Morality binds and blinds: Applying Haidt’s framework to NPP’s political psychology – Part 1

The NPP’s shift under AKD is not just ideological, but psychological: a move from reform to ritual

The NPP’s shift under AKD reveals not just a political turn, but a moral one. Haidt’s insights show how movements bound by sacred values can become blind to contradiction. What was reform has become ritual. Logic yields to loyalty; dissent becomes betrayal. In this sanctified echo chamber, betrayal no longer shouts — it whispers. And the faithful, caught in moral trance, mistake it for virtue.

1. Introduction — Dark energy and moral drift: The quiet unravelling of the NPP

In 2011, Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for uncovering one of the universe’s most unsettling truths: the cosmos is not merely expanding, but accelerating outward — propelled by an invisible force known as dark energy1. This force does not erupt or shatter; it pushes. Quietly. Relentlessly. It drives galaxies apart not with sound and fury, but with an inaudible, gravitational repulsion.

That discovery was cosmological. Yet its metaphorical resonance reaches deeply into the moral and political fabric of Sri Lanka today.

Political movements, like galaxies, are held together not by mass, but by moral gravity — shared purpose, ideological coherence, and public trust. When those bonds weaken — when promises fade, principles shift, and critique is deflected — the result is not necessarily collapse, but drift. What was once warmth becomes estrangement. Loyalty thins. Applause fades.

This is the quiet fate now confronting the National People’s Power (NPP) under Anura Kumara Dissanayake.

Once tethered by righteous dissent and fuelled by populist energy, the movement now seems governed by its own form of political dark energy — an accelerating separation between its leadership and those who once orbited its moral centre. There is no visible storm. Only distance. And disillusionment.

Just as Riess revealed that even the grandest galaxies are fated to part, the NPP reminds us: in politics, as in space, the loudest endings often begin in silence — and end in cold, unlit retreat.

2. The chimaera within: NPP’s mutational politics

In my two-part series published in the Daily Financial Times, I analysed the early trajectory of the National People’s Power (NPP) under Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s leadership. I argued that the transformation of its progenitor, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), since 2019 was not evolutionary but mutational2. What once resembled a butterfly emerging from a cocoon now evokes a darker metaphor — the chimaera.

Drawn from Greek mythology, the Chimaera of Lycia was a grotesque fusion of lion, goat, and serpent — a hybrid whose discordant anatomy mirrors the NPP’s ideological composition. The lion’s head, once a symbol of militant defiance against capitalist hegemony, now functions as a rhetorical mask: projecting resolve while concealing retreat from core principles. Behind it juts the goat’s head — a nostalgic remnant of the party’s grassroots socialist past. Though muffled, it hums familiar tunes to a dwindling base, offering comfort as substance fades.

But it is the serpent’s head, coiled and alert at the tail, that best captures the NPP’s current trajectory. It speaks fluently in the idioms of globalisation, technocratic efficiency, defence cooperation, and neoliberal reform3. This pivot has not occurred in a vacuum. The serpent slithers within the authoritarian architecture laid down by J.R. Jayewardene — drawing on institutions like the Police, the PTA, and the Attorney General’s Department to consolidate power and discipline dissent. The Attorney General now acts less as steward of justice than as a political shield — burying corruption, excusing abuses, and sanitising the lawlessness of the president and his ministers. The Supreme Court remains a fragile bulwark, forced to navigate this landscape with caution. What we are witnessing is not mere hybridity, but a political machinery engineered for centralised control.

3. Ideological drift: From rebellion to realignment

The JVP’s six-decade metamorphosis culminates not in rupture, but in fulfilment—a slow mutation from insurrection to institutionalism. To grasp the NPP’s current moral psychology, one must trace its ideological DNA—from the thatched-roof gatherings of 1965 to the glass-panelled boardrooms of 2025.

On 14 March 1965, seven young men gathered in Akmeemana under Rohana Wijeweera, launching a movement rooted in class struggle and Marxist vision. This ideology sparked the 1971 insurrection and endured underground through the 1980s. By 1989, after a brutal counterinsurgency, most of its leadership had been eliminated, with places like Batalanda and Matale etched into memory as sites of torture.

