosexual matched controls. We used a sexually non-explicit functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) paradigm with images of men, women, boys or girls randomly embedded in neutral target/non-target geometrical symbols. We applied statistical parametric mapping (SPM2) and SPSS 14 for image processing and analysis. While controls activated significantly less to pictures of children compared to adults, the activation profile was reversed in subjects with pedophilia, who exhibited significantly more activation to children than adults. The highest activation was observed for boys in the patient group, and for women in control participants. Our data show enhanced activation to children’s pictures even in an incidental context and suggest the provocative hypothesis that a normally present mechanism for reduced emotional arousal for children relative to adults is reversed in pedophilia, suggesting a neural substrate associated with deviant sexual preference in this condition. More extensive research in this field would be of benefit for both the victims and the offenders.
I don’t intend to make the argument that standard liberal folks are more susceptible to pedophilia, but rather than deficits with amygdala function can be a very bad thing.
The cold war propaganda, MKUltra, and xǐnǎo/洗脑;
Several decades ago the US had a program called MKUltra. “Mk” is a security designation, “Ultra” was taken from the top secret WW2 era British spying program that bragged about it’s ability to “read the minds of the enemy”.
When he put Rommel’s picture up in his caravan he wanted to be seen to be almost reading his opponent’s mind. In fact he was reading his mail.
The program was incredibly compartmentalized with it’s aims, it’s operations, and it’s operational security, being completely unknown to the public until 1974. The only speculation such a program even existed was based on the suspicions of some Germans citing implausibility of certain encounters. Extensive red herrings for used to provide an explanation for every red flag
In the Battle of the Atlantic, the precautions were taken to the extreme. In most cases where the Allies knew from intercepts the location of a U-boat in mid-Atlantic, the U-boat was not attacked immediately, until a “cover story” could be arranged. For example, a search plane might be “fortunate enough” to sight the U-boat, thus explaining the Allied attack.
Some Germans had suspicions that all was not right with Enigma. Admiral Karl Dönitz received reports of “impossible” encounters between U-boats and enemy vessels which made him suspect some compromise of his communications.
With respect to the American project with some inductive reasoning, we can conclude at least one of the aims of this program involved pacifying domestic civilians for the purpose of political control, lest they fall under the sway of foreign despotic regimes. The continued limited public discussion surrounding MKUltra-style operations, coupled with the often excessive defenses and obfuscation employed by media outlets claiming to be ‘government critical,’ suggests that such compartmentalized organizations may still operate.
The program began after all during the Korean war when the US began to fear the loss of moral authority in the young communist regimes. Those regimes had plenty of their own propaganda and crimes to report on of course, but one allegation that seemed to occur and cause unacceptable amounts of de-legitimizing the government was some limited deployment of biological warfare items.
This does not mean every allegation of biological warfare from the Korean or Chinese governments was true, several were indeed likely propaganda, but other allegations were too specific to be fraudulent. The most damning evidence is the US treatment of US POW’s that came back from Korea. Those men faced a threat of legal prosecution, despite allegedly fabricating a story out of thin air:
In February 1953, China and North Korea produced two captured U.S. Marine Corps pilots to support the allegations. Colonel Frank Schwable was reported to have stated that: “The basic objective was at that time to get under field conditions various elements of bacteriological warfare and possibly expand field tests at a later date into an element of regular combat operations.” Schwable’s statement said that B-29s flew biological warfare missions to Korea from airfields in American-occupied Okinawa starting in November 1951. Schwable’s statement was obtained following months of torture and abuse at the hands of his captors, according to the US military. Other captured Americans such as Colonel Walker “Bud” Mahurin made similar statements.
The US governments narrative was inconsistent, and narrative management was remarkably similar to that of the U-2 incident just 7 years later. In the U-2 incident, it is publicly acknowledged that protocol encouraged Francis Gary Powers to blow himself up if caught, with a backup option of a poison laced injection pen, as the information and narrative monopoly was viewed as that important.
According to his book Operation Overflight, Powers delayed activating the camera’s self-destruct mechanism until he made sure he could exit the cockpit before the charges detonated. When g-forces unexpectedly threw him from the spinning aircraft, he could no longer reach the destruct switches. While descending under his parachute, Powers had time to scatter his escape map, and rid himself of part of his suicide device, a silver dollar coin suspended around his neck containing a poison-laced injection pin, though he kept the poison pin.[24] “Yet I was still hopeful of escape.”
