On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder
Lorin Friesen, April 2025
Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University. He speaks five and reads ten European languages. His specialization is Eastern European history and the Holocaust. I learned about him recently as one of three scholars who will be teaching at the Munk School in the University of Toronto in response to policies instituted by Donald Trump. There is an interesting symmetry here because I recently wrote an article on a book on religion written by Jordan Peterson. Timothy Snyder is moving from the United States to the University of Toronto to preserve his academic freedom. Jordan Peterson, in contrast, has recently moved from the University of Toronto to the United States to preserve his academic freedom. This symmetry is discussed at the end of this essay.
Timothy Snyder has written a book entitled On Tyranny which describes how one should respond to growing fascism. He has also posted twenty short videos about this book on YouTube. This essay will be analyzing those videos in the light of mental symmetry. The quotes are taken from a transcription of Snyder’s dialogue on these videos. Therefore, there may be inaccuracies in the quotes. I have also taken the liberty of cleaning up the quotes by removing repeated or redundant words as well as ‘ums’. Snyder tends to use run-on sentences. This is effective when speaking because it replaces ums’ with clarifications, but it can lead to awkward written language. The videos are fairly short and each heading in this essay contains a link to the corresponding video. Therefore, the quotes can be checked fairly easily for accuracy.
I suspect that I would not agree with all of Snyder’s political views. However, this video series deals with the deeper topic of the existence of a political system and at this deeper level I find that his statements resonate deeply with what I have discovered. There is no point in arguing over liberal versus conservative viewpoints if the democratic system that makes it possible to vote liberal or conservative ceases to exist. We have now reached the point where the system itself needs to be saved, and here Snyder speaks with wisdom and authority.
Snyder’s views on fascism and tyranny are based upon extensive historical analysis of Nazi and Communist history as well as interactions with individuals who attempted to stand up to these regimes. In other words, they are backed up by empirical evidence. In contrast to Snyder’s bottom-up approach, this essay takes the top-down approach of starting with the meta-theory of mental symmetry. Mental symmetry acknowledges empirical evidence indirectly by explaining systems, such as Snyder’s book On Tyranny, that are based in empirical evidence. More generally, I suggest that a meta-theory is valid to the extent that it can be used to explain other theories.
Table of Contents
1. Do Not Obey in Advance
2. Defend Institutions
3. Beware The One-Party State
4. Take Responsibility for the Face of the World
5. Remember Professional Ethics
6. Be Wary of Paramilitaries
7. Be Reflective If You Must Be Armed
8. Stand Out
9. Be Kind To Our Language
10. Believe in Truth
11. Investigate
12. Make Eye Contact and Small Talk
13. Practice Corporeal Politics
14. Establish a Private Life
15. Contribute to Good Causes
16. Learn From Peers In Other Countries
17. Listen For Dangerous Words
18. Be Calm When The Unthinkable Arrives
19. Be A Patriot
20. Be As Courageous As You Can
Jordan Peterson versus Timothy Snyder
Introduction
I have discovered through repeated experience that academia instinctively rejects the very concept of starting with a meta-theory in Teacher thought. However, I have also discovered that the same individuals who explicitly reject the idea of starting with a meta-theory invariably are guided by some implicit meta-theory. One common meta-theory is the theory of biological evolution. Another common meta-theory is the concept of universal tolerance. Universal tolerance is based in the Teacher overgeneralization that everyone and everything should be treated equally. In essence, it gives a grade of C to everyone regardless of what they say or do. When society gives a grade of F to some individual or group, then this is regarded as injustice imposed by society upon the marginalized and oppressed. Any person or group which suggests that people should be given different grades is regarded as an oppressor and is given a grade of F. The end result is societal conflict between those who think that everyone should be given the same grade and those who think that people should be given different grades.
Looking cognitively at this conflict between giving grades and rejecting those who give grades, two different cognitive divisions are involved. The first division involves the matter of truth in Perceiver thought. Is truth imposed upon the mind by some source of truth, or is truth discovered by looking for connections that are universally repeated? The first method of absolute truth uses emotional respect for some source of authority in Mercy thought to overwhelm Perceiver thought into ‘knowing’ what is true. (The term ‘knowing’ is put in italics to indicate that Perceiver thought is not functioning but rather being overwhelmed.) The second method of universal truth uses Perceiver thought to look for connections that are repeated. Every child begins with the first method of basing truth in adult authorities and then, hopefully, makes the transition to the second method of using Perceiver thought to evaluate truth. Tyranny bases its Perceiver truth in Mercy emotional respect for sources of authority. Snyder focuses upon this interaction between authority and truth in On Tyranny, mentioning significant fundamental principles that the average person tends to ignore.
The second division involves the matter of theories in Teacher thought. A theory brings order to the complexity of some situation or context. The first method of generalization assembles Perceiver facts into the structure of some Teacher theory. This is like assembling a set of puzzle pieces into the picture of some puzzle. Coming up with a legitimate Teacher theory is difficult because the facts will not fit together if they are not put together in the right way. Coming up with a legitimate meta-theory in today’s technological society is extremely difficult. That is because technical specializations have fragmented society into numerous well-defined puzzle pieces. As Thomas Kuhn pointed out, each technical specialization is guided by the Teacher generalization of some paradigm, a general theory that brings order to the knowledge and skills of that specialization.
Thus, the tendency is to use the second method of overgeneralization. Overgeneralization avoids the problem of having to fit facts together by putting the various facts into a metaphorical blender and declaring that the resulting sludge brings unity to the complexity of these facts. More rigorously, one claims that there is a universal order that transcends the facts. Overgeneralization is possible because Teacher thought, the cognitive module that comes up with a theory, is different than Perceiver thought, the cognitive module that uses facts to check a theory. Overgeneralization results when Teacher thought makes a sweeping statement and Perceiver thought is prevented from checking this statement. This can be done by ignoring Perceiver facts, preventing Perceiver thought from functioning, or by asserting that the Teacher overgeneralization transcends Perceiver facts.
Overgeneralization describes the approach taken by mysticism, and it also summarizes the mindset of universal tolerance, which declares that everyone should be treated the same regardless of individual factual differences. Overgeneralization does not construct a meta-theory, but it does generate the feeling of having a meta-theory.
Ideology is a combination of generalization and overgeneralization. An ideology accepts some of the facts in Perceiver thought and then uses Mercy respect for some source of truth to put these facts together in a way that supposedly brings order to the fragments. Saying this another way, ideology uses Teacher thought to amplify the specific facts and mental networks of some group. In other words, an ideology is a set of cultural and personal Mercy mental networks (MMNs) posing as the Teacher mental network (TMN) of some general theory.
The primary struggle in modern society is between universal tolerance and ideology. Universal tolerance rightly observes that traditional morality—which insists that behavior be assigned a moral grade—is invariably based in absolute truth and respect for authority. For instance, American conservatism is based primarily in the absolute truth of the Bible and the American Constitution, emotionally supported by respect for the authority of the writers of the Bible and the writers of the Constitution.
The modern questioning of traditional morality was initially driven by scientific thought, which has learned that truth can only be discovered by questioning respect for authority. But universal tolerance replaces the imposition of traditional morality with the overgeneralization of universal sameness. This overgeneralization is actually enabled by scientific thought, which suppresses subjective Mercy emotions by remaining objective and ignores universal Teacher emotions by remaining specialized. Scientific objectivity and specialization leave an emotional vacuum that is typically filled by some form of overgeneralization, such as mystical unity or universal tolerance.
Going the other way, traditional morality rightly observes that modern scientific thought eliminates morality and meaning without providing an alternative. But traditional morality typically responds with some form of ideology. Traditional morality has learned from science that the solution involves using rational thought to construct some theory in Teacher thought. But traditional morality has also learned from science that it is only necessary to apply rational thought to the details. Thus, ideology uses some rational thought to put together some of the facts and then uses respect for authority in Mercy thought to overwhelm Perceiver thought into knowing how these fragments fit together.
Mental symmetry suggests that the solution is to use rational thought to put all of the pieces together into a genuine meta-theory that really ties all the pieces together in a manner that includes the subjective. The underlying assumption is that all human thought and behavior is shaped by the structure of the mind. Therefore, a theory of cognition can be used as a meta-theory to bring unity to many different specializations.
Mental symmetry is like traditional morality because it rejects universal tolerance and insists that it is possible to give moral grades to people and society. But, unlike traditional morality, mental symmetry bases its moral grade in the universal principle of mental wholeness: whatever causes more of the mind to work together is morally good while whatever causes the mind to fragment or fight itself is morally bad. Thus, instead of using emotional respect for some source to impose moral truth upon society, mental symmetry uses Perceiver thought to look for repeated connections of cognitive cause-and-effect. Going the other way, mental symmetry is like scientific thought because it insists upon using Perceiver thought to discover solid facts and then using Teacher thought to put these facts together to construct general theories. But, unlike modern science, mental symmetry extends this rational theory building to include the subjective and the universal. And unlike modern science, which claims to be based only in empirical evidence while invariably being shaped by implicit meta-theories, mental symmetry explicitly starts from a meta-theory of cognition while simultaneously recognizing the facts of empirical evidence.
Summarizing, mental symmetry respects the text of the Bible, and mental symmetry has been used to analyze two-thirds of the original Greek text of the New Testament. But mental symmetry suggests that approaching the Bible with an attitude of absolute truth causes the mind to misinterpret the biblical text in subtle but pervasive ways. Similarly, mental symmetry respects the facts of scientific research while suggesting that the objective and specialized methodology of science causes science to put scientific facts together in an inadequate manner.
Now that we have a framework, let us turn to the twenty points that Snyder mentions in On Tyranny. These points will be discussed in the order that they are mentioned by Snyder and a link will be provided to each video. The quotes are all taken from the linked video. Snyder recorded these videos in 2021 right after the capital riots of January 2021, when the followers of Trump tried to overthrow the election of Biden.
1. Do Not Obey in Advance
The previous paragraphs referred to authority figures, paradigms, theories, ideologies as if they are objective structures that one can choose to follow or ignore. That describes the mindset typically taken by objective science. However, the mind represents people as mental networks. A mental network is a collection of emotional memories that functions as a unit. Triggering some memory with a mental network will activate the entire mental network, which will then impose an entire collection of likes and dislikes upon the mind. Similarly, if a theory or ideology continues to be used, then it will turn into a Teacher mental network (TMN) that will use emotional pressure to impose its explanation upon the mind when triggered.
Snyder points out that tyranny initially grows by appealing to mental networks. “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given in times like these. Individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want and then offer themselves without being asked.” Stated cognitively, a growing tyranny is triggering mental networks of expectation within people’s minds which are then emotionally imposing certain thinking and behavior upon people’s minds. In other words, growing tyranny initially appeals to existing mental networks of culture and belief. And people initially view the tyranny as supporting certain mental networks of behavior. This support will be welcomed if these mental networks have been suppressed. For instance, many evangelical Christians welcome Trump because he claims to be supporting mental networks of traditional morality and his imposition of truth upon society is consistent with the evangelical Christian concept of absolute truth.
Snyder asks, “Are we going to go with the new flow or are we going to stand, if only a little bit, only hesitantly, as long as we can against the current. A deep idea underlying this notion of not obeying in advance is the normal.” ‘Normal’ is emotionally determined by the mental networks that are usually active in some society. More generally, culture can be defined as behavior that has been normalized by being supported by the mental networks of the average person within some society. The mind of today’s average person is split into various sets of incompatible mental networks. This incompatibility enables free will, because one is forced to choose between various mental networks, but it also means that authority figures can change the course of society by appealing to mental networks that are currently being suppressed within many people’s minds. If this emotional appeal to suppressed mental networks is successful, then the societal definition of what is normal will be changed.
Mental networks can only be successfully overcome by another set of mental networks. This is a corollary of the statement that free choice becomes maximized when the mind contains incompatible mental networks. Stated more simply, one can choose to be guided by one set of mental networks or another set of mental networks but one cannot choose to be not guided by any mental networks.
Thus, standing against growing tyranny means internalizing one’s sense of what is normal, because one is choosing not to go along with the new and changing sense of societal normality. Snyder describes this emotional conflict. “People who actually did very good deeds described what they did as normal. They didn’t boast about it. They said it was just normal. Rescuers said there was nothing exceptional about what they did, and this suggests a radical form of one way we understand the word ‘normal’. Normal is good; normal is upholding a norm; normal is trying to make the world outside in some way correspond to our virtues, our values, the things we have inside us. That’s one idea of normal, and then of course there’s the other idea of normal, what everyone else is doing, what you expect that people more powerful than you are going to want.” On the one hand, those who are doing good are being guided internally by mental networks of value and humanity, mental networks based in universal concepts of human well-being—which is related to the moral standard of mental wholeness suggested by mental symmetry. On the other hand, the average person is being guided by mental networks that are being triggered by the new authority figures within society.
Snyder adds that it is important to become guided by an internal sense of normality as soon as possible. “One thing you do when you recognize a situation as abnormal is that you’re laying down a marker. You’re laying down a marker in time; you’re saying from this point forward I’m not going along. And this is very important because the longer you wait before laying down your marker, the harder it’s going to become. The longer you just let things go, the more you’re going to be tempted by the new normal.” That is because mental networks are not static. Instead, they become modified by new emotional experiences. Thus, if growing tyranny imposes some new emotional experience upon society, then the default is to allow this new of emotional experience to modify existing mental networks of cultural normality.
Notice that a growing tyranny will change definitions of societal normality in two ways: The first way is by triggering mental networks that are currently being suppressed. The second way is by using emotional experiences to modify mental networks. For instance, if Trump and his followers question election results, then this can affect normality in two ways. The first way is to make it societally normal to question elections—a behavior that until now has been societally unacceptable. The second way is to modify this new normality by questioning elections in increasingly blatant ways.
The alternative to this flipping and stretching of normality is to take a stand and choose not to recognize the new behavior as normal but rather to reject it as abnormal. But whenever one rejects societal behavior, then one is choosing to be internally guided by mental networks of normality that are different than the behavior being triggered by the new societal mental networks of normality. When mental networks of expected behavior are continually being challenged, then the longer one waits before internalizing mental networks of normality, the more twisted one’s internal sense of normality will become. Therefore, it is imperative to choose to take a stand early on rather than postpone this internalization until later.
Notice that this dilemma arises when one does not have a Teacher theory upon which to base some system of normality. If one has a Teacher understanding of normality, then one can choose to follow TMNs of understanding rather than changing mental networks of society. One can choose to head towards the moral high ground because one has an internal understanding of moral topography. But if one lacks such an understanding, then the only way to stand apart from society is to ‘get off the train’ of changing societal normality and choose to stand at that location. If the train of society is heading morally downhill, then one will gain the highest moral ground by getting off the train as soon as possible.
Snyder mentions a further cognitive problem. “If you do normalize then you become morally, psychologically, socially committed to all the things that happen. And because you never investigated, you never took a stand, you never asserted your own idea of normal, you’re going to be all the more committed to these things. You’re going to feel all the more defensive; you’re going to be all the more likely to argue, to quarrel, even to engage in acts of violence.” This relates to the interaction between Perceiver thought and Mercy emotions. Choosing to go along with the flow of growing tyranny means that you are allowing Mercy emotions of authoritarianism to overwhelm Perceiver thought. In contrast, investigating means using Perceiver thought to determine what the facts really are.
