Monomania, Radicalism, What’s the Difference?

Truly there is nothing new under the sun. In a piece at Persuasion Jonathan Haidt attributes the “democracy recession” to “monomania”, an irrational focus on a single aspect of things rather than on the whole. After a parable of the nature of these competing “monomanias” he asserts the following:

1. Monomania makes groups illiberal.

   In theory, one could be a liberal monomaniac—obsessed with a celebrity or an intellectual paradigm but perfectly willing to let everyone else have their own obsessions, or no obsessions. But moral and political monomaniacs generally travel in self-policing groups, and these groups are rarely liberal according to either of the two Oxford definitions. If you and your friends believe that everything is about power, and that the world is divided into the powerful people (who oppress others) and the powerless (who are oppressed), then you have a moral obligation to do something about it—all the time.

2. Monomania makes groups stupid.

   In a 2009 TEDx talk titled “Be suspicious of simple stories” the economist Tyler Cowen warned that stories impose a structure on events that distorts them and blinds us to the distortion. He was particularly concerned about moralistic stories that divide the world into good and evil. He proposed that “as a simple rule of thumb, just imagine that every time you’re telling a good versus evil story, you’re basically lowering your IQ by ten points or more.”

Begin radicalized with respect to something, as was pointed out sixty years ago, means you are predisposed to interpret every experience in light of whatever it is you have been radicalized on, e.g. sex, race, power, inequality, the right to bear arms, etc.

Or, said another way, monomania, radicalism, what’s the difference?