“The differences had always been there. The whites conceptualized and froze them. The extremists turned them into a political program. This was the fatal mechanism in which our country had embarked.” —André Sibomana1
About two weeks ago, the Washington Post and others reported that Ted Von Nukem, née Ted Landrum, took his own life while awaiting trial. Von Nukem had earned notoriety when he lent his face to the Confederate cause at Charlottesville, Virginia, back in 2017. Due in court this month to face drug smuggling charges, he failed to appear. His wife found his near-remains (still breathing), with some farewell notes nearby.
Once the story broke, a diary here broadcast the news: “The World is Better Off Today With One Fewer White Supremacist”. To tell you the truth, I shied away from entering that diary. I had a feeling that people would be celebrating that man’s death (and indeed, as I learned today, reading through the comments, some did).
Dismayed, I wondered what I could do or say. Surely no one would come to this man’s rescue, to redeem his reputation. Could such a thing even happen? I had asked folks here to consider not labeling MAGA followers with a common slur because it was dehumanizing. But here was a dehumanizer. What words would anyone say in support of Von Nukem?
I tell you this: I come not to white knight for this white supremacist. I come to bury him. But first let’s examine some of his words and deeds to see if we cannot glean something even greater in his passing.
(And possibly we can apply some of this to Scott Adams, in light of the video he released; that occurred just a few days ago, too recently to address within the scope of this essay. Adams does merit a mention at the end.)
This piece is long, but let me give you a tour: We’ll go from ideology to the power of speech, taking a deep look at what’s known as striking-property generalizations (the basis for stereotypes). Then we will follow up with conversion, which is what these white supremacists undergo.
Ideology
Back in 2017, the Springfield News-Leader published an article that featured some quotes from Von Nukem that give us insight into his beliefs. There is not much here in-depth, but we can certainly piece some together to examine contour and shape:
“The rally was not a racist rally. It was a rally to save our history.”
“I don’t mind showing solidarity with them [that is, white supremacist, alt-right, neo-Nazi and pro-Confederate groups].”
“If we don’t play, we will be the field trampled by the players. You have to pick your side. You have to throw support behind the army that is fighting for you.”
“Were there dark times along that road [when Whites “helped other parts of the world develop”]? Sure. But does that mean we need to go extinct? Absolutely not.”2
This sounds like someone who has bought into the ‘Great Replacement’ conjecture, which drives paranoia and resentment among its adherents. Note, too, the violent terminology: trampled, an army, extinction. This gives us insight into how he may have been recruited into the white supremacist movement. These words may have been the exact attractor.
Tore Bjørgo & Jacob Aasland Ravndal reveal that “the American Alt-Right/white nationalists gravitate more towards racial nationalism”:
Racial nationalists fight for a society based on ideas of racial purity and embrace totalitarian principles. They draw ideological inspiration from ideas derived from National Socialism, Fascism, Christian Identity, or varieties of white supremacy. Their worldview is typically based on anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, claiming that Jews promote immigration, egalitarianism, and racial mixing to destroy the white race. These movements reject democracy and notions of universal human rights and consider violence necessary and legitimate to achieve their stated goals. They expect that a race war will eventually come. When it does, racial nationalists advocate for ‘racial traitors’ and people of the ‘wrong race’ to be exterminated or, at the very least, expelled from the country.3
These extremists “tend to distance themselves from many core liberal values and promote conservative views on gender roles.”3 We’re familiar with this archetype, as we’ve been dealing with devotees to this worldview for some time now, since at least that fateful day in Charlottesville.
How does a person get drawn into a movement like that? The jury is still out in Mr. Von Nukem’s case (I at least don’t have access to that information), but those who study fringe groups and extreme ideologies have left us some clues. Oftentimes, the person who finds themselves drawn to these support structures or organizations are in a seeking mode. They may be experiencing a life transition, maybe even a trauma, and they are in need of social fulfillment and bonding.
[A]lienation, demoralization, and low self-esteem made some individuals particularly vulnerable to groups that offered salvation and answers to life’s problems. Galanter (1989) … argued that people join these groups primarily to relieve neurotic distress, because of a desire for contentment, or as a result of the intolerable consequences of perceived social oppression.4
Such ideological waystations can serve as oases, which then in the bargain extract the recruit’s time, devotion, and ultimately money. Some pony up their life savings—some their literal lives.
