George Monbiot: Demagogues thrive by whipping up our fury. Here’s how to thwart them
By understanding the
psychological buttons they’re pressing, we can stop demagogues from destroying
our democracy Is this democracy’s
death spiral? Are we falling, in this and other countries, into a lethal cycle
of fury and reaction, that blocks the reasoned conversation on which civic life
depends? In every age there
have been political hucksters, using aggression, lies and outrage to drown out
reasoned argument. But not since the 1930s have so many succeeded. Trump,
Johnson, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Scott Morrison, Rodrigo Duterte,
Nicolas Maduro, Viktor Orban and many others have discovered that the digital
age offers rich pickings. The anger and misunderstand-ing that social media
generates, exacerbated by troll factories, bots and covertly-funded
political advertising, spills
into real life.
Today, politicians and
commentators speak a language of violence that was unthinkable a few years ago.
In the UK, Boris Johnson mocks
the memory of the murdered MP Jo Cox. Nigel Farage, talking of civil
servants, promises
that “once Brexit’s done, we will take the knife to them.” Brendan
O’Neill, editor of the magazine Spiked, that has
received funding from the Koch brothers, told
the BBC that there should be riots over Brexit’s delay. They must all
know, particularly in view of the threats
and assaults suffered by female MPs, that violent language licences
violence. But these statements seem perfectly pitched to trigger unreasoning
aggression.
Surely voters must now
wake from this nightmare, dismiss those who have manufactured our crises, and
restore the peaceful, reasoned politics on which our security depends?
Unfortunately, it might not be as simple as that. Several fascinating
branches of neuroscience and psychology suggest that threat and stress in
public life are likely to be self-perpetuating. The more threatened we feel,
the more our minds are overwhelmed by involuntary reflexes and unthinking
reaction.
The strangest of these
effects is described
by the neuroscientists Stephen Porges and Gregory Lewis. They show that
when we feel threatened, we literally cannot hear calm, conversational voices....
