Chris Mooney's latest piece on the fundamentally different thought patterns of liberals and conservatives is the starting point for this essay. His well-researched conclusion is that:
There’s now a large body of evidence showing that those who opt for the political left and those who opt for the political right tend to process information in divergent ways and to differ on any number of psychological traits.
But, IMHO, Mooney is way too kind to the only kind of conservatives that matter - the ones that take their marching orders from hate radio and the rest of the corporate propaganda media. They are zombies who are beyond reason. They are hypnotized by corporate/theocrat propaganda to the point of harming themselves and America in furtherance of an anti-democratic ideology. I would say that Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas" has the same shortcoming - it legitimizes these zombies as rational human beings who merely rank their social "values" higher than having a first world country. Both authors imply that you can reason with these lunatics.
Instead, you need to reason with people who haven't yet been captured by this dangerous, anti-common sense cult. You need to teach them just what is at stake here (the end of the the Middle Class, and democracy, and the Enlightenment; followed by the return to brutal, impoverished, ignorant theocracy for the benefit of corporate aristos). You need to point out, as Eugene Robinson or Bill Maher have done recently, that the GOP is bat-shit crazy, armed, and dangerous. You need to go further and point out that this cult has the tacit, if not open, support of large segments of the growing American police state (NYPD, TSA, fundamentalist cadres in the military). The problem is that the society is so dumbed down and drowning in "its cool to be an ignorant, violent thug" propaganda that the argument in favor of thinking is very hard to make.
So, I'm not even going to try to make it. Below the fold, I'm going to present some far-out cognitive psychology ideas about the zombification of the right. Be forewarned; its not lowbrow stuff. It will never convince Joe Sixpack, but it may get some intelligent people thinking of ways to deal with the threat.
Over the course of the last 35 years, a non-conscious thought pattern was proposed and analyzed by a controversial theory of cognitive science; passed through its adolescence in a dystopian, cyberpunk novel; and has arrived at "adulthood" (to strain the metaphor here) in the rabid, delusional base of the GOP. You know, the ones that some wag referred to as the "Christo-fascist zombie death cult".
1. Zombie mind
The thought pattern goes by the name of the bicameral mind, and it was proposed by the late Julian Jaynes, a psychologist and classics scholar.
the bicameral mind was experienced as a different, non-conscious mental schema wherein volition in the face of novel stimuli was mediated through a linguistic control mechanism and experienced as auditory verbal hallucinations.
The bicameral mentality would be non-conscious in its inability to reason and articulate about mental contents through meta-reflection, reacting without explicitly realizing and without the meta-reflective ability to give an account of why one did so. The bicameral mind would thus be a "zombie mind" lacking metaconsciousness, autobiographical memory and the capacity for executive "ego functions" such as deliberate mind-wandering and conscious introspection of mental content.
Leftovers of the bicameral mind today, according to Jaynes, include religion, hypnosis, possession, schizophrenia and the general sense of need for external authority in decision-making.
- Wikipedia
If you want to know more, read the Wikipedia articles and their links or Google the topic. Although the discussion will probably get side-tracked there, my purpose is not to debate the validity of bicameralism as a theory. I acknowledge that it is controversial. But, it has survived almost 40 years of criticism; and some of its predictions are beginning to be validated by functional MRI studies. For example, right hemisphere speech centers have been shown to be involved in auditory hallucinations. Right hemisphere frontal lobe areas have been shown to be activated during hypnotic paralysis. So, for now, I'm just going to state an important implication of the theory: The General Bicameral Paradigm (GBP)
2. Belief systems and authorization
The term collective cognitive imperative was first used by Princeton University psychology professor Julian Jaynes in his 1976 book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". Jaynes viewed it as the first part of “The General Bicameral Paradigm” which he used to characterize various phenomena involving the diminished consciousness supposedly linked to an ancient mentality called “The Bicameral Mind.” According to his highly speculative but thought provoking theory, such people supposedly lacked left-brain centered analytical thinking skills and were unable to introspect.
While the verdict on Jaynes’ theory is not in, many nonetheless find his paradigm and the collective cognitive imperative behind it widely applicable. They claim it can be used to understand how and why certain people—those who long for absolute guidance and external control—join cults, follow fundamentalist preachers or demagogues, are manipulated by advertisers and authoritative media voices, or generally engage in related non-thinking, stimulus-response type behavior.
Wikipedia
The General Bicameral Paradigm (GBP) has four parts:
the collective cognitive imperative, or belief system, a culturally agreed-on expectancy or prescription which defines the particular form of a phenomenon and the roles to be acted out within that form;
an induction or formally ritualized procedure whose function is the narrowing of consciousness by focusing attention on a small range of preoccupations;
the trance itself, a response to both the preceding, characterized by a lessening of consciousness or its loss, the diminishing of the analog or its loss, resulting in a role that is accepted, tolerated, or encouraged by the group; and
the archaic authorization to which the trance is directed or related to, usually a god, but sometimes a person who is accepted by the individual and his culture as an authority over the individual, and who by the collective cognitive imperative is prescribed to be responsible for controlling the trance state.