They were, in effect, being made to renounce the people, the organizations, and the standards of behavior which had formed the matrix of their previous existence. They were being forced to betray—not so much their friends and colleagues, as a vital core of themselves.5
In exchange, these followers gain a new sense of belonging, of purpose, and of identity:
Almost overnight the [new recruit] seemed to step into an identity which allowed him to be active rather than passive, which offered him a sense of logic and purpose rather than meaningless compliance with tradition, and an opportunity for self-realization rather than self-denial.6
There are reasons why this sounds so much like a cult. One sees the same instant community and enforced enthusiasm often found in such intense groups. The same demand for loyalty, suppression of doubt, and worship of the central figure or the cause: these elements the extreme right groups and cult groups share in common.
Daniel Kriegman and Leonard Solomon, in their treatise on cults and the narcissistic personality, contributed this to our understanding:
The cult's offering of a merger suggests that those who respond are suffering from a defective self-experience which can be ameliorated by a merger with the group and a surrender of the validity of one's own self-experience.7
Another characteristic of cults is the way in which they set themselves apart from outsiders. The members have something special about them. This offer of grandiosity would be likely to appeal to those suffering from feelings of shame and inferiority which further supports an emerging picture of a narcissistic defect.8
The cult group techniques of recruitment and ‘conversion’ are designed to exploit the formation of an idealized transference in which the convert becomes merged with the ‘omnipotent’ leader. The leader acts out the role of ‘savior and redeemer.’ His goal is to maintain interminably the follower's symbiotic attachment to the leader.9
Just as in a cult, the inner circle or the radical group’s leaders lure persons into what they purport to be a haven: a plug-and-play family that can fill in the empty spaces in the recruit’s life.
At the same time, just as is seen in white supremacist circles, a cult targets people who have clear vulnerabilities. It’s their way in.
Another characteristic of cults is the way in which they set themselves apart from outsiders. The members have something special about them. This offer of grandiosity would be likely to appeal to those suffering from feelings of shame and inferiority which further supports an emerging picture of a narcissistic defect.8
Sounds like white supremacy, doesn’t it?—insular crowd, not mixing with outsiders, telling themselves that they themselves are special, that they should only deal with each other, etc. The racist recruiters, too, sell this in their word-of-mouth advertising campaigns: Join us and become one of the superior beings.
Was this Von Nukem’s vulnerability? Maybe he was a down-and-out teen looking for guidance and coming across the wrong mentor. Maybe he was always a little rough-and-tumble who just grew more and more entranced with the idea of enforcing his will on other folks, just as he did with a gang of other alt-righters as they committed “bloody business in the garage” against DeAndre Harris’ face.10 Either way, Von Nukem seems to have devoted himself to the cause after adopting its beliefs as his own.
What we need to remember is that white supremacy, as a toxic or flawed ideology, captures people. What the initiate gives up in return is a sunk cost, an opportunity cost, that must be justified somehow. The bargain involves accepting the picture painted, a setting oneself apart and above; but also melding and merging with the greater body of what the recruiters purport as the highest material good, the pool of all other self-identified white people as beyond anything the individual could complete in him- or herself.
Then… the prisoner [or, in this case, the initiate] can experience the deep satisfactions of solving all problems; of group intimacy in living, working, and suffering; of surrendering himself to an all-powerful force, and sharing its strength; of laying himself bare in the catharsis of personal confession; of sharing the moral righteousness of a great crusade of mass redemption.11
This is the exchange; and, when made, a person surrenders self-determination for that which, no matter the cost, uplifts the whole body of Whiteness. One’s allegiance shifts.
Power of Speech
Language is a social practice, probably our most constitutive one.12
Potential recruits come to these flawed ideologies through entreaties, cajoling, convincing, persuading, and other forms of salesmanship. These pitches (both in the sports sense but also in that of striking the right key) draw their intended target further into a raveled fantasy, a tapestry of falsehoods that buoy the recruit’s frayed spirits. How can language be fashioned into such a lure?
Part of the brinkmanship involved in these pitches derives from the depiction of a dangerous world,13 reducing all aspects of life into binary categories with no nuance whatsoever. A Manichaean, black/white good/bad world is a great draw for these ideologues, a key to deciphering and categorizing the world more easily, which reduces anxiety over things that otherwise would remain ambiguous. Categorization leads to compartmentalization; this too lends itself to error.
Words themselves have the power to introduce these ideas, just by their very structure. By ‘power’ I mean both the power of derogation—a deliberate setting below—and the power of discrimination, a preliminary setting apart when conducting the process of discerning or of consideration. (This is also known as prejudgment.)
