Take a look at this graph. It shows an increase in young American teenagers’ rates of depression, with a notable uptick, especially in girls, since around 2010. It, and studies like it, are at the centre of a debate around social media and mental health.

Findings like this have been replicated in many countries. That in many cases, reports of mental health problems – depression, anxiety, self-harm, suicide, and so on, have almost tripled.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that the timing is clear: the cause is social media. Others have pointed to the 2008 financial crash, climate change, worries about the future. But Haidt asks why this would effect teenage girls in particular?

He points to Facebook’s own research, leaked by the whistle blower Frances Haugen, who said, ‘Teens themselves blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression… this reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups’.

In 2011, in surveys, around one in three teenage girls reported experiencing persistent ‘sadness or hopelessness’. Today, the American CDC Youth Risk Survey reports that 57% do. In some studies, shockingly, 30% of young people say they’ve considered suicide, up from 19%.

At least 55 studies have found a significant correlation between social media and mood disorders. A study of 19,000 British children found the prevalence of depression was strongly associated with time spent on social media.

Many studies have found that time watching television or Netflix is not the problem: it’s specially social media.

Of course, causation rather than correlation is difficult to prove. Social media is has become ubiquitous over a period in time in which the world has change in many other ways. Who’s to say it’s not fear of existential threats from climate change, inequality, global politics, or even a more acute focus on mental health more broadly?

But Haidt points out that the correlation between social media use and mental health problems is greater than that between childhood exposure to lead and brain development and worse than binge drinking and overall health. And both are things we address.

He argues all of these studies – those 55 at least, and many, many more that are related – are not just ‘random noise’. He says a ‘consistent story is emerging from these hundreds of correlational studies’.

Instagram was founded in 2010, just before that uptick. And the iPhone 4 was released at the same time, the first phone with a front facing camera. I remember when it was ‘cringe’ to take a selfie.

It also makes sense qualitatively. School age children are particularly sensitive to social dynamics, bullying, and self-worth. And now they’re suddenly bombarded with celebrity images, idealised body shapes and beauty standards, endless images and videos to compare themselves to on demand. On top of this, social networks like Instagram display the size of your social group for everyone to see, how many people like you, how many like your next post, your comments, and, more importantly, as a result, how many people don’t.

Social media is popularity quantified for everyone in the schoolyard to see.

One study which designed an app that imitated Instagram found that those exposed to images manipulated to look extra attractive reported lower self body image in the period after.

Another study looked at the roll out of Facebook to university campuses in its early years and compared the time periods with studies of mental health. It found out that when Facebook was introduced to an area, symptoms of poor mental health, especially depression, increased.

Another study looked at areas as high-speed internet was introduced – making social media more accessible – and then looked at hospital data. They concluded: ‘We find a positive and significant impact on girls but not on boys. Exploring the mechanism behind these effects, we show that HSI increases addictive Internet use and significantly decreases time spent sleeping, doing homework, and socializing with family and friends. Girls again power all these effects’.

Young girls, for various reasons, seem to be especially affected. However, the reasons why are difficult to establish – although idealised beauty standards are one obvious answer.

One researcher, epidemiologist Yvonne Kelley, said: ‘One of the big challenges with using information about the amount of time spent on social media is that it isn’t possible to know what is going on for young people, and what they are encountering whilst online’.

In 2017, here in the UK, a 14-year-old girl, Molly Russell, took her own life after looking at posts about self-harm and suicide.

The Guardian reported: ‘In a groundbreaking verdict, the coroner ruled that the “negative effects of online content” contributed to Molly’s death’.

The report said that, ‘Of 16,300 pieces of content that Molly interacted with on Instagram in the six months before she died, 2,100 were related to suicide, self-harm and depression. It also emerged that Pinterest, the image-sharing platform, had sent her content recommendation emails with titles such as “10 depression pins you might like”’.

Studies have found millions of posts of self-harm on Instagram; the hashtag ‘#cutting’ had around 50,000 posts each month.

A Swansea University study which included respondents with a history of self-harm, and those without, found that 83% of them been recommended self-harm content on Instagram and TikTok without searching for it. And three quarters of self-harmers had harmed themselves even more severely as a result of seeing self-harm content.

One researcher said, ‘I jumped on Instagram yesterday and wanted to see how fast I could get to a graphic image with blood, obvious self-harm or a weapon involved… It took me about a minute and a half’.

According to an EU study, 7% of 11-16 year olds have visited self-harm websites. These are websites, forums, and groups that encourage and often explicitly admire cutting. One Tumblr blog posts suicide notes and footage of suicides. Many communities have their own language – codes and slang.

Another study found that, to no one’s surprise, those who had visited pro self-harm, eating disorder, or suicide websites reported lower overall levels of self-esteem, happiness, and trust.

Harm Principles

Okay, but anything can be harmful. Crossing the road carries risks. So do many other technologies – driving, air travel, factories, medicines. But with other technologies we identify those risks, the harmful effects or side effects, to try to ameliorate them.

These problems are bound up, and often come into contact with, other values that we hold dear – free speech, freedom for parents to raise children in the way they wish, the liberal live-and-let-live attitude.

But we usually tolerate intervention when there is a clear risk of harm.

Our framework for thinking about liberal interventionism comes from the British philosopher J.S. Mill’s harm principle. That my freedom to swing my fist ends at your face. That we are free to do what we wish as long as it doesn’t harm others.

Mill wrote: ‘The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others’.

We – usually the police or government – prevent violence before it happens, investigate threats, make sure food and medicine and other consumer products aren’t harmful or poisonous. We regulate and have safety codes to make sure technology, transport, and buildings are safe.

So to make sense of all of this, I want to start from cases where social media has actually harmed in some way, and work back from there. One of the problems, as we’ll see, is that it’s not always clear where to draw the line or how to draw it.

Harmful Posts

First, is there even any such thing as a harmful post? After all, a post is not the same as violence. It might encourage, endorse, promote, lead to, or raise the likelihood of harm. But it’s not harm itself. As Jonathan Rauch says, ‘If words are just as violent as bullets, then bullets are only as violent as words’.

But in other contexts, we do intervene before the harm is done. False advertising or leaving ingredients that might be harmful off labels. Libel laws. We arrest and prosecute for planning violence, even though it hasn’t been carried out. For threats.

These are cases where words and violence collide. I call it ‘edge speech’ – they’re right at the edge of where an abstract word signals that something physical is about to be done in the world.

During the Syrian Civil War, which started in 2011, at least 570 British citizens travelled to Syria to fight, many of them for ISIS.

The leader – Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi – called for Sunni youths around the world to come and fight in the war, saying, ‘I appeal to the youths and men of Islam around the globe and invoke them to mobilise and join us to consolidate the pillar of the state of Islam and wage jihad’.

ISIS had a pretty powerful social media presence. One recruitment video was called, ‘There’s no life without Jihad’. They engaged in a ‘One Billion’ social media campaign to try and raise one billion fighters. They had a free app to keep up with ISIS news, ‘The Dawn of Glad Tidings’, and used Twitter to post pictures, including those of beheadings.

The Billion campaign, with its hashtags, lead to 22,000 tweets on Twitter within four days. The hashtag ‘#alleyesonISIS’ on Twitter had 30,000 tweets.

One Twitter account had almost 180,00 followers, its tweets viewed over 2 million times a month, with two thirds of foreign ISIS fighters following it.

Ultimately, the British Government alone requested the removal of 15,000 ‘Jihadist propaganda’ posts.

Or take another example, what’s been called ‘Gang Banging’.

Homicides in the UK involving 16-24 year olds have risen by more than 60% in the past five years. There are an increasing number of stories of provocation through platforms like Snapchat. In one instance in the UK, a 13-year-old was stabbed to death by two other 13 and 14 year olds after an escalation involving bragging about knives which began on Snapchat. In another, a 16 year old was filmed dying on Snapchat after being stabbed.

One London youth worker told Vice, ‘Snapchat is the root of a lot of problems. I hate it’, ‘It’s full of young people calling each other out, boasting of killings and stabbings, winding up rivals, disrespecting others’.

Another said, ‘Some parts of Snapchat are 24/7 gang culture. It’s like watching a TV show on social media with both sides going at it, to see who can be more extreme, who can be hardest’.

Vice reports that much gang violence now plays out on Snapchat in some way, with posts being linked with reputation, impressing, threatening, humiliating, boasting, and, of course, eventually, escalating.

Youth worker and author Ciaran Thapar said, ‘When someone gets beaten up on a Snapchat video, to sustain their position in the ecosystem they have to counter that evidence with something more extreme, and social media provides space to do that. It is that phenomenon that’s happening en masse’.

The head of policing in the UK also warned that social media was driving children to increasing levels of violence: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43603080

Hate Speech

Or take another example, controversial hate speech laws.

The UN says: ‘In common language, “hate speech” refers to offensive discourse targeting a group or an individual based on inherent characteristics (such as race, religion or gender) and that may threaten social peace’.

This latter part is often forgotten. That the point of hate speech laws – rightly or wrongly, as we’ll see – is to address threats of harm before they happen.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights – which many countries have adopted and most in Europe at least have similar laws to – declares that, ‘In that exercise of their rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society’.

But, in an exception: ‘Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law’.

These laws were developed after the Nazi atrocities during the Second World War, and it was argued that laws of this type – now called hate speech laws – were necessary because the threat of harm from things like genocide was so great.

The UN’s David Kaye writes that, ‘the point of Article 20(2) was to prohibit expression where the speaker intended for his or her speech to cause hate in listeners who would agree with the hateful message and therefore engage in harmful acts towards the targeted group’.

It wasn’t meant to ban speech that caused offence, but to prevent speech that would lead to violence.

Of course, the problem is that this is very difficult to define, but by many metrics speech loosely defined as ‘hate speech’ has increased over the past few years.

In ‘Western’ countries including New Zealand, Germany, and Finland, 14-19% of people report being harassed online.

A 2020 study in Germany found observations of hate speech online had almost doubled from 34% to 67% in the last five years.

Just under 50% of people in the UK, US, Germany and Finland (aged 15 to 35) answered yes to: ‘In the past three months, have you seen hateful or degrading writings or speech online, which inappropriately attacked certain groups of people or individuals?’

And some research has found that youth suicide attempts are lower in US states that have hate crime laws.

The Edges of Harm

Okay, so when should social media companies and the government step in? Should social media companies host self-injury groups? Should the Ku Klux Klan have a Facebook page? What’s the difference between a joke and harassment? Should the police ever be involved? There’s also a variety of ways of addressing issues: from banning, to hiding posts, to shadow banning and demonetising, age restriction, to civil suits, fines, and prosecution.

Then there’s the problem of overreach. I’ve had this channel demonetised, videos age restricted and demonetised, which never recover in the algorithm – that I spend months working on and get nothing back from. This video is on a sensitive topic, I wouldn’t be surprised if it has problems with reach and demonetisation, so if you’d like to support content like this then you can do so through Patreon below.

Okay, so how can we approach this? One answer I think we can rule out pretty quickly is the libertarian one. Let everyone do what they want, users and platforms alike, and social media platforms and pages will thrive or fail as a result.

First, no libertarian society in history has worked. And second, even in the early days of the internet, where in effect the libertarian approach did thrive, social media companies slowly realised that if they let their platforms be full of self-harm, pornography, violence, and more, that advertisers and users tend to leave quickly. So they started to self-regulate, and some say, over-regulate.

As a result, free speech has become a subject of fierce debate. This is, I think, for three reasons: first, that free speech is, correctly, considered one of our most important values. Second, that with the internet, we now have more speech than ever before. And third, because in some cases, speech clearly can lead to harm.

We’ve seen this: suicide, mental health issues, self-harm, eating disorders, depression, promotion of terrorism and gang violence, the promotion of hate speech that openly calls for fascism or genocide.

So should we restrict speech of this type?

First, we should acknowledge that there is no such thing as free speech absolutism. We already limit the fringes of speech in many ways: threats, harassment, blackmail, libel, copyright, slander, harassment, incitement to violence, advertising standards, drug and food labelling standards, broadcasting standards.

Furthermore, we restrict many freedoms based on the likelihood of causing harm: health and safety and sanitation in restaurants, building codes, speeding and drink driving laws, wider infrastructure requirements, air travel regulation, laws on weapons, knives, etc… the list goes on.

So if we regulate these things, why do we not regulate social media companies when there is a significant risk of harm? I think we should be careful. Only focusing on those very ‘edge cases’. If there’s a substantial risk or if regulation can effectively reduce a risk of harm while minimising the curtailing of freedoms then it should either be done by institutions, companies, or governments that can. Importantly, how this is done should be subject to democratic debate.

Policy analyst and author David Bromell writes: ‘Rules that restrict the right to freedom of expression should, therefore, be made by democratically elected legislators, through regulatory processes that enable citizens voices’.

He continues: ‘Given the global dominance of a relatively small number of big tech companies, it is especially important that decisions about deplatforming are made within regulatory frameworks determined by democratically elected legislators and not by private companies’.

And none of this is to deny that it’s difficult, and finding that line, striking the right balance, is complex. But in the cases I’ve mentioned, with the statistics as they are, to do nothing would be irresponsible. In all of them, I think the potential for harm is often as clear as the potential for harm from, for example, libel.

Does this it mean posts, forums, and speech of this type should be banned outright.? Not always. Human rights expert Frank La Rue has argued that we should make clear distinctions between: ‘(a) Expression that constitutes an offence under international law and can be prosecuted criminally; (b) expression that is not criminally punishable but may justify a restriction and a civil suit; and (c) expression that does not give rise to criminal or civil sanctions, but still raises concerns in terms of tolerance, civility and respect for others’.

In other words, context, proportionality, tiered responses, all matter. There are many policies that can be put in place before banning or prosecution – not amplifying certain topics, age-restrictions, removing posts or demonetising before banning.

Haidt argues that big tech should be compelled by law to allow academics access to their data. One example is the Platform Transparency and Accountability Act, proposed by the Stanford University researcher Nate Persily. We could raise the age above which children can use social media, or force stricter rules. We could ban phones in schools.

Finally, democratic means transparent, so we can all have a debate about where the line is. Youtube is terrible at this. I don’t mind if a video gets demonetised or age-restricted because I’ve broken a reasonable rule. But it’s more often the case that I haven’t and they do anyway.

The UK has just introduced an online safety bill which addresses much of all of this, and I agree with the spirit of it. The Guardian reports that, ‘The bill imposes a duty of care on tech platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to prevent illegal content – which will now include material encouraging self-harm – being exposed to users. The communications regulator Ofcom will have the power to levy fines of up to 10% of a company’s revenues’.

It makes encouragement to suicide illegal, prevents young people seeing porn, and provides stronger protections against bullying and harassment, encouraging self-harm, deep-fake pornography, etc.

However, it also tries to force social media companies to scan private messages, which is an abhorrent breach of privacy, and a reminder that giving politicians the power to decide can carry as much risk as letting a single tech billionaire decide.

But ultimately, through gritted teeth, I remind myself that the principle remains: the more democratically decided, the better. And democratically elected politicians are one-step better than non-democratically elected big tech companies.

The post AntiSocial: How Social Media Harms appeared first on Then & Now.

We now live in an age of self-obsession. The era of everybody’s autobiography, as Gertrude Stein said. We all have our story, celebrities and politicians sell memoirs, we’re surrounded by reality TV and podcasts about personal growth, we live in a culture of self-development, the age of me.

De Quincy’s story begins with his pains and afflictions – toothache, poverty, hunger, sufferings – that ‘threatened to besiege the citadel of life and hope’, in his words. Crucially, he says that usually ‘Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice: they court privacy and solitude’.

His book is a confession because he says that usually people omit the ugly parts of their character and emphasise their success. He wanted to challenge that.

Then, he describes the relief of taking opium for the first time – ‘what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me!’

He describes an ‘abyss of divine enjoyment’ and ‘ a panacea for all human woes: here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered: happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket: portable ecstasies might be had corked up in a pint bottle: and peace of mind could be sent down in gallons by the mail coach’.

He uses the experience of his opium addiction to explore, psychologically and innovatively, that ‘abyss within’ – that ‘apocalypse of the world within me’.

This gazing into the abyss within is a mode of self-exploration that is still unfolding culturally. Compare the popular TV shows of this year with those of just twenty years ago. From the Last of Us to the Bear to Succession – these new shows are not what they’re ostensibly about on the surface – zombies, cooking, or business – but are about something much more universal – character. Much of their genius – much like Oppenheimer, for example – relies on these shallow depth of field close ups on the intense emotions displayed on the torn character’s face.

So where did this inward gaze come from? Before de Quincy’s time, we have to remember that knowledge, traditionally, was not about what’s in here – endogenous – but what’s out there –exogenous. Everything from moral rules coming from god, to science coming from studying the world, to art coming from ancient models and classical forms – was about studying and learning from the external world.

There’s a great book on the early Ancient Greeks of Homer’s time that influentially makes the case that the people of that period saw their emotions, passions, angers, and desires not as coming from within but as being placed in them by the gods.

Agamemnon says that Zeus put wild ate – the goddess of mischief and delusion – in him, and made him act in a way contrary to how he usually would – he says the ‘plan of zeus’ was fulfilled.

Other characters talk as if gods had taken away, changed, or destroyed a normal way of thinking and replaced it with another.

In other words, character came not from within but from without. Remember, the Ancients had no concept of personality, of biochemistry, they genuinely believed in their gods. Think about how powerful our imaginations are – why wouldn’t you believe that an intense of experience of anger, say, and a loss of self-control was something planted there by the gods.

To take one more example, in the Christian framework, the self is always in reference to god. St Augustine may have written the first autobiography – The Confessions – in the 4th century, but his aim was to conform his behaviour to the external rules of Christian teaching and god’s will, not to discover some true self within.

The Medieval period was defined by roles you were born into – craftsman, butcher, peasant, lord – the rules were laid down, you didn’t question them. But in de Quincy’s time all of this was changing.

De Quincy was obsessed with two poets: William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge – he idolised them, wrote letters to them, befriended them, and travelled here to the English Lake District where they lived. He idolised them because, like other writers of the time like Goethe and philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau – they were all working out a new idea of the self.

Wordsworth, before de Quincy, also wrote one of the first autobiographies – a very long poem called the Prelude about ‘the growth of a poet’s mind’ – all about his childhood experiences. He admitted that, ‘it is a thing unprecedented in literary history that a man should talk so much about himself’.

Wordsworth believed, adopted philosophical ideas in Germany from people like Kant, that our inner life – the framework, structure, ideas, emotions, of the mind and body – shapes the information we get through the senses and patterns it, colours it, transforms and raises it – so that everyone sees a lake, for example, in a different way, with different memories, different goals and ideas. This was radically new.

It all started with Rousseau, who, not long before in the 18th century had a profound realisation. If, as he believed, it was the world, political systems, and social norms around him – those exogenous features – that were oppressing ordinary people, keeping them in chains, where was truth to be found? It could only be found, he decided, within.

Rousseau opened his autobiography – again, one of the first, probably the first, and again titled The Confessions – with this influential passage: ‘I am made unlike any one I have ever met; I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am different’. Because of this he said, ‘I should like in some way to make my soul transparent to the reader’s eye’.

The historian W.J.T. Mitchell even described Rousseau as the first modern man – ‘the great originator’.

Goethe, inspired by Rousseau, said that he turned into himself and found a world. Rousseau said his project was one that had ‘no model’, and would have ‘no imitator’.

It was an act of pure, singular, individual, irrepressible creativity – from within.

This spirit of the age had a profound affect on many writers. Wordsworth wrote so much about this place because it was where he was from. He described the psychological ‘spots of time’ that influenced his individual character.

Personal and local stories from places like this one: Dungeon Ghyll Force – as a place where lambs almost drown because the shepherd’s boys aren’t concentrating – he describes their inner worlds – their ‘pulses stop’, their ‘breath is lost’.

Or when he remembers stealing a boat at night when he was a child, becoming terrified in the middle of a lake at the dark imposing shapes of the mountains around him that haunted him and  ‘moved slowly through my mind / By day, and were the trouble of my dreams’.

De Quincy admired all of this so much that he moved into Wordsworth’s cottage after him and when writing his own autobiography, wrote with his tongue in his cheek that there were ‘no precedents that he was aware of’ for this sort of writing.

But this is what makes De Quincy’s Confessions so innovative. He focuses on what is usually swept away in our own self-aggrandising narratives about ourselves. He says, ‘Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feelings, than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that “decent drapery”’.

He took Wordsworth’s exploration of emotion, feeling, the self and the natural world and applied it to his own warped experiences with opium and urban life.

He describes how opium furnished ‘tremendous scenery’ in the dreams of the eater. He writes poetically about the ‘endless self-multiplication’ of the self going up and down symbolic staircases, and talks about the ‘wonderous depth’ within.

He uses metaphors like translucent lakes and shining mirrors and waters and oceans changing, surging, wrathful, to describe the changes in our own inner lives. ‘My agitation was infinite,’ he said ‘my mind tossed – and surged with the ocean.’

Of course, this new inner self didn’t appear from nowhere. It mirrored the scientific developments of the period. When astronomers like Galileo made observations about the universe that contradicted that taught wisdom of the Bible, all of these poets and philosophers were saying: ‘what about the universe within?’

Wordsworth’s spots of autobiographical time, de Quincy’s artistic description of personal challenges and addiction, Lord Byron’s model of heroic outcasts on voyages of self-discovery – all provide the groundwork for modern psychology, the modern self, and for the core injection of the modern world: create yourself as something new.

The autobiographical self is the model that helps us traverse the world. As psychologist Qi Wang says, the autobiographical self is, ‘self-knowledge that builds upon our memories and orients us toward the future, allowing our existence to transcend the here-and-now moment’.

This had an incalculable effect on the culture and politics of the modern period. These writers were a sensation across Europe and anyone who argued for individual rights, freedoms, the power of ordinary people, drew on them in some way.

