A few weeks ago, I listened to “We Read the Dilbert Guy’s Attempt to Make Trump into a Religion,” a podcast by Behind the Bastards. It was the first time I’d encountered Behind the Bastards, but the topic seemed interesting—it’s clear there is a push from some quarters to make Donald Trump into a religion, and I already had a set opinion of the Dilbert guy, otherwise known as Scott Adams. (He’s the one who thinks that mentally ill sons should be killed and that white people should “get the fuck away” from their Black neighbors.) So I was curious as to what these folks had to say.
The hosts were lampooning Scott’s 2017 book Win Bigly: Persuasion in a world where facts don’t matter, as Adams, by dint of repetition, tries to convince the audience A) that Trump is a supposed “Master Persuader” (uh huh) and B) that Adams was a genius for being so in the bag for Trump so early on and calling the 2016 race for him when nearly no one else had.
As I said, I’m no fan of Adams, especially after his dive into the racist shitter back in February. And his attempts at using repetition, the crudest of propaganda / PR tools, are pitiful. But what Adams does do is try to express his experiences with psychedelics and how they helped usher in a brand-new way of looking at the world; and he talks about how hypnosis might be an aspect of some persuasion efforts.
The hosts didn’t actually have a response to Adams’ presented argument except derisive laughter. They didn’t have a refutation. The extent of their reply was, “Hypnosis? Pshaw! Whatever!” At the same time, they had to give Adams the point raised about how we in our bodies are limited in terms of how we interpret reality as we are constrained by what our senses tell us or reveal. They clearly were uncomfortable granting that point. But that point is absolutely true.
Similarly, Adams posits that Trump is so supposedly skilled at persuasion because he uses elements of hypnosis. The hosts merely guffaw at this, stating that instead what Trump did was utilize a tried-and-true authoritarian playbook that has been knocking around various eras in American history for some time. To me, it’s clear that there needn’t be a mutual exclusion to those two things. But the presentation, the framing, by these podcast hosts set it up for the listener to make a hard-and-fast exclusive choice. That’s not necessarily the case.
I don’t like Adams’ viewpoint on the world in general, and to find that he and I share some thought threads or processes in common is a bit disconcerting. But I can chalk it up to a stopped clock being right twice a day. And I say that, secure in the knowledge that the neuroscientific, neurophysiological, psychological and psychoanalytical literature support the position that hypnosis is a real and measurable thing. It’s an actual phenomenon. We have decades of data, which at this point includes very solid MRI, functional MRI (fMRI) and PET data and images, as well as EEG (electroencephalogram) data.
We know it’s real because we can measure its effects. It’s true that the ultimate mechanism by which it achieves these effects has yet to be found. We don’t know exactly how it works. But there are plenty of prescription drugs where the professionals (the doctors who prescribe them and even the designers and chemists themselves) don’t know the exact mechanism of action. But we use the drugs because we know that they work, and we know this because we can quantify the physiological response—we can measure the effects.
We have pinpointed brain ROIs (regions of interest) where activity occurs when someone has been put under a hypnotic induction. Inductions themselves (the instructions that bring about the hypnotic state) have been standardized. We can isolate different effects with differing stimuli (especially different wording for the hypnotic scenario—see, for example, this study with possession thoughts versus alien control scenarios as set parameters during induction).
We know that about 20-30% of the general population is noticeably susceptible to hypnosis (with about the same proportion being more resistant); about 3-5% overall are especially suggestible. We know that some anesthetics are mimetics of the hypnotic state of mind (that is, they approximate the experience). We have science now.
As for Adams’ book itself, it was cited in a published article, “Hypnotic Influence of a Leader” (Endre Koritar, The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2022):
Koritar (2022) suggested that Trump was actually a master hypnotist who mesmerized his listeners with hypnotic technique described by Scott Adams in Win Bigly (2017). Adams recognized Trump’s technique as he himself had taken a training program in hypnosis.
Koritar drew on psychoanalytic literature to analyze Trump’s hypnotic technique. Ferenczi (1909) in ‘‘Introjection and Transference’’ proposed that hypnotic suggestibility was based on a regression to infantile transference experiences with parental objects. In a regressed state, the child in the adult responds to a maternal transference acknowledging mother’s love for the child and imagined wish fulfillment of his omnipotent fantasies, while transference to the paternal object represented a submission to the authority of father figure.
Transference hungry individuals seek to introject the idealized maternal object in the person of the hypnotist or submit to the internal paternal authority figure embodied in the hypnotist. In the former situation, the suggestion is passively implanted in the psyche of the individual, while in the latter, the suggestion is forcefully introjected.
Koritar uses cultural tropes as a starting point in proposing hypotheses of unconscious phantasy driving the mesmerized subject. Koritar proposes that inter-generational transmission of the trauma of the South’s defeat in the Civil War was never accepted and therefore not mourned, resulting in generational transmission of fantasies of white supremacists regaining hegemony over brown-skinned interlopers who had usurped political power that the white majority were rightfully entitled to. Trump’s rhetoric touched a deep chord in the American psyche in promising a return to the good old days of omnipotent and hallucinatory wish fulfillment that had lain dormant for generations in the polis’ collective psyche.
(Koritar, The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2022, p. 342, paragraphs added)
It is thus possible to use Adams’ book as a springboard to deeper ideas, rather than just laughing at the very idea that such a persuasion technique could be involved in his appeal.
The Behind the Bastards podcast seems to be one of those aimed at Gen Z—very fluid, off-the-cuff responses as analysis, with a high amount of hipster irony and a sense of being in on the joke. It’s an interesting format, actually, and I will probably explore at least one or two more episodes before deciding whether or not to keep the podcast in rotation. But here I felt they missed an opportunity to inform their audience. I understand why: Adams is a big target for ridicule. He should endure much ridicule for many of the stances he’s taken in the past. I get it. But mockery can take someone only so far as a rebuttal. There’s substance here, and it should be explored.
Listen for yourself: the podcast is about an hour and eighteen minutes long.