Plain English with Derek Thompson - Why the "Need for Chaos" Is Eating American Politics

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

Today’s episode is about one of the most interesting pieces of research I’ve read in the past year. It's an idea called "need for chaos," and the truth is that I literally cannot stop thinking about it as I follow American culture, politics, and media. Very briefly, it is the observation that many Americans today embrace conspiracy theories and nihilistic burn-it-all-down messages, not because they are partisans of the left or right, but rather because they've become hopelessly cynical (sometimes for very good reason!) about all elite and all major institutions of power. Today’s guest is the Danish political scientist Michael Bang Petersen, who coauthored the paper that introduced this idea. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Michael Bang Petersen Producer: Devon Baroldi Links: https://politicalsciencenow.com/the-need-for-chaos-and-motivations-to-share-hostile-political-rumors/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/need-for-chaos-political-science-concept/677536/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Today's episode is about one of the most interesting papers I've read in the last year, one that I literally cannot stop thinking about as I follow and read about American culture and politics and media. It's an idea called The Need for Chaos. And I think if I give this idea, it's proper due, and explain it correctly in the next 40 minutes or so, you will feel like I do that this concept seems to haunt wherever you look. So as I wrote in the Atlantic last week, this story begins with a political scientist in Denmark named Michael Bang Peterson. Peterson, whose papers I found really uniformly fascinating,

wanted to understand why people, specifically Americans, share conspiracy theories on the Internet. And he and a few other researchers in Denmark and France created a study that showed Americans several obviously false stories, conspiracy theories about Democrats and Republicans, stories about Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump. And the subjects were asked, would you share these stories online? So Peterson and his researchers had a hypothesis. They assumed that they would find typical polarization patterns. The left believes nonsense about the right, and the right believes nonsense

about the left, and maybe there's some imbalance between the two that's important to tease out, but the most important thing he found actually had nothing to do with that. It seemed to defy the very logic of polarization itself. There was a certain group of people who seemed to be down with sharing any conspiracy theory, no matter what party it affected. So Bernie's a puppet? Sure. Trump's a Russian spy? Yeah, that too.

Hillary's a lizard. Ted Cruz, an alien? Like and share. This was pretty odd. So they did some follow-up research. They asked people who shared these conspiracy theories, why are you doing this? What sentiments might be behind this inclination to share conspiracies? And they served up several nihilistic statements to these folks.

They said, how do you feel about statements such as, quote, we cannot fix the problems in our social institutions. We need to tear them down and start over. How do you feel about something like, quote, I need chaos all around me? It's too boring if nothing is going on. How do you feel about, quote, when I think about our politics and social institutions, I cannot help thinking, just let them all burn. And to their surprise, to the researcher's surprise, a significant number of these conspiracy theorists

subscribe to many, if not all of these nihilistic, burn it all down, chaos can be fun, sentiments. And so they called this mentality, this mentality of the conspiratorial. the need for chaos. Through even more research, they concluded that the need for chaos emerged from the interplay between three factors. Number one was

dominance-oriented traits. That's like a preference for traditional social hierarchies, right? I disagree with the rise of modern feminism. I disagree with certain aspect of trans rights or queer rights. Number two was feelings of marginalization. The idea that the rules of society

had passed them by and made any hope of winning the game of life impossible. And the third thing behind the need for chaos, and maybe the most important thing, was intense anger toward elites and deep suspicion. I hasten to add here, sometimes richly deserved deep suspicion, that elites or traditional institutions cannot do anything right. So several months after I first read Peterson's paper,

I still couldn't get the phrase, need for chaos out of my head. Everywhere I looked, I seemed to see new evidence of it. I saw it in online discussions that seem based on who could get the most angry or show the most anger toward a subject rather than come up with any kind of solutions to fix a problem.

