March 12, 2026 The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry (2013) Luke Ford No sacred cows.

The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry (2013)

Posted on March 12, 2026 by Luke Ford

Gary Greenberg’s The Book of Woe is a sustained attack on the DSM-5 and on the institutional culture that produced it. Greenberg writes as both a practicing therapist and a journalist, which gives him an unusual vantage point. He understands the clinical world from the inside, but he approaches the American Psychiatric Association and its diagnostic manual with the skepticism of a reporter who has learned not to take official stories at face value.
The book’s central argument is that the DSM is not a scientific document. It is a political one. The diagnoses it contains do not reflect discoveries about the nature of mental illness. They reflect negotiations, compromises, votes, and the accumulated weight of professional and commercial interests. Greenberg follows the making of the DSM-5, which was released in 2013, and documents the process with considerable detail. He attended conferences, interviewed key figures, and gained access to internal debates that the APA would have preferred to keep quiet. What he found was a process riddled with disagreement, ego, and institutional defensiveness masquerading as scientific rigor.
One of his sharpest targets is the concept of validity. A diagnostic category is valid if it corresponds to something real in nature, a genuine disease with a distinct cause, course, and biological signature. Greenberg argues that almost no DSM diagnosis meets this standard. The categories are reliable in the narrow sense that clinicians can agree on how to apply them, but reliability is not validity. Two doctors can reliably agree that a patient meets the criteria for major depressive disorder without that agreement telling us anything about what is actually wrong with the person or what might help them.
He traces this problem back to the DSM-III, which Robert Spitzer oversaw in 1980. That revision was a deliberate attempt to save psychiatry’s scientific reputation by replacing vague psychoanalytic concepts with specific, checklist-based criteria. It worked as a political move. It gave psychiatry the appearance of precision. But Greenberg argues it buried a deeper problem rather than solving it. The new criteria were operationalized descriptions of symptoms, not explanations of causes. Psychiatry got better at agreeing on labels while understanding no more about what produced the conditions those labels described.
The pharmaceutical industry runs through the book as a persistent presence. Greenberg does not reduce everything to pharma corruption, but he makes clear that the DSM’s expansion of diagnostic categories created enormous markets for drug treatment, and that this financial logic shaped what got included and how conditions got defined. The relationship between the APA and the drug industry is not a simple conspiracy. It is something more structural and therefore harder to address.
Greenberg also takes on the Research Domain Criteria project, or RDoC, which the National Institute of Mental Health launched as an alternative framework grounded in neuroscience rather than symptom checklists. He is skeptical of this too, not because neuroscience is worthless but because the confidence with which its proponents speak outstrips what the science can currently deliver. The brain is complicated, mental illness is complicated, and the history of psychiatry is full of moments where a new biological framework promised to resolve everything and delivered far less than advertised.
What makes the book work beyond its arguments is Greenberg’s voice. He is funny, angry, and genuinely troubled by what the medicalization of suffering has done to the way people understand themselves. He treats his own patients with care and takes their pain seriously, which keeps the book from sliding into the kind of antipsychiatry polemic that dismisses suffering along with diagnosis. His complaint is not that mental illness does not exist. It is that the DSM pretends to know more about it than anyone does, and that this pretense does real harm to real people.
Stephen Park Turner‘s framework adds something genuinely useful here, and it cuts deeper than most sociological critiques of psychiatry because it targets the epistemological foundation rather than just the institutional behavior.
Greenberg gets at the reliability versus validity problem, and Horwitz identifies the conceptual mistake of stripping context from diagnosis, but neither fully explains why the DSM project keeps failing on its own terms while the profession continues to defend it with such confidence. Turner’s concept of tacit knowledge helps explain that gap. The clinician who has seen thousands of patients develops a feel for distress that no checklist captures, and when the DSM-III tried to replace that feel with operational criteria, it did not eliminate the tacit dimension. It just made it invisible. The criteria look explicit and scientific, but applying them still requires judgment that lives below the surface of the written rules.
The circularity point is particularly sharp. Psychiatric authority validates itself through professional consensus rather than through the kind of external verification that other branches of medicine can at least gesture toward. A cardiologist can point to a blocked artery. A psychiatrist points to a committee vote. Turner would say this is not unique to psychiatry, that all expertise has this self-referential quality to some degree, but psychiatry is unusually vulnerable because it simultaneously claims biological grounding it cannot demonstrate and dismisses that vulnerability as a temporary problem that more research will eventually solve.
The epistemic prison argument, borrowed from Steven Hyman, connects well to what Scull shows historically. Each generation of psychiatrists inherits a set of tacit assumptions so thoroughly embedded that they do not register as assumptions at all. The belief that mental suffering is fundamentally medical, that it belongs to doctors rather than priests or philosophers or communities, shapes every question the field asks before any data gets collected. Turner would likely say this is how tacit knowledge operates at the institutional level. It does not just inform practice. It forecloses alternatives without anyone noticing.
Where Turner adds the most to Greenberg specifically is on the DSM’s self-defeating ambition. Greenberg treats the shift from clinical intuition to checklist criteria primarily as a political maneuver, which it was. Turner lets you see it also as an epistemological mistake, an attempt to make explicit what is by nature resistant to explicit formulation. The result is a document that looks rigorous and functions as a shared fiction, which is more or less what Greenberg concludes, but Turner gives that conclusion a theoretical backbone.
The one place Turner’s framework might need some friction is the implication that tacit knowledge is primarily a problem or a source of illegitimate authority. Tacit knowledge is also how expertise actually works in any field that deals with complex, variable phenomena. The question is not whether psychiatry relies on tacit judgment but whether it acknowledges that reliance honestly and builds its institutions around that reality rather than around a fantasy of algorithmic precision. Greenberg’s book is largely a document of what happens when an institution chooses the fantasy.
Allan Horwitz cites The Book of Woe sparingly but it fits directly into the argument he develops across his own work, particularly in Creating Mental Illness and The Loss of Sadness. Greenberg provides him with a journalistic account of the DSM-5 process that corroborates what Horwitz argues at a more analytical level, namely that the diagnostic categories produced by that process reflect professional and institutional pressures rather than scientific discovery.
The most useful thing Greenberg offers Horwitz is evidence of what happened inside the APA during the DSM-5 revision. Horwitz’s critique depends on showing that diagnostic expansion was not driven by better science but by something else, and Greenberg’s reporting on the internal debates, the resistance to reform, and the ultimate conservatism of the revision supports that claim. When Horwitz argues that the profession could not bring itself to restore the contextual distinctions the DSM-III had eliminated, Greenberg’s account of why that proved politically impossible fills in the institutional detail.
Greenberg also reinforces Horwitz’s reliability versus validity argument without using exactly that vocabulary. When Greenberg shows that the APA prioritized inter-rater agreement over any deeper correspondence to biological reality, he is making the same point Horwitz makes more formally. The two accounts strengthen each other.
That said, Horwitz does not lean heavily on Greenberg because their projects differ in kind. Horwitz builds a sociological and conceptual argument that stands on its own. Greenberg writes reported narrative. Horwitz uses him the way a scholar uses good journalism, as illustration and corroboration rather than as a primary theoretical source.
Charles Taylor‘s distinction between the buffered self and the porous self comes from A Secular Age and it adds something neither Horwitz, Scull, nor Greenberg fully develops, which is an account of how the person receiving a diagnosis experiences it and why that experience has changed historically.
The porous self is the pre-modern condition. The boundary between the self and the world is permeable. Meanings, spirits, moral forces, and social obligations flow through that boundary and constitute the person from the outside in. Madness in this framework is not simply an internal malfunction. It might be possession, divine punishment, a rupture in the person’s relationship to cosmic order. The mad person is embedded in a web of meanings that extend far beyond the skull.
The buffered self is the modern condition. The boundary hardens. The self becomes an interior space, insulated from external meanings, responsible for its own mental states, and understood primarily through the lens of individual psychology. Suffering becomes something that happens inside you rather than something that happens between you and the world. This is the anthropological precondition for the DSM project. You cannot build a checklist of internal symptoms unless you already assume that the relevant unit of analysis is the bounded individual rather than the person-in-context.
This connects to Horwitz’s central argument in a precise way. When Horwitz says the DSM stripped context from diagnosis, he describes a technical failure, a conceptual mistake made in 1980 by people who should have known better. Taylor would say something deeper is going on. The decontextualization Horwitz identifies is not just a professional error. It reflects the buffered self’s basic assumption that internal states are primary and context is secondary. The DSM did not invent that assumption. It codified it and gave it institutional authority.
Greenberg’s frustration throughout The Book of Woe is partly a frustration with this same assumption. He keeps pointing out that the DSM treats suffering as if it exists independently of the life that produces it, and that this produces absurdities like the bereavement exclusion debate, where the APA argued over whether grief after loss should count as depression. Taylor would recognize that debate immediately. A culture of buffered selves finds it genuinely difficult to think about suffering as a relational and contextual phenomenon rather than an internal one, because the buffered self experiences itself as the origin of its own states.
Turner’s tacit knowledge argument also looks different through this lens. The tacit knowledge that experienced clinicians carry includes, among other things, a feel for the person in front of them as a social and relational being embedded in a particular life. That knowledge is porous in Taylor’s sense. It crosses the boundary between the clinician’s interiority and the patient’s situation. The DSM’s explicit criteria are buffered by design. They locate the disorder inside the individual and bracket everything outside. When Turner says codifying the tacit fails, part of what gets lost in that codification is precisely the porous dimension of clinical judgment.
Scull’s historical work gains something here too. The asylum as an institution is a buffered technology. It extracts the person from their social world, places them in a controlled environment, and treats their condition as separable from the relationships and circumstances that may have produced it. The history of that institution looks different if you understand it as the expression of a particular anthropology rather than simply a practical response to social disorder.
The buffered self also helps explain why biological psychiatry has such cultural appeal despite its weak track record. If you experience yourself as a bounded interior self, the idea that your suffering has a biological cause inside your brain feels like an explanation that matches the shape of your experience. It locates the problem exactly where the buffered self already assumes problems live. An explanation that pointed outward, to poverty, isolation, trauma, or social dislocation, would require a different and less comfortable anthropology, one closer to Taylor’s porous self, where the boundary between self and world is not a fixed wall but a permeable membrane.