As we return to the incident with the 1953 POW’s, those fellows were allegedly instructed to “tell everything they knew” to captors. Then the narrative shifted to them being “brainwashed”. And even with all that, they still faced legal charges at home. Why would soldiers who successfully tricked an enemy military into believing a fabricated plot be viewed with scrutiny at home?
”United States prisoners of war who collaborated with their Communist captors in Korea may face charges of treason” (New York Times, August 15, 1953)
It is far more likely that the joint Japanese-American agency adopted an assumption of their Japanese colleagues, that any clandestine programs agents would “go down with the ship” if captured, a warped adoption of the practice of Junshi that motivated imperial Japanese soldiers to take their own lives to avoid dishonor.
The pilots interrogated here (around the 10 minute mark) do not appear to have been fabricating a fantastical story:
Operations in MKUltra were much more successfully contained by comparison, as the strategy for operational security involved hyper-compartmentalization. The very few confirmed and documented cases with that project were revealed almost entirely by accident due to failed document deletion.
As an excellent politico article reported:
For decades, though, much of what went on at the base was a closely held secret. Directors of the CIA mind control program MK-ULTRA, which used Detrick as a key base, destroyed most of their records in 1973. Some of its secrets have been revealed in declassified documents, through interviews and as a result of congressional investigations. Together, those sources reveal Detrick’s central role in MK-ULTRA and in the manufacture of poisons intended to kill foreign leaders.
After World War II, Detrick faded in importance. The reason was simple: The United States had nuclear weapons, so developing biological ones no longer seemed urgent. As the Cold War began, however, two seemingly unrelated developments on opposite sides of the world stunned the newly created Central Intelligence Agency and gave Detrick a new mission.
In the spring of 1949 the Army created a small, super-secret team of chemists at Camp Detrick called the Special Operations Division. Its assignment was to find military uses for toxic bacteria. The coercive use of toxins was a new field, and chemists at the Special Operations Division had to decide how to begin their research.
Gottlieb wanted to use Detrick’s assets to propel his mind control project to new heights. He asked Dulles to negotiate an accord that would formalize the connection between the military and the CIA in this pursuit. Under the arrangement’s provisions, according to a later report, “CIA acquired the knowledge, skill, and facilities of the Army to develop biological weapons suited for CIA use.”
Taking advantage of this arrangement, Gottlieb created a hidden CIA enclave inside Camp Detrick. His handful of CIA chemists worked so closely with their comrades in the Special Operations Division that they became a single unit.
Some scientists outside the tight-knit group suspected what was happening. “Do you know what a ‘self-contained, off-the-shelf operation’ means?” one of them asked years later. “The CIA was running one in my lab. They were testing psychochemicals and running experiments in my labs and weren’t telling me.”
A decade of intense experiments taught Gottlieb that there are indeed ways to destroy a human mind. He never, however, found a way to implant a new mind in the resulting void. The grail he sought eluded him. MK-ULTRA ended in failure in the early 1960s. “The conclusion from all these activities,” he admitted afterward, “was that it was very difficult to manipulate human behavior in this way.”
What was MKUltras true purpose? In my humble opinion, the search for a way to manipulate a person into performing specific tasks against their will (ie murdering a target, Manchurian candidate style) is a gigantic red herring.
What if a “liberal democracy” feels the need to pacify potential opposition?
The true purpose of the program was likely the more literal, original definition of “brainwashing”: washing the brain clean of undesired elements and removing undesirable behavior. The Chinese term for this phenomena was “xǐnǎo”, to “wash brain”, which was used as a term in Chinese society for intellectuals to refer to modernization, and washing away pre conceived and backwards ways of thought. When this term of relatively generic growth became translated into American society it was depicted as some sort of neo-futuristic way of destroying independent minds to break down all resistance to a tyrant. This definition seems to have been applied in the more extreme way for MKUltra, as Linda McDonald experienced then recounted in 1994 interviews:
“The aim was to wipe out the patterns of thought and behavior which were detrimental to the patient and replace them with healthy patterns of thought and behavior,” said Dr. Peter Roper, a colleague of Cameron’s who still defends the experiments. “I think this was stimulated by the effects on the American troops of the war in Korea, how they seemed to have been brainwashed.”
