Left Brain, Right Brain, Who’s the Master?

Published my first Substack today 🤗

Link to Audio Version

Welcome to Dr Bob’s Ruminations, where I explore the unseen patterns shaping our minds, our politics, and our future. Today we’re going to dive into something both philosophical and deeply practical: how the structure of our brains might explain the current crisis in American politics – and what we can do about it.

This episode is inspired by the work of psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist, whose books The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things offer a profound framework for understanding how the left and right hemispheres of our brain shape the way we see the world.

But this isn’t just neuroscience. It’s also about Trump, Elon Musk, DOGE, Project 2025, and how we might reclaim the cultural and political imagination of the United States.

The Brain’s Two Worlds

Let’s start with McGilchrist’s core idea. The left and right hemispheres of the brain aren’t just responsible for different tasks—they offer fundamentally different ways of attending to the world.

The left hemisphere gives us narrow, focused attention. It analyzes, categorizes, and seeks control. It likes certainty, abstraction, and simplification.

The right hemisphere gives us broad, open attention. It sees things in context. It understands relationship, emotion, metaphor, and the interconnectedness of life.

McGilchrist argues that in the modern West, we’ve become trapped in a left-hemisphere worldview. We prioritize efficiency over empathy, quantity over quality, and control over connection. And that imbalance is playing out right now in our politics.

The Left Hemisphere in Power – Trump, Musk, DOGE, and Project 2025

Let’s talk about how this left-brain dominance shows up in the current political landscape.

President Trump’s creation of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, led by Elon Musk, is a textbook example of left-hemisphere thinking: reduce, restructure, cut, control. The emphasis is on measurable outcomes, rapid decision-making, and elimination of what’s seen as unnecessary complexity.

Project 2025 follows the same pattern. It proposes dismantling key government institutions and replacing them with streamlined, centralized structures.

But here’s the problem. These changes are being made with an almost exclusive focus on function, ignoring meaning. There’s little regard for the human, relational, and moral consequences. We’re treating the country like a machine, not a living system.

And this isn’t just a political issue. It’s a psychological one. It reflects a worldview in which control is valued more than connection.

Elon Musk and the Technocratic Imagination

Let’s take a closer look at Musk. He’s a visionary, no doubt. But in the DOGE role, he brings with him a tech-world mindset that aligns perfectly with left-brain dominance: optimization, automation, reduction.

And now, there are growing concerns about conflicts of interest between his federal role and private business dealings, especially with global actors like China. This again highlights a split: a technocratic vision of the future that values innovation over integrity, speed over context.

In McGilchrist’s terms, this is what happens when the “emissary” – the left hemisphere – believes it knows better than the “master” – the right hemisphere. The part takes over the whole. The model replaces reality.

Peter Thiel and the Ideology of Control

We also need to talk about Peter Thiel. Thiel is not just a tech investor; he’s an ideologue who has poured resources into reshaping American governance toward a model that emphasizes hierarchy, control, and efficiency—a distinctly left-hemisphere vision of political power.

Thiel’s funding of candidates like JD Vance and think tanks aligns with a worldview that sees liberal democracy as inefficient, and seeks to replace deliberation with direction, messiness with order. His techno-libertarian ideology is deeply skeptical of public institutions and romanticizes the idea of a small group of “rational actors” making decisions for the many.

This matches McGilchrist’s warning: when the left hemisphere dominates, it seeks to simplify, control, and abstract away the messiness of lived reality. In Thiel’s world, complexity is a problem to be engineered away—not a human reality to be embraced. And his influence is growing in both political and cultural spheres.

Thiel is also heavily influenced by the French philosopher René Girard, who mentored him at Stanford. Girard’s theory of mimetic desire—that humans unconsciously imitate each other’s desires, leading to rivalry, scapegoating, and violence—deeply shaped Thiel’s worldview. He sees social dynamics not as collaborative but as fundamentally competitive, fragile, and prone to collapse.

Thiel’s network of protégés and allies—spanning tech, finance, and political consultancy—carries this Girardian vision forward. It fuels a kind of anticipatory authoritarianism: if rivalry and breakdown are inevitable, then control must be seized before chaos erupts. This outlook not only justifies elite power but sees it as a stabilizing force in an irrational world.

But again, this is left-brain logic applied to human culture. It’s reactive, strategic, reductionist. It misses the possibility of transcendence, of healing through relationship, of building systems rooted not in fear of collapse but in trust and mutual care.

Scapegoating and the Girardian Mechanism

René Girard’s most powerful insight may be the role of the scapegoat mechanism in human society. When tensions, rivalries, and mimetic conflicts escalate, communities unconsciously resolve the crisis by projecting collective blame onto a single figure or group. This scapegoat is then excluded or destroyed, restoring a false sense of unity and order.

This mechanism, according to Girard, is the root of myth, ritual, and even the foundations of civilization. But it is also dangerous. It hides the truth of human violence behind a veil of moral justification.

In our modern politics, scapegoating is rampant—whether it’s immigrants, journalists, academics, or entire political parties. It is a deeply left-hemisphere strategy: reduce complexity to a simple villain, externalize blame, and assert control through exclusion.
Thiel and others in his orbit, knowingly or not, make use of this mechanism. The language of existential threat—”deep state,” “enemy of the people,” “globalist elites”—all primes the public for scapegoating, feeding mimetic rivalries instead of resolving them.
A right-hemisphere response would seek integration rather than exclusion, reconciliation rather than retribution. It would expose the scapegoat mechanism for what it is: a false cure for a deeper relational crisis.

Understanding this Girardian dynamic is essential if we want to build a politics that doesn’t just shift blame, but transforms conflict into shared purpose.

How We Can Respond

So, what can we do?

First, stop speaking only in facts, policies, and bullet points. That’s left-brain territory, and the right already dominates that space through control of narrative structure.

Instead, we need to reclaim meaning, story, and relationship.

• Tell human stories, not just policy stats. Show what healthcare, climate action, or public education means in people’s lives.
• Lead with values – not just what we’re against, but what we stand for: dignity, connection, interdependence.
• Revive community. Organize locally. Build presence, not just resistance.
• Reclaim tradition in our own terms: stewardship, sacredness of the land, intergenerational care.

This is right-hemisphere politics. It’s about depth, context, and coherence. It’s about people, not programs. Wholeness, not fragmentation.

A New Political Imagination

If the left hemisphere has taken control of our culture’s mind, the solution isn’t to destroy it. We need both hemispheres. We need reason and feeling, analysis and presence.

But we must restore the master to its rightful place: the hemisphere that sees the whole, that understands meaning, beauty, and the sacred.

Politics is downstream from culture. And culture is downstream from how we attend to the world. Change begins with attention.

I hope you found this conversation insigtful and helpful. Please share it with a friend. Let’s keep asking deeper questions. Let’s imagine a politics of presence.