A prior book review of American Psychosis by David Corn ended by listing and attempting to answer a series of questions about conspiratorial thinking, paranoia and plain kooksterism as they interact with society and government. All of the analysis attempted to omit terminology associated with current tribal factions in current American politics and focus on the problem at the most generic level possible. The last question in the analysis merited a more thorough answer that didn't fit a shorter review. It is treated as a dedicated topic here.
One important point to make about the language in this commentary. Language about ideas is highly subjective so words like "fringe" are typically used pejoratively to reference "bad" ideas espoused by opponents. In a complicated, highly technical and globally interrelated world, no one can understand the entire spectrum of thought so there will always be ideas on the "fringe" of people's understanding that may be the idea everyone needs the most. Fringe ideas are not what this commentary addresses. Instead, this commentary will address thinking which unduly relies upon vague labels with connotations of enemies and conspiracies, unduly links problems in a variety of areas to a single oversimplified cause and single group and freely invents facts and events to suit a story or theory. This type of thinking is kooksterism.
How can kooksterism be differentiated from legitimate debate?Kooksterism is driven primarily by ignorance, a lack of transparency and apathy. Ignorance acts as the intellectual equivalent of a compromised immune system. Humans are bombarded with great / good / meh / bad / wrong / deadly ideas continuously. Like a biological immune system, knowledge of all ideas is useful to properly understand the entire environment and respond to it appropriately but once ideas tagged on the lower end of the spectrum are tagged and neutralized, they need to consume as little resources as possible. Public processes lacking transparency aid kooksterism by hiding information that feeds this intellectual defense system. How can the success or failure of a law or regulation be accurately evaluated if statistics are being withheld or purposely distorted? Apathy aids kooksterism by allowing bad ideas to gain acceptance as long as their negative consequences are limited to "others."
Ensuring a proper "immune system response" to kooksterism starts with recognizing the use of communication patterns that are INVARIABLY used when fringe groups attempt to spread falsehoods. Exposure to these patterns requires defensive listening skills to pick up the patterns, strip the vitriolic fluff from the message to access the real content then debate what's left on any merits that might remain.
Examples of communication requiring defensive listening skills are easy to provide. After fifty years of cold war, every American SHOULD have a gut instinct that knows to immediately REJECT statements that read like this:
Comrade Kim Il Sung — who paid foremost attention to strengthening the revolutionary armed forces throughout the entire period of the long revolutionary activities — performed the military miracle of the 20th century of defeating the two most outrageous imperialisms in one generation, and prepared a powerful military guarantee for sovereignty of the country and prosperity of the nation for all ages by raising the people’s army into a revolutionary strong army of one-a-match-for-a hundred, and arming all the people and fortifying the whole land. Great Comrade Kim Jong Il — who put forward inheriting and completing the military-first revolutionary cause of chuch’e pioneered by Comrade Kim Il Sung as his lifelong mission — opened the highest stage of the development of our revolutionary armed forces with his extraordinary sagacity, outstanding art of command, and matchless pluck. During the period of the gravest ordeal for our revolution, Comrade Kim Jong Il strengthened! and developed the people’s army into the most elite combat ranks, led to constant victories, the unprecedented battles to protect socialism, and achieved the great historic feats of enhancing our country to the status of a world-class militarily powerful state through the ever-victorious military-first politics.
That's from a transcript of a speech given by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on April 15, 2012. (See ttps://www.northkoreatech.org/2012/04/18/english-transcript-of-kim-jong-uns-speech/. The average American likely rolled their eyes at the first or second occurance of revolutionary or maybe miracle or imperialisms. It takes zero conscious effort. Enough trigger words are said and -- CLICK -- this is BS. Stop processing it.
Or this example:
I cannot help but go back to the time when the Soviet Union was formed, when Russia was creating modern Ukraine. It was Russia that created modern Ukraine, giving it significant swathes of land, historical lands of Russia, along with the people, who no one asked about where and how they want to live, how they see the future of their children, and in which country. The same thing happened when the Soviet Union broke apart. The elites decided everything among themselves, and no one asked millions of ordinary citizens anything.