We often think of discrimination in concrete terms, such as in racial, sexual, religious or orientation discrimination, especially in the workplace or in the classroom. But before any act of discrimination occurs, a belief underlies it; and these beliefs are built brick by brick by the use of words to convey meaning.
Derogation often itself leads to discrimination. The two can work together, hand in glove. Lynne Tirrell, author of “Toxic Misogyny and the Limits of Counterspeech” and “Genocidal Language Games”, explains how derogation works, detailing its insidious nature:
The power of language to shape social being is clearly displayed in the workings of derogatory terms for human beings. The normative power of derogatory terms is most obvious in their negative force, but they also exert positive power, giving social and material strength to those who wield them. Using such terms helps to construct a strengthened ‘us’ for the speakers and a weakened ‘them’ for the targets, thus reinforcing or even realigning social relations. As we shall see, such speech acts establish and reinforce a system of permissions and prohibitions that fuel social hierarchy.14
My focus here is on deeply derogatory terms, rather than mere slurs or casual derogations, for deep derogations are tied to systems of oppression. ‘Jerk’ might be a slur, and it might hurt or insult, but it does not have the power that deeply derogatory terms do. Deeply derogatory terms serve many functions. First, they express the insider/outsider function, which is multi-directional: the terms serve to mark members of an out-group (as out), and in so doing, they also mark the in-group as un-marked by the term. When speaker A uses a racial epithet to tell her friend B to stay away from a particular racial group of people, A sets up an insider/outsider relation, whereby A and B are not members of that group. They are insiders in their own presumed-to-be-better world, and they are outsiders to the badness of that racial group.15
It is easy to see here how this basic function operates in white supremacist circles. This too is a basic function of cults and other intensive groups. They demarcate an inner sanctum of what is considered good, and all else that falls outside of it is damned or to be reviled. (Many strands of fundamentalism also separate the world into such binary inclusion—exclusion classifications. Robert Altemeyer estimates that, by age five, children can easily distinguish such categories, providing a foundation for intolerance to develop as the child matures.)16
Authoritarianism follows this model as well. These themes chime; and there are reasons to believe that they magnify each other by just this resonance. Why do we see the overlay of authoritarianism, cultish enthusiasm, nationalism, and race-domination dynamics in this rise to fascism? They may be interlocking pieces, a self-reinforcing complex.
In North America, research has shown that high RWAs [right-wing authoritarians] dislike Blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals, feminists, aboriginals, East Indians, Japanese, Chinese, Pakistanis, Filipinos, Africans, Jews, and Arabs. … The other half of ethnocentrism, high regard for the ‘in-group,’ is also readily detectable among right-wing authoritarians. Their prejudices tend to run alongside a streak of White supremacy akin to the Nazis' Aryan Superman myth[.]17
A person so initiated can become possessed of an ideology. This, too, is part of the bargain.
In both the totalitarian state and the totalitarian state of mind in patients the paranoid defence is successful because power and strength are derived from projecting weakness and vulnerability and guilt into others while identifying the state or the self with all that is good and righteous and strong. There is an avoidance of guilt about the ruthlessness, cruelty and destructiveness because the victims or the opposition are identified as fully deserving this treatment because they are identified as bad. There is the gratification of sadism when they are attacked. By creating this state of affairs omnipotent power is released, based on sadistic excitement, freedom from guilt, depression and self-doubt.18
There is a psychological exchange that takes place. The leaders of the cult (or white power cell, or fundamentalist confession circle, or other intensive group) encourage the recruits to externalize their fears into scapegoats, to displace their own insecurities into targets that can be beaten, broken and crushed as though effigies for their own faults and flaws. They are encouraged to transform their anxieties into catchphrases and callwords, symbols that translocate their flaws into the bodies of other people. Destruction of those bodies fulfills the same function as breaking an idol.
Alarmingly, “authoritarians reduce guilt over their misdeeds almost completely through religion,”19 virtually guaranteeing a rinse/repeat cycle.
Now, it’s unclear from what little public knowledge we have of Ted Von Nukem to say what, if any, religious beliefs he may have had. But we can tell that he held white nationalist beliefs, and these are tinged—or, in many cases, fully saturated—with absolutist language. This entices the recruit to adopt the diction of the movement, to start speaking the language.
It is that adoption that facilitates the transformation into the new person, the new self-image that can more fully immerge with the larger, more powerful group. Immersion may feel oceanic in many respects as one identifies fully as something larger than oneself, but this comes at the price of one’s individuality and ability to think independently. This suppression of the self can become so extreme as to reduce the original personality to a mere pinpoint. In its place, a pseudoidentity may form,20 a suffocating suit donned so that one may radiate sameness. Orthodoxy replaces spontaneity. Life begins to become fixed, inflexible. The mind follows suit.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously said:
The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect, but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them. We note further that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem. It is a particular form of the impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions.
Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances.
The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.21
These catchwords and slogans (as well as sound bytes, inside jargon, and the like, even movie quotes and private jokes) can coalesce, constituting a new web of associations. These associations come to occupy their own universe; there, they exert their own motive force. Words can snag themselves in people because words—such hooks—fasten people to social systems and structures.
[D]erogatory terms are most effective when they are connected to networks of oppression and discrimination, with the weight of history and social censure behind it. This is what most clearly marks deeply derogatory terms from other sorts of slurs. Let’s call this the social embeddedness condition. Social context, with embedded practices and conventions, is the major source of the power of derogatory terms that are used to dominate, demean, or dehumanize people.22
Elsewhere, Tirrell expands on the use of words and the power derived from speech acts:
We must remember that words are used in speech acts, acts of expression that are also actions done to and about other people. To treat speech as ‘only words’ is to fail to grasp why we speak, what we do with our speech, and the impact speech has in the world.23
Words perform and accomplish measures. Even the most ceremonial speech can enact itself, as when someone memorializes another in a eulogy or christens a ship. As Tirrell says, we “must not presuppose an untenable distinction between language and behavior. Speech acts are behavior.”24
The speech acts that Tirrell indicates here bring to mind an intriguing discussion by Sarah-Jane Leslie in “The Original Sin of Cognition: Fear, Prejudice, and Generalization.” Published in 2017, the essay highlights a particular reductive process that plagues human thinking.
First she defines what formulations concern her treatise:
From the very beginning, we are inclined to generalize from experience with a given item to other items that we perceive as belonging to a common category.
There is, presumably, some innate cognitive mechanism that is responsible for these early inductive generalizations. In earlier papers, I argue that generics—sentences such as ‘ravens are black’ and ‘tigers are striped’—express the generalizations that are delivered by this basic mechanism of generalization. If this is so, then generics provide us with a window onto the workings of this mechanism.25
The focus is on a particular subset of negative stereotypes: ones that involve generalizing extreme and horrific behavior from a few individuals to a group, for example Muslims are terrorists or Blacks are rapists.26
It is clear that the speech that concerns Leslie is the same type of dehumanizing, derogatory language that Tirrell showcased in her argument about how language fed the Rwandan genocide.
From here, Leslie moves on to what she intends as her focus, that class of generics she designates as “the ‘striking property”’:
This class includes claims such as:
- Mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus
- Sharks attack bathers
- Deer ticks carry [Lyme] Disease
- Pit-bulls maul children
- Tigers eat people
These claims are intuitively true, even though very few members of the kind in question possess the predicated property. As it happens, less than one percent of mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus, and yet we are quick to assent to ‘mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus,’ even after learning this statistical fact.27
These are basically unearned reductions. Yet they serve a particular function:
[G]eneric sentences may be language’s way of letting us give voice to cognitively primitive generalizations… There are now a variety of convergent reasons for supposing that the generalizations we articulate using generics reflect deep-seated aspects of our psychology.28
Combining Tirrell and Leslie, it would appear that striking-property generalizations allow a person to give voice to these derogatory belief structures, which in their very utterance tend to construct and execute that exact derogation. The speech acts enact themselves.
Tirrell invokes philosopher John Searle’s creative and original description of the power of declaration. (I’d touched on Searle’s ideas previously.) Searle, in his explanation of how human societies function, examines language and its ability to order and organize the social world so as to create mutual concepts. We do this ultimately by an act of reification—for example, in the instance of money:
Understanding certain aspects of the exit moves present in racist speech—understood as a social practice—is clarified by the concept of status-functions. John Searle originally introduced status-functions to explain institutional realities such as how certain pieces of paper can be money. Searle argues that we move from brute facts and merely physical objects (atoms, wood, paper) to social or institutional objects by way of collective consciousness and through collective assigning of status-functions to objects. These pieces of paper are money because we say they count as money; this saying involves both the speech act and its supporting behaviors. We treat that paper and those metal bits as money by trading with them, and so they come to be money.29
Racist derogations are status-functions, for they tell the target, ‘You count as a so-and-so here.’ [...] The imposition of racist status-functions diminishes the power of the target and increases the power of others who are not members of that socially constituted kind.30
This is important, because it perfectly describes what happens when a person utilizes a derogatory term that is meant to classify that person into a lower class or category. The use of such language, often in the form of a striking-property generalization, removes status from the target of said speech, thus enacting its own action. Such speech is a performance. It is doing something.
