During the coverage of President Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration, the star anchor of MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, asked “How is this happening?”  The events playing out before our eyes have transcended the familiar, ironic Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times,” and are setting new benchmarks for “confounding times” on a daily basis. There are no agreed upon facts – ‘fake news’ runs rampant. Dedicated scientific research is often granted no more credibility than casual hunches. And there is no major event that can’t be touted as proof of a conspiracy theory. We have left the Information Age and are boldly stepping into the Disinformation Age.

Emblematic of this chaos are the blatant double standards embraced by MAGA Republicans in general. Examples are endless and endlessly proliferating. How can you claim to be the party that upholds Christian values and yet ignore Christ’s example of leadership as you fawn over a mythomaniacal, power-seeking sexual predator who is a convicted felon? How can someone continue to insist that the 2020 election was stolen without a shred of substantial evidence? We are so bombarded by statements that are unmoored from reality that our ability to robustly protest has been worn down. Even more frustrating is that the cognitive dissonance on display is often held by very smart people. As Maddow lamented, how can we make sense of it?

The easy route is to denounce “doublespeakers” as harbouring evil intent – but we might also pause and recognize that people generally do what they feel is best. If the MAGA diehards who blithely embrace double standards are truly doing what they feel is best for America, we have to look elsewhere for an explanation. And I don’t know of anyone who brings more clarity to the issue than psychiatrist, philosopher and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist. As he has demonstrated, the answer lies in how we are built.

McGilchrist has devoted much of his esteemed career to delineating the differences between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. The jaw-dropping wealth of clinical research he brings to that task, especially in his most recent book The Matter with Things, establishes that our hemispheres aren’t distinguished so much by any categorical functions as they are by their different outlooks. In effect, it turns out that each hemisphere is virtually a brain unto itself, so strikingly do they diverge in how they see the same world. The critical question, then, lies in which hemisphere dominates.

The left hemisphere notices the ‘things’ of the world – the parts that make up the whole – but it cannot detect the wholeness to which those parts belong. It sees the relationships among those parts as mechanical in nature, and assesses the parts in accord with its principal concern, which is how to manipulate the world. To facilitate its manipulation it builds for itself an abstract model of the world, reducing the subtlety, ambiguity and paradoxes that characterize wholeness into the certainty of a fixed structure. And it is so dependent on its representation of reality, as distinct from reality itself, that in the face of contrary evidence it will confabulate wildly to justify its position without even acknowledging that it is making up stories out of thin air. In other words, it’s more comfortable with cognitive dissonance than with any admission that threatens its world view. Sound familiar?

The right hemisphere, by contrast, is primarily concerned with understanding the world as a whole and how to relate to it. And it sees the whole not in mechanical terms, but as a complex unity in constant flow. It doesn’t need to reduce it to black-or-white certainties, but instead remains open to novelty and possibility. Nor is it prone to confabulation. The right hemisphere, as McGilchrist puts it, “is more in touch with reality.”[1]

Both ways of knowing the world are active in all of us, and both are necessary, but McGilchrist’s overarching message is that when the hemispheres are in a balanced, healthy relationship, the left hemisphere acts as a servant to the right; when the left becomes dominant, the consequences are dire. Untethered from the reality that only the right hemisphere understands, we drift more and more deeply into an agenda that seeks to manipulate the world without truly understanding it. In this regard it’s important to understand that not just MAGA enthusiasts, but our culture at large and political parties of all stripes, are characterized by a left-hemisphere dominance. Unlike most indigenous cultures, we consistently manipulate the world without truly understanding it – and often do so with a sense of entitlement. Admitting our left-hemisphere dominance as a culture, it’s nonetheless clear that some on the extreme right behave in a way that is characteristic of a more extremely left hemisphere outlook. And the rising popularity of authoritarian political leaders can also be understood in this context: the more uncertain the times, the deeper the craving people will feel for certainty. Fascism provides a black-and-white view of the world that democracy can never offer.

Here’s the part that makes this issue all the more intractable, though: by its very nature, the left hemisphere is totally convinced that it has hold of the truth, that it needs nothing from the right, and so should naturally be in charge. The right hemisphere, by contrast, is inclusive of the left and welcomes what it has to offer. When the left hemisphere dominates, then, it is virtually immune to facts or insights or arguments from the right hemisphere. Furthermore, no one who is strongly left-hemisphere dominant is likely to learn much from McGilchrist’s delineation of the hemispheres; they simply won’t recognize themselves in it. Checkmate.

The hemispheric differences uncannily align with political differences when we take into account that the left hemisphere maps onto the right side of the body, and the right hemisphere maps onto the left. So our designations of the political ‘right’ and the political ‘left’ may originate in our embodied experience. Understanding this may not help us move past our “interesting times” – but it certainly helps me feel less confounded.

Written by Philip Shepherd

Author of New Self, New World; Radical Wholeness; co-author of Deep Fitness; and co-director of The Embodied Present Process