wilwheaton

I wrote a long post on my blog about being attacked by a group of people I call The Stupidsphere, mostly to clarify who I believe these people are, and who they are not.

This comment, from reader Merus, is incredibly interesting to me:

“So I’ve been reading about cults for a thing (although cults, as we think of them, and not just harmless hippie communes, are an expression of what’s called a totalist belief system) and I’m reasonably sure the Stupidsphere fits the behaviours, which is worrying because one of the behaviours is ‘stop seeing people who don’t agree with us as people’.

One of the key pieces is having a “milieu” that can be controlled. Fox News and their ilk encourage their watchers not to get information from outsiders, and the American cultural tendency to let people be so long as they’re not hurting anyone keeps outsiders out.

That’s when you start the talk about how it’s imperative that they participate, because they’ll save America from the enemy (defined as: anyone who disagrees with them). They start redefining the world to conform to their ideology (that of outsiders who are simultaneously dangerously effective and incompetent fools). They invite people to share in that ideology, and thereby become heroes fighting the forces of darkness, who are everywhere! Without ever having to leave the couch other than the moments where they blindly vote Republican.

A lot of the techniques that we make fun of Fox News for – their brazen willingness to blend fact and fiction, their use of ‘liberal’ as an epithet, their insistence on impossible standards of ethics – are all techniques to maintain control over their viewership, who are seeing a country their identity is wrapped up in perpetually sliding into the abyss. They’re made vulnerable by their powerlessness, by the Stupidsphere convincing them of their powerlessness.

Fox News is willing to stop here, because all they want is a captive audience, but there’s one further step: when individual experience is superseded by doctrine, you start to encourage erasure of the self, and at that point control is complete. The idea of people, with all their needs and flaws, starts to fall away, replaced by the doctrine, and defending it from outsiders who wish to kill the idea. They are not real; they are flawed, broken, otherwise they would see the perfect truth of the doctrine for themselves. They can not be convinced. They can only be marginalised or destroyed.

Most exit counselling (they don’t do deprogramming any more) starts with teaching the client about methods of control. It’s the same principle as mindfulness – if you can name what’s going on, it’s easier to rise above it.”