I see it in popular podcasts among conspiracy theorists who go on shows like Joe Rogan to excoriate U.S. institutions and pass-long conspiracy theories about them, but often without any kind of plan to build something better in the ashes. I see it endemic on the right. January 6th, people like Marjorie Taylor Green saying that she misses Donald Trump at

GOP debates because politics is boring without his chaotic act. And frankly, I see it sometimes in parts of the left that have excused fires and property destruction as active vandalism that are committed for a righteous cause. And by the way, that's not my false equivalence. Peterson himself says that the need for chaos as he identifies it extends beyond any one political party or any one race. The need for chaos, it seems, is swallowing American politics from the center. Today's guest is Michael Bang Peterson. We talk about status, power, control, chaos, and this phenomenon that he sees eating America from the inside. I'm Derek Thompson.

This is plain English. Michael Bang Peterson, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. You and I have spoken a few times, and you always seem to be working on something interesting and surprising. You and I have talked about Denmark and how Denmark was considered both progressive in terms of its COVID precautions, but also it was one of the first countries to declare that the pandemic was over as a health emergency. I think that was something that really surprised a lot of Americans and a lot of American liberals in particular. We've talked about how Denmark is both very pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine mandate, again, something that is surprising and very interesting to me because I think that in America, most people assume that attitudes toward vaccines and vaccine mandates tend to go hand in hand. You've done a lot of work on trust, which I find really interesting, which countries have

trust in their political leadership, which countries do not have trust, what trust actually is where it comes from. And today we're talking about a subject that's a little bit related to trust and also somewhat related to the pandemic and the elite failures of the pandemic. And that is your theory of need for chaos in the American electorate and really in electorates around the world. This is, first off, a really fascinating portfolio of subjects. So my first question is, what is your job? I think what is your research corner?

What are the questions that you find or the subjects that you tell people you do political science in? Yeah, so I'm a political scientist, but I have a particular interest in what you can call political psychology. So trying to understand the psychological basis of the way that people think about politics, especially in their own country. But what I'm most interested in within that is what you can call the darker sites of politics. So I'm particularly interested in not so much trust as mistrust and not so much reliable information as misinformation. Also trying to figure out, well, why is it that some people are extremely hateful in social media? So everything that can sort of go wrong in an advanced democracy, that is what I find particularly fascinating. And of course, that also informs us to some extent about why things sometimes go right.

Let's talk about what can go wrong in democracy and talk about your need for chaos paper. It seems you were initially interested in why people share rather blatantly false online conspiracies. and you found a meaningfully large cohort that would share conspiracy theories about both parties, about seemingly any elite, whether they were left, right, center. And what I initially found so interesting

about this paper, when I saw it, is that it seems to violate what I understand to be the first rule of polarization. That polarization, at least in America, creates really clear lines between right and left. The left hates the right,

the right hates the left. That's polarization. And your research said, no, actually, there's a sizable group that is above all against all elite institutions on whatever side they happen to exist. Tell me a little bit more about this research,

this initial paper that discovered the need for chaos. Yeah, so in many ways it was one of those things that often happen in science that there's something you don't understand and then you begin to dig deeper into it and suddenly something completely new emerges. And when we began understanding or doing research on the spread of misinformation, what we were sort of expecting was exactly this sort of clear pattern of polarization,

this clear partisan divide that you would have people on the left wing sharing misinformation about elites on the right wing and people on the right wing sharing misinformation about people on the left wing. wing. What we found was exactly as you're describing that there is a sizable group that just shares everything. And we try to see, well, what is it actually that they want? If they don't just want to hurt one of the established parties within the system, what is it then really that they want? So let's take this concept of need for chaos and really blow it out. What do you define as need for chaos in your own words? So the way that we define the need for chaos is a social strategy of last

resort. So essentially, it's a psychological motivation that emerges when you feel stuck in the current system. When you feel that you have no way of advancing in the current social hierarchy, then at a certain point that frustration becomes so large that you, simply say, well, it's better to tear it all down and see if something better awaits after that. And that sort of super destructive drive is at the core of what we call a need for chaos, that you have this urge for destruction. You identify this group. You ask them questions to understand their motivations.

