Political change in an era of massive psychic damage

There are lots of opportunities for misunderstandings these days. This is bad because online discussions — which are way more important than real-life discussions because they happen separate from the totalitarian self-censorship regime that’s taken hold in America — are dominated by nonproductive personality feuds where misunderstandings (intentional or otherwise) serve as the primary source of ammunition.

I’m not an academic. I don’t have any kind of graduate or professional education other than one semester of a never-completed film studies MA (an expensive but fortunately brief mistake) and auditing a single job-related course at UC Berkeley (it was fun, TBH). Nothing I write is intended to be cited in a book or anything like that, although I try to make my writing as accurate as possible.

All it really takes to solve seemingly unsolvable civilizational problems is for people to just “wake up” en masse.

Rather, my hope is that the history, movies, books, and video games I write about can just be part of the wallpaper in the back of your mind. That’s the main problem facing conservatives today, I think. The wallpaper needs to be updated.

Why mental models matter

A mental model is basically your internal understanding of how the outside world works. When you see something happen, it might have happened for 1,000 different reasons, but you will have one particular reason in your head to explain how and why it happened. This is usually not a conscious process. It’s more like a reflex.

The Condundrum Cluster

Understanding mental models is important today because even though everyone is nominally responding to the same real world, people think that that world works in very different ways.

I’m sure you have noticed that oftentimes when you talk about politics or current events with someone else, it seems like you are talking to a crazy person. He might be intelligent, he might be credentialed or well-educated or whatever, you might have known him for years, but there’s something that is just not connecting for him, and no matter how you explain it, it never will.

This is because there are mental models essential to understanding the world that normal people will just never be exposed to in the course of their regular lives. I’ve already written about this phenomenon in history. People understand the world through stories and anecdotes.

As people become more disconnected from reality due to television and the internet, the stories they will accept take on a crazier and crazier tone, even though they remain relatively high functioning. They can go to work, maintain relationships with friends and family, and seem reasonable until you hit one of their emotional tripwires. After that, they can become very unreasonable.

The fake injustice that spawned Black Lives Matter

So, back to my brilliant and insightful article about mental models in history: Take the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri. This was the incident that led to the professionalization of the Black Lives Matter movement, which raised billions of dollars and ultimately reshaped criminal justice and hiring practices nationwide.

The controversy over Brown’s shooting was entirely fake. The shooting was unambiguously justified. The phenomenon activists were supposedly responding to, unarmed black men being killed by police, is actually extremely rare. It’s about a dozen per year, which is less than a rounding error in a country of more than 300 million people.

I’ve heard people say they think that the number of unarmed black men killed by police is 10,000+ per year. It’s crazy. Many of those extremely rare shootings (such as Brown’s) were unambiguously justified as well. The BLM movement, based on these lies, was a vehicle for an enormous amount of real-world organized violence to achieve systemic political change.

Totally forgotten: The initial national BLM protest campaign climaxed with a black nationalist killing 5 police officers in Dallas, after which the professional activists organizing the BLM movement turned it off like a light switch until it was activated again during the run-up to the 2020 election.

Getty Images/Spencer Platt

So, what is going on here? The controversy was fake, the issue is fake, but the feelings are real. It’s not cynical for the overwhelming majority of participants. The violence is real, too. What are they all reacting to? Why did tens of thousands of people participate in armed mobs and roadblocks? Why are people shooting innocent drivers over this?

Well, they’re reacting to decades of programming from the media and schools and even their parents. In short, their mental model tells them that the propaganda they see on TV is real and also that the appropriate response to this propaganda is real-world violence.

The real mental model that people should have developed after the Ferguson incident was that everything professional race activists say is a lie and that large numbers are happy to use those lies to justify violence.

Conservatives for rioting?

I think I’m the only person who remembers this, but during the initial Floyd riots, many right wingers were supporting the rioters using a number of pretexts. The rioters were really speaking out against “government abuse” or manifesting the true Bronze Age Mindset according to these people. It was not a small number of right wingers who were cheering on the revolution. Even those who opposed BLM during 2020 riots responded mostly with passivity. Many suggested that, even though they might oppose the rioters’ methods, the rioters kind of had a point.

The consequences of this rioting (total surrender to BLM criminal justice policy proposals almost nationwide) may have had such a visible negative impact on quality of life that people are now allowed to mentally object to the movement and its aims, but it was touch and go for a while.

Attitudes may be changing, Republicans and moderates (to the extent those still exist) seem to be getting to the right place (or at least are open to being brought there) on many issues, but the civilizational reflex revealed in 2020 should be sending alarm bells through everyone’s heads.

