People Unlike Me

Political ideologies tend to suit the people who promote and believe them, and not suit others. This makes governance difficult.

If you take a properly designed and normed personality test (either Five Factor or HEXACO), one trait both will assess is your conscientiousness.

In most walks of life, “high trait conscientiousness” is a good thing to have. It means you finish what you start. It means you always remember to put the bins out, or you’re waiting for the kids outside the school gate, daily, at exactly three-fifteen in the afternoon. When combined with high trait agreeableness, it produces a loyal and hardworking employee, but not an innovative or brave one.

Conscientiousness is sometimes called “diligence,” while geneticists are currently exploring the link between it and executive function. Conscientiousness is moderately heritable. Executive function is highly heritable.

If you want an innovative employee who also reliably finishes what he or she starts, then you need to look for a much rarer combination of traits: not only conscientiousness but also disagreeableness. Disagreeable people who care about doing a job well will poke holes in your plan but then fix it up for you while making it better. This combination of traits then gives conscientious, agreeable people something to work with: wins all round in/on your office, factory, farm, or university.

Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash

Unfortunately, disagreeable, conscientious people are also prone to coming up with political ideologies and policy proposals that suit them but are absolutely shite for everyone else. When I reviewed

Rob Henderson

’s Troubled for Law & Liberty at Liberty Fund, I made this observation:

The reality that classical liberalism—the closest to my own political views, I admit—has at least a whiff of the luxury belief around it stings. It’s discomforting to acknowledge that what goes by the name of paternalism has its own intellectual pedigree, while liberalism can be a system developed by the clever, for the clever. “Highly educated and affluent people are more economically conservative and socially liberal,” Henderson says. “This doesn’t make sense. The position is roughly that people shouldn’t have to adhere to norms and if/when they inevitably hurt themselves or others, then there should be no safety net available. It’s a luxury belief.”

Since reading and reviewing Henderson’s book, I’ve now come across an older (2014) piece that makes Henderson’s point at greater length and with more rigour:

Some people have more self-control than others. Let me give you an example. I love my wife dearly, but sometimes she freaks me out. Several months ago she got tired of paying for proprietary statistical analytics software and so decided to learn R, the open-source alternative. She signed up for some free online course, and then every day in the evening after work spent about an hour watching video tutorials of a guy explaining the subtleties of R programming. She did a bunch of problem sets, and by the end of the month had basically mastered it.

What I find freaky is the amount of self-control that it takes, after a long day at the office, to come home and spend an hour teaching yourself stats programming. I could never do something like that, because I simply don’t have that much self-control. And yet at the same time, I must have way more self-control than the average person. After all, I write books, which is a lot of work, and requires the ability to postpone gratification by several years.

So it’s probably fair to say that both my wife and I belong to the upper 10% of the population, when it comes to exercising self-control. This is the group that I refer to as the “self-control aristocracy.” Being a member of this club comes with enormous benefits in our society – as the famous marshmallow test suggested. This is because self-control has been shown to be a fairly stable personality trait, that generalizes across domains. (For example, neither my wife nor I have ever made anything less than the full payment on our credit cards, for over 25 years.) In fact, self-control probably confers more advantages in our society than does mere wealth – because it gives you advantages in so many different areas of life (in health, education, diet, finances, relationships, career development, staying out of jail, etc.).

Joseph Heath

(who wrote the above piece, and who also has a background in political science) uses the phrase “self-control aristocracy” to describe those who really do benefit from maximal freedom. These are people who can make better choices for themselves than any authority could make on their behalf. When the state or large corporates boss them (us) around, they (we) get really bloody annoyed. They (we) know better!

Heath’s phrase is simply a layman’s term for the personality trait various formal tests measure, and which overlaps with executive function to a considerable but as yet unknown degree.

Because I am self-conscious about my membership in the self-control aristocracy, I am acutely aware of the fact that, when I think about questions of “individual liberty” in society, I come to it with a particular set of class interests. That is because I stand to benefit much more from an expansion of the space of individual liberty than the average person does – because I have greater self-control. So I recognize that, while a 24-hour beer store would be great for me, it would be a mixed blessing for others […]

What does this have to do with libertarianism? It is important because every academic proponent of libertarianism – understood loosely, as any doctrine that assigns individual liberty priority over other political values – is a member of the self-control aristocracy. As a result, they are advancing a political ideal that benefits themselves to a much greater extent than it benefits other people. In most cases, however, they do so naively, because they do not recognize themselves as members of an elite, socially-dominant group, that stands to benefit disproportionately. They think of liberty as something that creates an equal benefit for all.

