How they will try to decide the election and what we can do about it Old Biology, New Stimuli
Daniel Kahneman, whose work in “behavioral finance” won a 2002 Nobel Prize, showed that investors are often more influenced by emotional factors than rational analysis. Well, you can call this “behavioral politics.” Even though some people will take the time to think through the positions of the candidates and make their votes based upon reason, many more will choose based upon more primitive responses.
Sigmund Freud famously said “Biology is destiny.” Even though we have thinking parts of our brains, we are still easily controlled by visceral responses from our more primitive, reactive nervous systems. Our nervous systems have been developed over eons of time to recognize and react to perceived threats with an automatic “fight or flight” response to help us to survive. Contemplating our ancestors, when they saw something threatening, like a saber-toothed tiger, I imagine the ones who survived must have had a fast “fight or flight” response. (The people, who were a little slow on their response time, probably became dinner instead of ancestors.)
And even though this primitive nervous system survival-wiring has served our family trees for millennia, modern political spin-meisters have learned how to use it to manipulate us. In fact, they have become psychological terrorists, assaulting our nervous systems with fear based ads, opponent attacking sound-bites, email smear campaigns and misleading robo-calls. All of this is to try to “frame” their opponent as some kind of threat to us. If they can succeed at implanting a fearful image or impression of their opponent in our primitive brains, they are counting on our fear reaction to motivate us to reject that candidate. We may not even consciously know why.
The Neurobiology of Fear: Waking the Tiger
There have been many recent studies of this effect. An accessible discussion can be found in the book, “Waking the Tiger, Healing Trauma” by Peter Levin. He talks about how any perceived threat or stimulated memory of trauma is like “waking the tiger” – setting off “fight or flight” alarms in our nervous systems. On this primitive level of reaction, although they may vary in intensity, all threats are fundamentally the same. Also, it is important to note, on this level, perception is reality. A perceived threat is just as real as an actual threat.
How it works: The amygdala, [uh-mig-duh-luh] an almond-sized nexus of our primitive, limbic nervous system, is “involved in signaling the cortex of motivationally significant stimuli such as those related to reward and fear, in addition to social functions such as mating.” (Source: Wikipedia.) In other words, if we see a threatening tiger coming at us, or a potential mate, the amygdala will activate all kinds of hormonal and chemical reactions in our brains to cause the appropriate survival response; to run away from the menacing tiger or advance toward the attractive potential mate.
Cranial therapist Gary Peterson describes the action this way: “The amygdala’s first option after detecting a perceived threat is to jump on the internal equivalent of the “red phone” and fire off a DANGER signal to the hypothalamus, which then fires the pituitary, which in turn fires the adrenals and that’s how the fight / flight mechanism gets triggered. Simultaneously the amygdala shoots a signal to the pre-frontal cortex (the thinking part of the brain).....more of a question.....”Hey, there is this thing going on. Is it dangerous or not?” Since this is a much slower signal, the whole fight / flight cascade is well under way before the cortex can assess the situation and give its response.”
Reactions Are Us
In our modern world, this very old survival mechanism, which has been so useful for the self-preservation and reproduction of our species for so long, is now over-stimulated, big time, on a daily basis. Advertisers focus on stimulating our pleasure and procreation responses. News organizations and political propagandists concentrate on our fear responses.
The people who run advertising agencies constantly run their ads to stimulate reactions in us: especially about pleasure and sex. For example, we are treated to lots of images on television of buff guys and super-babe girls frolicking happily on the beach. Why are they so healthy, sexy and happy? They drink beer! After we watch approximately 12,584 of these commercials during a typical football game, you can bet that we are ready to drink beer and have sex!
The people who run news organizations know that we pay the most attention and react most strongly to perceived threats; that is why their headlines are usually about something sensationally bad. Because of the reach of modern media, our environment now includes the whole world. We are fed ever-present coverage of every kind of local and global calamity. We are constantly bombarded with images and stories of potential threats to our existence: wars, terrorist acts, natural disasters and the loss of economic security. These are all threats as real to our nervous systems as a marauding tiger.
This is way more stimuli than our ancient nervous systems were designed to handle. The result is that, in terms of our nervous systems, most of the time we are really freaked out! We are, in a sense, traumatized and continuously sensitized to our environment.
Virtually everyone will react on some level, but of course every person has their own nature, history, level of sensitivity and type of reaction. We all know people, who have a “hair trigger” reaction to any threat and others who are more reserved. Different people may have individual types of reactions to the same event; confronted by an aggressive driver who cuts us off in traffic, some of us will have an angry reaction and yell at him (fight reaction). Others will seek to get away from him (flight reaction).
