THE 4-WAY VOTER SPLIT
When voters are exposed to the intensity of an HCP Wannabe King’s emotional warfare, they tend to split into four groups (based on my observations and reading about historical and current leaders). This helps ensure the Wannabe King’s election and domination. These groups are based on voter temperaments or personal emotional styles, not on any standard type of personality analysis or disorders. The groups are flexible so that depending on how they are treated, members may shift from one group to another, from one election to another.
The Four Groups
Here are the four groups who become divided or split by HCP Wannabe Kings:
LOVING LOYALISTS These are the HCP’s followers who would do anything for their leader. Loyalists believe that their HCP is special and will serve their needs where others haven’t. They believe their HCP speaks to them and for them. They generally agree with the HCPs attacks on their Targets of Blame.
The following three groups generally disagree with the HCP’s attacks on their targets but have three different emotional reactions to it.
RILED-UP RESISTERS Resisters are the strong opponents, those who view the HCP’s behavior as alarming and requiring strong opposition, otherwise the community or country will suffer dire consequences.
MILD MODERATES Moderates are the people who see the Wannabe King’s behavior in generally political terms and vote for or against them based on parties or policies, mostly ignoring their character defects and attacks as minor or temporary.
DISENCHANTED DROPOUTS Dropouts are the people who most strongly dislike politics and want nothing to do with it. They don’t think their vote matters, so they don’t bother voting. They see the Wannabe King as being just like all the other politicians.
Figure 3 is what this 4-way split looks like.
The result of the HCP’s emotional attacks is that all of the groups become highly emotional and fight with each other. This has the effect of further strengthening the Loyalists’ ties to their HCP leader and neutralizing the three opposition groups. The following is a description of the emotional response pattern that is surprisingly consistent throughout the examples in this book:
LOVING LOYALISTS Loyalists despise Resisters for criticizing their leader and looking down on them. They hate the Resisters’ resistance and consider them unpatriotic and possibly evil. They dismiss Moderates as simply representing the “establishment,” since they tend to be those in the political center. Loyalists are emotionally inspired to follow.
RILED-UP RESISTERS Resisters despise the Loyalists and can’t understand how they can support the Wannabe King. They think Loyalists are not very smart. Resisters are angry with Moderates for seeming unconcerned about the HCP and believe they are too willing to give in to their demands. Resisters are also angry with the Dropouts and say they should be ashamed of themselves for not voting. Resisters are emotionally inspired to fight.
MILD MODERATES Moderates dislike the extremes of the Loyalists who are challenging their moderate values. They also dislike the Resisters because they don’t see the need for angry protests and are emotionally turned off by them. They are generally disappointed with the Dropouts. Moderates tend to wring their hands about the polarization they see, but they don’t know where it came from and how to reduce it. They are emotionally inspired to freeze.
DISENCHANTED DROPOUTS Dropouts may dislike the aggressive nature of the Wannabe King, but they blame both the Loyalists and the Resisters for conflicts and polarization. Dropouts feel pressure from both camps to vote for their side, but they mostly ignore the “political” people and focus on their own lives. They are emotionally inspired to flee.
FIGURE 3. The 4-way split created by high-conflict politicians. Copyright © 2019 Bill Eddy, All Rights Reserved, Why We Elect Narcissists and Sociopaths—And How We Can Stop, Berrrett-Koehler Publishers
Wannabe Kings are skilled at keeping these groups fighting each other or immobilized by creating an ongoing sense of conflict, chaos, crisis, and fear. Through their constant speeches, they use what each group says and does to feed the anger of the other groups. This way they can gain power and remain in power.
Interestingly, they don’t usually have the support of more than about 40 percent of the adult population (their Loyalists), so the other three groups combined (60 percent) could easily out-vote them if they united. Instead, these groups often stay divided and emotionally ineffective.
For an example of applying the 4-way voter split (shown earlier in Figure 3.1) to a specific election, go to Chapter 8 and look at the part titled “US Presidential Election—2016.” And if you want to apply this framework to other examples in this book or to one of your own, refer to Appendix C; feel free to make a copy of the blank form for your own use.