So now we start to see how language can accomplish these types of derogations, a setting someone else below oneself. “Assign the status, and the treatments follow.”31
These types of speech acts are exactly what each convert to a new ideology absorbs and emits; and their participation in these acts is what marks them as included in this new, insider-only group.
The danger in this type of language is in its very insidiousness. Meanings tend to emerge alongside the words themselves, existing somewhat independently as they become embedded in a larger field of social dynamics. The word fades, but the association stays:
In the case of Rwandan Tutsi, we saw that the status-function ‘inyenzi’ [i.e. ‘cockroach’] led to vilification and then genocide. … [T]he inyenzi status-function became so entrenched that, during the genocide, the action-engendering force of the derogatory term came to be applied even without explicit use of the derogatory term.32
The slur suggests treatment, even when the slur is not uttered. The meanings become understood. “These derogatory terms are richer than code words, however,” Tirrell warns us, “and their force is enacted across the population.”33
Much as with white supremacy min/maxxing of lesser/greater, weak/dominance messaging, the language of 1990s Rwanda also played into the extremists’ agenda. In this way, their slurs furthered their political goals:
In Rwanda, Hutu extremists had a lot at stake in making unjustified inferences (from ‘Tutsi’ to ‘inyenzi’) stick. Without them, ordinary Hutu would have feared Tutsi less, and would have been unlikely to participate in the genocide. To keep and expand political power and to gain control of more land and resources, Hutu extremists needed ordinary Hutu to believe that ordinary Tutsi were a threat to their own lives and well-being.34
The Tutsis’ striking property of lesser than justified their treatment. That treatment, as we witnessed, included acts ranging all the way to genocide—not only cultural decimation but widespread murder. By the time the propagandists were done, the Tutsi no longer seemed like people. They could be dispensed of, just as one would a snake or a cockroach. Nothing personal, because to the exterminator there is no person to consider.
A Rwandan génocidaire said this in an interview:
‘Before, we could fool around among ourselves and say we were going to kill them all, and the next moment we would join them to share some work or a bottle. Jokes and threats were mixed together. We no longer paid heed to what we said. We could toss around awful words without awful thoughts. The Tutsis did not even get very upset. I mean, they didn’t draw apart because of those unfortunate discussions. Since then we have seen: those words brought on grave consequences.’35
Von Nukem spoke of picking a side and getting into the game, because otherwise he and people like him would become the field and thus get trampled. Instead, presumably, he wants to be the one doing the trampling. Here also we have a confession from a participant in the genocide, explaining how casually talk would meander toward banter, then murder, then back again. This type of violent imagery resembles a sales pitch, a badge, an incentive to join. All this too can be yours.
Conversion
While we know of Von Nukem because of his notoriety, he really could be seen as an otherwise average guy, down on his luck, maybe (indeed, off the beaten path); looking for a little direction. Who knows if a recruiter approached him; maybe he self-radicalized, as is often the case these days. Either way, Von Nukem decided to renounce old ways of being and believing. He underwent conversion.
Here was an ordinary man undergoing an extraordinary experience—one that had the power to change his mind. There are many ordinary people, among us, alongside us, within us: we all possess aspects of the ordinary because we are all human: and in that sense, our ordinariness is tied to our humanity.
Pews are full of ordinary folks.
Von Nukem was able to change his mind about what is and isn’t patriotic or proper because he had a receptive mind, and brains are plastic. We are able to take in novel information and reevaluate our perceptions—that is, we are able to consciously nudge or swap our beliefs.
Some beliefs resist instant change, while some yield to evidence (confirming or disconfirming) quite easily—if, say, the held belief is weak, as in Kathleen Taylor’s description.36 Keep in mind, however, that there is a technique used in professional hypnotherapy called fractionation.37,38 In this procedure, the patient is brought incrementally into deeper levels of subdual; and by doing this the therapist is able to shift the person’s perceptions quite rapidly.
Another form of conversion is a two-front assault, not only with rhetoric but with supercharging emotions at the same time.
