3552 Why Leftists Are Violent | John Wright and Stefan Molyneux
What is the correlation between political ideology and criminality? Are either liberals or conservatives more likely to engage in criminal behavior? Stefan Molyneux is joined by Dr. John Paul Wright to discuss the relation between ideology and criminality, the genetic component to human violence, the dark triad personality traits and what can be gained by the continued study of biosocial criminology.Study: Political Ideology Predicts Involvement In Crime http://www.fdrurl.com/Ideology-Predicts-CrimeStudy: Malevolent Forces: Self-Control, the Dark Triad, and Crimehttp://www.fdrurl.com/Malevolent-ForcesThe University as a Total Institutionhttp://quillette.com/2017/01/02/the-university-as-a-total-institution/Dr. John Paul Wright is a Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati and the author of "Criminals in the Making: Criminality Across the Life Course."Book: http://www.fdrurl.com/Criminals-In-The-MakingTwitter: https://twitter.com/cjprofmanFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I'm here with Dr.
John Paul Wright.
He is the professor of criminal justice at the University of Cincinnati and the author of Criminals in the Making, Criminality Across the Life Course.
You can follow him on Twitter at CJProfMan.
We'll put links to all of that below.
Dr.
Wright, thank you so much for taking the time today.
My pleasure.
Great to be here.
The question that has most interest me in your research, and it's really fascinating stuff, we'll put a link to your research as a whole below, this question around political ideology and its relationship to criminality.
Now, putting the caveats in, of course, that correlation doesn't necessarily imply I wonder if you could help people understand this very strong...
I mean, I'm not a mathematician, but in the social sciences, strong correlations are hard to find.
This seems like a dose-dependent, fairly strong correlation between liberal versus conservative ideology and a propensity toward criminal behavior.
You know, it actually very much surprised me as well.
I've been moving my career to study how ideology influences people's lives and the choices that they make and so forth.
So when I went to apply this to the study of crime, I was actually quite shocked that there wasn't anything there.
And the more I thought about it, well, you know, most of the academy is very far to the left.
There's a real reluctance to study things on the left like this.
There's a whole, there's a sort of almost a gluttony of studies on conservatives.
You know, most people in the social sciences see conservatives as something to study, an aberration, something abnormal.
So it struck me that the lack of empirical investigation, this is quite Startling.
So, you know, I located a national data set and did some tentative analyses and I thought, well, that can't be right.
The results were much stronger than I had anticipated.
So I went through very carefully and verified the correlation between political ideology and criminal behavior, both cross-sectionally and longitudinally.
I was actually quite surprised by the magnitude of the difference.
We're talking about between, from very liberal to very conservative, almost a one standard deviation difference In the participation in crimes that we measured in our index, which were primarily property crimes, drug crimes, things like that.
So there was a substantial difference, and that difference didn't go away when we controlled for some other variables.
Now, what does the standard deviation mean for the layperson?
What kind of numerical multiplier can we expect in terms of criminality from somebody more on the liberal side?
You know, that's hard to quantify given the You know, the numbers that we're talking about without me showing you the full distribution.
But let's just say that, you know, if you're familiar with the bell curve and where that center is in the bell curve and going full right, you know, you're talking about a general difference that is almost,
that's rarely seen in the social sciences as a measure of As a measure of difference, that's not seen in most studies with factors that we know are related to criminal behavior, like self-control and certain temperamental features.
The associations are much smaller.
So it's a fairly substantial difference.
Now, there are certain characteristics associated with conservatism versus liberalism, or maybe we just sort of stay with left versus right because, of course, people across the pond find these terms a little bit confusing.
But on the right, of course, a willingness to abide by social norms and an aversion to hyper-experimentation with new experiences, whereas on the left, there is, of course, more of a sort of restlessness, a willingness to Experiment sexually, willingness to pursue new experiences, sometimes even at the expense of safety.
Are those associated with criminality or are they sort of red herrings when it comes to understanding those tendencies?
No, but they are substantively associated with criminality.
And in framing the paper, I wasn't exactly sure which way to go in predicting whether it would be left or right.