In 1994, the JVP re-entered democratic politics. By 2022, amid the collapse of the Gotabaya Rajapaksa regime, Anura Kumara Dissanayake (AKD) emerged as a beacon for disillusioned citizens. The Aragalaya moment opened political space, and the NPP seized it—only to repeat some of the same political manoeuvres it once condemned4.

From 2019, the JVP shed its revolutionary skin, rebranding as the NPP. Out went the red shirts and ringing bells; in came the purple compass and the rallying cry “Malimawata Jayawewa!” But beneath the stylistic shift lies a strategic accommodation: a move from Marxist orthodoxy to IMF-friendly capitalism. What was once a vanguard of socialist transformation now mimicking the very frameworks it pledged to dismantle.

Despite the rhetoric of justice and reform, critical gaps remain. The NPP’s manifesto offered little substantive economic divergence. Questions of accountability—like Batalanda and Matale—remain untouched, especially with figures like Ranil Wickremesinghe still influential5. The transformation, rather than a leap forward, resembles a quiet surrender of moral clarity for electoral viability.

3.2 From promise to parody: A moral reversal

On 14 March 2025, at the 60th anniversary of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), Anura Kumara Dissanayake (AKD) addressed a vast crowd at Victoria Park, Colombo. He spoke with trademark confidence, though recent electoral setbacks lent a quieter undertone. “We are moving forward by learning our lessons,” he declared, insisting the public’s trust remained unbroken — despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

The crowd erupted in applause with each defiant phrase. For many, this was not a moment of reckoning, but of reaffirmation. The speech offered reassurance, not reflection — emotional resonance over empirical truth.

The electorate had treated AKD’s promises as Rubicon crossings — moral commitments beyond retreat. Many, perhaps unconsciously, likened him to Ibrahim Traoré, the bold young leader of Burkina Faso who had seized power with anti-colonial resolve and promises of radical change. Unaware of the movement’s altered face, voters placed their hopes in decisive leadership and collective will.

Yet barely a month into power, those promises lay in ruins — sacrificed to political expediency. The betrayal was swift6.

Still, on that March Day, thousands gathered again to celebrate the party and its leader — as if nothing had changed.

This enduring loyalty puzzled me — until I revisited The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt7. His framework offers not just an explanation, but a lens to understand the NPP’s transformation — and its followers’ fidelity.

To grasp this paradox, we must turn to Haidt’s concept of the moral matrix: how moral systems bind communities and blind them to contradiction.

4. Jonathan Haidt’s moral matrix: Why we bind, why we blind

Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion offers a compelling framework for understanding why political movements evolve as they do — and why their supporters remain loyal even in the face of contradiction.

While a full-scale application of Haidt’s moral psychology to the National People’s Power (NPP) and AKD’s regime would be complex, that is not the aim here. Rather, I offer a selective glimpse into how Haidt’s insights help us make sense of some troubling dynamics in Sri Lanka today.

Haidt distils his approach into three principles: Intuition Comes First, Strategic Reasoning Second; Morality Is About More Than Harm and Fairness; and Morality Binds and Blinds.

At the heart of his model is the metaphor of the mind as an elephant and a rider. The rider represents conscious reasoning, but the elephant — the other 99% of mental processes — governs most behaviour. “The mind is like a rider on an elephant: the rider’s job is to serve the elephant, not to guide it”8. Moral judgements arise primarily from fast, automatic intuitions, while reasoning justifies them after the fact.

According to Haidt’s Social Intuitionist Model, we do not reach moral truths through dispassionate logic. We make intuitive judgements, then use reason to defend them — to ourselves and to others9.

Crucially, Haidt argues that morality plays a dual role: it binds individuals into cohesive moral communities, but also blinds them to dissonant information or alternative views10.

Seen through this lens, President AKD’s World Environment Day address in Kegalle is revealing. The evolving treatment of the public sector under the NPP exemplifies what Haidt describes as morality’s capacity to bind and blind11. Having once morally bound the state sector to its campaign — with promises of dignity, wage hikes, and ideological validation — the NPP now seeks to blind both itself and its followers to that past alliance.

As IMF pressures grow and public sector downsizing looms, a new narrative is being crafted: public servants, once hailed as partners, are recast as obstacles. This was evident when President Dissanayake warned officials to “change or be made to change,” portraying them not just as inefficient, but as morally wayward — failing to embody the NPP’s virtuous mission.

