This is Your Brain on Propaganda.
A few thoughts on religion, bad messaging, naive humans and their assumptive nature.
The older I get, the more aware I become of the psychological effects of falling prey to propaganda. What’s more, I become increasingly aware of just what constitutes propaganda and how it feeds our collective delusions, and this awareness causes me a lot of discomfort and anxiety. As they say, once you see it, you can’t unsee it… I suppose if I hadn’t been raised in an abusive Evangelical family, I might not have developed the resistance I have to contrived realities, and I might be a happier person. Some might call it a blessing but I consider it more of a Greek tragedy for the simple fact that it took a lot of pain and betrayal for me to end up where I am today, as the critical thinker I am; when it would have been much easier for my elders to put aside their delusions for the sake of a more rational and open-minded interpretation of reality.
Recently, I read this piece by Kristin Gunner on how the pandemic affected her and her relationship to her religious community.
Her experience is on par with mine in many respects, in that there was a disparity between word and deed on the part of trusted elders, so I can relate despite the fact that we are in two different places, in terms of belief; mine being that of an open Atheist as opposed to her being a believer without a congregation. The long and short of her lament is that she lost faith in her tribe because in the midst of the pandemic, she saw the people she considered most moral in the world going against the very ideals they professed to value as believers; a kind of ‘do as I say not as I do’ conundrum — my childhood in a nutshell.
She learned two significant things here, in my opinion. For one, by witnessing how Evangelicals flocked to the Trump banner, as immoral as he is from a supposed ‘christian’ perspective, she got a glimpse of what it might have been like to be a German living in the midst of Hitler’s rise to power, witnessing how the con job of the Nazi ideology could have fooled supposedly moral German citizens into siding with such an evil, horrendous political and social agenda. Second, she learned a very valuable lesson about human history — being religious doesn’t automatically lend itself to ethical and moral behavior. In fact, if we’re to examine history in more detail, we will often find that religion serves more to reinforce structures of political and social power than it does to promote morality, sometimes even going in the completely opposite direction, helping perpetuate grossly immoral deeds.
Take the example of the Crusades. In the bible, it quotes Jesus as being in favor of loving your enemies, turning the other cheek and not defending yourself when attacked, yet over the course of two centuries in the late Medieval period, scores of supposedly good, virtuous christian warriors went off to fight against their perceived enemies in the name of their god and the church they served. They were the overt aggressors in a series of unnecessary ecumenical military actions designed to consolidate all of Christendom under the authority of the church in Rome. Sometimes it was against Muslims in the Holy Land, at other times it was against undesirables right in their own European backyard. As it regards the latter, I refer, of course, to the Albigensian Crusade of the early 13th Century against the Cathars in southern France.(1)
What makes the Crusades so horrendous in historical terms is that they were predicated on a massive distortion of reality precipitated by an aggressive propaganda campaign from the top. It was, in effect, a gross readjustment of the rules regarding the conduct of good christians; specifically one of the more notable of the 10 Commandments in the Hebrew bible — Thou Shalt Not Kill. In modern parlance, this has been transcribed as ‘do not murder’, but for the Crusaders, it wasn’t so shameful or cut and dry, because the heads of the church basically ‘clarified’ the rules to say that it was only a sin to kill fellow christians and that killing your enemies was now a penitential act, because you were acting for the ‘grace’ of god and the Holy See.(2)
As more than a few commentators have put it, killing as a penitential act has no precedent in history prior to the Crusades, which means that a major shift in human thinking occurred which altered irrevocably the course of human morality. You could now kill fellow humans and not have to suffer any damnation for it, provided it was in service of the church. You fought, or at least attempted to fight, you died, either in the course of battle or on your way there, and your god welcomed you into heaven with open arms. Consider it the Medieval equivalent of getting a posthumous Medal of Honor. You were brave enough to commit to killing for a righteous cause, so you deserved salvation, despite prohibition against killing being a core moral and ethical principle of the texts on which your religion was based. Only propaganda can facilitate a logical disconnect such as this.