The ability to use Perceiver facts grows as Perceiver thought is successfully used within emotional experiences. Therefore, investigating and taking a stand makes it easier to investigate and take a stand in the future. Going the other way, allowing emotional pressure from growing tyranny to impose itself upon existing mental networks makes it more difficult to use Perceiver thought and easier to submit to the method of using emotional Mercy experiences to overwhelm Perceiver thought. Thus, the temptation will be to respond to factual questioning by being emotionally defensive.
Going further, mental symmetry suggests that personal identity is composed of the mental networks that keep coming to mind. Therefore, a person who continually submits to the mental networks of shifting society will become personally invested in continuing to submit to these shifting societal mental networks. And when facts collide with personal identity, the result is conscience, meaning that those who take a stand will increasingly view their stand as a stand of conscience while those who shift with society will increasingly feel that changing their path will generate feelings of guilt.
2. Defend Institutions
Snyder emphasizes that institutions need human support to survive. “Institutions that help us to preserve decency; they need our help. As well, do not speak of ‘our institutions’ unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended.”
Looking at this cognitively, the previous section looked primarily at Mercy mental networks (MMNs) of culture and social morality. Institutions are emotionally supported by Teacher mental networks (TMNs) of order-within-complexity. An institution brings order to some context through some combination of paradigms, structure, hierarchy, procedure, and buildings. On the one hand, the Teacher order of an institution is artificial, unlike the Teacher order of the laws of nature, which are inherent to the fabric of the universe. On the other hand, a democratic society requires institutions of democracy to exist. Without these institutions, social interaction turns into the strong imposing their personal and cultural MMNs upon the weak.
As Snyder points out, the average citizen regards institutions as structures that are independent of human behavior which cannot be affected by human behavior. “The word institutions was invoked like some kind of magical talisman which was going to rescue us. We were in a story and things were dark, but somebody was going to rescue us, or something was going to rescue us, and that thing was the institutions.” The key to recognizing the nature of an institution is to realize that Teacher emotion is different than Mercy emotion. Mercy emotion is a label that is applied to specific experiences: I like ice cream; I hate needles. Teacher emotion, in contrast, comes from order-within-complexity. An institution functions most effectively when it is emotionally supported by Teacher emotions that are believed by the average individual to be independent of personal Mercy feelings. This independence makes it possible for social interaction to be emotionally guided by the structure of some institution as opposed to personal feelings of personal status. And when the structure of some institution continues to be used, then it will turn into a TMN within the mind of the user that will emotionally impose this structure upon the mind. This explains why a bureaucracy develops a life of its own, but it also explains why institutions survive.
However, it is also essential to realize that the emotional staying power of an institution is not infinite. Institutions have to be constructed and institutions can be destroyed. Snyder points out, “Institutions are the work of human beings. An institution is the effects of careful and planned human labor. This can be true of a small institution, whether it’s a library, [or] a large institution [like] the United States Senate. But that institution only renews itself insofar as human beings consciously take care of it, consciously reassert its values, constantly update its practices.”
Looking at this more carefully, it is very difficult for an individual to overthrow an institution, because the TMN of an institution applies much more widely than the MMNs of some individual. But ideologies and dictators have the ability to destroy institutions because they cross the boundary from specific Mercy experiences to general Teacher theories. An ideology amplifies the personal Mercy feelings of some group and treats them as universal within Teacher thought; the values and/or opinions of some specific group become the standard that is imposed upon everyone and everything. For instance, American evangelicalism is currently attempting to impose its moral standards upon all of society. Similarly, a dictatorship amplifies the personal Mercy feelings of some individual and treats these personal feelings as universal within Teacher thought. For instance, Donald Trump is currently imposing tariffs upon most of the world based upon his personal whims. When Mercy feelings become amplified to the level of Teacher universality, then groups and individuals acquire the power to override institutions.
Similarly, the checks and balances that have historically protected American society from dictatorship are also institutions that can be destroyed by ideologies and dictators. In Snyder’s words, “We in America talk about checks and balances, but those checks and balances only take place when the various parts of government function independently as opposed to being drawn into a single logic, a logic drawn out by an individual or by a political party.”
The underlying problem is that both objective science and American evangelicalism naturally take institutions for granted. Objective science is emotionally guided by the meta-theory that scientific thought should avoid being emotionally guided. Saying this more carefully, science tries to avoid Mercy emotions by remaining objective. But continuing to follow this strategy will turn it into a TMN that will use emotional pressure to impose this meta-theory upon the mind. The end result is that scientific analysis self-destructs when attempting to analyze Teacher thought and Teacher emotion. For instance, Thomas Kuhn’s book on paradigms and paradigm shifts has been cited over 140,000 times. But Kuhn himself abandoned the idea of paradigms after writing the second edition of his book in 1970. This means that one cannot turn to academia for help when attempting to defend institutions, because a mindset of objective specialized science is incapable of analyzing the emotional basis for an institution.
Evangelical Christendom also faces an inherent contradiction. On the one hand, the evangelical fundamentalist believes that absolute truth was revealed in the Bible by God, and this mindset is cognitively reinforced by using Mercy feelings of religious fervor to overwhelm Perceiver thought into ‘knowing’ that the Bible is ‘true’. On the other hand, the evangelical fundamentalist also believes that rational thought should be used to study the Bible and come up with coherent theories of theology and morality. The end result is that rational thought is used to analyze peripheral moral and theological topics while core religious beliefs are determined by blind faith and submission to authority. Stated another way, the Christian fundamentalist uses rational thought when dealing with personal and local issues while ‘believing’ that global and universal issues are ruled by a God who transcends rational thought. This explains why evangelical fundamentalists tend to reject global warming as well as covid vaccinations. In both cases, human institutions are behaving in a universal manner that invades the realm that is mentally governed by God. The feeling is that humans do not have the power to alter the course of nature on a global scale and should not attempt to control a pandemic by intervening on a global scale. In both cases, Christian evangelicals feel that humans are using rational thought to invade the universal realm that is mentally governed in their minds by the God of blind faith.
Given these limitations, it is still possible to preserve institutions through Server actions. Mentally speaking, Server actions give stability to Teacher words. Doing homework, for instance, gives stability to the words of teaching that happen in the classroom. Thomas Kuhn described this relationship in the second edition of his book, introducing the concept of exemplars. Kuhn suggested that the student of physics does not learn physics primarily by learning verbal theory but rather by performing the Server actions of solving characteristic problems. Thus, Snyder suggests, “Choose an institution you care about, a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union, and take its side.” Stated cognitively, personally supporting some institution will build Server confidence in the processes of that institution as well as turning the structure of that institution into a TMN that will emotionally impose its structure upon the supporter’s mind. If enough people support institutions to the extent of forming TMNs within their minds, then those TMNs will create an alternative emotional pressure to the MMNs of shifting cultural normality driven by growing dictatorship.
Notice that Snyder’s suggestions are capable of preserving cultures and institutions that are being threatened by growing dictatorship, but they are not capable of creating these cultures and institutions in the first place. However, if cultures and institutions are worth preserving because they are consistent with mental and societal wholeness, then it is possible to build or rebuild these cultural and institutional mental networks by starting from the TMN of a meta-theory of mental and societal wholeness. That provides a deep rationale for placing the principles mentioned by Snyder into a meta-theory of cognition.
3. Beware The One-Party State
Mental symmetry suggests that free will is real but limited. A person can choose to temporarily suppress core mental networks but the emotional pressure of a core mental network will always eventually overwhelm free will. Thus, free will normally occurs within the context of some mental network, because one can use free will to decide how this mental network will be expressed. Free will becomes maximal when the mind contains conflicting core mental networks, because free will can be used to choose which of these mental networks will be pursued, and the mental network that is chosen will grow at the expense of the one that is rejected, making it increasingly difficult to choose not to follow the stronger mental network. This means that maximal free will is always a window of opportunity, in which one can temporarily decide to choose between one major alternative and another.
The first video described people choosing to follow the mental networks that are being promoted by the new regime. This will lead eventually to a one-party state in which one has no choice but to follow the mental networks of the regime. Snyder describes this progression. “The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start. They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents, so support the multi-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections.” Notice that there is a window of opportunity during which free will can be used. The growing dictatorship took advantage of this window in order to get people to choose to follow their mental networks. But as the mental networks of the dictatorship grow in power, citizens will lose the ability to choose.
Snyder emphasizes that this transition involves cognitive principles which transcend partisan politics. “Democracy and anti-democracy is not a partisan affair. The temptations that lead us or our political leaders or the leaders away from democracy are old and have been understood in fact for a couple thousand years. The reasons why one party or another party can cease to campaign democratically are pretty much always the same over time.” In other words, one is dealing with two distinct issues. The first issue is the agenda being promoted by the growing dictatorship. The second and more fundamental issue is the ability to choose democratically between governing parties. This second ability depends upon cognitive principles that transcend the agenda of any specific political group.
Snyder describes the underlying choice. “If you become a party that rigs the system you cease to become a party that campaigns for votes on policies.” Campaigning on policies uses Perceiver facts to convince Perceiver thought within the voter. Rigging the system attempts to attack the Perceiver facts that guide the voting system. Saying this another way, campaigning on policies tries to win the game, while rigging the system tries to change the rules of the game. One cannot simultaneously emphasize Perceiver thought and attack Perceiver thought. Instead, the better one becomes at attacking Perceiver thought, the less effective one becomes at using Perceiver thought. Snyder explains, “When your main concern is not the population but how you’re going to gain the elections, then you cease to become a democratic party, and this works over time. The longer and the better you get at gaming the system, the worse you are at actually speaking to people and coming up with policies that speak to them.” The key point is that Perceiver thought is a cognitive module. When one attempts to manipulate the rules of the game, one is not just twisting specific Perceiver facts but rather disabling the function of a cognitive module.
Eventually, one loses the ability to use rational Perceiver thought and one must manipulate the system in order to stay in power. Snyder explains, “You can’t afford to have elections. You know that in non-gamed elections, non-rigged elections, elections where you didn’t make or exploit the rules, you would lose.”
Going further, when a person or group repeatedly tries to manipulate the system, then that person or group is actually using its emotional status to overwhelm Perceiver thought. This emotional imposition of personal mental networks upon Perceiver thought eventually becomes explicit. In Snyder’s words, “You start to take for granted that elections in some way are just a ritual to keep you, your people, the right people as you see it, in power. You start to say, for example, that you always win. You tell the lie that you always win, your party always wins.” This transition involves technical thought. Mental symmetry suggests that the mind can function in the three ways of normal thought, mental networks, and technical thought. The interaction between Mercy emotions and Perceiver confidence is an aspect of normal thought. Technical thought constructs and follows plans by treating some subset of Perceiver facts and Server sequences that are known with sufficient certainty as the rules of a game. For instance, the process of getting elected is usually treated as a plan to be followed by technical thought.
A technical plan requires elements that are known with sufficient certainty. For instance, in a game of chess, one knows exactly how each piece moves as well as the shape of the playing field on which these pieces move. Factual certainty can be gained in one of three ways: empirical evidence gains Perceiver confidence in facts by looking for connections that are repeated; testing gains Perceiver confidence by holding onto facts in the midst of emotional pressure; blatant lying uses emotional status to overwhelm Perceiver thought into ‘knowing’ with certainty that some ‘fact’ is true. Saying that ‘Your party always wins’ is an example of blatant lying because it uses the emotional status of the ruling dictatorial party to impose ‘truth’ upon the people and then builds its plans upon this self-imposed ‘truth’.
Going further, if plans are constructed and implemented by using emotional pressure to impose Perceiver ‘truth’ upon people, then failing plans will be rescued by using emotional pressure to impose Perceiver ‘truth’ upon people. In other words, election campaigns will be supported by violence. Snyder explains, “If an election doesn’t go the way of your party, people will resist violently.”
More generally, holding an election becomes interpreted as the ruling party using its emotional status to reimpose ‘truth’ upon Perceiver thought. Quoting from Snyder, “You’re teaching other people that elections are the same thing as their winning.” There is a cognitive reason why elections continue to be held even when their outcome is predetermined. Suppose that some emotional source, such as a political or religious leader, overwhelms Perceiver thought within my mind into ‘knowing’ what is ‘true’. This blind faith will only remain as long as my emotional source of ‘truth’ has much greater emotional status within my mind than personal identity. However, simply living and choosing within normal life will raise the emotional status of myself with respect to my source of ‘truth’, eventually causing me to doubt this ‘truth’. A show election plays the role of a religious revival, because the citizens are choosing to re-mesmerize Perceiver thought within their minds by reaffirming the emotional status of their political or religious leaders.
Snyder finishes this section by applying a Teacher meta-theory of total equality. “What we have to be able to do is believe seriously in the simple principle that each person has one vote, and having a vote means not just the formal right to exercise the vote but also the practical ability to vote. An equal right to vote means nothing if it’s just a statement on a piece of paper. An equal right to vote has to mean that. Regardless of where you are and who you are as a citizen, it will be easy for you to vote.” Notice that everyone is being treated the same, regardless of who they are or what they know. This is definitely superior to the alternative of some dominant group using its emotional status to impose its cultural MMNs upon the rest of the population. But it is also a Teacher overgeneralization that does not take into account personal or political maturity.
Looking at this further, one has to be the citizen of a country in order to vote in that country. And becoming a citizen requires passing a test about that country which includes knowledge of the history, geography, and political process of that country. It might be helpful to make passing such a test a requirement for all voters, and not just for immigrants. Of course, as this section as mentioned, all systems can be gamed. But my suggestion does not involve setting up a new system of requirements but rather extending an existing set of requirements. And when the political process itself is being manipulated and the facts of history are being denied, then limiting voting to those who have passed a test about the political process and the facts of history could have a significant impact upon preserving the democratic process.
Snyder concludes, “If we change the system such that each person did have a vote not just formally but practically, and both parties, or more parties, were really competing on policies, that would be better for everyone.” I fully agree, but such change involves both external and internal elements. External change involves minimizing tricks such as gerrymandering or making it more difficult for minorities to vote. For instance, in America, corporations are regarded as people and election donations are essentially unlimited, making it easy for the rich to use corporate power to influence elections. In contrast, the personhood of a corporation is less established in Canada, there are strict limitations upon election donations, and political boundaries are determined by a nonpartisan organization, limiting gerrymandering. Internal change means teaching individuals Perceiver facts as well as the ability to use Perceiver thought, while minimizing opportunities for important people to impose Perceiver ‘facts’. I suggest that internal change is more fundamental than external change because any external changes will inevitably be overruled by how people think internally.
Applying this to the United States, I suggest that the underlying problem is the mindset of American exceptionalism, which believes that the United States has the intrinsic right to be the leader of the world because America is in some way a special, chosen nation. Snyder will discuss American exceptionalism in video 16. Decolonization, in contrast, declares that it was wrong for Western society to impose its beliefs upon the rest of the world. Decolonization is an example of Teacher overgeneralization because it believes that all cultural groups are equal and that no cultural group should impose itself upon another. Decolonization does not actually address the problem of exceptionalism because it takes the entire mental network of exceptionalism and suppresses this entire mental network without breaking it apart and analyzing the pieces. Such wholesale suppression is inevitable because a Teacher overgeneralization, by its very nature, avoids dealing with facts, because facts have the power to poke holes in overgeneralizations. A mental network that is suppressed in a wholesale manner remains intact under the surface, waiting to be retriggered and reactivated by succeeding leaders. Thus, a mindset of decolonization suppressed traditional mental networks of exceptionalism, and Trump is currently reactivating these suppressed networks of exceptionalism in order to Make America Great Again.
