Multiple Entrapments in a Supposedly Free Society: Cellphones, Social Media and a Fossil Fuel Economy

A talk by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (pronounced "height") is packed with data and insights, metaphors and meaning. Blessed with a mellifluous speaking voice and a mind brimming with curiosity and ideas, he fills you with an articulate vision of a deeply troubled world salvageable only through specific collective actions. 

He visited Princeton University this month to deliver a talk entitled "Far Beyond Mental Health: What the New Phone-Based Life is Doing to Human Development, Social Capital, and Democracy." 

According to Haidt, as the power and appeal of the cellphone has increased, young brains in particular have grown around it as a tree's trunk and roots might grow around a rock or a gravestone. This growing attachment, despite considerable benefits, has spawned a long list of maladies, beginning most visibly with pinky fingers deformed from constantly grasping a phone. Myopia has become more prevalent as people spend more time indoors, staring at their screens. 

At the same time, parents perceiving a more dangerous world, have deprived their kids of the chance to explore the world on their own. Largely limited to adult-supervised activities, kids have little opportunity to learn self-government. As neighborhood connections have broken down, phones have delivered increasingly addictive content, calculated to keep kids continually online. Suicides among girls have increased. Boys interact primarily through their computers, spending hours on customized video gaming maximally experienced only on their own computers at home. Though it can be potentially heartening that accidents and injuries have dropped among young people, it also points to a drop in physical activity and risk-taking that are an important part of growing up. 

Young people trapped in cellphone use:

Significantly, surveys show that youth are not necessarily enamored with this constant attention to the screen, but say instead that they are glued to their phones because everyone else is. To put the phone down is to risk social isolation and diminishment. 

At one point, citing young men of the past who made transformative contributions to society in their 20s--Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg--Haidt asked the audience for names of young people who have proved transformative more recently, excluding the music world. Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai were mentioned, but no young men, and no one outside of advocacy. His suggestion is that young people's attention is now largely consumed by the phone, leaving no time for the mind to wander and mull things over.

Starting around 2012, Haidt's collection of data shows, youth became increasingly trapped--by their own and their parents' perceptions of lurking dangers, in sterile subdivisions, in schools running lockdown drills due to mass shootings, and most of all by increasingly sophisticated phones and software calculated to suck them in and keep them fixated on the screen. Internal communications reveal that tech companies learned early on the physiology of how to manipulate phone users, providing dopamine-inducing reward with every click. 

Another, even more widespread form of entrapment:

Unmentioned in the talk is a strong parallel here with another form of entrapment that affects people of all ages. We are all trapped in a fossil fuel economy. The drop in happiness among youth coincides with increasing awareness that each one of us contributes in a small but measurable way to the destabilization of the earth's climate. Here, too, the social pressure to participate in this collective rush towards dystopia is overwhelming. Advertisements urge us to buy more, drive bigger cars, fly to appealing destinations. Our primary role in society, we are constantly being told, is to seek fulfillment and happiness through consumption. As with the youth locked onto their phones by social pressure, all of us risk social isolation and diminishment if we unilaterally withdraw from a fossil fuel-dependent lifestyle. Here, too, internal communications in fossil fuel companies have revealed efforts to keep us addicted to their products, regardless of consequence.

Though fossil fuels have enabled us in many ways, the mobility and comfort they make possible has often kept us isolated in our cars and homes. Machine-scaled development spreads us out in subdivisions notable for their sterile landscaping and detachment from places to socialize. Unable to get anywhere or see a friend without the assistance of a parent and a machine, kids in particular have been disempowered. 

Also unmentioned in the talk, nature, once a playground and source of refuge and endless fascination for childhood, has changed as well. What woodlands and fields remain have become impoverished and tangled with the dense, thorny growth of invasive species. Exploration carries the risk of tick borne disease.

Haidt cited evidence that those of a more liberal persuasion, and/or lacking in religion, have proved more prone to unhappiness. He quotes about the hole in our hearts that can only be filled by God. I believe he said that past efforts to replace religion with various forms of spirituality lacking God have not been very successful. Though an atheist, Haidt takes his kids to the synagogue, and encouraged the audience to explore the role religion could play in bringing solace in troubled times. 

