HS 342 - The Psychological Causes of Political Madness with Dr Lyle Rossiter

This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company. For more information and links to all our great podcasts, visit hartmanmedia.com.

Welcome to the Holistic Survival show with Jason Hartman. The economic storm brewing around the world is set to spill into all aspects of our lives. Are you prepared? Where are you going to turn for the critical life skills necessary to survive and prosper? The Holistic Survival show is your family's insurance for a better life. Jason will teach you to think independently, to understand threats and how to create the ultimate action plan. Sudden change or worst case scenario, you'll be ready. Welcome to Holistic Survival, your key resource for protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Ladies and gentlemen, your host, Jason Hartman.

It's my pleasure to welcome Dr. Lyle Rossiter to the show. He is a leading forens psychiatrist and author of the Liberal the Psychological Causes of Political Madness. Lyle, welcome. How are you?

Thank you. I'm fine, Jason. Thanks for having me.

It's good to have you on the show. So this show has an interesting title. My friend, a good friend of mine, who's very intelligent guy, has long said that there just must be physiological and chemical differences in the brains of the two sides of the political aisle because no one seems to be able to convince anyone of anything.

And I've certainly had my share of arguments on social media and so forth and the needle doesn't move much. Tell us, you know, what goes on in the mind of someone who is, say, conservative versus liberal.

I think the differences probably don't have much to do with physics and chemistry. The healthy mind of the physiologically and chemically normal mind is capable of learning all sorts of nonsense. Healthy brain can learn very unhealthy ideas. So that suggestion on the part of your friend probably isn't quite accurate. We don't.

Well, he's not a professional, he's just a hack. But.

Anyway, whoever he is, he's probably got it right though, that there are some, certainly some psychological differences and personality differences in those who tend to be conservative and those who tend to be liberal. Conservatives, of course, traditionally are in favor of limited government, a maximum degree of individual liberty consistent with social order, low taxes, non intrusive governments that allow people to run their own lives. The governments are set up in the minds of the conservatives to sort of set the traffic rules but not determine its content. And the liberals, on the other hand, or at least the radical liberals, are very intrusive. They tend to be quite controlling and they have the idea that masses can't run their own lives. They need a ruling elite to tell them what to do. And that implies big government with all its apparatus of bureaus and officials and laws and regulations and taxes and so on, it all becomes very oppressive. So there is in traditional conservatism versus traditional liberal progressive philosophies, there are very distinct differences. Those have tended to blur, as you undoubtedly know, at least among the competing parties of Republicans and Democrats who have historically represented themselves as conservative and liberal respectively. But they're not that different in recent years anyway.

Interesting. Well, big government socialism and its ugly big brother communism are great for the people at the top. Those people in the elite class. I mean, it's a pretty awesome deal for them. Unfortunately, the, the hoi polloi don't get a very good shake. But, but you know, I almost think that in debating things with my left wing liberal friends and just so everybody knows where I stand, I'm pretty much a libertarian. I've sort of given up on the Republicans, but I'm certainly not becoming a liberal. And I almost hate to say because it's so cliche that, you know, I'm a fiscal conservative and socially liberal, but I kind of think that's where I'm weighing in most of the time nowadays, if you will. So just in the interest of full disclosure there, but it's almost like the left, the liberals just sort of seem like they trust government, like they, they trust this big nameless, faceless establishment of bureaucrats to do better than the individuals within society or within a marketplace. It's always been odd to me how I kind of want to give them credit in a way, you know, that they're so trusting. I don't know, is that even the right word or.

I think it is. And I think you've hit on something that's terribly important. In fact, some critics believe that liberals see governments in the way that the faithful sees a religion. The government has become in some respects a religion for the left.

And there's no question about that, by the way, because in big government countries obviously we saw this under many different examples of communism. They oppress the church. You know, you can't have religion because religion competes for that mind share with government. You can't believe in anything above government because that is, that is the all powerful. Right?