Brain-washers use a technique of conversion which does not depend only on the heightening of group suggestibility, but also on the fomenting in an individual of anxiety, of a sense of real or imaginary guilt, and of a conflict of loyalties, strong and prolonged enough to bring about the desired collapse.39
William Sargant refers to this technique when describing the methods of John Wesley, famous Protestant speaker, one of the most effective evangelists of his day. Sargant details how Wesley stoked pitched emotions, using bellows and fiery imagery to cause the not-yet-saved to fear for his or her safety (what some psychologists today might call the threat condition); then he would offer balms of salvation. This emotional push and pull, this good-cop/bad-cop routine first confused, then enthused, the convert. Wesley got his reward (in terms of the brain, his pleasure centers lit up). The convert got his experience.
It just so happens that this hot/cold approach to emotional manipulation may also induce what’s known as identification with the aggressor. Anna Freud has spoken about this, as has Sandor Ferenczi; Sargant also alerts us to this phenomenon. He speaks of animals—and, by extension, humans—being driven to a state of high anxiety and even some forms of confusion and catatonia, where the animals would afterwards suddenly show affection for a trainer or research assistant that previously it would have avoided, perhaps even had shown antipathy toward in the past.
This state, called an ultramarginal or paradoxical state, created new behaviors in traumatized animals; and these not only overwrote their previous training but were quite resilient in themselves. In many cases, these changes in temperament were long-lasting.
Animal experimentation … showed that when the brain was stimulated beyond the limits of its capacity to tolerate the stresses imposed, protective inhibition finally supervened. When this happened, not only could previous behaviour patterns implanted in the brain be suppressed, but former positive conditioned responses could become negative, and vice versa. Similarly, the administration of too exciting, or too frequent, brain stimuli may sometimes cause human victims to reverse their previous patterns of behaviour. And others are likely to become more suggestible, accepting whatever they are told, however nonsensical, as the inescapable truth.40
Once re-indoctrinated, [subjects] were fattened up, and the new behaviour patterns became as firmly fixed as the old; indeed, Pavlov could not get rid of them again.41
Beliefs can be changed. But surely we as Americans have known about such possibilities of rapid, 180º-turn, radical departures in belief since the 1950s, when the term ‘brainwashing’ became popular (especially as exemplified in The Manchurian Candidate, the 1959 book by Richard Condon, which three years later would become a classic of mainstream cinema). Researchers discovered over the next few decades, especially during the cult boom of the ‘70s and ‘80s, that no physical maltreatment was necessary to effect this change: people joined these groups of their own accord. They were facilitating their own surrender. Force was—is—unnecessary.
Surrender is a key point in conversion, especially religious conversion. Martin Luther stressed the need to surrender oneself spiritually so that one could serve one’s material master faithfully—freedom in one realm entailed peace through servitude in the other. “For freedom—and we must hold fast to this astonishing phrase despite its paradoxical nature—is the condition of unfreedom,” Herbert Marcuse described this position.42 Many religions and spiritual/mystical disciplines instruct the initiate to renounce an old version of self and to take up the mantle of the new. Living water will flow through the belly; one will be as though newly born.
Surrender is a choice, often the last conscious, private, personal choice the convert will make (unless and until that person reevaluates the terms of that surrender and removes the self-imposed status-function of hostage). Robert Lifton spoke of the terrible pressure experienced by university students during China’s Cultural Revolution: once a person made the decision to publicly confess, that was usually the end of that person as an individual.
Kriegman and Solomon explain:
The cult's offering of a merger suggests that those who respond are suffering from a defective self-experience which can be ameliorated by a merger with the group and a surrender of the validity of one's own self-experience.43
Surrender is a bargain, part of the transaction. In exchange for such surrender of autonomy and agency, recruits gain an instant family with all of the attendant support that they may have been craving; they derive a sense of elevation by becoming one of the Elect or elites—their newfound superiority permits a downward glance upon their out-group neighbors; they unburden themselves from a sense of responsibility, which relieves their guilt.
In his classic The True Believer, Eric Hoffer gives us an inside view:
We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, ‘to be free from freedom.’44
This sense of liberation comes from having escaped the burdens, fears and hopelessness of an untenable individual existence. It is this escape which they feel as a deliverance and redemption.45
The price of surrender is steep, but recognize that the initiate sees these costs as worthwhile trade-offs. It’s a distortion effect, possibly driven by demand characteristics46—that is, a bowl of gruel will taste delicious to a starving man. Such demand as extreme hunger warps our perceptions, down to the very sense data coming in through our nerves.
These people, these converts, may have been willing participants in this negotiation, this transformation, but we must remember that these people are not collaborators. They truly are victimized at the deepest level. Recall Bonhoeffer’s admonition that the stupid person is not independent. Louis Jolyon West speaks directly to this:
Someone wrongs the victim: the victim does not wrong him/herself.47
Kathleen Taylor talks extensively about the fact that what we call brainwashing is also known as coercive persuasion, a practice that someone inflicts upon another.
