One of the Most Interesting things I’ve Read in a Long Time: How Political Psychology Explains Bush’s Ghastly Success
Over the past year, I have written a number of articles about the role fear –the fear felt by the American people, and the fear-mongering practiced by the Bushite regime– has played in this era. The fascinating article presented here goes further than my previous knowledge of the psychology involved. It is not often that psychological research gives me so strong a sense of learning something. It is not so much that the world works differently from how I thought as that the power of certain factors so far exceeds what my own mental model of humankind would have predicted.
I highly commend this article to your attention.
A few comments of mine follow the article.
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How Political Psychology Explains Bush’s Ghastly Success
Death Grip
by John B. Judis
In June 2004, I went door to door in a white, working- class neighborhood of Martinsburg, West Virginia, a small blue-collar town in decline. There, I found voters disillusioned with both the Iraq war and the flagging economy. But, when I returned five months later– the Sunday before the election–I had difficulty digging up anyone who didn’t plan to vote for George W. Bush. As far as I could tell, Martinsburg voters were backing him for two reasons: first, because he opposed gay marriage and abortion (“There are two gays around the corner who are voting for Kerry,” one fellow, with a Bush sign in his yard, advised me scornfully from his stoop); and, second, because he was leading the war on terrorism (“I feel more safe with Bush in there,” an elderly disabled man explained). There was still grumbling over the war, the economy, and other topics–the same elderly man who praised Bush for making him feel safe also bemoaned America’s lack of universal health insurance–but these issues were eclipsed by the threat of gay weddings and terrorist attacks.
Bush carried West Virginia and won the election partly because he ran a better campaign than John Kerry. But that wasn’t the only reason. There was something odd about the support for Bush in places like West Virginia. Unlike voters in New York City, voters in Martinsburg had little to fear from terrorist attacks; yet they backed Bush, while New Yorkers voted for Kerry. If gay marriage were legalized, Martinsburg would be unlikely to host massive numbers of same-sex weddings; yet voters I talked to were haunted by the specter of gay marriage.
Some pundits have tried to explain away this mystery by arguing that Bush backers voted for their values rather than their interests. But this explanation is unsatisfying, since many of those voters didn’t opt for “family values” in 1992 and 1996, when the country elected a well-known philanderer as president.
In fact, many political scientists can’t begin to explain what took place in West Virginia in 2004. In recent years, the field has become dominated by rational choice theorists, who have tried to develop complex mathematical equations to predict voting behavior. These equations rest on a view of voters as calculating consumers choosing a product on the basis of relative cost and utility–a view that generally leaves little room for the possibility of voters acting irrationally.
There is, however, one group of scholars–members of the relatively new field of political psychology–who are trying to explain voter preferences that can’t be easily quantified. The best general introduction to this field is Drew Westen’s recent book, The Political Brain, but the research that is perhaps most relevant to the 2004 election has been conducted by psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski. In the early 1980s, they developed what they clumsily called “terror management theory.” Their idea was not about how to clear the subways in the event of an attack, but about how people cope with the terrifying and potentially paralyzing realization that, as human beings, we are destined to die. Their experiments showed that the mere thought of one’s mortality can trigger a range of emotions–from disdain for other races, religions, and nations, to a preference for charismatic over pragmatic leaders, to a heightened attraction to traditional mores. Initially, the three scholars didn’t attempt to apply their theory to elections. But, after September 11, they conducted experiments designed to do exactly that. What they found sheds new light on the role that fear of death plays in contemporary politics–and, arguably, goes a long way toward unraveling the mystery of Martinsburg.
olomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski met as graduate students at the University of Kansas in the late ’70s. (Today, they are professors at Skidmore College, the University of Arizona, and the University of Colorado, respectively.) In 1980, Solomon discovered the work of Ernest Becker, an anthropologist whose last book, The Denial of Death, had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. Becker was part of a generation of American social psychologists–stretching from David Riesman, who wrote The Lonely Crowd in 1950, to Christopher Lasch, who penned The Culture of Narcissism in 1979–who operated outside the academic discipline of psychology and were far more influenced by Freud and Marx than by B.F. Skinner and John B. Watson. Riesman, Lasch, and company are no longer avidly read–partly because of the fascination with neuroscience, but also because today’s students and academics don’t appear as interested in fundamental questions about life, death, love, and history.
Becker, who died of colon cancer in 1974 at the age of 49, had a checkered academic career, largely because his work failed to fit within academic departments. Although a riveting lecturer–he filled the 700-seat Wheeler Hall auditorium in Berkeley for a class on Marx and Rousseau–he bounced from school to school on short-term contracts. In 1967, Michael Lerner (later of Tikkun) and I helped organize a demonstration on the Sproul Hall steps to demand that Berkeley’s anthropology department hire Becker permanently, but to no avail. Two years later, Becker finally found a home at Simon Fraser University outside Vancouver, where he wrote what turned out to be his most influential books.
In The Denial of Death, Becker tried to explain how fear of one’s own demise lies at the center of human endeavor. “Man’s anxiety,” Becker wrote, “results from the human paradox that man is an animal who is conscious of his animal limitation.” Becker described how human beings defend themselves against this fundamental anxiety by constructing cultures that promise symbolic or literal immortality to those who live up to established standards. Among other things, we practice religions that promise immortality; produce children and works of art that we hope will outlive us; seek to submerge our own individuality in a larger, enduring community of race or nation; and look to heroic leaders not only to fend off death, but to endow us with the courage to defy it. We also react with hostility toward individuals and rival cultures that threaten to undermine the integrity of our own.
Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczyn- ski first presented a summary of Becker’s ideas at the Society for Experimental Social Psychology in 1984. As they talked, the three later wrote, “well-known psychologists jostled each other vigorously to escape.” Afterwards, they submitted their take on Becker to The American Psychologist and were peremptorily turned down. “I have no doubt that these ideas are of absolutely no interest to any psychologist, alive or dead,” the journal’s reviewer replied. Later, the journal’s editor told the three psychologists that, if they wanted to be taken seriously in their profession, they would have to find ways to test their ideas experimentally. And that’s what they proceeded to do.
Their first experiment was published in 1989. To test the hypothesis that recognition of mortality evokes “worldview defense”–their term for the range of emotions, from intolerance to religi- osity to a preference for law and order, that they believe thoughts of death can trigger–they assembled 22 Tucson municipal court judges. They told the judges they wanted to test the relationship between personality traits and bail decisions, but, for one group, they inserted in the middle of the personality questionnaire two exercises meant to evoke awareness of their mortality. One asked the judges to “briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you”; the other required them to “jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you physically as you die and once you are physically dead.” They then asked the judges to set bail in the hypothetical case of a prostitute whom the prosecutor claimed was a flight risk. The judges who did the mortality exercises set an average bail of $455. The control group that did not do the exercises set it at an average of $50. The psychologists knew they were onto something.
Over the next decade, the three performed similar experiments to illustrate how awareness of death could provoke worldview defense. They showed that what they now called “mortality salience” affected people’s view of other races, religions, and nations. When they had students at a Christian college evaluate essays by what they were told were a Christian and a Jewish author, the group that did the mortality exercises expressed a far more negative view of the essay by the Jew- ish author than the control group did. (German psychologists would find a similar reaction among German subjects toward Turks.) They also conducted numerous experiments to show that mortality exercises evoked patriotic responses. The subjects who did the exercises took a far more negative view of an essay critical of the United States than the control group did and also expressed greater veneration for cultural icons like the flag. The three even devised an experiment to show that, after doing the mortality exercises, conser- vatives took a much harsher view of liberals, and vice versa.
In conducting these experiments, they took care not to tell the subjects what they were doing. They also devised experiments to answer obvious objections to their theory. For instance, they substituted other exercises designed to increase anxiety–by reminding subjects of an upcoming examination or a painful dental visit–to determine if these thoughts had the same effect as the mortality exercises, but they didn’t. It wasn’t anxiety per se that triggered worldview defense; it was anxiety specifically about one’s own death.
Drawing on psychoanalysis, but looking for experimental verification, Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski developed a theory to explain how mortality salience works. When they started conducting experiments, the psychologists had believed that the sheer recognition of one’s mortality directly triggered worldview defense. But, when other psychologists, varying the procedure, failed to reproduce the same results, they discovered an important caveat: When they would ask sub- jects to make judgments immediately following the mortality exercises, the exercises would have little effect. It was only when they interspersed a diversionary interval between the exercises and the judgments that the exercises had their full impact.
Freud had distinguished between “primary processes” of thought that were unconscious and irrational and “secondary processes” that were conscious and rational. Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski reasoned that, when individuals first feel anxiety about their mortality, they respond consciously by invoking the usual psychological defenses– for instance, telling themselves that “it’s not me, now.” That allayed conscious anxiety, but, after the conscious anxiety about mortality had subsided, the thought remained unconscious and active and led people to erect worldview defenses. “The implicit knowledge of death rather than the current focal awareness is the motivating factor,” they wrote. “Once the problem of death is out of focal attention but while it is still highly accessible, terror management concerns are addressed by … bolstering faith in the worldview.”
To demonstrate this effect, Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski devised experiments using subliminal cues. They asked subjects to evaluate whether two words on a computer screen were related. One group of subjects had the word “death” flashed subliminally between the two words, while another group had the word “field” flashed. Afterward, neither group said they saw more than two words at a time. But, by using word-fragment completion tests–for instance, is “coff_ _” completed as “coffin” or “coffee”?–the psychologists were able to establish that the group which had “death” flashed before them, but not the control group, was unconsciously thinking about death. The psychologists then asked the groups to evaluate essays critical and supportive of the United States. Those who had “death” flashed before them had a much more negative view of the essay critical of the United States than those who had seen the word “field.” They exhibited the same pattern of judgment as those who had done the mortality exercises but, unlike them, did not need an interval before making judgments. The psychologists still lacked a full explanation of how this worked, but they had shown that, in their words, “worldview defense in response to thoughts of death does not require any conscious awareness of such thoughts.” Indeed, it worked best when these thoughts were unconscious.
By the end of the 1990s, Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski had made their reputation among social psychologists. Psychologists around the world–particularly in Germany, the Netherlands, and Israel–were using their theories to devise experiments of their own. In October 2001, the American Psychological Association asked the three to write a book on how their theories could explain Americans’ reaction to September 11. In the Wake of 9/11, which appeared in 2003, recounted more than a decade of experiments and speculated on how the public’s reaction to the attack– including heightened religiosity, patriotism, and support for both Bush and his evangelical swagger–could be explained as worldview defense.