Mental symmetry suggests a third alternative: A country, society, or civilization is special to the extent that it applies principles of cognitive development. Similarly, a country, society, or civilization ceases to be special when it abandons principles of cognitive development. The underlying assumption is that the mind is governed by principles of cognitive development that are independent of country, society, or civilization. Snyder describes many of these cognitive principles but does not have a Teacher meta-theory of cognitive development that is capable of integrating these various cognitive principles.
4. Take Responsibility for the Face of the World
This video discusses public symbols such as swastikas. Snyder warns, “The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.” Examined cognitively, triggering a mental network will activate the entire mental network with its likes and dislikes. A symbol is some visible object, drawing, or action that is meant to trigger some specific mental network without triggering other mental networks. Snyder refers to the swastika, which is a symbol of Nazism in Western society. However, in Asia the swastika is the symbol of Buddhism. When I lived in South Korea, I repeatedly saw Buddhist temples with swastikas, and a Buddhist temple is indicated on a map by a swastika.
We saw earlier that a growing tyranny is attempting to replace existing MMNs of normality with new and/or suppressed mental networks based in the emotional status of the emerging dictatorship. An effective way of activating a previously suppressed mental network is by displaying symbols that trigger this suppressed mental network. People cannot read each other’s minds but rather have to use Theory of Mind to guess what other people are thinking. If a symbol of the growing dictatorship is publicly displayed, then this will trigger the mental networks of that dictatorship within people’s minds. If this symbol continues to be publicly displayed without being erased, than the average person will naturally assume that the mental networks which the symbol represents have become approved by society, motivating the average person to go along with the flow of society and accept the mental networks of the new regime as normal. However, if these symbols are immediately erased, than the average person will conclude that the mental networks which the symbol represents are not approved by society and do not define normality. Thus, individuals can slow down the growth of a new regime by erasing the symbols that represent the new regime.
Snyder points out that choosing not to erase a symbol is also a choice. “For example, a swastika. We take part in its existence by seeing it. Sure, you’re not the one who painted the swastika, but in some sense you are partaking in its presence by walking by and doing nothing.” The person who walks by without doing anything is allowing the symbol to trigger the mental networks of the regime within his mind and choosing to accept those mental networks as normal. And the longer that such symbols remain without being removed, the more likely the average person will conclude that the mental networks triggered by these symbols actually define what the average person regards as normal.
Snyder interprets this more generally as an example of the impact that an individual can have. “It was the point of many other dissidents that one has to exercise a bit more responsibility than seems comfortable, and the way to realize that a moment for responsibility has come is these little irritants... these things which are slightly wrong about the outside world.” The cognitive principle is that Perceiver and Server confidence can only grow one successfully negotiated challenge at a time. If the emotional intensity is too great, then Perceiver (and/or Server) thought will become emotionally overwhelmed by the situation. If the situation is emotionally trivial, then there will be no need for Perceiver or Server confidence. Instead, confidence grows when one successfully applies Perceiver facts and Server skills within situations that are a little too hard. Thus, it is essential ‘to exercise a bit more responsibility than seems comfortable’. Thus, Snyder is describing a significant cognitive principle. This principle can apply to erasing symbols, because it usually takes some mental confidence to choose to erase a public symbol, but this principle extends far beyond erasing symbols.
A little bit goes a long way when erasing a symbol precisely because a symbol is ‘a little bit that goes a long ways’. First, a simple drawing or movement is triggering an entire mental network with its collection of societal standards. Therefore, changing or removing the symbol will trigger a totally different mental network. Second, when societal definitions of normality are being challenged, then it is difficult for one person to guess what other people mentally regard as normal. Therefore, people will use clues, such as which symbols remain and which symbols are erased, to guess what other people currently regard as normal. Therefore, individuals can exert considerable power by erasing symbols because symbols are a vulnerable point in the transmission of cultural information from one person to another.
A symbol exerts emotional power by triggering mental networks. Obviously, these mental networks will only be triggered if they are present within the mind. For instance, the symbol of a swastika triggers mental networks of Buddhism and not Nazism within the average Asian mind. Therefore, a person who lacks these mental networks—or has a different set of mental networks—may use symbols inappropriately without recognizing the power that these symbols have. Snyder warns about the inappropriate use of symbols. “For a number of young Americans the hammer and sickle just means... rejection of the status quo... but the hammer and sickle is the central symbol of the Chinese Communist party, which is the most repressive major regime in the world right now. It’s also the historical symbol of a number of communist parties which perpetrated policies of famine and terror. That might not mean anything to you but it means a lot to an awful lot of people.” In other words, the symbol of the hammer and sickle triggers painful mental networks of extensive suppression within the minds of those who have lived under communism. But this same symbol triggers much less painful mental networks of ‘the status quo’ within the mind of the average young American. Stated more concisely, when one uses a symbol, one must be conscious of the mental networks that this symbol will trigger within the minds of others and not just the mental networks that this symbol is triggering within one’s own mind. That is because the purpose of posting a symbol is to trigger mental networks within many people’s minds.
Snyder states more generally about symbols that “We think monuments are about the past. They’re not about the past. Monuments arise in a moment of the past in order to influence the future from the point of view... of that past. And so when we think about monuments we’re not really talking about whether respecting history or not. History will be just fine with or without monuments. What we’re thinking about is what version do we want to communicate into the future.” This is a significant point which I have not thought of. I think that this principle is most valid when the existing mental networks of normality are being challenged. Tearing down a monument is a way of suggesting that existing mental networks are no longer being regarded as normal by society. However, a monument can also be viewed as a way of remembering the past if one wants to ensure that the mental networks that guided the past continue to guide people in the present. Going further, it is important to tear down a monument for the right reason. If this is done for emotional reasons in a manner that resists factual analysis, then one is actually heading towards some form of emotional tyranny.
Snyder concludes by emphasizing the important role played by the artist. “The people who can help are the artists... the people who help are the poets, all the people who are shoved to one side by a society which is pragmatic or instrumental, which confuses efficiency with values or productivity... These are the people who are actually capable of helping us to think about what kind of face we would like the future to have.” There is some truth here because the real battle is being fought at the level of mental networks, and a technological society that ‘is pragmatic or instrumental’ will naturally downplay the role played by mental networks in guiding society. But the real power of art and writing comes from the intensity of the mental networks that are being triggered. Art can make a person feel better by activating and resonating with mental networks that have been suppressed. For the average person, art is like scratching an itch that has not been scratched for a while, a way of temporarily escaping from society. Art may be nice, but it is not essential. Art acquires power by triggering mental networks that are backed up by either reality or by cognitive mechanisms. Art is powerful when a dictatorial regime is using its emotional status to impose mental networks upon society that violate reality or mental wholeness in major ways. Art then exerts its power by triggering alternate mental networks that are consistent with the facts of reality and the principles of mental wholeness.
Snyder suggests that art can help ‘all the people who are shoved to one side by a society which is pragmatic or instrumental’. There is some truth to this statement, but it also needs to be unpacked. A society becomes ‘pragmatic or instrumental’ by emphasizing technical thought in an objective, specialized manner. Art brings balance to such a society by triggering mental networks that are being suppressed by technical thought. But merely triggering mental networks is not enough. Instead, one needs to trigger mental networks that are consistent with the facts of reality and principles of mental wholeness.
Looking at this further, people can be ‘shoved to one side’ for different reasons. First, they may be shoved to one side for simply being different. Art that triggers cultural mental networks that are being suppressed because of being different can be educational and exciting, but this art is not necessarily helpful. Second, people can be shoved to one side because they emphasize and/or embody uncomfortable truths about reality and mental wholeness. Using art to remind society of such people is redemptive and helpful. Third, people may also be shoved one side because they are experiencing the painful consequences of violating facts of reality and/or principles of mental wholeness. Art that celebrates such groups actually damages society by filling the emotional vacuum with harmful emotions. If art is to be helpful, then it must learn to distinguish between these three options.
Unfortunately, a mindset of universal tolerance will avoid the factual analysis that is required to distinguish between these alternatives, because universal tolerance is an expression of Teacher overgeneralization and any factual analysis threatens Teacher overgeneralization. Instead, art under universal tolerance will tend to emphasize the group that is being shoved to one side which is screaming the loudest. And the group that screams the loudest will tend to be the group that is experiencing the personal pain of violating facts of reality and/or principles of mental wholeness in some major way. Stated another way, a mindset that focuses upon the feeling of a meta-theory will tend to apply the ‘oil’ of universal tolerance to the wheel that is squeaking the loudest and not necessarily to the wheel that really needs the oil.
5. Remember Professional Ethics
Snyder observes that both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union required professionals to implement their policies. “In the case of Nazi Germany, the concentration camps needed and relied upon willing businessmen. It is literally the case that show trials... in the Soviet Union required judges and prosecutors and other legal professionals.” The previous section suggested that the power of artists to protest a regime lies in their ability to trigger mental networks that are based in reality and ‘how things work’. Similarly, the power of the regime to control individuals depends upon its ability to harness professionals who can use technical thought and technical skills to translate slogans into real policies that affect people. Using religious language, the universal theories of God the Father require an incarnation of technical thought to transform ‘the word into flesh’.
Putting this into the larger context, we saw earlier that a dictatorial regime acquires the ability to distort and control institutions by ascending from the specific realm of Mercy experiences to the universal realm of Teacher ideology. But once a regime acquires power then it needs professionals and institutions that can use technical thought to descend from the universal pronouncements of its Teacher ideology into specific, concrete plans.
Every profession is guided by some set of professional standards. This is not a normal conscience in which MMNs of societal and religious expectation impose Perceiver rules upon people. Instead, the knowledge, skills, paradigms, and procedures of the profession form a Teacher system of ordered complexity that turns into a TMN within the minds of those who function within this profession and this TMN imposes a set of professional standards upon the members of that profession. Saying this more simply, normal conscience involves the interaction between Perceiver facts and subjective Mercy experiences. Professional conscience involves the interaction between Server actions and the Teacher order of some profession.
Snyder notes that the professional standards of a profession can help to prevent a regime from co-opting that profession, asking “whether lawyers or judges or military officers are just people with titles and uniforms, or whether they have some kind of, let’s call it, guild loyalty—they have some set of values which is not just a watered-down version of whatever the regime is telling them—is a crucial question for the future of any democracy and of our democracy.” In other words, do professionals simply transform orders into actions or is there some kind of professional ethics that limits the implementation of regime policies?
It was mentioned earlier that technical thought uses Perceiver facts and Server actions that are known with sufficient certainty. One aspect of this is that plans and procedures that fail to meet accepted standards of professionalism will instinctively be rejected. Snyder elaborates, “We certainly saw that during the course of the last few years it mattered a great deal whether lawyers would go along with lawsuits which they understood to be farcical and false having to do with Mister Trump’s claims of voter fraud.” Notice that these lawsuits were not being rejected because they were morally wrong but rather because they were farcical and false and failed to meet the professional standards required by courts.
Snyder adds that professional ethics are significant for maintaining institutions. “The institutions themselves didn’t rescue us. They never do. One of the things which kept the United States recognizably a democracy during that period was the decisions that people made on the basis of codes of ethics which have to do with their professions.” Saying this more clearly, an institution is internally preserved by the TMNs of professional behavior that form within the minds of those who work within the institution.
Looking at a related topic, Snyder notes that regimes are more likely to gain power when supported by businessmen. “In the past, the success or failure of coup attempts, or indeed the survival or the failure of democracy, has depended upon the choices of business leaders.” Business, and economics in general, is another example of technical thought that uses some toolkit of sufficiently certain facts and skills to pursue some bottom line.
Snyder recognizes that his discussion has shifted from professional ethics to business leaders. “In the lesson I talked about judges and lawyers and civil servants, but at the very end I also mentioned businessmen.” This shift is cognitively important because Teacher theories have to descend first through abstract technical thought and then through concrete technical thought to reach specific human Mercy experiences. Judges, lawyers, and civil servants deal primarily with abstract technical thought, using official rules and procedures to translate general Teacher policies into more specific decisions. But these decisions are still at the abstract level of words and decrees. Saying this another way, abstract technical thought is based in precise definitions, and judges, lawyers, and civil servants add precision and definition to the statements of government decree. Business, in contrast, uses concrete technical thought, pursuing Server actions that are guided by Perceiver facts in order to reach Mercy goals. Saying this another way, concrete technical thought is based in principles of cause-and-effect, and business uses principles of cause-and-effect to pursue bottom lines. The concrete technical plans of business can only function effectively within some framework of abstract technical thought that is established by judges, lawyers, and civil servants. Abstract technical thought defines the rules of the game within which concrete technical thought plays. Thus, a dictatorial regime must begin by co-opting corrupt judges and lawyers before it becomes possible to enroll corrupt businessman.
What Snyder says is significant, but he does not address the larger question of why technical thought is vulnerable to being co-opted by dictatorships. Technical thought is normally driven by emotional goals of intermediate intensity, such as some economic bottom line or some theoretical hypothesis. Technical thought then uses logic and rational thought to improve these intermediate-level goals. However, technical thought finds it difficult to deal with deeper emotions, such as moral dilemmas or paradigm shifts. The end result is that technical thought is vulnerable to being hijacked by dictatorships and ideologies that deal with deeper emotions and core mental networks. The solution is to place professions within the general framework of a meta-theory of personal and societal well-being, which is what mental symmetry does—and what this essay is attempting to do.
Saying this more crudely, the professional is tempted to ‘sell his soul’ to the system in order to progress more quickly within the system. This type of spiritual prostitution is possible because technical thought naturally limits its understanding of value to peripheral value while ignoring topics of deeper value. Thus, the spiritual prostitute who sells his soul to the system is abandoning deeper value in order to gain from referral value within the profession. A growing dictatorship finds such spiritual prostitutes very useful, because they are eager to sell their souls to the regime. Using an example from Nazism, they are willing to make money by employing slave labor.
Turning to personal experience, my initial research in mental symmetry was rejected by professionals for failing to meet the standards of rigor required by technical thought. Therefore, I devoted extensive effort over many years to raise the standards of my research, and I eventually reached the point where my research passed the threshold of rigor that was required. However, I then discovered that professionals using technical thought did not find my research interesting because my analysis included subjective Mercy experiences and universal Teacher theories. In other words, the academic demand for rigorous thought is a legitimate requirement, but it can also be used as a smokescreen to avoid dealing with deeper issues. As long as those who address universal theories and subjective feelings do so in a non-rigorous manner, professionals can use the demand for technical thought as an excuse to avoid the legitimate concerns of those who are attempting to include universal theories and subjective feelings.
Giving a current example, Trump, his followers, and his regime are characterized by shallow intelligence and deep incompetence. Thus, those who use technical thought find it easy to belittle Trumpites as fools and idiots, because, generally speaking, that is precisely what they are. And, as this section points out, such instinctive rejection of unprofessional behavior plays an important role in resisting the rise of tyranny.
