U.S. Psychology’s Unfinished Journey from 9/11

As the 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001 nears, there will be many valuable reflections about that horrific day and about the subsequent “global war on terror” that devastated countless lives around the world. My own focus here is narrower: to briefly consider this disturbing two-decade period in relation to the American Psychological Association (APA) and professional psychology in the United States.

In the days following the terrorist attacks that targeted New York City and Washington, D.C., it quickly became apparent that the White House, the Department of Defense, and the CIA were prepared to ignore well-established international laws and human rights standards in pursuit of our adversaries. But at that time, it was less immediately obvious that some members of my own profession—fellow psychologists—would choose to embrace and participate in the merciless “dark side” operations that took place at secret overseas “black sites,” at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba, and beyond. And then, as events unfolded further, it became even more surprising that—through acts of commission and omission—these abusive and sometimes torturous operations would also find support within the leadership of the APA.

At any point, the APA could have joined with concerned human rights groups in seeking to constrain a U.S. military-intelligence establishment set on unbridled retribution that brutalized prisoners and diminished the country’s moral standing around the world. But for the world’s largest organization of psychologists, that tragically proved to be the proverbial road not taken. 

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Rumsfeld Then, DeSantis Now: The Lies That Bind

Given the horrific toll of the Iraq War, that disastrous misadventure hardly seems like a good template for combating COVID-19. Yet in key ways, recent pronouncements from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—whose state is experiencing an overwhelming surge in cases and hospitalizations amid his prohibition on mask requirements—should remind us of the propaganda we once heard from Donald Rumsfeld, the late former Secretary of Defense. The deadly consequences are reminiscent too.

In particular, three “political mind games” stand out. Each takes advantage of a core psychological concern that influences how we make sense of the world. First, “It’s a False Alarm”: when others raise doubts about your plan, offer overconfident assurances of success. Second, “Don’t Blame Us”: when your rosy predictions are proven wrong, deny that anything could have been done to prevent the setbacks. And third, “They’re Misguided and Misinformed”: when you’re questioned about falling short, attack the media for purportedly misrepresenting events. Tragically, this trio of manipulative appeals has spanned time and space, from Iraq almost twenty years ago to the Sunshine State today. Let’s briefly examine each component in turn.

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Psychologists Should Now Lead the Call to Close Guantánamo

A guard stands duty in a tower over Camp Delta on Sept. 12, 2007. (Photo by Army Sgt. Joseph Scozzari)

Last week, Mansoor Adayfi, Moazzam Begg, Lakhdar Boumediane, Sami Al Hajj, Ahmed Errachidi, Mohammed Ould Slahi, and Moussa Zemmouri published an open letter in the New York Review of Books. Noting that many Guantánamo detainees had been abducted from their homes, sold to the United States for bounties, and subjected to physical and psychological torture, these seven former prisoners–all held without charge or trial before their eventual release–called upon President Biden to close the detention facility. Their letter, which merits reading in its entirety, includes this plea:

Considering the violence that has happened at Guantánamo, we are sure that after more than nineteen years, you agree that imprisoning people indefinitely without trial while subjecting them to torture, cruelty and degrading treatment, with no meaningful access to families or proper legal systems, is the height of injustice. That is why imprisonment at Guantánamo must end.

These accusations are neither isolated nor unsubstantiated. Indeed, the week before Biden’s inauguration, a group of United Nations experts–including Nils Melzer, the Special Rapporteur on torture–described Guantánamo as a “disgrace” and as “a place of arbitrariness and abuse, a site where torture and ill-treatment was rampant and remains institutionalised, where the rule of law is effectively suspended, and where justice is denied.” They too called for its closure and reaffirmed that “The prolonged and indefinite detention of individuals, who have not been convicted of any crime by a competent and independent judicial authority operating under due process of law, is arbitrary and constitutes a form of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or even torture.”

