Corruption erodes trust, fairness, and ultimately, the rule of law. A fair playing field is necessary for a thriving democracy. Justice must come for the rich just as she comes for the poor.
- see the full list on bookshop.org
Corruption Books
Is America a Christian nation? No.
The Founders knew acutely the pains of centuries of religious warfare in modern Europe and resoundingly did not want that for their new nation. Many of them moreover knew religious persecution intimately — some whose families fled the Church of England for fear of being imprisoned, burned at the stake, or worse. Is America a Christian nation? Although many Christians certainly have come here, in a legal and political sense the nation’s founders wanted precisely the opposite of the “Christian nation” they were breaking with by pursuing independence from the British.
Contrary to the disinformation spread by Christian nationalists today, the people who founded the United States explicitly saw religious zealotry as one of the primary dangers to a democratic republic. They feared demagoguery and the abuse of power that tilts public apparatus towards corrupt private interest. The Founders knew that religion could be a source of strife for the fledgling nation as easily as it could be a strength, and they took great pains to carefully balance the needs of religious expression and secular interests in architecting the country.
Americans sought religious freedom
The main impetus for a large percentage of the early colonists who came to the Americas was the quest for a home where they could enjoy the free exercise of religion. The Protestant Reformation had begun in Europe about a century before the first American colonies were founded, and a number of new religious sects were straining at the bonds of the Catholic Church’s continued hegemony. Puritans, Mennonites, Quakers, Jesuits, Huguenots, Dunkers, Jews, Amish, Lutherans, Moravians, Schwenkfeldians, and more escaped the sometimes deadly persecutions of the churches of Europe to seek a place to worship God in their own chosen ways.
By the late 18th century when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, many religious flowers were blooming within the 13 colonies. He had seen for himself the pitfalls of the experiments in which a unitary control of religion by one church or sect led to conflict, injustice, and violence. Jefferson and the nation’s other founders were staunchly against the idea of establishing a theocracy in America:
- The founding fathers made a conscious break from the European tradition of a national state church.
- The words Bible, Christianity, Jesus, and God do not appear in our founding documents.
- The handful of states who who supported “established churches” abandoned the practice by the mid-19th century.
- Thomas Jefferson wrote that his Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom was written on behalf of “the Jew and the gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindu and the infidel of every denomination.” In the text he responds negatively to VA’s harassment of Baptist preachers — one of many occasions on which he spoke out sharply against the encroachment of religion upon political power.
- The Constitution explicitly forbids a religious test for holding foreign office.
- The First Amendment in the Bill of Rights guarantees that “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
- There is a right-wing conspiracy theory aiming to discredit the phrase “wall of separation between church and state” by claiming that those exact words aren’t found in the Constitution.
- The phrase comes from Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, wherein he is describing the thinking of the Founders about the meaning of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which Jefferson contemplates “with sovereign reverence.”
- The phrase is echoed by James Madison in an 1803 letter opposing the building of churches on government land: “The purpose of separation of Church and State is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.”
- The 1796 Treaty of Tripoli states in Article 11: “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,-and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.” — President George Washington first ordered the negotiation of a treaty in 1795, and President John Adams sent the treaty to the Senate for ratification in 1797, with this article widely interpreted to mean a reiteration of the purpose of the Establishment Clause to create a secular state, i.e. one that would not ever be going to holy war with Tripoli.
The Founders were deists
For the most part, the prominent Founders were deists — they recognized the long tradition of Judeo-Christian order in society, and consciously broke from it in their creation of the legal entity of the United States, via the Establishment Clause and numerous other devices. They were creatures of The Enlightenment, and were very much influenced by the latest developments of their day including statistics, empiricism, numerous scientific advancements, and the pursuit of knowledge and logical decision-making.
- They distrusted the concept of divine right of rule that existed in Europe under monarchies. We fought a revolution to leave that behind for good reason.
- They disliked the idea of a national church, and were adamant about the idea of keeping the realms of religion and politics independent of each other.
- Thomas Paine lamented that “Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law.”
- Paine also pushed the envelop even further, asserting his belief that the people would eventually abandon all traditional religions in favor of the “religion” of nature and reason.
Who really increases the national debt?
