“Everybody has a plan,” Mike Tyson once said, “until you get punched in the face.” For a lot of us, that punch is Donald Trump: a messianic narcissist who acts like Chucky, thinks like Archie Bunker, and makes the highest office of the land look like an episode of “The Tiger King;” and his comrade, Elon Musk, who runs around the White House like Leatherface in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” treating Federal employees like a bunch of moochers looking for some gas for their van, laughing about the desolated families and communities he leaves in his wake.
The question is how in the hell did we end up here?
What follows is a mini-book of eight “chapters” that unpacks some of the threads of this Orwellian nightmare for anyone struggling to understand how Archie Bunker and a sieg heil-happy Leatherface ended up in the Oval Office. If there’s a simple answer, it’s that political power is today derived more from showmanship than substance, and more from misinformation designed to addict us to the dopamine triggered by rage and worry than honest communication about problems and solutions. Add a little Right-wing media spin and Russian collusion, whitewash history to reflect a mythical past based more on fantasies than facts, and treat delusions of grandeur as divine revelation , and voilà! Why? Because “Real power,” as Trump told Bob Woodward in 2016, “is fear.” But how’s that different from terrorism or Stalinism?
First, notice how that punch is felt so differently by the two sides of our political divide. Like Abraham Lincoln, Trump is seen as a hero and savior by one side, and a tyrannical “king” by the other. He is a Moses come to free the Right from the “fascist” dogmas of the Left, and a pharaoh seeking to impose the “fascist” dogmas of the Right on everyone, ignoring the Constitution and rejecting the separation of church and state to do so. Or is he a bit of both, or neither? Any response you receive reveals the perspective of the person offering the answer. Ironically, Lincoln relied on the very Federal government to save America from Southern oligarchs bent on slavery that Trump is now gutting like a fish and handing over to techno-oligarchs who are enslaving us; and apparently even Russian oligarchs, and indeed anyone willing to pay him for favors. His supporters simply “believe” that, despite his record of fraud, deception, infidelities, and failed businesses, he’s the only person they trust to be capable of “saving America:” the very place that allows such fraud and deception to be rewarded with such profits. And like the God of the Old Testament, many feel he can “do no wrong.” As he said, he could even shoot someone in the street and his followers would still support him. So, what if he calls for genocide?
Today, a major political problem we face - thanks to the anger-addicting algorithmic echo chambers designed to operate as dopamine-triggering “artificial tribes” by those techno oligarchs - is the difference in what our political system rewards now versus then. Back then, a relative unknown could win the most powerful seat in the land through appeals to reason by being “honest Abe.” Today, that same seat is often awarded to any emotional terrorist willing to be the most dishonest president in U.S. history. One rewarded those who appealed to the intellect and aspired to be a benefactor, the other rewards any demagogue capable of duping his followers into “believing” he aspires to be a benefactor, so he can command the passions and instinct of the herd for his own gain.
Like virtually all demagoguery, the DNA of that punch is woven together from three threads: religious conditioning, which formats our minds and primes us for control through dependence on a “savior” figure; crowd psychology or “group-think,” which makes it easier to orchestrate our thoughts, perceptions, and behaviors; and an ever accelerating rate of change that only fuels our fears and uncertainties, and by doing so, preys upon our conditioning and “group thinking” more and more. Born of a preference for authoritarian control, the cultivation of deception as a political virtue, and a disdain for liberal democracy as ‘the road to serfdom,’ these threads have often metastasized over the last century into various forms of Christian Nationalism.
I. Christian Nationalism
A precursor for fascism during the 20th century that always uses “liberty for us” to impose limits on everyone else, Christian Nationalism sprouted from the blood-soaked soil of Germany after WW I, America’s Great Depression, and the Spanish Civil War. While fanning fears and funneling rage, top-down authoritarianism was championed as the only defense against movements for equality that wealthy elites demonized as “Marxist,” socialist, Leftest, and atheistic. In Germany, it grew in response to the left-wing communism of the Soviet Union to become an extreme right-wing dictatorship that led to WW II and the Holocaust. But few remember how, in 1939, the Roman Catholic Church used Christian Nationalism to defeat democracy in Spain under the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Like Spain, in America in 1933, Christian Nationalism grew out of right-wing religious and political circles that sought to use fascism to crush from above the democratic instinct that shared misery so often embolden and unleash from below. Like a concentration camp, power maintains control through terror, division, and the imposing of competition between the inmates, while the inmates struggle to survive through covert ways of solidarity, mutual aid, and cooperation.