Only now, only modern Russia has given the residents of the Lugansk People's Republic, the Donetsk People's Republic, Zaporozhye and Kherson the right to choose. People came to the referendum and made their choice to be with their historical homeland, Russia.
Just an episode from what happened two, three or four days ago. The elections were going on in Lugansk, and people were standing in line in the street waiting to get into the polling station. The artillery shelling began. A shell landed nearby, not far away, but no one left the line to the polling station. Amazing!
That's a portion of Vladmir Putin's address at a public concert ostensibly "celebrating" the annexing of territories in Ukraine via sham referendums. (See http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/69470). Same thing. Historical lands. Elites. Historical homeland. Two or three magic words in and the average American spots this for exactly what it is.
The odd, triggering tone isn't solely due to poor idiomatic translations between languages - like dialogue in a Borat skit. The odd tone is sensed because a very high percentage of the content involves fluff words such as elites, homeland / motherland, "the people's (fill in the blank) ", revolution, historical victories, ad nauseum. What remains is entirely devoid of importance -- like filler in an a essay assignment for a fifth grader falling short of the required minimum length -- or one hundred percent false.
So now we have a calibration baseline from arguably the two most unhinged psychopaths on the planet. Now compare those ramblings to this:
What we are really dealing with here and uncovering more by the day is the massive influence of Communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China in the interference with our elections here in the United States. The Dominion voting systems, the Smartmatic technology software and the software that goes in other computerized voting systems here in as well, not just Dominion, were created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez to make sure he never lost an election after one constitutional referendum came out the way he did not want it to come out. We have one very strong witness who has explained how it all works. His affidavit is attached to the pleadings of Lin Wood in the lawsuit he filed in Georgia. It is a stunning, detailed affidavit because he was with Hugo Chavez while … He was being briefed on how it worked, he was with Hugo Chavez when he saw it operate to make sure the election came out his way. That was the express purpose for creating this software. He has seen it operate and as soon as he saw the multiple states shut down the voting on the night of the election, he knew the same thing was happening here, that that was what had gone on.
The machines were easily accessible to hackers. There’s video on the net that will explain to you how a kid with a cell phone can hack one of these voting machines. There’s been no oversight of Dominion or its software. Workers in each county were trained by Dominion, but there’s no evidence of any monitoring otherwise. We have testimony of different workers admitting that they were trained how to dispose of Trump votes and add to Biden votes. The software has a feature pursuant to which you can drag and drop any number of batches of votes to the candidate of your choice, or simply throw them away. So we have mathematical evidence in a number of states of massive quantities of Trump votes being trashed, just simply put in the trash like you would on your computer with any file and Biden votes being injected. That’s addition to the flipping.
Yep. The world is watching this. I have gotten multiple emails from people in other countries who watched the same pattern happened there. We have witness testimony that the same things were done in those countries, as this was exported from Venezuela by Maduro and by Mr. Chavez and by Cuba. Of course, we know China also has a substantial presence in Venezuela and substantial interest in making sure that President Trump does not continue in office. This is the consummate foreign interference in our election in the most criminal way you can possibly imagine. It must be shut down.
That's lawyer Sidney Powell, speaking at a press conference (see https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/rudy-giuliani-trump-campaign-press-conference-transcript-november-19-election-fraud-claims) on November 18, 2020 on behalf of Trump the President and Trump the campaign as his team began fouling the courts in five states with bogus claims about voting machine fraud. A feature pursuant...? exported from Venezuela by Maduro? I guess that's why Trump recently hired a three million dollar lawyer registered as an actual foreign agent of the Maduro government in Venezuela.
