Pragmatic rationalism: Another forlorn attempt to explain it

Germaine's predicament -- cognitive rocks are super heavy

This blog post is another of my proverbial lost causes. But I'm a modern day Sisyphus. In my opinion, my past attempts to explain my political anti-ideology ideology, pragmatic rationalism, have been unsatisfactory.

Nonetheless, Sisyphus is persistent. He keeps pushing that rock up the hill, hoping the spouse doesn't, uh, interfere?

Hey tweety pie, could you please let that thing go and get some groceries?? 

You can play with your rock later. I'll make sure it 

stays at the bottom of the hill. 

Aw, crud, do I have to?

Yesterday, I tried to explain why I now believe that the Republican Party and its rank and file supporters are fairly included in the label of FRP (fascist Republican Party). I got entangled in this quite useful politics back and forth, also known among experts as "to and fro."  

The following is from yesterday's discussion here about the fascism or lack thereof among Republican rank and file voters.

Opening volley: I don't think your description of the Republican party is either helpful or entirely fair. You basically are saying that there are 3 types of Republicans: Christian nationalists, Nazis, and the people deluded by Fox News. There isn't enough daylight between these groups to call them separate.

Most of the people who actually care about fiscal conservatism (read: tax cuts) are a separate group. The second group are the actual elites, and they don't care much about the first group (we'll call them the base). The elites don't have the same social priorities of the base, but they're happy to use them and let them have their way if it means feeding their interests. Likewise, the base is willing to parrot the points of the elites, but they don't really care about the priorities of the elites. Both are fine with authoritarianism, but for different reasons. The elites are fine with it because it solidifies their power. The base is fine with it because it lets them impose their will on others.

Sisyphus response 1: 

The second group are the actual elites, and they don't care much about the first group (we'll call them the base). The elites don't have the same social priorities of the base, but they're happy to use them and let them have their way if it means feeding their interests. .... Both are fine with authoritarianism, but for different reasons.

That is a really nice, clear way to describe the situation. Well done.

That is how I see it. The elites are happy to, and expert at, using the base to serve their own interests.

But I do not understand the unfairness you see in how I characterize and label the FRP. I'm missing something in your reasoning. Is fascism the wrong label, and if so, why? What is a better label, or is it better to assign labels to the different groups to be more accurate?

For example:
elites = three groups (i) anti-democratic laissez faire capitalists, (ii) anti-democratic radical Christian nationalists, and (iii) anti-democratic racists, fascists and/or White supremacists
R&F = ? (some of all of the above?)

Volley 2: The label of fascist is fine for the party as an organization. What's unfair is saying that there are only 3 types of Republicans: Christian nationalists, Nazis, and the people deluded by Fox News.

You stated that there are 2 groups. The elites, radical ideologues whose main goals include Christian nationalism, and the rank and file, 50% of whom are Nazis, and 50% of whom are deluded by Fox News. By your reasoning, all Republicans fall into one of those 3 groups. That's what isn't fair.

There are plenty of Republicans who joined the party because they are anti-tax and/or anti-regulation. They don't care about Christian nationalists, Nazis, or Fox News, both in the sense that they don't necessarily share that ideology but also in that they feel no need to oppose it. Saying there's no difference between that group of Republicans and those who fall into your 3 groups is unfair and inaccurate.

Response 2: I understand your point. Not all Republicans are strictly in one or more of those three major groups. That is true.

But here is my problem. Reference to the FRP includes in people who aren't in one of the three groups, but they are in the genus group called Republicans, which includes all groups, not just the big three. If these outliers vote for Republican candidates who advocate for anti-democratic policies and rely heavily on anti-democratic rhetoric and dark free speech, what are those people? They support the fascism of the FRP with their votes. Maybe there are enough Republicans outside the big three groups that they are a necessary block of votes to win state and/or federal elections for anti-democratic or fascist Republicans.

In their minds they are not fascists. But in practice, what does their meaningful behavior amount to?

Volley 3: If you're just going to paint them all with the same brush based on how they're voting, you don't need to go through the charade of separating them into categories that you're just going to ignore. If you're actually trying to understand them, though, you have to consider where they're coming from. The question, then, it what you're trying to do. Are you trying to justify screaming about them? Or are you trying to make a fair description of them?

Response 3: 

... you don't need to go through the charade of separating them into categories that you're just going to ignore.

It's not a charade on my part. It is an attempt to explain why the categories can collapse into the single FRP label. Some people accuse me of unreasonably lumping disparate groups into one genus and to be transparent, explaining the subgroups helps people understand my reasoning, which they are free to partly or completely accept or reject. At least when others decide, it will be on the basis of a reasonable understanding of why I lumped groups as I now do. I don't ignore the small groups but conclude that, by their actions or behaviors, they defensibly or rationally can be included in a larger generic group.

Are you trying to justify screaming about them? Or are you trying to make a fair description of them?

I am trying to make a fair description of them. I try not to engage in irrational screaming. Not all criticism amounts to irrational screaming. But unless I explain myself and my reasoning, people have no objective basis to decide if I am unjustifiably screaming or fairly describing something that is complicated and open to dispute.

Without an empirical basis to understand my beliefs, people default to politics as usual, i.e., people who agree will see my opinions as true, and ones who disagree will see them as false or flawed. I don't want to do politics as usual. IMO, politics as usual is inherently toxic and anti-democratic. I want to do pragmatic rationalist politics and that requires enough explanation to afford people a better basis to decide for themselves than mere uncritical agreement or disagreement with an opinion not supported by any facts, truths and/or reasoning.

Volley 4: You really don't seem like you're trying to make a fair description. Your three categories look more like of a collection of insults than any kind of serious effort to understand them, and your dismissal of anyone who doesn't fit one of those three as being a small minority not worth considering only compounds that impression. The entire post makes me think it's unlikely you have any friends or family that are conservatives.

Response 4: Fair enough. At least we understand each other and that is a good thing.

To recapitulate, nothing I have said to try to explain myself in this blog post and my comments to you is sufficient for you to believe that my assertion of facts, truths and reasoning is nothing more than mere insults with no respect or serious effort to understand the people my comments discuss. 

Just curious, exactly what do I not understand about the people you believe I unfairly and/or irrationally smear, slander and/or falsely lump together or characterize? Since you offer almost no details of your facts, truth or reasoning, I assume you completely reject everything I assert as false or worse, with little or no probative weight in fact, truth or reason.

 

I am not trying to be obtuse or disrespectful to you. I am trying to explain myself. So far, my explanation is completely unpersuasive in your mind. I accept that, but don't understand why.

FWIW, some of my family is deeply conservative, but not my immediate family. Some of my friends are conservative, but not hard core T**** supporters -- they are uncomfortable with the modern GOP. Would a different family and friends situation for me necessarily make a major difference in my analysis and beliefs? How many liberal friends and family do T**** supporters have and would a difference in

Volley 5: to be determined if there is a return volley

The point I want to make

The core point I want to make here is in the comments highlighted above. Whether one agrees or disagrees with my assessment of rank and file Republicans as fascists is beside the point here. 

My point is this: One cannot do rational pragmatism without at least some explanation of asserted facts, truths and/or reasoning. Absent that, there is no rational basis to evaluate most political opinions in dispute, ~98% in my opinion. In those cases, politics defaults to politics as usual where people agree with opinions they like and disagree with ones they don't.

Questions: Other than facts, truths and reasoning, what else is there to evaluate the acceptability or lack thereof in disputed political opinions, e.g., personal morals and self-interest? Are morals and self-interest built into truths? Is this blog post too wonky?