Propaganda only works en masse because, as individuals, we tend to live very self-involved lives. Take nationalism, for instance. One can easily say that there is not one ‘America’ but as many Americas as there are warm sacks of flesh and water living here, a multitude of perspectives and lived experience determining very disparate ideas on what is and isn’t the definition of life in this Republic. Your average Nancy Gonzales living in Yuma, Arizona likely has a lot of differing ideas about what it means to be an American than does your average Joe Smith living in Greensboro, North Carolina. It’s where those individual perspectives intersect that propaganda gets its power to mold and shape further our collective assumptions about the world. And the biggest snag therein is human ego, the source of our rabid individualism which leaves us absurdly self-assured that what we believe is correct.
Sadly, most Americans don’t really know as much as they think they do. If you’ve ever watched a late night talk show, you’ll have seen those ‘man on the street’ interviews where they try to elicit humorous responses from random passersby on fairly common sense issues.(3) These people are fairly innocuous though. It’s the people with social capital who do the most damage by influencing the behavior and assumptions of the masses. Holistic medicine is a particular fly in the rational ointment. Get a famous celebrity to endorse any random junk science and suddenly every Tom, Dick and Harriet becomes a medical expert and knows what you need to improve your ill health, no matter how incurable your ailments are.(4) The Snowball effect from this kind of misplaced ‘faith’ can be so insidious that it spills over into the political arena.(5)
I would like to be charitable here and say I could forgive these naive sheeple their trespasses, but it’s not that easy. Recent history has proven just how damaging support for the wrong element can be. I refer of course to the shit-show SCOTUS Reality TV bit of late where they wiped their ignorant asses with settled legal precedent and turned back the clock on all kinds of affirmative legal policies, all thanks to some seriously underhanded and corrupt dealing on the part of the previous White House occupant.(6)
In some cases, the naive can be forgiven their ignorance, provided the effects of their bad decision making don’t result in a great deal of harm. That said, it’s a lot harder to be forgiving in the face of tragedy. This recent piece on the part of our Lisa Osborne, the latest in a series on her emergence from her own oppressive religious upbringing, can give you a sense of what I mean. I have to ask, though, how do you punish these people when hardly a one considers themselves incompetent and is unlikely to atone in the face of that deluded self-image? Everyone likes to think they operate from a place of reasonable inquiry, but the results of their decisions show clearly that many don’t. What’s more, science can demonstrate why they think in this fashion and why it’s so dangerous to do so.
According to Ming Hsu, an associate professor from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley “To the brain, information is its own reward, above and beyond whether it’s useful. And just as our brains like empty calories from junk food, they can overvalue information that makes us feel good but may not be useful — what some may call idle curiosity.”(7) Put simply, the brain likes new input because it keeps things fresh. If we don’t have novel experiences, exercise our brains regularly, our neural pathways will deteriorate in a grander fashion as we age.(8)
Essentially, the brain doesn’t care where the information comes from, because having an ‘A HA’ moment is just as potent, subjectively speaking, regardless of whether it comes from a scientific experiment, a credible history book, a Chick Tract or a bad documentary about ancient aliens. As long as no one acts on the bad epiphanies, everything will go smoothly; but if the Information Age has demonstrated anything about human nature, it’s that you can’t inherently trust people to be reasonable. Some of us have to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the swamp of our own self-involved internal propaganda and into the light of reasoned, rational thinking.
If we want to ensure a bright future, people have to be disabused of the egoist notion that just because an individual has a strong feeling that what they hold in their head is right, it doesn’t mean such is the case. Value evidence first before you assume you know your shit. To do otherwise is a crime against reality, especially in an age where everyone seems content to retreat into their own contrived realities and forsake a collective, affirmative understanding of our situation. We must work together in common cause in order for our Republic to survive, as our original, better national motto implies — E Pluribus Unum (from many, one) — and we wont get there if we continue holding to our guns, assuming we’re always right, especially in those times when it can be demonstrated that we aren’t.
Adieu.
If you would like to read more of my writing on matters of religion in today’s world, follow this link.
Sources:
- Albigensian Crusade
- Terry Jones — Crusades Episode 1 — Pilgrims in Arms
- Jay Leno’s Science quiz
- Oprah’s long history with junk science
- Dr. Oz would be one of many quack physicians in the Senate’s history
- Donald Trump’s lasting legacy will now be the overturning of Roe v. Wade
- How information is like snacks, money, and drugs — to your brain
- Brain Exercises That Work
