PART 6
On 6 January 2021, an angry crowd of Trump supporters, protesting about the ‘stolen election’, broke into the Capitol. Jacob Chansley stood out in the throng thanks to animal pelts, tattoos with Nordic insignia, a beard, bare chest, a chain, fur headgear topped with horns, and a face painted in the colours of the flag – red, white and blue.1 He was soon widely known as the ‘QAnon Shaman’. That his striking image was broadcast globally, through social media as well as news agencies, illustrates how, nowadays, a face, story or meme can suddenly go viral everywhere. Chansley became the best-known face of the riot, and a public talking point. He was viewed in the liberal press as a flamboyant proponent of conspiracy theory, an exemplar (or victim) of the paranoid style and a symptom of the breakdown of the normal political process. In fact, there were many reasons for people to be there protesting that day; no single case can characterise all. But we have something to learn from his story, its media coverage and the argument made in defence by his attorney.
QAnon is a multi-faceted online conspiracy theory, and a terrifying sign of the times; terrifying because of the claims it makes, and because of the sway it holds over huge numbers of voters, not just a maverick few. The QAnon phenomenon has aroused enormous apprehension, especially in the liberal media, generating headlines such as ‘QAnon is an American invention, but it has become a global plague’.2 Polls abound, illustrating the scale of public support for such sources of ‘news’; one, from Ipsos, in December 2020, for instance, estimated that over 50 per cent of Republican voters gave QAnon ‘teachings’ some credence.3
We are all vulnerable to states of mind where we misread what is happening in ourselves and in the world; this ‘difficulty’ is not just born of ignorance of facts or available interpretations. It can sometimes be just that, but we may also actively reject sources of information that enable us to better understand our minds and relationships. Everybody at times, and some people all the time, is riven by narcissistic wounds and grievances, haunted by overblown fears or governed by a mood of ‘suspicious discontent’, as Richard Hofstadter put it in his landmark 1963 lecture and subsequent essay on the paranoid style in US politics. Moreover, paranoid attitudes can be deliberately cultivated and exploited by cynical agencies, most obviously today to target mass fury and public aggression, while avoiding analyses of other ‘messy’ threats and problems, in which perhaps the accusers might themselves be implicated. People may suffer paranoia, and/or seek to inflame a paranoid view in others; they might well want to provide at the same time soothing or titillating ‘circuses’ designed to distract or de-politicise.
Hofstadter noted how conspiracy fears may arise for a plethora of reasons, and how they came to be exploited in the United States, not least by demagogic politicians and reactionary clerics. The important questions for him, as for us now, include: what makes large numbers inclined to adopt the paranoid style; who benefits; and what might counter that style, and help redirect public concern towards real rather than chimerical dangers?
The paranoid style can serve many purposes, psychically and socially. We might buy into new claims of conspiracy because they reflect our prior, entrenched, paranoid frame of mind. In other cases, the temptation to adopt that style may be more fleeting and circumstantial. Either way, there are parties in society that use states of terror politically or strictly for business. Some entrepreneurs, for instance, sell health treatments in the same virtual space on which they peddle delusional narratives, turning a tidy profit. Hedge funds seek to make a killing by creating digital platforms on which authoritarian populists have free rein to undermine democracies. Largely unfettered social media organisations have massively cashed in; yet their major shareholders and directors may be broadly indifferent as to who spreads persecutory tales and lies, or what those lies are, so long as the lying serves well to colonise the greatest amount of public attention possible, keeping advertising revenue and data collection rolling in. They are not necessarily in favour of people believing scurrilous propaganda; just willing to bet on every possible outcome and loath to disrupt the flow of absorbing chatter and constant engagement, since their business model relies upon that uncritical engrossed attention.4
*
As to the motives of the millions of individual subscribers, online, each day, for sharing in conspiracy tales, there might, again, be a plethora of reasons for participation: an inkling that the real sources of power are bound to be hidden, a desire to clinch a larger political argument about the bankruptcy of the existing regime, an inclination to share feelings of dread, or perhaps just a pleasure in secretive conversations about other secretive networks. It may make the participant feel special, party to the latest gossip, ‘in the know’ to hear of horrific conspiracy. One might swap vicious canards, fanciful hypotheses and counter-narratives doubtfully, a little agnostically, or, alternatively, give the benefit of the doubt, and conclude ‘no smoke without fire’. Many, however, have gone a great deal further on the spectrum of credulity; the most avid take proclamations by ‘Q’ or other such bogus sources as certain revelations and instructions, as, perhaps, did some of the Capitol rioters. Followers of conspiracy theories have been known to take the law into their own hands. In 2016 a man attacked a Washington DC pizza restaurant following preposterous internet claims that Hillary Clinton and her associates were sexually abusing children in satanic rituals in its basement.
A person need not be a paranoid conspiracy theorist, perhaps needless to say, to research political plots, complain of propaganda and dirty tricks or criticise undemocratic, back-room deals. For instance, after the 2008 crash, when certain southern European countries, especially Greece, faced complete financial meltdown, the EU was accused by hard-headed critics, as well as conspiracy theorists, of bypassing its own parliament and operating in a byzantine, oppressive fashion. Protestors may have plenty of cogent arguments as to why they deplore opaque political decision-making, be it in the EU or any other bloc or country. However, such critiques of secrecy can also switch tracks, not in the business of serious analysis of real eventualities, but rather caught up in apocalyptic warnings, fantastical terrors, omniscient assumptions that, deep down, ‘everything connects’.
Chansley apparently thought that the Illuminati,5 the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group between them ‘control the world’.6 The first of these entities was a secret society created in late-eighteenth-century Bavaria; the second, a non-governmental discussion group founded by David Rockefeller in 1973, the third, a regular gathering of financiers, media moguls and politicians who have met discreetly, if not completely in secret, since 1954. The extreme right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of the Infowars website, in similar vein, heckled one Bilderberg meeting through a megaphone: ‘We know you are ruthless. We know you are evil. We respect your dark power.’7 Like many other conspiracy theorists, Jones is notorious for peddling visions of Jewish mafias and world-wide interwoven conspiracies to his many followers.8
Stories about Bilderberg and other such organisations, meetings or clubs easily morph into visions of a singular, omnipotent enemy. The language of conspiracy theory today is often still replete with tropes about back-stabbing elites and, specifically, ‘conspiratorial’ Jews, sometimes with images redolent of the old blood libel, where Jews were supposedly involved in ritually drinking the blood of murdered children.9 The Far Right is once again awash with tales of global Jewish ‘puppet masters’ orchestrating the ills of the world. Accusations may be direct or insinuated; for instance, with the invocation of the name of the billionaire financier George Soros, or with the resuscitation of stories about the untold influence of the Rothschilds. So, before we know it, allusions to a particular powerful individual or group change into signifiers of an omnipotent shadowy world government, or references to organised networks with devilish designs on white, God-fearing, Christian people. An early blueprint for such stories, concocted at the start of the twentieth century and then unleashed to terrible effect in the febrile Europe of the 1920s, was a fiction, portrayed as though a genuine document, detailing Jewish conspiracy: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.10
Devoted followers of QAnon believe that ‘Q’, the mysterious source (purported to be a single former military intelligence officer, but perhaps in fact a group of misinformation spreaders), offers them real clues to the truth of the world, elements of genuine enlightenment, indeed, an antidote to the mass brainwashing conducted by a liberal elite. A user codenamed ‘Q’ or ‘Q Clearance Patriot’ first set a potent thread running online in 2017, posting a message and warning of the ‘Calm Before the Storm’. Cryptic communications were designed to intrigue, and before long a story had crystallised: a governing cabal was committing obscene criminal acts, enjoying impunity from prosecution and pursuing all means to rob the Republicans, or rather, Donald J. Trump, of legitimate victory.