However, many of the supporters of Trump voted for him in the hope that he would address deep concerns involving traditional morality, wokeism, political correctness, anti-colonialism, and alternate ‘knowing’. Stated more clearly, the evangelical Bible-believing Christian has legitimate concerns regarding society and morality. But the typical evangelical Bible-believing Christian expresses these concerns incoherently as an anti-intellectual, anti-science, blind faith, America-worshipping idiot. Thus, it is easy for those who use technical thought to reject these concerns because they are usually being spoken in a non-rigorous manner by idiots who fail to meet the standards of technical thought.
Mental symmetry has been used to translate these legitimate moral and religious concerns into the more rigorous language of cognition and cognitive development. One result of this translation is to discover that technical thought has its own fundamental weaknesses. When moral and religious topics are translated into a language that is compatible with technical thought and scientific research, one then discovers that most professionals will refuse to discuss the topic. Thus, those who support Trump tend to be idiots, that those who oppose Trump tend to be locally rational, limiting their rational thinking to objective specializations. The one discusses morality in a childish manner driven by a mindset of blind faith in the Bible while hiding behind the smokescreen of religious belief, while the other refuses to discuss morality, driven by the Teacher overgeneralization of universal tolerance while hiding behind the smokescreen of academic rigor.
Snyder finishes by relating business ethics to the concept of one vote for everyone. “There’s a business ethic which has something to do with a political system with a normative affirmation of just the basic idea that everybody has the right to vote.” The concept of ‘one person one vote’ is fundamental, but it was pointed out earlier that this is also an example of Teacher overgeneralization, because a universal theory of equality is being asserted that does not take account of any details.
Business ethics involves many other issues, such as honoring contracts, delivering reliable products, treating workers properly, and honoring personal dignity. This cognitive foundation for economics is discussed in an academic paper on John Stuart Mill’s Political Economy. Snyder covers this to some extent, mentioning that in Nazi Germany, “Big business was opposed to labor unions and opposed to democracy, and thought that the world would be easier to handle without labor unions and democracy... That is part of Hitler’s rise to power.” This may be true, but it does not address the deeper question why big business thought it would be easier without labor unions and democracy, or the related question of whether labor unions are the best method of protecting the rights of the individual. Looking briefly at the question of big business and democracy, big business tends to be run by male Contributor persons, because they naturally excel at using technical thought. Study of personality indicates that the male Contributor person typically treats people within his plans as pawns upon a chessboard, preferring pawns that move when and where they are told without having a life of their own. Meanwhile, the male Contributor person himself insists upon the freedom to move when and where he wishes without being treated as a pawn.
6. Be Wary of Paramilitaries
Snyder warns, “When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle the end has come.” The previous section discussed the emergence of a corrupt system of professionals and businessmen who implement the Teacher ideology of the new regime. The technical rules of any regime are ultimately enforced by men in uniform with guns. Saying this another way, the government has a monopoly on force. Those who wear uniforms are expected to exhibit a uniform response that is guided by uniform rules in Teacher thought rather than personal identity in Mercy thought. Guns are used to force others to comply. A person in a uniform with a gun implies that any exceptions to the universal rule in Teacher thought are being eliminated by force.
Examining this in more detail, when there is a regime change or a paradigm shift, then the Teacher order of the new system will be imposed in two stages. The first stage establishes the new Teacher order, typically giving the impression that alternative viewpoints will be tolerated. The second stage eliminates any exceptions to the rule. For instance, Thomas Kuhn said that when there is a paradigm shift, then textbooks will be rewritten in the light of this new paradigm to give the impression that previous viewpoints never existed. When members of the new regime wear uniforms and carry guns, then this indicates that the regime change has entered the second stage where exceptions to the rule are being eliminated.
If these uniformed men with guns carry pictures of their leader, then this is a sign that one is dealing with ideology and not democracy. A democracy is governed by a rule of law that applies equally to all people and groups in Mercy thought. Applying the same rules to everyone is an example of Teacher generalization and not overgeneralization because Perceiver rules and facts are being assembled and not just transcended.
An ideology, in contrast, amplifies the Mercy opinions of some person or group and treats these personal feelings as if they are universal theories in Teacher thought. Carrying torches conveys the impression that the dictator and his group are the sole sources of the light of truth and that everyone else is living in darkness.
Finally, when the paramilitary of the new regime mingle with the official police force, then there is no rule of law that is independent of the new regime, because one does not know in any specific situation if one will encounter a police officer or a paramilitary thug. This arbitrariness is a fundamental aspect of an ideology because using Mercy status to overwhelm Perceiver thought is being juxtaposed with using Teacher universality to extend Perceiver thought. In such a regime, Perceiver thought has to be sufficiently overwhelmed to submit to the person of the dictator while sufficiently functioning to universally apply the rules of the regime. This leads inevitably to the hypocrisy of selective universality.
The Bible-believing fundamentalist exhibits a similar juxtaposition. On the one hand, deep Mercy respect for the source of the Bible overwhelms Perceiver thought into ‘believing’ that the Bible is the only source of absolute truth. On the other hand, the fundamentalist also believes that the truth of the Bible applies universally to everyone. This juxtaposition is reasonably stable if the religious believer believes in a holy book that was written by religious experts from the distant past who lived in a different culture whose words must not be changed by any experts in the present. A similar principle would apply to the American Constitution, which has been regarded by Americans as a source of absolute truth for American society written by long-dead founding fathers. However, this juxtaposition breaks down when a living dictator—such as Donald Trump—becomes the source of absolute truth. (Mental symmetry, in contrast, concludes that the Bible is an exceptionally accurate description of universal cognitive principles, based upon extensive symbolic analysis of the original Greek text of the New Testament, combined with some symbolic analysis of the Old Testament.)
Snyder explains the historical basis for his statement. “The SS was an illegal, violent group that was associated with the Nazi party, but it wasn’t part of the state. It wasn’t part of the state, it was a paramilitary, and it was the merger of this racial, racist paramilitary with state power which was one of the most dangerous things about the Nazi period.” Notice that the SS did not gain police status through any official process. Instead, the SS took on the appearance of an alternate police force which then merged with the official police force.
A similar infiltration is happening academically with ‘Indigenous knowing’. It is not becoming part of academia through some academic process based in empirical evidence and peer-review. Instead, it is claiming to be a form of ‘alternate knowing’ that stands alongside academic knowledge and wears the academic clothing of academic knowledge. This alternate academia of indigenous knowing is ‘carrying pictures’ because it demands emotional respect for indigenous leaders and is ‘carrying torches’ because it views itself as a light of understanding and enlightenment surrounded by the darkness of colonialism. In countries such as Canada, ‘indigenous knowing’ is currently in the process of becoming intermingled with academic knowing.
Before I get metaphorically lynched by the paramilitary of ‘alternate knowing’, I need to point out that indigenous cultural groups have legitimate expertise when it comes to living within nature and protecting nature, and they also have an awareness of spirituality that is not shared by the average city-dwelling Westerner. I also need to point out that being mistreated does not automatically make a person right; the person who applies such ‘logic’ is using Mercy emotions to overwhelm Perceiver thought. Going further, it appears that this legitimate Native expertise was acknowledged in at least some textbooks from the past. This claim can be verified by reading through the Canadian school history textbooks from the 1930s that I have digitized on my website. However, this legitimate Native expertise has now been exalted to the level of an ideology in my home province of British Columbia, because the government has recently declared that “Indigenous knowledge and perspectives are integrated throughout all areas of learning and are evident in the curriculum’s rationale statements, goals, big ideas, mandated learning standards, and elaborations.”
My statement is also consistent with Snyder’s analysis of history, which warns against both the tyranny of right-wing Nazism and the tyranny of left-wing Communism. Stated more generally, it is also possible for the left wing to head in fascist directions.
Snyder points out that “In general, a failed coup is what happens before a successful coup. A failed coup is practice for a successful coup. It’s hard to get a coup right the first time. Once you’ve had a coup attempt in your country, which we have had, you can’t look away from the basic reality that other coup attempts are very likely coming down the road.” Looking at this cognitively, a first coup attempt may fail physically, but the very fact that a coup is being attempted indicates psychological success. That is because attempting a coup moves it psychologically from being unthinkable to being possible and doable. A coup attempt blazes the cognitive path from verbal slogans in Teacher thought through technical organization to personal imposition in Mercy thought. This alters the question from ‘Can a coup be attempted?’ to ‘How can a coup be attempted more successfully?’ Saying this another way, technical thought requires a toolkit of Perceiver facts and Server sequences to get established within some context. A coup attempt sets up the toolkit, making it possible for technical thought to use this toolkit to optimize and improve the next coup attempt.
Snyder adds, “The fact that we had a coup attempt in very strange circumstances, by the way, means that the armed forces and the police and all the other institutions where people bear arms have to be investigating themselves. They have to be wary in that sense how many of our people took part in this, how many of our people supported this.” Stated cognitively, an ideological regime juxtaposes personal dictatorship, which uses Mercy respect for some dictator to overwhelm Perceiver thought, and the rule of law, which applies Perceiver rules universally to everyone within the state. If a coup has been attempted and has failed, then it is essential that every one who bears arms believes in the rule of law, which means removing those who respect dictators and/or participated in the attempted coup from the system. If these individuals are not immediately and effectively removed, then this will implicitly change the definition of ‘normal’ within the minds of those who bear arms. In other words, removing dictatorial supporters from the police and the army is cognitively similar to erasing the symbols of the new regime.
7. Be Reflective If You Must Be Armed
Snyder notes that “We’d like to talk about the Nazis as though the Nazis were a set of bad people who we can then just kind of separate from the rest of us, the rest of the Germans, the rest of the world. The Nazis somehow mysteriously appeared in 1933, mysteriously disappeared in 1945.” Stated cognitively, it is easy to view the Nazis as a special group in Mercy thought that epitomizes evil and has no connection with normal life and normal society. Saying this same thing from a different perspective, it is tempting for Jews to view the Holocaust as a unique tragedy of genocide that cannot be compared with any other traumatic cultural or ethnic experience. Likewise, I suggest that it is tempting for Canadian aboriginals to view residential schools as a unique tragedy of cultural genocide that cannot be compared with any other traumatic cultural or ethnic experience. But a recent article in the Guardian describes the lifelong negative impact experienced by British children who attended British boarding schools. The article summarizes that “These schools historically set out to cauterise emotions and to break the child, to then shape the child.”
The first problem with this approach is that one cannot learn lessons from an experience that is unique and has no parallel, because learning lessons from history, by definition, implies that the experiences of history can—at least to some extent—be repeated. As the saying goes, history may not repeat itself but it definitely rhymes. The goal is not to minimize the horror of some genocide but rather to learn from that genocide in order to prevent it from happening again. The second problem is that the mental networks of such tragedies remain undigested under the surface, waiting to be triggered. For instance, the current Israeli war on Gaza was triggered by a horrific terrorist attack by Hamas upon Israeli citizens on October 7, 2023. However, the response of Israel has been sufficiently devastating and thorough to reach the level of genocide. Genocide is not the same as Holocaust, but it is in the same ballpark. About 70% of Gaza infrastructure and buildings have been destroyed and about 50,000 Palestinians have been killed. Gaza now has the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world. I am not suggesting that the Palestinians are morally upright. Hamas is evil. Instead, I am observing that when a group of people views a Holocaust as a unique experience that has no parallel with anything else, then the MMNs of that horror remain undigested under the surface, capable of emotionally imposing their structure upon people’s minds and behavior. Again, the goal is not to minimize some genocide but rather to mentally digest the memories of that genocide in order to prevent these horrific, suppressed mental networks from re-emerging. This is imperative when dealing with growing tyranny, because dictators are experts at reactivating horrific suppressed mental networks.
The other danger is to trivialize the Holocaust by applying words such as ‘genocide’ to behavior that is oppressive but does not reach this level of horror. Similarly, the term Holocaust needs to be reserved for unusually horrific cases of genocide. Instead, one needs to recognize that societies can follow certain paths, paths that are determined by inescapable cognitive mechanisms. And this includes recognizing that there are societal paths that can lead eventually to genocide and even Holocaust. Therefore, it is vital to analyze the historical paths towards fascism and tyranny—as Snyder is doing in these videos—in order to ensure that our society does not follow such a path.
Snyder notes the ordinariness of Nazi atrocity. “The German police, and I mean just the regular police, the order police, the people who would ordinarily be patrolling the streets and who went back to patrolling the streets of Germany after they’d done their done awful things in the East, the German police took part in every major massacre of the holocaust; everyone beyond a certain size. The German armed forces, despite the legends about them, also took part in the Holocaust and were the agent of starving millions of people to death.” Stated simply, ordinary police and soldiers turned into monsters and then turned back into ordinary police and soldiers.
Part of the explanation lies in realizing that an officer or soldier with a gun is an inherent contradiction. On the one hand, the police officer or soldier represents the Teacher order of the state and is functioning as an expression of this Teacher order. But on the other hand, an officer or soldier is also an individual human being who is using personal force to impose his will upon others. A professional police force or professional army minimizes this contradiction by focusing upon Teacher order and delegated authority. But this still does not eliminate the fact that a soldier or police officer uses guns to kill other human beings. Therefore, when ordinary police and soldiers turn into murderous monsters, this does not mean that some external force has taken over the police or the army. Instead, it means that mental networks of murderous behavior that already exist to some extent within the minds of police and soldiers are being released from control and being allowed to express themselves freely.
These mental networks of murder must be present if one is to function as police or soldiers. But these mental networks can be balanced by TMNs of professionalism. Snyder explains, “As I said in the earlier lesson about professional ethics, these collectivities, these groups have to develop an ethic which goes beyond just what power is asking them to do.” However, professionalism is only a partial solution because being a professional in today’s objective society means being guided by TMNs of professional skill and expertise that ignore MMNs of personal feeling. Thus, today’s professional has to go beyond the objective thinking of scientific thought to explicitly include subjective Mercy emotions. This means that the professional will have to go beyond his or her training in order to follow Snyder’s advice.
Snyder suggests that more investigation is required. “We need an investigation, many investigations with historians, with digital forensics, experts with people with all kinds of expertise. We need a number of investigations of what happened on January 6th, not least so policemen, police women, members of the armed forces can read those papers, think for themselves about how it got to that point, how they would have behaved.” I agree that investigation is required, but I am not convinced that this is sufficient. A fairly extensive investigation was made after Snyder made these videos, but it all came to an end when Trump issued a blanket pardon for all 1500 rioters on the day he was inaugurated. Thus, history shows that extensive investigation of January 6 was not enough. Another problem with extensive, forensic, expert investigation is that it just adds more technical thought to the underlying problem of too much technical thought.
The ultimate problem is that technical thought emphasizes professional skills while downplaying subjective Mercy emotions and universal Teacher understanding. This enters the realm of God and religion, because mental symmetry suggests that a concept of God emerges when a sufficiently general Teacher understanding applies to personal identity. Unfortunately, when those who talk about God and religion practice blind faith in holy books, then those who believe in religion in a society that is abandoning religion all in may end up supporting a societal move towards tyranny because they will view the dictator as a savior who will restore respect in traditional religious morality. Thus, American evangelical Christendom has generally turned into a ‘dog in the manger’, refusing to feed intellectually from the hay of biblical truth while growling at anyone who dares analyze biblical truth from a rational perspective. I speak here from extensive personal experience. What is left is Snyder’s helpful, but inadequate, suggestion of more extensive investigations. What is actually needed is a rational conscience based in a meta-theory of cognitive, spiritual, and societal wholeness. Unfortunately, all the liberal has to offer is the Teacher overgeneralization of universal tolerance. And overgeneralization lacks the content that is required to analyze and digest suppressed mental networks, while simultaneously generating the Teacher feeling that the problem is being addressed.
