Personality disorders explain the 'Palestine' obsession.

Traits typically recognized as disordered (such as splitting, narcissism, hysteria, and cruelty) are now celebrated as moral virtues in activist culture, with "Palestine" as their perfect stage.

photo: حسن/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Lucy Tabrizi, who writes about politics, philosophy, religion, ethics, and history.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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I can’t help but notice that behaviours considered toxic in personal relationships are paraded as virtues in today’s activist culture: manipulation, black-and-white thinking, hysteria, gaslighting, violent outbursts.

Psychologists group these under the Cluster B personality disorders: borderline, narcissistic, histrionic, and antisocial.

Studies estimate that roughly one in ten people meet criteria for a Cluster B disorder at some point, with borderline alone affecting about 1-to-2 per cent of adults¹. These are not fringe traits; most people encounter them in daily life. Their hallmarks of volatility, splitting, and theatricality seep into culture, where politics legitimises them as “passion,” “authenticity,” or “speaking truth to power.”

I recognise it because I lived inside it. As a young adult, my volatile energy latched onto the grand mission of “saving the world” and “defending the vulnerable.” The chaos inside finally had a cause, which made me the perfect candidate for Left-wing activism. I threw myself in headlong, and for a long time there was no exit, only escalation. Then, just in time, I found the off-ramp and shed the activist identity along with the warped perspective that sustained it.

What I learned is that, while the goals often sound noble, much of “progressive” activism is shaped by a distorted lens. In that distortion, it harms the very people and causes it claims to defend. And that is the tragedy: Urgent problems that demand serious solutions are squandered by movements dragging their unresolved baggage into every cause.

That is why I can write about this with conviction. To me, it isn’t just politics; it’s pathology scaled up to the collective. Cluster B diagnoses are clinically recognised disorders, rooted in trauma rather than ideology. They cause real suffering for those who live with them and those around them, and deserve compassion and treatment, not stigma. My concern is how traits once recognised as disordered are now normalised and rewarded in activist culture.

Here’s how the four Cluster B disorders map onto the traits that now define today’s activist movements.

Borderline Personality Disorder

Borderline Personality Disorder is characterised by unstable self-image, frantic attempts to avoid abandonment, dramatic mood swings, chronic emptiness, and relationships that veer between idealisation and devaluation. At its heart is splitting, the inability to recognise complexity in people or groups, reducing them instead to all good or all bad.

You see this not only in how activists frame conflicts, but in how they classify people. The world is divided into “oppressors” and “oppressed,” with no room for nuance. It is the old Marxist script of proletariat versus bourgeoisie — recycled in climate, gender, and racial activism.

Nowhere is it more obvious than in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, where Palestinians are cast as wholly innocent and Israelis as wholly evil. Any attempt at complexity — acknowledging Hamas atrocities, recognising Palestinian agency in their own political choices, or noting the ingenuity of the Jewish People — is condemned as betrayal. This is textbook splitting.

Splitting makes for tumultuous personal relationships, and when scaled up into politics it corrodes entire movements. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in his book “The Righteous Mind,” describes how our moral intuitions often push us to divide the world into saints and sinners long before reason weighs in². On the Far-Left, this reflex has become orthodoxy. It blocks the reason that should follow, leaving only binaries of victimhood and villainy.

Borderline Personality Disorder also involves unstable identity. In activism, this appears in movements constantly reinventing themselves, swapping slogans, symbols, and even causes as if trying on outfits. In 2020 it was Black Lives Matter, yesterday climate, today “Palestine,” tomorrow something else. Each is invested with the same apocalyptic urgency: Act now or civilisation collapses. The churn never stops because the movement’s sense of self is too fragile to hold steady.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Narcissistic Personality Disorder is defined by inflated self-importance, a constant need for admiration, and hypersensitivity to criticism. The narcissist lives for attention, so their worth depends on endless validation, and the absence of praise feels like attack.

In activist culture, this becomes relentless demands for affirmation. Every post, conversation, and silence is policed. “Silence is violence” is the ethos, not because activists want dialogue, but because neutrality or dissent feels intolerable. Praise is treated as the minimum, while critique, however reasoned, is cast as complicity or malice.

A meta-analysis found consistent links between social media use and narcissistic traits, underscoring how platforms reward the very tendencies that demand constant validation. Survey data likewise show liberals are more likely than conservatives to block or unfriend over political disagreement, pointing to lower tolerance for dissent.³

The pro-Palestinian movement, again, offers the clearest example. It has inflated itself into the moral centre of the universe, despite Palestinians making up less than 1 per cent of those facing humanitarian crises worldwide⁴. Headlines, marches, hashtags, and UN resolutions make it the omni-cause dominating global conversation. Yet activists still insist it is being “ignored.” In what parallel universe is “Palestine” being ignored? The endless hunger for validation, paired with fury at the faintest pushback, is collective narcissism on display.

Like the narcissist in a relationship, activist movements test loyalty at every turn. Support must be absolute. Even a pause or a question is marked as betrayal. The cause is never just supported; it must be adored.