Trump was perceived, in this QAnon narrative, as a moral redeemer, the scourge of a rotten system. He was someone to rescue at all costs, so he could save ‘the people’. As to the pernicious extremity and fantastical nature of the claims at the heart of this narrative, here is how The New York Times drily summarised the key plank of QAnon theory: a cabal made up of ‘Satan-worshiping paedophiles’ included politicians, financiers, leaders and media figures, among whom were top Democrats like Biden, Clinton, Obama and Soros, entertainers and Hollywood celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks and Ellen DeGeneres, and religious leaders including Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama. In addition to molesting children, the cabal supposedly committed many other crimes that would not be amiss in a horror movie … they ‘kill and eat their victims to extract a life-extending chemical called adrenochrome’.11 The image of grievous harm being inflicted on children by monstrously exploitative, selfish adults is potent, of course. And accurate news about past crimes and cover-ups may make it hard for people to be sure the more outlandish accusations don’t have some merit. At any time, day or night, after all, somewhere children are indeed being terrified, beaten, abused, used, discarded. Children can also become the signifier of elite exploitation of the mass.
It is hard to know for sure to what extent followers believe parts or all of the QAnon fantasy. We should not assume all those millions are a solid, homogenous block – some, as I’ve noted, may swallow such stories entirely; others partially or perhaps not at all, engaging with ‘Q’ more searchingly or opportunistically – so when we say ‘follower’, it begs such questions. Clearly some people appear to follow but are really there to exploit mass interest, to express solidarity with the fanatics, seeing ‘Q’ as a battering ram that can be seized upon for their own purposes or immediate interests. Trump, for example, was reluctant to condemn QAnon, which is not to say he truly believed in such ridiculous claims; it was perhaps for him all part of the political game, a tactic to use to try to retain power at all costs.
It is striking that some of the more obviously self-promoting fellow travellers with QAnon, at a certain point, peeled off, publicly insisting the ideas had – finally – grown too bizarre for them, leaving the foot soldiers high and dry. Even Alex Jones eventually lost patience completely, spectacularly parting company with the ‘Shaman’ and his conspiracy cause live on air. Admittedly it was late in the day (in an interview in March 2021) when he told a disconcerted Chansley: ‘I will not suffer your Q people after this! … I’m sick of all these witches and warlocks and pumpkin popsums [sic] and everything … Hahaha … God, sorry … Bye Q, I can’t talk to you anymore.’12
It is worth restating here an obvious point: ‘populism’ is a term that can be used lazily and, worse, contemptuously. It’s not populism as such that is the problem, but the nature of the political programmes that are often promoted by populists in the name of the people.13 Various recent demagogic disrupters of liberal democracies who have gained prominence and power on the Right (in Western and Eastern Europe, the United States, Latin America, etc.) provide wrong-headed, extremely sinister, even crazed answers. But they may, all the same, be alert to important questions that we all need to consider seriously. In other words, they hijack legitimate and vital criticism about the ravages wreaked on many societies over recent decades; they cotton on to the crisis of political legitimacy that is already happening, albeit their answers drastically deepen that crisis, and serve to imperil democracies. The questions may well concern the heavy price paid by populations for neoliberal policies, for globalisation, for the unregulated flows of capital, outsourcing, voracious asset stripping. They seize on the widespread perception that systems of governance or ideals of democracy and freedom have been badly corrupted, that once-flourishing communities are dying, that good jobs have become scarcer, that a narrow band of ‘winners’ are disjoined from a vast array of ‘losers’, that corporate forces have grown so vast and entitled that they can dictate policy to governments.
Authoritarian populists may even pose, directly or implicitly, salient questions about the corruption of public speech (even as they corrupt that speech further and give their own frighteningly brutal ‘solutions’): what has debased debate in the public sphere; why is the mass media not talking about what really matters; to what end has the digital economy vitiated human exchanges; how has social media alienated us from each other? How have we moved so far from the ideals, let alone the practice (when did it ever fully exist?), of ‘deliberative democracy’? Even Chansley, who loved Trump greatly, had more than an inkling that something was, indeed, drastically wrong with communication in contemporary society, with the operation of technology and the mass media, and, moreover, that much about liberal democracy may be fake and illusory. However, he saw the threat in an extremely concrete sense, more akin to an ‘influencing machine’. He warned of forces that could meddle directly and control people absolutely inside their heads, telling a reporter how radio and TV operate on ‘very specific frequencies that are inaudible that actually affect the brain waves of your brain’.14
Conspiracy theories range widely today, frequently shifting public attention from the ordinary and open to the extraordinary and closed, pointing to undiscovered machinations in the infernal depths.15 Many hubs exist around the world where people can hear of outrageous cover-ups and explore all manner of perturbing theories about hidden conspiracies, past and present; stories that are then used ostensibly to explain the parlous state we are in. On the internet there is great scope for people to exploit search engines, especially where relevant data is limited. Media manipulators often work in concert to take advantage of these ‘data voids’,16 gaming the system so that people subsequently searching then immediately stumble on misinformation, including dire, concocted warnings of terrible deeds and monstrous plots.
True, of course, some conspiracies do really exist, but conspiracy theories may lead us along pathways that zigzag between plausible, conceivable, unlikely and incredible political scenarios, as though they are all worth the same consideration: the Illuminati had a hand in the French Revolution; freemasons lay behind the case of Jack the Ripper; high-ranking Nazi scientists were allowed to escape the Allies’ net and smuggled to the West; the vice president was at the heart of the plot to kill JFK; the reasons for and scale of the war in Vietnam were not as officially stated; the Apollo moon landing was faked; the Clintons conspired to assassinate dozens of opponents; 9/11 was a false flag operation; the Sandy Hook massacre in which twenty children and six educators died was all entirely staged to attack the right of Americans to bear arms; the Covid-19 vaccine programme was designed to destroy you; reptilian aliens are here in our midst, disguised as humans.
It is quite possible to operate in a virtual, parallel universe, where facts are never checked online, where fictions morph into news and where demonology shapes the ‘analyses’ of global problems. Here is a not uncharacteristic report, from 2021, about a conspiracy theory regarding Covid-19 that circulated widely, in Arabic, on Facebook: ‘Bill Gates is dressed as the Joker. His hair is fluorescent green, his face painted white … In his hand is a large needle, filled with bright green liquid … a caption teases Gates’ “horror plan”.’ It is just one of dozens of disinformation operations that have been viewed millions of times, promoting the case for mass vaccine resistance.17 Other popular stories shift readers’ attention seamlessly from known facts, such as CIA-funding of the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan (to provide an anti-Soviet bulwark) or the insistent claim that Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, intentionally created Islamic State to wipe out the Arab oil states and to damage irreparably the Arab world. Some theorists declare with certainty that the United States not only re installed the Taliban in Afghanistan but also formed an alliance with al-Qaeda to defeat Islamic State; or contend that behind practically all the malice and discord everywhere lies Mossad (the best-known branch of the Israeli secret services).
In sum, the lines between rational critique and the paranoid style, or what might be called a ‘hermeneutics of ultra-suspicion’, can easily blur. In any society, some people who are not actually persecuted can suffer a sense of persecution for years, and then, by virtue of that condition, be attracted to causes that confirm some ghoulish intrigue; but today many others are also easily drawn in by conspiracy talk, seduced, albeit to varying degrees, by insidious, utterly misleading ‘information’. The internet enables stories to spread faster and wider than in earlier times, thereby joining up individuals swiftly into loosely associated virtual groups. Sometimes the same untrustworthy ‘dog whistle’ inflammatory tales are recycled from one site or one extreme political party’s Twitter stream to another abroad, thus ‘off the peg’ theories are translated from one country to another.