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With the Win-Win Machine, Most of Us Actually Lose


Somewhere, deep in the bowels of our nation’s capital, today’s Democratic Party establishment keeps close guard over a hulking, fearsome, and often temperamental machine. With hundreds of moving parts, it’s surprising that the elaborate contraption has only one purpose: to take bold and popular policy proposals that could improve millions of lives, chew them up, and then spit out much feebler versions that don’t materially threaten the status quo. Servicing this apparatus isn’t cheap. But that’s not a problem because so many corporate behemoths–Wall Street, Big Oil, health insurers, Big Pharma, defense contractors, and beyond–are more than happy to foot the bill. They’re also very generous when it comes to tipping the machine’s operators, which apparently is how the Win-Win Machine got its name.

Given how well this arrangement works for its beneficiaries, the Democratic leadership understandably finds it unsettling whenever progressive candidates–having won office despite the considerable obstacles routinely erected by the Democratic National Committee and its offshoots–enter Congress but refuse to get their hands dirty by helping out with the Win-Win Machine. Indeed, worries about the machine’s future–and the buckets of money it reliably brings–are undoubtedly part of the impetus behind a post-election narrative being promoted by establishment Democrats. They claim that support for “socialism” among progressive candidates–in the form of Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and other efforts to counter injustice and inequality–is the reason the party failed to expand its control of the House or win back the Senate.

But the evidence doesn’t fit this self-serving account. Around the country, progressive candidates–and policies–flourished. Noteworthy winners in their races include Rashida Tlaib in Michigan, Ilhan Omar in Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts, Pramila Jayapal in Washington, Cori Bush in Missouri, Marie Newman in Illinois, Katie Porter and Ro Khanna in California, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, and Mondaire Jones in New York. As Bernie Sanders wrote a week after Election Day, “It turns out that supporting universal health care during a pandemic and enacting major investments in renewable energy as we face the existential threat to our planet from climate change is not just good public policy. It also is good politics.”

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Black Lives Matter: Resisting the Propaganda of Status Quo Defenders

First came the new names—Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and others—all added one by one to the long list of tragic, unjustifiable police killings of Black Americans. Then came the batons, the pepper spray, the tear gas, the flash-grenades, the helicopters, the armored vehicles, and the rubber bullets wielded against nonviolent Black Lives Matter protesters across the United States, from Minneapolis to New York City to Portland. And then came the chorus of privileged beneficiaries of our country’s discriminatory status quo, denying and defending the reality of brutal, racist, militarized, and unaccountable over-policing.

This sequence—grievous harm and public outrage followed by false reassurances from self-serving voices—is a familiar pattern. It’s one that I’ve studied as a psychologist, focusing primarily on the manipulative “political mind games” that the rich and powerful use to preserve an oppressive and inequitable system, one that rewards the few at the expense of the many. I’ve found that these propaganda ploys often target five specific concerns in our daily lives—namely, issues of vulnerability, injustice, distrust, superiority, and helplessness. Each of these concerns is linked to a key question we regularly ask ourselves: Are we safe? Are we being treated fairly? Who should we trust? Are we good enough? Can we control what happens to us?

Because these questions are so central to how we make sense of the world, it’s not surprising that the so-called one-percent aren’t the only ones for whom disingenuous answers become rhetorical weapons. The same appeals are used by other status-quo defending authorities when their apparent wrongdoing and corruption are too obvious to ignore. This is clearly the case in the current national crisis over police brutality and institutional racism, where these mind games are promoted to create the doubt and division that undermine the solidarity necessary for achieving long overdue progress. 

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Asylum, Now an American Horror Story

It’s hard to know exactly where the Trump Administration found the inspiration for its newest set of draconian asylum rules. Might it have been a National Geographic special where a giant anaconda encircles its prey, squeezes it to death, and then swallows it whole? Or perhaps a late-night, B-grade horror film in which some evil mastermind drowns his victims by slowly filling a sealed room with water? Regardless, these proposed changes cannot camouflage the racism, xenophobia, and nativist politics behind them. We’ve seen the Muslim travel ban, the attempted rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and the terrorizing of communities by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Now we’re witnessing an assault designed to suffocate the hopes and life prospects of asylum seekers.