At this point in an otherwise highly convincing talk, I grew skeptical. Conservatism in many ways has devolved into illusion and irresponsibility. Unchastened by truth and evidence, denying our collective impact on the climate, ignoring massive deficits caused by tax cuts, coddling its own while projecting harsh criticism outward, it excuses its adherents from caring about our collective fate and the plight of others. Conservative happiness appears dependent on being gaslit and let off the hook. 

Religion can foster a similarly dubious happiness, believing God has a plan that will ultimately supersede current earthly suffering. Embedded in denial and passivity is a deeply pessimistic view that we cannot understand nor solve society's problems. A liberal, seeking happiness on earth, feels trapped in a political climate where we are free to collectively create problems, while political sabotage prevents us from collectively solving them.

Haidt has a solution, however, at least for kids trapped in social media: phone-free schools, no smartphone until highschool, no social media until age 16, and encourage real-world independence and play. That might help youth trapped in social media, but all of us will remain trapped in a society destabilized by our machines' emissions and a seemingly uncontrollable proliferation of lies, while collective action to solve problems is stymied. 

It's a sign of just how rapidly our world is unraveling that the title of Haidt's lecture, advertised as "Far Beyond Mental Health," had become the more deeply urgent "Far More Than Mental Illness" by the time he showed up to deliver it. 

Part of a lecture series named for Harold Shapiro, whom I remember as president of the University of Michigan when I was there, the talk was hosted by the James Madison Program, led by Robert George and known to have a conservative leaning. 

Robert George (on the left in the photo) promotes a diversity of views on campus, which is a fine sentiment, but ten years ago, when he hosted columnist George Will, that promotion of diverse views was used as an excuse to deny and delay while climate destabilization continued unchecked.

Haidt seems optimistic that the case he and others are making about smartphones and social media will lead to action. We've seen, though, how even overwhelming evidence of climate change's perils can be resisted and denied. I grew up in an era of free-range childhoods, exploring nature and playing pickup games with no grownups in sight. It was a time when facts still mattered. We enjoyed the comforts and mobility of fossil fuels without the knowledge of the havoc they ultimately wreak. Technological innovation has brought new freedoms, and yet we and kids especially are increasingly trapped, indoors, in social media, in ideological echo chambers, in a fossil fuel economy, with resistance to collective solutions deeply entrenched. 

Forced and Unforced Lies in Political Discourse

Here's an interesting distinction that is not currently being made by those in the media who report and interpret the news. Broadly speaking, politicians generate two kinds of falsehood--forced and unforced. This distinction is borrowed from tennis, where there are forced and unforced errors. A forced error is due to the pressure an opponent exerts, while an unforced error is the player's own mistake. For example, when a player sends two straight serves into the net, committing a double fault, that is an unforced error, because the opponent was just standing there, waiting for the serve.

Now, in a political context, a forced lie would be the sort of lie that is committed to cover up an embarrassing truth. This is the old style form of lying. A politician lies to cover up something that the opposition will otherwise be able to pounce on and take advantage of. This sort of lie can also be called a defensive lie. Nixon lied about Watergate; Reagan and George H.W. Bush lied about the Iran-Contra affair, and so forth. 

In contrast, an unforced lie is a lie that no one is forcing the politician to make. A false attack on an opponent would be an unforced lie. The perpetrator is not trying to cover something up, but instead using a lie as a weapon. Propaganda often takes the form of unforced lies.

The forced/unforced terminology can be applied to Trump's troubled nomination of Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense. Among allegations of a drinking problem, sexual impropriety, and financial misconduct, the most provocative was an email written by Hegseth's mother to her son while he was in the midst of a contentious divorce. In the email, she told him "I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man ..." That email can be viewed as an unforced truth. Hegseth's mother didn't need to forward the email to Hegseth's wife, who presumably shared it with others through whom it ultimately was made public. The mother's recent disavowal of the email (“It is not true. It has never been true.”) can be seen as a forced lie, that is, a predictable defensive attempt, given social and political pressures, to contradict the unforced truth she herself had revealed.

