Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - A light touch and a slight nudge

Episode Date: March 28, 2016

Is Donald Trump actually a CIA asset with implants in his small hands or are our brains just wired for paranoia – or both! Rob Brotherton, author of Suspicious Minds, explains how our cognitive biases push us to see Conspiracies everywhere. Plus a look back to when the CIA weaponized Abstract Expressionism (one of the greatest real Conspiracies of all time). image by Celeste Lai    

You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. At Radiotopia, we now have a select group of amazing supporters that help us make all our shows possible. If you would like to have your company or product sponsor this podcast, then get in touch. Drop a line to sponsor at radiotopia.fm. Thanks. episode. Why is there something called influencer voice? What's the deal with the TikTok shop? What is posting disease and do you have it? Why can it be so scary and yet feel so great to block someone on social media? The Neverpost team wonders why the internet and the world because of the internet is the way it is. They talk to artists, lawyers, linguists, content creators, sociologists, historians, and more about our current tech and media moment. From PRX's Radiotopia, Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet.

Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called A Light Touch and a Slight Nudge. A couple of weeks ago, my aunt opened up her laptop and logged on to the Huffington Post. A giant photo of Donald Trump minister. I will put Hillary Clinton in prison, he screamed. My aunt slammed the laptop shut and called the taxi to take her to the hospital. She explained to the doctor that she's been volunteering and donating to the Hillary campaign. She's worried that if the Donald gets elected, the Trump people will then come after her. This doctor didn't give my aunt anything for her frayed nerves.

Instead, he fired up his computer and showed her some website that claimed Donald Trump was a CIA experiment. An actual Frankenstein with implants in his hands. Don't worry, he assured my aunt. The people in charge might be battling over the White House, but they won't let their monster kill the villagers. Now, my aunt is a very sensitive person. She lives alone with her cat. She writes poetry. This quack from the hospital totally sent her over the edge. Now she's deep in the weeds, blogs, and tumblers. The emails I've been getting from her are very disturbing. She believes that Trump and his handlers are part of a giant conspiracy.

So when I was in Seattle last week, I paid her a visit. First off, I showed her a recent piece by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter that explains this whole hands thing. He's the guy who first called Trump a short-fingered vulgarian back in the 1980s in his magazine Spy. To this day, Trump still sends Carter photos with his hands circled with notes like, doesn't look small, right? But then my aunt took back the laptop and pulled up the Crystal Knight forum on Truthout.net. Apparently, Spy was the first American magazine to go all out and openly admit that it was a CIA-funded publication. And Graydon Carter was the agent tasked with turning Trump into an asset. His taunts drove Trump to seek plastic surgery for his hands.

And it was during this operation that the CIA put the implants in. My aunt showed me another blog called Gambling Patriots. According to Whitejack1776, Trump, or Trump's hands, played a large part in getting a mafia outfit to turn on its eastern counterparts in 1988. And it was this event that really led to the fall of the Soviet Union. She also showed me a video that demonstrated how rogue CIA agents could use the chips in Trump's hands to get him to do and say all kinds of things. I tried to get my aunt to watch this YouTube video about the current limits of programmable bio-nano chips, but she wouldn't have it.

She showed me a Tumblr called Making Humans Great Again. As we scrolled through dozens of images and GIFs of people constructing pyramids and digging tunnels and working in giant factories. She explained that all of this had been traced back to Trump's computer, and it was obviously compiled by AI that resides in Trump's hands. Isn't it also a possibility, I calmly suggested, that Trump is just another petty, short-fingered, insecure man suffering delusions of grandeur. Sure, my aunt said, gesturing at her laptop, but I haven't found anything on the internet that proves that. Thank you. American conspiracy theory. Visit any newspaper in the United States and thumb through their

letters to the editor archive, and you'll discover that Americans have been trying to warn their fellow citizens about conspiracy theories. Well, since whenever that particular newspaper started its archives. There were conspiracy theories about Walt Disney, conspiracy theories about farmers, conspiracy theories about the postal service. Basically, everybody was accused of being the villain of some conspiracy or another. Rob Brotherton is an academic psychologist. He told me about a couple of researchers who did that very thing, study letters to the editor. Their work suggests that it's actually incorrect to say the internet is fueling a golden age of conspiracy theories. For the American conspiracist, it's just all golden.

