Fear, Outrage, Amygdala Hijack, Social Media Addiction, and Learned Helplessness ...

still needs a bit of work ... somehow, references seem to disappear from search engines, conveniently...

What algorithmically-driven social media is very good at, is driving wedges between people, in breaking up communities into warring factions neither of whom listen to each other. And then these factions are further split up, until the community exists no longer but is simply a geographical grouping of atomized individuals, each glued to a screen. And this very effectively lays the basis for totalitarianism:

“For totalitarianism to flourish, [Hannah Arendt] posited, two requisite ingredients must coalesce, forming a kind of unholy alliance: Terror and ideology.
 
In order to effectively terrorize a population, Arendt contended, man must first be separated both from his fellow man and from his own, inner self. He must be isolated, cut off from his support networks, both external and internal, outflanked societally and infiltrated mentally. 
 
At the societal level, Arendt followed the words and deeds of her philosophical mentors, Socrates and Aristotle, who contended that man is fundamentally a social - which is to say, a political - animal. Socrates, for his part, demonstrated this daily through avid engagement with his fellow citizens, the demos, in the ancient Athenian marketplace of ideas, known as the Agora. Though he never wrote anything down himself, he led what Arendt herself famously formulated as the vita activa - or the “active life” - in which he spoke truth to power, at least as he identified it, and called into question accepted dogma of the day. The resulting dialogues would form the basis for that eponymous and indispensable method with which we still associate the Father of Western Philosophy to this day. It is no small irony then that, the city which brought democracy to the world, voted by majority to have Socrates put to death on the twin charges of corrupting the youth and asebeia - impiety, or introducing new deities into the accepted pantheon.
 
After the trial and death of Socrates, the gadfly’s closest student, Plato, led the world of philosophy on a kind of inward journey, a detour which Arendt characterized as the vita contemplativa - or the “contemplative life.” This she viewed as a grave error, one that saw man eschew the objective reality of his natural surroundings, including the fellow individuals with whom he shared them, in favor of isolated theorizing, subjective abstraction and generally nihilistic omphaloskepsis. Thus, Arendt argued, did society become gradually atomized, composed of discrete individuals who were disengaged from the wider public discourse, the vita activa, that mighty Athenean aegis which shielded man against the lurking totalitarian impulse. 
 
Aristotle, too, recognized man as a fundamentally political animal, able to most fully realize his own, individual freedom within the context of a community (from household to city-state) in which he could live and thrive. For Aristotle, although the concept of “political man” was a function primarily of his nature, specifically in his unique linguistic capabilities, which enables him to seek, discern and articulate truth and virtue, its ultimate expression was something entirely differentiated from mere biology, his flesh and bones and material makeup. From his very name to the will of his mind and the consequent actions that carry him through life, Aristotle’s idea of man as a political, social being was bound up with the understanding that this, too, guarded against the worst ills of his nature. “For as man is the best of the animals when perfected,” he wrote in Politics, “so he is the worst of all when sundered from law and justice.”
 
To reduce humans to apolitical animals, to alienate them from one and other, to number them, to tag them, and to dehumanize them. This is what Stalin meant when he said, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths a statistic.”
 
Once man was rent from his community, “a clod washed away by the sea,” to marshal Donne’s famous words, he was left prone, exposed to still a more profound, insidious disjunction; the estrangement even from “the self” as an independent agent of reason. For Arendt, it was this interior citadel of the mind that represented the individual’s last stand against totalitarian ideological infiltration; the ability to hold an inner dialogue with one’s own conscience, to weigh countervailing impulses, to observe the same position from different angles, to entertain discordant ideas without necessarily subscribing to one or either of them. In short, to think for oneself.