Brainwashing is a deliberate act; that is, intentional behaviour on the part of the brainwasher is part of the essence of brainwashing.48
Malice aforethought is present here. The manipulator knows what he or she is doing: they mean to shift attitudes and opinion. To nudge—or thrust—someone down the spectrum of opinion or belief is that recruiter’s main goal.
Brainwashing in fiction is often depicted as a coercive torture, but its conceptual heart, the deliberate and manipulative changing of belief, need not require force. Advertising is not coercive, but it is a deliberate attempt to change minds.49
But, as words created this change in the person, words can be a rescue, too. Beliefs not only can be altered, they can be restored. People can return to a sense of wholeness and autonomy.
I don’t mean these terms as some sort of ethereal ideal, some abstraction that possibly could be manipulated by an influence peddler or trust agent (as happens with concepts such as “freedom”, etc.). What people need to learn or remember is how to think for themselves. They need to regain internal footing so that they can evaluate information independently. They may need to be reminded. Some may never have had the skill and so may need to practice. They may need to consciously work at it, like building a muscle. Intentionality matters a great deal here.
Because these people were turned by words, words can return them.
Take Christian Picciolini, who gave a TED Talk on his participation in a white supremacist group.50
This is one of the best TED talks I’ve ever seen, and I encourage you to invest the twenty minutes.
What is Picciolini doing here? He is evangelizing the counter to his previously held beliefs. He, an apostate, uses his words as lanterns so as to show those still lost in the labyrinth a way out.
But, first and foremost, Picciolini is saving himself every time he gives this speech. His outreach is his redemption.
We see Picciolini and through him we know that someone with even these odious beliefs are not beyond the pale. Their beliefs, while socially stigmatizing, are not permanently lodged in the body.
Beliefs are not permanent. They can be changed. To think otherwise is to essentialize the convert, to write that person off as totally lacking in value, fixed, irredeemable. That’s exactly the mindset that the convert has toward the outsider: that the Other is fallen, lower or lesser than the Elite; that maybe there’s just no hope and one should just “get the fuck away” from them, as Scott Adams urged his audience to (dis)regard Black people. The essentialism is the same.
But beliefs can be changed. The mind is plastic.
Ted Von Nukem went down the path of radicalization, but had he met the right mentor-—maybe if he had heard Christian Picciolini speak—he may have made the decision to reconsider, to think twice.
So no, I don’t celebrate Von Nukem’s death. He was just a man. The rain falls on both the just and the unjust.51
Conclusion
They call it a culture war, the conservatives, to capitalize on war imagery. But we are in a persuasion space, where people are being courted, both with rhetoric and emotion, to change their minds about foundational beliefs. The distance from their initial position, and the velocity by which they obtained their new beliefs, is one warning indicator that they may have been radicalized: “the shorter the time of transition—between old and new beliefs—the more likely that some form of brainwashing has occurred.”52
But a person is more than their beliefs; they are prior to beliefs. We must engage on this chessboard so as to provide these followers alternative moves so that they can regain flexibility and can break out of these group practices and ideologies that serve to trap a person away from their own independent thought.
References
1 Tirrell, Lynne. “Genocidal Language Games.” In Speech and Harm: Controversies over Free Speech (Ishani Maitra and Mary Kate McGowan, eds.), Oxford University Press (2012), p. 181.
2 Zhu, Alissa. “Southwest Missouri man identified as Charlottesville demonstrator in viral photo.” Springfield News-Leader, August 16, 2017.
3 Tore Bjørgo & Jacob Aasland Ravndal. “Extreme-Right Violence and Terrorism: Concepts, Patterns, and Responses.” International Centre for Counter-Terrorism Policy (ICCT) Policy Brief, 2019.
4 Jolyon West, Louis. “A Psychiatric Overview of Cult-Related Phenomena.” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis (1993), Vol. 21, No. 1, p. 11.
5 Lifton, Robert J. Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China, W. W. Norton & Co. (1961/2014), pp. 68-69.
6 Ibid., p. 371.
7 Kriegman, Daniel and Leonard Solomon. “Cult Groups and the Narcissistic Personality: The Offer to Heal Defects in the Self.” International Journal of Group Psychotherapy (1985), Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 246-247.
