Brains are lazy. They take shortcuts. Society can do the hard work of figuring out what’s right and wrong, and who’s moral or immoral, and our lazy brains can just ally with the good people. Good people are right about things. You won’t get in trouble for agreeing with the good guys. Save the energy and associate yourself with them. Look around. Do you really want to be on the same side as those other guys, and after all, it is a side. Look at those guys. That one’s definitely racist. Look at him. You don’t want to be allied with the racists, do you? You don’t want to be that guy who believes Mr Racist’s theory! What’s wrong with you?
Brains are lazy and ideas are people
It’s easier to associate an idea with a particular person, judge whether being associated with that person is broadly socially good or bad, and choose a belief that way rather than to think through various arguments for and against an idea. It saves calories and time. It’s also evolutionarily beneficial to be associated with people who are liked. Neurons that fire together wire together, and generally being associated with positive feelings related to a person is beneficial and will associate you with those feelings by proxy. It also signals allegiances to others, a benefit for in-group definition.
Next time you consume media, watch out for the journalist forming connections in your mind between people and concepts. Let’s call the process of fusing the person and the idea personaganda. The personagandist journalist will embed a person’s name in pejorative terms, put on a negative tone of voice when discussing them, and in this context mention the concept that becomes associated with all this extra social baggage. The idea cannot be expressed without this. It doesn’t exist abstracted in Plato’s world of forms. Instead, the idea acquires a social form.
This phenomenon had a significant effect on my life while researching the origins of the pandemic in 2020. I’d found records from a bat virus database run by the suspect Wuhan lab showing unusual activity around the time the virus most likely spilled over into humans. I considered going public and basking in the glory of fame, but something stopped me: cowardice. You see, there had been a personagandistic media campaign associating the belief that a lab leak likely caused the pandemic with President Trump. In mainstream media, the belief was deeply associated with him, and he with racism, and thereby anybody who put forward evidence supporting the likely industrial accident risked becoming viewed as racist by proxy. A writer for the highly influential New York Times wrote about the allegedly racist origins of the lab leak hypothesis. Associating my name with racism at that point would have made me effectively unemployable.
I was living on a shoestring budget at the time after a travel app failed, in a house of multiple occupancy with a rat infestation and black mould, working odd programming jobs while my main source of joy in life consisted of training a neighbourhood squirrel to be my alarm clock (leave nuts out at a set time and they’ll knock on your window when you don’t). One mainstream media article labelling me personally would have been read by any HR department and destroyed what chance of a stable career I had. I saw other volunteer lab leak researchers face career pressures and one lost his job due to pandemic policy-related social media posts. So, I remained anonymous, sending evidence to journalists and other researchers under pseudonyms and from disposable email addresses. I kept a low profile for years out of self-preservation.
Why did I feel the need to do that?
Because ideas are people.
Associating myself with an idea would have meant in effect allying with the international press’ adversary Donald Trump, somebody I’ve never communicated with. It was election season and the press would say whatever they needed to to lose him a vote or two. I heard later from a reputable journalist who shall remain forever nameless that their news organisation deliberately didn’t emphasise the lab leak hypothesis to avoid benefiting Trump’s election campaign.
Personaganda - propaganda via personas
These considerations are widespread in the advertising industry, where it’s typical to find a face for a brand. Influencers are scrutinised very carefully, their past posts combed through for signs of anything that a brand would not want to be associated with. This happens when presenting ideas to the public too.
During the pandemic, the face of the vaccine program was Dr Fauci, and his face and name were everywhere. Famous TV hosts did bits and dances honouring him. He frequently addressed the public. He appeared in a white lab coat, building his image as a medical professional. He stood in front of the world and promoted the natural origin hypothesis for the pandemic. He was the face of vaccines, of masking, of natural origins for the pandemic, and broadly of state policy.
This establishment of the person as a concept explains why there has been so much focus in the media on attacking his record. To criticise him was to criticise the whole pandemic response programme. People on the industrial accident hypothesis side brought up his mishandling of the AIDS crisis decades ago, funding bizarre experiments and so on. Critiquing the person critiqued the idea.
An adept personagandist fuses the idea with personas already established in the audience’s mind. Seeing someone in a white lab coat connects them with the personas of the family doctor, the genius scientist and other trusted authority figures seen over the years. The coat increases credibility and thereby makes the ideas they communicate more persuasive. A personagandist journalist is careful to present the person and thereby the idea in a positive context. In contrast, notice the unflattering images they present of people they disagree with. You’ll see their jaws agape, mid-bite of a sandwich, or face contorted mid-sneeze.
This power to rewire people’s minds and fuse concepts with people and social context grants the media far more power over the individual than one would likely grant them voluntarily. It’s become very difficult to discuss certain ideas publicly, of particular concern in the universities, our great centres of idea incubation. Instead, ways of viewing the world are walled off due to the reputational risks of being associated with figures granted pseudo-immortality as personas. So, to keep our jobs we keep our heads down. Because ideas are people. And you’d better be careful who you associate yourself with.