Cultural Leadership
What most people don’t see is that the Wannabe King is primarily responsible for keeping these fights and conflicts going, not the other groups. Polarization doesn’t fall from the sky. As the cultural leader, the HCP has a powerful influence on whether the community or nation takes an adversarial or a cooperative approach to problem-solving.
It’s almost like flipping a switch. A unifying leader will use words to overcome divisions and inspire a community to set aside its differences in order to accomplish a common task. A divisive leader (an HCP) will use words to pit people against each other and teach them to take action against individuals or groups within their communities. In this manner they teach polarization, rather than simply reflecting the views of the community. We will see this over and over again in the examples in Part II.
Ironically, an HCP leader can drive both sides of these conflicts. The HCP does this by attacking one of the split groups, then another, while flattering their followers. Although these opposition groups may not like the HCP, they still tend to absorb the HCP’s opinion about the other opposition groups, which then affects their voting patterns. The four split groups are somewhat flexible so that cultural leaders can move some of them from one group to another. But the basic pattern of splitting seems to have existed throughout history.
Hitler’s Example
Hitler built up his Nazi party of Negative Advocates (Loyalists) primarily by treating the small Jewish population in Germany (about 1 percent of the country at the time) as his Target of Blame. By the elections in February 1932, the Nazis had become the largest party in Germany having grown from a tiny regional group in the 1920s. They received approximately 42 percent of the seats in the Reichstag (parliament). The Social Democrats received 24 percent, the (Catholic) Center Party 18 percent, and the Communist Party 16 percent.42
The Social Democrats were in power at the time and were essentially the Mild Moderates, along with the Center Party. Hitler attacked the Social Democrats viciously as the establishment, blamed them for losing World War I, and falsely claimed they were controlled by Jews.
The German Communist Party (Riled-Up Resisters) was told by Stalin, in Communist Russia, to focus on attacking the Social Democrats, since he dismissed the Nazis as having little potential. The Social Democrats saw the Communists as the bigger threat, so these two groups weakened each other. The Center Party, with the cooperation of the Social Democrats, eased restrictions on the Nazis, which allowed them to get into bloody street fights with the Communists. It’s unclear how many people (Dropouts) didn’t vote in this February 1932 election.
In the November election later that year, the Nazis lost votes to become only 35 percent of the parliament, but because they were still the largest party, Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January 1933.43 If the other parties could have recognized Hitler’s Wannabe King patterns, instead of being focused on their long history of squabbling, they might have worked together and prevented World War II and the genocidal holocaust of the Jews and Hitler’s other Targets of Blame.
Stalin’s Example
In the 1930s, Stalin wanted to make the farms of the Soviet Union into large collectives so they would be more efficient at producing more grain to sell for industrial equipment.44 At the same time, doing this would help the government stamp out any capitalist tendencies farmers might have developed by owning their own small farms ever since the Russian tsar gave the peasants their freedom in 1861.45
Stalin saw these resistant land-owning peasant farmers as his Targets of Blame. He called them kulaks—a rare term from before the revolution that “simply implied someone who was doing well, or someone who could afford to hire others to work, but not necessarily someone wealthy.”46
[One Soviet leader said:] “If the requisition meant civil war between the kulaks and the poorer elements of the villages, then long live this civil war!” … [T]he Bolsheviks were actively seeking to deepen divisions inside the villages, to use anger and resentment to further their policy.47
In one mandatory meeting with peasant farmers, a young revolutionary brigade “propagandist” from the city urged the peasants to sign up for the collective farm:
“Come on! It’s late,” he urged us. “The sooner you sign in, the sooner you go home.” No one moved. All sat silently. The chairman, bewildered and nervous, whispered something in the propagandist’s ear … We kept our silence. This irritated the officials, especially the chairman. A moment after the propagandist finished his admonishment, the chairman rushed from behind the table, grabbed the first man before him, and shook him hard. “You … you, enemy of the people!” he shouted, his voice choking with rage. “What are you waiting for?”48
I picture these peasants—caught in the middle between angry Loyalists and angry Resisters—as the Moderates, who didn’t really cooperate but didn’t really fight back either. These divisions enabled Stalin to divide and conquer by using Loyalists (including the urban revolutionaries and some local villagers) to do much of the dirty work, including forcibly taking food and equipment from farm families without leaving them anything to eat. It was these actions that caused the famines, which led to the deaths of millions by 1933.49 Yet, there were always more peasant Resisters and Moderates (and Dropouts who left for the big cities) than Loyalists.
