Show Notes
Conspiracy theories are not beliefs. They are painkillers. In 1949, psychologist Else Frenkel-Brunswik at the University of California, Berkeley published a study that would reshape how we understand the relationship between personality and political behavior. She was not studying conspiracy theories. She was not studying politics at all. She was studying perception. Specifically, she was studying why certain people could not tolerate the experience of not knowing something. She called the trait intolerance of ambiguity. Frenkel-Brunswik found that some people can sit comfortably with uncertainty. They can hear a question and say they do not know the answer yet. They can hold two competing possibilities in their mind at the same time without distress. They can wait for evidence before arriving at a conclusion. Other people cannot do any of that. For them, uncertainty is not an intellectual state. It is a physical emergency. The absence of a clear answer produces anxiety so acute that the brain will seize on any available explanation just to make the discomfort stop. The quality of the explanation does not matter. The accuracy does not matter. What matters is that the uncertainty ends. The brain is not optimizing for truth. It is optimizing for relief.
The Authoritarian Connection Frenkel-Brunswik did not study this trait in isolation. She was one of four researchers behind The Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950 alongside Theodor Adorno, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford. The project set out to understand why certain people are drawn to authoritarian leaders and rigid ideological systems. Intolerance of ambiguity turned out to be one of the core traits in the authoritarian personality profile. The same people who scored highest on measures of authoritarianism, who wanted strong leaders and strict social hierarchies and harsh punishment for anyone who deviated from the rules, also scored highest on intolerance of ambiguity. The connection was not incidental. It was structural. The need for a strong leader and the need for a simple answer are the same need. Both eliminate uncertainty. Both replace the discomfort of not knowing with the relief of being told. A leader who says “I alone can fix it” is not making a political argument. He is offering a psychological service. He is removing ambiguity from the lives of people who experience ambiguity as pain.
Why Conspiracy Theories Spread This is the mechanism that makes conspiracy theories so resilient inside authoritarian movements. A conspiracy theory is not an analysis. It is an anesthetic. It takes a complicated, ambiguous, uncertain situation and replaces it with a clean narrative that has clear villains and a simple explanation. Why did the economy collapse? Not because of a complex web of global financial interdependencies that no single actor controls. Because a shadowy cabal did it on purpose. Why did a pandemic kill a million people? Not because of a novel virus interacting unpredictably with immune systems, public health infrastructure, and human behavior in ways that epidemiologists are still studying. Because a lab built it as a weapon. Why did a candidate lose an election? Not because of demographic shifts, campaign strategy failures, and voter preferences distributed across millions of individual decisions. Because it was stolen. Each of these conspiracies does the same thing. It takes a situation saturated with ambiguity and replaces it with certainty. The certainty is wrong. But for someone whose nervous system treats uncertainty as a threat, being wrong and being certain feels better than being honest and being unsure. This is why you cannot argue someone out of a conspiracy theory with evidence. The conspiracy theory is not filling an information gap. It is filling an emotional gap. The person does not need better data. They need the discomfort of not knowing to go away. And the conspiracy theory already did that. Removing it means reintroducing the ve
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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.