12 helpful terms to understand American chaos
Want to know what ‘agent provocateur’ and ‘Streisand effect’ mean? Read on.
All of us have a valid reason for feeling bewildered these days. After all, we’re living through the worst American political crisis since the Civil War.
A lot of concepts and catchphrases whiz past us, some of them quite relevant to understanding the current chaos. This list of 12 terms may help. At the very least, it might allow you to decipher some cryptic references on Bluesky.
Self-coup
This is when someone who wins a democratic election uses their position to seize dictatorial power through illegitimate means. Ferdinand Marcos did it in the Philippines. Recep Tayyip Erdogan did it in Turkey. Trump is doing it now in the United States.
Brandolini’s law
Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini stated: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” This law, also called the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle, explains why fact-checking of political lies tends to be a losing game.
Agent provocateur
As Trump militarizes American cities, street protests are vital to resisting fascism, but they run the risk of creating excuses for authorities to become even more heavy-handed. That’s the time to beware of an agent provocateur, a French phrase meaning “provoking agent.” This is a person who secretly embeds in a group and tries to get the group to act in a way that will justify a crackdown.
False flag
This is a harmful act designed to cast blame on an innocent party. A false flag operation occurred in 1939 when Germans disguised in Polish uniforms attacked a border outpost, giving Adolf Hitler a pretext to invade Poland. These days, MAGA radicals like to spin conspiracy theories accusing their opponents of “false flags” to divert blame from their own movement. For example: Jan. 6.
Reichstag Fire
An arson fire burned the building of Germany’s parliament, the Reichstag, in 1932. Even today, it’s unclear whether a communist torched the place or the Nazis did it as a false flag (see above). But what’s clear is that the Nazis used it as an excuse to suspend the rights to assembly, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press. The phrase “Reichstag Fire” describes an incident – real or invented – that is used to justify an authoritarian takeover. Many fear this will happen in the United States, or already is happening, as Trump declares “emergencies” in cases where they don’t exist.
Streisand effect
A positive quality of today’s media environment is that cover-ups often backfire. The Streisand effect got its name after singer Barbra Streisand sued to get a photo of her Malibu home removed from an online database of photos along the California coast. Pre-suit, the picture was accessed six times. Soon after the suit was filed, it was seen 400,000 times.
Concern trolling
This is a form of rhetorical sabotage, especially on social media, in which someone pretends to be an ally but undermines the message by sowing doubt or bringing up complications. For example, a concern troll might see someone supporting green energy and post a comment agreeing with that but expressing misgivings about dead birds around wind turbines.
Toxic empathy
This seems like an oxymoron. Empathy is healthy, right? Not to some right-wing Christians who think it would be bad for fellow Christians to relate to their fellow human beings on the left. As writer and podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey put it, “Putting yourself in someone’s shoes, feeling what they feel can also lead you to do three things that I say makes empathy toxic: One, validate lies. Two, affirm sin. And three, support destructive policies.”
Dunning-Kruger effect
Psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger say people with low ability in a specific task tend to overestimate their ability to perform that task. As Dunning put it: “The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member of the Dunning-Kruger club.” This explains the reckless, incompetent behavior of the Trump regime.
Uncanny Valley
This concept in robotics has important applications to artificial intelligence. It’s the theory that people are comfortable with humanoid robots until they resemble humans so closely that you can’t tell the difference. At that point, people supposedly experience a negative “eerie sensation.” The term “Uncanny Valley” was coined by roboticist Masahiro Mori, whom I interviewed once at his Tokyo home. AI images may cause people to experience the Uncanny Valley – or not. I worry that as AI improves, many people will give up caring whether a video is real or not. They’ll vaguely doubt but generally accept everything. This is dangerous when Republicans are in the disinformation business. (Fox News had an AI scandal just last week in which it presented fake videos of SNAP recipients as if they were real.)
Red pill
In the 1999 film “The Matrix,” the act of taking a red pill would allow a person to see a disturbing truth, but taking a blue pill instead would cause them to accept an illusory version of reality without question. The term “taking the red pill” has been adopted by right-wing radicals such as Curtis Yarvin to describe their supposed new awareness.
Accelerationism
Far-right proponents of this idea believe that causing chaos and increasing political division will hasten the collapse of the current version of Western civilization and allow them to take over. Interestingly, this is similar to an approach that Vladimir Lenin championed for a communist takeover: “The worse, the better.”
.. And finally:
Sorry, I can’t explain to you what “6-7” means.
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Most of those terms were already familiar to me but a couple were not. The Dunning Krueger effect has the perfect poster child in the felon. He says he ‘knows more than the generals, or the architects, or the doctors’, when in reality he knows very little about anything unless it’s retribution.
So, is the East Wing Demolition an inverted Red Flag, a Reichstag Fire with known perps, simply Accelerationism, or just another ‘Helpful Term’ to describe the immoral chaos that so many choose to ignore? Perhaps the question is only a pesky conundrum from a Toxic Empathy survivor, climbing out of an Uncanny Valley with a Dunning-Kruger hangover 🤕.