The Angry Apes of Harmony

On the science and philosophy of conformity

One of the myths of political extremism is that it’s like some dark bird that spreads its wings to prey upon the innocent mouse of the meadow. But a better metaphor is the lancet liver fluke, a parasitic flatworm that infects cows and pigs. Snails eat the fluke’s larvae and secrete the waste onto blades of grass where they are consumed by ants. The infected ants then climb to the tips of blades of grass at night like so many miniature wolves mutely howling at the moon.

This makes it so the ants are more easily consumed by cows or pigs and then the flukes can complete their life cycle in the bellies of these beasts. Political extremism doesn’t spread by attacks from above, but by willing participation from below. Some voluntarily consume feces. Others offer themselves up like sacrificial insects.

Consider that Chinese support for Xi Jinping hovers at an astonishing 80%, and while a recent study found support for Xi is 30 percentage points lower when respondents are surveyed anonymously, that still means half the country supports Beijing’s blend of red fascism. This is possible not because they’re scared, but because they’re good. In my conversation with the political scientist Wilfred Reilly, he observed that if leftist utopian goals were achievable, they’d have the moral high ground.

The problem is, humans cannot bring paradise into this world because this world is inhabited by humans. Utopia is a beautiful dream, but things get ugly when people try to force the dream into reality through flesh and bone. That’s how well-meaning college kids who want to support Palestinians end up echoing Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin with the familiar chorus, “by any means necessary.”

This phrase can be traced back to the Marxist philosopher Frantz Fanon, who used it in a 1960 address as part of the Positive Action campaign to liberate Ghana from British imperial rule. I have written about Fanon’s work and what decolonization really means, but even in the context of Ghana’s decolonial efforts, Fanon’s view that the ends justify the means was entirely out of step.

That’s because the Positive Action campaign was intended to combat imperialism through nonviolence and education. Its leader, the socialist Kwame Nkrumah, became the nation’s first president later that year and though his rule was fraught with conflict and he sought to crush tribal communities that naturally felt more kinship among themselves than to the State, we can recognize that his advocacy for peaceful change was noble and sets him apart from the moral myopia of Fanon’s bloodlust.

Even a child can watch a Marvel movie and easily grasp that while Ultron seeks world peace and Thanos seeks to end suffering, what makes them evil is not their untempered intelligence or power but their implacable pursuit of such noble aims by any means necessary. And much of the left today believes anything is justifiable so long as it’s politically correct. This week, for example, pro-Palestinian activist Riddhi Patel threatened to murder the city council members of Bakersfield, California.

“You guys are all horrible human beings and Jesus probably would have killed you himself,” she said, adding, “I remind you that these holidays that we practice, that other people in the global south practice, believe in violent revolution against their oppressors and I hope one day somebody brings the guillotine and kills all of you motherfuckers.”

Patel closed by saying, “We’ll see you at your house. We’ll murder you.”

This is justifiable according to the logic that these council members are “oppressors” because Patel was worried they would not pass a resolution regarding Gaza, never mind the fact that this is a city council that can do nothing to alter events in Gaza.

Officers booked Patel on 16 felony charges including eight counts of intent to terrorize and eight counts of threatening state officials. Patel, who remains in police custody on $2 million bond, has since appeared in court weeping after being charged. It’s delicious to see, but it’s interesting to consider what drove her to think that mass murder would be justified because the council members might have failed to take action to stop something that they have no power to stop.

As I often say, evil does not spread by telling people to be evil, but by convincing them that the evil is actually good. Or rather, that it is okay to do evil in the name of good. This is how you get a colony of ants to climb leaves of grass. Think of white nationalists, who more often self-radicalize and find their own way to the ranks of groups such as the Aryan Nation or Atomwaffen Division. They are not captured and converted. They have to approach such groups themselves and apply, and they often do so in the belief that they are working to make their worlds more just.

In Soviet Russia, people tripped over themselves to turn in their own neighbors. In Nazi Germany, citizens were all too willing to show their support long before they were forced or pressured to do so. In modern America, nobody is coercing people to chant genocidal Hamas propaganda or threaten the lives of city council members.

As Yale history professor Timothy Snyder writes in On Tyranny, “Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy … it was the Austrians’ anticipatory obedience that decided the fate of Austrian Jews.” The subtitle of his book is Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century and the first lesson is the title of Chapter 1, Do not obey in advance, which begins, “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.”

