Julian Jaynes, a professor at Princeton, wrote about the earliest human societies and how their large-scale projects were consistent with hearing imaginary voices. The Jaynes Model considers a possibility that a large number of early humans experienced auditory hallucinations similar to what is reported today with schizophrenia and schizoid disorders. The big difference is that message content in the Jaynes Model voices is heavily influenced by those societies' authoritarian leaders.
These "voices" work like Tea Party members listening to Rush Limbaugh and television evangelists. The Jaynes Model predicts strong social cohesion, submission, and a willingness to work many hours to achieve group goals.
Does it sound familiar?
A charismatic leader 7,500 years ago did not have radio or television. But if Jaynes is right, this leader could plug in to the populace's hallucinatory voices and sell a broad segment of the community on a claim to personal godliness. Hours of daily communal prayer play a role in the indoctrination. The "voices" could be used to control people for war, for such as draining marshes, or to build the pyramids.
Being a god can be very, very cool. Ask a Roman emperor. Or a pharoah. Ask Ted Cruz.
Sigmund Freud also did work analyzing the messaging system for authoritarian controls. This is his theory of the Superego. But by Freud's day most people's messages had gone underground, become subconscious. The Superego operates with silent inhibitions on behavior. Submission to a strong leader is addressed by Bob Altemeyer and used for political analytics by John Dean in his works on the Nixon administration
The central threads include a behavioral inventory that depends on submission to authority figures and acceptance of non-rational arguments solely based on authoritarian packaging.
In a nutshell, this is how you influence people to vote against their own interests repeatedly. To worship a loon and gold digger such as Sarah Palin. This is how relentless ad hominem and rude name-calling at our American president are disguised as patriotism. Jaynes's auditory hallucinations are echoed by RWNJ "Message Discipline" and a well defined set of hoaxes.
Thing is: Never Underestimate the Effectiveness of Non-Rational Argument.
For most people on the Right politically, fact checking might as well not exist. They are a class of victims who have been "catfished" to believe that Republicans are so many Prince Charmings on white chargers. At the end of the day about a fourth of American voters have been manipulated to form a "Jaynestown USA" cult.
For Progressives to respond effectively it is not enough to fighting off single, atomic lies from the RWNJs. What modifies individual behavior is not the lies, but the hoaxes that create and then support. Follow below the orange muffin... we'll have a look at the structures of two of their major hoaxes and what it takes to keep them going... with links.
Here is a good intro to the basics of historical analysis relevant to how voices in the brain connect to personal awareness, leading to Jaynes's research on consciousness:
Consciousness and the Voices of the Mind
Jaynes's big book is here:
The Origin of Consciousness in the Break-Down of the Bicameral Mind
My guess is that Jaynes overreached. But if a fourth of the population in an early society could be manipulated with voices-amplified-religion, as he postulates, that would give a leader all he needed to keep control. These were pre-writing societies with very low intellectual stimulation for slave classes and simply terrible food resources where IQ could have averaged 60 to 80 against modern standards.
A society with many voice-hearers would be easy to manage.
We get something similar in the early 20th Century with the Russian, Lev Vygotsky. He listened to children and found that they talked to themselves, to imaginary friends, to almost anything. The imaginary friends talked back, too. Building language structures and the generative capabilties is not a simple points-on-a-line waterfall.
Lev Vygotsky in wikipedia
Vygotsky appreciated that individual development in childhood is different from what children can do when they work with other children and with adults. He diagrammed this as a Zone of Proximal Development -- extending from individual to full group achievement. Imagine this ZoPeD process operating in a Jaynestown world where communal daily prayers and songs and hallucinatory voices are major players for childhood development.
That is a different world from ours.
All too much a part of our world are American authoritarians. Here's Bob Altemeyer's test:
Altemeyer Authoritarian Test
Freud is left to Dearest Reader. You can find "The Century of the Self" BBC series in four parts at the Google video library. The series shows how Freud's ideas invaded capitalist advertising and then politics.
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RWNJ strategy goes to pushing well-defined hoaxes. They want their targets to believe broad, emotionally charged concepts that tie them to "conservatives" as to family. The individual lies can come and go. It is the hoaxes that matter.
Let's look at a couple of them.
-- Ronald Reagan was a great president
Selling Ronald Reagan has become an industry for Right Wingers. He is their George Washington. Without him, if you want to go all the way with this hoax, there might not be a United States with a constitutional government. He was the critical figure who saved America in the 1980s.
Foreign policy and war making were his chief areas of strength. He made no mistakes. Every move was brilliant.
Thing is, if you do fact checking on Reagan, he was a terrible failure more than not. Yet today it has been more than a decade since our broadcast news programs have mentioned that Reagan invading Lebanon in 1983. He got 398 people killed there in that one year and then turned tail in full retreat. Reagan abandoned our local allies.
Some 241 were killed at the Marine BLT Barracks in October. The embassy had been hit earlier killing 63 and there were two additional truck bombings afterward. He had set up naval bombardments of Arab villages up hill from Beirut. He killed hundreds of civilians, setting up a cry for revenge.
By 1985 it is not an exaggeration to say that Reagan was the "father" for Hezbollah. Prior to bombing the Marines, the Iranians had next to no influence in Lebanon. But when they got revenge, they became the long term allies for all the hilltop tribes. Reagan solved his political problem by invading Grenada and by having removal of a benign polyp headlined as a "cancer scare."
Reagan was very good at PR. Not much else. The line "Tear down this wall!" is credited with powers like Jehovah parting the Red Sea. You would think that Reagan was up on Mt. Rushmore to listen to GOPer propaganda.
Except that Reagan didn't get a many people killed uselessly, he was similar to GW Bush. Bush's speech after the 9/11 attacks was his high point, same as Reagan's speech at the Berlin Wall. Neither of them accomplished much of substance and the failures in Lebanon and Iraq were their most important impacts on history.
-- Democrats are always profligate, always for increasing government, wasteful of your tax dollars
This second big hoax mangles what has happened over the last century with Democrats and Republicans in office. We have a DKOS diary that is a classic for stating the facts:
Which party is best for the economy? It's not even close
It has charts and links for everything you'd ever want to know.
Instead of facts, corporate media pound out material supporting RWNJ hoaxes. Here they would have the citizenry believe that Democrats ruin the economy again and again by increasing government spending and raising taxes and drowning puppies.
Helluva hoax, that. Directly opposite to the facts. And it's pushed like crack to America's authoritarians.
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Between the auditory hallucinations inhabiting AM and FM radio and putrid run off from the Citizens United out-house, it is no wonder that a fourth of Americans believe swill.
When you go after a specific lie, make sure to tie your attack back to the Major Hoax it supports.
The hoaxes are what populate Tea Party mental processes. The lies are cheap tools used to sustain the hoaxes.
Good luck with it. Breaking up RWNJ hoaxes is tough work. Success is like getting any other target of a scam to realize that the person they've been sending money to is a crook. You're pushing against a large mass of denial.
Really, good luck!
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And many thanks for the COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT listing. And thanks for corrections to spelling and diction. My typing sucks, has always sucked, will always... as fingers outrace thought.