Popular Delusions and Climate Action
We have seen some spectacular examples of herd behavior in 2020. They remind one of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, first published in 1841, Charles Mackay’s account of four infamous financial manias. But the 2020 versions, such as anti-mask, actively endanger others.
Popular delusion is indeed the operative term but let me start with crowds and build up to this everyday pathology.
The most familiar example of herd behavior can be seen by looking up at birds flying in flocks. All it may take to organize that flock formation is an inborn tendency to stay surrounded by others that look like you. Those birds out on the edges of the flock are more exposed to predators, so natural selection promotes the gene variants that provide stronger centering behavior. It is those birds that more successfully raise the next generation.
A corollary is to behave in a way that does not cause others to push you farther away from the center of the flock. Don’t look different. Don’t behave in a way that causes you to be labeled as odd. Looking unfamiliar is the easiest clue for a stranger in the midst. From such simple shortcuts, prejudice is born. As the essayist E. B. White once quipped, “Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.”
When conforming becomes delusional
Humans have a far more elaborate social repertoire, of course, but we still have lingering tendencies to “conform.” Some individualistic societies make an effort to deemphasize it; others are known for, as they put it, pounding down any nails that protrude the slightest bit from the level wood floor. Consider the penalties for being an apostate in the Muslim world; it’s like being a traitor to one’s country.
Even supposedly individualistic societies like the United States have episodes that, this year, we have been calling tribal behaviors*. “My guy, right or wrong” is the attitude towards a “Teflon president” to which no criticism seems to stick. There is a considerable evolutionary backstory, involving competition between neighboring groups, to our criteria for selecting our leaders — and for continuing to support leaders with terrible flaws in character, mostly because of concerns for sticking together, not letting defenses against revengeful neighboring groups weaken.
But here I want to focus on what might help explain the attitudes of nearly half of U.S. voters in the last two presidential elections. It helps to also explain the 2020 pandemic paradox, where even the hardest-hit states were flamboyantly resisting mask-wearing and quarantine restrictions. All it seemed to take was the community consensus being Republican enough to make exceptions vulnerable.
That they were endangering their own children and their elders did not seem to matter. What can lead people to behave so irresponsibly, endangering democracy as well? We have just given competing countries (not just potential enemies) evidence of how easily manipulated half of the voters are, and thus of how to weaken the United States on the world scene. It makes US promises seem unreliable when half of the voters can be fooled so easily. The voters may have thrown out Trump by seven million votes, but those voters did not also penalize the Senators and House members that enabled Trump. This is what has enabled the bizarre post-election maneuvering: politicians who know they can get away with lies.
How things change
One candidate to explain the self-inflicted-harm paradox is conformity, a fear of being seen as going against the community’s consensus. And it is not that they think one way and vote another: they seem to conform their news gathering and evaluation to their perceived notions of what their neighbors might think of them. And act upon. Fox is the “safe” channel to watch; changing channels occasionally never seems to occur to some of them. This failure to doubt is what traps them.
Here we see Orwell’s 1984 result, even without a Big Brother to implement it.
Other analyses of this paradox tend to feature fear. I tend to think that the fear of being ostracized is always there; yes, unethical leaders played on the fear, but they need not have created it.
Before, there were the barriers of the education and experience needed for promotion. That, too, changed gradually. The status of nonwhites was greatly aided by the “GI Bill” after WW2 that, at least for males, enabled the able to rise. Such gradual improvements may not endure, as all the pushback on abortion rights shows, but there are many examples of gradual improvement over a half-century.
In my undergraduate classes in the late 1950s, there was only one woman studying engineering (I used to study with her); now women are common. The same ratio was true in medical school classes in the 1960s (I used to regularly have dinner with one of the two women in the hospital cafeteria; she felt that she was under enormous pressures). Now, the med student ratio is half-and-half. Women managers and executives are often seen these days, but it was a slow haul because of the need for on-the-job seasoning and thus generational turnover.
Quick flips in attitudes
There are also some examples of a consensus changing quickly, in only a decade or so. It was hard getting up those hills to midway, but then things flipped. A flip is what we urgently need for pandemic protection and for taking effective climate action.
What is so interesting is how fast things can flip.
You can supply your own quick-flip examples from fashion (my favorite example is how suddenly the bustle disappeared in the 1870s and then reappeared in the 1880s), but in the political-differences realm, there are two really big situations in the last several decades where things flipped. For the benefit of those who did not live through the flips, here are a few examples.
· Banning smoking in offices took 25 years after the 1964 Surgeon General’s report to even get started. Lawsuits over second-hand smoke in the workplace helped, as did different insurance rates. In the 1990s, there was real progress even though the tobacco lobby still kept Congress on the sidelines.
· An even better example is in tolerance of nonstandard genders, even in the military (though President Trump, naturally, tried to reverse it). In India, its Supreme Court unanimously struck down one of the world’s oldest bans on consensual gay sex in 2018. Last year, lawmakers in Taiwan voted to legalize same-sex marriage, a first for Asia. Now the pressure is on Japan.
Those who did not live through these 21st-century sea changes should study them because, before the flip, it looked a lot like the popular delusions and self-inflicted harm that we are seeing today from some anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, and climate deniers. (The non-bizarre delusions in psychiatry are fixed false beliefs such as being harmed or poisoned; delusional disorder includes stalkers.) But they are not contagious; popular delusions are. As Mackay said in 1841, “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
Because climate action has become so urgent, thanks to sustained surges in extreme weather a decade ago, we ought to be studying the sociology of fast flips and how to promote one for more effective climate action. There isn’t enough time to teach critical thinking to everyone.
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