In many ways, the readings this week continue our conversations from last class around the construction of belief. In the short video “Make Believe and Make Belief,” Richard Schechner suggests that the practice of “making belief” creates a meaning that is “not endowed”; “in actually performing the rituals…these actions, these performances create the belief, a reality that people live for, celebrate, murder for…” In Elizabeth Kolbert’s article, the ritualistic, repetitive nature of this practice becomes tied to human evolution. Following the experts interviewed for the piece, Kolbert writes, “Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.” Confirmation bias is cited as one of the examples of this phenomenon; according to the Gormans, the experience is physiological; “suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure––a rush of dopamine––when processing information that supports their beliefs.” This is an interesting perspective to establish a dialogue with in terms of our ideas about politics and the mobilization of affect.
Indeed, the political trajectory of our country is enough cause to make one question the limits of reason. Blindness once again comes into play; Kolbert’s article discusses “myside bias,” which suggests that we are adept at spotting the weaknesses in other’s arguments, but that “the positions we’re blind about are our own.” In Mercier and Sperber’s terms, this does not have to do so much with percepticide –an active disavowal– but rather how we are inherently socially wired, “[it] reflects the task that reason evolved to perform, which is to prevent us from getting screwed by the other members of our group”; significantly, there is still an effacement of recognition on the part of the subject, that has been tied to a lack of acknowledgment of complicity and responsibility in our previous conversations (later on, Sloman and Fernbach do point to blindness’ extreme manifestation that does include active disavowal, stating “If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration”). Mercier and Sperber trace the first instance of this blind behavior from the time in which humans lived in hunter-gatherer formations, suggesting that reason often seems to fail us because “the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.” I would contest this conception of belatedness because reason has evolved with changing historical circumstances; take Foucault’s tracing of the development of a neoliberal reason for example, based on homo economicus as an entrepreneur of himself. While Foucault saw, through neoliberal governmentality, the possibility for an increased individual autonomy, in the contemporary situation we see how this reason has mutated further into one that champions self-sufficiency and competition above all else, eroding relational bonds and communitarian values such as care in the establishment of social relations. This too has a connection to the original concern of not “getting screwed by the other members of our group.”
One of my critiques of Kolbert’s article is its focus on a scientific-rational ordering of the world; “Science moves forward,” “the goal [is] promoting sound science,” which undermines other knowledges and possible solutions for the contemporary reality. Charles Blow raises a smart counterpoint to the strategy of calling Trump a liar (one that obviously has not yielded much success) because “the rules don’t apply to the folk hero.” In fact, many times, breaking the rules is positively reappropriated into challenging the establishment in Trump’s rhetoric; he plays the role of the “powerful stranger” (24) in Machiavellian terms and is able to make a practical use of his bad behavior; “It is essential…for a Prince…to have learned how to be other than good, and to use or not to use his goodness as necessity requires” (Machiavelli 79). Blow argues that the opposition’s focus should rather be on dismantling Trump’s figure as such a “hero”: “the great miscalculation people make in trying to understand Donald Trump and the cultlike devotion of the people who follow him is that they continue to apply the standard rules of analysis…How does one fight a fiction, a fantasy?” Blow’s article allows us to perceive how Trump has effectively mobilized the strategies of persuasion and perception present in Machiavelli’s text. He emphasizes how “the only vulnerability the folk hero has is an exposed betrayal of the folk”; Trump realizes the importance of keeping his base’s support; he “fawns” over them, and they reciprocate. Trump also demands loyalty of his “court”; the musical-chairs like turbulence that his Cabinet and key White House posts have experienced through constant resignations and replacements clearly speaks to how “the choice of Ministers is a matter of no small moment to a Prince” (Machiavelli 116).
Machiavelli argues that the attainment of a Civil Princedom lies in the fortunate astuteness of the leader; fortunate, because the circumstances have to be right, but astuteness, because the leader needs to secure the “favour of the people or of the nobles” (52). Machiavelli bases the relationship between ruler and subject on favour, affect, stating that the Prince’s subjects should, at all times, “feel the need of the State and of him, and then they will always be faithful to him” (56). Trump’s self-centeredness, and how he performs it in an “I/me”-based discourse and rhetoric through the repetition of his own accomplishments, is then a mobilization of this performance that seeks to maintain the loyalty of his following, and consequently, his own power.