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Andrew T. Scull vs Allan V. Horwitz On The History Of Psychiatry

Posted on March 12, 2026 by Luke Ford

Both Andrew Scull and Allan Horwitz write about psychiatry and mental illness, but they approach the subject from different angles and reach somewhat different conclusions, even when they cover similar ground.
Scull is a historian, and his work reflects that. He traces the rise of institutional psychiatry over centuries, asking how and why society came to medicalize deviant behavior and place it under the authority of doctors. His most celebrated book, Museums of Madness: Social Organization of Insanity in 19th Century England, examines the rise of the asylum in England, and his later Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud offers a sweeping history of mental illness from antiquity to the present. Scull tends to be skeptical, even caustic, toward organized psychiatry. He sees the profession as having repeatedly overstated its knowledge and authority, from the 19th-century asylum keepers who promised cures they could not deliver to modern biological psychiatry’s confident claims about brain chemistry. His book Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness catalogs treatments that caused enormous harm, often carried out by well-intentioned doctors who convinced themselves that crude interventions worked. Scull does not argue that mental illness is a myth, but he does argue that the history of psychiatry is a history of professional ambition often outrunning genuine understanding.
Horwitz is a sociologist, and he focuses more tightly on the present. His most influential work, Creating Mental Illness, argues that modern diagnostic psychiatry, particularly after the DSM-III in 1980, stripped context from the definition of disorder. By eliminating the distinction between contextually appropriate distress and genuine dysfunction, psychiatry inflated the prevalence of mental illness and made normal suffering look like pathology. He developed this argument further in The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder, co-authored with Jerome Wakefield, which focuses specifically on depression and argues that much of what psychiatry diagnoses as a disorder is a proportionate response to loss or adversity. More recently he has written about anxiety in a similar vein.
The two share considerable common ground. Both view the expansion of psychiatric diagnosis with suspicion. Both argue that social forces, professional interests, and institutional pressures shape what gets called mental illness. Neither is a straightforward antipsychiatry polemicist in the Thomas Szasz mold, but both question the authority and precision that mainstream psychiatry claims for itself.
The differences are real, though. Scull writes with historical depth and tends toward the dramatic. He takes the long view, which lets him show how confident each generation of psychiatrists has been about theories that later collapsed. The rhetorical weight of his work comes from that accumulated evidence of failure and hubris. Horwitz writes more narrowly and sociologically. His argument is less about institutional overreach across centuries and more about a specific conceptual mistake embedded in contemporary diagnostic categories. He wants to fix something precise: the failure to distinguish disorder from distress. Where Scull tends toward indictment, Horwitz tends toward critique and reform.
Scull also engages more directly with the experiences of patients and the material conditions of institutions. His history of madness has a human texture that Horwitz’s sociological analyses sometimes lack. Horwitz argues at a more abstract level about categories and definitions, which makes his work precise but occasionally dry.
One tension worth noting is that Horwitz, despite his critique of diagnostic inflation, still works within a framework that accepts the concept of genuine mental disorder. He wants better distinctions, not the elimination of the category. Scull is harder to pin down on this. His historical work raises deeper questions about whether psychiatric categories have ever tracked anything stable in nature, without fully resolving that question. He is more comfortable sitting with the uncertainty.
Together they make a useful pair. Scull provides the historical sweep and the sense of how deep the problems run. Horwitz provides a more targeted analytical argument about what went wrong at a specific moment and why it matters. Reading them together gives you both the long arc of the problem and a precise account of its contemporary form.

What incentive structures make attacking Jews attractive or useful for certain actors in the United States?

Posted on March 12, 2026 by Luke Ford

If you take David Pinsof’s incentive determinism seriously, the first step is to stop explaining antisemitic attacks in terms of “evil people” or “irrational hatred.” Pinsof’s point is that behavior follows incentives. People do what their environments reward or make emotionally satisfying.

So the useful question becomes: what incentive structures make attacking Jews attractive or useful for certain actors in the United States?

1. Status and signaling inside ideological coalitions

In polarized movements, attacking Jews can function as a signal of loyalty to the group. On the far right, antisemitic conspiracy theories about “globalists” or Jewish control serve as identity markers for white nationalist subcultures. On parts of the far left, the framing of Israel as a “settler-colonial state” sometimes morphs into rhetoric that treats Jews collectively as oppressors. This framing makes attacking Jews appear morally justified inside those circles.

The incentive is simple. If attacking Jews earns applause from your ideological peers, people who want status in that group will do it.

2. Online attention incentives

Social media platforms reward outrage and shocking content. Antisemitic memes, conspiracy theories, and threats often generate engagement, which can translate into followers, notoriety, or influence. Reports show that most Americans who witness antisemitism now encounter it online, illustrating how digital platforms amplify the phenomenon.

For a fringe activist, attacking Jews may bring far more attention than ordinary political commentary.

3. Coalition-building incentives in political activism

Sometimes antisemitism is not the primary goal. It emerges as a side effect of coalition politics. Activists trying to mobilize large movements may adopt narratives that unify supporters against a symbolic enemy. Jews or Israel can become that symbol because they are already embedded in historical narratives about power, colonialism, finance, or media.
In Pinsof terms, moral rhetoric often functions as coalition glue. It binds allies by defining a villain.