And it was entirely...
Not experimental, but sort of I didn't know.
I wanted to find out.
So when I wrote the front part of the paper, I said, look, there are reasons that we would expect an association between those on the left in crime or reasons that we might find out on the right in crime.
The big reasons are associated with personality.
And a lot of what the political ideology studies are showing is that people on the left have certain personality characteristics and ways of seeing the world.
That are conducive to criminal behavior.
You mentioned, one, openness to experience.
So, they're much more likely to engage in risk-taking behaviors and engage in risk-seeking behaviors, to experiment with drugs, to have a substantially greater number of sexual partners, to push the boundaries, if you will, and that general sort of tolerance of antisocial behavior.
In some ways, it's played out in daily life and daily existence.
The other area that these studies are fairly new was in self-control.
And self-control is a ubiquitous predictor of life outcomes.
It matters across the board.
It matters for just about everything.
And according to some contemporary studies, people on the left score lower than people on the right on measures of self-control.
So that was another reason that we thought this may be the case where we see people on the left engaging in these types of crimes more often than people on the right.
Exactly correct.
People on the right Score higher on measures of conscientiousness, less impulsive, much more concerned about order, public safety, authority, those types of factors, which are probably protective factors when it comes to criminal conduct.
The question of free will I found fascinating as well, and this is sort of dipping back to my long ago Psych 101 course around the sense of locus of control.
One of the things that seems quite common in the left is to ascribe life choices to environmental factors.
You know, if you're born poor, odds are stacked against you.
Whereas on the right, and I think this has something to do with religiosity, belief in the soul, and the capacity to choose outside or independent of environmental variables, I'm going to go.
Yeah, it is interesting and that tendency does sort of separate the right and left.
You mentioned locus of control.
Do I feel like I'm in control of events in my life or events controlling me?
And we do see those differences in data as well between left and right.
And I think there's something to be said about You know, the conservative belief in sort of personal accountability and how my behavior affects other people.
Now, certainly liberals, you know, liberals share that, but it's oftentimes counterbalanced by other types of factors like the willingness to push those boundaries or violate social norms or just to reject social norms.
Because they don't like them.
But yeah, free will or the perception of free will or the perception of agency, right?
That I'm an actor and I'm responsible.
You mentioned religion, right?
Well, for conservatives, Religion is that element of responsibility, metaphysical responsibility to myself, my community, or my God.
And that's another one of those protective factors against crime and drug use and other types of activities that bring long-term harm to people.
And this question of self-control, of restraint, I'm sort of reminded of the sort of famous marshmallow test, you know, where the kids were offered one marshmallow an hour versus two in half an hour or something like that, and that very strongly predicted life success.
It's also sort of struck me that, you know, everyone's first job usually sucks, and it's bad and annoying, and you've got to get a paper route and stuff like that, getting up at 6 o'clock in the morning on a Sunday to go deliver papers and stuff.
But if, of course, you believe that you are the sort of master of your own destiny and if you're focused on free will and responsibility and if you're willing to subjugate yourself to the social norms of work and pleasing customers or at least your boss, it seems to me that you'd kind of get on a track of life success in the market.
Whereas, of course, if you think that you're a victim's circumstances and you haven't got a hope, wouldn't that also predicate you more towards the sort of criminal track?
Short answer, yes.
You know, the great thing about going through life, especially starting to work and engaging in those things, is that you learn that life is not fair.
Everyone has it hard, right?
Everyone has a set of conditions that they have to deal with and that you learn to maneuver and navigate through those.
You have setbacks, you advance, you know, that's just the nature of things.
And the earlier, the sooner you learn that, Probably the better.
What the victim stance ideology does is it says, well, none of that really matters because these people have it better than you, and you have it worse than they do, and there's sort of an escapism that that allows, indeed encourages, and a resentment and a An orientation,
if you will, a psychological orientation that says, you know, I'm just not in control of it, and I will do what I need to to get ahead.
I've done a lot of field work on the street and inner cities and so forth, and I can tell you through the various anecdotes and conversations and interviews that I've had with active offenders that that is a very...
