I’ve always been interested in the questions of why people do what they do and why people feel and think as they do. Being of a philosophical and scientific orientation, my interest in those questions led me to wander on my own until as a teenager I found and started studying the most philosophically deep schools of thought in economics, linguistics, and some of the other sciences of human action and the human mind.

To my surprise, though, it turned out in my experience—I was born and raised in America in the 1990s—that many or even most people that I shared my insights with, whether they were intellectual or not, found my insights uncomfortable. Why? Because they found it uncomfortable to generalize about people.

But the fact of the matter is that science, whether about people or things, is about generalization. To find it uncomfortable to generalize about people is to find it uncomfortable to do science about people. I was shocked, bewildered, at my experience with the people around me, until I looked into the history of the epistemological and methodological controversies in the social sciences. There’s a long history to being uncomfortable generalizing about people—indeed being uncomfortable in that way is natural to the leftist temperament. That revelation led me to take a step back from the debate and look at it from the outside, to go meta. It helped me not only clarify my side of the debate but also stop being shocked that the other side exists.

The leftist infection, which started in the 19th century, spread to the heart of the West after the World Wars, and part and parcel to the leftist temperament is social-science denialism.