The three scholars also began devising experiments to test this theory. The first of these explored whether reminders of September 11 functioned as mortality reminders. In the spring of 2002, the psychologists, along with five colleagues, conducted an experiment at the University of Missouri, where subjects had either “911,” “WTC” (for the World Trade Center), or “573″ (the area code for Columbia) flashed subliminally between word associations. Afterward, they completed word-fragment tests to see whether thoughts of death were stirring in their unconscious. The psychologists found the same pattern between “911″ and “WTC,” on the one hand, and “573,” on the other, that they had earlier found between “death” and “field.” They concluded that reminders of September 11 awakened unconscious mortality thoughts. Later experiments would further confirm this.
They then explored whether Bush’s popularity in the years after September 11 stemmed in part from Americans’ need for a charismatic figure who could help them overcome these thoughts. Bush’s appeal, the psychologists speculated, lay “in his image as a protective shield against death, armed with high-tech weaponry, patriotic rhetoric, and the resolute invocation of doing God’s will to rid the world of evil.’” In 2002, the psychologists, aided by two colleagues, conducted an experiment at Brooklyn College that showed that mortality reminders dramatically enhanced the appeal of a hypothetical candidate who told voters, “You are not just an ordinary citizen: You are part of a special state and a special nation.”
Next, they began testing Bush’s appeal directly. In October 2003, the three scholars, together with five colleagues, assembled 97 undergraduates at Rutgers to participate in what the students thought was a study of the relationship between personality and politics. One group was given the mortality exercises. The other wasn’t. They then read an essay expressing a “highly favorable opinion of the measures taken by President Bush with regards to 9/11 and the Iraqi conflict.” It read, in part:
Personally I endorse the actions of President Bush and the members of his administration who have taken bold action in Iraq. I appreciate our President’s wisdom regarding the need to remove Saddam Hussein from power and his Homeland Security Policy is a source of great comfort to me. … We need to stand behind our President and not be distracted by citizens who are less than patriotic. Ever since the attack on our country on September 11, 2001, Mr. Bush has been a source of strength and inspiration to us all.
This was not the kind of statement that would appeal to most Rutgers undergraduates, and indeed, on average, members of the control group rated it unfavorably. But those who did the mortality exercises on balance favored the statement. In February 2004, the psychologists repeated the experiment, but this time they used September 11 cues. They had one group of students write down the emotions that September 11 aroused in them and describe what happened on that day. They got the same results as before: On average, those in the September 11 group approved of the statement, while those who didn’t do the exercises disapproved. Based on political questionnaires they had the students fill out, they also found that the September 11 and mortality exercises “increased both conservatives’ and liberals’ liking for Bush.”
Then, in late September 2004, the psychologists, along with two colleagues from Rutgers, tested whether mortality exercises influenced whom voters would support in the upcoming presidential election. They conducted the study among 131 Rutgers undergraduates who said they were registered and planned to vote in November. The control group that completed a personality survey, but did not do the mortality exercises, predictably favored Kerry by four to one. But the students who did the mortality exercises favored Bush by more than two to one. This strongly suggested that Bush’s popularity was sustained by mortality reminders. The psychologists concluded in a paper published after the election that the government terror warnings, the release of Osama bin Laden’s video on October 29, and the Bush campaign’s reiteration of the terrorist threat (Cheney on election eve: “If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we’ll get hit again”) were integral to Bush’s victory over Kerry. “From a terror management perspective,” they wrote, “the United States’ electorate was exposed to a wide-ranging multidimensional mortality salience induction.”
n their experiments, Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski make a good case that mortality reminders from September 11 enhanced Bush’s popularity through November 2004. But, on the basis of their research, it is possible to draw even broader conclusions about U.S. politics after September 11. Mortality reminders not only enhanced the appeal of Bush’s political style but also deepened and broadened the appeal of the conservative social positions that Republicans had been running on.
For instance, because worldview defense increases hostility toward other races, religions, nations, and political systems, it helps explain the rage toward France and Germany that erupted prior to the Iraq war, as well as the recent spike in hostility toward illegal immigrants. Also central to worldview defense is the protection of tradition against social experimentation, of community values against individual prerogatives–as was evident in the Tucson experiment with the judges–and of religious dictates against secular norms. For many conservatives, this means opposition to abortion and gay marriage. This may well explain why family values became more salient in 2004–a year in which voters were supposed to be unusually focused on foreign policy–than it had been from 1992 through 2000. Indeed, from 2001 to 2004, polls show an increase in opposition to abortion and gay marriage, along with a growing religiosity. According to Gallup, the percentage of voters who believed abortion should be “illegal in all circumstances” rose from 17 percent in 2000 to 20 percent in 2002 and would still be at 19 percent in 2004. Even church attendance by atheists, according to one poll, increased from 3 to 10 percent from August to November 2001.
In the months after September 11, most Americans were caught up in the same reaction to the tragedy–and that included adulation for Bush, even among many Democrats. But over the next few years, faced with two elections, Bush had to maintain his popularity; and he did so by constantly reviving memories of that dark day. As the 2002 election approached, voters turned their attention to the recession, as well as Enron and other scandals–all to the Democrats’ favor. At that point, Bush, who had stood aside in the November 2001 gubernatorial elections that Democrats won, sought to base the 2002 election on terrorism. Bush and Karl Rove used the full arsenal of scare tactics to evoke fears of another September 11. The result was that the electorate became sharply polarized between conservatives and liberals and between Republicans and Democrats, while those caught in the middle tended to side with the Repub- licans–exactly as the psychologists’ experiments might have predicted.
