Why Arguments Don't Work

Developmental psychology shows that most people think in groups. The question is which group. The answer will determine our future.

A reader named NeoCarolean recently wrote to me asking if I was familiar with Integral Theory. I wasn’t, at least not by that name. But when I started digging into what it was about, a whole field of insights opened up that confirmed much of what we as nationalists have understood intuitively, but rarely been able to articulate with scientific precision.

Integral Theory is the American philosopher Ken Wilber’s ambitious attempt to synthesize Western psychology with Eastern contemplative traditions and modern developmental psychology. The framework is contested in academia. Wilber is a philosopher rather than an empirical researcher, and his grand syntheses attract both admiration and skepticism. But the foundations he builds on have strong scientific support, and these foundations are what interest us here.

What these theories describe is something both simple and revolutionary: that human consciousness develops through distinct stages, and that most people, regardless of intelligence or education, process political and moral questions through the filter of group identity. The question “What is true?” becomes in practice “What does my team say is true?”

The stairway of consciousness

Developmental psychology has a long and respected history in science. Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive developmental stages is standard material in psychology programs worldwide. Lawrence Kohlberg’s research on moral development has extensive empirical support. Clare Graves’ work, later popularized as Spiral Dynamics, was built on decades of empirical studies.

The core of these theories is that human consciousness is not static but develops through qualitatively different stages. Each stage has a characteristic centering: what one identifies with and therefore what horizon one can think within.

The egocentric stage is characterized by the world revolving around one’s own self and its immediate needs. Small children are naturally here, but adults can get stuck at this level too. The ethnocentric or conformist stage means that identification has expanded to the group: the tribe, the nation, the party, the subculture. Right and wrong are defined by the group’s norms, and the natural question becomes “What do we think?”

The worldcentric or post-conventional stage is characterized by the ability to take universal perspectives, to see one’s own group’s norms from outside, to weigh principles against each other. Finally, there is the integrative stage, where one can hold multiple perspectives simultaneously and see partial truths in different positions.

Here’s what matters: research consistently shows that the majority of adults operate primarily at the ethnocentric stage. This is not an expression of stupidity or lack of education. We are social beings who orient ourselves through group identity, and asking “What does my team think?” before taking a position is the spontaneous cognitive strategy for our species.

Democracy’s hidden assumption

Here we reach the point that makes developmental psychology politically uncomfortable for modern mass democrats, and that its proponents often avoid drawing the consequences of.

Classical democratic theory, especially in its liberal Enlightenment form, presupposes voters who can weigh arguments, assess evidence, and set the common good against self-interest. This is a description of post-conventional thinking. But if the majority operates at the conventional level, where political information is filtered through group identity before it’s even processed, then this entire assumption collapses.

Voters don’t primarily vote for “best policy” but for “my team.” Election campaigns become tribal rituals rather than substantive debate. Media optimizes for group confirmation because that’s what the market demands. The enlightened debate between rational citizens that democratic theory presupposes simply doesn’t exist at any significant scale.

This is one of several things I address in my book Skådespelet (Runströms förlag, 2025).

The historical elite theorists saw this clearly, even though they lacked developmental psychology’s language. Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, Robert Michels, José Ortega y Gasset: all of them pointed out that the masses cannot rule in any meaningful sense. Democracy always becomes, regardless of formal structures, in reality oligarchy with popular legitimacy. Modern research confirms this insight, albeit in different words.

The necessity of the nation

If group identification is psychologically unavoidable, which both developmental psychology and social psychology strongly suggest, then the question is not whether people will identify with groups, but which groups. Politics then becomes about shaping which identities become salient: which group affiliations are activated and experienced as relevant.

Without an overarching national identity, loyalties fragment downward and outward. Class against class, gender against gender, ethnicity against ethnicity, region against region, generation against generation. Every particular identity becomes politically mobilized, and society becomes an arena for zero-sum conflicts between groups that no longer recognize common interests.

A functioning national identity does something very specific: it creates a “we” substantial enough to subordinate other loyalties. Class conflict is dampened when workers and employers both primarily see themselves as Swedes with a shared fate. Gender antagonism is softened when men and women see themselves as parts of the same people with complementary roles and mutual obligations.

This doesn’t mean conflicts disappear. They will always exist. But they are handled within a framework of fundamental solidarity rather than as wars between strangers. The nation is not a political preference but a psychological necessity for societal cohesion.

The Marxist transformation

Here we must speak about what is usually called cultural Marxism, Western Marxism, or American Marxism. The names vary but all point to the same historical transformation.