Mythology has it that “reckless Democratic spending” is to blame for the ballooning of the national debt — though the historical record shows otherwise.
In fact, the conservatives‘ beloved demi-god Ronald Reagan was the first President to skyrocket the debt, thanks to some bunk ideas from an old cocktail napkin that linger to this day — the Republican monetary theory in a nutshell is (I shit you not) that we should take all our pooled tax money and give it to… billionaires. Because, you know, they’re clearly the most qualified people to make decisions affecting the 99% poor people. Supposedly they’re the smartest folks to entrust with our money.
Except it’s not true, as year after year and study after study shows. Nor for all their finger-waggling at Democrats over the national debt has the GOP turned in a balanced budget since Nixon. Republicans are the most gigantic hypocrites on economics writ large, but particularly so for the national debt — with Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and Trump all turning in record debt increases, primarily through tax cuts for the wealthy and the Gulf and Afghanistan wars.
Meanwhile, Bill Clinton balanced the budget, created a surplus, and reduced the debt during his 8 years in office, and Obama inherited the deepest recession since the 1929 Great Depression.
The financial crisis of 2008-09, itself caused by the reckless Republican zeal for deregulation — this time of financial derivatives — was a wholly GOP-owned debacle that the next president paid for politically. Nevertheless, President Obama had the debt again on a reduction path as a percentage of GDP — but then Donald “I bankrupted a series of casinos!” Trump oozed his way into the highest office in the land.
During the Trump administration, Republicans patted themselves on the back for giving a $2.7 trillion tax cut to billionaires for no reason, while the economy was relatively hot already (after being rescued by Obama). Not only was no progress made on diminishing the debt, but the national debt actually increased (both nominally and as a percentage of GDP) under Trump’s first term even before the sudden arrival of a novel coronavirus caused it to leap into the stratosphere like a 21st century American tech oligarch.
Only when President Biden arrived on the scene and took the helm of fiscal and monetary policy did the national debt begin cooling off once again — all while dramatically and quickly scaling up covid-19 vaccine production and distribution and passing over $3 trillion in Keynesian legislation meant to get the dregs of the middle class reoriented to a place on the map vis-a-vis the 1% once again.
Republican national debt bullshit
I am hereby calling bullshit on Republicans’ crocodile tears over the national debt, which they suddenly remember only when a Democrat is in town and summarily ignore while their guy is in the hot seat burning through cash like it’s going out of style.
We need to have a better collective narrative for Democratic success on the economy. The Republicans are no longer the kings of the economic world — if they ever were. It feels more like smoke and mirrors each passing day, with climate change denial, the Inflationary Boogeyman, and other GOP Greatest Hits playing ad nauseum on the AM social media waves.
Here are at least a few things to remember about the national debt, that Republicans generally get wrong:
- wars are very expensive
- booms in social services are expensive too; but not as expensive as wars
- there is not any perceivable truth in the old GOP party line that Democrats always overspend and Republicans are always thrifty
- be wary of graphs that don’t “normalize” to GNP — it’s an attempt to “lie with statistics” by obfuscating the roles of inflation and the growth of the economy itself
- there is more than one way to look at and evaluate the level of public debt
National Debt by President since the 20th century
| President | National Debt Change | Total National Debt |
|---|---|---|
| Taft | +$210 million | $2.13 billion |
| Wilson | +$21.5 billion | $23.5 billion |
| Harding/Coolidge | +$7.9 billion | $22.3 billion |
| Hoover | +$7.3 billion | $29.7 billion |
| F.D. Roosevelt | +$218.9 billion | $260.1 billion |
| Truman | +$7.5 billion | $256.6 billion |
| Eisenhower | +$23.2 billion | $272.8 billion |
| Kennedy/Johnson | +$54.9 billion | $311.9 billion |
| Nixon/Ford | +$371 billion | $698.1 billion |
| Carter | +$299 billion | $997.9 billion |
| Reagan | +$1.86 trillion | $2.86 trillion |
| G.H.W. Bush | +$1.55 trillion | $4.42 trillion |
| Clinton | +$1.40 trillion | $5.81 trillion |
| G.W. Bush | +$5.85 trillion | $10.71 trillion |
| Obama | +$8.59 trillion | $19.30 trillion |
| Trump | +$7.80 trillion | $27.10 trillion |
| Biden (as of March 2023) | +$3.00 trillion (projected) | $30.10 trillion (projected) |
Koup Klux Klan: The authoritarian movement trying to take over America
It may have seemed like the election of 2016 came out nowhere, and the January 6, 2021 attempted coup event was another deep gash to the fabric of assumption — but in reality, the authoritarian movement to dismantle America has been working diligently for a long time. Depending on how you count, the current war against the government began in the 1970s after Roe v. Wade, or in the 1960s after the Civil Rights Act, or in the 1950s with the John Birch Society, or in the 1930s with the American fascists, or in the 1870s with the Redemption and Lost Cause Religion, or in the 1840s with the Southern Baptist split, or in the 1790s when we emerged from the Articles of Confederation.
