Show Notes
There is a particular kind of anger that has nothing to do with what is happening in front of you. It is not a reaction to a policy, a headline, or a specific event. It is older than that. It sits underneath everything else, coloring every interaction, turning every perceived slight into proof of a story the person has been telling themselves for decades. It is the anger of someone who did not become who they thought they would be, and who has never found a way to say that out loud. James Gilligan spent his career sitting across from men who had committed acts of violence so extreme that most people would call them incomprehensible. He worked as a prison psychiatrist in the Massachusetts correctional system before directing the Center for the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School. His patients were murderers, men convicted of assault so severe it bordered on attempted homicide, men who had destroyed other people’s lives and, in many cases, their own. The conventional understanding of these men was that they were evil, or broken, or wired wrong. Gilligan rejected all of it. What he found, documented in his 1996 book Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, was consistent to a degree that surprised even him. Underneath every act of violence he studied was the same emotion. Not anger. Anger was the surface. Underneath the anger was shame. And not shame in the colloquial sense of embarrassment or mild discomfort. Gilligan described what he observed as something he called the death of the self. A state in which the person’s internal sense of worth had been so thoroughly destroyed that they no longer experienced themselves as fully real. Violence, in this framework, was not an expression of power. It was the last remaining proof that they existed at all.
The Mechanism Nobody Talks About Gilligan’s model rests on a distinction that most people outside of clinical psychology never encounter. There are two moral systems that govern human behavior: guilt ethics and shame ethics. Guilt says “I did a bad thing.” Shame says “I am a bad thing.” The difference is not semantic. It is structural, and it determines what a person does with the feeling once it arrives. Guilt is actionable. A person who feels guilty about something they did can, at least in theory, make amends. They can apologize, change their behavior, repair the damage. Guilt points outward, toward the act, and leaves the self intact. Shame offers no such exit. A person who feels shame is not responding to something they did. They are responding to something they believe they are. And you cannot apologize for existing. You cannot make amends for being insufficient. The only options are to sit with the feeling, which most people cannot tolerate for long, or to convert it into something that feels more survivable. For many men, the conversion is into rage. Rage has a direction. It has a target. It provides the momentary sensation of power, which is the precise opposite of what shame produces. And this is where Gilligan’s clinical findings intersect with something much larger than the prison system.
The Gap Between the Man and the Myth There is a version of masculinity in American culture that is largely aspirational and almost entirely fictional. It is the man who builds things, provides for his family, earns respect through competence, and needs nothing from anyone. This version of manhood is presented as both natural and achievable, which makes it doubly punishing when reality does not cooperate. The men Gilligan studied in prison had, almost without exception, been measured against this standard and found wanting. They had not built the lives they were supposed to build. They had not earned the respect they were told they deserved. The world had not recognized them as the men they believed they were entitled to become. And because the cultural script offered no framework for processing that failure as a structural problem, or a matter of circumstance, or simply the
More from The Lucas Bean Show
There’s a familiar ritual that happens every time an authoritarian movement begins to collapse. The supporters disappear. Not physically. Psychologically. They scrub the evidence, rewrite the timeline, and emerge on the other side with a story they’ve rehearsed just enough to almost believe. “I never really supported him.” “I just voted against the Democrats.” “I don’t talk about politics anymore.” This is happening right now across America. The yard signs are coming down. The hats are going into drawers. The Facebook posts are being deleted. And millions of people who spent a decade loudly and publicly cheering for cruelty are quietly trying to exit the building before someone turns the lights on. The companion video to this piece says what needs to be said plainly: they’re not confused. They’re lying. They know what they did. They know what they defended. And they’re trying to erase the evidence before accountability arrives. This Substack examines why that matters, why it won’t work this time, and what history tells us about populations that try to pretend they were never part of the thing they spent years supporting.
Most political analysis starts with policy. Voters chose this candidate because of the economy, immigration, healthcare, taxes. And for most voters in most elections, that’s probably true. But Donald Trump is not most candidates. And the question that keeps surfacing isn’t why people agree with him. It’s why they love him more every time he does something cruel. The mockery. The insults. The attacks on disabled reporters, Gold Star families, and women. Behavior that would end any other political career has somehow become the foundation of his. In 2021, psychologist Matthew Yalch at Palo Alto University published a study in PLOS ONE titled “Dimensions of pathological narcissism and intention to vote for Donald Trump.” And what he found should make everyone uncomfortable, including the people it describes.