The effect of this dual severing, the simultaneous external (from society) and internal (from the mind) dissociation, was to leave the individual utterly, helplessly stranded... and longing desperately for a savior. By way of analogy, we might consider how an abusive spouse employs intimidation and panoptical invigilation to monitor and then suppress his victim’s contact with the outside world, gradually cutting them off from their critical support network of family, friends and colleagues. Once his victim is isolated, the predator can begin the far more intricate undertaking of incessant psychological attack, distorting his victim’s perception of reality, gaslighting them into accepting, even appreciating, their “new normal,” a condition sometimes referred to as Stockholm Syndrome. Having dashed the outside supply lines and emptied his victim of all self-confidence, the abuser is now in a position of absolute power, able to dictate terms and translate reality, to fill his prey with whatever narrative, whatever ideology, best serves his own interests. To dominate them, in other words, totally.” Arendt, 1948

Here's an idea: fear and outrage are what social media spread, like wildfire. The various social contagions seen over the past four or five years - the transgender hysteria, the COVID hysteria of fear and loathing, the “woke” hysteria - can be laid at the feet of social media - and this is apparently deliberate and well-characterized, in the case below by researchers at Facebook itself:

“Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. Emotional contagion is well established in laboratory experiments, with people transferring positive and negative emotions to others. Data from a large real-world social network, collected over a 20-y period suggests that longer-lasting moods (e.g., depression, happiness) can be transferred through networks [Fowler JH, Christakis NA (2008) BMJ 337:a2338], although the results are controversial. In an experiment with people who use Facebook, we test whether emotional contagion occurs outside of in-person interaction between individuals by reducing the amount of emotional content in the News Feed. When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks.” https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1320040111, in https://streamfortyseven.substack.com/p/facebooks-new-twitter-alternative

And "amygdala hijack" appears to be the mechanism: "Anger, aggression, fear, and stress are all common emotional triggers. They can cause sudden, illogical, and even irrational reactions. ... The amygdala hijack occurs when your amygdala responds to stress and disables your frontal lobes. That activates the fight-or-flight response and disables rational, reasoned responses. In other words, the amygdala “hijacks” control of your brain and your responses." https://neurohacker.com/how-social-media-and-ai-hijack-your-brain

This is how social media makes its viewers into addicts.

“Learning which environmental cues that predict danger is crucial for survival and accomplished through Pavlovian fear conditioning. In humans and rodents alike, fear conditioning is amygdala-dependent and rests on similar neurocircuitry. Rodent studies have implicated a causative role for dopamine in the amygdala during fear memory formation, but the role of dopamine in aversive learning in humans is unclear. Here, we show dopamine release in the amygdala and striatum during fear learning in humans. Using simultaneous positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging, we demonstrate that the amount of dopamine release is linked to strength of conditioned fear responses and linearly coupled to learning-induced activity in the amygdala. Thus, like in rodents, formation of amygdala-dependent fear memories in humans seems to be facilitated by endogenous dopamine release, supporting an evolutionary conserved neurochemical mechanism for aversive memory formation.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-021-01400-x

People operating under the influence of fear, hatred, and outrage make dumb decisions, just like drunks and drug addicts do, and that goes a long way to explain why a lot of the world is in the state it's in.

And then this continued psychical attack induces a psychological state known as "learned helplessness": "Helplessness is a state in which nothing a person opts to do affects what is happening. It is the quitting or the give up response that follows the conviction that whatever a person does doesn’t matter.[1] Learned helplessness (LH) was initially used to label the failure of certain laboratory animals to escape or avoid shock, despite giving an opportunity, subsequent to earlier exposure to unavoidable shock.[2,3] Now, the term has been applied to the failure of human beings to pursue, utilize, or acquire adaptive instrumental responses. It is observed in a depressed person who seems to have given up hope that effective voluntary control over important environmental events is possible.[4] People suffering from LH accept that bad things will take place and they will have little control over them.[5] Those who are exposed to complex problems for an extended period learn that responses and events are unconnected. Learning attained in this situation weakens imminent learning and leads to inactivity. Consequently, they will be unsuccessful to resolve any concern even if there is a possible solution for the concern." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5141652/

And a population that has learned to become helpless is an obedient and submissive population - even if that obedience could kill them - even if they know it...