In response to the New Deal Programs designed to help the victims of the Crash of 1929 (the way the TARP Program was designed to reward the perpetrators in 2008), Christian and Republican Conservatives— many of whom were most responsible for that crash and the abject misery that followed—denounced those programs as acts of “socialism,” government overreach, and a violation of individual responsibility (even though those most responsible were least affected, and the least responsible bore the worst of it: just like 2008). Liberals, on the other hand, believed that government intervention could stimulate the economy, thinking of it like an engine that needed oil. But Conservatives felt the economy must be “free” to fix itself, as if it were a living organism, or a divine being. Like Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Scientists refusing medical treatment (at times even allowing their children to die rather than violate their sacred vow of “In God We Trust”), Conservative elites thought it was better to trust the “invisible hand” of the market, even if that meant some people starved to death, rather than risk giving starving families a taste of socialism. Thankfully, banking regulations and New Deal Programs won out. Mixed with war spending, those economic vaccines kick-started the most robust economic period in U.S. history. After that, the warfare state became the welfare state, as George Monbiot explains, “and we enjoyed the most democratic progressive re-distributive era (of broad economic growth) we have ever had.” (That ended in the 1970s as Conservatives rolled back those economic safeguards.) For American Liberals, this was the best way of preventing socialism from spreading in America like a virus. And it worked!
For Conservatives, the danger from the Liberal solution for preventing Socialism in America was the recognition by both that, to the majority of 1930s Americans, the risks of Socialism’s safety-nets were a far sturdier foundation for Capitalism to stand on than the shanty towns that were eating away at that foundation like termites in an old house. For Liberals, New Deal programs were like a small dose of Socialism to inoculate a sickly economy, however, which was something even Plato and Aristotle saw as necessary for maintaining political stability. Knowing this was true, corporate elites had even reconstructed a ‘new deal’ Capitalism during The Gilded Age that ensured socialism for themselves while imposing “free market competition” for everyone else. Having done so out of their own self interest, Conservatives knew that anything that offered people the same “freedom” to spend their taxes on such social safety nets — the way corporations did so through lobbying — was a threat to not just the freedom of elites to use unemployment as a threat against unionization, but the true power of the virtues of “Social Darwinism” that only Capitalism could provide.
Social Darwinism was the belief that Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” was a natural law. “Natural law” had long been a bedrock of Christian theology. Proposed by St. Thomas Aquinas, natural law theory states that humans are born with an innate sense of morality and that reason can be used to discern what is good and evil. For Aquinas, however, only through Roman Catholicism could this sense be shaped to secure the “survival of the fittest” souls for salvation. On a spiritual level, in other words, God was a Darwinist. As a result, Darwin’s “natural law” was interpreted as a confirmation and reinforcement of what Aquinas had already attributed to God and God’s will. Ironically, the very same Darwinism that Christians rejected when it came to evolution was embraced as a divine mandate when it came to economics. And in this way, both were used to defend industrial capitalism, transforming the money changers from a “brood of vipers” into “God’s Chosen people” through the preaching of The Gospel of Wealth.
Created by Andrew Carnegie in 1889, The Gospel of Wealth led to the prosperity gospel of Joel Osteen and trickle-down economics of Ronald Reagan. In an essay defending the money he and other industrialists had amassed at that time, Carnegie, forgetting the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man, argued that their wealth was a blessing from God; a blessing which would eventually trickle down like crumbs from a rich man’s table through improvement of technology and providing jobs. But the financialization of the economy a hundred years later enabled the use of tax breaks and subsidies to reverse this process and redistribute wealth from the Lazaruses of the world to the rich man’s table.
Like the blood purity laws to protect the Aryan race in Germany that were likewise based on Darwinian ideas, Christian Nationalism was born when American Christian and Conservative capitalists saw any socialist programs as polluting the purity of Capitalism’s bloodline. For them, such programs deviated from the “natural law” of Social Darwinism which they saw as forming the double helix of Capitalism: one strand discovered by Darwin and the other by Aquinas. To defend against such an offense to God and country, they sought to install Smedley Butler as dictator. A retired Marine Corps major general, Butler testified under oath that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans’ organization with him as its leader and use it in a coup d’état to overthrow Roosevelt. Known as “the Business Plot” and “The Wall Street Putsch,” Butler declined the offer because he was no longer interested in working for them anymore. Two years later, he explained why in his book, “War is a Racket:”
“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
But where it failed in 1933, Christian Nationalism succeeded in 2024 with Trump and Project 2025.
Incredibly, Conservatives who opposed attempts to improve how “the hand of God” doled out punishments and rewards through the booms and busts of the economy — as if crucifying Jesus rather than the devil was an economic blueprint for punishing the poor for the sins of the rich — also supported attempts to perfect what had been “made in the image and likeness of God” Himself. How? By seeking to produce “racial improvements” through eugenics. One was seen as the hand of a “divine will” that disdained attempts at “utopian” equality, wanting us to “trust God” instead even if He waterboards the whole planet, the other as clay to be shaped and molded to the needs of that will, which was inherently Capitalist (despite Biblical teachings to the contrary). Markets were perfect for they obeyed the “natural law” of Darwin, while people were flawed because their nature was to disobey the “natural law” of Aquinas.
