by Tobin Smith
Maslow taught us that first we have a powerful innate drive and motivation to build and refresh our feeling of self-esteem—call this pride-in-self and feelings of prestige, accomplishment, and value.
Social scientists tell us that in prehistoric tribal days, women preferred the alpha male—the self-confident leaders bursting with self-confidence. So in other words, the self-confident male got laid.
But our basic primal social identity reflex is also part of our drive to build our self-esteem with our level of social capital. Social capital is created when we feel family and group inclusion and acceptance (the feeling of being a proud member of a group we call “us” or an in-group).
Unfortunately for our democracy, with social identity also comes the self-esteem growth and social capital creation we get from social identity exclusion. With our new social identity in-group comes the reflex to distinguish ourselves by denigrating “others” or out-groups.
Sounds like being in fifth grade again doesn’t it? I feel better about myself by being included in one clique while making fun of those losers in the other obviously less-worthy cliques?
Yet the fact is the research says humankind does this social identity capital building innately—it is indelibly part of our human nature to do so, long after we’re done with fifth grade. You could also correctly say that your drive for social capital is nature’s way of delivering you the ingredients for a mild but constant superiority complex.
Yet the obvious problem with exaggerated dependence on social identity feelings for filling up your personal self-esteem gas tank is obvious: For you to feel that superiority and build your social capital reserves, you have to see others not belonging to your tribe as inferior. In other words, for me to feel a moral or ethical superiority hit from my in-group, I have to contrast my in-group against a morally or ethically inferior out-group. It’s the in-group/out-group contrast that delivers my much-needed positive self-esteem and ego boost.
Don’t get this concept? Have you ever watched a reality TV show like The Bachelorette or Hoarders and said to yourself, “Wow—compared to these folks, I am a saint!” or “Man, my problems are nothing compared to this person.”
Thus we come to the most important part of the psychological power of our social identities—and the other hidden superpower of Fox News and the right-wing conservative media ecosystem. Social psychologists tell us that we highly evolved Homo sapiens innately and implicitly judge our in-groups to be morally, ethically, and intellectually superior to other competing groups—regardless if they are objectively better or not.
It’s logical, right? Who joins a group to feel inferior? Okay, except for a longtime Cubs fan. These feelings of in-group superiority and out-group inferiority are encoded in our primal instincts. They served a very powerful purpose in our prehistoric lives on the African savannas.
But why is social identity superiority and inferiority so important to my story about Fox News? Number one—because as a partisan, you know we naturally seek information that confirms the superiority of our social identity and the inferiority of our contrasting out-group.
Key Point: Social identity theory is the other core content strategy behind Fox News’s white tribal identity porn. The business of arousing your innate feelings of cultural and political superiority (and proving the inferiority of liberalism) is Fox’s core business and emotional manipulation model.
The problem with this innate emotion-based strategy is this: Once we become emotionally attached to a particular in-group identity, social psychologists argue that “these social identity in-groups are powerful enough emotional attachments that they transcend thinking or objective fact.”
Think about that last paragraph for a second—the intensity of our emotional attachment to our self-identified political or cultural in-group makes us transcend thinking and embrace our in-group’s subjective beliefs as objective fact (the word “belief” defined as any cognitive content that we hold true).
Really—you don’t say!
Does this concept sound at all familiar to you in 2019 America? Now you understand another Fox News superpower that is prominently used and exploited in the FNC tribal warfare playbook.
In a recent study of political identity co-authored by Toronto University Rotman School of Management’s Matthew Feinberg puts a button on this power: “It is not the policy preferences or the values that differ between people, but simply the labels (i.e., in-group social identity) they give themselves that count.”
There is a ton of emotional power inherent in your self-identified social identity. That gives a huge amount of influence to your social capital providers—the people in your life that lift your heart and build your reserves of spirit and love that social science calls your social capital.
Really Key Point: because so many Americans today consider our political or cultural identity to be such a big part of our personal sense of virtue and critical to maintaining our social esteem reserves, when someone attacks our politics or culture, they attack our virtue and they threaten to diminish a large part of our social capital reserves too.
In other words, “Them is fighting words,” and we defend our personal virtue and social capital reserves at all costs. This behavior is in our human nature—we don’t control it—it controls us.
Again—here is the Fox News context. When you show up at my tribal identity activation TV show or click on and stream my tribal activation segment on a social media app, the mere fact you tuned in for more than one segment tells me everything I need to know to start you on a tribal amplification and radicalization spiral.
The reason for this should now be clear—the more intensely you value your tribal identity, the more your self-esteem and sense of superiority depends on Fox News to constantly provide evidence that supports you against your perceived tribal enemy and out-group.
Key Point: For many Americans, particularly older, lonely, and economically challenged ones, the Foxhole spiral is a positive self-reinforcing psychic feedback lifeline—you get that now, right?