4. Low-risk targeting incentives

Another structural factor is perceived vulnerability. Jews are a small minority in the U.S. but highly visible through institutions like synagogues, schools, and community centers. Attackers may perceive these targets as symbolically powerful yet physically accessible. This helps explain why Jews make up a tiny percentage of the population but account for a large share of religion-based hate crimes.

When the perceived cost of targeting a group is low relative to the symbolic payoff, attacks become more likely.

5. Moral framing incentives

In many movements, the key incentive is moral self-image. If a narrative convinces people they are fighting oppression or defending civilization, hostility toward Jews can be reframed as righteous activism. Once that moral frame is established, extreme behavior becomes psychologically easier. This is why antisemitism often appears across ideologically opposed groups. Each coalition embeds Jews into its own moral story.

6. Event-trigger incentives

Antisemitic incidents spike around highly visible events involving Israel or global crises. For example, U.S. antisemitic incidents increased sharply after the Hamas attack and the war that followed. These events activate pre-existing narratives and create opportunities for mobilization.

Instead of asking “why do people hate Jews,” the incentive model asks:

What rewards does attacking Jews provide?

Common answers:

status within an ideological tribe
attention online
psychological relief through scapegoating
coalition solidarity
moral self-justification
low perceived risk

Once those incentives exist, some individuals will inevitably exploit them.

The uncomfortable implication of Pinsof’s approach is that reducing antisemitism requires changing incentives, not just condemning hatred.

That means altering what social groups reward, what platforms amplify, and what narratives confer moral status. Without those changes, the same patterns tend to reproduce themselves.

7. In academic or bureaucratic environments, Jews often represent a meritocratic standard that conflicts with newer equity-based hiring or promotion models. Attacking Jewish influence or institutional presence allows competitors to de-legitimize existing hierarchies to make room for their own advancement. This provides a material reward for professional actors who might otherwise have no personal animosity toward Jews.

8. The “middleman minority” position. Jews in the United States often occupy visible roles in retail, real estate, and professional services within urban areas. For local political leaders or activists, Jews serve as a buffer. Directing the frustration of a disadvantaged constituency toward Jewish landlords or shop owners diverts anger away from the state or more distant corporate entities. This provides a political safety valve for leaders who cannot or will not provide systemic economic improvements.

The data on hate crimes highlights the incentive of low-risk, high-visibility targeting. While Jews make up approximately 2.4% of the U.S. adult population, the FBI consistently reports they are the targets of over 60% of all religion-based hate crimes. In 2023, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 8,873 antisemitic incidents, a 140% increase from the previous year. These numbers suggest that for those seeking to make a public statement, the Jewish community offers a target that ensures immediate national media coverage.

9. Narrative simplicity. Complex geopolitical or economic problems are difficult to communicate to a mass audience. Jews have been used as a shorthand for “the elite” or “the oppressor” for centuries. Using an existing, recognizable villain reduces the “cost” of storytelling for a movement. It is easier to mobilize a crowd against a specific, identifiable group than it is to explain the interplay of global capital or historical grievances.

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Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships By David Schnarch

