Mind Plays Tricks

One of my favorite psychiatrists, the late Peter Stevens, would ask a question when interviewing a patient that initially floored me. "Does your mind play tricks on you sometimes?" As I am familiar with the lack of insight that is often a main symptom of psychotic illnesses, especially schizophrenia, I inwardly scoffed at the idea that anyone would agree to that. I had preferred formulations such as whether the patient found that others disagreed with his interpretations as a way of gently introducing the idea that their thinking might not be right.

My way seldom worked, his worked a surprising amount of the time.  For some reason the question is less threatening and reduces defensiveness. (Not infallibly. Nothing works all that well.)

Nonpsychotic people certainly resist the idea that their mind plays tricks on them.  You maybe, but not I. Yet we believe in the general idea, that we have these evolutionary adaptations to situations in hominid history that are less useful in a modern interconnected society. The theory that our minds are geared to social groupings of a max of 150, usually broken into subgroups with frequent interaction, and perhaps also part of a larger group, say 3000 or so, which meets annually or less for festivals, leading to trade, marriages, and exchange of news and craft knowledge is an idea that just makes sense to us. It has become very popular, though I don't know if it is as solidly evidenced as advertised.

Yet if not that, then something like that is in play. We have programs that play in our choosing a mate - women (as a group, not you personally) still greatly prefer taller men; men still prefer fertile-looking women. We have patterns of reciprocity that are nearly universal, leadership and followership responses that seem designed for hunting or war bands more than cities of millions. Yes, yes, our mind plays tricks on us, we allow.  Especially you. And very especially our opponents or competitors, who are obviously fools and stupid people being led around by the nose.

When we sense that someone is a competitor for resources, our desire is to eliminate or at least undermine him at low cost to ourselves. We have a sense of how many people it would take to all get angry and gang up on someone and kill them or kick them out. There is probably some cultural variation on this, but I'll bet it's not overwhelming. We know how much mob we need to run someone out of town on a rail, and it is far less than the number needed to storm the castle with pitchforks. When we sense we have that many people with us, we are far more likely to pounce. 

In a city, fifty people who hate the mayor or some celebrity is nothing. You might get a critical mass in one village neighborhood and be able to do some local damage, but set against all of Chicago the fifty angry souls know they have no chance.

On the internet, people are in a group far larger than any city, but they still respond as if they are in a village. If they get fifty people together all  wanting Francine to be fired and maybe even threatened, it feels powerful.  It feels like enough. Francine, even knowing that fifty is a small number in comparison to the whole net, may still feel intimidated by fifty angry people calling for her head.  Intellectually, she knows that they come from 21 states and 6 foreign countries and aren't going to band together, but somewhere in her evolutionary programming she feels threatened. The mob's individual minds are playing tricks on them, and Francine's mind is playing tricks on her. 

There is a chance some of them even know that this is an unreasonable, disproportionate response, yet they keep responding to it anyway. What we used to call "mass media" has steadily increased this trickery, as far back as the printing press and certainly including the TV culture that subtly tells us what is normal and who should be excised. We have not even adjusted to that - hell, we may not have adjusted to the false inflation of the printing press yet - but enter the internet, both huger and more intimate than all previous. 

Ann Althouse put up a video of Nikki Haley For President, and the comments were instructive. She's got an intelligent bunch, so some of the writers gave reasons for or against her candidacy. Yet others had a different tone, clearly trying to police conservatives to make sure they knew what was acceptable and what wasn't. That group was largely critical, which is unsurprising. It had all the feeling of a few people putting in effort to stir up a mob. Snowball sabotaged the windmill. For me it created backlash.  I was mildly negative, mostly neutral about her, but now I'm just a bit on her side. And I will note that I feel this in spite of myself, knowing that this is not based on policies, or evidence of competence and leadership, but on suspicion of the mob.