Or this:
The facts matter. The truth matters. And if you are fair reporters, you will cover that fairly and appropriately and you will allow coverage of our media team here and our legal team. That is absolutely shocking, that all you cover are around the margins, and I’ve seen all of you taking pictures right now, and I can anticipate what your headlines are going to be. If you are not willing to talk about the evidence that has been presented, then that is absolutely unacceptable for journalistic standards. This is an opening statement. This is something where we have told you what the evidence will show and we have given you a brief description. That happens in a courtroom all the time, where that’s not the fact-finding process, that is just an overview. That is what we have given you today, because the American people deserve to know what we have uncovered in the last couple of weeks. Remember, this is such a short timeframe, and this is an elite strikeforce team that is working on behalf of the President and the campaign to make sure that our Constitution is protected. We are a nation of rules, not a nation of rulers. There is not someone that just gets to pick who the next President is outside the will of the American people. That is our task, because when we talk about voter fraud, it’s actually election official fraud. That cannot stand. The Constitution requires that the State Legislatures are the ones that make election law. It still has to go by the US Constitution. But what has happened in this case is that state and local level officials and all the way up, have changed the rules. That’s what the Democrats do. If they don’t like the rules, they change them and they change them at the last minute, they manipulate them. They want to tear down our American system.
That's fellow Team Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis at the same 11/18/2020 press conference explaining to the press that what they just heard was only a "summary" of the facts of their case and that no reasonable reporter would expect ACTUAL facts to be provided to back up such claims until some point in the never-specified future because the "elite strike force" is extremely busy fighting for the American people and the Constitution.
Or this:
The Framers of the United States Constitution provided that presidential electors be appointed in a manner directed by the state “Legislature[s].” Art. II, § 1, cl. 2. The legislature of every Defendant state had established detailed rules by which that state’s appointment of presidential electors should have been conducted. However, in the months before the 2020 election, those rules were deliberately changed by both state and non-state actors. The clear authority of those state legislatures to determine the rules for appointing electors was usurped at various times by governors, secretaries of state, election officials, state courts, federal courts, and private parties.
That is an excerpt of the amicus brief submitted on December 10, 2020 by one hundred and six US House members to the US Supreme Court in order to grease the skids for other legal finagling aimed at overturning a Biden win. Note the tone of the language… Non-state actors? Private parties? Usurped? Note that while complaining of these unauthorized changes to voting rules, only the results in states found to have been won by Biden were targeted with lawsuits, yet possibly ALL FIFTY STATES altered rules for registration, mail-in voting and ballot drop-offs to avoid mass spreader events at the polling booth while Covid was still killing 3,000+ people per day.
These "friends of the court" were arguing elected and appointed officials at the state level had usurped the authority of their state legislature to choose their electors. These "friends" were also arguing that the Vice President's role did not have the Constitutional authority to decide between dueling slates of electors if that situation arose. Yet these "friends" were arguing unelected, unappointed partisans in TEXAS, MISSOURI and OTHER STATES could interfere with GEORGIA'S selection of electors -- because those outside partisans who were not Vice President or an elected or appointed official of GEORGIA didn't like Georgia's outcome. It's tough to comprehend the sheer level of hypocrisy, flawed jurisprudence and criminality in that argument.
Anyone who reads at an 8th grade level can spot the wild-eyed, tin-foil-hat madness in those public statements. And the United States got to the point where people of that mental caliber were aiding and abetting a criminal fraud and insurrection on behalf of an equally mentally deficient client who somehow was elected President.
How can this type of propaganda be thwarted?
First, conserve energy. People CREATING this type of communication are already effectively lost. They are likely the ones expecting to profit from it -- either as its end result or merely collecting fees for creating and distributing it or collecting fees for defending it in the courts. There is probably a twenty to one ratio of time required to research and refute claims provided in the types of communiques illustrated above. That lopsided ratio makes it easy for fringe actors to succeed at swamping real debate about real issues with a disproportionately small effort spreading nonsense.
Second, as communications like this are shared or summarized, don't just pass it along with a thumbs down or try to paraphrase it (and possibly helping to cloud the flaws). Provide a blueprint for recipients to register the flaws and find their own way out of the maze of twisted logic:
- show me names, job titles, employers of the alleged actors
- show me names, job titles, employers, background of the experts you are citing in your statements
- show me exact dates and times
- show me statistics from a known government agency or public filings of actors involved
- after eliminating trigger words, see if the remaining content explains anything about an underlying issue and claimed cause/effect relationships
Can kooksterism be reversed or eliminated?
This is the most difficult question to address. It is also where the immune system analogy begins failing and more difficult realities for individuals and groups have to be considered.
