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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

When Moral Psychology Becomes a Substitute for Geopolitical Analysis

A critical review of Joseph Dillard's response to three Putin articles

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Joseph Dillard's Moral Identity and the Capacity to Change: Frank Visser, the Drama Triangle, and the Wider Crisis of Adaptive Reorganization is an ambitious attempt to turn a disagreement about Putin's invasion of Ukraine into a more general investigation of moral identity, motivated reasoning, and the ability of individuals and institutions to learn. It is also an essay that illustrates a familiar difficulty in Dillard's approach: the ambition to transcend opposing perspectives sometimes draws attention away from the very asymmetries that a serious analysis needs to explain.

Dillard's strongest argument is that people can become so attached to their moral self-image that they mistake defending their identity for defending the truth. His weakest move is to make that psychological possibility the organizing principle of a discussion in which the central questions are also historical, strategic, legal, and empirical.

The resulting essay is not without merit. Dillard identifies genuine risks in the use of emotionally powerful analogies, acknowledges that Russia's invasion violated Ukrainian sovereignty, and explicitly concedes that his own account may overstate Western causation and underweight Russian agency. Those concessions matter. But they do not resolve the underlying disagreement. Nor does the introduction of Adaptive Reorganization Theory (ART) establish which interpretation of the war is better supported.

The key question is therefore not whether Frank Visser, Joseph Dillard, or Western institutions are susceptible to motivated reasoning. All are. It is whether Dillard applies that insight with sufficient symmetry, evidential discipline, and attention to the actual distribution of responsibility in the Ukraine war.

My verdict is that Dillard offers a worthwhile critique of moral self-certainty, but an incomplete critique of Visser—and an even less complete account of the geopolitical conflict that prompted their disagreement.

1. The first problem: a critique of moral identity is not yet a critique of the argument

Dillard begins with a productive distinction between holding moral commitments and identifying oneself as a morally good person. We can defend freedom while supporting a harmful policy; oppose imperialism while overlooking our own government's imperial conduct; or condemn aggression while resisting evidence that complicates our preferred account of it.

This is a legitimate subject for psychological and political analysis. Dillard is also right that neither a commitment to scientific rationality nor an opposition to Western foreign policy confers immunity from motivated reasoning.

But an important distinction gets blurred as the essay develops: showing that a person might be motivated by moral identity is not the same as showing that the person's argument is mistaken.

Visser's position can be examined without speculating about his psychological needs. Is the domestic-abuse analogy illuminating? Does the Drama Triangle clarify or obscure the relationships between Russia, Ukraine, and Europe? Are the UN voting statistics interpreted correctly? These are questions that can be answered by analyzing arguments and evidence.

Dillard does some of that work, especially regarding the first two essays. Yet he repeatedly moves from the content of Visser's arguments to the possible psychological functions they serve.

His disclaimer that he is not claiming privileged access to Visser's motives is welcome. But a disclaimer cannot eliminate the asymmetry that arises when one author's arguments become an extended case study in moral identity, while the other's receive a more limited examination.

The test is straightforward. If Visser's reasoning is flawed, identify the error. If his analogy exaggerates a similarity, demonstrate where it breaks down. If his interpretation of a historical event is wrong, provide contrary evidence. Psychological explanations can supplement these tasks, but they cannot substitute for them.

Otherwise, the critic risks creating a sophisticated version of the familiar rhetorical maneuver: I need not establish that you are wrong if I can explain why you need to believe you are right.

That is not necessarily Dillard's intention. It is, however, a danger in the structure of his essay.

2. The jealous-husband analogy: emotionally powerful, but not therefore invalid

Dillard's most sustained criticism concerns Visser's comparison of Putin's relationship with Ukraine to that of a possessive husband who cannot accept his partner's independence.

His objection deserves serious consideration. The analogy makes an immediate emotional connection between Putin's actions and domestic abuse. Readers recognize the possessive husband, sympathize with the threatened partner, and may identify with the neighbors who come to help. Once the analogy is established, an argument about Russian security concerns can appear to be an attempt to defend the abuser.