From the Christian perspective, God clearly makes mistakes, without which there would be no need to create a religious brand as the cure. Between the economy and humanity, Christians claimed the latter needed to be “improved” to serve the will of the former, while from the Humanist perspective, it was the other way around. And claiming “the law was made to serve man not man to serve the law,” Jesus demonstrated he favored one over the other.
Including both a biological and spiritual dimension, the labeling as “unfit” by eugenicists for the needs of the economy was applied to both ethnic and religious minorities, the disabled, the urban poor, and LGBTQ individuals. “Christian leaders and organizations in America sided overwhelmingly with politicians, scientists, social elites, and various progressive groups to champion the application of “scientific” methods designed to improve the nation’s gene (and spiritual) pool. American Protestant churches often supported eugenics directly from the pulpit — including sponsorship of a sermon contest to reward ministers who promoted eugenic ideals1 — and through active involvement in politics and civil society. Large numbers of Christians believed that genetic improvement of the human species was in keeping with God’s command that humankind exercise dominion over creation.2
What’s important to understand here is how Christian Nationalism and outright fascism, both of which saw eugenics as a virtue of both forms of “natural law,” are two sides of the same authoritarianism. In the former, the “Christian” is called to be as obedient to God as Abraham was in his willingness to murder his own son. From the Christian perspective, disobedience to God is always more immoral than murder; especially the murder of witches, heretics and blasphemers. Fascism works the same way: morality is tied exclusively to one’s loyalty to obey not the law but their ‘divine’ leader, who their God has appointed to do His will on earth. As in Germany and the Old Testament, when God calls for genocide, the only immorality at that point is to disobey.
And today, while the Right applauds Trump for striking back at a political bogey-man it calls “the deep state” — what the Brookings Institute identified as the very thing Trump is now handing the government over to: deeply entrenched mega-corporations— for the Left, the dismantling of agencies designed to protect the public from corporate misconduct in pursuit of profits (which Conservatives were so focused on when it came to covid vaccines), feels like a form of economic eugenics, while the rhetoric of Christian Nationalism recalls how Franco’s fascism resulted in the torture and murder of as many as 200,000 people.
The problem isn’t just that Trump appears to be selling access to his presidential power to the highest bidders. The problem is also how, since the 1980s, democracy has been slowly and systematically dismantled by oligarchs, and done so through the use of political and religious rhetoric that weaponizes “religious freedom” as a means of snake-charming fears out of the fog of uncertainty. And many of the same Christians who denounce climate change as a hoax, ironically enough, are even hoping Trump will usher in the apocalypse!
II. On The Wheel of Change
Ever accelerating with technology, change can be good, but we often hate the uncertainty that comes with it. “To the human mind, uncertainty equals danger,” Bryan E. Robinson wrote in 2020, when uncertainty was particularly rampant. “If your brain doesn’t know what’s around the corner, it can’t keep you out of harm’s way. So it always assumes the worst, over personalizes threats, and jumps to conclusions.” A critical driver of anxiety, studies show uncertainty is even more stressful than situations with predictable negative outcomes. We prefer pain, in other words, to the fear of pain, or even the fear of change.
On a deep level, our prime directive is safety. Feeling danger can, as a result, lead us to seek safety in our respective herd and cause us to lash out to protect it, and ourselves, against threats; either to our physical body or to our ego. Like an invisible exoskeleton, the ego is a many-colored coat of “beliefs” that shields our emotional vulnerabilities. Like a car’s airbag, it inflates to protect our most childlike beliefs from harm whenever they crash into facts or evidence that conflict with them. As an inflated consciousness, Carl Jung explained, it is “always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, of understanding contemporary events, and of drawing right conclusions about the future. This ‘consciousness’ is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with.” The more traumatized you were as a child, the more you depend on your ego-airbag to protect you, so the more it inflates. Even if merely imagined, the ego responds to threats as if they are real, and seeks safety among other airbags. Within that herd of airbags, we can tune-out and let our ego operate on the autopilot of our subconscious beliefs, floating like a leaf on the emotional current of our preferred “crowd.”
What is the change we are seeing today? In “The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism: 1890 to 1916,” one of the great historians of the 20th century, Marty J. Sklar, wrote extensively about how, during the Gilded Age, corporate elites worked with politicians to shift the economy away from dealing with the perils of “free market” competition for themselves, shifting those perils instead onto the working class to undermine unionization efforts, in order to create oligopolies and consolidate corporate control. Socialism for the elites, in short, Capitalism for the rest. And today, as Chris Hedges points out, the tectonic plates of our economy are shifting yet again, from the corporate oligopoly that has reigned for the last century, to the good-old-days of oligarchic feudalism with a twist of techno.
What is techno-feudalism? “It’s where large tech platforms act like digital landlords, controlling access to essential online spaces and extracting value from users (“digital peasants”) through data and attention, rather than through traditional market exchanges. While still operating within a capitalist framework, it signifies a move towards a system where power is concentrated in the hands of platform owners or “digital plantation oligarchs” who dictate the rules and benefit disproportionately from user activity, creating a hierarchical structure reminiscent of feudalism within the digital economy.”
