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comp / comp.os.linux.advocacy / Most Trump Followers See Him As Superior Because He's Rich And They're Poor and Lazy

Subject: Most Trump Followers See Him As Superior Because He's Rich And They're Poor and Lazy
From: Raven
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Subject: Most Trump Followers See Him As Superior Because He's Rich And They're Poor and Lazy
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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
rawlogo

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.

So, worldviews are a double-edged sword: on one hand they give us
direction and comfort, on the other they divide us into in-groups and
out-groups, turning fellow humans into spiritual or political enemies.
The unfortunate result is tribalism. Racism can be thought of as a
specific type of tribalism, as tribalism proper would include other types
of prejudice, like bias against people of other nationalities, religions,
and political parties.

Tribalism, or loyalty to one's social group and aggression toward
outsiders, is bad enough when times are good, but when there is an
atmosphere of existential fear lingering over society for whatever
reason�terror attacks, political incompetence, or a pandemic�tribal
behavior gets turned up to eleven. In response to mortality salience, we
double-down on our beliefs and try to force them on dissimilar others,
and if they resist, we try to punish them. Whether the purpose of this
punishment is to enforce fairness or to get revenge is largely in the eye
of the beholder.

Understanding racism as emergent from tribalism can make sense of many
confusing things. For example, during the Capitol riot, footage from Fox
News showed more than a few black protestors in the audience. CNN cameras
showed practically none, and we will probably never know whether Fox was
selectively focusing on the minorities in the crowd, or if CNN was
selecting them out of shot, though we can reasonably assume the truth is
probably somewhere in between. While the minorities appeared to be safe
in the crowd of QAnons and Trump soldiers, Nancy Pelosi would have
undoubtedly gotten mauled by the mob. This of course does not mean that
many of the Alt-Right rioters were not racist�it simply means they
interpreted the minorities in the crowd to be tribe defectors, and as
long as they show allegiance to the Nationalist movement or conspiracy
theory mindset that signals they belong to the right tribe, the white
tribe, they are accepted.

While the Alt-Right is mostly composed of Christians and Republicans,
their Christian-American worldview has evolved into the more-extreme
philosophical framework outlined by the tribe leaders�Donald Trump, Q,
and conservative talk show hosts looking to boost ratings. At the same
time, these influencers are monitoring social media and gauging sentiment
on the ground, so the views of the tribe members and leaders evolve
together, and this coevolution is guided largely by the atmosphere of
existential fear, which is enhanced by the fear mongering coming from the
top. And then, Trump's reassuring words, and Q's perceived righteousness,
provide scared and confused human beings with a philosophy that gives
them comfort and purpose. It is difficult if not impossible to reach
these people with reason alone, as reason is not going to make them feel
safe or comforted or inspired. And if the reasoning is perceived as being
based on principles from an opposing tribe's worldview, they will flat
out reject that logic on principle alone. That is not to say these people
are completely unreachable�it's just going to take a lot more than
reasoning with them.
Predictions Come True

What were the sources of existential threat that created the conditions
that would put an opportunist like Trump in the most powerful position in
the world?

In 2016, I wrote an article for the website Aeon titled How the Fear of
Death Makes People More Right-Wing, which argued that the Brexit and
Trump movements were catalyzed by existential fear created by the string
of ISIS attacks that had recently rocked the world. Prior to that essay,
in January�almost a year before the election�I wrote an article for Raw
Story called Donald Trump Has a Mental Disorder That Makes Him a
Dangerous World Leader, which over the course of his presidency would
receive upwards of 30 million views, making it the website's most popular
article ever published.

In July of 2016, when all the pundits and statisticians were predicting a
blowout by Hillary Clinton, I published another article titled A
Neuroscientist Explains Why Trump is Winning, and one month later another
piece titled The More People Think About Death, the More They Think About
Voting for Trump, which directly linked Terror Management Theory to
Trump's rabid support. A 2016 Daily Beast article along the same lines,
called Why Do Some People Respond to Trump? It's Biology 101, issued a
warning for voters in its concluding paragraph:

"The rise of Trump has defied almost all logic. But he isn't appealing to
logic. He is appealing to our most basic survival instincts. Those
include fear and the natural tendency to thrive and conquer. This
presidential election will be an important test for our nation. We will
see if we are evolved enough for our logic to overcome our instincts."

Apparently we were not. Over the next few years, I would write more than
a dozen articles on Trump-related psychology for Raw Story and Psychology
Today that would receive millions of views, and land me offers of
representation by fancy literary agencies, and media requests for
appearances on popular web shows like the Young Turks' Damage Report and
the David Pakman Show.