On the other hand, I’s produced the narcissism and obsessions with the self we see everywhere today. We no longer look outward as much, but spend a lot of time naval-gazing in.

I think the challenge of this century will be whether the world within can be reconciled with the world without.

The post Why We’re So Self-Obsessed appeared first on Then & Now.

Russell Brand’s career as an entertainer was based on promiscuity, shock, extravagance, wit, intelligence – but that’s the case with so many comedians. In 2013 Brand did something most comedians don’t – he talked to Britain’s chief MSM political interrogator – Jeremy Paxman.

He said: ‘here’s the thing that we shouldn’t do: shouldn’t destroy the planet; shouldn’t create massive economic disparity; shouldn’t ignore the needs of the people. The burden of proof is on the people with the power’.

Brand told the incredulous Paxman that he didn’t vote, what’s the point? It went viral at the time, not least because Brand is one of Britain’s most recognisable faces, but because it seemed to many people to capture the mood: an ordinary person, telling the truth, up against the establishment.

It was the start of a shift towards politics.

In 2014, after a stint in Hollywood, he wrote a book – Revolution – which he discussed in another much talked about interview on Newsnight in the UK.

The same year, he started The Trews on Youtube, reading and commenting on the UK newspapers, interviewing a range of people, making mostly progressive arguments.

Of course, for many the pandemic changed things. In January of 2021, one subject stands out as getting millions more views than usual – The Great Reset.

It’s a topic Brand comes back to several times, and these videos always have many more views than most others. Around this time, Brand becomes more critical of policies surrounding Covid-19 – much of it reasonable. He shifts to his current, regular format – Stay Free – a full time regular show with millions of subscribers, advertisers, co-presenters, and guests.

A few months later, in the middle of 2021, stories began being published which were mostly drawing on Brand’s tweets: Brand ‘is a conspiracy theorist’.

By 2022, two competing narratives are set: for many, Brand had become a crackpot tinfoil hat conspiracist. For Brand, that there’s a centralising, authoritarian, mainstream agenda, dominated by MSM, the political establishment, big tech, and global corporate interests, to take away our freedoms.

I want to look at several stories as they unfolded – Covid and vaccines, the Great Reset, the Dutch farmers protest, and the allegations against Brand in September of 2023 – and ask a question that I think is fundamental to our information age: what does it mean to be called a conspiracy theorist? Especially if there have been real conspiracies in history – Iran-Contra, Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, the Holocaust, all the way back to Julius Caesar’s assassination. All of these were the result of a conspiracy.

We’ll look at the history and the psychology too to try and separate fact from fiction, asking what drives Brand? Is there any truth to what he says? How can we think about the establishment, the mainstream media, the global elite – what does all of this tell us about the society we live in?

Contents:

• The Great Reset
• The Dutch Farmers Protest
• COVID-19
• History and Conspiracy
• The Psychology of Conspiracy
• Cognitive Biases
• The Mainstream Media Agenda
• The Recent Allegations and Rumble
• Narcissism News Entertainment
• Public Trust, Private Solutions

The Great Reset

Brand talks about lots of different subjects, in a lot of different ways, but there are a few themes and topics he comes back to again and again.

He is aware he’s been framed as a conspiracy theorist, and frequently points out that he’s just reading facts from a variety of sources, some mainstream – the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post – some more fringe. So how can we disentangle fact from fantasy?

At the beginning of 2021, clips circulated on the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset.

‘The Great Reset’ is an initiative from the World Economic Forum to drastically change the direction of the economy after Covid-19 by addressing social issues and, ‘to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world’.

Depending on who you ask, The Great Reset is anything from capitalist propaganda, to a genuine attempt to address the problems with capitalism, to a global conspiracy to exert more control over the population.

In the case of Brand, he argued, ‘there are some people that believe in shady global cabals running things from behind the scenes. Now, I don’t believe that, I believe that there are plain visible economic interests that dominate the direction of international policy’.

The video is reasonable. It criticises those who think the Great Reset is part of an authoritarian plan to take control through the justification of a manufactured fake climate crisis, for example.

The video is a hit, it has a million views, compared to his other videos of the time ranging around 100,000.

Brand makes another video, saying he’s decided to, ‘dive a little bit deeper into what you think, and further evidence, and your legitimate concerns’. The video currently has 2.7 million views.

A year later, he says: ‘bad news, the Great Reset, where you will own nothing and be happy, is being brought about by economic policy decisions made by your government that will facilitate the advance of the most powerful interests on earth’.

Brand continues that: ‘this is not conspiracy theory, I’m going to read you the actual facts here, I’m just using rhetoric that’s appealing, I’m an entertainer’.

Okay, so what is the Great Reset? It began as a book written by the founder of the corporate lobbying group the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, and his co-author, Thierry Malleret.

One review describes three main themes:

1. A ‘push for fairer outcomes in the global market and to address the massive inequalities produced by global capitalism’.
2. ‘efforts to address equality and sustainability by urging governments and businesses to take things like racism and climate change more seriously’.
3. Embrace ‘innovation and technological solutions [that] could be used to address global social problems’.

All of this sounds reasonable enough, admirable even. But, as political author Ivan Wecke points out, Schwab and the WEF’s ideas have something ‘fishy’ about them. The initiative can be seen as an exercise in corporate PR that gives multinational business leaders more power, not less, and that give political elites more power, not less. In another review of the book, Steven Umbrello concludes that the book does point out a lot of problems, but has no substantive solutions. And, of course, liberal elites love this stuff. Trudeau, for example, has used the language of needing a ‘reset’.

So there’s plenty to criticise. But as Brand explores the Great Reset, he connects it to other events – Black Rock buying up houses, for example. Emphasising one video ominously claiming that in the future you’ll own nothing and be happy, increasing government restrictions during the pandemic, Bill Gates, and the Dutch farmers protest.

He seems more aligned with Alberta premiere Jason Kenney, who has claimed the great reset is a ‘grab bag of left-wing ideas for less freedom and more government’, and, ‘failed socialist policy ideas’.

Brand uses the word ‘agenda’ frequently, and as he says, it’s not a conspiracy, he’s just reading the facts. So what is a conspiracy?

One definition is: ‘the belief that a number of actors join together in secret agreement, in order to achieve a hidden goal which is perceived to be unlawful or malevolent’ (Zonis and Joseph).

Another by professor of psychology Jan-Willem Prooijen argues a conspiracy has 5 components:

1. It makes connections that explain disconnected actions, objects, or people into patterns
2. It argues that it was an intentional plan
3. It involves a coalition or group
4. The goal is hostile, selfish, evil, or at odds with public interest
5. It operates in secret

Another definition proposes a simple four criteria model: ‘(1) a group, (2) acting in secret, (3) to alter institutions, usurp power, hide truth, or gain utility, (4) at the expense of the common good’.

There also many types of conspiracy – within government and institutions, without, in the form of another country or nefarious power, above in the form of shady elites, or even below in the form of ordinary people overthrowing capitalism.

By Prooijen’s criteria, the Great Reset can be thought of as a conspiracy. After all, it’s intentional, it involves a group of people, some argue it’s not in the public interest, and it at least in part operates in secrecy at Davos. But Brand points out that it’s not a conspiracy, they’re saying it publicly: https://youtu.be/BXTPzFSx6oI?si=xMQIZ7u4xFfNYEc7&t=213

But I think the most interesting component is the first one – it makes connections that explain disconnected actions, objects, or people into patterns. Brand does this often, hopping between topics. So let’s look at another one topic, the Dutch farmers protest.

The Dutch Farmers Protest

The Dutch Farmer’s movement, beginning in 2019 and continuing today, are protests that argue that farmers are being unfairly targeted in efforts to address climate change.

The Dutch government have passed a range of policies aiming to cut nitrogen pollution and livestock farming in the country.

Brand says, ‘Bloody farmers, protesting, hating the environment. What is it? Are farmers all bastards? Or, are we seeing the beginning of the Great Reset play out in real time?’.

In short, the Dutch government policies are a power grab, taking power from ordinary farmers, and he connects the protest to other stories he covers frequently – the Great Reset, WEF, Bill Gates, and the MSM failing to cover the events appropriately.

Remember: ‘1: It makes connections that explain disconnected actions, objects, or people into patterns’.

So what’s really happening in the Netherlands?

Studies since the 80s have shown that nitrate pollution in the ground, getting into drinking water, and into wider ecosystems, has been an increasing problem. Nitrate pollution can cause blue baby syndrome, increases in bowel cancer, respiratory problems and premature birth.

It causes havoc in rivers, which nitrate-based fertiliser runs into, killing fish. The EU has identified Natura 2000 areas – fragile areas of nature that are home to rare and threated species.

The Netherlands is an agricultural superpower. It’s the second largest exporter of agricultural products in the world, and the EU’s number one exporter of meat. Unfortunately, being close to the designated Natura 2000 areas, this makes nitrate pollution in the Netherlands a big problem.

It’s also an EU member state – with its freedom of movement, courts, European Parliament, and so on, and support for staying in the EU in the Netherlands is very high – around 75%.

The EU has legislated to reduce nitrate pollution by 2030 and more broadly, worldwide, agriculture contributes to between a quarter and a third of all greenhouse gas emissions.

The Dutch government and EU have agreed a 1.5 billion euro package to help 2000-3000 “peak polluter” farmers either innovate, relocate, change business or, as a last resort, buy them out.

Obviously, among many farmers this is deeply unpopular.

‘For agricultural entrepreneurs, there will be a stopping scheme that will be as attractive as possible’, said Van der Wal in a series of parliamentary briefings. ‘For industrial peak polluters, we will get to work with a tailor-made approach and in tightening permits. After a year, we will see if this has achieved enough’.

Is it hypocritical to focus efforts on ordinary farmers rather than industrial peak polluters? On the surface, yes. And none of what I’ve just said is to blame farmers. But it’s obviously a complex problem with a lot of different interests at stake.

And in the middle of the video, Brand makes some reasonable points. In Sri Lanka the outright banning of all fertilisers and pesticides was disastrous. He makes points about focusing on farmers rather than finding ways to shift attention to corporations and the one percent. He says it’s always ordinary people rather than the powerful. All of which I can agree with. But he ignores some of the complexity. The Dutch government has also ordered coal powerplants to close, for example. And the biggest polluter in the country is Tata Steel, which the regulation does focus on, and is one of the country’s biggest employers of ‘ordinary people’.

But what stands out is the framing. It’s about the Great Reset, Bill Gates, the agenda, and the next piece of the puzzle…

COVID-19

There are several ongoing Covid-19 debates. The lab leak hypothesis, the efficacy of vaccines, big tech censorship, the legality or ethics of ‘lockdowns’ – and what should be clear, wherever you stand on a particular issue, is that each of these, while having some crossover, is somewhat different.

Some of the Brand’s many Covid-19 videos, like one on ‘vaccine passports’ for example, have a lot to agree with. However, like with other topics, Brand has a tendency to take a story and spin it into a wider pattern.

We hear it a lot recently – it’s about ‘the narrative’.

The lab leak hypothesis isn’t about laboratory safety precautions or lack thereof, but about a coverup involving world government, the WHO, and big tech censorship. A WHO epidemic surveillance network across the world that monitors the outbreak of communicable disease becomes about an elitist surveillance society that spies on us. A doctor describing helping with outbreaks becomes an object of derision.

Take this video, one of many on vaccines. It’s about Pfizer falsifying the data of vaccine trials – a serious issue. It’s based on a BMJ article in which a whistleblower raised a number of concerns with a trial site they worked at, including:

‘1. Participants placed in a hallway after injection and not being monitored by clinical staff

1. Lack of timely follow-up of patients who experienced adverse events
2. Protocol deviations not being reported
3. Vaccines not being stored at proper temperatures
4. Mislabelled laboratory specimens, and
5. Targeting Ventavia staff for reporting these types of problems’

All worrying concerns. And Brand repeatedly points out that he is just looking the evidence objectively, just asking questions. He describes himself as a ‘glass funnel’ reporting information carefully and unbiasedly, while the MSM report it ‘morally’, telling people what to do.

There are a few points of irony here. First, obviously Brand has a moral position here. We all do – unless we read a story without comment or opinion, which Brand is doing. Second, he says it’s not being reported on by the mainstream media, while using reports from mainstream institutions – the BMJ, CBS, and it’s been reported by the Daily Mail and the Conversation. I find a brief reference to it in the Financial Times.

But, it might be reasonable to ask, should there not be more of an outcry? I can’t find it reported in the New York Times or the BBC, for example.

As the Conversation article points out, the concerns raised are important and worrying but don’t meaningfully undermine wider evidence on Covid-19 vaccines. It involved three Pfizer trial centres out of 150. Those 3 sites involved around 1000 people.

Of course, across the world, hundreds of thousands took part in trials involving many different pharmaceutical companies, third-party trial centres, universities, and hundreds of regulatory bodies.

And most of the whistleblower’s complaints were about sloppiness – photos of things like needles thrown away inappropriately, participants’ IDs left out when they shouldn’t have been. One section reads, ‘a Ventavia executive identified three site staff members with whom to “Go over e-diary issue/falsifying data, etc.” One of them was “verbally counseled for changing data and not noting late entry,” a note indicates.’

Now, all of this is obviously worrying, good reporting, worth investigating, et cetera.

But it’s important to keep a sense of proportion. This is a single third-party trial centre in Texas, but Brand spins it into a wider narrative, claiming in another video, for example, that, ‘the mainstream media are preventing their own medical experts from accurately reporting on potential covid problems. Meanwhile, they continue to repress information about vaccine efficacy’.

As Prof Douglas Drevets, head of the infectious diseases department at University of Oklahoma has written: ‘There have been so many other studies of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine since the Phase III trial that people can be confident in its efficacy and safety profile. That said, Pfizer might be wise to re-run their analysis excluding all Ventavia subjects and show if that does/does not change the results. Such an analysis would give added confidence in the Phase III results’.

Pfizer then reported that they looked into the complaints and said that, ‘Pfizer’s investigation did not identify any issues or concerns that would invalidate the data or jeopardize the integrity of the study’.

I’m not saying Pfizer’s claims should be taken at face value, or that pharmaceutical companies do not have perverse profit incentives, and so on, or that this isn’t worth someone digging into – the point is that this is a very small story, it has been looked into, and I’d imagine if you’re an editor at a TV station or newspaper, with hundreds of other competing stories to present, you’d decide on balance that there are more important stories. News reporting is a matter of emphasis. With only a limited number of positions on, for example, a front page each day, what’s included and what’s not?

Brand says that the mainstream media are censoring information when in fact the opposite is true. There are, again, issues with the mainstream media that we’ll come to, but it’s an endorsement of the press that, unlike in say China or Russia, a relatively minor issue could be reported and investigated.

Brand constantly says things like, ‘this is what happens when you politicise information’, without the awareness that by weaving insignificant details into wider narratives, deciding to give small stories weight, he is himself obviously politicising information.

The whistleblower was also reported to be a sceptic about vaccine efficacy more broadly. Brand also relies on jokes as innuendo to spin it into his wider conspiracy narrative – joking, for example, that the whistleblower was found dead.

He says, ‘individual freedom, individual ability to make choices for yourself, based on a wide variety of sometimes opposing evidence, and sometimes contradictory information, that places you in the position as an adult to make decisions for yourself. That’s not what the mainstream media want, but that’s what we demand on your behalf’.

But he doesn’t use a wide variety of evidence. He selects minor stories and connects them to the narrative. There are many, many, many more sources that report things like vaccines have saved three million lives in the US alone. 96% of doctors are fully vaccinated. Myocarditis has been reported in ten out of a million shots of the vaccine, but is more likely to be caused by the Covid-19 virus than the vaccine.

There are debates to be had, there always are, but what Brand doesn’t have is a good sense of the weight and significance of a story. And what he does have, as we’ll get to, is a good sense of how to tell a compelling, scary and entertaining story.

But wait, just because it’s a small story it doesn’t make it automatically wrong. And yes, there are monied interests, powerful lobbies, values and ideas that are dominant and others that get sidelined. The risk is throwing out the baby with the bath water. And as we saw at the beginning of the video, some conspiracies turn out to be true, and they weren’t reported on either. So is there any other way to separate fact from fiction?

History and Conspiracy

History is full of conspiracies, but they tend to be limited – a small group of people with a limited set of goals.

Most theories, though, have turned out to be wrong, or at the very least, there’s little evidence for them. Vaccines don’t cause autism. Obama was born in the US. The earth is not flat. Witches weren’t conspiring to encourage the harvests fail. Jews weren’t conspiring to take over the world in Weimar Germany.

But the idea that there is an agenda to take over the world, an idea that connects dots between disparate events is as old as time – and they’ve usually turned out to be wrong, or at least, as we’ll get to, miss the real point.

In the middle of the 19th century, it was a common belief in America that the Catholic Church and the monarchies of Europe were not only uniting to destroy the US, but had already infiltrated the US government. One Texas newspaper declared that, ‘It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions. We have the best reasons for believing that corruption has found its way into our Executive Chamber, and that our Executive head is tainted with the infectious venom of Catholicism’.

Before that, it was the Illuminati, who, according to one book in 1797, were formed, ‘for the express purpose of ROOTING OUT ALL THE RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS, AND OVERTURNING ALL THE EXISTING GOVERNMENTS OF EUROPE’.

In an influential 1964 article, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter points out that throughout history there have been suspicions of plots that have infected all major institutions, a fifth column, that all in power have been compromised.

The inventor of the telegraph, Samuel Morse, wrote that, ‘A conspiracy exists, its plans are already in operation… we are attacked in a vulnerable quarter which cannot be defended by our ships, our forts, or our armies’.

Morse, sounding just like Brand, wrote: ‘The serpent has already commenced his coil about our limbs, and the lethargy of his poison is creeping over us.… Is not the enemy already organized in the land? Can we not perceive all around us the evidence of his presence?… We must awake, or we are lost’.

Another article worried that, ‘that Jesuits are prowling about all parts of the United States in every possible disguise, expressly to ascertain the advantageous situations and modes to disseminate Popery’.

It was alleged that the 1893 depression was the result of a conspiracy by Catholics to attack the US economy by starting a run on the banks.

WWI was started because the Austo-Hungarian Empire believed the killing of the heir to the throne Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the result of a Serbian government conspiracy, and so attacked Serbia, setting off a chain of events leading to the war. There was no evidence for this. Historian Michael Shermer calls it the deadliest conspiracy theory in history.

Senator McCarthy famously believed a communist conspiracy had infiltrated every American institution. In 1951 he said that there was, ‘a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men’.

During the resulting Red Scare, influential businessman Robert Welsch wrote that, ‘Communist influences are now in almost complete control of our Federal Government’, the Supreme Court, and that they were in a struggle for control of, ‘the press, the pulpit, the radio and television media, the labor unions, the schools, the courts, and the legislative halls of America’.

The Psychology of Conspiracy

One of the important distinctions here is between phrases like an ‘agenda’ and ‘conspiracy theory’. Brand, while defending himself as not being a conspiracy theorist, tends to use terms like ‘agenda’, ‘they’, and ‘the global elite’. The difference is between purposeful collusion across institutions and a pattern of say, certain values aligning between corporations and neoliberal politicians. Sometimes this is a gradient more than black and white, but another way we can untangle this is to look at studies about who believes in conspiracies and for what reasons.

Firstly, a lot of people believe in them. One third of Americans believe Obama is not American. A third that 9/11 was an inside job. A quarter that covid was a hoax. 30 percent that chemtrails are somewhat true. 33% believe that the government are covering up something up about the North Dakota crash.

Never heard of it? That’s because researchers made it up. They polled people about their beliefs in conspiracies and included a completely made up event in North Dakota, and people instinctively believed that the government was hiding something about it.

People are naturally suspicious of power, which is of course a good thing, but for some people that leads to belief in a conspiracy. Why?

There are several factors that psychologists have looked at. The first is uncertainty. Psychologist Jan-Willem Prooijen points out that at a fundamental level, conspiracy theories are a response to uncertainty.

He writes: ‘Conspiracy theories originate through the same cognitive processes that produce other types of belief (e.g., new age, spirituality), they reflect a desire to protect one’s own group against a potentially hostile outgroup, and they are often grounded in strong ideologies. Conspiracy theories are a natural defensive reaction to feelings of uncertainty and fear’.

Responding to uncertainty and fear by hypothesising a threat is an evolutionary instinct. You’re better off jumping at the sight of a stick in the long grass than be bitten by a snake. The same thing happens when we see shapes in the darkness. We are risk calculating creatures, always on the watch for danger.

And we do this by looking for patterns. Jonathan Kay writes that, ‘Conspiracism is a stubborn creed because humans are pattern-seeking animals. Show us a sky full of stars, and we’ll arrange them into animals and giant spoons. Show us a world full of random misery, and we’ll use the same trick to connect the dots into secret conspiracies’.

Psychologists call it pattern perception. I like to call it patternification.

Prooijen writes, ‘pattern perception is the tendency of the human mind to “connect dots” and perceive meaningful and causal relationships between people, objects, animals, and events. Perceiving patterns is the opposite of perceiving randomness’.

Again, all very reasonable. But sometimes the stick in the grass is just a stick. And sometimes an event is just random, meaningless, an accident, a result of incompetence, ignorance, and so on.

Prooijen writes, ‘Sometimes events truly are random, but most people perceive patterns anyway. This is referred to as illusory pattern perception: People sometimes see meaningful relationships that just do not exist’.

We all do it all the time. But what’s interesting in research is that some people see patterns more readily than others.

In studies, people who see patterns in abstract paintings, random dots, or coin tosses, were more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, paranormal phenomena, and be religious. People who believe in astrology, spiritual healing, telepathy, communication with the dead, are all more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. Belief in conspiracies have also been shown to increase after natural disasters.

Threat leads to the formation of a belief in a pattern in response to that threat.

In many – by no means all, but many – of Brand’s videos, small stories, a small sample of data, a single piece of evidence, are spun into a wider pattern.