Posted on March 12, 2026 by Luke Ford

More people have told me that they found this book particularly painful to read than any other book mentioned to me.
It will rock your world, and not in a pleasant way.
Passionate Marriage by David Schnarch has a strong and durable reputation in the world of couples therapy. Published in 1997 and reissued by W. W. Norton, it earned praise from William Masters himself and won a nomination for the “Books for a Better Life” award. Therapists cite it regularly, and Schnarch received major recognition from both the American Psychological Association and the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. Within clinical circles, it holds real weight.
The central idea is differentiation: that healthy intimacy requires two people who maintain distinct selves rather than merging into each other emotionally. Schnarch argues that marriage is not something you are ready for but something that makes you ready, a kind of pressure chamber he calls the crucible. The book treats sexual monotony and conflict not as problems to fix with better technique but as symptoms of arrested emotional development. That is a serious and challenging argument, and it has influenced a generation of therapists.
The painful reading experience has two sources. The first is the content itself. Schnarch argues that our emotional growth goes exactly as far as our ability to manage anxiety, and he pushes readers to confront the possibility that their relational behaviors, including sexual ones, are mostly anxiety management in disguise. That is uncomfortable material. The second source of pain is the prose. What some readers encounter is what one reviewer called the Schnarchian Swirl: lyrical paragraphs about love, ten pages of therapy memoir, rapid-fire advice, and folksy allegory, with the central argument not clearly stated until roughly seventy pages in.
The book’s core move is to tell the reader that whatever is wrong in the marriage, you are probably more implicated than you think. Schnarch keeps redirecting the lens back at the person holding the book. Most people pick up a relationship book with at least some hope that it will confirm their suspicion that the other person is the problem, or at least the bigger problem. Schnarch refuses that comfort systematically.
The differentiation framework makes this worse, from the reader’s ego perspective. A less differentiated person, by Schnarch’s logic, actually needs the partner to behave in certain ways to manage their own anxiety. So the controlling spouse, the withholding spouse, the one who picks fights or goes cold, all of them are revealed as people running from their own underdevelopment. That is a hard thing to sit with when you came to the book convinced you were the more emotionally mature one in the relationship.
There is also something specific to the way educated, self-aware people read it. They tend to be the ones who most trust their own psychological insight, who have a vocabulary for their partner’s dysfunction, and who expect a therapist-author to eventually validate their diagnosis of the relationship. Schnarch never does. He treats that very confidence as part of the problem.
The chapter on normal marital sadism probably produces the most resistance. The idea that ordinary, non-abusive spouses routinely use their partner’s vulnerabilities against them, not out of malice but out of the same defensive smallness, is not what most readers want to find staring back at them from the page.
Schnarch’s framework sits in deliberate opposition to the attachment-based models that dominate modern couples therapy, which tend to emphasize empathy, emotional attunement, and the healing power of a responsive partner. Where attachment theory locates the problem in early wounds and the solution in a partner who meets your needs, Schnarch locates both the problem and the solution inside the individual. You cannot be rescued by your partner’s responsiveness. You have to grow yourself up.
Attachment theory sits at the top of the field right now and has for roughly two decades. Its clinical expression, Emotionally Focused Therapy developed by Sue Johnson in the 1980s, reports strong outcome numbers, and the model has become the default framework in graduate training programs, popular books, and couples therapy more broadly. It is genuinely influential and not without real evidence behind it.
That said, the criticisms have grown more pointed. The foundational problem is one of translation. Attachment theory was developed from John Bowlby’s work and Mary Ainsworth’s observations of one-year-old infants in a controlled setting, and the leap from infant-caregiver bonds to adult romantic relationships carries assumptions that not everyone accepts. Adult relationships involve decades of accumulated experience, agency, and chosen behavior that infant attachment studies were never designed to address.
The clinical claim that troubles skeptics most is the idea that therapy can actually change a person’s attachment style. The argument requires accepting that attachment is entirely environmentally constructed, with the caregiver’s behavior as the sole cause of anxious or avoidant patterns. Behavioral genetics complicates that picture considerably. Critics also note that building trust with a therapist over months or years does not reliably translate to more secure functioning in other relationships the rest of the time.
There is also a cultural critique gaining ground. The theory carries Western assumptions about what a secure relationship looks like, and has sometimes been used to pathologize relational styles that fall outside that norm.
None of this has dislodged it from its dominant position. But the gap between the theory’s popularity and the strength of its evidence base is real, and Schnarch’s framework looks more interesting against that backdrop. Where attachment theory tells people to find a more responsive partner or become one, Schnarch tells them to become a more differentiated person. Those are genuinely different bets about what makes relationships work.
Charles Taylor‘s buffered self is the modern, bounded individual who experiences the self as a stable interior space, protected from external forces, including other people’s emotional states. The porous self, which Taylor associates with pre-modern experience, has no such membrane. It bleeds into its environment. Other people’s moods, spirits, and needs enter you directly rather than being processed at a distance.
Attachment theory, whatever its clinical intentions, reinforces a porous model. The whole architecture rests on the idea that your emotional regulation depends on another person’s responsiveness. A secure attachment means you have an accessible, emotionally present partner who functions as what Bowlby called a safe haven. Your nervous system literally co-regulates with theirs. The therapist’s job is to help you find or become that regulating presence. That is a porous self treated as the healthy ideal.
Schnarch goes the other direction entirely. Differentiation is essentially a program for building a buffered self without losing the capacity for genuine intimacy. The goal is someone who can self-soothe, hold their own identity under pressure, and stay emotionally present with a partner without needing the partner to manage their anxiety. That is Taylor’s buffered self, applied to marriage.
What makes this framing useful is that it suggests the two therapeutic models do not just disagree about technique. They disagree about what a healthy human being looks like. Attachment theory pathologizes the person who cannot find security through another. Schnarch pathologizes the person who needs to. Those are opposite anthropologies dressed up as competing clinical methods.
I see buffered identity as a useful fiction, but it is clearly a fiction. The neuroscience alone makes it hard to defend the buffered self as a literal description of how people work. Mirror neurons, emotional contagion, the degree to which our nervous systems are genuinely shaped by proximity to other nervous systems, all of that suggests the porous self is closer to the biological reality. We are not sealed units who choose when to let others in. We leak, constantly.
Taylor himself would not entirely disagree. He treats the buffered self as a historical achievement, something the modern West constructed rather than discovered. It is a way of experiencing selfhood that emerged from specific intellectual and religious conditions, not a finding about human nature. So even its most sophisticated defender frames it as a cultural accomplishment rather than a fact about persons.
Where it gets interesting is that useful fictions do real work. The person who operates as though they have a buffered self, who behaves as if their emotional state is their own responsibility and not their partner’s job to manage, tends to function better in relationships than the person who experiences themselves as fully porous and expects the partner to regulate them. Schnarch’s clinical results, whatever their limits, seem to bear that out. The fiction produces better behavior than the truth does, at least when the truth becomes an excuse for emotional dependency.
The harder question is whether the buffered self stops being a useful fiction and becomes a damaging one when it gets used to justify emotional unavailability or to pathologize the very real human need for co-regulation and comfort. Some people use the language of differentiation the way others use stoicism, as a sophisticated rationale for keeping everyone at arm’s length. The fiction curdles when it stops being a discipline and becomes an identity.
Taylor uses disenchantment in Weber’s sense: the modern world stripped of spirits, magic, and forces that could act on you from outside. The buffered self is both a product of that process and a mechanism that sustains it. Once you experience yourself as a sealed interior, the world outside loses its power to penetrate you. Things and people can only affect you if you let them. That is disenchantment lived from the inside.
Schnarch does something structurally similar to intimate relationships. He strips marriage of its romantic mythology, the idea that the right partner completes you, that love should feel effortless, that desire is something that happens to you rather than something you generate yourself. Those are all enchanted notions, and he refuses every one of them. His marriage is not a haven or a merger or a homecoming. It is a pressure system that exposes your limitations and forces growth if you can tolerate the heat. That is a cold and demanding picture, whatever its clinical merits.
The attachment model by contrast is re-enchanting in a quiet way. It restores the partner to something like a magical function. The responsive other becomes the source of regulation, safety, and selfhood. You need them the way the porous self needed the world to be full of presences that held you. Johnson’s language about safe havens and secure bases carries a warmth that is almost devotional.
So the debate between Schnarch and attachment theory might be, at a deeper level, the same argument Taylor traces through modernity. Whether the self is fundamentally alone and must build its own ground, or whether it is fundamentally relational and finds its ground in others. Most people want the second to be true. Schnarch insists on the first, which is a large part of why the book hurts.