Linda McDonald emerged from Cameron’s care in a near infantile condition. “I had to be toilet trained,” McDonald said. “I was a vegetable. I had no identity, no memory. I had never existed in the world before. Like a baby.”
The US military openly engaged in experiments on how to sedate and incapacitate combatants in enemy territory. It would make more sense for the CIA to take that same interest in incapacitating domestic civilians seen as undesirable.
Sometimes the “conspiracy” isn’t quite as grand as some superhuman plot, but a more simple empowerment of the ruling authorities against alleged threats. And that’s it.
The French residents of a town in 1953 seemed to understand this:
Mr Albarelli added: ‘The real smoking gun was a White House document sent to members of the Rockefeller Commission formed in 1975 to investigate CIA abuses.
‘It contained the names of a number of French nationals who had been secretly employed by the CIA and made direct reference to the Pont St. Esprit incident.’
Locals in Pont-Saint-Esprit still want to know what caused the mass insanity Villager Charles Granjoh, 71, was one those affected.
He said: ‘At the time people brought up the theory of an experiment aimed at controlling a popular revolt.
‘I almost kicked the bucket and I’d like to know why.’
What drove the research behind programs like MKUltra? Looking back, it’s clear these projects frequently evolved as new information emerged. Considering the program’s longevity, it seems unlikely that its starting point—a deliberate effort to create a ‘sleeper cell’ assassin – was ever intended to be its lasting objective, though it did diverge into behavioral manipulation in general. Though the only behavioral manipulation that appears genuinely effective is short-term, acute intervention focused on shaping immediate perceptions, such as “hit the hammer with the nail”:
Inside the Archive of an LSD Researcher With Ties to the CIA’s MKUltra Mind Control Project
Louis Jolyon West seems to have used chemicals and hypnosis liberally in his medical practice, possibly leading to the death of a child and the execution of an innocent man.
Tom O’Neill, Dan Piepenbring
November 24 2019, 7:00 a.m.
…In the ’50s, even before hippies embraced the drug, “Very few people took LSD without having somebody being a ‘trip leader,’” Charles Fischer, a drug researcher, told me. The suggestibility from LSD was akin to that associated with hypnosis; West had studied the two in tandem. “You can tell somebody to hurt somebody, but you call it something else,” Fischer explained. “Hammer the nail into the wood, and the wood, perhaps, is a human being.”
In 1949, the CIA, then in its infancy, launched Project Bluebird, a mind-control program that tested drugs on American citizens — most in federal penitentiaries or on military bases — who didn’t even know about, let alone consent to, the battery of procedures they underwent.
Their abuse found further justification in 1952, when, in Korea, captured American pilots admitted on national radio that they’d sprayed the Korean countryside with illegal biological weapons. It was a confession so beyond the pale that the CIA blamed communists: The POWs must have been “brainwashed.” The word, a literal translation of the Chinese “xi nao,” didn’t appear in English before 1950. It articulated a set of fears that had coalesced in postwar America: that a new class of chemicals could rewire and automate the human mind.
When the American POWs returned, the Army brought in a team of scientists to “deprogram” them. Among those scientists was West. Born in Brooklyn in 1924, he had enlisted in the Air Force during World War II, eventually rising to the rank of colonel. His friends called him “Jolly,” for his middle name, impressive girth, and oversized personality. When he got out, he researched methods of controlling human behavior at Cornell University. He would later claim to have studied 83 prisoners of war, 56 of whom had been forced to make false confessions. He and his colleagues were credited with reintegrating the POWs into Western society and, maybe more important, getting them to renounce their claims about having used biological weapons.
…Their work encompassed everything from electronic brain stimulation to sensory deprivation to “induced pain” and “psychosis.” They sought ways to cause heart attacks, severe twitching, and intense cluster headaches. If drugs didn’t do the trick, they’d try to master ESP, ultrasonic vibrations, and radiation poisoning. One project tried to harness the power of magnetic fields.
Now that we see a more realistic utility of the program, we can re analyze it’s purpose.
Within a liberal democratic state, paradoxically, dissidents who undermine the legitimacy of the system are much more of a risk and require more elaborate strategy to contain than those in an authoritarian state. An authoritarian state can attack a traitor. But a liberal democratic state cannot, it instead needs ways to discredit and “break down” such dissent, to “wash” their minds clean.