We are facing an unprecedented crisis of democracy under attack by the most current roster of these extremists, hardliners, theocrats, plutocrats, and others of their ilk. The following mind map diagrams the suspects and perpetrators of the Jan 6 coup as we know so far — including the Council for National Policy, the Koch network, Trump and his merry band of organized criminals, the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and other right-wing groups — from militia convicted of seditious conspiracy, to rioters who have been arrested in the January 6th probe, to persons of interest who have been subpoena’d by the January 6 Committee in the House, to anyone and anything else connected to the ongoing plot to kill America whether near or far in relation. The map extends to include coverage of the basic factions at work in the confusing melodrama of American politics, and their historical precedents.
Mind map of the seditious conspiracy
I’ll be continuing to work on this as information comes out of the various investigations and inquiries into the attempted coup to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, from the January 6 Committee to Merrick’s DOJ, the GA district attorney, NY district attorney, various civil suits, and probably more we don’t even know about yet. You can navigate the full mind map as it grows here:
Head onward into “Continue Reading” to see the same mind map through a geographic perspective:
Continue reading Koup Klux Klan: The authoritarian movement trying to take over AmericaProperty vs. People, all the way down
Or capital vs. labor, oligarchs vs. plebes, plutocrats vs. proles, rich vs. poor — however you want to narrate it, the property vs. people struggle continues on in new and old ways, each and ere day.
Here in America, the plutocrats have devised many clever methods of hiding the class struggle behind a race war smokescreen, that is both real and manufactured — instigated, exacerbated, agitated by the likes of schlubby wife abusers like Sloppy Steve Bannon, wrinkly old Palpatines like Rupert Murdoch, and shady kleptocrats like Trump and Putin.
The United States has nursed an underground Confederacy slow burning for centuries, for sociopathic demagogues to tap into and rekindle for cheap and dangerous political power. Like The Terminator, racist and supremacist troglodytes seem always to reconstitute themselves into strange and twisted new forms, from slavery to the Black Codes to sharecropping to convict leasing to Jim Crow to Jim Crow 2.0 — the psychopaths want their homeland.
The political left loves people, and our extremists for the most part destroy capital or property that insurance companies will pay to make shiny and new again — unlike the right wing extremists who bomb federal buildings, killing hundreds of people and costing taxpayers’ money to replace.
Meanwhile, the right wing claims to be the righteous party for its extreme fixation on life before birth, yet its regulation-allergic capitalists destroy people and the natural world more broadly, from factory farming to deforestation, the destruction of habitats, strip-mining and other toxic extraction practices, and on into climate change itself. Being in fact the chief architects of manmade atmospheric devastation, they have managed to make themselves invisible from the deed by simply (wink wink!) denying it exists.
WWJD?!
Certainly, not anything the Republican Party is up to. Jesus would be sad.
Global financial crisis 2008
A national banking crisis in America that eventually spread to threaten economies around the globe, the economic crisis of 2007-8 was precipitated by the financial industry getting deeper and deeper into highly leveraged risk with a specific type of financial product called a subprime mortgage.
The loans were not of very high quality, due to the effects of predatory lending and of companies “pushing their luck” in a deregulated market by knowingly offering mortgage credit to Americans who couldn’t really afford to buy the homes they were encouraged to purchase. Mortgage underwriters were often incentivized with large bonuses for subprime signups, and even relatively well-off home buyers were often shepherded into subprime loans with worse terms than the traditional 30-year mortgages they would have qualified for.
