Both Sides Are NOT The Same

You ever notice the people saying both sides are equally as bad used to wear a red hat?There is a psychological reason for that.Psychologist Roy Baumeister at Florida State University spent decades studying how people protect their self-image when they are forced to confront being wrong. What he found was that the brain will do almost anything to avoid a direct admission of failure. Instead of accepting the full truth, it rewrites the story into one where nobody was right. That way the person never has to say I was wrong and you were right.He called it Threatened Egotism.Here is how it works.Admitting Trump was a disaster is one thing. But admitting the other side was right the whole time is something else entirely. That means admitting you spent years defending a con man. That you fought with people you love for nothing. That the people you called stupid were right and you were wrong the entire time.Their pride will not allow it.They burned the house down. Now they are pretending they were not holding the match.So they invented a position that requires no accountability. Both sides are bad. I am done with all of it. I am voting independent.It is a lie they tell themselves so they never have to apologize.They get to walk away from everything they helped cause without ever saying I was wrong. Without ever acknowledging the damage they did. Without ever having to step into the same reality as the rest of us.We cannot move forward together unless you are in the same reality. You know that, right?Nobody is asking them to be humiliated. What we are asking them is to be honest.Because you cannot fix what happened to this country if the people who helped break it are still pretending both sides did it.They voted for this. They cheered for this. They told everyone who disagreed to go to hell. And now they want a participation trophy for finally noticing.That is not the center. That is a coward who broke this country and is too proud to admit it.The Psychology Behind the PivotWhen a person’s deeply held beliefs are proven wrong, the mind does not simply update. It protects itself. Baumeister’s research on threatened egotism shows that when the self-concept is under attack, people redirect outward rather than revise inward. It is easier to claim the entire system is corrupt than to accept personal responsibility for being wrong about one part of it.The “both sides” position is not a political philosophy. It is a psychological escape hatch.It allows a person to feel principled while doing the one thing that requires the least courage: nothing. No accountability. No apology. No acknowledgment of harm. Just a clean exit dressed up as wisdom.The brain is extraordinarily good at this. It will construct an entirely new narrative, complete with its own internal logic, that protects the self-image at all costs. The person is not lying consciously. They genuinely believe their new story. That is what makes it so difficult to challenge.But difficult is not the same as impossible.What the research tells us is that the path forward is not confrontation. It is not humiliation. It is the creation of conditions where honesty becomes less threatening than the alternative. That requires time, accountability structures, and a culture that rewards the admission of error rather than punishing it.We are not there yet.And until we are, the people who helped break this country will keep pretending they were innocent bystanders.SourcesBaumeister, R. F., Smart, L., and Boden, J. M. (1996). Relation of threatened egotism to violence and aggression: The dark side of high self-esteem. Psychological Review, 103(1), 5-33.Baumeister, R. F. (1997). Evil: Inside human violence and cruelty. New York: W.H. Freeman.Baumeister, R. F., Bushman, B. J., and Campbell, W. K. (2000). Self-esteem, narcissism, and aggression: Does violence result from low self-esteem or from threatened egotism? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9(1), 26-29.Baumeister, R. F., Heatherton, T. F., and Tice, D. M. (1993). When ego threats lead to self-regulation failure: Negative consequences of high self-esteem. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(1), 141-156. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe