Jay Bhattacharya is the new director of the National Institutes of Health. He says,

As NIH Director, I will build on the agency’s long and illustrious history of supporting breakthroughs in biology and medicine by fostering gold-standard research and innovation to address the chronic disease crisis.

Sure. Sounds great. How does he plan to accomplish that?

There is no step 2.

NO STEP 2. Just fire everyone.

Israel has done it again. They are blatantly committing atrocities in their ongoing genocide of Palestinian people.

Some of the bodies of 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers, killed by Israeli forces and buried in a mass grave nine days ago in Gaza, were found with their hands or legs tied and had gunshot wounds to the head and chest, according to two witnesses.

The witness accounts add to an accumulating body of evidence pointing to a potentially serious war crime on 23 March, when Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance crews and civil defence rescue workers were sent to the scene of an airstrike in the early hours of the morning in the al-Hashashin district of Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city.

Paramedics and rescue workers are not terrorists, but the Israeli soldiers who gunned them down are.

No more aid or military assistance to Israel, because that would be contributing to war crimes.

I know everyone is talking about the Signal chat where a bunch of warmongers stupidly invited the editor of The Atlantic to join in, but I have to tell you that these things are always insecure, and I have some personal experience with that.

Remember when the Expelled movie was a topic of conversation? They were doing all these press tours and radio interviews touting that stupid movie, and one of their events was a conference call in which the various people involved (Ben Stein, Mark Mathis, etc.) were calling in to promote the movie, and invited people to call in and listen to their propaganda. Well, I was involved, unfortunately, and I called in to hear what they were going to say, but accidentally found out how to join in, not just to listen, but to speak. I ‘hacked’ their system and crashed the event!

Some of you know that the producers of Expelled had a conference call this afternoon…a carefully controlled, closed environment in which they would spout their nonsense and only take questions by email. I listened to it for a while, and yeah, it was the usual run-around. However, I dialed in a few minutes early, and got to listen to a tiresome five minutes of Leslie and Paul chatting away, during which time they mentioned the secret code (DUNH DUNH DUNNNNH!) for the two way calls. I know. Sloppy, unprofessional, and stupid, but that’s the way they work.

So … I redialed. (DUNH DUNH DUNNNNH!)

Then I listened along quietly until I could take no more.

There were links about this, and even a recording of what I said in response to their nonsense, but it’s all dead links now, I’m sad to say.

Don’t trust the tech to protect your conversations! You never know when some nefarious rascal might eavesdrop.

I’ve been watching this race for the Wisconsin supreme court. It was a contest between a liberal (that is, sane) judge, Susan Crawford, and a conservative (that is, insane) judge backed by a Koch brother, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk, and it was pretty much a demonstration of the power of rich people to buy elections. Elon Musk was actively campaigning for Brad Schimel, the right-wing wackaloon, throwing tens of millions of dollars at him and appearing at rallies, where he was awkwardly jumping to make a schlubby “X” shape, doing his usual inarticulate, stammering speechifying, and handing out million dollar checks.

It’s not just how much Musk and his groups have spent—more than any donor to a judicial election in US history—but how he has spent this money that makes Musk’s intervention in Wisconsin so alarming.

In addition to funding two dark money political groups that ran TV ads against liberal Judge Susan Crawford and sought to get out the vote for conservative candidate Brad Schimel, Musk resurrected a controversial scheme from 2024, paying voters $100 for signing a petition from his America PAC opposing “activist judges.” He then awarded Scott Ainsworth, a mechanical engineer from Green Bay, $1 million for signing the petition.

On the Friday before the election, he dramatically escalated this sketchy tactic, saying he would travel to Wisconsin to “personally hand over two checks for a million dollars each in appreciation for you taking the time to vote.” Unlike paying a Wisconsin resident to sign a petition, these million-dollar checks were contingent on someone actually voting. Legal experts quickly pointed out that Musk’s pledge violated the state constitution, which prohibits offering “anything of value…in order to induce any elector to…vote or refrain from voting.”

Musk backtracked, saying the money would only go to people who signed his PAC’s petition, holding a rally in Green Bay on Sunday where he hand-delivered two $1 million checks. The Wisconsin attorney general sued to stop him, but the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to intervene before the event.

This was criminal activity, but he’s a billionaire, so no one stopped him. He was openly and brazenly trying to buy an election, and nothing was done. This was particularly ironic, given that…

Republicans have been alleging for years that Democrats have been buying elections, usually with the help of liberal billionaires like George Soros. Indeed, election deniers, including Musk, widely promoted a conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was “bought by Mark Zuckerberg” because an organization he funded directed election grants to blue areas to juice Democratic turnout. (In reality, it gave grants to both red and blue areas for routine election administration activities to help offset the Covid-19 pandemic.)

If this happened in any other country, the US would be quick to declare that the elections were corrupt…that is, if a pro-USA candidate didn’t win. Schimel also ran a dirty campaign, altering images of Crawford. It was an all-around disgrace to democracy.

But, good news: Crawford won!

Democratic-backed candidate Susan Crawford will win Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race, CNN projects, maintaining the liberal majority on the court in a key battleground state less than three months into President Donald Trump’s second term.

Crawford, a liberal circuit court judge in Dane County, will beat the conservative candidate Brad Schimel, a Waukesha County judge who received Trump’s backing in the final stretch of the campaign. The race was officially nonpartisan, but Crawford’s victory will be seen as a bright spot for Democrats in Wisconsin and nationwide as voters handed the president’s preferred candidate a defeat in the first major political test of the second Trump era.

I’m wondering if one contributing factor to her victory was that the few remaining principled conservatives, if such a thing exists, must have been appalled at the spectacle. Patriotic Wisconsinites must have been embarrassed at the sight of this South African carpetbagger putting on a show. He looks so small and stupid.

Although, I must admit, I was hoping that my daughter or son-in-law, both Wisconsin citizens, might have been handed a million dollar check. Unfortunately, that big money give-away was rigged (of course it was!) and only MAGAs could win.

The students don’t have any significant voice in the management of the university, oh heck no. It’s definitely not the faculty, either — they are allowed to contribute to strictly defined internal academic domains, but that’s it. The people who have real control over the resources of the university are the board of regents (at the University of Minnesota) or the board of trustees, as they are called at Columbia University. These are the people who actually call the shots, and generally they don’t participate in academic life at all.

The ultimate decision-maker at colleges and universities is the board of trustees. And these boards, as the explosive events of the past year demonstrate, have serious problems, both in how they are constituted and how they lead. Those committed to the distinctive strengths of the university as a maker, teacher and custodian of knowledge, both old and new, must at long last try to grasp why these boards are failing and figure out how to fix them.

Trustees (sometimes called governors, regents, visitors or “members of the corporation”) have a lofty function: to ensure the financial health and stability of the institution, partly through their own donations. This fiduciary responsibility has extended to the recruitment, appointment and retention of the school president, and sometimes of other senior administrators, usually (as at Columbia) with little substantive faculty consultation required by the norms of shared governance. Trustees play an increasingly active role in academic decisions through the levers of cost, donor power and financial austerity. In our fraught times, these levers are in increasing use, especially by the Trump-driven Republican party, to target disciplines, departments and individual professors. Many boards have become political wolves in the guise of fiduciary sheep.

Boards of trustees are essentially private clubs, which follow their own, always confidential, norms to determine who is asked to join, who controls key committees, and who is gently persuaded to resign when they do not meet the criteria of the most influential trustees. (In some private institutions, presidents may have a say in who gets selected as trustees, but presidents themselves are appointed by trustees.) At public universities, these boards are directly tied to the powers of state legislatures and administrators and thus are at the mercy of state politics in key matters. At private universities, the club is dominated by heavy hitters in business, law and technology; the number of alumni, academics and students is vanishingly small. These business-oriented trustees (a majority being white and male) treat their board meetings as golf parties; they schmooze, network and discuss deals while going through the motions of discussing university policies and priorities.

I think I’ve met a regent at the University of Minnesota maybe twice. They generally aren’t at all interested in professors, and students even less. As the linked article explains, this is a real problem: there is a deep gulf between what universities do, and who gets to pull the strings. They’re mostly CEOs, lawyers, hospital administrators, bankers, retired politicians, that sort of thing.

Who becomes a trustee? At Columbia there are 21, all of them from business, law and technology, with the exception of a former journalist. Although they are in charge of an academic institution, none of them is an academic. None has ever led a classroom or a lab meeting or medical rounds with interns. None has gone through the process of tenure, where their teaching, publication record and service are rigorously assessed by colleagues in the field both from within the institution and outside it. None has ever had their work peer-reviewed by anonymous readers or panels of experts. None has ever published in academic or scientific journals or presses and had their ideas debated in the public sphere. None has ever framed a hypothesis and tested it on the basis of evidence they have collected. None, in short, has sought truth and had their search confirmed by objective scholars and scientists.

The University of Minnesota isn’t quite that bad, but almost; I think we’ve got one emeritus faculty on there. In general, though, they are moneyed people with deep financial interests, not scholarly experience. Here in Minnesota they are all volunteers, and are not paid for their services, which does make me wonder why they are doing this at all. It’s a mystery. I don’t like being managed by rich people with mysterious motives, but that’s where we’re at. Especially when they mostly look conservative and Republican.

This is a problem everywhere.

The Columbia board is by no means unique. The same situation prevails, with few exceptions, across the Ivy League and its peer institutions (exemplary is the University of Chicago). As far as public universities are concerned, though there are some variations among several of the flagships, such as the regents of the universities of California, Michigan and Wisconsin, they are typically composed of lawyers, politicians and businessmen, and generally appointed by governors of individual states. Their accountability is hard to locate in their charter documents, and their near-autonomous powers are wide-ranging. In these regards, they are very much like their private counterparts./p>

There is a fantasy solution proposed. Balance the CEOs on boards with professors and students, to realign the values of the university.

The most urgent need today, as the Columbia case shows, is to create a new social contract on boards of trustees, who have become too craven to be watchdogs and too self-interested to be trusted. This change will require hard community-based activism that balances lawyers, hedge fund managers and tech bros with professors, schoolteachers, researchers, scientists and students. For public institutions, this may require legal support, as well as a powerful alliance between communities and state governors. Without such changes in boards of trustees, the current capture of colleges and universities by an unholy alliance of wealthy alumni, rightwing billionaires and bureaucrats is likely to become entrenched.

Creating this new social contract will require two crucial steps. The first is to bring the full force of public scrutiny to bear on boards, their membership, their accountability and the checks on their powers. The second is to demand that all academic governing boards both reflect and defend the fundamental values of universities in a liberal democracy: freedom of academic speech, opinion and inquiry; procedural transparency; and demographic diversity.

Nice. Although I had to laugh: the regents/trustees have all the power and complete autonomy, so how do we convince them to surrender some of their power to the people they govern? Shall we ask them nicely? I guess we could demand, but all they have to do is say “no.”

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: I have great news to share today! One of my spicy hot takes that I have defended for years continues to be right: protest works, whether you like it or not.  Back in June …

I am in a Paris museum looking at thick bronze plates full of crushed parchment. The bronze is an engraved “Declaration Of The Rights of Man And Of The Citizen” from 1789 and the paper, a copy of the 1791 new French constitution. They had been placed on top of each other, according to the museum label, and “broken by the national pile driver on May 5th 1793.” Two idealistic texts smashed by a machine essential for creating the foundations of new buildings and bridges; it’s an apt image of how revolutions break societies, and go on to break them again and again into new pieces and forms.

It was four years after the storming of the Bastille that the new revolutionary government really established the framework for the Republic. The crushed 1791 Constitution was one of 250 objects in an exhibition about Paris in 1793-4 at the Carnavalet Museum.

Far from the simplistic tearing up of the old and bringing in of the new, the exhibition revealed a year that was marked by a new utopian confidence, but also by the start of the Reign of Terror. As crowds of visitors elsewhere in Paris thronged to marvel at the restored Notre Dame Cathedral, I gazed at one of the 28 original statues of kings that once adorned its façade. All 28 were removed and many mutilated as part of the cleansing of monarchical symbols after the Revolution.

It wasn’t all destruction, of course. Creating a Republican culture from scratch was exciting. The new France replaced up to 800 different sets of weights and measures, with a clear metric and decimal system which has endured and been taken up around the world. But there was also a new decimal calendar with a 10-hour day, 10-day weeks, and months named things like Thermidor and Germinal which didn’t.

There is something both joyous about remaking a whole nation’s image of itself, and occasionally ludicrous. Considering how much was destroyed by revolutionary fervour, the exhibition showed that a surprising amount of ephemera has survived. A citizen’s worn, faded Phrygian cap; residency permits given to tradespeople as they moved to Paris to start a new life; new alphabet books and curriculum texts created as a national education system was launched for the first time.

I was struck by how much paper art survives, notably a huge number of illustrations by the artist Jacques-Louis David, who was tasked with designing classical-inspired costumes of state for the new elected deputies, and noble dress for citizens themselves, featuring tricoloured fringed sashes. He designed a new Feast of the Supreme Being, first celebrated on 8 June in 1794, with a grand bonfire and elaborate costumes, offering a new civil religion with a “natural” god.

David is better known, of course, for his dramatic painting of the death of his friend, the revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat, stabbed in his bath in 1793 by the female assassin Charlotte Corday. Already the revolution was turning on itself, and the speed of its fragmentation offers some surprising parallels with today’s unhinged political fury, violent protest and polarisation.

Rival factional leaders attacked each other by printed poster, the way that the likes of Elon Musk, celebrities and party leaders do today in the “public square” of social media platforms. Wealthy or influential prisoners would find a way to get hundreds printed and posted around the city. Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, the aristocratic author of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, penned one in August 1793 “To his fellow citizens” answering each accusation laid against him one by one. He was facing the guillotine, but such was the impact of his arguments that he was released the day after the posters went up.

As the violence of the republicans increased, conspiracy theories flourished, just as they do today. One was that the government had set up tanneries to make human leather to bind books of the Constitution with the skin of executed enemies. And yes, posters went up around Paris making the accusation, followed by posters denying it.

A guillotine blade is one of the most disturbing relics on display, a reminder of the estimated 30-50,000 people killed during the Reign of Terror. But as the curators point out: what survives “bears the many marks of silence, erasure and reconstruction that the struggle for memory has produced over time.” As we grapple with an increasingly volatile world now, it is no bad thing to re-examine such relics.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

Stephen Fry is an actor, comedian, writer and presenter. He is also a patron of Humanists UK and a vocal advocate for mental health.

Why is uncertainty an important intellectual value to you?

I’m very lazy when it comes to intellectual things, and therefore I almost don’t bother with reasons, because I am pretty much fully an empiricist, rather than a rationalist. I don’t need to explain why certainty is wrong by any logical or metaphysical twists and turns. I can just say, “Look at what happens when people are certain.” It’s empiricism, it’s what experience shows – people of certainty have nearly always, as far as I can see, got us into trouble. People who are more shadowed in doubt, and nuanced and uncertain, seem to be, if not more likely to provide solutions to world problems, at least less likely to contribute to the problems quite as much as the certain. I mean, really, all I’m saying is something I think most people instinctively understand, that dogma and doctrine and ideology have been pretty disastrous for the human race. We can look at the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason and say these got us a long way forward, but they were not doctrine.

What about moral certainties?

I suppose Immanuel Kant had one certainty, which was what he called “the starry skies above me and the moral law within me”. And I kind of go along with that. This idea that we have within us, somehow, in the same way as we have other instincts ... this thing, this Jiminy Cricket on our shoulder that says, “No, that’s wrong.” And we can argue that it’s our parents who teach us that. The religious will say it’s from doctrine and text. But Kant understood, and I think most people understand, that it seems to be something inborn – or, if it is learned, it’s so profoundly and deeply embedded as to be almost the same thing. That’s to say, it’s not that one hears the voice of one’s parents saying, “That’s wrong.” It’s the whole chorus of humanity that instinctively understands that stealing is wrong, that lying is wrong, murder is wrong, meanness is wrong, cruelty is wrong, betrayal, deceit and all that. We just seem to know it. We certainly don’t need to be told it by a hierophant or a priest!

And I’ve always been aware of that. I believe I’ve always had a very high sense of morality and ethics – not that I’ve been a very moral and ethical person in my life, necessarily – but I’ve been aware of [these values], and they touch me and pain me when I fall short. Maybe I misjudge other people, but I do know people who genuinely don’t really seem to care that much about the moral or ethical mark they make on the world – or who may not, when they go to sleep at night, beat themselves up about it. But I do, and I’ve always had [this sense of morality] and it annoys me to some extent, because I’d love to be free of it.

How does the problem of other people’s “bad” behaviour square with the idea that this sense of right and wrong is something that is in all of us?

That’s a really good question. Obviously, those of us who have been active within humanism are particularly annoyed by the claim of religion that without it, there would be no moral sense, because that just is empirically nonsensical, and rationally nonsensical too – and this was exploded, as I’m sure you know, by Greek philosophers, way, way, way back. Looking around the world, we can see that [the moral sense] is something that is apparently inborn.

One could look for the solutions, as we love to do, through evolutionary psychology and ethology. But I suppose the question, really – and this is where we get to the Greeks – is happiness. We want to be happy, that’s pretty obvious. And the question that exercised the Greeks was whether you could be happy, if you were not virtuous? If you are not kind and decent, and good, and thoughtful, and generous, and open and honest.

So the question is, can you be happy if you’re not a good person?

And similarly, can you be good if you’re not happy? That suddenly becomes a kind of political idea, that you can’t be good if you’re not happy. Oscar Wilde and others kind of mocked Victorian morality [for example, the idea of the deserving poor] by saying, “If you’re poor and you’re suffering, the idea that you can waste time being good in a Victorian sense is pretty nonsensical.”

Is that your belief, then? You believe that human beings are set up to be good, if the conditions are right, and it’s poverty, or injustice, or things going wrong in our lives that might warp us a little?

And the kind of territorial horrors we’re seeing now in the Middle East. It’s so easy for me to sit here in my fat, comfortable, western luxury, and talk about how moral the world is now, everybody’s good. And yet we can see there’s so much suffering, cruelty, abuse, terror, exploitation, etc. We know there are terribly wicked people out there who are sex trafficking, who are selling arms right this minute. There is a lot of terrible behaviour going on, a lot of
awfulness.

Sometimes I think, rather than being a handwringing liberal – which is, I suppose, what I am – I should be more like [18th-century writer] Jonathan Swift. You know, a true satirist.

What is it about Swift that you admire?

Now, Swift was a religious man, as you know; he was Dean of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, he was a man of the cloth. But he was a true satirist, in that he absolutely did not let humanity off the hook. He presented humanity as completely disgusting. He made satirical points that were remorseless, like his Modest Proposal, which was that we should eat Irish children, because it would solve the problem of the excess of children [and ease the plight of their poor and starving families]. And it was so beautifully and rationally put, that he never excused himself from the irony to say, “Oh, boo, by the way, I’m being ironic.” He just stayed within it ...

And he said – and I think this is a thing that a lot of satirists can probably agree with (and you’ll have to forgive the gendering, but that’s how it was in those days) – he said, “But principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.” This is one of the things that’s really interested me over the years: the nature of the difference between the individual and the mass.

But let me just finish my point about satire. If I was a satirist, I would stop going on about morals here and morals there. And I would do similar things to Swift in terms of modest proposals.

What would you propose, if you were a modern Swift?

Here’s my modest proposal, that would instantly make the world a much better place, a happier place, a less violent place, a less aggressive place, a place where more people are likely to have an equal share of everything, and in which there will be so much less violence and aggression. And it is guaranteed, by the way. I’m not necessarily a big one for this, but it’s drug control. We have to outlaw the most dangerous drug in the world, which is called testosterone.

Without testosterone ... Have you ever seen a cat that’s been spayed? From the yowling tomcat that fights in the alley, it becomes a little pudding, and you tickle it and it purrs, and it’s lovely, like a eunuch in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: pleasant, pleasing, slightly tubby because the weight gets put on.

And all these Andrew Tates, all these figures of toxic masculinity or however you want to describe it, would be fabulously reduced to being cosy, warm, sweet, and they wouldn’t have this territorial madness, this strange thing that testosterone adds to the human. It’s absolutely failsafe. It would work perfectly.

Very modest.

Yes, a very modest proposal – but apparently, there are problems.

Could we return to your point about the mass and the individual?

My interest really started when I was first in theatre and in the West End. I remember a play that was a moderate success, which is to say it was making money, but it wasn’t an absolute sold-out smash every night. It was eight shows a week. And I noticed that on Mondays, you would have about 40-50 per cent [seats sold], later in the run 60 per cent of the house; on Tuesday, it would be 60, 65, 70 per cent; Wednesday matinee would be 40 per cent; Wednesday evening would be 90 per cent. And then the rest of the latter part of the week would be sold out.

Now, let’s say you’re looking at the month of April, and in the first week of April, on that Monday, 52 per cent, and then the next Monday, 58 per cent. Why didn’t 30 or 40 per cent of the people who went on the second Monday come on the first Monday? Why don’t you have a Monday that is completely sold out, with queues around the block? But instead, it thins itself out. The individuals don’t know that, they’re just behaving according to whatever they want and need – “Oh, shall we go and see that play, darling?” And yet, it’s always the same.

Sherlock Holmes makes the point to Watson in The Sign of Four; he points out that although you can predict to a remarkable degree of accuracy what a mass of people will do, you cannot predict with any degree of accuracy what an individual will do. And it is a most
extraordinary thing.

Is that something that gives you pleasure, thinking of all those different people and the wonderful human diversity that there is? Is that something to value? You’ve talked about E. M. Forster before, and he valued it, as a novelist. In “Two Cheers for Democracy”, he thought that it was a good guarantee against conformity and totalitarianism.

Yes, I think that’s right. Also, I’m sure most of us face this strange sense that the human race is almost like rabid dogs in a cage. And you get too close to the cage, and the fierce yapping, barking, the slathering, and the horror of this creature, is what you get an impression of humanity being. But when you go out into the streets, or you sit next to someone on a bus, or in the pub, or you chat to them, it’s the opposite: everyone seems individually to be reasonable, kind of humorous, resigned about the mess of the world, not completely having swallowed a red pill or blue pill. There’s a kind of openness. Not all, of course – there are those who swallow all kinds of pills and conspiracy theories, and others who are loaded with prejudice against certain groups of people and all the rest of it.

But generally speaking, if you wanted to look at it in a gardening sort of way, of all the human seeds that you want to plant in the garden, there are only about two per cent that you’d say, “Oh, that’s a bit mouldy, throw that one away.’” The rest are really good, and will grow into wonderful flowers. But sometimes, the weeds are too strong.
And of course, you have to be aware that you and I as we talk, someone might listen, who is not well disposed towards us – and we are the weeds, as far as they’re concerned. We are the problem.

I’m fully aware that there are people further to the left of me, and further to the right of me, who regard my kind of centrist and progressive, vaguely tolerant liberal beliefs as not just fatuous and weak, but genuinely dangerous.

You seem to be saying you’re a woolly liberal, to use an old-fashioned phrase.

Yes – and maybe I shouldn’t be, as I say. Maybe I should be really fighting for the prohibition of testosterone, and walking up and down Oxford Street with a big sign.

Well, the alternative to being a woolly liberal is being a harder sort of liberal, and being more firm about the truth and necessity of liberal values. But that’s an inbuilt problem with liberalism, isn’t it? You see both sides.

And it is what worries me about artificial intelligence. It’s taken us hundreds of years to realise that all human lives are of equal value, and that women are of equal value to men, and people of different races and outlooks and upbringings are of equal value, and there isn’t a hierarchy of worth amongst humanity.

And therefore, you must bake those values into AI, so that Chat GPT and other [programmes], when they’re scraping data from the internet, if they come across data that suggests women are inferior to men from somewhere, they must have an instinct, a prime directive to ignore that. Yes, we can all agree with that.

But we forget that Russia and China have their own AI. They have a totally different ethical framework, one in which the citizen is subjugated by their duties to the state, and they should report neighbours who misbehave and mock the supreme leader. And suggesting that one AI can’t sort of infiltrate another is like saying, “If I put the yellow dye in the Pacific, I haven’t put it in the Atlantic.” Well, there’s only one ocean on Earth, and there’s only one internet, really. There are firewalls and national attempts to control bits, but, generally speaking, we have to be very aware of the fact that – and this is the part that’s so depressing for cowards like me – that these values that you’ve very perfectly expressed, maybe have to be fought for.

And fighting for values is something that, instinctively, we [liberals] tend to go against. The pure logic of Oscar Wilde’s comment that the ability or the willingness to die for something doesn’t make it any truer.

You implied earlier that intellectual uncertainty led, for you at least, to a certain type of tolerance. Would you say that was one of your moral values?

I think so. I suppose I would combine that with the things that have most compelled my attention and love all my life, and that is the arts: literature and poetry and music, and so on. They add another dimension, which is the ability to put yourself in the heart and mind and soul of another person.

That’s what imagination is. Imagination is not fantasy. It’s not, “Gosh, I pictured this planet in which the mountains are shaped like shoes, and there are 17 suns.” Fantasy can be very charming, but imagination is knowing what it is to be that person or the other person, to know what it is to be the rapist as well as the raped. And what it is to be the abuser and the abused, and to be the hopeful, to be the side-lined, and the ignored.

The best artists are able to become other people, and therefore allow us to understand humanity and the feelings of others more than we otherwise might. I think that, combined with uncertainty, is a very useful way of being in the world. You don’t judge people, necessarily. I mean, obviously, you make judgements. But it is [a case of] testing oneself. Not allowing oneself to get above other people.

In the current mess of the world, taking a position is sometimes regarded as the ultimate good – you must declare what side you’re on. In American politics, British politics, Brexit, the Middle East – all these terrible places where man is handing out misery to man, to misquote
[Philip] Larkin.

It’s wonderful to tribalise yourself on to one side of that and to make an enemy that is clear. But experience and knowledge of humanity, and the empirical ability to look back at history, I think, shows us that that’s no way to be moral. The most moral thing you can be is effective. And I think one of the crimes of our age is that people would rather be right than effective.

You’re thinking politically here.

Yes, that’s right. But it’s also very easy, because I’m a sensitive soul, to worry about what’s being said about one, and to fill in all the arguments against one in one’s head. So you hear a chorus of people and you end up wringing your hands and feeling as Forster did at one point, since we’re addressing that great man.

Please, tell us the story.

Well, when the Spanish Civil War broke out, a lot of British and American intellectuals and artists joined the International Brigade to go and fight for the Republican cause against the fascists, and the young writers [W. H.] Auden and [Christopher] Isherwood, who both knew and were hugely inspired by Forster, decided they would go off to Spain. And they went to see Forster, and he was sitting in front of an electric fire with some toast and a cup of tea, in a very old tweed jacket, probably, and I dare say carpet slippers – because somehow, he always comes across as wearing carpet slippers. And when they said they were going, he said anxiously, “Oh, do you think I should go too?” And they looked at him and smiled and said, “Morgan” – he was always known as Morgan, his middle name – “Morgan, your place is here at Cambridge with a pen in your hand.” He said, “Oh, good.”

Imagine him fighting alongside [George] Orwell and [Ernest] Hemingway! But in that sense, I do think one of the wisest lines ever given in cinema was that of Inspector Callahan [played by Clint Eastwood] in the second Dirty Harry movie Magnum Force, where he says to Holbrook a number of times, “A man’s got to know his limitations.” And that is very important, you know.

And that’s as profound an observation as any to end our conversation.

Clint will always give us the answer!

This is an edited version of a conversation first published in the interview collection “What I Believe: Humanist ideas and philosophies to live by”, edited by Andrew Copson and published by Piatkus Books. It appeared in New Humanist's Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

How Tyrants Fall: And How Nations Survive (John Murray) by Marcel Dirsus

As late as November 1989, Nicolae Ceausescu probably thought things were motoring along pretty nicely. He was 71 years old, and had been the uncontested overlord of Romania since 1967. The 14th Congress of the Romanian Communist Party had just awarded him another five-year term. Construction of his ghastly 3,000-room palace in the heart of Bucharest was proceeding. Granted there was some counter-revolutionary nonsense afoot in Berlin, and talk of restless comrades elsewhere across the Warsaw Pact ... but it couldn’t happen here.

But it did. Protests began in Romania’s west and began to spread. On 21 December, Ceausescu resolved to put a stop to it. He mounted the balcony of the Central Committee building to address a large – if forcibly wrangled and therefore somewhat sullen – crowd, with the intention of reminding them, and the viewers of a live telecast, who was in charge. This went badly. The dictator and his wife fled by helicopter, but found no sanctuary. On Christmas Day, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu were hustled through a show trial in an army barracks, then put up against a wall and shot by soldiers they believed they still commanded.

As How Tyrants Fall demonstrates, when it goes wrong for these leaders, it tends to go wrong two ways – really badly, and really quickly. For those dictators who do not end up dying in office, the options are unappealing: a choice, sometimes a combination, of exile, imprisonment and execution. Marcel Dirsus, a German political scientist, has run the numbers in his fine book, and calculates that fully 69 per cent of unemployed despots are damned to such fates.

Dirsus introduces us to what he calls the golden gun paradox – a reference to one of the ludicrous weapons brandished by Muammar al-Gaddafi, whose 42 years terrorising Libya ended with him being beaten and bayoneted to death in a sewerage pipe. “Tyrants,” writes Dirsus, “can have all the trappings of power, even a gun made of gold, but at the point where they need to use their power to save themselves, it is already too late ... for Gaddafi, holding the gun only imbued power as long as people believed it did.”

As Dirsus tells it, his curiosity was piqued by being on hand for an unsuccessful putsch. In 2013, he was working in the Democratic Republic of Congo when a coup d’etat was attempted against President Joseph Kabila. The reasons for its failure were not difficult to diagnose – it was led by an eccentric televangelist – but it got Dirsus thinking about why some tyrants tumble and others don’t. The book is his extended – and hugely entertaining – effort to figure that out, assisted in part by the input of some who have participated in various overthrows.

Each chapter addresses one of the hazards which could, if managed unwisely, see the unfortunate autocrat swinging by his ankles. Certainly unintentionally, but probably unavoidably, the book almost ends up reading as a how-to manual for the maintenance of a dictatorship: one can imagine Kim Jong-Un or Alexander Lukashenko dutifully inscribing notes in the margins, even if some of the subtler jokes may be lost on them.

Dirsus’s key metaphor is the treadmill. “Tyrants can run and run,” he writes, “but the best they’ll ever do is stay upright. If they get distracted for even an instant, their legs may shoot out from under them, and they’ll get hurt.” There are those who grow tired of the incessant schlep, and attempt to step off, but this is a risky endeavour. You can try to embrace democracy, but asking people you’ve oppressed to vote for you rarely prompts a positive response.

Or you can hand over to a carefully chosen successor, but they’re unlikely to want to keep you around. Or you can run for it – but choose your destination carefully. Liberian president Charles Taylor, Dirsus notes, did not. When his dreadful regime collapsed amid civil war in 2003, he bolted for Nigeria, which handed him over to the court prosecuting war crimes in Sierra Leone, a country in which Taylor had also meddled. He is now serving the rest of his natural life at HMP Frankland in County Durham.

On balance, the tyrant is best off keeping the treadmill turning – yet this requires not just inexhaustible stamina but delicate judgement. You cannot let your military become too weak, lest they render you impotent, or too strong, lest they start wondering whether they could run the place themselves. You have to give your subjects the impression that you are capable of monstrous violence against them, but you probably can’t actually order your troops to open fire on such protestors (one chapter is entitled “You Shoot, You Lose”).

Dirsus correctly notes that while vanquishing a tyrant may well be virtuous in and of itself, it offers little guarantee of improvement. His concluding chapter sums up what causes tyrants to totter, and wonders how – and if – those contributing factors should be encouraged. None of this is straightforward. The early 21st century – from Afghanistan to Iraq to the Arab Spring – was a bracing series of lessons that unloading a tyranny, from without or from within, does not guarantee the dawning of liberal democracy.

Yet this decade has reminded us grimly of the dangers of indulging autocracies – as the post-Cold War wait for Russia to become an affable, collegiate European country was brutally demonstrated to have been in vain. Acting against authoritarians is worth doing, when doable. While the short-term costs may be considerable, the longer-term benefits can be incalculable. “As a German who enjoyed freedom from the moment he was born,” Dirsus writes, “I am not going to argue that force should never be used to topple tyrants.”

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Back in January, I talked a little bit about my experience visiting the UK headquarters of the Church of Scientology, and here’s what I said: “I’ve been on this beat longer than you might …

Britain’s Labour Party, finally back in power after 14 years of opposition, are now having to navigate their many internal divisions. Over the last decade, the issue of welfare has proven particularly fraught. Founded as the party of workers, Labour went on to create much of the modern welfare state. Given this history, the choice to support a more generous provision of benefits might seem uncontroversial. In practice, it has proven anything but. Soon after Keir Starmer became prime minister in July, disagreements on welfare were already tangling him up in knots.

What is going on here, and why is the issue such a difficult one for Labour? A deeper analysis of the debate suggests it’s about more than differing takes on policy. On a philosophical level, the conflict might actually be about the purpose of politics itself.

The current drama over welfare dates back to 2015. Jeremy Corbyn had been picked by Labour’s left flank as its sacrificial candidate (they stood a candidate as a matter of course, but never expected them to win). But this time was different. Harriet Harman was interim leader, and thus heir apparent to lead the party into the general election. Only, she had made a miscalculation. She had ordered her party to abstain on the second reading of a welfare bill brought by the Conservative government, which would institute a two-child cap on benefit payments, alongside other measures to restrict welfare provision.

The cap meant that families with more than two children would not be given any additional support. The vote was a procedural one – the MPs would have a chance to vote against the final bill. Harman believed she was avoiding a trap set to get Labour on the unpopular side of a prominent issue. She was playing to the general public, and thought she could keep her party onside.

But the move backfired. The cap went through and the decision to abstain was presented by supporters on the party’s left flank as a betrayal of everything Labour was supposed to stand for. This surge of anger fuelled interest in Corbyn – the only candidate who rebelled against the whip – and helped create the wave of interest that propelled him to the leadership.

Fast forward to today, and Starmer’s commitment to keeping the cap is one of the ways in which he has distanced himself from Corbyn’s more radical politics. But now, as prime minister, he is under significant pressure from his party to remove it, raising the prospect that this policy issue may once again play an outsized role in shaping the fate of Labour.

Why can’t the issue be resolved? Firstly, it’s emotive: we’re talking about children, many of whom are living below the poverty line. But there seems to be another dynamic that is hampering communication. If you look more closely at the debate, the two sides appear to be speaking entirely different languages. One side – let’s call them the pragmatists – view politics purely in terms of policies enacted and material change on the ground. The other – let’s call them the idealists – see a role for demonstrating their principles and modelling them in public. It is a debate that has simmered for centuries, and yet seems to catch each new political generation unawares.

Idealism vs pragmatism

Applying this lens to the current welfare debate, the idealists in Labour objected to Harman’s pragmatic strategy. Even if the vote didn’t matter in practice, they believed that Labour should still stand up for its principles. (Later, this simple picture got more complicated, as Corbyn’s 2017 manifesto was in fact predicated on maintaining the benefit cap, which his supporters then seemed to accept.)

This is the history that Keir Starmer’s government was facing off against when it came into power and prepared its first King’s Speech and Budget. Not only did it have the weight of its own historical decisions on the two-child benefit cap to reckon with, but it faced significant pressure from almost every child poverty charity and policy expert, all of whom agreed that ending the cap would be by far the single most effective measure to reduce child poverty in the UK.

Many Labour MPs will privately admit that scrapping the cap is the policy they would most like to see the government enact, but in public there is no promise yet on the table. Labour has created a child poverty action group to present recommendations this year, but the issue is clearly a point of vulnerability for the government.

This created the opportunity for what was seen by many in Number 10 as mischief-making from opposition groups. When Labour presented its first legislative bill for 15 years in the King’s Speech, the Liberal Democrats, SNP and Greens took the opportunity to present an opposition motion on the two-child benefit cap, regretting that it had not been included in Labour’s agenda for its first year. They knew the amendment wouldn’t pass (it was a “cosmetic vote”), but it was an effective way to drive a wedge between Labour’s idealists and its pragmatists.

The government argued that given the vote was intended to embarrass the party, it would take a hard line on any Labour MP voting for it, suspending the whip for a minimum of six months – not least because those MPs would be voting against Labour’s first King’s Speech. Eight MPs nonetheless voted for the amendment, and were punished accordingly.

For them, the logic of the “cosmetic vote” cut both ways: if Labour argues that it would like to end the benefit cap, but doesn’t think it can afford to do so yet, why can’t its MPs at least agree in principle with ending it? The vote didn’t commit to spending, after all, so why can’t parliamentarians show what they believe in? Is that not what they have been elected to parliament to do?

Max Weber's 'Politics as a Vocation'

Perhaps the definitive authority on these questions, at least when it comes to electoral politics, is the theorist Max Weber, and in particular his 1918 lecture “Politics as a Vocation”. Weber begins modestly, apologising to his audience that he is about to disappoint them by steering clear of the “actual problems of the day” – but the loftier and deeper problems he addressed instead made the lecture one to last through the ages.

At first, Weber’s sympathies seem to lean towards the idealists. He expresses irritation at the politicians who merely enact the will of their party bosses. “Nowadays the members of Parliament, with the exception of the few cabinet members (and a few insurgents), are normally nothing better than well-disciplined ‘yes’ men,” he complains. By contrast, “to take a stand, to be passionate – ira et studium – is the politician’s element, and above all the element of the political leader,” he argued. (Ira et studium is Latin for anger and enthusiasm, or passion.) “His conduct is subject to quite a different, indeed, exactly the opposite, principle of responsibility from that of the civil servant.”

However, like orators through the ages, Weber is merely setting out the argument he intends to side against. He goes on to identify “vanity” as a fatal weakness in a politician, not least because it leads to what is in his view a cardinal sin: irresponsibility.

He contrasts the “ethic of responsibility” with “the ethic of ultimate ends”. The latter places the politician in the role as the keeper of the flame: “for example, the flame of protesting against the injustice of the social order”. From that perspective, handing on that flame to a next generation of politicians is victory enough, whereas compromising to deliver a lesser goal would be seen as a failure.

For Weber, that rendered the “ethic of ultimate ends” on its own untenable – but without some measure of it, the “ethic of responsibility” was similarly vacuous. The “politician may serve national, humanitarian, social, ethical, cultural, worldly, or religious ends,” but ultimately “some kind of faith must always exist.”

With his conclusion that “politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards,” Weber lends a little credibility to both the passionate and the pragmatic, but tips his hand towards the latter.

Labour's pragmatic history

Labour is a party with a long tradition of – to borrow Weber’s analogy – making the effort to drill holes in hard boards. The party is decidedly anti-revolutionary but has nevertheless managed to enact transformational policy. Proof of this can be found throughout the party’s history. Clement Attlee was anything but an ideologue, despite the change his post-war government brought to Britain: the birth of the NHS, the modern welfare state, a huge homebuilding programme and more. Attlee is remembered as an almost milquetoast chairman-like figure, balancing off the huge egos and factional interests that surrounded him at the cabinet table. It was through his skill in buying off and mollifying the ideologues around him that their plans became reality.

Harold Wilson modelled himself after Attlee, who gave him his first cabinet position just days after he became an MP, and who became the godfather to one of his children. Wilson might have convinced some of the party’s idealogues that he was one of them when he stood down alongside Nye Bevan over prescription charges for the NHS, but his nuanced reasons for doing so belied the pragmatist within. Wilson did not oppose the principle of introducing charges for NHS dentures and glasses, but he did oppose doing it to fund a rearmament effort he believed (correctly) was doomed to failure – he was not willing to introduce charging for something that would deliver no benefit.

That is perhaps the essence of Weber’s idealised politician: not abandoning principle, but moderating it through the lens of pragmatism.

Through shiftiness and a reputation for being “too clever by half”, Wilson achieved transformative change that remains under-appreciated to this day: the biggest programme of housebuilding ever achieved in Britain, massive expansion of access to higher education, the Equal Pay Act, the Race Relations Act, the end of the death penalty and the decriminalisation of homosexuality.

Of Tony Blair, little more need be said than that very few of even his closest friends would accuse him of being a man whose ideals were not tempered by pragmatism. What sign of compromise with the electorate could be clearer than a full rebrand of your party as “New Labour”?

And yet, in reality, Blair was a continuation of Labour’s tradition in government, not a repudiation of it. That did not happen until Corbyn came along, a man who had previously never served in any frontbench role, whether in government or opposition, and who had never given the party whip much regard: Corbyn voted according to his own conscience, come what may, and left the compromises of governing to others. He had never pretended otherwise – in fact, this drove much of his appeal.

Turning to the ideologues

The current allure of the idealists is perhaps understandable. The “centrists” or pragmatists have not had much to show for their work in the last decade – the financial crisis of 2008 was followed in the UK by austerity, Brexit and the pandemic. Public services are underfunded, and real wages are still lower than they were in 2007. If compromise doesn’t deliver, why should voters accept it? Around the world, they are turning to ideologues, whether on the left or the right – Donald Trump in the US, Javier Milei in Argentina, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, or Gustavo Petro in Colombia.

This changing calculus seems to be troubling the Conservative Party too, in recent years. Liz Truss’s disastrously short premiership showed the danger of rejecting the oft-repeated mantra that to govern is to compromise. By producing a Budget in which she included almost every tax cut she’d ever dreamed of delivering – with the hard work of reform pushed to a future date – she demonstrated what happens when ideology wins, and it looked a lot like the “irresponsibility” of which Weber warned.

Truss herself seems determined not to take that lesson from her tenure, insisting instead that she was brought down by the incompetence of her officials and the malign efforts of her political enemies – many of them outside the ambit of parliamentary politics, such as the Bank of England and the International Monetary Fund. It is clear which course the Conservative Party wants to take next, having chosen another ideologue, Kemi Badenoch, as its current leader.

If pragmatic compromise, albeit underlined by principle, is the true purpose of politics, then someone needs to make that case afresh to the public. Joe Biden’s presidency was marked by quiet delivery for the working people of America: he was pro-union, funded billions in investment, delivered the best economic growth in the western world (by some margin), and had record employment numbers.

None of it mattered and almost no-one believed it when Democrats tried to highlight that record. America looked instead to Trump, a man who doesn’t compromise and who doesn’t worry about delivery. Trump’s promises might often be dark – deportation in the millions followed by a global trade war – but they are not tempered by caution.

Politicking, done well, is the act of finding the right blend of principle and pragmatism to create positive change. But after two decades of relentless financial shocks – the subprime loans crisis, austerity, Brexit, Trump, the pandemic and more – the public is tired of the art of the possible. It is looking to the dreamers, and historically, dreamers don’t deliver, at least not within democratic systems.

Someone has to make the case to reclaim pragmatism from the political graveyard. The only way to do that is to show that it can actually get results. With incumbents round the world falling and populists taking their place, the pressure is on for Starmer and his 170-seat majority to do that.

But Starmer risks his brand of pragmatism being associated with the politics of “no”: no, you can’t have a pay rise; no, we can’t fix the NHS; no, we can’t do anything about the leaking roof of your school. If he wants to try to redeem pragmatism, he would do well to take lessons from Weber and from Wilson, and remember that pragmatism is there to deliver on the promise of principle. Wilson might have been known as shifty, but when he left Number 10 he could look back on a set of accomplishments that would be the envy of any of his party’s purists – his clever-clever approach got stuff done.

Starmer spent his election campaign, and now his first months in government, telling us what isn’t possible. We will have to compromise, he said, with the difficult circumstances of reality. That message is safely received. But even Weber or Wilson would tell him that it’s possible to take pragmatism and compromise too far, and that at some point you have to try and deliver something you really believe in. Does Starmer have anything he can point to that he’s getting done as a result of his hard, unpopular slog? If he looks around and decides the answer is “no”, then it’s time to step up. Perhaps ending the two-child benefit cap would be a good place to start.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: It’s tough to find good news these days, so I’m very excited to bring you some today, and it’s all about our trans friends! First, 26 medical and psychotherapeutic organizations from across Germany, Austria, …

Is there a narcissist in your life? It’s the question posed time and again across countless books, websites and social media posts. How to spot a narcissist, how to handle them, what they want – the internet is suddenly full of such discussions. Even outside the online sphere, it can feel like we are living in an age dominated by this psychological spectre. Former White House lawyer Ty Cobb once branded US President Donald Trump a “deeply wounded narcissist”, claiming that this shaped his decision-making during his first administration. (Trump, for his part, has described himself as “a very stable genius”, not exactly disproving Cobb’s theory.) Numerous commentators now double up as part-time psychologists, accusing politicians, celebrities and reality TV stars of being narcissists lurking in our midst.

So what actually is a narcissist? Let’s turn to the real experts (avoiding the many who claim to be). The term derives from the ancient Greek myth of the vain young man Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection and died as a result – or rather, lost his humanity, transforming into the drooping daffodil that bears his name.

Kostas Papageorgiou, associate professor at Queen’s University Belfast’s School of Psychology, tells me that “Modern descriptions of narcissism stem from the works of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic writers like Sigmund Freud, who highlighted traits like grandiosity, attention-seeking, egocentricity, entitlement and a domineering interpersonal style.” These traits appear in the general population on a spectrum, meaning that everybody has a score on narcissism. “If this score is too high,” Papageorgiou tells me, “we suspect Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).”

Discussion of the disorder was usually confined to a mental health context until 2002, he says, when psychologists Kevin Williams and Delroy Paulhus coined the term “Dark Triad” to describe a particularly dangerous group of people who exhibited tendencies towards narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. Psychopathy is distinguished by impulsivity and thrill-seeking, while Machiavellianism is marked by manipulation and calculated self-interest. Both align nicely with narcissism, which is also a socially malevolent tendency associated with self-promotion, emotional coldness, duplicity and aggression. “There was an explosion of publications on the topic [of narcissism] after around 2008-2009,” Papageorgiou says. He considers it no coincidence that this was the time of the global financial crisis: “‘Dark’ personalities emerge in conditions of adversity where lack of control and unpredictability are key characteristics,” he says.

The growth in academic interest accompanied a surge in public concern that shows no sign of abating. Armchair diagnosing has become a kind of sport. It’s tempting for those who have been mistreated by a partner, friend or family member to recognise a few signs and “identify” a narcissist. There are 1.4 million posts tagged #narcissist on TikTok alone, with celebrities and influencers teaching their social media followers how to spot and handle these people – “Narc 101” in pop psychology parlance. But amateur diagnosing can have troubling consequences, and not only for the people who stand falsely accused.

The origin story

First, let’s look at the official definition of NPD. The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lists nine criteria, of which an individual must have at least five to be diagnosed: a grandiose sense of self-importance; preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power and the like; seeing themselves as special and only understood by similar or high-status people; requiring excessive admiration; entitlement; exploitation of others for their own ends; lack of empathy; jealousy or the belief that others are envious of them; arrogance. Yet no two narcissists are entirely alike, as Papageorgiou points out. There are different recognisable types, including the domineering “grandiose narcissists” who “generally exhibit antagonism in their attempt to gain status” yet tend to have more positive mental health outcomes and performance in different domains, as well as the insecure, hypersensitive “vulnerable narcissists” who also exhibit antagonism but because they believe “everybody is out to get them”.

