Robert Wicklund

There's a psychological reason for that.

In nineteen eighty-two, psychologist Robert Wicklund at the University of Texas at Austin wanted to know what happens when people feel like failures.

Not people who just failed once in life.

People who wanted to be something their whole lives and never became that thing.

They dress up as the thing they wanted to be.

They take the shortcut, just like they always do.

Wicklund called this symbolic self-completion.

When you feel like a failure in something that you actually want to be, your brain grabs shortcuts, and we know MAGA is always taking shortcuts and never doing the work.

They didn't see the irony at all.

In nineteen eighty-two, psychologist Robert Wicklund at the University of Texas studied what happens when people fake success they never earned.

Psychologists call this symbolic self-completion.

It's the need to use fake proof of success to feel successful when you're not successful.