Chaos Theory

A Butterfly Flaps Its Wings: From the Powell Memo to the Eastman Memo and January 6th

Published on by Brynne VanHettinga

Part 10 of a 10-part Series:

What Are We To Do?

What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience.”

Hannah Arendt

We might ask ourselves whether America is a pathocracy—or might have been a pathocracy on January 6th? I believe we can safely say that America has never been a full pathocracy like Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, but has, at various points, demonstrated elements of pathocratic tendencies. Leaving aside the sordid issue of slavery, historical examples are the forced migration of Native Americans and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. More recently, we had official Dept. of Justice documents supporting the torture of detainees in Guantanamo (2003) and the inhumane treatment of migrants at the U.S. border, particularly children. At the local level, I have completely lost count of the number of unarmed Black people killed by police. 

As much as Americans convince themselves of their own exceptionalism, we are nonetheless subject to the same dark side of human nature as everyone else. However, we have avoided becoming a full-blown pathocracy because most of the aforementioned atrocities were eventually subject to popular backlash, investigations, and (sometimes) accountability. The January 6th coup attempt itself was prevented because there were honorable persons still occupying positions of power. Regardless of our own opinions of these individuals, the coup was unsuccessful because former Vice President Pence refused to do anything other than his duty to count the Electoral votes. Election officials in Georgia, Arizona and other states refused to submit to Trump’s threats and certified a valid election. Republican-appointed judges (some appointed by Trump himself) upheld the rule of law. If any one of these individuals had been dishonorable, we would likely not be living in the free United States of America anymore. Fortunately, legislators and other pro-democracy groups are working on “fixes” to our antiquated electoral system to prevent another January 6th-like coup attempt from happening again. 

Although America has not succumbed to a full-blown pathocracy, we seem to be at an unusually high point in a “hysteroidal cycle” (to use Lobaszewsky’s term). A sizeable minority of the population continues to subscribe to the Big Lie that Trump used to perpetuate his coup attempt, and a lot of media (right wing outlets and social media) continue to feed it. Even the right-wing oligarchs who stoked and fed the anger that ultimately resulted in January 6th admit they may have created a monster they can no longer control. Shortly after the 2020 election, Charles Koch admits to “screwing up” —and this was before January 6th 

A significant percentage of the US population subscribes to either (or both) Q-Anon and election denial, which represents a disconnection from the reality that most of the rest of us live in. Cult deprogrammers have been overwhelmed with requests for help from family members concerned about one of their own who has gone down the rabbit hole. Most of us simply do not have the skills and training to deal with this level of delusion. Logic, along with arguments about facts and evidence will not work. Rather, the strategy is to help these folks re-learn to think for themselves and connect the dots using a form of “reverse engineering” of the same tactics that led them into the cult. These folks must be able to see a way back to their old lives, which will never happen if they are confronted with shame and humiliation.

 

In order to heal and recover from a pathocracy, Lobaszewsky advises us to build a society based on an equitable distribution of resources; to promote education, particularly education about the human capacity for evil; and to encourage the formation of social bonds across diverse groups. Ironically, Lobaszewsky urges us to refrain from “moralizing,” but rather view evil from the dispassionate position that it will always be with us and the best we can do is to understand and manage it.  

In essence, we will have to build solidarity out of the post-January 6th remains of a tattered social fabric and a dis-United States of America. It is an understatement to say that this will be hard to do. When doing his own research into the nature of macrosocial evil, Lobaszewsky reported having to suppress his own revulsion and “moralizing impulses” to maintain scientific objectivity. He admits that his training in psychiatry (which most of us don’t have) helped him with this. How can we re-connect people back to reality and the fundamentals of prosocial thinking—especially if they hate us? If we only return the hate, then the dark side will have prevailed.

We can begin by recognizing that many (but not all) of those who stormed the Capitol on January 6th are both perpetrators and victims. I personally will probably never find it within myself to forgive the people who planned the coup and knew the “Big Lie” for what it was but continued to push it anyway. Easier to forgive are the folks who simply voted for Trump—perhaps they did not follow politics closely or habitually voted Republican no matter who the candidate was. A little harder (but not impossible) to forgive are those who continued to support Trump even in the face of overwhelming evidence of corruption. Here, the issue of blameworthiness depends on how much of the delusion is the result of willful ignorance (I have to believe Trump is right because he gives me permission to hate the people I don’t like). 