Some political analysts harshly criticized Kerry in 2004 for failing to counter Bush’s charismatic style with an equally attractive appeal of his own. Many, like Slate’s Chris Suellentrop, complained that Kerry lacked vision. “Vision without details beats details without vision,” Suellentrop wrote. Others, like Thomas Frank, wrote that Kerry should have countered Bush’s “cultural populism” with “genuine economic populism.” But, if Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski are right, it would have been very difficult for any politician–not just the stolid Kerry–to overcome Bush’s built-in advantage from being the nation’s leader at a time when many voters feared another attack. In 2004, Bush, as the commander-in-chief, still had the unconscious on his side. And that advantage may have proven insuperable.
oon after the 2004 election, the mood in the country began to shift. Reminders of September 11 lingered, but they were increasingly displaced by worries over the Iraq war and anger over the growing scandals within the Bush administration and the Republican Congress. Bush’s incompetence in responding to Katrina tarnished his image as a father-protector. Says Solomon, “Bush became less of a useful object to unload non-conscious anxieties about death.”
One explanation for what happened psychologically can be drawn from experiments that Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski conducted in the mid-’90s. These showed that there were conditions under which the mortality exercises had a reduced impact. One such situation occurred when the experimenter repeatedly told the subjects to make a “careful” response to the questions rather than a “gut-level” or “natural” or “first” response. In those cases where the experimenter urged care and deliberation, the psychologists concluded, subjects acted on a “rational” basis that reduced the influence of unconscious anxieties.
Something like that might have happened after the 2004 election, as voters, forced to weigh other concerns–Iraq, Katrina, the Abramoff scandals–subjected reminders of September 11 to greater thought and skepticism. These associations made Bush “less of a useful object.” It could also be that active memories of September 11 have begun to fade for many Americans–just as memories of Pearl Harbor did for an earlier generation–reducing the effect that these memories have on unconscious fears. The reduction of mortality salience is evident not just in growing public dissatisfaction with Bush, but in reduced support for conservative social causes. The average annual percentage of those believing abortion should be illegal dropped from 19 percent in 2004 to 15 percent in 2006, and the percentage believing it should be legal “under any circumstances” rose from 24 to 30 percent. The postSeptember 11 outburst of religiosity also began to abate, particularly among the young. These changes in public sentiment, which reflected the diminished psychological impact of September 11, help explain the Democratic triumph of 2006.
Of course, there are still voters within the Republican electorate whose hearts beat to the rhythms of September 11 and who are still engaged in a passionate defense of their worldview. They continue to identify the war in Iraq with the war on terror; they worry about illegal aliens and terrorists crossing the border; some even judge the growing public opposition to Bush as further confirmation of his role as protector. These voters appear particularly attracted to Rudy Giuliani, whose entire campaign is based upon reminding voters of September 11. And, if Giuliani is the Republican nominee in 2008, the election may pivot on his ability to use reminders of September 11 to provoke the public into another massive bout of worldview defense.
But, right now, it doesn’t look promising for any candidate who hopes to follow Bush’s 2004 script. The voters of 2008, including those in Martinsburg, will probably be buffeted by competing emotions about Iraq and the war on terrorism, and therefore less inclined to base their decisions on gay marriage. Barring another assault on American soil, the moment of September 11–and the reminder of mortality that it brought–may well have passed. And with it, too, the ascendancy of politicians who exploited the fear of death that lies within us all.
John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
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Part of the impact of this piece on me was to make me feel more sympathetic with those of my countrymen whose response to the Bushite menace I’ve felt so bitterly disappointed by. Somehow, having this simple and surprisingly powerful mechanism laid bare makes it seem more comprehensible, and less a profound indictment of the moral nature of the people who are swayed thereby.
Then I also started wondering: how much do these findings a) reveal human nature, and/or b) reveal something about the condition of the American psyche in our era?
After all, NOT ALL people in the experimental group manifest this pronounced influence of the exposure to those things that evoke anxiety about death. A surprising number of people apparently do, but not all.
That leaves open the possibility that in different times and places people are more or less subject to being influenced in this way.
(Which reminds me of the piece I wrote –”Get a Grip America! It’s Dangerous for a People to be Ruled by Fear,” at www.nonesoblind.org/blog/?p=328).
I’m still sorting it out just how these empirical research findings should affect how this Bushite era impacts my view of my fellow Americans.
August 27th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
It seems to me that this is just additional proof of the shallowness of so much of the American electorate and their refusal to do the hard work of rational analysis, not only when it comes to selecting political leaders, but in the development of their personal values. I don’t see any reason why a heightened awareness of one’s mortality should lead to greater disdain for other races, religions and nations, and a preference for charismatic / prag-matic leaders. I would have hoped it would have resulted in some soul-searching and a committment to becoming a more knowledgeable, loving, tolerant person. Why should a heightened awareness of one’s mortality not lead to greater personal integrity and a desire to put similar-minded people in political power?
August 27th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
It seems sad to realize that it took so much effort to reveal what is common sense. Fear has long been known as a primary limbic system response to mortality effects. Emotions are seldom stronger. It is but a short step to realize that politicians find this basic human emotion easily affected and manipulated. Joseph Goebbels’ many pronouncements about mass manipulation clearly lead to this awareness.
