Lies, Political Cults and Social Evolution
When I was a child growing up in the U.S. South, my mother taught me in no uncertain terms that to accuse someone of lying was at best vulgar, and at worst life-threatening. Vulgar because there were circumlocutory ways to identify dishonesty; life-threatening because the culture of the time and place focused great importance on the verity of a person’s word – the expectation of honesty was deeply connected to the person’s honor. In the worst case, a man who felt that his honor had been damaged (in other words, it had been a ‘damned lie’, not just a lie) could show up at the offender’s home, armed, and ‘call him out’. If the offender did not come forth, his cowardice confirmed the accusation. In many cases he did come out and a duel, frequently with shotguns, ensued. The one who prevailed in this tended to be treated lightly by a jury of his peers.
What, then, is a lie? Conventionally it is a statement that is not factually correct. The genuine liar knows it is not, and the detection of his untruth is likely to be a source of discomfort for the liar’s inner self as well as for the possibility of a load of buckshot to his outer self. If the offender emits a statement that he genuinely thinks is true, even if it is easily shown to be not true, the impact on his conscience and his social standing are less. Both of these possibilities imply that the liar has a social conscience. If society does not or cannot punish dishonesty, or if those involved are not punished by their own consciences, trust within the community breaks down. The mantra “A man’s word is his bond” was frequently relied upon implicitly, unless and until trust was broken, and everyone in a small community knew whose word was good and whose was not.
It has been said that all politicians lie, that politics makes liars out of people in the same way that it does for building contractors. Generally political lies take the form of breakable promises, and the public has a fairly good estimation of whether such promises will be broken by any individual politician. Now something strange has happened. In the world of U.S. politics, the assumption that lies found out will harm a candidate has broken down. How did this happen, what are the social implications, and what can be done to restore the rule of fact?
Political cults are so rare in U.S. history that I have not been able to think of a clear example until the present, but they have been common in world history. What is a cult? Cults are characterized by unreasoned belief systems and exuberant loyalty that center around a single leader’s personality. In the recent era, it is easy to point to Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, the Kim dynasty and Mao Tse Tung as leaders of cults of personality. A feature of cult belonging is the enthusiastic, unquestioning acceptance of a set of beliefs enunciated by the leader. If one fails to adhere to these beliefs and the ‘truth’ of any of the leader’s pronouncements, that person is no longer a cult member. Cult members in good standing adopt visible signals, whether black shirts, swastika armbands, blue Mao uniforms, the black suits of the Amish, or the suits, ties and briefcases of Mormon missionaries.
Cult beliefs are characterized by emanation from the leader and by being unrelated and untouched by facts. Evidence against such beliefs is ignored by cult members; the beliefs are resistant to rational discussion. Cultism cannot be opposed by deployment of facts. Religions – especially Christianity – have cultish qualities built into them, but all religious groups are not cults. Those religious organizations that allow their members some freedom to discuss and question issues surrounding basic beliefs are ipso facto less cultish. My in-laws were Methodists and recited the Nicene Creed many times in the religious year. I know that they privately questioned some aspects of their creed. When the Temperance Pledge was passed around each year, my in-laws sat on it; they weren’t going to stop enjoying (in moderation), their Bourbon whiskey and home-made wine. On the other hand, true religious cults were near at hand there in Tennessee. There were Pentecostal congregations in which members were routinely expected to handle poisonous snakes and to drink poison. This was a test of faith; if you didn’t get bitten or if you did and lived, your faith was confirmed. Someone who stood up and said, this is both dangerous and ridiculous, would have been ushered to the door. Jehovah’s Witnesses are well known to practice ostracism of any member who seems to have slipped in his belief. In other words, cults are characterized by extreme in-versus-out memberships. The Communist Party operated similarly in the days of Lenin and Stalin – those Party members who deviated in the least from the party line found themselves purged or worse. Now, consider the current Republican Party: departure from any of the leader’s precepts is grounds for being declared a RINO, the ex-President withdraws his endorsement, and the party apparatus summons a more pliable member to challenge the RINO in his/her next primary election.
In the current political climate, an alliance has developed between evangelical Christians and Republicans. How does this work? Evangelicals are called on to profess unwavering belief in several propositions that no rational person would accept. The idea that God impregnated a woman without physical contact (in the Middle Ages this was examined by theologists – maybe He got in through Mary’s eyes, or her ears) is one. The proposition that a dead man in Palestine and the Creator of the universe were one and the same was one that Gibbon found most preposterous, but the idea that a heaven exists ‘up there’, invisible to the most powerful telescopes, and that a hell exists somewhere immediately below the surface of the earth are propositions that can be tested and of course found to be myths. The proposition that God (He was known as Yaweh at the time) made the Sun go back in the sky so that Joshua could finish the defeat of Jerico would involve catastrophic violation of many laws of physics. In the Christian tradition and especially among Evangelicals, one’s faith rests on an ability to believe such things for which there is, and can be, no evidence.
