- How linguistic anthropology and narrative psychology explain the appeal of Trump and other right-wing authoritarians;
- Why that everyone, not just conservatives, is pessimistic about the world, despite the evidence, is more evidence of how human nature, shaped in humanity’s ancestral past, cannot accurately apprehend the realities of the modern world;
- How Republicans think that applying the scientific method is evidence of conspiracy.
Salon, Chauncey DeVega, 18 Jul 2023: “Train and socialize”: Expert on linguistic anthropology explains how Trump is warping MAGA minds, subtitled “The implications stretch far beyond Donald Trump — and are ominous for American society”
One of the Republican Party’s most effective weapons in its campaign to end America’s multiracial pluralistic democracy is a media propaganda machine that functions as a closed epistemic and echo chamber. Anchored by Fox News, the feedback loop exerts a powerful if not almost omnipotent level of control over its public’s beliefs, thoughts, values, behavior, and emotions. This is accomplished through a strategy of repeating lies, amplifying and circulating conspiracy theories, and encouraging violence and hatred against some type of Other.
Ultimately, Donald Trump and other right-wing neofascists, authoritarians, demagogues, and malign actors are political entrepreneurs who are leveraging a public that has been trained and conditioned over decades to respond to such leaders, messaging, and voices. Trump is a symptom of a much deeper problem in American politics and society, after all, not the cause.
This is an interview with Marcel Danesi, author of Politics, Lies and Conspiracy Theories: A Cognitive Linguistic Perspective. And of course this applies to Orban, Erdogan, and others, not only Trump. Sample question and answer:
In the most basic terms, narrative psychology consists of the stories that individuals and groups tell about themselves as a way of navigating the world and their place in it. What role does narrative psychology play in terms of eliminationism, conspiracism and violence?
The first step to manipulating minds is tapping into an emotional state, such as fear or uncertainty. As cognitive science has been showing, the brain is designed to respond to fear in various ways, with its own in-built defense mechanisms which produce chemicals in the response pattern, such as cortisol and adrenaline. These chemical responses are also activated by forms of language that instill fear, either directly (as in a vocal threat) or, more insidiously, by twisted facts which allay fears through lies and deceptive statements. Research shows that this language taps into and “switches on” existing circuits in the brain that link together important and salient images and ideas. Metaphors in particular bypass higher cognitive reasoning centers to make linkages that may not have a basis in reality. And when that happens, a person is less likely to notice the lie, because it “feels” right.
This whole idea of psychology, that of human nature as it evolved in the ancestral environment hundreds of thousands of years ago, increasingly occupies my interest, and is a core theme of my Westfahl essay and eventual book, about how science fiction represents a kind of compromise between the biases of human nature, and the honest attempt to acknowledge the real world.
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Also by Chauncey DeVega, noted without comment:
Salon, 19 Jul 2023: Trump leans on George Soros for campaign cash, subtitled “Republicans have long known that antisemitism pays on the right”
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Wall Street Journal, Alison Gopnik, 6 Apr 2023: Pessimism Is the One Thing Americans Can Agree On, subtitled “New research shows that no matter their political leanings, age, race or economic status, people think most things are worse than they really are”
This is another example of how ancient human nature mis-perceives the present. Things are *not* worse than they were before.
I noticed this via Jerry Coyne’s Tuesday: Hili dialogue post, who noticed it via Steven Pinker’s tweet; Coyne quotes from the article:
Are Americans cockeyed optimists or incorrigible pessimists? Do they think that American society has improved or gotten worse in various ways—and how accurate are their views? You might imagine that the answer would be nuanced, that it would depend on factors like people’s politics or news-consuming habits.
But the answer isn’t nuanced at all, according to a new study. In research published earlier this year in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, Gregory Mitchell at the University of Virginia and Philip Tetlock at the University of Pennsylvania looked at these questions empirically. Everybody they tested—young and old, conservative and liberal, news-addicted or not—showed the same pattern. Everybody thought that most things had gotten worse, even if they had actually gotten better. Pessimism reigned.
We’ve seen accounts of this before, as in Pinker’s books, the Hans Rosling book I reviewed here, and the Bobby Duff book I reviewed here.
Again, this is flaw in human thinking, since human thinking evolved in an era much different than the modern world. I could spell out how this applies to contemporary American politics, but let’s not and say we did.
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Similarly,
AlterNet, Lindsay Beyerstein, 19 Jul 2023: Opinion | For the GOP, the scientific method is evidence of conspiracy
(This reminds me of that story of some conservative mom who thought that the existence of *globes* in classrooms across America, even around the world, wasn’t an indication of a consensus of knowledge going back thousands of years, but evidence of a *conspiracy* to hide the truth of the flat earth.)
A scientific paper now ranks with the grassy knoll in the minds of conspiracy theorists. “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” (2020) has become an object of obsession complete with its own rich folklore. Last week, House Republicans devoted a three-hour hearing to haranguing the scientists who wrote it.
Two of the paper’s authors, Dr. Kristian Andersen and Dr. Robert F. Garry, were hauled before the committee to answer for their defiance from GOP orthodoxy.
The GOP party line is that Dr. Anthony Fauci somehow forced a group of university professors to publish a peer-reviewed paper arguing that Covid-19 wasn’t a bioweapon or a laboratory construct. Fauci supposedly wanted to discredit the lab leak because he helped the Wuhan Institute of Virology create the virus. No, really. They get indignant when you call it a conspiracy theory, but that’s the B-movie plot they’re pushing.
Here again, the GOP has decided on a conclusion, never mind evidence, that supports its worldview, and is now grilling scientists for their temerity in reaching a different conclusion, albeit tentatively, based on, you know, evidence.
Most disturbing of all, Republicans tried to spin the scientific method itself as evidence of a conspiracy. They seized on a snippet of an Andersen email stating that he and his colleagues were trying to disprove the lab leak theory. That’s not a conspiracy, that’s science. Experimenters start with a testable hypothesis like, “Sars-CoV-2 leaked from a lab” and then they do their best to knock it down. If they can’t defeat it, the hypothesis survives to be tested again another day. As Andersen explained, they couldn’t definitively disprove a lab leak, but the evidence convinced them it was unlikely.
“My early hypothesis was that of a ‘lab theory’ and when I stated that we were “trying to disprove any type of lab theory,” I was specifically referring to the concept of falsification,” Andersen said in his written remarks.
“This is a text-book example of the scientific method in use.”
