Guest post: The hardest lesson to swallow
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on If.
…all his opponents thought that he was engaging in hyperbole for dramatic effect
There is certainly no shortage of normalization or “sanewashing” – not to mention delusional levels of wishful thinking – going on. I also suspect that the moderate, centrist tendency to “err on the side of least drama” has become such a reflex to a lot of people that any suggestion that things might actually be that bad sounds like obvious “alarmism” and “hysteria” and hence self-refuting.
Still “all his opponents” seems like an exaggeration to me. There are plenty of people out there who never had any illusions about Trump himself. What a lot more people seem to have a hard time fathoming is that a large minority of the American electorate (almost certainly the single largest identifiable “constituency” at the present) really do support Trump’s authoritarian and illiberal agenda and will not start turning against him in droves if only nice liberals and lefties can make them understand how awful he truly is. Sam Harris* once made the point (rightly in my opinion) that because most secularists or moderate believers are unable to imagine what it’s like to really believe the things that religious extremists claim to believe, many can’t bring themselves to accept that anybody else believes it either, hence the obligatory attempts to find secular motives for everything from suicide bombings to the practice of letting your own children die rather than allowing necessary blood transfusions. Apparently any correlation between theses people’s actions and their expressed beliefs was a pure coincidence.
I think the same goes for nice, moderate, centrist liberals and the MAGA crowd. In the summer of 2016 a writer in Der Spiegel argued that Trump was actually a lot closer to the White House than most liberals and leftists were prepared to admit to themselves. In part his argument was based on the observation that, according to the most recent poll results, if you took the rural bias of the electoral system into account, the outcome was basically a coin toss. But the part that really stuck with me was that because liberals and lefties found everything about Trump so repulsive, they couldn’t quite bring themselves to believe that anybody else could find anything to like about him either, hence his “apparent” popular support could only be a great big misunderstanding.
Others, like Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, may not have started out with any particular illusions about the electorate, but underestimated the degree to which the Republican Party had become radicalized. Levitzky and Ziblatt are on record as saying that when they published How Democracies Die in 2018, they saw Trump as a dangerous demagogue with strong anti-democratic tendencies, but they did not see the GOP as an anti-democratic party. They have been forced to revise their opinion on this latter point, however.
Perhaps the hardest lesson to swallow is that he really can get away with anything and that neither the constitution nor the greatly over-hyped system of “checks and balances” is going to stop him. As someone once commented I think most people used to have a vague idea that “they would never let him get away with that”. It’s time to face the fact that there are no such people as “they”, and that no one is coming to the rescue.
*Yes, I know, but as I keep saying, people are not split into those who are right about everything and those who are wrong about everything.
What does the footnote about Sam Harris mean? I seem to have missed something.
I keep coming back to this idea when I try to understand why people stay loyal to groups that clearly do harm — whether it’s cults like Scientology or gender ideology or extreme political movements like MAGA or Fascism.
It’s that tribal loyalty lives in a completely different part of the brain than rational thinking. And sometimes, the tribal part takes over.
Roughly speaking, it’s the lower brain versus the higher brain. Or if you prefer Freud, the id versus the superego. Or if you’re Homer Simpson, it’s Devil-Homer versus Angel-Homer.
The “lower brain” (or limbic system) is evolutionarily older. It handles emotion, fear, reward, and motivation — all things tied to survival. The “higher brain” (the prefrontal cortex) is newer and handles planning, decision-making, and impulse control. It’s supposed to step in and override the lower brain when it’s about to make dumb, emotionally driven decisions.
But that override system doesn’t always work — especially in kids and teenagers (whose prefrontal cortexes aren’t fully developed) or in adults under stress or fear. In those states, control shifts back to the limbic system. Survival mode kicks in, and rational thinking takes a back seat.
Here’s where tribalism comes in. I think emotional bonding with a group is a deep, evolved instinct, rooted in survival. For most of human history, being cast out from your group could mean death. So once that bond forms, the brain treats any threat to it — like criticism of the group — as a threat to you.
And when do these bonds usually form? Often during periods of vulnerability: isolation, fear, major life changes, or identity crises. People are most susceptible when they’re seeking belonging, certainty, or meaning, and some people need those things more urgently than others. That’s why some fall harder or faster into extreme ideologies or cults. It’s not because they’re weaker or less intelligent — it’s because the group offered something they deeply needed, at the exact moment they needed it.
Once the emotional bond is locked in, rational information is treated like an attack, not a challenge to think through. The emotional brain slams the door shut. You’ll defend your group, even if it means ignoring evidence, contorting logic, or getting angry at facts. Not because you’re stupid, but because some ancient part of your brain thinks your life depends on it.
And if some part of you does recognize that something’s wrong? That’s when cognitive dissonance kicks in — that uncomfortable mental tension when your beliefs and your reality don’t match. The rational brain starts to panic, but the emotional brain is already guarding the gates. And almost always, to relive the tension, people don’t question the tribe. They double down on it.
Right now, we’re living through a period of massive technological and social upheaval. Everything everywhere is changing; the future feels uncertain; everyone’s overwhelmed. That uncertainty creates fear, and fear activates the limbic system. The result is what we’re seeing all around us: the culture war is less about ideas than about instinct — people retreating into opposing tribes, not because they’ve thought it through, but because some deep part of their brain is trying to feel safe.
And the deeper into the tribe people go, the more fear they generate in the opposing tribe — fueling a feedback loop that keeps the whole thing burning. It’s Mutual Assured Destruction.
If there’s a way out, it probably starts with recognizing the pattern and calming the fear. That means speaking not just to people’s facts and logic, but to their need for safety, respect, and belonging — the things the lower brain craves. Moments like the end of the Cold War, where dialogue and empathy defused decades of mutual fear, taught us that calm, patient communication can re-engage the higher brain. Political leaders like Nelson Mandela showed this when he chose forgiveness over revenge.
So basically, what we need right now is the exact opposite of Donald Trump. His politlcal strategy works because it runs on activating the lower brain — fear and anger — which is where most people’s minds are at right now. Michelle Obama’s slogan, “When they go low, we go high” seemed a ittle trite at the time, but at the moment, it feels like a solid first step in a disarmament plan — an antidote to Trump’s apocalyptic destructivism.
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GW
For a while back in my militant atheist days I used to have a very high opinion of Sam Harris, and I still consider many of his arguments specifically against faith-based religion to be spot on. I also largely share his views on (counter-causal) “free will”. So when the first red-flags started popping up, I remember thinking “Why did it have to be him?!”. The disillusionment began with his less than skeptical attitude (as expressed in The End of Faith) towards psychic phenomena and reincarnation, citing the work of (IMHO) pseudoscientists like Dean Radin and Rupert Sheldrake. He has also said other things suggesting that the mind (or at least consciousness) is something more than “what the brain does”. Then there was the Dunning-Kruger-like manner in which he took it upon himself to lecture an actual security expert on the virtues of racial profiling. I also thought The Moral Landscape was one long circular argument: He claims to refute Hume’s “is-ought” distinction, but assumes the “ought” from the outset.
To be fair, though, there have also been cases where I thought his critics were not being entirely fair. E.g. he has frequently been accused of being pro torture, but if you read his actual arguments (presented as a trolley problem style ethical dilemma), they were definitely a lot more nuanced than he was given credit for. Many have also taken issue with his views on meditation and “spiritual experiences”. Then again, as far as I could tell, he was always careful to stress that we shouldn’t derive any metaphysical claims from such experiences, so if that was all there was too it (i.e. if not for his flirting with paranormal woo elsewhere), I wouldn’t have had too much of a problem with that.