Hidden Brain - From Pedestals to Guillotines

Episode Date: November 3, 2020

As election season comes to a close, we explore our contradictory relationship with winners and losers. We tend to idolize the powerful, but we also enjoy seeing the high and mighty fall. Today we explore this paradox with a 2017 episode that takes us from Hollywood and the White House to the forests of Tanzania.

Hey there, Shankar here. Back in January 2017, we released an episode called Pettistills and Geateans. It explored an interesting paradox of human behavior, our love, hate relationship with people at the top of the social hierarchy. Why are we so drawn to the rich and powerful? And what is it that makes us so excited when they fall from their perch? So much has changed in the world since we worked on that episode. But as a long election season in the United States winds to a close, we found ourselves reflecting on this episode and what it says about the transience of power. We hope you enjoy. Welcome to Los Angeles, the celebrity capital of the world. It's a city that conjures palm-line boulevards,

sprawling mansions, luxury cars. At the center of all the glitz, Hollywood. Movie stars are the only ones here. Star gazers are drawn here too, like paperclips to a magnet. With the Musac blaring, a handful of people on a celebrity tour pure out there van, hoping to glimpse the homes of Elle's rich and famous. The guide points out Gwen Stefani's house, and a clump of bushes behind which she claims is Quentin Tarantino's home. She pulls up Nyakadi Perry's compound. Do I have any Katy Perry fans, Abort? Fine, your works. Okay, well here's her house.

Look up to your left and you'll see the awning, the red awning. You can't really see it's red there, but we are right beneath her house. She actually owns the entire corner here and look at her view. It's amazing, isn't it? One of the tour's most popular sites is the home of Kim Kardashian. Well, sort of. Kanye and Kim, they needed a house to have their friends over Tor's most popular site is the home of Kim Kardashian, while sort of. Kanye and Kim needed a house to have their friends over and on the left hand side this

is the house they use rented for 12,000 a month. There's somebody right behind it so I can't stop. I'm sorry about that, but that is the house right there. Has its own little swimming pool. Boy, they had some big parties too. Tor's like this are big business. Andrew Imordino helps manage the tour company called Star Track. He says not just Americans, but people from all over the world sign up for these tours. And they kind of want to just get that little feel, that little taste of what

it's like to, you know, see the celebrities's homes and do all the crazy stuff that you see in the magazines and the television. But it's more than just wanting a taste of celebrity culture. The glitz and glamour, the swimming pools, the manicured grounds, the storied homes, humans hunger for a chance to pure into and fantasize about lives of luxury and extravagance. This extends to our political leaders too. We adore the pomp of state dinners and inaugural balls. Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States, Canada, Cleveland, and Bruce Wayne, America, Canada, Cleveland. We dream of what it must be like when presidents make life and death decisions for a nation. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. We fantasize about what it must mean to be fabulously rich and powerful.

Words can't describe how beautiful it was. Everything you saw was breathtaking. And we got to meet his girlfriend, Melania, who was amazing as well. Hi, hi, I'm Melania. College adulation, adoration, idolization. Humans are prone to suck up to the rich and powerful. But this turns out to be only one side of our psychology. On the other side, it's something entirely different. Many of us hate the rich because they are rich. We want to see the powerful topple from their pedestals.

We enjoy seeing the glamorous fall and fail. The lure of celebrity tours is rivaled only by the popularity of tabloid magazines, detailing the rehab trips and broken marriages of those same celebrities. If a monochist enthralled by pomp and power sits on one of our shoulders, a vengeful populous sits on the other, a populous suspicious of power distrustful of the wealthy, eager to have the high-end mighty pulled off their pedestals. The thin line between adoring the rich and powerful and marching them to the guillotine, this week on Hidden Brain. On a pre-dawn morning, a high-stalker in Paris. Breaking news this morning, and Kim Kardashian robbed at gunpoint in Paris late last night by

five men dressed as police officers. The robbers made off not only with Kim case, 20-carat, emerald-cut diamond engagement ring, but other jewels and cash totaling more than $10 million. The news media was sympathetic to Kim's ordeal. A source close to Kim tells ET, the mother of two is still very, very shaken up. Quote, she thought she was going to die. They put a gun to her head while they were searching the apartment. She was crying begging them for her life.

The sympathy didn't last long, especially on social media. Andrea McDonald is a communications professor who's interested in celebrity culture. There's a tweet here from the House of WTF that says, quote, Kim Kardashian was held at gunpoint in a Paris hotel. Man will be charged with not pulling the trigger and saving humanity from mediocrity. Or this post. After years of desperation, Kim Kardashian finally

has a reason to be in the news today. There were other snarky comments. Maybe Kim faked the robbery as a publicity stunt. Maybe she faked it so she could disappear for more plastic surgery. Where was the love, the outpouring of concern from Kim's millions of fans? Why, after a brutal robbery, did people turn on her? Andrea has a theory. Kim Kardashian is someone who has made her whole living out of being famous and employing her fame to make money and really flaunting her success and wealth in various ways.

