The Psychopolitics of Trauma by Scott Alexander is a very interesting essay to read. It talks about politics and today’s social and political climate in a way that was new to me and felt extremely reasonable. In fact, it posits an explanation for the feeling of aversion I have always felt towards politics and political discussions, even though I too, shockingly, Have Opinions.
It’s a long essay and it covers multiple aspects of the topic, so I’ll try to summarize the parts here that seemed most interesting to me. But if you find this interesting, I can only encourage you to go read the original essay instead, or at least the relevant parts of it.
Politics is traumatizing
The essay starts (parts I - III) by essentially calling out the (primarily American) political climate to be the toxic hellscape that it is, from any entirely psychological point of view, without taking a political stance:
Very smart people lose basic reasoning abilities when the topic switches to politics. This isn’t just a truism, it’s been demonstrated in formal experiments. […]
Paranoia and conspiracy theories, considered psychotic symptoms in individuals, are almost the norm in politics. […]
Politics can create such strong emotions that they impair normal social functioning. […]
Politics can become something between an addiction and an obsession. People can spend hours every day watching cable TV or scrolling through their Twitter feeds, trying to stay abreast of the latest outrage the other side is perpetrating. […]
In summary:
In any other situation, a condition with impaired cognition, psychotic symptoms, emotional instability that impaired normal functioning, and associated addictions/obsessions would qualify as a mental disorder. So again, which mental disorder is it? This post is about the possibility that it might be trauma.
It’s official: politics is literally traumatizing, according to a licensed and practicing psychiatrist. And it should disturb us that the claim “politics is literally traumatizing” just sounds… normal. Like, sure, yeah, and the sky is blue (except if you live in the Netherlands, where the color of the sky is gray). So why is this?
Anything can be traumatizing if it gives you strong negative emotions and makes you feel helpless and victimized.
Politics is uniquely positioned therefore to be traumatizing, because it is everywhere and inescapably related to everything, as it is ultimately about fundamental disagreements on how the world should look like.
[…] everyday political debate crosses lines that would qualify as emotional abuse in any other sphere of life. People get told they’re disgusting or idiotic or deserve to die. They have to watch as powerful rivals plot openly how to ostracize them from polite society. Groups of their enemies get together to spread the rumor that they are Satanists, Nazis, or pedophiles. They have their views twisted into totally false claims that they want to murder children, which then “go viral” to people who otherwise know nothing about them.
…
I think a lot of people feel persecuted and threatened by politics, a lot of people feel emotionally abused by politics, and a lot of people feel like they’ve had vicarious experiences of people they identify with being harmed by politics. This isn’t enough for a formal PTSD diagnosis […]. But it might be enough to start doing some really unhealthy things to their brains.
The neuroscience of trauma
Part VI of the essay discusses the neuroscience of trauma:
The brain is a learning machine. It learns responses at various levels: instinctive, emotional, rational. These form “priors” (assumptions, schemas, stereotypes) that guide action in a range of situations. As the brain gathers more evidence, it refines and updates these priors to stay relevant and functional.
…
Some priors are very hard to update. […] For example, suppose you are so afraid of everyone that it is impossible to have a good experience with a new person. As soon as they talk to you, alarm bells start ringing in your brain and you flee and hide. You “learn” that they were actually pretty mean - they made you afraid and miserable! No matter how nice they are to you, your distorted picture will cause each encounter with them to further update you in the direction of “they, and everyone else, are mean.”
Trauma, in this model, is a negative event so compelling that it creates a new threat-related prior strong enough to become trapped. […]
And how this relates to politics:
When I say that politics is analogous to trauma, I mean that decades of consuming news favoring your chosen side, learning its arguments, learning the approved counterarguments to the other side’s points, and hearing about the outrages perpetrated by your enemies - have trapped both the relevant cognitive and emotional priors: you are absolutely sure your side is right, and you feel such intense negative emotion about the other side that it makes it impossible to interpret anything they say fairly.
Dog-whistles
Part VI also talks about dog whistles, which is not something I’ve ever heard of in a political context, so this was completely new to me:
[dog whistles] is the theory that sometimes politicians say things whose literal meaning is completely innocuous, but which secretly convey reprehensible views, in a way other people with those reprehensible views can detect and appreciate. […]
Maybe this kind of thing is real sometimes. But think about how it interacts with a trapped prior. Whenever the party you don’t like says something seemingly reasonable, you can interpret in context as them wanting something horrible. Whenever they want a seemingly desirable thing, you secretly know it means they want a horrible moral atrocity.
I do want to note that mere distrust in and of itself can cause something that looks very similar to this, and that such distrust is often earned and warranted, such as – I am fairly comfortable saying – for politicians. Of course, this phenomenon can get completely out of control:
[…] I’ve had arguments with people who believe that no pro-lockdown liberal really cares about COVID deaths, they just like the government being able to force people to wear masks as a sign of submission. Once you’re at the point where all these things sound plausible, you are doomed. You can get a piece of evidence as neutral as “there’s a deadly pandemic, so those people think you should wear a mask” and convert it into “they’re trying to create an authoritarian dictatorship”.
The role of media
Putting this all together, in Part VII:
Suppose that outrage addiction is, in fact, trauma addiction. That means the media ecosystem is a giant machine trying to traumatize as many people as possible in order to create repeat customers, ie trauma addicts. Combine that with the explicit, confessed desire on both sides to “trigger” the other as much as possible, and you have a lot of very clever people all trying to maximize one another’s trauma levels. On the external level, that looks like weaving as strong a narrative of threat and persecution as possible and trying to hit people in their psychological weak points. On the internal level, it means making sure they replace their normal ability to update with a series of triggers that make them replace reality with pre-packaged stories about how the other side is innately evil and everything they do is for specific threatening and evil reasons. Once you have a machine like that running, I’m not sure that identifying it will make things too much worse.
But thinking of things this way has made me less interested in consuming this kind of media, and I hope it does the same for you.
Disturbing.
Politically-neutral writing
The essay makes a sincere effort to be politically neutral (does not endorse or condemn any political beliefs), which I deeply appreciate because one of the core issues of the political divide is that it has become absolutely impossible to get to any common ground. Somebody either completely and totally agrees with you, or they are the Literal Anti-Christ who has come to unmake everything that is good and fair in the world.
Laying out his argument in a way that is free of political stance-taking is vitally important because it gives the chance for somebody on the opposite side of the political spectrum to read this article and take something useful from it, thereby making the world just a little better of a place. This cannot happen if the article would take a political stance, regardless of whether that would happen by endorsing or denouncing Trump, in a similar way that I tend to dismiss any articles or books would overly religious themes, even though they may have something valid to tell me beyond that. I just can’t take such text seriously!
It’s a common argument that you cannot stay out of politics, which is true, but it doesn’t mean that everything has to be politically-colored. The key to understanding the world is science and facts, and as difficult as it can be to distinguish a fact from an interpretation, it must be done, as no reasonable discourse can ever be had without the facts being known. Only then can you begin the task of interpreting.