Chapter review: Levers of Influence: (Power) Tools of the Trade

“. . . . the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. . . . cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change. . . . . the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.” -- Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Fail to Produce Responsive Governments, 2016

(Note: the argument in Democracy for Realists about the "average citizen" being too confused by the complexity and intricacy of the world to have a reasonable grasp of it, basically recaps Walter Lippman's classic argument to the same effect in Public Opinion (1922). In the end he concludes we need experts in communications-- propagandists he depicts as benign-- to interpret the world and spoon feed the masses the limited knowledge they can handle. Dewey and Lippman argued about this. Lippman said democracy is impossible, Dewey denied such a conclusion while recognizing that for it to succeed the mindset prevalent in our society would need to change. Hence his educational theories.) -- PD, comment here, Aug. 27, 2021 

If some form of pragmatic rationalism is to ever have a chance of making a significant difference regarding the human condition, public education will need to be significantly reoriented to focus on how the human mind works and fails to work and how it can be and often is deceived and manipulated. -- Germaine, Aug. 29, 2021

Chapter review

Levers of Influence: (Power) Tools of the Trade is chapter 1 of Robert Cialdini’s 2021 book, Influence, New and Expanded: The Psychology of Persuasion. Cialdini is a leading expert on persuasion science. Some of his research was discussed here before. The book (446 pages, 41 pages of notes) is written for a general audience and is easy to read.

Cialdini starts out by noting that evidence from social science is settled that both humans and other higher animals often, maybe usually, respond to input information in what he refers to as an automatic “click-run” mode. This kind of behavior is formally called fixed-action patterns. These behavior patterns range from simple to very complex. A key trait of click-run mode behavior is that the behaviors in the pattern almost always play out is exactly the same pattern or sequence of behaviors. As Cialdini puts it: 

“It is almost as if the patterns were installed as programs within the animals. .... Click, and the appropriate program is activated; run and out rolls the standard sequence of behaviors.”

What is really interesting about click-run is what triggers the initial click. It often isn’t much at all, e.g., a patch of the right color instead of the same color as a whole animal threatening the turf of another animal. With humans Cialdini points out that the word “because” in a request for a favor is the trigger, not the reason for the favor that follows the trigger. Thus ‘can I cut in line at the copy machine because I'm running late and need copies right away’ is ~94% effective, ‘can I cut in line at the copy machine because I need to make some copies’ is ~93% effective, while ‘can I cut in line at the copy machine’ is only ~60% effective. The trigger is the word because, not the reason given.

Cialdini argues that humans have no choice but to rely on click-run, mental shortcuts and other tactics that reduce the cognitive load needed to navigate a world that is too complex for anything more than a superficial understanding or even a false impression of some understanding:

“Such automatic, stereotyped behavior is prevalent in much of human action because in many cases, it is the most efficient form of behaving, and in other cases it is simply necessary. You and I exist in an extraordinarily complicated environment, easily the most rapidly moving and complex ever on this planet. To deal with it, we need simplifying shortcuts. .... Without the simplifying features, we would stand frozen--cataloging, appraising and calibrating-- as time for action sped by and away.”

In addition to click-run mode, humans can respond to information by a process called controlled responding. This mode is slow and requires conscious effort. This requires both a desire to be more thoughtful and an ability to think the information through. There is a strong human tendency to operate in click-run mode when the effects of something are relatively modest or impactful on other people, but not themselves. Thus controlled responding tends to kick in and act as a safety net in situations where personal stakes are significant. 

We all know where this is going - the profiteers

Cialdini notes that complexity and time are not on the side of mindsets oriented to controlled responding: “I have become impressed by evidence indicating that the form and pace of modern life is not allowing us to make fully thoughtful decisions, even on many personally relevant topics.” Too often, issues are too complex, time too limited, distractions too intrusive and fomented emotional responses too strong for people operate in controlled processing mode, so we default to click-run mode. 

Professional influencers are aware of all of this. Propagandists have been aware of most of these things at least since the early 1900s. Some or most of these aspects of the human condition were intuited by careful observations of people ranging from Plato in ~400 BC to master propagandist Edward Bernays in the early 1900s to Walter Lipmann in the 1920s to modern corporate marketing and the Republican Party today.

Cialdini comments that most people know little or nothing about click-run mode and how it can be triggered to coax people to believe and/or do things they might otherwise not. He sounds a warning: “it is vital that we clearly recognize one of their [click-run] properties. They make us terribly vulnerable to anyone does know how they work.” He points out that humans share with other animals this aspect of behavior and the vulnerability it imparts on people and other animals.  

Businesses are acutely aware of this aspect of human behavior and they know how to hit triggers that lead to more sales and higher profits. We are rarely aware that we have been manipulated. For example, salespeople in clothing stores are instructed to always guide customers first to the most expensive item and then to a less expensive item. That is because once we have accepted a more expensive item, a lower cost item seems less expensive that it would if that had been the first thing the customer decided to buy. Some (most?) real estate salespeople show new home shopper a couple of undesirable but over priced properties and then show a couple of nicer properties. This contrast makes people more open to higher prices for a nicer home. 

Car dealers and salespeople use the same low-high contrast tactic, called perceptual contrast, to coax people into buying expensive options after a price on the car has been agreed to. By contrast with the cost of the car, the cost of various options or upgrades look cheap and are offered inly one at a time. They can easily add a lot to the final price the customer winds up paying. Cialdini sums this sales tactic up nicely: “While customers stand, signed contract in hand, wondering what happened and finding no one to blame but themselves, the car dealer stands smiling the knowing smile of the jujitsu master.” 

Questions: 

1. It is mostly legal, but is it immoral to trigger click-run behavior patterns or use tactics like perceptual contrast to coax people to buy and/or pay more than they otherwise would have? If one business doesn’t adopt such tactics, a competitor could or would, putting the less manipulative business at a disadvantage. 

2. Roughly, what amount of commerce in the US is driven by manipulation that increases buying and selling over mostly unmanipulated commerce, e.g., ~45%? Of that, how much is waste in the sense that added purchases turned out to be not needed, e.g., ~85%? 

3. Is the moral situation any different for politics compared to commerce, at least when they are mostly independent? What about when business buys legal favors from governments to more aggressively exploit consumers, at least in situations (i) without discernable beneficial impacts on society, or (ii) with discernable harmful impacts on society, e.g., freedom from pollution regulations?

Some thoughts on ideology in politics, cognitive biology and pragmatic rationalism

Context

My ideology, pragmatic rationalism, is intended to function as an anti-biasing, anti-ideology ideology. The core concepts are based on what human social behavior and cognitive science tells us about sources of flawed politics and policy such as bias, error, irrational distrust, false beliefs and flawed reasoning (motivated reasoning). Political, religious and/or economic ideologies, constitute major sources of flawed politics. With the dominant ideology-based mindset, politics and policy are largely grounded in ideology and competition for ideological influence. In the pragmatic rationalist mindset, the hope is to shift politics and policy from mostly ideology-based to somewhat more empirical evidence and sound reason-based. Nothing can be perfect, but it's at least theoretically possible to do better. That's the hope. Some evidence supports this possibility for at least some people.

Ideologues of all flavors of ideology strenuously claim (1) they are empirical evidence and sound reason-based, and (2) political opposition and opposing groups and institutions are not. Evidence from social science convincingly shows that is simply not true most of the time for most issues. Politics usually significantly disconnected from evidence and sound reasoning is settled science. Like human-cause climate change, this not something that experts still dispute. 

A 2013 research paper 

The concept of ideology can be difficult to reconcile with empirical research on political knowledge and belief system organization. First, ideology is a construct that is used at multiple levels. Political ideologies exist as formal systems of political thought. Texts on Marxism, liberalism, conservatism, and fascism develop elaborate interpretations of social, economic, and political arrangements and offer prescriptions for political actions. In somewhat less structured ways, ideologies operate at the societal level to organize political debate by allowing political parties to offer more or less coherent policy platforms. And, in the primary focus of this chapter, ideology is also used to describe the ways in which people organize their political attitudes and beliefs. It is easy to introduce confusion into discussions of ideology by blurring the lines between these levels of analysis. Some connections between these levels should exist, but we must not make the mistake of assuming that there are straightforward relationships between these varied uses of ideology. While I will review a great deal of important research on the structure and determinants of political ideology in this chapter it is important not to lose sight of the implications of low levels of political knowledge, instability in measures of issues preferences, and multiple dimensions of issue preferences when evaluating research on individual-level political ideology. At a minimum, these findings encourage us to consider models of ideology that do not require a great deal of sophistication from most people and to be aware of the limits of ideology among nonelites. --- Feldman, S. (2013). Political ideology. In L. Huddy, D. O. Sears, & J. S. Levy (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of political psychology (pp. 591–626). Oxford University Press.