The hardest thing we will have to confront is the huge propaganda machine that continues to poison individual minds and our body politic to this day. The oligarchs are still pumping it out, but now they have been joined by hostile foreign governments, who now have all the evidence they need that America can be destroyed by disinformation. Disinformation that taps into the darkest recesses of the human limbic brain. Disinformation that makes the media oligarchs richer. Disinformation that keeps the rest of us divided, not just on values, but on the very definition of reality. America can be brought to its knees without firing a single missile or sending a single soldier, because Americans can be made to do it to themselves and each other.

Holding those responsible for January 6th accountable to the law and fixing the loopholes in our electoral system is a good start—but it is only a start. The dark side of human nature (what some religions term “original sin”) is probably something we will never be able to fix. But we can come up with ways to contain it. We certainly should be able to find ways to structure society where we don’t reward it. Perhaps we could require some sort of character test (complete with documented history) for every candidate for public office above a certain level. Perhaps we could articulate limits to the First Amendment, permitting (well-defined and narrowly tailored) restrictions on speech that is both false and provably harmful to public health. 

We stand at a crucial juncture in humanity’s history. I do not know what the result will be. But somewhere, a butterfly flaps its wings.

A Butterfly Flaps Its Wings: From the Powell Memo to the Eastman Memo and January 6th

Published on by Brynne VanHettinga

Part 9 of a 10-part Series:

The Pitchfork Politics of Conspiracy and Hate

“The road to fascism and dictatorship is paved with failures of economic policy to serve the needs of the general public.”

 Tim Wu in The Curse of Bigness:  Antitrust in the New Gilded Age (2018)

On January 6th, it was mostly White men—members of the most privileged group in American society—who were now the ones threatening the “system.” Yet, these were not the billionaires and oligarchs—the “masters of the universe”—whose primary objective is the protection of obscene wealth. This was a protest against a government that is viewed as being unresponsive to the People. If we are completely honest, we might admit to some sympathy for this sentiment, if not for the action. How many of us have argued that our elected representatives know nothing about the struggles of our daily lives and care even less. How many of us have participated in peaceful protests or rallies at the Capitol (as this writer has), which (even if unlikely and not caused by any of us) could have turned violent?

Moreover, imagine what any one of us might do if we genuinely believed the election was stolen. Indeed, there was a small-but-non-zero probability that Trump may have simply declared himself the winner (regardless of actual results) and barricaded himself in the White House behind a force of military loyalists and armed MAGA vigilantes. What would we have done in such a situation? Certainly, the Capitol would not have been a target, nor would January 6th have been a day of any particular significance. There likely would have been mass protests, and some of these likely would have turned violent. Although the riot at the Capitol on January 6th was the inflection point that climaxed a slow but insidious threat to American democracy, we know that this could have taken any number of alternative paths. Former Vice-President Mike Pence should take serious note of possible alternate outcomes.

 

Michael Cohen predicts Trump will not leave White House if he loses on 2/27/2019

January 6th is a unique event in more ways than the obvious. Post-January 6th analysis has focused on criminal prosecutions and reforms to the Electoral Count Act, with the goal of insuring that such a thing does not happen again. As necessary as these legalistic remedies are, they do not address the extreme level of delusion and hate that has infected a sizeable minority of the population. As attorneys who participated in the coup plot are now being charged with “weaponizing their law licenses” by bar disciplinary authorities, harder to address has been the weaponization of the First Amendment. 

At what point should free speech rights yield to public safety hazards? In the case of Covid misinformation, we can point to this as creating a threat to public health, and even human life. We can point to “hate speech,” that results in “hate crimes” and acts of stochastic terrorism where people are killed. In some cases, the public harm is less acute and even harder to establish causation. For decades, we have been subjected to a corporate media that, at first, focused on manufacturing insatiable wants to keep us working harder. In the beginning, many of us in the (formerly robust) middle class may have been able to afford the occasional advertising-induced splurge. What was the harm in wasting money buying things we didn’t need? As the middle class was hollowed out and most of us found ourselves working harder for less, the corporate media shifted to the manufacturing of consent, a Panglossian propaganda model touting glamorous lifestyles, justifying the infallibility of “markets,” and blaming everyone who isn’t already rich for their own shortcomings.