Substantive mindset.
That is, in a lot of ways, how they see the world.
Yeah, and of course, if you feel that circumstances have conspired to keep you from whatever positive goals you have in life, there is a lot of resentment, there's a sense of entitlement, the world owes me back because it robbed me, and you've sort of sat in combat against the larger social norms within your own society, and I think if you really don't respect the social norms within your society, criminality becomes much easier to justify.
I think even criminals need to find some way to justify their own actions, and I think that's one path, and it's a pretty It's a sinister path to go down, I think, to end up with that mindset.
It's really interesting, too, because in the criminological literature, we have these things called criminal thinking errors.
Pretty much in the corrections arena now.
These are victim stance thinking, denial of responsibility, blaming the government, power control orientations, what have you.
But they're part of the cognitive scripts that people have to understand and to explain their world and to explain their role in the world.
And what we find is people that have a lot of these scripts, they blame others for their predicament, they're always in the wrong place at the wrong time, that pretty much nothing is their fault.
That these scripts allow them, provide the psychological escape hatches, if you will, for them to engage in all sorts of It's not just crime, it's promiscuousness, it's drug use, it's driving too fast, it's acting dangerously, assault, you name it.
Those scripts, those ways of seeing the world are fundamental to understanding criminal conduct.
Absolutely.
Delving into the realm of genetics, which is always a challenge, but I think really is one of the great unspoken fundamentals of criminology and sociology that people are just kind of loathe to sort of look at directly.
But as far as I understand it, we can't sort of look at the human mind as a blank slate.
And it's like, oh, well, if you happen to be adopted into a liberal family, you're going to get this kind of thinking.
And if you happen to be adopted into a conservative family, you're going to get this kind of thinking.
The way that it works is twin studies seem to indicate that I think you've written about 60% of political ideology spread.
It can be at least associated with genetics, and I sort of want to make sure that we look at the genetic underpinnings so that we can look at perhaps something that is even more causal than political ideology, which is the genetics that may lead someone one way or another down a political path.
Well, I started working in an area of bio-social criminology a number of years ago, and I've published a number of studies along with my colleagues.
I think you had Dr.
Kevin Beaver on here a couple of times.
I've worked extensively together on several of these projects that really show There's a genetic component to aggression.
There's a genetic component to human violence and so forth.
And that you can't escape this.
This is just human evolution.
This is the type of individual differences that we would expect for biology to play a role.
It's not to say that environment doesn't matter and all of that stuff, but that Biology is meaningful.
Genetics are meaningful.
When we look at family studies, or twin studies, or extended twin studies, or you name the methodology, we always find a genetic influence.
And we're really grappling with how to understand how that plays out.
Not only the mechanisms of influence, but how this plays out in the social world.
And incidentally, it was the reaction of my discipline To our work, which was largely negative, that really got me thinking about how ideology plays a role in other parts of our lives, but especially in academia and in scholarship.
There is a strong propensity, if you will, to see everything in terms of environment, to see everything in terms of Of racism or oppression or what have you, amongst those on the left, and of course most faculty are to the left, right, especially in the social sciences.
So they carry all of that forward and have, for many decades now, excluded the biological study of human behavior.
Well, they say that was because, you know, we had good intentions and You know, Nazism and all this other stuff, but I've always found those arguments selective and not very convincing.
I personally think that they did it for personal political reasons, that these were sacred values to them, environment became a sacred value, and hence it took on sort of a life of its own.
But they were able to do this for about 40, 50, 60 years.
And we have to ask ourselves what type of scholarly biases were present that allowed that to happen when they were clearly wrong.
They were clearly wrong on this.
Let's talk, just to break that out a little bit more, Dr.
Wright, in what ways, I mean, I get that the left has this sort of economic determinism, your class structure, not saying that it's all Marxism, but there's certainly those elements in it that the class you're born into determines you're In what way would you say definitively that it was wrong to focus so much on the environment?
Well, the very earliest studies in crime showed a familial fact, right?
