Language is a Virus: Mike Pence edition
August 11, 2023·Politics
The bizarro bondage-clown-violinists are from a Laurie Anderson show called "Language is a Virus", which is a line she got from William S. Burroughs and I am now totally stealing. I doubt that Mike Pence has ever heard of Laurie Anderson, much less William S. Burroughs, but I'd like to think this would be his reaction to seeing bizarro bondage-clown-violinists. Anyway, I thought this was a funny juxtaposition of photos that have no reason to ever be found together in nature, and the Mike Pence reference is just the vehicle for the punch line.
Ditto for this note.
Ditto for this tweet.
I posted this on Twitter (or X or whatever you want to call the platform) the other day, mostly just to see what would happen. I mean, don't get me wrong. I believe every word that I wrote.
I believe that if a Trump stooge had been Vice President or if Trump stooge lawyers were in senior White House counsel or DOJ positions on January 6th, then a) the election would NOT have been certified, b) Trump would have remained in the White House post-January 20th, c) massive protests against Trump would have broken out in every major American city, and d) Trump and his stooges were fully prepared to use the Insurrection Act to quell those protests.
I believe that Donald Trump and his stooges conspired in a putsch - an attempt to seize political power by illegal and extralegal means - and that a tiny handful of Republican lawyers and officials, most prominently Mike Pence, torpedoed that conspiracy at enormous personal and professional cost.
Now you may disagree with any or all of those statements I just made. And that's fine! I'm not looking for 'engagement' on this. I'm not going to 'debate' you on this. I don't think you're a bad person or a stupid person if you disagree with me on this. The only reason I'm telling you all this is so that we can now take what I believe about Mike Pence and January 6th and what you believe about Mike Pence and January 6th and we can put ALL OF THAT in a little box waaaay over there for an in-person one-on-one conversation with lots of alcohol at some point in the future. Or not. Not is perfectly fine, too.
I believe every word that I wrote, but that's not why I wrote it.
This is not a note about Mike Pence.
This is a note about language.
Now speaking of language, you may have noticed the brutal engagement metrics of my original tweet.
This, ladies and gentleman, is a ratioed tweet.
A tweet is 'ratioed' when you have more comments than retweets (in my case 3x more comments than retweets), which is a sure sign that the mobs of Elon-world hate your post and feel compelled to inform you that you're an idiot. I figured that this tweet would be hated by both the MAGA tribe and the Good Leftie Soldier tribe because both tribes despise Mike Pence, and I was not disappointed.
One of these replies is from a Trump true-believer and the other is from a Trump hater, but you'd have to look at their profiles and tweet history to tell.
But again, that's okay! In fact, it's extremely helpful that both Team Red and Team Blue agree that I'm an idiot and that Mike Pence is no hero.
Because, once again with feeling, this is not a note about Mike Pence.
Or Donald Trump. Or January 6th. Or any other political person or issue or whatever.
This is a note about how our brains become infected with specific words and grammatical constructions and how these words change the way we SPEAK about and THINK about Mike Pence and Donald Trump and January 6th and any other political person or issue or whatever.
And you can see this in the replies to my tweet.
Not in whether the replies agreed or disagreed with me, but in the linguistic patterns used in the replies.
Here, let's start with my Democrat-leaning friends.
Words of therapy have infected blue tribe brains.
How does this linguistic infection happen?
On the left it happens through the intentional choice of purposefully vague, therapy-speak words by left-mobilizing political entrepreneurs as they tell you how to think about the world. Not what to think. HOW to think.
Words like enable and empower.
Political entrepreneurs like Mike Madrid, long-time Republican political consultant and co-founder of The Lincoln Project, a grift PAC that has raised more than $100 million from Democrat-leaning voters and funneled the vast majority of that money directly into the co-founders' affiliated consulting firms.
Mike Madrid is - to use the Epsilon Theory lingo - a raccoon.
And this raccoon took the bait.
This is the opposite of ratioed! More than 11x retweets versus comments, and more than 50x likes versus comments. 4,700 likes! I've never gotten that many likes on anything I've ever tweeted, and I have more followers (168k vs. 143k).
Mike Madrid's blue tribe audience LOVES this tweet. Why? Because he gives his audience the words by which they can FEEL GOOD about maintaining their intense dislike of Mike Pence and their even more intense dislike of Donald Trump even in the face of a psychologically jarring event like Mike Pence almost singlehandedly defeating Trump's putsch, words that are immediately familiar within this tribe as the sort of thing that good, sensitive, right-thinking people say to each other.