In short, the same way the Civil War marked a shift from serfdom and plantations to being replaceable cogs in factories, and corporate consolidation shifted the hazards of competition onto the working class behind the rhetorical double-speak of “free markets” in the half century that followed, so now there is a shift from working in factories and offices to living in the Matrix. And in the Matrix, warfare is fought not with bombs and bullets but with bits of information and weapons of mass deception. Other names for such weapons are neuromarketing, rewriting and whitewashing history, behavioral economics, and crowd psychology. And the parents of such warfare were Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays.
III. Ivy Lee & Edward Bernays
All forms of authoritarianism and fascism require controlling historical memory, and mass manipulation and misinformation. These techniques were first developed by two men who had figured out how to sell people the Brooklyn Bridge of any belief. If lying was a professional sport, Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays were the world heavyweight champions of all time. In a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter described Bernays and Lee as “professional poisoners of the public mind, exploiters of foolishness, fanaticism, and self-interest.” Sociologist E. T. Hiller described their “widespread efforts to manipulate public opinion” as both a “perversion of intellectual candor, and a menace to political sanity.” Simply put, if America was Eden, these men were the greatest snake-oil salesmen in history.
Before his death in 1934, Lee had been under congressional investigation for his work with IG Farben — the Nazi chemical company “which produced the first poison gas used in World War I, and then synthetic rubber with the labor of starving concentration camp inmates, and which made the gas which killed those inmates when they were too weak to work any longer.”
Then there was Edward Bernays, the man Marlen E. Pew once referred to as “the young Machiavelli of our times.” In the race to develop ever more sophisticated weapons of mass manipulation, Bernays was Lee’s chief rival. Considered to be “the father of public relations,” Bernays dubbed his use of propaganda to manipulate public perception “the engineering of consent.” Nephew to Sigmund Freud, he sold his “engineering” techniques to clients that ranged from GE, Proctor & Gamble, and the American Tobacco Company, to media outlets like CBS, and even politicians, with the promise that it would provide them with the means to “control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it.”
Bernays and Lee had both studied the work of the French polymath who, in 1895, wrote “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind,” which is considered one of the seminal works of crowd psychology.
IV. Crowd Psychology
In “The Crowd,” Gustave Le Bon explains that the most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd (that is, a group that shares the same unquestioned ‘beliefs’) is the following: Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were each person in a state of isolation.
“There are certain ideas and feelings which do not come into being, or do not transform themselves into acts except in the case of individuals forming a crowd. The psychological crowd is a provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined, exactly as the cells which constitute a living body form by their reunion a new being which displays characteristics very different from those possessed by each of the cells singly.”
Social psychologist Johnathan Haidt called this kind of “crowd” a hive, and the “living body” of “believers” is what evangelical Christians call “the Church,” the “family” of God, and “the body of Christ.” As pack animals by nature, each of us has a “hive switch” that, when triggered, makes us prioritize our group over ourselves. But this comes as a mixed message. It can be positive, as Jeremy Griffith points out, by bringing a sense of belonging and helping us work toward a common goal, which can improve our well-being and drive us to act altruistically. That leads to better lives for all of us (or at least our group). But it can also lead to a lack of concern, empathy, or respect, or even outright hostility for those outside of “our group.” Empathy for “us” is good, in short, but empathy for “them” is immoral.
There are special characteristics of crowds, Le Bon explains, “such as impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgment and of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of the sentiments, and others besides — which are almost always observed in beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution.” For Le Bon, crowds operate with the mentality of “savages,” and children. For savages and children, life is more fantasy than fact, and irrational “beliefs” are often worshiped as magical stories which are presented as special or even divinely revealed “truths.”
Seeing the world as a dangerous place transforms intolerance and fanaticism from vices into virtues, as both become seen as not only political weapons for separating our ideological foes from friends, but survival skills, in this life and the next. “These two characteristics, which are inevitably displayed by those who believe themselves in the possession of the (‘true’) secret of earthly or eternal happiness, are to be found in all men grouped together when they are inspired by a conviction of any kind. The Jacobins of the Reign of Terror were at bottom as religious as the Catholics of the Inquisition, and their cruel ardor proceeded from the same source.” Religious freedom in such a situation is the freedom to practice hatred of any “them” as a form of love of “us,” with the latter being measured by the zeal one exhibits in practicing the former.
“In this way, convictions of crowds assume those characteristics of blind submission, fierce intolerance (to show one’s hatred of “them”), and the need of violent propaganda (to show ones “love” of “us”) which are inherent in (and primed with) the religious sentiment. For this reason, it may be said that all their beliefs have a religious form. The hero acclaimed by a crowd is a veritable god for that crowd. Napoleon was such a god for fifteen years, and a divinity never had more fervent worshipers or sent men to their death with greater ease. The Christian and Pagan Gods never exercised a more absolute empire over the minds that had fallen under their sway.