What that says is that average people generally do not apply ideology in sophisticated or consistent ways. My interpretation is that ideology can be used as a glue to help hold groups of people together, while at the same time be a framework lens to inform or misinform people and to divide societies by creating in-groups (e.g., Republicans) with credibility and trust and out-groups without (e.g., Democrats). 

Another 2013 research paper 

Decision scientists have identified various plausible sources of ideological polarization over climate change, gun violence, national security, and like issues that turn on empirical evidence. This paper describes a study of three of them: the predominance of heuristic-driven information processing by members of the public; ideologically motivated reasoning; and the cognitive-style correlates of political conservativism. The study generated both observational and experimental data inconsistent with the hypothesis that political conservatism is distinctively associated with either unreflective thinking or motivated reasoning. Conservatives did no better or worse than liberals on the Cognitive Reflection Test (Frederick, 2005), an objective measure of information-processing dispositions associated with cognitive biases. In addition, the study found that ideologically motivated reasoning is not a consequence of over-reliance on heuristic or intuitive forms of reasoning generally. On the contrary, subjects who scored highest in cognitive reflection were the most likely to display ideologically motivated cognition. These findings corroborated an alternative hypothesis, which identifies ideologically motivated cognition as a form of information processing that promotes individuals’ interests in forming and maintaining beliefs that signify their loyalty to important affinity groups. 

Much more perplexing, however, are the ubiquity and ferocity of ideological conflicts over facts that turn on empirical evidence. Democrats (by and large) fervently believe that human activity is responsible for global warming, Republicans (by and large) that it is not (Pew Research Center, 2012). --- Ideology, Motivated Reasoning, and Cognitive Reflection: An Experimental Study; Judgment and Decision Making, 8, 407-24 (2013) Cultural Cognition Lab Working Paper No. 107 Yale Law School, Public Law Research Paper No. 272

Clearly, even before the ex-president rose to power, researchers were well-aware of the phenomenon of people fighting over empirically true facts. Political observers had written on that years ago. The data here indicates that this does not have anything to do with differences in cognitive ability, roughly intelligence. It is grounded in psychological and social factors such as tribe and ideology.

A 2015 paper abstract

In this commentary, we embed the volume’s contributions on public beliefs about science in a broader theoretical discussion of motivated political reasoning. The studies presented in the preceding section of the volume consistently find evidence for hyperskepticism toward scientific evidence among ideologues, no matter the domain or context—and this skepticism seems to be stronger among conservatives than liberals. Here, we show that these patterns can be understood as part of a general tendency among individuals to defend their prior attitudes and actively challenge attitudinally incongruent arguments, a tendency that appears to be evident among liberals and conservatives alike. We integrate the empirical results reported in this volume into a broader theoretical discussion of the John Q. Public model of information processing and motivated reasoning, which posits that both affective and cognitive reactions to events are triggered unconsciously. We find that the work in this volume is largely consistent with our theories of affect-driven motivated reasoning and biased attitude formation. --- Why People “Don’t Trust the Evidence”: Motivated Reasoning and Scientific Beliefs, Patrick W. Kraft, Milton Lodge, Charles S. Taber,[1] The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2015

Here, the concept of motivated reasoning is seen as central to ideologue thinking when empirical evidence is rejected. Ideologues tend to treat their political and economic beliefs as as both sacred in a religious sense and correct and thus not open to question. Religious ideology, of course, is usually seen by the believer's mind as sacred and infallible.

Footnote: 

1. Lodge and Taber wrote the 2013 book, The Rationalizing Voter. A non-technical book review is here and a technical review is here. Lodge and Taber focused a lot on affect or feelings and how they influence perceptions of reality and thinking. This aspect of the how the human mind operates seems to be central to politics.

A 2009 research paper, Affect as a Psychological Primitive, described emotion and feelings like this:

Historically, “affect” referred to a simple feeling—to be affected is to feel something. In modern psychological usage, “affect” refers to the mental counterpart of internal bodily representations associated with emotions, actions that involve some degree of motivation, intensity, and force, or even personality dispositions. In the science of emotion, “affect” is a general term that has come to mean anything emotional. A cautious term, it allows reference to something’s effect or someone’s internal state without specifying exactly what kind of an effect or state it is. It allows researchers to talk about emotion in a theory-neutral way.

The phrase, 'internal bodily representations associated with emotions' reflects a belief that some or all of the human body can contribute to feelings in the mind. Some researchers occasionally refer to this as speaking directly to the gut, not the mind. The point is that there is evidence to believe human emotions and feelings are powerful influencers of perceptions of reality and thinking about whatever reality individuals think they see, including when the reality is false. Strong ideological beliefs tends to make it easier to deny, distort and/or downplay inconvenient facts, truths and sound reasoning. 

Book Review: Rules for Radicals

“WHAT FOLLOWS IS for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away. .... A major revolution to be won in the immediate future is the dissipation of man’s illusion that his own welfare can be separated from that of all others.”

Saul Alinsky’s 1971 book, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, presents rationales and tactics in the struggle for power between the Haves (rich people and powerful special interests) and their nominal allies, the Have-a-Little, Want Mores (~middle class), against the Have Nots (~poor people, discriminated against minorities). Some of what Alinsky discusses appears to remain viable today, but some seems dated and co-opted by how politics and the two-party system has changed since 1971. 

Alinsky's book has inspired a slew of books by conservatives that claim to counteract what Alinsky outlined, e.g., Rules for Conservatives: A Response to Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky and Rules for Radical Conservatives: Beating the Left at Its Own Game to Take Back America. The conservative response seems largely oblivious to the fact that much of what Alinsky is fighting for is what most Republicans at least claim to be fighting for. 

Republicans hate his guts

That includes concern for the public interest, more power and freedom for middle class and poor people and means to make them more self-reliant. Alinsky himself seems to be more pragmatic than radical liberal, commenting that “Parts of the far left have gone so far in the political circle that they are now all but indistinguishable from the extreme right. .... When there are people [radical leftists who espouse assassinations, murders and bombings] .... we are dealing with people who are merely hiding psychosis behind a political mask.”

 

Regarding freedom, the public interest and self-reliance, Alinsky wrote, “People cannot be free unless they are willing to sacrifice some of their interests to guarantee the freedom of others. The price of democracy is the ongoing pursuit of the common good by all people. .... We are not here concerned with people who profess democratic faith but yearn for the dark security of dependency where they can be spared the burden of decisions. .... Those who can, should be encouraged to grow; for the others, the fault lies not in the system, but in themselves.”

Those comments on freedom and self-reliance sound like Republican talking points. What Republicans probably hate is Alinsky’s concern for the public interest or general welfare. That concept implies there is a role for government, taxes, spending and democracy, which are evil, theft, tyranny and distributed power. That seems to be what terrifies and angers Republicans the most.

On the Haves, Alinsky wrote: “The Haves want to keep things as they are and are opposed to change. Thermopolitocally they are cold and determined to freeze the status quo.”

Ideology, propaganda, revolution & other stuff

Alinsky commented on dogma or ideology: “This book will not contain any panacea or dogma: I detest dogma. .... Dogma is the enemy of human freedom. .... no ideology should be more specific than that of America's Founding Fathers: ‘For the general welfare.’” Unfortunately, it is the case that ‘the general welfare’ is an essentially contested concept. Most elite Republicans hate it, but pay cynical lip service to it, just to keep the faithful deceived and betrayed by a false belief tat GOP elites are actually on the side of their rank & file.

Alinsky commented on propaganda in defense of the status quo: “From the Haves, on the other hand, there has come an unceasing flood of literature justifying the status quo. Religious, economic, social, political and legal tracts endlessly attack all revolutionary ideas and action for change as immoral, fallacious, and against God, country and mother.” IMO, that is still the case today, except the situation is much worse.