An internet search uncovered precious little, but there's an anonymous post on reddit that also divides lies up into forced and unforced. Here it's an atheist's interpretation of God as a Big Lie that spawns forced lies to deal with the inconsistencies between the Big Lie and reality.

"Even if you have reasonable critical faculties in other areas of life, people who have bought into the big lie construct very complex additional lies as part of the apologetics process. These additional lies are forced lies in the sense that they need to be constructed to paper over the (increasingly many) inconsistencies between the big lie and reality. This is somewhat understandable, if one is empathetic enough to accept the power of buying into an ideological big lie in the first place."

Later in the post, the author introduces the concept of a debt to the truth, the idea being that, just as governments can accumulate debt, people can accumulate a debt that expands with each new lie they tell.

"Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt is paid."

How satisfying it would be if people who accumulated a debt to the truth ultimately got their comeuppance. It is an appealing notion that speaks to faith in a moral universe, even among those who question the existence of God. What I see, however, as 2024 comes to a close, is a world or at least a nation where lies, now primarily of the unforced variety, are ascendant, tolerated, often rewarded.

Gabor Mate and a Nation Primed for Demagoguery

People who are anxious, fearful and aggrieved may be unable to recognize the flaws in those seeking power. They mistake desperate ambition for determination, see grandiosity as authority, paranoia as security, seductiveness as charm, dogmatism as decisiveness, selfishness as economic wisdom, manipulation as political savvy, lack of principles as flexibility. - Gabor Mate

After World War II, studies were made and books written to explore whether customs of child rearing could have made some nations more easily succumb to authoritarian rule. Now that our nation has elected yet again a leader who thrives on demagoguery, the question arises here at home.

When I told a friend about speculation that Donald Trump was profoundly affected by undiagnosed learning disabilities in his youth, she suggested checking out Gabor Mate. She mentioned a study of facial expressions at Trump rallies that documented a nonverbal communication between Trump and many of his followers. The premise: victims of childhood trauma reveal that trauma through subtle facial cues picked up on by others who have also experienced trauma.

I looked up Gabor Mate, and though the study didn't come up, a colleague of his, Stephen Porges, said something similar in a conversation between the two:

Instantaneously, our body responds to another who has suffered trauma, not just in seeing them, but in feeling their facial expression and feeling their voices. Our nervous system evolved to detect those features.

What I found in Mate's online writings is the connection he makes between the childhood trauma that Trump likely experienced, and the widespread trauma that causes many people to follow him. In a short essay from 2016, "Trump, Clinton, and Trauma," in which Mate explores the potential impact of childhood trauma on Trump, and also Hilary Clinton to a lesser extent, he explains the compensations that can play out in adulthood in those traumatized in childhood.

“What we perceive as the adult personality often reflects compensations a helpless child unwittingly adopted in order to survive. Such adaptations can become wired into the brain, persisting into adulthood. Underneath all psychiatric categories, Trump manifests childhood trauma…. Narcissistic obsession with the self then compensates for a lack of nurturing care. Grandiosity covers a deeply negative sense of self-worth. Bullying hides an unconscious conviction of weakness. Lying becomes a mode of survival in a harsh environment. Misogyny is a son’s outwardly projected revenge on a mother who was unable to protect him.”

While many of us see Trump as a dangerous demagogue, Mate explains how others can see him very differently:

We need not be perplexed that a Donald Trump can vie for the presidency of the most powerful nation on Earth. We live in a culture where many people are hurt and, like the leaders they idolize, insulated against reality. Trauma is so commonplace that its manifestations have become the norm.

People who are anxious, fearful and aggrieved may be unable to recognize the flaws in those seeking power. They mistake desperate ambition for determination, see grandiosity as authority, paranoia as security, seductiveness as charm, dogmatism as decisiveness, selfishness as economic wisdom, manipulation as political savvy, lack of principles as flexibility. Trauma-induced defenses such as venal dishonesty and aggressive self-promotion often lead to success.