David Pinsof‘s core argument is that most of what people call desires, values, and self-narratives are status competition in disguise. We don’t just want things; we want to have more, or be more, than the people around us, and we hate admitting this. The need to cover it up is, in his view, a primary engine of human bullshit. Everythingisbullshit He extends this to happiness itself, arguing that we don’t want happiness as an end so much as we pursue fitness proxies, social and competitive goods, and then dress those pursuits up in the language of fulfillment and meaning.
Attachment theory’s appeal might owe something to the fact that it frames dependency and the need for a responsive partner as healthy and natural rather than as status anxiety or emotional underdevelopment. It gives people a flattering story. Schnarch’s framework is painful partly because it strips that story away, but Pinsof might add that Schnarch’s differentiated self could become its own status game, the person who has done the harder psychological work, who needs less, who maintains selfhood under pressure. That too is a position of superiority dressed up as growth.
Pinsof acknowledges the trap himself. The anti-bullshit project is also a status game, one you play because you think you stand a good chance of winning it. Nobody gets out clean.
Where he most directly adds to the buffered versus porous argument is in suggesting that the appeal of the porous self, the attachment model’s safe haven, might be less about genuine human need and more about the fact that needing people and being needed by them is a way of securing social position. The enchanted partner who regulates your nervous system is also someone over whom you have leverage. That is an uncomfortable thought that neither Taylor nor Schnarch quite says out loud.
Daniel J. Siegel has not retreated on his veneration of attachment theory. He has expanded. His response to the pressures on attachment theory has been to widen the frame rather than defend the old one, and his 2022 book IntraConnected: MWe (Me + We) as the Integration of Self, Identity, and Belonging is the clearest sign of that move.
The book argues that the bounded individual self, what he calls the solo-self, is a cultural delusion that modern Western life has imposed on us. He argues that who we are extends beyond the brain and beyond the body, and is fundamental to social systems and the natural world. He coins the term MWe to describe what he sees as the proper unit of identity, something that holds both the Me and the We together rather than treating them as opposites in tension. The self is not a container with walls. It is a node in a web.
This is a significant move in our terms. Siegel is essentially conceding Taylor’s point about the porous self being more biologically and relationally accurate than the buffered one, and then building an entire therapeutic and philosophical program on that concession. Where critics of attachment theory say it overreaches, Siegel responds by overreaching further, pushing the relational self out past the family, past interpersonal neurobiology, and toward something closer to an ecological or even spiritual identity.
The Schnarch contrast here is sharp. Schnarch’s differentiated self holds its ground precisely against the pull of the relational field. Siegel’s MWe dissolves the ground entirely and calls that health. Siegel frames healthy development as requiring both differentiation and what he calls intraconnection, but the gravitational center of his work pulls hard toward the We. Happily Family The balance he claims to offer reads, in practice, as re-enchantment through neuroscience, the porous self rehabilitated with brain scans and quantum physics references as supporting evidence.
That last detail matters. Some reviewers have noted that IntraConnected reaches toward quantum physics and broad systems theory in ways that outrun the evidence, which is a pattern critics have flagged in Siegel’s work before. The prose also reportedly circles the same ideas repeatedly without resolving them, which is a complaint that will sound familiar from our earlier discussion of Schnarch.
Daniel Siegal seeks status and influence in the academy and in the broader public. On the academic side, Siegel holds a clinical professorship at UCLA, edits the Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology, and publishes technical work on brain development and attachment. He has cultivated the apparatus of scientific credibility carefully: the institutional affiliation, the peer review adjacency, the dense citation practices, the neuroscience vocabulary. When Jerome Kagan challenged him publicly at a conference, Siegel demanded of his colleague whether he had actually read the attachment research, a response that assumed the posture of the empiricist defending hard-won findings against a skeptic. That is an academic status move, performed in front of an audience of therapists who largely treated attachment theory as settled science.
On the popular side, the operation looks different. He has multiple New York Times bestsellers, a global workshop circuit, the Mindsight Institute, branded concepts like mindsight and MWe, and blurbs from Gabor Maté and contemplative authors. IntraConnected draws on quantum physics, indigenous wisdom traditions, and pandemic metaphors in ways that would not survive serious peer review but work well for a general audience hungry for a scientific imprimatur on spiritual intuitions about interconnection. The Gabor Maté blurb calling the solo self a delusion is not academic language. It is revival meeting language wearing a lab coat.
The dual game works because the two audiences rarely audit each other. Therapists in weekend workshops do not read the behavioral genetics literature that complicates attachment theory’s core claims. Academic critics do not typically bother engaging with trade books aimed at parents and meditators. Siegel moves between the two registers fluidly, citing neuroscience to popular audiences who find it authoritative, and claiming clinical and cultural relevance to academic audiences who might otherwise dismiss him as a self-help author.
Pinsof’s framework fits here with some precision. The status game in the academy requires different signals than the status game in the wellness market, but Siegel plays both simultaneously, and the branded vocabulary, mindsight, MWe, intraconnection, serves both. Invented terms do double work. They sound technical enough for therapists and evocative enough for general readers, while also being proprietary in a way that plain language is not. You can build an institute around MWe. You cannot build one around “we are connected to each other.”
The vulnerability in this position is that it depends on the two audiences staying separate. When critics like the Psychology Today piece we looked at earlier start making the case that attachment theory overpromises and underdelivers, they address both audiences at once, and the gap between Siegel’s scientific claims and his therapeutic and spiritual ones becomes harder to manage.
Chris Kavanagh and Matthew Browne, the anthropologist and psychologist who host the podcast Decoding the Gurus, identify a fairly consistent set of features that mark a secular guru. These include: the invention of proprietary vocabulary that sounds technical but resists falsification; cosmic scaling, the habit of starting with a clinical observation and expanding it until it explains everything from brain development to the fate of civilization; credential performance that moves fluidly between hard science and spiritual intuition depending on the audience; and what they call semantic gliding, where key terms shift meaning depending on what the argument needs them to do at that moment.
Siegel hits most of these. Mindsight, MWe, intraconnection, interpersonal neurobiology, the integration of differentiation and linkage: these are proprietary terms that carry the weight of neuroscience branding while remaining loose enough to mean different things in different contexts. The cosmic scaling in IntraConnected, which moves from infant attachment to quantum physics to indigenous wisdom to the survival of the planet, is a near-perfect specimen of what Kavanagh and Browne flag in figures like Iain McGilchrist or Gabor Maté, who notably blurbed Siegel’s book. The Maté connection would itself register on the gurometer, since Maté is a figure they have decoded and found to exhibit many of the same patterns.
Where Siegel might score lower than a Jordan Peterson or a Teal Swan is on the persecution narrative. He does not position himself as a dissident or an exile from the mainstream. He is the mainstream, institutionally speaking, which makes him a different type. Kavanagh and Browne have increasingly noted that the guru move is not exclusively a fringe phenomenon. It also runs through credentialed academic figures who leverage institutional legitimacy while making claims that exceed what their evidence supports. Siegel is a cleaner example of that variant than of the iconoclast type.
The most damaging reading from their framework would focus on what they call the unfalsifiability shield. When critics push back on attachment theory’s evidentiary limits, Siegel’s response, as seen in IntraConnected, is not to defend the specific claims but to expand the frame until the criticism seems small. You object that attachment style may not be as malleable as claimed? Siegel replies that the self is broader than the brain and bigger than the body. That is not a rebuttal. It is a category escape. Kavanagh and Browne have a name for that move too, though they usually deliver it with more Irish and Australian warmth than I just did.
Nobody serious would want a blurb from Gabor Maté. That’s the tell about Daniel Siegel’s direction. I’m just a blogger and I would shrivel with embarrassment if Gabor Maté praised me.
The blurb list for IntraConnected reads like a map of the wellness-spirituality circuit rather than a map of the academy. Gabor Maté, Thomas Hübl, Joanna Macy, Shelly Tygielski. These are figures whose authority derives from retreats, podcasts, and trauma workshops rather than from research programs. When a book with genuine scientific ambitions seeks validation from that community rather than from, say, developmental psychologists or cognitive neuroscientists, it signals where the book actually lives.
A serious scholar seeking peer validation goes to people who could find holes in the work. You want the blurb from the person who might otherwise write the critical review, because that endorsement means something. Siegel’s blurb choices suggest he is not especially worried about that kind of scrutiny, or has concluded it is less valuable than market positioning among the therapeutic and contemplative communities where his brand already has traction.
The Maté connection is particularly interesting because Maté himself occupies a similar position, a credentialed physician who has moved steadily toward a popular audience by making large claims about trauma, addiction, and the body that outrun his evidence while wrapping them in personal narrative and compassion. His own blurb economy runs in the same direction. They essentially blurb each other into a mutual legitimacy that neither could obtain from the scientific community they nominally represent.
David Pinsof would recognize this instantly. It is an alliance structure. They protect each other’s status games by treating the wellness and trauma circuit as a credentialing body in its own right, one that operates parallel to the academy and increasingly rivals it for public influence, even as it remains invisible to serious researchers who simply do not read the same books or attend the same conferences.