The Politics of Fear
The clever people who rule political campaigns know this very well. They count on the fact that our nervous systems are usually so over-stimulated and traumatized by the daily onslaught of bad news and fearful images provided by the main stream media, that if they throw more fearful images or ideas at us, it is like throwing a fire bomb at our already inflamed nervous systems. Our nervous systems will tend to explode: to react very quickly and powerfully to any perceived threat and stay in an “activated” state for some time.
It should also be mentioned that this sort of tactic does not need to focus on a candidate. An alternate line of attack, besides attempts to frame the candidates themselves as threats, is to leverage fearful situations or threatening “values” issues. As Thomas Frank says in his book, “What’s The Matter With Kansas,” “People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about.” In recent elections many people have consistently voted the opposite of their economic interests and stated positions on many issues, because they have been activated by a single “hot button values” issue they regard as a primal threat to their way of life. A prime example of this in the last presidential election was when republicans successfully activated a large number of people to turn out and vote against their own economic interests and against their stated beliefs on other issues, because the issue of gay marriage was on the ballot and that perceived threat trumped all other considerations.
Fear based stories and ads that air just before an election date are especially effective; like the famous “Willy Horton” ad about a rapist released from prison the republicans used to swing the 1988 election or the recent ad used by the Clinton campaign before this year’s Pennsylvania primary, with images of Osama Bin Laden, Pearl Harbor, etc. . The message was, “It’s scary out there, better vote for me.”
We Want Change, Or Do We?
The only way the current candidates have emerged out of the past boring (one old, white, Ivy League, establishment guy vs. another) sameness of the American political process is because current polls show that over 80% of us American citizens think that the country is headed in the wrong direction and needs to change course. We like the idea of change, but can we handle the reality?
The famous tennis player/philosopher, Andre Agassi, once proclaimed, “Image is everything.” He was on to the point that for our nervous systems, perception is reality. On that level, image is more important than reason. As explored in the book “The Image Is Everything Presidency” by Gilbert St. Clair and Robert Wright, the political spin-meister’s ultimate goal is to convince us that their candidate can provide leadership, even if in reality they have only a limited ability to affect outcomes. They emphasize that image creation is a serious business with critically important implications for the success of any politician.
Our political parties, through the primary process, have provided leading candidates, who both represent change, but in very different ways. The republicans have moved slightly away from their standard “John Wayne” prototype candidate (Reagan/Bush), because George Bush has sullied the image. So, now they have gone to more of a “Top Gun - Maverick” model. (At least that is the image they are trying to project to independents and democrats). Even though he is an old white guy, at least McCain is not Ivy League. He is a little edgy and different. He represents change, but not toooo much.
The democrats have outdone themselves this time, providing us with a candidate, who not only offers dramatic alternatives to current administration policies, but is also easily identifiable as very different. Obama is Ivy League to be sure, but he is also a multi-racial man from a modest and multi-national background, who is more of a “Superman” prototype: kind of alien, but with extraordinary powers.
Hope vs. Fear
This election started out with such hopeful feelings, but now it is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. The main-stream-media love to attack our nervous systems with daily controversies and fears. No matter how much we are repulsed by the tawdry spectacle, since we are hard-wired to pay attention to disturbing things in our environment, we keep paying attention to it.
The republicans all started out in their primary promoting their ideas, then predictably turned to nasty attacks on each other, but that was several months ago and I cannot quite remember it. Now, their main platform seems to be fear, fear and more fear: possible terrorist attacks, loss of our way of life, Obama the elitist/socialist/black radical/terrorist and on and on.
On the democratic side, as soon as Clinton and Obama emerged as the two front runners and it became obvious that they were very close on the issues, the campaign turned personal. After falling behind, the Clinton campaign threw the “kitchen sink,” the toilet bowl, the whole septic tank and every other foul thing they could think up against Obama, I know my amygdala was totally activated, because I used to like Clinton, but now I cringe whenever I see her or hear her speak. I’ve even found myself yelling at her image on T.V. (fight response) or I just turned it off or left the room (flight response).
And many of Clinton’s supporters have expressed the same level of trauma and reaction about the media, the DNC and Obama, claiming many real and perceived slights and treacheries against her. Many democrats have definitely been traumatized by the primary election; so much so that they are saying, “If my first choice candidate doesn’t get the nomination, I’m just not going to vote or I will vote republican to punish the democrats.”
Known Trauma or New Threat? You Choose!