“In less than fifty years, the legend of Napoleon, one of the greatest heroes of history at the time, was modified several times. Under the Bourbons, he became a sort of idyllic and liberal philanthropist, a friend of the humble who, according to the poets, was destined to be long remembered. Thirty years later, he had become a sanguinary despot, who, after having usurped power and destroyed liberty, caused the slaughter of three million men solely to satisfy his ambition. It was the proudest and most intractable of the Jacobins who acclaimed Bonaparte with greatest energy when he suppressed all liberty and made his hand of iron severely felt.
A crowd’s complete lack of the critical spirit does not allow of its perceiving these contradictions. Instead, those contradictions become a form of cognitive dissonance that, as Chase Hughes has argued, can be weaponized and used as a form of gaslighting. Like Napoleon, such gaslighting led Mason’s followers to see him as a messiah, and throngs of people to profess their undying love for Joseph Stalin, even after his surveillance, inquisitions, imprisonment, and executions led to the death of twenty million people.
In fact, the same societal gaslighting is how countless women, and even children and a dog, were all accused, tortured, and executed as “witches” by people who, convinced of their moral superiority and divine authority, killed as much to defend their all-powerful “God” as to avoid hell themselves for failing to do so; and all in hopes of securing their own seat in heaven. How? By giving the accused an impossible choice: admit to being a witch and accuse others to be spared, or deny being a witch or refuse to accuse others and be executed. So who’s the witch today?
Standing before God and given the same choices, what Christian would not choose heaven by falsely accusing others of being “sinners” over suffering forever in hell for the sin of denying they were a born sinner in the first place? Especially when all you have to do is interpret the cherry-picked evidence you’re provided as supporting such a “belief”?
Far from being harmless or healthy for everyone, however, such a spiritual vaccine can cause incredible harm in the form of religious trauma, from which many never heal.
V. Religious Conditioning/Trauma
Christianity is a religion based on the oldest most hollowed sales secret in all human history: create the wound and then sell the cure. To do that, it creates a story of “sin” for which you deserve damnation, and sells you the cure of salvation from eternal tortures in exchange for obedience and “belief.” The former inflicts a moral wound on an innocent child by convincing them they are born guilty, and for which they deserve death and an afterlife of endless torture, but from which they can be “saved” if they agree to “believe” and obey.
Only by proclaiming certain stories to be “divine revelations” can religious conditioning convince you that the story Christianity sells can cure you of a deformity it also requires you to believe you are born with: a sin stained soul. Teaching an innocent child they need to be “saved” from the sin-stained soul they are born with, and for which they need to beg God for “forgiveness,” is to teach a beautiful swan to “believe” they need to be forgiven for being born an ugly duckling while threatening to throw that swan into an oven if they refuse to “believe” it. The instant reward for accepting such a “belief” is the relief of avoiding such an oven, the euphoria of feeling “chosen” and understood, and thereby elevated above the ranks of lowly “disobedient” sinners.
Such conditioning primes the mind for depending on three things. Like Hollywood superhero movies, one is a reliance on binary perspectives like friend or foe, in which the former is always morally superior to the latter. Easier than weighing evidences and arguments, such dichotomies are always tools of manipulation. The second is pattern recognition, with anyone who follows our pattern of behavior and language being a friend, and all who are different being labeled as a “witch.” As Jonathan Haight explained, fear amplifies and funnels pattern thinking. Skydivers, for example, see more patterns just before exiting plane. And thirdly, like Marvel superhero’s, it depends on a “savior” figure.
By stirring up fears in order to funnel the pattern thinking of his followers, the “savior” is anyone who speaks in the language of separating the “wheat from the chaff,” and saving the “chosen” from the damned. With the right religious rhetoric, the savior can bypass a person’s critical thinking defenses. And the more rage and worry we feel, the more we default to this kind of black and white thinking, even though the word “God” is an abstraction of infinite colors. One thinks like a robot, the other like an artist. And while the latter can talk to the former, the former sees their binary colors as a divine language of “truth” about “good” and “evil.” Yet we “can teach monkeys to differentiate” between 1s and 0s, as Russian physicist Gleb Kotkin said, but to think like an artist we must integrate new and different ideas, and “integration requires humans.” Indeed, monotheism is the integration of all the gods into one, while religion is often the worship of thinking in binary programing.