So, for the shooting of Michael Brown. People heard that a young black man had been killed by police. Their mental model told them that young black men are systemically targeted by trigger-happy cops and that that’s what happened in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.

No new piece of evidence could convince them otherwise, even though the initial story was almost immediately discredited, and the police officer was completely exonerated. They were speaking a different language. In fact, their conviction in this belief was only strengthened by similar, equally fake, outrage stories that emerged in the years that followed. This model was echoed in entertainment media, “news,” and the education system. It’s how people think the world works, and it’s just not real.

The mental models people have today are fried. Everything a person knows about a given subject might be completely fake. The exact opposite of what they learned might be true.

Lies my teacher told me

This phenomenon has been around for a very long time: take the Sacco and Vanzetti case. There have been tens of thousands of pages written (and movies made, etc.) claiming the pair was innocent, when actually pretty much all of the evidence available suggests that they were guilty. At the very least, they were active members of a terrorist organization, rather than the peaceful political dissidents they are painted as in nearly all media related to the case.

Propaganda can snowball for centuries until the only story people will be exposed to is a complete inversion of what actually happened. This gives them some bizarre mental models.

There is a values crisis, and I don’t mean that in a moralizing way. What people literally value or find important has been distorted to the point that they are no longer able to navigate reality. The revelation that a celebrity used a racial slur online ten years ago would get far more attention and generate far more outrage than a shooting spree.

The U.S. Army recently set aside the convictions of more than 100 black soldiers who mutinied and went on a rampage killing any white civilians they encountered, all based on dubious claims that the mutineers were fighting systemic racism. The Army public relations official who handled the pushback to this decision seemed to genuinely not understand why people were upset that these unambiguously guilty men were being legally exonerated for racial politics reasons 100 years after the fact. He said that the soldiers shouldn’t have even been put on trial for the murders.

Defusing the bomb

America has a bomb sitting in its lap. There are tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, of Americans who hold beliefs so crazy that they likely would have been grounds for hospitalization in the past. The things people will support are objectively depraved: jailing people for self-defense, providing irreversible pseudoscientific surgeries to mentally ill children, letting criminals steal with impunity, allowing tens of millions of people to illegally immigrate for the express purpose of politically transforming the U.S.

What’s more, they are passionate about this support. It is not cynical or financially motivated for the overwhelming majority. Rather, it taps into their deepest feelings, messages that they’ve heard for years and even decades.

Conservatives, even if they understand the issues facing the country, generally do not seem to grasp the size of this bomb and what it means for resolving political problems today. They try to negotiate with the bomb, they argue with the bomb, they count on the bomb to act rationally and with proportionality. Edgier conservatives think that they can solve their problems by yelling at the bomb or blowing the bomb up in their lap. All of these solutions leave much to be desired. You have to disarm the bomb.

My skepticism toward paths like national divorce, Civil War, or really anything that substantially disrupts the current system has been greatly criticized for years. People often tell me that I just don’t know how bad things are because I (at least used to) live in the San Francisco Bay Area, work in tech marketing, and eat avocado toast.

But my skepticism toward these things doesn’t come from me minimizing the problems we face. Rather, I think that the situation for the American right is actually much worse than these people, who are supposedly more extreme than I am, realize.

The bomb isn’t just a small group of radical liberal government officials, anarchist heroin addict terrorists, or comically naïve kindergarten-teacher types — it’s probably over half of the country. It’s your friends and families, and neighbors, and people who have never done you any wrong in your whole life.

They’re not bad people, but they have been primed to support very bad things, or at least oppose anyone who wants to stop the bad things. In a crisis, these people could not be relied upon to do anything productive. In fact, they should be counted on to try to block any productive action.

A lesson from the Russian Revolution

An historical incident that can help us understand our situation is the fall of the city of Rostov at the start of the Russian Civil War. Rostov was the seat of the Don Cossack Host (basically the Cossack government). The Cossacks are a semi-nomadic people-group (not quite ethnic, not quite not-ethnic) that played a prominent role in the pre-Revolution Russian military. They were settled in frontier areas and often served as border guards and internal police during times of unrest. Although they had a reputation for loyalty to the Czar (which made them hated by the Russian left), they were also granted a great deal of autonomy in the Russian Empire.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

By the time of the crisis of the Russian Revolution rolled around, Cossacks had a very sophisticated political tradition stretching back hundreds of years. In the Revolution, the Czar was removed, arrested, and taken away to parts unknown, then replaced by an extremely weak liberal democratic government headed by Alexander Kerensky.

Kerensky and his followers were so incompetent that they were overthrown by the Bolsheviks, communist radicals who from the very beginning plotted civil war in order to kill their enemies en masse, a few months later.

