Quackery, Charlatans, and the Amazing Short American Memory
There are Real Reasons our Collective Thinking Gets all “Screwed Up”
We are in 2024, an election year, a year I call “the Year of the Precipice” for our democracy. To better equip Americans to exercise their civic duty this year, we have begun a series in Democraticus examining important ways of thinking and belief systems that can have a major impact on our democracy’s future. We are now examining forces in our politics that are abnormal to democracy but have come to seem normal to us. I call them “democracy destroyers”.
The Great American Funk
“Americans are in a funk, and no one seems to know why…” [1]
So begins the analysis of psychiatrists George Makari [2] and Richard A. Friedman [3] in their recent Atlantic piece, “It’s Not the Economy. It’s the Pandemic.” [4] The two cite loads of recent indicators as to this funk in this American “season of discontent” (apologies to John Steinbeck). The evidence indicates American voters are “disgruntled”. President Biden’s approval rating has been stuck in the high 30s. [5] Perhaps most importantly, Makari and Friedman point to a recent Gallup survey where almost half of those surveyed “…said they were worse off than three years ago.” [6]
What??? How could this possible be? Psychiatry has some answers for us.
Not Processing Our Grief
These two psychiatrist point to an interesting cause- our individual response to the pandemic. As the two help us recall how bad this pandemic was for Americans:
“…Four years ago, the country was brought to its knees by a world-historic disaster. COVID-19 hospitalized nearly 7 million Americans and killed more than a million; it’s still killing hundreds each week. It shut down schools and forced people into social isolation. Almost overnight, most of the country was thrown into a state of high anxiety—then, soon enough, grief and mourning. But the country has not come together to sufficiently acknowledge the tragedy it endured. As clinical psychiatrists, we see the effects of such emotional turmoil every day, and we know that when it’s not properly processed, it can result in a general sense of unhappiness and anger—exactly the negative emotional state that might lead a nation to misperceive its fortunes.” (emphasis mine) [7]
They go on to note that, “…The pressure to simply move on from the horrors of 2020 is strong. Who wouldn’t want to awake from that nightmare and pretend it never happened? Besides, humans have a knack of sanitizing our most painful memories…When faced with an overwhelming painful reality like COVID, forgetting can be useful…It allows people to temporarily put aside their fear and distress, and focus on the pleasures and demands of everyday life.[8]
But here’s the key point to their argument:
“…But consigning painful memories to the River Lethe [9] also has clear drawbacks, especially as the months and years go by. Ignoring such experiences robs one of the opportunites to learn from them. In addition, negating painful memories and trying to proceed as if everything is normal contorts one’s emotional life and results in untoward effects... Traumatic memories are notable for how they alter the ways people recall the past and consider the future... Traumatic memory doesn’t feel like a historical event, but returns in an eternal present, disconnected from its origin, leaving its bearer searching for an explanation. And right on cue, everyday life offers plenty of unpleasant things to blame for those feelings—errant friends, the price of groceries, or the leadership of the country.” [10] (emphasis mine)
The bottom line is many of us attempt to “normalize” traumatic events in our lives by setting it aside, not grieving it, much less acknowledging it. Anyone who has lost a spouse, child, or parent to death, especially sudden death can tell you this. Following the loss, you’re just trying to survive. Remembering the trauma causes pain, mental anguish. We just want to forget it, even erase it from our minds. Often one is angry, but that anger gets directed toward things that often are not related to what caused the lost.
And it is not just trauma such as death of loved ones that we do this with. It can be major life altering events like a pandemic. So, one begins to see an explanation for this “American funk” we seem to be in right now. We never dealt with the trauma of the pandemic properly causing us to “mis-remember” the reality of its horrors and fear and replace them with a sense that “things were better three years ago”.
But what if there is also another dimension to what Makari and Freidman see happening with our national psyche resulting from the pandemic? What if how and what we remember of the pandemic was manipulated and attempted to be removed from the reality that actually occurred around us at the time?
Setting the Context for What Happened to Us
If you had been told that there would be nearly 500,000 plus deaths from Covid-19 virus by the end of the Trump administration’s term of office, what would the reader have predicted Donald Trump’s reelection chances to be? Would it be a landslide against him? During the 2020 presidential campaign, James Hamblin in The Atlantic reported that the massive and continuously rising number of Covid deaths in this country,
“…indicated extensive support for former Vice President Joe Biden, which buoyed speculation that the vote tallies might amount to a decisive repudiation of Trump’s disastrous handling of the coronavirus. The president lied by his own admission, denied the severity of the disease, and promised false cures, all as the death toll shot into the hundreds of thousands…” [11]
Yet, though Trump lost the election decisively, still, 70 million Americans voted for him. Trump’s handling of the pandemic and its attendant huge stresses, pain, death, and economic loss did not dissuade 70 million Americans from supporting him. This cannot be ignored. With the U.S. Covid death count approaching the country’s World War II death count as the election neared, were these voters not even minutely aware of this fact? How could it not have affected their civic awareness?
