American Mind Control

Like everyone else this election, I'm obsessed with the answer to this question: what is driving Trump supporters?

Is it economic anxiety?  Is it loss of white, Christian identity?  Is it simple bigotry? Is it authoritarianism?

My own current theory is that it isn't based so much on any of these things, as so much as an ideological narrative that has been stewing and metastasizing for decades, propagating largely via conservative media outlets, but thriving in the oxygen-rich environs of isolated rural and suburban America - church to church, gun show to gun show, Cabellas to Cabellas, racetrack to racetrack.

Would it be possible, I ask, for an ideological narrative to develop that isn't actually based on facts in reality, but rather on facts that are assumed by its own mythology?

The clearest example of this is the world of conspiracy theories.  Despite no evidence - and often times direct evidence to the contrary - a certain type of person continues to buy in to the larger story.  The belief is thus sustained and maintained over time.

You also see this in religion, where certain areas of inquiry are immune to contradiction.  The more insular and extreme the religion, the greater the immunity.  The pure example of this is the religious cult, where almost all sense of normality is overridden by dogma.

In general, we view people who go down these rabbit holes as abnormal, and generally psychologically flawed in some way.  Yet how so?  I'm not very familiar with the literature here, but my guess is that there a lot of theories but nothing conclusive.  At any rate, these types of people have generally been considered a small, deluded, (yet strangely persistent), segment of the population.

Yet historically we can find examples of ideological movements that are not abnormal to the population, but rather the norm.  Nazi Germany comes to mind.  Anarchists at the turn of last century.  Fundamentalist Islam is a more contemporary example of an ideology that is quite popular in many regions of the world.

So how possible, then, might it be that contemporary conservatism has normalized a form of hysterical, at times conspiratorial thought?  I realize that this line of argument could easily become a cheap form of ad hominem dismissal of valid political arguments.  But what we have in Trumpism are not valid political arguments.  The bile that has been spilling from AM radio for at least 40 years - throughout the 1980's, 1990's, 2000's and 2010's is not valid argument but demogoguery and conspiratorial falsehood.  Fox news, Breitbart.com and social media have only spread the narrative's reach.

Michael Savage:

"…You have to explain this to them in this time of mental rape that's going on. The children's minds are being raped by the homosexual mafia, that's my position. They're raping our children's minds."

Glenn Beck:

“President Obama, Tim Geithner, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, all the other lawmakers are going after the blood of our businesses, big and small. Who's next? They have their fangs in the necks of everybody, and nothing's going to quench their thirst…There's only two ways for this movie to end: Either the economy becomes like the walking dead, or you drive a stake through the heart of the bloodsuckers.”

Bill O'Reilly:

"I just wish Hurricane Katrina had only hit the United Nations building, nothing else, just had flooded them out, and I wouldn't have rescued them." --Bill O'Reilly on his radio show, Sept. 14, 2005

Sean Hannity:

"Halloween is a liberal holiday because we're teaching our children to beg for something for free. … We're teaching kids to knock on other people's doors and ask for a handout." —Fox News host Sean Hannity (October 31, 2007)

Ann Coulter:

"God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.'"

Rush Limbaugh:

"A feminazi is a woman to whom the most important thing in life is seeing to it that as many abortions as possible are performed. Their unspoken reasoning is quite simple. Abortion is the single greatest avenue for militant women to exercise their quest for power and advance their belief that men aren’t necessary. Nothing matter but me, says the feminazi; the is an unviable tissue mass. Feminazis have adopted abortion as a kind of sacrament for their religion/politics of alienation and bitterness.”~Rush Limbaugh, The Way Things Ought To Be, p.192-93 , 1992

The problem with people in cults or who buy into conspiracies isn't the specific beliefs they hold.  They are often innocuous enough.  Rather, it is the mental state within which they are interacting with the larger world.  The sense of measured, reasonable,  epistemological skepticism is gone.  Truth becomes "truth", and one becomes incredibly susceptible to manipulation, as long as the sense of anger, fear and often hatred, is fed.

It doesn't happen in a vacuum.  People just don't wake up one day and decide to join a cult.  But with enough isolation, social reinforcement, and limited knowledge, and desire for some kind of affirmation of values, the ideology seeps in, puttying the gaps with its insidious dogma.

