HEROES, FALSE PROPHETS, AND DEMAGOGUES
Human Vulnerability and Our Need for Meaning and Significance
David Barnhizer
In 1959, I listened to the nightly news reports on a little pink transistor radio as Fidel Castro and his heroic “revolutionaries” came down from the Cuban mountains to confront Batista’s evil people who suppressed the population. I “knew” they were heroes fighting against injustice and evil. To my unsophisticated young boy’s ears, Castro was a combination of Tonto and the Lone Ranger, or Superman bringing a version of “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” A hero like Davy Crockett, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln, Castro was bringing freedom to the oppressed people of Cuba. My beloved grandfather, who worked in “the mill” for almost forty years and was active in helping to organize the Steelworkers Union in Youngstown, Ohio, had always told me to protect the “common man” and that commitment made Castro a hero to me, until it became clear he was allied with the USSR and hated America.
It also became clear that Cuba’s overthrown dictator and President Fulgencio Batista and American criminal syndicates had been running the country for their own benefit, so there was reason for many Cubans to not like the United States. Then Che Guevara took the revolution’s message of justice to Africa and South America, and for a brief time he was a hero to me, and still is for some people. Tragically, however, as almost inevitably occurs, it quickly became obvious that Cuba had simply changed dictators through Castro and was enforcing an oppressive system through secret police, military power and the imprisonment or execution of dissidents.
Thank God for Real Heroes
While there are false prophets and demagogues everywhere, there are also real heroes. Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson, Rosa Parks, Cesar Chavez, and Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) come to mind. Another person I respect immensely is a fantastic civil rights leader I worked with in Colorado named Elizabeth Patterson. She was an incredible Black woman possessed of rare courage that allowed her to face whatever came up. These are all people whose courage inspired me. John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy offered a beacon for many of us to follow. There were numerous times when I was working in Washington, DC that I would walk across the bridge over the Potomac and go into Arlington National Cemetery so I could visit JFK’s grave.
We all need heroes, guides, and people with vision who fight against injustice. For me, as a matter of reading and my own educational experience, I can add Patrick Henry, Nathan Hale, the “Green Mountain Boys,” Jeanne d’Arc, Horatio at the Bridge, the three hundred Greeks who held back the Persians, and the Arthurian Knights of the Round Table. Much of it myth, of course, but our myths are often more important as guiding ideals than our common reality. I don’t care, for example, if George Washington didn’t chop down a cherry tree or refused to tell a lie. Nor do I care if Abe Lincoln actually walked miles barefoot to return some pennies when he realized the store owner had miscalculated.
These myths are taught to children in order to create ideals about honesty and good behavior. That is why it is so important that our youngest children, at home and in their earliest school years, experience the ideals and moral lessons we feel strongly they should have as individuals and contributing members of society. The duty to challenge the evils of racism and unjust treatment are prominent among the goals of education.
There are other heroes. George Washington as the Father of Our Country and Abraham Lincoln as the ”Great Emancipator.” My mythic heroes, all with the inevitable “feet of clay“ that afflict all humans, include Ethan Allen, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Geronimo, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela whose courage was truly “off the charts” and numerous others. Sitting Bull and other Sioux agreed to a treaty with the US Government in 1868, but after gold was discovered in the tribal lands the treaty was breached. Sitting Bull allied the Great Plains tribes and resisted the unjust white settler takeover of the areas that had been granted the Tribes by treaty. Heroes can be found everywhere, but they do not always win.
On a more personal level, our family has a great great uncle John who fought on the American side in the Revolutionary War, another Yankee descendant who fought to free slaves on the Union‘s side in the Civil War, my Father who, like hundreds of thousands of other Americans fought against the Nazis, my Uncle Bob who spent time as a prisoner of war in WWII, and my Grandfather Thomas Seth Jones who served in the Army Air Corps in WWI. Along with the above, my younger brother Bret Barnhizer served two tours of duty in Vietnam spanning the years between his 18th and 21st birthdays. He was an Army medic and was assigned to two different infantry brigades and a separate Military Advisory Team working in dangerous territory to determine and counter North Vietnamese deployments.