Snyder mentions two aspects of what it means to be guided by conscience. The first aspect is the ability to reflect upon one’s self and one’s actions. “My point is that we ask these people to be reflective. We also have to give them something upon which they can reflect, which would mean importantly reports about the 6th of January.” Stated cognitively, Perceiver thought organizes Mercy experiences into facts, objects, and repeated connections, essentially placing these Mercy experiences within an internal map. Applying this kind of thinking to mental networks of personal identity leads to self-image: the mental object within Perceiver thought that defines me. Self-image makes it possible for people to reflect upon themselves. As Snyder points out, self-image requires solid facts within Perceiver thought: facts that accurately describe what I and my group have done.
The second aspect involves local reporting. “One of the worst things which has happened to us as a country is that we’ve lost our local press. We’ve lost our local newspapers. Most of the country is a news desert, and that means that people don’t know if local politicians are corrupt or how they’re corrupt. It means that people don’t know if their water is polluted or not.” Stated cognitively, an effective conscience applies Perceiver facts to my own personal Mercy experiences. This addresses the fundamental weakness of Teacher overgeneralization, which makes sweeping statements that ‘transcend’ Perceiver facts. The primary goal of a Teacher overgeneralization is to provide emotional comfort and inspiration for me and my group in Mercy thought. Perceiver facts poke holes in Teacher overgeneralizations, and Perceiver facts about me and my group poke holes in a Teacher generalization that is making me feel better about my rotten situation. Thus, there is a natural tendency for universal tolerance to stay at the vague level of sweeping statements and slogans, while resisting factual analysis of specific situations. Overgeneralization can point out that the emperor has no clothes, but it cannot take the next step of actually clothing the emperor.
Snyder refers to ‘Black Lives Matter’ and the police murder of George Floyd in 2020. “We have to be able to be more reflective [of] the police and George Floyd and the murder of African-Americans. Those are things which can be understood in terms of racism. They can be understood in terms of particular police officers. And that’s all valid, but they can also be understood as a failure of reflection.” There is a problem with police brutality in the United States. However, yelling the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’ and speaking in general terms of racism is not going to solve the problem because that remains at the level of Teacher overgeneralization. It observes–correctly–that the emperor has no clothes without clothing the emperor. The solution requires taking a detailed level at the culture, thinking, and behavior of both whites and blacks in the light of mental wholeness. But any attempt to be reflective at this level of detail tends to be vilified as racist colonialism. I agree that the solution involves reflection about specifics. But heaven help—and at this point that is literally my prayer—the individual who dares to be reflective about specifics when it comes to blacks in America or aboriginals in Canada. Instead, ‘Bring on the slogans.’ But dictators are very good at using and misusing slogans. Stated simply, there is no point in telling people to be externally reflective about specifics if they are unwilling to be internally reflective about specifics. As Snyder concludes, “We can ask people to do the right thing, to be reflective. But we also have to make it easier for them to do the right thing. We have to give them ways to reflect.”
Stated simply, I agree with what Snyder is saying, but I suggest that his statements and suggestions need to be taken further. Who knows. Maybe Snyder himself would like to take his statements further, but does not dare do so because of the current political and social climate. However, I personally am trying to follow the advice that Snyder gives in his first video by getting off the train of shifting societal normality as soon as possible in order to take my stand. I am also trying very hard not just to make a stand for cultural MMNs of conservative Christian morality but rather to pursue the TMN of mental and societal wholeness. I must be doing something right because I currently find myself estranged from both sides of this conflict.
8. Stand Out
This video describes how people behave when they are internally reflective about specifics, when they are guided personally by conscience. They stand out as individuals. Snyder observes, “It can feel strange to do or say something different, but without that unease there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell, the status quo, is broken and others will follow.” Rosa Parks helped spark the American civil rights movement by refusing to move from her bus seat in 1955. Her specific act was very small: sitting rather than standing. But it had a major impact. Snyder says that such specific acts can set an example and break the spell, and this did happen in the case of Rosa Parks. But not every specific act will set an example and break a spell. Instead, the regime must be casting a spell on the average person and the average person must know that this is a spell.
Snyder describes the larger context. “We’re social creatures and we’re creatures who are very good at adapting and that’s appropriate a lot of the time, if you’re playing bridge or you’re going bowling... It’s important that you adapt to the rules, to the situation, to other people’s expectations. But then part of being a political person, or even having a policy worthy of the name, is recognizing the moments that aren’t just social moments, recognizing the moments where following the rules, flowing into the expectations, doing what people expect of you, that’s not just not enough, it’s the wrong thing.” Snyder is contrasting two ways that the mind guides behavior. The first method is through cultural MMNs. If I see a game of bridge or a game of bowling, for instance, then this will trigger mental networks within my mind of how one is expected to behave within such a situation. Snyder describes this as ‘adapting to other people’s expectations’, but it is more accurately being guided internally by my mental networks that model other people’s expectations. The second method also involves mental networks, but these are based in an understanding of ‘how things work’ or ‘how things should work’.
Being guided internally by ‘how things work’ can set an example and break the spell if the regime is imposing cultural MMNs upon society that are leading to extensive personal pain because they are massively inconsistent with how things work. When this happens, then there will be a major disconnect between the slogans of the party and reality. Everyone will know that society is under a spell, but this spell will be maintained as long as everyone continues to behave in a way that is consistent with the mental networks of official ideology. Breaking the spell requires someone acting in line with the facts of reality, because this behavior will trigger suppressed mental networks of ‘how things really work’ within the minds of others.
Saying this more simply, someone has to say that ‘The emperor has no clothes’, but this statement will only be effective if the emperor really has no clothes, the regime is pretending the emperor does have clothes, and everyone knows that the emperor is naked but is afraid to say it. Taking an example from today’s news, global economic markets are currently experiencing extreme instability because of Trump’s incoherent tariff policies. An article in today’s Guardian compares Trump with a ‘mad king’, a naked emperor who is pretending to wear clothes. “‘He’s certainly living up to the caricature of being a mad king,’ said Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist. ‘When you’re addressing a ballroom in a tuxedo, telling people to take the painful medicine, or on your umpteenth golf vacation while economic chaos is rippling throughout this country and others, at best you’re completely out of touch. At worst, you’re a sociopathic narcissist who doesn’t give a crap about anyone suffering. Ultimately there will be a political price to pay for that.’”
The individual who stands out in such a situation is carrying out the equivalent of a paradigm shift. Snyder describes, “You’re the one then who’s reshuffling the deck. You’re the one who’s changing the status quo. You’re the one who’s reordering the symbols. If you stand out just a little bit, you’ve made the whole future go off in a different direction.” A paradigm shift does not change the facts. Instead, it views the same facts from a different perspective. It takes the existing deck and reshuffles it; it reorders the symbols. In order for a paradigm shift to work, people have to know the facts—even if these facts are not being publicly acknowledged, and they have to know that these facts are being put together falsely by the dictatorial regime. In other words, they have to know that the regime is spouting an ideology that is inconsistent with the facts. A paradigm shift has the power to ‘make the whole future go off in a different direction’ because it is emotionally imposing the TMN of a different general theory upon people’s minds.
A theory will only turn into a TMN with emotional power if one continues to use this theory. Snyder gives two examples of individuals continuing to be guided by a theory that was different than their surrounding culture. “We have a young woman called Teresa Prakarova who rescued a family from the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust. The interesting thing about Teresa was that she didn’t change when everyone around her changed. And that’s one way to stand out: to have a set of a set of values and to hold close to them even when other people are adapting, and even when other people think that it’s a little bit strange, a little bit weird, that you’re holding on to your values.” This example relates to the point made in the first video about what defines ‘normal’. Teresa internalized mental networks of what used to be considered normal and continued to be internally guided by these mental networks while people around her were allowing the growing dictatorship to redefine mental networks of what defines ‘normal’. Saying this another way, Teresa got off the train of changing normality and took a stand.
The only way to hold onto what is ‘normal’ in the face of changing ‘normality’ is to become internally motivated. That is because what was normal is no longer being triggered by current society. On the contrary, continuing to be guided by what was normal will be regarded by others as ‘a little bit strange, a little bit weird’. Going further, continuing to be guided by these mental networks of the past that are now internally generated will eventually lead to the formation of a TMN.
The cognitive reason for this transformation from social MMN to internal TMN has to do with cognitive ownership. A mental network will take ownership of behavior that it motivates. For instance, whenever an investigation attempts to determine the motivation for some crime, then it is asking which mental networks within the mind of the criminal motivated that crime. Cognitive ownership of behavior will shift if this behavior is motivated by a new mental network and not by the mental network that normally ‘owns’ this behavior.
For instance, being kind to one’s neighbor is normally driven by cultural MMNs. But suppose that one’s neighbor is confined to a ghetto and that new cultural MMNs dictate that one should not be kind to the members of a ghetto. If one continues to be kind to one’s neighbor even when it is socially disapproved, then a different mental network will take ownership of this behavior. Going further, if the new cultural MMNs of cruelty are backed up by the TMN of some ideology, then continuing to be kind to one’s neighbor will ultimately be viewed as being motivated by some TMN of human dignity that is different than the TMN of party ideology. One has then reached the level of being able to trigger a paradigm shift through a simple act.
Snyder’s second example involves Winston Churchill. “In 1940 the decision to keep Great Britain in the war [was] the work by an individual of recognizing the world historical moment, frankly, and standing out by doing what his country didn’t necessarily want him to do. The interesting thing about that, of course, is that because Churchill chose to keep fighting, because the British with him chose to keep fighting, everything about British history after that point and the way that the English and the British understand themselves is different. If Churchill had been like other politicians and said ‘Let’s make a reasonable compromise’, everything after that would have been different.” This example contains the same elements that were present in the first example. Churchill made his decision to keep fighting despite the responses taken by other politicians. Thus, he had to go beyond being driven externally by cultural MMNs to being internally motivated. Churchill’s decision to keep fighting was not just a local decision involving specific Mercy experiences but rather had ascended to the Teacher level of generality because the freedom of Western civilization was now at stake. Finally, Churchill’s internal fortitude turned into a TMN over time as he continued the fight to preserve Britain.
Snyder suggests that the first example is specific while the second is general. “For Teresa Prakarova that the situation was local, it was the Warsaw Ghetto, for Churchill it was global, it was Nazi power.” Physically speaking, Snyder is correct. However, what matters cognitively is not external generality but rather the internal feeling of generality. Churchill was obviously dealing with a global, universal conflict. But the personal stand of Teresa reached the level of Teacher universality within her mind. She was not just standing against specific acts of oppression but rather against the universal oppression of an entire group of people who were being condemned by Nazi ideology to spend their entire lives within a ghetto. Stated more simply, what matters for cognitive ownership is how my mind is perceiving the situation.
This personal awareness of universality can be seen in another example that Snyder gives, referring to “someone like Stacey Abrams who recognized that the basic issue, that the issue of voting, is so fundamental to the future and the moral character, the moral shape, of our country that it was worth devoting oneself to.” Voting is only done once every few years. But Stacy Abrams took a stand regarding voting because she recognized internally that the specific act of voting has universal implications.
Snyder finishes by mentioning the difficulties that black voters often have voting. “It’s easy in general in our country for white people to vote, or easier. If you’re a white person listening to this, you don’t wait in line probably to vote, and if you’re a black person listening to this, you probably do wait for a very long time to vote. I realize individual experiences will be different, but on average that’s the way things are.”
Snyder mentions voting a lot, and making it harder for some group to vote is a major problem that needs to be addressed. (It should also be added that this is not a major problem in most Western countries.) But if one understands how the mind functions, then it becomes apparent that voting is actually a secondary problem. Voting will tend to be viewed as the primary problem by those who emphasize technical thought, because Contributor thought is the cognitive module that does the choosing, and Contributor thought lies at the core of technical thought. However, Contributor thought chooses between a set of options being promoted by Exhorter thought, and Exhorter thought will focus upon emotional memories and mental networks.
In other words, when one votes, one is choosing from some list of candidates on a ballot, and the candidates who made it to the ballot got there because of emotional support from various religious, cultural, personal, and ideological mental networks. Thus, what is more basic than having the right to vote is being able to determine the candidates for which one can vote. For instance, when Trump got reelected in 2024, the initial choice was between Trump and an aging Biden who was obviously becoming senile. This was replaced by a choice between Trump and pro-wokeist Kamala Harris supported by pro-wokeist Tim Walz. Exactly how wokeist these two candidates are is of secondary importance. What matters is that both candidates strongly triggered mental networks of wokeism within the minds of American voters. Thus, the average American evangelical Christian swallowed hard and chose Trump. Democratic candidates should have emphasized rational thought, democracy, scientific reasoning, honesty, integrity, the rule of law—all of the principles that Snyder is emphasizing in these videos. Instead, what stuck out in the minds of potential American voters was wokeism. And what drives wokeism is primarily the Teacher overgeneralization of universal tolerance. Discussing wokeism goes beyond the scope of this essay, but the history of wokeism is examined extensively in another essay. Instead, I am trying to illustrate that what lies beneath the ability to vote is the process that determines the voting candidates and the mental networks that drive this process. And our discussion of Snyder’s videos is making it clear that a growing dictatorship has to be defeated ultimately at the level of mental networks.
9. Be Kind To Our Language
Snyder discusses books and language based upon the feedback that he has received from others. “I can really tell the difference between people who write me because of something they’ve been triggered by on the Internet, and people who write me because they’ve read a book, my book or someone else’s book. The mode, the mood, the time taken, everything is different... People don’t say, ‘I was triggered by this on the internet’, but you can tell right away. You can tell because they use the same words that all the other people triggered by that same thing on the internet were using. And sadly it’s very often the very words that they were triggered by which they are simply repeating. And this is a prospect which frankly terrifies me.”
Snyder is mentioning a characteristic distinction between absolute truth and universal truth. Absolute truth uses Mercy emotions to overwhelm Perceiver thought into ‘knowing’ what is ‘true’. The underlying assumption is that the source of truth in Mercy thought has much greater emotional status than personal identity in Mercy thought. This leads naturally to an attitude of self-denial, because I will feel that I am nothing compared to my source of truth. And if I am nothing compared to my source of truth, then I have no right to analyze, or even rephrase, the words of my sources of truth. Instead, all I can do is quote from the experts. This will lead to the situation that Snyder describes of everyone using the same canned phrases. For instance, Christian theological arguments are primarily made by quoting verses from the Bible, or possibly from some of religious leader or founder.