Regarding the colossal mistake the Have-Nots made in letting the Haves frame them as communists: “The Have-Nots of the world ..... desperately seeking revolutionary writings can find such literature only from the communists, both red and yellow. Since in this literature all ideas are embedded in the language of communism, revolution appears synonymous with communism. .... Today revolution has become synonymous with communism while capitalism is synonymous with status quo.” The Haves are desperately fighting for their vision of America, which is basically (i) brutal laissez-faire capitalism and its accompanying power and wealth inequality, or (ii) something as close to it as they can buy from government. The more corrupt the government, the closer ruthless rich people can get.

I've written on the awesome but mostly unconscious power of framing here.

Alinsky argues that some or most of the Have-a-Little, Want Mores (the middle class) are stalemated by their own conflict in wanting more but also protecting what they have. He calls this group the Do-Nothings. A doing nothing mindset is a powerful that favors the Haves, and the Haves know it. “These Do-Nothings profess a commitment to social change for ideals of justice.” 

Of interest, the Haves, often aided by some or most of the Do-Nothings deploy the tried and true delay tactic, “now is not the time to talk or think about X,” where X is something current the Haves oppose and want to make go away. For them, there never will be a time to talk about it and public attention inevitably moves on to other things. 

Alinsky also cites a pile of rules with some commentary. Here are some.

The first rule of the ethics of means and ends is that “one’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue. We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others.”

“The second rule of the ethics of means and ends is that the judgment of the ethics of means is dependent on the political position of those sitting in judgment. To the British [the Declaration of Independence] was a statement notorious for its deceit by omission. .... the Bill of Particulars attesting to the reasons for the revolution cited all of the injustices which the colonists felt that England had been guilty of, but listed none of the benefits. [The Founders] knew that a list of the many constructive benefits of the British Empire to the colonists would have so diluted the urgency of the call to arms as to have been self-defeating.” 

If that assertion is true, and it probably is, one can believe that right off the bat, Americans came out of the gate in a state of delusion induced by the standard propaganda tactic of being completely one-sided about the framing and truth of an issue. For context, Americans did not want to engage in WWI. A massive government propaganda campaign was necessary to coax them into changing their minds. That propaganda campaign was loaded to the gills with lies, slanders, tricks, smoke and mirrors, e.g., war was necessary to make the world safe for democracy. And, we all remember the deceit and propaganda that was used to coax America into the Vietnam war disaster.

US government pro-WWI propaganda poster

“The fifth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that concerns with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa. .... if one lacks the luxury of a choice and is possessed of only one means the ethical question will never arise; automatically the lone means becomes endowed with a moral spirit. .... To me ethics is doing what is best for the most.”

There seems to be some internal conflict in how Alinsky views the morality of politics and power. Everyone claims that what they want does the best for the most. And when there is only one mean to an end, that alone imbues it with morality and justification. Maybe pragmatism requires that belief and maybe it is justifiable because what is best for the most is usually (almost always?) almost purely subjective. 

Alinsky’s views on morality raise the question of propaganda, deceit, lies, dehumanizing slanders, motivated reasoning, etc. The American people arguably were tricked into the Revolutionary War. They definitely were tricked into WWI and Vietnam. No one can know how history would have played out if the colonists and Americans later had not been tricked into those wars. It is possible that America, the environment, civilization and mankind generally would be better off. 

Another point Alinsky makes that is worth mention relates to compromise and democracy. He wrote: “A society devoid of compromise is totalitarian. If I had to define a free and open society in one word, the word would be ‘compromise.’” 

Alinsky also lays out rules of power tactics that indicate how the Have-Nots can take power from the Haves by means of doing what is possible and acceptable to those fighting for power.[1]

Questions: When there is no choice and deceit, lies and dehumanization of political opposition is necessary to move people to action (or inaction), is it justified? Does pragmatism really mandate that all means are acceptable in view of inherently moral ends? Pragmatic rationalism as I envision it holds core, semi-universal moral values in fidelity to actual facts, true truths and sound reasoning (as opposed to lies, false truths and motivated reasoning), so does that make it not pragmatic in Alinsky’s moral universe, e.g., is it just semi-pragmatic rationalism at most, or is it neither pragmatic nor rational?

Footnote: 

1. “The seventh rule: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. Man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time, after which it becomes a ritualistic commitment, like going to church on Sunday mornings. .... From the moment the tactician engages in conflict, his enemy is time.

The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Obviously there is no point to tactics unless one has a target upon which to center the attacks. It should be borne in mind that the target is always trying to shift responsibility to get out of being the target. .... The forces for change much keep this in mind and pin that target down securely.”

Regarding Research on the Morality of Atheists

I do not myself believe that many people do things because they think they are the right thing to do . . . . I do not think that knowledge of what is morally right is motivational in any serious sense for anyone except a handful of saints. -- federal judge Richard Posner, referring to the power of social situations to compel behavior, moral or not, rational or not

Moral consequentialism (moral utilitarianism): morality is assessed by looking only at the consequences of an act or the state of the world that will result from what a person does; that absolutist attitude is persuasively criticized as not always the best way to do moral reasoning, but it is a reasonable way to include consideration of regarding moral dilemmas before arriving at a moral judgment

CONTEXT

An interesting research article, The amoral atheist? A cross-national examination of cultural, motivational, and cognitive antecedents of disbelief, and their implications for morality, examines the stereotype that atheists are untrustworthy and lack a moral compass. The paper looked at differences between believers and non-believers. The hypothesis was that social distrust of atheists was a major source of negative attitudes toward atheists and their perceived lack of morality. The research surveyed people in a religious country, the US, and a relatively non-believer country, Sweden. 

A 2019 survey generated data showing that 44% of Americans think that belief in God is necessary for morality. Many Americans believe that atheists are least in agreement with their vision of America compared to all other groups because they do not share their moral norms and values with 'normal' people. Some research has found that some atheists also believe that atheists are immoral, so there is solid evidence that this belief is common in most countries.

The results

The survey data indicated that compared to believers, disbelievers or atheists are less inclined to endorse moral values that serve group cohesion. By one hypothesis, those morals are socially binding moral foundations or values. Only minor differences were found in endorsement of other moral values referred to as individualizing moral foundations (care/harm and fairness/cheating morals) and epistemic rationality (something that some people do not believe is a moral value, but is the central moral value of pragmatic rationalism). The data also indicated that atheism correlated with cultural and demotivational antecedents (limited exposure to credibility-enhancing displays, low existential threat***) are associated with disbelief. Those moral beliefs correlated with weaker belief in binding moral foundations in both countries. The results also correlated disbelievers (vs. believers) with a more consequentialist source morality in both countries. Moral consequentialism was also correlated with analytic cognitive style, which is another hypothesized antecedent of disbelief.

*** Credibility enhancing displays (CREDS) were assessed by survey questions such as “Overall, to what extent did people in your community attend religious services or meetings?” (1 = to no extent at all, 7 = to an extreme extent). A low CREDS score is believed to constitute an antecedent or path to religious disbelief. Existential threat perceptions were assessed by questions such as “There are many dangerous people in our society who will attack someone out of pure meanness, for no reason at all”, and “Any day now, chaos and anarchy could erupt around us. All the signs are pointing to it” (1 = Completely disagree, 7 = Completely agree).

Commentary

As usual, the situation is complicated and data needs to be (i) considered with caution, and (ii) replicated to confirm and further explore the results. There multiple concepts discussed in this paper that I am not familiar with, e.g., measurement and interpretation of CREDS, antecedents to disbelief and analytic cognitive style. 

The authors speak of associations or correlations, not causal relationships. In addition, other research has shown that religiosity is positively related to some morally relevant behaviors, but unrelated or negatively related to others. Also, acting in a way that can be considered moral does not imply that the behavior was morally motivated. A behavior can arise from multiple motivations. For example, behavior is well-known to usually be variably, often strongly, influenced or even dominated by different social situations or contexts.

If the results hold up, they arguably point to a social and political weakness and strength in atheism and pragmatic rationalism. The weakness is the a mindset-ideology that is insufficient for good social cohesion and trust. The glue in the mindset-ideology may be too weak to sustain a liberal democracy, especially a racially diverse one. Although it's counterintuitive, that possible weakness suggests that atheism and pragmatic rationalism probably need to find some sort of spiritual component, e.g., Buddhism, that can afford some social glue. Atheists seem to be more like a herd of cats than any united kind of cohesive human group. If there are non-spiritual sources of pro-democracy social glue, they are not apparent to me. 

