Episode Details

One of the more interesting areas of my research these days is on what Cultural Psychology calls “the Laws of Sympathetic Magic.” These laws or mental routines are very relevant in my Finding Manuland project (particularly the Law of Contagion), as well as in Decoding Trolls. However , the ability of Disinfolklorists like MAGA or Russia to convince us, using Disinfolklore, of the complete opposite of what is true (MAGA will make America great; Ukraine, rather than Russia, is full of Nazis; vaccines not viruses harm us;…) is a phenomenon so common and so attractive, it calls for explanation.

In the past I have written about how the Chef of Disinfolklore Prighozin financed the Internet Research Agency’s successful campaigns to get Donald elected the first time and Brexit done. I wrote about how, through amplified Disinfolklore, that apparatus was able to convince many people to muddle Cause and Effect. However it was not clear to me which aspects of our psychological made us susceptible to such trolls. Economists are more or less agreed that America’s economy in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election had never been healthier or stronger. Yet MAGA Disinfolklore convinced Donald’s voters that not only was the opposite of that true but also that Donald’s tariff troll would make them richer, even though empirical evidence belied these trolls. Nevertheless millions fell for this troll and how and why they were susceptible to it is fascinating.

The two main sub-laws in the Jurisprudence of Sympathetic Magic, which find their most ready application in the realm of consumer/market research, are the Law of Contagion and Law of Association.

I first noticed how in Disinfolklore we can be convinced to believe quite easily the opposite of what is true (for example, that vaccines cause the effects the virus the vaccine protects against actually causes). This is an example of what Fraser in the Golden Bough referred to as the Homeopathic Principle in the laws that govern our modes of thinking. A smidgeon of plausibility amplified by Disinfolklore can serve to dominate our thinking so much so that we neglect, in this example, to vaccinate ourselves against a disease.

The Law of Similarity, which particularly anthropologists like Levi Strauss and Marcel Mauss identified, which is that people think the... So for instance, this thing about with the COVID vaccine, mistaking the solution to an empirically, visually you can see it using certain kinds of instruments, uh, virus, and that the response to that, uh, is actually the cause of the problem. This mode of thinking is almost mainstreamed into our minds. I remember the first time a neighbor talked to me about how it was the vaccine causing the problem, not the COVID. And I tried very earnestly trying to explain to him, um, how literally billions of people have taken the vaccine and there’s been a problem with a few thousand or a tiny percentage, whereas everyone who had got the COVID had suffered harm and damage. We can see it and all of that. Now however I don’t even bother trying to explain to people because it’s just been mainstreamed. There’s a ‘logic’ which seems to go into this law of similarity that it’s a central element in most culture, in most mental models of the world. And disinformationists use this. They riff off this by mixing cause and effect. You can confuse people into muddling these things so that for some reason, people will believe that the vaccines is what’s causing the harm and that it’s not the disease the vaccine is designed to fix.

We see that a lot in Russian propaganda. We see it actually on that paper or on that poster where NATO, in this sense, is the vaccine. But it’s the vaccine against Russia invading and killing everyone. Yet it’s being blamed for causing the war. It’s the complete opposite. So this is the law of opposites, which they’re riffing off. It’s just being aware that this exists as a mental guideline in our mind