Why It All Makes Sense: The Psychology and Sociology Behind What We’re Watching
A deeper companion to “They’re Not Crazy.” For paid subscribers.
Why It All Makes Sense: The Psychology and Sociology Behind What We’re Watching
A deeper companion to “They’re Not Crazy.” For paid subscribers.
The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #949: Saturday, June 27th, 2026.
In the shorter piece, I made a claim and asked you to take a lot of it on faith:
That almost nothing we’ve watched is insane, and that “bat-shit crazy” is a comforting story we tell ourselves to avoid the harder one.
This is where I pay that off.
What follows is not opinion…dressed up as analysis.
It’s a tour through what researchers in psychology…social psychology…political science…and history have actually documented…much of it decades before the current moment, some of it using data gathered on the very people we’re trying to understand.
I’ll give you the names…the mechanisms…and the links…so you can check every load-bearing claim yourself. I’d rather you trust the sources than trust me.
I’ll also do something most persuasion pieces won’t:
I’ll show you where these theories are contested. Several have faced serious challenges, failed replications…or sharp methodological critiques.
That’s not a weakness in the argument. It’s the argument. People who are confident in the truth…can afford to show you the disputes. People selling you something…can’t.
Here’s the through-line before we start:
The behavior isn’t a glitch in human nature. It’s a feature of it…a set of predictable responses to fear…status…identity…and information…that have been studied for generations. That’s the bad news…and the only good news, both at once.
Let’s go.
Part I: The Leader’s Logic: Dominance, Not Derangement
Start at the top, because this is where “crazy” fails fastest.
The single most useful body of work here belongs to the late Bob Altemeyer, a psychologist who spent four decades measuring authoritarianism with actual instruments…rather than vibes. His free book, The Authoritarians, is the best entry point anyone has written.
Altemeyer drew a distinction that dissolves a lot of confusion.
There are authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders…and…they are not the same animal. Leaders tend to score high on what’s called social dominance orientation…a worldview that sees the human world as divided into the strong and the weak…with the strong entitled to rule.
To a high social dominator…deception…broken promises…and cruelty aren’t lapses. They’re tools. “Might makes right” isn’t an accusation you’d level at such a person; it’s closer to their operating premise.
Now hold that next to the behavior. Constant dominance displays. Loyalty prized over competence. Promises made and discarded without apparent friction. Cruelty deployed as a signal rather than concealed as a shame.
Through the lens of “crazy,” that’s chaos. Through the lens of social dominance…it’s coherent. It’s a person doing exactly what the framework predicts a person like that will do…because it has worked for them their entire life.
Altemeyer also identified a rare and dangerous type he called the “Double High”… someone who scores high on both social dominance AND authoritarian submission.
And…he warned about what happens when a social-dominator leader…links up with a mass of authoritarian followers: a volatile condition he flagged as the historical precursor to the worst outcomes a society can produce.
Read that again.
He wasn’t theorizing in the abstract. His final book, co-written with Watergate’s John Dean…applied the lifetime of data directly to the present.
The point of Part I…is narrow but essential:
At the leadership level…what looks like impulsive madness…is better explained as a stable personality structure…pursuing power by the means it has always trusted. That’s not a diagnosis of illness. It’s a description of a strategy.