Or, did other things come into play that affected these voters’ civic awareness and civic participation in the election? As Hamblin points out, Trump’s “…vacuous promises were more than self-serving, disingenuous, and deadly; they were also convincing and appealing to people…” [12] The question must be asked- why in the midst of this public health disaster were these promises so appealing to so many? Is there something going in addition to what Makari and Friedman identified has happened by our failing to acknowledge the trauma caused by the pandemic that raged in this nation just four short years ago?
Enter the Quack
The answer is voters’ trust, and the tactics former president Trump used to gain it. Hamblin’s analysis of the answer to this question reveals fascinating answers about us as human beings. Trump not only worked to create trust with his voters, but he also worked to create a special kind of trust:
“…as sole beacon of truth- amid a sea of corrupt, lying scientists and doctors- drawn on those of cult leaders, self-proclaimed healers, and wellness charlatans as much as those of authoritarian demagogues.”[13] (emphasis mine)
As Hamblin notes, these methods are centuries old. However, their manifestation in more recent history can be seen with the origin of the word “quackery” in 1927. It was then that British physician A.J. Clark, who is credited with first using this word, “lamented the proliferation of “quackery” in the medical profession…” Clark’s lamentation was in response to what today we commonly call “quack” medical devices based on what at that time was newly discovered x-ray technology. Numerous devices using this technology were soon being sold with promises to cure all manner of illnesses by “realigning electrons” in one’s body. As Hamblin explains, “…when we are sick or threatened by disease, we seem to be uniquely susceptible to scams…”[14]
The Quack’s First Step- Establish the “Renegade”
These same psychological techniques transfer quite well to the public square. To become the “sole beacon of truth”, one must take four steps. First, according to Hamblin, the quack sets himself up as a “renegade against authority” so that they “…establish a dogmatic faith even more absurd than the orthodox traditions he tried to explode. The quack is nothing if not a prophet: He promises access to a truth that no one else has. Unlike all the slow, doom and gloom scientists, he can make the problem go away now.” This promise of having the inside perspective on how to solve a problem, the means and ability to solve it, along with the confidence to solve it, is attractive to people, especially in times of uncertainty or perceived calamity.[15]
Step Two- “It Will Disappear”
The next step for the quack is to establish their credibility through use of “information asymmetry”. To explain the concept of information asymmetry, Hamblin uses the example of the seller who depends on this concept to make a sale. It is difficult for a consumer to actually know “…if a product is effective, but very easy to believe it is. If someone tries to sell you a car that doesn’t have wheels, you know it. If someone tries to sell you a secret vitamin that’s going to prolong your life, you just have to trust him (or not). The same holds if someone tells you that an invisible virus is going to disappear…” [16]
Steps 3 and 4: Misdirection and Truth We Long to Hear
Thirdly, the quack tells people what they would like to be true. In this case, that the virus will “just disappear”. We will have a vaccine very soon. Soon everything will be going to normal as the disease is not that serious to begin with. Fourth, the quack will use misdirection. He points to a threat that, by comparison, the quack maintains is an equal or greater threat. A relevant example of this approach is that “…stopping the coronavirus would kill jobs”. This is actually a false issue. It is a false issue because Covid and the condition of the economy are what Hamblin describes as already “co-joined”. This false choice becomes clear if when one realizes that economies collapse when people do not feel safe enough to go outside. Economies can and do thrive once people feel safe and are safe.[17]
But false choices and the false dichotomies they are based on are not always readily apparent. To 70 million American voters in 2020, this false choice was not apparent or, if it was, it did not matter to them. Quackery in the public square can be very effective at affecting our civic awareness. Effective indeed.
Bringing the Evidence Together- Will We Continue being Suckers?