In this video, he links the Great Rest and the WEF’s video, ‘you’ll own nothing and be happy’, to movements in the financial markets, for example – a story about Black Rock buying up real estate.

It’s all part of the agenda. He throws in that the mainstream media reports it as ‘good news’ – a housing bonanza that’s going to great for everyone – insinuating journalists are part of the agenda, ignoring the irony that he’s citing the New York Times.

What’s it got to do with the great reset? I honestly couldn’t tell you. I wonder if bitcoin.com – Brand’s source – has an agenda?! In this video, the great reset is linked to the farmers protests. Throw in Bill Gates, vaccines and it all becomes part of the simple good vs evil narrative.

Author Naomi Klein describes it as a ‘conspiracy smoothie’.

She writes, ‘the Great Reset has managed to mash up every freakout happening on the internet — left and right, true-ish, and off-the-wall — into one inchoate meta-scream about the unbearable nature of pandemic life under voracious capitalism’.

Conspiracy theories become, through patternification, totalisers. Everything gets lumped in together as part of the same single narrative. It becomes zero sum, good vs evil analysis. But this doesn’t answer why some people do this and others don’t, nor does it answer when the dots should be connected. To see why people do this, we’ll look at two categories: cognitive biases and the need for control.

Cognitive Biases

Studies have shown that education at high school halves the tendency to believe in conspiracies, from 42% to 22%. Why is this?

It’s kind of counter intuitive, because in many ways education actually teaches you, more than anything, to be sceptical. The scientific method, for example, is built on scepticism of received wisdom. In history, you’re taught to be sceptical of and scrutinise the literature and sources. In politics, many approaches – liberalism, Marxism, poststructuralism, and more – are, at their core, sceptical about the state and institutional power. If you’re sceptical about what you’re told, surely you’re more likely to believe that something is going on behind the scenes.

Except, while scepticism is key, education also teaches you to draw on evidence, being led by evidence as much as possible – and importantly, all of the evidence.

If you only draw on bitcoin.com to make a case you wouldn’t get far. Which is why most undergraduate essays or dissertations and papers to submitted journals require a literature review – show that you’ve assessed and understand the literature, identified weaknesses, made an argument.

In fact, the very basis of the modern scientific method in both the hard sciences and the social sciences and humanities is peer review – you must reference, show you understand the evidence, cite sources in a bibliography, show how the studies can be rerun and submit it to a body of peers to check over the work. This idea – that work is checked and can be responded to – runs through the heart of institutions.

We rely on the work of others, we build upon it, we respond to it. It has its limits, it’s often biased, it’s middle class, it can be wrong, subdisciplines are at loggerheads, criticise one another, but, that’s precisely what makes it work – it’s tentative, it’s open to critique, and it can be checked, it’s how knowledge is built up communally. We’ll come back to its benefits and limits.

Another mistake conspiracy theorists make is proportionality bias: that a large effect needs a large cause to create a sense of ‘cognitive harmony’ – a balance between two ideas.

JKF couldn’t have been killed by a lone assassin, he was the president of the US. Princess Diana couldn’t have been randomly killed in a car crash, it must have been the royals. 9/11 couldn’t have been the result of 19 guys from the Middle East, it must have been the government.

We’re all human, including presidents. But if a US president and your neighbour Ned both died randomly on the same day – which one would there be a conspiracy about?

In one study, two groups were told two different stories about a president of a small country being assassinated. One group were told the assassination led to civil war, in another it doesn’t. People were more likely to believe the assassination was a conspiracy if it led to a war.

Prooijen says the proportionality bias is that ‘a big consequence must have had a big cause.’

There are some other biases. Tribalism leads us to protect our in-group, divide the world into us vs them, good vs evil. Another is the intentionality bias, that leads us to believe that the negative effects of other’s actions were intentional, whereas if we did them it would be an accident or we’d have good reason. Every banker is evil, our own pension fund is necessary. Or in the form of Hanlon’s razor: ‘never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity’. A politician does something that we perceive to be evil, really they just don’t understand the topic, and so on.

So there biases of thinking that we all make, and I think in many ways they can be summed up in the way Brand thinks about the mainstream media.

The Mainstream Media Agenda

I think combining these fallacies and thinking about the way Brand takes a small story – like the Pfizer data falsification story – and turns it into a global elite agenda, gives us a good frame to think about Brand’s critique of the mainstream media.

It’s almost always part of the narrative, and even more so since the accusations against him in September.

The mainstream media have lots of problems – they’re diverse problems – not least of which that they tend to be close to elites, institutionalised, cozy with politicians, centred in and overly focused on places like Washington, London, and New York, and have financial interests. The list goes on.

But to paint hundreds of thousands of journalists in the US and UK alone as part of an agenda is not only naïve, it’s dangerous.

Firstly, large media institutions could not get away with relying on small stories to construct speculative narratives like Brand does. They are always going to be led, for good or bad, by the dominant body of evidence available. If 99% of scientists believe that the vaccine is safe and effective, the BBC is going to report it that way. That’s what you get. Media literacy is to read the news widely, know an institution’s biases, and read elsewhere too.

Second, the surge in independent media is a great thing – you’re watching it, now – and obviously I’m an enthusiast. However ‘independent’ does not automatically mean authentic, unbiased, ‘giving the voiceless a voice’, ‘free’, or any other of the superlatives you often hear. Independent media largely rely on stories investigated and first reported by the same mainstream media they go on to criticise. Brand does this all the time. ‘Independent’ media rarely have the budget to execute years-long investigations, report from warzones, get access to archives and data quickly, get to the scene of a disaster or protest while it’s happening. Media institutions are important for this very reason. We need institutions with the budget and connections to do these things. Compare this to Brand reading from bitcoin.com.

Third, to paint everyone in the mainstream media in the same way is to ignore that the media is made up of millions of people around the world doing work passionately, carefully, with varied opinions and interests. To frame the mainstream media as monolithic, and use language like us vs them, is dangerous.

Brand paints anyone who is part of the ‘narrative’ as stooges for a centralising corporate and government agenda to take away your freedom. As any cursory look at a textbook on propaganda will show, that’s not how influence works in authoritarian countries, let alone liberal ones.

Brand relies on a top down model of propaganda in which power and money directs information, education, news, and opinion downwards through the press and the schools into the minds of a mindless population.

But as Jonathan Auerbach and Russ Castronovo point out in their introduction to the Oxford Handbook on Propaganda, propaganda is not total, even in totalitarian regimes. Persuasion by information is much more complex. They write, ‘people consume propaganda, but they also produce and package their own information just as they also create and spin their own truths.’

If you think the mainstream media are just propagandists then I implore you to just look at the facts of any of these issues. One million people have died from Covid in the US alone. And vaccine hesitancy has been estimated to have led to 300,000 preventable deaths. That’s a study from Brown, Harvard, the New York Times, and more. If you think the mainstream media are just propagandists, take a look through the Pulitzer Prize nominees at the investigations of the past year.

Again, I’m not saying that there aren’t many, many criticisms to be made. And that obviously the mainstream media are de facto in the centre, and that collective, radical, and socialist solutions or candidates will never get a fair shout and that lobbying and money will always delegitimise solutions that don’t align with their interests, and that supporting independent progressive media is crucial to countering that. But none of these criticisms paints the mainstream media as monolithic, evil, propaganda. It’s simplistic, it’s dangerous, it’s wrong, and as we’ll see, it’s often about narcissism, control, and in many cases outright lies.

The Recent Allegations and Rumble

In September of 2023, Channel Four and the Telegraph in the UK released an investigation into Brand that included allegations of sexual assault and rape. The day before, Brand posted a video denying the allegations.

What happened next, for many, seemed to prove Brand’s point. The media focused its attention on Brand, countless articles were written, news items broadcast, investigations launched at the BBC. He was dropped by his agent, a tour was cancelled, Youtube removed advertising from his account so he could no longer make money from it, a charity he did work for cut ties, and on and on.

One platform stood firm – Rumble – and a letter from a UK MP asking whether Rumble was going to stop Brand earning money was ridiculed and criticised by many, including Rumble, who said in an open letter: ‘We regard it as deeply inappropriate and dangerous that the UK Parliament would attempt to control who is allowed to speak on our platform or to earn a living from doing so’.

Inevitably it became a story about a story. Free speech, cancel culture, the establishment, the agenda.

There are, again, reasonable debates to be had here. I for one am not sure Youtube should have taken a stance based on allegations alone, no matter how strong. But a week or so after the allegations, the ‘I’ in the UK ran a story about ads on Brand’s Rumble channel. One was from the Wedding Shop, who told them: ‘We are on the phone right now to our agency to ascertain which of these networks is showing our ads on Rumble so that we can actively remove ads from the platform… It goes without saying that we would not be happy to be featured on Russell Brand’s videos’.

They continued: ‘We use a media agency to spend our advertising budget and we have never chosen to advertise on Rumble, which must be part of the Google, Bing or Meta ad network. Where our ads are placed is not something we generally control – it would be for Google, Bing or Meta to decide whether or not to include or exclude particular platforms’.

It also reports that several companies including Burger King, Xero and Fiverr have stopped their ads running on Rumble. The stories are all similar.

A Fiverr spokesperson said, ‘These ads have been removed and our partners and teams have been alerted to ensure this doesn’t happen again. (We have excluded his channel on both YouTube and on Rumble.) We take brand safety and ethical advertising placement seriously, and we do not condone or support any form of violence or misconduct’.

A toy manufacturer said something similar.

In 2017, Youtube went through something called the ‘adpocalypse’. Advertisers pulled out of Youtube en-masse, when they realised that their ads were being played in front of videos that were accused of being anti-Semitic, homophobic, or just ‘scammy’.

All of this points to an obvious conclusion. Charities, agencies, advertisers, and institutions would prefer not to be linked with someone accused of sexual assault and rape – it’s not great PR. Youtube, in particular, has to balance between supporting creators and attracting advertisers, and so the middle ground is to limit ads on videos that advertisers are likely to pull out of, before the advertisers pull out of Youtube.

Of course, for Brand, this quickly became part of the agenda. In a Rumble video he criticises something called the Trusted News Initiative and argues that the mainstream media are targeting independent media in an attempt to control the narrative.

The Trusted News Initiative is an effort by many media organisations to counter fake news, false reports, viral disinformation, and so on. Not dissenting opinions, but purposefully false information, which studies have shown get shared six times as much as real news on sites like Facebook. Fake stories like this one: ‘Ilhan Omar Holding Secret Fundraisers with Islamic Groups Tied to Terror’, which got shared 14k times on Facebook alone.

Brand argues that, ‘plainly the TNI has an agenda, an explicit agenda to throttle and choke independent media’.

He uses a story from Reclaim the Net that focuses on a lawsuit filed in the US by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that claims that dissenting views are being stamped out unconstitutionally by the TNI, violating freedom of speech and anti-trust laws.

It’s a minor story from nine months ago, but it’s useful for Brand because it supports his main point: he’s under attack.

Not only does he rely on a single fringe source to tell a biased story, he either lazily or wilfully distorts it. He reads from parts of the article, then at the end says again that, ‘plainly the TNI has an agenda, an explicit agenda, to throttle and choke independent media’.

But he’s completely distorted the language that even he’s just read a second ago. Again, there may be legitimate concerns about this, but if you look at the lawsuit, available online, filed to the district court, the so-called ‘explicit agenda’ is to find ways to ‘throttle’ and ‘choke’ false news stories. The comments about independent media are separate, and even these are misquoted.

The quote Brand reads out is from Jamie Angus at BBC News, saying: ‘Because actually the real rivalry now is not between for example the BBC and CNN globally, it’s actually between all trusted news providers and a tidal wave of unchecked [reporting] that’s being piped out mainly through digital platforms. … That’s the real competition now in the digital media world’.

This is a misquote. Both Brand and RFK and others reporting this uncritically have conveniently left out the parts of the quote that dilute their point. Anyone can watch the clip, it’s linked below. He actually said that the divide is between all trusted news providers and a tidal wave of unchecked, incorrect, or in fact, explicitly malicious, nonsense, specifically to destabilise regions of the world’.

How Brand has framed this is an outright lie.

The context is not only left out, its manipulated. The entire discussion is about how much newsrooms need to do now to verify the vast amount of information they’re dealing with; how much newsrooms of changed and the challenges they face; how many more technicians and specialists are required. He’s talking about wars, verifying whether a tiktok from Ukraine is manipulated or useful evidence, employing specialists in things like geolocation verification, using satellite imaging to understand bombings He even praises ‘citizen journalism’ and talks about opening up the news ecosystem – It’s an interesting watch. Brand and his like have to do none of that difficult work. Not only that, but they rely on it, use it, feed off it, while denigrating the many ordinary people who make it possible.You might say, well Brand is just one person, he is just an ‘entertainer’, he’s just commenting on articles and news, not producing it, it’s not his responsibility to fact check every story. And that’s precisely the argument Brand makes too.But if I – with a budget of almost nil can quickly check a source – then maybe Stay Free with Russell Brand might also do a bit of work. I’m not saying they should have a newsroom of fact-checkers, specialists, and technicians sifting through every claim, but with the following, net worth, and status he has, he clearly has the budget to do due diligence, to check sources, to not misrepresent. With a channel that large you have a clear moral duty to. Instead, the laziest and most entertaining interpretation comes first; laziness fosters conspiracy because thoroughness exposes the truth.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t be very concerned with big tech being in control of what can and can’t be said. I disagreed with them taking down clips and interviews about vaccines and Covid. I think big tech platforms should be committed to freedom of speech.

But Angus is talking about genuine floods of disinformation, propaganda machines, Russian bot farms, designed to lie to people. And he’s right. Whatever the dangers and criticisms, I think it would irresponsible of the mainstream media not to think carefully about this. It took me a few minutes to search through the court document, watch the clip, to see that Brand and his source had either willingly or lazily misquoted the source so as to spin it into their own narrative, combine it with another quote to make it seem more malicious, and in Brand’s case use it to defend against accusations from many ordinary women of sexual assault. And if that doesn’t make you angry, I think it should.

Narcissism News Entertainment

In his book on conspiracy theories, Michael Shermer writes that seeing patterns everywhere – patternification – is the result of the need for control.

He writes: ‘the economy is not this crazy patchwork of supply and demand laws, market forces, interest rate changes, tax policies, business cycles, boom-and-bust fluctuations, recessions and upswings, bull and bear markets, and the like. Instead, it is a conspiracy of a handful of powerful people variously identified as the Illuminati, the Bilderberger group, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Rockefellers and Rothschilds’.

He continues: ‘conspiracists believe that the complex and messy world of politics, economics, and culture can all be explained by a single conspiracy and conspiratorial event that downplays chance and attributes everything to this final end of history’.

Instead of acknowledging messiness, complicated people, and multiple motives, conspiracy thinking sees a pattern as the result of purposeful agency in an attempt to control others.

Psychologists Mark Landau and Aaron Kay looked at studies that show how people compensate for perceived loss of control by trying to restore control themselves by ‘bolstering personal agency, affiliating with external systems perceived to be acting on the self’s behalf, and affirming clear contingencies between actions and outcomes’, and by ‘seeking out and preferring simple, clear, and consistent interpretations of the social and physical environments’.

In one study, participants were asked to think of an incident in their lives where they felt in control, while another group were asked to think of an incident where they weren’t. The latter group were more likely to believe in the conspiracy theories presented to them after.

Psychologists Joshua Hart and Molly Graether did a study and found that conspiracy believers, ‘are relatively untrusting, ideologically eccentric, concerned about personal safety, and prone to perceiving agency in actions’.

One of the most important findings in studies is that narcissism – the belief in one’s own superiority and need for special treatment – is a strong predictor of believing in conspiracies. Narcissists are also more sensitive to perceived threats.

As one paper notes, ‘the effect of narcissism on conspiracy beliefs has been replicated in various contexts by various labs’, and that, ‘narcissism is one of the best psychological predictors of conspiracy beliefs’. It continues: ‘grandiose narcissists strive to achieve admiration by boosting their egos through a sense of uniqueness, charm, and grandiose fantasizing’.

Narcissism arises out of paranoia, that threats are powerful, and narcissists tend to respond with a bolstered sense of ego – the need for personal dominance and control. The need to feel unique makes narcissists feel like they have access to special information that others don’t. (PETERSON IN HIS MAD SUITS)

It’s also been found that narcissists, ‘tend to be naïve and less likely to engage in cognitive reflection’. To put in bluntly, they’re more gullible. Narcissism has been linked to low levels of ‘intellectual humility’ by one study.

Obviously the entertainment industry is full of narcissists, who are particularly suited to voicing ‘special’ opinions and entertaining people. And there is a sense in which Brand knows this is entertainment. He says things like ‘you’re gonna love this story, its right up your ally’ – a strange way to frame a story if you think it’s existential: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjGYsner6oI&ab_channel=RussellBrand

What you get is a kind of narcissistic news porn based on paranoia and a need for control. Brand’s an entertainer. I don’t want to be psychoanalysing anyone, but Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, and Brand – three major figures who talk about conspiracy theories a lot – come from a place where maybe they wished they had more agency, more control.

Musk had a very troubled and abusive childhood in South Africa, Joe Rogan has talked about how he moved around a lot, got bullied, and learned to fight to defend himself, and Brand has a well-documented history of addiction.

What this can lead to is a feeling of not being in control, a world of threat, and a sense of paranoia. Mirriam-Webster defines paranoia as, ‘systematized delusions of persecution’.

It leads to the need to form a narrative to help a person feel superior by having access to special knowledge about larger forces out to persecute them that they themselves have overcome.

In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Hofstadter points out that the paranoid person sees an enemy that is pervasive, powerful, conspiratorial, pulling the strings, and, importantly, everywhere.

He writes that the proponents of the paranoid style ‘regard a “vast” or “gigantic” conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political give-and-take, but an all-out crusade’.

Hofstadter continues that the enemy is, ‘a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman: sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving’… ‘He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced.’ He controls the press, ‘manages the news’, brainwashes, seduces, has control of the educational system.’

For the paranoid, ‘Nothing but complete victory will do. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated’.

This is why Brand seems to get on so well with Tucker Carlson. Tucker is well versed in something that his former employer Fox News revolutionised: news as entertainment – flashy graphics, sensationalist language, us vs them narratives, a conspiracy involving every institution.

Fox News realised that it’s the ongoing narrative – good vs evil – that keeps viewers tuning back in, and so Carlson and Brand like him pick a story or study or witness that supports the long-running dramatic narrative that gets the views, rather than the other way around.

It’s not reporting, it’s not journalism, it’s not news, it’s entertainment – they make a few points and the rest is how it’s said, with anger, or charisma, with jokes, with a story of good vs evil. It’s shallow news porn.

Public Trust, Private Solutions

None of this is to defend a political system that’s failing ordinary people. None of this is to deny that inequality is widening, wealth is moving upwards, wages are stagnated, that people are underrepresented. None of it is to deny that lobbying, money, selfish interests, corporate greed all play a central role in politics. And none of this is to argue that there’s anything wrong with looking at big pharma’s financial incentives, criticising the great reset, or emphasising the concerns of farmers in climate policy. None of this is to say that we don’t need radical solutions.

What this is to absolutely reject is the framing. The paranoid style, the good vs evil narrative, the narrow selection of stories and evidence to suit your own dramatic narrative, the linking of every issue together into a totalising agenda.

Brand paints the mainstream media narrative as a lie; his is not only a bigger lie, but also a self-aggrandising and dangerous one.

George Monbiot writes about Brand that, ‘He appears to have switched from challenging injustice to conjuring phantoms. If, as I suspect it might, politics takes a very dark turn in the next few years, it will be partly as a result of people like Brand’.

If you’re not selecting the stories, facts, evidence you cover by their wider significance, if you’re picking up perspectives and narratives based on fringe evidence and ideas, then all you’re doing is being led by your own individualistic narcissistic ego. This is why Brand’s criticism of the mainstream media has only increased since an investigation into his very well-known behaviour was released. It’s obvious that this isn’t an objective analysis, it’s driven by his own fragility, his own little world.

And that’s when we get narcissistic news porn rather than careful study and analysis.

To paint the mainstream media as totally propagandised is to miss that people are multifaceted, complex, have competing incentives. What many missed about the investigation in the recent allegations against Brand is that it was as much an investigation into a BBC and Channel Four that facilitated Brand than about Brand himself.

Think about that. Channel Four aired an investigation into itself. Would you ever see that on Brand’s channel?

Brand does no original reporting, he sits in his shed and reads from journalists who have gone out and done the work, while at the same time howling about how terrible they are.

To be clear, again, I’m not saying that there aren’t many critiques of the mainstream media to be made, and more journalism, more independent voices, ultimately, are a great, potentially revolutionary, thing to be supported.

But when you totalise and cram everything into the ‘agenda’, you paint the world in paranoid, apocalyptic terms of us vs them that dehumanises the other as individuals to be gotten rid of, rather than look at real collective, structural solutions to the problems we face.

This is why Brand gravitates towards figures like Tucker Carlson. Carlson doesn’t want collective solutions. What he wants is more of the same but with him in charge. If every institution is tainted, part of the ‘centralising agenda’, you get libertarianism, you get more corporate power, more greed, more unregulated pollution, more inequality. You get the opposite of what we need.

If you portray every institution as part of an agenda then what’s left to do? Revolution, maybe? But then what? Where are your solutions? What’s your theory? What replaces the current system?

Conspiracy thinking is the easiest type of thinking – everyone does it. It’s easy for showmen like Brand because at the end of reading off a few quotes from one source you can just link them to the agenda, the great reset, a ‘centralising agenda’, and Bill Gates.

It’s like having a safety blanket to return to that says don’t worry, the world is evil, but you know the truth, you have it figured in a simple little package, don’t worry, you never have to think again.

