Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) said new polling data suggests that supporters of Donald Trump are lurching into “cultism” territory.Kinzinger, now a CNN senior political commentator, during an appearance on “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer,” was responding to a question from the host over po...
I have to admit that I have a bit of a failure of empathy when it comes to people who get sucked into cults. I understand many of them suffer from various psychological vulnerabilities, and if you’re talking about someone with extremely low self-esteem or certainly an intellectual impairment, then fine, I get how they might be duped by a cult leader. But if you’re basically mentally healthy, the signs of cultdom seem so obvious to me that I have a hard time understanding why they don’t see them. I accept that they don’t, but it’s difficult for me to understand.
As such, this whole Trump thing has put me in a kind of political existential dilemma: I don’t know that I will ever be able to see Trump supporters (~90% of conservatives) as mentally reliable people from now on. I don’t mean to be dramatic; I go back and forth on this (hence it being a dilemma). At times, I tell myself, “it’s not that bad, it can’t be that bad,” but then another poll comes out reporting that 3/4 of these folks really are forehead-deep in the Kool Aid.
The sad thing is this is my field! I work in mental health; I’m supposed to understand how this shit happens, and when it’s a small group (like most cults) I…guess I just sort of write it off as an anomaly. But this is over 1/3 of the U.S. population. I’ve done a little research and the prevailing explanation seems to be groupthink and echo chambers—Trump supporters are just surrounded by each other and so when everyone you know seems to think these things are true, you reason that they can’t all be wrong and agree based on that heuristic. But…really? No critical thinking?
I accept that this is a failing on my part though, because there are other examples of this in history. I guess seeing it play out in front of my eyes is just too surreal for me to handle. I don’t know. I guess the scariest part is the idea that in theory this can happen to any group of people. Leftists are not immune, we just haven’t had it happen to us yet. It’s a truly depressing thought that our brains have this kind of innate software bug, but then again I guess it does explain a lot about human history.
It’s quickly stomped out by groupthink. Other people point to lack of education, but I don’t think that’s correct. They are surrounded by Republicans. All their friends and family are republicans. Most people in their towns are.
Going against the group means being ostracized. They see the amount if hate and vitriol being cast at the others and they are terrified that it will be cast at them. So they always go along with the group, never against it. They can think critically but they won’t ever do so out loud.
Look at how even some far right people have been painted as liberal hacks by Republicans just for not being far right enough.
They are absolutely terrified that will happen to them.
There was an episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast that interviewed someone (sociologist maybe?) about masks maybe in 2021. The tribalism of it all was their explanation. Signaling that you’re part of the group is tremendously important for us, probably evolutionarily so. Who’s going to protect you when a lion tries to pick you off?
Which brings up triggering the lizard brain responses by constant broadcasting angry and all news about violence or scary others. Which appears to be the main recruitment tool.
that’s my observation too. Having lived in several parts of the world with very different religions and values… conformity is incredibly important to many people. The proven structure is to market some other group to hate.
it would seem to me that the intersection between certain flavors of religion, authoritarianism, faux patriotism, hate of the “other” and self loathing is a perfect catalyst for this national cult nightmare.
I agree, it is a sort of bug and deep down I think these people either want a rigid hierarchical society (where they are at least not the bottom rung) or are 100% willing to burn everything and everyone down to the ground - its binary with zero nuance or room for compromise. trump is the perfect guy for them.
Sociological analysis of Germany in the 1930’s and 40’s would agree with you, certainly, but I still find it a little hard to fathom. I think part of it may be that I’m just very resistant to viewing anyone as so wise/intelligent that I would put them up on a pedestal and regard them with awe. Maybe there’s a sense of comfort in believing that this other person has our complex, confusing world figured out and you just need to follow them, they’ll lead you through the morass of conflicting ideas. And yes, simplistic, us-vs-them, good-vs-evil narratives are a much easier sell to just about everyone, but it’s still a staggering thought to me that 75% of conservatives lack the ability to see through that bullshit. I mean, these are real people. Homo sapiens.
Fuck.
