Self-fulfilling prophecies are false beliefs that lead to true happenings. This is an actual phenomenon. According to Robert Merton, a self-fulfilling prophecy is “in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true.”
Is self-fulfilling prophecy, as such, powered by the placebo effect?
Placebos work because the person using/consuming them hope or otherwise expect them to do so. It’s a very specific type of faith.
And that faith is effective. It’s just not scientific, so people tend not to take it seriously. It’s simply a byproduct. It’s something experimenters account for and measure in their studies, but they’re not conducting experiments to produce the effect in question. Usually it’s detritus. It’s like noise, in a way: you must account for it, then rule it out, to get an accurate measurement of what you’re truly seeking.
But what if what you’re running could use the placebo effect (or, more accurately, the faith generated as a necessary derivative)? Might you harness (or, psychologically speaking, canalize) that libidinous dynamism?
The placebo effect is not predictable and is ephemeral, but it’s guaranteed to show up as a background process.
So what if something like this is powering this nascent fascist movement? All the orchestrators would need to do is produce momentum. Once the goal is achieved (successful coup) that energy wouldn’t be needed any longer. The placebo effect would need to be effective only for a slim window of time.
Theodor Adorno, in The Stars Down to Earth, called fascism “an organized flight of ideas.”
The propaganda of Adorno’s time was the operant mechanism by which those flights of ideas were crafted and communicated to the general populace. The confusion generated by that propaganda (measured as its derivative, anxiety, in this 2011 study) is what is being produced, what is literally being manufactured by the consumption of this deliberately sequenced ordering of ideas.
If I understand Adorno correctly, this organized flight of ideas generates a low-grade experience of mania. We can see this accomplishment by cross-referencing the very symptoms of mania. The propagandists will utilize these symptoms as techniques (alternately, possibly they first view the symptoms then devise techniques via reverse engineering):
This is not an exhaustive list.
Schizophrenics are known to be susceptible to (and tend to personal utterances in) clanging. This, too, happens to be a technique used by advertisers, lyricists, and poets since time out of mind: repetition and rhyme. (This means that, to some extent, we’re all susceptible to these effects. Otherwise, advertising, especially TV advertising, would be a crapshoot in terms of effectiveness.)
Echoing Adorno’s warning, Joost Meerloo, in his Rape of the Mind, regards propaganda as the “right” words in the appropriate order.
[Magical thinking] can be induced. It is simply a question of organizing and manipulating collective feelings in the proper way. If one can isolate the mass, allow no free thinking, no free exchange, no outside corrective, and can hypnotize the group daily with noises, with press and radio and television, with fear and pseudo-enthusiasms, any delusion can be instilled. (p. 203)
(See also Adorno in his Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism.)
The propagandists are channeling this anxiety, confusion, and resentment into a fantastical idea of brief (if violent) transformation. This is distilled false hope. Of course, with the placebo effect, the fascists only need a little of that false hope to transmute itself into direct action, which would help make the false idea come true.
What looks like chaos to us—on the outside of Maga, looking in—might be the greatest demonstration of faith we’ve seen this side of the nineteenth century.