As discussed in the prior post, the negative feedback cycles so helpful in aiding kooksterism cannot be completely eliminated. Human thinking and psychology exhibit certain traits that tend to over-weight them, almost as a mechanism to see if there's anything to them that MIGHT be useful before snuffing them out. No one lives in a perfect world free of all bad information. Like a functioning immune system charged with a sufficient baseline of white blood cells, it should be possible for most people to encounter a wide variety of mild doses of bad ideas and fend them off by comparing them with a middle-of-the-road perspective provided by a baseline of actual knowledge. As long as the dose of bad ideas remains mild enough in degree and short enough in duration, most people will see through the worst ideas at the fringe and keep them in check in the larger society.
When a subset of humans learn how to leverage bad ideas for extreme profit or to gain undue power over others, the exposure to bad ideas can be extended in duration and made more toxic. This is the danger point for both individuals and society.
For people affected by extended, intense immersion in bad ideas, the recovery paths are far more difficult -- both for the individual, their family and society. For these cases, the only recovery point likely left is that of a teachable moment -- a point at which actual PHYSICAL reality (physical health, physical security, financial security) is threatened or destroyed by forces so obviously linked to choices made by the person experiencing the threat that it overwhelms the mental energy required to continue denying the cause and effect. Teachable moments are NOT day-to-day corrective inputs most people use to continually update their model of the world. For this level of dysfunction, "teachable moments" are not just losing an argument, losing a job, losing $100,000 in a retirement account, etc. Teachable moments for people at this level of disconnect will likely involve being financially wiped out to nothing, experiencing catastrophic illness or, more tragically, loss of life.
A voter in Florida supporting state and national politicians who vote against hurricane relief for citizens in other states because the politicians say people need to be self-reliant and big government programs will waste money won't ever learn the folly of that belief watching a sunset from their veranda overlooking the ocean. It is a near certitude that same voter WILL learn the value of collective public aid after spending two days in the attic to escape eight feet of water in their home, only to emerge and see their entire town destroyed in a hurricane.
There's no point in debating the value of regulations on energy utilities, chemical companies and telecommunications providers with a pro-business diehard in Texas in May when temperatures are in the 80s. Instead, have that conversation with a Texas resident in February after a cold snap triggers a statewide power grid failure, freezing then bursting pipes in tens of thousands of homes that require gutting the entire house. Explain to them that "pro-bidness" policies didn't force the energy company to harden its facilities for predictable weather. Maybe remind them the exact same cold snap scenario caused a similar grid failure ten years prior and no one did anything then either. Explain to them that their homeowner's insurance might not cover "flooding" or might not cover interim living expenses for months as they wait for rebuilding. Explain to them that reconstruction is going to take three times as long because 700,000 workers throughout the US workforce died from COVID crippling our entire supply chain but we don't want to allow immigration from Mexico, Venezuela or Ukraine because America is for "Americans."
The problem with teachable moments is their damage is not restricted to the individual with the broken thinking. Damage extends to their family, community and the entire country. The abysmal vaccination rates in the world's richest country didn't stick it to know-it-all doctors and faceless government bureaucrats trying to destroy millions of people's sense of freedom. It contributed to killing over one million people, causing immense human suffering for families losing a loved one and crippling nearly every aspect of our economy and extending the pandemic needlessly.
As one of MANY examples of a teachable moment that has ricocheted through the entire country, results from ACT test results for the high school senior class of 2022 were announced on October 12, 2022. The average ACT score dropped from 20.3 to 19.8 (with a perfect score being 36). The average score hasn't been that low since 1991. Equally horrifying, forty two percent of takers in the class of 2022 failed to meet the minimum achievement bar on ANY segment of the test. That figure was thirty eight percent in 2021. Even worse, average scores on the ACT or SAT tests are not indicative of the ENTIRE high school graduating class of roughly 3.85 million students. Only about thirty six percent take the ACT and only about thirty eight percent take the SAT. Standardized tests may be highly flawed and may not accurately predict success in college as claimed but results ARE standardized among the pool taking them and allow some trending over time. The current trend is not good for the future inventiveness and productivity of America.
WTH