8 Ibid., p. 251.
9 Ibid., p. 255.
10 Bella, Timothy. “Unite the Right marcher captured in viral video dies by suicide before trial.” Washington Post, February 15, 2023.
11 Lifton, op. cit., p. 79.
12 Tirrell. “Toxic Misogyny and the Limits of Counterspeech.” Fordham Law Review (2019), Vol. 2433, p. 2446.
13 Maslow, A. H. “The Authoritarian Character Structure.” Journal of Social Psychology (1943), Vol. 18, p. 402.
14 Tirrell. “Genocidal Language Games,” pp. 174-175. Emphasis added.
15 Ibid., pp. 190-191. Emphases added.
16 Altemeyer, Robert. The Authoritarians, 2006.
17 Altemeyer, Robert and Bruce Hunsberger. “Authoritarianism, Religious Fundamentalism, Quest, and Prejudice.” International Journal for the Psychology of Religion (1992), Vol. 2, No. 2, p. 115.
18 Temple, Nick. “Totalitarianism—The Internal World and the Political Mind.” Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (2006), Vol. 20, No. 2, p. 110.
19 Altemeyer & Hunsberger, op. cit., p. 127.
20 Jolyon West, op. cit., p. 5.
21 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. From “After Ten Years” in Letters and Papers from Prison” (originally published in 1951).
22 Tirrell, op. cit., p. 192. Emphasis added.
23 Tirrell, “Toxic Misogyny,” p. 2451.
24 Tirrell, “Genocidal Language Games,” p. 206.
25 Leslie, Sarah-Jane. “The Original Sin of Cognition: Fear, Prejudice, and Generalization.” Journal of Philosophy (2017), Vol. 114, No. 8, pp. 1-2.
26 Ibid., p. 2. Emphasis added.
27 Ibid., pp. 3-4. Emphasis added.
28 Ibid., p. 3.
29 Tirrell, “Genocidal Language Games,” p. 212. Emphasis added.
30 Ibid., p. 213.
31 Ibid., p. 193. Tirrell further explains, “My focus here is on deeply derogatory terms, rather than mere slurs or casual derogations, for deep derogations are tied to systems of oppression. ‘Jerk’ might be a slur, and it might hurt or insult, but it does not have the power that deeply derogatory terms do.” See page 190.
32 Ibid., pp. 213-214.
33 Ibid., p. 206.
34 Ibid., p. 210. Emphasis added.
35 Ibid., p. 202.
36 Taylor, Kathleen. Brainwashing: The science of thought control. Oxford Landmark Science (2004/2017), p. 189: “Weak beliefs are therefore subservient to reality, in the sense that if new information comes in which requires them to change they will, without much effort on the believer’s part.”
37 Hammond, D. Corydon et al. “The Use of Fractionation in Self-Hypnosis.” American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis (1987), Vol. 30, No. 2.
38 Casiglia, Edoardo et al., “Relaxation Versus Fractionation as Hypnotic Deepening: Do They Differ in Physiological Changes?” International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis (2012), Vol. 60, No. 3.
39 Sargant, William. Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brain-Washing. Malor Books (1997) [originally published by Wm. Heinemann Ltd. (1957)], pp. 154-155.
40 Ibid., p. 61. Emphasis added.
41 Ibid., p. 75.
42 Marcuse, Herbert. A Study on Authority. Verso, an imprint of New Left Books (2008) [originally published in English by NLB (1972), p. 8: “The individual cannot be simultaneously free and unfree, autonomous and heteronomous, unless the being of the person is conceived as divisible and belonging to various spheres. For freedom—and we must hold fast to this astonishing phrase despite its paradoxical nature—is the condition of unfreedom. Only because and in so far as man is free can he be unfree; precisely because he is ‘actually’ (as a Christian, as a rational person) completely free must he ‘unactually’ (as a member of the ‘external’ world) be unfree. For the full freedom of man in the ‘external’ world as well would indeed simultaneously denote his complete liberation from God, his enslavement to the Devil.”
43 Kriegman and Solomon, op. cit., pp. 246-247.
44 Hoffer, Eric. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. Harper Perennials (2010) [originally published by Harper & Row (1951)], p. 31.
45 Ibid., p. 32.
46 Jolyon West, op. cit., p. 4.
47 Ibid., p. 15.
48 Taylor, op. cit., p. 14.
49 Ibid., p. 77.
50 Picciolini, Christian. “My descent into America’s neo-Nazi movement—and how I got out.” TED (YouTube), April 20, 2018.
51 Bible. Matthew 5:45.
52 Taylor, op. cit., p. 16.