The number one priority in cults is to develop in the individual a lack of faith in outside authority.  Don't trust your family.  Don't trust the government.  Don't trust outsiders.  This enables complete mind control.  Paranoid conservatism has slowly been developing a similar tactic: don't trust the government, the media, scientists, academics, or outside culture in general.  What is left is a form of mind control in which only paranoid conservatism has any authority.

So is it economic anxiety, bigotry, loss of White Christian identity, or authoritarianism?  We've all felt economic anxiety.  Having bigoted thoughts - fear of the "other" - is a natural part of being human.  We live in a pluralistic country that values personal freedom of religion and diversity.  Authoritarianism seems as much a value as anything else that becomes socially reinforced.

What stops us from allowing these things to rule our lives and destroy our objectivity is a faith in the outside world, a maintenance of continuity with our past, and trust in institutions that have stood the test of time.  There are certainly legitimate critique of the authority of government, media, science or academia.  But each are only as good as we make them, and themselves come from principles that we ignore at our peril: democracy, objectivity, empiricism, and study.  Cultish conservatism seems diametrically opposed to each of these.

Propaganda Works

Santi di Tito: Niccolò Machiavelli

A recently leaked FOX news memo from 2009 shows explicit instructions being given for reporters to refer to the "government option" instead of the "public option".  Apparently this directive was informed by Republican pollster Frank Luntz who had found that people found the term "government" less favorable than "public".

Just goes to show how powerful propaganda is. The right has been relentless in their campaign to make government into a dirty word. If they were honest, they would say "certain types of government". But then they're starting to sound like Democrats - you know, acknowledging nuance, putting things in context, speaking clearly and without misleading and dishonest overgeneralizations.

But hey - it works. Maybe if we start talking about government libraries, government parks, government education, and government-works projects we'll really save the Galts some cash.

At the risk of going full-bore partisan here, let me just ask why the right seems so much more comfortable with dishonesty. As exhibit A let me just introduce basically every AM radio personality. "Lying" might sound too offensive, so how about a continuous stream of half-truths and mischaracterizations. And then there's the anger and hatred. It's been a while since I've stomached a listen, but I remember a lot of schoolyard name-calling, yelling, and endless ad-hominem attacks on "liberals": retarded, mentally ill, out to destroy America, etc.

I mean, when I meet people like that in real life, I get really creeped out. The general word for them is "A-hole" or "bully". So why are they so integral to conservatism's trajectory in the past few decades? We've got a few random people on the left who are comparable, but they're hard to find. NPR would be a much more accurate picture of what is driving left-wing debate. Although even there, the idea that NPR "drives" politics in the same way as a Glenn Beck or Limbaugh is kind of ridiculous.

FEMA Camps and Ego Death

Conspiracy theories have likely been around for as long as, well, conspiracies themselves.  And there is certainly no sign that they are abating any time soon.  But what drives some people into their clutches, while others merely shrug their shoulders, contented with more practical explanations?

There's a difference between being skeptical and inventing fabulous stories.  Occam's razor says: "selecting the competing hypothesis that makes the fewest new assumptions (aka postulates, entities) when the hypotheses be equal in other respects."  So while I am distrustful of the CIA, I also don't believe they faked the moon landing, built the pyramids in Egypt, faked 9-11, started AIDS, faked vaccine data, or are setting up FEMA concentration camps.  There are much simpler explanations for all of those events that rely on actual evidence and not wild conspiracy theories filled with fantastical scenarios. 

Wikipedia has a pretty good page on conspiracy theories.  My problem with them is that they always rely on an attack on authority or expertise.  Yet once you go there, the burden is on you to be an expert.  And most of us simply don't have the training.  So for instance, just about every engineer who has looked at 9/11 has said that it was the work of two jets.  The Truthers (9/11 conspiracists) usually say it's all a cover-up and that there were explosives.  Well, unless you are an engineer and understand the physics of skyscrapers, it's going to be pretty hard to have confidence in anyone. 