Ah, sweet dopamine.
Words like 'enable' and 'empower' nudge listeners with a positive neural reaction to those words into a very specific story arc of HOW to think about Mike Pence's actions on January 6th. If words like 'enable' and 'empower' sound good to you, then the story of Mike Pence isn't a political thriller, it's not a sweeping tale of a brave Constitutional officer of the United States resisting the awesome power of a corrupt Executive branch and saving the Republic. No, the story of Mike Pence is a psychological drama, a very personal story where Pence enabled and empowered Trump, as if the President of the United States were the mean, crazy uncle of the country. Sure, Pence took the knife away from crazy uncle Donald at the last minute, but we were only in danger of being stabbed in the first place because of all those years of enabling and empowering, whatever the hell that means.
It's a powerful story. We love our psychological dramas!
It's exactly the same thing on the other side, of course. Just a different sort of powerful story.
The political entrepreneurs of the red tribe don't use words that nudge you into thinking about January 6th as a psychological drama. No, they absolutely want you to understand these events as a political thriller, as a sweeping tale of a brave Constitutional officer of the United States resisting the awesome power of a corrupt Executive branch and saving the Republic.
But the brave officer in this story is Donald Trump! Mike Pence? He's either a witting or unwitting stooge of the Deep State / DOJ / FBI that Trump is battling.
Sadly, my original tweet wasn't picked up by a raccoon political entrepreneur on the MAGA side like it was by Mike Madrid on Team Blue. All the same, you can see the outlines of the linguistic infection I'm talking about here in the wild strain of red tribe replies.
Words of war and conflict have infected red tribe brains.
What's absolutely fascinating to me about these red tribe replies is that they see the words in my original post - words like insurrection and civil war and riots - and they apply them to a completely different story than I am telling!
The insurrection and riots and civil war I am describing are NOT the events of January 6th.
Everything I am describing in my tweet is what comes after January 6th if Trump had been successful in his putsch to invalidate the Electoral College vote and remain in office. The riots in this tweet are the riots against Trump. The civil war in this tweet is a civil war against Trump. The false claims of insurrection in this tweet are the false claims of insurrection by Trump.
And yet the vast majority of red tribe replies to my tweet read these words and mistakenly understood them as applying to their story of January 6th, where there was no riot on behalf of Trump, where there was no civil conflict called for by Trump, and where false claims of insurrection were made against the Trump supporters who entered the Capitol. They saw the words of war and conflict, and their thinking shunted immediately into an entirely different perception of what was written on the page!
It's pretty wild, right?
The words that we use change the way we see the world. The words that we use change the way we speak to the world. The words that we use change the way we think.
And I'm pretty sure that's what William S. Burroughs and Laurie Anderson meant when they said that language is a virus.
But what's different today, I think, is the scale and scope with which these viral words are arrayed against us, the degree to which political entrepreneurs and raccoons of all sorts and sizes intentionally weaponize these viral words to edit our thoughts into a frame that's advantageous for their interests. Put that effort together with the ubiquitous always-on dopamine machines that we call smartphones, put that effort together with the willing abdication of our time and attention to social media and 'content' ... and you have what I think is the greatest threat to human liberty in human history.
Our liberty is not only or even primarily our autonomy of action.
Our most fundamental liberty is our autonomy of mind.
It's our autonomy of mind that is threatened by this unholy troika of smartphones, social media and linguistic weaponization, and there is no more important struggle today than to defend ourselves against that threat.
How do we do that? Well, let me ask you this:
Do you see yourself in these replies?
Because I sure do!
I'm as infected as any of these repliers. I'm as infected as any of you. But now I can see where the infection is coming from. Now I can make a conscious effort to resist. Now I can make a conscious effort to get better.
And that conscious effort is Epsilon Theory.
Comments
Ha great note and I’m only halfway through!
The meta reason why Language is a Virus in this note is that we now have to spend half our time explaining what a thought is NOT about in order to utilize an auto tuned model or narrative. I’ve noticed this a lot lately where the choice of framework immediately compels prejudgements on the part of listeners. I’m sure I do it more often than I notice as well, but I expect it’s a twig in my eye vs a log in others kind of thing.
I am saddened that my reply didn’t make the cut Ben.