The flaws of our leaders perfectly mirror the emotional underdevelopment of the society that elevates them to power.

Dramatically different interpretations of the Harris-Trump debate can be viewed through the prism of Mate's insights. 

Can a nation be artificially traumatized through propaganda?

Playing a big role in preparing a population for a demagogue, in my view, is the ever expanding reach of rightwing news media. The dystopian America that Trump depicts in his speeches, the fabrication of dark forces and enemies in our midst, of evil immigrants eating people's pets, would be traumatizing for anyone who believes it. Any real trauma people have experienced in their own lives is then augmented by the artificial, vicarious trauma of dark and looming threats conjured by Trump, then amplified by the very news media that should properly be exposing its fallacies. Pervasive propaganda, once it takes hold and becomes dominant, can, to paraphrase Mate, insulate people against reality and stir in them anxiety, fear, and grievance. False propaganda and real trauma, then, can be seen as working in tandem to prime a nation for demagoguery.

Thoughts On Election Day, 2024

Going about this day, Tuesday, November 5, with equal parts hope and trepidation. Though it is one of many very uncomfortable days leading up to the election, I am savoring these hours when I can still believe that America remains the America I grew up in, where truth matters and there are consequences for misbehavior. If Kamala Harris wins, there will still be vast challenges. But if she loses, the election will represent a seismic shift for a country already shaken and paralyzed by artificial political polarization, disunited by deepening income disparities, and increasingly battered by climate change. 

If trump wins decisively, many of us will be eating irony paradoxide. That is to say, it would be ironic if, after so much concern about a violent revolution if Trump were to lose or the results were not definitive, it turns out to be the Democrats who must acknowledge clear defeat and cede power peacefully, respecting democracy while yielding to someone determined to undermine it. 

Evidence that Trump could in fact win by a substantial margin are opinion pieces like the NY Times' deputy opinion editor, Patrick Healy, who reported on the opinions voiced over three years by focus groups of voters. Inflation looms large for many. The Time's chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, points to evidence of a rightward shift that's been underway for some time. In this view, if Trump loses, it will reflect less an embrace of progressive values than the failure of conservatives to field a candidate with fewer liabilities. 

What is left unmentioned in these formidable opinions is the extraordinary power of propaganda being generated by Fox News and many other outlets that has made many in the country unresponsive to evidence. While Trump is free to think and say essentially anything and everything without apparent consequence, he has muzzled his followers and forced the Republican Part to strictly conform, to either parrot his words or face eviction. 

Along with the increasing isolation from and imperviousness to differing views, there is the cathartic power of "throw the bums out", in which voters are so busy directing their discontent at those in office that they forget to consider what sorts of bums they will be throwing in. Constantly fueling disgust towards his enemies, Trump's talent for harnessing this cathartic power is matched only by his capacity to stir disgust towards himself. If he wins in 2024, he will be thrown back in by some of the same cathartic energy that threw him out in 2020.

Also unmentioned in other analyses is how Republicans have a built-in advantage, not only due to the electoral system and the skewing of the Senate due to sparsely populated conservative states. The Republican Party lets voters off the hook, offering tax cuts while increasing government debt, and pretending climate change isn't real. Running from tough issues is a sign of weakness, and yet Republicans still claim to be strong protectors. This abdication of responsible governance has shut down productive debate and left the government paralyzed as these core threats grow ever larger. 

Even if Kamala Harris were to win, there will still be propaganda, a constant stirring of artificial political polarization through lies, and a political party that claims to protect the nation while ignoring looming threats.

What is heartening on this day of profound uncertainty is the Democratic Party's nominee. I was not expecting to like Kamala Harris after her campaign in 2020, but she has grown significantly in ways that fit this moment in history. She has the requisite experience, embodies compassion and caring, has found the joy, and there is widespread acknowledgement that she demolished Trump the one time he dared to debate her. She has the aura of a winner, while Trump stumbles to the end, showing his true colors, muddled, angry and extreme. Four years of unbearable and debilitating chaos await if he wins.

When Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt, my take on divine intervention was that God saved Trump so that he could be roundly defeated in the election. For him, that would be a fate worse than death. If he does lose, again, it will not deepen my belief in God, but will deepen my belief in the prospects for this beloved country. 

Understanding Donald Trump Through an Undiagnosed Learning Disability

A woman I know, 98 years old, sharp as a tack, excited about the upcoming election, offered a theory about why Trump is the way he is. She used to work with kids with learning disabilities, and based on her experience, she believes Trump has multiple learning disabilities, most prominently dyslexia. Undiagnosed when he was a child, and combined with a father who had no tolerance for failure, these caused him to become a compulsive liar to hide his inadequacy. Thus the bizarre inability to acknowledge he lost the 2020 election.

I had never heard this take on Trump before, and so I searched the internet for similar opinions. A similar view came from Harriet Feinberg, a former teacher, who wrote a piece entitled "Why Trump Can't Learn: An Educated Guess by a Veteran Teacher." She describes dyslexia as "a neurobiological condition that makes it difficult to learn to read and can also affect sentence formation and vocabulary." Trump has long had trouble speaking in full sentences, and on the campaign trail is said to use a 4th grade level vocabulary. According to what she calls her "informed speculation," a "mild to moderate" dyslexia is "foundational to his inability to learn and grow while in office," and also serves "as a way to link disparate troubling elements in his makeup."

Feinberg further elaborates her educated guess, 

"Because trying to read was frustrating, as time went on he read as little as possible. Because he experienced humiliation and shame in the early grades when he saw other children acquiring information with ease from books, I believe he came to resent those children who were academically successful, who loved school, and drew the teacher's praise. His own natural curiosity about the world waned."

The humiliation and shame Trump likely experienced in elementary school goes a long way in explaining the narcissistic and vengeful qualities so much on display in his public behavior.

Like my 98 year old acquaintance, Feinberg links an undiagnosed and untreated learning disability to compulsive lying:

"How does Trump's difficulty in reading relate to his penchant for uttering falsehoods? I think he began faking when he was six or seven and couldn't keep up with the other children his age who had learned their letters and were starting to read sentences and little stories. He wanted to be "great" so he made things up. Faking got baked into his personality. He couldn't stop now, not for anything."

Imagine someone growing up in such a vice, trapped between an undiagnosed learning disability and his father's high expectations, with no one to turn to for solace or help.

Another view in a similar vein comes from Divergents Magazine, whose mission is to shift us away from the language of disability and towards neurodiversity. In an article entitled "Trump's Likely Struggle, Our Nation's Consequences," the unnamed author, who has "worked with adults with learning disabilities for 30 years," describes Trump's shame and dissembling when asked to read a legal document. The author's diagnosis: "'a hyperactive dyslexic'--a term coined by Paul Orfalea, the founder of Kinko’s, in his autobiography."

Describing this rare combination of hyperactivity and dyslexia, the author says that "either challenge by itself presents high hurdles in education. Taken together, they can be devastating to a child’s ability to attain literacy."

The author went to New York Military Academy a few years after Trump, in an era he describes as 

"the Dark Ages then when it came to learning disabilities. I can well remember how struggling students were humiliated by teachers in public and the exodus of some students to schools with greater behavioral rigor and lower academic demands. Only in 1977 did a federal law begin regulating education for individuals with learning disabilities.

Having grown up in the 60s and 70s, I remember how humiliation was sometimes used in schools, most memorably by a high school symphony band director who presumably modeled his approach on that of university band directors William Revelle and George Cavender. Though ultimately earning respect and even reverence from his musicians, Revelle acknowledged "I'm intolerable when it comes to perfection. Sometimes I'm even downright mean about it." Of Cavender's admirable pursuit of excellence by less than admirable means, it is said that he "accomplished a lot through intimidation and humiliation." For those who could weather the tactics, these directors offered an inspiring commitment to excellence, but imagine someone with an undiagnosed learning disability trying to survive in such a milieu. 