A man fixated on the truth, motivated by internally held values and emotional impulses, is perceived as a liability and enemy to the state.
Let us visit the case of Ken Kesey and his “transformation into an anti establishment warrior”:
Despite Allen Ginsberg’s insistence, Kesey did not believe that the project was sponsored by the CIA, and not until decades later did Kesey discover the program’s true intent: “[The testing] wasn’t being done to try to cure insane people, which is what we thought. It was being done to try to make people insane—to weaken people, and to be able to put them under the control of interrogators.” Of course, the resulting effect of the LSD did not weaken Kesey, as psychedelics came to be a tool of enlightenment for the author and cultural icon. Kesey noted that the CIA experimentation helped in evoking the kind of epiphanies that ultimately served as the foundation for the counterculture movement that would soon follow. “We suddenly realized that there’s a lot more to this world than we previously thought,” Kesey recalled. “One of the things that I think came out of it is this, is that there’s room. We don’t all have to be the same. We don’t have to have Baptists coast to coast. We can throw in some Buddhists and some Christians, and people who are just thinking these totally strange thoughts about the Irish leprechauns—that there is room, spiritually, for everybody in this universe.”
Thus we come full circle. All this generic (western) liberal bullshit, open borders no god no faith no rules nonsense seems remarkably similar to to the more experiment mentioned with brain magnets, no? Such a person would never betray his government to work for a foreign despot.
Kesey started his journey as a straight edged, conservative Christian patriot. He transformed into a liberal radical who helped galvanize the harmful push to eliminate asylums, which thus destabilized large parts of American civil society by creating a novel, divisive issue that continues today, and pushes disorganized, destabilizing actors into the public square.
Whatever the literary strengths of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the book has done much to harm both the mentally ill and their communities
Ken Kesey (1935–2001) was a great admirer of manliness, a quality that would inform his countercultural indictment of America’s attitude toward mental illness, and of postwar America more generally. The darkly comic 1962 novel for which he is known, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, likened US society to an asylum in which men (in particular) are stripped of freedom and psychologically castrated. Inspired by interactions with patients at a San Francisco-area Veterans’ Hospital—which sometimes coincided with his own participation in clinical studies on the use of mescaline, LSD, and other hallucinogenic drugs—Kesey came to believe that these institutions only made people sicker, notwithstanding the grand scientific pretensions under which they operated.
Cuckoo’s political message was aimed at both emptying America’s asylums and extinguishing the climate of social oppression that, as the author saw it, lay behind them. On both fronts, Kesey’s programmatic recommendation was to provide everyone, including those who seem troubled or dysfunctional, with more autonomy. It’s a viewpoint that’s gained enormous influence in the 60 years since One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was published. Unfortunately, whatever the literary strengths of Kesey’s signature novel, the movement it helped inspire has done much to harm both the mentally ill and the communities in which they live.
The expansion of “liberal primacy”
In 2025 what should have been a ground breaking admission from the scientific research community went relatively un-noticed.
Psypost had an article expressing intent to psycho-analyze and deconstruct “MAGA minorities”, ie nonwhite people who may express support for Donald Trump, or “authoritarianism” more broadly.
For decades, political psychology research has focused on how individual personality traits and ideological values shape people’s views on leadership. A consistent narrative has been that people on the political right are more likely to desire leaders who are forceful, uncompromising, and even willing to break rules to achieve their goals. Much of this research has roots in mid-20th century work, including the influential studies of authoritarian personality types.
But those earlier studies were based almost entirely on White samples. As minority populations continue to grow in countries like the United States, a deeper understanding of how ethnic background influences leadership preferences has become increasingly important. Recent political trends—such as rising support for Donald Trump among Latino and Black voters—suggest that the traditional picture may be incomplete.
What does this mean? It means the oppressive apparatus initially obsessed with deconstructing “right wing extremism”, “whiteness”, etcetera, is now going to be targeting other ethnic groups. The critical theory liberal primacy crowd is no longer content to limit it’s deconstruction of the nonwhite world to foreign countries cultures like that in Japan:
The Wajin’s Whiteness: Law and Race Privilege in Japan (批判的人種理論と日本法―和人の人種的特権について)
Hōritsu Jihō, (法律時報), Vol. 80, No.2, 80-91, February 2008
32 Pages Posted: 15 Feb 2010