In this unique amalgam of neuroscience, genetics, and evolutionary psychology, Ryan argues that leftists and rightists are biologically distinct versions of the human species that came into being at different moments in human evolution.

This turned out to be very true! It also has a glowing review by John Jost:

“Do liberal forms of cooperation and pacifism and conservative forms of competition and authoritarianism have deep origins in our evolutionary history? In prose that is skilled and accessible, Michael P. Ryan makes a passionate, provocative argument that they do. He has read seemingly everything, and he pulls no punches. His book provides food for thought, worry, and, surprisingly, hope.”
—John T. Jost, New York University, USA

Since Jost is known as perhaps the most biased social psychologist (and a very p-hacky one), this sets the stage for the book. The reader won’t be disappointed. In just 200 pages Ryan argues his case that rightists are archaic humans that are biologically and psychologically distinct. They are fearful, emotional, biased, stupid, closed minded and every other negative adjective. Ryan embraces speculative evolutionary psychology and genetic population differences and the latest unreplicable neuroscience of politics to show that this is because this and that brain anatomical difference (p < .05). Their differences are profound he says:

A more substantive approach is required, one that would take a lesson from science and recognize that leftists and rightists operate from different evolutionary locations, have different biological temperaments, and evidence different adaptive behaviors as a result. They are so substantively different that they should not be treated as formally equal. Their biological differences are too profound.

Taking this further into the past, Ryan argues that all the great societies in the past were leftist until evil rightists took over and destroyed them. Thus we learn that:

Greek leftism was extended in two directions outside of Greece. One went eastward to South Asia, where the Greeks formed a trading alliance with the leftist Mauryan king, Ashoka. The other reached Egypt, whose existing socialist economy was made even more pro-social under Greek Ptolemaic guidance. It would be the incredible productive success of the Egyptian socialist agricultural model that would feed Rome and stabilize its precarious politics by allowing Roman rulers to gift free grain to the Roman masses. Simone Weil, the French philosopher, compared Greek cultivation to Roman crassness and decided that things took a bad turn when Rome replaced Greece as the leading nation of the Mediterranean basin. The Athenians were artists, scientists, and philosophers, the Romans thieves, imperialists, and oligarchs. They had no art of their own and had to borrow from Greece.

No doubt Egyptian scholars will be surprised to learn it was a socialist economy. Or maybe it’s a old version of socialism where there are kings, feudal lords, their vassals etc., and no workers’ democracy (or any other democracy). Likewise, Roman historians may be surprised to learn that Julius Caesar was a leftist:

Roman history has been misrepresented by rightists. According to the rightist account, the good conservative republicans such as Cato the Younger sought to defend “liberty” against “tyranny,” which is best represented by Julius Caesar. But rightists consider any civilization-building restraint placed on the “free” expression of archaic survival urges such as resource hoarding to be “tyranny.” About Rome, it would be more accurate to say that the rightists who succeeded at hoarding resources—often by taking them from men who had fought longwars to secure those very resources—kept the resources for themselves rather than share them. Leftists such as Julius Caesar and the Gracchus brothers made them share the republic’s wealth more equitably. Caesar was a version of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a leftist who was well liked for the help he lent the poor. It is a remarkable testament to the difference between leftists and rightists that Caesar wanted to build a library while the descendants of his adversaries built a slaughterhouse where dissidents, slaves, and animals were killed in public displays of callous brutality.

History is full of leftists according to Ryan:

The Renaissance and the Enlightenment constituted a remarkable period in European history when the rightist reign in the West that had lasted nearly 1,400 years was finally ended. Science was once again welcome and leftist critical reflection possible. Rightist dogmatism and authoritarianism in social ideology and politics ceded ground to leftist flexibility and inventiveness. Leftists succeeded in evicting the church from politics, casting doubt on authoritarian government, and challenging rightist social dominance hierarchies based on skewed resource allocation across the social spectrum. The two major Enlightenment ideas— liberty and equality—eroded hierarchy and paved the way for democracy and socialism.

The defeat of Napoleon on the fields of Waterloo in 1815 marked the end of the Enlightenment as a project of leftist reform. In the aftermath of the Enlightenment, rightists dominated not just the political world of western Europe but also the philosophical one. The mental representational abilities that sustained the Enlightenment had to be discredited. David Hume began the rightist assault on leftist philosophy by casting doubt on the very notion of an abstract universal idea such as equality. He argued that all such ideas were the product of associations and conventions, mere ghosts compared to the hard certainty of positive or empirical “facts”: “There is nothing in any object, consider’d in itself, which can afford us a reason for drawing a conclusion beyond it.”16 All the airy-fairy notions of equality leftist Enlightenment philosophers invented are mere words that mean nothing apart from our agreement that they mean something. Take away the agreement, and the universal ideas disappear. Hume noticed leftism’s great weakness, the fact126 that it is a genotype dependent on niche support, environmental nurture, and institutional artifice. An idea like equality is a mental representation in the brains of leftists that they use to build civilization, but otherwise, it does not exist as a tangible physical object outside of schools, books, and language, all of which are needed to sustain it. At the same time, Hume made a virtue of the rightist cognitive bent towards literal-minded empiricism, a bent derived from the need to scan the horizon for danger in the archaic environment.