The cognitive disconnect here is not confined to ignorant snake handlers. A man of my acquaintance, an American Baptist who holds a PhD degree in chemical engineering believes that the Bible is the literal and inerrant word of God. This is the position of his religious group. There is no point in detailing the many obvious internal contradictions raised by this belief. On one occasion we walked past one of the university swimming pools in which a game of water polo was being played. We stopped to watch it, and I remarked that I had played water polo in college. “You have to tread water like a demon, though,” I remarked. There was a thoughtful silence. Then he said, “Well, I suppose demons can swim,” and it sounded sincere. The theory of illness as a result of demonic possession is long discredited in Western medicine, but for him the episode of the Gadarene swine was sovereign. We were collaborating to develop medical devices at the time.
The point of this is that an Evangelical’s ability to accept irrational religious propositions is a predisposition that opens one to irrational political and social ones and sets one’s foot on a primrose path to cultism. The circuit is closed when the political cult leader is identified as chosen by God. After the 2020 election I noted a book on the bookshelf at Good Will entitled God: Trump Must Win. If one accepted that proposition, the proposition that the 2020 election was stolen somehow becomes very palatable, and the enthusiasm for Trump’s candidacy in 2024 is understandable.
Many commentators are comfortable with attributing this to ‘tribalism’. When our prehuman ancestors were evolving as social animals on the plains of Africa, there must have been powerful group selection for tribes that had social cohesion. Furthermore, until the Greeks invented logic, magical thinking was the only recourse for otherwise sophisticated people because it provided explanations for the many natural phenomena that primitive people experience, and that we all still experience. Behaviors that are of adaptive significance tend to become genetically programmed, because genes are what evolution works on. When a tribal leader or religious figure expressed a myth to his fellows, adaptation of that myth was favored because it led to increased social cohesion. I think the evidence is overwhelming that magical thinking and a tendency to use it to form religious beliefs are genetically programmed in humans and lead to brains that are hard-wired to resort to it, particularly in the face of social or environmental stress, because these are the conditions in which social cohesion is most valuable.
What does this mean for political discourse in today’s America? For the cult member, arguing with facts is useless. Fact-checking, as in the Trump-Harris debate, is seen only as annoying and unfair. The substantial debunking of the story that Haitians were eating pets in Springfield OH was simply seen as bias of the moderators against Trump. It did not turn any of the heads in red caps. The main people on whom it did have impact were the watchers who had already marked him down as a shameless liar anyway, and it increased their bootless ire and frustration at his untouchability. For cult members, facts pose no threat.
It is ironical that Trump has so many times referred to the accusations against him as ‘witch hunts’. He has a gift for projecting his failings and crimes on his opponents. The history of the Salem witch trials is apposite. The trials took place against a background of social and political stress. At the time of its founding in 1630, the Puritan Settlement in Massachusetts Bay Colony faced major challenges from its environment – Cotton Mather described trying to warm himself by a fire in which the water exiting the burning logs was freezing. However, the social cohesion of the colony was sustained by its thoroughgoing religious doctrine. In my judgment, Puritanism qualified as a cult.
By the beginning of the witch trials in 1680, the Puritan community in Salem was under continual attack from the north by Indians, whom Puritans considered agents of the Devil. The colonial governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony had recently been deposed and replaced by the King of England; the replacement was rejected as insufficiently Puritan. The Salem Puritan authorities felt that their power, total in the beginning of the settlement, was, after 50 years, slipping from their hands. They had failed to provide their people with enough food – it has been suggested the psychological symptoms experienced by the accused and their accusers could have resulted from the fact that their supply of stored grain had spoiled, causing it to be contaminated by a fungal neurotoxin, ergot.
Puritanism was an intensely patriarchal organization that left little agency for women and girls. It has been suggested that the intensity of patriarchy combined with the atmosphere of poorly defined social stress resulted in the hysteria of some of the women and girls who were accused of witchcraft. We can see similar issues in present day America – rural people, in particular, are seeing their traditional societies and beliefs under stress. The stressors are multiple. Since 1980 the imbalance between the wealth of ordinary people and that of the upper echelons of society has greatly increased. In order to join the upper elites, one has to acquire knowledge of modern technology. The rapidity of technological change has created a separation between those whose skill set relates to traditional occupations, which in some cases are disappearing, and those who are seen as an ‘uncaring elite’ that live in coastal cities and pursue technology-dependent occupations. Traditional patriarchy is under stress from a new understanding of gender biology and the liberating effect of technology on women and children. This is happening against a background of climate change. Hotter summers and more erratic weather in general present a social stress that cannot be fought by denial. The response, in the Puritan times and in ours, was mass hysteria. Ultimately, after so many had been impeached with increasingly baroque accusations, the scales fell from the eyes of Cotton Mather and the other principals in Massachusetts Bay Colony, and they realized that something beyond their comprehension had been going on. If something like this happens to the many Republican panjandrums who were hostile to Trump until suddenly they weren’t, perhaps we can come out of this nightmare. If not, beware. Trump would be no one without supporters who are implausibly irate, and without the help of politicians who see him as a vehicle for their own ambitions. If he evaporated tomorrow, these individuals would remain, in a political environment in which racism, sexism and politically justified violence have been now been legitimatized. If the scales do not fall, America will enter one of the darkest eras in its history.