Just Make It Stop.
Personal behaviour under pressure and those who sell relief.
The last few pieces on markets and pricing have tracked what happens when the physical market finally overwhelms the paper one. The financial market trades words. The physical market trades barrels, and there have been fewer of those regardless of what anybody said. Once the pipeline emptied and the ships that were at sea when the war began had delivered their last cargoes, the lag closed. The price caught up with reality.
Now watch what it does to people.
The Pivot
When Iranian protesters were being killed in their tens of thousands, a particular kind of Western voice was very loud about it. Something must be done. The regime is barbaric. We cannot look away. Free of personal cost, the conviction held beautifully.
Hormuz shuts. Fuel gets expensive. Holidays are cancelled. The position evaporates. The Americans are being too aggressive. Iran has legitimate grievances. The regime that was barbaric in March turns out, by April, to have concerns that deserve respect. What changed was not the regime. What changed was the bill.
Call it hypocrisy if you want. That framing is satisfying but it misses what’s actually happening, which is more interesting and considerably more depressing.
Distance Collapses
When something bad is happening far away, we think about it in the broadest possible terms. Values. Principles. What kind of world we want to live in. This is not nobility. It is what the brain does when the cost of a position is hypothetical. The Iranian protesters were a problem at the level of human rights and regime accountability. Cheap to hold, easy to perform, available at no personal expense whatsoever.
The moment the same event lands as a figure on an energy bill, the brain stops thinking in principles and starts thinking in prices. Trope and Liberman mapped this with some precision - the farther removed something is from direct personal experience, the more abstractly we represent it to ourselves, and the moment it gets close, the abstract collapses into the concrete. The moral geometry hasn’t moved. The distance has. Proximity reprices everything, and it does it fast.
Analysis Yields
It moves fast partly because stress makes it move fast. Stanovich and West’s foundational work on dual-process cognition, later developed by Kahneman, maps the architecture - two systems running in parallel. One is slow, deliberative and effortful, the system that builds consistent positions across time, weighs new evidence against prior commitments, and holds a coherent view on Iran for eighteen months. The other is fast, automatic and cheap to run.
Under normal conditions the slow system governs. Under pressure, it doesn’t. Deliberative cognition is metabolically and cognitively expensive. Stress degrades the resources it runs on. When those resources fall below a threshold, the fast system takes over and it has no interest in consistency. It is not looking for the right answer. It is looking for the fastest exit from discomfort. Whatever heuristic is most available gets applied. Whatever position reduces the immediate anxiety gets adopted.
The person who lost their Iran view didn’t reason their way to a new one. Reasoning requires the slow system. The slow system was no longer available. Something faster and considerably less fastidious took the traffic instead.
The Credit Runs Out
There is a third dynamic. The vocal support for Iranian protesters was a moral credential, publicly performed. Merritt, Effron and Monin showed that past good conduct creates an implicit permission structure for subsequent retreat - the psychological profit and loss account registered a credit when the position was taken, and that credit is now being drawn down. The licence was earned in the cheap phase and is being spent in the expensive one. The behaviour changes. The self-image does not have to.
Put those three dynamics together and what you have is not a population of hypocrites but a population of people doing exactly what stressed mammals do when a cost becomes personal. The spread between the declared principle and the actual pain tolerance has been measured and found to be thin.
The Comfort Sellers
The Iran pivot is the acute version. Something slower and stranger is happening across the electorate.
People are frightened. Not the sharp directional kind of frightened that produces anger and action, but the low, exhausting kind that produces a desperate wish for everything to go back to the normal of the past. The cumulative weight of energy disruption, inflation, institutional decay and geopolitical instability has crossed whatever threshold separates manageable anxiety from the active craving for someone to just fix it. Rational people look for levers. Most people are not currently being rational in the broader sense but they are being very rational in trying to solve for a different problem - immediate pain.
This is where Greenberg, Pyszczynski and Solomon are worth knowing about. Under genuine existential threat, people do not sharpen up. They reach for worldviews that make the threat feel contained. They warm to whoever promises restoration. They become substantially less interested in whether the route is coherent than in whether the destination sounds like relief.
What the UK’s Liberal Democrats and the Green Party are selling is not a policy platform. It is an anxiety buffer with a rosette on it. The Lib Dems offer a universe where everything can be sorted out if enough people are reasonable. The Greens offer one where redistribution and the right choices lead somewhere safe. Both are selling the same assurance - that the chaos is the result of bad decisions, that better decisions by better people will restore the equilibrium and that voting for them is the first step back to lovely. The fact that their polling is going up at all, given the distance between what they offer and what is physically deliverable, tells you precisely how frightened people are.
The Greens carry an additional product that the Lib Dems do not - a fear that was deliberately installed, operates on a timescale beyond any individual lifetime and cannot be falsified by any evidence most people will live to see. The structural resemblance to religion is not coincidental.
Stress has moved people out of deliberation and into intuition. The intuitive mode does not interrogate the route. It asks only whether relief is on offer. It is on offer, as a promise rather than a deliverable, and they are taking it.
Loss aversion explains the price people are willing to pay. Losing a level of comfort already held hurts roughly twice as much as an equivalent gain would please. Once security and predictability become part of someone’s reference point, the threat of losing them produces a response disproportionate to the objective scale of the loss. People will overpay to retrieve what they had. They will pay in rationality, in consistency and in the currency of convictions they held with apparent firmness less than six weeks ago.
The Same Product, Different Channel
The telephone scammer who calls a frightened person and offers, for a modest fee, to make a threatening situation disappear is running the same basic neural circuit.
“We have detected fraudulent activity on your account” - Boom. Stress levels sky-rocket and rational behaviour evaporates, to be replaced by a malleable mind looking for a saviour.
The offer is implausible and the fee is unreasonable. In calm conditions it would be laughed at. Under stress, with the analytical architecture already degraded, it gets traction. The production budget differs from a party political broadcast, the legal status differs but the product is identical.
The people pivoting on Iran are not bad people. The people polling for comfort parties are not stupid people. They are people in whom a predictable sequence of events has run - the chaos landed, the cost became personal, the deliberative system yielded and the nearest available exit was taken. The situation did the work.
The Spread Goes Negative
The Sin Spread series has been measuring this from the start - the gap between what people say they will sacrifice for a conviction and what they will actually absorb when the bill lands. That spread is now being measured in real time, across an entire population, by the same event.
The political and diplomatic environment is being shaped not by what people believe but by what they can afford to keep believing. The comfort-sellers have the largest addressable market they have had in a generation. The positions held six weeks ago, on Iran, on energy, on what kind of political offer was even worth considering, are being repriced at a rate of knots.
The physical market took five weeks to catch up with reality. The psychological market is quicker and considerably cheaper to move.