Ryan embraces biblical studies of non-canonical books:

In his gospel, which was declared too heterodox for inclusion in the Catholic Church canon, Thomas describes a God who resembles Isaiah’s very abstract divinity, who rises above the concrete senses: “I will give you what no eye has seen, and what no ear has heard, and what no hand has touched, and what has not occurred to the human mind.”28 Thomas’ version of Jesus is also more politically socialist and more explicitly, like Isaiah, an enemy of hoarding resources: “Theone who has found the world (and) has become wealthy should renounce the world.” For Thomas, Jesus’ vision of generosity is explicitly leftist: “If you have money, do not lend (it) out at interest. Rather, give (it) to the one from whom you will not get it (back).”29

And so on. The evil rightist catholic church is blamed for not including the leftist books. Ryan appears unaware that these books are often fraudulent and written 100s of years after the included books (which also includes multiple fraudulent works).

Not content with telling historians about Sumer (“theocratic socialism”), Egypt, Greece, Rome, and Napoleonic France, he also has lessons for economists:

Two things trouble this picture of a rational economic system. The first is inequality. If the system were rational, equality, not permanent inequality, should result from the economy. Yet, economic activity under capitalist auspices is incapable of generating equality. The economic system not only produces but also depends on a disequilibrium of incomes. Hoarding of resources at the top end of the social hierarchy depends on austerity on the bottom. Lurking within the deceptive ruse of rationality is the admission that inequality is unavoidable on capitalist terms for reasons that have nothing to do with a reasonable measure such as “individual merit.”

The second impediment to rationality is inflation. According to economic theory, prices represent a reasonable balance between people’s needs (demand) and the amount of goods produced (supply). People are willing to pay for a good if the price is reasonable (in balance with incomes), and suppliers of the good accept a price if it is sufficient to cover costs. On each side of each transaction, rationality prevails. But the ideal of rationality does not account for permanent inflation. Prices inevitably and consistently rise. Inflation occurs even when labor costs fall as they did when capitalists discovered cheap labor in places like China in the 1990s. That should have reduced prices, but instead it drove them higher.Cars and cell phones made in China cost far more than they did ten years ago.

Why?

Archaic motives, not rationality, drive economic behavior.

They might be confused to learn that markets lead to inflation, and not, say, governments abusing their control of the monetary supply. I guess the Soviet Union wasn’t socialist enough as it had not one, but two periods of hyperinflation.

Of course, this also happens under capitalism as governments there sometimes also print a lot of money.

As you might expect, Ryan tells us that Venezuela and Cuba are or were great places to be:

In contrast, when socialists took over Cuba in 1959, they began training doctors to be sent around the world to provide healthcare in countries that lacked medical resources. The socialists who won power in Venezuela in 1998 did something similar. They sent the army into the streets to give out free medical care, provide cheap food, and repair roads in poor areas. They established cooperatives to help the poor launch businesses of their own and to obtain cheap housing.They redirected the wealth of the nation, which largely came from oil exports, to the lower income classes. Life expectancy rose by five years. Rightist businessmen responded by going on strike. They stopped stocking their grocery stores with the necessities of life. They refused to deliver goods to market. Life expectancy fell by a year as a result.5 Rightists were willing to destroy society and harm others rather than cede control to the hitherto disadvantaged in the existing social dominance hierarchy.

Even modern African infighting is because of rightists:

The genocide in Rwanda in 1994 was triggered by conservative businessmen and rightist nationalists of the Hutu tribe and directed against the majority Tutsi ethnic group as well as leftist Hutus. An estimated 800,000 were murdered. At its root was inter-ethnic competition for resources. Favored by the country’s Belgian colonizers prior to independence, the Tutsi had greater access to jobs. The “Ten Commandments” published by a Hutu newspaper prior to the genocide called for civil service and military jobs to be restricted to Hutu. The “Commandments” also emphasized the rightist ideal of racial purity—although Hutu and Tutsi in fact pertain to the same haplogroup and differ “racially” only as a result of mating practices imposed by the colonialists. While it appeared to be a spontaneous populist uprising, the genocide was inspired by a Fox News-like radio station—Radio-Television Milles Collines—which was owned by a wealthy rightist businessman who imported the hundreds of thousands of machetes used in the massacres and provided trucks for transporting murder gangs around the country. If one needs a reason for thinking that permitting the existence of a conservative television network such as Fox that stokes negative emotions such as resentment, bitterness, spite, anger, and hatred against adversaries is a bad idea, the images of thousands of dead bodies floating in a river or lying in fields provide it.

Continues…