So the villains have changed a little bit over the years, but the most remarkable trend was the stability, the lack of change in the amount that people were interested in and talking about conspiracy theories. And so this suggests that this is part of being human. They must resonate with our minds. They must resonate with the ways that our brains work. In his new book, Suspicious Minds, Rob Brotherton explains why and how our brains are hardwired for conspiracy thinking and why so many Americans fall under their sway. Take, for example, 9-11. The number of Americans who believe there is a conspiracy at the heart of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, is staggering. Some polls put it at half. Half of all Americans believe

their own government conspired to lie and kill. These numbers make more sense, though, when you take into account our brain's proportionality bias. Psychological research has revealed that we have a bias built into our minds called the proportionality bias. And what this says, basically, is that when something big happens, we assume that there must have been a big cause. And so you can't get much bigger than a terrorist attack like the 9-11 attacks. And so the idea that they were perpetrated by just these 19 hijackers from some other country who maybe many Americans hadn't even heard of or certainly hadn't considered before. These minimally trained guys were able to do something so huge and so world-changing. That doesn't ring true according to this bias that's wired into our brains. And so then some people come up with a different explanation, a conspiracy theory that it wasn't just this terrorist organization, but in fact it extended all the

way up to the highest offices of the American government, that is a much bigger explanation. There are more people who would be involved with it. It has bigger implications for global politics, for our understanding of how society works, knowledge, free will, liberty, all that. It's a huge explanation. And so according to this bias, this proportionality bias, this might seem more plausible than the official story

that it was this small group of relatively unknown terrorists who were able to pull off this huge event. To better understand just how deep the proportionality bias goes, some researchers like Rob Brotherton will create studies based on American presidential assassination attempts. We can compare the assassination of JFK with the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. The successful assassination of JFK was one of the biggest events probably of the century. One of the most powerful people in the world was killed in this shocking public way. And it's become one of the most widely believed conspiracy theories still to this day. There have been surveys over the years, within days of the event, something like half of the American public thought that there was more to it, that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't work alone,

that there was a conspiracy. And there have been many surveys over the years finding that consistently around half or more of the American public think that there was a conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK. And so we can compare that with the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, which obviously Reagan survived. So it was a much less significant event. The president survived, kept on presiding. There were no real global or even national consequences of the event. Fairly small event.

And at no point have a significant number of people bought into a conspiracy theory about that event. And so this reflects the fact that we have this bias built into our mind, it's shaping our beliefs about these things that happen in the world in a way that we have no awareness of, or at least very little awareness of. We don't consciously think to ourselves that this big thing has happened, it must have a big explanation. This bias and the other psychological biases that we suffer from, they work in the background of our brains. We're not aware of them, we don't know that our beliefs are being shaped, and yet as the studies show and these real world examples show, this bias does seem

to shape our beliefs and to predict how likely people are to buy into a conspiracy theory about a particular event. Another bias that contributes to the great American conspiracy theory is something called the confirmation bias. This is our tendency to seek out evidence that proves what we already believe. Studies have looked at this in the context of conspiracy theories. There's a study by a psychologist called John McCoskey from 1995, and he used the context of the JFK assassination conspiracy theories. What he did is he got a group of participants, he measured how much they believed in the conspiracy theories about the assassination. Before beginning the experiment, he just measured their pre-existing attitudes. Some people believed the conspiracy theories. Some people believed Lee Harvey Oswald worked alone. And then what McCoskey did is he presented everybody with exactly the same body of

information about the conspiracy theories. And it was designed to be ambiguous. So some of the information in there was in favor of the conspiracy theories. Some of the information went against the conspiracy theory. He just had everybody read all these statements about the assassination. And then he measured their attitudes again after having read that. Now you might expect that everybody reading this ambiguous packet of information, they might temper their attitudes. They might become less sure of whatever they believed in advance. But in fact, the opposite happened. So the people who went in believing that Lee Harvey Oswald worked alone were more convinced of that fact after reading this ambiguous information. And the people who went in believing the conspiracy