Antisocial Personality Disorder

Marked by disregard for the rights of others, lack of empathy, and a readiness to violate norms, antisocial personality disorder is defined by cruelty rationalised as necessary or even virtuous.

In politics, the pattern is unmistakable. Behaviours condemned in daily life — harassment, intimidation, even violence — are reframed as righteous “resistance.” Calls for intifada, chants celebrating massacres, or mobs chasing Jewish students into libraries all unfold in a culture where slogans like “if you aren’t angry, you aren’t paying attention” serve as moral licence.

Research has found that liberals showed less empathy toward conservatives than conservatives did toward liberals, especially when the conservative target was seen as morally objectionable⁵. When ideology collides, compassion collapses.

What would get you shunned in ordinary life is valorised on the activist stage. Tearing down posters of kidnapped children, trampling a memorial, or applauding terrorism are suddenly framed as moral acts. This is antisocial behaviour posing as political principle.

Histrionic Personality Disorder

Histrionic Personality Disorder is characterised by excessive emotionality, constant attention-seeking, dramatic behaviour, and a tendency to turn even ordinary events into spectacle. People with Histrionic Personality Disorder thrive on being seen, and will often exaggerate or dramatise to hold the spotlight.

In activist culture, politics has devolved into performance art. Outbursts replace argument, and protests become choreographed melodramas: fake blood on monuments, die-ins in city squares, chants designed not to convince but to intimidate. The aim is domination through emotional noise. Extinction Rebellion’s own reports openly describe disruption as “symbolic spectacle,” confirming that the goal is not persuasion but theatre.

This is less about justice than about the stage. Activism becomes perpetual drama: Extinction Rebellion blocks highways, Black Lives Matter riots burn neighbourhoods, climate protesters hurl soup at paintings. Such spectacles draw crowds not to solve problems but to revel in chaos.

So, when people say “leftism is a mental disorder,” it sounds like a cheap shot (and often is), yet given how closely activist behaviour mirrors the diagnostic criteria, it isn’t entirely wrong. The emotional volatility, unstable identity, and moral splitting on display are hallmarks of Cluster B disorders. And calling it out achieves about as much as confronting a manipulative partner in the middle of a fight.

That pathology explains the carnival of contradictions that follow. The crowd who insists words are violence will cheer an assassination. The feminists who rage against “toxic masculinity” chant for regimes that stone women and kill rape victims for “honour.” The activists who demand safe spaces and trigger warnings hail jihadist terror as “resistance.” They turn a blind eye to real genocides while screaming about imaginary ones. They shout the loudest about unity while perfecting the art of division.

Cluster B diagnoses, especially Borderline Personality Disorder, skew female in clinical samples: The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders notes roughly three-quarters of Borderline Personality Disorder diagnoses are in women (though some debate ascertainment bias). That reality echoes the culture of many activist spaces, which are female-dominated and tend to reward performative intensity, emotional absolutism, and loyalty tests as moral signals.

Schools reinforce this skew. Teaching is heavily female, especially in the formative years that shape norms and behaviour. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s 2023 “Education at a Glance” confirms that women make up about 82 percent of primary teachers across OECD countries.

At the same time, curricula have shifted toward “social-emotional” learning, training children to process feelings as central to education. Layer onto that the fact that girls consistently outperform boys in reading, while reporting higher anxiety, and you get an education system that privileges the emotional register over the rational.

It’s in this context that many activist spaces normalise emotional excess and theatricality as political virtues. Behaviours once recognised as disordered are reframed as a kind of feminine moral authority.

This is not a critique of women or of feminism. The female overrepresentation in both diagnoses and teaching reflects deeper social and cultural forces, not some inherent flaw in women. Trauma, abandonment, and unstable attachments are the roots of these disorders. They require structured treatment such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Schema Therapy, or Mentalization-Based Therapy, and in some cases, medication.

Cluster B traits may be survivable in a family or workplace (though often destructive), but scaled up into mass politics, they corrode truth, dialogue, and even basic reality. This is why so much of modern activism feels unmoored from reality: It is unmoored. Behaviours psychologists define as disordered are rewarded with likes, funding, institutional backing, and media platforming. The pro-Palestinian movement shows it in its starkest form, with splitting, gaslighting, histrionics, and even cruelty all repackaged as “justice.” The dynamic doesn’t define “progressive” movements, but it has become mainstream enough to shape their tone and tactics.

When movements reward pathology, they can mobilise attention, but not solutions. Politics built on these foundations not only fails to achieve its goals, but leaves scorched earth behind, deepening division instead of healing it.

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1. American Psychiatric Association (2013). “DSM-5. BPD prevalence ~1–2%. See also Lenzenweger” (2008), Biological Psychiatry; Grant et al. (2008), J Clin Psychiatry.

2. Haidt, J. (2012). “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.” Pantheon Books.

3. Pew Research Center (2019). “U.S. Public Divides Over Social Media and Politics.”

4. UNOCHA, “Global Humanitarian Overview 2023.” Estimated 305 million people in need worldwide; Gaza population ~2 million.

5. Wojcik, S. P., et al. (2025). “Ideological asymmetries in empathy.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.