Why are Fox News and Sky TV and other News Corp. white tribal identity porn media companies so influential and emotionally powerful to their audiences?
Answer: Because they deliver innately needed feelings of hope and self-pride to people whose lives in many cases are leaking a lot of self-esteem. They can feel like a lifeline to people whose lives are filled with existential fear and trauma.
Let’s you and I imagine this real-life scenario for many older white Foxocracy viewers in America. First off, odds are great you live in the part of America where 60 percent of America’s twenty-first-century economy is not working for you—and boy does that drain your self-image and inflate your level of economic fear.
Now if you are like 62 percent of Americans over fifty that report you don’t have enough nurturing family and friends in your life, your social capital reserves are rapidly depleting as well. Then—if you find the scorched earth identity politics and PC dogma of the left-wing Libocracy chronically insults and disrespects your cultural and religious beliefs, that unresolved trauma has a negative drag on your self-esteem reserves too.
For many self-identified “committed conservatives” or Deplorables, they are living a perfect storm of personal and social capital depletion and have been living that perfect storm for decades. For them, watching Fox News white tribal identity content or attending a Trumpism rally is like injecting a powerful cocktail of self-esteem and social capital reserves. The more hours they watch, view, stream, comment, or generally engage, the better they feel.
For many, their dose of cultural and political pride is the only positive emotional injection they get in their normal day. They don’t have enough positive self-esteem building moments in their everyday lives, and they don’t have enough human contact with spiritually nurturing family and friends either.
To add insult to injury, the more tribally partisan you become, the more time you spend with your Fox News televangelist “imaginary frie
nds.” Many Fox News addicts spend 50 percent or more of their waking time immersed in the Foxocracy, leaving little or no time for emotionally nurturing and spirit supporting human beings.
For them, social identity psychologists I’ve talked with say Fox News can become, in essence, your primary self-esteem and social capital dealer.
Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes did not create an American capitalism that is failing for nearly sixty percent of American households—but they sell a coping mechanism for the pain and trauma from that failure. All you need to do is power up your TV or digital device. Becoming the primary self-esteem/social capital dealer for conservatives has been the business and programming objective of Fox News and Murdoch for generations.
If you understand how humankind innately seeks people and groups that bring them self-esteem and social capital reserves, you can understand the real Foxocracy superpower: For a growing number of older white conservative Americans, their Fox News addiction is the best few hours of their day. And many of them have few remaining alternatives.
Review: If Fox News can activate your tribal instincts and fan your normal-sized white tribal identity ember into a self-reinforcing “tribal intensity spiral” via a constant digital feedback loop, they own you because they own your psyche.
In other words, if your life outside the American Foxocracy bubble is in a self-reinforcing downward spiral depleting your self-esteem, if you have fewer human relationships in your life to naturally build the levels of social capital required for emotional stasis—Fox News and the rest of the American Foxocracy are there to fill up your empty emotional gas tank. And for many that fill-up feels so damn good you can’t get enough.
Why are so many Americans’ reserves of self-esteem and social capital being depleted so fast they run to the Foxocracy for a daily emotional booster shot?
Ah—now you asked the right question. Think of this—what if you can’t get enough self-esteem or social capital feedstock in your life outside the Foxocracy because you are one of the 60 percent of Americans whose economic health has been in a self-reinforcing downward spiral for decades?
Maybe in your real life outside the Foxocracy you are living in a chronic and self-reinforcing downward social capital depletion spiral because you don’t have enough nurturing personal relationships or reinforcing social fabric in your everyday life?
Maybe you also noticed (via social media or relatives outside your area) that many Americans who live in Metro America (the twenty-four states where incomes and life expectancy are in an upward spiral instead of down) seem to have opportunities that you don’t? Maybe you watch this slow motion train wreck over and over every day and you grow to deeply resent these facts and the seemingly insurmountable economic and quality of life divide between you and “them” because for you it did not use to be that way?
One person who has correctly identified the largely regional self-reinforcing downward and upward economic and health expectancy spirals in America today which unfortunately provides the unending supply of economic trauma feedstock which Fox News and the American Foxocracy feed off of is Ray Dalio. He is a self-made billionaire and founder of Bridgewater Associates LP, the world’s largest hedge fund.
He for years has taught me and others that twenty-first-century capitalism in its present form has developed into a self-reinforcing upward and downward feedback loop—there’s that term again. Unfortunately the upward and downward economic feedback loops that Mr. Dalio’s extensive research team has tracked for decades have now reached a critical mass of negative ramifications that are amplifying an ever wider wealth gap in America which, in his words, puts the very existence of the United States at risk.
In the first part of a two-part series published on LinkedIn, he argues that American capitalism is now desperately in need of reform:
“I have seen capitalism evolve in a way that it is not working well for the majority of Americans because it’s producing self-reinforcing spirals up for the haves and self-reinforcing downward spirals for the have-nots.