We are all sometimes prone to deny or disavow a piece of reality, to exaggerate a story, occasionally preferring to entertain the most questionable or even quite unhinged view of ‘the facts’. There can be paranoid, perhaps even psychotic, streaks in neurotic people; we may ‘go mad’ for a time, overwhelmed with extreme suspicions, states of jealousy, hate and envy; or be smitten by ‘road rage’, intent on murdering, or feel as though we are being murdered, but then, hopefully, swiftly recovering, before we act on the impulse. Or we might fall into temporary, massive self-pity, assuming that problems in our lives are not – indeed could not possibly be – connected to complex causes, or even stem from chance and contingency. Instead, it can be tempting to assume a hidden, malevolent human agency must be pulling the strings, persecuting us personally, giving us the hope that if only we can expose and destroy that source, that plot, we will be free. Conspiracy theory, in short, can resonate for all kinds of people, not just a crazy few; its effect cumulatively, in recent times, is to weight much public inquiry heavily towards a shrill and adversary tone, and to assume, a priori, the prevalence of nefarious schemes. The task for the conspiracy theorist is to work back from the ‘effects’ to trace the necessary, clandestine cause in a discrete group of plotters, while perhaps ignoring the ‘plot’ hidden in plain sight; for example, conflicts of class, vast wealth inequalities or the bitter fruits of a particular culture, governing system or ideology.
During the Cold War, various clinicians and historians noted how conspiracy theory and the paranoid style might be especially alluring when a people are already traumatised, or feel most heavily imprisoned; when a population is wounded, aggrieved, anxious and under intense pressure, or most unmoored. Loneliness can breed paranoia, and paranoia can exacerbate loneliness and draw people towards dangerous demagogues. Arendt, let’s recall, said that totalitarianism is built on ‘organised loneliness’. Loneliness prepares people for totalitarian domination; and, to put it the other way around, totalitarianism, once installed, always destroys the public spaces that mitigate loneliness, leaving each person isolated in an ‘iron band of terror’. She also said of totalitarianism that it creates a world where truth and lying are impossible to disentangle. Arendt worried acutely about liberal democracies that corrupted themselves and grew ever more mired in lies and deceptions. She knew where all this could lead: collective confusion, isolation, even madness, and the destruction of any remnant of deliberative politics.
As he sought to defend his client, Chansley’s former attorney Albert Watkins made this point too, of the United States and its liberal democracy, observing how we need to look beyond individual cases to a whole climate of opinion and face up to how society can all too easily turn a blind eye or actively foster basic attacks upon thinking, culminating in disasters such as 6 January 2021. His client, he let it be known, was a victim of brainwashing and in the thrall of a dangerous cult.18 The politics of hate and deception in the United States had created the trouble, he argued. January 6, when the riot took place, was ‘a day on which our nation was compelled to commence bellying up to the bar to acknowledge each of our roles in permitting, fostering, tolerating, endorsing or ignoring without action an ever-increasing barrage of divisiveness, intolerance, untruths, misrepresentations, and mischaracterizations through an unrelenting multi-year propaganda odyssey’.19
Hofstadter had already explored the problem of lying barrages and conspiratorial mischaracterisations sixty years earlier. He reflected upon politics, paranoia and conspiracy theory, which had been rife during the 1950s, and in the United States most especially focused upon putative hidden communist plots.20 He had given his lecture on the paranoid style in Oxford on 21 November 1963. This was the year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the time when the superpowers – the United States and the USSR – came closest to a calamitous nuclear exchange. The lecture was delivered, by chance, the day before President Kennedy was killed, an event that lent new significance to his thesis, and spawned a plethora of additional theories, some of which still have a following. Those grim events in Dallas represented, for many Americans, a disorientating turning point after which the state could never be trusted again; as though here was the real launch pad of the ‘turbulent sixties’, the dawn of a new ‘age of fracture’.21
Although we can draw distinctions between mainstream political views in Western democracies after 1945 and the more outlandish conspiracy theories of those on the fringes, including such extreme conservative and overtly racist organisations in the United States as the John Birch Society, we should not forget how senior figures in the political establishment, including many in leadership roles, expressed paranoid views and/or displayed paranoid symptoms. Some psychiatrists opined freely at the time about the ultra-suspicious views of the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, and of Republican Party leading players such as Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater, speculating if they were clinically ill. This reached a notable crescendo in the run-up to the 1964 election, where Goldwater stood (and lost) against Lyndon Johnson.
Goldwater’s extreme anti-communism, and stubborn opposition to major civil rights reforms, led hundreds of mental health professionals to diagnose him as a mortal danger to the country, a ‘megalomaniac’, with a ‘persecution complex’. Goldwater complained, after defeat, to the American Psychiatric Association (APA). No doubt his ire was intensified by the extensive mockery to which he was subjected during the campaign, such as the dismissive and widely circulated attack line: ‘In your guts you know he’s nuts.’ The APA thereafter created the ‘Goldwater rule’, suggesting it was unethical for clinicians to make comments about public figures whom they had not personally examined.22
That debate was revived in the years of Trump’s presidency; but the issue, in the 1960s, as in the 2010s and 20s, is not just whether a particular leader is mentally ill, but how and why the paranoid style resonates across constituencies and is taken up so powerfully in political movements. And the issue is also why authoritarian populists, spouting conspiracy views and operating in the paranoid style, can at times gain so much traction. For evidently the paranoid style has boomed in the West, and around the world, in the new millennium, facilitated greatly by the internet, and fallout from 9/11, the 2008 financial crash and the Covid-19 pandemic. Across continents, researchers suggest how huge numbers of people are now primed to be doubtful of the ‘facts’ they are offered, deeply mistrustful of government information, suspicious of the bona fides of official bodies and implicitly or explicitly critical of the various brands of liberal philosophy and liberal democratic conventions that shaped so much Western political thinking through to the end of the Cold War.23 Consensus, such as it was, in the West, about the basic trustworthiness of state authorities has weakened, and sometimes broken down, leaving a vacuum for the most illiberal and reactionary forms of populism to fill.24
While it is true that the idea of ‘futureless futures’ or ‘living in end times’ is not a new experience for all, it is also the case that many citizens see themselves thrown, only of late, into a more dangerous, fraught situation, and are acutely aware of downward mobility compared with parents or grandparents. We are all, no doubt, thirsty for explanations (if not rationalisations) about the current state of our world and the shape of the future. Envisioning ever greater environmental disasters and yet further political, military and economic chaos, even many privileged people, those in the wealthiest ‘one per cent’, are profoundly worried and feel at a loss about what to do. There are today, in that still smaller fraction of the ‘elite’, after all, billionaires building supposedly disaster-proof refuges in New Zealand, preparing for the end times.25 In the post-war decades, admittedly, end times were in fact also easily imaginable in the West, as in the East, even if, under the two old systems, jobs and livelihoods were more secure and predictable for the majority than they are now; it was nonetheless an age when nuclear fear was widespread, and it was not necessarily paranoid at all to believe an apocalyptic ending was possible.
To recap, real dangerous conspiracies may occur in any state, or supranational organisation. But the paranoid style serves to generate and then make use of a climate of fear, to assume a hidden enemy, often but not always peopled by stereotypical, racialised, villainous figures; it may well distract, displace and focus the attention of subscribers on a particular ‘meta-explanation’, decry a general imperilment of human freedom, before proposing as an answer to social ills, a draconian, fundamentalist or fascistic response. The paranoid style tends to invite us to locate the blame for real problems in some occult, shadowy force that is already the source of disquiet (or prejudice), rather than enable one to see contemporary history as a matter of thorny social problems, policy choices, open political struggles and competing ideologies. To debunk a style of rhetoric that lures us into conspiracy theory is not necessarily to deny the baleful and clandestine activities that can occur inside any party or government.