Financial “hot potato”
The mortgages were securitized as complicated new types of assets, re-packaged into large bundles of derivatives to better obscure the sources, and rated far more favorably than warranted by the nation’s credit rating agencies. Sold swiftly around the world and especially here in the U.S. to institutional investors (who manage, among other securities, the pensions and retirement funds of the country), the game of financial “hot potato” ensured that almost no one in the complex chain of exchange had any incentive to take responsibility for the actual solvency of the underlying loans.
Eventually, the bubble popped and the house of cards came tumbling down. The downturn is widely regarded as the worst economic disaster in American history since the Great Depression of the 1930s, brought on by the stock market crash of 1929.
Moral hazard: Does commercial and investment banking under one roof create the wrong incentive?
In post-recovery, much scrutiny remains over the question of whether one specific law — the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 which separated commercial banking from investment banking in response to the Great Depression — should be reinstated. Following its passage, the U.S. was able to stop the previous historical cycle of banking crises with regularity about every ~15 years:
…Until “stagflation” (high inflation coupled with stagnant growth) plagued the American economy in the 1970s, and the political establishment began to adopt policies heavily influenced by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of economic thought, which borrowed heavily from an earlier wave of economic philosophy in the 1930s loosely congealed under the term “neoliberalism.” Widespread financial deregulation ensued, leading to the full repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999. Many economists now point to the deregulation spree as the ultimate cause of the 2007-8 financial crash.
For a great resource on this, check out Matt Taibbi (of Rolling Stone fame)’s book Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History
Inequality
Inequality is the difference in measures of economic well-being between individuals in a group, among groups in a population, or among countries. Also known as economic inequality; inclusive of both income inequality and wealth inequality.
In the United States, the data broadly shows shared economic growth and prosperity in the post-WWII period until the 1970s, when things begin to take a turn: economic growth slowed and income inequality began to increase. For the past 40-50 years, income growth for lower and middle class Americans has stagnated while income growth at the top of the distribution remained growing strongly. Meanwhile as wages have stagnated, costs have risen dramatically, especially in key universal areas like housing, utilities, health care, and education.
Wealth is even more greatly concentrated than income. A recent Oxfam report found that the world’s richest 62 people control as much wealth as the bottom half of the entire population of the planet. In the U.S., the richest 20% of families owned about 89% of the country’s wealth as of 2013 figures.
Those at the top of the wealth distribution who benefit financially from the growing inequality find numerous ways to justify the architecture of the system, and retain much of the power and control over its design. Yet an overwhelming majority of the available historical and present-day data indicates that stark income inequality has wide-ranging negative effects on societies as a whole, from exacerbating social ills to deleterious effects on basic human needs.
Related effects
- Endangers the basic viability of democracy by concentrating power vs. distributing it broadly
- Social Security shortfall
- Hinders and can even destroy social mobility
- Negative effects on population health, lifespan, and basic social values/contracts
- Rising Gini coefficient
Further resources
- Pew Research Center research on income inequality
Trump is driving Evangelicals from the flock
It’s been said that the devilish ways of pedophiliac liberal Democrats are killing Christianity in America, but the numbers tell a different story. Following the 2016 Armistice in the War on Christmas, Donald Trump yet managed to drive 1 in 7 Evangelicals from the fold, according to data from Pew and PRRI.
Far from the surge in True Believers prophesied by the right wing, the religious right’s deal with the proverbial and/or literal devil seems to have driven members away. Trump is losing Evangelicals, and really — should we be so shocked? If it doesn’t matter (to some) whether our leaders are serial philanderers and lifelong business cheats, or earnestly striving public servants spreading compassion — what use is their moral code, then? None. It is bankrupt.
Shrödinger’s Moral Leadership
The religious right can’t have it both ways — either moral leadership is important, or it isn’t. It can’t selectively be important *only* when a Democrat is in power. Evangelicals also need to make a choice between God and Caesar. Prosperity gospel is the latter and not the former, but many pretend otherwise or are fooled — after all, fool’s gold can still fool.