theories were also more convinced of that fact. Despite the fact that everybody read exactly the same information, people became more convinced of their pre-existing beliefs. And this is part of the logic of conspiracy theories in general, is that any evidence that you find from the world can be interpreted as fitting with the conspiracy theory. So if there's evidence that seems to be in favor of the conspiracy theory, of course they're going to be all over that. If there's no evidence in favor of the conspiracy theory, well that fits with the conspiracy theory too, because the conspirators are covering up the evidence. And if there is evidence that explicitly goes against the conspiracy theory, well, again, that fits with the conspiracy theory as well, because we would expect the conspirators to be putting out misinformation designed to deceive us.

And so for this reason, because of this logic behind conspiracy theories, they are a perfect example of a claim that suffers from confirmation bias. One of the most amazing examples of the confirmation bias at work is the birther conspiracy that Donald Trump helped fuel during the 2012 presidential election. The birthers believe that President Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii. President Obama was actually goaded by the birthers into releasing his long-form birth certificate, a document that proved he was in fact born in Hawaii. But the birthers held fast. The

White House PDF they claimed has image layers and therefore proves the conspiracy. So yeah, there comes a point when you just have to ask, are conspiracy theorists just stupid? Studies have looked at this. They've looked at whether people who buy into conspiracy theories have a lower tolerance for ambiguity or complexity. That doesn't seem to be the case. If anything, conspiracy theorists seem to have more tolerance of complexity. They seem to be more open-minded, especially when it comes to certain kinds of explanations. So particularly explanations that go against mainstream wisdom, that go against the orthodox explanation for

what's happening in the world. Okay, so we can't call the birthers stupid. But if we opened up their brains, we would discover that they are super, super lazy. This might be the real reason why so many Americans believe in conspiracy theories. There's a view within psychology that we, as a species, we humans, we're what we call cognitive misers. Essentially, we don't like to think too hard about things. We don't like to expend our cognitive resources when we don't have to. And so this is why we have these biases wired into our brains. We have these shortcuts, these ways of thinking that save us mental energy. And the idea is that usually they're good enough. They lead us to useful beliefs, useful views of the world that aren't necessarily right,

but they're close enough to being right most of the time, or at least they're useful enough that they allow us to get by in everyday life. And people give examples from, you know, thinking about our evolutionary history. If we hear a rustle in the bushes, it's best if we jump to the conclusion that it might be a predator, it might be a tiger or a bear, and we take action, we jump to a quick reaction versus taking a more analytic approach, thinking about, well, what are all the things that this rustle in the bushes could possibly be? It could be the wind, could be a tiger, could be, I don't know, a rock rolling over, it could be anything. But it's better if we just jump to a conclusion and we run away. If we were wrong and it was just the wind, then we haven't really lost anything, we haven't harmed ourselves. But if we spent a longer time deliberating about it

and we were wrong, if it really was a tiger, then we could lose our place in the gene pool. And so evolutionarily speaking, it makes sense that we would have these brains that are biased in certain ways that lead us to these quick and dirty ways of thinking about the world. And conspiracy theories might be just a byproduct

of the kind of brains that evolution has imbued us with. So how does one fight conspiracy theories without resorting to using non-effective tools like facts or reality? Well, according to Rob Brotherton, we have to conspire to manipulate and nudge our fellow citizens. There's only really been one study so far that has come up with a potential way that we could engage with these conspiracy theories. And so what this study did, basically, is it used a couple of groups of participants. One group was the control group. Another group was nudged towards thinking about the world in a more analytic way.

And the way they did that was pretty simple. They just had people do a sentence unscrambling task, which primed them to think about the world analytically. They used words like ponder and think, analyze and stuff like that. So it wasn't clear to the participants that they were being manipulated to think in a more analytic way. It was more subtle than that. But the idea is it would get people to not trust their intuition so much to think more analytically. And as the researchers expected, this manipulation was successful. It made people a little bit less likely to believe conspiracy theories. So prompting people to think in a more analytic way, to not trust their gut reaction seemed to be successful, at least a little bit, or at least for some people, to make them less likely to fall for conspiracy theories.

