Yet one remained an enthusiastic collaborator
Anne Applebaum in 2020 on collaboration and resistance:
Separately, each man’s story makes sense. But when examined together, they require some deeper explanation. Until March 1949, Leonhard’s and Wolf’s biographies were strikingly similar. Both grew up inside the Soviet system. Both were educated in Communist ideology, and both had the same values. Both knew that the party was undermining those values. Both knew that the system, allegedly built to promote equality, was deeply unequal, profoundly unfair, and very cruel. Like their counterparts in so many other times and places, both men could plainly see the gap between propaganda and reality. Yet one remained an enthusiastic collaborator, while the other could not bear the betrayal of his ideals. Why?
It’s a question that never really gets answered.
One possible answer I think is mostly useless: that X has more courage than Y. There’s more to it than that, and what the more may be is an interesting puzzle.
Czesław Miłosz, a Nobel Prize–winning Polish poet, wrote about collaboration from personal experience. An active member of the anti-Nazi resistance during the war, he nevertheless wound up after the war as a cultural attaché at the Polish embassy in Washington, serving his country’s Communist government. Only in 1951 did he defect, denounce the regime, and dissect his experience. In a famous essay, The Captive Mind, he sketched several lightly disguised portraits of real people, all writers and intellectuals, each of whom had come up with different ways of justifying collaboration with the party. Many were careerists, but Miłosz understood that careerism could not provide a complete explanation. To be part of a mass movement was for many a chance to end their alienation, to feel close to the “masses,” to be united in a single community with workers and shopkeepers.
That’s the kind of answer that’s more interesting.
You know what I’m thinking about, of course – the chronic question of why so many otherwise reasonable/skeptical people have embraced a loony fantasy-based ideology, and done so with such zeal and venom.
This is why courage is irrelevant. It takes more than fear of ostracism to explain the collapse.
IMO, related to why people join cults… people don’t join cults out of fear – although that might play into why they don’t leave them. The cult belief offers them something, and not just material gain.
And in many cases, they have to give up material success to be part of the cult; they still do it. Cults do have a lot of ways to keep people under their influence, not limited to group peer pressure, fasting, and music, but they still have to get them in first.
‘ To be part of a mass movement was for many a chance to end their alienation, to feel close to the “masses”, ‘
See “The True Believer” by Eric Hoffer, which I recently read for my book club.
copyright 1951
exactly, which is why they offer something much deeper… not merely community, but a sense of purpose and righteousness, a sense that you are superior. See also: conspiracy theories.
Of course genderism isn’t so much a “mass movement” as it is a movement forced upon the “masses” by way of forced teaming and captured institutions. They’re at no risk of being plowed under if they’re driving the plow. So much the better for one’s self image if you can claim that resistance is bigotry.
Having fooled themselves that transgenderism is progressive, they can no longer see how much they resemble the forces of compulsory, civic Christianity, and that the ubiquitous “Pride Progress” flag is as much a symbol of a hegemonic imposition as the religious Right’s Ten Commandments plopped on courthouse lawns, or posted in classrooms. Both are the symbols of religious belief systems attempting to turn the commons into a totalizing, state-enforced, intellectual and political monoculture, to which all must give public obeisance or face ostracism, or worse. Questions, criticisms, and pushback are signs of irredeemable Evil, rather than principled defence against the erosion of rights and freedoms. You don’t make deals with the Devil. “NO DEBATE!”
Our erstwhile skeptics, like Republican Dominionists, have decided that the righteousness of their movement means that, so long as it is in the service of She/Her, they can do no wrong. They can say “Be kind,” and “KILL TERFS” in the same breath, with a straight face, without any thought of inconsistency or hypocrisy. After all, they’re fighting for a “marginalized, vulnerable community,” despite the fact that a movement that has succeeded in taking control of large swathes of government, business, the courts, the police, the schools, unions, news media, etc., can no longer convincingly claim to be “oppressed.” But don’t try pointing that out. You don’t have to worry about that sort of thing when you’re on the Right Side of History.
I thought this was helpful:
https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/
I think rationalizing fits better than justifying (when there is no justification to be had). Assuming they gave it any serious thought at all. Groupthink and tribalism are largely emotionally driven.
Continued thoughts from above.
Like Christian Dominionists, genderists will claim that the removal and rollback of their unearned, unaccountable power, privilege, and influence is a denial of their “rights”. I imagine that when you’ve grown accustomed to the high ground, an enforced return to a level playing field is going to feel like persecution. Imagine, high Party officials being forced to stand in the same food lines as the proles they’re supposed to be leading!
One difference between the two movements, I suspect, is that Christian Dominionism might have more actual devotees and fewer hangers-on. They might profess belief in gender ideology, but the number of “trans allies” probably vastly outnumbers the number of actual trans-identified people for whom they claim to be fighting. Those “rights” they’re helping to win aren’t for themselves, but for “oppressed others.” Such a noble cause, as long as someone else is paying the price. Better to be on the juggernaut than under it. Take that pleasure of superiority away and they’ll squeal like the “oppressed” Christans they mock. Trans allies have a lot less fun riding the gravy train if there’s no gravy. And no train. Righteousness for its own sake isn’t nearly as rewarding without being able to enjoy some tasty woke cookies, while basking in the reflected glory of fighting the Good Fight. Victory without effort is a lot more fun, and less work than effort without victory.