Dillard correctly identifies this risk. He also makes a valuable distinction between the existence of an analogy and the validity of every inference drawn from it. International politics involves sovereign states, military alliances, historical grievances, nuclear deterrence, and competing strategic interests. A domestic relationship cannot adequately model all of these factors.

But Dillard's criticism becomes too sweeping when it implies that the analogy's emotional force undermines its analytical legitimacy.

Analogies are not invalid simply because they evoke emotion. They become misleading when relevant differences are ignored, when a comparison is mistaken for a complete explanation, or when the emotional association is used to settle questions that require independent evidence.

Visser's analogy has a specific purpose: to illuminate the difference between a powerful actor's desire to maintain a relationship and its alleged entitlement to control the other party. Its central point is that shared history, cultural proximity, and a sense of historical ownership do not give Russia a right to determine Ukraine's political future.

That point does not depend on believing that Russia and Ukraine are literally a married couple.

Dillard is right that the analogy cannot settle the entire geopolitical argument. But Visser explicitly acknowledges that limitation and discusses the importance of Russian security concerns. The question, therefore, is whether the analogy illuminates one dimension of the conflict despite its limitations—not whether it can independently establish a complete theory of the war.

Dillard's criticism would be stronger if he demonstrated that the analogy causes Visser to misinterpret specific evidence. Instead, he largely argues that it creates a psychological atmosphere in which disagreement becomes morally suspect.

That is a plausible observation about how rhetoric can work. It is not a demonstration that the rhetoric is fundamentally misleading.

A counter-question for Dillard

Why is the emotional effect of Visser's analogy examined so closely, while the emotional and ideological effects of Russian historical narratives receive less attention in this particular analysis?

Putin's portrayal of Russians and Ukrainians as one historical people, his questioning of Ukraine's independent political identity, and his insistence that Russian security interests constrain Ukrainian choices also frame the conflict in ways that influence how audiences interpret events.

These narratives, too, can encourage identification, establish preferred roles, and make disagreement appear illegitimate. They are not neutral descriptions of geopolitics simply because they are presented in the language of history or strategic necessity.

If Dillard wants to investigate how narratives shape political judgment, he should apply the same scrutiny to the narratives of the invading power. Otherwise, his criticism risks treating Visser's rhetoric as a problem to be diagnosed while treating Putin's rhetoric primarily as a perspective to be understood.

3. The Drama Triangle: a useful warning about rescuers, but an inadequate theory of aggression

Visser's second essay examines the relationship between Russia, Ukraine, and Europe through the Drama Triangle: Persecutor, Victim, and Rescuer. It also asks whether European assistance can become a source of dependency or political leverage. integralworld.net

Dillard's criticism here is more persuasive.

The Drama Triangle can encourage us to examine how people interpret their roles, how helping relationships can become controlling, and how participants may move between positions of grievance, aggression, and assistance. Applied to international relations, it raises worthwhile questions about whether Western support expands Ukrainian autonomy or makes Ukraine increasingly dependent on external decisions.

Dillard is right that these questions deserve examination.

But the Drama Triangle has a serious limitation as an explanatory framework for war: the possibility of reciprocal psychological dynamics does not establish reciprocal responsibility for the conflict.

Russia launched the full-scale invasion in February 2022. Ukraine resisted it. European countries subsequently provided assistance. These actions are causally connected, but they are not equivalent in their relationship to the initiation of the war.

Dillard acknowledges that unequal power and responsibility must not be confused with reciprocal patterns of interaction. Yet his discussion risks giving the psychological model more explanatory weight than it can bear.

Consider an analogy. A country attacked by a more powerful neighbor may depend on an external ally for military assistance. That dependence can create vulnerabilities, political expectations, and opportunities for influence. The ally might even exploit those vulnerabilities. But none of these possibilities establishes that the attacked country needs its aggressor, that the ally has an interest in perpetuating the war, or that the three actors are jointly responsible for the original aggression.

Those are separate propositions requiring separate evidence.

Visser's essay itself recognizes that a rescuer can overreach and that military assistance can serve the helper's interests as well as the recipient's. His central warning is against mistaking the structural symmetry of the triangle for moral equivalence.