This moral reframing signals to the base that former allies can now be sacrificed for the greater good. It functions as a blinding mechanism — allowing the leadership and its supporters to justify coming retrenchments and the erosion of public services they once vowed to protect. As Haidt notes, morality binds groups with shared purpose, but blinds them by enabling the convenient rebranding of allies as adversaries12.

By fuelling resentment against the very state workers who helped it ascend, the NPP preserves its legitimacy while redirecting blame onto internal scapegoats. In doing so, it sanctifies the in-group and evades the uncomfortable reckoning that true moral reflection would demand. As Haidt warns, such moral communities risk turning from engines of reform into echo chambers — where betrayal is recast as virtue, and inconvenient truths are erased13.

5. The drift into moral absolutism

This shift reflects a deeper transformation in the NPP’s moral psychology. Movements born in rational critique often harden into moral tribes, where disagreement is seen as disloyalty and inconvenient truths as sabotage. The NPP’s narrative — once dynamic and reformist — now risks hardening into moral absolutism, where allegiance replaces accountability and loyalty eclipses logic. What began as a vehicle for transformation is drifting toward performance, ritual, and myth — a political faith sustained less by scrutiny than sanctification.

Jonathan Haidt challenges the Enlightenment belief that humans are primarily rational. He argues moral judgement arises not from logic but from fast, emotionally charged intuitions shaped by evolution. Reason, in this account, is not the driver but the press secretary — justifying intuitions after the fact14. This helps explain why NPP critics are so readily branded traitors, elitists, or saboteurs. In a moral tribe, dissent is not just disagreement — it is heresy. Reason holds little sway when sacred values feel endangered15. If political behaviour stems from moral intuition, the question is not why contradictions are ignored — but how they are absorbed within a shared moral ecosystem. The NPP’s shift is not just ideological; it is architectural. It binds adherents through sacred values, blinds them to contradiction, and repels scrutiny. Even internal critics risk moral excommunication. As Haidt notes, dissent becomes heresy when sacred values are threatened16. To grasp the next phase of this psychology, we must examine its echo chamber — a moral soundscape that shields the faithful and silences doubt.

Conclusion

Haidt’s framework reveals how political movements are shaped by moral forces that bind and blind. The NPP’s shift under AKD is not just ideological, but psychological: a move from reform to ritual. As dissent turns to heresy and loyalty trumps logic, we are drawn toward a deeper question — not only how moral conviction shapes action, but how it builds echo chambers that silence doubt and sanctify contradiction.

Footnotes:

1NobelPrize.org. (2011). “The Nobel Prize in Physics 2011.”

2Jayalath Bandara Adikarige, Political Alchemy: From Messiah to Machinery – Rise and Mutation of AKD (Part 1, Daily FT, 30 April 2025. Newtonian Physics, traditional biology, and Sri Lankan politics-Part 2, Daily FT, May 01, 2025.

3The 2025 national budget on 17 February 2025 and Shihar Aneez, Sri Lanka’s Defence Cooperation MoU with India, Economy Next, May 15, 2025. 

4Jayalath Bandara Adikarige, Daily FT, 30 April 202, and Daily FT, May 01, 2025. 

5Ibid.

6ibid.

7Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (London: Penguin Books, 2013) 

8Ibid, p. XV, Chapter 4 and p.291

9ibid, Chapter 4.

10Ibid, Chapter 9, P217 and Chapter 11, p. pp. 315–316. 

11ibid, P. XVI, Part 111 of the book. 

12ibid, Chapter 11, pp. 315-316

13ibid, pp. 292–293

14ibid, chapter 1, pp. 17–18; and chapter 4, pp. 76–78, 

15ibid, Chapter 11, pp. 315–316. 

16ibid, Chapter 9, pp. 253–254 and Chapter 11, pp. 315–316]

(The writer, a former academic at the University of Peradeniya, is a noted expert on Sri Lanka’s political economy. His doctoral research examined the country’s complex ties with the IMF and World Bank from 1960 to 1985, highlighting key economic and ideological shifts. He is currently analysing the political and legal dimensions of Sri Lanka’s decline in upholding the rule of law and judicial independence, framing it within a broader pattern of institutional erosion and executive dominance. He can be reached via: [email protected].)