Trump was sent off to the Military Academy, a private boarding school, at age 13. The author's description:

In those earlier years, students with learning problems had few options for compensation. One common one was to become the class clown. Another was to become the class bully. Trump seems to have chosen the latter.

Being exiled from home and from one’s circle of friends is hard for any child. It seems possible that for Trump it caused a narcissistic wound that has driven much of his behavior as an adult: the need to surpass his father, his mistrust of most others, his terrible pride and anger, his drive to be the best in all ways.

That’s all speculation, of course.

A third source suggesting Trump has an undiagnosed learning disability is Trump's niece, Mary Trump, in her 2020 book “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.”

There will never be a professional diagnosis. To fill that void, a mix of informed speculation, educated guesses and insider family exposes are all we will ever have as each of us seeks to make sense of Trump's behavior. 

What is particularly striking is how our political reality has come to mimic the conditions Feinberg believes to have been at play in Trump's childhood. The Republican Party's refusals to acknowledge human-caused climate change and taxcut-caused deficits play out as a learning disability. The doubling down on falsehood, the reflexive export of blame--these strategies work with the electorate much as they may have worked with an unforgiving father. And when Feinberg speculates that Trump "came to resent those children who were academically successful," it's hard not to think of the Republican Party's cultivation of resentment and its dismissiveness towards academia. 

These traits--denial of reality, anti-intellectualism, bold fabrication, a need to stoke resentment of the "Other"--were already deeply embedded in the Republican Party long before Trump came along. The groundwork was laid for him to take existing traits further, and brand the Party in his image.

On this blog, I have viewed Trump through varied lenses, as a suicide candidate, a narcissist, a hypnotist. Now an insightful 98 year old has offered a fourth lens, perhaps even more powerful and foundational than the others. Reminiscent of the apparently fictional story of the Spanish king whose lisp became embedded in the national language, the Republican Party now speaks Trump's language, dutifully parroting his fictions. As the 2024 presidential election approaches, there is currently a 50/50 chance that the nation, too, will succumb. If he gains control of the nation as he did of the Party, for the duration of his reign we will find ourselves living within the harsh, polarizing realities of a most unfortunate childhood.

Denialism Lets Voters Off the Hook for the Federal Debt and Global Warming

In "America Is Living on Borrowed Money," the NY Times editorial board sounded a warning about the federal debt, which continues to increase at a spectacular pace. 

The editorial covers a lot of bases, but it misses a central point. Americans are being let off the hook. One political party acknowledges the need to increase revenue to pay the government's bills, the other party does not. Similarly, one political party acknowledges the reality and danger of global warming, the other does not. This denialism has kept the Republican Party electable by letting voters off the hook. A vote for the Republican Party in its current state is a vote for shirking collective responsibility for our future. The reward for the voter is being relieved of having to pay the government's bills and making any substantive changes in our lifestyles to save a livable planet. 

As long as one party maintains an electorally advantageous posture of denial, all substantive debate is shut down. That posture of denial has worked well for the Republican Party since the Reagan era, allowing the party to compete for power despite many unpopular policies. The result is the quiet rise of increasingly troubling numbers, be they the size of the federal debt or the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Both of these rising numbers pose a threat to the America we know and love, and contribute to the diminishment of the nation's stature in the world--first through a steady weakening in the government's fiscal condition, and second by cheating the nation of its charmed place in the world's climate. 

That's the way to undermine a nation. Shut down substantive debate through denial, then let the problems grow and grow. 

Thoughts On a Consistent Ethic of Life

I was introduced to the concept of "a consistent ethic of life" by an opinion piece entitled "You Can't Protect Some Life and Not Others." The writer, Tish Harrison Warren, is a priest in the Anglican Church, but quotes Catholic leaders heavily, calling for a "whole life" ethic that "entails a commitment to life 'from womb to tomb'." She sees this consistency as a means of breaking the rigid categories of political affiliation. "We need to rebundle disparate political issues, re-sort political alliances and shake up the categories," she says. "A whole life ethic is often antiwar, anti-abortion, anti-death penalty, anti-euthanasia and pro-gun control. It sees a thread connecting issues that the major party platforms often silo."