The process of conditioning is fairly straightforward: gradually dial up the heat, until you run into resistance. Once you’ve pushed as far as you can go, and the resistance starts to materialize in force, back down; repeal the mandates, soften the requirements, allow some of the challenges to see victory; let the people feel like their complaints have been heard, and the tyranny is going to stop now. Once the resistance has settled down, kick it back into gear again, and this time go a little further, a little faster, and see where the new boundary really lies. Winnow and exhaust the capacity and willingness to resist, fine-tune the propaganda and enforcement, and keep on pushing.

We have had a fairly long period of softening; cases being won, mandates largely becoming a relic of the past, loosening censorship, and generally moving forward from the pandemic onto other matters, like Hunter Biden and the official neglect that caused the Lahaina firestorm. We are now in the opening stages of ramping the heat back up again - unless the resistance is fierce, united and ubiquitous, it’s going to get incrementally more draconian every time.

Subjugating a country so deeply rooted in personal liberty and freedom was never going to be easy, but compulsory public education has played a large role in making this possible - people subjected to such indoctrination are pre-primed for this process:

“Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole. Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modern schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier: 

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force. …” https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~abatko/interests/teaching/essays/Against_Schools/

“Having largely completed the process of institutional capture, they are again stretching their wings; the rule of law is becoming increasingly weakened, be it through rampant unpunished petty crime, the absurd, lawless indictments of Trump and his circle, or the total failure to hold the Bidens accountable for their broad-daylight corruption; the criminality and corruption is heating up, and with it, the people are again beginning to push back. The mandates have absolutely nothing to do with anybody’s safety or well-being. They are a purely political tool, a cudgel, with which they can again and again assault your sense of reality, your integrity, and simultaneously both assess, and hopefully degrade, your capacity for resistance.

If they can make you comply with a mask mandate, when you know full well that it serves absolutely no beneficial purpose, what manner of meaningful resistance do you possibly think you can offer against the wholesale theft of a country and the persecution of its rightful, twice-elected President?

They aren’t blind; they can see that they’re poking a hornet’s nest with these nakedly political, unjust prosecutions. What they really need to know right now is how far they can push the envelope. Has the program of demoralization worked? How significantly, how completely has it worked? How many people still believe that the masks do anything, versus how many are complying anyway and wearing them?

The answer to that question is going to inform just how hard they push the envelope over the next year. If they find that there is still broad compliance - particularly alongside simultaneous, widespread knowledge that they do nothing - that right there is a blinking green light to continue and accelerate the effort to break apart this country, and consign us all to a Marxist, WEF-dominated hellscape, from which there will be no peaceful escape.

Maybe you ascribe to accelerationism. Personally, I don’t; especially given their incredibly lackluster geopolitical performance of late, with alliances and vassal states falling and failing left and right, time is emphatically not on their side; the longer it takes, the slower it goes, and the more resistance they meet, the likelier that the whole house of cards will collapse before they manage to fully consolidate their power. We are coming into a crucial, historical period of time; the events of the next few years will shape the century to come. What that looks like depends wholly and solely on you.

Do not comply.

How?

Of course, propaganda and peer pressure isn’t the only tool being used to generate compliance. The biggest ones are the workplace and college mandates; when long-pursued careers, livelihoods, and hard-earned educational achievements are directly threatened, the threat becomes much more immediate and personal than any abstract concept of what might happen to the country at large in the future, and standing up against it comes with real, quantifiable, potentially life-destroying risks. Over the last few years, those threats were used to enforce compliance with the vaccines; years later, the true experts, warning about blood clots, heart diseases, strokes and sudden death, and berated as quacks and conspiracy theorists, have been proven correct. All-cause excess mortality is far above normal and continuously rising; sudden deaths of celebrities, newscasters, sports players at all levels, and friends, family and colleagues are a regular and ongoing event. Nevertheless, as you may have figured out by now, good faith is a sucker’s game when it comes to opposing these things. As Bezmenov said, it doesn’t matter how much evidence you bring to a communist; they’re never going to believe, understand or accept it, until that boot lands squarely on their face. Likewise, trying to argue in good faith with one’s HR department, or your local college commies, is a losing proposition.

