Tristan Harris, a former Google engineer who now advocates for ethical social media algorithms, coined the term “race to the bottom of the brain stem” to describe how social media companies “hack” our brains to make us angry or outraged, which keeps us on their websites for longer thereby increasing the companies’ advertising revenue. This metaphor describes the phenomenon of social media companies learning that certain types of content stimulate the amygdala – the part of the brain that regulates emotional responses, and fear in particular – which reliably creates “engagement” (i.e. clicks, likes and responses) thereby increasing “user time on site” and boosting their revenue.
A similar dynamic is also playing out in legacy media, with previously reputable newspapers incentivised to pump out click-bait articles with provocative headlines that pull readers in so that, to paraphrase Patrick Le Lay, they can sell as much of our available brain space as possible to advertisers. Critics of the mainstream media forget that the alternative media follows a similar dynamic (but without the professional deontology and institutional memory to keep the most pernicious behaviour in check), but that’s a conversation for another day...
The argument I want to make today is how political demagogues similarly weaponize voter frustration for political gain, which has the side-effect of increasing polarisation and ultimately damaging democracy. Populists manipulate us through stories – sometimes anecdotes, sometimes outright lies – that provoke our most primal, unconscious concerns. These are our moral foundations, which sociologists generally divide into five or six categories: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation, and sometimes, Liberty/Oppression. It is generally understood that the Care/Harm–Fairness/Cheating axis is more important to left-wing/liberal voters, while Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation are more important to right-wing/conservative voters. Liberty/Oppression can be important to both conservatives and liberals in different contexts.
When far-right candidates stoke up anger about “immigrant hordes” taking our jobs and committing crime, this galvanises voters’ innate concerns about loyalty, cheating, and authority. When immigrants are painted as part of an out-group competing in a zero-sum competition for limited resources, conservatives’ natural in-group loyalty will cause them to feel hostility to immigrants and the politicians who let them in. This is exacerbated with the issue of illegal immigrants, who are seen as cheating the system and subverting authority. Far-left candidates wield the opposite argument and appeal to their electorate’s sense of care and fairness by characterising any real or perceived societal inequality as the privileged class abusing their power to maintain a permanent underclass. Libertarians on both sides of the political spectrum have made extreme claims that appeal to citizen’s sense Liberty/Oppression, such as how vaccine policies foreshadow a future social credit score system and are a slippery slope to tyranny.
However, in all these cases, although their proponents may be eloquent and their arguments often contain a kernel of truth, the claims of populists are inflammatory and their proposals are generally unworkable. In periods of political and social upheaval, populists often set the agenda: witness Le Pen, father and daughter alike, repeatedly ensuring that crime remains a key talking point at successive elections. Donald Trump is a master in the genre who, despite his intellectual limitations, managed to provoke half the population into a fit of rage while gaslighting the other half into believing he was a political genius and/or their literal saviour.
Faced with simplistic arguments – or opponents such as Trump who simply confuse the issue by making so many contradictory claims that it becomes difficult to follow any given subject – it is difficult for more nuanced candidates to be audible. The economy and society more widely are impacted by a functionally infinite number of factors, which means that implementing public policy is an incredibly complex task, made harder in an environment of self-serving partisan politics where any proposed policy or bill is simultaneously decried as both catastrophic and not going far enough. Democracy works through a process of incremental change, trial and error, with checks and balances that prevent sudden, radical change. This means that democracies change slowly – too slowly sometimes, to be sure – but they are also a safeguard against the unintended consequences of the kind of huge policy decisions that occur in autocracies. A failure to accept that reality is a refusal of the democratic process writ large.
There is much to be angry and frustrated about in the world (when has this not been true?), and it’s not that the political extremes don't have a role to play; progress is often made thanks to those who are willing to push the envelope, and most political and social change is initially seen as extreme. Moreover, politics is by its very nature polemic and argumentative, but there needs to be a commitment to good faith exchange. Many politicians are simply not committed to that kind of discourse, so voters must be mindful of whether people running for elected office are trying to manipulate them. As Eisenhower said, “the middle of the road is all the usable surface. The extremes of right and left are in the gutters.” If a political speech makes you feel enervated or angry, consider that a politician may be trying to tickle your brainstem for their own desire for political advancement and power.