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

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.

- By Dr. Jayalath Bandara Adikarige

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