Yeah, let's just leave it at that. But is there anything else you want to add, or something I didn't ask you about? I guess the only thing we haven't really touched on is the idea that, you know, sometimes conspiracies are true. The CIA is best known for its covert actions in the paramilitary and political field, and less well known for its cultural division,

which was housed under an organization or a department within the CIA called the International Organizations Division. And its sole purpose was to create a bridgehead between American and European intellectuals and artists and writers and poets and historians in the hope that, on the one hand, along this bridge could be funneled the best of American achievements in these fields so that, as an advertisement, if you like, a sort of juggernaut that could thunder across this bridge

to advertise the progressive and modern and tolerant and freewheeling aspects of American culture. In the 1940s and 50s, the CIA weaponized abstract expressionism in order to fight and win cultural battles in the European theater. In her book, The Cultural Cold War, author Frances Stoner Saunders exposes one of the most amazing conspiracies in American history. Well, you know, the Cold War is full of paradoxes,

and one of the most delicious paradoxes of all is that you get the situation where you get the CIA, you know, traditionally perceived as kind of a pretty roughneck, you know, traditionally perceived as kind of pretty roughneck, rogue elephant, even right wing. You have them getting into bed with old lefties like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, et cetera, et cetera. You know, what we now refer to as the school of abstract expressionism and, you know, providing US dollars for their work to be exhibited abroad. I mean, it's completely bizarre.

Listen, there's no surprise that the CIA chose the best artwork that was going at the time. You know, they had built up a program to focus on just this kind of artistic expression. If they'd missed abstract expressionism, then they had absolutely no point in continuing their programs. One could argue that they had no right to have anything to do with these programs, but from a practical level, if they'd missed this,

they really would have fallen down on the job. On the one hand, you could argue that the CIA made better art critics than most of the art critics at the time, because the acceptance of abstract expressionism in critical circles took a while to be generated. Don't forget, you know, these are Ivy League educated, quote-unquote liberal intelligentsia, some of them. The joke, you know, in the early CIA was that, you know,

there were enough people there to staff most of the campuses in the U.S. should they decide on a change in career. And indeed, many of them did work in U.S. campuses at the same time as they worked for the CIA. And that was their cover. You know, you have a guy who's spearheading this campaign who runs the International Organizations Division, a.k.a. the Ministry of Culture within the CIA, and his name is Tom Braden. And where's Tom Braden before he pitches up at the CIA?

He's working to Nelson Rockefeller at the Museum of Modern Art. You know, there's a kind of closeness of association, almost a sort of contiguity or continuation of interests that explains this kind of overlap, if you like. I mean, I would make the point that in all this interconnectedness is vital. If you look at the dummy foundations that the CIA set up to provide money covertly to projects that looked on the surface to be completely transparent, which were devoted to spreading the good news about American art and cultural life in general to Europe. If you look at the names of the people who sit on those boards and

effectively rubber stamp these foundations, decisions and grants, they're the same names as appear on covert action committees set up by Alan Dulles and his cohorts at the CIA. The crossover is extraordinary. The list just goes on ad nauseum. All the, you know, principal sort of movers and shakers of 1950s America, you will find sitting on CIA dummy foundations, which in turn are giving money to touring exhibitions, which are working under the auspices of the Museum of Modern Art, you know, the most powerful brand you can imagine at that time for promoting progressive art. What you get is the Museum of Modern Art, the most powerful brand you can imagine at that time for promoting progressive art. But what you get is the Museum of Modern Art acting as a kind of

willing and witting front for the CIA in exporting these works abroad. Abstract expressionism was created quite consciously, I think, if you read the biographies or the diaries or the words of the artists who made it, to be empty of politics. It was a grand rhetorical gesture, if you like, that was against political rhetoric and against the politicization of art. You know, we've come out of war-torn Europe in which artists had been subjugated by the fascist regimes. We're in a period where still in the Soviet Union, artists are lassoed into serving the state. These people in the States are consciously eschewing art with a political message or art as a political metaphor.