These mandates are not grounded in reality; they are grounded in disparities of force, and driven by ideology. So too, then, is the most effective means of opposition; you have more force at your disposal than you might think, and you would be amazed at how far integrity, and standing for your principles and beliefs, can take you. Lots of people have been winning lawsuits and compensation for constructive dismissal, wrongful termination, discrimination, etc, over the mandates. A few have sadly been lost, too. Companies and corporations tend to be allergic to risk; while standing up for yourself usually does entail some degree of risk, if you can flip the tables and turn it into their risk, you just might come through it okay. In the end, you’re the only one that can make that determination, and you should do what’s right for you.”

=========

A means for stopping amygdala hijack dead in its tracks -

“Extract from Thomas Jefferson to Francis Eppes

Monticello May 21. 16.

while you endeavor, by a good store of learning, to prepare yourself to become an useful and distinguished member of your country you must remember that this can never be, without uniting merit with your learning. honesty, disinterestedness, and good nature are indispensable to procure the esteem and confidence of those with whom we live, and on whose esteem our happiness depends. never suffer a thought to be harbored in your mind which you would not avow openly. when tempted to do any thing in secret, ask yourself if you would do it in public. if you would not, be sure it is wrong. in little disputes with your companions, give way, rather than insist on trifles. for their love, and the approbation of others will be worth more to you than the trifle in dispute. above all things, and at all times, practice yourself in good humor. this, of all human qualities, is the most amiable and endearing to society.

whenever you feel a warmth of temper rising, check it at once, and suppress it, recollecting it will make you unhappy within yourself, and disliked by others. nothing gives one person so great advantage over another, as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.

think of these things, practice them & you will be rewarded by the love & confidence of the world.”

============

It strikes me that this is a way to stop amygdala hijack dead in its tracks, and to move you over from emotion-driven reflexive responses to rationally-considered responses - it's the context for the Jefferson quote in #6:

"whenever you feel a warmth of temper rising, check it at once, and suppress it, recollecting it will make you unhappy within yourself, and disliked by others. nothing gives one person so great advantage over another, as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances."

That "warmth of temper rising" is the initiation of amygdala hijack:

"Anger, aggression, fear, and stress are all common emotional triggers. They can cause sudden, illogical, and even irrational reactions. ... The amygdala hijack occurs when your amygdala responds to stress and disables your frontal lobes. That activates the fight-or-flight response and disables rational, reasoned responses. In other words, the amygdala “hijacks” control of your brain and your responses." https://neurohacker.com/how-social-media-and-ai-hijack-your-brain

Having constant fight or flight responses, chronic shots of adrenaline to your system, is without doubt bad for your health, especially your cardiovascular system, they may destroy immunity or put it in check as well. And social media is dependent on inducing the fight or flight response to get and keep your attention - because your attention is what the social media corporations harvest and sell. Thus, people may become addicted to regular shots of adrenaline - become "adrenaline junkies" - and thus become addicted to the use of social media, suffer its deleterious effects on their physical, mental, and spiritual health, and be seemingly unable to tear themselves away from it, much like the sailors in the Odyssey were unable to tear themselves from the song of the Sirens, and be wrecked on the rocks of Scylla and Charybdis.