How Do You Explain Men Who Can But Don’t Cheat On Their Wives?

Posted on March 12, 2026 by Luke Ford

The simplest answer is that the opportunity to do something and the desire to act on it are two different things. A man who does not cheat when he could has made a choice, and the reasons vary considerably from person to person.
Some men simply love their wives. Not as an abstraction, but in a specific, daily way that makes the prospect of betrayal feel genuinely unappealing. The other woman, however attractive, represents a disruption to something they value more than novelty.
Some are risk calculators. They see what infidelity costs when it comes apart, and they have watched it come apart in other marriages. The beautiful young woman is also a potential catastrophe: a divorce, estranged children, financial ruin, public humiliation. The arithmetic does not work in their favor and they know it.
Some men have a strong identity built around being trustworthy. Their self-image depends on being the kind of person who keeps his word. Cheating would not just damage the marriage; it would damage how they see themselves, and that matters to them more than the short-term gain.
There is also the factor of genuine satisfaction. A man who feels respected, desired, and at ease in his marriage experiences temptation differently than one who feels unseen. This does not mean unhappy men always cheat, but it does mean that happiness at home changes the weight of what is being offered elsewhere.
Finally, some men have a moral framework, religious or otherwise, that they take seriously enough to live by rather than simply profess. Belief, when it is real rather than performative, shapes behavior.
The interesting thing is that none of these explanations require the man to be a saint. They require him to have something he values more than what is being offered. That is less about virtue in the abstract and more about what a particular man, in a particular life, has decided matters.
Studies on men with high status, wealth, and access consistently show elevated rates of infidelity. Power reduces inhibition, increases opportunity, and often comes with a social environment where other men behave the same way, which normalizes it further. The research on politicians, executives, and celebrities broadly supports the idea that access and infidelity correlate.
It might be that fidelity among men with serious opportunity is the exception rather than the rule, and that the men who resist are outliers shaped by unusually strong marriages, unusually strong religious conviction, or an unusually powerful fear of consequences. That would not be a flattering portrait of men as a class, but flattery is not the same as accuracy.
Evolutionary psychology would say men evolved in an environment where reproducing with multiple women increased the number of offspring carrying their genes. A man who felt strong desire for sexual variety and acted on it left more descendants than one who did not. Over thousands of generations, that preference got baked in. The contemporary man inheriting that psychology did not choose it any more than he chose his height.
Robert Trivers’ work on parental investment is foundational here. Because women bear the greater biological cost of reproduction, they evolved to be more selective. Men, who can in principle reproduce with minimal investment, evolved toward a greater appetite for novelty and number. David Buss has documented this cross-culturally at length, finding that men across very different societies consistently report stronger desires for sexual variety than women report.
The specific scenario of a man with wealth and status having access to attractive young women maps almost perfectly onto what evolutionary psychology predicts would maximize male temptation. Youth and physical attractiveness are signals of fertility. High status in the man correlates historically with resources that could support offspring. The setup is, from a purely biological standpoint, close to optimal conditions for the evolved drive to fire hard.
Where evolutionary psychology gets more careful is in distinguishing desire from behavior. The framework predicts strong temptation, not inevitable action. Humans also evolved the capacity for long-term pair bonding, for reputation management, for caring deeply about their children’s welfare in stable households. These pressures cut the other way. Steven Pinker and others have argued that evolution gave us competing drives rather than a single override switch.
The honest summary from that field would probably be: the drive is real, the temptation under those conditions is intense, and most of the forces keeping men faithful are social and psychological rather than biological.
A study published in the British Medical Journal using data from the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project found that among men aged 75 to 85, about 39 percent remained sexually active. That means a majority had stopped by that age range, suggesting the median cessation falls somewhere before 75. Other research points to the late 60s as the period when frequency drops sharply for many men, though a meaningful minority remain active well into their 80s.
The range is enormous. Health is the dominant factor, more than age itself. Cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, testosterone decline, and medication side effects all suppress sexual activity significantly. A healthy 75-year-old man may have a more active sex life than an unhealthy 60-year-old.
Relationship status matters too. Men without partners stop having sex at higher rates than men in relationships, which reflects opportunity as much as desire.
Charles Taylor‘s distinction between the buffered and porous selves comes from A Secular Age, where he contrasts the pre-modern porous self with the modern buffered self. It adds something genuinely interesting to the adultery question.
The porous self of pre-modern culture had no firm boundary between inside and outside. Spirits, forces, social obligations, and divine commands penetrated the self directly. A man in that world experienced his obligations to wife, family, and God as external forces that inhabited him, not merely rules he had chosen to follow. Violation carried a weight that was almost physical, something closer to pollution or contamination than to rule-breaking. The social and sacred world pressed in on him constantly.
The buffered self that Taylor associates with modernity has erected a wall. The modern individual experiences himself as the author of his own meaning, protected from external forces by a sense of inner sovereignty. Moral commitments become choices rather than constraints imposed from outside. Religion, social expectation, and even love become things the self ratifies rather than forces the self submits to.
Applied to adultery, this suggests something worth taking seriously. The buffered man experiences temptation differently. He does not feel the weight of violated sacred order pressing in on him. He reasons about consequences, calculates risk, consults his preferences. The question becomes not “what kind of cosmos am I violating” but “what do I actually want and what will it cost me.” That is a much lighter set of restraints.
Taylor would not say the buffered self is simply more selfish. But he might say it is more alone with its desires, less held in place by forces larger than itself. A porous man in a religious community with a thick sense of honor and sacred obligation carries the community inside him. The buffered man has to generate his own reasons to resist, and that is a harder thing to sustain when a beautiful young woman is in the room.

But It Violates A Canon!

Posted on March 12, 2026 by Luke Ford

I feel like I’m getting ripped off when an expert explaining religion or politics points out how this or that manifestation violates the canon of this or that, as though canons are universal, transcendent, and global rather than post hoc rationalizations for alliances.
The appeal to canons works as a rhetorical move precisely because it sounds neutral. The expert positions herself outside the fray, above the messy business of interest and power, armed with a rulebook. But the rulebook got written by people who had already won certain fights.
Canons in religion are especially good at this. The Council of Nicaea didn’t just settle a theological dispute about the nature of Christ. It settled who got to define orthodoxy going forward, which meant it settled who could call everything else a deviation. The losers didn’t lack canons. They had their own texts, their own councils, their own arguments. They lost politically and militarily, and then they lost canonically, which is the cleaner way to lose because it makes the victory look like it was always already true.
Political canons work the same way, though the timescale compresses. Constitutional originalism is a version of this. The document becomes the standard against which current behavior gets measured, but the interpretation of the document is itself a contest, and whoever controls that interpretation wins without having to argue on the merits. They just point to the text.
What the expert-commentator move does is borrow the authority of the settled canon while hiding the fact that the settlement was itself a power struggle. It says: I am not attacking you politically, I am simply noting that you have failed to meet an objective standard. But the standard didn’t fall from the sky. Someone put it there, and someone benefits from its being there.
The frustrating part is that canons aren’t useless. Institutions need internal standards or they fall apart into pure faction. But that’s different from treating canons as though they were discovered rather than made, as though appealing to them ends the argument rather than relocating it.
This move occurs most often the past 50 years when some scholar tells us that Islamic terror violates the canons of Islam. This rhetoric has a specific political function. It reassures a nervous liberal audience that Islam is not the problem, extremism is the problem, and here is a credentialed Muslim scholar to prove it. The scholar gets to be both insider and referee simultaneously, which is a powerful rhetorical position.
The trouble is that the canon of Islam, like every religious canon, contains multitudes. You can find Quranic verses and hadith that support violence against apostates and unbelievers, and you can find others that forbid it. You can find jurisprudential traditions that authorize jihad in expansive terms, and others that confine it narrowly. The extremists are not simply making things up. They are reading certain texts, certain traditions, certain scholars, and finding genuine support there. The moderate scholar who says they violate the canons is also reading genuinely, but she is reading selectively, as everyone reads selectively, because the canon is large and contradictory enough to support multiple conclusions.
This doesn’t mean the two readings are equivalent in terms of their human consequences. It matters enormously which interpretation gains ground. But it does mean the argument that terror violates Islamic canons is a political argument dressed as a textual one. It is an argument about which reading should win, which scholars should be authoritative, which traditions should be centered. That’s a real argument worth having. It just shouldn’t be disguised as a neutral finding.
There’s also something slightly condescending baked into the whole exercise. The implicit audience is non-Muslim Westerners who need to be reassured, and the implicit message is that the real Islam is the one that fits comfortably within liberal democratic assumptions. The extremists, on this account, are not just wrong but somehow not authentically Muslim. That framing serves Western political needs more than it serves any honest account of what a 1,400-year-old tradition actually contains.