Sources

Terry Pinkard, Does History Make Sense,

Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-66369532

Jan-Willem van Prooijen, The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories

https://theintercept.com/2020/12/08/great-reset-conspiracy/

Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10186363/Researchers-running-arm-Pfizers-Covid-jab-trials-falsified-data-investigation-claims.html

https://theconversation.com/vaccine-trial-misconduct-allegation-could-it-damage-trust-in-science-171164

https://inews.co.uk/news/russell-brand-advertisers-pulling-ads-rumble-site-comedian-videos-2633281?ito=twitter_share_article-top

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_23_2507

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/30/peak-polluters-last-chance-close-dutch-government

Steven Umbrello, Should We Reset?

Michael Christensen and Ashli Au, The Great Reset and the Cultural Boundaries of Conspiracy Theory

Ivan Wecke, Conspiracy Theories Aside, There is Something Fishy about the Great Reset

Michael Shermer, Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational

Aleksandra Cichocka, Marta Marchlewska, Mikey Biddlestone, Why do narcissists find conspiracy theories so appealing?

Cosgrove TJ and Murphy CP, Narcissistic susceptibility to conspiracy beliefs exaggerated by education, reduced by cognitive reflection

https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3750&context=historical

https://reclaimthenet.org/rfk-jr-sues-mainstream-media-misinformation-cartel

https://www.bbc.co.uk/beyondfakenews/trusted-news-initiative/role-of-the-news-leader/

https://www.hollandtimes.nl/articles/national/tata-steel-environmental-threat-or-essential-industry/

https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25688696/

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But what exactly are metaphors?

Lakoff and Johnson argue that metaphors aren’t just poetry, but a fundamental part of our brains’ conceptual systems. That is, they’re central to the way we perceive ourselves, others, and the world.

Lakoff and Johnson write that the ‘essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another’.

One of the most common examples is all the world’s a stage – an example that draws similarities between acting for an audience and human life in general.

Are metaphors simply poetic? Or is there something else going.

Lakoff and Johnson argue that, actually, metaphors aren’t just poetic but a fundamental way we understand ourselves.

They write, ‘the concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people’. Furthermore, ‘our conceptual system is largely metaphorical’.

Take the metaphor ‘argument is war’.

An argument is a concept – it’s abstract, a product of human minds.

Now look at how we describe it:

• Your claims are indefensible.
• There’s a weak point in my argument.
• His criticisms were on target.
• She shot down and destroyed my arguments.
• He attacked the argument.

Much of how we describe arguing is structured, at least partially, by the concept of war. But not only that, how we describe arguing goes on to affect how we argue.

That is, it’s not just poetic – the structure of the metaphor determines thought itself.

So, why do we do this?

Both war and argument are systematic. Both are structured in a recognisable way that has sides, positions, wins and losses. There are similarities and so we can describe something in a way that other people can easily understand. We borrow from something pre-existing to describe something conceptual.

Let’s take another example: ‘time is money’.

You’re wasting my time.
This gadget will save you hours.
I don’t have the time to give you.
How do you spend your time these days?
That flat tire cost me an hour.
I’ve invested a lot of time in her.
I don’t have enough time to spare for that.
You’re running out of time.

Again there are structural similarities between time and money.

We also have orientational metaphors.

Orientational metaphors are spatial.

For example, happy is often up while sad is down.
That boosted by spirits.
I’m feeling high.
I’m depressed.
His mood sank.

Or we use orientational metaphors to describe how we relate to a concept.

I have control over her.
I am on top of the situation.
He’s in a superior position.
He’s at the height of his power.

Lakoff and Johnson argue that most of our experience is organised spatially, and again, as with structural metaphors, there is a shared systemicity between the two that is coherent.

They note that, ‘since there are systematic correlates between our emotions (like happiness) and our sensory-motor experiences (like erect posture), these form the basis of orientational metaphorical concepts (such as happy is up). Such metaphors allow us to conceptualize our emotions in more sharply define terms and also to relate them to other concepts having to do with general well-being (e.g. health, life, control, etc.)’.

When ideas or concepts are abstract we sometimes have to imagine them as physical objects so as to give them a form.

Take inflation.

We imagine it as an object with physical characteristics.

We must combat it.
It’s out of control.

Or take the mind is a machine metaphor.

My mind isn’t operating.
We’re trying to grind out the solution.
I’m a little rusty.
My mind is fragile.
He broke down.
She snapped.
She went to pieces.

We give the concept a physical form and borrow meaning from the physical world to help describe it.

Furthermore, most of the time we describe concepts as if they are physical containers.

We, as humans, are physical objects – we have an inside and an outside – like other entities in the world, and the world and universe itself.

Containers are a structural part of our being – they are universal.

We organise human concepts, ideas and plans as if they too were containers.

Are you in the race? – A race as a container.
Are you going to the race? – Watching the container.
Did you see the finish? – End of the container.

Jobs too are thought of containers:

Did you get out of doing it?
How did you get into that?

And take some others:

He’s in love.
We’re out of trouble now.
He’s coming out of the coma.
I’m slowly getting into shape.
He entered a state of euphoria.
He fell into a depression.

Container metaphors help us think about how we relate to a concept. Whether we’re part of it, in it, experiencing it, or not.

But all of these types of metaphor can be mixed together – they’re not mutually exclusive.

Take love is a journey:

Look how far we’ve come.
We’re at a crossroads.
We’ll just have to go our separate ways.
We can’t turn back now.
I don’t think this relationship is going anywhere.
Where are we?
We’re stuck.
It’s been a long, bumpy road.
This relationship is a dead-end street.
Our marriage is on the rocks.
We’ve gotten off the track.
This relationship is foundering.

These are structural, orientational, and ontological.

Importantly, for Lakoff and Johnson, metaphors are culturally conditioned.

Take the concepts of labour and time.

They argue that both labour and time as resources are culturally grounded in a particular way that draws on a western relationship to material resources.

Material resources can be quantified, have a value, a purpose, get used up.

In the same way, labour is a kind of activity that

can be quantified fairly precisely (in terms of time)
can be assigned a value per unit
serves a purposeful end
is used up progressively as it serves it purpose

Time too:

can be quantified fairly precisely
can be assigned a value per unit
serves a purposeful end
is used up progressively as it serves its purpose

Lakoff and Johnson write, ‘LABOR IS A RESOURCE and TIME AS A RESOURCE are by no means universal. They emerged naturally in our culture because of the way we view work, our passion for quantification, and our obsession with purposeful ends’.

They continue: ‘The RESOURCE metaphors for labor and time hide all sorts of possible conceptions of labor and time that exist in other cultures and in some subcultures of our own society: the idea that work can be play, that inactivity can be productive’.

So Lakoff and Johnson have a progressive understanding about how metaphors can change over time.

New metaphors are creative and imaginative and can change the very way we think.

They take the idea of love being a collaborative work of art:

Love is work. Love is active. Love requires cooperation. Love requires dedication. Love requires compromise. Love requires discipline. Love involves shared responsibility. Love requires patience. Love requires shared values and goals. Love demands sacrifice. Love regularly brings frustration. Love requires instinctive communication. Love is an aesthetic experience. Love is primarily valued for its own sake. Love involves creativity. Love requires a shared aesthetic. Love cannot be achieved by a formula. Love is unique in each instance. Love is an expression of who you are. Love creates a reality. Love reflects how you see the world. Love requires the greatest honesty. Love may be transient or permanent.

Thinking like this might change the way we approach love itself.

In a 2002 study Carola Skott looks at the metaphors cancer patients use. This can help us understand how we can ‘gain a richer understanding of how we structure abstract, emotional, or other experiences that are not clearly Delineated’.

Cancer is often described as an ‘other’, ‘eating’ and ‘invading’ the body. Combatting cancer is a common metaphor. Is this helpful for the patient’s mental health? Christopher Hitchens said it doesn’t so much feel that I’m fighting cancer as cancer is fighting me.

In another essay, Sarah Higinbotham looks at metaphors of violence.

She cites a psychology study that gave a fictional newspaper article to readers that reported that the city of Addison saw a 19% rise in crime and a 52% rise in the murder rate in 2004. They gave out two articles that were identical except for one difference: in one, crime was described as a beast ravaging the city, while in the other, crime was described as a virus ravaging the city.

71% that read that crime was a beast opted for enforcement strategies in a conversation after, while only 54% did who read crime was a virus.

Beasts are evil, with agency, big and attackable. Viruses have a very different connotation.

Metaphors We Live By is a powerful book and has revolutionary consequences that are only just being understood. Metaphor studies are becoming a larger area of research, having an increasing influence on the other humanities.

I’d go into more detail but rather than say that time is running out I’ll borrow from Christopher Morley.

‘Time is a flowing river. Happy those who allow themselves to be carried, unresisting, with the current. They float through easy days. They live, unquestioning, in the moment’.

Sources

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By

Carola Skott, Expressive Metaphors in Cancer Narratives

Sarah Higinbotham, Bloodletting and Beasts: Metaphors of Legal Violence

The post Metaphors We Live By: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson appeared first on Then & Now.

 ‘Guilt, Bad Conscience, and Related Matters’, the second essay of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, is a difficult, winding and far-reaching essay, but its general argument might be summed up like this: guilt is the price humans have paid for entering civilised society. And morality has its roots in power, not justice.

This essay builds upon and diverges from the themes in the first essay. So, if you haven’t seen the video on that, you can watch it here.

I’d also like to preface this video by saying this: this essay is beyond doubt hugely influential philosophically and historically. I also find it very problematic, and while it is full of powerful, insightful and important ideas, you can also see some of the reasons Nietzsche is so often co-opted by the far-right.

With that in mind, I’d find it difficult to produce a balanced, neutral introduction. I will try to do this for the most part, but this will also be a critical introduction, presenting fundamental concepts while alluding briefly to a few points I find problematic.

Nietzsche starts the essay by arguing that one of the fundamental traits that raises humans above other animals is our ability to make promises.

This means remembering to do something, to act a certain way in the future. To be able to say, ‘I will’, and, ‘I will do’.

He sees this as the basis of morality – the origins of responsibility.

Promising, acting, responsibility, they all make up man’s conscience.

Guilt is then born of breaking promises, actual or metaphorical. Pride, on the other hand, grows out of keeping them.

In tribal times, Nietzsche theorises, a promise was like a debt to be paid to a creditor. I promise to do something for you in return for you doing something for me – especially important before money started circulating.

The German word for guilt, schuld, has the same roots as the German word for debt, shulden.

Promises and guilt are then born out of the relationship between the creditor and the debtor.

If I break my promise I must be punished. The tribe or community is galvanised by promises and so the creditor-debtor relationship becomes the basis for social rules and politics as a whole.

In punishment for broken promises a certain pleasure must be extracted by the wronged creditor – the powerful extracting from the powerless – a pleasure to remind the community not to break promises.

Nietzsche says that, ‘to make someone suffer is pleasure in its highest form’. A ‘true feast’. He cites public executions and torture as evidence of this.

It is passages like this where we find Nietzsche at his most problematic. It’s a problem of what I’ll call polemical emphasis, where you can see why his works are so easily co-opted by authoritarians.

That being said, you don’t have to agree with this for the rest of Nietzsche’s argument to hold.

You could say that it was important to see promise breakers punished in some way, without arguing that it was pleasurable, enjoyable. Then again, maybe there is some pleasure in seeing someone get their just deserts. It’s just that today to suffer means to be locked-up, and before it was normal to be tortured.

Either way, Nietzsche writes: ‘A thing must be burnt in so that it stays in the memory: only something which continues to hurt stays in the memory’.

He goes on: ‘a few ideas come to be made ineradicable, omnipresent, unforgettable, “fixed,” in order to hypnotize the whole nervous and intellectual system through these “fixed ideas” – and ascetic procedures and lifestyles are a method for freeing those ideas from competition with all other ideas, of making them “unforgettable.”’

Bad actions must be celebrated, memorialised, sermonised, if society is to remember not to do them.

We then start to see two types of punishment developing in pre-civilizational culture.

When the strong punish the weak, they are level-headed because they are punishing the act, and are not fearful or resentful of the weak – they’re not bothered by the weak man. The strong says, ‘you have broken a promise, you must be punished, but I’m not fearful of you, you don’t mean anything to me, so I’ll punish you and move on. I’m focused on myself’.

But when the weak punishes the strong for breaking promises he is resentful, gleeful at getting his own back – he is a man of resentment, a man of revenge as we saw in the first essay. The weak says, ah, you’ve broken a promise and now I have the community behind me ready to punish, and I also want revenge, I’m fearful of you and want you to suffer so that you don’t try to take advantage of me again.

In ancient times, the promise-breaker was punished, pain was extracted, and everyone returned to their lives.

But with resentment, or slave-morality, we keep strength and power in check so as not to let the strong take power over us.

Nietzsche calls this ‘bad conscience’.

For Nietzsche, all life – plant and animal – develops through the ‘will to power’ – the desire to grow, be stronger, become safer, spread, reproduce – and humans are no different.

This bad conscience, then, this resentment and revenge of the weak over the strong, limits the will to power.

Why? Because once a system of moral codes, language, aesthetics, art, courts, laws, culture arise around it, they contain that seed of revenge, of wanting to limit the power of the strong.

This then becomes psychologised, turned inward, makes us question our actions all of the time. Creates a kind of introverted morality. Makes us all weak.

Nietzsche says punishment of this sort tames us, rather than makes us better.

He says, ‘this is what I call the internalization of man…’.

His argument, if we consider it in the context of the Genealogy‘s first essay, is that our understanding of morality today is based upon the weak protecting themselves against the strong.

This has led to bad conscience.

Bad conscience is conscience turned inwards. An over-questioning, an inner turmoil, an introversion.

If Christian morality is based on weakness and humility, then our consciences are weak too.

Nietzsche wants a morality based on strength so that we can push forward.

I think this is a good place to see both problems and a defence of Nietzsche.

Problematically, his argument doesn’t acknowledge the possibility that slave-morality – limiting one’s power, keeping avarice in check, abhorring greed – is a rational psychological mechanism that lies behind a cohesive and strong community. That it’s completely necessary.

Alternatively, in defence of Nietzsche, it could be argued that he wants a community based on everyone’s strength. That the very structure of a morality based on weakness is one that keeps us weak, whereas one based on strength will make us strong.

He says, ‘Bad conscience is a sickness, there is no point in denying it, but a sickness rather like pregnancy’.

Nietzsche is not saying that we should go backwards to the morality of the strong, but that there is something new to be discovered, a new type of justice, of morality.

He ends with a call to tear down this bad conscience.

He says, ‘this anti-christ, this anti-nihilist, this conqueror of God and nothingness – he must come one day…’.

What Nietzsche wants is the possibility for us all to be strong, powerful and moral in some way. And he’s not saying he has all the answers.

The problems I have with this essay are mainly ones of polemical emphasis. The will to power, for example, has nefarious connotations, whether you mean them or not, while power is a nebulous and inexact analytical concept.

Similarly, the possibilities of the powerful enforcing their justice on the powerless is just as much a distortion, an example of bad conscience, as the weak enforcing their justice on the strong. And allusions to pain being better than guilt, swift violence being better than drawn out worry, or the authority of the strong being better than the softness of democracy have obvious and worrying connotations.

To be fair to Nietzsche, these connotations can be seen more clearly in the light of 20th century events than in his period.

It is easy to think of authoritarian regimes when he writes like this. But read with his other works in mind, it is useful to think of Nietzsche as talking about psychology and culture, while always remembering the context of European Christendom, as opposed to our politics and world today. Reading him like this redeems these points somewhat.

All that being said, this essay is extremely important. It inspired much of 20th century philosophy – Heidegger, Foucault, and much of postmodernism. He sets up Freud – unconscious desires. The psychological reading of religion. The dangers of nihilism and a world without religion. There is so much here that it is impossible to overemphasise its importance. Nietzsche wants to draw out, controversialise and problematise what we think of as normal or natural, so as to shine a light on our cultural disposition and find a path forward.

To me, the challenge here is to draw out what’s important while downplaying the speculative parts that may be tainted with Nietzsche’s own biases.

The post Nietzsche: The Genealogy of Morality (Essay 2 – Guilt, Bad Conscience…) appeared first on Then & Now.

Almost all of Peterson’s arguments revolve around this idea of individual or personal responsibility. You could say it’s the meta-foundation at the core of his philosophy.

Today, I’m going to look at what individual responsibility really means, how we can understand it philosophically, and why it has its limits.

The argument I’ll draw out is this: that Peterson emphasises individual responsibility to an unreasonable degree, while discounting the necessity and power of social or collective responsibility. That each are two sides of the same coin.

But before we start, I will say this. 12 Rules for Life and Beyond Order are both great books. I learned a lot. There’s a lot of insight, many ideas to agree with, and much to disagree with.

I like the psychologisation of the biblical stories, there’s a great chapter on telling the truth, another one on assuming the person you’re listening to might know something you don’t. And I think he often gets unfairly caricatured. But he, in his turn, repeatedly straw mans and oversimplifies leftists and postmodernism in a way I think is, frankly, irresponsible.

But taking a thorough look at the idea of ‘individual responsibility’ helps us to understand why he almost has to do this.

So first, what does Peterson mean by individual responsibility?

12 Rules for Life, Beyond Order, and Peterson’s wider lectures have individual responsibility at their core. The books are replete with phrases like, ‘you must take responsibility for your own life. Period’, ‘each individual has ultimate responsibility to bear’, and ‘we must each adopt as much responsibility as possible for individual life, society, and the world’. Some of his lectures talk of the ‘sovereign individual’.

Now first, what follows isn’t an attack on individual responsibility. The concept is important, timeless, powerful, and Peterson has a lot of well-articulated and useful insight on how to take responsibility that people clearly want to hear. What I want to focus on is what’s left out.

It’s safe to say Peterson is a type of individualist. He focuses a lot on the archetype of the hero’s journey, of personal sacrifice, and focusing on yourself. Conversely, he’s sceptical, to say the least, of any collectivist ideologies, and ideologies more broadly.

He says, ‘Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world’

Peterson writes: ‘Consider your circumstances. Start small. Have you taken full advantage of the opportunities offered to you? Are you working hard on your career, or even your job, or are you letting bitterness and resentment hold you back and drag you down? Have you made peace with your brother? Are you treating your spouse and your children with dignity and respect? Do you have habits that are destroying your health and well-being? Are you truly shouldering your responsibilities? Have you said what you need to say to your friends and family members? Are there things that you could do, that you know you could do, that would make things around you better? Have you cleaned up your life?’

To understand why this core foundation is one-sided and see what the other side of the coin is, we need to ask a really simple question: what does individual responsibility mean?

Throughout history, philosophers have interpreted responsibility in several ways. The concept has been discussed most frequently in philosophical debates about free will.

First, lets take it apart: response-ability.

Etymologically, the root of responsibility is to be ‘able’ to ‘respond’ to something. To react to a set of circumstances.

But its also often used as value judgement. One person might judge whether another was ‘able’ to ‘respond’ in a positive, helpful, useful, or moral way.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it like this: ‘The judgment that a person is morally responsible for her behavior involves—at least to a first approximation—attributing certain powers and capacities to that person, and viewing her behavior as arising (in the right way) from the fact that the person has, and has exercised, these powers and capacities’.

So we have several key concepts: judgement, behaviour, power and capacities.

Let’s look at an example: shoplifting.

We might judge that it is immoral behaviour, and that the person had the capacity to know it was wrong and had the power to not do it.

Consequently, we might hold them responsible.

But what if we found out the person had dementia? We might say they didn’t have the capacity or the power to remember right from wrong, or to remember where they were.

Does this diminish their responsibility? Is this a mitigating circumstance?

It seems we’d judge them less morally responsible for the shoplifting than we would someone stealing jewellery because they want to be rich.

But if we find out the person had dementia we might say that they didn’t have the capacity to know right from wrong, and not find them morally responsible.

This is where free will comes in.

Many – like the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, for example – have argued that to be responsible for something, to be held accountable, you would have to have the freedom to have done otherwise, to have chosen more morally. That is, you have to be the cause of the action, inaction, or belief – not the dementia, say.

Let’s look at another example.

Take the jobless 16-year-old who assaults someone. If we’re on a jury, our initial inclination might be to hold them responsible as the cause, to blame them, to hold them accountable.

But imagine certain facts are slowly revealed. They came from a bad home, a poor neighbourhood, someone had been bullying them, or taunting them. Or even stealing from them. What if we found out they’d been blackmailed?

We might still hold the aggressor responsible, but maybe less so. Mitigating factors might lead us to sympathise with them because many factors contributed towards them becoming momentarily violent.

Let’s take one more example: the same child failing a maths test.

Were they responsible? Did they cause the failure? Of course, it depends on the context: they might not have studied enough, yes. But they might have a teacher who has treated them unfairly, a homelife that doesn’t encourage homework, they might have a learning difficulty.

We can see in a quote like this (from Book I, Rule III) that Peterson tends to discount contextual factors in favour of individual ones: ‘People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand. Faulty tools produce faulty results. Repeated use of the same faulty tools produces the same faulty results. It is in this manner that those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it. It’s partly fate. It’s partly inability. It’s partly… unwillingness to learn? Refusal to learn? Motivated refusal to learn?’

This is the central question asked by many philosophers of free will and responsibility: if we are a product of our contexts, of our environment or circumstances, upbringing, education, or even of our genes, are we ever truly, ultimately, responsible for anything?

This position is called determinism, and it attempts to understand human behaviour in a scientific way.

As the psychologist B.F. Skinner wrote, ‘If we are to use the methods of science in the field of human affairs, we must assume that behavior is lawful and determined. We must expect to discover that what a man does is the result of specifiable conditions and that once these conditions have been discovered, we can anticipate and to some extent determine his actions’.

Skinner frames the problem of responsibly in a specifically modern and scientific context: science tells us that the entire universe is determined and everything has a cause. Why should human behaviour be any different?

He continues ‘small part of the universe is contained within the skin of each of us. There is no reason why it should have any special physical status because it lies within this boundary, and eventually we should have a complete account of it from anatomy and physiology’.

If determinism is true – if everything is caused – then this poses a problem for the idea of individual responsibly because we’re not really responsible for anything.