And so when that wealth is quite literally attacked in a very confrontational and personal way. Our potential empathy for her, even if we are fans of hers, may be lacking there because of our own potential envy or distaste for some of her personal presentation of wealth. In other words, as much as many of us like seeing the rich and luxurious world of Kim, we don't like the idea that she's rubbing it in our faces. And so we don't mind when she's taken down a few notches. We do the same with our political leaders.

We adore the pomp and circumstance associated with high office, but we pounce at the slightest gaff. Vice President Dan Quayle was all but drawn and quartered when he urged a little boy to add an E to the spelling of the word potato. And Texas Governor Rick Perry suffered a moment of forgetfulness during the presidential debate. I would do away with the education, the commerce. And let's see, I can't.

That was the end of Rick Perry's role in the National Spotlight. At least until President-elect Donald Trump chose him to leave the department he couldn't remember. Energy. Governor Howard Deans 2004 campaign for President came to a crashing halt when he ended a televised speech with slightly too much enthusiasm. We're going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico. We're going to California and Texas and New York. We're going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and New York, and we're going to South Dakota, and Oregon, and Washington, and Michigan!

And then we're going to watch it at E.C. and take back the White House! Yeah! Goodbye, Mr. Dean. You get the point. We can adore our leaders one moment and skewer them the next. Not long ago, I was watching all the way, a wonderful movie about Lyndon B. Johnson, starring actor Brian Kranzsten. There's one scene that stayed with me.

It sums up the contradictory feelings humans have toward people in power. LBJ has just been elected president. He walks through an enduring crowd, and he says this to himself. faces will be watching me. Wait, and one first moment of weakness. And then they will gut me like a deer. It's not a bad analogy, given that so much of our psychology was formed in the ancient past, when humans lived in small, nomadic tribes of hunter-gatherers. Some researchers believe the roots of our love-hate relationship with power lie in this evolutionary history. If we look carefully, we can still find evidence for it today in the forest of Tanzania.

Stay with us. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. To understand the contradictory relationship that humans have with power, we need to go back in time, way back, to prehistory, to our evolutionary past. One way to do this is to observe the behavior of a close relative, the chimpanzee. As a young woman, the evolutionary anthropologist and pucy walked deep into the Tanzanian forest. She was there as a student assistant to the great primatologist, Jane Goodall. Anne's job was to observe and record chimpanzee behavior in the wild.

Sometimes she'd watch the chimps at a feeding location loaded with bananas, other times she'd simply trail them. And following them around was pretty tough because it's, as I said, a rugged place and so you're going up and down, you're crawling through vines, the paths, if there are paths that the chimps walk on are small and you often have to scramble through the vegetation. And if they didn't want to be followed, they could very easily lose you. Over time, Anne began to understand how the chimps engaged with each other. Chimps society is very male-dom dominated. The headhunt show is the alpha male.

He's often the center of attention. The other males will groom him. He's probably groomed more by than other males are. And the same, the females pay particular attention to the alpha male as well, partly because they get chased around by him more. So that there's certainly probably a benefit to individuals from having a good relationship with the alpha male from their own point of view of safety

and maybe support that they may gain from him. Often, the younger males appear to idolize the alpha. Some of the males I watched, especially one in particular, just follow the alpha male around. And he, the alpha male would do a charging display, and the little male I was watching would sort of charge long behind him and kick the same buttress of the tree. But the relationship between the alpha and others in the group is more complicated than it might first seem.

Christopher Bohm is a cultural anthropologist who also worked with Jane Goodall observing the chimps. Basically, if you look at the individual chimpanzees and how they behave around their superiors, it's rather ambivalent. You can see the sembivalence each time the alpha male intimidates the other chimps. He basically goes crazy. He runs around. He writes all of his hair to look as big as possible. Uproots, trees, and throws them, picks up boulders, heaves them in the air, swings aggressively on finds, races around, and attacks any member of the group that doesn't show deference by going up a tree in a hurry.

What Chris found interesting as he watched the chimps is what happened next. As they race up the trees, they are screaming, which is a fear of vocalizations, which tells the alpha male I'm scared of you, so it's also deference. But as they get up to the top of the tree, they then stop screaming and they give another call called the wall bark. And a wall sounds something like this, law, but ever so much louder. And the wall call is one of defiance and hostility. And so once they're up in the tree tops and they know he isn't going to take the trouble

to come up and punish them, they all start whying at him. And this tells him and me that they don't like what he just did, because he's basically dominated and frightened them and forced them to run up a tree when they'd rather be on the ground feeding and so on. So, in terms of ambivalence, political ambivalence toward the alpha male is pretty easy to identify once you know the species well. In other words, woven into the fabric of adulation and submission are strands of defiance and rebellion. Early humans seem to share this trait.