I tend to witness it like you describe too. I do not see people saying “oh, we were wrong, the pandemic wasn’t going to be over by Easter 2000 and it went on for years”… or really kind of admit that Fox News mislead them, or Alex Jones is a liar and they want to make sure that skills like his don’t keep influencing the next generation.
Why can’t people blame advertising for being fat… do you really need McDonald’s and Burger King reminding you all the time that they have food? At what point do you realize the influence that can be scientifically measured with advertising is real. What would the side-effects be of too powerful of advertising, Donald Trump? Obesity icon? If an advert does not work, they change technique, media outlet, agency, or they run it at a different time, they very much measure the increased sales. At what point do you look at your brain and go - oh, I can’t defend against weaponized snack food and soda. It’s engineered to make me crave it.
It’s a very personal experience. It really doesn’t take long to be exposed to something, maybe even a movie, through advertising instead of a friend actually recommending it to you personally based on experience.
why would you want to live knowing there are profiting manipulating you to purchase things you don’t really want and vote for people that don’t deserve it, etc. At what point do you stand up and realize that those people are organized and learning what other people will accept and using it on you? What kind of freedom is this, and why do you want everyone else to be treated this way too.
sigh.
To further your point, there’s a reason Republican law makers and red states are attacking and demonizing education, and stepping it down. Critical thinking skills aren’t really developed in a lot of curricula as it is, it’s a lot of date memorization and fact regurgitation unless a student takes an AP or honors class or their school’s equivalent.
A lot of people, especially politicians and law makers, don’t seem to understand that the best tools to give students is the ability to think critically, do actual research (not just watch jimbob’s YouTube rants), media literacy, and to question what their leaders tell them. The amount of times I’ve asked for sources from right-wingers and they give me links to articles and studies published by organizations with an obvious bias or funded by groups with an obvious agenda and they don’t understand how that impacts their credibility.
The same thing with abortions. You really think Republican politicians care that much about abortions? Their loudest constituents might on “religious” grounds. But for them it helps prevent an educated voting population from growing. Forcing a woman to birth and care for a child impacts their ability to get an education.
A lot of it just comes down to educating people with the proper skills rather than preparing them for some standardized test.
I’ve made this observation myself in the past, and I agree that religious leaders and authoritarians have a clear reason for wanting an uneducated constituency. I’d even agree that conservative leaders are more likely than liberal ones to have these traits. However, I’m wary of thinking of my opposition in cartoonish stereotypes. I don’t doubt that there’s some truth to this, but that’s a far cry from saying the GOP opposes education to keep their flock in line.
That being said,
to the extent that it’s true some politicians do oppose education to keep their constituents dumb, I don’t think it’s because they don’t understand the importance of critical thinking, etc. To the contrary, I think it’s because they understand its importance that they oppose it.
Again, I’m dubious that most Republicans and/or anti-abortion folks have motivations this cartoonishly evil. I don’t agree with them, but I understand why the pro-life argument is so compelling to a lot of people: they think they’re saving a life and abortion is murder. That’s all it really takes to get people who don’t understand the science to be anti-abortion. It’s not really about patriarchal control over women to most of them; they just honestly feel a fertilized human embryo = human being. To that end, I even understand why it makes single-issue voters of so many; if you accept the premise, abortion really is murder and pro-choice folks are monsters. Again, I don’t agree, but I understand it.
Talking about politicians not understanding the importance includes all politicians. No Child Left Behind set the groundwork for standardized testing and removing funding from schools that performed poorly.
Republicans in power are constantly gerrymandering districts, lying about statistics they know are wrong like blue states having higher crime, claiming that CRT is being taught in public schools to indoctrinate their kids, punishing students who talk about their sexuality (especially if it’s not heterosexual), ban books, incite insurrections, and they never call out extremist tterrorists for what they are, because they are their own creation. They literally called themselves domestic terrorists to downplay the extremist violence that has come out of their party.
The vast majority of domestic terrorism in the last 30 years comes from the far-right. From Timothy McVeigh, to El Paso.