Otherwise, it is an interesting post. But specifically I do wonder if your intention is to point that a therapeutic tone coming from the left is a bad thing? Or do you intentionally leave it as a point of reminder with no leaning?
In and of itself, it’s neither a good thing nor a bad thing. It simply is.
To the degree it’s an intentionally constructed weaponization of viral language for the economic and political gain of the virus spreaders - which I believe it 100% is - then it’s absolutely a bad thing.
The languages of peace and understanding being weaponised against others for an agenda is truly ironic and truly a bad thing.
But I’m not surprised that they are finding it effective using psychobabble speak against Trump. Maybe you sit on one side or the other on an issue to Trump (I’m pretty sure I sit opposite in nearly everything), but one thing about near everyone can agree is that Trump is a verifiably a narcissist. Maybe the word “enable” is to trigger the memory of other enablers and narcissists.
In the same vein, maybe the “civil war” narrative is to trigger the amygdala and the fear response, which again is ironic because in this context the appropriate response in this war is to downplay that there even was a war.
But in either case, the narrative/language virus is triggering those strong responses by borrowing associated memories with those words.
Or maybe I’m writing a bunch of bullshit. Who knows?
Anyway I appreciate the troll on twitter. It’s really the best way to be. Elon in that sense has mastered it the most though probably.
Now I’ve finished it and I think this note is in excellent addition to mogcom for the summer.
Rusty’s work gave me new awareness of a mode by which memes propagate themselves in the metaverse. This note has done something similar. Seems obvious in hindsight but I don’t think I had appreciated how much the types of words we use signal the viruses that we are infected by at the same time that our adoption of them is a mode which spreads the virus further. And this is our intention in selecting them because it worked for us.
I assume that the social media algorithms already take this into account in some form. Whatever signal is there in our own words choices would be measurable by something like the fiat index. As I think about it I can’t decide how much I think social media algorithms capture this or if there are some other dimensions to what you are talking about.
I commented on mogcom about the viruses I realize I’ve been infected with that have most dominated my thinking in life, which have naturally changed and gotten to be a more complex milieu over time. Reading your note I realized how prominently my word choices reflect these infections. The worst one is the Trust the Science virus, or whatever you prefer to call it. Academic, sciency words really do it for me lmao (intentionally done here a time or two for kicks…did you catch it?). Somewhere more distant is still the Charismatic Revival Fury virus. I expect if the algorithm runs on me that it’d find I still like to use religious language. Which others??
You’ve added another layer to my narrative hypersensitivity! Have to police my own language now for high load viral infections.
Adding to my first comment on the sense that much caveating is required, you can just feel the difficulty in our minds keeping the topic on the story about the story, and not the story itself. I think this is what you are struggling with on climate change discussions also and…yea that one will be maybe even tougher than Jan 6th to keep the attention on the story about the story.
I had more thoughts from your note that were epimemetics related but they’ll have to wait. Thanks for the fun and insightful piece.
Right? It’s literally like fighting a fever.
I’m a little surprised to find that while I thought I leaned a little towards one team on the red/blue spectrum, I’m actually infected by the virus on the other side of the spectrum.
Hi Ben - thanks for the post. Our neural pathways create associations, linking related things or experiences. Those associations can sure act like a virus, contaminating our thoughts with feelings instead of facts. Your post made me think about how I think.
This note is a brief explanation of why ET has held my attention. I was introduced to ET though Narrative and Metaverse Part 1 and have continually experienced ET notes, effectively, as a mirror. I quit my Twitter account 5 weeks ago and my life is significantly better. I’m less irritable with my fiance, I’m less prone to impulsively, and inappropriately, vent about the culture war with friends/family. And I’m more at peace with my emotions, more focused on pursuing my goals. Everything seems to be better. Twitter had a way of infecting my mind with thought patterns, powerfully tied to emotions (primarily of outrage and a false self-righteousness), that I have now come to know as ‘narratives’. Things are trending in the right direction and the wisdom here is much appreciated!
Having never been much a Twitter user I can’t attest to the infection, but I definitely felt a sense of nauseation with it as soon as I’ve started using it. I think the best way to innoculate yourself to the virus is first always asking yourself why? Even personally ET is a masterclass in that specific thing; it’s not about understanding how but always trying to get at why?
The how is usually pretty boring and almost always mundane, but the why? If nothing else, is always entertaining. Or sometimes horrifying.
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