However, to say that we need to make that distinction, and appraise genuine problems and face real crises, as far as we can, without falling into this paranoid style, is easier said than done. Debates continue about the relative vulnerabilities of different constituencies, and whether those at the ‘top’, in the ‘middle’ or at the ‘bottom’ are more susceptible: people in ‘gated communities’ and other secluded cocoons, leaders who enjoy positions of great power, those protecting their middling perch in the social hierarchy, the ‘just about managing’, or those at the bottom, bereft of a stake in society, poor, deprived of reliable data, perhaps even of adequate literacy, without the necessary critical tools of analysis.
In deprived communities, the Rust Belt, flyover states, neglected inland or coastal towns, as a Bob Dylan line once had it, ‘you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows’. Polling reports on the ultra-suspicious state of opinion in continental Europe, in the United States in the 2016 and 2020 elections, during the 2016 Brexit referendum in Britain or now in the midst of a global pandemic, suggest the depth of mistrust of old sources of elite authority. The continuing appeal of media-savvy, mostly ultra-right-wing populist politicians, conspiracy theorists and outright fascists is evident in many countries. There are also notable left-wing populists, for instance in Latin America as well as in Europe, who make use of conspiracy narratives, so I do not want to suggest some right-wing monopoly. However, in the last ten years the most striking and consequential examples in the West, I contend, have come from the Right.
During the 2010s, leaders such as Trump and Bolsonaro took something important from the playbook of the Italian right-wing media tycoon turned politician Silvio Berlusconi, who first became prime minister in 1994. Even before the internet provided a super-charged mode of communication, Berlusconi was already adept at dominating media attention, exploiting his ownership of TV channels and captivating huge audiences with his own demotic style. The skill was to seem both huge and successful and yet ‘like the workers’, in contrast to the so-called political elite. Such politicians displayed considerable guile in setting the agenda of the daily news, always appearing larger than life, and yet salty and real by comparison with the ‘robot’ professional politicians. Such charismatic leaders have an army of ‘people shapers’ to help sustain the illusion.
Current debate about such leaders (above all Trump) and what they signify might also lead us to discuss the history of the uses made of lying in politics. Trump’s direct falsehoods, while US president, would be recorded daily by various newspapers, as though to insist we were now in completely uncharted waters. The lying was indeed monumental. Some pundits have suggested that the scale of it is unprecedented, a function of a new kind of performative politics, an expression of a breath-taking novel mindset of shamelessness, a symptom of the unaccountable nature, perhaps, of so much discourse on the internet, leading politicians to care only about attention, not about probity. Some point to a post-truth era; others to something more cyclical in the prominence of political mendacity. In the last decade or two, there have been many commentaries about the brazen nature of this complete untruthfulness by such political leaders, suggesting the current abandonment of a more measured, careful and sometimes hypocritical style of liberal politics that had largely prevailed since 1945. Are we witnessing, they ask, a new kind of swaggering braggadocio, a discourse of ‘open’ dishonesty, a frank embrace of fraud that we have not previously seen in our lifetimes? And what should we make of the careless revelations, or perhaps sometimes more-or-less deliberate public parading, of marital infidelities by various national leaders: Berlusconi and Trump, for instance, but also in Britain, Johnson? Are we now in a world where open expressions of personal as well as political deceit are required, to create a certain look, like some inverted badge of honour, part of the anti-feminist backlash, the attack against ‘political correctness’, a means to show that you can conquer people’s hearts at will, and then dispense with them, do not care, and are sufficiently macho to reach ‘the top’?
While it is true that political mores and constraints on deception may shift, questions about corruption and degeneration of political morals, not to mention debate about who guards the guardians, who polices the police, who arbitrates truth and lies, who can protect a citizenry from poisonous stories and shameless liars that threaten the state, are in fact as old as political philosophy. In Cold War times, the issue was also revived, as it is now, with many debates about truth and falsehood in the conduct of Western politics, or conversely about how to protect the probity of public discourse in a ‘healthy’ democracy.
Arendt’s notable 1972 essay ‘Lying in Politics’, for example, was prompted in part by the leaking of the ‘Pentagon Papers’. This was a cache of top-secret documents handed to the press by a then US defence official, Daniel Ellsberg.26 The Papers revealed much about the war in Vietnam, and about the vast field of political lying that accompanied US military actions, under Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon alike. Arendt noted, rightly, that falsehoods in public life are age-old, and that no political state functions without some diplomatic silence and evasion to avoid international tensions, or sometimes mass panic. Like Hofstadter, she asked readers to consider basic human propensities – for example, our shared vulnerability to be attracted to liars, to accept subterfuge or to indulge in denial – and at the same time she asked that we focus attention upon the social and institutional conditions that may promote or restrict such inclinations, and disincentivise politicians, civil services and electorates from giving way to governance based on chronic deception.27
Arendt reminds us that we need to approach lying in politics from several directions at once. She noted the aggressive, scheming capabilities of certain people in power to manipulate; the propensity of swathes of the public to tolerate deceit; and the role of all those legions of people who staff ministries, universities, think tanks and a host of other relevant agencies: in short, all those functionaries, advisers, analysts and technicians whom she called the ‘problem-solvers’. They could be truthful, challenging, well-briefed, independent and upright officials; at best, they might serve as a crucial conscience and safeguard for democracy. However, all too often such problem-solvers turned into cynical or perhaps mentally conditioned officials and hacks, working on a kind of autopilot to get the job done and maintain their careers. She had in mind Western officials whose actions might determine the fate of peoples at home or abroad about whom they knew virtually nothing, and perhaps cared even less. She saw these problem-solvers as heirs to an early Cold War ideology that was prone to treat zones of the world as test cases, chapters in a bigger story: hence Vietnam could be regarded simply as a pawn in the larger superpower chess game. A country or people might become merely collateral damage in the global task of somehow ‘containing China’. Arendt also singled out, in considering contemporary lying in politics, the influence of Madison Avenue.
In a thriving society, and certainly in a flourishing democracy, Arendt suggested, politics needs to mean more than a tale of leaders, formal parties and electorates undertaking occasional votes. She emphasised the complexity of civil society, and noted the importance of critical and scrutinising agencies – a functioning and independent legal profession, the press and a robust civil service, with the requisite skills, codes, arms-length relation to the executive and appropriate ethical guidelines, supporting but also observing and sometimes constraining government. The array of necessary counterbalancing structures is easy to damage or destroy but hard to rebuild. We seek, after all, efficient but not inhuman bureaucracies, and recourse to law (or indeed ‘good law projects’, to borrow from the title of an organisation currently holding the UK government to account), to help to detoxify politics, not just to enforce the will of a party or leader.
Lying politicians, Arendt noted, may be adept at understanding mass psychology, tuning into wishful thinking and exploiting public reluctance to abandon preconceptions; electorates may be open to ‘being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes’.28 The liar in politics has an obvious advantage: falsehood may sound more plausible and real, as well as more palatable than inconvenient truths. The liar may have an inkling as to what the audience already keenly wishes or expects to hear. They may be very good at crafting a story in the most ‘credible’ fashion, whereas ‘reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected for which we were not prepared’.29 The question was, how might such propensities to self-deception, as well as to lying, be contained, resisted or actively offset?