Classical Marxism predicted that the working class would develop revolutionary consciousness and overthrow capitalism. It never happened. Workers in Western Europe and North America chose reformism, consumption, and national identity over revolution. For the orthodox Marxist, this was a puzzle: why didn’t the proletariat act in accordance with its “objective” class interests?

The Frankfurt School provided the answer. Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and their successors claimed that the oppression was not primarily economic but cultural. The working class had been seduced by bourgeois culture, by the family, by religion, by the nation. These structures functioned as ideological prisons that prevented the oppressed from seeing their situation clearly.

From here, it was a short step to a new revolutionary strategy. The task was no longer to organize the working class but to dismantle the cultural “superstructure”: the family, the nation, tradition, Christian ethics. And since the working class didn’t want to be the revolutionary subject, new candidates had to be found: the sexually marginalized, the ethnically different, women defined as an oppressed collective.

This transformation explains why the modern Left systematically works to strengthen particular identities. Intersectionality is explicitly a framework for multiplying identity-based conflict lines. Every new “axis of oppression” is a potential revolutionary force, and every attempt to build a cohesive national identity is stamped as “reactionary” or “fascist” precisely because it threatens to dampen the conflicts that revolution needs.

The Swedish establishment’s project

With this understanding, the Swedish political establishment’s actions over the past fifty years become comprehensible in a new way.

The Social Democrats after 1968 underwent the same transformation as the international Left. SAP had been built on a fundamental loyalty to the Swedish people and nation. Per Albin Hansson’s Folkhem (”People’s Home”) was explicitly national. But a new generation schooled in Frankfurt School ideas took over the party and redefined its mission. Sweden was no longer to be built for the Swedes but transformed into a laboratory for multiculturalism and norm criticism.

When Fredrik Reinfeldt and the “New Moderates” took power, the project was completed from an unexpected direction. The Moderates, once the closest we had to a bourgeois national-conservative party, capitulated completely to the culture-radical hegemony. “Open your hearts” became the symbol of a bourgeoisie that no longer dared or wanted to defend its own population’s interests. The work ethic and tax cuts were seamlessly combined with mass immigration and norm dissolution.

The Sjuklövern (”Seven Clover”) — the seven parties that in practice pursued the same immigration policy, the same cultural policy, the same fundamental social vision — did not represent democratic pluralism but a united front against the Swedish people’s right to their own country and their own future. They competed over marginal economic issues while agreeing on what was essential: that Swedish national identity was a problem to be solved through dilution.

If you understand developmental psychology and cultural Marxism’s logic, you see that this was not a conspiracy in the narrow sense but an ideological convergence. Both Left and Right within the establishment had absorbed the same basic assumptions: that national identity was outdated, that Sweden should be redefined as a “humanitarian superpower,” that resistance to this development was morally suspect.

Lessons and temptations

What does this analysis give us?

First, a realistic understanding of political psychology. We no longer need to naively believe that “the right argument” automatically convinces, or that people are rational decision-makers just waiting for correct information. Political change happens through shaping group identities, not through winning debates.

Second, the central importance of national identity is not a nostalgic fantasy but a psychological reality. If people inevitably think in terms of “us” versus “them,” then the question is which “us” is constructed. A strong, inclusive but substantial national identity, grounded in language, culture, history, and people, is better than fragmentation into antagonistic subgroups.

Third, the opposition’s strategy is exposed. The systematic dismantling of Swedish national identity is not an accident or well-meaning naivety but an ideological project with roots in Marxism’s transformation. The diversity doctrine, the constant expansion of new “oppressed groups,” the attacks on family and tradition: it all hangs together.

But this critique must also be turned inward. The national movement has not been immune to the same dynamic. Too often, the struggle for the people has transformed into identification with the movement itself — with the party, the subculture, the community of the initiated. When nationalists start wishing their own people ill because they “vote wrong” or “don’t understand,” they have in practice switched in-groups. They have done exactly what they criticize the Left for: put their own group’s self-image ahead of those they claim to fight for.

This is nationalism’s constant temptation: to let the struggle become more important than the goal, to let the bitterness over the people’s indifference transform into contempt. But a people that despises its people has lost its right to speak in their name. Those who truly love their people must love them as they are, not as they wish them to be.

Finally, our task is not to “raise the consciousness level” of the population to some post-conventional ideal. That would be both arrogant and unrealistic. The task is to offer a positive, cohesive identity that can give meaning and belonging to ordinary people who live their lives the way most people always have: through community with those who share their language, their memories, their fate.

The nation is not a stage to outgrow. It is the natural framework for human coexistence at scale, confirmed by both evolutionary psychology and historical experience. Our work is to restore it.

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