I also quote from the experts when writing papers, and I am quoting from Snyder in this essay. But I am not quoting from Snyder because of my deep emotional respect for him as a source of ‘truth’ (though I do respect his knowledge and expertise) but rather because I want to make it clear that I am not putting words in his mouth. I am not twisting his facts to squeeze them into the theory of mental symmetry. Instead, I am rearranging his facts as he states them and placing these facts into the theory of mental symmetry in a legitimate manner. Similarly, this essay is going through all twenty of Snyder’s videos in order to demonstrate that I am not ‘cherry-picking’ merely a subset of facts that fit into mental symmetry while ignoring the rest of the facts. Instead, I am taking all of the facts that are mentioned in this series of videos and placing them legitimately within the theory of mental symmetry. A similar principle applies when I use mental symmetry to analyze books of the Bible. I quote from the original Greek (or Hebrew) text and I also go through entire chapters and books. In both cases, I want to make it clear that I am doing a legitimate paradigm shift by taking the same facts and placing them into a different framework.
Absolute ‘truth’ tends to quote directly from some source without changing the words. Universal truth, in contrast, uses Perceiver thought to look for connections that are repeated in many different contexts. I am a Perceiver person, and I can state definitively from personal experience that Perceiver thought does not think verbally. Instead, I think factually. For instance, when I meet some acquaintance, I automatically remember a set of facts about that person, while finding it difficult to remember that person’s name. One result is that when I am relating a set of Perceiver facts, I will automatically do so using my own words which do not necessarily line up with the words of the original source.
There is a natural connection between books, Teacher theories, universal truth, and non-predictable language. A book is a visible example of a Teacher theory. Teacher thought uses words to come up with simple statements that bring order to a multiplicity of concepts. Similarly, a book takes a number of words and places them within an ordered arrangement of sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. A Teacher theory, by definition, describes general concepts, which implies using words that have general meanings. Perceiver thought assigns meanings to Teacher words by connecting some verbal string with some set of facts. Thus, using general words to describe theories implies that Perceiver thought is thinking in terms of universal truth and universal meanings that apply to many similar contexts. For instance, if I write a general theory about dogs, this implies that the word ‘dog’ has a universal, or at least general, meaning that applies to many different kinds of dogs. Finally, if I am coming up with my own Teacher theory about some subject based upon universal Perceiver truth, then I will naturally state this theory using my own language. For instance, I recently gave an introduction to mental symmetry to an academic group. One of the comments that I received was that they had never heard a theory like this. I had succeeded in using non-predictable language.
Social media, in contrast, resonates with absolute truth. The Internet is filled with millions of messages, each clamoring for our attention. Social media platforms have optimized the dopamine rush of attracting viewers with short, memorable messages and slogans. Quoting from the linked Guardian article, “The smartphone [is] the ‘modern-day hypodermic needle’: we turn to it for quick hits, seeking attention, validation and distraction with each swipe, like and tweet. Since the turn of the millennium, behavioural (as opposed to substance) addictions have soared. Every spare second is an opportunity to be stimulated, whether by entering the TikTok vortex, scrolling Instagram, swiping through Tinder or bingeing on porn, online gambling and e-shopping.” When a person ‘likes’ a message, then this indicates that this message resonates with the cultural MMNs of the ‘liker’. Similarly, when a person ‘retweets’ a message, then this message is being treated as absolute truth based in some source of ‘truth’, and when a message gains sufficient likes and retweets, then acquires the emotional status of absolute ‘truth’, emotionally backed up by crowd support for the source of this ‘truth’. This leads to what is known as the echo chamber, in which people with similar cultural MMNs mutually reinforce their emotional prejudices, without any need to acknowledge truth or facts.
The Guardian article describes this emotional attachment by referring to neurology. “Our obsession with instant gratification means we’re constantly living in our limbic brain, which processes emotions, rather than in our pre-frontal cortex, which deals with future planning and problem-solving and is important for personality development. When we’re confronted with a complex or unsettling issue in our work or social lives, our digital companions are always there to help us escape the stickiness of life with an easy distraction.” The neurology being mentioned here is vague, but in essence correct. The ‘limbic brain’ refers to information that is imposed upon the mind by emotional intensity, while ‘pre-frontal cortex’ means using internal knowledge and structure to evaluate information without swallowing it blindly for emotional reasons.
The Internet does not have to be this way. For instance, I write and post book-length essays on my website. I also search for academic papers using Google scholar. But my long essays do not attract many viewers, while messages on social media can be shared almost incidentally by millions of viewers.
Snyder adds that “Democracy depends upon us having some sense of time beyond our immediate outrage. It involves us having some way of expressing ourselves besides the words that travel through us from the Internet.” This describes an essential distinction between Mercy thought and Teacher thought. Mercy thought adds emotional labels to memories of specific experiences. Absolute truth can form instantly, because a single emotional experience of ‘immediate outrage’ can overwhelm Perceiver thought into ‘knowing’ what is ‘true’. Teacher thought, in contrast, thinks in terms of general theories. And a theory, by definition, applies to many situations and not just the current situation. Similarly, universal truth grows gradually as one uses Perceiver thought to compare many situations to uncover similar patterns. In a functional democracy, people do not use emotional status to impose their opinions upon others. Instead, people function within the Teacher order of a structured society governed by processes and institutions that extend beyond the lives and experiences of specific people in Mercy thought. And behavior in a democracy is governed by the rule of law, which means applying the same Perceiver rules universally to everyone in society, regardless of their emotional status. Thus, Snyder’s statement is accurate, but it is also an external expression of underlying cognitive mechanisms.
Snyder looks further at the attribute of verbal unpredictability. “Reading makes you less predictable. Reading takes what you have. It adds something to it in an unpredictable way. You don’t know what you would write to someone after you’ve read a book... So the question becomes how do you become unpredictable and the answer is simple. The Internet is not only predictable... it makes you more predictable.” Universal truth is inherently verbally unpredictable. That is because Teacher emotion comes from order-within-complexity. Teacher thought feels good when many items fit together in a structured manner. Teacher order-within-will complexity can be expanded by finding new facets to an existing theory. For instance, writing this essay is causing me to encounter new facets to the theory of mental symmetry. Absolute truth, in contrast, comes from specific esteemed sources of ‘truth’ whose specific words are then quoted verbatim. Absolute truth dislikes verbal unpredictability, because coming up with one’s own words implies that one is losing emotional respect for the source of absolute truth and his words.
I should add that there is also a kind of predictability in abstract theories. That is because abstract technical thought is based in precise definitions. Therefore, technical theories use a predictable vocabulary of carefully defined words. For instance, I use the terms ‘absolute truth’ and ‘universal truth’ in a predictable, repeatable manner. But because these are general terms, I am continually finding and describing new aspects and illustrations of these terms. Thus, there is a deep predictability rather than a surface predictability.
Snyder mentions the verbally limiting, emotionally driven, impact of social media. “It’s the social media which are narrowing down the words that you hear, or rather read. The words to which you’re exposed to, the ones that are most likely to trigger you, most likely to make you outraged or happy—because it’s that alternation of outrage and contentment or complacency... it’s that mixture of feelings which keeps your eyes peeled on the screen.” On the one hand, one is being outraged by messages that trigger strange cultural MMNs, while on the other hand, one is experiencing contentment from familiar cultural MMNs being triggered. A feeling of cultural unity comes from interacting with others who both like the same MMNs that I like and hate the same MMNs that I hate. This summarizes the tribalistic thinking that naturally emerges when people interact on the basis of cultural and religious MMNs within Mercy thought.
Snyder finishes by mentioning humanity. “If you have to be on the Internet, try not to be its agent, not spread its memes out to other human beings. If you’re in touch with another human being, make sure that you’ve paused and cleansed, and you say something human to that person rather than something which is flowing through you because the algorithms you’ve just been exposed to.” When one interacts on social media, one does not encounter a complete person but rather some collection of cultural MMNs. Interacting in the real world with a real human being triggers mental networks of reality as well as mental networks of existence as a whole human being. Saying this another way, the bandwidth of social interaction is much greater when interacting in reality. The online world, in contrast, is both limited and artificial. For instance, when I was younger I hated talking on the phone, because I had to ignore all the various information from my senses in order to focus upon the disembodied voice speaking to me over the telephone.
10. Believe in Truth
Snyder begins by describing the nature of historical truth. “The point of history is not to pull out this point and that point and compare one thing, compare A and B, and say A is better. That’s not the point. The point of history is that history is a reservoir of the possible, everything which could happen. That’s one thing we can say with 100% certainty about it.” Comparing one aspect of history with another uses Perceiver thought to look for common patterns. Perceiver facts connect Mercy experiences, and Mercy experiences have emotional labels. Therefore, comparing facts in Perceiver thought will lead to the conclusion that some Mercy experiences are better than other Mercy experiences. This leads to judgmentalism and cultural condemnation: my history is better than yours; culture A is better than culture B. Like Snyder, I have concluded that this is an inadequate way of examining history. However, I suggest that the solution is not to eliminate Mercy feelings and pretend that all cultures are equal, because all cultures and societies are not equal. Instead, the solution is to add a sense of time and sequence. The goal of comparing one culture and society with another is to build a map of possible societies, in order to avoid following paths that lead to worse societies while following paths that lead to a better society.
Snyder emphasizes history as a map of possibility through which one travels. “If we’re able to listen to the wisdom of people who passed through crises that are still greater than ours, we can learn something which might be relevant. That was the method of On Tyranny. I was drawing from my own knowledge of history, but even more than that I was drawing from the witnesses. I was taking from people who had passed through fascism and communism.” Notice the goal of learning how people can move from a tyranny to a better society.
Saying this more clearly, using Perceiver thought to factually analyze personal and cultural MMNs will make people feel bad. The postmodern conclusion is to reject factual analysis: ‘How dare you make me feel bad by imposing your facts upon my culture, my religion, and my history!’ This has the short-term benefit of making people feel better, but the long-term result is to imprison people within their inadequate cultures. The solution is not to attack Perceiver thought but rather to add Server thought: How does one move from one society to another? What paths can be taken by a society and how does one take these various paths? Snyder’s videos have been focusing upon steps that can be taken which lead either to or away from tyranny.
Snyder points out that Perceiver truth actually leads to freedom and not to condemnation. “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.” This quote mentions several significant points. First, freedom implies that one can choose which path one will follow. Choosing some path implies the presence of a map of possibilities in which one can use Server thought to travel from one Perceiver location to another. And the freedom to choose only becomes meaningful to the extent that different paths exist between which one can choose. Second, Perceiver facts are independent of Mercy experiences and Mercy emotions. This independence provides a standard of judgment that is independent of cultural and personal MMNs. Instead of saying, ‘I do not like you because you are different than me’, one can say, ‘You are bad because you are violating these Perceiver facts and rules’. Third, if Perceiver thought is not permitted to examine the facts, then all that is left is using Mercy emotions to overwhelm Perceiver thought. Those who have the most resources will be able to define ‘truth’ by creating the most mesmerizing Mercy experiences.
Stated simply, “Political power becomes entertainment power, or vice versa. The ability to entertain then becomes political power. If nothing is true then, whoever draws our attention is the one who has power.” In other words, the flashiest MMN becomes the defining emotional experience that overwhelms Perceiver thought into ‘knowing’ what is ‘true’. Teacher thought adds an extra dimension to this. An ideology is a set of cultural MMNs that is expanded by Teacher thought. For instance, broadcasting the same speech to millions of listeners will increase the feelings of order-within-complexity generated by those words. Therefore, Nazi Germany developed and marketed a cheap radio that made it possible for German citizens to listen to official Nazi broadcasts. Similarly, the Nuremberg rallies generated Teacher feelings of order-within-complexity by having massive audiences carry out similar actions. Carrying out such massive campaigns requires massive financial and logistical resources. This explains why ‘the ability to entertain then becomes political power’.
Snyder complains that “We don’t really have any way to resist, because we can’t really create, or most of us can’t create, counter spectacles.” This is true if the only way to generate Teacher emotions is through massive spectacles and national systems. But there are at least two other ways of generating potent Teacher emotions. The first way is with a meta-theory. A meta-theory brings internal Teacher order to a multiplicity of subjects, groups, and specializations. Going further, a meta-theory of cognition can provide emotional support for a map of societal possibilities. For instance, mental symmetry places the various paths of history and society into the general framework of heading towards or away from mental wholeness. Using mental symmetry to guide one’s personal path will turn it into a TMN that provides an emotional alternative to the mass spectacles of a tyranny. An ideological tyranny uses state resources to create mass spectacles of external Teacher order-within-complexity. A meta-theory of cognitive development uses Perceiver thought to point out how various situations fit within the map of cognitive development. Mass state spectacles are backed up by the power of the system. A meta-theory of cognitive development is backed up by reality along with the pain of refusing to acknowledge reality.
The second way of generating potent Teacher emotions is through personal purity. A cognitive meta-theory brings Teacher order to the map of historical possibilities. If the ultimate goal is to reach mental wholeness, then following such a path will increasingly cause all mental networks and all cognitive modules to point in the same direction of mental wholeness. This will be sensed as purity, because all the various fragments are heading in a similar direction. Spectacle generates Teacher feelings of order-within-complexity by having as many people as possible carry out similar actions. Purity generates Teacher feelings of order-within-complexity by having as many fragments within one person point in the same direction. Living as a monk or nun creates the illusion of purity by limiting human existence to a small subset of behaviors that point in the same direction, resulting in a caricature of purity. A meta-theory of cognition, in contrast, is capable of bringing unity to a vast range of normal human thought and behavior.
Snyder points out characteristics of legitimate Perceiver truth. “Believing in truth has to do with asserting of value, that some things are actually true. I mean we may never get to truth, but there’s a horizon of truth and that we should be pursuing it, and that hunt is valuable. That hunt for truth is virtuous.” Value is a combination of Perceiver facts and Mercy emotions, because one is factually comparing one item or option with another in order to compare their emotional benefits. Value also implies a map of possibilities in which one lets go of what is less valuable in order to acquire what is more valuable.
Absolute truth can lead to instant feelings of total ‘knowing’, because a single emotional experience is capable of overwhelming Perceiver thought. Confidence in universal truth, in contrast, builds up over time as one continues to see similar patterns being repeated. This means that there is a ‘horizon of truth’. One can never acquire total certainty or arrive at a total knowledge of truth. But one can acquire sufficient certainty and get sufficiently close to truth to construct a sufficiently accurate map of personal and societal value. This hunt is valuable because learning how to use Perceiver thought to discover truth is itself a learning process. One is learning the skill of mental mapmaking which makes it possible to pursue value. For instance, using mental symmetry to analyze many different fields has taught me the skill of using mental symmetry to analyze many different fields.
Using Perceiver thought to discover truth means going beyond postmodernism. “Truth is elusive, but it’s also hidden from us by power. So the strongest argument for free speech is that free speech is about speaking truth to power. Free speech is about exercising the double virtue of looking for the truth and saying it right... I will fight to the death to protect your right to repeat the idiotic internet meme that you just learned last night, but that’s not the point of free speech. And when you repeat the idiotic internet meme that you just learned last night, don’t think that you are taking part in the great transcendent history of free speech. You’re not. The great transcendent history of free speech is about hunting hard for truth and speaking it to power.” Truth is ‘hidden from us by power’ because power uses emotional intensity to overwhelm Perceiver thought. Free speech makes it possible for one to verbally state Perceiver facts without being suppressed by the emotional status of some group. Speaking truth to power means recognizing that Perceiver facts also apply to powerful MMNs. Repeating some ‘idiotic Internet meme’ means that Perceiver thought is being emotionally overwhelmed by some set of MMNs.
