When Logic Fails and Psychology Rules
Despite transhumanists' best efforts so far, we still can't update peoples' minds when they have wrong ideas in their heads as if they were bio-smartphones.
As a Software Engineer/Analyst, I had a tendency to operate under the unexamined assumption that new information and data should be sufficient to change peoples’ minds on any subject. In other words, I had an almost classical Greek view of the challenge of persuasion. I assumed people were both conscious of their operating beliefs and capable of changing them if presented with new information or a compellingly constructed rational argument.
Some say the human mind is the last unexplored frontier, and there is a lot to be said for that insight. Despite fascinating advances in brain mapping and other fields, most of us are only familiar with the conscious features of one mind— our own. We tend to assume what goes on in other peoples’ heads must be more-or-less similar to what goes on in ours… until it isn’t.
And isn’t it a shocker when we find ourselves arguing with someone who just “won’t listen to reason”? For most of us, these impasses are either the end of the discussion (and possibly the relationship), or, if we are more strongly attached to the person, the beginnings of some very emotional and typically heated exchanges we’ll probably look back on with regret and chagrin. Sometimes we seek out third parties to agree with “our side”, as if we were in some type of election process that, if we could only get enough votes, would change the mind of the person we’re at an impasse with, or at least make us feel more certain we’re in the right. Or, alternatively, we Google up authorities who agree with us, only to learn that our partner-in-dispute simply disagrees with or doesn’t accept our authorities and has authorities of their own that, if we’d only take the time to read them, … and so on and on.
We tend to take offense because the implication of our adversary’s assertion that their view is correct and ours is wrong is taken to be more than the simple challenge of not having been exposed to certain facts and deductions. The implication is that we are looking at the same information and coming to very different conclusions because there is something very wrong with our cognitive functioning— that we are stupid, crazy, liars or dupes. We tend to take it personally and that can be very hard to come back from.
In sum, most of us are ill-equipped for the task of resolving the kinds of disputes in which logic seems to fail us. And, too often, we suffer as a result. We lose friends. We become estranged from family. We might be shunned or ostracized in work or school settings.
But is it really that a logical approach has failed us or is it more that we have failed to approach the discussion logically? I think in most of these impasses, it’s the latter. What we’re really seeing is strong, mostly subconscious, resistance to considering logical facts and arguments that we don’t want to consider, almost as if we know where they lead and we’re committed to not going there.
Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”
So, in the context of being life-long evidence-based and disciplined seekers of truth, what are the obstacles that emerge that seem to defy logic and are more psychological in nature?
Cognitive Dissonance
Let’s look at the great-granddaddy of conspiracy theories, the JFK assassination as an example. According to Gallup polling, as many as 80% of Americans, at some points in the years since 1964, have rejected the Warren Commission’s finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Logically, the only alternative is that other people were involved in the murder and it was, therefore, by definition, a conspiracy. But, would 80% of Americans go so far as to say the assassination was a conspiracy? Probably not. There is a sizeable fraction of people who are convinced the Warren Commission’s conclusion can’t be true but they’re not prepared to agree with the clear implication— not prepared to admit what it means if the Warren Commission’s conclusion is false.
This is an example of cognitive dissonance— when someone holds two conflicting ideas in their mind at the same time. Cognitive dissonance can be very uncomfortable and anxiety producing so one coping mechanism is simply to stop thinking about the conflicting ideas and to distance oneself from information sources that remind them of the conflict. Such avoidance can be disorienting. If you try to force someone to look at the conflicting ideas when they’re in the grasp of cognitive dissonance, they’re likely to want distance from you as well.
Somewhere, often at a subconscious level, a person trapped in cognitive dissonance is making a cost-benefit evaluation between two conflicting ideas. Either the Warren Commission was correct and I’m crazy for thinking their “magic bullet” explanation is absurdly impossible or the Warren Commission conclusions are demonstrably false and all of government and the mainstream media are complicit (or at least tacitly approving) of the deception. Would I rather be a crazy person living in a sane world or a sane person living in a crazy world? Neither option is particularly appealing. Many people hang out in indecision for some time looking for, hoping for, a third option they must have overlooked before.
Believing that government and media are essentially beneficial or at least benign is a much more comfortable view than the alternate, namely that these institutions are deceptive and perhaps even malicious.