The strange thing, to me, is that contrary to the assertions of the Woke who parade about as if they created awareness of social justice and injustice, in my own educational processes the schools I attended—K-12 and college—did provide such perspectives six decades ago. The modern “Woke” are actually “late to the party” and many of them are unwelcome guests. This is because their often absurd and overblown claims and accusations have risked causing damage to the decades of achievement experienced since the 1960s in the Civil Rights movement of which I have long been a part. The tragedy is that the rhetoric of the Woke and race “theorists” has generated a new kind of racism and other distorted discriminations in their overweening search for power and control.
We Need to Aspire and Be Inspired, and That Makes Us Vulnerable
We need to aspire and be inspired by something we perceive as “higher” and “better” than us. Chicago Pastor Corey Brooks demonstrated just this in his “100 Night Vigil” on a building roof on the city’s South Side. Brooks did this arduous feat with the aid of filmmaker Eli Steele with the aim of raising funds to build his area’s youth a community center, and to show them the critical importance of aspiration aimed at using your strength and talents to achieve a worthy goal. Brooks and Steele are heroes and I have great admiration for their courage and intense commitment. This need makes us susceptible to “prophets” who seem to understand something of universal importance that is better than us. Our “prophets” are masters at manipulating others who are searching for “the way” to have something meaningful and majestic in which to believe and be part of. The prophets weave spells and we fall prey to their “magic.”
In the deep dark space we all have within ourselves but from which we seek to hide, we humans know how little we actually understand. We also know that most of us have a “mean and spiteful little person” living inside us. Our deep-felt need for meaning creates a void many of us try to fill. We silently “whistle in the dark” in the face of our own ignorance, as I did at night in grade school when walking past the graveyard located next to the path I took on my way home. It was even scarier when I was thirteen after I watched Bela Lugosi in Dracula for the first time by myself at Midnight on Halloween. After weeks spent whistling even more loudly and walking really fast on my journey home to safety, I snuck out of my parents’ house at midnight and made myself walk through the cemetery to challenge my fear. It actually worked. I wasn’t attacked by a vampire intent on sucking my blood.
Our fears and needs, including the need to feel we are part of something significant, make us susceptible to impassioned and powerful people who persuade us they have great insight. Sorting out the real prophets from the hustlers, manipulators, demagogues, and “snake oil salesmen” has always been a difficult task, and we seem to fail more often than we succeed. It becomes even more difficult when movements such as Wokeism, Marxism, Maoism, Fascism, or Nazism are successful in building a larger and larger membership whose impassioned “believers” tell us how great it is and offer benefits for being part of the collective. Of course, as their power increases, it is made clear that there are consequences if we do not “get in line”.
Noam Chomsky argues that “intellectuals are the most indoctrinated part of the population … the ones most susceptible to propaganda.”
Noam Chomsky is a public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. He is sometimes called “the father of modern linguistics.” Chomsky is Institute Professor and professor of Linguistics Emeritus at MIT and Laureate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona, where he is also the Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice. He is the author of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax and The Minimalist Program, both published by MIT Press.
I remember the time I staged a significant international conference on sustainable economic and social strategies for national and global societies. Noam Chomsky, who I found to be a delightful man, was about to make his presentation, and my responsibility as the host was to introduce the brilliant linguist and philosopher. I started telling people all the technical stuff about his background, but all of a sudden something came over me and I said, “You all know who he is and the analytical and political things he stands for, so, HERE’S NOAM!”
Entirely distinct from my inadequate introduction, Noam Chomsky offers significant and honest insight as to how intellectuals function. In a 1991 interview, Chomsky offered a damning opinion about how many intellectuals function. This included describing intellectuals’ almost automatic submission to those in power to preserve their own power, privilege, status, and reputations. The following Q & A from Chomsky’s 1991 interview capture the reality of the motivations and behavior of the “special class” of intellectuals.