Free speech does not mean replacing one set of mesmerizing MMNs with another set, because one is simply replacing one master with another master. Perceiver thought is being mesmerized by a new emotional source, but Perceiver thought still remains mesmerized, incapable of determining the facts. Searching for truth means using Perceiver thought to develop the facts and then acquiring sufficient confidence to hold on to the facts despite emotional pressure from powerful MMNs.
‘Speaking truth to power’ is often viewed as using the emotional intensity of crowds, protests, and shouting to emotionally impose my ‘truth’ upon power. But all that does is make me and my group the new dictators who are using emotional power to impose ‘truth’ upon society. Instead, speaking truth to power has to be done in a quiet and confident manner that allows Perceiver facts and Perceiver truth to apply to both me and power. This means quietly insisting that those who are in power submit to the same Perceiver rules that they are imposing upon me and others. Speaking truth to power means that the same truth applies to both me and to those who are in power. Otherwise, what I am actually doing is shouting power to power rather than speaking truth to power.
What is missing from Snyder’s description is the concept of speaking truth from the power of a meta-theory and/or from purity. Acquiring sufficient Perceiver confidence to assert the facts despite Mercy emotions is necessary. But it is not sufficient. Instead, these Perceiver facts need to be emotionally backed up by TMNs of integrated understanding and unified character that are sufficiently potent to overcome the emotionally amplified ideologies of the regime. If one lacks TMNs of meta-theory and purity, then speaking truth to power will inevitably decay into claiming to stand for universal principles while in practice imposing the MMNs of some marginalized cultural or religious group. That is the danger of applying some overgeneralization of universal equality. It creates the feeling of Teacher universality while in practice acquiring its content from specific cultural and religious MMNs. It claims to be universal while being tribalistic. It claims to be speaking truth to power while actually being another version of ideology.
Snyder points out that what “We have had to do Under the Trump Administration is to listen to lies from power”. He adds, “I think it’s fair to say, at no other time were we bombarded with consistency, with frequency, by so many lies, continuous lying, which was corrosive, which did push Americans further in the direction of thinking that nothing’s really true, they’re only opinions. And of course if nothing’s really true and they’re only opinions, then we’re disempowering ourselves.” It is estimated that Trump told over 30,000 lies during his first term. So far in his second term, Trump and his sycophantic followers state whatever they wish without even attempting to line up with the facts.
Telling a specific lie is a way of gaining a personal advantage, but this only works if people assume that everyone is telling the truth. In other words, listeners accept the lie as truth because they assume that the goal of communication is to tell accurate Perceiver facts. The purpose of telling endless lies, as Trump did and does, has a different goal which is to overwhelm Perceiver thought in the listeners and replace independent Perceiver thinking with emotional submission to the Mercy status of the liar. Stated crudely, the goal of Trump is to become a dictator who dictates ‘truth’. I think that this second form of lying to impose personal authority is expressed by the Russian word vranyo, which is different than lozh, the normal Russian word for lying. It makes sense that the Russian language would have a word for this form of lying because it is an essential aspect of Russian dictatorship, and it is becoming an essential aspect of Trump dictatorship. Repeated lying plays a similar cognitive role to a religious revival or a mock election because they all carry out the same cognitive function of using Mercy status to re-mesmerize Perceiver thought.
Going further, Perceiver thought looks for connections that are repeated. Therefore, an effective way of overwhelming Perceiver thought is by continually using personal status to alter what is ‘true’. This can be seen in Trump’s current policy of tariffs. The primary characteristic of this policy is that it has no coherence or stability but rather depends totally upon the current whims of dictator Trump. When a staff member of Trump can state with total certainty that something is true today and has always been true and then state with equal certainty that exactly the opposite is true tomorrow and will always be true, then this is a sign that Perceiver thought has ceased to function but rather has submitted itself to the emotional dictatorship of Trump. This goes beyond the normal lying of lozh to the abusive, mocking lying of vranyo. By definition, a mind that is incapable of determining its own Perceiver truth has become disempowered.
Snyder points out the role of a big lie and emphasizes that this was described by Hitler in Mein Kampf. “This comes from Hitler, whether we like it or not, this comes from Hitler. This opens the space to tell a lie which is so big that no one can doubt it. Hitler explains this logic in Mein Kampf. I’m sorry, that’s just where it comes from. I mean, you may not like to have things posed this way, but there’s only one history. Hitler and Mein Kampf explains that telling a big lie is successful because people won’t believe that you would tell a lie that was that big.” A big lie is successful because the mind uses different strategies to evaluate objective information and emotional information. It was mentioned earlier that technical thought naturally develops in the realm of objective, specialized information. A society with technical specializations will use technical thought to check the validity of information. But it will apply this critical thinking to less emotional information while ignoring the subjective and universal. A ‘big lie’ bypasses this technical error-checking by making a universal statement that applies to subjective identity. Big lies are normally rejected instinctively because they are inconsistent with the core mental networks of society. But if a tyranny can use grandiose spectacles and personal authority to redefine ‘truth’, then this tyrannical regime can impose its own mental networks upon society. This works best if the regime imposes core mental networks—big lies—upon society, because big lies bypass the error-checking of technical specializations.
Snyder describes the emotional basis for a big lie. “Because it’s not true and because it’s big, if you commit yourself to it, that means you’re committing yourself to belonging to the leader who told it and to the group who also believes it. You’re committing yourself in effect to a conspiracy theory. It has to be a conspiracy theory because the lie which is told is against all kinds of evidence which is actually out there in the world. And so therefore you must generate a conspiracy which is big enough and powerful enough to have produced all of this evidence.” Looking at this cognitively, a big lie is an implicit paradigm shift. That is because a big lie goes beyond the specific realm of personal Mercy experiences to reach the universal realm of Teacher theories. It jumps, for example from, ‘my Jewish neighbor treated me badly’ to ‘all Jews are evil’. Or it jumps from ‘wokeism makes nonsensical statements about culture’ to ‘everything the liberal says is fake news’. A legitimate paradigm shift explains the same set of Perceiver facts from a different Teacher perspective. It changes the Teacher theory but not the underlying Perceiver facts. A big lie uses Mercy status to impose a set of false or misleading Perceiver ‘facts’ and then comes up with a simple Teacher theory to explain these ‘facts’. This leads in Teacher thought to the feeling of a paradigm shift, but this new paradigm is not based in Perceiver facts but rather in the Mercy status of the source of fake ‘facts’. Thus, the Teacher emotion of ‘understanding’ will only last as long as one continues to allow Perceiver thought to be overwhelmed by the Mercy status of the source of ‘truth’. The source of ‘truth’ must be ‘true’ or else one’s entire worldview collapses.
Going further, continuing to follow this process of believing and supporting a big lie will create a TMN that will impose its ‘explanation’ upon all thought and behavior. Thus, one will interpret all truth and all behavior as examples of ‘big lies’. This means that using Perceiver thought to search for truth in some ordered manner will be reinterpreted as conspiracy theory. In other words, the fake ‘paradigm shift’ of promoting a big lie will be followed by meta-paradigm shift of interpreting all structured knowledge as big lies. This magnifies the tribalistic struggle between the cultural MMNs of one group versus the cultural MMNs of other groups, in which my cultural MMNs are regarded as good and other cultural MMNs as bad, into the ideological struggle between the ‘big lies’ of one ideology versus the ‘big lies’ of competing ideologies, in which my big lies are regarded as holy and competing big lies are regarded as evil.
Snyder describes this amplification of tribalism. “Big lie has to lead to faith in a leader who is the source of the lie, but it also has to lead to conspiracy theories, and it has to lead to a politics of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Because you’re committed to this thing, you’re committed to this story, and so therefore the people who are not committed to it, who don’t accept this incredibly important thing that you believe, they must be the enemy, not just your fellow citizens, but the enemy.” Summarizing, a big lie leads to false Teacher theories that are ‘factually’ supported by allowing Perceiver thought to be totally mesmerized by a leader. This transforms people who do not ‘believe’ in the big lie into big enemies.
Snyder reminds the listener that truth is not just ‘out there’ but rather that discovering truth is difficult. “It’s not true that the truth is just out there. It’s not true as... you know Milton to Mill, it’s not true that there’s a marketplace of ideas... Most of the truth is only present because people work hard to produce it or to find it, and people can only produce or find truth in so far as there are institutions and money behind them that help them do that, whether they’re a health professional or a scientist or, in my opinion the most important group, a local journalist.” I suggest a slightly different interpretation. Discovering truth is always hard. But it is extra difficult today because postmodernism has convinced the average person that truth does not exist. Thus, discovering truth does not just mean using Perceiver thought to determine the facts in the midst of emotional pressure to suppress the facts. Instead, it also means using Perceiver thought in the midst of the emotional pressure that Perceiver thought itself has no right to exist.
In contrast, the period of society from Milton to Mill (and I have written a cognitive analysis of John Stuart Mill’s political economy) was guided by a general consensus that it is possible to use Perceiver thought to discover facts and truth. Thus, a ‘marketplace of ideas’ existed in that era which no longer exists in the present. Instead, what exists today is the error-checking of countless technical specializations which reinforce local rational thought but leave the door open for big lies by suppressing the subjective and ignoring the universal. This type of local error-checking is done by ‘a health professional or scientist’. It is necessary but not sufficient. Emphasizing local journalism extends this objective error-checking into the subjective realm of personal and local experiences. This extension into the subjective is necessary. But what is missing is an extension in Teacher thought from specialization to meta-theory. That is because current society does not have a legitimate meta-theory. Mental symmetry appears to be a legitimate meta-theory.
Snyder points out the personal Mercy side of combating big lies. “The thing that stops them, or at least creates some resistance, is confidence about your own life, your own town, your own locality, and that confidence that some things are true, some things are false, that confidence that some reporters can be trusted that only can arise with some kind of local press.” This is necessary, but I suggest that it is insufficient. For instance, there are many sincere evangelical Christians who live lives of personal honesty and integrity. As Snyder recommends, they know how to distinguish truth from falsehood when dealing with personal subjective experiences. But when it comes to larger Teacher theories, then they are susceptible to the big lies of Donald Trump because they believe that the universe is governed by a God who uses His Personal Status to impose ‘truth’ upon the course of history. Like the professional, they too tend to be locally rational. Many of these sincere evangelical Christians are supporting Trump because he presents his big lies in a manner that sounds like attacking wokeism and restoring traditional morality.
Snyder mentions the danger of jumping mentally from specific Mercy experience to universal Teacher theory. “If we don’t have local press, then people jump immediately to the national. They jump immediately to the emotional. They jump immediately to conspiratorial. If we do have the local press, then we have some chance of building ourselves back towards a country which doesn’t just believe in truth but which has some truth to believe.” Snyder’s suggestion is accurate in the sense that the real struggle today is learning how to use Perceiver thought. Thus, if one acquires the ability to use Perceiver thought in local situations where one can use direct observation to verify the facts, then it becomes possible to use Perceiver thought when dealing with larger questions. As Snyder mentions, the flaw of ideology is universalizing from the specific MMNs of some group or individual to some Teacher overgeneralization. But the big lies of Donald Trump are flourishing within a scientific community that is capable of being rational at a local level as well as sincere Bible-believing Christians who are capable of following conscience and integrity at a personal level. Being able to use Perceiver thought at a local level is useful and necessary, but not sufficient.
Snyder refers to this underlying weakness. “We have to remember that a big lie is not just big in scale but that it has a certain political force, it expands into a vacuum and it draws other things in... We have to not just be willing to say things are true, we have to be willing to say, I believe that things are true, I believe that there is truth.” Stated cognitively, there is a vacuum in today’s society at the level of universal Teacher theory: Academic specialization creates this vacuum by specializing. Universal tolerance and/or various forms of mysticism create a vacuum by replacing genuine Teacher theories with the feeling of Teacher overgeneralization. Evangelical Christendom creates a vacuum by replacing the concept of a God of order with a God of the gaps who steps in mysteriously in some magical manner to impose divine Teacher order upon society. Similarly, the theory of biological evolution replaces a rational God with a Nature of random mutation, who also steps in mysteriously in some magical manner to impose Teacher order upon biology. In each case, one has to assert that Perceiver thought has the right to exist. One has to acquire sufficient Perceiver confidence to be able to construct Teacher theories that assemble the Perceiver facts rather than just asserting that Teacher order transcends the facts in some overgeneralized manner. Acquiring this cognitive ability is essential because big lies are very good at transcending the facts in some overgeneralized manner.
Snyder observes that “People are simultaneously gullible and cynical. They’re cynical about all the stuff they don’t like but they’re gullible to the things that make them feel good.” Cynicism and gullibility are two sides to the assertion that Perceiver thought has no right to exist. Cynicism observes that people are not using Perceiver thought and turns this into a universal Teacher thought: ‘Everyone lies. No one tells the truth.’ This allows me to reject Perceiver facts that come from cultural MMNs that I regard as ‘bad’. Gullibility allows Perceiver thought within my mind to be overwhelmed by cultural MMNs that I regard as ‘good’. Gullibility and cynicism give the impression that one is using Perceiver thought, while in fact one is allowing Mercy feelings of good and bad to predetermine what Perceiver thought regards as true and false.
The solution is to learn to use Perceiver thought, which means believing that Perceiver thought has a right to exist and be used. In Snyder’s words, “Be a hunter for truth, to seek and to find. And in that seeking and finding, there’s no choice but to assert the virtue of truth, that facts are there, [not just that] we work for facts we have but that we believe in truth.”
11. Investigate
This video continues with the topic of truth. Snyder summarizes, “Truth is the last line of defense. If there isn’t truth, then oligarchy always wins. If there aren’t facts, then spectacle always wins. An individual is always going to lose out to an oligarch who can make a better spectacle.” I am a Perceiver person who is conscious in the cognitive module that determines facts and truth and I have spent a lifetime struggling against various kinds of spectacle supported by various kinds of oligarchies. Thus, I know from deep personal experience what Snyder is talking about.
But there are some additional subtleties. Objective science naturally distinguishes between facts that are not emotional and emotions that cannot be factually trusted, similar to the MBTI division between Thinking and Feeling. MBTI Thinking is Perceiver thought without Mercy thought while MBTI Feeling is Mercy thought without Perceiver thought. Thus, science views truth as an alternative to the Mercy and Teacher emotions of spectacle.
Mental symmetry suggests something subtly different, which is recognizing that Perceiver truth is independent of emotions. I may hate or love some person. But the facts about that person are independent of my emotional attraction or repulsion. The struggle is not to hold onto facts rather than emotions, but rather to gain sufficient confidence to be able to recognize the facts in the middle of the emotions. Individuals can make a greater emotional impression than the spectacle of oligarchy if individuals are guided by Teacher meta-theories to exhibit purity. For instance, during the early Civil Rights Era in the 1950s and 60s, individuals were guided by the meta-theory of universal tolerance. Universal tolerance may be an overgeneralization but it still provided a starting point for challenging obvious racial and cultural inequalities. These individuals then demonstrated the purity of being guided purely by a Teacher meta-theory of racial equality despite facing extensive challenges from various cultural MMNs. Thus, the Teacher spectacle of the oligarchy was overcome by the personal examples of individuals being guided purely by the Teacher meta-theory of human equality. Summarizing, the individual can sometimes use truth to overcome the system by personally exhibiting a Teacher meta-theory that is more truthful than the ideology of the system. This is not easy, it is not quick, and it does not always succeed on the first attempt, but it is possible.
