Cigarettes induce mental states that people desire such as calmness, mild euphoria, and relaxed focus. The tobacco and chemical additives are compounded and balanced to induce these feelings in order to keep us buying the product. The objective of keeping us engaged is profit, of course.
In order to become profitable, Facebook had to figure out how to keep people engaged with the site in order to garner enough personal information about its subscribers to target them with advertising, which is how it makes money. In other words, the intention was addiction. So, it developed algorithms to learn what kept folks engaged. This took some time. The company didn’t turn a profit for its first six years.
What the algorithms gradually taught the owners by experimenting with billions of human beings as though we were human guinea pigs was that a preponderance of our species was attracted to negative emotions such as fear, disgust, hatred, and outrage. They were then able to colonize our nervous systems, to addict us to these emotional states in order to keep us engaged. This diabolical methodology worked beyond their most avaricious dreams.
Those desiring power over others were then able to co-opt this methodology and reproduce it on other social media platforms, Fox News, hate-filled blogs and podcasts, and, of course, all over the universe of talk radio. The same methodology that is used for promoting our mercantile economy can target ideology and aspirations to political power.
Many folks wonder with genuine bewilderment why the mind of the MAGA world is as it is, why so many people can’t see through the disinformation, the cruelty presented as loyalty, and why the venal corruption that may be obvious to you and to so many others with whom you associate is opaque to those in that world. I suggest that a key to that mystery is an understanding of the pervasive dynamic of this colonization of people’s emotional life.
I am not suggesting that this is the sole cause of Trump support which has many interrelated socio-economic and political determinants that I am sure readers can declaim. I am here simply hoping to cast one narrow beam of light into the dark abyss of utter bafflement that so many folks gaze into wondering what happened to the mind and heart of so many millions of people who do not seem to live in the same world they do.
So, why has your mind not been colonized in this way? There are two main reasons.
One is that you have not exposed yourself to a constant barrage of fear, disgust, hatred, and outrage by inhaling a constant diet of social media along with hateful podcasts, talk radio, and television. Your viral load of these pathogenic mental states has been less.
The other is that you have cultivated mental, emotional, and spiritual immunity by nourishing yourself with such practices as liberal education, loving relationships, artistic liberation, meditation, spending time close to nature, and seeking understanding of the ways we are similar and connected and all worthy of the essentials of a healthy life rather than degenerating into tribal animosities. These positive engagements have nourished our mental, emotional, and spiritual immune systems providing resistance to the pathogenic assault of the epidemic of fear, disgust, and hatred that has descended upon us.
We have not developed an anti-hatred vaccine. Some may suppose that to be the function of religion and this is so for some who pursue possibilities of the realization of universal love through the scriptures and observances of their faith. The divisiveness, oppression, violence and cruelty that religion can also engender is pervasively evident in our world today. Whether or not religion engenders immunity from the pathogens of fear and hatred depends upon what one is reaching for in their religion.
The first step in political resistance is self-immunization against the pathogenic colonization of our mind and heart by cultivating kindness, consciousness and compassion, healing relationships, and connection to life and to all other beings in this world. Oh dear, yes, other actions must follow. But they must flow from this source.
Jonathan Klate lives in Amherst.