This strategy enabled the oligarchs to maintain a hold on power for decades. But people will continue to work harder for less only so long. At some point, most folks were no longer willing to vote on single moral/cultural issues like abortion, even when the opposition was labeled as baby-killers. New and more heinous bogeymen had to be created. It started with pedophilia—which, unfortunately there are plenty of real-life examples. But—oops—some of the pedophiles are doing “our” bidding, so even more loathsome (and patently incredible) stories were made up about deep state pedophile rings drinking the blood of children in the back of a pizza restaurant in New Jersey. The Q-conspiracy took on a life of its own.

The Q-Anon movement appeared after decades of right-wing disparagement of government. Government is portrayed as an impediment to freedom, but this version of “freedom” is about allowing the privileged to do whatever they want unimpeded by obligations to society at large. Freedom for the rest of us means the “freedom” to work harder, with the remote chance that we too, might become obscenely wealthy. The purpose of “public” schools was to provide a training ground for technocratic job skills useful to the corporatocracy. High level positions in academia, government and law are reserved for those educated at elite institutions—and who are carefully screened to insure they subscribe to elite values. The hoi polloi are not privy to learning the history and mechanics of government, a philosophical ethos of public service, or the critical thinking skills necessary to challenge the status quo.

The working class is not only kept ignorant of how government functions, but is programmed to view government as the enemy—a “deep state” which is comprised of elites who are completely disconnected and disinterested in their daily lives and welfare. Which, unfortunately, contains some element of truth, but they are unable to discern the whole picture. Success is determined in a hypercompetitive environment of Darwinian survival of the fittest and everyone for himself. This prevents development of solidarity among the working rabble, which also prevents them from forming or joining labor unions—which have also been demonized. This creeping degradation of working and civic life erodes hope in the future.

Since the civil rights era of the 1960s, previously marginalized groups—BIPOC, women and LGBTQ—were able to make some visible gains in socio-economic advancement.  Although still in the minority, women are now CEOs of major companies.  There is a record number of women in Congress, and four women now sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Income of Blacks and other minorities has also improved, but inequality remains high. Although income and status for women and minorities has improved over the past several decades, they have nonetheless not caught up with the income and wealth levels of white men. From the vantage point of rural and working-class white males—whose incomes have stagnated or declined—what they observe is that some “others” are gaining while they are losing—which creates resentment and polarization.

The economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton describe a heretofore unacknowledged epidemic they term Deaths of Despair. They trace a rising death rate from suicide, drug overdose and alcoholic liver disease (a slower form of suicide)—particularly among middle aged white men without college degrees—to declining real wages, insecurity, deprivation, alienation, and loss of hope for the future. For the first time in a century, American life expectancies fell in 2019 (pre-Covid) and 2020. Although the drop in life expectancies was larger for most minority groups, it fell 2.4% for whites. Even when life expectancies were increasing, Americans had lower life expectancies and poorer health than citizens in other high-income countries. Moreover, beginning in the 1990s, life expectancies in the United States began to diverge across geographic regions, and these have been correlated with political party domination. Between 2001 and 2019, the absolute difference in mortality rates between Republican leaning and Democratic leaning counties jumped by 541%.

The acknowledgement (and discussion) of extreme and growing inequality is found primarily among academics or non-mainstream media sources. Government and academic centers that collect data typically focus on datasets and formats designed to be useful to businesses or “economic development” planners. Other than occasional, fragmented stories or articles, popular culture and mainstream media has developed no language or discourse to address how and why the “system” is not working for so many people. Most Americans know (or more likely, “feel” on a gut level) that they are working harder for less, and that life has become more precariatized and harsher. Because they have no way to even articulate the angst—let along avail themselves of systems and institutions to help figure out why and what to do—they look for someone to blame.

This alienated angst is juxtaposed against a media saturated in relentless optimism, Wall Street boosterism, jingoistic hubris, and celebration of wealth. The message is if your own life doesn’t measure up to the roaring success that is all around you, it is because you either need to work harder, “market” yourself more aggressively, or are simply a loser. This is more than a disorienting cognitive dissonance, but amounts to a subtle assault on the core of one’s own human dignity. A combination of material, social, and psychological degradation primes a significant subset of the affected population to devolve into scapegoating and conspiracy theories—which can lead eventually to disconnection from reality. Or, what Dr. Lobaszewsky would term a hysteroidal high point.

