Politics & Power Quote by Steven Pinker

Pinker is poking at a very contemporary reflex: the way “the facts” can feel less like information and more like an ambush. The sentence is engineered to sound mild, almost therapeutic (“sometimes,” “seem to clash”), but the intent is sharper. He’s not just describing discomfort; he’s diagnosing a cognitive habit. The target isn’t ignorance so much as unexamined ideology - the mental wiring that makes certain empirical results register as moral threats.

The key move is his quiet demotion of politics from reasoned position to “assumptions.” That word choice reframes political identity as a set of background settings people forget they’re running. When a study contradicts the settings, the reaction is affective first: recoil, defensiveness, motivated skepticism. Pinker’s subtext: this isn’t a failure of data literacy alone; it’s a failure of conceptual bookkeeping. If you can’t articulate how your values connect to your beliefs about the world, you can’t tell the difference between a factual dispute and a normative one.

The context is Pinker’s larger project: defending Enlightenment-style empiricism against what he sees as tribal, identity-protective reasoning in public discourse. He’s also preemptively answering critics who accuse him (and scientists like him) of political naivete or covert ideology: if evidence feels politically “dangerous,” maybe the politics was built on poorly inspected premises. It’s a provocation disguised as a calm observation, inviting readers to do the one thing social media punishes: slow down and trace the wiring.