Binary thinking limits the interpretation of any story to a single perspective being right and all others being wrong. Known as mono-perspectival, heralding a story as special and “divinely revealed” limits the interpretations of it to serving the perspective of power. All power comes from controlling the story of who we are. Like art, however, all stories invite the interpretive creativity of all who hear them. Constraining this creativity is always an exorcise of fascism. “All things are subject to interpretation,” Friedrich Nietzsche is alleged to have said, and “whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”
Dogma, as such, is the man-made phalanx that fascism erects against our natural creativity and curiosity, like erecting an ice-wall to restrict the free flow of water. Like heat and cold on water molecules, curiosity and creativity stimulate and expand the neurons in our brain, while fear controls and contracts them. With enough heat, the fluidity of water becomes as free and formless as steam. Through fear, however, a “belief” in a single version of a story can be crucified by dogma. Such “beliefs” become indistinguishable from brainwashing, for both are empowered only to the degree a person is required or willing to “believe” them to be true, and powerless to the degree we are willing to “be not afraid,” ask questions, and be creative. Facts, of course, don’t mind questions, but to lies, questions are like sunlight to a vampire or kryptonite to Superman.
Growing in the moral wound inflicted in our subconscious like mold spores in a dark basement, religious beliefs — especially beliefs like the need for a “savior” who’s own suffering saves us from the eternal tortures that sinners are born deserving of — often derive their power over us by first colonizing the more emotional parts of our brain. Doing so exploits the emotional vulnerabilities of our brain decades before the rational defense areas of our brain can fully develop, and with it, critical thinking. Like missionaries preceding a military into a foreign land, those beliefs are often sown into our subconscious when we believe in anything, like Santa Clause and the tooth fairy. Just like a lie, once a “belief” is installed and accepted as “true,” it operates as a bias-filter that colors our perception and determines what we define as “true” or false. Just imagine your spouse refusing to buy Christmas presents for your children because he chooses to “believe” Santa Claus is real, or refusing to take a child to the dentist because they claim “the tooth fairy will fix it.” This is the basis of why all magic, hypnosis, and fortune telling can seem so real, and “true.” It is also why fictional stories or movies can provoke real emotional responses. And for children, their response is what makes it hard for them believe a fictional story isn’t true; creating a potential feedback loop in which the greater their emotional response, the truer the story is felt to be.
This is how a “belief” becomes truth, because of what it means to us. Perception is real, even if it isn’t true. If you “believe” the world is a wonderful place filled with awesome opportunities, even if it ain’t, then that is exactly what you’ll see. But if you believe the world is filled with trouble, danger, and treachery, that’s also what you’ll see, even if it isn’t. Religions tend to foster a dependence upon a brand of “God” by always proclaiming the “wisdom” to see both ourselves and the world as the latter, from which only our herd or “hive” can “save” us through conformity to its dictates and dogmas. Such salvation, however, requires a “savior” from God. Enter the Donald, the Word (of Deception) made flesh.
VI. Scapegoats: Flowers in the Mind-Fields of Fear
In a society where fear and trauma are rampant, uncertainty activates our “beliefs” to operate as a defensive lens. A snake-charmer is anyone who has learned to activate that lens and then exhibit absolute certainty about who or what the real “enemy” is. Even if the certainty they project is pure fiction and in direct opposition to all the evidence, it is the certainty they embody that is the only evidence the true “believer” needs, wants, or considers. That’s why “faith” in fantastical stories is more powerful than factual truth: the latter we come to posses through questioning, while the former comes to possess us through submission to a “belief,” and the “savior” who sells it. By projecting certainty to the uncertain, the “savior” figure is seen as being able to do-no-wrong, at least not to those who see such a figure as only “doing God’s will.” This allows for the miracle of making acts of murdering “witches” seem perfectly moral, like turning the flood waters of Noah into the righteous wine of God’s judgement.
In America, there was more than one way to label and hunt down someone of being a “witch” in the years following World War II. One form was CONINTELPRO. A counter-intelligence operation conducted by the FBI from 1956 to 1971, it was a covert operation, and often used extralegal means to criminalize various forms of political struggle and derail several social movements, such as those for civil rights. As the Church Committee investigations put it in 1975: “Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that.…The Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas was necessary to protect (what Conservative elites wanted for) America.”
The public face of this covert operation was McCarthyism, also known as the Second Red Scare. Based on right-wing Republican senator Joe McCarthy, McCarthyism was the political repression and persecution of left-wing individuals and a campaign fomenting fears of communist and Soviet influence on American institutions and of Soviet espionage in the United States during the late 1940s through the 1950s.
In 1951, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover used the Red Scare also to start a “War of Gays.” Calling them “sexual deviates,” his goal was to identify every gay and suspected gay person working for the federal government. Why? Because, Christianity having conditioned people to see it as a shameful and sinful thing, if you were gay, you were that much more likely to be anti-American, and more easily blackmailed by Communists. Why did Hoover fear this could happen? Because he was also a “sexual deviant.”
Something similar was happening in Germany at the same time this was going on in America. In her riveting book, “A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghost of the Past in Post-WWII Germany,” historian Monica Black details the connection between Germany’s trauma from WW II and an upsurge in superstitious hysteria. From 1947 to 1956, in addition to an explosion in “Marion apparitions” predicting the end of the world was nigh (yet again), there were 77 “witchcraft” trials in Germany. To be clear, these were not trials of witches; they were cases brought by people accused of witchcraft against their accusers. (The word “witch” was seldom used; the accusers called them “evil people.”)