That crime was concentrated in some families and not in others.
That finding has been replicated many, many, many times over or across continents.
About 10% of all families produce around 90% of all serious chronic delinquents, for example.
Well, there's a strong hint that there's some possibility of some genetic influence there.
When we look at families and we start to look at it generationally, we see very strong intergenerational continuity.
And we find this, again, everywhere that we look.
The intergenerational continuity is Would seemingly suggest that there might be something genetic going along, right?
After you get out to, you know, four, five, six, seven generations, it's very difficult to argue that socialization is that perfect.
Okay, so the twin studies.
The twin studies have advanced both in size and scope and complexity.
They converge along these points depending on when you're measuring aggression or violence, what age, type of sample and so forth, but they're converging.
They are entirely replicated.
And it's not a matter of method.
It's not a matter of how it's measured.
These are reliable findings produced by scientists across the world.
So, right, there's this weight of evidence now that, you know, these things were wrong.
But let me just say something, a little step back away from all of that.
One of the strongest predictors that we have of engaging in violence, right, is being male.
And when I was a graduate student, right, I was taught, well, it's socialization, it's masculinity, it's, you know, you name it, right?
We give males, you know, the Tonka trucks and the Bobo dolls and teach them how to become violent.
If you were to simply step back and say, you know, boy, you know, males are...
The most violent in every culture, across every time period, you know, they've been the victims and offenders, they've died in wars, I mean, all of this other stuff.
Maybe that degree of continuity and uniformity ought to suggest that there's something biological about being male that predisposes men to those types of actions, right?
That's not what you would get in the social sciences.
It's not what I received in the social sciences.
And again, we're clearly wrong about this.
The bad ideas take a long time to die.
Oh, what is it?
The old saying that science advances one funeral at a time?
Just as the old guard died off.
That too, by the way.
Now, let's talk a little bit about, and again, I'm going to grossly generalize, so feel free to comb in into more detail, but this distinction of two types of criminals.
Number one, of course, is sort of the impulse control problem criminal.
They get a criminal opportunity, they sort of smash and grab, or someone just says, hey, we're We're going to go knock over a gas station.
Like, woohoo, sounds fun.
There is those aspects.
And then I think you associate with the sort of dark triad of personality traits, those with more sinister and sadistic and cruel criminals that even the sort of impulse criminals are afraid of and say, whoa, that guy's nuts.
Don't go on.
He doesn't carry a gun because he loves beating people to death with his bare hands.
Could you help people sort of understand the distinctions between these two different Types of criminality and the role that these sort of dark triad personality traits play in forming these distinctions.
Yeah, sure.
You know, in criminology and in real life, right, we find that self-control matters.
And like I mentioned, it is a substantive, ubiquitous predictor of a lot of things in life.
And that has given rise to this image that criminal offenders are sort of these, you know, hapless opportunists that go about, you know, if you leave your keys in the car and they see it, they'll take your car, right?
Or if they're walking down the street, man, you've got a nice...
You know, set of headphones on.
Well, that's an opportunity.
They'll take the opportunity.
Now, there's some truth in this, okay?
Criminal offenders do tend to be much more impulsive, do tend to have much lower levels of self-regulation and so forth.
But there are also criminal offenders who are simply malevolent, that they are mean, they are cruel, they are vicious, they care little about other people.
They see them as pawns to be used, to be played with, and then disposed of when the time's right.
And that group has pretty much really not a lot of appreciation for that group in criminology.
But they are unique.
These are the folks that enjoy violence.
These are the folks that are turned on by violence, physically turned on by it, that they're attracted to it, that they generate and work to keep their street reputation that's centered around violent conduct.
It is an instrument, right?
Violence is an instrument to them.
That they use for retaliation or to, you know, depose somebody that's in competition or simply because they want to.
But what separates them, and this is where the dark triad is coming from, you know, the dark triad's composed of You know, three broad personality factors, the psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and the cognitive use of people, and narcissism, right?
High levels of narcissism, you know, really important, you know.