I think you underestimate the powerful in the GOP. They’re not uneducated. Rupert Murdoch studied philosophy and politics at Oxford and had a bust of Lenin in his dorm. DeSantis graduated magna cum laude from Yale and cum laude from Harvard Law.
These people aren’t dumb, backwater reactionaries. You might think it’s cartoonish, but there’s a reason that so much extreme policies and laws have been spreading through red states. Roe v Wade was a 50 year precedent, and then Alito’s opinion was leaked, something that rarely happens, which led to many states passing trigger laws.
I’m not saying everything is planned out and calculated. But it’s not just a happy accident that more and more right wing politicians have embraced extremism.
Wasnt “No Child Left Behind” a Bush era policy?
It was an act passed through congress with overwhelming support from both sides and co-authored by Republicans and Democrats. Bush signed it into law just like the president does with most acts that pass with a vast majority of support.
The GOP opposes education, and always has, in order to maintain a steady supply of wage slaves.
The Walton family, of WalMart, funds campaigns for school voucher programs and donates to private schools. Only the wealthy should get an education, that is, if you’re the largest employer of minimum wage labor in America.
Critical thinking requires a certain level of intellect. That is the main reason why Republicans basically want to destroy the educational system.
Home schooling, subpar school books, underpaid and frustrated teachers, to little money to actually afford the basic educational materials in schools - the goal is clear. Apart from a few select expensive schools, the masses should be held down education wise.
And it continues after school, too. Murderous tuition fees and student debt are designed to keep the poor down low, and the few less well off who managed to survive school without succumbing to docile dumbness are kept in nearly forever debt, preventing them to get far and pressing them into subpar jobs just to pay back those loans.
I definitely will never trust a conservative for the rest of my life, nor will I tolerate them in my social circles. At best, they have terrible judgement, and a lot of them have made it clear that they’d like to inflict physical violence on people like me and people I care about, so staying away from them is a matter of personal safety.
I’m sure there are some people who identify as conservative are harmless, but even if they are, I can’t count on them to stay that way.
The problem is that right wing radio and fox primed their audience to believe bullshit. Then media changed and people got their news from youtube and Twitter. Fox has been struggling to regain the narrative but they can’t.
Propaganda. In this case it’s designed to make people angry about an issue and in angry people critical thinking shuts down and falls back on group opinions. Any rational argument from outside that group then becomes an attack on the commonly held beliefs.
It is not you, it’s a big paradigm shift in how we should rationalize about society and the human race. I used to believe that 10% of the population was truely dumb, and used to believe I was a pessimist. Truth is it’s closer to 30%, and I think I am being generous.
Critical thinking is not a cornerstone of our DNA. Better arguments and better “facts” won’t change the mind of those people. Critical thinking is important to you, not to them.
That doesn’t explain it for me, because in order to chock Trump support up to low intellect, you have to reason that the intelligence distribution somehow tracks with political alignment, and that just isn’t the case. No, calling them all stupid is too easy.
You probably know way more about intellect than I do. I admit I have very little tolerance for mentally lazy or emotional arguments, whether I think the person can do better.
Let me put it this way. If you can’t do abstract thinking, or if you believe all complex issues have simple answers, answers which of course require you to twist reality to justify your simple answer, I am gonna categorize you as a fairly simple-minded person. You can still posses great domain-specific kbowledge regarding certain things, you can still be a friendly and good person, but I don’t think such folks should be doing the thinking.
Anyway, I wish I was still as optimistic on people’s intelligence as you are. It seems to me like you also don’t want it to be true. Sucks either way.
I understand. It’s a very tempting explanation and all the more so when you’re trying to explain behavior and thinking that doesn’t make much rational sense, if any. My point was simply that we’ve done many studies testing IQ across conservative/liberal lines and there’s no clear pattern that indicates one side is substantially more intelligent than the other (studies have found statistically significant differences, but the point is it’s not as simple as liberal=smart, conservative=dumb). Imagine a standard distribution (bell curve) of intelligence scores. The left-most third of that curve would be your 30% of the population that are “truly dumb.” In order for that to explain Trump supporters, all of them would have to be in that left-most third of the curve, which would mean liberals would make up the vast majority of the rest of the curve. We’re talking about ~70% of conservatives being in the bottom third of said distribution. If that was actually the case, society itself would look very different, like the wealth distribution between liberals and conservatives would be totally lopsided in favor of liberals, you’d barely see any conservatives on college campuses no matter where you were in the country, etc. It’s just too lopsided an IQ distribution to be realistic.