Yes, exactly. And if you compare the historical attitudes toward God and the divinity, an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent being or entity, and then you take a look at the lefts and the traditional socialist collectivist, statist view of government as omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent. You get a pretty obvious parallel. And the belief in the goodness and the efficacy of big government becomes really more of an article of faith, because the facts don't bear it out. Historical facts certainly don't confirm the belief that big government is the ideal way, or even a remotely adequate way to run a society. It just doesn't work. And it doesn't work according to my researches, because big government and its policies, its philosophies, its whole conceptions of how human beings operate violate human nature and the human condition. And those two topics are of great interest to me. I continue very actively to research those topics. And I am more than ever convinced that the flaws historically in all forms of government are derivative from misconceptions, misunderstandings of human nature and human condition. Just to give you a quick example, human nature obviously has both autonomy and mutuality dimensions. We are capable as human beings of acting entirely alone, entirely self directing, if we wish to. But we are also deeply embedded in social process. We are all creatures very much attached to each other in one way or another, whether it's marriages or friendships, or school teacher and student or what have you. And we need social process and regulations and rules and norms and virtues and values and morals and laws in order to regulate our social relatedness. Well, if you don't understand the autonomy part and the details of the mutuality parts of human nature, you're not going to get social policy right, you're not going to get the rules right. And socialist status collectivists don't get those right. And that's why socialist status collectivist programs routinely fail and probably always will.

It's interesting. I've been to 80 countries around the world now and I have this morbid fascination with communism. It's just really funny. Well, it's not funny, but you know what I mean. And I remember being in Romania and going to the. They always have these great branding campaigns for these oppressive, disgusting dictators like Ceausescu. And I went to the People's palace, which nothing could be further from the truth. It's the largest man made structure on the planet, literally, right? And I toured the People's Palace. You know, the people, of course, did not have access to it. Only Ceausescu and his cronies and his elites had access when they weren't busy oppressing and killing people and infecting babies with AIDS and so forth. Just absolutely disgusting beyond belief. But people will argue, liberals will argue, that the most evil force throughout history, the most oppressive force throughout history has been religion, but I would say that's completely false. I think it's been government. If you look at the force. And of course, it doesn't go by one brand or one flag, okay? And neither does religion. Government has the armies and government sends people to war and government kills people and government starves people. And you look at just the last century, the three major socialist and communist tyrants, whether it be Mao, Stalin or Hitler, a lot of people don't remember that Nazi is the National Socialist Party. How easily liberals forget that. They want to say, oh, Republicans are Nazis. But it's the complete, the complete opposite. You know, Hitler promised health care kinds of things. They're responsible for the deaths of nearly 200 million people in the last hundred years. That's insane. Religion didn't do anything like that.

Yes, exactly. The innate tendencies of human beings and part of our human nature toward destructiveness are exaggerated, greatly multiplied when power is concentrated in governments. And there's no question that the greatest executioners in history have been governments of one kind or another. Tyrants, dictators, emperors and so on. But also, unfortunately, quote, democratically, unquote, elected governments where the voting is controlled, of course. And it's really not.

It's totally rigged. But it's rigged in the US too, to a lesser degree.

There's no question. And not only are governments the greatest killers, they're the greatest polluters. The left would be very occupied and preoccupied with the whole business of polluting the planet since they're so concerned about environmental things, which I am, too. I don't mean to put that down.