And combined, when these things sort of gel in, the dark triad, well, we thought there's a strong possibility that we can separate out People that have those high DT traits from the entire population.
In our study, that's exactly what we found.
Incidentally, another group did the exact same thing on another sample and found exactly what we did.
So we're starting to see some initial convergence on this.
But it goes without saying that some criminal offenders are cruel, callous, unemotional, Vindictive, spiteful.
They really are set apart by their cruelty.
Going backward in a time, however, this same theoretical position has been used to look at kids with conduct disorder.
And children with conduct disorder, a number of very talented academics have said, you know, Yeah, we see conduct disorder, but within this, there's a group of kids that are really just almost dangerous, right?
And these kids have what they call callous and unemotional traits.
Callous in their treatment of other people.
They can be very physically violent, very manipulative.
And emotionally, there's just no emotional boundary or barrier there.
They don't care.
So, whether we're talking about callous and the non-emotional traits in childhood or dark traits in adulthood, we're probably talking about the same thing.
Right.
Now, one of the things that I sort of noticed in the last election cycle was the constant accusation that Donald Trump supporters were being violent.
And a lot of this stuff turned out to be, you know, faked or at least exaggerated to a large degree.
Where we did see quite a bit of violence was on the part of the left.
And I found this, the research that you and others have done, Dr. Rasmussen, Wright, kind of really fascinating in helping people to understand that, that the left has this impulsivity of aggression that they generally will project onto the right, but doesn't seem to manifest nearly as common on the right.
Do you think your work fits into this level of protest and aggression in the political spectrum in America?
Yeah, you know, I'm I'm sort of working on some of those projects right now.
But you do see this.
And the more you delve into it, you know, the left has a history of violence.
The left has used violence instrumentally, political violence especially, for their own purposes.
And I think that often escapes scholarly attention.
Again, in large part, right, because Most people who are scholars are on the left, right?
They tend to glorify or to excuse or to even hold up some of the perpetrators of violence that are on the left.
I'm not sure you see that on the right.
Maybe I haven't looked at it, but I don't see people on the right holding up Mao or Che Guevara or the Weathermen as Things as people that we want to emulate.
People, some folks on the left side, you do see that.
So there is this acceptance amongst those on the far left to use violence for instrumental means.
Remember in the 60s and so forth in the United States, you know, there was, what, a bombing of the week at one point in time, right?
The war protests and all of the other, the weatherman activities and so forth, execution of police officers, some of the things that we've seen recently with the execution, open execution of police officers on the street, these are not committed by right-wing terrorists, people influenced by left-wing ideology and left-wing causes.
Well, I remember being deeply shocked the first time I read about the sort of trajectory of a lot of the domestic terrorists in the 1960s and how many of them ended up in academia of all places.
I just found that I couldn't imagine that occurring on the right, but it certainly seems to be quite common on the left that they're sort of welcomed with open arms for their commitment to the struggle and the demonization of the right by the left.
I mean, they view them, the left views the right, you know, as the sort of famous basket of deplorables A case goes as sort of these irredeemably not just amoral but malevolent people and of course when you demonize your opponent What you're doing is you're justifying or you're increasing justifications for violence.
If you're facing an enemy that immoral, that despicable, then, you know, the ends justify the means.
And I think that that escalation of, you know, they also talk about the other, you know, the escalation of the negativity or the hostility towards the other, I think does go a long way towards justifying it.
it.
And again, I don't know whether they use the language and then it justifies and then the violence escalates or they just like to use violence and this is the best way they can convince themselves it's the right thing to do.
It's probably a mix of all the above.
I'm not sure we're capable of disentangling all of that with data or anything.
But what I think is important and clear is that Sort of contrary to this image that you get in college of the pacifist left, that they embrace diversity and tolerance and all these things.
Well, at one level, maybe, but they also embrace some other things that lead to violence and that justify and indeed glamorize violence.
And you're exactly right.
I just read where a number of the Protesters or people that actually engaged in acts of violence and crime, you know, went on to become tenured professors.
I would venture to say that that would be almost unheard of for people on the right, if that were the case.