It can be refreshing when people adopt points of view that draw from different political camps. Warren points to a time, in 1973, when conservative evangelical leaders declared that "we, as a nation, must 'attack the materialism of our culture' and call for a just redistribution of the 'nation’s wealth and services.'" And yet attempts to achieve moral consistency come at a price. A whole life ethic appears to call on women to risk their lives to have unwanted children, and calls on society to put vast resources into sustaining indefinitely lives made unbearable by pain or dementia. The ethics of life get murky at the beginning and the end. Does the quality of life enter into these ethical considerations, or just quantity?

A consistent ethic of life becomes even more elusive when considering our relationship to nature. I spend my days seeking to heal nature, and yet all of us depend for our comfort, sustenance, and mobility on machines that are chemically altering the earth's atmosphere, to the detriment of nature. Each of us can do a great deal to reduce our own individual dependency, but as long as our shared ecomony and culture runs on fossil fuels, there is little hope of consistency. What we intend and what we unintentionally do will remain very much at odds. 

To break down rigid political polarization, I'd suggest we invest our consistency in a pursuit of truth, in building opinion on accumulating evidence, and not just the cherry-picked facts that will prop up an emotionally comfortable opinion. And, in building an opinion, be ready to be wrong. It's a readiness to be wrong that motivates the study needed to be right. 

Related post:

Skepticism and Self: Science's Role in Sustaining Democracy

The Movie Gaslight, and a Nation in a Narcissistic Grip

Written before the 2022 national election:

For many people, narcissism has a limited meaning: someone who is self-absorbed and caught up in their own image. But start reading about it, and you discover that narcissism expresses itself through a whole suite of symptoms. Some people with narcissistic qualities can have significant and sometimes beneficial roles in the community, but they can also exhibit traits that vary from annoying to deeply disturbing, many of which you may encounter in the workplace or at home, or most tragically in the political world. Narcissism has roots in childhood trauma, is nearly impossible to cure, and ultimately proves emotionally impoverishing for all involved. A familiarity with narcissism's many dimensions can shed considerable light on persistent problems in the public and private realms.

After hearing that Angela Lansbury had died, I watched a Fresh Air podcast about her, in which I learned that she first appeared as a movie actress in Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. Gaslight was first a play, then a 1940 British movie, then the classic 1944 version out of Hollywood. We ended up watching the 1940 version because it's free on youtube. The movie is so grim at the beginning that we at first bailed. But I was curious, read about the plot online, and knowing what would happen actually made me more interested in watching the movie. It turned out to be a perfect, if over the top, example of how narcissism can wreak havoc on a marriage.

The male character, Paul in the 1940 version, is the ultimate narcissist. He dazzles a woman in a whirlwind romance, marries her, then steadily works to undermine her confidence. Gaslighting, a term that grew out of this movie, is a classic tactic of a narcissist. He hides things, then blames her for losing them. When the gas lights in the apartment periodically go dim, he tells her it's her imagination. He is harshly critical and controlling. He seeks to isolate her from her friends and family. As he victimizes her, he claims that he is the victim. All of these are classic symptoms of narcissism. Despite his mistreatment, she loves him still, committed to the marriage and not understanding why they can't get back to the happiness they had shared early on.

In some ways, I see our country as being similarly under siege. In politics, narcissistic traits like projecting one's own negative traits onto others can prove highly adaptive, whether it be for an individual or a whole political party. The more pathology a narcissistic politician has stewing within, the more ammunition he has to hurl at his opponent. There's the doubling down on lies (a form of gaslighting), the quickness to blame others rather than reflect on one's own actions, a lack of empathy, false claims to victimhood, and the iron control to maintain party unity. 

Even as the husband Paul isolates his hapless wife Bella from her friends and relatives, in order to expand his control over her, she remains loyal to him. Can we not see the same dynamic occurring in our country, as people remain loyal to a political party bent on dismissing truth and dismantling democracy in order to tighten its grip on power? A nation's cherished ideals are sacrificed to sustain one man and the big lie.

