Roy Eidelson is a clinical psychologist and the president of Eidelson Consulting, where he studies, writes about, and consults on the role of psychological issues in political, organizational, and group conflict settings. He is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, former executive director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania.
Full disclosure— Dr. Eidelson is also someone I have conversed with periodically about politics, and he was gracious enough to give me permission to post a diary about his article published this week at CounterPunch: The 1%’s Mind Games: Psychology Gone Bad.
Dr. Eidelson’s article summarizes themes and concepts he presents in his new book (which I haven’t yet had a chance to read), entitled: Political Mind Games: How the 1% Manipulate Our Understanding of What's Happening, What's Right, and What's Possible.
He begins with this observation:
While millions of Americans grasp for lifelines amid the unforgiving currents of extreme inequality, multi-millionaires and billionaires comfortably ride the waves and add to their enormous wealth and power. The contrast is jarring to be sure, but it persists nonetheless because self-interested representatives of the 1% have become masters at using manipulative psychological appeals — I call them “mind games” — to defuse and misdirect our outrage. And when they succeed, we regrettably lose our bearings about what’s happening, what’s right, what’s possible, and what we must do.
How do political and economic elites accomplish this? By relying on emotional, rather than factual or logical appeals:
…persuasion typically follows either of two different paths. One route engages us in a careful, rational evaluation of the arguments presented. As listeners or readers, we review the evidence, assess which claims seem to make sense and which do not, and then draw our conclusions accordingly. With this route, we try to distinguish between strong arguments and weak arguments. It’s an approach that has a lot to offer in getting it right. But it requires time, effort, and discernment — three elements that can be in short supply, especially when we’re in a hurry, or we’re not very interested in the topic, or we lack important background knowledge and skills.
That’s where the second persuasion route comes into play. With this path, our judgments are instead based on considerations quite different from the merits of the arguments themselves. The critical factor here becomes the extent to which the message we hear or read elicits strong emotions, perhaps making us fearful, or angry, or optimistic. This emotional arousal can lead us to ignore the actual quality of the evidence that’s being presented to us.
What are the emotional chords played upon by the conservative messages of the 1%?:
… five concerns… are particularly influential in our daily lives: namely, issues of vulnerability, injustice, distrust, superiority and helplessness. Each is associated with a basic question we routinely ask ourselves: Are we safe? Are we treated fairly? Who should we trust? Are we good enough? Can we control what happens to us?
The ‘populist’ messages of the political and economic elites are subtle, powerful, and purposeful:
Given their power and pervasiveness, then, it’s really not surprising that our concerns about vulnerability, injustice, distrust, superiority and helplessness are prized targets for manipulation. That’s why they figure so prominently in the propaganda campaigns of one-percenters who aim to discourage resistance to their narrow, self-aggrandizing agenda.
The messages are as insidious as they are effective with a properly cultivated audience:
The 1% feed our vulnerability fears by pushing alarmist accounts of perils in our midst (the “It’s a Dangerous World” mind game). They twist our sense of injustice by insisting that they’re the ones who are actually being mistreated (“We’re the Victims”). They promote distrust and disorganization within the ranks of their opponents by pitting potential allies against each other (“They’re Different from Us”). They exploit notions of superiority by portraying the United States as a land of limitless opportunity where the cream always rises to the top (“They’re Losers”). And they encourage feelings of helplessness by arguing that today’s stark inequalities are the result of powerful forces beyond anyone’s control (“Change Is Impossible”).
Dr. Eidelson goes on to describe how we might ‘inoculate’ ourselves against such propaganda (although it is another question if we can ‘deprogram’ those already receptive to these messages, and whether there are other factors— such as explicit or implicit bigotry— that make those already taken in by the propaganda resistant to progressive counter-messaging; on that point Dr. Eidelson and I differ):
As Noam Chomsky wrote almost four decades ago, “Citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self-defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control, and to lay the basis for more meaningful democracy.” Such preventative strategies have never been more crucial than they are today. Of course, implementing them isn’t easy because tapping into our core concerns can give the 1%’s appeals the solid ring of truth — even though they’re as flimsy as a con artist’s promises…
The good news is that research on the psychology of persuasion shows how we can hold firm against the propaganda of the self-interested rich and powerful… Having been warned that this “virus” is prevalent and heading our way, in the form of deceptive appeals targeting our core concerns, we can become more vigilant and prepare in advance for the onslaught. The recommended preparation involves learning to recognize the mind games and practicing the counterarguments — the “antibodies” — that we’ll need when we’re later faced with an all-out assault. As psychologists Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson have explained, “We cannot resist propaganda by burying our heads in the sand. The person who is easiest to persuade is the person whose beliefs are based on slogans that have never been seriously challenged and examined.”
I think the messages of the political and economic elite Dr. Eidelson refers to are best understood within a broader historical context, especially the context provided by Hannah Arendt.
Roger Berkowitz, writing for the LA Review of Books, notes how truth, and the organizing messages of authoritarians, are opposed to each other:
Movements thrive on the destruction of reality. Because the real world confronts us with challenges and obstructions, reality is uncertain, messy, and unsettling. Movements work to create alternate realities that offer adherents a stable and empowering place in the world. Amid economic dislocation and the loss of stable identities, the Nazis’ promise of Aryan superiority is stabilizing. Stalin understood that people would easily overlook lies and mass murder if it were in their interest to do so. Above all, movements promise consistency. Movements “conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself.”
He suggests that while ‘intellectual inoculation’ of the sort Dr. Eidelson proposes may be effective with those already receptive to a progressive message, those who have been indoctrinated by the propaganda of the political and economic elites may simply not hear the counter-messages:
The reason fact-checking is ineffective today — at least in convincing those who are members of movements — is that the mobilized members of a movement are confounded by a world resistant to their wishes and prefer the promise of a consistent alternate world to reality.
Arendt makes it plain that necessarily specific groups are targeted to belong to the movement, and others, by definition, excluded:
Imperialist rule requires the justification of violence over another people in the service of ruling them. Such a justification is possible only on the basis of racism: “Imperialism would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible ‘explanation’ and excuse for its deeds.” For Arendt, it is racism, not race-thinking, that is truly dangerous. “There is,” she writes in articulating this distinction, “an abyss between the men of brilliant and facile conceptions and men of brutal deeds.”
Understanding how the propaganda of the 1% works, and with whom, is crucial; whether it is possible to reverse its effects with those already converted, let alone how, is not a settled question.