Long ago, Lewis Lapham wrote a piece in which he described the immanent rise of a “New Puritanism” after a few years of Reagan. The Puritans were not seeking a new land here…. They were literally ushered out of England for their unabashed efforts to force their fear-mongering god on everyone. The evidence is there for any one who cares to look closely and deeply.
“We have noting to fear but fear itself.” When we finally help all our sadly
shaped humans who have innocently been led down the garden path of religious fear-bating (“Be saved OR ELSE!”) enough folks will awaken to the reality of _citizen_ participation in place of fear induced reactionary posing. I worked with enough young people in a very reactionary place to see this dynamic play out every day. So many were compelled to be afraid all the time except when praying.
There are some who say the “cult of personality” was born in the 200 years after J. arrived at Golgotha (see John Romer’s insightful _Testament_). Basic to the view is that the Judeans were in constant states of fear, from the ever present warfare all about. It should be as familiar as air. Fear is the greatest motivator and if “consciousness” can be so easily manipulated, the blend of these two dynamics will be used for political expediency. “Political Psychology” is almost a _non sequiter_.
August 27th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
I felt the same ominous mortality salience as everyone on September 11th and to boot was reminded of my mortality by the death of my mother in December of 2001. Even with all those reminders, I still knew that Bush was lying about Iraq, WMDs, etc and so opposed Bush. I do not know if Bush and the Mortality Salience caused me to move toward my worldview of Liberalism or whether I am immune to this effect that effects so many of my compatriots.
I do believe that this effect exists to a degree although I do not have access to their research except through the above excerpt. Although it explains the mindset of those who support Bush, at least in part, it still doesn’t explain the 28% or so of those still supporting Bush. Perhaps that 28% are truly the base who are impervious to emotional or factual contraindications, maybe even mortality salience.
I also think that the Authoritarian mindset figures prominently here. Perhaps a study looking at both ideas will prove fruitful.
August 27th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
Thanks Andy! I am pleased to be one who did not respond as expected to the motivators. I tend to believe that there are always people who are more easily manipulated than others. It has to be a combination of (and this list isn’t all) psychological make-up, education, socioeconomic status, authoritarian lifestyle, and exposure to many points of view. That said, this is an amazing piece you posted. I live in NE TN, far, far away from NYC, PA and DC as well as other areas that could be possible targets for terrorists. I know a woman who had to be committed because she just could not cope after September 11, 2001. She’s still mentally wobbly all this time later. I also think that the media has done a really good job at reinforcing the ideas presented in the essay about seeing your own mortality. Me, when I die, I’ll go on. Matter is not created or destroyed but just rearranged. Additionally, we are just beginning to study (except the Buddhists) consciousness. What does happen to our consciousness when we pass on? I think it goes on and comes back in a life form. Back to the point though; I’m like Andy and this does explain somewhat why so many Americans lost their way and believed the lies and accepted the shredding of the Constitution.
August 27th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
Thank you for posting the article. I have had only a limited amount of anecdotal evidence to consider that has relevance to the denial of death theory, but it has been enough to make me wonder if the links postulated by Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski could be supported. My own grandfather was an immensely talented, creative man who was quite sensitive for the era in which he lived. Yet, when he drew closer to death he began to change in confusing ways. He started to identify scapegoats for the ills of society including, unfortunately, the Jewish population. He went so far as to rant and rave that Hitler should have finished what he started. I have often wondered how a man who was once so rational could have fallen to such a degree.
I am seeing the same tendencies now (though not as dramatic yet) with my surviving parent, aunts and uncles, and inlaws. Can this hardening of opinions be explanied largely because they have reached the age when the surety of death can no longer be ignored? If so, I wonder if I too will eventually fall prey to some “useful object to unload non-conscious anxieties about death.” A frightening thought!
I do not fear death, having confidence that consciousness and even personal growth does continue after death. Perhaps this will provide enough armor.
A line from “The Never Ending Story,” a fantasy movie that was released some time ago: “People who have no hope are easy to control.” How unfortunate it is that some self-serving demigods attempt to capitalize on this reality through subconsious means!
August 27th, 2007 at 2:58 pm
I’m surprised, Lee Ferrell that you find here nothing surprising.
Would you have predicted that it would have so pronounced effect on the basis of whether the groups went through a little exercise or not:
“those in the September 11 group approved of the statement, while those who didn’t do the exercises disapproved?”
And the depth of resonance of even a sublimal flashing of “WTC” or “9/11″ or just some area code– how powerful is the impact on consciousness of such small things.
And then think of how powerful this 9/11 “war on terror” Bushite fearmongering might have been, with so much more powerful a force to amplify the message, and so much more sustained an effort, with real-life danger upping the receptivity.
The magnitude of the impact is surprising to me– surprising enough to require me to rethink my image of just what this vulnerability has been about. I
It is surprising enough to me to compel me to give more thought than I have to the matter of THE FEAR OF DEATH.
And I still am wondering if this just exposes a piece of a greater defect –moral, spiritual, intellectual, emotional– that fits into what I’ve been saying about “moral breakdown” but only adds depth to the picture.
The fear of death is a bigger deal –or at least a bigger part of the picture– than I thought.