Nowadays, “witch” is often a label applied to anyone seeking equal rights by those who feel “religious freedom” grants them special rights . It’s applied, for example, to any independent minded women who thinks she deserves to have as much right to control her own body as some men feel they deserve to have over their guns. But we don’t use that word as much anymore. Instead, feminists, socialists, Leftists, and other “evil people” are now being labeled pejoratively as “woke.” Like a dog whistle for virtue signaling their own ‘woke’ political identity to each other, the label is cast like a stone by those who seek to impose their “religious freedom” on anyone who has different “beliefs” from them, like trans people. Doing so allows the former to practice what they accuse the latter of preaching. The same Christian Conservatives who think morality requires teaching the Bible in public schools and obsess about protecting girls in sports from transgendered people, for example, oppose teaching about how that same Bible was used to moralize American slavery and genocide, as well as the anthropological and biological reality of transgenderism, and oppose gun controls for protecting children in classrooms. Indeed, like Musk, many who condemn transgenderism, in a species said to be “intelligently designed” with a mixture of both male and female chromosomes, openly champion transhumanism, where humans should merge themselves with their machines and technology.
“Moreover, all the great statesmen of every age and every country, including the most absolute despots, have regarded the popular imagination as the basis of their power, and they have never attempted to govern in opposition to it. “It was by becoming a Catholic,” said Napoleon to the Council of State, “that I terminated the Vendéen war. By becoming a Muslim that I obtained a footing in Egypt. By becoming an Ultramontane that I won over the Italian priests, and had I to govern a nation of Jews I would rebuild Solomon’s temple.” Never perhaps since Alexander and Caesar has any great man better understood how the imagination of the crowd should be impressed.”
VII. Trapped in The Fog of a Three-threaded Feedback Loop
Now, consider the interplay between crowd psychology, religious conditioning, and uncertainty.
Whenever we interact with the world, in any way, to get our needs met, and it results in getting our needs met, we will repeat the process. Humans are hard-wired to repeat any process that works. Our lives are an endless feedback loop where our experiences either validates our beliefs or reshapes them. Because the world, as perceived through our conscious mind, has much more information and data than we could possibly see, our beliefs act as a filter and a short-hand. And like a snowball rolling downhill, as our “beliefs” filter information to find only what verifies our beliefs, our beliefs become stronger as the feedback loop they create grows and grows.
As uncertainty increases with age and technological advancement, and screens splinter nuclear families like light through a prism, our desire for safety increases as well. America is so religious, as such, because the insecurity that comes with change and the dismantling of social safety nets creates an emotional undertow for the security and stability most people experienced as children. And as capitalism speeds up the former in reality, shedding jobs like a snake sheds its skin, religion sells us the latter with myths that operate as an emotional security blanket, under which we crawl on our knees to hide from reality and pray for a savior to deliver us from the evils of technological change, like unemployment and lack of healthcare.
Being raised to need and seek a savior from the uncertainties of life, and reinforcing that need every week by treating it like the greatest virtue a human can exercise, makes it incredibly easy to use that need to control our perceptions whenever we are made to feel unsafe and uncertain. Combine this with how people operate on more automatic and emotional levels in a crowd, coupled with the constant threat of economic and environmental collapse, and such control is made even easier. Fear, as such, becomes the lever that allows a puppeteer to switch a person’s train of thought from a rational independent set of synaptic tracks, where we are free to change our mind, to a herd-mentality that moves together like lemmings off a cliff. The former is characterized as System 1 thinking, which is fast, intuitive, and automatic, while the latter is considered System 2 thinking, which is slow, deliberate, and analytical.
This is the meaning of the emperor’s “new clothes.” They are invisible precisely because, like Napoleon proclaiming himself to be a Catholic and a Muslim and Bernays and Lee selling everything from cigarettes to World War I, they are the hot air of mere words. The emperor’s power over the herd comes from his ability to switch a crowd from S2 to S1 thinking through the use of whatever magical language his constituents crave, and “believe” will save them from their uncertainties. This is why the various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world, as Edward Gibbons pointed out, “were all considered by the magistrate as equally useful,” because they were considered “by the people as equally true,” even though the authors of those fables knew they were all equally false, but equally desired by the crowd.
In “Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy,” founder of PolitFact, Bill Adair, details how our dopamine addiction to rage and the sugar of sweet lies our political heroes clothe themselves in is far more powerful than truth has ever been for controlling the crowd. Enter Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, two men who use the techniques of Lee and Bernays to channel mass misinformation through the syringe of a digital video screen. If information is the resolution of uncertainty, as Claude Shannon claimed, misinformation is the incitement of uncertainty for political gain.