In the 1951 Asch conformity experiments, subjects were shown a series of lines of different lengths and asked which two lines were the same length. Unbeknownst to each subject, everyone else in the room was a confederate, meaning they were actors, and they were instructed to claim that two lines of obviously different lengths were the same. When they did, only 26% of subjects consistently disagreed.

Interestingly, the study’s author Solomon Asch noted subjects were not ignoring their own perception in order to fit in, but were experiencing what he called a “distortion of perception.” That is, they literally saw the different lines as being the same length.

The Soviet journalist and KGB propaganda agent Yuri Bezmenov, who defected to the West in 1970 and began writing and giving interviews about the Soviet process of subverting American society, has found renewed fame in recent years because the process he outlined has proven prophetic. The Soviet Union could never hope to defeat the United States in direct armed conflict, he explained, so it had to embark on a decades-long campaign of subversion with the goal of getting the American left to revile its own government and society in favor of socialist values.

Anyone who thinks this campaign has not already succeeded is looking at two different lines and calling them the same. But like Asch, Bezmenov understood that people do not pretend to believe such things. They literally see them that way, which makes it impossible to persuade them using evidence, just as you cannot persuade a subject in an Asch experiment that the two lines are different simply by showing them a picture of the lines. In his now famous 1984 interview on the stages of ideological subversion, Bezmenov explained:

Exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures. Even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him a concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it—until he is going to receive a kick in his fat bottom. When the military boot crushes his balls, then he will understand, but not before that. That is the tragedy of the situation of demoralization. So basically, America is stuck with demoralization.

As the saying goes, you cannot reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into. But here’s the thing. People often forget or are unaware that the Asch test had a second component, in which a single confederate would give the correct answer while all the others gave the wrong one, as in the original test. Once there was at least one person willing to tell the truth, subjects became more likely to do so.

The lesson is obvious, and uplifting. Conformity is powerful but fragile. The lie requires confederates. Every person or institution, every government agency or private company, every university or news outlet that conforms to a lie under the pressure of popular sentiment does not merely duck the scythe of public scorn but adds their weight to the swing of the blade, helping it clean more necks.

In Chapter 4 of On Tyranny, Snyder notes that Czechoslovak communists took full power after a coup in 1948, adding:

When the dissident thinker Vaclav Havel wrote “The Power of the Powerless” three decades later, in 1978, he was explaining the continuity of an oppressive regime in whose goals and ideology few people still believed. He offered a parable of a greengrocer who places a sign reading “Workers of the world, unite!” in his shop window.

It is not that the man actually endorses the content of this quotation from The Communist Manifesto. He places the sign in his window so that he can withdraw into daily life without trouble from the authorities. When everyone else follows the same logic, the public sphere is covered with signs of loyalty, and resistance becomes unthinkable … what happens, asked Havel, if no one plays the game?

In Chapter 5, Remember professional ethics, Snyder continues the point:

If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it. 

…

If members of professions think of themselves as groups with common interests, with norms and rules that oblige them at all times, then they can gain confidence and indeed a certain kind of power. Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional. Then there is no such thing as “just following orders.” If members of the professions confuse their specific ethics with the emotions of the moment, however, they can find themselves saying and do doing things that they might previously have thought unimaginable.

Snyder sharpens the point in Chapter 8, titled Stand out:

Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow … It is those who were considered exceptional, eccentric, or even insane in their own time—those who did not change when the world around them did—whom we remember and admire today.

The second part of the Asch experiment proves this to be true. But Snyder’s book is more hopeful than depressing because it delivers one clear message more than any other. Namely, that it only takes the smallest drop of courage to stem the tide. Lies depend upon a crowd to spread, but the truth requires only a single dissident voice.

This is important not just because we value truth, and not just because we require truth in order to make authentic decisions, but also for existential reasons. Truth is a surer path to peace than the alternative. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote in his journal, “Conformity is the ape of harmony.”

When we convince ourselves to see what we want, we are only aping harmony if no real work was done to forge our views into one. The Book of Isaiah tells us, “they shall hammer their swords into plowshares,” but what it does not say is that they will arrange their swords to look like plowshares. Real peace means hammering out differences. That means knowing what the differences are. An honest disagreement is always better than a dishonest agreement, and while being the dissident voice in a room is uncomfortable, that’s only because we don’t want to create conflict.

We have to remind ourselves that sometimes conformity is how violent parasites spread, and causing conflict with truth is often the first step to resolving it.