The Weird Thing
July 31, 2024·25 comments·Politics
The "weird" attack on Trump appeared everywhere at once. Many assume this was coordinated. But something far more unsettling is actually happening. The narrative spread not because anyone orchestrated it, but because human brains are designed to adopt certain symbols, and American culture was primed to receive this one. What looked like directed propaganda is something more inevitable and far harder to resist.
• A narrative took over the conversation without anyone explicitly planning it. People point to coordinated media messaging, but the symbols that dominate our politics often emerge organically from how our brains process cultural meaning.
• The real mechanism isn't conspiracy. It's neurobiology. Human brains evolved to perceive symbols. Those symbols then evolve to be perceived by our brains. In a networked age, this creates a feedback loop no one fully controls.
• Symbols only spread if a culture is ready for them. "Weird" worked because it aligned with existing cognitive universals and reinforced beliefs people already held. The same message wouldn't have stuck if the cultural ground wasn't prepared.
• Even people who understand this dynamic struggle to accept it. There's a deep human preference for believing in directed conspiracies over accepting that dominant narratives are inevitable outcomes of monoculture.
• What we call propaganda is often just the exhaustion of our own homogeneity. If media, politics, and culture all converge on the same symbols and meanings, the resulting narrative feels coordinated because it is. Just not in the way we think.
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Comments
Great follow-up brief to Rusty’s tour de force note yesterday!
I’m a believer in bottom-up change, and this note kicked that belief into the next gear. Thank you for sharing @rguinn! You’re right, that is the weirdest thing about weird.
“But weird didn’t need a meticulously planned conspiracy to become a dominant narrative.”
But it’s my expression of MY autonomy of mind and spirit that you are calling weird, right? Is it like the dominate narrative of ether before quantum physics?
Isn’t a word a non fungible token?
fungible weird jim
“I think most Americans still look at San Francisco, Austin, Berkeley, and Portland as their capitals of weird” - Rusty
You must’ve left out Burlington, Vermont only because of its smaller scale. Otherwise….
What struck me most about this “weird” thing is that it isn’t directed at the voters the way “deplorables” was. Trump is the one being “othered” and not his fan base. If Hillary’s dumb comment taught the DNC anything it was this, and the Dems might have learned that lesson.
Orchestrated to some degree or not, the stickiness of weird is undeniable.
I wonder how much they’re going to regret playing this game when the response is going to be ‘the people who applaud grown men dressed as women doing highly sexualized dances in front of children think we’re weird because we would like more people to get married and have babies’.
Vance’s weirdness—which is more a combination of social awkwardness and attention seeking from what he perceives to be his crowd—seems downright pedestrian when you start comparing it to a lot of the other things that have been shoehorned into everyday life. And this sort of very dumb battle is exactly how you get fewer and fewer potential supporters to stick up for your more fringe ideas.
On this one I’d bet on Scott Adams being correct. To judge between the two theories it would be helpful to know whether the news pundits in multiple states all started saying “weird” on the same day, or was there evidence of the delay of a wave spreading. Perhaps seeing a compilation video of many pundits saying “weird” has given me a false sense of synchronized appearance of the messaging.
I suspect it won’t stick. It is a boring message that will lose its energy quickly, and as others have said, it is too easy for the Republicans to just hold up a mirror to the more extreme parts of the Democrats base and say “Oh really, you think we are weird?”.
The stickiness of any word is undeniable.
-rumplestiltskin jim
Couldn’t agree more on this point, but it’s going to be interesting to watch as it’s directed at Trump himself and not his fanbase this time around.
Plenty of weirdness within the fanbase on both sides - always was, except now it’s more visible (edit) and “whataboutism” is such a bottomless pit effectively (over)used to demonize the other side.
Sigh. On the political playground Team R shot back with Wacky. Those still on the fence must now decide which moniker they dislike more - Weird or Wacky? My 5 year old grandson can now enter this substantive platform debate as he learned Nana Nana Boo Boo on the Pre-K playground.
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