The strength is an analytic cognitive style that tends toward rationalism (epistemic rationality) as a moral value. Although I believe that mental trait is pro-democratic, anti-authoritarian, anti-corruption, anti-lies, etc., the paper points out that some people do not treat rationality as a moral value.**** The paper's authors comment that research on religious disbelief has also been linked to moralization of epistemic rationality. If that is true, both atheists and pragmatic rationalism may be fundamentally morally different from most significant political, religious and economic ideologies or moral frameworks that compete for influence, wealth and power today.

**** Humans did not evolve to be rational. We are intuitive, biased, social (~tribal) and arguably morally intolerant, unless one adopts tolerance as a moral value. According to psychologist Johnathan Haidt, we are designed by evolution to be “narrowly moralistic and intolerant.”[1] In other words, we evolved to be self-righteous little buggers.

Footnote:

1. The paper refers to morality in the context of Haidt's moral foundations theory. I do not know to what extent researchers have adopted this mental framework for morality research. Morality research is in its infancy. It is fraught with complexity, confounding factors, human biases, p-hacking, raging controversy and general messiness, including skepticism that morality research can ever rise to the level of a respectable scientific discipline. Despite the mess, morality research might reveal ways for humans to tame their innate tendencies to bigotry, hate and self-destructiveness enough that we avoid destroying civilization on a good day or maybe even avoid species self-annihilation on a bad day.

But isn't morality sometimes absent when spirituality is present?

Maybe morality is always necessary, unless it's bad morality

Why can't morality be a kind of spirituality?

Book Review: Escape From Freedom

Erich Fromm - 1974

Context

Erich Fromm (1900-1980) was a German Jew who fled the Nazis and settled in the US. He was a co-founder of The William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology in New York City and was associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. He wrote Escape From Freedom in 1941 in response to what he was as the sources of authoritarianism in the human condition and the grave threat to freedom this aspect of humans posed to democracy. 

This review is based on the original 1941 Foreword and a newer 1965 Foreword (9 pages). They lay out his vision of humanity and the source of threats to democracy that are inherent in modern civilization. I focus on the two Forewords because they describe Fromm's desire or goal for the human condition that is basically identical to what I came to believe about what might be possible and have tried to convey here as pragmatic rationalism. In essence, Fromm recognized and articulated the intellectual framework for pragmatic rationalism in 1941, about 70 years before I came to also see the same threat and to some extent, its human origins. 

What Fromm saw clearly that I did not fully understand, only sensed, was the social unease that leads some or many people to need to escape from freedom into the comforting arms of reassuring demagogues and authoritarians or dictators and their reassuring lies, deceit, emotional manipulation and motivated reasoning. This need for psychological comfort and tribe is apparently universal in all societies.

Review

Given the urgency of the situation in 1941, Fromm interrupted his much broader life long investigation of the human condition in modern civilization. In Escape From Freedom, Fromm focuses on the meaning of freedom for modern man. After Escape, he wrote The Sane Society which expanded on the themes he laid out in Escape. In The Heart of Man, Fromm focused on the origins of hate and destructiveness. 

In the 1941 Foreword, Fromm wrote: 

"Pointing out the significance of psychological considerations does not imply, in my opinion, an overestimation of psychology. .... It is the thesis of this book that modern man, freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him, has not gained freedom in the positive sense of the realization of his individual self; that is, the expression of his intellectual, emotional and sensuous potentialities. Freedom though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated, and thereby, anxious and isolated. This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of his freedom, or to advance to the full realization of positive freedom which is based upon the uniqueness and individuality of man. .... the understanding of the reasons for the flight from freedom is a premise for any action which aims at the victory over the totalitarian forces." 

In the 1965 Foreword, Fromm wrote: 

"Escape From Freedom is an analysis of the phenomenon of man's anxiety engendered by the breakdown of the Medieval World in which, in spite of many dangers, he felt himself secure and safe. .... modern man is still anxious and tempted to surrender his freedoms to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine, well fed and well clothed, yet not a free man but an automaton. .... There can be no doubt that in this last quarter of a century the reasons for man's fear of freedom, for his anxiety and willingness to become an automaton, have not only continued but have greatly increased."

Fromm goes on to point to nuclear weapons, the nascent rise of fast thinking computers and fast acting giant corporations, and overpopulation are all factors that tend to undermine a comfortable Medieval-type sense of self and social place that some (most?) people need. 

He goes on to firmly reject the criticism that despite psychological insight and knowledge, that science cannot be translated into social progress and benefit:

"It becomes ever increasingly clear to many students of man and of the contemporary scene that the crucial difficulty with which we are confronted lies in the fact that the development of man's intellectual capacities has far outstripped the development of his emotions. Man's brain lives in the twentieth century; the heart of most men still live in the Stone Age. The majority of men have not yet acquired the the maturity to be independent, to be rational, to be objective. They need myths and idols to endure the fact that man is all by himself, that there is no authority which give meaning to life except man himself. .... How can mankind save itself from destroying itself by this discrepancy between intellectual-technical over-maturity and emotional backwardness?

As far as I can see there is only one answer: the increasing awareness of the most essential facts of our social existence, an awareness sufficient to prevent us from committing irreparable follies, and to raise to some small extent our capacity for objectivity and reason. We cannot hope to overcome most follies of the heart and their detrimental influence on our imagination and thought in one generation .... At this crucial moment, however, a modicum of increased insight -- objectivity-- can make the difference between life and death for the human race. .... Progress in social psychology is necessary to counteract the dangers which arise from the progress in physics and medicine."

 Does any of that sound familiar to people who are familiar with Dissident Politics? Most of that sounds very familiar to me. The social goals Fromm articulates, just a small increase in objectivity and reason, are identical to one key goal of pragmatic rationalism. The hope is the same: try to coax humanity away from self-annihilation and toward long-term sell being and survival. The tactic is the same: teach people self-awareness so they can better understand themselves and better defend themselves against the reassuring dark free speech[1] that demagogues and tyrants know is the path to power and wealth.

Dang, I feel vindicated once again. What a great book.

Footnote: 

1. Dark free speech: Constitutionally or legally protected (1) lies and deceit to distract, misinform, confuse, polarize and/or demoralize, (2) unwarranted opacity to hide inconvenient truths, facts and corruption (lies and deceit of omission), (3) unwarranted emotional manipulation (i) to obscure the truth and blind the mind to lies and deceit, and (ii) to provoke irrational, reason-killing emotions and feelings, including fear, hate, anger, disgust, distrust, intolerance, cynicism, pessimism and all kinds of bigotry including racism, and (4) ideologically-driven motivated reasoning and other ideologically-driven biases that unreasonably distort reality and reason. (my label, my definition)

Authoritarianism: Heritable or Inheritable? Does it matter?

Personality traits: Stable over time, maybe due more to 

genes (inheritance) than nurture (non-genetic effects)

Heritability vs. inheritability of traits

Heredity refers to the likelihood or probability of traits running in families or groups. A trait can arise from genetics (nature), environment (nurture), or usually some combination of both. Environmental or nurturing influences include habits, behaviors, and various physical, emotional and psychological experiences. Families often demonstrate similar habits and behavior because they tend to share at least some experiences. Heritable traits are not necessarily genetic.

On the other hand, inherited traits are due only to genes. Eye and hair color and blood type are inherited as a gene(s) from each parent. Body shape is both inherited (genetic) and heritable (nurture influenced), but probably mostly influenced by inheritance (genes). Body shape can be affected to some extent by exercise and eating habits, which can arise from heredity, e.g., family habits. In the case of eye and hair color and blood type, nurture effects do not influence those traits. Being a good cook can run in families and that trait might be significantly or nearly all a heritable (nurture) trait with little or no known inheritance (genes) effects.

