Daniel Hannan’s half-baked psychology lesson

Under the headline “Here’s why the Left revel in the deaths of political opponents in a way Right-wing people never would…”, the director general of the right wing Institute for Economic Affairs handpicked a few things people had posted following Widdicombe’s murder and decided it proved his notion that “Leftist brains are wired differently from Rightist brains”.

Hannan singled out Peter Tatchell, the lifelong gay rights campaigner who had labelled her a bigot (“even if, at the time, he was not aware that she had died violently,” he conceded) and Heather Herbert, a web developer at Aberdeen University, who had written some idiotic things online but is hardly a noted public figure. After those, he was limited to a few anonymous accounts on Bluesky (which is apparently “a cesspit of hatred”, unlike Hannan’s cuddly preferred medium of X).

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Those few examples, Hannan decided, proved that left-wingers’ brains are all different from those of more sympathetic right wingers. “Does their wiring enable the paradox whereby people who think of themselves as empathetic and inclusive struggle to extend those feelings to their political opponents?” he mused.

“In short, yes. Your political opinions are a lot more emotional than you like to imagine. Two people can look at the same event in very different ways because they are unconsciously primed to see what they want.

“What makes Left and Right-wing brains different is that, while conservatives let a series of different intuitions inform their views – concerns for freedom, fairness, sanctity, loyalty and so on – Leftists are driven overwhelmingly by just one, namely sympathy with the underdog.

“Boiled down, the Left-wing take on the world goes something like this: ‘I am a good person. I care about poor people, minorities and underdogs. You disagree with me, so you must dislike all these groups, which makes you a bad person.’”

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And who can argue with Hannan, the noted science expert who, at the start of the Covid pandemic, wrote an article for Conservative Home decrying all those so-called “experts” who worried that the virus might turn out to be a bit of a problem.

“I’m going to stick my neck out here,” he wrote in February 2020. “You’re unlikely to be killed by the coronavirus. Yes, the disease is unpleasant; and, yes, in some circumstances, it can cause complications that lead to fatalities. 

“But it is unlikely to be as lethal as the more common forms of influenza that we take for granted, let alone as lethal as, say, stroke or heart disease. We are nowhere near a 1919-style global catastrophe.”

Quite. Give that man a Nobel Prize!