Stages of Grieving
When the implications of changing one’s beliefs include realizing that some elements of the world we previously thought were safe might actually be hostile or even, in some cases, existential threats, we are faced with a serious loss. The stages of grieving were originally outlined to describe the phases people go through when facing a terminal illness, but the stages can be seen in less serious types of loss as well. The loss of a world-view that was comfortable in exchange for one that is adversarial or worse can easily be big enough to trigger stages of grieving.
Although subsequent researchers have named additional stages and noted that often people don’t progress through the stages in a consistent or orderly way, Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross suggested there were five stages in her 1969 book “On Death and Dying”:
Denial — (Continuing with the JFK example) There cannot have been a conspiracy. People aren’t that devious and evil. Thousands of people would have to have been complicit in the cover-up. Someone would have talked.
Anger — The bastards! They killed the best and most decent President to come along in generations! They’re evil murderers! It was a coup! We need a revolution to take back our country! The media are all sycophants and cowards!
Bargaining — Okay, there are still many good people in government and in the media. Some of them might be silent on topics that could endanger their careers, but they’re still basically good people. Maybe we can vote out the bastards, “drain the swamp” and begin anew. Perhaps, even yet, there can be justice or at least acknowledgement of what really happened in the history books.
Depression — That’s going to take a lot of hard work for a long time and there’s no real assurance of success. All my old hopes, fears and plans seem useless and irrelevant given what I now know about the world. I don’t know what to do. (If you guessed that Bargaining and Depression are the two steps most likely to happen out of sequence or involve multiple steps, forwards and backwards, you’d be right).
Acceptance — One accepts the new truth and finds a way to adjust to it. Part of this stage is deciding “What is mine to do?”. I thought I wanted to be a doctor, but now I think I’ll become a lawyer so I can challenge injustices in the courts. Maybe by helping make wrong-doers face real consequences more consistently, I can help deter other wrong-doers from committing crimes and conspiracies in the future. I’m going to subscribe to more alternative journalism (like this substack, hint, hint) and try make sure any future deceptions are discovered and corrected faster.
The stages of grieving, like cognitive dissonance, occur mostly in the minds of people hearing the “bad news”. Other aspects of psychology deal with the minds of people creating the “bad news”.
Psychopaths, Sociopaths and Narcissists
According to psychologists, people with these disorders place their own needs first and the needs of others just don’t concern them, except when such needs might be useful for manipulating them. Not only don’t they have any reservations about lying, but often they rather enjoy it and gain a sense of superiority over the people they trick into believing their falsehoods.
Only a small fraction of the population (1% to 5%) has psychopathy or narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). They are rare enough (and sneaky enough) that most of us haven’t interracted with them while they’re being obviously horrible and so we find it difficult to imagine that anyone exists who would do the awful things such people are capable of. Most of us have reasonably well-developed senses of empathy, honesty and fairness that we imagine are universal. Unfortunately, they are not.
Having difficulty believing psychopaths exist can be very damaging. First, denying their existence makes it impossible for one to recognize and name when one is being abused by one. Typically, such failure to recognize psychopathy means the psychopath gets away with various abuses for a much longer time before they are finally called out.
Failure to recognize psychopathy isn’t just a problem at the individual level. It can be at the societal level as well. We can know from the testimony of Madeline Brown1, LBJ’s mistress, and CIA operative E. Howard Hunt’s deathbed confession2 that the murder of JFK was carried out with LBJ’s knowledge and tacit support, at the very least, and yet LBJ was the consummate schmoozer, attending funerals of next of kin to Congressmembers, calling people on their birthdays and so on. People found it difficult or impossible to believe that he was a psychopath and that he played a role in the murder of JFK. So the crimes go uninvestigated and unprosecuted and the criminals go on to commit even more crimes because they can, because they’re good at what they do and because it “works”.
Gaslighting
Sometimes the lies of sociopaths are considered gaslighting. Gaslighting is a form of abuse in which the liar attempts to overpower his victim’s reason by causing them to doubt their own sanity, memory or competence in order to believe the lie and, often, to establish a controlling influence over them. Gaslighting typically appears in the context of conspiracies where witnesses that don’t conform to the conspirators’ narrative are coerced to change their story or be silent.
One example of gaslighting is Sgt. Enrique Hernandez’s interrogation of Sandra Serrano,3 a witness who saw Sirhan Sirhan leaving the Los Angeles Hotel with two others immediately after the shooting of Senator Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968. In a recording of the interrogation, Serrano repeatedly states that she saw a woman in a white polka-dot dress with Sirhan, who exclaimed “We shot him! … Senator Kennedy” as the three left the Hotel. Sgt. Hernandez repeatedly insists she is wrong and that she can’t have seen or heard any such thing and that she needed to come clean and admit that was all un-true. Eventually he succeeded in wearing her down to the point where she was willing to sign a statement that was used to dismiss her testimony, but it’s clear from the recording she was coerced.