In a 2016 research paper, The Heritability Fallacy, two researchers wrote about the confusion that commonly plagues the concept of heritability vs. inheritability:

Contrary to popular belief, the measurable heritability of a trait does not tell us how ‘genetically inheritable’ that trait is. Further, it does not inform us about what causes a trait, the relative influence of genes in the development of a trait, or the relative influence of the environment in the development of a trait. Because we already know that genetic factors have significant influence on the development of all human traits, measures of heritability are of little value, except in very rare cases. (emphasis added)

My read of the data is that most human behavior traits arise from a variable combination of nature and nurture and are thus both inherited and heritable. One expert estimated that in terms of political beliefs and behaviors, the average person's politics is is about 35% nature or genes and about 65% nurture. Another estimated it was about 50:50. Clearly, this is not a precise science.

Authoritarianism 

Authoritarianism: a form of government characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of a strong central power to preserve a political or social status quo, and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voting; authoritarian regimes may be either autocratic or oligarchic in nature and may be based on the rule of a party or the military, limited plurality, political legitimacy based on appeals to emotion and characterization of the regime as necessary to combat threats, which are often ill-defined, suppression of political opposition, etc.  

Declining respect for democracy

Some portion of all populations appear to include people with an authoritarian mindset or susceptible to authoritarian appeals (which seem to be usually heavily grounded in dark free speech). In the 1950s and until recently, authoritarianism was generally considered to be a personality trait. recent research suggested that authoritarianism is not stable enough to be a personality trait and instead is a personal adaptation or a trait that is variable.

A 2013 paper, Authoritarianism as a personality trait: Evidence from a longitudinal behavior genetic study, generated data indicating that the source of authoritarianism is mostly genetic and stable enough to be considered an actual personality trait, i.e., it's a genetic problem.[1] The authors wrote:

Authoritarianism has long been conceived of as a highly stable personality trait (Adorno et al., 1950; Altemeyer, 1981), though recent accounts have argued that authoritarianism is too malleable to justify this conception. We provided a test of the trait conception of authoritarianism by measuring its stability in a community sample of twins over a 15 year period, and by identifying the source of any stability with biometric modeling. Our results showed that authoritarianism exhibited a high degree of rank-order stability (r = .74). Biometric analyses indicated that this stability derived primarily from genetic influences, with changes in authoritarianism due to the unique experiences of the individual. In both of these respects, our results were highly comparable to those reported for other personality traits in previous work, indicating support for the trait conception of authoritarianism. .... Our results were consistent with the conception of authoritarianism as a highly stable personality trait. .... This stability was particularly pronounced among the more educated segment of the sample. Among those with 14 or more years of education (N = 285), the correlation between Time 1 and Time 2 scores was .78, significantly higher than the correlation of .64 among those with 13 or fewer years of education (N = 240; p < .001). (emphasis added)

By now it seems clear that the ex-president, most of the GOP leadership and most rank and file republicans are significantly or dominantly authoritarian and that will probably be very hard to change without significant social violence in America, unless more effective non-violent means to address the problem are applied, e.g., maybe pragmatic rationalism, social trust building efforts, etc. If the 2013 data is fundamentally sound, it is reasonable to believe that the authoritarianism the now fascist  GOP and ex-president have unleashed cannot easily be tamped down. 

Decades of radical right lies and polarizing anti-democratic rhetoric (Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, etc.)  plowed and fertilized the ground for the rise of fascism in modern America. The ex-president was the toxic seed that thrived in that ground and acted as a force for authoritarian minds to coalesce around. It took American involvement in World War II to tamp American fascism down. Unfortunately, the radical right has finally succeeded in resurrecting it and bringing it into mainstream political acceptance by the political right,

The data in the 2013 paper is consistent with data analyzing the 2016 election indicating that the single most important factor in driving support for the ex-president was (probably still is) unease over social and demographic changes. Economic complaints and fears were the other co-mingled primary influencer. In view of all the data, one can begin to clearly see how a demagogic authoritarian could have and did overwhelm the old order in the GOP. That old order was replaced with the anti-democratic fascism that now arguably dominates the GOP. It was a smaller step than I thought from authoritarian GOP radical right authoritarianism to full-blown fascist cult authoritarianism.

Maybe it really does matter if authoritarianism and fascism are inherited.

Footnote: 

1. Although authoritarianism is likely to be a significantly or mostly genetic problem, that does not mean the only solution is ethnic cleansing or violence. IMO, social means and institutions, e.g., building social trust, critical thinking and defenses against propaganda, worked in the past to keep it in check and that is what will probably be needed in the future to restore a stable status quo. My brand of politics always looks for non-violent, minimally oppressive-discriminatory means to achieve good political, economic, social and environmental outcomes. 

To make this completely clear: I am not explicitly or implicitly advocating ethnic, ideological or social cleansing by force, coercion or any other non-democratic mean. That is how authoritarians and fascists operate. Pragmatic rationalists like me advocate non-violent, respectful social means to address social problems, including the rise of GOP authoritarianism and fascism. 

Research is into personality and authoritarianism is ongoing and seems to be in a fairly early state of knowledge. A 2020 paper commented: 

Philosophers have long speculated that authoritarianism and belief in determinism are functionally related. .... Authoritarianism and allied variables manifested moderate to large positive correlations with both fatalistic and genetic determinism beliefs. .... openness was negatively related to fatalistic determinism beliefs and agreeableness was negatively related to genetic determinism beliefs. Taken together, our findings clarify the nature of relations between authoritarianism and general personality, on the one hand, and free will/determinism beliefs, on the other, and suggest intriguing intersections between worldviews and personality traits. .... Scholarly recognition of potential links between deterministic beliefs and authoritarian attitudes can be traced to the origins of modern social science. Fromm (1941), a pioneering scholar of the psychology of totalitarianism, posited that individuals seek to “escape from freedom” via authoritarianism in times of uncertainty and threat. Similarly, Adorno and colleagues’ The Authoritarian Personality (1950) highlighted belief in fate, a variant of determinism, as one of 9 personality facets underlying susceptibility to fascist ideology. .... few authors have examined the more basic hypothesis that authoritarianism is related to belief in determinism writ large, the notion that “all events in this world are fixed, or unalterable, or predetermined.” (emphasis added)

Fromm may have arrived at a critically important insight in 1941, years before the full savagery and misery of German and Russian authoritarianism had been fully unleashed on the world. What Fromm seems to have intuited is that authoritarians can't handle changing reality and in their moral cowardice, they regress into force to protect their weak egos. 

Should We Do Mind Hacking In Defence of Freedom & Democracy?

This 56 minute PBS broadcast, The Wings of Angels, describes in general audience terms what I now believe has always been the fundamental basis of politics for as long as humans have been doing politics. In essence, politics is a struggle or competition for power, wealth and advantage. The struggle plays out between at least two fundamentally different but not always completely separate human mindsets, cooperative-democratic and competitive-authoritarian. The struggle plays out in the human mind mostly (~97% ?) unconsciously, emotional, intuitive, moral and social, not consciously and rational. Because of that, the human mind is easily hackable and governments, businesses and religions have all developed effective ways to hack our minds.

The program poses the question of whether democracies should consciously engage in mind hacking for good, at least in part as defense against the all-out hacking war that some authoritarian governments, most prominently China, now use to subdue their people and quash dissent, all with the unconscious cooperation of the subjugated people. China present a possible model for the ultimate fate of the human species, eternal enslavement and oppression.

Wings of Angels is the third in a series of three called Hacking Your Mind that PBS produced about the workings of the human mind and what modern cognitive and social science now understand the human condition to be. This program is mind blowing. It is akin to the Netflix documentary Social Dilemma. It is another sign that the incredible importance of modern cognitive and social science in understanding the human condition, politics and everything else about humans.

My description of mind hacking 

Mind hacking happens all the time. People engage in behavior that influences the behavior of others. That happens by shaping the reality others see, e.g., by experiencing a person’s (hacker’s) behaviors, including speech, and unconsciously reacting to it. Whether hacking is intended or not, various behaviors affect the observer’s mental state, cognitive processes and/or level of cognitive function. In politics, there usually is (~99% of the time?) intent to manipulate the target audience’s behavior without their knowledge or consent. That said, people mind hack by simply being alive and interacting with other people. That cannot be helped or changed because it is an inherent, fundamental trait of the human mind. For politics, the main question is whether the hacking is for authoritarianism and the dictator’s vision of law and order, or for messy, chaotic democracy.