So how did they get that way? According to pop psychology, narcissists usually have a similar background. Here’s how the story goes. Responding to trauma or a lack of love or stability in early life, the narcissist suppresses his or her authentic self as shameful and instead develops a protective false self, an attractive facade. Perhaps a great poet. A beauty. A scholar. The individual may have been rewarded for playing this role in childhood and it may change over time. Yet, no matter the exact specifics, this enhanced version is likely to be charming and charismatic, designed to lure people in. Anything – or anyone – that punctures this facade and reminds the narcissist of their true self will provoke pain and rage.

Does the science support this? “We do not know much about the development of narcissism,” Papageorgiou says. “We know that just like every other psychological trait or disorder, narcissism is heritable and influenced to some degree by genetic differences. We have findings to show that excessive praising from parents in childhood can contribute to grandiose narcissism later, while inconsistent and harsh parenting can contribute to vulnerable narcissism.”

Returning to our Narc Class, the narcissist now faces a problem. How to bridge the gap between the real and false selves? The answer comes in the concept of “supply”. Lacking inherent worth, the narcissist becomes dependent on external validation to prop up the false image. The sources can be, for instance, status symbols, prizes, publicity, money, sex, and hobnobbing with the crème de la crème of society. He or she also feels compelled to seek out individuals who are content to play along with their delusions of grandeur. Yet, that “source” of supply must be reliable. The deceptive, manipulative narcissist will therefore take certain steps to control their source and so keep the praise coming, enjoying power over another.

The narcissist's 'playbook'

This idea of being a “source” or “supply” and how to avoid it, or recover from it, fuels much of the current content on narcissism – including more than 50 podcasts devoted exclusively to the subject on Apple Podcasts alone, with names like “Navigating Narcissism”, “Breaking Free from Narcissistic Abuse” or “You’re Not Crazy”. People share similar stories of encounters with narcissists, through romantic relationships, family or work. Through these stories and projects, a perceived “playbook” of narcissistic strategies and techniques has emerged. So do sufferers of the disorder share common patterns of behaviour, or is the public discourse encouraging people to find patterns where they don’t exist?

Psychotherapist and professor Alfried Längle explains that, while no two individuals are the same, there are behaviours that constitute “fixed coping-reactions” in those suffering from NPD. “Coping-reactions are psychodynamic behaviours which happen automatically (ie are not decided) in situations when a person is overwhelmed by problems or pain which they cannot resolve in the moment.” One of these, Längle says, is colloquially known as “love bombing”, where a person with NPD initially showers a romantic interest with attention and affection, only to later withhold it. “They want to possess the ‘beloved’ object because it provides more esteem. They are [love] bombing because they need it urgently and/or they must always win. These feelings when they fight for their prey are real. The processes are not so conscious.”

Various aspects of the discourse around narcissism do align with respected academic theories and research. In the 1960s, British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott posited ideas of the true and false self, the latter a defensive facade developed due to the primary caregiver not meeting a child’s emotional needs. Meanwhile, Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel discussed “supply” in 1938 and some academic papers continue to use the notion.

But it is questionable how many social media influencers or popular podcast hosts have actually read such research. The content is often not only simplistic, but can verge on panicked hysteria. “Eating with a Narcissist” is one popular topic on TikTok, with influencers describing “how narcissists control you with food”. Another topic, “Narcissist Eyes Filmed”, advises on how to recognise “the narcissist’s stare”.

'Cartoon villains'

There is another problem. Once “diagnosed”, the supposed narc can expect little sympathy. They appear to struggle with feelings of love and empathy, so it’s natural that people might avoid them. However, the popular discourse often seems to suggest that they are less than human, or as close to a cartoon villain as it’s possible to be, and that they “cannot change”.

The current medical consensus is that NPD is indeed a difficult disorder to treat – even when a sufferer is persuaded to seek help. But treatment is still possible. Through psychotherapy, “they can gain insight and learn to control themselves better; their pain and distorted experience can be restructured,” Längle says, adding that “The personality tendency remains but impulses can be corrected.”

Sufferers of NPD may not seek treatment, however, since they may not perceive their behaviour as morally wrong. The manipulation of others, and the seeking of wealth and status, can also yield real-world benefits. But there are exceptions. Ben Taylor describes himself as a “self-aware narcissist turned abuse recovery coach”, now working with women who have been victims of narcissistic abuse to restore their confidence.

“Finding out that I was a narcissist was a gradual process like turning on the dimmer switch,” he says. “A lot of my traits were there early on, as in some of my childhood development there was not a lot of emotional safety in what I could share and talk through so I started to lie and hide who I was.” While commendable, it should be noted that Taylor has built a successful career and garnered public attention from outing himself as a sufferer of NPD. Others would likely suffer loss of relationships, friends, wealth and status – which may not be considered worth the risk.

Social media and narcissism

The reluctance of someone suffering from NPD to seek help, or acknowledge the disorder, poses problems when estimating its prevalence. There are other difficulties too. Chanki Moon, assistant professor in social psychology and criminology at Royal Holloway, University of London, tells me that personality disorders are classified into three clusters. A 2020 study in The British Journal of Psychiatry estimated the global prevalence of personality disorders in the “dramatic-erratic” cluster – which includes NPD as well as histrionic, borderline and anti-social disorders – at 2.8 per cent. But that only gives us data on the cluster of disorders, not specifically on narcissism.

So is narcissistic personality disorder rising? “Answering this question is challenging due to the lack of research on the topic,” Moon tells me. Comparing the 2020 data to World Health Organisation Mental Health Surveys in 2009, he says that “we can tentatively suggest a slight upward trend in the prevalence of personality disorders, although the increase is minimal and further research is needed.” What the data does suggest is that NPD is more prevalent in men than women, he added.

Could social media be accelerating the development of narcissistic traits? Platforms allow users to project an idealised, crafted version of themselves that is then confirmed by the dopamine hit of adoring followers’ likes and shares. “People with higher levels of narcissism tend to enjoy social media more, as they seek attention and admiration,” says Moon.

However, there are distinctions. A study published in the journal Computers in Human Behaviour in 2020 found that grandiose narcissists are more likely to present a version aligned with their true self on social media, whereas vulnerable narcissists project a false self.

Trump and Macron

What about particular professions? In their 2023 book Dark Politics: The Personality of Politicians and the Future of Democracy, Alessandro Nai, associate professor of political communication at the University of Amsterdam, and Jürgen Maier, professor of political communication at the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau, conducted psychological profiling of around 200 world leaders including Vladimir Putin, Jair Bolsonaro and our very own Boris Johnson.

Nai says that “across all those world leaders, a politician stands out for his extreme level of narcissism: Donald Trump.” No prizes for guessing that. However, other entries may be more surprising. According to their analysis, “French President Emmanuel Macron scores quite high on narcissism,” Nai explains. “He has given his own initials to the party he founded, a typical narcissistic move.”

Nai notes that narcissism can correlate with political ambition and a belief in one’s own capabilities. Meanwhile, voters can be drawn to the confidence and charisma, associating it with strong leadership.

But is our age particularly prone? “We have no good historical data, at least not in a comparative perspective, able to answer such a question,” Nai explains. “My gut feeling is that the advent of social media – and, specifically, the possibility of setting up immediate and direct communication from the politician to the voter – exacerbates the visibility of narcissistic traits in the political arena. Those traits might well have been there before, but are now out there for everybody to see.”

Are there any positive aspects in this growth of awareness? Brian Comstock is a personal coach who has over 70,000 Instagram followers and offers sessions which he says can help clients heal from narcissistic abuse. The majority of his online engagement comes from women. Comstock says he recognises the problems of excessive or misplaced diagnoses, but that his online reach can also help people in need of support and advice.

“It’s crucial to approach this topic responsibly, avoiding the trap of labelling every challenging relationship as narcissistic,” he says. “My focus is primarily on guiding victims toward healing and fostering healthy relationship practices, rather than on formal diagnoses.”

But while personal coaches may stop short of dishing out diagnoses, their content might nevertheless encourage viewers to “spot” narcissistic traits, while they then profit from helping clients “heal” from the impact of dealing with those freshly identified “narcs”.