In these interviews I described how Trump would respond as he began to
lose power, based on insights from Terror Management Theory and the
neuroscience of narcissism. Again, I deserve no special credit for these
predictions; had I not been introduced to Terror Management Theory by a
colleague, I would have been just as clueless as the pundits and
statisticians. However, Ernest Becker, the cultural anthropologist who
wrote The Denial of Death, and Sheldon Solomon, the psychologist who
turned Becker's idea into an actual testable theory, are prophets in my
book. Prophets of death, I guess you'd call them.

A more recent article, posted in September of 2020 at Psychology Today,
titled How Trump and Media Allies Target the Mentally Vulnerable, had
another clear warning. The teaser text read, "We can expect that
conspiracy theories will be weaponized this election (again)." In it I
explain how Trump and Q targeted people with schizophrenia and related
disorders, by exploiting their heightened sensitivity to patterns (which
are often not actually there). In another article published around the
same time, I warned that the division was getting so bad that we could
expect the election results to be rejected by half of the country.
Despite these dire predictions being widely broadcast, the future that
the science was foreshadowing seemed to be unavoidable. Why? Because
unless we can learn to mentally override our fears and biases, they will
completely control us, and they will make us tribal. But we are not
totally hopeless�if we understand the neuroscience underlying these
phenomena, we can fight back.
The Prefrontal Cortex is the Source of "Free Will"

The kind of person who is likely to be a Trump extremist is also likely
to have impaired or suboptimal brain function in an important region
known as the prefrontal cortex. A healthily-functioning prefrontal cortex
is what allows one to override their primitive instincts, to think
rationally, and to respond to stressful events in a controlled manner,
rather than being controlled by fear and reflexive behavior. It does this
by arming the conscious agent with a higher form of self-regulation and
control, known as cognitive control, executive control, or effortful
control.

To be clear, impaired cognitive control is not just a problem we see with
Right-wing radicals. It is connected to ideological extremism more
generally, so poor prefrontal activation is a concern for Left and Right-
wingers alike. In fact, this cognitive profile is also associated with
stimulant and alcohol addiction, as well as mental illness, like
schizophrenia. And in super stressful times, like during a pandemic, we
all become mentally ill in some way (anxiety, depression, etc.), and
therefore less in control of our biases and behavior, which limits our
ability to act freely. Why? Because the cognitive mechanisms that
normally allow us to do so dissolve, leaving us with only preprogrammed
behavior.

While some people will claim that they have no racial biases, or any
biases for that matter, a famous experiment called the implicit bias task
reveals that almost all of us do, and there's plenty of data to prove it.
This bias affects how we process information and perceive the social
world around us. However, this bias is subconscious and not easily
detected with the naked eye. This has the unfortunate result of making it
easy to ignore. Whether or not our implicit racial bias leads to overtly
racist attitudes and behavior depends on an interplay between different
brain areas�specifically the amygdala, which lights up when we experience
something we perceive to be threatening, and the prefrontal cortex, whose
job it is to regulate and suppress that fear response and the associated
behavior. But if the prefrontal cortex isn't working right, it can't do
its job.

Brain imaging studies have shown that people who display a stronger
implicit bias have a stronger electrical response to black or other-race
faces in the amygdala. An exaggerated amygdala response is part of what
creates the sudden sensation of feeling scared. In people with healthy
functioning brains, the fast amygdala response activates the prefrontal
cortex, which is slower and plays a regulatory role. When the fear system
is triggered, prefrontral areas work to assess the situation rationally,
calming the mind and curbing fear-evoked behavior. Thanks to specific
neural regions like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the anterior
cingulate cortex, the brain exercises cognitive control, suppressing the
tendency toward tribalism.

The problem is, not everyone has a properly functioning prefrontal
cortex, and these people are the ones whose biases control them. They
cannot reason those fearful surges away because they lack the mechanisms
that make that kind of high-level reasoning possible. Since alcohol and
amphetamine addiction can exacerbate this problem, Fox News viewers with
such vices will be more vulnerable to the effects of fear mongering, and
if they are given a "call to action" by a tribe leader like Trump or Q,
more likely to act aggressively in an effort to push their worldview on
others. Most supporters will stay home, but with many millions of
followers tuned in, it is not surprising that a few thousand showed up to
storm the Capitol.

So now that we understand the root cause of it all, perhaps we should
view Trump and Q followers differently. They are not normal supporters,
but more akin to cult members who have been radicalized by fear, their
fates determined due to a lack of free will�which refers to our ability
to override our primitive programming and tribal instincts. They are, in
a sense, victims. They have been duped and brainwashed by rigid
ideologies almost from the time of birth, and those ideologies have been
weaponized by divisive politicians like Donald Trump. Does it make more
sense to want to punish or fight these people, or to recognize them as
agents who've lost their autonomy and ability to reason effectively?

