<div><p>One of the most interesting aspects of political psychology concerns the gap between the reasons for which people believe they hold their political opinions and the real causes of their holding those opinions.</p><p>Typically, that gap generates another one – between the content of arguments

Half of Politics Is the Refusal to Be Imposed Upon

<div><p>Many people who favorably view Donald Trump and politicians like him, talk up his “authenticity” or his “telling it as it is”. Even many of those who profoundly dislike his politics, his manner, or both, grudgingly admit to the appeal of his “what you see is what you get” quality.</p><p>Yet 

The Liars We Trust – Why We Choose Transparency Over Truth

<div><p>One of my recent articles, “<a href="https://ivn.us/2018/08/28/mistake-make-every-political-argument/" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Mistake You Make in Every Political Argument</a>” (<em>Mistake</em>) made the claim that most political arguments that seem to turn on a disagreement over mora

How Facts Get Chosen and Minds Get Changed

<div><p>We’ve all been sufficiently frustrated by the gap between the values someone espouses and the policies they support that we’ve gotten into political arguments to help them see their error. Perhaps, if we’re more honest about our own motivation, we just reacted to get rid of that visceral dis

The Mistake You Make in Every Political Argument

<div><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCL_f53ZEJxp8TtlOkHwMV9Q" rel="noopener noreferrer">Jordan Peterson</a>, the Canadian professor of psychology who in the last year has become North America’s most popular public intellectual, has spent many decades studying tyranny and its antecedents

The Diagnosis & Treatment of Ideological Possession

<div><p>Margaret Thatcher once said that “politics at its purest is philosophy in action." As someone who gave her name to a political age that represented a very clear break from what came before and fundamentally changed a nation – according to both her admirers and her critics - she may have earn

Political Purism Isn’t Principled In An Impure World

<div><p>They say you always remember your first time.</p><p>The first time I was sexually assaulted, I was sixteen years old.</p><p>I had not long started a job working as a kitchen porter at a third-rate pub-restaurant and had been moved from the kitchen to the restaurant floor to wait tables, in w

#MeToo: From a Male Who Has Been Abused and Accused

<div><p><strong>It’s Not What You Believe. It’s How You Believe It </strong></p><p>George Orwell’s novel <a href="https://www.amazon.com/1984-Signet-Classics-George-Orwell/dp/0451524934" rel="noopener noreferrer"><em>1984</em></a> has been selling in large numbers to people scared of a lurch toward 

Political Scientism: Beware the Enlightened Ones

<div><p>Complying with the tax code costs the United States <a href="https://taxrevolution.us/tax-code-complexity-costs-up-to-1-trillion-per-year/" rel="noopener noreferrer">a cool trillion dollars per year</a>. That’s the entire <strong>GDP of Mexico</strong>, wasted because of the sheer complexity

From Dawn till Dusk, Protesters Gather in Front of IRS Building on Tax Day

Robin Koerner

Articles by Robin Koerner