Movies condition us to believe in happy endings. I won't say whether the author of Gaslight, playwright Patrick Hamilton, gave us one. My main concern, as an election nears, is whether a gaslighted nation can escape a narcissistic grip. 

False Representation of Conservatism as "Tough"

For as long as I can remember, conservatism has been associated with strength. Why, exactly, is this? Is it because conservatives tend to vote for a bigger military, harsher sentencing for crimes, bigger walls along the border, more consumption of powerful fossil fuels and more exploitation of nature to strengthen the economy? Is it because conservatives stand united in opposition to liberal proposals, and hold steadfastly to a point of view? Conservatism can seem akin to bedrock, stubborn in its rigidity, impervious even to overwhelming evidence. It is the hardness of the shield that repels. By contrast, empathy and openness to truth require a porosity, a capacity to absorb that which is outside of oneself. These latter qualities may require more inner strength, yet are considered soft. 

This may be why a NY Times journalist described Liz Cheney as a "tough and hawkish conservative," as if "tough" and "conservative" are naturally linked. I'm alert to this reflexive linking, because the conservatism I've seen on display since the Reagan era has a decidedly weak and indulgent side to it. If conservatism is so tough, then why does it turn tail and run from tough issues like climate change? Can it really be called tough if it directs its toughness only outwards while shunning self-scrutiny, protecting its own from investigation while mercilessly attacking its political opponents? Can conservatism be called tough if it is constantly offering candy to voters, letting them off the hook by pretending that climate change is a hoax and that tax cuts pay for themselves? It's easy to cut taxes, far harder to cut the popular government programs that taxes support. 

Liz Cheney, remarkably, has found the courage to reject Reagan's decree forty years ago to "never speak ill of a fellow Republican." The high political price she has paid within her own party speaks to the degree to which Republicans define toughness as something to be directed outward, not at themselves.

But even Liz Cheney, for all the strength and character she has shown to finally impose standards of truth and decency on her own political party, maintains a persistent weakness in other realms. When it comes to climate change, Ms. Cheney runs from the overwhelming evidence while the nation's climate grows increasingly hostile. Her wikipedia page describes her as being known for her fiscal conservatism, but to what extent did she fight against the massive deficits of the Bush and Trump years? The pattern has been for conservatives to impose fiscal constraints only on Democratic presidents, not on their own. This is tactical partisanship, not strength. 

The article that made the unfounded association of toughness and conservatism had an interesting perspective on the role of women in the January 6 investigation. Oftentimes it is young women who have come forward to testify, while the "50-, 60- and 70-year-old men," in Cheney's words, "hide themselves behind executive privilege.” And it is female witnesses who have more often been singled out for attack by Trump and others who have attempted to recast strong women as deranged or warped by ambition. 

Toughness, then, is a trait that has falsely been attributed to conservatives who run from tough issues, ignore evidence and fail to exercise self-scrutiny. It will be all the more important to look at what constitutes strength as the climate continues to radicalize. Fossil fuel and the machines it powers played a big role in America's victory in WWII. But now we know that fossil fuels are as much enemy as friend. Using them makes present comfort and mobility possible while making the future impossible. The power they give us is also empowering an enemy that will grow more terrifying as more and more of the country becomes endangered by rising seas, increasing temperatures, drought, fires, and flooding. And authoritarianism, which we fought against in WWII, now finds fertile ground in our own country, where its brand of relentless attack and lack of self-scrutiny is mistaken for toughness. 

Liz Cheney, having decided to hold Republicans to account, is on a journey. Tough in at least one way that most Republicans are not, she is reminiscent of Bob Inglis, former representative of South Carolina, whose atypical toughness came in the form of acknowledging the overwhelming evidence and calling on Republicans to act against climate change. He was defeated in the 2010 primary, and Ms. Cheney may meet the same fate this fall, spurned by a political party that can't tolerate true strength. 

How we define and talk about strength matters. It influences what sorts of politicians we put in power, and what sort of country we will have in the future.

Related post: The Dark Side of the Reagan Legacy