August 27th, 2007 at 3:12 pm
Let me respond to you, Aaron, in a way that is also a continuation of what I just wrote to Lee Ferrell– about how the role of the fear of death is apparently bigger than I’d supposed, and so a clear understanding of this receptiveness to Bushite fascism requires me to take the depth and magnitude of that fear into better account than I have.
And I keep pondering that question: does this article tell me something about human nature, so that I should perhaps put less emphasis on my theme of America’s moral breakdown as connected to this fascism? Or does it just flesh out some of what this breakdown is about.
It is in that context, Aaron, that I appreciate what you say here with that line from “The Never Ending Story,� : “People who have no hope are easy to control.�
And it makes me think that at some level in America there has been a breakdown in faith and hope. That there is little real spiritually meaningful hope in America. We as a nation are content to represent nothing, and to represent the dark side. Is that not a sign of a loss of hope for the experience of real meaning? A people without hope is a people that is disconnected from the spiritual realm, from a devotion to the idea of the good, to an ideal of taking moral responsibility, from the proud position of truth honestly sought. And without hope, there is terror at the idea of death. There is not enough connection with what lives on.
Without being plugged into HOPE, our death is too frightening to contemplate. The spiritually connected do not fear death so much, because they are connected with what lives on.
The true, the beautiful, the good.
It is a nation that has lost the hope of embracing the realm of the sacred (good, true, beautiful) is what is required for it to choose fascism– with its meanness, its lies, its ugliness, its injustice, its lust for domination and destruction.
So maybe Americans in the era that gave us the Marshall Plan and the raising up of our defeated enemies had hope, and being plugged into some sense of transcendent value –which helped to underlay those post-war achievements– those Americans would not have been so likely to give up on hope, or with lesser terror of death.
I wish I knew whether the results would be different in a society that is more connected than America today with the good, the true, and the beautiful.
August 27th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
One implication of these findings is that, in communicating with the currently fascist element in the American body politic, more effort should be spent on addressing the problem of the fear of death in their experience. If we ignore it, they simply will not be able to transcend the fear of death enough to come to their senses and withdraw their support for fascism. They are not mostly people who need to be aligned with evil, but they won’t join with us so long as their fascist leaders do a better job of addressing their underlying fear of death than do the defenders of liberty and decency.
There simply is not a full-throated enough opposition to the Bushites. And part of an effective “opposition” would be a message that effectively and constructively addresses the fears of our audience, including those for whom a mere flash of a “WTC” is enough to send them into deep reverberations of terror and of support for fascist tendencies and values.
The needs of scared people to have their fear taken into account is nothing illegitimate. If we want to persuade them, we need to tailor our message to optimize our chances of succeeding. Some of them have been temporarily disabled by a campaign of playing on their vulnerabilities, as these fear mongers –with their countless ways of seeking to increase the people’s fears, rather than inspire them for the noble struggle.
Bush and Churchill– often paired from one side or another. Here’s where the difference is most profound: Bush has deliberated sought to inflame people’s fears, for no GOOD purpose. Churchill helped lead his people into being less afraid, more courageous and noble, than they might have expected themselves capable of.
Bush has sought to call forth the weakest part of our nature –that deeply resonant fear of death– while Churchhill (as Eric Hoffer said) cast his countrymen into the role of heroes and they rose up to play them.
The Bushites in their delusions– like linking Bush with Churchill. Those Bushites are really disconnected. They simply haven’t got a clue.
August 27th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
Continuing along these lines:
It is really amazing the discrepancy between who these people are and who they like to pretend (even to themselves) to be.
I think of that bit of footage of Mussolini that Woody Allen used to hilarious effect in CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS– such a contempt shown for the Duce posing as being such a big great leader, so arrogant, so full of himself, so ugly a spirit. It is used to mock his boss, and of course the insult costs him his job.
Bush sees himself as this tough cowboy, but we know him for the lying coward he is. We saw him sitting there in Fahrenheit 911, looking for all those minutes like he really doesn’t have it in him to deal with any real challenge. We’ve seen who he is, the self-entitled brat who was happy to escape duty in Vietnam by having his family pull strings to get him to the front of a lucky line, and then not even have the decency to fulfill THAT responsibility the way a man of character would.
And then of course there’s HITLER. When we see films of him strutting and preening and calling forth the demons from people’s hearts, we can hardly imagine that he and so many others could have believed him the great FUEHRER, object of adulation, “Heil, Hitler” being mandated in all their greetings. BUt to us he is this monster, this piece of disease ridden human filth that brought out all that was worst in his people.
WTC. Cultivate fear.
Seil heil. Cultivate a lust for domination.
Two different roads to the same destination.
Their heaven is in fact a form of hell. No wonder they’ve got such a warped image of what it is that they embody.
August 27th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
I have always thought the “fear of death” was the motivating force behind much of culture and civilization as we know it… otherwise why such a material focus for so much of what we call culture.
August 27th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
I expect you are right, Donna, in connecting our fear of death with our materialism. I’m not exactly sure how it works, but the material is that which is more separate from the spiritual. We don’t regard health, though it is material, as something unconnected with the spiritual. Health is a part of wholeness, and something we pray for. No, it is material at the level of going for only physical and coarse gratifications, not sufficiently honoring the more abstract and spiritual aspects of our pleasures– like the delight we take in the good, the true, and the beautiful. (And health being part of both the good and the beautiful.)
