Even at the heights of our enchantment and homage to the charismatic leader, the discerning part of our psyche, though allowed a temporary freedom and suspension from judgment, still whispers to us that something make-believe is going on. To prevent the truth from breaking through, we search out all those affirmations from our environment that will support the illusion and neutralize the threat of any eruption from our more critical faculties; we want the play to continue, we want the show to go on. And so we derive reassurance from the crowd at political rallies, we take comfort from the media that reinforce our seduction; we help disguise those elements of pretence that threaten the play and we cast out the cynic who would disturb the glamourization.
— Irvine Schiffer, Charisma: A Psychoanalytic Look at Mass Society (1973), p. 52
This passage highlights confirmation bias and explains the role of, say, Fox News (and its imitators / daughter cells, Newsmax, OANN, etc.). The function of the network is to prop up this fantasy land, and the method by which it aims to do this is suggestion and flattery. It tells people they’re right; then it tells people what to think and believe. The flattery lets down the drawbridge, which allows the entire ordnance of manufactured beliefs to be moved into the fortress of the mind without regard.
Fox has figured out the formula. In that scenario, the thought movement of the listener would follow a routinized or predictable route or path. This recalls Hypnotic Realities (1976) where Milton Erickson spoke of knowing what the next natural association the human mind tends toward:
Given a certain stimulus, it is useful for him [the hypnotist] to know that a certain response will follow. Or, if he can evoke one piece of behavior, it is important for him to know that another piece of behavior is closely related to it and is likely to occur. Thus, he can use one stimulus to evoke a certain response and then use that response to evoke, by association, another specific response. (p. 27)
This is like using probabilistic methods or measures to predict the mind’s next step; the overlaid suggestion transfers power of sequencing or of ordering those thoughts to an outside caretaker. A transference of power (in this instance, brainpower) is a transfer of authority. It’s an internal handing over of the reins.
In “Why Inspiring Stories Make Us React: The Neuroscience of Narrative,” Paul Zak explained that “compelling narratives cause oxytocin release”—the “love” or bonding hormone—“and have the power to affect our attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.”
[T]he change in oxytocin was associated with concern for the characters in the story…. If you pay attention to the story and become emotionally engaged with the story’s characters, then it is as if you have been transported into the story’s world. (pp. 6-7)
All the more so if the story told is, or is taken suggestively to be, one’s own.
A person is naturally narcissistic because she or he knows her or his own story. A preference for the immediate personal experience—that is a knowledge that feels right, because it can be called up in memory and experienced as the self. It has its own unique familiarity.
This may go toward explaining that overwriting of self in revivalist religion, where conversion processes are focused on bodily sensation as a means of feeling / knowing the self. But this is, in that context, acknowledged as God / the godhead, as distinguished from the self.
Due to being told to split this idea and to call it God (as communicated in the religious ritual)—is that person being conditioned to respond to the reified signal “God”? The preacher says, “God says”—does that signal the listener to automatically generate or recall that state of mind, that split-off self-from-self? Is that not unlike a hypnosis signal?
Such an evocation can be seen as doing something so similar as to be the same as what Fox has perfected.
In this light, the appeal to immediate personal experience, plus the praise of being right, may lead to a state of mind open to suggestion.
“[P]eople may be consistently more egocentric when reasoning about God’s beliefs than when reasoning about other people’s beliefs.”
—Nicholas Epley et al., “Believers’ estimates of God’s beliefs are more egocentric than estimates of other people’s beliefs,” PNAS (2009), Vol. 106, No. 51, p. 21533
Is being controlled so a good facsimile (but false recognition) of a strong bodily attraction? Merton Gill and Margaret Brenman stated in Hypnosis and Related States (1959)1 that the state of mind resembles infatuation / crush / lust / amor—Is this the hopped-up-on-the-Spirit body rush that these ministerial techniques are meant to evoke?2
Not just gratification through narcissism, not just the pleasure of self-righteousness (a form of satisfaction, cerebral), but also this physiological intoxication—this, it would seem, is a recipe for domination. The bargain is to permit oneself to be entirely opened up to suggestion by an outside caretaker.
That’s a part of the bargain never explicitly bartered between priest and parishioner. Those terms of the relationship are never negotiated. Yet it is an exchange, just the same. It is a transfer of cognitive authority.3
This may or may not extend to committing behaviors—those would be under a specific mental lockbox, one might say—but the superego and maybe also the id would be open to the overwriting process.
Incursions from both of these forces would constitute a double-pronged attack on the ego and could lead directly to a bullying of and reshaping of the ego. It could not help but respond to overmastering criticism from the superego as well as to the id’s pressure to indulge in instinctual or impulsive reactions and engagements in thought. These engagements could be conceptual ideas, direct body states, or affective emotions like lust, anger, ecstasy, or even disgust.
Religion and certain in-groups, especially bigotry and exclusivity groups, at times sell disgust to the people, masked either in self-righteousness or the entirely canny. (Here we have stories such as Sodom and Gomorrah, with its compressed lesson of punishment for “unclean” actions; or tales of how certain ethnic or racial groups may have a unique smell.) This disgust is interpreted bodily, experienced through the insula.
The insula is readapted hardware, a brain region that originally coded visceral states like vertigo, taste, smell, sensation of heartbeat, sensation of temperature. Modern humans have repurposed this hidden gray matter, letting us express and interpret when something gives us a gut punch, turns the stomach, leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, and related metaphors.
This is a body state. The reverends are evoking this sensation over and over in their sermons about purity. They coat the negative, bitter-sour emotion in a candy coating of self-righteousness. Those who use the reverend’s techniques, such as totalitarian leaders, do the same with their converts. Hate groups, too.
This leads directly to perpetrators. Something about disgust triggers something very primal, something primordial.
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