On becoming less left-wing (Part 2)

Learning about political psychology and epistemology made me more sceptical of left-wing politics (and all politics).

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

When I was younger, I endorsed a political worldview that went something like this:

Politics is a battle between the left and the right. The left champions justice, freedom, and equality. The right celebrates selfishness, hate, and hierarchy. The left believes in truth, reason, and science. The right wallows in lies, ignorance, and superstition. The left is tolerant. The right is authoritarian. The left fights for progress. The right fights progress.

And so on.

Admittedly, I was a little more sophisticated than this description suggests. For example, I couldn’t help noticing that many left-wing people I encountered were not particularly virtuous and that many right-wing people seemed thoughtful and kind. And I was dimly aware that many left-wing political movements throughout history had been disasters. But these and other observations didn’t threaten the core worldview through which I understood politics.

Many things reinforced this worldview. I grew up in a left-wing family, and most of the friendships I formed as a teenager were with left-wing people. When I got to university, almost everyone, whether academic or student, seemed to endorse variations on the same left-wing worldview I’ve just described. And whenever I tried to learn about politics, I turned to left-wing intellectuals, writers, and media.

For these reasons, becoming less conventionally left-wing over the past decade has felt like a dramatic change. In some ways, the experience is probably similar to what people feel when they lose their religion. (As I explore below, the psychology and social forces underlying political conviction often resemble those underlying religious belief).

In the first article in this series, I explored how learning about evolution and economics contributed to this change. In this article, I will describe how two other fields—political epistemology and political psychology—have also played a role.