When we refer to the word ‘politics’ now, or aspire to see its future renewal as a means of combatting such ills, we would do well to have in mind the form that Arendt extolled. By politics she meant a process whereby a people, in their plurality, come together to engage with each other peaceably, to look at real problems, debate and try to determine collectively what is needed; to consider matters in a properly inclusive and deliberative fashion.
Politics is an achievement, maybe even an ideal; it can almost miraculously emerge, but also may tragically disappear, even if we have, formally speaking, conditions of representative democracy. It requires proper forums for ongoing debate. We have lost half the battle in advance if we accept that politics is simply a matter of occasional voting, internet surfing or angry tweeting while an administration operates in the dark and does our supposed bidding. For Arendt, freedom is politics. Moreover, politics always holds out the possibility of something quite new and surprising emerging. Society needs open spaces where ideas can be born and then be subject to lively exploration and critical scrutiny; sites where substantial resources exist for voters, not just officials, to consult, to test propositions, to check facts and hold governments accountable. A society, she suggested, needs to be engaged in a common conversation across all its differences. A thriving polity is surely more than a state where a majority or perhaps not even that (due to apathy, cynicism or disenfranchisement) vote in party A or party B, every few years, and leave it at that.
In politics, evidently, our capacities to think and reflect, and step back from the paranoid style, may be supported, if we are fortunate, not only by family and friends, but by serious researchers and journalists, by colleagues or workmates, by a variety of formal and informal educators, by challenging dramatists, film-makers, stand-up comics, cartoonists, artists and other commentators willing to speak truth to power. However, a politics that holds a mirror up to us and our own foibles, that invites our ‘second thoughts’, easily withers away, and civil society shrinks, even without recourse to totalitarian extremes and the world of Big Brother. Politics can descend, as Arendt warned, into the massaging of public opinion, appeasement of mass emotion, the wanton channelling of ‘the crowd’.30
She considered the ideas of John Adams (the second US president) and amplified his earlier references to the importance of peer discussion, deliberation and representation. For to succeed, she insisted, the American Revolution had to create the necessary conditions for discussion and deliberation, as well as persuasion. What the Founding Fathers had realised was that after the violence required to create the Republic, the new political entity needed ongoing support and sustenance for rational debate and argument; the provision of appropriate resources, places, conventions, enduring opportunities for people to gather, as equals, to review, disagree, decide, and to learn. We require, this suggested, an equal ‘right to assemble’, and proper means to deliberate fully upon public affairs. A key word was ‘deliberate’. Adams had written of conditions conducive to ‘deliberative choice’, and of the original animating spirit of the American Revolution, the assumption of a right to assemble, in order to ‘deliberate upon public affairs’. We need, ideally, to deliberate actively about our chosen representatives, and to understand what they wish to enact and what they stand for. Deliberation means deciding carefully, not just randomly, emotionally or quixotically, not plucking an idea out of the air or going along with received opinion. To spell out the requirements can sound now, as in the past, hopelessly naive, and certainly Arendt’s work has been contested and debated by other political philosophers ever since. Evidently, we are so far from such an ideal that even to pose it as a goal may invite cynicism; however, it is essential to keep that vision of politics in mind, not least to note how much we fall short.31
The most egregious examples, today, of the exploitation of people’s feelings and desires for expression, and the milking of popular rage, fears, suspicions and hopes online to create personal and corporate fortunes and devastate democracies, invite consideration of a much larger question: how capitalism has proved so vastly adaptable to changing times, pulling us into new shared forms of fantasy, and denial. Some critics on the Left insist that we should face the cruel illusion that deliberative democracy, liberal justice or any hope of radical, progressive change is impossible within the form of governance we call liberal democracy; perhaps, they argue, the goal of communist revolution should be revived once again, extricated from its bad history, and revitalised so as to address the real sources of the paranoia, fear and insecurity, the fundamental and otherwise irresolvable antagonisms at the heart of our economic and political systems.32
Whatever conclusion we draw about that, clearly sinister forces are always lurking to threaten that open space of politics and our capacity to think freely. This is widely apparent in the world that is now shaped by the digital economy and by corporate capitalism. Conspiracy theory, marshalled by unaccountable interests, notably the fossil fuel industry, can have a devastating effect, as we saw in the notorious 2009 hack of emails at the University of East Anglia, to discredit climate science, that has come to be known as ‘Climategate’.33 There are massive interest groups that seek relentlessly to cancel that space for careful deliberation, to render forums for debate null and void, by corrupting the process, whether it be for personal gain, narcissistic gratification or on behalf of corporations and states. As this book was completed, in the autumn of 2021, a whistle-blower from Mark Zuckerberg’s company was making a stir, informing senators in the United States that the business model of Facebook and Instagram paid little if any heed to the harm the platforms are causing to millions of children; profit trumped care in that business every time, she said, although the CEO instantly hit back.34
The process of politics can be derailed for and through money, via advertising, propaganda and lobbying, as Arendt noted. She also mused on how this very insistence on the importance of the process could seem tiresome or even intolerable to those who claim to know best for all others. Genuine engagement let alone deliberation in an electorate is truly a problem for those who assume history entails merely the implementation of foregone conclusions and plans. Let’s recall here Rosa Luxemburg’s anguished realisation that the Russian Revolution was killing itself, foreclosing an open revolutionary future, creating a society where ‘public life gradually goes to sleep’.35 Or rather where public life was actively put to sleep by the Party.
Politics may affect psychology, but a particular mass psychology may also be seized, solicited and then used by parties or demagogues to produce a form of anti-politics. In other words, an attack on the due process, the necessary skein of protections that politics requires. As Arendt scholar Samantha Hill put it in 2021, we need to consider how conditions come to be fostered, in Western societies, of ‘organized loneliness’, ‘characterized by cynicism’, that lead people:
down rabbit holes of thought, always thinking the worst while convincing them that there is a true reality beyond the reality of everyday life that we share. You destroy their relationship with themselves, which isolates them and cuts them off. This makes people hungry for meaning. The regime creates the conditions for loneliness through political propaganda, while also meeting that hunger for meaning by telling people how to think and who to blame.36
We need to hold in mind now, as much as ever before, Arendt’s notion, indeed her ideal, of politics: to ask what spaces exist for listening, witnessing, speaking, collaborating, dissenting and collectively choosing.37 And continuously to analyse how far we are from such a model, and then seek to lessen the gap. As I have noted, some believe the gap can be closed within the prevailing system; others seek its revolutionary transformation. We need to consider today the combination of a sense of frantic hyper-connectivity, and fragmentation, a constant flow of news ‘nuggets’, where nothing really makes sense, or is contextualised and fully explained: a ‘news cycle’ where at best we oscillate between attending to the constant buzz and switching off.
The path of politics, as Arendt conceived it, must be open; people are bound to have contrasting experiences, divergent stories, opposing fears, clashing desires; but that is different from a system where the worst passions are cultivated by the parties with the most money and power, drowning out alternative voices, refusing even to allow fact checkers to have a proper hearing. The question now must surely be about the renewal of systems and structures that enable politics in Arendt’s sense. In short, we need to struggle for the creation, or in some instances the restoration, of conditions that enable us better to engage with each other as people, with requisite information, and to think in company with others about our futures, to compare notes on harms and on remedies, with less role for money and the banishment of corrupt corporate lobbyists in that process, and to protect as far as we can shared forums for news – where paranoid fears and false accounts are turned around.
Politics must mean more than formal parties, stage-managed conferences, law-making chambers, with all the rest of the process reduced to shrill shouting matches on social media. Politics should not be just a means to an end; it is a value in itself. The idea of human beings as political animals can be traced back to the Greeks, especially to Aristotle; Arendt was one of the most formidable modern thinkers to retrieve this idea of our essential political identities, and what can then happen to pervert or destroy those identities.