Our reluctance to believe anyone could be so wicked as to tell the lies and commit the acts required for conspiracies to succeed is the basis of a great deal of our denial phases of grieving. The more we know about sociopathy and related disorders, the better prepared we will be to recognize when behaviors fit these high-functioning but deeply dysfunctional profiles.
The Asch Conformity Experiments
A truly large conspiracy, like the 2008 financial collapse, requires the knowing participation of many thousands of people— so many that not all of them could likely be sociopaths. What’s going on in these large system failures?
The Asch conformity experiments4 demonstrate how average people are so strongly inclined to fit in within a group and not “rock the boat” that, more often than not, they will repeat the opinion of the group as their own opinion even though they can see with their own eyes, in the diagram shown to the group, that the group’s stated opinion is incorrect and that the group is either wrong or lying.
Interestingly, the people who choose to go along with the group (and deny what they can see with their own eyes) includes some who know the group is wrong but choose to conform anyway as well as some who genuinely start to doubt their own perception and think the group might actually be right and, therefore, there must be something wrong with them. This might be a form of group gaslighting. It gives rise to the question as to how frequently this dynamic plays out in our larger society and how big the group conformity effects can be scaled.
Getting back to the 2008 collapse5, one can well imagine financial service workers who were paid well enough that they didn’t want to risk doing or saying anything to set them apart from co-workers. Fear of falling off their career tracks might explain their silence. Maybe they noticed a lot of dubious loans being approved and, as they looked around at everyone else in the office acting normal, they simply decided to act normal. It seemed like the safe thing to do. Did they really know the collapse was imminent or did they doubt their own judgement and say things like “That’s above my pay grade” or “Better heads than mine have got this”?
It is amazing and disappointing to realize so many people are willing to ignore the elephants in their rooms simply because everyone else is doing it. Such voluntary silence may apply to most people, but there’s still a big slice of the pie chart of people who are inclined to speak up anyway. Why don’t we hear more from such people?
The Milgram Experiments and the Stanford Prison Experiment
Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Reality Winner, Sibel Edmonds, John Kiriakou— it doesn’t take very many “examples” of whistleblowers subjected to retaliation, abuse, fines, imprisonment or worse to give the rest of us pause when we try to summon up the courage to speak out. But for each example, there are dozens of people behind the scenes filing lawsuits, conducting arrests, searches, seizures, shutting down bank accounts and crowd-funding sources, chasing whistleblowers through Hong Kong and so on. For every act of retaliation against whistleblowers there is someone, or a room full of people, whose job it is simply to make the whistleblower’s life intolerable. Why would anyone work in such a job?
As it turns out, the Milgram experiments showed us that most people will follow the instructions of an authority figure, even to the point of administering what they know to be lethal electric shocks to people screaming in the next room.
This is, essentially, the psychological principle that allows the “divide and conquer” strategy to work. Some people have surprisingly little resistance to being controlled by others who impress them as authority figures. Some even like being in the position of an authority’s underling-enforcer. The Stanford Prison experiment6 is an excellent study of such dynamics.
The examples of abuse and control in the Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments were relatively simple structured, institutional forms of abuse and control such as one might expect career research psychologists to formulate to make data collection more straightforward and behavioral responses more consistent (scripted) to make the data collected meaningful.
In uncontrolled, personal settings, abuse and control methods, unfortunately, can become highly sophisticated as life-long abusers develop their skills over many years. The fields of study covering trauma and abuse are hard for many of us to understand, but there are important key ideas to be aware of.
Trauma and Abuse
By including trauma and abuse7 patterns from personal-level relationships, we are veering a little off the topic of the difficulty of processing societal-scale obstacles to truth-telling… or are we?
