There’s been a growing number of studies mapping the distribution of personality traits among followers of different ideologies. Movements like LGBT activism, feminism, and the climate crusade tend to attract a disproportionate number of exhibitionists—though not necessarily in a sexual sense. That’s obvious to anyone who’s seen videos from their rallies. But here’s the catch: research also shows that these movements contain a significant number of psychopaths—enough to shape the overall character of the political causes they attach themselves to. I wrote that at the end of September.
The good news is that things may not be as grim as they look at first glance. Studies suggest that the intensity of pathological traits changes over the course of life. It peaks around age twenty, then steadily declines until about sixty, where it levels off. Naturally, this is an average pattern—but it does imply that when we see twenty-year-old activists screaming about the climate or gender, they’re likely going through the most turbulent stage of their psychological development.
That’s probably one reason why interest in climate or gender activism declines with age—alongside life experience and the realization, for some, that these movements don’t actually offer a career path. Of course, there are older activists. But they tend to be exceptions—some life’s failures who never moved on, others serving as “elders” or mentors to the young zealots. And then there are the older women, often driven by maternal pride: they admire their radicalized children. These are the mothers who feel that if their daughter is shouting on a public square and makes it onto television, she’s achieved something wonderful.
Perhaps this also tells us something else: that our nostalgic memories of polite, reasonable young people from previous generations are probably not as realistic as we like to think.