My response to reading Professor Heath’s piece was simplicity itself: I feel seen. I’ve even done the night school thing while working full-time. I’ve written books and chosen to play sports that require a long time and lots of skill to master. I retired at 45.

Politically, I’m not a libertarian. Libertarianism is a distinctive and largely American ideology (as the recent and bonkers fracas at its US Convention indicates) with philosophically unusual deontological roots. I am, however, within the British and French tradition of classical liberalism (which does assign individual liberty priority over other political values). And like many classical liberals I’ve been blind to problems of laws and governance for people unlike me.

I disclose this because I’ve worked in policy development in both devolved and national parliaments. I’ve probably given politicians and civil servants alike dud advice. There is almost certainly a shit policy out there (in either Scotland or Australia) with my name on it. However, this mind-blindness doesn’t only apply to people who advocate libertarian politics. I think it applies to a significant number of political ideologies just as strongly as it does to libertarianism.

That is, the ideology serves the inherited personality traits of those who promote it. “You only support that because it’s in your self-interest to do so” always struck me as a genuinely mean criticism of people who were involved in politics and policy (I may have been one of those people, natch). The problem—as I’ve been forced to accept—is that it’s true.

One ideology where it’s as true as it is for libertarianism is feminism. Feminism was led by (and greatly improved the life chances of) women like me. It was great for smart, disagreeable, career-focussed women who don’t like or want kids. And yes, just like getting banged up for a bit of weed while harming precisely no-one seriously annoys the kind of smart, self-controlled person who can formulate a (libertarian) policy response to the War on Drugs, so too with women who were uninterested in home and family (or who were same-sex attracted) and found that being circumscribed professionally and romantically really, really rankled.

However, just as most people aren’t members of Heath’s self-control aristocracy, most women do not combine high intellect with disagreeableness and conscientiousness. Some feminists have realised this—albeit in an ad hoc way—and because feminism as a wider movement was/is wedded to blank-slatism, they believed they could shift the dial on what was then called “female socialisation.” That is, they thought it would be possible to make women as a group more closely resemble the able, disagreeable women who were by the 70s and 80s entering the professions, politics, academia, lobbying outfits, and think-tanks.

Or, of course, men. Men more often combine high trait disagreeableness with high trait conscientiousness (although even among males, the combination is rare). This is despite the fact that there are more agreeable women than agreeable men, and more conscientious women than conscientious men.

“No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction.”

‘A Dialogue with Simone de Beauvoir,’ in Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement, Random House, 1976, p. 397.

de Beauvoir’s suggestion is both authoritarian and hilarious, and represents a panicked response—not unlike the howls from Marxists when it became clear the proletariat was uninterested in revolution—to women unlike her. While it’s true (at least historically) that there were a number of strands to feminism—including a pro-motherhood one—careerist feminism finished up dominating all the others. I’m old enough to remember campaigns for wages for housework. If some old school wonks got hold of this idea, it could form part of a suite of policies directed to increasing the fertility rate.

You don’t see those feminist campaigns any more, though. They’ve been submarined. As I say, I’m old.

Women throughout the developed world—notoriously—tell pollsters they want more children than they have. Usually three is the preferred number, as opposed to two or one. The so-called “gender wage gap” exists because women have children.

Economists often decry this finding as a case of stated versus revealed preferences: what people do is more salient than what they say, something known since Roman times. Hence the Stoic quip acta non verba (“deeds not words”). However, even if fully half the “I want more kids than I have” response served up to pollsters is nothing more than windy stated preferences, that still leaves a lot of unborn but wanted children. Feminism, as

Louise Perry

is fond of pointing out, has simply dropped the ball on this one.