Key points 

For those who don't want to take the time to watch this, these three points stand out.

Point #1: Whether we like it or want it or not, we are all mind hackers. Simply being alive and interacting with others hacks minds. This blog post hacks minds, but at least the intent is for good, not bad. Wings of Angels poses the question should we hack in a democracy. But the question is moot. We do hack, whether we like or want it or not. Some people argue a slippery slope will lead democracy into tyranny if we do mind hack. That argument is not accompanied by a recognition of two key points. 

First, there may be a worse slippery slope if we do not hack for good because authoritarians hack their people. Mind hacked authoritarianism could come to dominate the entire human species for thousands of years. In my opinion, it is the most plausible means to enslave the human race forever.[1] Wings of Angels makes that point clear in its discussion of how Chinese authoritarians now effectively employ mind hacking to get the Chinese people to willingly but unknowingly support their own tyranny by suppressing dissent and ‘bad citizenship’. The Chinese voluntary opt-in mind hack tactic is brilliant, brutal and effective. 

Second, mind hacking is multidirectional. It can be for good, bad, stupid, entertainment, educating, disinforming, ethnic cleansing, waging war, saving a marriage, picking better musicians for an orchestra, reducing criminal recidivism, selling anything (smart or dumb, useful or useless, e.g., pet rocks) to consumers or just about anything else. 

Chinese people voluntarily opt-in to a social monitoring and 

grading system that monitors and punishes bad citizens and  

rewards good ones -- essentially everything is monitored 24/7/365

(my guess is that most opt in due mostly to a combination of social  

pressure and a predisposing collective culture mindset)   

Point #2: Mind hacking can have amazing subtlety, power and social reach. It is a true social contagion phenomenon. It can reach past degrees of separation and right through to people's minds and behaviors in ways that profoundly affect other minds and behaviors. This happens without one shred of awareness of any of the people involved. The Wings of Angels discusses research on obese people, their friends, friends of their friends and so on. 

In that research, being obese was shown to reach through to a person separated by at least 3 degrees of separation. The data indicated that an obese friend (1st degree) of an obese friend (2nd degree) of an obese person (3rd degree) can influence whether a person tends to be obese merely by association with the 1st degree friend. That happens without the person even knowing the 2nd or 3rd degree persons exist at all. Something is transmitted from the 3rd degree person all the way to the affected person and no one has any idea that it is happening. The same observation is found with alcohol drinking.

1st degree of separation = friend of a mind hacked person

2nd degree = friend of the friend of the mind hacked person

3rd degree = friend of the friend of the friend of the mind hacked person

4th degree = etc.

If there is any at least partly effective vaccine to this social contagion phenomenon, it lies in teaching self-awareness and critical thinking skills.

Point #3: Lastly, pro-environmental mind hacking research shows that appealing to conscious reason fails, but appealing to the unconscious mind can work quite well. This research harks back to observations on the human condition by the eccentric economist-satirist Thorstein Veblen, some of which are described in his strange, brilliant 1899 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. In short, when one keeps up with the Jonses, one has usually been mind hacked. If Jones buys a Buick, you buy a Buick or preferably a Cadillac or BMW. That's a mind hack. In this situation, at least some people are probably aware to some extent that they are keeping up with the Jonses, but they aren't aware they have been mind hacked. 

The research looked for ways to get people to be more energy efficient, e.g., by using less energy and having lower utility bills. Three groups received one of three different appeals to conscious reason, e.g. it will lower your energy bills or your children will be better off if the environment is not so polluted. Once group was mind hacked by appeal to what the Jonses do. The mind hack group was simply shown how much energy their household used compared to their neighbors (the Jonses) and told nothing else.

The result? Only the mind hack group showed a significant energy use drop. The other groups did not change in their energy consumption. Based on that research, appeals to slow, weak conscious reason to help the environment failed, but appeals to the fast powerful unconscious mind succeeded. If that research is replicated and holds up, this observation reflects the core messages that Nobel laureate Daniel Khaneman described in his well-known 2012 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, and what psychologist Johnathan Haidt described in his 2012 book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Questions:

Should our government use mind hacks to better serve the public interest, or is it too dangerous?

Did Obama make a mistake when he opened a federal office dedicated to applying behavioral science to federal policy when possible? 

Footnote: 

1. Most plausible because it is the political “ideology” most based on what the human mind is and how it works according to modern science. Science-based political ideology transcends liberalism, conservatism, Christianity, capitalism, socialism, fascism, racism and all the other significant ideologies in politics that I am aware of in terms of effectiveness. To the best of my knowledge, only pragmatic rationalism (PR) can potentially come close to what the Chinese government has done and is doing (Only potential because it is not a significant political ideology and the hypothesis remains untested). That is because PR is also based on the science of the human mind. PR, like the Chinese counterpart, rational authoritarianism(?), tries to understand and accept humans for what they are, not for what they ought to be according to any ideology that is unduly detached from relevant science. 

The Wings of Angels points out that the short 2009 book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, a book by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein was highly influential in shaping Chinese government thinking about how to control its people. Thaler's work earned him a Nobel prize in 2015 in behavioral economics for his understanding that humans are not the rational creatures that obey the complex equations that economists falsely believed they obey. The Chinese are dead serious about using cognitive and social science to inform their brilliant mind hacking tactics.

I've posted several times about the growing Chinese authoritarian cognitive mind hack technology and its underlying foundation in advanced, all-encompassing deep surveillance technology. For example, the Chinese government uses it for ethnic cleansing and reinforcing good citizenship as the dictators explicitly define good citizenship and grade people on. The lives of bad citizens are forced into misery, low income and low social status. Who knows, maybe they go extinct.

Is Morality an Existential Threat to Democracy?

Note: This post is long. However, it discusses one of the most important and enlightening broadcast programs that I recall hearing in the last 30 years or so.

The program: A broadcast on NPR entitled Moral Combat produced by the Hidden Brain program discusses what happens when morality is injected into a political issue or tends to be inherent in it. The effects are almost completely socially corrosive and anti-democratic. In essence, most issues can be politically weaponized by moralizing them. Playing on conflicting moral beliefs is an effective way to divide, distract and polarize a population. That affords demagogues and dictators the most common pathway to authoritarian political power.  The 55-minute podcast is here. Several key points of the research the program discusses are summarized below.

Moral certainty neuters facts, truths and reason: Major moralized issues in the US include immigration, same-sex marriage, abortion, gun control, police violence, religious dogmas, euthanasia laws, trade policy and even political ideologies, e.g., evil socialism, liberal tyranny, etc. For many people, moralized issues are not generally debatable because the moral issue is clear in their minds. People see their moral belief as obviously correct and therefore not subject to debate or contrary facts, truths or reasoning. People who try to convey moral inconvenience or threat are generally rejected as not trustworthy because they are perceived to be talking obvious nonsense.

The more self-righteous, the more anti-democratic: People who have moderate to limited moral feelings about an issue such as a euthanasia law, tend to accept court decisions about the law without experiencing much positive or negative reaction toward the court. By contrast, when a court decides against people with strong moral convictions, they tend to see the court as less trustworthy, less procedurally fair and less legitimate. A court decision that morally weaponized people agree with tends to foster a perception of trust, legitimacy and fairness. Thus by morally weaponizing an issue and publicizing court decisions on it, both the courts and political opposition can be delegitimized and made to appear untrustworthy and/or illegitimate.

Researchers find similar moral reactions in court cases that decide on cases of vigilante justice. People who strongly morally believe that a person is guilty or immoral tend to be more sympathetic to the vigilantes and less trusting of the court that punishes vigilantes. The lesson is that probably most people with moral convictions about an issue generally do not care a lot how the moral conviction is defended or vindicated, e.g., by legal or illegal means. Moral self-righteousness tends to override concerns that get in the way, including the rule of law. Another cited example of moral self-righteousness justifying the means is Mitch McConnell's refusal to consider Obama's Supreme Court pick in 2016 saying "of course, of course" the people should have a say, but in 2020, simply denying that people do not need to have any say. Lying, cheating and hypocrisy tend to justify self-righteous moral ends over other concerns.