Q. You have suggested that “intellectuals are the most indoctrinated part of the population … the ones most susceptible to propaganda.” You have explained that the educated classes are “ideological managers,” complicit in “controlling all the organized flow of information.” How and why is this so? What can be done to change this situation?
Now, my point is that the people we call intellectuals are those who have passed through various gates and filters and have made it into positions in which they can serve as cultural managers. There are plenty of other people just as smart, smarter, more independent, more thoughtful, who didn’t pass through those gates and we just don’t call them intellectuals. In fact, this is a process that starts in elementary school. Let’s be concrete about it. You and I went to good graduate schools and teach in fancy universities, and the reason we did this is because we’re obedient. That is, you and I, and typically people like us, got to the positions we’re in because from childhood we were willing to follow orders. If the teacher in third grade told us to do some stupid thing, we didn’t say, “Look, that’s ridiculous. I’m not going to do it.” We did it because we wanted to get on to fourth grade. We came from the kind of background where we’d say, “Look, do it, forget about it, so the teacher’s a fool, do it, you’ll get ahead, don’t worry about it.” That goes on all through school, and it goes on through your professional career. You’re told in graduate school, “Look, don’t work on that; it’s a wrong idea. Why not work on this? You’ll get ahead.”
[Y]ou allow yourself to be shaped by the system of authority that exists out there and is trying to shape you. Well, some people do this. They’re submissive and obedient, and they accept it and make it through; they end up being people in the high places—economic managers, cultural managers, political managers. There are other people who were in your class and in my class who didn’t do it. When the teacher told them in the third grade to do x, they said, “That’s stupid, and I’m not going to do it.” Those are people who are more independent minded, for example, and there’s a name for them: they’re called “behavior problems.” … In fact, the whole educational system involves a good deal of filtering of this sort, and it’s a kind of filtering towards submissiveness and obedience.”
What Happens when the “Submissive and Obedient” Intellectuals Chomsky Describes Are Controlled by Rabid Activists and Demagogues?
The university is, as Marshall McLuhan explained through the “medium is the message” concept, an overarching and penetrating medium through which power can be obtained and society shaped. In his classic 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man , McLuhan argues in Chapter One, “The Medium Is the Message,” that a “message” is “the change of scale or pace or pattern” that a new invention or innovation “introduces into human affairs.” In Conformity Colleges, among the points being made is that the university system, and the entire educational system as structured, is a critical medium that contains and energizes “the message.”
That capture of the “medium” of the university, the overall educational system, and the media’s institutions of communication on nearly all levels, is why the takeover of the educational system being described here is such a vital element of the social and political transformation. Institutional capture lies at the center of the Woke/Critical Race Theory agenda. That takeover of the university and the K–12 system grants the Woke/CRT activists free rein to use the techniques of propaganda to instill their “transformative” agenda in the hearts and minds generations of students and make them “social justice warriors” in their cause. This provides the presumptively “educated” mass of true believers a sense of meaning and significance. This outcome, however, is not achieved through the quality of their vision but by propaganda, intimidation, and indoctrination.
French Natural Law philosopher Jacques Ellul speaks of stereotypes, propaganda, and symbols. He writes:
Propaganda gives the individual the stereotypes he no longer takes the trouble to work out for himself; it furnishes these in the form of labels, slogans, ready-made judgments. It transforms ideas into slogans, and by giving the “word,” convinces the individual that he has an opinion. The stereotype, which is stable, helps man to avoid thinking, to take a personal position, to form his own opinion.
How this works has been explained by Thomas Green in his book, The Activities of Teaching.
Every mind is fettered at some point, ridden with presuppositions and stereotypes that stand in the way of mental freedom. … [A] person may hold a belief because it is supported by the evidence, or… may accept the evidence because it happens to support a belief he already holds. It is possible to hold conflicting sets of beliefs as psychologically central because we tend to order our beliefs in little clusters encrusted about, as it were, with a protective shield that prevents any cross-fertilization among them or any confrontation between them.