- J Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (OOCIBBM)
I don't need to belabor the quotation; it speaks for itself. Jaynes himself pointed out that this paradigm covers what goes on in fundamentalist religions driven by emotional frenzy. However, with the advent of television and radio, the trance can be maintained almost indefinitely. In fact, the zombies are proud of their zombie-dom. Limbaugh worshippers call themselves "dittoheads", which is just another way of saying "zombie mind". So, modern fundamentalism resembles hypnotism more than religion.
3. The "Glassy-eyed stare" of fundamentalism
hypnosis…engages the general bicameral paradigm which allows more absolute control over behavior than is possible with consciousness…
If calling hypnosis a vestige of the bicameral mind is valid, we might also expect those most susceptible to being hypnotized would be this most susceptible to other instances of the general bicameral paradigm. In regard to religious involvement this appears to be true. Persons who have attended church regularly since childhood re more susceptible to hypnosis, while those who have had less religious involvement tend to be less susceptible…
If we can regard punishment in childhood as a way of instilling an enhanced relationship to authority, hence training some of those neurological relationships that were once the bicameral mind, we might expect this to increase hypnotic susceptibility. And this is true. Careful studies show that those who come from a disciplined home are more easily hypnotized, while those who were rarely punished or not punished at all tend to be less susceptible to hypnosis.
- J. Jaynes, OOCIBBM
Well, surprise, surprise, surprise! If you brutalize children and ram Old Testament-style "angry God" religion down their throats, they will be more likely to obey orders spoken by "religious" authority figures. And, the authority figures themselves will be those most adept at self-hypnosis - which is vitally necessary to deny reality and common sense in a confident and authoritative manner. This is why the scariest of fundamentalists have that glassy eyed stare.
4. The 1990s satire of Snow Crash
When you Google for references to OOCIBBM, you will find the cyberpunk SciFi author, Neal Stephenson's, breakthrough book, Snow Crash. The main plot line of this 1992 novel concerns a billionaire (named Rife) who has created technology which reverts people to a bicameral state. He then use that technology to assemble a religion of brainwashed people that he intends to use to rule the world. (All of this written with tongue firmly in cheek with heaping doses of sarcasm and humor.)
At the time the book was published, it was simply good, high-brow fun. But, let's just take a key piece of the narrative from that novel, talking about a cable TV magnate Rife, and pretend that it refers to the billionaire Koch Brothers:
They started dumping a lot of money into Pentecostal churches…They took a small-time preacher and made him more important than the Pope. They constructed a string of self-supporting religious franchises all over the world and used their university to crank out tens of thousands of missionaries…They do a lot of talking about Jesus, but like many self-described Christian churches, it has nothing to do with Christianity except that they use his name. It's a post-rational religion…
They want to be Ozymandias, King of Kings. They can convert millions of people because…people have no resistance to it because no one is used to thinking about religion, people aren't rational enough to argue about this kind of thing. Basically, anyone who reads the National Enquirer or watches pro wrestling on TV is easy to convert…
Their key realization was that there's no difference between modern culture and ancient Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV - which is sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate power elite who understand that information is power...
- Neal Stephenson, "Snow Crash"
Without intending to do so, Stephenson has described the state of America in 2012 - packs of mindless zombies cheering whatever nonsense emerges from the corporate/theocrat propaganda machine and the blow-dried phony "ministers" shilling for dollars and issuing fatwas. Since Stephenson wrote, we have a neologism, "Christianist", to describe the billionaire-serving rhetoric and "theology" of these hot-house fundamentalist churches. BTW, the March 19 DKos diary about the
1980 origin of abortion outrage is a perfect example of using "made to order" religious dogma to rile up zombies.
5. The New Reality: Fundamentalist hijacking of the GOP and the destruction of common sense
The 2012 GOP primary season demonstrated the destruction of common sense, the selective institutional memory of the corporate propaganda machine, and the disappearance of legitimate protest (OWS) from the world of the talking heads. Need I recount the number of times GOP audiences booed soldiers, cheered heartless social policies, accepted blatant lies, ran from one crooked, corrupt candidate to the next? It was all a year-long exercise in total immersive propaganda, to rile up the zombies.
The GOP today is the party of fundamentalist zombies. They want a return to suicidally simplistic social patterns: women and children as property; death for gayness or even uppity adolescents; no social safety net. I will not bother to recite the Neville Chamberlain-like appeasement response to this situation by the Democratic Party leadership. They are paid to be silent. They are paid not to notice the imminent demise of democracy and freedom in America.