Papageorgiou warns that online content can create “simplistic dichotomies between good and evil characters”, taking the focus away from supporting those with NPD to understand and restrain their behaviour. “Reproducing stereotypes and marginalising are never good strategies for dealing with problematic behaviour,” he says.

Increased awareness may be effective at directing those with NPD, and those who encounter them – as romantic partners, relatives, friends or work colleagues – to appropriate forms of help and support. But it’s critical that this is informed by academic and clinical expertise – and it’s time we return the task of diagnosis to the experts.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

I have lots of talks and shows coming up soon. Meanwhile, here are two podcast interviews that I did recently. ….

I hope that you enjoy them!

 

Hey welcome back to my new channel, Documenting the Collapse of US Democracy! I know this must be strange for those of you who preferred the old format of discussing science and critical thinking but those don’t exist here anymore so this is all I’ve got left. Okay, just kidding, I swear I’m going to …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: I’ve been talking about measles for about the last 20 years, banging this drum so often that I really debated whether or not I should bother making this video. I went back and looked …

The Edinburgh Magic Festival takes place soon, and I am staging a few events, including a talk on the magical history of Edinburgh, a magic workshop (joint with slight of hand expert Will Houstoun), and my ‘Invention of Magic’ show. For details, please click here. 

As part of the event, I have teamed up with Festival co-founder Svetlana McMahon and the amazing Young Carers charity to produce a fun optical illusion exhibition. Together, we created some mind-bending illusions, and then photographed the carers staging the images around the city. Each photograph features young carers doing what they do every day – making the seemingly impossible possible. 

If you are in Edinburgh, please pop into the Storytelling Center on the High Street, enjoy the free exhibition and watch our behind-the-scenes video. Here are a few of my favourite images….

 

I recently received a lovely email from a pal of mine, Ian Franklin. We met when I investigated alleged ghostly phenomena at Hampton Court Palace, and so I thought that it would be a good time to re-visit the work.

As a kid, I was fascinated by ghosts and hauntings. In the 1990s, I obtained a PhD in the psychology of the paranormal from Edinburgh University and then started my own research unit at the University of Hertfordshire. One day, I received a curious letter from Hampton Court Palace.

This historic Palace has been home to many British monarchs and is now a popular tourist attraction. It also has a reputation for being haunted, with many people experiencing unusual phenomena in an area now known as ‘The Haunted Gallery’. The letter invited me to carry out an investigation (the first at a Royal Palace).

I put together a team of researchers (Caroline Watt, Paul Stevens, Emma Greening and Ciarán O’Keeffe) for a five-day investigation. It proved to be lots of fun. For instance, before we started, the Palace staged a press conference to announce my study. During a break, I stepped outside to get some fresh air and some teenagers drove past. Weirdly, one of them threw an egg at me and it smashed on my shirt, leaving a large stain.  I returned to the press conference, said that the stain was actually ghostly ectoplasm and that this is going to be a tough investigation. 

At the time, Ian Franklin was working as a palace warder. He was kind enough to go through the historic records and figure out where people had reported unusual phenomena in the Haunted Gallery.   

Each day, I asked visitors to walk through the Gallery and write down any unusual experienced (e.g., suddenly feeling cold or sensing a presence). They were also given a floorplan of the area and asked to indicate the location of their experience. About 600 people participated. Interestingly, the experiences from those who believed in ghosts tended to take place in areas that Ian had identified from historic reports. Before the study, we had asked everyone to rate their previous knowledge about strange happenings in the Haunted Gallery, and we could see that that wasn’t a factor.

So, what was going on? We discovered that some of the experiences were caused by natural phenomena (e.g., subtle draughts), and speculated that others might be due to areas looking dark and scary. But who knows, maybe there actually are ghosts at the Palace! Importantly, the work showed that it was possible to carry out a rational and open-minded investigation into an alleged haunting, and it paved the way for my later ghost work (more about that in another blog post). Alas, little did I know that there would soon be lots of people (including those on TV) carrying out somewhat less scientific investigations into alleged ghostly phenomena!

Anyway, it was wonderful working with Ian, and the journal article about the study is here, and it also described in Paranormality. 

This week we will take a detailed look at an optical illusion that I created to shrink people.

There are a few ways of making someone look small. One approach involves making everything else big! Here is a great example of that from a Trick Eye exhibition in Japan. The picture is huge and the glass is painted on the back walls (I pressed my hands against the ground beforehand, so that they looked like they were being pushed against the glass).

Another approach involves forced perspective (making a far-away object appear much closer to the camera) – a technique used in the famous Beuchet Chair illusion….

It’s wonderful but is still a big build. I wanted to create something that was far more portable, and had the idea of moving the chair very close to the camera. Here is how this new illusion looks and works.

All of the details and templates were published in the journal iPerception and I was especially happy with the article because that’s my mum in the photos! I have used the idea lots over the years, ….

….including in this quirky video……

Next week I will reveal a brand new optical illusion! Oh, and if you are in Edinburgh, I will be giving a talk on the 28^th December at MagicFest about the strange intertwined lives of three master magicians from the city. One was the most famous illusionist in the world, another perfected a trick that revolutionised magic, and the third was frequently asked to appear in the Edinburgh Sheriff Court. Do come along, fun will be had. Details here.

Welcome to another Thursday post celebrating curious mind stuff. This week, we enter the world of illusion! 

I have created many optical illusions over the years, and I am fortunate enough to be friends with some of the smartest and most inventive folks in the field. Olivier Redon is certainly one of those people. Working with his daughter Chloe, Olivier creates new illusions and wonderful twists to existing ideas. A generous soul, his pieces are as playful as they are fooling.

Here is his Oh La La Box, which won the Best Illusion of the Year in 2021. Simple but brilliant….. 

A man after my own heart, most of Olivier’s creations are built from cardboard and paper, and show how to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. In another instance, the dynamic duo have joined books and boxes together in impossible ways….

Our paths first crossed when I created a version of the Beuchet Chair, only to discover that Olivier had had pretty much the same idea several years ago (mine involves an addition of a fake cloth to help with the illusion of continuity)!  
Olivier has also used the same idea to make objects shrink and grow in desktop version. Genius. Olivier is based in San Francisco and creates for the fun of making something new and the joy of sharing it with younger minds. Who knows, perhaps there will be a museum dedicated to his work. 

I asked Olivier three key questions about his work…

How do you find your creative ideas? 
Very interesting question. At first, I paid attention to what was around me. But then, over time, I noticed that there were no big changes in the world of optical illusions, and so I decided to do something about it and create something new myself. Now I have more than 50 optical illusions that fill 3 rooms in my house!

Who are your heroes of the world of optical illusions?
Jerry Andrus, because he invented so much, yet had no computer or printer! He just worked with metal, cardboard, or wood. I found Jerry Andrus via the internet in 2022, but I didn’t know him before that because I wanted to create my illusions without knowing about what already existed.

Should all the classrooms in the world have optical illusions? 
Of course! It is so much fun to play with your brain and especially for adults, children, teachers and students.     

You can find out about Olivier’s great work here and read more about it in this article.

What do you think? Leave a comment and let us know.

check, 1, 2…is this thing on? hi everyone! it’s been a while.

Someone contacted me hoping to find young atheists who might be interested in being part of a new series. I’m not particularly interested in having my mug on TV, but I would love to have some great personalities represent atheism on the show, so I offered to repost his email on my blog: My name […]

All throughout my youth, I dreamed of becoming a writer. I wrote all the time, about everything. I watched TV shows and ranted along with the curmudgeons on Television Without Pity about what each show did wrong, convincing myself that I could do a better job. I flew to America with a dream in my […]

A friend linked me to this. I was a sobbing mess within the first minute. I sometimes wonder why I feel such a strong kinship to the LGBT community, and I think it’s because I’ve been through the same thing that many of them have. So I watched this video and I cried, because, as […]

UPDATE #1: I got my domain back! Many thanks to Kurtis for the pleasant surprise: So I stumbled upon your blog, really liked what I saw, read that you had drama with the domain name owner, bought it, and forwarded it here. It should work again in a matter of seconds. I am an atheist […]