The explanation is that the cognitive errors Trump supporters exhibit exist in all of us more or less independent of IQ. Einstein was just as prone to investment bias as the average person, for example. In short, even the very smart can think very stupid things. What’s mind-blowing to me is that such an immensely large proportion of the country has bought into the same brand of extreme, anti-reality, willfully blind bullshit in such a short time period. The article is right: this is exactly what you observe in cults, but on a scale literally a million times larger. There’s a reason cults tend to start small and never grow beyond that size: most people can spot a charlatan when they meet one. In order for cults to grow into recognized religions, it typically takes time, because they have to grow slowly, building up a critical mass of members, which then lend the cult legitimacy. What doesn’t make sense to me about Trumpers is that they seemed to buy into his bullshit in huge numbers literally overnight. I don’t get that. It don’t make no sense.
I think to your last two sentences: it only seems like overnight. 2-3 decades of conservative talk radio and 24-7 Fox News amplified by the echo chambers created by social media and YouTube, laid the foundation of this.
Add in an undercurrent of racism and having a popular black president, a societal push for diversity and inclusion, etc. Not to mention policies and government actively working to get rid of social safety nets and creating an economica environment where people are struggling. They are ready to feel attacked.
All you need is a megalomaniac who is willing to exploit it for their own gain.
60+ years. They killed Kennedy to get Nixon, they killed Martin and Malcolm, they killed RFK, they sandbagged Carter with help from Iran to get Reagan, they did the Clinton impeachment and the Brooks Brothers Riot to get Bush, they lied about WMD to get perpetual wars in the middle east, they threw everything at Obama, they gave social media data on a hundred million Americans to Russia in order to elect Trump, and trying to steal the election is only their latest crime against democracy.
It’s possible they also killed Pac and Big, and did 9/11.
Same people, and their daddies.
My gripe with IQ is that it is not the complete picture of intelligence, and more so that it is even hard to agree on what is intelligence exactly. e.g: Are you truly intelligent if you have good pattern recognition, but poor EQ, and willingly opt to listen to your emotional brain all of the time.
I am not saying that trump supporters occupy perfectly the left side of the distribution, be it for IQ or whatever good measure of intelligence we might have. Obviously intelligence is also not just it. Lazy, proud, hateful and people with a tendency for authoritarianism will vote for trump, they’re not all ‘truly’ stupid, but I think most truly simple-minded folks at a big risk of falling prey to cults and populism.
To add onto this, there is a correlation between being uneducated and supporting trump. There is also a correlation between education and IQ (if that matters). It is not perfect, so it is not all supporters. The way I see it, you can still support trump if you’re very intelligent, but also cruel. Or if you know better but you lack the EQ to go over your family values and your entourage of cultists.
I guess, my point is that IQ fails to address what we observe in society, because IQ lacks one or many of the components needed to truly draw conclusions from it. When I call people ‘truly dumb’ for being susceptible to cults and populism movements, I am sort of stretching the definition of intelligence, which is the point I tried to make in the previous post. I don’t need to know where someone is located on a normal distribution to make a judgment of intellect, because, to me, by definition, if you’re blind to objective reality, fails at the simplest syllogism exercise when it comes to your beliefs, and let hate flow through you and everything else, then you’re ‘dumb’ to me. You’re that 1 out of 3 person who I can’t rely on for anything, whether you posses the ability for critical thinking and simply decide not to use it for your whole life, if whether you’re simply incapable, in both cases I can’t, and might never be able to reason with you.
I believe the reasons why a cult which such blatant cognitive errors to adapt is that there is really more 'dumb" and unreliable people that we’d like to believe, and it could happen anytime anywhere, you just need to right “brand” of stupid shit at the right time, and you can count on 30% of the population being potential buyers.