A central implication of the material in the present book is, indeed, that we need to attend to how a society creates or hampers conditions for politics in that sense; and, I’d add, more specifically democratic politics; how it enables or disables a population from having the means to think and to choose, as equals, deliberatively, wisely, when it most matters. Politics is always at risk of corruption, erosion or even abolition. Yet politics can potentially also be renewed, retained as the lodestar, brought back closer to actual shared life. Politics can disappear into a barren desert, of course, but there can also be new oases, innovative spaces for thinking afresh, new public arenas for engagement and debate that we have yet to foresee.38
Arendt was not alone in conceiving of politics as vital to human flourishing, or in warning that the process of politics required constant vigilance and careful nurture and could all too easily be foreclosed. Other intellectuals post-war linked the idea of an open democratic political process to the healthy mind, hence pluralistic, tolerant of difference, open to challenge and doubt, capable of entertaining new possibilities, never ossified or tyrannised.39 A generation older than Arendt was Melanie Klein, a psychoanalyst whose concern primarily was the inner world, but whose ideas also have an important bearing on politics and the paranoid style. Klein developed a model of the mind based around two central concepts: the depressive position and the paranoid-schizoid position.40 In the former, which she regarded as a psychic achievement, there is more integration, but an integration that is also based on plurality, recognition of one’s own mixed thoughts and feelings, some insight into one’s own destructiveness, real concern for others, a wish to repair, a capacity to mourn.
In the paranoid-schizoid position, the one that comes earliest in life, the mind, or rather the nascent ego, that she envisaged, is fragile, porous, divided, sensitive and explosive; it feels easily bombarded; it is concerned with survival and ejects what it can’t bear, constantly projecting bits of itself and what feels ‘bad’ onto another. The fledgling ego may be terrified of its own total disintegration, or conversely in awe of its own imagined, terrifying omnipotence. In the depressive position one has a chance to gather and think. The depressive position, for Klein, is never secure: we are never simply ‘mature’, integrated, cured, balanced. Rather, those of us who are sane enough, and not simply stuck, oscillate between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, hopefully increasingly staying with the latter. Paranoid-schizoid mechanisms are the earliest ways the psyche finds to protect itself, but if we stay in that position always, then things never come together in our minds, to enable thoughtful reflection. In early life, we have thoughts but are not able to reflect much on those thoughts, or to contain our own most intense feelings.
The infant’s capacity to think about its own mind and others’ comes about through its internal struggles, and crucially through its evolving relationship with a thinking and sensitive caregiver. In Klein’s wake, others, most notably Wilfred Bion, developed this idea, showing how the baby projects its feelings (for example by crying) in the hope that these projections will find a suitable ‘container’, a carer who not only picks up on the baby’s feelings but also provides a crucial thinking function, based on sufficient loving and attentive care. Thinking is then ultimately facilitated inside the baby’s mind – a kind of care within, linked ultimately with a capacity to tolerate and make sense of complexity in the self, in the other and in the world. Some people make the best of very little care, but we all need, Klein assumed, a ‘good object’ inside to help us to think. Hopefully we develop a capacity to recognise the conflicts in our emotions, wishes, thoughts; some ability to link them up and think about them, and to face our dependency and limitations. But the achievement is always reversible, and we move back to something more archaic, frightening and raw. Psychic integration (such as it is) remains precarious. We are all affected, and easily destabilised or humiliated, when our environments are convulsed, when relationships fray or break; and by the passions and drives, those warring others within. Thus, the need for psychological ‘containment’ goes on throughout life, inside, but also at an interpersonal and social level; to assist us to think without constantly resorting to the sometimes indispensable but often desperate and distorting mechanisms of splitting and projection.41
Circumstances in the 2020s are of course very different to those that prevailed when that important strand of psychoanalytic thought was elaborated by Klein and her followers, and when Arendt wrote of politics and the human condition. We can still draw profitably upon their vital ideas, even if we are also required to think afresh, as we ask what shared cultural values, what social structures, economic arrangements and technological facilities are most likely to support a mode of politics that is properly ambitious, inclusive, uncertainty-tolerant, self-critical and caring, avoiding, on the one hand, apathy, depression and cynicism, and on the other, paranoia, mania and crazed conviction.
Liberal democracy in its current incarnations is not best regarded, I assume, as some satisfactory political end point, but rather the foundation for a struggle towards more democracy and a deeper realisation of human freedom. We need to consider what the institutions are that we already have that can support this never-ending struggle, and to ask, what kinds of social conditions and modes of ‘containment’ are needed to reduce unbearable anxiety, manage passions and conflicts, sustain debate, foster thinking and enable measured and decisive collective actions? Post-war, the answer seemed increasingly clear to many people who held sway in liberal democracies: greater investment in the dignity of work; freedom from squalor, ignorance and want; support of and greater access to schools and universities and an entitlement to education and training; public service broadcasting; and adequate healthcare, either through insurance schemes or general taxation, but, crucially, free at the point of use. In some countries, where these measures were most fully realised, an integrated ‘welfare state’ would emerge.
Such measures were regarded by the majority post-war as important for the development of societies. In many instances those post-war societies gradually did become more inclusive, less obviously unequal and on the whole safer and more secure places in which to live. We can’t go back to the past, just seek to revive a post-1945 model of the welfare state, and nor should we idealise it either. But many of those values and goals surely remain essential. For those who value liberal democracy or agree at least that it provides the necessary platform for a more egalitarian future, it is important to consider why it has proved so difficult to renew structures of social care and creaking old electoral processes, to counter the influence of big money, to resist cynical strategies of gerrymandering and voter suppression and to avoid grotesque online disinformation wars. Innovations are clearly needed in the way societies are organised, protected and supported if we hope to get off the self-destructive and ominously anti-democratic paths that many parties and states are currently on.
We can begin by noting what neoliberalism’s ‘stealth revolution’ (as Wendy Brown puts it) ushered in over the last forty or fifty years; and ask how we may find new ways in the future to counter this effectively, without surrender to authoritarian populism. Our current institutions are evidently in need of renewal, but we need to notice properly that they are under systematic attack. Clearly many of those institutions long established in liberal and social democratic politics that aspire to be more than just ‘market operations’, and to provide the settings for administering justice, or for providing education, health, communication, art, etc., have not always been as inclusive, transparent or equitably spread across nation states as they ought to be. Yet, if they require substantial reform and change, to meet different times, and to fulfil more adequately their original missions, they also need protection from the threat of decimation, or at least complete commercialisation, as for example today we can see in the threat from the Right, in the UK, to the BBC.
Legislative and constitutional frameworks need attending to, as do sources of news. A further and obvious implication to be drawn from much of the primary literature on brainwashing is that the manner in which a society treats and values critical commentators and probing journalists has immense political consequences; reporters need to be able to thrive without having to prostitute themselves and do the bidding of those with power, for example by working for organs of ‘infotainment’ designed to mislead and make profits for political tyrants and business tycoons. For we have, no doubt, equivalents in the capitalist world of the artists reduced to producing odes and marches to ‘socialist realism’ as described by Miłosz.
