Discrediting your political opponents by casting them as mentally ill is a tempting and popular sport. There’s no better way to damage the credibility of people with whom you disagree than an en masse diagnosis of being out-of-touch with reality. Given the general preference of academics for left-leaning politics, it comes as no surprise that many examples exist of psychologists who diagnose right-wingers as somehow disordered.

I am professionally skeptical of the idea that large groups of people can be meaningfully diagnosed as pathological. But I have nonetheless struggled with an attempt to understand a political movement than employs a seemingly alien mode of thought from my own. At the intersection of my vocational background (as a commodities trader, turned neuroscience student) lies those beliefs implicitly and explicitly endorsed by proponents of American right-wing, free-market libertarianism. I see a conflict between the internalized ideological worldview of the modern American libertarian, and the empirical properties of the world they parse. I would like to explore a parallel of this dilemma in certain studied phenomena of neuropsychology.

I. POLITICS

With the recent rise of the so-called Tea Party in American politics (or, at least, the media's perception of it), libertarianism has been the topic of much public discussion. But the term means many things to many people. It is impossible to characterize all people who identify in such a way, beyond to say that they believe in the application of social and governmental non-involvement in one or more spheres of public life. Many people who consider themselves “libertarians“ extend this principle primarily to the domain of personal and expressive activities: issues such as free speech, drug policy and sexual freedoms.

In such cases, “libertarianism” arguably represents a pro-social endeavor in line with social values of personal liberty and privacy. Lower-case “l” libertarians tend to be people primarily concerned with civil liberties. Capital “L” Libertarians, then, tend to be right-wing members of the American Libertarian Party primarily interested in promoting free markets. For the purposes of this piece, I will generally use the capital “L” version of the label to identify not only members of the Libertarian Party, but also some on the American political right who are sympathetic to its platform.

In my mind, the philosophy of Objectivism (as espoused by Ayn Rand and her adherents) is the most distilled essence of the American strain of Libertarianism. To be clear, Objectivism is not the same thing as Libertarianism. It is an outgrowth or branch of Libertarianism—and, while it maintains many of the characteristics and ideological components of Libertarianism, it ventures off into an attempt to become a more comprehensive philosophical worldview. Some Libertarians, while agreeing with the political and economic positions of Objectivists, view them as cultish.
 
I honestly found the process of reasoning required in Objectivism so deeply bizarre upon first encounter, that I simply could not believe that the movement had any adherents—much less, that it was in fact a powerful and deeply influential system of thought in American culture and politics. Despite its name, Objectivism to me embodies the disconnect between ideology and empirically verifiable reality. For example, Rand argues in her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology that, in order to be conscious, one must be conscious of something, and that the appearance of that something indicates the existence of a universally-apparent objective reality.

From this premise, she argues that sensory perception is an intrinsically pure representation of this empirical reality. Rand allows that humans make mistakes—these are products of cognitive distortions and mistaken ideologies. More base-level sensory errors, such as optical illusions, are described as categorizing errors. That is to say, they arise from lazy thinking.

All of her arguments derive from this epistemology: our senses and sensory apparatuses are accurate and unfailing means of recording objective reality. This first, and crucial precept is also one trivially simple to refute. An immense body of neuroscientific research, including work I've already explored in previous articles (notably, the studies of Benjamin Libet) shows a powerful and insurmountable disconnect between our perceptual processes, and the accounts of external observers or recordings.

Contrary to Rand's naïve assertion, sensory processes are not in any meaningful way separate from cognitive processes that occur elsewhere in the brain. Neuroscientific research suggests that sensory experience is a synthetic process, integrating neuronal activity in response to an external stimulus with a variety of dependent and independent brain states.

More mainstream Libertarianism may not support the bombastic metaphysical and epistemological leanings of Objectivists, but I think their political agendas might as well be one and the same. Both groups believe in the so-called magic of the market, which suggests that government intervention produces only economic disaster. Lacking the fantastical epistemology of Objectivism, the "reality disconnects" in the broader category of American Libertarians are better analyzed from the perspective of market economics, and government involvement in macroeconomic policy, as these appear central to their political agenda.

Libertarian economics are predicated on the belief that there is a natural current to the world, pushing all things towards utility and progress. Whether it's called rational agency, expected subjective utility or “the Invisible Hand”—this belief is, to me, the essence of magical thinking. Yet the belief in the “efficiency” and “goodness” of markets is close to universal in the United States, and one of the strongest Libertarian elements in our popular thought.