And that's the general gist of all conspiracy theories - almost by definition they require a massive conspiracy on the part of multiple government agencies, media networks, academic institutions, scientists or corporations.  Except for corporations, the others are just about the only real authorities we have.  And once you throw them out, you can make up anything you want.  Maybe 9/11 was caused by North Korea?  Or maybe Iran?  Or maybe the EU?  Or Pat Robertson?  Or aliens? 

But isn't the obvious answer that it was a group of people from Arab countries who are pissed off at the decadent West interfering in their affairs for the past 100 years, and with a fundamentalist ideology that glorifies violence?  Not only does it make sense, but it is backed up by an insane amount of evidence!

One of my students argued with me today because he watched a show on the history channel which claimed to have evidence that aliens helped all the pyramids get built.  It took me forever to try and debunk this crap that he thought was legitimate because it was on the "History" channel.  The main problem, I think, was that he didn't know how to distinguish legitimate authority from illegitimate authority.  To him, as he is also I think a creationist Christian, magical thinking was a normal part of life.  He had no real concept of what a legitimate authority might look like.  He didn't know that there are thousands of people who have studied this stuff for years, reading and writing papers on every aspect of what we do and do not know.  And that we need to be humble enough to respect the science, and not just rely on our whatever "common-sense" story we might be able to come up with to suit our particular desire for exotic mysticism.

I'm kind of interested in the psychology of pseudoscience and magical thinking.  There are many theories out there.  Evolutionary biologists propose that as a species, it would have made more sense for us to take any threat seriously, and in light of very limited knowledge of the natural world, inventing fabulous narratives would have at least provided a predictable explanation for future events.

Biologists and psychologists might say that as a practical matter, we live on faith and trust everyday, in the sense that because we can't think everything through at every second of the day, we rely on mental shortcuts - the apple I bite into won't be glass, if I jump I'll return to Earth.  And so we are biased toward making sense of the world.  But if something doesn't fit, we are predisposed to come up with an explanation.  In some larger manner, maybe magical thinking is simply a bias towards making sense out of complex or unknown issues. Of course, this could explain a dangerous over-reliance on traditional authorities as well as it could explain a tendency to seek an easier, if more magical or mystical, line of reasoning.

Or maybe the sociologist or political scientist might point to the propensity for people to hew to established ideological narratives, otherwise known as "group think".  Among certain groups, often more radical, this tends to operate within an echo-chamber.  The term "epistemic closure" has been used to further describe this process by which systems of knowledge can become self-limiting.  In interpersonal terms, we refer to this state as denial.  Somehow, the glaringly obvious is avoided, often by great feats of mental engineering.  Freud described denial as a defense mechanism, a way of protecting oneself from an uncomfortable reality.

But what then of the belief in fantastical explanations that do not hide uncomfortable facts so much as invent new ones?  One commonality among these ideas is that they seem to all seem to in some way give support to, or operate in tandem with, a suspicion of some established authority, or political opposition.  The theory provides two separate, yet mutually-reinforcing functions: it is first created by prior ideological assumptions, and then provides evidence to support those same assumptions. 

So for instance, Glenn Beck is paranoid about the government, and so he buys into secret FEMA concentration camps, which then provide evidence justifying his initial paranoia.  This may explain why these beliefs seems so difficult to debunk.  If they can act as assumption-affirming evidence, their destruction can act as the opposite, as to undermine original assumptions.  Of course, this is just as illogical.  Whether or not the government is not doing something is evidence of nothing.  The fact that the government is not operating FEMA camps tells you nothing about whether or not you should be paranoid about the government!

Returning to psychology, the concept of ego and identity might explain why a false-belief is clung to.  If one's identity is dependent upon one's ideological assumptions, then anything perceived as a threat to those assumptions would also be perceived as a threat to one's identity.  So, a false belief built upon identity-bound assumptions becomes a sort of fragile cathedral for the ego.  If the cathedral falls, so to does the identity. 

It's common fear to be afraid of death.  Back to Freud, he felt it one of life's fundamental drives, in direct opposition to that of sexual desire.  Although he also felt one's consciously expressed fear might really be an expression of some deeper repression.  I suppose distancing myself thusly would appear suspect.  But aside from the practical impulse to self-preservation, I've never really worried all that much about dying.  I have always had a difficult time understanding the idea of being motivated in any kind of profound way by something that seems so impossibly distant, or at least unexpected.