The Cossacks, when faced with an illegal Bolshevik coup that seized most major cities in European Russia and captured the national government bureaucracy mostly intact, were in a uniquely favorable position compared to other non-Bolshevik factions.

They already had their own autonomous government with legitimacy that stretched back hundreds of years. They had a reputation for conservatism, independence, and toughness (something like the mental image people have of Texas today). They also had enormous stockpiles of arms and ammunition belonging to the old government.

Further strengthening the Cossack position, thousands of Russian officers and soldiers fled to the Cossack-controlled areas after the Bolsheviks began massacring their political opponents and gave the lower classes a license to rob and murder.

The Don Cossacks had a government, they had weapons, and they had a potential army of seasoned troops. The Bolshevik military organization was extremely primitive; decent people didn’t want to participate in it. The success of the Bolshevik Revolution mainly relied on the unwillingness of all elements of Russian society to defend the weak and dysfunctional liberal Kerensky government. Lenin’s Bolshevik dictatorship was never popular and never had a majority of support in Russian society.

Paralyzed by preconceptions

What did the Don Cossacks do? Nothing. They sat around, they debated, they allowed the Bolsheviks to consolidate. Bolshevik-backed demonstrations and strikes increasingly paralyzed Don Cossack territory. The Revolution was coming to the Don.

An association of Russian officers called the Volunteer Army formed for the purpose of fighting the Bolshevik coup. They were regarded as troublemakers by the Don government and received little support, though they were used by the Cossacks (who had trouble maintaining law and order with their meager local forces) as police.

When the Volunteer Army eventually had to use force to suppress an attempted Bolshevik uprising, its members were promptly thrown under the bus. They were treated as butchers, even by refugee officers who had seen firsthand what a Bolshevik takeover entailed.

Going along with the existing narrative that brutal reactionaries are slaughtering innocent political dissidents? That’s easy. Admitting that those political dissidents weren’t peaceful at all and were planning something far worse was much harder.

They didn’t have the right programming. It was as if Russians in general couldn’t grasp what was happening to them. Their mental models only allowed them to oppose conservative “counter-revolutionaries” and paralyzed their response to the real threat of the Bolsheviks.

The city of Rostov was the seat of the Don Cossack government and home to more than 8,000 refugee Russian military officers. But by the time the Bolshevik advance on Don Cossack territory began it could only muster a few hundred defenders. Most decided to wait and see what would happen.

Although they knew on one level the revolution meant bad things, and even death, for them, they also viewed it as inevitable and even justified. They saw the counter-revolutionaries as somehow worse and that left them unable to save their own lives.

The few defenders were mostly retired senior officers and teenaged military cadets. The Volunteer Army chose to evacuate the city to seek reinforcements elsewhere, crossing the barren and frozen steppe, because they knew they would receive no help from the locals.

The leader of the Don Cossack Host, Ataman Kaledin, was so disgusted by the passivity of the Cossacks he loved so much that he resigned his post and then shot himself in despair. The Don Cossack government, which had all those advantages and seemed unbreakable just a few months before, fell almost entirely without a fight.

Demoralized people are not good for anything. People with bad programming are worse than useless in a crisis.

The problem today is not that right wingers have not come up with the right arguments, or that they have not done something decisive and fantastical or whatever, but rather that normal life doesn’t really exist anymore. There is no baseline of normalcy to operate from, and it is distorting everyone’s worldview and behavior. People do not have the mental models they need to make good decisions.

One senior Russian official in the years before the Russian Revolution remarked that the peasantry was so prone to depraved and desperate violence, the intelligentsia was so divorced from reality, and the upper classes were aloof and apathetic, that his role was really that of a zookeeper.

If you are an American who understands the problems facing this country and wants to solve them, I encourage you to see yourself in this role. You have to stop the fighting in a way that doesn’t kill everyone.

With this in mind, right-wing victory in American society will not come in the form of a decisive desperate struggle. You’re not going to accomplish anything by just rattling someone’s cage. It’s not going to be “The Turner Diaries” or whatever violent fantasy people are drawn to these days.

Rather, it’s going to be more like Shakespeare’s play “The Taming of the Shrew.” You have all these crazy people who have been rendered dysfunctional and even deranged for any number of reasons, and you must seduce them into being normal and happy again so that positive change can actually occur.

Getty Images/Adam Larkey

Radical deceleration

In my opinion, conservatives should make every effort to visibly improve quality of life and calm people down. I call this Radical Deceleration. There is no crisis. Nothing that crazy is happening. You can breathe easy and actually think about what’s going on. There’s no need to just blindly react. Unclench your jaw and take a deep breath.