But surely the idea is meaningful in some way. Does this not leave something out?

The influential American philosopher Roderick Chisholm uses the following example. Take a flood destroying a dam. We might ask the following: what caused the dam to give? Poor construction? Political corruption cutting corners? Or was it constructed to the best of the builders abilities but the rainfall was unprecedented in a way no-one could have predicted? Maybe wrong materials were supplied by accident? Maybe someone sabotaged the damn? Maybe a river was redirected?

The question is where is the cause, where does responsibility lie?

Aristotle put it like this: that ‘a staff moves a stone, and is moved by a hand, which is moved by a man’.

Do we hold the staff responsible for moving the stone, or the hand? Maybe the muscles? The neurons? Maybe the man? Maybe he was ordered to move the stone by a despot? Maybe moving the stone was a by-product of another intention. Like simply standing up.

The point is this: when we look closely, we often don’t locate a single point of causation, find a single ultimate factor that we hold responsible. There are, of course, many factors, all partly responsible, all connected like a thread of causation; like a sequence or series of responsibility.

Historians approach topics in this way, like, for example, when they ask who was responsible for the Holocaust? Was it the product of Hitler’s will? Was it more structural? A German soldier in the forest shoots a Jew under orders. He’s been told they’re the enemy, they want to destroy Germany, it’s war, they would only starve later, etc. Do we intuitively hold the soldier less responsible than Hitler? Do we look at the economic factors that caused it, the propaganda, the history of antisemitism? Many things contribute to a single moment.

As the philosopher Robert Kane puts it, to retain individual freedom in a world where we’re so clearly determined we’d have to somehow be the ‘original creators of our own wills’ – when we can trace most of our behaviour backwards to things that have happened to us, to media exposure, to upbringing, education, to conditioning of some kind.

But some factors do seem to be more internal than others. If a man has every motivation you could think of, the education, the job market, but still refuses to find a job out of laziness, that seems to be an internal cause – that he is the one responsible for that lack of action.

This is the big question, the central question: how do we draw the line between internal and external causes?

Before we return to Peterson, lets visualise that line. There are interior causes – where we intuitively want to hold someone responsible – and external ones – where responsibility lies elsewhere. But oddly, this line isn’t just inside and outside the person. Genes lie outside the line. If someone is born with a condition that limits their mobility, say, we don’t hold them responsible for it.

But if lazy Billy has had a good upbringing, is smart, healthy, able-bodied, and there are plenty of jobs available, the responsibility we attribute to him, and the moral praise or blame that accompanies it, moves within the circle. We might say it’s laziness, say.

If there were no jobs in the area, or Billy’s mother was unwell and he had to look after her, we might move this factor outside, and we’d probably want to blame him less.

Let’s take one more historical example. When we ask what caused the First World War – what was responsible – the superficial reason we teach children is that Gavrilo Princip assassinated the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But there were many other factors: colonial expansion, treaties between countries, nationalism. To say Princip was individually responsible for the war would be ridiculous.

Okay, lets return to Jordon Peterson.

Okay, so remember, Peterson’s central argument is about taking personal responsibility. And that’s a theme of self-help more broadly.

‘Set your house in perfect order’, he writes, ‘before you criticize the world’ (Book I, Rule 6).

And note the perfect here. It’s a very absolute word.

But again, before we go on, taking responsibility for your house, for what you can do, is perfectly good advice. Try your hardest, don’t be resentful, set your sights on specific goals – there’s some great advice here that can strengthen the internal circle. But the question is, what’s outside the circle? What do we do when there are factors outside of ours or other people’s control?

Is it not perfectly possible that the organisation of social life, of the state, of our economic systems, of our genetic inheritance, of our educational systems, have effects on individuals that are, shall we say, less than satisfactory, that at least could be improved on?

The extent to which Peterson idealises internal factors is illustrated most clearly in Book I, rule III: make friends with people who want the best for you.

In this rule, he warns us to think twice before helping someone in need for two reasons: that you might be helping for the sake of your own ego, and that the person doesn’t actually want help.

Peterson writes, ‘Are you so sure the person crying out to be saved has not decided a thousand times to accept his lot of pointless and worsening suffering?’.

He advises us not to assume the person is a ‘noble victim of unjust circumstances and exploitation’ and that there is ‘no personal responsibility on the part of the victim’.

In fact, in one passages, Peterson asks, ‘How do you know that your attempts to pull someone up won’t instead bring them—or you—further down?’

He imagines a team of ‘hardworking, brilliant, creative, and unified’ workers who are joined by someone ‘troubled, who is performing poorly, elsewhere’.

‘Does the errant interloper immediately straighten up and fly right? No. Instead, the entire team degenerates. The newcomer remains cynical, arrogant and neurotic. He complains. He shirks. He misses important meetings. His low-quality work causes delays, and must be redone by others’.

Not only that, Peterson assuredly declares that the ‘psychological literature is clear on this point’ when the single study he’s referenced could be interpreted in many ways. Training someone, for example, will always slow you down, helping someone is always difficult, but there are obvious reasons we do it. It’s an odd reference for a clinical psychologist to make.

And the message it supports and that runs through the chapter is worrying – it is essentially a scepticism at helping people.

Peterson says in Book I, Rule 6: ‘Don’t blame capitalism, the radical left, or the iniquity of your enemies. Don’t reorganize the state until you have ordered your own experience. Have some humility. If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city?’

Through Peterson’s lens people become atomised, so that responsibility comes from within.

He makes people individually accountable, unrealistically self-reliant, so that help must come from within without any reference to factors that might be too big for a person to overcome themselves. Many have already pointed to how this message falls flat in the context of endless historical struggles: have you thought about looking at your own life Mandela? Are you sure the British are the problem Gandhi, maybe start by cleaning your room?  Yes, Doctor King, you might want voting rights but you are a serial adulterer. Yes, you might want this $100,000 life-saving cancer drug but have you thought about working harder to pay for it? Yes, the Nazis are coming but aren’t there plenty of places to hide if you make the effort to think it through?

Again, I’m not trying to belittle the idea of individual responsibility – you could point to any number of counter-examples where it is applicable. I’m only trying to show where it’s not, where it seems to leave something bigger out.

The question is not just how do we hold individuals responsible for changing themselves, but how do we arrange social, cultural, and economic life in the way that individuals are most likely to be able to change themselves.

As Peterson himself says, ‘perhaps the game you are playing is somehow rigged’. But then he can’t avoid the temptation of adding: ‘perhaps by you, unbeknownst to yourself’.

So what do we do when faced with problems outside the circle, when the game is rigged, when there are no jobs, when the Nazis are closing in, when we’re denied our rights? What do we do when someone or something else really is responsible?

We look to something bigger.

Some things, in a broad sense, are clearly what we might call social, cultural, or collective in some way. Language, for example, etiquette, fashion, the news cycle, our political systems. The list goes on. These phenomena transcend the individual; they require, by their very nature, wider agreement and consensus, at least loosely.

These things make up what philosopher Manuel Vargas has phrased the ‘social scaffolding of moral responsibility’, or the ‘moral architecture’ – the cultural and social landscape that changes across cultures and throughout history; the external factors that might encourage or discourage certain behaviours.

Take etiquette. We can hold someone morally responsible for being rude, for saying racist or sexist things, for giving a Nazi salute, for constantly interrupting in a conversation, but the person has to know that the statement or action is considered wrong. If they come from another country, for example, we might say ‘they were unaware’.

As Peterson himself says, ‘What we deem to be valuable and worthy of attention becomes part of the social contract; part of the rewards and punishments meted out respectively for compliance and noncompliance; part of what continually indicates and reminds: “Here is what is valued. Look at that (perceive that) and not something else. Pursue that (act toward that end) and not some other.”’

In other words, the external factors that motivate us to speak or act in specific ways are culturally and socially constructed, and we can be aware or unaware of them.

Sometimes, though, it’s the social and cultural scaffolding itself that some might consider wrong, unethical, and in need of changing: someone in Germany might not have wanted to give the Nazi salute, even though it was considered the responsible thing to do. A slave might not want to use the phrase ‘yes master’.

Some of these things are clearly social. The acceptability of them, the motivational power of the tyranny of the majority, external pressures, are all larger than any one individual. Language is a great example. We’re partly responsible for what we say but the tools, the structure, the language itself is a broader social phenomenon. Culture is another example; so are roads and infrastructure, moral norms and political systems.

The central point, if we return to our internal/external circle, is this: some of the factors that contribute towards how people act, are external, they’re larger than any one person, but they can also be changed. The question is how?

Take the campaign for women’s suffrage. It was an external factor that women couldn’t vote and so had impediments to living their lives in certain ways. The social scaffolding of moral responsibility expected women to act in certain ways, dress in a certain way, look after the home, not work, not get an education, not vote, not drive. To say a women was responsible for not being able to advance her career in this context is like saying Gavrilo Princip was responsible for World War One. There are larger structural factors.

And those factors are often so socially entrenched that there’s only one way to overcome them: collectively. Socially. Through networking, campaign building, coalition building, through critique, through, dare I say it, ideology.

Instead of acknowledging this Peterson writes: ‘It is impossible to fight patriarchy, reduce oppression, promote equality, transform capitalism, save the environment, eliminate competitiveness, reduce government, or to run every organization like a business. Such concepts are simply too low-resolution’.

But for collective action like the civil rights movement, or even building a community bridge, low-resolution, at first at least, is necessary. It enables us to come together, for alliances, enables us to delineate the outline of the problem, to find a broad agreement that unites a group pursuing a goal despite their disagreements. Not every suffragette agreed on the course of action, not everyone agreed where the bridge should be, not everyone agrees on the values, on the history, but the low-resolution goal in many great social justice movements was clear: to take a large external impediment and unite into a body powerful enough to address it.

In Book II, Rule IV Peterson recommends that we ‘notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated’.

Great rule. He advises us to ‘Organize what you can see is dangerously disorganized’.

He writes, ‘what is the antidote to the suffering and malevolence of life? The highest possible goal. What is the prerequisite to pursuit of the highest possible goal? Willingness to adopt the maximum degree of responsibility—and this includes the responsibilities that others disregard or neglect. You might object: “Why should I shoulder all that burden? It is nothing but sacrifice, hardship, and trouble.”’

Does this not contradict Peterson’s advice to think twice before helping others? Does this not include the highest possible social goals? Does it not require forming groups to tackle the dangers and problems too big for any one of us to address?

This leads us to next time: Book II, Rule 6 is ‘renounce ideology’. In part II of this two-part series, I want to look at what ideology is, and why we need it to pursue those things that transcend the individual. We’ll see how Peterson’s critique of ideology is limited by his partial, one-sided analysis of responsibility, and how a closer look at both draws out even more contradictions in Peterson’s worldview.

For now I’ll leave you with words from the man himself:

Align yourself, in your soul, with Truth and the Highest Good. There is habitable order to establish and beauty to bring into existence. There is evil to overcome, suffering to ameliorate, and yourself to better.

Sources

Joel Fienberg and Russ Shafer-Landau, Reason and Responsibility: Readings in Some Basic Problems of Philosophy

Michael McKenna, Power, Social Inequities, and the Conversational Theory of Moral Responsibility

Catriona Mackenzie, Moral Responsibility and the Social Dynamics of Power and Oppression

Manuel R . Vargas, The Social Constitution of Agency and Responsibility: Oppression, Politics, and Moral Ecology

Moral Responsibility – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life

Jordan Peterson, Beyond Order

Michael Katz, The Undeserving Poor: America’s Enduring Confrontation With Poverty

The post Why Jordan Peterson is Wrong About Responsibility appeared first on Then & Now.

Call one reason, call the other passion, one logic, the other emotion, one prudent, the other desirous – the duality, however it is split, is a common one in the history of philosophy and psychology.

Socrates said sometimes ‘these internal guides are in accord, sometimes at variance; now one gains the mastery, now the other. And when judgment guides us rationally toward what is best, and has the mastery, that mastery is called temperance, but when desire drags us irrationally toward pleasure and has come to rule within us, the name given to that rule is wantonness’.

He said that one horse – desire – pulls us down towards objects on earth. The other drives us upwards towards heaven.

A soul can lose its wings though, and wings have something divine about them. Wings symbolise wisdom, truth, virtue, they aim upwards. Up towards towards immortality, towards the outer rim of heaven, towards the gods, towards the divine.

Troubled souls, Socrates says, cannot break through into heaven, ‘they are carried around under the surface, trampling and bumping into one another as one tries to overtake another. So there is utter chaos, nothing but sweat and conflict’.

The Ancient Greeks had a word for being pulled down to earth: akrasia – lack of willpower, or quite literally, lack of mastery.

Mastery is rational. It thinks about what is right, what is good in the long term, what is useful, wise.

The writer Lucy Sante said that, ‘not so long ago, all the world smoked, and that all of waking life was measured out in cigarettes’. Mark Twain said he’d rather not go to heaven if you can’t smoke there. Writing about giving up, Richard Klein said that he was enamoured by their charms and grateful for their benefits. David Lynch said smoking has something of the artist’s life about it. A long list of writers have puffed about their love of smoking against a now much larger chorus of scientists warning that, today, it’s likely the stupidest habit you could maintain.

And I have to confess that, despite having smoked on and off since fourteen, I cannot share these writers’ enthusiasm. Maybe it’s because the consequences of smoking have been hammered into us more than any previous generation, but no matter how I interrogate it, I cannot identify the charms of smoking, yet still, like being led to and fro by Socrates’ unruly horse, I do it.

Unlike alcohol, the buzz is minor, unlike sugar, the taste is harsh, unlike caffeine, the spark is dim. It is no longer cool, no longer inexpensive, drags you outside on cold nights, coarsens the throat, and yeah, kills you.

And yet I can’t resist all those other temptations with much more ease, and, while I’m only really a social/occasional/drinking smoker now, and I go for months here and there without a cigarette, when it comes down to it, there is, something – with a cold beer – unidentifiably, inimitably satisfying about it.

But in making this video recently, I realised that bad habits, addictions, desire, impulse are fascinating because they are uniquely philosophical. Because the impulse to do something – especially a habit we find hard to resist – is, more than anything, about freedom, free will, ethics, how we act.

And we all do things we feel we should resist. Whether we’re talking about alcohol, cigarettes, cocaine, social media, work, exercise or gambling, addictive traits, I’d argue, are a near universal feature of the human condition.

But akrasia – weakness of will, resisting ourselves – is counterintuitive, if you think about it. How can we act against ourselves? Is there two of us? When we give in to desire, to too much food, drink, gambling, work even, cigarettes – it is like we’re pulled in two different directions – forward and backward, up and down – it’s like we’re weighed down, chained, dragged, beckoned, by that unruly horse, that we’re not free to act in what we want to do, but are slaves to our own bodies.

We are, like under a spell, compelled. In his confessions, Augustine wrote, ‘the madness of lust… took complete control of me, and I surrendered wholly to it’.

The madness of lust – madness, the opposite of reason. Do we all have a spark of the insane in all of us? Why would we ever feed a grotesque crazed mad beast within us, against our own clearheaded, rational, health seeking, decent part – why would we ever willingly do that? It surely doesn’t make sense.

But this is where actually Socrates takes a different view.

While he uses the twin horses metaphor in one of Plato’s dialogues, he also says, in another, that the soul is an ‘organic whole’. In other words, we’re not really driven by two horses – there’s only one of us – and we act for single reasons.

He said, ‘When people make a wrong choice of pleasures and pains—that is, of good and evil—the cause of their mistake is lack of knowledge. . . . What being mastered by pleasure really is, is ignorance’.

So akrasia – weakness of the will – is not really a weakness – but a lack of knowledge.

But for Socrates knowledge is very broad. Not just bookishness. It includes knowledge of taste, joy, beauty, consequences of actions  – after all, what isn’t knowledge?

Knowledge can cause the wings of the reasonable horse to grow.

Socrates says, ‘further nourishment pours in, the quills of the feathers swell and begin to grow from the roots upwards and to spread all over the under side of the soul, because previously the whole soul was winged’.

In choosing to do one thing over another – smoking a cigarette over eating an apple – the soul is really just acting on the knowledge that one is preferable in that moment. Enjoyment after all is reasonable.

‘No one’, says Socrates, ‘who either knows or believes that there is another possible course of action, better than the one he is following, will ever continue on his present course’.

It is not that we have correct knowledge that the cigarette is bad for our health and wrong knowledge that it is enjoyable in the moment. Knowledge is equal. What’s happening is simply that the knowledge that the cigarette is enjoyable in the moment is stronger than the knowledge that its bad for us in the long term, and so we act with recourse to the stronger knowledge.

He says that people erroneously think they ‘may have knowledge, and yet that the knowledge which is in him may be overmastered by anger, or pleasure, or pain, or love, or perhaps by fear,—just as if knowledge were a slave, and might be dragged about anyhow’.

Instead, Socrates says, ‘knowledge is a noble and commanding thing which cannot be overcome, and will not allow a man, if he only knows the difference of good and evil, to do anything which is contrary to knowledge’.

He points out that we have this common idea that something we’re doing – when we have akrasia – that weakness of will – the bad habit, is evil.

But he asks how can enjoyment – something good – be an evil? It’s not.

He says that in all of our actions we’re essentially balancing what feels pleasurable as good and what feels pain as an evil. And if the pleasure from doing something in the moment is greater than what we perceive as the consequences, then, it’s a good, it’s a preferable choice, and we’ll do it.

He says, ‘no man voluntarily pursues evil, or that which he thinks to be evil. To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he may have the less’.

Now, here’s the thing – obviously we make wrong decisions, do things we know are bad for us, make mistakes. He says what we really have, though, is a failure of judgement, which again, is resolved with the right knowledge.

He points out that when we do something because the benefits are present and the consequences are distant – later in life say, further away – we have misjudged because while the consequences appear to be distant, we should know that objects in the distance only appear to be smaller – and that appearances can be deceiving.

A poor judgement is the result of poor measurement.

Here’s a key passage: Socrates says, ‘Do not the same magnitudes appear larger to your sight when near, and smaller when at a distance?’.

He continues: ‘Now suppose happiness to consist in doing or choosing the greater, and in not doing or in avoiding the less, what would be the saving principle of human life? Would not the art of measuring be the saving principle?… The art of measurement would do away with the effect of appearances, and, showing the truth, would fain teach the soul at last to find rest in the truth, and would thus save our life’.

Socrates says the key to this, to measuring, thinking, is knowledge. Ignorance leads us to choose poorly, wisdom to choose correctly. The goal should be to think through something and bring all possible outcomes – all pleasures and pains – into proportion.

The Dutch rationalist philosopher Baruch Spinoza would later agree with Socrates, saying, ‘an affect – by which he means the impulse or feeling to do something – cannot be restrained or taken away except by an affect opposite to and stronger than the affect to be restrained’.

Spinoza thinks that if we have ‘adequate knowledge’ of a choice, it will always beat the lesser impulse to do otherwise.

The wisdom in this, for me, has been to keep acquiring knowledge of habits – why you do them, when you do them, what you need in the moment, what the alternatives are – and eventually their ‘affective force’, as Spinoza would call it, will be diminished. And we can learn from Socrates that it is an examined life that presents the best possible course.

The post How Socrates Beats Bad Habits appeared first on Then & Now.

After reading his book and watching endless Tucker Carlson Tonight segments, I found that Tucker has a very specific view on the world – some of which I actually agree with – but under the surface, often bubbling above, explicitly, and especially in the worrying last few pages of his 2018 book, Ship of Fools – is a conspiratorial and paranoid world view, and a scepticism about the merits of democracy itself.

Tucker embodies the Fox News formula as it has developed over its twenty-six years on air.

That the viewer – you – are under siege, night after night, segment after segment, Facebook and Youtube video after Facebook and Youtube video – that the elites – corrupt, lazy, greedy and incompetent – are not just out to get you – but that it’s a concerted effort, an evil plan.

It’s a formula I explored in my last video.

As Nicolas Confessor at the New York Times notes, with Tucker, ‘virtually any piece of news can be steered back to themes of elite corruption, conspiracy, and censorship’.

And there are some alarming themes that emerge around what Tucker thinks should be done about it.

When Trump’s popularity began to fall and the tide started turning against him, producers at the Tucker Carlson show – on air every night from 8 to 9 – decided on a new focus, a new approach – Trumpism without Trump.

It was as a way to distinguish Carlson. For him to be his own person. To avoid being a lapdog for a president known for his gaffes and lack of seriousness, and to avoid having to constantly apologise for or defend him on air.

We’ll look at Tucker’s worldview, what he’s said about topics like immigration and the January 6 capitol riots, how the conspiratorial style he adopts was analysed by a historian sixty years ago, and what, most alarmingly, Tucker seems to believe about the future of democracy.

Carlson started his career as a pro-capitalism, pro-immigration classical libertarian. But along with many on the right, he drifted slowly towards a nationalist populist worldview concerned with the excesses of capitalism, and, most notably, the dangers of unbridled immigration. Along with his friend Neil Patel he started the online publication The Daily Caller in 2010.

Former editor at the Caller, Jim Antle, told the NYT that, ‘When The Caller started, most smart young conservatives were libertarian. Within a few years after that a lot of them were populist, nationalist types’.

One former employee said that, ‘immigration was always the most animating thing – it wasn’t even close’.

Several Daily Caller employees were found to have used pseudonyms to write for white nationalist websites, and almost a dozen were found making racist posts elsewhere online.

One editor also wrote for white nationalist Richard Spencer’s Radix Journal.

Caller employees have been discovered in pictures with white nationalists like Matthew Heimbach, and one was a speaker at the 2017 Charlottesville Rally where white nationalists marched with flags and torches.

Tucker said that the Daily Caller was for ‘People who are distrustful of conventional news organizations’. He had joined Fox the previous year in 2009, began Tucker Carlson Tonight in 2016, and left the Daily Caller entirely in 2020. But what are his politics?

Carlson outlines his theory of American politics in his 2018 book Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class if Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution. America, he says in it, has changed.

