To my international friends: If you ever wonder why Americans are the way they are, just remember that 1/3rd of all US citizens are in a cult that teaches them to suppress the activity of their prefrontal cortex, particularly when it comes to doubt, critical thinking, and differentiating emotional responses from personal values.
1/3rd of Americans are Evangelical, and Evangelical Protestantism is a cult. We just don’t think of it as one because it’s so normalized. However, it follows the B.I.T.E. model of cult dynamics.
Evangelism teaches its followers to always maintain states of bliss and ecstasy for Jesus. What this does is condition the brain to always operate out of less-evolved parts; areas that are responsible for more primal emotions like euphoria, anger, and fear. Because of how we’ve evolved to survive, the brain will actually shut down our higher functioning—including critical thinking skills—in favor of these primal emotions, when they’re active.
Always feeling bliss = never questioning or feeling doubt. Evangelicals may actually fear the thoughts that do originate from their higher brain-parts because they think it’s the devil tempting them away from their religion. They’ll engage in self-indoctrination techniques to make this stop.
This creates a cognitive dissonance so great that many Americans have no separation between how they feel and what they believe. This is really bad because their minds have literally no defense against undue influence. They’ll vote for the dude who hyped them up enough. They’ll buy into the conspiracy theory that excites them the most. They’ll side with whatever gets the best reaction out of them, and getting a rise out of people is super easy to do.
Things like financial insecurity and low employment make this worse, too.
And just to be clear, this kind of conditioning can happen to anyone, regardless of their intellectual capacity.
Cult conditioning has nothing to do with how smart or dumb people are. You can condition literally any brain with the right time and environment.
Counteracting undue influence is a skill, and like any skill, it needs to be taught.
Cult experts frequently point out that the smarter people are, the more susceptible they are to this once the initial hooks are in, and the harder they are to deprogram. This is because while this kind of conditioning does not rely on intelligence, the ability to rationalise does – the smarter someone is, the better they can rationalise what they already believe, so if they’re committed to following their feelings, a smart person is much better at making it seem (to themselves as well as others) that they’re actually using logic and reason rather than making ad-hoc justifications after the fact.
Also, people who know (or believe) that they’re smarter than average tend to assume that this makes them harder to fool, conditon, or lie to. Which makes somebody much easier to fool, condition, or lie to.
So I am from the US but now live in Argentina, and as The American™ I often get reasonably asked the question, “Why are Americans, you know, like that?”
The best and most immediate answer I could come up with, and the one I’ve stuck to, is telling people that America is a country defined by being a haven for cults and religious extremists since its inception. And people are always like “god that makes so much sense.”
But you know, the wildest thing is if I tried to tell any given American this (which I have) chances are they’d be like, “No way, that’s absurd.” And I think the thing is, if you’re an American and have lived most or all of your life in America, this is just your normal. But when you live somewhere that is less saturated with religious dogma, cults and anti-intellectualism, it’s readily apparent.
Time: 770,000 to 55,000 years ago (Chibanian to Tarantian stage of the Pleistocene epoch, Quaternary period)
Location: Throughout Australia, including Kalamurina, the Wellington Caves, and the Nullarbor Plain
Today, there are no vultures in Australia. In fact, until recently, it seemed fairly clear that no vultures had lived in Australia – but now, we know they did! Originally thought to be an eagle, Cryptogyps was on the small size for a vulture, only bigger than the living Hooded Vulture – though it was about the size of the wedge-tailed eagle. However, it was proportioned similarly to other vultures, and between that and its great range across the entirety of Australia, it is logical to conclude that it lived similarly to other vultures, feeding primarily on carrion and going great distances to find it. It did not have the right musculature to be an active hunter like eagles and hawks. As such, Cryptogyps was a vital part of its environment, reducing the spread of disease and recycling nutrients and energy back into the food web like vultures today. Cryptogyps lived alongside a wide variety of weird megafuana present in Australia during the last ice age, including marsupial lions, giant demon-ducks (mihirungs), giant hippo-sized wombats, sheep-sized and fossorial echidnas, short-faced kangaroos, giant koalas, thylacines, giant maleefowls, huge monitor lizards, large crocodilians, and giant pythons – as well as cassowaries, regular kangaroos, emus, and other large animals that remain today. It was a weird place of which Cryptogyps was a small and important part, and would have been a regular sight in the skies to the first Indigenous Australians to settle on the continent!
Time: 16 to 19 million years ago (Burdigalian stage of the Miocene epoch, Neogene period)
Location: St. Bathans Fauna, Bannockburn Formation, Aotearoa
Heracles was a truly alarmingly large parrot, related to modern day Kea, Kaka, and Kakapo, known from the fantastic avifauna of St Bathans. Standing more than two feet tall and weighing about fifteen pounds, this animal was much larger than any expected from the St Bathans fauna, which represented the initial colonization of Aotearoa (Zealandia) after it returned above sea level. Heracles is also the largest known species of parrot, ever. It was presumably flightless, though it is uncertain if it was nocturnal like its living relative the Kakapo. Its exact ecology is still uncertain, given the material known from Heracles is limited and its living relatives have very disparate ecologies, though it is possible it was omnivorous similar to the Kea and Kaka today. The St Bathans fauna lived in a freshwater lake system, in a subtropical emergent rainforest. Separated from land bridges, the fauna was dominated by birds, with early relatives of the Kiwi, New Zealand Wrens, Adzebills, and Wedge-Tailed eagles found in the fauna, as well as somewhat modern looking Moas. Smaller flamingos, large fruit pigeons, and a huge variety of geese and other waterfowl are known. In addition, frogs, tuataras, other lizards, crocodilians, turtles, and many different types of fish are known from this fascinating ecosystem.
“It’s also a deeply melancholy picture about the way dissatisfaction, the anxiety of recognizing the emptiness of a supposedly comfortable life, can creep up on you, with Pádraic and his carefree ways the casualty of another man staving off those feelings.”
– A. A. Dowd’s review of THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN (2022) dir. Martin McDonagh