Yeah, right, but, but, but environmentalism has been hijacked. And there's a saying, green trees have red roots, because environmentalism is a way to control the population. And there are some very evil things about the environmental movement. But you're absolutely right. I remember when I was much younger, I used to donate money to Greenpeace. Okay? And interestingly, the founder of Greenpeace has left Greenpeace saying it's a sham. Right. He just can't deal with Greenpeace anymore. Right. Interestingly, I remember reading their monthly Greenpeace magazine. Of course, probably not even printed on recycled paper, God forbid, but talked all about the invention, environmental horrors that were uncovered after the Soviet Union fell apart. And, you know, birth defects, massive pollution of lakes and rivers, and just unbelievable amount of environmental destruction. I mean, if you want someone to take care of something, probably the best thing you can do is to have them own it. I certainly take better care of my own car than I do a rental car. So if you own the land, I think you're probably more likely to take care of it. I'm not saying it's perfect. Certainly big polluters could buy swaths of land just for purposes of dumping on them and such, but by and large, it's. It's a lot cleaner than government. I mean, you know, I remember being in Cuba and it was like a trash heap. There's just trash everywhere you look. Of course, Michael Moore thinks they have the best health care in the world, but he doesn't go there when he gets sick. Interestingly, there's just like litter everywhere in Cuba. You know, it's unbelievable. I mean, at least when I was there.

Yeah. And that points up another aspect to our human nature discussion here. Not only is it human nature under certain circumstances to look for a great deal of power and control over others, that's part of the sickness. When the left is irrational, it's especially irrational in its hunger for power and control and dominance over others, because normal people don't want to do that. You and I and other people, the vast majority of your listeners, will be repelled by the idea of getting control over somebody else and dominating them. And yet that is right.

But there's only one other kind. You know, it's either someone in government or someone who is president of a homeowners association.

Those are little dictators too, you know, you're right.

The ubiquity of this wish to control others is really quite striking. But I was going to add to it. There's another element, and that is the very people who describe themselves as so caring, and the left always does that. Radical liberals and progressives describe themselves as so terribly caring, and yet when they get power in government, they turn out to be very callous and uncaring. And that's part of the indifference to the damage governments do to the environment. It's just an extraordinary degree, the contrast between the claimed concerns over the human condition on the one hand, and their actual practice, which is so negligent, it's callously indifferent to the damage they do to people, to property. It takes a great deal of denial to overlook, to not see the fallacies of modern liberal progressive philosophies and government.

That's what just puzzles me. I mean, you know, I have many liberal friends and they are very intelligent people. I want to say. These are not dumb people. They read. They are interested in literature. They're, you know, they're interested in travel. A lot of them don't have, like the Life experience of, you know, I hate to say it, but it's because it's cliche of like running a business and making payroll, okay, you know, which will turn you away from the left usually most of the time. That'll do the job. You know, when you really understand the pressure of having to be responsible for other people working for you and to make the business work and take it upon yourself to do that, to be able to pay them and they're, you know, so that support their families. That's an incredible burden, an incredible amount of responsibility. Much more so I'd say, even than being a parent, especially if you have quite a few employees. You probably got more employees than kids. But it's funny to me because you take a look at someone like Bernie Sanders, right? Bernie Sanders, who just, by the way, purchased his third luxury home because he's a man of the people.

It's always this hypocrisy, isn't it? And Al Gore, of course, is flying around polluting the world in all of his private jets.

Running for president may be lucrative. Maybe I can get in on it.

Yeah, exactly. I know, it's unbelievable, but he says things that make sense. Bernie Sanders does a pretty good job of identifying the problems. I think his solutions, by and large, are like living in fantasy land. It's. It's like, how can a man who's 70, whatever years old he is be so childish? Doesn't he have any concept as to how marketplaces work after all this time? Oh, raise minimum wage, it's just going to cause more unemployment. It's going to hasten companies to move toward automation even more quickly than they might otherwise. It's going to make them do more with fewer people. Or they're just simply going to pass price increases through to their customers, causing inflation. This is obvious. This is not. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know this stuff. It's just common sense. How can they not know that?

Yeah, that's one of the striking things about the liberal mind, in my view, is that how often chronological adults end up being very childish in their outlook, especially with regard to economics. I'm not quite sure what it is about economic logic and processes. Cost benefit analyses, for example, and a simple common sense thing that you just observed, that if you raise the price of something, you're probably going to have people buying less of it. If you raise the price of labor, in that example, employers hiring fewer laborers, if they do, they're going to do something clever so they don't have to Incorporate the Affordable Care Act.