Now, the danger of this of course is that any art that's empty of political meaning is vulnerable to being laundered, to being filled with political meaning because there's a silence there that can be filled with a sort of you know white noise if you like of politics and you know everybody's kind of contesting abstract expressionism. It means this to the congressman, the right-wing congressman. On the other hand, it's being claimed by the left. And right in the middle, what you get is the CIA, who correctly identify abstract expressionism, if you like, for its very sort of emptiness, as a perfect example of American freedom, tolerance, self-expression, what

Nelson Rockefeller called free enterprise painting. You know, this was a great, big, freewheeling democracy that could tolerate anything, would never censor or attack its artists for being creative, progressive. This was European modernism washed up on the shores of America at the end of the war, reinvented, repackaged, and sent back bigger and better than ever before. You know, there was a feeling amongst abstract expressionists themselves that their art had been hijacked.

You get this rather sort of sorry scene towards the mid-60s or end of the 60s where they're bloated with drink and sort of almost ruined by the official acceptance of their art, as if they're sort of drowning under Caesar's coin. And Jackson Pollock, you know, shortly before he died at the wheel of his car, said, you know, spoke to this disillusionment and disenchantment, I think, with what had happened to this art when he said that the idea of an isolated American painting seems absurd to me, just as the idea of creating a purely American mathematics

or physics would seem absurd. These were artists who on the whole hadn't thought that they were painting their way into an American political or ideological statement. You know, they didn't see themselves as part of a Pax Americana

in the post-war world. But there were others who were perhaps less forgiving, like Ad Reinhardt, the only abstract expressionist who kind of continued to hold to his leftist beliefs, and who some would argue because he wasn't very good, although I think that could be disputed, but who was sort of left out, if you like, of this big business venture. He was consistently disregarded, perhaps because he saw quite early on this market boiling with activity and was suspicious, perhaps, of how the market was being fed and manipulated and managed. He started to rail at his fellow abstract expressionist. He called Rothko a vogue magazine, cold water, flat ferv,

and Pollock a Harper's Bazaar bum. Barnett Newman, he said, was the avant-garde, huckster, handy craftsman and educational shopkeeper, the holy roller, explainer, entertainer in residence, for which Newman later sued him. He didn't stop there. Reinhardt went on to say that a museum should be a treasure house and tomb, not a counting house or amusement center. He compared art criticism to pigeon droolings and ridiculed some of the abstract expressionists leading critics like Clement Greenberg as dictator

popes. So, you know, what he was doing was saying, you know, these artists, myself included, you know, we were painting in the Cold War, but we weren't painting for the Cold War. And those who succumbed to these blandishments, effectively he saw as traitors, I think, to the original idea of abstract expressionism. You know, I think it's worth remembering that when you look at an abstract expressionist painting, you're not simply being duped by the CIA. You know, they weren't changing the work by investing in it, but they were certainly helping to alter the perception

and the reception of this work. I don't have any particular problem with the fact that they identified this art and saw that it was worth running with. I think they were kind of clever. The problem, I think, is that you start then building associations and links that, by definition, when they're exposed, will poison the wells of discourse around this subject. There's a kind of royalty situation going on here.

I mean, I think, you know, if you want to try and identify something that speaks as powerfully to American ideas of freedom and self-expression as the work of Jackson Pollock, for example. I mean, listen, Jackson Pollock was on the cover of every magazine in the United States. There was that whole spread in Life magazine. He was directly rhetorically linked with the American century and the great promise that it offered. And there's something a bit rotten about this idea that his work was being handled and sort of smudged, you know, by these CIA types. It just doesn't play very well.

I mean, I don't think anyone holds the CIA in particularly high regard. They may think it's necessary, but I don't think anyone has particularly fond, romantic notions of what it actually does. I think this connection is just, you know, a connection too far for most people. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's

Theory of Everything. This installment is called A Light Touch and a Slight Nudge. This episode was produced by myself, Benjamin Walker, and it featured Rob Brotherton and Frances Stoner Saunders. Rob Brotherton's book is called Suspicious Minds, and Frances Stoner Saunders' book is called The Cultural Cold War. This episode was also supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science, technology, and economic performance. More information on Sloan at sloan.org.

Radiotopia from PRX.