As the enormous, almost miraculous, success of anti-immigration parties in Germanic and Scandinavian countries in just the last few years has shown, all it really takes to solve seemingly unsolvable civilizational problems is for people to just “wake up” en masse.

It’s important to remember that they weren’t “convinced” into adopting crazy positions, like allowing unlimited numbers of Africans and Middle Easterners into their countries, in the first place. They did this reflexively (with lots of help from the government and mass media). They were operating under a totally fried mental model, which had been drilled into them for decades by television and the education system. The model changed, at first gradually and later like a dam breaking. The problems and the solutions were always obvious to those who knew how to see.

A big contributor to this sudden change, I think, is the fundamental differences in lifestyle and culture between America and these European countries. I’m sure I’m not breaking new ground when I say this, but Germanic and Scandinavian Europeans are consistently happier and healthier than Americans.

Although this was a common talking point among leftists due to these countries' robust welfare systems, I think their success is more due to their extreme homogeneity, deference to authority, and literally conservative worldview: They don’t like change very much and value conformity.

Although these traits can be bad in many ways (it allowed them to eventually be manipulated into pursuing suicidal policies like mass immigration), things move slower, and as a result, people have more time to breathe and respond to changes in a healthy way. They can pull out of a tailspin.

In America, everything moves at light speed. This can be a good thing, because a wealthy nation with such a strong meritocratic bent offers ambitious and well-meaning people the ability to make positive change quickly.

However, this phenomenon has taken a sinister tone in recent years. Things can get worse much faster, too. Everyone is stressed out now. You can see it on their faces. People look rough. Obesity has been kicked into overdrive. Drug use (both prescription and otherwise) is at all-time highs. Tattoos and piercings are everywhere now.

The country is becoming schizophrenic, and its politics are reflecting that. Politicians on both the left and right increasingly have lives as insane as their constituents. Serious social dysfunction affects all regions, demographics, and classes.

Although I suspect this is because America has decisively turned away from the unique and dynamic WASP culture and value system that shaped the country for hundreds of years, whatever the cause, this is not an environment conducive to positive change.

The power of living normally

I’ve already written about the importance of reducing stress in your own life. This importance goes beyond just you. American Expeditionary Force intelligence officer Montgomery Schuyler noted in his reports on the Russian Civil War that the big obstacle to resistance to the Bolsheviks was that the Russian people had become “so thoroughly disorganized and lifeless as a result of the last three years, that they are unable even to think for themselves far less to govern themselves.”

Demoralized people feel and act helpless. They are drawn to indecision, despair, comforting lies, or even counterproductive fake solutions to their problems.

Every effort should be made to recreate the appearance of normal life. It’s OK to fake it a little bit. I won’t tell. Good feelings are contagious. Optimism is contagious. I think that generally people want to rise to the occasion. They want to be part of something with high standards and live somewhere that they can be proud of.

Much of General Wrangel’s remarkable success during the closing stages of the Russian Civil War, despite being outnumbered nearly 10 to 1 and having basically zero stockpiles to draw from, was his insistence on the maintenance of discipline and good order among his men and the areas he controlled.

He may have had 200 troops, but when those 200 troops showed up somewhere, they were a real army, not a band of thugs. The crimes against civilians, looting, or even just obnoxious behavior like public drunkenness, commonplace under other White Army commanders, were not tolerated by Wrangel and his forces. These were not people playing dress-up, these were serious men who wanted to save their country.

This is something that the American right must replicate. Rather than watch society fail with resignation or even delight, conservatives should make every effort to improve the areas they control.

There is no reason that so many conservative states should be dominated by a few blue urban centers, which are visibly in decline yet grow in influence more and more as they fail. These areas are like open psychic wounds. They tell people that bizarre behavior is normal and provide a critical base of support to expand the decline into relatively unaffected areas. Although liberals benefit from decline, diminishing the public disgust response to social dysfunction, for conservatives, strength generates strength and weakness generates weakness.

Five principles for the future

This phenomenon has to extend beyond the realm of pure policy. Circling back to the start of the essay, the wallpaper in people’s minds needs to change. Their reflexes and instincts need to change at the mass scale. This has to be a priority.

Correcting this problem will require that the messages people receive every day be different. If any kind of shakeup occurs under the current conditions, disaster for the American right is guaranteed. Real victory is something that’s going to have to be eased into.

This essay has already gone on for way too long, so I think I’ll conclude it with a few principles that I think are going to be important in years ahead.