“This is creating widening income/wealth/opportunity gaps that pose existential threats to the United States because these gaps are bringing about damaging domestic and international conflicts and weakening America’s condition.”
“Feedback loop” and “self-reinforcing spiral” are, perhaps strangely for a media company, the other key concepts you need to comprehend to understand the incredible psychological power and societal influence of the American Foxocracy and Planet Fox. The technical definition of a self-reinforcing spiral or feedback loop is a “circuit that feeds some of its output back into the input of a system in a self-regenerating cycle.”
But the term simply means the effect of the positive or negative outcomes feeds the size and power of the upward or downward cycle. The positive outcomes spawn additional positive outcomes (in economic terms the size of the economic pie), and the negative outcomes spawn more negative outcomes (in social terms, the negative outcomes enlarge the scope and size of deprivation).
In recent history, the negative outcome of World War I for Germany led to a twenty-five-year downward and negative self-reinforcing feedback loop. In America, the end of World War II led to one of the greatest economic and societal positive self-reinforcing feedback loops in the history of the modern world.
The problem America faces, and not-so-ironically what the Foxocracy and now the Libocracy all profit and feed from, is very much like the downward spiral of Germany which accelerated with the Great Depression of the 1930s. The creation of a positive feedback loop of growth for fascism in Germany was fed by the negative feedback loop of economic deprivation. Economic depression led to fewer jobs; fewer jobs led to economic deprivation; economic deprivation led proud but desperate Germans to seek a solution to end the economic decline and deprivation and to find a villain to blame; the hypnotically charismatic Adolf Hitler came up with an economic and cultural solution in his oratory and his book, Mein Kampf; he and his Minister of Propaganda came up with groundbreaking ways to employ his charismatic oratory to sell his solutions via the new technologies of radio, talking pictures, and propaganda movies—and then you know the rest.
Does that combo of negative and positive feedback loops sound at all familiar?
Used in the sense of media, propaganda, and Fox News, the American Foxocracy is now a fully integrated and self-reinforcing tribal propaganda feedback loop. Today at Fox News, white tribal televangelists feed the Trump White House information and the Trump White House feeds it back to Fox News, which goes directly into its own media output. To call Fox News white tribal identity mongers “hosts” at this point is absurd and farcical.
This white tribal content is then rebroadcast on Fox News and then repurposed—chopped into three-minute propaganda segments for social media—and retargeted to social media users. As you know, these users are identified by social media digital surveillance systems as the most likely to emotionally engage with this white tribal identity porn in their social media stream and share it virally.
To risk stating the now obvious: the American Foxocracy is the most powerful self-reinforcing political and cultural digital feedback loop of the twenty-first century. Fox News was explicitly built to weaponize Roger Ailes’s intimate knowledge of how to manipulate and monetize our innate mass psychology.
Full stop. To deny this reality in 2019 is akin to denying gravity or the shape of the Earth.
Next, in order to increase our personal self-image, we innately enhance the status of the group to which we belong. For example, if you are American you believe America is the best country in the world! But we also increase our self-image by discriminating and holding prejudiced views against out-groups which we don’t belong to by choice or exclusion. For example, if you are a proud conservative, then liberals are a bunch of losers and liberalism is a mental disease!
More importantly, in this process of social identification, we divide the world into “them” and “us” based upon an innate pr
ocess of social categorization. We naturally access and put people into social groups—think high school! Social identity theory states that the in-group or tribe will innately discriminate against the out-group purely to enhance their own self-image.
Aha! So Fox News fans hate on their out-group enemy to enhance their self-image and self-esteem? I told ya—if you self-identify as a “proud conservative” and on the good guy side of history, part of the identification is a visceral feeling of intellectual and moral superiority over liberals and liberalism as the bad guys who hate America!
For Fox News, this social identity power gets better while America gets worse. The entire central hypothesis of social identity theory is that members of an in-group will innately seek to find negative aspects of “them” in the out-group, thus enhancing their self-image via evidence of their in-group’s superiority. You may not have thought about this reality, but when you watch a TV segment performance that declares your tribal opponent is obviously an evil and stupid loser, you are directly congratulating yourself and the people who agree with you for being the most intelligent, morally superior, the most righteous, or all three.
What does Fox News opinion programming do around the clock? It sells you a list of half a dozen new negative aspects/policies/behaviors of “them” (those libtard idiots!) as well as recycling the libtards’ greatest blasphemies and desecrations of America.
When it comes to weaponizing the incredible power of us vs. them social identity manipulation, the difference between 1930s Germany and America today, folks, is that in America since the launch of Fox News, social identity weaponization is done under the cover of “free speech” and the First Amendment and it is now a $10 billion annual commercial enterprise.
