This chapter examines the psychological factors that underlie behavioral continuity after revolution leads to regime change. Revolutions change the people in power, but they do not necessarily change the behavior of those who come to power after the revolution. All revolutionaries, irrespective of their particular ideologies, face the challenge of changing the behavior of people in their society – behavior that took shape over many years in the pre-revolution society. All revolutionaries are confronted with the stubborn resilience of how people think and act as it was shaped before the revolution – but how are behavioral changes to be achieved toward the ideal society that revolutionaries envisaged? Mao and some other revolutionaries proposed there should be “perpetual revolution,” because the possibility of backsliding to pre-revolution behaviors is too great. But perpetual revolution also means perpetual uncertainty and instability – and even chaos. Other extremist programs attempted by revolutionaries (to prevent continuity in behavior) are emptying cities (as practiced by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia) and emptying universities (as practiced by Mao in China and Khomeini in Iran).

The ideological nature of mainstream psychology becomes particularly clear in how motivation is interpreted and researched. The cauusal-reductionist model leads mainstream psychology to treat motivation as an intra-personal characteristic that causes individuals to succeed, or not, in a social system that is assumed to work as a meritocracy. From this perspective, the solution to poverty is for poor individuals to develop resilience. In this approach, mainstream psychology commits both the mereological and embryonic fallacies, ascribing the properties of wholes to parts, and assuming that from birth humans are self-contained individuals functioning independent of context. The issues of power and powerlessness should be central to the psychology of motivation, but they are almost completely absent from discussions. Poor people remain invisible and powerless, but the few individuals who do succeed to move up to become rich as used as tokens to justify the idea that 'this is a meritocracy that works.'