He points out that there’s been a decline in the size and wealth of the middle class. (From 60% of national income in 1970 to 43% in 2015. The share of wealth going to the rich went from 29% to 50%)

He sees inequality as a big problem. He writes: ‘the rich now reside on the other side of a rope line from everyone else. They stand in their own queues at the airport, sleep on their own restricted floors in hotels. They watch sporting events from skyboxes, while everyone else sits in the stands. They go to different schools. They eat different food. They ski on private mountains, with people very much like themselves. Suddenly America has a new class system’.

He says Republicans ignore this. But in a break from the past Democrats now ignore this too.

He says that now both Republicans and Democrats are parties of the rich.

He told the Atlantic: ‘If you’re starting to suspect the conservative establishment doesn’t really represent your interests, there’s a reason for that. They’re every bit as corrupt as you think they are’.

What’s new is that liberals defend crony capitalism. He points to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos actually supporting Hillary Clinton, as did eight out of ten of the most affluent counties in America, and most of the wealthy employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon, who donated to Hillary over Trump by 60 to 1. He says that now Democrats like talking about identity politics, climate change, and abortion, rather than inequality.

Both parties preside over an unequal society, and unequal societies, he writes, tend to collapse. He’s called it ‘vulture capitalism’.

Now, there’s a lot in this diagnosis to agree with. The next question to ask, though, is why this has happened. Instead, Tucker begins his descent into paranoia and conspiracy…

Carlson says that one of the problems with this left-right convergence is that the elites broadly accept mass immigration. Why? Because an influx of cheap labour keeps wages low and boosts profits.

He writes, ‘For decades, ever-increasing immigration has been the rule in the United States, endorsed by both political parties. In 1970, less than 5 percent of America’s population were immigrants. By 2018, that number had risen to nearly 14 percent’.

Immigration for politicians and businesspeople is a win-win. Democrats know that immigrants will vote for them, and Republicans and business owners know that immigrants will work for less money that he describes as ‘legacy’ Americans.

He writes, ‘Both parties, looking for votes, are for it. Big business, which is always looking for cheaper labor, is for it. But it turns out the average person isn’t for it’.

Immigration, he says, has two problems: economic and cultural.

The economic argument is that an influx of immigrants, willing to work for less, pushes down the wages of working-class Americans. Even progressives, he argues, used to be more critical of immigration for this reason.

He writes, ‘In 1885, Congress passed a measure that forbade companies from hiring foreign contract workers. Two years later, the government tightened vetting of immigrants at ports of entry. In 1888, Congress mandated fines for companies that hired illegals’.

Bill Clinton – a Democrat – had argued for a stricter immigration policy, border patrols, cracking down on employers who hire illegal immigrants.

Tucker says, ‘As late as 2006, there were still New York Times columnists willing to concede that immigration came with a downside. “Immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants,” economist Paul Krugman wrote that year in the paper. “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.”

Okay, so immigration depresses wages for ordinary Americans and the elites like it because it boosts profits – that’s the economic case, and we’ll return to it. But he also argues immigration also has its cultural problems.

Immigration at this scale, he says, ‘destabilizes our society’. Nothing looks the same, neighbourhoods are different, customs and language. He says: ‘Human beings aren’t wired for that. They can’t digest change at this pace. It disorients them. Over time it makes even the most open-minded people jumpy and hostile and suspicious of one another. It encourages tribalism’.

He continues, ‘why should a country with no shared language, ethnicity, religion, culture, or history remain a country? Countries don’t hang together simply because. They need a reason. What’s ours?’.

Now, there are perfectly honest debates that can be had around the merits and issues immigration presents in an increasingly globalised world. And there’s plenty of evidence that can be called upon in those debates. So before we ask why Carlson has the view of the world he does – what motivates it – we need to look at his very selective reasoning, his conformation bias – how his argument that immigration is a central problem is based on a very narrow – to say the least – understanding of the studies.

In the book, Tucker cites two pieces of evidence that immigration drives down wages, neither of which are actually footnoted or cited, but, fine, it’s not that kind of book. One reference is from a NYT story about Storm Lake, Iowa.

He writes, ‘In the spring of 2017, the New York Times ran a story about a town in northwest Iowa called Storm Lake. Tyson Foods operates slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants in Storm Lake, and over the years thousands of workers from Asia and Latin America have moved there to work in them. Not surprisingly, the flood of cheap labor destroyed the local labor union and depressed wages’.

First, I can find no studies or evidence for the claim that immigration depressed wages in Storm Lake. The original article does acknowledge that wages are stagnant, but the claim it actually makes is that, ‘Mr. Smith remembers that it wasn’t the arrival of foreign workers that initially drove down wages, but the plant owners’.

Or take this quote: ‘Faced with competition from new companies that had developed a faster, more efficient method of boxing beef and selling it to supermarket chains and fast-food outlets, Hygrade (a food products company) in 1981 asked its workers to take a pay cut of $3 an hour. When they refused, the plant closed’.

This was before immigrants from South East Asia and South America began arriving in Storm Lake in the mid-1980s.

Carlson also ignores the evidence that immigration is keeping the town alive, and even growing.

He also says, ‘In Storm Lake, mass immigration had a dramatic effect on violent crime rates, which are 56 percent higher than in the rest of the state’.

He cites no evidence for this and I can’t find any with a Google search, but it might be true.

But, this is beside the point and precisely the point at the same time; it’s odd that, for someone who is so animated by the topic of immigration, he relies so much on a single town and cites no real evidence. There are thousands of academic studies on immigration, wages, and crime. For example, a meta analysis of 51 studies between 1994-2014 found that immigration reduces crime.

In fact, the literature seems quite clear on this. As many papers on Google Scholar show, like this study from 2009, immigration reduces crime (which is an emerging scholarly consensus). It concludes: ‘Contrary to the predictions of classic criminological theories and popular stereotypes, immigration generally does not increase crime and often suppresses it’.

So, yes, studies are better than anecdotes from a single town. Let’s look at wages. Again, Carlson cites one study, from 1980.

He says that in the past, ‘Nobody doubted that an influx of refugees would harm American workers. One study, conducted after the Mariel boatlift of 1980, found that Americans with lower education levels in Miami saw their wages fall by 37 percent after the Cuban refugees arrived’.

Wow, 37%! That’s a lot right? I wonder if this is normal and not a selective reading of the evidence and cherry picking the single piece of data that backs up a preselected worldview?

The first studies on the Mariel boatlift – a mass migration of around 125,000 Cubans to Florida in 1980 – concluded that the effect on wages was negligible or nothing at all. One 1990 study, for example, concluded that, ‘an analysis of wages of non-Cuban workers in Miami over the 1979-85 period reveals virtually no effect of the Mariel influx’.

But there was an influential paper in 2017 that ‘reappraised’ the boatlift. It argued that, ‘This analysis overturns the prior finding that the Mariel boatlift did not affect Miami’s wage structure. The wage of high school dropouts in Miami dropped dramatically, by 10 to 30%’.

So, first of all, not 37%, as Tucker suggests, but 10-30%. And this too has been called into question. This study concludes that, ‘As a whole, the evidence from refugee waves reinforces the existing consensus that the impact of immigration on average native-born workers is small, and fails to substantiate claims of large detrimental impacts on workers with less than high school’.

Okay, but, again this is one single event, and it’s a bit of a unique case. So this is the worst case Carlson could find – the only one that backs up his wider world view – what do other studies show? Does immigration depress wages?

I’ve spent some time looking into this – and if you’re interested in a more in-depth video on this let me know in the comments. It seems like the consensus in the literature is that yes immigration can depress wages, but by an almost insignificant amount. It also ignores the positive effect immigration tends to have on economic growth in an area.

For example, this paper finds that in the UK an inflow of immigrants the size of 1% of the population (that’s 670,000 immigrants – a lot) can lead to a 0.6% decline in the wages of lowest paid but an increase in the wages of higher paid workers.

This 2016 report – Migrant Intake Into Australia – found that, ‘the evidence generally indicates that Australians’ wages are not adversely affected by immigration on average’.

Or this analysis of 12 other studies found ‘none to small impact on earnings and unemployment level of lower wage earners’.

One review of the literature concludes that, ‘decades of research have provided little support for the claim that immigrants depress wages by competing with native workers’.

So that’s seven studies I’ve cited, one a study of 12 other studies, in a few minutes while Carlson cites one study in an entire book. Choosing this one study because it has the most dramatic figure is more than just motivated reasoning, it’s dishonest, misleading, and manipulative. Of course, blaming immigration for low wages is easier for a conservative than maybe suggesting that union busting and anti-labour laws and low minimum wages and poor education are to blame.

He also selects and exaggerates stories about the cultural implications of immigration.

He writes, ‘Go to Lowell, Mass., or Lewiston, Maine [which is about an hour from where he lives by the way] or any place where large numbers of immigrants have been moved into a poor community, and it hasn’t become richer. It’s become poorer. That’s real’.

That’s, uh, not real at all, actually Tucker. As one study from a bipartisan think tank – New American Economy – concluded, ‘When nearly 1,000 Somali refugees began relocating to Lewiston in 2001, many people worried that the new immigrant population would be an undue burden on the city services and finances’. And then, ‘Fifteen years later, the opposite has proven true. New businesses, a growing local economy, a declining crime rate, and a younger, more diverse population are all playing a significant role in Lewiston’s economic and cultural renaissance’.

And one study on Lowell found that immigrants in the city had more spending power than the average household, took less in social security, benefits, and Medicaid and Medicare than the average, contributed $119 million in federal taxes, and accounted for a whopping 90% of the city’s population growth.

He also writes that, ‘Honor killings, too, are now a feature of American life. In July 2008, a Pakistani man living in the suburbs of Atlanta strangled his twenty-five-year-old daughter’.

Troubling, of course, but citing a single murder in a population of 3.5 million American Muslims is again intellectually dishonest, stupid in fact, and probably not a wise tactic when what he calls ‘native Americans’ – sorry natives – have been responsible for at least 300 mass shootings already this year.

He’s also suggested immigrants are dirty – claiming that one street was covered with human faeces, which turned out to be false (it was one child who couldn’t get to the toilet in time).

So again, the cultural critique he makes is full of omissions, conformation bias, selective reasoning, and stereotyping, that added up amounts to intellectual dishonesty and warped world view, that, if not adopted from a careful study of the evidence, must come from somewhere else. And this somewhere else, is where we start to see a very paranoid mind.

Before we move on to some of the talking points Carlson has promoted on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News, I want to talk about the historian Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. We’ll then return to see how it says a lot about Tucker’s repeated suggestions of shady plans and corruption, and his hyperbole, exaggeration, hysteria, and paranoia. His book also has a troubling conclusion.

Hofstadter argued there was a history of paranoia at the heart of American politics. He wrote in the influential essay: ‘The central image is that of a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life’.

Hofstadter calls it the paranoid style because ‘no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind’.

As we’ll see, Carlson is paranoid about the FBI, black South Africans, an elite or immigrant plan called the great replacement, and climate change. And as Hofstadter points out paranoia is a mental disorder characterised by ‘systemized delusions of persecution’, and a fear of a widespread conspiracy.

Sometimes Carlson only hints at it. For example, in the book he says elites support immigration not out of a moral concern for welfare, and not even to keep wages low for national economic purposes, but because they want to keep nannies affordable.

He writes, ‘for the affluent, immigration has few costs and many upsides. Low-skilled immigrants don’t compete in upscale job markets. Not many recent arrivals from El Salvador are becoming lawyers or green energy lobbyists. An awful lot of them are becoming housekeepers. Mass immigration makes household help affordable. That’s one of the main reasons elites support it’.

Really? That’s one the main reasons? Well, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Hofstadter argues that throughout America’s modern history, commentators have been paranoid about ‘Jesuits or Freemasons, international capitalists, international Jews, or Communists’.

The essay highlights a few of these conspiracy theories. For example, panic about the Illuminati was common in the late 18th century. One 1797 book was called, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies‘. Another conspiracy theory was the fear that the Catholic Church was planning to infiltrate, control, or overthrow the US government.

In 1855 a Texas newspaper said that, ‘It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our destruction’.

Another 1773 book warned of the dangers of a ‘“triple conspiracy” of anti-Christians, Freemasons, and Illuminati to destroy religion and order’.

In the early 19th century there was a trend of fears of a conspiracy of the Catholic Church and Jesuits trying to take over America. One book warned, ‘Jesuits are prowling about all parts of the United States in every possible disguise, expressly to ascertain the advantageous situations and modes to disseminate Popery’.

There was a theory that the market crash of 1893 was intentionally started by a Catholic run on the banks.

In the 20th century, the paranoid style became about the government being infiltrated by communists, and the whole country infiltrated with, ‘a network of Communist agents, just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media are engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans’.

During the Red Scare, for example, Senator McCarthy said that communists in high government were ‘a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men’.

The influential businessman and anti-communist Robert Welch Jr. of the John Birch Society claimed in the fifties that communists had taken over the supreme court and were winning the struggle to control, ‘the press, the pulpit, the radio and television media, the labor unions, the schools, the courts, and the legislative halls of America’.

An influential figure, Welch described Eisenhower as ‘a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy’.

He said he knew this ‘based on an accumulation of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable that it seems to put this conviction beyond any reasonable doubt’.

Hofstadter describes how the paranoid style went from a focus to foreign plots to overthrow America to an obsession with domestic threats.

Tobin Smith, who worked at Fox News and wrote a book about his time there, wrote that an executive at Fox told him, ‘Look—have you read Richard Hofstadter’s book, The Paranoid Style of American Politics? If you haven’t, I’ll lend you my copy. Everyone in the opinion broadcast team at Fox News has read it’.

Historian Robert Toplin has written that, ‘Hofstadter associated that mentality with a “Manichean and apocalyptic” mode of thought. He noticed that right-wing spokesmen applied the methods and messages of evangelical revivalists to U.S. politics. Agitated partisans on the right talked about epic clashes between good and evil, and they recommended extraordinary measures to resist liberalism. The American way of life was at stake, they argued. Compromise was unsatisfactory; the situation required militancy. Nothing but complete victory would do’.

It’s almost like Fox News picked up Hofstadter’s essays and mistook it for an instruction manual on how to run a political television network. Carlson’s paranoid style manifests this in many ways. We’ll look at a handful.

Changing demographics, and, as we’ve seen, the threat of immigration to ‘legacy’ America, is a favourite topic of Tucker, but his references to the great replacement theory adds a conspiratorial spin.

The theory came from the French novelist Renault Camus in 2011 – le grand replacement. Camus believed that non-whites – Muslims in particular – immigrating to Europe were colonisers who were part of a slowly-acting grand plan to replace the indigenous population.

The great replacement has been adopted by anti-immigration politicians across Europe. Marine Le Pen in France has cited it and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands has tweeted about it.

The New York Times found that Carlson raised the idea that Democrats wanted to use immigration to change the demographics of the United States in over 400 episodes of his show.

The key is the conspiracy – that the politicians are in concert, with goals that are secretive, with the specific intention of furthering their own power.  Using language like invasion also suggests that the country is under attack.

Carlson has defended billboards in California that read, ‘Stop the Invasion, Secure Our Borders’.

He has said: ‘It’s an invasion. I don’t know what’s wrong with saying so’.

The great replacement theory has been cited by the New Zealand Christchurch terrorist who killed 51 people in a mosque in 2019, and by a shooter in El Paso Texas who targeted Latinos and killed 23 people in the same year. And by the Buffalo attackers in May 2022 who killed ten. All the killers cited their motivation being a defence of the native population, which they saw as being replaced.

Demographic changes are of course real, but the emphasis here is on conspiracy – that demographic changes are part of an elite plan to keep wages down, nannies cheaper, to increase the numbers of votes for your political party, and for Muslims to turn Europe into a colony governed by sharia law. This is what makes this a particularly dangerous talking point.

While defending the great replacement theory Carlson pushes the idea that white supremacy is exaggerated by the mainstream media – he’s gone as far as to call it a hoax. He writes in his book that, ‘If you can convince voters that white supremacy in the heartland is the real problem, it’s possible they may ignore that you and your family live in a rarified white enclave and are far richer now than you were ten years ago’.

Carlson has also stoked fears of minority white farmers in South Africa being targeted to be wiped out by the black majority. In 2018, Carlson told viewers that the South African government had ‘just passed a law allowing it to seize their farms without any compensation, based purely on their ethnicity’.

He said that it is ‘in some sense an intentional campaign’, to ‘crush a racial minority within your country’.

Brian Jones – the most senior black presenter at Fox – told Fox News viewers on his own show that Carlson was wrong about every detail. Yes, the ANC in South Africa was debating a bill that meant land could be hypothetically expropriated, but it wasn’t based on ethnicity, and it hadn’t even been passed. It based on many factors – like whether land was sitting empty, whether it was held purely for speculative use, or whether the owner had left the country. Most media organisations would not let this simple factual error get on air.

Most recently, Carlson has been pushing the narrative that the storming of the capitol on January 6th by Trump supporters was an FBI false flag operation – instigated by undercover FBI agents – to discredit the Trump movement and ‘purge’ Trump voters. He’s called it the Fedsurrection and it’s the subject of an outlandish three part documentary called Patriot Purge that’s based on hearsay, wild speculation, and hysterics.

The documentary claims that left wing instigators were changing into Trump clothes and ‘goading members of the crowd’ to go into the capital. He’s said on his show that two ‘unindicted co-conspirators’ were ‘almost certainly working for the FBI’.

Why? Because they hadn’t been charged. As the Washington Post points out, there are several reasons someone might not be charged. They might have cooperated with the FBI, been treated with leniency, or the charges based on the evidence not worth pursuing. To jump to conspiracy is, of course, a wildly preposterous and irrational leap of the paranoid imagination. And along with ‘some people were getting changed’, that’s about the extent of the evidence that a three part documentary is based on.

Hofstadter wrote, ‘What distinguishes the paranoid style is not, then, the absence of verifiable facts (though it is occasionally true that in his extravagant passion for facts the paranoid occasionally manufactures them), but rather the curious leap in imagination that is always made at some critical point in the recital of events’.

Politifact looked at court documents and found clear evidence that the defendants were ‘overwhelmingly Trump supporters’.

Of course, the idea that a storming of a government building is something that’s orchestrated by the state itself is a serious claim for a mainstream news anchor to make and would require some serious evidence – or at least, that used to be the case.

Carlson has also pushed the idea that elites have used fear and panic of climate change to get what they want. And it’s no surprise that Carlson has promoted 4chan on air, a website known for being a hotbed for conspiracies like Pizzagate and Qanon.

Shutting down free speech is also part of the conspiracy. He wrote in his book, ‘If you’re going to run a country for the benefit of a few, it’s dangerous to let people complain about it. The only way to impose unpopular policies on a population is through fear and silence. Free speech is the enemy of authoritarian rule. That’s why the Framers put it at the top of the Bill of Rights. That’s also why our ruling class seeks to crush it’.

So let’s look a little bit more into the mechanics of Tucker’s paranoid mind and ask: why is he like this?

Throughout his book there’s a constant tension – one that veers from attributing the reason for the elite’s misguided politics on them being simply wrong, and the reason being a malicious organised conspiracy to limit speech, increase their power, bring in cheap labour that they’ll benefit from, discredit Trump voters, replace the native population, and to divert attention with identity politics.

Why does he do this? Of course, you can make many of these arguments – although not all – without appealing to conspiracy. I can get on board when Tucker says: ‘the main reason the press lost interest in holding the permanent government accountable is that they had more in common with its members than with the rest of the country. They share the same life experiences and cultural assumptions as the people they cover. The people in power are the neighbors and former classmates of the members of the press. On the most basic level the two groups have become indistinguishable’.

But he takes things even further – not only do they share interests, but they’re all colluding, organising against your interests – a cabal, in cahoots, sinister, shadowy, evil, pulling the strings. And when it comes to crafting a powerful message, the paranoid style has its benefits.

Hofstadter wrote that for the paranoid, ‘Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he directs the public mind through “managed news”; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional); he is gaining a stranglehold on the educational system’.

Why has conspiracy been such a recurring theme in history? Why does Carlson jump to it so quickly? Does he really believe it? Well, the simplest answer is that it sells, it attracts attention, it mobilises, and it works as a political tactic.

Fox is known for its assiduous study of its own ratings. While traditional television ratings data looked at viewer numbers hour by hour, then fifteen minute by fifteen minute periods, Fox started using ratings data that looked at viewing figures minute by minute. One Fox news employee said that Carlson studied them intensely.

They said, ‘He is going to double down on the white nationalism because the minute-by-minutes show that the audience eats it up’.

Another employee told the New York Times that Fox wanted to focus on the ‘grievance, the stuff that would get people boiled up… They’re coming for you, the Blacks are coming for you, the Mexicans are coming for you’.

The emotional core, as the New York Times puts it, is ‘white panic over the country’s changing ethnic composition’.

And being one of the most successful media publishers on Facebook, Fox has access to even more detailed analytics than ever.

Another former Fox political editor said: ‘Cable hosts looking for ratings and politicians in search of small-dollar donations can see which stories and narratives are drawing the most intense reactions among addicted users online’.

They continued that using social media is ‘like a focus group for pure outrage’.

As we saw on my in-depth exploration of how Fox News grew into the powerhouse that it is, the network presents the story in the most emotional language, supported by melodramatic attention grabbing graphics, relying on the most destructive tendencies of our evolutionary inherence – our defence mechanisms, fear, survival, fight-or-flight, our tendency to focus on threats and dangers.

People become mobilised when a threat is powerful, organised, elitist, the other.

Hofstadter writes that for the paranoid, ‘Nothing but complete victory will do. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention’.

He continues, ‘this enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman: sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving’.

The enemy ‘makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced’.

I think the most disturbing part of Carlson’s book is the short two page epilogue. It’s where he talks briefly about what he sees as solutions. Even here, it’s difficult to discover exactly what policies he believes in though.