Posted in Epistemics, Islam | Comments Off

Populism & The Rise Of Trump

Posted on March 12, 2026 by Luke Ford

Populism is a useful frame for understanding Trump’s rise, but it is neither sufficient on its own nor always the sharpest lens available. The debate among political scientists and historians has produced several competing frameworks, each illuminating different aspects of the same phenomenon.
The populist frame, developed most rigorously by theorists like Jan-Werner Müller, treats Trump as an expression of a recurring democratic pathology. On this view, Trump drew on a logic that divides the world into a virtuous, unified “real people” and a corrupt elite that betrays them. The appeal of this framing is that it explains the moral register of his campaign, the relentless attacks on institutions, and the claim that only he could restore what had been stolen. Populism also connects Trump to a global pattern, letting analysts place him alongside Orbán, Bolsonaro, and others in a comparative framework. That comparative reach is the strongest argument for keeping populism in the analytical toolkit.
The problem is that populism, as a concept, does not do much causal work on its own. It describes a rhetorical style and a political logic, but it does not explain why that style found such a large audience in the United States at that particular moment. For that, other frames become indispensable.
The most compelling competitor is the status threat and cultural backlash framework, associated with scholars like Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart. On their account, Trump’s coalition mobilized not primarily around economic grievance but around a perceived threat to the social status of white, non-college, largely rural Americans. Decades of cultural change, including growing visibility of nonwhite, immigrant, and LGBTQ communities, combined with elite valorization of higher education, left a large segment of the country feeling displaced, condescended to, and invisible. This framework has more predictive power than populism alone, because it explains the geography and demography of Trump support better than income-based explanations do. Many Trump voters were economically comfortable but socially anxious.
A third major frame emphasizes partisan sorting and institutional dysfunction. Scholars like Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson argue that Trump did not arrive from outside the Republican Party but was incubated by it. Decades of partisan media, primary structures that rewarded ideological purity, and a Congress that had abandoned bipartisan governance created the conditions for a figure like Trump to capture the nomination and the base. This frame is less dramatic than populism but arguably more structurally rigorous.
There is also a tradition, rooted in the work of historians like Richard Hofstadter, that places Trump within a long American pattern of conspiratorial, anti-intellectual political culture. Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” identifies a recurring strand in American life in which political opponents are not merely wrong but actively malevolent. This is perhaps the oldest and most distinctly American of the available frames, and it connects Trump to movements from the Know-Nothings to McCarthyism.
Each frame captures something real. Populism captures the rhetorical structure and the delegitimation of institutions. Status threat captures the sociological base. Partisan sorting captures the systemic conditions that made his rise possible. The paranoid style captures something about the emotional texture and historical continuity of Trumpism. The most complete analyses tend to combine all of these rather than elevating one. Populism is a good entry point, especially for comparative purposes, but it risks becoming a shorthand that substitutes for the harder work of explaining why American democracy was vulnerable to this kind of politics when and where it was.
Academics occupy a peculiar position in the status landscape that populism targets. They are credentialed, institutionally embedded, and heavily invested in the idea that expertise confers legitimate authority. Populism, in its most direct form, attacks exactly that claim. When Trump mocked experts, dismissed scientists, and declared that he alone could fix things, he was not just performing anti-elitism for the cameras. He was delegitimizing the very class of people who would later write papers explaining why he was a populist threat to democracy.
There is a real conflict of interest here that most academic treatments of populism do not acknowledge. A scholar at a research university diagnosing Trumpism as irrational, authoritarian, or driven by status anxiety is also, whether consciously or not, defending the legitimacy of his own institutional position. The framing tends to place the analyst above the phenomenon, looking down at a distorted politics that fails to meet the standards of rational deliberation that, not coincidentally, credentialed experts are supposed to embody.
This shapes the literature in subtle ways. Status threat and cultural backlash frameworks, for instance, can function as a way of pathologizing Trump voters, treating their resentments as psychological distortions rather than reasonable responses to real changes in power and recognition. The academic says: these people feel displaced, and that feeling drives irrational politics. But the displacing forces are real. The condescension is real. The sense that a college degree now functions as a class marker and a ticket to social legitimacy is not a paranoid fantasy.
There is also a selection effect in who studies populism. Political scientists and sociologists at elite institutions are among the people whose status populism most directly threatens. They have strong professional and psychological incentives to frame populism as a problem to be solved rather than a symptom worth taking seriously on its own terms. That does not mean their analyses are wrong, but it does mean the genre has a structural bias worth accounting for.
The academic framing of populism is itself a political move, not a neutral description. Calling something populism, with all the connotations of demagoguery and irrationality that trail behind the word, is a way of discrediting it without directly engaging its grievances. By the time you have classified Trump as a populist, you have already decided that his supporters’ anger is a malfunction rather than a signal.
That said, the critique has limits too. Some of what gets called populism really is cynical and manipulative. Trump exploited genuine grievances without doing much to address them. That academics have a stake in the diagnosis does not automatically make the diagnosis wrong. But it does mean the frame deserves more skepticism than it typically receives from the people most likely to apply it.

Scholars of populism generally fall into three camps: those who see it as a “thin ideology,” those who view it as a political style or performance, and those who treat it as a radical democratic corrective. Their bias usually stems from their underlying normative definition of democracy.

Cas Mudde is a leading figure who defines populism as a “thin-centered ideology.” He argues that populism divides society into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups: the pure people and the corrupt elite. Mudde suggests populism is not inherently right-wing or left-wing but attaches itself to “host ideologies” like nativism or socialism. His framework is rooted in liberal democracy. He views populism as essentially illiberal because it rejects pluralism and minority protections in favor of a monolithic “general will.” While he acknowledges it can be a “corrective” to elitism, his work often leans toward a defensive posture of liberal institutions.

Jan-Werner Müller, author of What is Populism?, offers a more restrictive and critical definition. For him, the defining feature is not just being anti-elite, but being anti-pluralist. Müller argues that populists claim that they, and only they, represent the “real people.” Anyone who does not support them is excluded from the body politic. His bias is strongly pro-institutional and pro-pluralist. He views populism as a threat to the foundations of democracy because it delegitimizes political opposition. He focuses heavily on how populists govern (mass clientelism and state occupation) to argue that the movement is inherently authoritarian.

Benjamin Moffitt shifts the focus from what populists believe to how they behave. He defines populism as a “political style” performed for the media. He identifies three key stylistic traits: an appeal to “the people” versus “the elite,” the use of “bad manners” (breaking political decorum), and the staging of a crisis or threat. Moffitt’s bias is more descriptive and less normative than Müller’s. He views populism as a symptom of a mediated age where politics is a performance. He tends to be skeptical of “technocratic” mainstream politics, arguing that the populist style often exposes the dry, unresponsive nature of modern liberal governance.

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: Unlike the scholars above, Laclau and Mouffe (often associated with “Left Populism”) view populism as the very essence of politics. They argue that all politics involves creating a “we” against a “them.” Populism is a tool to unite disparate grievances into a single movement to challenge entrenched power. Their bias is radical and anti-liberal. They believe liberal democracy has become a stale, technocratic consensus that ignores the needs of the working class. They advocate for populism as a necessary way to “re-politicize” society and achieve social justice.

The late Margaret Canovan provided an influential bridge between these camps, arguing that democracy has two faces: the “pragmatic” (institutions and rules) and the “redemptive” (the promise of the people taking charge). She argued that populism is a permanent shadow of democracy that emerges whenever the pragmatic side becomes too distant or bureaucratic. Canovan is often seen as a centrist, but recent critiques suggest she had a conservative, anti-progressive lean. She was suspicious of “elitist” intellectual projects and held a romanticized view of the “common sense” of ordinary people, making her more sympathetic to populist impulses than her peers.

Cas Mudde and Jan-Werner Müller treat Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump as prime examples of the populist threat to liberal democracy. They argue that these leaders use a thin ideology to separate a pure people from a corrupt elite. Müller specifically points to Orbán as a model for how populists move from rhetoric to state capture. He notes that once in power, these figures claim an exclusive moral mandate that allows them to dismantle institutional checks and balances.

Scholars such as Benjamin Moffitt focus on the performance of these leaders. He analyzes how Trump uses bad manners and stages crises to maintain a sense of urgency and direct connection with his base. This perspective treats the behavior not just as a personality trait but as a calculated political style. It explains how leaders bypass traditional media to speak directly to the people.

Critics of the liberal consensus like Chantal Mouffe see the rise of these figures as a response to the failures of technocratic governance. They argue that when mainstream parties ignore the needs of the working class, a space opens for a populist to re-politicize society. From this view, the bias of scholars like Mudde and Müller is their commitment to a status quo that has failed many citizens.

The comparison between Hungary and the United States often centers on the idea of illiberal governance. Gabor Scheiring and other researchers suggest that Orbán provided a blueprint for using democratic tools to weaken democratic institutions by reshaping the judiciary and the media to ensure that the ruling party remains in power indefinitely.