I went over some of this in the open. You literally quote, from the dark night to assess whether these people have a kind of joker-esque mentality. And you establish that there is a real and sizable chaos cohort in the U.S. electorate that is drawn, whether by entertainment or political purpose, to messages of burn it all down chaos. How large of a group are we talking about here? Is this 1%? Is it 50%? I would say that around maybe 5% is among the really hardcore group of people who are at the high end of the need for chaos and have this sort of very extreme. mindset. But if we look further down the scale, where there is people who sometimes have these

thoughts, well, maybe it's better just to burn it all down, then we might be up to 30% of the American electorate who have some aspect of this mindset. Who are we talking about here? Who has the strongest need for chaos? And why don't you talk to me both about age, young versus old. And I believe you also looked at party and ethnicity, white versus non-white. So where is this need for chaos cohort strongest? So we see it in particularly, it's particularly high among young men. A lot of sort of antisocial motivations are more widespread among young men.

And this is what we're seeing in this case. as well, and we can talk a little bit more, perhaps, about why that's the case. But we're also seeing, as you are suggesting, that there is a racial component to it. And it's in particular white men, but also black men who have this need for chaos. But it's for slightly different reasons, as we can see. So if we look at the group of black males, the reason why they have a high need for chaos is the sense that they are sort of not able to advance in the current US society because of historical injustices. But if we look at the white men, that reflects a sense that they are losing status. And the group that we found that are most reactive to a sense of status loss is specifically white men.

So if you are a white man who are sort of feeling fine with your place in society, then likely you won't have a very high need for chaos. But if you are feeling that you are losing out, that you're losing status, then we find, found that white men react with particular levels of aggression. So let's say someone's listening along and they say, okay, I understand that you did this survey where you found that there is this cohort of people that want to share conspiracy theories about basically any elite that it is disproportionately located among, you know, younger voters. There are some white voters who are especially status anxious. There are non-white voters, black voters who are anxious about their own, their own case for injustice.

I feel like the next really critical question is, what does this concept help us to see more clearly? What does this concept actually help us explain? Does it explain aspects of the Trump phenomenon and his surprisingly resilient strength among some voters? Does it help potentially explain why? We've done a podcast about this. There's some evidence that young men in the U.S.

and maybe around the world are beginning to, list a little bit more conservative? What real world phenomena do you think this concept of need for chaos helps us see more clearly? So I think one of the most important phenomenon that it explains in current U.S. politics is why we shouldn't find the support for Trump so surprising that at least many in Europe find. Often the way that a European person would look at Trump's support is to say, well, why do we see this level of support when we here have a former president who has been caught in lying,

who has been caught in being extremely. extremely rude, being extremely sexist, who have been involved in the storm on Congress and so on. So the way that we normally would think of that from a European perspective is, so, okay, he has something to offer that that means that people will support him despite those things. But what the need for chaos theory is suggesting is that no, it's not despite those things that there is support. It is, in fact, because of those things, that there's very clear signals that Trump does not care about social conventions, that he doesn't care about the norms, that he's willing to take really aggressive. use really aggressive means to his end. So a lot of what would make a sort of European not vote for Donald Trump is exactly why he caters to a large segment in the United States.

I want to pick up the baton there because I absolutely agree that one of the most useful ways that need for chaos helps me see American politics more clearly, is to show why it has been so unsuccessful for practically every single Trump opponent to call him an agent of chaos. And if you go back since 2015, over the last nine years, basically every major opponent has tried to defeat him by associating him with chaos. In 2015 and 2016, Jeb Bush called him a chaos candidate. Today, in the presidential primary of the GOP, Nikki Haley says that Trump, quote, only brings one bout of chaos after another. The Biden team, Democrats, constantly try to frame the election as a choice between Biden versus chaos.