If life is about accumulating two thousand shoes, like Imelda Marcos, then you are seriously off the spiritual trail into the material realm.
And there’s a bit of the spirit of Imelda Marcos embedded in the heart of our consumerist –material, and death-fearing– culture.
August 28th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
I’ve been struggling through a book originally published in 1984 on the subject of “ethnomethodology,” a branch (or an alternative approach to) Sociology that was founded by Harold Garfinkel. I had heard of this work in passing many years ago, and finally sat down to read something on it (“Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology,” by John Heritage). I’m no student of Sociology, so the going is slow and the book full of jargon!
I quote here from an online definition about Garfinkel’s work:
“Garfinkel suggests that the way individuals bring order to, or make sense of their social world is through a psychological process, which he calls “the documentary method”. This method firstly consists of selecting certain facts from a social situation, which seem to conform to a pattern and then making sense of these facts in terms of the pattern. Once the pattern has been established, it is used as a framework for interpreting new facts, which arise within the situation….Garfinkel suggests that we are all constantly making use of the documentary method in our daily lives to create a “taken-for-granted” world which we feel we “know” and can be “at home” in. We perceive our social world through a series of patterns we have built up for making sense of and coping with the variety of situations that we encounter everyday.” (http://www.hewett.norfolk.sch.uk/CURRIC/soc/ethno/intro.htm)
I had not gone through too many pages of Heritage’s book, when I got the very strong impression that this material was describing a framework for the phenomenon that happened in the U.S. after 9/11. A surprising feature of ethnomethodology apparently is that people place a very high MORAL value on the worldview that they adopt and that guides their responses to new stimuli. This is even though in most cases, the stimuli, and the worldview framework, usually involve non-moral or ethical matters. It is, I believe, why people are so insensed (not merely skeptical) when anyone questions the official report on what happened to the WTC and the Pentagon. Heritage reports that in experiments, people become very emotionally insensed over things that just don’t have much import – but if someone challenges the framework either by presenting contrary evidence, or an alternative explanation, it is taken as a very affront to the individual’s personal integrity.
As Robert Gates is quoted as saying, “The American People know what they saw with their own eyes on September 11…”. Of course, the central question is, “Do they really?” There was a great deal of coordinated media work done within the first couple of days to link, in peoples’ minds, the towers collapsing, with the 19 faces, plausible explanations of how the towers must have fallen due to the planes (“flames were so hot the buildings just coudn’t withstand the heat…”), the alleged Pennsylvania crash site that amounted to a hole in the ground while people found parts, luggage and remains for miles, the “pieces of an airliner” at the Pentagon, etc. We all accepted what we “saw” and heard many times over, but mainly because we were provided with a ready world view by entieies that at the time, we still trusted.
The research that your posting describes – very intriguing – develops the psychological content that can help us understand how people get to that point, and just as importantly, how to recognize the manipulation that exploits it. So many people suspect that we are in for a new “event” – on schedule – sometime between now and the 2008 election. Yet, these openly exprressed suspicions may have almost no effect on forestalling a rerun of the manipulation of 2001, because this underlying fear of death has been so closely linked to terrorism.
August 28th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
Namaste Andy, and all,
The good, the true, the beautiful (philokalia). Would that it were. The rushing TV format these days (7 mins of show – 4 mins of hypercommercials) may well be aimed at keeping watchers hyped constantly with materialist dreams. And 9/11 – the most gargantuan fear inducer imaginable. Mix and match. Even the very careful journalist Robert Fisk has begun to realize that the steel core of the towers could not have fallen as it did and he’s realized he must stop calling those who ask for a reinvestigation into the events “cranks.”
All the known capitalist theorists feared such a excessive drive for “MORE!” stuff. Stanly Milgram proved how easy it is to get ordinary people to torture as long as there is an “authority” saying, “Go on….” And, the “holy land” (more – the Ares land) was in constant fear that Armageddon was just minutes away which meant constant fear based watchfulness for one of the
Jewish factions who were killing each other more intently in Jerusalem while the Roman legions calmly camped outside and waited for the internecine fighting to ebb.
Fear, Materialism, Violence or the good, true and beautiful? Yet, those carefully programmed fearful ones, without the intervention of some gentle consciousness raising understanding may continue to to fall easy prey to the fearmongers, the hatemongers, the “BUY NOW” mongers. Lets hope the inevitable incompetence of the power brokers defuses any potential to create another BIG false flag event. Yes, Andy. I must paraphrase: America is Stuck in an invisible hole. There are none so blind.
Ananda
Ryokan (lee ferrell)
August 28th, 2007 at 3:41 pm
A consideration upon reading the Dalai Lama. “Wisdom grounded in compassion” is the only solution. Karen Armstrong’s _The Great Awakening_ notes that all the religions of the world center on the awakening of compassion. As a thought experiment, I wonder what would happen if we could offer the whole nation a “wisdom grounded in compassion” in some indetermenite way? Well, it seems very likely that one response would be defensive from the Rove reactionary model. “Why should I have compassion for terrorists?” And therein seems to lie the rub. Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed appeared in the face of intense disruptions all around them…., in the latter case, an extreme ecological upheaval which lasted many decades.
Mohammed’s family were well known in Medina and found all the food sources available and gave them all away in equal portions to all. When the food ran low, the people cried out for relief, which precipitated the transformation of Mohammed into a “spiritual” leader. The wars that followed, according to David Keys (researcher into ecological change an social impacts) were a result of resource depletion from a large volcanic eruption in 535 AD. It took 220 years to clear up.
