Here is a recent conversation between Dave Rubin and Eric Weinstein. You will find yourself agreeing with some of what they say and disagreeing with some of it.

I did not find Eric persuasive when he compared opening a border to immigrants to allowing a dinner guest to stay in your house forever. I don’t own the land where immigrants reside. They are not my guests to throw out.

I think that we lack the will to enforce immigration law because from an individualistic perspective it feels wrong to do so. When they work for what they get and obey other laws, it’s hard to feel good about throwing them out of the country.

Suppose that we do not think of land in this country as something that we as citizens own collectively. Instead, land is owned by individuals. An immigrant is going to pay rent to an individual landlord. Throwing out that immigrant means that the state breaks a voluntary contract between two individuals, the landlord and the tenant. There may be justifications for doing that, but I don’t think you arrive at those justifications through a metaphor of a guest over-staying.

Eric also said something that was counterintuitive when he said “We need to love them out of their cult.” He supported Bernie Sanders, but he thinks that Sanders has some bad economic ideas. Weinstein says that in general progressives have adopted some bad ideas, but they have good intentions. If we can love their intentions, then perhaps we can coax them away from their bad ideas.

This approach appeals to me. One of my favorite children’s fables is the one about the sun and the wind competing to get a man to take off his coat. The wind blows hard and cold, but that only makes the man pull his coat tighter. The sun bathes the man in warmth, and he removes his coat. I think there is a lesson there for those involved in political conflicts.

But I think that there are complicating factors. Most important, I worry that political anger is fueled by emotional needs, not good intentions. The anger comes from internal demons, a sort of bitterness (self-hatred?) that the individual projects outward.

Suppose that there is a spectrum of personal contentment. At one end of that spectrum there are people who are happy with their lives and comfortable in their skins. They feel gratitude. Many of the conservative and libertarian intellectuals that I regularly follow fit in this category. The folks I know at Reason, at National Review, or in the GMU economics department. At the other end of the spectrum are young men who are so frustrated and angry that they become serial killers.

The politics of anger falls somewhere in between. At the extremes, it might be close to the serial-killer end of the spectrum.

How does anger on the left compare with anger on the right? The following is very speculative.

Think of life contentment as normally distributed, with an upper tail of people who are very grateful and a lower tail of people who are very bitter. Now imagine graphing two distributions of life contentment, one for well-educated, articulate people on the political left and one for well-educated articulate people on the political right. My sense is that while the two distributions would overlap, the distribution of the people on the left would be shifted to the bitter side relative to the people on the right. Again, I am limiting this to the well-educated and articulate.

Getting back to Eric’s idea, my worry is that by the time someone has become bitter and has translated that bitterness into political activism, it is too late to love them out of it. Ideally, one could find a way to prevent or overcome such bitterness in the first place. Failing that, it is important to find a way to channel that bitterness toward areas where it is least destructive. Video games or something.