During this election cycle, the media has been talking all about questions like, “Why can’t Obama win working class whites? Why does McCain give many people “the creeps?” And some of us voters have been wondering, “Why do we tolerate endless reruns of scary images, like Reverend Wright’s ranting?” With all of the crazy name-calling and fear mongering of the campaign, why do some negatives “stick?”
McCain and Obama are both exceptional public servants with unique qualifications and their own well-reasoned positions on the issues of the day. However, they can also be “framed” or described in wild and scary ways to activate fear responses in us. In fact, they can be used as exceptional examples of two very fearful perceived threats:
McCain = stimulated memory of past trauma
Obama = new, unknown threat.
Even though we (at least some of us) like to think of ourselves as reasoning people, who dispassionately contemplate the weighty challenges of the world and vote for a candidate based upon his or her positions on the issues, the election will probably come down to this. How many people will vote for Obama, because they are afraid of McCain, because they think he is like Bush: an old, out-of-touch conservative who will start wars and ruin the country? Or how many people will vote for McCain, because they are afraid of Obama, because he is so new and different that under that cool, reasoned exterior, he might be some kind of radical socialist/Muslim terrorist/alien, who will threaten our way of life?
I’m in the “older white male” demographic the political parties seem to be worried about attracting. And I can report that as much as I have studied the positions of the candidates on the issues of the day and sought to understand their characters and values, I find my fear reactions are still easily activated by these negative associations about them.
McCain: Shall I “Cling” To Him?
I count myself as an independent voter. In the past, I’ve voted for democrats, republicans and independents. I’m not one of those people, who would never vote for someone of another race or age group. I like to think of myself as open-minded, but like everyone else (not just some people in Pennsylvania) when I feel threatened, I will tend to cling to my self-identified values and groups: my religious affiliation, regional identity, perceived economic class and so on.
These deep, sometimes unconscious “my group/other” identifications are part of my survival nervous-system wiring and can easily be stimulated with attack ads about some general risk (terrorists, socialists, black radicals) or some associated “values” issue (gay marriage, immigration). Then, as sure as my ancestors ran from a tiger or a group from a hostile clan, those basic fear reactions will over-ride more rational considerations, such as the candidates’ proposed solutions to the challenges we face.
So, when I feel threatened, I might tend to cling to McCain. He is an old white guy like me and seems like “one of the guys” joking around and all. Like most Americans, I respond positively to his history as a war hero and long record of public service. He is a known and that is comforting.
But on the other hand, what gets my fear most activated about McCain are pictures of him with images of the war or anything to do with the current administration. President Bush might be the nicest person in the universe, but after the traumatic events of the last 7 years, my nervous system has had it with him and anyone associated with him.
The democrats are now promoting this fear-based theme that I better not vote for McCain, because he represents a reminder and a continuation of the trauma we have experienced during the reign of the current administration: irresponsible wars, economic ruin for everyone but the rich, abuse of power, diminished American status in the world, etc.
McCain has tried to distance himself somewhat from the current administration, but it’s a tough sale. The “maverick” and “straight talk” brands he cultivated in the past have not held up to his recent speeches and actions; voting with the current administration right down the line in recent years and pandering to the right wing base.
Obama: Is He “Change I Can Believe In?”
Obama is something else. His campaign is all about “change” and change is by definition something new and different. To my mind, this sounds good, but to my nervous system, this sounds scary. The primaries were one thing, it was easy to like the concept of change, but the winner of the general election gets to actually govern. What will that really mean?
Obama has tried to present himself as different in a good way: transcending the old divisions and representing a hopeful, new way of conducting government. This has been very inspiring to me and this stance certainly represents meaningful change for the country and perhaps the world.
And even though I really admire Obama as a person, the way he has conducted himself and the reasoned positions he has taken on the issues, the Clinton campaign, the republicans and the main-stream media have really worked to get me stirred-up about him. They have skillfully hammered my nervous system with the drum-beat that he is so new and unknown that there might be some hidden danger; like when Clinton said, he is not a Muslim “as far as I know.” She might as well have said, “Watch out amygdala!”
Even though my reasoning brain has been saying, “I like the ideas he is representing,” my nervous system has been saying, “Aha! I knew there was something funny about that Obama guy! The Wright video showed us what might be his true nature underneath his calm and reasoned exterior: possibly some sneaky angry black man or Muslim terrorist or alien dressed up as a mild-mannered senator. On that level, I wonder, as John Steward facetiously, but tellingly asked Obama on The Daily Show, “Is your plan to enslave the white race?” (For the record, he said “No”).
That kind of nervous system dissonance is why Obama can’t shake off the seemingly silly questions about not wearing a Flag Pin to show his patriotism or if he is really a Christian, etc. It’s because many people have a deep-seated fear of anyone they perceive as “unknown” or “too different.” That’s why the silly questions “stick;” because they point to an underlying fear.