Chris has studied nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes who have had almost no contact with the outside world and whose lives have changed little over thousands of years. What he found again was a deep ambivalence about the powerful. Take for example one of the most powerful members of a hunter-gatherer tribe, the skilled hunter. And people love this guy, but the minute he tries to turn that meat into power, that is to keep the meat for himself and give it to his cronies and develop power that way, it to his cronies and develop power that way. The group will treat him with extreme discuracy, they may criticize him. If it gets too bad, they may ostracize him. If it really gets too bad, and the guy is a real despot and is trying to basically take other people's

autonomy away, they'll kill him. The great hunter is admired and revered, but if he becomes too big for his boots, he's quickly taken down. In his book, Hierarchy in the Forest, Chris concluded that early human society was marked by a remarkably egalitarianism. The roots of democracy he concluded weren't in the American Declaration of Independence or even in ancient Greece. They're woven into the DNA of human beings.

Really, humans are somehow disposed to look up to those who are rich and powerful, and also to subject them to special scrutiny morally. And again, if you have a leader and you're watching out carefully that he doesn't overdevelop his power, that kind of scrutiny is very important. Our contradictory attitudes about power aren't lost on the rich and powerful. It's one reason handlers work so hard to make leaders and celebrities look down to earth and humble. President Reagan was often shown in jeans and flannel shirt cutting wood on his ranch

or saddling up his horses. That used to ride and would just play down the m and I forget and girth up before I remember. The Kennedys went water skiing for fun and remember to bring the media along. It's a family outing in Louis Bay, Hianna, a sport for the Kennedays. The president, accompanied by his kind of a blessing father, his brothers, and a full complement of children, relaxes from the cares of Washington with a day on the water. Beloved leaders are the only ones who have learned this trick. In 2011, Vogue ran a puff piece about Asma Alassad and her husband Bashar.

She was the rose in the desert. Together they were the beautiful, down-to-earth couple deeply committed to empowering citizens in Syrian civil society. Two years later the Assad regime used chemical weapons on its own people. Or consider this. Decades earlier, various international newspapers wrote about the domestic life of a well-known leader. Readers learned the interior spaces of his Bavarian retreat were painted in various shades of green. There was a portrait of his mother in his bedroom.

He breakfasted on milk, bread, honey, oatmeal, and cheese. They talk about his vegetarianism. They talk about his dogs and how much he loves his dogs and his dogs love him. They talk about how much he loves children. The man was Edal Hitler. In her book, Hitler at Home, the Spina Stratigacos explores how the Nazi propaganda machine

created an image of Hitler as a humble man of the people at ease in nature. In 1937, the New York Times magazine featured a sympathetic glimpse of Hitler living in the mountains, thinking about the destiny of his nation. Shockingly, after this 1937 New York Times article, there is an absolute puff piece that appears on August 20, 1939 in the New York Times again, and that one has absolutely no critical edge to it. It is by a woman who I haven't been able to identify, who talks about the fact that Hitler loves Gooseberry Pie and how wonderful the tomatoes are on his table.

And it appears, you know, just less than two weeks before Hitler invades Poland. Gooseberry Pie, a photo of a water skiing Kennedy, a president grooming his horses like a cowboy, what these images do is say, don't worry, I may be powerful, but I haven't lost touch with you. We're still connected. We're the same. Thousands of miles from the Bavarian Alps, tourists in Hollywood are balancing the twin impulses we have toward

the rich and powerful. As the tour winds through the Hollywood hills, it comes to a stop, a new one. And whether you hit the new president or you love him, I can just tell you this, this is his house on the right hand side. This is Donald J. Trump's winter estate here in Beverly Hills right here on the right hand side, the house there. And we're going to pop the pools right there. It's the tiniest little pool. And here's the servants' quarters back here. Donald Trump's election has ignited the contradictory feelings we have toward the rich and powerful.

To his critics, Donald Trump has broken with the precedent of modesty set by many leaders. He's rich, he's powerful, he's famous, and he flaunts it. In the language of evolutionary anthropology, he is the boastful hunter in the tribe. But to his supporters, he's very much a man of the people, someone who's promised to level the playing field, a populist. In the language of evolutionary anthropology, he's the skilled hunter who vows to share the meat. You can be sure of this. As the cameras flash and the motorcades go by, there will be lots of adoring smiles and

conceal daggers. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Midroa Media is our exclusive advertising sales partner. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Laura Quarell, Autumn Barnes and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero this week is our former producer, Jenny Schmidt. Jenny played an essential role in the development of Hidden Brain. She loves beautiful writing, which makes sense, because she is herself a beautiful writer. Many of the stories

that you've heard unfold on our show, including today's episode, bear the mark of her signature writing style. We're so glad to have had the chance to work with her and learn from her. Thank you, Jenny. For more Hidden Brain, you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Find more information about us at hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantum. See you next week.