The enemies are the influencers intentionally deceiving these vulnerable
people, stoking their fears and fueling their biases. You may say some
were racist, crazy, or ignorant before Trump, but we now see how that got
that way. Politicians create fear and hatred for votes, Alex Jones does
it for clicks, Fox does it for ratings, and QAnon does it for�chaos, I
suppose. These are the people we must not let win. The actual followers
are pawns in their game.

So, what can we do to release these people from the grips of their
psychological captors?
The Path to Deradicalization

The solution is multi-faceted, and change won't happen overnight. One
major goal would be to alter the worldview and belief structure of the
extremist, and another would be to strengthen their prefrontal cortex, so
that the agent is in control, rather than being controlled by the
primitive brain.

Fortunately, one fascinating feature of the brain is its plasticity�or
ability to rewire itself in response to new information and experience
throughout life. Through exposure to new stimuli, new synaptic
connections can be formed, creating neural pathways that can promote a
restructuring of old and rigid belief systems. To facilitate cognitive
restructuring, meditation and attentional exercises can train the
prefrontal cortex to attenuate a hyperactive amygdala and control those
bad instincts. A campaign to make these kinds of practices commonplace
should be a goal of scientists and educators. It is not easy, but it is
certainly possible to reverse biased and even racist tendencies through
cognitive interventions. Counterbias training has proven effective in
making police officers more aware of their implicit biases, though
enhanced awareness does not always immediately translate into changes in
behavior.

That could require more extreme therapeutic measures, such as
pharmacological treatments to reset the brain. Psilocybin, the ingredient
in magic mushrooms, or LSD, supplemented with talk therapy could be an
effective way to alter rigid worldviews and dissolve biases. In a 2016
article, I suggested LSD therapy for Donald Trump, and although the title
may make one chuckle, I seriously believe it would be the most effective
way to get Trump to understand the effects of the division he's sowed.
Psychedelics work by relaxing belief structures, so that the agent can
"achieve a healthy revision of pathological beliefs," to quote
psychedelics researcher Robin Carhart-Harris. Unfortunately, this remedy
would require that the extremist be open-minded enough to give such an
experimental treatment a try. Given that the average Q follower is all
about "waking up" and seeing reality as it is, it is not unreasonable to
think that a psychedelics campaign could catch on in those communities.
Studies have shown that the use of psychedelics is associated with a
decrease in authoritarian political views and an increase in views
associated with liberalism, like open-mindedness and empathy (though one
could argue some "liberals" today have neither of these). These drugs
work by dissolving the ego, making one feel more connected to nature and
to others.

But the real problem is that our most popular worldviews�the major
religions, political ideologies, and national identities�divide us into
tribes, and emphasize our differences rather than our similarities and
shared human interests. If Terror Management Theory is correct, then the
obvious solution is a new cultural and political worldview that unites us
all under a common existential goal: the continued survival, progress,
and eventually, the outward expansion of humanity. This worldview is
called the Cosmic Perspective, and I have outlined it in a Psychology
Today blog post titled, Could a 'Cosmic Religion' Unite a Divided Nation?
You can learn about how the Cosmic Perspective naturally emerges from
Terror Management Theory in this YouTube video on my channel (Road to
Omega), Trump Divided America�Here's How We Heal.

Part of being liberal means being compassionate, but this is just as much
about practicality as it is empathy. There's really no other choice than
trying to make things better. I'll be playing my part by creating more
content aimed at coming together�call it propaganda for a psychedelic
revolution. Coming together does not mean meeting in the middle�as
extreme centrism can be just as counterproductive as any other kind of
extremism. We need radical solutions that push us forward, and we cannot
go forward if we're at war.

If you'd like to be part of the solution, subscribe to my Substack
newsletter, Road to Omega, which is a project aimed at fighting
misinformation, healing division, and redistributing wealth and power in
America. The project will be tokenized with NFTs (non-fungible tokens),
and token holders will benefit from the project's success, so there is
value in participating.

Simply stated, Road to Omega is an effort to save the world with science
and epistemology. The plan entails:

healing the division in America and abroad by fighting tribalism
fighting misinformation with a logical reasoning system
decentralizing wealth and power with blockchain technology
creating a new political party based on self-correction
unifying the sciences with a new kind of "Theory of Everything"
dissolving the boundary between science and spirituality
developing a "religion for robots" that provides a code of ethics for
AIs

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o Most Trump Followers See Him As Superior Because He's Rich And They're Poor and

By: Raven on Thu, 29 Aug 2024

0Raven

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