Thus, offering wisdom grounded in compassion to all is just as abstract a notion and the positing of a prime mover. The early sutras in the Koran are compassionate. The problems mounted. Thus, the later sutras are violent and warlike. (Richard Dawkins) And for us, too, there are too many mounting problems and attitudes magnified by 24/7 news hyperbole. Again, it seems all we can do if offer compassion to those we encounter and be prepared to
parry intense interpersonal accusations, too often. Absolutism, political, spiritual, social, economic, legal, has no interest in compassion for any
beyond the in-group.
We are left with what we can do that we can effect given our resources. Organizing a mass movement to enlighten the beleaguered masses (job loss, downsizing , inflation, insurance woes, ecological concerns, unemployment, etc.) just does not seem feasible. How do we get them away from their TV’s and all the other material distractions?
Questions and considerations from the far horizon line. What has been called _The View From Nowhere_ (Tom Nagel).
August 28th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
A little speculation: To what depth did US politicians in the 30′s understand the politics of Germany under fascism? Did they only see imperial ambitions, resource grabs, troop strength, industrial capacity, submarines, reactionary motivations, capitalism gone amok;)? Or, being politicians, did they converse on the exploits of social psychology? Perhaps their concepts hadn’t passed objective testing, but the rewards of political insight predate the scientific method, no? If we give so much credence to the forefathers, why should we deny succeeding politicians brilliance? Why didn’t Roosevelt provoke the populace to the threat of the Reich? Why did he instead provoke the Axis?
Has not galvanizing fear been exploited long before the age of science and is it not an essential part of religion? Like the medicine man’s treatments mined by modern science, the politician’s and pastor’s “intuition” held and hold many secrets to be unveiled by social and neuro-science. Is it not intriguing that fire and brimstone fools people not just in the sense that it cons them but in the sense that it stupefies them? Does that make fear-mongering a crime?
Now imagine what it feels like to be politically aware outside this, a country so self-confident yet simultaneously fearful. A country which believed not ten years ago that it was at the forefront of technological civilization and had nowhere to go but up and now, bristling with nuclear weapons, is embroiled in an exhausting, maniacal, and bellicose coup d’etat. Roosevelt had hope of the competitive industrial capacity, restless workforce, and isolation; what does the rest of the world have hope of? So ironic that Russia is now less threatening than the victor of the titanic struggle. What has Bush demonstrated? The public lesson is that a lone superpower cannot be trusted, that absolute power corrupts absolutely, that for whatever reason, be it crooked leaders or immoral populace, a self-proclaimed democracy representing a 20th of the world population cannot be trusted to maintain its integrity. And the private lessons? One hopes that the class warfare incidentally (wink-wink) waged by Bush (and the upper class) is generally repellant and threatening. Though some in the American spirit we are most proud of are having limited success, the public reaction is still unfolding and the private lesson is in abeyance. But other nations not comfortable with the tools of fear must be concluding that isolation is not the answer, alliance is. The addict to power needs an intervention.
Isn’t it interesting that a nation which faced WWII had the “morality” which Andy harkens back to? Trapped in this fucking semi-cyclical dynamic, where the population is periodically reeducated, who denies that the state (as well as business) suppressed morality? We are sold Bushite preemptive warfare but denied preemptive morality. Andy diplomatically avoids noblesse oblige and rage and engages target practice on the craptan’s ship but where is the detailed analysis of the betrayal and abandonment, where is the admission that democracy is foreclosed by capital, where is the admission that the worst worshipers of idols make their money subverting morality? Who are your idols of probity, Andy, the ones that can withstand the spotlight of scepticism? It’s no wonder this culture turns to the soldier for guidance (yet is still deceived.)
Last night at a Code Pink gathering I was rewarded with a Christian denouncing Bushit’s tarnishing of her faith. What hasn’t the X?!?!X! soiled? What really troubles me, is the sense that the tyrant has liquidated our delusions. The capitalist jig is up and the leader of the capitalist fuckers, liquidated social capital: faith, honor, hope, integrity, compassion, trust, etc. before we realized how much they were wrapped up with our dreams of capitalist progress. Until the very end, corporate socialism indebted the citizenry.
August 30th, 2007 at 12:26 am
Interesting article. It occurs to me that this technique of evoking consciousness of death to produce conservatism would probably work better on people who already have a substantial fear of death. People who come from a religion with an angry judgmental God probably have more fear of death than people whose God is loving, forgiving, and compassionate. But, like an alcoholic who drinks more to escape his problems caused by drinking, a person with an angry God would seek more religion to assuage his fears…. and it becomes a cycle. Those of us with a more safe and benign sense of the universe might be less susceptible to this whole thing. What about the Consumer Hedonists? Their purely material view of the world may or may not increase their fear of death — but I would guess that the spiritual emptiness and sense of purposelessness that comes with Consumer Hedonism might serve to increase the fear of death.
I wonder if they have done any experiments to test this kind of thing?
September 8th, 2007 at 7:32 pm
I also think we should be saying: “The Bushites want to make cowards of Americans! They want you to be a coward! They keep saying ‘Be afraid, Be very afraid!’ Americans aren’t cowards! We have nothing to fear but fear itself!”