Oh, it's like, you know, I was talking to an Uber driver recently who used to work for ups. He used to be delivery man. And I said, well, why don't you work for UPS anymore? And he said, because as soon as Obamacare came in, they started cutting everybody's hours down to 28 hours a week so they wouldn't have to participate in the aca. And they act as though the marketplace doesn't react. It's as crazy as this example. Now, this is a, you know, more extreme example, obviously, but take a look at Zimbabwe where they were under this massive amount of inflation. And here's what the idiots in the government of Zimbabwe did. You know, several years ago, you know, merchants were selling things and they had to raise prices constantly because the value of the currency kept getting debased and debased and debased through government mismanagement and ridiculous spending. Right? And so the Zimbabwe, you know, $4 trillion bill was, you know, or 10 trillion dollar bill was worth like $4 on eBay, you could buy it from for 4American dollars or something. And so merchants kept raising prices and the government said, well, that's not right if they keep raising prices. So we're going to arrest the merchants if they increase their prices, well, guess what happens then the merchants just stop selling. Why would they risk imprisonment? You know, and they can't stay in business without raising the prices because due to the government's disastrous influence inflation they created. I mean, this is silly, of course. You know this stuff. It's just obvious. This is the way things work.

Yeah, that's part of economic reality, is price controls invariably lead to shortages.

Oh, of course. And they hurt the exact people they try to help. So minimum wage is a form of price controls. And the left will say, well, we got to help the minorities and the poor and the downtrodden. Well, raise the minimum, minimum wage and you'll make sure more of them are unemployed instantaneously. It'll happen like over in a month. It'll happen in a month.

You'll just think, I think school children should all be taught courses in unintended.

Consequences more conspiratorially intended. Maybe they're intended because they really do recycle into the voting booth forever because they're dependent on government, and so they're gonna constantly vote themselves the public treasury. Right. And so maybe it is the intended consequence.

Actually, one of the things that Ferdinand Lundberg, the guy who wrote the Natural Depravity of Mankind several years ago, is about 1994, I think, pointed out that socialism and all forms of collectivism eventually destroy themselves because they wreck the society which they intend to govern, as has happened in Cuba and is happening in Venezuela and has happened elsewhere in the world. Because collectivism, statism and socialism invariably, when they're carried to their logical extremes, end up destroying the fabric, the moral fabric of the country, the economic, social, political, liberal, moral, legal fabric of the country. So it is incompatible with human nature and the human condition. So the one good news about the collectivists is that they eventually burn themselves out. Unfortunately, there's a great deal of suffering that goes on before that happens.

Yeah, and unfortunately, it takes an awful long time for this system to collapse. I mean, you know, you could have lived your whole lifetime, obviously in, In Soviet Russia, 70 years, or Cuba, you know, since 1959. You know, you just live this miserable existence. It's funny, I don't see many Americans leaving the coast of, to Florida to try and get to Cuba. I guess Michael Moore likes it better, but, you know, I just don't see it happening. It's always one direction, you know, it's.

Hard to get rowboats in Florida.

Yeah, it is, it is. Well, what, what else can we learn about the mind? You know, you have an interesting chapter, and I know we got to wrap it up, but you have some interesting chapter heads in your book. For example, number 35, you know, adolescence and the Liberal Agenda. Did we cover any of those concepts or do you want to talk about that for a moment?

