[CLIP] Stella Morabito: The Impulse to Conform and Astroturf Mobs Versus Organic Protest

Stella, viewers of American Thought Leaders will know there's something I like to talk about often, which is something I call the megaphone, the mechanism that is used to manufacture perceived consensus in society, something that I think has profound importance in all the social dynamics that we're seeing today. But prior to having read your book, I didn't understand how it worked, and now I do. And you know what I'm talking about. So why don't we start there? Oh my. Well, thank you. And again, it's really great to be here with you, Jan. I love the show. The megaphone, the way I would view that is as propaganda combined with political correctness to produce that illusion, that illusion of unanimity, that illusion of consensus. And how does this work? I mean, why do so many people fall in line with it? And how do the people pushing propagandistic narrative get away with it? These are the two questions that have really been driving the purpose of writing this book, The Weaponization of Loneliness. And the way it works really is that we have as human beings, all of us, I believe without exception, have a hardwired need to connect with other people. We really can't survive in isolation. And along with that, the flip side of that is a primal fear of ostracism. And so the megaphone, you know, really those who apply this megaphone, the propaganda and political correctness, operate something I call the machinery of loneliness that triggers this conformity impulse and this need to obey whatever we perceive as a consensus, even if it's not really the consensus. That in a nutshell is, I believe, how it works. I didn't realize until the last while, okay, how powerful our need to belong is. I've actually mentioned this probably on the show, but certainly to countless people, I didn't realize and how that could be actually a central organizing principle. It's not necessarily obvious that this would be such an important thing. Right. And I think it's instinctive. I mean, I think we are kind of, we're aware to a certain extent, for example, maybe we don't want to say something because we're afraid we're going to be, oh, they're going to judge us or be rejected. Even if it's just an innocent idea or opinion, if we think that that goes against the grain, that goes again, that's politically incorrect. And so this hardwired impulse to conform and, you know, is definitely related to our need to belong and our intense fear of ostracism because we can't survive in isolation as human beings, severe isolation. And that works within us and it has a huge effect on society, on civil society, especially if people keep falling in line with a narrative or a megaphone that only creates an illusion of consensus. When the consensus isn't really there, when people aren't really talking to one another because they're fearful of saying the wrong thing. And this affects people on every level. I mean, of course, children are highly suggestible to that. You know, it can be operated by tyrants of all stripes, for example, you know, a toxic boss or a cult leader like Jim Jones, actually, for your viewers who might recall in 1978, he convinced almost a thousand people in his cult in Jonestown, Guyana to commit what he called revolutionary suicide. And so it's an extremely powerful, extremely, but natural impulse. And the only way around that is to have strong relationships that you can fall back in and private life in the private sphere of life. If you have family who you can or friends, really good friends, and because people might have a private sphere of life and private relationships that they can fall back on. This is why the private sphere of life has become such a target for tyrants and totalitarians and has always been. I mean, it's why the Communist Manifesto in 1848 had that proclamation abolished the family as a big part of the agenda. So loyalties on a personal level are very threatening to those who want to achieve power and control social control, social engineering. It's something that I felt, these dynamics were not explored deeply enough. That's why I wrote the book, Weaponization of Loneliness, because that's what it amounts to, is weaponizing our fear of being alone and threatening loneliness upon us if we don't get with whatever program, whatever said totalitarian wants us to focus on. It's fascinating also that the way our technology seems to have developed, for example, through social media, is a kind of an illusion or perception of community, which often doesn't really exist. It feeds some of that impulse, but it doesn't provide this exact part, the private sphere of life, which you say is so critical. Oh, yes, absolutely. Now what we're headed towards feels like a new kind of what we might call technocratic totalitarianism, where you have with new communications technologies and the ability for surveillance like we've never had before. You can read about different things, like what they call kill switches on vehicles, where if you are viewed as maybe having broken the law or not even broken the law, but for whatever reason, you can have your vehicle disabled. These kinds of technologies that are being developed are all about social control, and they all seem to attack our private sphere of life or those conversations, those relationships from which we get our strength. Vaclav Havel, who wrote The Power of the Powerless in 1978, pointed out that our power really comes from what he called the hidden sphere of life, that hidden sphere that totalitarians couldn't quite get their hands on. And they want to get their hands on it because if you think we're in some kind of information war, if you think that controlling information is really important to whatever powers that be, well, the first thing they're going to want to do is make sure that whatever we say to one another, even one-on-one, is controlled somehow. That's always how totalitarian systems work. I'm going to jump in here because you mentioned at the beginning, propaganda plus political correctness equals megaphone. Political correctness is sort of this amorphous thing, but as you were saying this just now, it's a method of speech control, isn't it? Just simply. Oh, absolutely. In fact, I discuss in my book what I call the machinery of loneliness, and it has three main components, and I suppose I would add those to the megaphone. The three main components are identity politics, which serves to erase us as individuals and just classify us and pigeonhole us according to whether it's a victim status or oppressor status. Second, political correctness, which is a process that induces self-censorship. It's a process by which one-sided propaganda, particularly in one party state, can control what's said, what's discussed, by injecting that fear of rejection if you say the wrong thing. Identity politics, political correctness, and what's the third? The third is mob agitation, which we see on social media, but mobs can be street mobs like Antifa, they can be human resources department bureaucrats. They can take many different forms, but they all serve to enforce political correctness and identity politics, and of course, the propaganda that's there to drive the agenda forward.