IQ, if we’re talking about leadership, is dangerous without emotional intelligence, empathy.
I think a big part of it is that it takes some intellectual humility to admit when you’ve been duped.
For a party of anti-intellectuals, this would mean accepting that everyone who had been calling out Trump as a lying criminal was right.
It’s easier for those who’ve dug-in to double-down than to face that kind of reckoning.
They get validation too from likes and retweets. On the internet, you can find people who will amplify anything.
Truth cannot compete in such spaces, especially when it’s their most emotional, instant reactions to complex issues and problems.
Truth has to have a material component. It can’t just be a bunch of people echoing information unmoored from reality, even if one person is right.
Two people can argue which direction the sun rises in forever. If they live in a cave it becomes an entirely academic debate. Only when you’re trying to get a sense of direction under the sky does this information carry relevance.
Alas we have, though not with someone as obviously vapid and self-serving as Trump
Who were you thinking of?
Perhaps Kim Il Sung, and there definitely has been some weirdly intense idolization/hero-worship of Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Ho Chi Minh. Not saying this is all or even the majority of MLs, Maoists, etc., but it definitely happens. An example of this is demonstrated by the short essay “Why Stalin is a God?” by Alexandra Elbakyan on her website Sci-Hub.
Also the preservation and public display of their corpses is creepy and weird.
Have you seen Hexbear?
Haven’t even heard of it.
It’s a left-wing instance filled with tankies, who behave much like a cult. Stay away.
Okay, but that isn’t anywhere near the scope of what I’m talking about.
“Left wing.”
Half of them are one Russian guy with 250 smart phones in his basement.
One popular method for inducting people into cults is called “Love Bombing”. You give the subject a bunch of positive attention, you occupy their social time with in-group events, and you generally just make them feel good when they’re around other members of the group.
People who don’t experience much empathy or friendship in the outside world are easy targets for this approach, because they don’t know where else to get this kind of warmth and affection.
A community devoid of empathy is ripe for cults to ply their trade.
I spent a lot of effort facing the history of humanity was all over the globe people were cultist towards stories that had no basis in realty. They set food laws, clothing rules, marriage - all based on childhood stories they are raised on - much like the spoken/written language they were raised on.
I think people raised on Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, Fox News - aren’t much different. It seems the human pattern is global and people who actually want to take a science thinking attitude of sincere facts and honest leaders.
What’s you’re reasoning for this? My experience pans out differently
I’m not sure I understand your question. In the segment of my comment that you quoted, I was simply saying that it’s difficult for me to fathom that 75% of Trump supporters (and ~90% of conservatives support Trump) report having a cult-like devotion to him, to the point that they simply believe anything he says like it’s the gospel truth. That’s roughly 1/3 of the U.S. population, approximately 110 million people, who regard this man like he’s basically infallible, who think he won the 2020 election, that there’s a huge Democrat conspiracy to rig elections, that all the present charges against him are fabricated, with large chunks of them believing even loonier shit, and who apparently can’t recognize the most obvious, artless, opaquely sociopathic liar modern media has ever presented to them for what he is. That blows my fucking mind.
To clarify, I’m asking why you’re of the opinion that 90% of conservatives support trump, and that 75% of that group reports cult-like devotion.
Ah. I was using rough numbers, but it looks like I overestimated the % of conservatives who support Trump right now. Presently, around 62% of them support him. I think I was recalling data from an earlier time, because it stuck in my head. But the 75% estimate comes from the following two recently published stats: Trump’s voters trust him more than they trust friends and family and Percentage of Republicans who think Biden’s 2020 win was illegitimate ticks back up near 70%.
So, to recalculate, that’s around 22% of the U.S. population or roughly 72 million people that treat him like a demigod. Admittedly not as bleak in pure numbers, but still terrifying. And, notably, if you eliminate DeSantis and give his percentage of GOP support (16%) to Trump, it’s back up at 78%, and I’m willing to bet a significant portion of those voters also believe the 2020 election was stolen.