But to your point, they might be pointing out not Trump's weakness, but rather his strength among this particular group, that they really want him to be an agent of chaos. There was this profile that I read in Politico that absolutely floored me and it was so easy to connect with your paper. And it was of a 58-year-old voter in New Hampshire named Ted Johnson. This is a political feature by the reporter Michael Cruz. And this guy, Ted Johnson, voted for Barack Obama twice in 2008 and 2012. Then he voted for Donald Trump twice in 2016 and 2020. He is not economically anxious. he lives in a three-bedroom house that has appreciated 50% in just the last four years during Joe Biden's presidency.

But when the profile writer, Cruz asks him again to, again and again, to explain his support for Trump, he says things like, quote, our system needs to be broken, that he believes that Trump will, quote, break the system and, quote, make a miserable four years for everybody, end quote. And of course, it's ridiculous to say that this one guy is a perfect representation of the million of people who love Donald Trump. But this seems to be a very elegant summation of the theory of need for chaos, that there are people that love Donald Trump, not because they believe he can restore some kind of order, but rather, rather explicitly because they appreciate that he's an agent of chaos in a system

of elite failure. What you're describing seems to connect really with our findings well. And also the fact that this is not about. being rich or poor. It is about status. So we can see that the people who are high need for chaos, they do feel that they have somewhat miserable lives in the sense that they feel more lonely,

they feel more excluded. But it's not a matter of income necessarily. But in addition to this sense of being socially, excluded, they have a very particular personality, namely that they really, really crave recognition and status. And that combination of social exclusion and a craving for status, that is what makes this sort of hyper-destructive, destructive drive trigger. One point that I think is really important to make is that there's a way to frame this discussion of need for chaos that merely criticizes.

those who hold these views. It says essentially this Need for Chaos cohort, they're crazy, they're destructive, they're neelistic, they're just out of their minds and they want to destroy the world, they don't care what comes after. And look, maybe there are aspects

of that description that are true for some people, but it is also the case that Need for Chaos materializes as anti-elite sentiment. And there's no question, at least in America, and you might have more expertise about what's gone on in Europe, that there have been just one elite failure after another, especially since the pandemic,

that you had public health failures, U.S. state government failures, you had federal government failures, you had scientific failures at the FDA, the CDC. The last four years have not covered the American elite in glory. There have been news media failures. My own industry has failed many, many times to accurately represent either the pandemic, the rise of inflation, the causes of inflation. I could go on and on. And so I do think that this need for chaos cohort,

to the extent that they are an anti-elite group, they are responding to reality to a certain extent. They are responding to elite failures. And I wonder whether you agree with that little rant that I went on, that to a certain extent we might see this rise in the chaos cohort because they're responding to an increase in perceived and real elite failures.

I think that there's some truth to that and a current discussion within political science research is whether it's in fact good to trust too much as a citizens that in some ways a lack of trust, in elites can also be a sign of a healthy public. I think what is key from a democratic perspective is that we have trustworthy elites, not necessarily that we trust the elites.

We shouldn't trust elites more than they deserve. So in that sense, I do agree that it's not completely, it's not completely unexpected what we are seeing. And if we look to Europe, for example, and the emergency of anti-elite sentiments there, then it particularly happened after the financial crisis where there was a sense that large segments of the public were let down by elites.

And more generally, what I think is a really central part of what explains anti-elite sentiments in United States, in addition to what you said, is also increasing economic inequality over the last many decades. So I do think we have had a societal development where some people have been left out. of economic growth, for example. And some people do have pretty miserable lives. So in that sense, I don't think it is, I don't think it's unexpected or unexplainable. At the same time, when I look at a political figure such as Donald Trump,

it's not clear that what he's doing is, in fact, to the benefit of those who have been sort of left down by the developments over the last decades. And I think that's the real concerning part, whether you have a sort of explainable level of frustrations in the electorate that is then being used by elites who are pursuing their own goals in order to get into power, but that they, in fact, do not want to use that power to the benefit of those that they mobilize. I'm glad you mentioned the financial crisis, because you're right.

