Decepticon
When can we admit we’ve been tricked … and what do we do about it?
Reader Notes: This is a political piece, which I hope is interesting but is also inevitably, I know, draining and depressing for many. So feel free to skip right to Good Things, a section devoted to stuff I really like, and that I think you’ll like too.
The single most important insight in the study of cults and conspiracy thinking is laid out in When Prophecy Fails, a 1956 study by Leon Festinger et. al. The study recounts the tale of a small Chicago-based UFO cult whose leader predicted that the apocalypse would arrive on December 21, 1954. It did not, of course – but that’s when things got interesting.
Instead of questioning the leader whose prophecy turned out to be wrong, the group’s disciples – who had made commitments to the apocalypse including abandoning jobs and family – came to believe that they had actually stopped the dire prophecy with their warnings and devotion. Vindicated, they became more aggressive in their recruiting – in other words, they doubled down. The study – both the specific fieldwork on the UFO cult and the broader historical work that underpinned it – was a main source of the concept of cognitive dissonance.
We are currently living through the failure of a prophecy that dwarfs the size of any UFO or doomsday cult: the prophecy of Donald Trump’s greatness.
The most obvious example of this failing prophecy is Trump himself getting COVID, after months of downplaying it, failing to lead on masks, failing to take any meaningful policy steps to combat the virus, &c &c &c - Trump’s latest ‘big lie,’ which in its defiance of obvious reality give his followers an exclusive banner to rally around. Trump and surrogates have proffered several ways for supporters to rationalize the sudden intrustion of reality on the lie, such as the idea that Trump is now a better choice for President because he has first-hand experience of the virus, or Trump’s own claim that it proves COVID is no big deal . . . because he personally had access to aggressive, mania-inducing experimental drugs that fixed him right up.
Amazingly, though, after years of political pundits predicting that any one of his many alleged frauds or crimes against humanity would be the thing that undoes Trump, it now seems catching COVID is what actually got him (politically). I’m not a political scientist, but there’s at least a big correlation between Trump’s diagnosis and a drop of around 2 points in the polls in early October.
That’s enough to make Biden’s lead seem insurmountable as we sit nine days out from the election. But as politically devastating as it is, it’s really a tiny move in terms of the proportion of people who have changed their mind about anything – who have been able to look back at the entire sequence of events over the past eight months or four years and conclude that they were duped.
That’s a different way of putting the now-common trope that reality either doesn’t matter to a lot of these folks, or genuinely doesn’t reach them. Such denial is like the wave function of quantum probability, in which the unobserved or unacknowledged can exist in two states at the same time. But one can only surf a wave function of denial so long before it collapses in contact with reality - in this case, a very real virus.
Other forms of reality continue to encroach. Will the layered fictions of Trumpworld collapse? And what energies will that collapse release?
Before we can hazard a guess, we have to try yet again to answer: What is the specific form of this resistance to reality, its texture and motive?
A core element is the deeply held but basically unconscious equivalence of changing your mind and being wrong. This is deeply linked to a disconnection from the basic scientific mindset: its requisite corollary is that one must forcefully square solidly-held beliefs with whatever evidence, however contrary, suddenly rears its head. This mindset is at the root not just of political discord, but America’s national disconnect on climate change, pandemic control, and education more generally.
In large part, the prevalence of this mindset can be blamed on a failure of our elites and our society to spread understanding about the nature of knowledge itself. Why does scientific consensus change? At what point is enough evidence enough? Which of multiple news outlets with conflicting framings should I listen to? How much do we expect average people to know or intuit about these arcane matters? The question of consensus formation is probably difficult for even a working geneticist or historian or media executive to explain.
At the same time, this is not simply an educational issue, but a structural one. Whether they can unpack and articulate it or not, people in these diverse fields – business, science, the arts – spend their days in the subtle rootwork of weighing information, conversations, and moods, in their effort to reach some individual and collective Truth. Knowledge workers do exactly what it sounds like they do.