Reading through the list of tactics that Dr. Aronson Fontes has compiled in her Psychology Today article, “The Mind Control Tactics of Domestic Abusers”, can send more than one chill down one’s spine. The reality is that we live in a society where people, within families, use tactics to control other family members ranging from physical exhaustion, involuntary drugging, sleep deprivation and restricting access to information all the way up to sexual injury, forcing someone to harm a child or pet, and forms of mental torture. Perhaps the most important aspect of “trauma-bonding” is the dependency created, by the abuser, in the abused person’s emotional attachment, their sense of self-worth and their longer-term behavioral cycles. Sometimes called the “Stockholm Syndrome”, trauma-bonding is a sympathetic connection of the abused person to their abuser or abusers that succeeds in, at least partially, transplanting the agenda, values, rules and reality-definition of the abuser into the mind of the abused person, making them much easier for the abuser to control because their thinking is systematically aligned with the abuser’s.
But are these tactics really just limited to face-to-face personal relationships? Or, can these tactics also be applied in larger social settings?
Do casinos not “push their visitors to consume alcohol” by giving away free drinks to lower inhibitions, encourage risk-taking and increase gambling revenue for the house?
Does Twitter not “Restrict access to information” by de-boosting social media content that runs counter to preferred narratives about issues of the day?
Is the “you’re not good enough” verbal abuse employed by abusers to cultivate approval-seeking behavior and obedience by their victims not a mirror of the kinds of hooks commonly used in mass media advertising to hook women (and men) into buying certain cosmetics and clothing?
In today’s intensely competitive marketplace, is it overly cynical to suppose some of the advertising businesses spend $US590 billion8 globally on is carefully-crafted psychological manipulation to drive increased sales? Or is that just being realistic?
Public Relations and Propaganda
When the truth is on your side, you can often persuade people to your point of view with your own sincerity and authenticity. When your agenda requires deception of large numbers of people, it’s most often more effective to seek the services of a professional.
Propaganda has gotten a bad name— and deservedly so. “Propaganda” became popularly understood as the messaging from nations that became our enemies in war, for the purpose of convincing us how good and strong the enemies were or, conversely, how bad and weak our country was. So, when Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays set up his offices in New York City, he called himself a “Public Relations Counsel”
What are the Limits to Psychological Manipulation?
Some of the most extreme modalities of psychological manipulation include Hypnosis and “MK/Ultra” (aka “brain-washing”). Experimentation has shown that it is possible to fracture personalities into multiple “alters” with different conditioned behaviors. It is even possible to hypnotize some subjects to perform acts, such as murder, that are morally repugnant to their normal, waking, conscious personality.9 A fascinating mechanism of hypnotized subjects is a tendency they have to explain away their behaviors that result directly from hypnotic suggestions as some kind of personal whim or conscious choice— a denial of their powerlessness to resist hypnotic suggestion.
Conclusion
As fascinating and powerful as these insights from Psychology may seem in explaining the inability of our conceptual adversaries to accept our information and follow our logic, they are all but useless when it comes to changing our adversaries’ minds.
If we say they’re in denial, they say we’re the ones who are really in denial.
If we say they’re propagandized or brainwashed, they say we’re the ones who are really propagandized or brainwashed.
If we say they’re just conforming to group think like the Asch conformity experiment subjects, they say we’re describing ourselves.
If we say anything at all about their psychological barriers to seeing the truth, they will find a defense mechanism that allows them to conceive of a way to project that psychological failing back onto us.
Because, when you get right down to it, all such appeals to psychologically-rooted fallacies and obstacles are, essentially, just a catalog of methods for distracting ourselves or others from the data and deductions that lead to conclusions someone refuses to accept.
If these ideas about psychology have any practical use at all, it will probably be when we learn to recognize them in ourselves— when we learn to notice the ideas we refuse to entertain and then begin to ask ourselves, “Why?”
In essence, the only way we can begin to do our society’s shadow work — making our culture’s unconscious aspects, at last, conscious— is by doing our own shadow work where we learn to recognize the unconscious discontinuities and “skips” in our own thinking and, through such exercises, make ourselves ever more conscious of our own habits of thought so that, maybe eventually, we can be examples of self-reflection that inspire others to greater depths of self-reflection as well.
“Texas in the Morning”, book, 1994, Madeleine D. Brown
Jim Marrs and Saint James Hunt interview(s), InfoWars video, “Jim Marrs & St. John Hunt - E. Howard Hunt Deathbed Confession JFK Assassination”
Sandra Serrano’s interrogation by Sgt. Enrique Hernandez can be found in part IV of “Evidence of Revision” (a six-part compilation of conspiracy-related news footage).
“The Big Short” is an excellent dramatization of actual people and events related to the 2008 collapse.
“The Mind Control Tactics of Domestic Abusers”, Periodical, Psychology Today, Lisa Aronson Fontes, PhD
Thank you for this