But a death I feel I can relate to is loss of identity, which may be as close as one might come this side of actual expiration.  One's identity is one, in many ways.  And the loss of a sense of self, while certainly liberating in some cases, would seem profoundly frightening, generally.  This fear then, would seem a powerful mechanism behind the attachment of identity to ideology.  The more one derives identity from ideology, the more this fear  comes under threat when the ideology is challenged, and the more the fear is assuaged when the ideology is promoted.

But why must identity be barricaded with false beliefs?  Is there some special urgency that inflates illogical or magical thinking, misguided ideas formed out of the deficits of haste?  This would describe the phenomena known as the "knee jerk" reaction, where intellectual response is less intellectual and more intestinal, emerging with valiant force from the misty domains of the unconscious.  While the reaction is rooted in a foundation of deep ideological conviction and logical coherence, the rushed response belies anything but almost Pavlovian reaction.  It may be more than a coincidence that the term "dog whistle" is used to refer to the subtle semiotics employed in political messaging.

Because it is here that the most devious tentacles of propaganda do their work.  With simplistic, cryptic suggestions, the submerged iceberg is resurrected, overwhelming the mind's rational, conscious capacity with that of the vastly more powerful and immediate unconscious response.  And it is here that dwells fear, anger, jealousy, revenge, pride, guilt, and self-doubt.  At any moment, an ideological semiotic trigger can employ each emotion towards a very specific and political end.  The propaganda at once raises the specter of these uncomfortable emotions, but then holds out the promise of deliverance from them via adherence to the ordained narrative.

Yet all of this seems too squishy; the unconscious is a black box and too easy to make up stories for.  While I feel I have made a reasonable case, I'm skeptical that there isn't much more at work as well.  For instance, many conspiracists are otherwise perfectly reasonable.  Some only go off the deep end on one or two issues - often those which they have some personal stake in.  It wouldn't seem they have a much larger ideological axe to grind.  Others are simply very passionate about politics and have somehow managed to worm themselves into a very odd corner. 

Among teenagers, conspiracy theories are a dime a dozen.  Their worlds bursting with imagination and possibility, yet rooted in a virginal ignorance, a sense of conspiracy is a welcome narratory foothold.  There is an excitement here, a feeling rooted in not the least of which a sense of anti-authoritarian discovery - a secret passageway under and out the family fence.  A magical sense of discovery permeates.  Like some holy grail, the gold at the end of the rainbow, the existence of elves - what should not be actually is! 

It is to this feeling, sniffed at as frivolity, that conspiracy debunkers remind us of the boredom of reality.  There is actually a good explanation, and it is dull.  The story involves no vast and elaborate networks, secret meetings or devious schemes.  The edge-of-your-seat thriller is actually a somewhat tedious documentary.  No one is going to buy the rights.  There is no revelatory found-footage.  There are no amazing turns of character.  No secret documents.  No smoking guns or deep throats.

For many this may seem a loss, a forced retreat in a cosmic pilgrimage to the Truth, a giving up on something worth fighting for.  Earlier this year, a man from Colorado went to Afghanistan "carrying a pistol, a 40-inch sword, night-vision equipment" on a private mission to kill Osama Bin Laden.  Clearly not operating reasonably, he nonetheless felt some profound calling to do what countless others and billions of dollars could not.  He was not going to sit around and twiddle his thumbs when there was a simple, clear, and honorable job to do.  No doubt he felt that to sit idly at home while his night-vision goggles and sword collected dust was somehow an acknowledgment of defeat.

For the conspiracy theorist, there is always a simple, straight line solution.  There are no complex individuals operating within complex geopolitical, social and cultural narratives.  There are no gray areas or reasonable disagreements.  There are no difficult problems with no clear answers.  Unfortunately, this just isn't how the world works.  Not only is the world an often times disorienting, confusing and complicated place, but humans are limited not only by simple minds, but by limited information.  If anything, this seems a powerful case for caution and humility.  Because chances are, strapping on your survival gear and going on a personal quest for magical treasures is going to lead to nothing but failure at worse, and greater confusion at best.

But who knows, maybe I was paid to say this...