This insight is, I recognise, a genuine example of ad hominem. It suggests that people plump for ideologies that will give them a leg-up, and do so deliberately. That said, political ideology is, like conscientiousness, heritable. Henderson’s and Heath’s insight reminds us that everything social is emergent from the biological (the basis of Lorenzo Warby’s essays on this Substack). That’s why libertarianism is the way it is, and feminism is, and probably other ideologies too.

Wokies, I’ve noticed, are often smart but organisationally hopeless: high intellect in combination with low conscientiousness. This is a recipe for mental illness and personality disorders (particularly the Cluster Bs, as

Josh Slocum

argues). High IQ people with mental health problems generally fail at life just us hard as dummies do, too, while being far more bitter and destructive about it. Do you blame them for adopting an ideology that says everyone else has to accommodate them and their messes, rather than the other way around?

Socialism and its milder cousin, social democracy, are great for people with chaotic financial lives: the state will ride to the rescue and smooth out lumpy income streams. When able to evince their preferences at the polls, working class people are notoriously either culturally (UK, France, Netherlands, Germany, Australia) or socially (US, Brazil, Argentina, Chile) conservative, but also support the sort of left-leaning, redistributive economic and industrial policies classical liberals and many conservatives hate. I’m also pretty sure a lot of people are conservative because they want systems and traditions they understand and can use to their advantage.

This isn’t a conspiracy. It isn’t malicious. It’s not people scheming so they can maximise their own ends using politics as a vehicle. They’re just attracted to things that work for them. Which is absolutely fine—you do you!—but it leads to mind-blindness, to an absence of theory of mind when it comes to people who are different from them.

This is the kernel of truth in woke “cultural appropriation” and “lived experience” claims: it’s hard to enter imaginatively the perspectives and experiences of those unlike oneself. Novelists and cinéastes can often do it, sometimes so eerily well they see things in others those people don’t see in themselves. One of the problems with Wokery is that it denies the creative alchemy that allows writers and directors to ventriloquise in this way. In that sense, artists are the eyes for other people. Go outside the high end of the creative arts, however, and this sort of imaginative empathy is in short supply. The more modest version of the woke claim happens to be true.

To return to the US Libertarians—and their shambolic convention—is also to be reminded that when teacher-pleasers who are comfortable with authority (agreeable, conscientious) take over an organisation designed and set up by disagreeable, conscientious people, that outfit implodes. As anyone who has paid even the slightest attention to US politics this week knows, a little under half the Libertarians have opted for Donald Trump. The majority, meanwhile, have endorsed a presidential candidate who combines support for compulsory vaccinations with calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza.

A party for free-thinking, disagreeable people this is no longer. Not anymore.

The US Libertarians’ fate is mirrored on a grander scale in the academy. There are many more smart, agreeable, conscientious people than there are smart, disagreeable, conscientious people. Historically, the academy attracted the latter, hence all those stories of nutty professors wandering around the quadrangle at midnight thinking deep thoughts sans pants. As it expanded in size and admitted more women, however, the academy needed to draw on a wider talent pool. This is all very well and good and noble but it means higher ed is now stuffed to the gunwales with conformist cowards who wouldn’t say “shit” for sixpence and are incapable of innovation.

I’ve developed a reputation for engaging in crunchy policy-wonkery in here, which means many of you no doubt expect me to offer some solutions to the problem of people believing (and acting on) things because they’re convenient, and not because they’re true. I don’t have many, because people like Heath and Henderson are bringing insights across from psychology and evolutionary biology to political science and policy development, something that isn’t often done.

“Recruit more smart, disagreeable, conscientious people to your company/university/factory/firm” sounds like a glib idea, but is I suspect a useful one, something you can test for and measure empirically. Relatedly, a bit of personal reflection on the extent to which you believe things because they help you paddle your own canoe would be helpful. Make an effort to understand people unlike you. If you finish up in politics and policy, try to govern for people unlike you (and without seeing them as opponents).

You can’t leave imaginative empathy to novelists and film directors, either, given the widespread censorship that’s emerged in publishing and production, especially children’s fiction and children’s television (likely for the same reasons the academy is in trouble). I get that “walk a mile in someone else’s moccasins” is very much the Hallmark version of Native American philosophy but it’s also sound life advice. Try it.

It means you start with accepting messy human reality rather than trying and failing to bend individual men and women to your will.