Most people's reaction to institutions that make decisions they strongly morally disagree with is to question the institution, not their own strong moral convictions. Thus by morally weaponizing as many issues as possible, a political group can delegitimize an entire government for reasons that are not objectively reasonable.

The decline in trust, science and experts: Poll data from the last 30 years shows that public trust in various institutions and political opposition has significantly declined. Public trust is one of the glues that holds a democracy together. Public trust is a bulwark against demagogues, tyrants, crooks, liars, lawbreakers and kleptocrats. When distrust is based on moral grounds, evidence is usually not needed to justify what people feel, and thus know, is true. That leads to distrust of (i) science that contradicts moral beliefs, and (ii) the experts who try to convey the inconvenient truth. Feeling or emotion usually overrides facts, truths and sound reasoning when strong moral convictions are at play.

False belief in moral objectivity and its truth = closed minds: People with strong moral convictions tend to believe that their belief is objectively true, like 2+2 = 4 is objectively true. Again, personal moral knowledge is usually certain. But in fact, moral beliefs are usually more subjective than objective. Moral convictions feel objectively true and thus are not open to debate or contrary facts, truths or reasoning. Based on such feelings, people or institutions, e.g., courts, who hold contrary moral beliefs must be objectively wrong. Those feelings are usually objectively wrong because personal moral truths are falsely but sincerely believed to be universal moral beliefs that should apply to everyone, everywhere, always or almost always. 

The problem with this false belief in objective moral truth is that when a person engages with or hears another who has a different moral belief, that person usually concludes that since they believe in something that is immoral or evil, that person must also be immoral or evil. Then, trust usually bites the dust, especially when the "immoral" person tries to explain their belief and its basis. 

Moral conviction and confirmation bias: Another corrosive effect on truth and trust that strong moral conviction tends to have is that it limits or blocks efforts to look for contrary evidence or reasoning that contradicts the moral conviction. Confirmation bias tends to shut down open-mindedness and strong moral conviction tends to create confirmation bias. This is another example of how strong moral and other beliefs tend to shut down open-mindedness and the psychological discomfort that contradictory evidence and/or reasoning can lead to.

The researcher that was interviewed for this program, Linda Skitka, commented that a person simply looking for reasons or contrary evidence about a genuinely felt moral certainty can lead to social pressure to not even inquire because the moral belief is obviously true and universal. Why question what is sincerely believed to be true and universal? It raises questions about the morality of the person doing an inquiry that could lead to finding contradictory evidence or reasoning. In other words, strong moral convictions can lead to social siloing, along with distrust. 

In addition to potential social ostracism or motive questioning, doing research into an morally-charged issue has a tendency to reduce the intensity of the moral conviction when contrary evidence or reasoning is encountered. That is a socially beneficial impact of having enough moral courage to overcome both confirmation bias and social pressure that tends to keep minds closed and thus usually misinformed. 

Inquiry into a matter of moral certainty also runs the risk of it leading to moral relativism, making everything up for grabs and personal while nothing is universally true. That invites the question of whether there is such a thing as a universal moral truth. 

Disregarding the rules: Experiments have shown that people with a moral conviction tend to break rules more when they have been exposed to court decisions they morally disagree with. There is something about moral disagreement that loosens other glues that holds democracy together, namely respect for the rule of law and simple respect for other citizens. Strong moral convictions can simply destroy those glues and weaken democracy.

In the case of the 2012 mass shooting in Newtown CT at the Sandy Hook elementary school, some gun rights activists claimed online that the parents of children who were murdered were not real and that the mass shooting was a faked conspiracy to foment gun more regulations. Some believed that the parents were paid to stage the gun attack. Some of the parents of murdered children were harassed in real life, not just online. That kind of blind, deranged hate and hideously false belief was grounded in strong moral convictions that guns were good and thus could not possibly have been used to murder 26 innocent people including children in an elementary school. 

Killed compromise: People in disagreement without a moral basis for the disagreement can usually find common ground and compromise far more easily than when strong moral convictions are clashing. In the moral conflict scenario, people have a hard time simply coming to agreement on how to simply talk about the issue. 

Personal observations

This research on the effects of moral belief on politics and political issues makes a lot of sense. It helps explain one of the key bases for how and why the radical right has relentlessly moralized issues in politics and used moral disagreements to polarize and divide American society. This moralization process has been a conscious, sustained effort by the radical right to gain influence and power at least since the mid-1950s. And, since colonial times in the US, various extremist groups also appear to have recognized the power of moral weaponizing to build in-group cohesion, typically by vilifying various convenient out-groups. The in-group extremists are morally good and the out-groups are at least immoral, if not evil.

The decades-long radical right effort to paint reasonable compromise as ideological or tribe betrayal or treason has been successful. The GOP has had RINO hunts for years and the party is now mostly ideologically cleansed. The GOP has become anti-democratic and pro-authoritarian in breaking norms that used to be frameworks for compromise. The party now looks for obedience based on intolerant moral condemnation, not diversity of ideas and moral tolerance. Morally weaponizing politics and political issues has been a major tool that helped sink the GOP into this moral morass that it has become. 

Pragmatic rationalism

The research findings discussed in the Moral Combat program are satisfyingly and fully compatible with pragmatic rationalism (PR) on moral grounds. PR is built on four core moral values: (i) fidelity to trying seeing fact and true truths with less partisan bias, (ii) fidelity to applying less biased or partisan conscious reason to the facts and truths, (iii) service to the public interest based on factors including the facts, truths and sound reason, and (iv) willingness to reasonably compromise according to political, economic and environmental circumstances suggest are reasonable. Inherent in those morals are a strong bias toward democracy, the rule of law, and social trust and tolerance and against authoritarianism, law at the whim of those in power and social divisiveness and distrust.

One of the concerns built into the four moral values is the matter of their universality, not the moral issues that now divide and poison American society and the federal government. As far as I can tell, most Americans would claim that they adhere to all four of those values, especially the first two. Unfortunately, respect for all of those moral values, especially compromise have been under decades of relentless radical right attack propaganda (dark free speech). Those core values are slowly eroding in America. I have argued that this semi-consensus on the acceptance of facts, true truths, sound reasoning (~logic), service to the public interest and compromise constitute a basis to claim high moral authority for them. I believe those values transcend the other moral values (abortion, gun control, etc.) that demagogues, tyrants, special interests and kleptocrats are now using to disinform, distract and tear American society apart.  

PR is not silent about morals related to dark free speech (lies, deceit, irrational emotional manipulation and bogus partisan reasoning), all of which are targeted as detrimental. 

PR is silent about toxic morals such as abortion, gun control or same-sex marriage.  Instead, it depends heavily on respect for facts, truths and sound reasoning. That is focused on the always disputed concept of service to public interest, and to a less extent compromise. Thus, PR inherently is anti-strong moral conviction by virtue of be inherently anti-confirmation bias and anti-motivated reasoning. As the Moral Combat program points out, simply looking for contrary evidence tends to weaken the intensity of moral convictions. Exposure to inconvenient but sound reasoning will have the same beneficial effect. 

A key goal of PR is to open minds to look for all the relevant evidence and apply sound reasoning to it from one or more points of view, liberal, conservative, centrist, capitalist, socialist, cost-benefit, etc.  PR is not a means to get rid of moral convictions, but instead it defines a mindset that should at least partially rationalize their intensity and irrational emotion-generating effects. The goal is to make moral convictions somewhat more compatible with democracy, facts, truths and sound reasoning, without unduly limiting people's ability to act on their personal moral beliefs within the limits of laws. 

Questions:

Can the four core moral values PR is built on be considered transcendent over other moral values, or are all moral values equal?

Is there such a thing as a universal moral value?

Is it a mistake to consider the intellectual framework of PR a moral one, and if so, what should the mental constraints that PR attempts to impose be considered purely secular with no moral component?

(keeping in mind Sisella Bok's view of the immorality of lying in politics)  

Is democracy more inherently moral than authoritarianism?

(that's a core assumption that PR is based on - if authoritarianism is just as good, then why be concerned about facts, truths, sound reasoning, etc., and just accept what the leaders say and tell people to do?)