1. Systems over Symbols

I’m sure everyone today has noticed the presence of numerous stunts and empty gestures emerging from conservative politicians. These should be greeted with hostility. It’s not going to be a single touchstone event that changes the current order, it’s going to be processes that can be repeated hundreds, even thousands, of times.

A good illustration of this can be found in the difference between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ very dumb Martha’s Vineyard flights and DeSantis’ courageous mass termination of DEI officials at major state universities. Although the former was a largely empty gesture that had no long-term impact on the problem, the latter is something that seriously disrupts organized liberal activism and can be replicated at schools all over the state.

Liberal policies are often extremely unpopular and have immediate real-world negative consequences; they only succeed due to well-organized cabals and mafias. Organization must be matched with organization.

2. Coherence over Circuses

Too many people want to turn conservatism into a “snobs vs. slobs” movie from the 1980s: a loose coalition of downtrodden outsiders. It’s tempting to try to bring together the biggest anti-liberal coalition possible. However, sacrificing political organization and standards for raw numbers is a bad trade. Systems live and die on discipline.

If people have different goals and different worldviews, there’s a danger of losing focus. This is one of the reasons Trump is so important: a single leader who can bring disparate elements together, resolving disputes internally, to effectively pursue a single vision.

3. Truth over Trivia

I think the negative impact of conspiracy culture on the right becomes more obvious every day. People know nothing now. They barely get any useful information from schools, and “mainstream” sources are often just naked propaganda. Because of this, you see a kind of nihilism developing: Nothing is real, everything is presumed to be fake. It becomes a meme: Space is fake, everything happens as a result of a shadowy conspiracy or supernatural forces, etc.

Even when the conspiracies are true, this knowledge doesn’t seem to spur anything good. People will learn something, then have no idea how to place it in context or use it in a productive way. They often end up in dumber places than if they were just oblivious.

You can’t master a given subject, or even have a basic understanding of it, by just reading one book, watching a video, or seeing a tweet. This stuff takes time. If the right wants to get anywhere, it needs to slow down.

4. Quality over Quantity

It’s hard to escape the decline of the American public mind. You see fads and stuff that are just obviously not true being pushed all the time these days by increasingly mainstream figures. People treat it like a game and ham it up. That sort of behavior may get big audiences, but it turns off high-quality people, those who want to be part of something serious and are concerned with truth.

It’s degrading to be lied to. This is the (increasingly small) demographic that can make good happen in society. They’re who we need to “capture” if we want to win. As a broader matter, it’s just difficult to work with people who aren’t coming at these issues from the right place. They’ll develop hardline positions or behave ruthlessly where it’s not really appropriate, or, conversely, become willing to accept the unacceptable.

There’s also the problem of excitability, which encourages superficial thinking and makes long-term action impossible. To make positive change, you need to arm people with a new way to see the world, but only certain types are going to be open to this at first.

5. Health over Everything

If you really want to inspire loyalty and commitment, make someone’s life better. For a very long time, developing extreme right-wing views was pretty much only guaranteed to make your life worse. People got really frustrated that knowing “the truth” didn’t correspond to any kind of real-world benefit to them. They felt betrayed and then angry.

This is why so many earlier right-wing movements fell apart or just went insane. One of the best developments in recent years has been the connection between right-wing views and renewed interest in health and nutrition. Liberals really have backed themselves into a corner with their insistence on blind deference to the medical authorities at a time when health outcomes are reaching all-time lows.

Once you’ve broken out of the box, it’s remarkable how good you can feel all the time. Healthy people aren’t just stronger and faster, they can think more clearly. They’re in better control of their emotions. They even have higher IQs. If attitudes are going to change on a truly mass scale, I think the best vehicle is the new wellness movement.

Something built to last

This was written over the course of a few weeks. I’m still not sure what prompted it. I’m just concerned about the direction of the quack right, which has been responsible for so much good in recent years. All the recent progress that’s been made can be lost over the course of a few very bad months. A large disorganized mob can easily be scattered by a ruthless organized minority. Conservatives need to be building a movement to last, and that is going to take a lot of time and focus. I just don’t hear people talking about this stuff very often.

I recently watched newly unearthed footage of a very elderly Peter Kemp speaking about his WW2 experiences with British special forces. I was struck by just how lively he was. He was full of vivid memories and could speak intelligently about his experiences even at the end of his life. Kemp was the product of a society that doesn’t exist anymore. He was built to last, his talents and instincts were cultivated for a long time, and he punched well above his weight for his entire life.

That’s an effect that the American right needs to recreate if it’s going to make it through the next year, much less the long struggle we’re looking at ahead.

This essay originally appeared on his Substack; it has been lightly edited for clarity.