An Explanation of the MAGA Mindset?

I found this BigThink article very interesting.  It’s long but there is an audio link if you want to just sit back and listen to it.  It explains how people interpret reality differently, based on an inner voice interpreter and associated brain functioning.  For what it’s worth, it might help us in understanding the MAGA mind, or even our own mind, for that matter.

Link here for full article.

If tl;dr, just skip to “the punchline” and wing it. 😉

Some of the more interesting phrases and sentences that stood out to me:

• The thinking mind reinvents the self from moment to moment such that it in no way resembles the stable coherent self most believe it to be.
• …it is the process of thinking that creates the self, rather than there being a self having any independent existence separate from thought.
• …99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself — and there isn’t one.
• …but since the left brain didn’t have access to these requests, it made up an answer and believed it rather than saying, “I don’t know why I just did that.”
• The left brain was simply making up interpretations, or stories, for events that were happening in a way that made sense to that side of the brain, or as if it had directed the action. Neither of these explanations was true, but that was unimportant to the interpretive mind, which was convinced that its explanations were the correct ones.
• Over the last 40 years, several additional studies have shown that the left side of the brain excels at creating an explanation for what’s going on, even if it isn’t correct, even in people with normal brain functioning.
• The truth is that your left brain has been interpreting reality for you your whole life, and if you are like most people, you have never understood the full implications of this. This is because we mistake the story of who we think we are for who we truly are.
• Most of us live our lives under the direction of the interpreter, and that makes the mind our master, and we are not even aware of this. … While it is clear that these experiences are happening to us, we somehow retain the idea that we are still in charge of it all.

Science supports the Eastern view (aka “the punchline”)

• So, for the first time in history, the findings of scientists in the West strongly support, in many cases without meaning to, one of the most fundamental insights of the East: that the individual self is more akin to a fictional character than a real thing. 

Questions:

1. Does this article help explain the MAGA mindset?
2. Did you find this article a good explanation for how the subjective reality of the inner voice has the power to negate objective reality for the MAGA voter?
3. If 99.9% of everything you do is for the self, does that leave only .1% room for selflessness?  In other words, other than a fraction of 1%, is it virtually impossible to be selfless?
4. If we are all controlled by that inner voice, what does that say about free will?  Chalk up another hash mark against it?