Cognitive dissonance upon dissonance continues to fall in the totally unraked forest of right-wing values. I’m aiming to continue pulling on a few threads connecting the religious right, and Evangelicals in particular, to the rise of political extremism in the Republican Party:
- The pitch that winning the culture war is more important than God’s law is thin at best
- Donald Trump is not a Christian
- The “imperfect vessel” fails as moral justification
- Jesus didn’t care about tax cuts
- Christian leaders’ claims that politics is amoral ground beyond the reach of God’s teachings is self-evident nonsense
- Christians are leaving their own moral house unguarded. No one is showing the living proof of Jesus’ teachings anymore — and it’s not the fault of the people on the left who weren’t doing it before.
Global Right-Wing Authoritarianism
It’s not just here at home in the US that fascism seems to have taken root in the population. There are many burgeoning nationalist movements resurrecting right-wing populism around the world, and as per many experts’ warnings, right-wing authoritarianism is on the rise around the globe.
Many of the right-wing populist thatches that have sprung up are at least in part, seeds planted by Vladimir Putin in his quest for Russian revanchism against the West following the end (or so we thought…) of the Cold War. Rumoured to be the richest man in the world by far, the former KGB agent was working in East Germany when the Berlin Wall fell, and has been pursuing his Lost Cause grievance ever since.
Learn more:
- Koup Klux Klan: Who is trying to take over America?
- American Fascists & the Global Right 😈
- Authoritarianism Dictionary
- The authoritarian personality
- Essential thinkers on authoritarian personalities
The right-wing authoritarianism movement is global
Given how seemingly easy it is for Charles Koch to buy American elections as the 15th richest person in the world, imagine what someone far wealthier and less provincial could accomplish. Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France took campaign cash directly from The Kremlin, Viktor Orban’s Hungary is Vladimir Putin’s strongest ally in the EU, the Belarusian dictator is propped up by Putin, who still occupies Ukraine’s Crimea, and the UK’s Brexit campaign acted as the canary in the coalmine for later disgraceful invasions of other nations’ sovereignty — perhaps most notably, election interference in the 2016, 2018, and 2020 US elections.
As such, it would be foolish not to see what’s happening here in America as part of a broader wave of right-wing populism and authoritarian fever that is very dangerous. We need to find out a lot more information about how all these puzzle pieces fit together, and get to the bottom of the real conspiracy clearly going on — if we can find it through all these smokescreen conspiracy theories clogging the propaganda waves.
Here’s a list of some of the extreme right-wing parties on the rise around the globe:
| Country | Flag | Party | Abbreviation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Austria | 🇦🇹 | Freedom Party | FPO |
| Belgium | 🇧🇪 | Flemish Block | VB |
| Britain | 🇬🇧 | UK Independence Party | UKIP |
| Britain First | |||
| National Front | |||
| Czech Republic | Freedom and Direct Democracy | SPD | |
| Denmark | 🇩🇰 | Danish People's Party | DPP |
| Finland | 🇫🇮 | True Finns | |
| France | 🇫🇷 | National Front | FN |
| Germany | 🇩🇪 | Alternative for Germany | AfD |
| Patriotic Europeans Against Islamization of the West | Pegida | ||
| Greece | 🇬🇷 | Syriza | |
| Hungary | 🇭🇺 | Movement for a Better Hungary | Jobbik |
| Fidesz | |||
| Italy | 🇮🇹 | Northern League | |
| National Alliance | |||
| Japan | 🇯🇵 | Nippon Kaigi | |
| The Netherlands | 🇳🇱 | Party for Freedom | PPV |
| Liveable Netherlands | |||
| Pim Fortuyn's List | LPF | ||
| Norway | 🇳🇴 | Progress Party | |
| The Philippines | 🇵🇭 | ||
| Poland | 🇵🇱 | Law and Justice party | |
| Portugal | 🇵🇹 | Popular Party | |
| Serbia | Serbian Radical Party | SRS | |
| Spain | 🇪🇸 | (Catalonian secession) | |
| Sweden | 🇸🇪 | Sweden Democrats | |
| Switzerland | 🇨🇭 | Swiss People's Party | SVP |
| United States | 🇺🇸 | Republican Party | GOP |
Tulsa Race Massacre
On May 31, 1921, a mob of murderous whites descended on the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma dubbed Black Wall Street, and razed it to the ground. They dropped homemade bombs in the first ever domestic aerial attack on American soil, during the Tulsa Race Massacre following the end of World War I.