Consequently, Dillard's criticism should be understood as a qualification of Visser's framework, not a refutation of it.

The Drama Triangle is a diagnostic lens, not a theory of international causation. It can help identify dysfunctional relationships after a conflict has begun, but it cannot establish why the war began, who bears primary responsibility, or what settlement would be just.

On this point, the two authors are closer than Dillard's critical framing sometimes suggests.

4. The crucial distinction Dillard makes—and does not consistently pursue

One of the strongest passages in Dillard's essay states that an explanation can be accurate even when an aggressor exploits it. Western policies may have contributed to Russian insecurity without removing Russia's responsibility for violating Ukrainian sovereignty. Conversely, the fact that Russia invaded Ukraine does not make every Western policy wise, lawful, or beneficial to Ukrainians.

This is exactly the kind of distinction that a serious geopolitical analysis needs.

The problem is not that Dillard asks us to consider Western responsibility. That is legitimate. The problem arises when the search for a more comprehensive explanation begins to function as a substitute for weighing the evidence concerning the different actors.

Three questions need to remain distinct.

First, what caused the conflict? This requires examining the historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine, NATO enlargement, Russian threat perceptions, Ukrainian domestic politics, Western policy, and Putin's own objectives.

Second, who decided to use force, and what did that decision entail? Here, the agency of the Russian leadership is central. Security concerns, whether genuine or exaggerated, do not automatically justify invasion, annexation, or the denial of another country's sovereignty.

Third, which policies are most likely to produce a durable and just peace? This requires examining military assistance, sanctions, negotiations, security guarantees, territorial disputes, escalation risks, and the preferences of Ukrainians themselves.

These questions interact, but they cannot be collapsed into one another.

A Western policy might have contributed to Russian insecurity without making the invasion inevitable. A Russian security concern might be genuine without justifying the remedy chosen by the Kremlin. Military assistance might prolong a war under some circumstances while preventing a more coercive settlement under others.

The relevant question is not simply whether Western actions contributed to the conflict. It is how much they contributed, through what mechanisms, relative to other causes, and with what implications for responsibility and policy.

Dillard recognizes the need for such distinctions. But his essay spends much more time examining the psychological dangers of Visser's moral framing than adjudicating these substantive questions.

That imbalance is the principal weakness of the response.

5. The UN voting essay: the strongest test of Dillard's approach

Visser's third essay examines the claim that three-quarters of the world condemned Russia. It distinguishes the proportion of UN member states voting in favor of particular resolutions from the proportion of the world's population living under governments that supported them. It also warns that neither measure tells us directly what individual citizens believe.

This is a particularly useful test case because the issue is less dependent on psychological interpretation and more amenable to empirical scrutiny.

Dillard recognizes the merit of Visser's distinction. He acknowledges that correcting claims about international consensus does not imply support for Russia, just as revising the causal significance of Western policies need not excuse the invasion.

That is an important concession. It demonstrates that Visser can refine an argument without abandoning his broader moral position.

But the statistical issue also reveals a limitation in Dillard's treatment of the other two essays. If the distinction between country counts, population-weighted calculations, and public opinion is worth making in one case, why not maintain comparable precision when discussing the causes of war?

Dillard is right to insist that moral commitments should remain open to correction. Yet the same standard applies to causal narratives. One should not move from evidence of Western hypocrisy to a conclusion about the relative responsibility of Russia and the West without showing the intermediate steps.

There is also a qualification to Visser's own statistical analysis. His population-weighted figures are explicitly described as provisional estimates rather than fully verified totals. They should not be presented as definitive evidence that a particular proportion of humanity supported or opposed the invasion. Abstention is not endorsement, and government voting behavior is not a reliable substitute for individual public opinion.

This is precisely why the distinction between evidence and interpretation matters.

On this third essay, Dillard's response is at its most constructive. He recognizes a substantive contribution rather than simply diagnosing the possible motivations behind it. The challenge is to extend that empirical discipline to the larger geopolitical disagreement.