The left has no interest in diversity, in my opinion, because if you just look at leftist departments, You know, about a third of people in America self-identify as being on the right.
You sure as hell don't find a third of those people in leftist departments.
They have no interest in diversity.
You know, they don't mind whatever skin color or whatever gender.
As long as you're a full-on leftist, you're welcome.
So this idea of diversity, that's a bit of a sidebar, but just that interest in diversity seems to be non-existent when it comes to ideological diversity.
Absolutely.
All of the data show this, right?
If you look at the studies that look at, you know, left-right differences in the social sciences and humanities, I mean, you're talking, you know, 40 to 1 in sociology and cultural anthropology and, you know, 20 to 30 to 1 in psychology.
In my field, I just conducted a similar type of study.
It's 30 to 1, you know.
And, of course, this presents a lot of problems.
If you're coming from a set of issues or policies from the left's point of view, then you don't see...
You know, what the other side has to offer.
In fact, you don't even care what the other side has to offer because it's off limits.
I think there's very clear evidence now that the lack of intellectual diversity in the social sciences has hampered our science, has let us down paths that have actually not just been intellectually wrong, but have caused harm.
I think that's certainly true.
Sorry, go ahead.
No, we need to take responsibility.
We need to reconcile that.
We need to understand the sacred values in our field, reduce those, and really seek out intellectual activity.
Look, if someone's on the right and the argument that they make is correct, it shouldn't matter if they're on the right, right?
Unfortunately, I think it's a truism that in academia, if it comes from the right, it's got to be wrong.
Well, and I would also argue that we fund, as a society, we would fund this kind of research in order to find solutions to our most pressing problems of poverty and abuse and criminality and so on.
Now, governments, of course, love the environmental explanation because then they can design...
Ludicrous government programs in an attempt to ameliorate these problems.
I think governments as a whole love funding academics who say it's all environment because the government can come in and tinker with the environment and hopefully solve the problem.
But the intransigence and intractability of some of these problems is certainly pushing back strongly against the environmental argument.
And if we're wasting resources trying to get the tail to wag the dog, That is hugely despicable and problematic in society because there are millions of people who could genuinely be being helped, but because we're only focusing on environment and it's not actually solving the problem.
Well, the government loves it, the leftist academics love it, but the people who you can actually help are being tossed out of the window.
I absolutely believe that.
I've written much of the same book.
And in terms of crime, my specialty, you see this in a lot of areas now, incarceration, policing, what have you.
And I think some of this has caused harm.
It has caused harm to real people who have to live in these areas that are now crying out for assistance.
And let's face it.
Most criminologists, A, have never met a criminal.
B, have never been into the neighborhoods where criminals reside.
In fact, they live in nice places.
We're reasonably well paid.
We have a lot of control over where we go and so forth.
So what I advocate for, for me, is not necessarily what I would advocate for for someone else.
And I think that aloof detachment that many criminologists have to the lives of people that they certainly live, right, and the people around them that have to deal with that, it sets them apart and says, well, you know, I live in a great place, right?
And everything's cool and nice, and we've got a lot of informal controls and so forth.
And, you know, I don't want the cops here, so why would I impose that on somebody else?
Well, go to those neighborhoods, right?
Get some experience with this.
Interview criminal offenders out on the street.
See, you know, if that matches up with your theoretical ideas that you talk about in class.
Well, actually be an empiricist, which is where all science should find its final Well, thanks very much for your chat today.
I'm fascinated with this topic, and I really do want to help get some of these ideas out of the ivory tower and more into the mainstream, and I really appreciate the articulation of these ideas.
It's very, very well done.
Just wanted to remind people that you can follow Dr.
Wright at twitter.com slash cjprofman, which is like an excellent rap name I wanted to add.
And we will put links to some of the studies we talked about below.
They're not hugely long.
They're very accessible.
And they're well worth your time to read and to understand.
You know, we do have significant dysfunctions within society that were getting better for a while and now arguably are getting worse.
And we really do need to focus on whatever it takes, whatever politically correct barriers we have to smash through to actually help people.