In February 2025, researchers at the University of Amsterdam published a study in Social Science & Medicine that should have rewritten every conversation about why people join the far right. They tracked over 40,000 people across nine countries, with data spanning fifteen years. They controlled for income, education, immigration attitudes, and political ideology. They wanted to know what actually predicts whether someone will support the populist radical right. The answer wasn’t immigration. It wasn’t economics. It wasn’t religion. It was loneliness. Lonelier individuals were consistently more likely to support radical right movements, with the association holding across all fifteen years of Dutch data and appearing across multiple European countries. The researchers noted that the effect sizes were comparable to the known health correlates of loneliness, meaning that the connection between loneliness and far-right support was statistically as meaningful as the connection between loneliness and heart disease, high blood pressure, and depression. A 2021 RAND Corporation study of former extremists and their families confirmed this from the other direction. Half of the former extremists surveyed said feelings of marginalization drove them toward radicalization, with most citing isolation and loneliness specifically. Individuals reported that the social benefits of joining extremist organizations, the friendship, the camaraderie, the sense of finally belonging somewhere, were among the most powerful forces keeping them in. These people didn’t join a movement because they were convinced by policy arguments. They joined because someone finally made them feel like they weren’t alone. And that tells us more about what MAGA actually is than any analysis of tariffs or border policy ever could.
A woman stood up at a political rally and asked a sitting congressman to create a federal law that would force her adult daughter to let her see her grandchildren. Not a therapy session. Not a family mediator. Not a phone call to her daughter asking what went wrong. A federal law. That single moment contains more psychology than most textbooks. Because what she revealed, in front of cameras and a cheering crowd, wasn’t a grandmother’s heartbreak. It was a narcissist’s playbook when someone finally tells them no. How a boundary becomes a theft. In 2002, psychologist Roy Baumeister at Case Western Reserve University published a theory that combined two existing psychological frameworks into something new. The first was narcissism, the personality structure built around an inflated self-image that requires constant validation. The second was psychological reactance, a concept developed by Jack Brehm at the University of Kansas in 1966, which describes the motivational state people enter when they perceive their freedom as restricted. Brehm found that when people believe a choice or behavior has been taken from them, they experience an intense drive to restore it, often wanting the restricted option more than they did before it was restricted. Baumeister’s insight was that narcissism supercharges reactance. When an ordinary person encounters a boundary, they may be disappointed, but they can process it. When a narcissist encounters a boundary, they don’t experience disappointment. They experience theft. The boundary isn’t perceived as another person’s valid choice. It’s perceived as something that belongs to them being taken away. And they feel entitled to take it back by whatever means necessary. Baumeister called it narcissistic reactance. This grandmother didn’t process her daughter’s boundary as a painful but legitimate decision by an autonomous adult. She processed it as her property being stolen. Those grandchildren aren’t people her daughter is protecting. In her mind, they are hers. Access to them is her right. And no one, not even their own mother, gets to take what’s hers.
There is a specific kind of frustration that comes from watching something fall apart in exactly the way someone told you it would. Not vaguely. Not in broad metaphorical strokes. In order. Step by step. With the stages so clearly defined that anyone paying attention can call the next one before it happens. Plato had that frustration 2,400 years ago. He lived through it. He watched the Athenian democracy, the most advanced political experiment in the ancient world, turn on itself. He watched it execute Socrates, his teacher, arguably the sharpest mind in the city, for the crime of asking uncomfortable questions. And instead of moving on, Plato spent the rest of his life trying to explain how a society capable of producing genius could also be stupid enough to kill it. The result was The Republic. And while most of the book covers justice, education, and the nature of reality, Book Eight is something different entirely. Book Eight is a manual. It is Plato at his most concrete, walking through the specific sequence of events that takes a functioning democracy and turns it into a dictatorship. Not in abstract terms. In stages. With causes, mechanisms, and outcomes laid out in an order that has repeated across civilizations for two millennia.