There is a spiteful attitude among the alienated white working class that goes above and beyond mere selfishness and greed we usually associate with plutocrats. This perversion of (perhaps justified) grievance is expressed in the sentiment that if my own life is miserable and my job sucks then no one else (especially if they are BIPOC, LGBTQ, or a different religion) should have a decent life or job either. So…,we will vote against minimum wage increases, employee rights, job safety, expanded health care, environmental protection or anything else designed to make the lives of the “least of these” better. We would rather deny these things to “the other”—which also serves to deny them to ourselves—because the only way we can feel good about ourselves is to ensure that someone (or everyone) else is miserable.  

The words of Katherine Stewart (The Power Worshippers at page 277) emphasize many of the same things that Lobaszewsky observed in Nazi and Soviet-occupied Poland:

“Reactionary authoritarianism doesn’t come out of nowhere. It draws much of its destructive energy from social and economic injustices that leave a few with too much power and many others with too little hope. Rising economic inequality and insecurity has created a large mass of people, on all ends of the economic spectrum, who are anxious for their future and predisposed to favor calls for unity around an identity that targets others for vilification and degradation, [thus elevating] to power a small group of people with the means and desire to control the social order for their own benefit.”

 

A Butterfly Flaps Its Wings: From the Powell Memo to the Eastman Memo and January 6th

Published on by Brynne VanHettinga

Part 8 of a 10-part Series:

The Toxic Combination of Psychopathic Elites

and Hysteroidal Masses

“When communities lose the capacity for psychological reason and moral criticism, the processes of the generation of evil are intensified…until everything reverts to ‘bad times.’”

Dr. Andrew Lobaszewsky

We understand the motivation of the oligarchs: Justification of privilege, protection of wealth over the well-being of workers, keeping the plebes divided and working harder for less without protest. But what happened on January 6th was not entirely the work of oligarchs (although some of them were happy to fund it). Yes, at least one insurrectionist flew into DC on a private jet, but a snapshot of insurrectionist demographics (94% white and 86% male) indicates that—while 85% of them were employed–only 13% were “business owners” and 28% held white-collar jobs, suggesting that nearly half of them (44%) were working class folks.

Before we segue from the motivations of the American oligarchy to the inner psychological world of the American working class, we will first visit the research of Dr. Andrew Lobaszewsky. Lobaszewsky was a trained in Poland as a psychiatrist during the time Poland was invaded by Hitler and then dominated by Soviet Russia. Instead of focusing on military and political leadership, Lobaszewsky wanted to know what was going on the psyches of ordinary people who were subjected to oppressive, authoritarian regimes. When Lobaszewsky left Poland and came to the U.S. in the early 1980s, he compiled his research to describe what he termed “ponerology,” or the science of macrosocial evil.

While completing his studies in psychiatry, Lobaszewsky began to observe changes in the thought patterns and worldview of his friends and colleagues. Distinguished academics were suddenly disavowing their own prior research in order to accommodate the new “party line.” As Lobaszewsky and his colleagues witnessed what they called “personality disintegration” or “transpersonification” among themselves, they wanted to use their training to help them understand what was happening to them (and most everyone else). Lobaszewsky reports that he and his colleagues had to keep “abhorrence and fear under control,” as well as the “natural moralizing reflexes of revulsion” as they delved into the dark side of humanity.

Similar to the operation of modern terrorist “cells,” Lobaszewsky and his fellow researchers conducted their work in secret and did not even know the identity of others, communicating through an underground messaging system. At one point, Lobaszewsky tossed the collected manuscript into a furnace after receiving a warning about an impending search by authorities only moments before. A second copy was given to an American tourist to be delivered to the Vatican, but its whereabouts are still unknown to this day. Only decades later was he able to compile the findings of the underground research from memory and have it translated from Polish.

According to Lobaszewsky, somewhere between one and six percent of the human population is psychopathic. Lobaszewsky follows the “disease model” of mental illness and does not blame these individuals for what he asserts is a genetic anomaly. Psychopaths don’t always turn into serial killers, but psychopaths who are born with access to wealth or special talent can cause a huge amount of suffering and even death without committing any overt acts themselves. The main identifier of a psychopath is a complete lack of conscience.