Over three hundred Blacks were murdered and hastily buried or burned. Police and other state officials were complicit; no one was ever charged for the crimes and insurance companies refused to honor Black business owner’s claims from the destruction of their livelihood and senseless slaughter of their friends, families, and community. A generation of wealth was wiped out overnight, with deep economic repercussions passing down to ensuing descendants.
Whitewashing, literally
The Confederates managed to memory hole the Tulsa Race Massacre event clean out of history for the most part, until the 100-year anniversary of the event — arriving at a time of perhaps maximum racial polarization and most extreme partisanship in this country since the civil rights era. Nor is it the only example of mass murder and destruction of Black property and assets — there are plenty others we’ve never heard about in school. That’s why it’s so important to bear witness, and to remember, and to tell and retell the stories of our past — even the painful ones. Especially the painful ones.
Lost Cause religion
The whitewashing of the Civil War to assuage white Southern guilt, Lost Cause refers to the historical gaslighting of the former Confederates. New mythology reinvented our nation’s greatest internal conflict as if it had been more of a technocratic war over states’ rights and the limits of federal power, instead of the truth — which is that the seditionists first seceded, then started a war against the northern states, to preserve their right to own human beings as slaves.
When they lost the war, they never accepted defeat, or put down their conviction that white people (conveniently, them) ought to “naturally” rule over the dark people (conveniently, not them) because, you know, God said so. It is known. Many people are saying.
The Ghost Confederacy
Nevertheless, the South did have to put up with the ignomy of federal occupation for several years before they were able to expel the godless globalists and return to their safe, secure, sadistic ways of slavering. It sent the Confederates’ sense of wounded pride soaring when they could finally recreate slavery under other names, after the short-lived era of Reconstruction gave way to the terrifying age of southern “Redemption.”
Peonage, convict leasing, sharecropping, and other forms of neoslavery persisted all the way through at least 1954, when the Sumter slavery case was one of the last judicial prosecutions of involuntary servitude in the United States.
1954.
The Confederacy, and with it the idea of Black servitude, stayed alive in the hearts and minds of the former Confederates — many of whom were pardoned and later went on to sit in Congress making decisions about the direction of the “union,” all the while harboring seditious views, biding their time, and awaiting the next opportunity to viciously strike. This sort of “fantasy football” fanfic version of a hallucinatory alternate history where the South won the Civil War is not just alarming, but very very dangerous.
That the Confederates were given only light slaps on the wrist before being allowed to reassume the mantle of legitimate power is bad enough. But worse — they lashed white supremacy to the mast of white southern Christianity in efforts to shore them both up, forever interweaving and corrupting a certain strain of red state Evangelical zealotry into something consciously or unconsciously celebrating white supremacy and harboring fever dreams of a white theocracy in America.
Bullies
How to deal with bullies
Or, DADA vs. MAGA. Defense Against the Dark Arts was like the women’s self-defense class of Hogwarts — it taught you how to prepare yourself for the evil that was out there lurking and waiting for you out there. This course of DADA will follow suit, aiming to offer ways to detect, defend, and defeat the cultism rising in America and beyond.
It will be a work in progress over time, so please bear with me as I assemble learnings from a number of sources.
Red Flags: Traits to watch out for
- evasiveness
- vagueness
- slipperiness
- can’t be pinned down
- won’t answer straightforward questions
- denialism
- cognitive dissonance
- doublespeak
- paleologic
- word salad
- contradictions
- nonsense
- black and white thinking
- “my way or the highway”
- rigid and inflexible, even when obviously off the mark
- all or nothing framing
- narrow range of observations
- tunnel vision
- motivated reasoning
- deceptiveness
- easily angered
- almost anything seems to trigger them
Attention: Take Back Control of Our Minds
The internet, social media, seemingly infinite channels of entertainment and franchises in gaming are but tips of the giant iceberg that now competes for our time and attention. The number of options to choose from has scaled exponentially over the past several decades — but our amount of time to spend has not increased whatsoever. If anything, it’s decreased
Brainwashing
A technique of torture and compliance, brainwashing is used in many contexts to control victims. From personal relationships and marriage to cults and high demand groups, all the way up to the scale of nation-states, removing or reducing independent thinking and action in a person or population gives the brainwasher enormous power and advantage.
