Political Psychology

I've been looking for a place to discuss political psychology for a long time.

It's a topic I've been interested in since taking a special topics course in high school that covered crimes against humanity. One of my favorite teachers taught the course, and even though it's been almost 2 decades since I took his class, as an adult, I've realized that he taught more than just historical facts and dates.He taught us how to think critically, how to spot disinformation, and how to recognize the same tactics that have been used throughout history to exert control over narratives and large populations of people.

Sadly, it's become quite a useful skill to have. It's not an intuitive skill for most people, and certainly not one I would have had if it hadn't been for him. It's usually a skill you only learn through either education or the experience of living through it. I consider myself lucky to be in the former category, but the older I get the more I find myself recognizing things that let me know society is not headed in a promising direction.

So, I hope I can share some interesting topics and maybe help more people recognize the patterns of human behavior that seem to loop endlessly throughout history.

I think it might be best to start on a note that examines the shared psychological scar that typically follows surviving repeated trauma in both survivors of authoritarian regimes and domestic abuse. For that, there's no better place to start than the work of Judith Herman.

The main post is a link to a PDF of Herman's 1992 work distinguishing between PTSD following a single traumatic event and complex PTSD following exposure to repeated traumatic events.