6. The problem of moral equivalence

Dillard repeatedly emphasizes that Western states must be scrutinized alongside Russia. He points to American interventions, democratic backsliding, restrictions on protest, unequal accountability, and Western support for Israel. He also discusses the January 2026 seizure of Venezuela's president as an example of conduct that should be assessed against the same sovereignty principles applied to Russia.

The general principle is sound: no state should enjoy immunity from scrutiny merely because it belongs to a favored alliance or invokes universal values.

But consistency does not require equivalence.

Two states can violate similar principles while differing substantially in the circumstances, scale, objectives, consequences, and legal characteristics of their actions. Establishing hypocrisy by one actor does not establish innocence by another. Nor does documenting wrongdoing by a Western government settle the question of Russian responsibility for invading Ukraine.

Dillard explicitly recognizes this distinction in his theoretical framework. He insists that identifying one actor's wrongdoing does not answer allegations concerning another. That is correct.

Yet the cumulative effect of his extensive catalogue of Western failings is to broaden the discussion considerably beyond the three essays under review. Visser's domestic-abuse analogy and his analysis of the Drama Triangle become the starting point for a much larger indictment of Western institutions.

That wider discussion is not irrelevant. But its relevance must be demonstrated rather than assumed.

If the question is whether Visser's analogy is misleading, the shortcomings of American policy are not a sufficient answer. If the question is whether Western governments apply international law consistently, those shortcomings are directly relevant. If the question is whether Russia's invasion was justified, the analysis must return to the specific legal and factual circumstances of that invasion.

The distinction between these questions is essential.

Otherwise, the discussion becomes a competition between catalogues of hypocrisy. The side with the longer list of historical failures may win the rhetorical contest without establishing its interpretation of the present conflict.

7. Does Adaptive Reorganization Theory add anything decisive?

Dillard's larger theoretical ambition is to use Adaptive Reorganization Theory to explain how individuals and institutions become capable—or incapable—of changing in response to new information. He supplements this with ARCR: autonomy, reciprocity, confirmation, and reliability. These concepts are intended to help evaluate whether competing interpretations receive a fair hearing and whether beliefs and institutions remain responsive to evidence.

There is a reasonable practical program here. A discussion should allow competing explanations to be heard, apply comparable standards to allies and adversaries, test claims against evidence, and revise conclusions when warranted.

But does ART explain the disagreement between Visser and Dillard, or does it mainly redescribe familiar problems of motivated reasoning and institutional rigidity in evolutionary terminology?

To establish its added value, Dillard would need to show what ART enables us to explain or predict that established accounts of confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, institutional incentives, and belief revision do not already explain as well.

He would also need to operationalize his criteria. What observable evidence would show that Visser is insufficiently open to reorganization? What evidence would show the same of Dillard? How would independent observers distinguish genuine adaptation from the mere appearance of openness?

Dillard makes a promising start in the closing sections. He offers possible conditions under which he would revise his assessment of Western policy and Russian objectives. This is more useful than a general declaration that everyone should remain open-minded.

However, his tests remain largely programmatic. The essay does not apply them systematically to a concrete dispute over historical evidence and show how the framework resolves it.

There is an additional irony. Dillard warns against frameworks that become so elaborated that they insulate themselves from contrary evidence. ART must be subject to the same test. If every disagreement can be interpreted as evidence of inadequate adaptation, the theory risks becoming self-confirming.

A framework for learning must itself demonstrate that it can learn.

8. The psychological diagnosis must be reciprocal

Dillard's most valuable theoretical point is that moral identity can interfere with the capacity to reconsider one's own judgments. His most important practical commitment is that the same standard must apply to himself.

Near the end, he asks whether Visser can recognize the limitations of his moral analogy and whether he, Dillard, can recognize where his account overstates Western causation, underweights other actors, or recruits ART to protect his conclusions. He even identifies conditions under which he would change his assessment.

This is the strongest part of the essay because it converts a general exhortation into something resembling an intellectual commitment.

But the principle must be applied throughout the argument, not merely acknowledged at its conclusion.