Here we are now, four years after the peak of our nation’s COVID pandemic with many Americans seemingly unable or unwilling to remember how bad the pandemic really was, or realize what a mess Trump made of it. We are stuck in the grief cycle, dealing with our grief by ignoring it and pretending things were not as bad as they truly were. Indeed, the evidence is clear that on all fronts, especially economically, things are better than they were four years ago. That’s a fact.[18]
Makari and Friedman have identified a key force in American politics during this presidential election campaign- Americans want to forget the pandemic. They don’t want to even think about it, regardless of how bad the pandemic actually was. They want to ignore the easily available mountains of evidence detailing Trump’s mishandling of it. Most of all, they want to forget its human cost collectively and on us as individuals. It cost thousands lives and for those that survived COVID, many have had to deal with the terrible impacts of “long” COVID. It’s only natural that as humans want to forget all of it,
Yet, as evidenced by the 2020 presidential election results, this element of quackery should be added to our understanding of how we Americans psychologically managed the pandemic. It was no small thing that the person elected in 2016 to lead the nation manipulated us through the creation of a false reality, a reality that quackery creates for those who allow themselves to be drawn in by it. Instead of leading, he chose to take a public health crisis and attempt to manage it solely as a political crisis. By any measure, particularly if measured by its cost in lives and the long-term effects of COVID, it was a bad decision on Trump’s part. Still, he got 70 million votes in his losing re-election bid of 2020. So, something he did worked on many of us.
But Juan Williams, author and political analyst for Fox News, helps us recall what really happened:
“…We remember the shortage of vaccine when he left office. We remember there was no plan for getting Americans vaccinated. And who can forget that Trump lied from the start about the severity of the virus and later promoted a quack, phony cure? The bottom line is that he produced the greatest failure of presidential leadership in history.
“…In January (2021), Trump’s last month in the White House, the nation had the highest number of COVID-19 deaths since the pandemic began. Shortly after he left office, the virus death toll topped 500,000…” (emphasis mine)[19]
Maybe It’s Not So Complicated
Perhaps it all as simple as what nineteenth American showman and circus owner P.T. Barnum supposedly said years ago- “There’s a sucker born every minute.” [20] There is always a huckster willing to sell someone their “snake oil” and there’s always someone willing to buy it.
The 2024 election will definitely determine how many of us have conveniently forgotten how bad it was in 2020 and how many of us continue to want to be suckered. As for me, I choose to believe that the American people as a whole are wiser now. One can only hope…
We will continue exploring topics like this that are not given near enough time and emphasis in our civic education efforts, if they are even taught at all. Democracy is so important. But it’s hard to keep, and it’s easy to lose. It’s up to us, and only us, to protect it. Support democracy, become a Democratist! Spread the word! Please share this Democraticus with others! For more information, go to www.tomthedemocratist.com
[1] It's Not the Economy. It's the Pandemic. - The Atlantic
[2] George Makari is the director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College.
[3] Richard A. Friedman is a professor of clinical psychiatry and the director of the psychopharmacology clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College.
[4] It's Not the Economy. It's the Pandemic. - The Atlantic
[5] It's Not the Economy. It's the Pandemic. - The Atlantic
[6] Less Than Half of Americans "Very Satisfied" With Own Lives (gallup.com)
[7] It's Not the Economy. It's the Pandemic. - The Atlantic
[8] It's Not the Economy. It's the Pandemic. - The Atlantic
[9] A river that ran through the underworld in Greek mythology. Those that drank from it experienced forgetfulness. Lethe - Wikipedia
[10] It's Not the Economy. It's the Pandemic. - The Atlantic
[11] “How Trump Sold Failure to 70 Million People”, by James Hamblin, The Atlantic, November 10, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/11/trump-voters-pandemic-failures/617051/
[12] “How Trump Sold Failure to 70 Million People”, by James Hamblin, The Atlantic, November 10, 2020, Ibid
[13] “How Trump Sold Failure to 70 Million People”, by James Hamblin, The Atlantic, November 10, 2020, Ibid
[14] “How Trump Sold Failure to 70 Million People”, by James Hamblin, The Atlantic, November 10, 2020, Ibid
[15] “How Trump Sold Failure to 70 Million People”, by James Hamblin, The Atlantic, November 10, 2020, Ibid
[16] “How Trump Sold Failure to 70 Million People”, by James Hamblin, The Atlantic, November 10, 2020, Ibid
[17] “How Trump Sold Failure to 70 Million People”, by James Hamblin, The Atlantic, November 10, 2020, Ibid
[18] The American Economy And People Are Much Better Off Than 4 Years Ago (forbes.com)
[19] “Juan Williams: Trump’s Jealous Rants Can’t Hide His Failures”, by Juan Williams, March 15, 2021, 6:00 AM EDT, The Hill, https://thehill.com/opinion/whitehouse/543169-juan-williams-trumps-jealous-rants-cant-hide-his-failures
[20] There's a sucker born every minute - Wikipedia