We sort of alluded to them. One of them involves the fact that adolescents need something to commit to. Adolescents are looking for something not necessarily because they're rebelling against the existing culture or the existing principles, but it seems to be part of the natural development of adolescents to want to idealize certain things. Of course, they idealize rock stars and entertainment people and songs and movie stars and sports figures and so on. And we all tend to do that as human beings. But adolescents in particular seem to want something, to commit themselves to, something they can feel faithful to. And it's important that society offers them something other than the more or less decadent garbage that our present society is offering adolescents. That's why I think of what we are going to need is a wholesale moral and ethical and ideal revolution in, in the Western civilization, because with the decline, unfortunately, the decline of Christianity. And I say that not because I'm a dyed in the wool religion person. I had no religious education as a child. I think that's somewhat unfortunate. But I come to respect the moral and ethical principles of Christianity because they have proven so effective in creating a moral conception of how people need to relate to each other in order to enjoy freedom. Because there is no freedom without responsibility, there's no freedom without morality, there's no freedom without virtue. And unless you teach people, including adolescents, how important it is to commit to being virtuous, to being decent, to being charitable and communitarian and altruistic and helpful to others, not just selfishly absorbed in your own pursuits, unless you teach that, people will tend to regress into more self centeredness than is good for them and that can be sustained by any reasonable society.

Well, you're absolutely right. The odd thing is though that the left kind of owns that argument. They think the right is selfish and uncharitable and all of those things that you just said we need to teach kids right now, you know, I don't think they'll be able to argue successfully that the right is not self reliant. You know, the ideology of the right. Certainly there are individuals that break all the rules, but yeah, it's, it's a generous.

How altruistic, how generous, how charitable are the Clintons? They have a huge foundation, but as far as we can tell, that money is going to anybody who could really use it.

Well, you know, Hillary Clinton, the criminal known as Hillary Clinton, says charity starts at home.

And it sure does in the Clinton Foundation.

It's just mind boggling. It really is. You know, I had Steve Forbes on the show a while back and one of the things he talks about is how, how the government somehow owns the moral high ground. It's like the government as you talked about before, comparing it to religion and how the left views government as a religion. They sort of own this high ground of being moral and virtuous and the government will always do the right thing. But the, you know, when it gets big enough and powerful enough, the government never does the right thing, at least historically. I mean, show me one huge big, intrusive and communist would be the biggest form of government. Right, because everything's owned by the state. Show me one of those. That was charitable and where he humans flourished and the individual is what mattered. You know, as Ayn Rand said, the smallest minority in the world is the individual. There's no such thing as the rights of a group. There are only a collection of individuals.

Well, as you pointed out early in the show, big government is a great deal for the ruling class, it's a bad deal for everybody else. And so the moral high ground when its government is put into practice, it doesn't wash. It doesn't pass the smell test.

Yeah, no, it doesn't. It doesn't. But somehow people keep believing it. I don't know how.

Well, that's why I think we have to construct a new moral and ethical paradigm of ideals to give adolescents and everybody else something to commit to, to have faith in and to practice that actually works and is compatible with human nature.

I think that if we can hold that up to people say, look, this is how you ought to act. These are the things that are fair and just. These are the things that are good and evil. These are the things that are good and bad. These are the contrast between what works and what doesn't. If we can do that in a very convincing way and show that all of this is compatible with human nature and the human condition, then I think we can sell it. But we can't sell it the way it is because the liberals, the left has grabbed it and are exploiting it falsely, in my view. But they're pretty good at it.

Yeah, they are pretty good at it, that's for sure. Well, very interesting stuff. The book is entitled the Liberal the Psychological Causes of Political Madness. Your website, I believe, Lyle, is libertymind.com Is that correct?

Libertyminds.com yes.

Fantastic. And the book is, of course, on Amazon with excellent reviews and a lot of reviews. 134 reviews and very, very good reviews. So check it out, listeners. And Lyle, thank you so much for joining us.

My pleasure, Jason. Thank you for having me.

Thank you so much for listening. Be sure to check out hartmanmedia.com for appropriate disclaimers and terms of service. Remember that guest opinions are their own. And if you require specific legal or tax advice or advice in any other specialized area, please consult an appropriate professional. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.