At some point, a psychopath will realize he (it is usually a “he,” but sometimes a “she”) is different from other people. The psychopath tends to deal with this self-realization of difference in one of two ways. The psychopath may attempt to fit into normal society, and can become quite skilled at mimicking “appropriate” human emotions that they do not themselves experience. Alternatively (and more dangerously), they will attempt to re-make everyone else in their own image. Feelings like guilt or concern about the welfare of others are reframed as “abnormal” or signs of “weakness.” One can readily intuit how either of these approaches could serve the psychopath in a rise to power in a modern, capitalist society.

In modern times, Dr. Robert Hare has refined the concept of psychopathy, which now includes (in addition to lack of conscience) lack of empathy; egocentricity; pathological lying; disregard for the law and social convention; shallow emotion; and a history of victimizing others. Dr. Hare has developed a psychopathy checklist (which has been determined to be reliable by others in the mental health professions) as a diagnostic tool, which is mostly used on adult males in the U.S. prison system.

Lobaszewsky’s research found that about another 12 percent of the human population is “characteropathic.” These folks are not fully psychopathic, but have hereditary (and sometimes latent) personality defects that can be triggered by exposure/interaction with “deviant” individuals or unhealthy environments.  Lobaszewsky argues that characteropathy can be triggered when an individual lives in a society that does not allow them to fully express their talents and skills (e.g., underemployment). The question that Lobaszewsky attempts to answer is how an entire society or culture can become mentally sick and dangerous when less than 20% of the population exhibit either psychopathic or characterological traits.

Psychopathic personalities tend to thrive in modern, materialistic, success-oriented cultures. Positions atop hierarchies are always attractive to psychopaths, and as organizations become ever more immense, the rewards of ascendance within them become larger as well (not only more money to be made, but more power to control others). Psychopaths often seek such positions in either commerce or politics (where money and power can be traded) or large, impersonal organizations, where they can manipulate others to assist them in seizing power. Moreover, psychopaths are driven to impose their values on others, promoting ideals of greed, selfishness, and opportunism as “normal,” while values like empathy are considered “abnormal” or only for “losers.”

However, societal ponerization (when a society itself becomes evil) does not happen simply when psychopaths ascend to positions of power. According to Lobaszewsky, societies experience what he calls a “hysteroidal cycle.” Lobaszewsky’s cycle begins with so-called “good times,” or a period of apparent prosperity. But the visible and publicly celebrated prosperity is almost always rooted in injustice to one or more out-groups. Here in the U.S., the Gilded age (1870 to 1900) and the Roaring Twenties (1920-1929) were such times. New ideologies may arise which attempt to address the injustice, but the ideologies themselves become perverted by psychopathic individuals in pursuit of power. Psychopaths themselves have no specific ideology (having been identified among Nazis, Communists, capitalists, and even religious leaders), but will adopt a locally popular ideology to suit their own purposes.

During these “good times,” the majority of people lose the ability to think critically. So long as most people have enough and those who are inferiorized can be scapegoated, protest is minimized. Lobaszewsky describes the process of ponerization as incremental—“one evil opens the door to another”—which may be undiscernible in its early stages. As pathological thinking becomes normalized (usually by persons in positions of power and influence), it spreads and becomes ever more pathological. Characteropathic leaders are replaced with psychopathic ones. Under the new leadership, group members are subjected to increasing scrutiny and tests for ideological purity. When psychopathic leaders have gained control over a society—both through their own machinations in addition to the acquiescence (and even support) of the hysteroidal masses—the society has become a full-blown pathocracy.  

How would we recognize a pathocracy? Taking lessons from Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, one sure sign is when a government engages in a campaign to exterminate large numbers of its own people. How could a pathocracy be installed when we live in a democracy?  It is here we have to understand the process whereby the masses become “hystericized.” Shortly after January 6th, the New Zealand Herald suggested that those who stormed the Capitol “could have had a mass psychosis.” The greater concern was that this process of “radicalization” was not confined to the United States. The “conspiracy information ecosystem is highly international,” with the same tactics being deployed by ISIS, white nationalists and Christian crusaders. It is being driven by AI algorithms that target the darkest human impulses because this is what drives the growth of social media platforms.

Lobaszewsky asserts that these processes are always cyclical. An established pathocracy will not last forever because all pathocracies contain the seeds of their own destruction. The sheer level of suffering among the majority of psychologically normal people will eventually wake them from their hysteroidal stupor. A resistance will arise, but it will not come about as a great counter-revolution, but rather a “stormy process of regeneration.” As ordinary people struggle to survive in a pathocracy, they begin to see the things they have in common where they may have formerly focused on their differences.