He’d clearly close the borders. But his critique of crony capitalism leads him to admire the ‘pure, old-fashioned economics’ of Elizabeth Warren, who supports increasing taxes on corporations and the wealthy.

But the most worrying part – especially from a man who has been touted as a potential republican presidential candidate – is his scepticism about democracy itself.

Carlson has cosied up to and taken inspiration from so called illiberal liberal authoritarians like Hungary’s Victor Orban and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, both critical of liberal positions on immigration, sexuality, gender rights, and both, shall we say, fast and loose with the rule of democratic law. Willing to subvert democratic norms to get their way.

In that two page epilogue to Ship of Fools, Carlson talks about two paths out of the crisis he’s diagnosed.

One is to ‘attend to the population’, ‘care about them’. He says this solution is the simplest. But this is it, no suggestions as to what to do, what policies to implement. Other than saying that massive inequality is bad.

The other? To suspend democracy. He says this solution is the quickest. He says democracy is new and that hierarchy is the older system, more normal and natural.

He writes hierarchy is ‘the story of all human history. Very few civilizations have operated in any other way. People naturally sort themselves into hierarchies. Those who have power defend it from those who don’t. Rulers rule, serfs obey. It’s a familiar system. We know it works, because it has for thousands of years. The new ingredient, what makes our current moment so unstable, is democracy’.

He continues that there are justifications for suspending democracy.

‘If your voters can’t reach responsible conclusions, you can’t let them vote. You don’t give suffrage to irrational populations, for the same reason you wouldn’t give firearms to toddlers: they’re not ready for the responsibility’.

So really Tucker’s views are there in black and white. Certain people shouldn’t be able to vote. They’re irresponsible. And the elites are conspiratorial, need purging from the system, the swamp needs draining. And democracy can be suspended if need be. It’s part of the reactionary idea that America isn’t necessarily a democratic country, just a republican one. If American is the most powerful country in the world, Carlson is the most influential conservative, and he has views like this, does this make him one of the most dangerous men in the world? Or does that make me a sufferer from the paranoid mind?

The last sentence of Tucker’s book is, ‘We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well’.

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Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/30/us/tucker-carlson-tonight.html?chapter=3

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/15/us/replacement-theory-shooting-tucker-carlson.html

https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/nov/05/tucker-carlsons-patriot-purge-film-jan-6-full-fals/

https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/segment-riddled-lies-tucker-carlson-dismisses-climate-crisis-and-actions-address-it

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/09/a-daily-caller-editor-wrote-for-an-alt-right-website-using-a-pseudonym/569335/

https://migration.ucdavis.edu/cf/more.php?id=154#:~:text=Storm%20Lake’s%20initial%20settlers%20(primarily,secondary%20migrants%20to%20Storm%20Lake

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How is it that we co-ordinate our activities as humans like clocks? Our language, our humour, our culture, our expectations; in many ways they come together so that we can interact.

For the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, born in 1930 and died in 2002, Leibniz was onto something.

Bourdieu’s lifelong concern was how we interact sociologically; what glues society together.

He was particularly interested in how we’re both free and constrained by the rules of society; how those two phenomena interact.

What determines our tastes, for example, or our sense of humour, and where’s the space for freedom, in choosing our own path.

He wants to think about how theory and the objective facts about society that affect us all, in practice; how we live that theory and embody those objective facts in our own subjective ways – interact.

The result is an influential mix of sociology and philosophy that’s had an impact across many disciplines.

His key concepts are habitus, field, and cultural capital, and while it’s important to understand how all three fit together, the key to understanding them all and the focus here will be the habitus.

The philosophical context of the second half of the 20th century is important for understanding Bourdieu.

Structuralists like Claude Levi-Strauss argued that there were universal, rigid rules to all societies that provided the foundation of all social life, while postmodernists and existentialists emphasised individual, subjective outlooks that could never be pinned down.

Bourdieu called this the ‘absurd opposition between individual and society’.

Both perspectives, he thought, were necessary and in some way worked together.

His answer to how is the habitus.

Bourdieu writes, ‘all of my thinking started from this point: how can behaviour be regulated without being the product of obedience to rules?’.

The habitus explains how our likelihood to act in a certain way is dependent on how we expect others to respond. How the social world becomes objectified into a range of probabilities and expectations that make us more likely to choose certain actions rather than others.

The habitus organises us, it’s a ‘predisposition, tendency, propensity, or inclination’.

We know that society is ordered in a certain way and that our own position in that society presupposes a range of options, some of which we might be likely to achieve, others not. Qualifications, universities, career paths, etiquette, different regions, subcultures, musical genres; they all have different ways of doing things, different styles.

There are rules of the game that aren’t necessarily written. Life is about getting a ‘feel for the game,’ Bourdieu writes. There is a way in which social life is ‘collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor’.

‘Should one talk of a rule? Yes and no. You can do so on condition that you distinguish clearly between rule and regularity. The social game is regulated, it is the locus of certain regularities’.

In this way objective social life presents itself as a kind of pattern that becomes encoded in how we act, how we build our buildings, what we show on television.

The habitus is the underlying structure of social life that becomes ingrained into how we physically move or talk in the world. How we behave is conditioned by these objective possibilities.

Bourdieu calls this the ‘subjective expectations of objective probabilities’.

Objective meaning is, for example, the chance of getting a certain job or being able to buy a certain car. Subjective meaning is the behaviour we adopt in setting out to do so.

We respond, unconsciously most of the time, to the mathematical probabilities of the social world.

You know, for example, that if you’re not good at maths the probability of becoming an astronaut is slim, so this conditions your subjective decisions.

You might think you’re an incredible singer but live in a village in Siberia and so not pursue that particular talent.

The range of objective possibilities are what Bourdieu calls the field. The habitus is the way we enter it with the knowledge we have about ourselves.

Another word Bourdieu likes to use is strategies. Again, these are not necessarily conscious.

We create strategies depending on what we think the right balance is between, for example, likeliness of success, along with appropriate challenge. The habitus is the way these social likelihoods become codified within our heads, within our psychologies.

Different cultures, different classes, different careers have a different habitus. They determine what is reasonable and unreasonable action within their fields, which then guides or restrains personal thought and action.

We develop, consciously or unconsciously, different strategies for organising our future actions. Language, interests, fashion, ways of speaking, walking, our routines.

And a lot of this is transmitted from parent to child at an early age.

This all means that behaviour isn’t just rational. It’s conditioned by the possibilities that are presented to us. It’s determined. But this doesn’t mean we are only determined.

We adjust the habitus depending on the uniqueness of our position in the world. We can move location, change what we wear, learn new skills.

Our emotional response to certain situations might be conditioned by the habitus.

Where we live – our culture and social rules – privileges certain emotions or virtues over others. Stoicism or openness, for example, or maybe religious reverence. This is something I’ve talked about in my video on the social construction of emotions.

In this way the habitus shapes physiological responses – the release of chemicals in the brain, our muscles’ response to stress under certain conditions.

A certain emotional style might be more socially profitable in the army say – cold, stern, disciplined – than that of a theatre actor. The boardroom demands a different habitus to the beach. Boys are told not to cry.

For Bourdieu, the habitus is the result of history being codified into practice.

‘in each of us, in varying proportions, there is part of yesterday’s man; it is yesterday’s man who inevitably predominates in us, since the present amounts to little compared with the long past in the course of which we were formed and from which we result’.

So how is the concept useful?

Gareth Wiltshire and others have argued in a paper that Bourdieu’s theory can help us understand health inequalities at an early age. Overcoming the disparity in life expectancy and healthy lifestyles between the rich and the poor is usually framed as either structural – access to healthcare, finances, etc – or individual – encourage changes through intervention, advertising etc. This dualism is something Bourdieu wanted to overcome as we’ve seen.

Following Bourdieu, they look at how class differences are reified into physical habitual practices. Living in some areas it might be important to look strong, for example, while in others to look smart. Accepting or aligning oneself to the habitus brings cultural capital that might lead to gains in contacts, respect, etc.

Their research was conducted at different schools, interviewing different children with different socio-economic backgrounds in England.

Children towards the middle or upper class tended to be pushed towards Rugby because football wasn’t ‘posh enough for the school’, which some of the children complained about.

Kids from a working class background tended to talk disparagingly about sport in general, preferring activities like free running.

Each activity carries with it certain expectations about the people you will associate with and the social capital that will be acquired.

So what’s the difference between habitus and habit?

Bourdieu writes that, ‘One of the reasons for the use of the term habitus is the wish to set aside the common conception of habit as a mechanical assembly or preformed programme’.

The habitus is more flexible and precedes the physicality of the habit. Gambling might be a habit, an urge, but the habitus is the social and economic conditions that structure the games, the locations, and the likeliness of a person gambling.

And habitus doesn’t refer just to the instinct of habit. Rather than just the physical, the way we think, rationalise, strategise about a situation – where we should build the casino, for example – is dependent on the habitus. We can see how similar habiti affect both the gambler and the bookmaker.

Some have argued that the concept of the habitus can be, and is, overused, and, because of its wide applicability, can become ambiguous and lose its usefulness.

But I think it’s most useful when we use the concept to think about what might be arbitrary in the way we act, when we might be acting that way for the sake of other people, in a way that is limiting for ourselves, and others.

Sources

Ed by. Michael Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts

Richard Jenkins, Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice

Gareth Wiltshire, Jessica Lee and Oli Williams, Understanding the reproduction of health inequalities: physical activity, social class and Bourdieu’s habitus

Nick Corssley, Habit and Habitus

The Partially Examined Life, Episode 137: Bourdieu on the Tastes of Social Classes

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Enter Adolf Hitler. Charming, charismatic, seemingly brilliant; after being elected in 1933 he quickly revitalises the German economy. Problem after problem seem to be miraculously fixed. You get a job, roads are built, reparations are halted, a wave of euphoria sweeps across the nation; life in Germany becomes good again. Why? Because Hitler and the National Socialists stand firmly against all of the things that were causing its destruction – the greedy capitalists, godless communists determined to overthrow the state, vindictive enemy countries abroad and an enemy within that connects all of these things, that’s responsible, and that wants you dead: the Jews.

For almost ten years you’re surrounded by anti-Semitic propaganda and conspiracy theory. The Jews control Wall Street, Hollywood, America, Britain, the Soviet Union. The war starts. Those threaten to take it all away from you. You’re too old to fight in the army but you’re drafted into the reserve police force.

One morning – on duty in occupied Poland – you’re roused from your bed and are driven to a nearby village.

Your commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp – known to you affectionately as Papa Trapp – is pale faced, has a choking voice, and tears in his eyes. He informs you of your orders. Remember, he says, back home bombs are falling on your wives and daughters too.

The Jews in the village were involved with the partisans, the enemy. It’s us or them. They must be rounded up and taken to the work camp. But those not able to work – women, children and the elderly – must unfortunately be shot.

Trapp makes an offer: you can be excused from this task if you wish. You look briefly at your friends but don’t take up the offer.

Instead you step forward, take the men, women, and children into the forest, order them onto the floor, aim, and pull the trigger.

Two million men, women, and children would be murdered in this way and at least 4 million more in the death camps and gas chambers. And statistically speaking, you would become a murderer in that way too. You would participate in the Holocaust.

What drives ordinary everyday people to become mass killers? Men and women – but usually men – like you and me?

The Holocaust was not perpetrated solely by a few sadistic psychopaths but by tens of thousands of everyday Germans, Poles, Frenchmen, Austrians, Slovakians, and, in fact, much of Europe took part.

If any of us could be motivated under the right conditions to become mass killers, how can we protect ourselves against the threat? How might we inoculate our societies and cultures from descending into genocide?

One estimate puts the number of victims of democide – that’s murder by government – and genocide at 169 million in the twentieth century alone. Stalin, Mao, the Khmer Rouge, Rwanda, the Congo, the Ottomans – what’s undeniable is that we’re a disturbingly violent species.

And there are even more distressing questions. What makes the twentieth century – the most advanced century – the most genocidal? As the journalist Mark Bowden has put it, ‘the Holocaust disturbs so much because none of the things we associate with modern civilization – peace, industry, technology, education – free us from the dark side of the human soul’.

He said, ‘just as there is evil in the heart of every man, there is evil at the heart of even the most ‘‘civilized’’ human society’.

The German philosopher Jurgen Habermas said that ‘a veil of naivete was torn up’ with the Holocaust, something that happened that was unimaginable until then. It ended the optimism of what seemed like the inexorable progress of western enlightenment.

I want to focus on a kind of inoculation against that evil. A moral vaccine. Social psychologist Thomas Blass puts it like this: ‘what psychological mechanism transformed the average, and presumably normal, citizens of Germany and its allies into people who would carry out or tolerate unimaginable acts of cruelty against their fellow citizens who were Jewish, resulting in the death of six million of them?’

But first, a definition. A UN resolution in 1948 defined genocide as ‘acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical [sic], racial, or religious group, as such: a) killing members of the group, b) causing serious bodily harm or mental harm to members of the group, c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life to bring about its destruction in whole or in part, d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’.

So what are the psychological, cultural, social, and political factors that might lead ‘ordinary men and women’ to commit crimes of this scale? We’ll look at a number of factors: propaganda, out-grouping, rationalization, authority, conformity, and compartmentalization or distancing. But, rather than the Nazi leaders, those ordinary people might be a good place to start.

That scene of Major Trapp tearfully informing his men of their duty did happen. Trapp was a police officer who commanded Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the Order Police. He was executed for war crimes in 1948.

The Order Police was made up of ordinary Germans, too old to be conscripted into the army -around 33-48 years old – predominantly working-class, but also too old to have only known Nazi propaganda as they were raised in the democratic era of the Weimar Republic.

These ordinary policemen joined SS units called the Einsatzgruppen who were tasked with following the army into occupied territories in the East – particularly the Soviet Union and Poland. They were to assist the SS in a number of jobs, and as their name suggests, keep order, rounding up Polish soldiers, guarding camps, organizing equipment, and, ultimately, executing enemy soldiers, partisans, and Jews.

Stalin had given the order for partisan warfare, and this made it easier politically for Hitler to order communists in occupied territories of the USSR to be immediately executed, since it made them a threat. Germany, he argued, was being attacked from all sides. Germany was at war and, as one order noted, the ‘men are to be instructed continuously about the political necessity of the measures’.

In June 1942, Police Battalion 101 were sent for guard duty to a city called Lublin in Poland where around 40,000 Jews lived.

In July Major Trapp was ordered to round up the 1800 Jews living in a nearby village. Working-age men were to be sent to a labour camp. The elderly, women, and children were to be immediately shot . When Trapp’s lieutenant was informed of the order he requested another assignment, insisting that he would not participate in an action in which defenceless men and women would be shot.

Before being told of the details, the men were informed they would be doing some difficult work. One sergeant told them ‘he didn’t want to see any cowards’.

They arrived at the village at dawn; Trapp assembled his men and said that any of the older men who didn’t feel up to it could step down. One man stepped forward, another ten or twelve followed. They were dismissed. Almost 500 men remained. They were to round up the Jews and take them to the marketplace.

Trapp did not join his men. He couldn’t bear the sight. One of the men reported hearing Trapp say ‘oh, god, why did I have to be given these orders’. He apparently paced back and forth. Another officer reported that Trapp had told him that the job didn’t suit him but that ‘orders were orders’. One said that when he and Trapp were alone he sat on a stool and ‘wept bitterly… The tears really flowed’. Another confirmed that ‘he wept like a child’.

Meanwhile, the air was filled with gunshots and screams. A doctor explained to the men that shooting victims above the shoulders into the backbone would result in an instant death.

The executions lasted all day. Alcohol was supplied. Many aimed too high or too low. One man said that when he shot ‘the entire skull exploded… brains and bones flew everywhere’. Another said ‘the entire skull or at least the rear skullcap was torn off, and blood, bone splinters, and brains sprayed everywhere’.

After a while, many of the men couldn’t take it anymore. One policeman simply ‘slipped off, another avoided his turn shooting. Those who resisted were called ‘weaklings’ but suffered no consequences for not participating. Some hid in the priest’s garden. Another said after one shooting ‘his nerves were totally finished’. One man said he ‘had become so sick that I simply couldn’t anymore’. Another ran into the woods and vomited. Many were sick, the word ‘repugnant’ was used a lot, and one said he’d go crazy if he had to do it again. Some shot ten or twenty Jews before they were asked to be relieved. One man said his comrade was such a terrible shot that the backs of heads were torn off and brains sprayed everywhere. He simply couldn’t watch any longer’. This is the testimony of some 200 men tried in a German court after the war.

When the men were finished, the bodies were left in the woods and the men returned to the barracks ‘depressed, angered, embittered, and shaken’. None of them talked, none ate, and they simply drank.

In court it was said that ‘after only a brief period, the commandos of the Einsatzgruppen got into considerable difficulties. . . . The members . . . were in the long run not up to the mental strain caused by the mass shootings. . . . There were disputes, refusals to obey orders, drunken orgies, but also serious psychological illnesses’.

Even Heinrich Himmler – commander of the SS and one of the architects of the Holocaust – was distraught after watching the execution of 100 men in Minsk. Another SS officer said to him ‘look at the eyes of the men in this Kommando, how deeply shaken they are! These men are finished for the rest of their lives…’

But the men soon got used to killing. By the end of 1942 they’d executed at least 6500 Jews and deported 42,000 more to the gas chambers. Once the initial massacres ended the ‘Jew hunts’ began; the searching for runaways in the villages and forests. They were so frequent that the men described them as their ‘daily bread’. By the time the war was over, only a minority – 10-20% – of Police Battalion 101 abstained from the killings.

And over the course of their service they became increasingly efficient killers. The massacre at Jozefow was typical of an early problem for the Nazis. The men seemed to find killing innocent humans repugnant and difficult. Even Himmler struggled with the sight of the killings, so it was quickly established that later executions would involve a division of labour, so as to ease the ‘psychological’ burden. This, as the historian Christopher Browning writes, allowed the men to ‘become increasingly efficient and calloused executioners’.

The literature on genocide research in general supports this: that initial executions are usually distressing but the distress subsides with each subsequent death. Even worse, while in the minority, some actually develop a pleasure from it over time.

Himmler ordered the gassing of victims, whether in mobile gas vans or in the death camps, so that there would be less direct stressful involvement for the men. Division of labour reduced the burden as some worked on the trains, some were guards, others filled the gas, some worked on accounts while others moved the victims into chambers. The shootings by the Einsatzgruppen were divided too. Some would round up, others would strip the prisoners, and the actual shooting was often done by Eastern Europeans under German occupation. Making men cogs in the machine diminished individual personal responsibility.

Similarly, historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has argued that the steps towards genocide were incremental so as to reduce the resistance that would have been felt if all of them had been carried out an once. These were: verbal assault and physical assault – both the result of millennia of anti-Semitism in Europe; legal and administrative measures – like the 1935 Nuremberg laws depriving Jews of rights and forbidding the marrying of Jews and Germans; pushing Jews to emigrate; forced resettlement; physical separation in ghettos – one study has shown that murder rates were higher in the more ghettoized areas; starvation, debilitation, disease; slave labour. And so on.

Compartmentalizing, as well as incremental escalation, reduces individual responsibility in an act that is much larger than you.

But does this explain much? Men and women still knew what they were doing, what they were partaking in, and they still pulled the triggers. Maybe they were simply following orders?

Commandment 1 of the Nazi Youth: the leader is always right.

In his classic study of the French Revolution, Gustav Le Bon argued that crowd psychology differs from individual psychology for two reasons.

First, anonymity can result in the diminishing of personal and individual responsibility. Responsibility is shared so each individual is more protected. The Nazis, for example, decreed that their soldiers in the USSR would be automatically absolved of any wrongdoing when executing anyone suspected of being anti-German. Anonymity and the protection of the group meant the feeling of personal responsibility shrank.

The second factor he identified was mimesis; that in a crowd, actions by individuals – shouting, chanting, clapping, attacking, seemed to be copied more readily. Psychologist Irvin Janis coined the word ‘groupthink’ in the 1970s. He described groupthink as ‘a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action’.

There’s a human tendency to want to agree, to conform, with your in-group. If a group is deciding on a takeaway or a restaurant you don’t want to be the one to object. You don’t want to be the one to cause a problem. The sociologist George Simmel has described how the desire to stay in an in-group motivates the fear of being censored or excluded by that group. But this has another effect. It also increases the chance that individuals will want to distance themselves from an ‘out-group’ so as to prove loyalty to the ‘in-group’.

The desire for conformity seems to be a universal of human experience, and when that conformity is compounded with authority the impulse to obey increases.

In his study of Police Battalion 101, Christopher Browning draws on Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments in which participants are ordered to give supposedly painful shocks to actors ‘screaming’ in the next room. If the participants hesitated, the phrase ‘the research requires that you continue’ was enough to convince 64% of them to continue to shock those wired up to the highest possible pain threshold.

Milgram was influenced by the Holocaust. He concluded after the experiments that ‘men are led to kill with little difficulty’, which fits nicely into the narrative that many were ‘only following the law of of their country’ – only following orders.

During his trial in Jerusalem, one of the architects of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, who was tasked with organizing transport across the Reich, claimed that he was only following orders. The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote when commenting on his trial that most of the killers ‘were not sadists or killers by nature; on the contrary, a systematic effort was made to weed out those who derived physical pleasure from what they did’. Most were normal, everyday men and women, complying with the law of their country.

Milgram’s approach is what social psychologists call ‘situational’ – that individuals are moved by the external pressures of the situation they find themselves in. If a scientist asks you to shock someone for an experiment you’re likely to conform because the scientist is a trusted symbol of authority and wisdom.

But there’s a problem here. The participants in Milgram’s experiment clearly thought what they were doing was right. That it was a scientific experiment about learning, that the pain was secondary to the benefit of what was being learned. That they didn’t think they were permanently harming someone. That there was a greater good. That the scientists are trustworthy.

This is clearly not the same as the murder of defenceless children. But it could be argued that the pressure to conform to authority during war in Nazi Germany was much greater than in Milgram’s laboratory.