There is a history, you can tell, of the 21st century in America that is one of just one elite catastrophe after another. The wars on terror, the financial crisis, the terribly slow recovery in the 2010s, especially for young people, the pandemic, inflation. And under the category of inflation, I would include both the acute crisis the last few years and the deeper crisis of affordability for housing and health care, which is a multi-year, multi-decade story. So let's say that you're a political party, and you want to reach these people.

You want to reach the chaos cohort, to listen to them and reach them. Where do you begin? So I think one of the key things is that a... at the center of these people are a sense of social exclusion. So I think one of the really difficult challenges is to find a way where you can actually try to listen to what they say, where you don't push those feelings of social exclusion or make them greater. And the challenge here is, of course, that a lot of the thoughts and a lot of the policies that they would support you disagree with.

But at the same time, you nonetheless need to listen to them take their concerns seriously in order to not push them further away from you, in order to not intensify those feelings of social exclusion. I think that's what you can do in the short run. Essentially, it is what you do in deregicalization programs to listen, to try to get those feelings of exclusion toned down. And I think it's also important to say that the way to remedy this is not with facts. these people don't care about the facts. They care about that they feel left out. They feel betrayed by the system.

So you need to listen to them, figure out, well, what are their concerns? And I think that's what you can do in the short run. And then in the long run, I think it's very crucial that we both in the United States, but also more generally in the Western world reverses the developments in inequality, because essentially that is the underlying systematic driver, I believe, of a lot of what we are seeing. And according to the research that we are doing, then we should see things like the sharing of misinformation, the rise of Donald Trump as more symptoms of the underlying disease. which is increased inequality.

Yeah, I agree with just about everything that you said. What I disagree with is the idea that this chaos cohort doesn't care about facts. Because just a few seconds after you said that, you also acknowledge that one of the reasons why this chaos cohort might be growing is the fact of economic inequality. So it is possible that this group is acting in a way or speaking in a way or voting in a way that some people might consider post-material that is, you know, not directly responsive to economic considerations, but it's possible that, um, that a lot of them are behaving in a way that

is actually very material, that, that some of them feel, um, you know, among, you know, non-white Americans, for example, that the injustices that they faced, uh, and the structural racism that they experience is real, um, or among, you know, rural white Americans. It's possible that a lot of rural white Americans feel rightly that their areas have seen, um, and the areas have seen economic stagnation and depopulation, and they feel like the rules of the game don't benefit them. And they're like, I don't like the rules of the game. I'd like to take the game board and, you know, throw the table aside because we need a new set of rules to fix the regime or overturn the regime of the last 20 or 30 years of political economy. So I do agree that sometimes

a pure factual case isn't going to work, but I do think it's important to say that these people's feelings, I think probably do flow downstream from, you know, the facts on the ground as they see them. No, I do think that you are right about that. That they are reacting to the reality that they experience and they are reacting to the reality as they see it. It's more, my point about the facts is more that if we look at their motivations to share conspiracy theories, misinformation and so on, that you cannot combat with a fact-based discussion, because it's rooted in other types of feelings. It's rooted in feelings of social exclusion.

I also want to make another point, and that is one of the, one of the, one of the, effects of inequality is, it's very important to say that this is not necessarily, as we also talked about before, this is not necessarily a conflict between the rich and the poor. But what inequality does is that it increases status competitions at all levels of the societal ladder. So when you have inequality in a society, it means that everyone are fighting more against everyone. So a lot of these people who have a need for chaos, they are not on the bottom of society, but they can be high up in society, but they just want to get higher. Michael Bing Peterson, thank you very much. No, thank you.

Thank you for listening. Plain English is produced by Devin Baroldi. One quick programming note. We in the month of March are going to move just temporarily to a once-a-week publishing schedule, We'll be coming at you every Tuesday, no Friday episodes for the month of March. We got a little bit of extra work. We got a little bit of travel. This is just the best way to smooth out the time that we have to bring you consistent weekly entertainment. So one show a week in March, and we will be back to our regular two episode per week schedule in April.