The only way to win the social media games is to not play them in the first place. Have real relationships, unmediated by algorithms, with real people, and dump social media. Quitting it "cold turkey" is the only effective way to stop, there will be at least two weeks of withdrawal - you'll feel depressed and isolated and perhaps angry - but after the withdrawal is over, you'll be a lot calmer - and a lot more tolerant of others who disagree with you. And always keep in mind what Jefferson said to his nephew, Francis Eppes: "whenever you feel a warmth of temper rising, check it at once, and suppress it, recollecting it will make you unhappy within yourself, and disliked by others. nothing gives one person so great advantage over another, as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances." https://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/336

========

In my experience, corporate social media - of which Substack, alas, is yet another example - can be used to make connections - and to break them, and the owners of corporate social media play by their own rules, which means that they don't hesitate to play the same tricks as Facebook and Twitter and the rest of them do. For that reason, I've largely given up social media, the manipulation and mind games are something out of my control and not worth the trouble to concern myself with. The far better thing is direct face to face relationships with real people, not their manipulated avatars on social media. When a neighbor's wife died recently, instead of sending a social media message, I walked across the street and offered my condolences in person. We had a short conversation, and I hoped that it helped him - in part - through his loss. "I'm so sorry for your loss, if there's anything I can do to help, don't hesitate to let me know" and if they do ask, then follow through and make good on your promise, no matter how inconvenient or difficult it might seem at the time. If you make a promise, abide by it. It's important, even though you may not realize it at the time.

There's really only one step - ask a question. "You've had all the shots - vaccines and boosters - yet over the past three years, you've had some sort of coronavirus disease six times, each time for weeks on end. I caught COVID in March 2020, recovered on my own in four days, had no further illness in 2020, none in 2021, was down for one day in September 2022, and have had nothing this year - and we've been around the same people. I've never had so much as a PCR test, let alone any of the shots, and stopped wearing masks in May 2020. What do you think is going on, what might be the reason for that?" and just let them sit with the question, let it percolate and ferment, and leave it at that. That's really the only thing that breaks people out of cults - an unresolvable question, one if answered breaks the walls into pieces over time. They either figure it out, do their own research, and they might come to you one day and tell you. It might be subtle, or they might go right off the deep end and end up with a library of books and videos on the topic. I've seen both in the same family. For some people, admitting that they have been fooled is well nigh impossible, it leads to the death of their ego, the prospect of collapse is unbearable, they just can't deal with it - and they don't, no matter how well educated they are, even in the sciences. "How could the government and NPR - NPR of all things! - consistently lie to us? It's *you* who is in the wrong" and so forth. But sometimes just a simple question will break the enthrallment - sometimes. The best advice I can give is in this song:

- "He said,

"Son, I've made a life

Out of readin' people's faces

Knowin' what the cards were

By the way they held their eyes

So if you don't mind my sayin'

I can see you're out of aces

For a taste of your whiskey

I'll give you some advice"

So I handed him my bottle

And he drank down my last swallow

Then he bummed a cigarette

And asked me for a light

And the night got deathly quiet

And his face lost all expression

Said, "If you're gonna play the game, boy

You gotta learn to play it right

You've got to know when to hold 'em

Know when to fold 'em

Know when to walk away

And know when to run

You never count your money

When you're sittin' at the table

There'll be time enough for countin'

When the dealin's done

Every gambler knows

That the secret to survivin'

Is knowin' what to throw away

And knowin' what to keep …”

The only way to fight this is to eliminate social media from your life - and to contact your friends and get them to do likewise. This is possible only through means other than social media, because postings and direct messages are monitored and censored to prevent direct connection between people - that’s the locus of their control over your attention. The main attraction for social media is that “everyone is present” - or at least the promise of presence… but this promise is dependent on the algorithm - and connections can be altered or destroyed at the will of the platform - and conflict can be introduced into real life relationships, and those relationships can be destroyed. If they can keep you dependent on their media platform for the possibility, the promise, of contacts with friends and family, breaking away will be very difficult and painful. Every person they enthrall is a source of monetization - and businesses out to maximize profit don’t throw it - or its source - away. Even after you go away, they will try to suck you back in, by making their social network ubiquitous - you buy a product - and the product has a facebook page for the “user community” - and once you are out, you can’t see over that wall. The only way to see what’s there - if anything - is to get sucked back in. I see social media - and facebook - for precisely what they are - and refuse the enticements… But this is the way it is for any addiction, whether meth or facebook.