Propaganda, True Believers, and “Gangs”
As my wonderful mother, who lived to be a hundred and was “sharp as a tack” to the end, always told me, “all propaganda begins with a grain of truth” and its purveyors then build a distorted message on that valid initial assertion or narrative. This is what we are now experiencing. Intellectuals, or perhaps more accurately, “pseudo-intellectuals” and propagandists are at the core of those twisting us with their message aimed at gaining power for themselves.
The problem, as Yale professor Robert Dahl has written, is that special interest groups, “gangs” and the like, always end up as closed systems. Others are “outsiders.” In his Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy, Dahl describes how organizational behavior and formal and informal identity groups and “gangs” are organizations that define us, limit our focus, and control how we view others in terms of their relationship to our own “organization.”
Organizations … are not mere relay stations that receive and send signals from their members about their interests. Organizations amplify the signals and generate new ones. Often they sharpen particularistic demands at the expense of broader needs, and short-run against long-run needs. …. Leaders therefore play down potential cleavages and conflicts among their own members and exaggerate the salience of conflicts with outsiders. Organizations thereby strengthen both solidarity and division, cohesion and conflict; they reinforce solidarity among members and conflicts with nonmembers. Because associations help to fragment the concerns of citizens, interests that many citizens might share—latent ones perhaps—may be slighted.
Those who teach, research, and study in the “soft” or noncumulative disciplines become easy prey for demagogues, false prophets, and others seeking power. Some, like Ibram Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones, are the manipulators and the profiteers making many thousands from their proclamations and accusations. They, like Lenin, Marcuse, Mao, Chavez and Maduro, Castro, and other demagogues, entice others into their “web.” Once their targets are seduced, they enrage their revolutionary base of true believers and sycophants who seek power and ego gratification by proclaiming their “victimhood” and how their followers have been unfairly exploited.
This strategy identifies and defines an “enemy” who must then be held accountable for their own supposedly associated “systemic sins” or, if that doesn’t work all that well, to convince people they are morally and financially responsible for the alleged sins of their historical forebears by establishing what has been called “white guilt”. If that scam doesn’t produce the required results because of a lack of “guilty” forebears, they are told they are accountable for the actions of all people, whenever born, whose identity characteristics, i.e. skin color, are similar to those now being condemned.
The Core Strategy of Eliminating Critical Thinking
When those pursuing such esoteric and intellectually strained topics and disciplines are not willing or able to employ the abilities of reason, testing, critique, and utilization of the full range of honest data, it is extraordinarily easy for demagogues such as Marx, Lenin, Hitler, Ibram X. Kendi (nee Henry Rogers), Hannah-Jones, and others to convince their “disciples” their proclamations are true. This is why the “new religions” of Wokeism and Critical Race Theory have condemned the use of reason, evidence, critical thinking and the like as “racist White values”. It is why they have eliminated the teaching of such skills and knowledge in many of America’s schools and other institutions.
Once you eliminate critical thinking, fact, the search for truth and evidence from the political equation, and change the linguistic message to accusation, assertion, and emotion-laden narratives, the demagogues are in control. This has become even more common due to the politically-driven identity collectives that now dominate American politics, media, and educational institutions. We live in a complex and scary world that is increasingly on edge. In America and the Western democracies as organized religion is fading away for many, people feel lost over which they lack control and have no sense of meaning or significance as individuals. In such a context many people want to be part of something significant. This desire often translates to the need to identify with something other people consider significant and meaningful. Many become easy victims for demagogues and “prophets” who offer a sense of “certainty” no matter how flawed and misleading it might be. The strategy of recruiting through compelling narrative and offering a claim of truth and certainty is grounded on the offering of purpose, meaning, and faith in a cause.
This strategy becomes destructive when collectives committed to specific organizational agendas, identity preferences, and pursuits of political transformation to advance their members’ interests are allowed to gain control. Such situations can rarely be resolved through rational discourse particularly when people have spent their lives being “educated” to see only one side of a dispute. The resulting inability to interact through rational discourse based on evidence creates a serious threat to the well-being of the overarching and complex political community that exists in America and is now under serious assault. America’s complex community, one unique in the world, is being corrupted by the “prophetic” leaders of “the tribes of identity”.