Education is certainly no guarantee, but it can offer much useful equipment to help people read politics better, to look in a more critical fashion at different points of view, to understand the models on which political offers are based, and to be able to see the present and future in relation to where we have been in the past. Citizens’ assemblies are increasingly recognised as important experiments that might be expanded in democracies, where debate is tied to better information and to an insistence on listening as well as to arguing; they offer a good deal of promise which has yet to be fully explored or applied. And in this regard the technology available now clearly can help. There are lots of ideas out there, beyond the scope of this book, for the deepening of e-democracy, participatory budgeting, co-operative working, international networking (and solidarity), or at the most local level, new forms of neighbourhood forums, town hall meetings, community actions, deliberative polling and greater transparency. In the borough in which I live in London, the local council embarked recently on just such a creative, participatory exercise to draw citizens, chosen at random, into detailed and sustained discussion with officials, of policy goals and practical actions on climate change.42
We have rational grounds to be very worried, for sure, about the way technology is organised now; about who owns and controls it, how algorithms are designed to ensnare us, how our data is used, who exploits data voids, and so on. Looking to the future some envisage the ever more complete triumph of the great tech corporations and warn that they could usher in a fully immersive and ultimately inescapable digital environment or metaverse. This may start to sound like the final realisation of certain sci fi tales of old, a fully simulated and synchronised world. It is hard to grasp the consequences of all these rapidly changing developments in 3-D modelling and block chain technology, or to know where the latest advances in ‘augmented reality’ headsets, implants, etc., may be taking us. Pessimists warn of our full descent into a ‘place’ that mimics the real world but also renders it null. In such visions, economic activity and communication might elude any meaningful government controls, let alone democratic accountability. But we do not have, I think, just grounds to despair. As Gramsci said long ago, we need ‘optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect’. There are campaigns for a new kind of charter; one, for instance, is being spearheaded by Tim Berners-Lee. We require, he notes, a fundamental rethink of the whole thing, a different system, in which we would seriously address how, as he puts it, prejudice, hate and disinformation are ‘peddled online’ and how ‘scammers use the web to steal identities, stalkers use it to harass and intimidate their victims, and bad actors subvert democracy using clever digital tactics’.43
But the internet, the source of so much malice, cruelty and deception, is also, potentially, an excellent resource for education in its broadest sense, rebutting pernicious rumour mills, building new collective alliances and associations and informing us about events taking place in other areas, even in real time, on a scale that was previously unimaginable. Many commentators insist rightly on the importance of campaigning for greater equity of access to the internet, at home and abroad; working to achieve the break-up of monopoly companies, better regulation of political advertising, protocols for policing hate speech and dealing with trolling, and, above all, the provision, as Berners-Lee proposes, of ‘pods’, so that people retain their data, and can choose knowingly to whom they give access.
Given a real sense of community, offered solidarity, dignity in life, we are more likely to maintain a saner contact with the real world. As a bare minimum in any prescription for a survivable future, in which we can think without being spun, we need a community that is also open, not closed, that allows for difference, that recognises a need to mourn, individually and collectively, and that offers sufficient safeguards against mass denial or unchecked greed. Many books, such as The Spirit Level,44 have offered metrics to show how, in grossly socially unfair systems, with vast disparities of income and unbridled private wealth, everyone may be, in emotional and social terms, worse off; they show why inequality and massive untaxed and hidden private fortunes ought to trouble us; they may well increase the sum of human unhappiness, not make us all more ‘aspirational’ and ‘high achieving’ or ‘dynamic’. Much of the logic of ‘trickle-down economics’ has now been thoroughly debunked. Such studies often focus on inequalities inside nations; but global inequities resulting from centuries of exploitation internationally also cry out for urgent redress.
In the autumn of 2021, the UN secretary-general appealed to affluent states to do far more to protect workers in the world’s poorest nations, who have suffered most extremely the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. He put a number on it, calling for an additional $1tn (£736bn) injection of funds to avoid a twin-track recovery that widens the gap between the wealthy and poorest nations in the immediate years ahead. Speaking in New York, the UN chief noted that the gravest global public health and economic crisis the world has faced in the past century was on course to worsen inequalities and threatened ‘the long-term livelihoods and well-being of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people’. We need to clarify the nature of the forces arraigned against necessary action, and debate what, in the face of climate breakdown, war, mass migrations and ever more economic dislocation ahead, best supports human security, interpersonal care and sustainable living. What would help create resilience, and what level or kind of prosperity is essential anyway, in any society, for it to ‘prosper’? What illusions (not least, those of the wealthier nations) must now be mourned, what cover-ups faced, what corruption fought, what reparations made for wrongs and ills?
Are we more vulnerable to the paranoid style than in times past? Yes and no. True, these days ideas can ‘go viral’ online, within minutes. And, for sure, the near ubiquity of economic insecurity, massive financial and political corruption in many states, the rise in international tensions, the break-up of former communities, the privatisation or abolition of former public assets and spaces in cities, towns and rural communities, exacerbate the ‘organised loneliness’ that Arendt identified. Pessimistic political analysts point to how the internet is prone to keep us isolated or in illusory alliances, to hook and divide us, and how more careful and complex analyses of social problems are at a great disadvantage in such a medium: things move so fast. But the future of the internet, as of other forums for politics, is ultimately open, even if it is true that it has been corporatised and monetarised at present. It is also true that human action over centuries (in what we now call the Anthropocene) has transformed conditions of life on the planet, generating forces, irreversible changes, the loss of biodiversity, risks of extinction for many species, unviable habitats for people in many places, that cannot simply be reversed by future programmatic action or collective will in the coming century: hence mourning has an important place, and policies are needed aimed at practical mitigation, not some fantastical form of collective rebirth, or some blithe promise of endless, untrammelled ‘growth’.
We must consider what changes are needed to reduce the atomised loneliness and sense of hopelessness that Arendt, long ago, was talking about; to renew social, political and legal structures that support us better, to listen, think, debate, understand the consequences of our actions, and not to resort to denial, disavowal or simplistic explanations, trying to drown out opposing views. We need, in short, society, community, culture, as well as that Arendtian vision of politics. No social order can abolish loneliness. It is a state that can be fundamental to our sense of self. Klein argued that loneliness, indeed, is part of the human condition, a consequence, at least in part, of our earliest infantile paranoid states.45 But more integrated states of mind, and certain kinds of more integrated political states in which we can live together with others, help mitigate that loneliness and make us less porous to cynical thought manipulation or outright brainwashing.
The narcissism that Freud, Klein and others described in psychic life can also pervert our engagement in politics. The psychoanalyst and climate campaigner Sally Weintrobe has well described assumptions of Western entitlement, which she calls exceptionalism, the illusion bought into by many of us, and sanctioned as well as intensified by political creeds, including, of course, neoliberalism, of infinite growth, a natural right to a given lifestyle, unfettered individualism, without needing to be mindful of the long-term social and environmental consequences, even now in the face of climate disaster. This state of mind, or rather this ideology, fosters or exploits a narcissistic wish. It proceeds as though people in other countries, usually those outside the West, or even children in the West today, let alone unborn generations, require little or no consideration. And this ideology presents a massive danger to effective global action to mitigate current still spiralling carbon use.46
We keep reaching precipices, politically as well as ecologically. It is sobering to read how the most senior general in the US armed forces was convinced in January 2021 that Trump and his closest circle were actively engineering a coup.47 What if the safeguards had failed, and the generals had gone the other way? And imagine, what if a new Trump emerges, more competent and focused, and thus able to railroad through the necessary measures to destroy entirely the checks and balances on which the Republic was founded, and to bring the death knell to any prospect of climate disaster mitigation? It is not far-fetched to envisage the sunset of democracies now.48
Some fear that coalitions for progressive change are largely helpless in the face of such evil and such madness. There is indeed no guarantee that democracy, hard-won civil liberties or the wish to care for each other and for the earth are certain to survive. Previous congratulatory assumptions that an ‘open society’ is always bound to outpace an authoritarian state, such as China, are now less sure and shrill than a few years ago; and, anyway, how ‘open’ a society is ours these days, other than to our own mass manipulators? Are we living, as Anne Applebaum has warned, in the ‘twilight of democracy’? Her recent book compellingly describes the diverse attacks taking place in Hungary, Poland, the United States, the UK and elsewhere, on the very structures that sustain democracy and enable a flourishing society.49
Even as I write, the government in my own country, still a liberal democracy of sorts, albeit of a very peculiar kind (with so many votes in our ‘first past the post’ system counting for nothing), is led by a prime minister who lies shamelessly, adopts a clownish shtick and careers wildly from the most illiberal measures to calls and half steps towards an agenda for greater fairness and stepped-up climate action. Yet from the moment he came into office he was evidently also serious in weakening the historic forms of protection against authoritarian populism – a strong and free school system, a robust university sector, an independent judiciary, a transparent, accountable civil service distinct from the elected officialdom, a fully functioning parliament, public service broadcasting, proper systems of care for the young, the old and the frail, and decent safeguards for people fleeing to these shores. Our PM talks of ‘levelling up’ the most deprived and excluded but wants to do so without ‘frightening the horses’, i.e. the wealthy, who fund and vote (along with a portion of the working class) for his party.