Czeslaw Milosz was a great poet, and his books on pre-war Poland and Lithuania, and what happened after the war with the Communist takeover should be required reading. I have admired his work for years.
Anne Applebaum has an article in The Atlantic just out, in which she describes the chaos that ensued in Denmark after what was clearly a very threatening call from Trump to the Danish Prime Minister. She had arranged to meet with Danish politicians in Copenhagen, but meetings were all cancelled. Her account begins:
“What did Donald Trump say over the phone to Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, on Wednesday? I don’t know which precise words he used, but I witnessed their impact. I arrived in Copenhagen the day after the call—the subject, of course, was the future of Greenland, which Denmark owns and which Trump wants—and discovered that appointments I had with Danish politicians were suddenly in danger of being canceled. Amid Frederiksen’s emergency meeting with business leaders, her foreign minister’s emergency meeting with party leaders, and an additional emergency meeting of the foreign-affairs committee in Parliament, everything, all of a sudden, was in complete flux.”
It’s tribalism all the way down. My endless fascination with Scientologists taught me that attachment to a tribe is one of the great instincts that drives human behaviour — just as great as the sexual and pair-bonding instincts are. What the Scientologists demonstrate so vividly is the capacity to completely block out obvious facts if they pose a threat to their sense of belonging within their tribe. The Xenu space alien story is possibly the most obvious pile of bullshit ever conceived, and yet perfectly rational people will find ways to avoid dispelling it, for the sake of staying in the tribe.
Tribalism is the whole reason the myriad sports teams and sports stadiums and sports bars and sports television channels and billions upon billions of dollars in sports team branded clothing exists, for one thing. Football and hockey and soccer are pageants of warring tribes.
It’s the whole reason religion exists, too.
Same for youth subcultures like goth and grunge and hippies and punks.
Same for office and corporate culture, with its cringey jargon and its team-building exercises and its tedious gossipy politics.
Of course, most of those tribes are benign, most of the time. Sports fandom does occasionally turn into violent soccer hooliganism; corporate cultures become monstrously corrupt sometimes (Enron, anyone?); youth subgroups can become criminal gangs; and we all know that religion can turn people murderous.
As for why some people stick with their tribe after it turns dark while other people have the courage to resist, I wonder if it’s got to do with how one learns to cope with rejection in childhood. Perhaps there’s a parallel with attachment theory. Attachment theory says that the other major instinct that drives us to behave irrationally much of the time — human dating behaviour — splits people into four very distinct groups (secure, anxious, fearfully avoidant, and dismissively avoidant), and the factor that sets us off on one of the four trajectories is the early relationship between the infant and primary parent (almost always the mother). The brain wires up its “relationship management strategy” in one of four ways, based on the subtle cues it receives in those crucial first interactions with the mother.
I suspect there’s a “tribal in-group management strategy” that our brains wire up in early childhood, too. We learn early on how to navigate group dynamics — which things one should and should not say and do in order to avoid social punishment or even ostracization from our peers. From my own experience, I had an extremely atypical childhood: I was an absolute outcast. I was a poor kid in the ghetto who took the bus across town to the good, rich kid french-immersion school, which meant that I was absolutely despised by both my hard-knocks, underprivileged neighbours and my sheltered, overprivileged schoolmates. The physical abuse I endured from the neighbourhood boys and the psychological abuse I endured from the mean girls at school both took their tolls on me, but they immunized me against the drive to fit in, which I could clearly see had such a stranglehold on the other kids’ behaviour.
I learned not to fear the social cost of saying or doing something that would put me at odds with my peers. I suspect that ostracization is something I’m completely unafraid of — to this day, I just as quickly step into groups as part ways with them — because I never found belonging within a tribe in my childhood. I have absolutely no fear of telling a boss if I think something’s unjust at work, or walking away from a “scene” that I think is taking a wrong turn (See ya later, gay village community! Sayonara, “gender critical Twittersphere!” Adios, New Atheism!).
I suspect that for a lot of the people who stick with their tribes even when they’ve gone dark, they’re following a course of behaviour that they unconsciously trained themselves to act out in those early days of childhood play, learning to navigate the schoolyard social dynamics, and training themselves to avoid falling out with the tribe at all costs. I suspect they don’t even know that they’re doing it. I suspect all those so-called “skeptics” who’ve gone mad with gender nonsense don’t even realize that what drives their behaviour is an unconscious fear of being kicked out of the playground, cast off like a primordial ape, left to fend for oneself in the wilderness of the savanna.
