Neuroscientist explains how fanatical Trump followers could lead us to
societal collapse
It's okay to be a little alarmed � behind the scenes, this cult is being
transformed into an army of soldiers
By Bobby Azarian
Published August 6, 2021 5:30AM (EDT)
Trump supporters near the U.S Capitol on Jan. 06, 2021 in Washington, DC.
(Shay Horse/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Trump supporters near the U.S Capitol on Jan. 06, 2021 in Washington, DC.
(Shay Horse/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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This article originally appeared on Raw Story
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Do not be alarmed, but consider this article a prediction and a warning.
Actually, it's okay to be a little alarmed, because recent events�like
the storming of the Capitol�are certainly cause for concern. Let's call
it what it is; Donald Trump has created a cult and radicalized its
members. QAnon also shares a large part of the responsibility, whoever
they are. We may not be able to see it because Trump has been banned from
Twitter and Q conversation cleaned from social media, but behind the
scenes, this cult is being transformed into an army of soldiers.

How do we know that it is as serious as I say; that this is not just more
fear mongering? Well, for one, people have died. Heather Heyer, a
counterprotester protesting the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville,
was run over by a white supremacist, and 19 others were injured. Last
year a man drew a hunting bow on protestors in Salt Lake City before
being taken out by the crowd, a chilling moment that was captured on
video. On the day of the Capitol riot, a pipe bomb was found a few blocks
from the Capitol building. In addition to these troubling events, many
others who will go unnamed have been the victims of hate crimes that can
be traced to the alt-Right, pro-Trump movement.

But the causalities have not only been on one side. Capitol rioter Ashli
Babbitt was fatally wounded by a cop as the mob tried to breach a door,
another frightening moment caught on video. The point I'm making has
nothing to do with whether or not the shooting was justified�though
saying that level of force was necessary strikes me as uncomfortably
close to Right-wing apologists who defend cops that shoot unarmed black
men. The point is that the violence is escalating, and there's every
reason to believe that escalation will continue. To use Newton's third
law as a metaphor�for every action, there is an equal and opposite
reaction. So, what does this mean for the future of America?

Since aggression provokes fear, and fear promotes aggression, a dangerous
feedback loop has been established, dividing the nation to such a degree
that something like civil war seems imminent. It may be a "cold civil
war," but there will still be violence, destruction, and death. There
will also be more gridlock in Washington, which makes any kind of
progress impossible. It is hard to calculate the suffering that could
have been avoided with a functional Congress, but we can be sure it is
substantial. And if the division gets too severe, which is where we are
headed, there will be a point of no return. Social chaos and economic
collapse will follow, the United States will lose its status as a
superpower, and life as we know it, will cease. If the pandemic showed us
anything, it is that despite how advanced we are technologically, we are
not protected from disaster, and our way of life can change overnight.

The good news is that this gloomy future is only inevitable should we
choose not to intervene. But we do have to make a conscious effort to
avoid catastrophe if we want any chance of being successful. I'm not
talking about compromising, or forgiving, or forgetting�because we should
do none of those things. I'm proposing something altogether new,
something radical to stop Right-wing radicalism. But to understand the
solution, and why it is necessary, we first have to get a clearer
understanding of the problem, and of the predictive power of science.
The Predictive Power of Terror Management Theory

To those skeptics who consider a civil war of sorts an unlikely scenario,
just ask yourself how likely any of the events mentioned above would have
seemed in the pre-Trump era. Imagine taking a time machine back to 2014,
and telling people that the reality show star Donald Trump would be our
next president. That alone would sound ridiculous. Now imagine telling
people that thousands of his supporters would storm the Capitol�many
armed�in hopes of overturning the 2020 election. It would sound like some
zany plot for an over-the-top comedy. Now imagine that after such event,
and after trying to get his vice president killed, Trump would still own
the Republican party and all of conservative media. On the surface, this
outcome seems so improbable that it makes one doubt our ability to
predict the future at all.

Despite how unlikely this general scenario might have seemed, I'm going
to argue that it was in fact predictable with a high degree of
statistical certainty, if one had the proper theoretical framework
through which to understand those events as they were unfolding. That
framework is called Terror Management Theory(TMT), and this paradigm from
social psychology will be our sense-making lens in a time where nothing
seems to make much sense.

Armed with the logic of Terror Management Theory, and an understanding of
the relevant neuroscience, I was able to predict the rise of Trump, the
white Nationalist movement that put him in office, the Q problem that led
to the Capitol attack, and the refusal to accept the results of the
election by Trump and his supporters�many months in advance. These
predictions will be explained later in the article. No, I am not a
psychic, but I did have a crystal ball called "science."

Karl Popper, the father of the philosophy of science, said the riskier
the prediction made by a scientific theory, the more convincing it is
when that prediction comes true. And you can be sure that when I was
making such predictions, in articles for websites like Raw Story, Daily
Beast, and Psychology Today, they seemed to describe highly unlikely
outcomes. That is, if one were getting their analyses from mainstream
news media and professional statisticians unfamiliar with the effects of
"mortality salience"�in other words, making people think about death, or
making them feel that there is a looming existential threat. I bring up
these predictions not to say "I told you so" or for bragging rights;
rather, it is a plea for the reader to take the predictions of the theory
seriously.

To understand how Terror Management Theory can be used to predict the
collective behavior of a society when existential threat looms�whether
that threat is ISIS, Right-wing terror, or the pandemic�a brief
introduction is in order. If you are already familiar with the theory and
its relevance to Trump supporter psychology from past articles published
at Raw Story, know that this piece presents new insights and ties up many
seemingly unrelated features of cognition in a way that illuminates
precisely why everything happened the way it did. The Trump loyalist is a
mystery we are about to unravel, and in doing so, we come to see that the
average MAGA maniac had little choice over their behavior.
Cultural Worldviews are Death-Anxiety Buffers

Terror Management Theory, which was based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning
book from the 1970s called The Denial of Death, has been supported by
hundreds of psychology and neuroscience studies. According to the theory,
most of human behavior is driven by our subconscious fear of death.
Unlike most if not all other animals, we have an awareness that one day
we will inevitably die, for reasons that are beyond our control. This
realization leads to an existential fear that is always bubbling beneath
the surface. Without any way to cope with that cold hard fact of life�or
fact of death, I should say�it can be difficult to get up in the morning,
and to go on living, knowing it is all in futility.

How do we deal with our fear of death and unrelenting existential angst?
Through cultural worldviews.

According to TMT, as a way of dealing with persistent death anxiety,
humans created cultural worldviews�like religions, national identities,
and political ideologies�to ease our fears and distract us from the fact
that we will soon be gone, and probably forgotten. These worldviews make
us feel safe and permanent by providing paths to immortality.

Through the concept of an afterlife, religions make literal immortality
possible, while political ideologies and national identities give us
symbolic immortality. In other words, they make us feel like we're part
of a group and a movement that will outlive the individual. Worldviews
also give life a meaning and a purpose. Whether we identify as Christian
or Muslim or Buddhist, Democrat or Republican or Libertarian, we all
belong to a tribe. Some tribes are just more ideologically extreme than
others, and less accepting of outsiders. This applies even to atheists
and anarchists, who are often just as ideological as the ideologies they
are trying to escape.