We are not, of course, at the end of history. Whatever the future may hold, the prevalence of conspiracy theories and paranoid discourse in politics today makes revisiting the history of ideas about brainwashing and thought control relevant and urgent. Political identities are always shaped in part by states of fantasy.50 The literature explored in these pages suggests that, in a democracy, fantasies shadow our choices, and differences of opinion, passions, struggles over the nature of justice, major tensions about equity, reward and the sharing of spoils will always occur, and that we will all – to differing extents – be vulnerable to illusions and schisms, and the lure of the paranoid style. The issue is how effectively we contain, recover from or work through such states; and what foundations we have in a particular polity for reasoned and sane debate, for justice and for concerted action in face of existential threats to life on earth.
A crisis is also an opportunity. Emergencies have been seized upon by ideologues for all kinds of purposes, not least to create those neoliberal ‘utopian’ projects. The question now is how the current crisis unfolds; and how we retain the freedom to think about it, and to respond to it in new ways. Slogans such as ‘build back better’ are worthless unless backed by concrete policy actions. As Greta Thunberg said, ahead of the vital but disappointing round of climate change negotiations, COP26, in 2021, ‘blah blah blah’. As she implies, the question is what is done by those with the power, and what pressure we can exert, as citizens, to effect change in them.
So, if you are still wondering, ‘am I brainwashed?’, a good place to start is in consideration of the interlocking environmental, political and economic emergencies. Does the present-day crisis engage you, or do you just switch the channel? If so, why, and encouraged by whom? We do well to keep returning to those questions about the sorts of bargain we strike with ourselves, the rationalisations we make, and who else, apart from ourselves, the deceptions might serve. The best of the literature of the Cold War we have explored here investigated so many forerunners of such current psycho-political concerns; that literature was often as preoccupied with denial and disavowal as with how we can be brainwashed, lied to, enflamed, distracted, secretly influenced or cynically misled. It showed how a particular milieu can destroy us or give us better grounds for realistic hope.
We may be surveyed, policed, cajoled and controlled; sometimes people face impossible odds in exercising any freedom of mind or personal agency at all in the material world. But often we have room to act and make decisions, and certainly we bargain with ourselves and others. We cannot have complete mastery of our own minds or of our environments, but we can notice ways we are deceiving ourselves and fitting in. We may perhaps find new concrete ways to bolster and renew the democratic foundations of politics that we value. We might have more potential to change paths, and make choices, than we tell ourselves. As well as challenging the webs of lies and deceptions we are offered, we can notice the webs that we weave for ourselves, the ways we succumb to lies and deadly stories, even in conditions of relative freedom.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I owe a large debt of gratitude to the Wellcome Trust; a Senior Investigator Award enabled me to establish a research group at Birkbeck College and to have the necessary time to work on this book. Details of the publications, online resources, broadcasts and films produced under the auspices of this project can be found at www7.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders/. My thanks to all those who supported the endeavour at the Trust and the College, and especially to Marcia Holmes, Katie Joice, Ian Magor, Sarah Marks, Naomi Richman and Charlie Williams for their impressive individual research and creative teamwork. Thanks also to Emily Bartlett, Simon Jarrett, Holly Lasko and Nicole Mennell for helpful editorial input and research assistance on the project. To Charlie and Simon for reading my manuscript at short notice, and significantly sharpening it. To Katy Pettit for administering ‘Hidden Persuaders’ with unfussy efficiency and much-needed humour.
Thanks to my patients for their candour and trust, and for enabling me to think afresh about several issues at stake in this work. I cannot name the numerous students, nor list all the academics, archivists and librarians in the UK and US who facilitated my work on this book, but I can mention at least those friends and colleagues who have contributed most directly, and generously, by sharing ideas and reading draft chapters. To Julia Lovell, Lyndal Roper, Quentin Skinner, Gareth Stedman Jones and Eli Zaretsky, for their creative suggestions and sage advice. To Elizabeth Coates Thümmel, Matt ffytche, Stephen Frosh, Simon Garfield, Rufus Olins and Matthew Reisz, for their invaluable thoughts about my work in progress. To Lisa Baraitser and Simon Bayly, for incisive comments, providing so many stimulating thoughts on politics and psychoanalysis along the way. To Chris Wellbelove, my literary agent, for his steady support, and for offering, along with Amy St Johnston, also at Aitken Alexander Associates, such pragmatic guidance when my writing got stuck. To Shan Vahidy, an outstanding editorial ‘troubleshooter’, who has been a pleasure to work with, and who has played a key role in refashioning this book.
To have the chance to discuss this history with the late Zygmunt Bauman and Robert Jay Lifton was truly a privilege. I also had illuminating exchanges on this topic over the years with Ana Antiü, Shaul Bar-Haim, Joanna Bourke, Greg Brenman, Susan Carruthers, Ian Christie, D’Maris Coffman, Matt Cook, Bartek Dziadosz (and the group of talented film-makers who work with him at the Derek Jarman Lab), Nasheed Faruqi, David Feldman, Paul Feldwick, Lily Ford, the late John Forrester, Mary-Clare Hallsworth, Dagmar Herzog, Jenny Langham, Peter Mandler, Don Moss, Rebecca Reich, Hilary Sapire, Simon Schaffer, Rory Sutherland, David Taylor, Phil Tinline and Lynne Zeavin. Thanks to Shui-Bo Wang for putting me in touch with David Hawkins. His contribution, for which I am also thankful, can be seen in Part 2. To Tim Allen, Mike Dibb, Lisa Guenther, Monica Kim, Jonathan Lear, Melissa Parker and Andrew Scull for their rich and thought-provoking presentations at Birkbeck, during the project. Conversations with Catherine Hall, with whom I co-edited a series of pieces on the question of ‘denial’, in History Workshop Journal, were also inspiring.
Kirty Topiwala, then employed at Wellcome, helped to set Brainwashed in motion. I am also grateful to my editor, Cecily Gayford, for her exceptional skill and patience, to Rebecca Gray, Graeme Hall and the team at Profile Books for their excellent input, and to Patrick Taylor for his careful and well-judged copy-editing, Caroline Wilding for the fine index, and Philippa Logan for painstaking proofreading.
My family have lived with this project for longer than reasonable. I am grateful to Irma Brenman Pick, for all her care, lively interest in this work and wealth of insights. To Anna and Tasha Pick for encouragement and the many vivid conversations we’ve had on these matters, not least during the time of pandemic. This book is dedicated to Isobel Pick. I owe her the biggest thanks, for all her generous help and unflagging support. She has exchanged ideas, commented closely on drafts and provided throughout a clear-eyed sense of the relevance of this troubling history in present, dark times.
Daniel Pick
London, 20 January 2022