The Art Of The Deal

Posted on March 12, 2026 by Luke Ford

Donald Trump’s approach to leverage centers on a few ideas he developed long before politics, most clearly in his 1987 book “The Art of the Deal.” The core principle is that leverage comes not just from what you have, but from what the other side believes you might do. Perception matters as much as reality. He has said plainly that he courts controversy because attention itself is a form of power.
Several things distinguish his approach from conventional negotiating theory.
He treats unpredictability as a resource. Most negotiators signal reliability to build trust. Trump does the opposite. By keeping adversaries uncertain about his next move, he forces them to hedge, which puts them on defense. He applied this in trade talks with China, pulling out of agreements or threatening tariffs in ways that kept counterparts off balance. The logic is that a predictable opponent is an easy opponent.
He also escalates first and negotiates second. Where most parties open with a reasonable position and work toward compromise, Trump tends to open with a maximalist demand, sometimes one that seems absurd, and then treats any concession as a win. Critics call this bad faith. Supporters call it anchoring. Either way, it shifts the midpoint of any eventual deal in his direction.
He personalizes leverage. Corporate and diplomatic negotiators usually separate the institutional relationship from the immediate dispute. Trump collapses that distinction. He makes deals feel personal, which raises the emotional stakes for the other side and can extract concessions that a purely rational actor would never give just to end the discomfort.
What makes this unusual is that most of these tactics carry serious long-term costs in traditional contexts: burned relationships, reputational damage, broken alliances. Trump seems to calculate that he operates in contexts where he can absorb those costs, or where the short-term win outweighs them, or where the other party simply has no good alternative to dealing with him anyway.

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The Disinterested Expert Who Says, ‘I Hope’

Posted on March 12, 2026 by Luke Ford

I often read or listen to what poses as expert objective analysis, and then the professor says, “I hope…”
That construction bothers me. It’s hard enough to explain reality, and now you want to go normative on me? I don’t like it. Decide what team you are playing for — the describing team or the prescribing team. No man can serve two masters at the same time.
Academic language is supposed to describe and analyze, not prescribe outcomes. When a scholar says “I hope the two-state solution prevails” or “I hope regional actors choose diplomacy,” they slip from analysis into advocacy without announcing the shift. The listener has no warning that the register just changed.
It also signals something about whose hopes count. An academic at a prestigious institution who says “I hope” is not just expressing a private wish. They are lending the authority of their credentials to a political preference. The framing implies that their hope is informed, considered, and perhaps more legitimate than the hopes of the people actually living through the conflict.
There is also something evasive about it. “I hope” can function as a soft way to avoid making a direct argument. If a scholar says “the evidence suggests that X policy increases civilian casualties,” that is falsifiable and open to challenge. But “I hope for stability” floats above the evidence entirely. Nobody can argue with a hope. It costs nothing analytically and risks nothing professionally, while still positioning the speaker as morally engaged.
The jarring quality comes from that gap between the pose and the substance. The scholar sounds human and humble, which is appealing, but the hope itself often smuggles in assumptions that deserve scrutiny. Which stability? Whose peace? At what cost? “I hope” tends to close those questions rather than open them.
The mixing is the problem, not the choosing. A scholar who argues openly for a position at least gives you something to push back against. You can examine the premises, challenge the evidence, dispute the conclusion. That is honest work.
But slipping between description and prescription without flagging the transition is a kind of intellectual sleight of hand. The authority built up through years of careful analysis gets quietly transferred to a political preference. The listener, who came for the analysis, ends up receiving the advocacy without quite realizing the transaction occurred.
Weber called this the distinction between the scholar and the prophet. He thought the lecture hall was the wrong place for prophecy, not because values are illegitimate, but because the power relationship between professor and student makes genuine disagreement nearly impossible. The student cannot easily say “that is your hope, not mine” to someone who controls their grade or their reputation. The same applies, in softer form, to the public intellectual and their audience.
The problem compounds in Middle East commentary specifically because the stakes feel so high that people believe silence equals complicity. That pressure pushes scholars toward the normative register even when they have nothing analytically useful to add. So you get a lot of “I hope” and “we must” dressed up in the vocabulary of expertise, which is worse than plain advocacy because it borrows credibility it has not earned through argument.
It feels like almost every prominent commentator has a team. Robert Fisk was honest about his sympathies. Bernard Lewis was honest about his. The ones who pretend to pure analysis while hoping loudly are the ones to watch carefully.
Pick a lane is not an unreasonable demand.

Robert Caldini vs Robert Greene

Posted on March 12, 2026 by Luke Ford

Both Robert Cialdini and Robert Greene write about power and persuasion, but they approach the subject from very different angles and with very different intentions.
Cialdini is a social psychologist who spent his career studying why people say yes. His most famous book, Influence, draws on decades of experimental research and field observation. He identified six principles, later expanded to seven, that explain how people get persuaded: reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity, and unity. His work is grounded in academic psychology, and he wrote it partly as a warning. He wanted ordinary people to recognize when these techniques were being used on them. The tone is measured and explanatory. He presents himself as a scientist first.
Greene is a writer and cultural observer with no academic credentials in psychology. His books, The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, draw on history, biography, and philosophy rather than controlled experiments. He writes like a strategist advising you from the shadows. His tone is amoral by design. He does not moralize about whether the people he profiles were good or bad. Caesar, Catherine the Great, P.T. Barnum, and Machiavelli all get equal treatment as case studies in how power moves through human behavior.
Where Cialdini explains, Greene instructs. Cialdini shows you the mechanism behind the curtain so you can defend yourself. Greene shows you the mechanism and says, use it. This is the sharpest contrast between them. One writes as a defender of the ordinary person, the other as a coach for anyone ambitious enough to want an edge.
Their audiences overlap but are not identical. Cialdini became required reading in business schools and marketing departments. Greene developed a cult following among entrepreneurs, musicians, athletes, and people who feel the mainstream success literature is too soft or dishonest about how power works. Jay-Z and 50 Cent have cited Greene publicly. 50 Cent co-wrote a book with him.
Cialdini’s weakness is that his framework, while useful, can feel clinical and tidy. Human persuasion is messier than six principles. Greene’s weakness is the opposite: his books are sprawling and sometimes rely on historical anecdotes that are oversimplified or stripped of context. He can make Napoleon or Talleyrand sound like they were following a playbook, when history is rarely that clean.
Both men, though, share a core belief. People are more predictable than they like to think, and understanding that predictability gives you leverage. They just disagree about whether to hand you a shield or a sword.
I find Robert Greene pseudo-profound and shlocky. It’s self-help of the basest kind. The core problem with Greene is that he works backward. He finds a historical outcome he wants to illustrate, selects the details that fit, and discards the rest. That is not analysis. It is storytelling dressed as wisdom. When Talleyrand survives every regime in France, Greene calls it mastery of power. He does not seriously consider luck, timing, the structural conditions of post-Revolutionary politics, or the dozen other advisors who tried similar things and lost their heads. The survivor gets the chapter. The failures disappear.
His prose style compounds this. The aphoristic format, the numbered laws, the portentous chapter openings, all of it signals depth without delivering it. A sentence like “never outshine the master” sounds like ancient wisdom. It is actually just a restatement of obvious workplace caution dressed in imperial clothing. The format flatters the reader into feeling they have learned something timeless when they have mostly received common sense in a velvet box.
There is also something adolescent in his worldview, and not in a forgivable way. Life in Greene’s universe is a permanent tournament where every relationship is a power struggle and every generous act conceals a motive. That might describe some environments, certain courts, certain industries. As a general theory of human behavior it is shallow and a little paranoid. Machiavelli at least wrote for a specific political context. Greene universalizes it and sells it to twenty-two year olds who want to feel like they see through everything.
The audience tells you something. His books resonate most strongly with people who are young, newly ambitious, and slightly resentful. That is not a condemnation of those readers. But it suggests the books are more therapeutic than instructive, confirming a suspicion that the world is cold and hierarchical rather than actually teaching anyone to navigate it better.
Cialdini, whatever his limitations, built his work on evidence. Greene built his on vibes and a very good editor.