Emotions Are Contagious
How could these HCP Wannabe Kings be so successful at gaining followers and intimidating their critics in a century with such rapid development of information, communication, and logical problem-solving? It’s simple. They are more effective than anyone else at using emotional communication and emotional relationships. These techniques are totally automatic for Wannabe Kings.
After all, emotions are contagious. And “high” emotions—fear, panic, jealousy, resentment, anger, rage—are highly contagious. Mild emotions are, of course, part of everyday life and they help us make decisions, get along with others, and build meaningful relationships. But when emotions run high, they get our hearts racing, our minds focused narrowly, and our muscles ready to fight, flee, or freeze. They also shut off the logical, problem-solving part of our brains so fast that we don’t even realize it.
Brain researchers tell us that we can “catch” each other’s emotions, especially when we are anxious. There are two parts of the brain in particular that play a big part in this. One is the amygdala:
[T]he amygdala spots signs of fear in someone else’s face with remarkable speed, picking it up in a glimpse as quick as 33 milliseconds, and in some people even in a mere 17 milliseconds…so fast that the conscious mind remains oblivious to that perception (though we might sense the resulting vague stirring of uneasiness). We may not consciously realize how we are synchronizing [with the other person], yet we mesh with remarkable ease.50
The other part is mirror neurons, which causes us to exhibit or rehearse in our brains and bodies the same behavior that we have seen in someone else, without even consciously thinking about it. They say that this is the primary way that children learn, as well as the reason adults can quickly join together in group action.
[T]hese systems “allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation; by feeling, not by thinking.”
This triggering of parallel circuitry in two brains lets us instantly achieve a shared sense of what counts in a given moment.51 (Emphasis added)
In addition, brain research tells us that in the absence of a clear understanding of who is in power in a given situation, the person with the most emotionally expressive face usually commands the attention of the group.52 Overall, it appears that our brains follow emotionally expressive leaders, just as we fall in love with emotionally expressive romantic partners. And in both situations, our emotional attractions operate outside of our conscious radar. We simply fall in love.
Narcissists and sociopaths intuitively know this and seduce people all the time. Groups follow them because they are emotionally expressive. But they don’t actually care about their followers. It is only later that individuals and groups discover that they have been manipulated and misled. At that point, they are often too ashamed to admit it and may deny they have been misled.
For example, one of Stalin’s young revolutionaries later expressed deep regrets when he realized how he had been misled by Stalin and his cohorts to contribute to the starvation of thousands of peasants when they tried to force collective farming on them. He described himself as succumbing “to a form of intellectual blindness” at the time.
“To spare yourself mental agony you veil unpleasant truths from view by half-closing your eyes—and your mind. You make panicky excuses and shrug off knowledge with words like exaggeration and hysteria. … We spoke of the ‘peasant front’ and ‘kulak menace,’ ‘village socialism’ and ‘class resistance.’ In order to live with ourselves we had to smear the reality out of recognition with verbal camouflage.”53
This emotional contagion can and does happen to everyone. We are actually all seduced into becoming emotional, although in different ways: some of us fight, some flee, some freeze, and some follow. The lesson to be learned here is that we need to watch out for this occurring and work together, rather than simply accept the emotional messages of those leaders who seem to be on “our side” when they say that it is a case of “us against them.”