Arty:
Banishment from the tribe, getting thrown off the playground and left to fend for oneself in the wilderness, was a death sentence in ancestral conditions, and our brains are highly attuned to avoid that. It’s the basic fear, which Lifton identifies as a primary component of thought reform:
When the choice is between annihilation and saying some words or believing nonsense, our brains will usually opt to continue our existence. Despite this being a universal human trait, the mere suggestion that people’s adoption of nonsensical beliefs might partly result from the basic fear is often seen as an attack on their mental capacity. It’s like you’re accusing them of being weak minded or stupid.
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Thanks for the Applebaum in Copenhagen item, Tim.
There were lots of places in the not-too-distant past, and far too many in the present, where failure to say the right words, or profess belief in the right things ended with torture and or death. People born into societies in which there are institutions wielding the power of life or death in the service of the furtherance and defence of dogma have little choice in the matter. One might think of the Catholic Church at the height of its temporal power, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its satellites until 1989, North Korea, or the Chinese Communist Party today. People under these regimes weren’t recruited or lured into these ideological systems. They were just born in the wrong place and the wrong time, somewhere where these structures already existed, where they were formed around and under them, or places which were taken over by invaders who imposed them upon the conquered.
In contrast, skeptics and atheists who have taken up the banner of trans “rights” volunteered for the job. Nobody held guns to their heads; it was not a matter of life and death. Granted, once in the fold, leaving will trigger those mechanisms of self-defence intended to avoid becoming an outcast, but joining in the first place presumably didn’t, unless it was as part of the unthinking adoption of beliefs that others had already decided for them were part of the “progressive” package. Then we have the anxiety of potential ostracism if belief and allegience are withheld. Perhaps one of the forks in the road was the divide between “dictionary atheism” and “atheism plus” with the former requiring nothing but the refusal to believe in gods, while the latter led to the all-absorbing purity spiral of the Omnicause. This is a problem when you outsource your moral judgement, or get your beliefs as part of a group combo meal, rather than à la carte. No substitutions, no exceptions.
Not that I have any illusions that there are any belief systems completely immune from the lure of totalitarian tendencies, but genderism has certainly shown such a proclivity in its use of the power it has been able to acquire so far. I have no doubt that that tendency would become more prononced if it were to become more powerful still.
Is it likely to become more powerful still though? I suppose the more institutionally powerful totalitarians could find some sort of accomodation but I don’t see why they would. The trannies have lost completely, they just haven’t noticed their legs getting cut out from under them.
Nobody held guns to the heads of the Scientologists, either. But they didn’t sign up for the Xenu story knowingly. It’s a bait-and-switch.
What gets people to join the Scientology tribe are positive feelings: love-bombings, therapeutic talk therapy sessions, spa treatments, a status ladder to climb with continual rewards for moving up, and a grand life purpose: you’re taught that you’re on a mission to save the world from the forces of the Bad Tribe who are everywhere, out to corrupt us. By the time you learn what the Scientologists actually believe, you’ve fully identified as a member of the tribe, and for some, once a tribal identity locks in, it’s almost impossible to break it. (That there is what I suspect is a mechanism that develops in certain people more strongly than others, based on childhood experience, not unlike people’s divergent romantic relationship styles: some people become romantically attached quickly, then become anxiously preoccupied with keeping the couple together, then they struggle terribly when relationship ends; others go through breakups and forge new relationships relatively easily.)
I think what gets people to join the trans-women-are-women tribe is usually positive feelings associated with gay and lesbian rights: the glitter and rainbows, the joyous parades, the cool characters in the movies and TV, and most of all, the sense of victory over the forces of the bad tribe: enlightenment over ignorance, love over hate… Hence the co-opted rainbow flags, and slogans like “No LGB without the T.” By the time they learn that they’re supposed to pretend biology is a right-wing conspiracy, it’s too late. They’ve fallen in love with the tribe and like a cheating lover, they just can’t quit it.
With the skeptics, I suspect there’s more emphasis on their supposed intellectual superiority to their Bad Tribe — the religious — which is why they tend to put more emphasis on the supposed intellectual stupidity of thinking sex/”gender” is simple and binary, rather than it being, according to their tribe, much complimacated and sooper deep. The reward of being in the skeptics tribe was always a sense of intellectual superiority. The fact that believing in gender woo makes them look, from the outside looking in, like the stupidest dupes in the world is, ironically, the main thing that frightens them away from quitting the tribe: as long as you stay inside the bubble, you’re part of Team Smarter Than Everyone Else. But once you leave, you’ll have to reckon with having actually been taken by a con that’s almost as embarrassing as Scientology.
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Once again, I think cognitive dissonance is a major part of the explanation. The pyramid metaphor from Mistakes mere made (but not by me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson is instructive: Imagine two people standing right next to each other on the top of a tall pyramid and trying to decide which way to go down (the sides of the pyramid representing different answers to some problem or dilemma). At this point no option may appear obviously better than any other, and none of our two test persons may feel too confident about the way to proceed. Even if they end up choosing opposite routes it may have more to do with a temporary mood or whim than any strong disagreement in principle. But once a choice is made, you have a stake in defending it. And the further down one side of the pyramid you get, the harder it gets to turn back without loss of face. In our metaphor we can see how these two people – who were initially standing side by side – end up very far apart by the time they get to the bottom.