We are on our own here. And the other side has an army of hypnotized zombies at their command.
(Orcs) fight ferociously as long as a guiding 'will' (such as Morgoth or Sauron) compels or directs them. Tolkien sometimes describes Orcs as mainly being battle fodder. Orcs are used as soldiers by both the greater and lesser villains of The Lord of the Rings, such as Sauron and Saruman.
Wikipedia
I think of the GOP as ORCs - Old Rich Christianists. Their powers magnified by the "guiding will" of the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, Karl Rove, and all the other villains arrayed againsttruth, honest labor, and common decency. Many other, poorer ORCs have been deliberately created by the 2008 financial crash and the deliberately failed responses to it. (I.e., refusal to prosecute crooks, breakup banks, or provide adequate stimulus). We face a society that is not merely crumbling; it is proactively being dismantled by rich neoliberals and libertarians.
This has all happened before. Hannah Arendt describes the mentality of people caught in the chaos of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe:
The fact that with monotonous but abstract uniformity the same fate had befallen a mass of individuals did not prevent their judging themselves in terms of individual failure or the world in terms of specific injustice. This self-centered bitterness, however…was not a common bond despite its tendency to extinguish individual differences, because it was based on no common interest…Self centeredness, therefore, went hand in hand with a decisive weakening of the instinct for self-preservation…Compared with their non-materialism, a Christian monk looks like a man absorbed in worldly affairs.
Social atomization and extreme individualization preceded the mass movements…The truth is that the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society…
All the new classes and nationalities (created by Lenin) were in Stalin's way when he began to prepare the country for totalitarian government. In order to fabricate an atomized and structureless mass, he had to liquidate the remnants of power
- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
The deliberate destruction of social solidarity, the pitting of worker against worker, the millenarian rhetoric - its all just a replay of the inter-war era.
6. The potential horns of a GOP dilemma
This time, though, the crooks at the top have no intention of being hijacked by any rightwing demagogue with the slightest chance of ruling on his own. They learned that lesson with Hitler. No genuine charismatic leader will be allowed the kind of media power needed to become dictator. Power must continue to be in the hands of the 1% financial elites. Hence the serial deflation of each, deeply flawed, lunatic GOP candidate. The elites got the fundamentalist message out; and they shot all the messengers, too. How Stalin-esque! In the end, Mitt Romney - uncharismatic and blueblood by birth - defeated all the hysterical, criminal, emotional yahoos in the pack.
But, mass hypnotism is such an important part of the billionaire takeover plan that it does seem to put the GOP on the horns of a dilemma. The GOP needs increasing doses of emotion and charisma to control the ORCs via the GBP. But this emotion must remain under the control of TPPB.
By means of lighting effects, public rituals, symbolic imagery, and Hitler's own spellbindng oratory, the German public was often thrown into a light (sometimes not so light) trance - something quite visible in the films of Leni Riefenstahl…(this) manipulation was crucial to the mass acceptance of the Nazis by the German public, and to the powerful hold of the Party on the public imagination.
"I have been reproached," Hitler once said (as recorded by Rauschning), "for making the masses fanatic and ecstatic…But [he continued] what you tell the people in the mass in a receptive state of fanatic devotion will remain like words received under an hypnotic influence, ineradicable, and impervious to every reasonable explanation."
- Morris Berman, "Coming to Our Senses"
That is the dilemma I see the GOP faced with. They need to keep ratcheting up the emotional rhetoric to keep the ORCs hooked. Even Hitler acknowledged the necessity of emotion in propaganda. But at some point, the absolute denial of reality in these increasingly-unhinged, emotional, wedge issues is going to break through the hypnosis and shatter the control - which is exactly how Jaynes says that bicameralism broke down in the ancient world: reality overwhelmed its simplistic control.
We need to find ways to speed up that process, to break the hypnosis. We need to apply George Lakoff's analyses. We need to put the total venality and hypocrisy of the GOP and the Christianist mullahs on trial. We need to showcase the double standard of beating and pepper-spraying leftish demonstrators while allowing gun-toting nutcases on the right a free pass. We need to stop getting distracted with side-shows, like the Secret Service in Columbia.
One of the biggest failures of the fight against fundamentalism is the acceptance of their ground rules - the idea that thinking is the devil's work, the demonization of literacy and science, the Hobbesian nature of economic reality in America. We need to attack this stuff head on. Their ground rules are barbaric, cruel, counterproductive, backward, a losing proposition in today's networked world. Their rules are also culturally inferior, culturally barren.
19th century racists denounced black society as "culturally inferior", it would really push their buttons to point out that now it is they who are inferior. Without all the billionaire money behind them, the GOP ethos is a sick joke. They need to hear that, loud and clear.
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That's my analysis. If anyone made it through, please feel free to comment.