The changes under consideration would upend the decades-old and internationally embraced standards of the Refugee Act of 1980, created to protect refugees who have a “well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” Despite the frequent misleading and malicious characterizations from the White House, with rare exceptions asylum seekers leave their homes with few resources other than the keen determination to endure the risks, hurdles, and hardships they inevitably face in reaching and living in the United States. But their motivation is simple: failing to do so is quite possibly the prelude to grievous harm and even death in their country of origin.

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Status Quo Bias and the “Change Is Dangerous” Mind Game


 The following brief excerpt is from Political Mind Games: How the 1% Manipulate Our Understanding of What’s Happening, What’s Right, and What’s Possible by Roy Eidelson. A free PDF version of the book is available here.

With the Change-Is-Dangerous vulnerability mind game, today’s plutocrats defend their agenda in a different way: by insisting that their opponents’ proposals for change will endanger us all. Regardless of the benefits these alternatives could bring, the 1% argue that initiatives inconsistent with their own policy recommendations will have potentially catastrophic consequences for the country. This is true whether we’re talking about tax increases for the wealthy (new investments stifled!), minimum wage hikes (forced layoffs!), curtailment of spying operations (terrorists everywhere!), new regulations to address climate change (U.S. businesses unable to compete!), reductions in mass incarceration (crime waves!), gun control (defenseless citizens!), or lower-cost imported medications from Canada (tainted drugs!).

Such appeals from self-interested one-percenters benefit from what psychologists call “status quo bias.” We generally prefer to keep things the way they are rather than face the uncertainty of less familiar options. In part, this is because we usually experience losses more intensely than rewards. That’s why winning $100 doesn’t feel as good as losing $100 feels bad. In much the same way, we tend to focus on how a proposed change could make things worse rather than better. Familiar expressions like “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know” and “When in doubt, do nothing” capture the phenomenon well. This helps explain why patients are reluctant to change a medication they’ve been taking for years, even if their doctor tells them a newer one works better and has fewer side effects. Likewise, when it comes to elections, incumbents have an advantage over their challengers—even when they’ve disappointed their constituents. Preferences like these may be irrational, but that doesn’t make them any less stubborn or potent.

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Beware the Bipartisan Legion of Doom: Corporate Democrats and Trump’s GOP

 

In professional wrestling circles, the Legion of Doom is a name that conjures up the fearsome physiques and painted faces of one of the great tag teams of all time. In the political arena today, the same moniker aptly describes an even more daunting and dangerous duo: the profits-over-people corporate wing of the Democratic Party and the belligerent, bigoted, and brutal GOP of Donald Trump. There’s really no better way to describe a pairing that literally imperils our democracy and our planet at the same time.

The foundation for this forbidding alliance–“bipartisanship” at its worst–is simple. Both of these powerhouses are beholden to the same benefactors: an assortment of status-quo-defending behemoths that includes Wall Street, the oil and gas industry, health insurance companies, Big Pharma, military contractors, and mainstream media conglomerates. They therefore share the same no-holds-barred commitment: making sure that progressive victories are few and far between.

Of course, unlike their predecessors on the mat, today’s Legion of Doom don’t rely on brute strength and frightening visages to subdue opponents. Rather, their seeming stranglehold on our politics comes from the bottomless wealth of the self-serving 1% and from the use of manipulative narratives–“political mind games”–designed to mislead us about what’s happening, what’s right, and what’s possible.

As a psychologist, I’ve studied these propaganda appeals. The ones that tend to be most effective in confusing and misdirecting us target five core concerns that govern how we make sense of the world–namely, issues of vulnerability, injustice, distrust, superiority, and helplessness. Each is linked to a basic question, like this.

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Bernie, Biden, and My Father


My father was a generous and forgiving man, devoted to his family. Although we didn’t always agree, he taught me a lot about many things, and I always admired his decency, his integrity, and his resilience. In 2014, at the age of 85, he passed away after several years of deteriorating health.

If my father were alive today, I’m sure we’d still be having our weekly Sunday morning breakfasts together. The number one topic–after his grandchildren–was usually politics. So here in January 2020, that would undoubtedly mean two lifelong Democrats (I’m now 66 myself) sitting at his kitchen table, debating the relative merits of presidential candidates Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.