The word’s origin is from a Chinese term meaning “forcible indoctrination to induce somebody to give up basic religious, social, or political beliefs and attitudes in favor of a belief system imposed by the brainwasher.” It’s also been referred to as mind control, thought reform, undue influence techniques, or coercive persuasion — and is a form of highly unethical emotional and psychological manipulation.
Thought reform
Brainwashing is essentially a method of inducing a false personality into a target, after breaking them down psychologically. There are many different methods and techniques employed, from disinformation and sleep deprivation to hypnosis to emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. The goal of this “thought reform” project is to remove the individual’s agency and train them to follow the orders of the cult or high-demand group.
Seemingly normal, totally “average” people can fall under the sway of brainwashing techniques in use by cults much more easily than one might think. Cults and abusive organizations prey on people at vulnerable times in their lives, when they are most suggestible and least likely to mount an opposition. People who have gone through a loss, or a major life change, or are feeling particularly adrift may be lured by the sway of a deceptive organization. It can be very exhilarating to feel plugged in to an intense community after going through a period of grief or anxiety — almost irresistable, to some.
7 brainwashing tactics
- isolation — separating you from family and friends, or any kind of support network who may provide alternative and negative views of the abuser
- monopolization of attention — they seek to have the target orient their entire world around the abuser, leaving them little time to think about anything else
- weaken your resistance — wearing down your defenses over time, so their messages take firmer hold
- give occasional indulgences — providing temporary relief or even pleasure contributes to the overall program of intermittent reinforcement, to induce dependency on the abuser for stimulation of any kind
- demonstrates “all-knowingness” — becomes an absurd moral authority on your entire life, presenting the truth about your inner self and past history with more omniscience than you yourself possess. They know you better than you know yourself — and you believe them!
- destroy all sources of joy — the brainwasher needs to ensure that they are the sole source of pleasure and pain, for complete operant conditioning control over the target. All other pleasures in life are eradicated or eroded.
- degradation and humiliation — if the target gets close to figuring out the truth about the power imbalance and impropriety of the abuser’s behavior, the abuser will immediately begin a scathing shame campaign to punish the temerity of daring to stand meekly on one’s own
Brainwashing in politics and religion
Use of brainwashing by communist officials in China, Korea, and Vietnam gained attention in the U.S. in the mid-20th century. The brainwashing technique is also used by gangs, cults, and organized crime networks to control both members and outgroups.
Perhaps most commonly it is associated with fringe religious groups like the Peoples Temple, Unification Church (or Moonies), Children of God, Branch Davidians, Heaven’s Gate, Aum Shinrikyo, The Manson Family, and thousands of other cults less well known. Sometimes the brainwashing is intended to limit the followers’ access to the outside world, and sometimes it is about grooming them to perform criminal acts from financial crimes to murder to starting a race war.
Important research
Many interdisciplinary minds across multiple fields have studied the topic of brainwashing and undue influence, or have contributed significantly to our understanding of behavioral influence. Here are some highly consequential thinkers, researchers, and experiments on the subject:
- BF Skinner
- Ivan Pavlov
- Robert Jay Lifton
- Asch Experiments
- Stanley Milgram — Obedience to Authority
- Zimbardo Prison Experiment
- Erich Fromm — Escape from Freedom
- Theodor Adorno — The F-scale
- Hannah Arendt — the banality of evil
- Bob Altemeyer — The Authoritarians
Related to:
- Mao Zedong
- Nazis
- Moscow Trials
- Jim Jones
- David Koresh
See also:
- undue influence
- thought reform
- mental predation
- phobia indoctrination
- hypnosis
- Stockholm Syndrome
Liberal values vs. Authoritarian worldview
The following list must be prefaced with some caveats about painting with broad strokes, and acknowledging everything is a distribution and Not All Republicans espouse all of these things to the same degree or even at all. Nevertheless, both the extremism and the polarization in our political system is the highest in recent memory — certainly in the totality of my Generation X memory, and by all accounts the highest since the 1930s. Extremism is high on both the Left and the Right, but research shows it’s been growing much more extreme on the Right.