Every morning, these sly foxes “serve up a few spoonfuls of deceit with the morning coffee” to an eager audience anxious to be angry at the latest “woke” witches of the day. As media scholar Jeffrey P. Jones points out, the “Fox and Friends” morning show “preys upon the irrationality of the crowd.” Presenting the perspective of Conservative elites as the American ethos, “the show is designed to thrust the viewer in the world of common sense group-think, complete with all the rumors, smears, innuendo, fear mongering, thinly veiled ad hominem attacks, and lack of rational discourse they can muster. The friends are masterful at this.” And they are, because “Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality,” as Hannah Arendt pointed out, “since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear.” Such political grooming ensures the target audience will swoon to the deceptions Trump merely repeats back to them as if they were the gospel truth of a Siren’s song.
Asking someone to let go of their “belief” in that song is like asking a person who never learned how to swim to “save themself” by jumping off the Titanic. The story they’ve chosen to believe in is their lifeboat, in a world convulsing like a stormy sea. And in that sea, it is better to hang on for dear life to that boat than to try and swim. For them, as such, the story is infallibly true, even if the person telling it is the world’s greatest liar, because without it feels like drowning. For the apple of “truth” (or “meaning”) they crave, in other words, they’ll “believe” any serpent who sings it. But if you want to “walk on water,” you have to learn how to swim.
Now ask yourself a question: is your mind filled with ice cubes, hot and cold running water, or steam? Do you think in dogmas, science and philosophies, or mysticism and enlightenment? For water is curious and infinitely creative in the kinds of life it can produce, or it’s as violent as a hurricane when cold and hot vapors wrestle with each other between earth and sky, or as soothing and peaceful and healing as rain on a summer day, or snow in the quiet of winter.
The point to all of this is purely political, to replace reasoned democracy with obedience to oligarchy. And to the degree the latter is reflective of the hierarchical perspective of “the Right,” the former embodies an egalitarian perspective of “the Left.” One is led by MAGA Conservatives who feel they, as J. D. Vance explained, “have lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been.” And Project 2025 is a Taliban-style blueprint for regaining control. And their definition of “the Left,” Heather Cox Richardson explains, “includes all Americans, Republicans and Independents as well as Democrats, who believe the government has a role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, and protecting civil rights, and who support the institutional structures Americans have built since World War II.” The former call themselves Christians for giving food to the starving, and condemn the latter as “Communists” for asking why people are starving?
Today, a MAGA minority act like thought-police while condemning the teaching of historical racism as “wokism,” and condemn “cancel culture” while calling for the firing of anyone who challenges their leader. Why? Because, as the Romans knew, the scepter of power belongs to the hand that can wield the natural skepticism of a crowd as a weapon against one’s political opponents. And like Mickey’s “magic broom,” that scepter is fashioned from all the pens that write the story that crucifies curiosity and creativity to the the cross of a single “infallible” interpretation of a brand of “truth,” and hell awaits all who question it.
But just imagine what would be possible if we could redirect all the the love and gratitude we spend on our particular story brand of “happily ever after,” into showing our love and gratitude for getting the chance just to be, rather than feeling the need to try to be what someone else wants us to be. Doing the former allows us to become a Picasso, redesigning ourselves everyday, while the latter saddles us with the curse of Sisyphus.
So who do you want to be? Someone’s pawn, or someone free?
VIII. So Roll with the Punches
It is not a coincidence that Conservatives on the Right value authority and tribalism more than the liberty and equality of Liberals on the Left. Yet it is a myth that the latter are driven or controlled more by emotion than the former. In truth, as Jonathan Haight has pointed out, our emotional brain is the elephant we all ride, and our rational brain is largely the press secretary that rationalizes and defends the choices our emotional-elephant brain makes. And all power comes to the circus leader who knows how to train and direct that elephant, especially in the fog of uncertainty.
As Meredith Marple explained, “you cannot make someone see clarity when they find comfort within their fog.” Human political history is a ten-thousand-year war of brains between the rich and the poor,” as Aravind Adiga wrote in The White Tiger, and sacred words are often the fog that the former uses to both gaslight the latter into obedience and moralize poverty, injustice, and inequality. As such, every generation must fight the same battles again and again. There’s no final victory,” as Tony Benn explained, “just as there is no final defeat, just the same battle to be fought over and over again. So toughen up, bloody toughen up.” Because it’s not about how hard you can hit,” as Rocky Balboa said, “It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.”
What’s important to remember about this time through which we now pass, is this: First, Christian Nationalism is actually the reaction of an entitled few against the progress of equality, for fanaticism always defends its privilege by championing inequality in the name of “freedom.” Ironically, that’s even what the South proclaimed as it condemned Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation. Second, that it’s not whether you get knocked down from a punch, as Vince Lombardi said, “it’s whether you get up.” Third, as Trump told Woodward in that same interview in 2016, when things get rough, “you have to roll with the punches.” Lastly, “when everything seems to be going against you,” as Henry Ford explained, “remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.” And the wind that rises now is the collective breath of every generation who breathed, from their first to their last, ever longing to be free.
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