The Dehumanizing Metaphor: The One Weird Trick that Autocrats Use to Hardwire Hate and Division into Their Followers

If you haven’t noticed, it is a presidential election year. Well, truth-be-told, it has been a presidential two-year since presidential elections now start a full year before the first party nominating primaries are held. The prolonged presidential campaigns means that we are all exposed to excessive amounts of campaign rhetoric. Since I2I4’s infamous ride down the gold plated escalator before all the adoration that cheap non-union actors money could buy and the inception of MAGA that means we’ve been flooded by a firehose of disinformation and a swirling sucking undertow of fake news.

Throughout 2023. I2I4 has ramped up his xenophobic, scapegoating. obfuscating, grievance, and spittle-inflected rants both at rallies and on the social medias. He’s harkened back to the halcyon days of yore when we locked Japanese-Americans up in sprawling concentration camps, given us heart-warming echoes of Hitleresque blood poisoning rhetoric, and gut-wrenching threats of political extra-judicial prosecutions. I don’t think we need to go through a greatest hits of his demagoguery, do we?

Sources on Autocratic Speech Commonalities and Their Effect on Their Audiences

It isn’t like this is a path that we haven’t been down before on Ye Olde Blogge, but let’s explore the effects of his dehumanizing metaphors and promotion of conspiracy theories on our body politic using several sources:

• What Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán Understand About Your Brain: The scientific explanation of the reasons some people are susceptible to conspiracy theories and autocratic rhetoric (Politico).
• Rational Riddles: Unpacking the Puzzle of Political Polarization: An way to view both sides of the political divide as being rational, which gives some clues on how to bridge our divisive politics (SciTechDaily).
• Who Is Likely to Believe in Conspiracy Theories? A profile of conspiracy theorists and conspiratorial thinkers based on research findings (McGill University)

The Commonalities in Autocratic Speech

There are several commonalities that both the rhetoric and the “believers” share when the speech and consumers have been studied:

• AUTOCRATS like Putin and Orbán use it more than democratists. It seems to be the providence of anti-democratic populist politicians. We’ve had a long list of such autocratic populists both here and abroad. Let me know your thoughts on them in the comments!
• DIVISIVENESS is the goal of all such rhetoric. Authoritarians use it to divide nations, instill hate, produce intrasocietal conflict, and sow chaos.
• IT ISN’T JUST MANIPULATION of the emotions of the susceptible, but their actual beliefs are literally being changed when exposed to this type of rhetoric.
• DEHUMANIZING METAPHORS are the mechanism that change the beliefs of those who are susceptible to them.
• RATIONAL THOUGHT MECHANISMS are used by EVERYONE to reach their conclusions; it is the information that they use and the way they deal with ambiguity that differs.
• SPECIFIC PERSONALITY CHARACTERISTICS correlate (remember, kids, correlation is not causation) with conspiratorial thinking!

Who is Susceptible to Autocratic Manipulation?

We’re going to address susceptibility to what we’re going to call authoritarian rhetoric and then look at the rhetoric itself.

There are two fundamental conditions that are necessary for people to fall prey to authoritarian rhetoric. One is situational and the other dispositional.

The Situational Factors that Autocrats Exploit in Manipulating Their Audiences

Authoritarians purposefully focus on emotional rhetoric. Rarely do they focus on the so-called kitchen table issues that concern most of us. Instead, they engage in fear mongering by either exploiting a real tragedy such as the Great Depression as homegrown populist authoritarian Huey Long and Hitler did in the 1930’s to fuel their movements. The other option is to manufacture that fear and uncertainty by hyping things like the Republican Party is now:

• CRIME RATES: Claiming that crime is bad and growing especially in those states and cities where Democrats hold majorities when the crime rates are actually falling, but certain crimes are growing in Red States.
• IMMIGRATION. Claiming that vast hordes of unwashed, diseased, uneducated, degenerates are marching on our borders harboring terrorists who will rape our fathers and brothers, behead us all, take our high paying jobs, move into our neighborhoods, and murder us all in our sleep all while dancing on the flag singing some celebratory song while the Twin Towers fell.
• ECONOMY. Claiming that the debt is soaring, joblessness is rampant, wages are depressed, and it is possible to bring manufacturing back to the country if no one had a guaranteed minimum wage or work age (which actually might be true if we didn’t mind paying children starvation wages).
• ABORTION. Claiming that loose abortion laws causes loose women which means that the downfall of white Western culture is nigh. If we don’t punish women with giving birth to every child they conceive, then they won’t be sexual beings allowing all of the incels to marry virgins and fuck whores or jerk off to porn.
• VIOLENCE. Claiming that secularism has led to an increase in danger and violence so that the only thing that will keep us safe is every good rural conservative white Christian buying lots of gun and Stand Your Ground laws.