And in many ways it feels like we are living through something akin to the 1930s, again. The rise in authoritarian regimes and totalist thought and linguistic patterns is troubling and dangerous. The United States never had an armed insurrection take over the Capitol building prior to January 6, 2021. America has had many periods of brutality in its past and present, but historically speaking nothing like the recent decades of escalating mass shooter events.
What can explain the religious devotion to a failed businessman and failed President on the Right? Loathe him through we might on the Left, Trump is revered on the Right for espousing the “virtues” of a traditional hierarchical society, and for giving coded approval to America’s most shadowy extremist groups that he would be finding excuses to look the other way if they chose to strike. They both held up their ends of the bargain, with would-be assassins in tactical gear assaulting the nation’s lawmakers as they certified the 2020 election results as mandated by the Constitution, and paid puppets in the Senate letting them all off the hook… technically speaking, that is.
Trump looked the other way, but only for another 14 days — until Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th President of the United States. With a new sheriff Merrick Garland in town, all bets are off regarding leniency for the nation’s most vile and seditious lot who stormed the Capitol and disrupted the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in US history — a sad day for the country and its venerable history of managing to keep the republic.
This will be a work in progress, as usual. And a tool for discussion — we’re going to need it for the coming years.
| Liberal Values | Authoritarian Values |
|---|---|
| Equality | Hierarchy |
| Justice | Force |
| Liberty | Control |
| Popular sovereignty | Unpopular rule |
| Common good | Privatization |
| Logic | Magical Thinking |
| Reason | Power |
| Truth | Propaganda |
| History | Myth |
| Reality | Fantasy |
| Responsibility | Escapism |
| Rationality | Irrationality |
| Integrity | Hypocrisy |
| Character | Character disorder |
| Wisdom | Ignorance |
| Generosity | Greed |
| Honesty | Deception |
| Earnestness | Cynicism |
| Skepticism | Loyalty |
| Curiosity | Boredom |
| Compassion | Contempt |
| Empathy | Sadism |
| Driven by care | Driven by fear |
| Morality | Nihilism |
| Transparency | Secrecy |
| Consideration | Callousness |
| Patience | Impatience |
| Maturity | Immaturity |
| Emotional intelligence | Emotional manipulation |
| Wholeheartedness | Cognitive dissonance |
| Vulnerability | Defensiveness |
| Authenticity | Mimicry |
| Deliberation | Act without thinking |
| De-escalation | Aggression |
| Conscious | Unconscious |
| Self-aware | Self-deception |
| Education | Brainwashing |
| Diversity | Conformity |
| Creativity | Destruction |
| Artistic | Fundamentalist |
| Solutions | Grievance |
| Community | Rugged individualism |
| Trust | Distrust |
| Gratitude | Envy |
| Respect | Disrespect |
| Sustainability | Extraction |
| Self-regard | Cathexis |
| Spirituality | Religiosity |
| Self-actualization | Follow the leader |
| Problem solvers | "Tear it down"-ers |
Paranoia
We all have fear from time to time. Paranoia is beyond that — way beyond. People who are paranoid see enemies around every corner and under every rock — everyone is an enemy, and sometimes they distrust even their friends.
Paranoid people sometimes go to great lengths to relieve the tension of their constant fear, engaging in overly cautious or, paradoxically, overly reckless behavior. At the extreme, they invent narratives that don’t exist and aren’t happening in the real world, and begin behaving as though they are real.
Paranoid delusions
It starts to get pathological when the fearful imaginings dominate the consciousness of the person. If this person has power over others, then those people may be brought into the invented world of the paranoid individual.
Paranoia is thought to contribute to or be an aspect of paranoid personality disorder, malignant narcissism, drug abuse, and schizophrenia. It factors in to a number of sociological phenomenon including conspiracy theories, aggression, antisocial behavior, conflict in general, and more.