Dillard could, for example, ask whether his emphasis on Western hypocrisy makes it psychologically easier to minimize Russian agency. Does his longstanding interest in challenging Western groupthink predispose him to give contrarian accounts greater weight than they deserve? Does his use of evolutionary language sometimes make familiar psychological observations appear more theoretically decisive than they are?

These are not accusations. They are the same kinds of questions Dillard asks about Visser.

The answer cannot be determined simply by identifying a possible psychological mechanism. It requires examining the actual reasoning, the evidence selected, the evidence omitted, and the standards used to judge competing claims.

The same applies to Visser. His analogy may encourage moral identification, but that does not establish that he is unwilling to revise it. His condemnation of Russia's invasion may be emotionally forceful, but that does not show that he ignores Western wrongdoing. His criticism of Dillard may be motivated by a strong prior view, but that does not make it incorrect.

The standard must be the quality of the argument, not the psychological story that can be told about its author.

9. What Dillard gets right—and where he goes wrong

The balance sheet

What Dillard gets right

• Moral conviction can turn into a defense of personal identity.
• Emotionally powerful analogies can narrow the perceived legitimacy of disagreement.
• Western hypocrisy deserves scrutiny, and criticism of Western policy is not automatically apologetics for Russia.
• Ukraine's dependence on external assistance raises legitimate questions about autonomy and political leverage.
• Empirical correction need not entail abandoning a broader moral commitment.
• Dillard's willingness to specify conditions under which he might revise his position is a constructive step.

Where the argument falls short

• It devotes more attention to the psychological function of Visser's arguments than to adjudicating their factual and causal claims.
• It risks treating the emotional force of an analogy as evidence against its analytical usefulness.
• It does not adequately distinguish reciprocal psychological dynamics from unequal causal and legal responsibility.
• Its extended catalogue of Western failings sometimes broadens the discussion without resolving the specific objections raised by Visser.
• ART and ARCR are presented as promising frameworks, but their added explanatory value is not demonstrated in this case.
• Its standard of reciprocal self-examination is more clearly articulated than consistently applied.

Conclusion: Transcending groupthink without losing sight of the facts

Dillard's response is best read as a contribution to the psychology of political disagreement rather than as a decisive rebuttal of Visser's three essays.

He makes a legitimate case that moral identities can become defensive, that analogies can exert pressure on readers, and that the language of victimhood and rescue can obscure the interests of those who claim to help. These are important cautions, especially when political conflicts are presented through emotionally compelling narratives.

But the danger runs in both directions. A critique of moralized Western narratives can itself become a preferred identity: that of the realist who sees through propaganda, the contrarian who resists groupthink, or the integral thinker who can supposedly include perspectives that others cannot tolerate.

None of those identities guarantees superior analysis.

The decisive test is whether a framework helps us distinguish competing claims, identify their evidential support, and reach conclusions that remain open to correction. By that standard, Visser's analogies should be scrutinized, but so should Dillard's psychological interpretation of them. Western policy should be examined, but so should Russian policy. The possibility of reciprocal dysfunction should be acknowledged without confusing it with equal responsibility for aggression.

Above all, explaining why a person believes something is not the same as establishing whether it is true.

Visser may sometimes use rhetoric that makes his moral conclusions more compelling than his causal analysis alone would warrant. Dillard is right to warn against that possibility. But Dillard's own extensive use of moral psychology, evolutionary terminology, and criticism of Western institutions does not exempt his argument from the same scrutiny.

The ultimate irony is that Dillard wants to teach Visser—and the reader—to become more capable of adaptive reorganization. Yet the most convincing demonstration of that capacity would not be another theory of why opponents resist change. It would be a more systematic examination of the evidence, including evidence that challenges Dillard's own preferred interpretation.

Transcending groupthink does not mean moving beyond moral judgment, nor does it mean treating every geopolitical narrative as equally credible. It means becoming better at distinguishing what we know, what we infer, what we value, and what we still need to establish.

That is a more demanding task than diagnosing moral identity. And it is the task that both authors, if they take their shared commitment to intellectual accountability seriously, still need to pursue.