With the Win-Win Machine, Most of Us Actually Lose

Somewhere, deep in the bowels of our nation’s capital, today’s Democratic Party establishment keeps close guard over a hulking, fearsome, and often temperamental machine. With hundreds of moving parts, it’s surprising that the elaborate contraption has only one purpose: to take bold and popular policy proposals that could improve millions of lives, chew them up, …

Psychology’s “Dark Triad” and the Billionaire Class

“They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby The Outrage of Billionaires The data are stark and compelling. The richest …

The DCCC’s Mind Games and the Ballad of Roy Moore

It’s bad enough that the business-friendly Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and other establishment Democrats are aggressively tipping the scales in favor of their hand-picked “moderate” candidates in primary contests around the country. It’s even worse that they’ve now taken to defending this strategy by comparing unwelcome progressives to the likes of Roy Moore. We …

My Interview about POLITICAL MIND GAMES with Bill Newman of WHMP Radio

In late April I had the pleasure of being a guest on Bill Newman’s WHMP Radio Show. Bill and I spent 20 minutes discussing the political mind games that the super-rich and powerful use to advance their selfish agenda while betraying the common good. You can listen to the interview below, beginning at the 5:00-minute …

The 1%’s Mind Games: Psychology Gone Bad

“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely …

POLITICAL MIND GAMES: How the 1% Manipulate Our Understanding of What’s Happening, What’s Right, and What’s Possible

Giant corporations are raking in record profits, while millions of Americans remain scarred by the Great Recession and a recovery that has left them behind. Mammoth defense contractors push for more of everything military, while programs for the poor are on life support. Global polluters are blocking effective responses to climate change, while the disenfranchised …

Building a Racially Just Society: Psychological Insights

  by Roy Eidelson, Mikhail Lyubansky, and Kathie Malley-Morrison Authors Note. As three white psychologists, we offer this brief essay with the awareness that our perspective is necessarily limited by our lived experience as members of the privileged racial class. Through our many years of work as both psychologists and activists, we know first-hand how …

Worse Than Fiction: America’s Overcrowded Cellar

In a 1973 short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” fantasy writer Ursula Le Guin describes a peculiar city where the inhabitants’ prosperity depends entirely upon the endless suffering of a single young child, locked away forever in a cellar. The townspeople ignore the child’s pleas for release because they have learned that …

In Praise of Shared Outrage

“We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all.” These were the words of Lord Brian Griffiths, Goldman Sachs international adviser, when he spoke at London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral last fall. With inequality at historic levels here in the United States and around the world, it’s a …