We will (half of us, anyway) be puzzled for a long time about what led such a large group of people to storm the Capitol on January 6, trash it, try to assassinate elected officials and cause a half dozen deaths. This in spite of the fact that everything they were violently riled up about had been proven over and over not to be true. How could those believers in "we support our police" and "law and order" and the Constitution hypocritically make such a savage attack on the police and try to stop Congress from carrying out its Constitutional duties?
A study in the U.K. showed that the amygdala, the evolutionarily early part of the human brain (also referred to as the reptile or lizard brain) is larger and more active in those with a conservative orientation than a liberal one. In addition, the anterior cingulate cortex, the region associated with managing information, decision making, ethics and dealing with uncertainty is favored by people with a liberal personality. The left insula area, which is also larger in conservatives, is associated with an emotional sense of disgust or repellence. One can guess this faculty was pretty essential for our distant ancestors, who had to learn to avoid bad smells caused by dangerous pathogens, and on a larger scale, social threats, such as almost all outsiders. Counterintuitively, it seems larger amounts of grey matter in some brain areas indicate a less mature brain. One that can rather easily be manipulated through an unrelenting focus on the negative and playing on the anxiety over perceived scarcity ("they're taking our jobs!") and an obsession with self-protection.
So it looks like our political bent derives more from DNA than from our environment. Take a look at the life of the person pictured above, Eileen Garrett (1893 - 1970). Her parents committed suicide when she was an infant, and her angry, unloving, abusive aunt had to take her in. At age four Eileen, disassociating and escaping into her own world in order to survive, developed three imaginary companions who she said taught her to observe adults' tones and cadences of speech and interpret facial expressions.
Things did not get better for her after a miserable childhood, unfortunately, as she had three marriages and lost three of her four children. Later in life she became known as a psychic who channeled four distinct exotic personalities, speaking in their voices during a trance state. Studied by several psychologists in the 1930s, Eileen came to realize these did not have an objective existence but rather came from her subconscious, and that her supposedly psychic predictions were no more accurate than guessing. The point is that Mrs. Garrett, despite everything, did not shatter and undergo a psychotic break like the January 6 mob, but had a saving balance between the higher-functioning right side of the brain (intuition, imagination and inspiration) and the complementary left side (reading, writing and arithmetic). Had she been driven by a predisposition for the primitive reptilian brain area instead, Eileen would probably have become a serial killer rather than the successful writer, publisher and executive that she did.
But, "If you're dumb enough to fall for a conspiracy theory, you're dumb enough to fall for another." -- Mark Evanier
It's got to be true! I've read it on the radio.
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