You get the idea. You have to steep people’s psyches in a toxic stew of stress, fear, and suspicion to get their brains all softened up and discombobulated.

The Dispositional Factors that make People Susceptible to Autocratic Manipulation

Not everyone is equally susceptible to this type of rhetoric. There is a special constellation of personality characteristics that people who fall under the influence of this spell have.

• PERCEPTIONS OF THREAT AND DANGER. Some people just view the world as being more dangerous and threatening than others, which leads to three important perceptions of the world:
  • They are distrustful of others and institutions.
  • They feel powerless in the face of such overwhelming odds.
  • And, they feel alienated from those around them.
  • It sets them up for preferring the warm and protective embrace of a strong authoritarian leader.
• RELIANCE ON INTUITION AND HAVING ODD BELIEFS.
  • Intuition. Human beings evolved to have shortcuts in their cognition and rational thought because thinking takes up a lot of energy. We call these shortcuts intuition because it is easier and faster. While it helped us survive on the savannas, it doesn’t help us navigate complex policy issues like the causes of immigration or making tough moral choices like whether to have an abortion or shoot the ten year old on our front stoop who just rang our doorbell.
  • Odd Beliefs. People who are vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking tend to have odd beliefs in other realms. There is an overrepresentation of personality disorder traits in people who believe conspiracy theories: psychopathy, narcissism, sadism, and Machiavellianism.
• BEING ANTAGONISTIC AND FEELINGS OF SUPERIORITY. Given that conspiratorial thinking correlates highly with personality disorder traits makes being antagonistic and feelings of superiority a given. This tendency provides two things: first is a strong demarcation of in-group and out-group and the other is a sense of specialness. They are in on the joke while the rest of us wankers are just, well, wanking off. This makes them the one rogue hero who knows the truth and will stop at nothing to right the wrongs that the vast conspiracy is trying to keep secret.

Once the authoritarian has softened up the susceptibles’ brains for manipulation by demagoguing any and every handy threat real or imagined out there, they start in on rewiring their followers’ brains — literally. As it turns out metaphor is an incredibly powerful cognitive tool that will cause two disparate ideas or concepts to be linked together. Now, don’t you wish you’d paid more attention in your literature classes?

Metaphor: The Rhetorical Super Power!

Hacking the Brain using Metaphor

Metaphors are a brain hack, who knew? They actually change the wiring of the brain, the connections between our neurons. By calling immigrants a poison, the circuit that allows us to conceive of immigrants and that which conceives of poison are linked. This linkage cuts the rational part of the brain out, the part that says, Now wait a minute!

It allows the brain to go from immigrant to Wholly French-speaking sugar orange fat man, they’re gonna kill us all! In this realm, the lie that immigrants are poisoning our blood takes on the veneer of truthiness. This helps explain the illusion of truthiness: a lie once heard will sound more truthful the second time around.

It just starts to “feel” right, you know, like it is intuitive or some such. See the connection?

Metaphors take advantage of the plasticity of the brain. The connections between neurons are either created or removed or strengthened or weakened depending on use, The more you focus on something and repeat it, the stronger the links in the brain circuits in the brain becomes. That’s why studying works, but also why you can still recall which episode of Star Trek Evil Spock appears in with only one viewing. And, it is why conservative talk radio has such a strong hold on our aging parents.

Dehumanizing Metaphor Plus Conspiratorial Thinking Equals MAGA

Combine the superpower of dehumanizing metaphor with a conspiratorial thinking prone personality and bibbidi-bobbidi-boo you’ve got MAGA!

Once we’ve reached the stage that we’re at now with eight years of living in the stream of I2I4’s firehose of shit, anti-immigrant rhetoric, and all of the other mis- and disinformation, otherwise known as bald-faced lies, and the mainstream media’s complete inability to cope with the situation, we now have a class of people who have reified their irrational conspiratorial belief system. Many will never lose their beliefs in things liked the stolen election, replacement theory, or guns make us safer no matter what happens.

However, there is one thing that might help. A calamitous change helps shake up the mind and makes it ready to hardwire another set of beliefs. So, in that sense, the looming climate change disaster just might save us. It’s like I always say, every silver lining has a dark center.

Image Attribution

This image was generated using Poe’s StableDiffusionXL bot using the prompt, A political cartoon of Donald Trump vomiting vermin during a speech