The market is assumed to be purifying force that generates utility for all. Indeed, in Libertarian thought, government interference with the natural operation of the market is the root cause of all economic and political problems. Wealth and prosperity emerge from, and are the product of removing market interference. Libertarians broadly define this interference as ranging from regulation, to social safety nets.In this line of thought, a society with completely unregulated markets and an extremely low level of taxation will achieve a high level of prosperity for all of its participants. In this model, social policies such as minimum wages and welfare only create market distortions by mis-pricing labor and creating work disincentives. According to Ludwig Von Mises and Milton Friedman, low taxation spurs business expansion and reinvestment. Unregulated markets allow for the accurate and rational pricing of commodities and services.

II. PATHOLOGY

A comprehensive and conclusive refutation the tenets of free-market fundamentalism—and its political and ideological child, right-wing Libertarianism—is unfortunately beyond the scope of this piece. But there exist several points where the more extremist beliefs of Libertarians might not mesh with reality. Contrary to core Libertarian assertions about markets, empirical data indicates that the high level of interventionism within economies on their way to ultimate wealth seems to correspond with, rather than conflict with periods of rapid expansion and growth in industrial dominance. Ha-Joon Chang asserts this relationship in the historic trade policies of both England and France over the last 300 years, where rising tariff rates and other economic controls moved lock-step with economic dynamism.

Here's another simple and easily available metric: Over the course of United States history, Gross Domestic Product growth has corresponded positively with top marginal tax rates. This means that, the higher tax rates are on the richest 10% or so of Americans, the more wealthy the nation has become. For those unconvinced by my claims, a number of economists make far more eloquent and informed arguments than I do; notably Anwar Sheikh and Paul Krugman.

So how to account for this separation between experiential reality and belief? American Libertarians are not suffering from pathology of mind. A ubiquitous lack of crucial symptoms (flat affect, unstable relationships, inability to hold down a job) would render any such diagnosis nonsensical—not to mention, vindictive. Instead, what I believe we are dealing with is likely an operation of a normal mental process, called the just-world bias.

First called the Just World Hypothesis, this theory was developed by psychologist Melvin Lerner in the 1960s to describe a psychological tendency to seek moral order in the world. In this common fallacy, successful people are ascribed positive attributes and seen as having earned their fortune, while unsuccessful people are viewed negatively, and thought to deserve their misfortune. Lerner conducted a series of experiments confirming this phenomenon, including a lottery game wherein lottery winners were perceived by subjects as being more virtuous and hardworking than identical individuals who did not win the lottery.

In another crucial experiment, Lerner and his colleagues had subjects observe a simulated learning task, wherein a student was seen to receive shocks for producing incorrect answers. The more capricious and aggressive the “teacher” was in administering shocks, the lower the opinion that subjects then formed of students, regardless of their actual performance.

Zick Rubin of Harvard and Letitia Anne Peplau of UCLA undertook a study in the 1970s to examine the implications of just-world biases in the context of social justice. The extent of a subject’s just-world bias was found to be positively correlated with admiration for powerful entities and entrenched interests, along with an expressed hostility towards underprivileged and minority groups. Is it possible that these people with a strong just-world bias are our American-style Libertarians?

To me, Libertarianism is not an ideology advocating for individual rights and liberties. Rather, it pushes for a world in which the powerful are uninhibited in their ability to influence and coerce the masses. When all regulation and restraints are removed from any social sphere—including, but not limited to markets—the loudest and most forceful voices become the dominant ones, capable of and willing to silence the rest. To me, to moralize this process as just is to support a political parallel of victim-blaming.

But if the beliefs of Libertarians are produced by the operation of a normal and broadly-observed mental process, then they cannot be said to be in any meaningful way pathological. Indeed, I believe that it is far more likely that just-world bias is largely responsible for the production of the Libertarian worldview. But nothing more: It is not enough for an individual to be consistently at odds with observed reality in order to qualify them for a mental illness diagnosis. They must conform to a set of symptoms that present at statistically low rates, and that interfere with their ability to maintain healthy relationships. With only a few exceptions (such as personality disorders), mental illnesses produce significant distress on the part of the sufferer. Jokes aside, I have seen no convincing evidence to suggest that one American political group is more likely to be miserable or socially isolated than any other.

It seems that the most logical way to understand American Libertarianism in this context is to see it as exactly the opposite of what it claims to be. Like the rest of non-pathological people, Libertarians likely genuinely want a society that maximizes some concept of utility. I have never met a Libertarian who disagrees with the notion that the elderly, the poor, and the disabled should be provided for in some way. They want to solve the problems of poverty and social injustice just as much as the rest of us do. However, by seeing institutions that represent the less powerful (i.e., the government) as a problem, and institutions that favor entrenched interests (i.e., markets) as the solution, I find many Libertarians to be askew in something more than their sensory perception. Employing science in polemic arguments has serious pitfalls. But while I no longer trade commodities for a living, economic themes come up constantly in the day-to-day value choices of my recession-era peers. In examining common biases in the mechanisms of moral reasoning, neuropsychology has simple lessons to impart for all those concerned with making choices both rational, and just.