Conformity is a powerful force. Those who didn’t partake in the killings were leaving their comrades to do the dirty work. They risked being ostracized, rejected, isolated, losing their support network – in a horrific war. And authority – punishment, court marshalling, the threat of death for not complying – was surely difficult to resist.

Except, after decades or research and trials, absolutely no cases have been found of anyone being punished for refusing to follow orders to kill Jews. Zero. In fact, as we saw with Police Battalion 101, many were able to avoid killing. So the argument that the desire to conform to authority was total here is insufficient.

And even for those that did, questions remain: who did they think they were conforming too? Did they believe it was evil but conformed anyway? Or did they think their superiors were wise and knew what they were doing, like Milgrim’s scientists? Does the aggressor still not have to believe that they’re making the right choice in pulling the trigger? After all, every action – good or bad – requires some kind of mental justification.

There is always some kind of rationalization, a belief that the action or the authority that convinces you to act is legitimate in some way.

Milgram argued that hierarchy and authority lead participants to adopt their superiors’ ‘definition of the situation’. In doing so, some of their moral responsibility is passed to them in the same way personal responsibility is diminished in a crowd. Individuals are just following orders of someone they trust because of some greater good.

So ultimately conformity and authority simply don’t explain enough. Beliefs – what the individuals think – is obviously important too. Compartmentalisation, conformity, and authority provide parts of the answer. But there is always a context, always a rationalisation.

Goering said at Nuremberg that ‘it is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country’.

Murder can always be rationalized in some way. All wars are ‘justified’ by those involved, the participants convinced of the righteousness of what they’re doing.

But what does it mean to rationalize something? To rationalise is to justify an action with logical reasons. To fit it into a larger framework of what ‘correct’ behaviour is.

There were a number of ways the men rationalized what they were doing, and a whole ideology that rationalised the war.

Most obvious was the justification that they ‘were at war’, that it is ‘us or them’. That ‘they’re bombing your wives and children back home’. These were often powerful motivators. Sometimes it was even argued that killing prisoners was the ‘humane’ thing to do as food was short or prisoners wouldn’t survive through the winter.

Train cars were torturous and many died on journeys. Forced marches led to many perishing. In the summer there were long hot days without water and in the winter short cold days without warmth. One officer told a policeman in battalion 101 that ‘nothing could be done with such people’. Another said that ‘the jews were not going to escape their fate anyway’. One justified killing a child because they wouldn’t survive without their mother.

Most perversely, ‘health’ itself could be rationalised not as the health of the individual but the health of the nation.

Before the war, the Nazis began the T4 programme, euthanising and murdering men and women with incurable diseases and mental illness. These were described as ‘mercy killings’. The death camps in Poland were run by doctors drafted from the T4 programme who had already been using gas because it was cheap, quick, and ‘unalarming’ for victims who thought they were going for a shower.

Eichmann’s lawyer described the gas chambers as a medical matter. When questioned on this by the judge he said, ‘it was indeed a medical matter, since it was prepared by physicians; it was a matter of killing, and killing, too, is a medical matter’.

In these ways, executions were often rationalized as the the most humane thing to do for people who wouldn’t survive anyway. But again, twisted rationalisations like this were not enough. The justifications for Nazi ideology and anti-semitism went much deeper and had dominated Germany since Hitler came to power in 1933.

So how powerful was Nazi ideology and propaganda as an incitement to murder? Propaganda, philosopher Jason Stanley writes, ‘uses the language of virtuous ideals to unite people behind otherwise objectionable ends’.

The Order Police undertook a basic training that included a month-long course in ideological education. Topics included ‘maintaining the purity of blood’, and the ‘Jewish Question in Germany’. Pamphlets and training films were distributed to troops throughout the war. Before being sent into the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen were given special training with SS figures who gave them ‘pep talks’ on the ‘war of destruction’, one with SS leader Reinhard Heydrich himself.

But the Nazi propaganda machine had existed long before the war. When the Nazis came to power they immediately created a new Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, the RMVP. Hitler, the artist-leader of the new Reich, was the chief storyteller and Joseph Goebbels ran the ministry.

The RMVP included the press, publishing houses, writers, theatres, radio, film, music; in fact, all culture. At noon everyday, a press conference issued press directives and topical ‘words of the day’ dictating which stories could be covered and details like the presentation and language to be used.

The free press ceased to exist almost immediately. Two hundred social democratic newspapers and twenty-five communist papers were closed down. Otto Dietrich – the Nazi press chief – placed all other publications under government control. Editors had to be Aryan. Moreover, the Nazi Party actually purchased newspapers and publishing houses themselves and by 1939 controlled 82% of newspapers. The Franz Eher publishing house became the largest publisher in the world.

Large ‘word of the week’ posters were designed to be displayed in public squares, kiosks, and shop windows. The posters, officials were informed, ‘must not be absent anywhere… the word of the week must penetrate every last community in the nation’ and ‘should always be in the pedestrians field of vision’.

The propagandists drew on Hitler’s Mein Kampf, drawing up the ‘basic laws’ of Hitler’s ideology: simplification, repetition, appeal to the emotions, contrasting simple good and evil. Lines, one designer wrote, must express ‘simple emotional rhythm’.

In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote that, ‘all propaganda should be popular and should adapt its intellectual level to the receptive ability of the least intellectual of those whom it is desired to address. Thus it must sink its mental elevation deeper in proportion to the numbers of the mass whom it has to grip… The receptive ability of the masses is very limited, and their understanding small; on the other hand, they have a great power of forgetting. This being so, all effective propaganda must be confined to very few points which must be brought out in the form of slogans’.

Posters, leaflets, were produced in their millions. All soldiers were made sure they had access to a radio. In short, for seven years before the war Nazi propaganda was ubiquitous in an environment where Hitler could be seen to do no wrong.

Propaganda was central to the dissemination of Nazi ideology, which, at its core, was an ideology of purity and unification. The Nazis believed that a pure German nation led by the singular will of the leader would rid it of division, producing a natural, efficient and utopian society. National socialism was the doctrine of blood, soil, and race. Goebbels wrote in his diary that the ‘Jew is the enemy and destroyer of blood-based unity’.

Instead of a pure nation, Goebbels wrote in his most famous essay – Why We Are Enemies of the Jews – that Germany had ‘become an exploitation of colony of international Jewry’. Jews could have no place – and would have no shared-interest – in a unified and cohesive German community.

Of course, anti-Semitism is mankind’s oldest prejudice, dating back to the foundations of Christianity. The Jews – ‘Christ-killers’ – rejected Jesus and the teachings of the New Testament; as an older and out-of-date religion that Christianity was meant to supersede, the Jews became a natural out-group for Christians.

An early leader of the church, John Chrystotom, wrote in the 5th century, ‘where Christ-killers gather, the cross is ridiculed, God blasphemed, the father unacknowledged, the son insulted, the grace of the spirit rejected….If the Jewish rites are holy and venerable, our way of life must be false. But if our way is true, as indeed it is, theirs is fraudulent’.

Jewish people were stateless, had no allegence to the nation, to the Church, to the race, lived in a cultrally different way and so over the centuries became an easy lightening rod, scapegoats. Jews have been banished, tortured, converted, and killed across Europe in countless episodes over centuries. Pogroms in Russia, for example, were motivated by conspiracy theories that Jews murdered Christian children.

But it took Social Darwinism and racial ideology – the survival of the fittest race – eugenics and the desires for racial purity in the 19th century for anti-semitism to develop into the modern form it took in Germany.

The Nazis were not only motivate by the idea of the natural necessity of racial purity but by a powerful conspiracy theory that Jews were plotting to take over the world.

Anti-Jewish policies were often portrayed as being a response to Jewish aggression, giving the impression that it was the Jews that were the aggressor and Germany that was the victim.

In 1933, the first year of Hitler’s rule. an anti-Nazi boycott was organized by Jewish groups around the world as a response to the Hitler’s rise to power. Hitler responded with an official boycott of Jewish shops and storm troopers stood menacingly at shop doors. The Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935, forbidding the marriage of Jews and Germans.

And in 1937, a German diplomat was murdered by a 17 year old Jewish refugee whose family had been persecuted by the Nazis. The response was Krystallnacht – the night of broken glass – a widespread pogrom across Germany that saw almost 100 Jews murdered, countless synagogues and Jewish businesses vandalised, torched or destroyed and 3000 Jews taken to concentration camps ‘for their own protection’.

Anti-Semitic actions then were presented by Hitler as defensive. The Nazis were simply heroes, preventing the Judeo-Bolshevik domination of the world. Jews were depicted as having total control of the Soviet Union, of the American government, Wall Street, and Britain. The trick was to consistently associate Jews with the aggressors and Germans as being in a heroic battle, surrounded on all sides, victimised by the rest of the world.

The perpetrators of genocide often see themselves as the victims.

After the First World War, Germany was forced by America, Britain and France into what many historians have called a harsh, unfair, and punishing agreement to pay reparations for the war. The Treaty of Versailles stipulated that Germany take full responsibility for the war, make repayments to the Allies, and cede German land at its borders to France, Poland and Czechoslovakia. This was one of the catalysts for Hitler’s rise to power.

On top of this, throughout the 1920s and early 1930s Germany was in chaos. In election after election, no majority or coalition could be formed between competing parties. Liberals, conservatives, authoritarians, communists are the army all vied for power. After Hitler was elected, the setting on fire of the Reichstag gave the impression that the country was on its knees. We just have to imagine the Capitol or the Houses of Parliament being burned down today.

On top of this, the war came. Destruction, death, poverty, hunger, desperation.

Psychologist Ervin Staub’s research on genocide shows that periods like this are a consistent factor in its occurrence. During this phase, Staub writes, ‘difficult life conditions frustrate basic human needs’. These needs can be the need for security, a feeling of control, the need for a positive identity and social connections, and of course, the need for food, water, shelter. But this alone doesn’t lead to violence.

The ‘frustration of basic human needs’ is almost always experienced relative to some other group. In this context, a vision, an ideology, a politics, a ‘definition of the situation’ as Milgram put it, is more likely to be offered that proposes a particular solution while excluding the status quo factors that seemed to have led to crisis.

In Nazi Germany, liberalism, democracy, Britain, France and America, and of course, the Jews, were all obvious targets to blame for Germany’s problems, creating numerous ‘out-groups’.

Because the problems were so urgent, the potential for friction and hostility towards out-groups increased. Any history of antagonism or prejudice against a particular out-group like Jews is likely to be drawn upon. Sometimes in-grouping and out-grouping manifests itself in simple disagreements, and other times it can escalate so that out-groups become enemies. Sometimes the out-group can be depicted as evil, and occasionally the relationship can become a zero sum game, a matter of survival – it’s either us or them.

In this context, everything good can be associated with the in-group and everything bad with out-group.

When a person perceives themselves as a victim and perceives a prisoner as an aggressor, in a war of survival, and we combine this with the pressure to conform and submit to authority, the probability for murder increases. In Nazi Germany, everything was made to fit this formula.

The Jews were not only meant to be everything that was wrong within Germany, but were a powerful aggressor attacking the country on all sides.

Entire academic works were dedicated to associating Jews with Germany’s enemies. Nazi Historians like Peter Aldag wrote histories like ‘the jews in England’. The film Why War with Stalin argued that the war was a pre-emptive defensive battle to stop the Bolshevik extermination of Germany. It was a ‘conspiracy of Jews and democrats, Bolsheviks and reactionaries’, with a goal to plunge ‘Germany into powerlessness and suffering’.

A 1941 headline of Der Vokische Beobachter – the Nazi Party newspaper – declared that ‘Roosevelt Main Tool of Jewish Freemasonry; Sensational Document Reveals Connections of the Warmonger with the International Clique; Where Roosevelt’s Hebraic Hatred of Germany Comes From’.

It published a so-called ‘secret’ photo of Roosevelt with Jewish Freemasons. Another story in 1942, entitled ‘The Mask Falls’, featured a photo of Roosevelt and his advisers, with each advisor labelled as a Jews underneath. When Churchill brought the left-leaning Stafford Cripps into his government it became a sign of the Bolshevisation and therefore the Jewification of the British government.

The same year, Goebbels wrote an essay titled ‘Mimicry’ which informed readers that Jews were masters of deception, at adapting to their surroundings, and hiding in plain sight. The Jew, Goebbels wrote, ‘is the master of the lie’. A photo collection – Jews in the USA – was published that included evidence of this mimicry – Jews looking ‘normal’ and blending in when necessary, juxtaposed with photos that depicted Jews with stereotypical Jewish features.

Once a global conspiracy involving millions of people is defined, evidence can always be found to justify it.

In 1941, Theodore Kaufman, an unknown Jewish American author, published a book titled Germany Must Perish. The Nazis misleadingly depicted Kaufman as being an influential figure in America, despite publishers refusing to publish his book, which, when published by Kaufman himself, was universally panned.

A headline in the Volkish Beobachter inexplicably linked the author to the foreign policy of the United States, announcing that, ‘Roosevelt Demands Sterilization of the German People: The Germans are Supposed to Be Exterminated in Two Generations’. The book was even published in pamphlets distributed in Germany. Kaufman’s face was used often in propaganda. The caption under a photo of Kaufman in Jews in the USA read ‘He Demands the Complete Extermination of the German People’.

At the end of 1941, Goebbels declared in a radio broadcast that ‘the historical guilt of world Jewry for the outbreak and expansion of this war has been so extensively demonstrated that there is no need to waste any more words on it. The Jews wanted their war, and now they have it’.

And in his article ‘the Jews are Guilty!’, Goebbels wrote that ‘all Jews by virtue of their birth and their race are part of an international conspiracy against National Socialist Germany… If we lose [the war], these harmless-looking Jewish chaps would suddenly become raging wolves. They would attack our women and children to carry out revenge… The Jews are a parasitic race that feeds like a foul fungus on the cultures of healthy but ignorant peoples. There is only one effective measure: cut them out’.

He wrote that the Jews were responsible for every German soldier’s death, that they were the enemy’s agents within Germany, and referred to the Jews’ gradual extermination as being brought on themselves.

The Jews were also associated with laziness, dirtiness and exploitation. An early Nazi manifesto asked who are we ‘fighting against?’ The answer is, ‘against all those who create no value, who make high profits without any mental or physical work. We fight against the drones in the state; these are mostly Jews; they live a good life, they reap where they have not sown’. If something wasn’t done about the virus spreading throughout the world and within Germany, then Germany’s destruction would be inevitable.

But there’s a problem here: it was hardly ever admitted in the post-war trials of ordinary German soldiers that anti-Semitism was a motivating factor for murder. Furthermore, many psychologists today have pointed to the limitations of propaganda as a method of influencing views.

One officer of Police Battalion 101 said during interrogation that ‘under the influence of the times, my attitude to Jews was marked by a certain aversion. But I cannot say that I especially hated Jews’. Many made similar claims.

Browning has argued, though, that this is probably because admitting anti-Semitism in court was enough to be convicted of murder rather than homicide. And many claimed that some of the more sadistic officers were anti-Semites out of ‘conviction’. Is it any surprise that this wasn’t admitted? But still, one Auschwitz inmate insisted that ‘nothing would be more misguided than to believe that the SS were a horde of sadists’. Another inmate estimated the sadists at not more than 5-10% of the total troops.

But as we’ve seen, you don’t have to be sadistic to be convinced to kill. You just have to be able to rationalize what you’re doing. And within the economic, social, and cultural conditions of Nazi Germany, plenty of rationalizations were provided by years of dogmatic propaganda.

During Adolf Eichmann’s trial the prosecution tried to depict him as a ‘monster’, but six psychiatrists at the trial all described him to be ‘normal’, and ‘a man with very positive ideas, who personally had nothing against the Jews. As the defence argued, was simply following the law’.

It seems then, that in the majority of cases, the aggressors simply had to accept some version of the Nazi ‘definition of the situation’. The extent to which that was motivated by anti-Semitism, conformity, duty, or authority clearly differed from case to case.

And while its difficult to assess with any certainty, many Germans clearly believed the Nazi’s anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Goebbels and Hitler certainly believed what they were saying. Many doctors, judges, philosophers, teachers, and lawyers all joined the party. One study that took place in the 1990s found that interviewees that lived through the Nazi era had two to three times more anti-Semitic views than those who did not.

And propaganda works in another way too. Nazi politics were built upon a strict chain of authority from the Fuhrer, down through the ranks to each citizen. The propaganda machine represented this unbroken chain of authority – the Fuhrer’s word was law. We’re back to Milgram’s scenario in which the scientist knows best.

It’s in this way that anti-Semitism, authority, rationalisation, and conformity combined into a potent motivator to kill. As history Jeffrey Herf has concluded, the central justification for the war and the Holocaust was the depiction of Jewry as a ‘powerful international anti-German conspiracy’.

In 1942 Hitler gave a speech in Berlin. He said: ‘the Jews in Germany once laughed about my prophecies. I don’t know if they are laughing today or if the laughter has already gone out of them. I can promise only one thing. They will stop laughing everywhere. And with this prophecy as well I will be proved right [vociferous expressions of agreement from the audience]’.

The response puts the idea that propaganda isn’t effective into doubt.

So let’s recap. In short, we have compartmentalization, incrementation, conformity, authority, propaganda, victimhood, and association.

The process described here has attempted to work backwards from an event – a murder – by peeling back the layers of an onion to understand how the onion functions as a whole, while hoping to get to some kind of core, a seed, a series of central factors and primary causes that lead to its growth.

The pulling of the trigger happened in the context of an order, authority, conformity, and simple rationalization, but those factors weren’t enough, there were deeper motivators that had already been planted. The motivations of ordinary men and women had to be structured within an ideological framework, what Milgram described as a ‘definition of the situation’. This framework was developed in the periods of economic chaos, and then a Nazi rule that was based on conspiracy theory. It presented a simple way out of a difficult period. A good vs evil story of victims and aggressors.

Ervin Staub proposes a model of genocide that has three initial stages: First, there’s the frustration of basic needs. Second, an out-group is identified and labelled to be the cause. Next, the in-group becomes motivated by a ‘utopian vision’ that excludes a certain group.

And Herbert Kelman has also argued that the requirements are threefold: authorization, routinization, and dehumanization. He says that, ‘through processes of authorization, the situation becomes so defined that standard moral principles do not apply and the individual is absolved of responsibility to make personal moral choices. Through processes of routinization the action becomes so organized that there is no opportunity for raising moral questions and making moral decisions. Through processes of dehumanization, the actor’s attitudes toward the target and toward himself become so structured that it is neither necessary nor possible for him to view the relationship in moral terms’.

Inoculation should stop a disease before treatment is necessary. In this case, at the core of the onion. The most obvious warning sign is economic difficulty or, as Staub phrases it, ‘the frustration of basic needs’.

The next warning sign is multiple social groups with different social statuses or economic positions living in a single environment, especially groups with pronounced religious, cultural, or social differences. When these first two factors combine there’s the potential for the in-group/out-group dynamic to deepen.

This, as we’ve seen, can be particularly powerful when the in-group is, or at the very least feels, victimized, and has lost prestige or their dominant status in the world.

In the case of the Holocaust, the factors seemed most fertile when the aggressors were made to feel both powerful and victimised at the same time. Both strong in a group that protected them and under the threat of forces that they believed could become too powerful for them later on.

Conspiracy theories have the potential to take hold in this context, conspiracies that are often directed at an out-group. Similarly, ideological visions that exclude certain groups and associate them with negative traits, as enemies, as dangerous, lazy, or labelling them with euphemisms like ‘virus’ that intend to dehumanise them.

Group psychology, as we saw, leads to the pressure to conform, individual anonymity, and shared responsibility that could lead to increasingly violent acts. The group does not have to be a physical group necessarily, but under the above conditions larger social groups and movements organize as a result of these factors.

These are the factors that led to the Holocaust. Inoculation, in this case, should be both political and cultural. It means shining a light on these factors when they occur, calling them out at their root, and warning of their consequences. It means education, media responsibility, press standards, and an ethical baseline with an emphasis on the fundamental equality between all people.

Currently, the genocide early warning project considers at least 30 countries around the world to be at high-risk for genocide, including Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, China, and Turkey.

It is often thought that the warning signs would be there well in advance, that there would be plenty of time to stop going down that road, or that it couldn’t happen here.

Ilse Stanley wrote in her memoirs that, ‘a concentration camp, for those on the outside, was a kind of labor camp. There were whispered rumors of people being beaten, even killed. But there was no comprehension of the tragic reality. We were still able to leave the country; we could still live in our homes; we could still worship in our temples; we were in a Ghetto, but the majority of our people were still alive. For the average Jew, this seemed enough. He didn’t realize that we were all waiting for the end. The year was 1937’.

What we’ve seen is not a philosophy of evil – a biblical tale of black and white, or angels and devils – but a theory of the incremental development of evil – a study of the causes of minor changes. Within this, there must be an admission that evil is not external to us all, but that its seeds live within each of us. ‘Cruelty has a human heart’, William Blake wrote. Evil is moulded and twisted into shape gradually. No person wakes up one day with hate in their heart – it has to be learned. Which means we all have a responsibility to inoculate ourselves and our own cultures from what always lurks within.

Sources

Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men

Laurence Rees, The Holocaust

Donald G. Dutton, The Psychology of Genocide, Massacres, and Extreme Violence: Why “Normal” People Come to Commit Atrocities

Ervin Staub, The Origins and Prevention of Genocide, Mass Killing, and Other Collective Violence

Ingrid Pfeiffer and Hirmer Verlag, Splendor and Misery in the Weimar Years

Joseph Goebbels, The Jews are Guilty

Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During WWII & The Holocaust

Frank McDonough, The Hitler Years

Thomas Blass, Psychological Perspectives on the Perpetrators of the Holocaust: The Role of Situational Pressures, Personal Dispositions, and Their Interactions

Henri Zukier, The Twisted Road to Genocide

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Peter Cohen, The Architecture of Doom

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