But what if you are utterly separated from anything resembling this process? What if you have no power within your workplace, community, economy, a position many working and poor people find themselves in as they are sucked dry? What if your local newspaper no longer exists? What if your high school couldn’t successfully convey to you what the wider world looks like?
Trump support correlates strongly with regions of America (the South and lower Midwest) and areas within regions (rural rather than urban) where the quality of education is broadly lower than average, and sometimes where the underlying principles of education, handed down through the culture over generations, are different. My favorite example (though there’s more to the story than is immediately obvious) was the time the platform of the Texas GOP explicitly opposed teaching critical thinking skills. That was in the Year of our Lord Two-Thousand and Twelve.
Yet this isn’t strictly a partisan or even cultural divide: witness the NXIVM case, where a very average intellect and terrible piano player convinced hundreds of rich, liberal, psychotically alienated California dingbats that he was the greatest philosopher since Heidegger and a concert pianist on par with Van Cliburn.
Where does knowledge come from? As far as many Americans’ lived experience goes, knowledge might as well come from God, and God might very well be dead.
And so the immediately appealing alternative is a frantic insistence on the reality of the unreal, that the thing you wish to be true simply is. Your reality is fracturing, and you’re trying frantically to erect an alternative from spit and masking tape. This crumbling hovel is a last refuge from an absolute howling void in which you will fall forever, your sense of self reduced to nothing.
It is often said that for Trump and his cabinet, the cruelty is the point – child separation, travel bans, etc. I think this is likely emotionally true for many of the inner circle. But for Trump’s most ardent supporters, there is a much stronger gravitation: the lying is the point. The more the lies are winked at and cracked by rough handling, the firmer the ties of the collective delusion. You buy the ticket, you take the ride.
This isn’t merely ideology, except in the sense that the fantasy is built from the decaying dregs of a completely fantastical hard-line economic conservatism. And it isn’t merely stupidity – intelligence as such has less than you’d think to do with whether you enter this particular devil’s bargain.
But once your’e in, there can’t be any reversal, any reconsideration, any process – there is only the spit and masking tape, which is the greatest, best, most luxurious accommodation (with full coverage for pre-existing conditions) that has ever been erected. Once it is entered into, it admits no renegotiation – only furious commitment, then collapse.
We are moving through this process of collapse together, like it or not. I have no idea how long it is going to take, or whether it is going to go as badly as some fear. I feel a kind of survivor’s guilt about this – I’m in New York City, where there’s no obvious threat to the sanctity or safety of my vote. From the tenor of the news, it feels like the wind has gone out of the sails of the Trump movement, at least in some minor way. Their cult may go quietly, forgetting itself as it fades.
Part of me would like to think that.
GOOD THINGS
Retro Ambient YouTube Channels
I have for years struggled mightily with my music listening habits. The transition to streaming is not to my liking, and managing MP3s is a friggin’ hassle. So if I’m being real, YouTube is often a default when I’m reading or writing. Luckily, there are some public-spirited folks keeping up a steady stream of weird music from the 1970s and beyond: crystal healing, dark caves, wind serpents.
Laird Barron – Occultation and The Imago Sequence
It’s not often that you discover a piece of writing so absorbing you immediately have to read it again. The authors that make that list for me include Cormac McCarthy, Gene Wolfe, M. John Harrison, and William Burroughs. The latest addition is Laird Barron, whose first two short story collections are such whorling vortexes of utter madness you won’t believe what you’re reading. Intertwined tales of witchcraft and alien invasion and you can’t always tell the difference. I literally can’t stop reading these.
Homemade Pickles
A once-a-month, one-hour task that will radically upgrade your kitchen, especially if you’re trying to eat a more plant-centric diet. I recommend starting with Mexican pickled onions and pickled red cabbage, both of which go on nearly anything. You don’t need much more than a jar, some vinegar, and salt.