The Conformity Impulse

Stella Morabito discusses the totalitarian tools of isolation, division, and silence

Stella Morabito, senior contributor at The Federalist and author of "The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer," in Washington on June 30, 2023.Wei Wu/The Epoch Times

In a recent episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek and Stella Morabito discuss the fear of ostracism involved in the suppression of free speech and the ways in which dictators seek to break trust among families and friends.

Morabito is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a former CIA intelligence analyst who studied the psychology behind Soviet Union propaganda. Her latest book is “The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer.”

Jan Jekielek: Stella, viewers of American Thought Leaders know I talk about the megaphone, a mechanism used to manufacture perceived consensus in society. Prior to reading your book, I didn’t understand how that mechanism really worked.

Stella Morabito: The megaphone is propaganda combined with political correctness to create an illusion of consensus. Why do so many people fall in line with it, and how do those pushing a propagandist narrative get away with it? Those two questions were driving me in “The Weaponization of Loneliness.”

The way it works is that human beings have a hardwired need to connect with others. We really can’t survive in isolation. The flip side is a primal fear of ostracism. Those who apply this megaphone of propaganda and political correctness operate the machinery of loneliness that triggers this conformity impulse, this need to obey whatever we perceive as a consensus, even if it’s not really the consensus.

Mr. Jekielek: I didn’t realize the importance of our need to belong, and how it could be a central organizing principle.

Ms. Morabito: This hardwired impulse to conform has a huge effect on society, especially when people keep falling in line with a megaphone that only creates an illusion of consensus and when people aren’t really talking to one another because they’re fearful of saying the wrong thing. It can be operated by tyrants of all stripes.

The only way around this is to have strong relationships in private life, family or good friends. This is why the private sphere of life becomes a target for tyrants and totalitarians. Loyalties on a personal level threaten those who want to achieve power and social control. So they weaponize our fear of being alone and threaten us with loneliness if we don’t go along with their agenda.

In my book, I discuss the machinery of this loneliness. It has three main components, and I would add those to the megaphone. The first component is identity politics, which erases us as individuals and pigeonholes us according to victim or oppressor status. Second, there’s political correctness, where one-sided propaganda can control discussion and induce self-censorship by our fear of rejection for saying the wrong thing.

The third component is mob agitation, like the mobs on social media and street mobs like Antifa. These mobs take different forms, but serve to enforce political correctness, identity politics, and the propaganda driving the agenda.

Mr. Jekielek: You wrote, “Pretending to go along with the belief you don’t actually hold creates a ripple effect.” You cite some work done on availability cascades. Please explain this to us.

Ms. Morabito: The availability cascade is a term that comes up in an article co-authored by Cass Sunstein, Obama’s regulatory czar in his second term, and Timur Kuran, a social economist.

They explain that you can create the illusion of a consensus on just about anything if people keep quiet about what they truly believe. They said that it doesn’t even matter how fringy an idea is. If you keep injecting it into public discourse over and over again, you create this cascade of public opinion.

If you look at some of the absurdities we’re dealing with today, that’s exactly what happened. Certain issues get injected time and again. I keep coming back to the transgender issue because it’s so fascinating.

In 2014, Time magazine came out with a big article, “The Transgender Tipping Point.” Then, Caitlin Bruce Jenner had that Vanity Fair article, and he was a star and athlete. So you had this intersection of popular culture and Hollywood, and a lot of academics repeatedly injecting this idea into the public discourse. That’s really all it took before people said, “OK, so this is what I should believe.”

That’s the availability cascade, and it influences a public opinion cascade. It doesn’t matter what people really believe, it’s all about what they say they believe. Quite often, they say they believe certain things because they’re fearful their reputation might be affected if they go off script.

Mr. Jekielek: You write about the importance of a private sphere of life, which of course is a huge problem today. Everything about our society is becoming public. This device I’m holding, for example, is collecting information on me even as we’re doing this interview, and a whole generation has grown up without realizing what privacy might look like, because there is constant monitoring and cameras everywhere.

Ms. Morabito: Exactly, but privacy is one of the conditions of having a civil society. Without privacy, there can be no intimacy. If you think about it, friendship is based on the ability to confide in someone. Without that, we become atomized, and that’s what we have to fight against. Privacy is absolutely imperative.

Mr. Jekielek: In Poland, the dissidents under communism had this idea—live as if you were free. It was a beautiful prescription: how to carry yourself, how to think about things, how to create an honest, honorable resistance. Despite the encroachment on our freedoms today, this idea remains true.

Ms. Morabito: Yes. When you live as if you are free, you pull back the curtain, as Vaclav Havel said, and you show others that it’s possible to live with truth, as much as the oppressors want to make that impossible.

And we can do it. There might be punishment, but the cost of not doing it is far greater. This is what every tyrant or totalitarian fears.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.