Emotional Differences
It’s also important to understand that people in different political groups may have a predisposition to think more one way than another. Part of what allows us as voters to be split and to argue with each other is the assumption that when people disagree with us they are stupid or evil. However, it turns out that our individual brains may be predisposed to see things differently—perhaps from birth.54
For example, some people seem to be born with the tendency to value loyalty highly, follow authority, have empathy for one’s own group, be suspicious of strangers, and seek certainty and stability. These people are generally more conservative. Others seem to be born to seek novelty and change, to be interested in people who look different, and to have empathy for strangers in need. They are generally more liberal.55
These conservative-liberal personality differences seem to exist even outside of politics. For example, Republicans apparently have three times as many nightmares as Democrats.56 And liberals “are more likely to own travel books than conservatives.”57 Studies have shown that as early as four years old, children have already begun to show these differing personality tendencies.58
Three political science researchers have been studying the biology and psychology of political orientations. They believe that a lot of our behavioral tendencies may be inborn, including some liberal and conservative personality traits. They found that what you gaze at, what disgusts you, and who attracts you as a mate are among the many traits that correspond somewhat with political tendencies. “Slices of the population on both the political left and the political right are predisposed, and therefore for all intents and purposes unpersuadable.”59
Others agree that whether our political personalities developed primarily from genetics, early childhood upbringing, or cultural experience, they appear mostly set by adulthood.
[Most] people either inherit their party affiliations from their parents, or they form an attachment to one party or another early in adulthood. Few people switch parties once they hit middle age. … Once they have formed an affiliation, people bend their philosophy and their perceptions of reality so they become more and more aligned with members of their political tribe.60
However, much of the time, people with these differing political tendencies get along just fine. It’s when a Wannabe King enters the picture and repeatedly exaggerates these differences, purposefully dividing people, that it can become a serious problem. What’s one of the most powerful tools they have for dividing people?
Fear Factor
Fear appears to be the strongest emotion that drives this split among voters. “Brain imaging studies have even shown that the fear center of the brain, the amygdala, is actually larger in conservatives than in liberals.”61 It is commonly said that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. And it is true that a liberal will temporarily become more conservative when “tired, hungry, rushed, distracted, or disgusted.”62
On the other hand, a study at Yale University focused on the views of liberals and conservatives when they imagined a fearful situation such as flying in airplanes and then imagined being completely safe. After the flying experiment, liberals and conservatives reported the typical differences on social issues, apparently because flying increased a sense of fear. “But if they had instead just imagined being completely physically safe, the Republicans became significantly more liberal—their positions on social attitudes were much more like the Democratic respondents.”63
While many politicians may say that power comes from organizing ability or good policies, Wannabe Kings emphasize fear or terror, as Hitler explained in his step-by-step method in Chapter 2. One Russian-born author, Masha Gessen, recently said this while analyzing Vladimir Putin’s presidency and history: “Ideology was essential only at the very beginning, for the future totalitarian rulers to seize power. After that, terror kicked in.”64
In the United States in 2018, it’s interesting that a book came out titled Fear: Trump in the White House, in which the author, Bob Woodward quoted candidate Donald Trump as saying: “Real power is—I don’t even want to use the word—fear.”65
Remember it’s not about the politics; it’s about the personality.
Conclusion
In reality, it seems that a family, workplace, community, and country need both liberals and conservatives to balance each other’s novelty seeking and stability seeking, openness to strangers and caution about strangers, loyalty to leaders and skepticism of leaders, and sensitivity to fear. But HCP Wannabe Kings use emotional warfare—they seduce, attack, divide, and dominate—to create chaos, conflict, confusion, and fear as a manipulative way to gain power for themselves.
When the Wannabe Kings are on the far left, the Loyalists tend to be liberal and the Resisters tend to be conservative (although there are some aghast liberals). Likewise, when the Wannabe Kings are on the far right, the Loyalists tend to be conservative and the Resisters tend to be liberal (and some aghast conservatives). Remember, these are primarily emotional tendencies.
Since we have different hard-wired or learned responses to this emotional warfare, we instinctively react with fight, flight, freeze, or follow. We fall into the trap of disagreeing with each other when we could unite and stop Wannabe Kings from ever getting elected. But why is this seemingly obvious manipulation increasing in the twenty-first century rather than fading away?