“Studies in 2004 and 2006 showed that normal subjects exposed to images of frightened faces or faces of people from another race will show increased activity of the amygdala (fight or flight response), even if that exposure is subliminal.”(Source: Wikipedia). So, you have the challenge of Obama’s “otherness.” Throw in associations to incendiary people like black radicals or weather underground terrorists and we’re scared up a tree!
A perfect example of that kind of “framing” was portrayed by the recent New Yorker magazine cover cartoon. It satirically showed a depiction of how the republicans’ have sought to instill an image of Obama as a flag burning Muslim terrorist and his wife as a black militant. It may have been an attempt at satire, but since it did not show any context, such as a Rush Limbaugh head with a thought bubble of the scene, it will probably do Obama a lot of damage. Because most people have emotional reactions, which are more basic and powerful than their thoughts, there will be many more people who will see that image and have a visceral, primitive, fear reaction, than there will be people who will “get the joke” and laugh at the ironic portrayal.
Evolve or Die? Functioning Beyond Reaction
This election is a great way to test our evolutionary mettle. Even with the constant assaults on our nervous systems, there are things we can do, as individuals and as a society, to enable us to function at a level beyond our fear reactions.
The more we become aware of our reactions, the more we can be independent of them. The awareness of reaction automatically creates a moment of separation and allows time for the thinking parts of our brains to act independently of the reaction. Even though we have this amygdala reaction problem, unlike other animals, humans have more active frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex. If our fear reaction is not overwhelming to us, we can take a moment to think: to consider the situation, evaluate our reactions and give ourselves more alternatives for action. We can ask an important question.” Is this truly a threat?”
“The so-called executive functions of the frontal lobes (of the brain) involve the ability to recognize future consequences resulting from current actions, to choose between good and bad actions (or better and best), override and suppress unacceptable social responses, and determine similarities and differences between things or events.”(Source: Wikipedia).
Gary Peterson, who addresses this neurobiology in his new book, “Settling,” points out that “some of the latest scientific research has shown that the most newly developed refinements to the nervous system are wired for love, attachment, bonding and cooperation, rather than blowing the hell out of each other. The trick is to get enough neural pathways laid down from the pre-frontal cortex to the older structures (amygdala, hypothalamus, etc.) to get them oriented more to present-time experience rather than old trauma experience; sort of re-setting them to the possibilities in each new moment, rather than the habituation of old reactions.” Yes, neural networks are constantly being built and reinforced in our brains. Just reading this article has (hopefully) caused some connections to be strengthened.
Society also provides opportunities for neural pathway growth. Cultural, political and religious traditions and other affinity group bonds provide patterns of thinking and acting beyond base reactions. There have been whole hierarchies of restrictions, taboos and laws developed for this purpose. Even though they help us to function in society, paradoxically, these canons sometimes form the basis of new reaction patterns.
Perhaps the social networking of the internet is helping us to build new neural pathways we will need to survive in the new, globally connected world. If enough of us can somehow transcend not only our basic, instinctual visceral reactions, but also our old limiting beliefs, and become open to exploring new ideas, we might be able to create the changes in American politics and the world that we will need. If we use some of the newer evolutionary functions of our brains, we might, as a population, make some reasonable choices and survive.
Once we are aware of our reactions, we can use some counter-measures to calm them and give our reasoning cortexes a chance to function. When we become aware that our nervous systems are being activated, we can take some time to pray, meditate, play some soothing music, get out into nature, exercise, get body-work, knit: anything to unwind the trauma of modern life and blunt the added arousals of the campaigns. I’ve seen a film about animals like impala, who have escaped the chase of a hungry tiger, shake their bodies all over to release the tension in their nervous systems. A wise old man once advised me to do the same thing and it seems pretty effective. (Caution, this looks pretty silly when done in public).
When we, as a society, become aware of what can stimulate our basic fight / flight reactions, I wonder, are we going to continue to be pushed around by the psychological terrorist spin-meisters and our amygdala reactions to their fear mongering ads and innuendos? Are we going to continue to jump to conclusions, then look around to find facts to support our conclusions? Or, can we instead achieve some inner calm, contemplate the facts, recognize the future consequences of our choices and reason out a new conclusion?
We are confronted with an historic opportunity. We say we want change, but can we handle the stress of it? Have the individual and collective nervous systems and brains of Americans developed to the point where we can handle our reactions of fight or flight and reasonably consider candidates as different as McCain and Obama and what they hold for our future? We shall see.
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