But to first take a step back, I should note that my father never would have believed that Donald Trump could become president of the United States. He would have been stunned even more by the bigotry, brutality, and corruption that characterize this White House and its GOP enablers, from Muslim bans to racist tweets to children in cages at the Mexican border to impeachable offenses. After all, I can’t count the number of times my father would reassuringly tell me, “Roy, remember, most people are basically good and honest.”

Over many years, our breakfast conversations took on a consistent form. First, I’d express dismay or outrage over current events–the torture of US war-on-terror prisoners; the deception-driven invasion of Iraq; the callous treatment of Hurricane Katrina victims; Wall Street’s predatory role in the financial meltdown; the unlawful mass surveillance of Americans, the growing divide between “haves” and “have-nots”; and other lesser injustices. My father, even when feeling much the same way as I did, would then typically ask me whether I’d really given sufficient consideration to all opposing points of view. That would eventually lead to my wondering aloud how those viewpoints could possibly be defended by a reasonable person. And often enough he’d smile and calmly respond, “You’re right.”

That single “You’re right” was a cherished prize. It reassured me that he and I were now seeing the world through similar eyes. In contrast, there was also my father’s triple “You’re right, you’re right, you’re right.” This was almost always said with some combination of frustration and exhaustion, and it had a very different meaning. It meant that, although the contrary evidence I offered was compelling to me, my father’s own position on the matter was still firmly entrenched. Sometimes it meant that relinquishing it would be a source of too much discomfort or pain for him. So that phrase represented closure of a different sort: it told me it was time for a new topic.

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Psychology’s “Dark Triad” and the Billionaire Class

“They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

The Outrage of Billionaires

The data are stark and compelling. The richest 400 families in the United States own financial assets that exceed the wealth of the bottom 60% of all American households combined. U.S. billionaires pay taxes at a lower effective rate than working class families. The CEOs of S&P 500 companies, averaging over $14 million in annual compensation, make roughly as much in a single day as their median employee earns in an entire year. At the same time, research shows that such extreme inequality between rich and poor is a driving force behind many of society’s most profound and corrosive ills. These disparities are associated with diminished levels of physical health, mental health, educational achievement, social mobility, trust, and community life. They’re also linked to heightened levels of infant mortality, obesity, drug abuse, crime, violence, and incarceration.

In light of these realities, it’s no surprise that some political leaders are calling for dramatic policy changes designed to tamp down economic inequality. Equally unsurprising, some members of the so-called billionaire class in this country are outraged by these proposals. Responding to Senator Bernie Sanders’s comment that he doesn’t think billionaires should exist, Stephen Schwarzman — the billionaire CEO of the private equity firm Blackstone Group — told a New York City audience, “Maybe Bernie Sanders shouldn’t exist.” On the Fox Business Network, Ken Langone, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot, angrily called Sanders a “blowhard” and asked, “What the hell has he done for the little people?” And CNBC host Jim Cramer reported that Wall Street executives — privately discussing the aspirations of Senator Elizabeth Warren — had told him “she’s got to be stopped.”

Complaints like these are nothing new from America’s super-rich. Almost a decade ago, Schwarzman (noted above) compared the possible elimination of a favorable hedge fund tax loophole to “when Hitler invaded Poland.” A few years later, in a letter to the Wall Street Journal, now-deceased billionaire venture capitalist Tom Perkins wrote, “I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one-percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one-percent, namely the ‘rich.'” And fellow billionaire Sam Zell told Bloomberg News, “This country should not talk about envy of the one-percent. It should talk about emulating the one-percent.”

But should we really be trying to emulate the one-percent? Perhaps not. Psychological research suggests that the super-rich, as a group, aren’t necessarily the role models we collectively need if our goal is to advance the common good and build a more decent society. In particular, one reason to be skeptical involves a constellation of interlinked personality traits — Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism — that psychologists call the “Dark Triad.” The originators of the term summarize it this way: “To varying degrees, all three entail a socially malevolent character with behavior tendencies toward self-promotion, emotional coldness, duplicity, and aggressiveness.”

Let’s now consider each of these three components separately, in regard to what they may tell us about the one-percent.

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