Snyder returns to the observation that “Propaganda is very predictable. What people want to hear is very predictable, what the Internet brings to you is very predictable and it makes you more predictable, What’s unpredictable is the world of facts. What’s unpredictable is the real world. What’s unpredictable are the things you find out if you actually look.” This is an accurate observation, but I am not sure that it is the best way of stating the principle. What actually differs is the kind of predictability. Truth is based in predictability, because truth looks for connections that remain the same over space and time. Thus, there is a deep predictability to the realm of truth. For instance, Newton’s laws of gravity apply to all physical movement on any planet anywhere in the universe at all times. That describes a deep and extensive predictability. But this predictability happens at an abstract, hidden level that is not immediately apparent. Such abstract, hidden predictability provides a solid foundation for surface variation. For instance, Newton’s laws of gravity express themselves in many different ways, such as dropping objects, projectile motion, pendulums, and satellites orbiting planets.
Propaganda replaces this deep predictability with surface predictability. Instead of searching for the underlying predictability of the laws of nature or principles of cognition, propaganda attempts to create truth by making the physical world predictable. For instance, in the typical oligarchic spectacle, everyone dresses the same, acts the same, exhibits the same symbols, and mouths the same slogans. The cognitive reason for this is that the absolute ‘truth’ of propaganda is rooted in specific, emotional, concrete, Mercy experiences. In contrast, the universal truth of scientific law and cognitive principles flows out of general, abstract, Teacher theories—which exhibit Teacher emotions of order-within-complexity. Teacher emotion is maximized through variations on a theme, when the same general theory expresses itself in a variety of similar ways. Stated succinctly, the absolute ‘truth’ of propaganda demands unison; the universal truth of understanding encourages harmony.
Snyder emphasizes again that reporters and journalists are needed. “We only have a very few journalists left. If we’re going to want to have a future as a free country, we’re going to need a lot more journalism, and especially journalism that comes from below, journalism which is about the places where we actually live, not just journalism that comes from the coasts or the big cities but journalism which is from the middle of the country.” This is an accurate observation. But there is a deeper problem of supply and demand. A primary reason why there are few local journalists is because there is no demand for such local journalism. The average person is not interested in using Perceiver thought to acquire facts. That is because the average person has become convinced by the postmodern doctrine that facts do not exist. If Perceiver thought is not encouraged to function—if there is no ‘marketplace of ideas’, then the only remaining option is to use emotional spectacle to overwhelm Perceiver thought into ‘knowing’ what is ‘true’. And as Snyder pointed out, big cities are better at generating of emotional spectacle than small towns in the country.
Snyder concludes, “I think one of the worst things which has happened to us is that we’ve lost the people who do the investigation about the things which really matter to us day to day, whether the water is polluted, whether the school board is good.” This is an accurate observation. But the even deeper problem is that we have lost the idea that it is good and valuable to use Perceiver thought to investigate facts that affect us personally in Mercy thought. Instead, it has become essentially taboo to apply any form of factual analysis to cultural and religious MMNs. We protest for or against such mental networks, we promote mental networks that we regard as oppressed or disadvantaged, and we cancel those who disapprove of the mental networks that we are supporting. We write academic papers about various mental networks and we study the history of these mental networks. But heaven help the person who dares to use Perceiver thought to factually investigate these mental networks. That type of local reporting we do not want.
12. Make Eye Contact and Small Talk
Snyder begins this video by describing his mental progression from surface predictability to deep predictability. “There’s now a new addition of the book. I’ve updated the text. It turns out that as I suspected the lessons in the book were not really about the Trump Administration. The lessons in the book were really about us and our country, so we’re still facing some pretty fundamental challenges.” Notice that Snyder began by focusing upon the external behavior of some specific administration. He then realized that the real predictability lies at the deeper level of ‘fundamental challenges’ that apply generically to ‘us and our country’. Snyder mentioned earlier that searching for truth is a process. One aspect of this process is that one often begins with a surface understanding of truth, because it is easiest to determine the empirical facts of concrete physical experiences. However, if one continues investigating, one begins to notice other situations that are similar, leading to a growing understanding of underlying, more fundamental principles.
This video focuses upon maintaining human contact with other individuals. Snyder suggests, “Make eye contact and small talk. This is not just polite. It is part of being a citizen and a responsible member of society. It’s also a way to stay in touch with their surroundings, to break down social barriers and understand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a culture of denunciation you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life.”
The previous two videos focused upon using Perceiver thought. When using Perceiver thought to examine the facts, the natural tendency is to shut down personal Mercy of feelings, essentially jumping from the MBTI category of Feeling to Thinking. Thus, people who hold on to wrong facts in Perceiver thought, or who try to use Perceiver thought in an inappropriate manner, become viewed as evil and inhuman. One needs to be continually reminded that the goal is not to judge evil but rather to reach mental wholeness in which all cognitive modules function in a harmonious manner. Using emotional Mercy experiences to overwhelm Perceiver thought is wrong, but it is also wrong to use Perceiver thought to dehumanize personal experiences in Mercy thought. Making eye contact interacts with another person at the level of Mercy thought and subjective feelings. It recognizes that the person with whom I am interacting is also a fellow human being with deep Mercy feelings. Small talk then adds Perceiver thought by interacting with another person at the personal level of specific facts.
Such personal interaction is also useful because it makes Theory of Mind more accurate. Theory of Mind uses small physical clues to guess which mental networks are currently active within another person’s mind. Eye contact and small talk are ways of training Theory of Mind by socially engaging with others’ personal MMNs in non-threatening ways.
Snyder observes that the onset of government persecution is typically preceded by the breaking of social interaction. “If you read first-person accounts of, let’s say, Germany in the 1930s or the Soviet Union for that matter in the 1930s, there’s very often the heartbreaking moment, it comes before the worst, it comes before immigration, it comes before state persecution, it comes before death. It’s the moment when the neighbor stops greeting you, it’s the moment when somebody you’ve known your whole life crosses the street instead of making eye contact or shaking your hand.” In other words, when one stops treating someone as a person in Mercy thought, when a person has become internally dehumanized, it then becomes emotionally possible to externally dehumanize that individual through persecution or even death.
This institutional dehumanization can be fought by simply maintaining human contact. “If someone is an immigrant, or someone is of another race, or if someone has some reason to feel that in general or the specific moment they’re being left out, they’re being pushed aside, small gestures can make a big difference.” Maintaining human contact at a personal level with some marginalized individual is quite different than protesting on behalf of some marginalized group. The individual in a mass protest is surrounded by others with similar mental networks. He may be protesting for some abstract concept of universal tolerance motivated by Internet memes, without having any personal grasp of what it actually feels like to be an individual within the marginalized group on behalf of which he is protesting. In addition, he is protesting against some evil ‘them’, not realizing that ‘they’ also have personal emotions. I am not suggesting that one should excuse all behavior and show compassion on everyone. There are people in the world who have truly become monsters, people like Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump. Maintaining human contact will not save such individuals. But maintaining human contact can play a role in saving many of the followers of such monsters.
Maintaining human contact in Mercy thought needs to be practiced in addition to investigating Perceiver facts. This is not a case of Mercy versus Perceiver but rather Mercy plus Perceiver. I can recognize in Mercy thought that some disadvantaged individual or some follower of a tyrant is a fellow human being without having to suppress the facts in Perceiver thought. Facts are independent of feelings. This sounds obvious, but it is very difficult to apply when immersed within the amplified feelings of a despotic regime.
Snyder addresses this difficulty. “I get all the time the question, ‘How am I supposed to talk to people who disagree with me? How am I supposed to reason with people who seem unreasonable to me? How am I supposed to deal with the former friend or the relative who takes views which just seem not to conform to reality?’ And the answer to this is there is no magic bullet. There is no way to solve this problem. But what we can do is we can remind one another that we’re all people, and this is in itself very important. If you make eye contact, if you make small talk, if you hear somebody out every once in a while, at least you’re reminding them that you’re another human being.” I know from personal experience that this is difficult to practice. But I think that Snyder is right.
Looking at this cognitively, I think that the way out lies in realizing that Mercy emotions are different than Teacher emotions. Ideology conflates these two by using Teacher emotions to amplify the Mercy emotions of some person and/or group. Dehumanizing some person who belongs to the wrong group falls into the mental trap of ideology by equating the person in Mercy thought with the ideology that they espouse in Teacher thought. A democratic society, in contrast, distinguishes between the Teacher emotions of institutions, societal structures, and systems of law, and the personal Mercy emotions of individuals who functioning within these institutions, structures, and laws. Thus, being able to interact humanly with a person in Mercy thought while at the same time abhorring the Teacher ideology that this person follows in Teacher thought helps to teach the emotional separation between Mercy emotion and Teacher emotion that is required for democratic society to function.
Snyder adds that human contact is also a way of going beyond the limited interaction of the Internet. “It’s also a way of keeping us out of the digital world. It’s a way of checking what happens to us in the digital world. It’s a way of making sure that we can still deal with other human beings. It’s a way of keeping ourselves human.” As mentioned before, the real world is much richer than the limited online world of social media. One is dealing with real humans in physical bodies with histories and a wide range of physical needs and desires. It is this wide range of sensory input that helps to train Theory of Mind, training that one does not receive when interacting with people on the Internet.
13. Practice Corporeal Politics
Snyder suggests that the social isolation of the covid pandemic helped to instigate the January 2020 invasion of the capital building. “I’d go so far as to suggest that the terrible events in the US in late 2020, the coup attempt that was carried out by Mr. Trump and the support he had for that, had something to do with people being too much on their own, spending too much time in front of the screen, being too much separated from other people, being too much exposed to the falseness that you can find on the Internet. The second reason why corporal politics is important, being outside is important, being with other people is important, is just sociological. Being outside, being in physical contact with other people, mixes things up. If all we have is virtual contact, the virtual contact is predictable. The whole way that social media works is to classify you, to sort you out by some lowest common denominator and then to get you in a virtual space with other people, or bots for that matter, who share the same characteristics.”
Looking at this cognitively, the real world is governed by Perceiver connections of natural cause-and-effect that cannot be changed. This predictability does not involve visible objects and experiences but rather underlying connections between cause and effect. Living in the real world teaches the common sense of knowing these predictable connections natural cause-and-effect; studying the real world leads to a scientific understanding of natural cause-and-effect. The Internet, in contrast, is artificial. The physical hardware of the Internet is subject to natural cause-and-effect, but it is possible to write software that creates the illusion of arbitrary connections of cause-and-effect. This is done when writing a computer game. Similarly, interaction on social media is guided by mental networks.
The Internet makes it possible to overcome the limitations of space, which means that one does not have to interact with one’s physical neighbor but rather can connect with people all around the world who share similar cultural and religious MMNs. Social media is designed to connect people together who have similar mental networks. Messages on the Internet are transmitted by computer protocols that guarantee repeatability. But what a person says on an Internet message is arbitrary.
Putting this together, people on the Internet are ignoring that they live in the physical world, they are connecting with people in a way that transcends physical location, they are pretending to live in alternate realities that have nothing to do with real life, and they are communicating with others who share similar mental networks in a manner that does not have to acknowledge reality. The end result is the falseness to which Snyder refers. Going further, the covid pandemic and lockdown caused people to spend excessive time within the alternate reality of the Internet while lacking interaction with the reality. The end result was people who were cut adrift from the common sense of reality while vulnerable to being manipulated by mental networks. A dictator such as Trump specializes in manipulating peoples mental networks in a manner that ignores the facts of reality.
Snyder mentions again the predictability of the Internet. I think that this is because of the predictable messages that Snyder keeps receiving from those who spend too much time on social media. As mentioned before, when emotional Mercy experiences and mental networks are used to overwhelm Perceiver thought, then the deeper Perceiver predictability of common sense becomes replaced by the external Perceiver predictability of memes and stock phrases.
Looking further at physical reality, Snyder adds that “You’re making a point by choosing to put your body in a certain place, at a certain time, with other people. That’s what taking a stand means.” He says that this is because “What happens in the real world has a kind of staying power in human memory.” This refers to two related cognitive principles. The first principle is that Server actions give stability to Teacher words. For instance, the words that I hear in the classroom tend to stick within my mind when I do homework or perform labs. Thus, the doing of taking a stand or going to a protest (Snyder mentions going to a Black Lives Matter protest) brings mental stability to words of conviction or protest. The second principle is that doing something in the real world generates more sensory input than merely sitting passively in front of a computer and typing on a keyboard. In order to immerse oneself within the alternate reality of computers and the Internet, one has to temporarily ignore most sensory input from the physical world.
In conclusion, Snyder’s arguments appear to be affected by his specialization as a historian. For him, Perceiver truth involves primarily the facts of history, which means that truth is discovered primarily by journalists. Snyder mentions political science and science fiction in his videos, but he does not refer to science itself, nor the predictability of scientific laws. However, one of the basic principles of scientific research is that scientific discoveries must be repeatable. It must be possible to predict what will happen independently of time and place. This does not mean that one can predict in a deterministic fashion exactly what will happen. Instead, quantum uncertainty as well as small variations mean that situations that appear identical will eventually diverge. However, the idea of predictability is still fundamental to science, and Snyder as a historian does not mention this predictability in these videos but rather assigns predictability to the Internet with its memes.
As a historian of Nazism and Communism, Snyder has a deep understanding of the impact that mental networks can have upon society. But Snyder describes this primarily as an outsider observing the behavior that is being caused by these mental networks, and his advice focuses upon physical behavior as opposed to internal motivation.
Thus, I suggest that Snyder’s analysis is accurate and profound, but it also appears to be incomplete, because Snyder is viewing reality and society through the lens of a historian. I have attempted to escape such a limitation when developing mental symmetry by becoming at least conversant in a wide range of fields.
14. Establish a Private Life
Snyder points out that tyrannies are less powerful than they appear. “When we think about totalitarianism, we imagine some kind of all-powerful ruler who can somehow assume total control. But that’s not the way that totalitarianism really works.” A tyranny appears all-powerful because of the nature of absolute truth. When Mercy emotions overwhelm Perceiver thought, then this leads to a sense of total certainty within Perceiver thought. Ideology then uses Teacher emotion to amplify this total certainty, leading to the feeling that the regime has absolute power everywhere. But a tyranny has to exert its power in the real world through existing institutions and professionals. And we saw earlier video that a political party that optimizes the ability to manipulate people’s mental networks loses the ability to use Perceiver thought in a rational manner. Similarly, a tyranny co-opts institutions and corrupts professionals, which means that these organizations and individuals will inevitably function less efficiently. The end result is a mismatch between the internal sense that a tyranny is all-powerful and the external reality of massive but still limited power.
Snyder suggests that a tyranny controls people primarily by blurring the lines between public and private. “How totalitarianism works is by breaking each of us down. And the way that we are broken down is we lose track of, or we lose control of, the border between a public life and a private life. The thing that allows us to be individuals is that we have control of that life. We have some power over how we behave in public, we have some power over how we behave in private, and we have some power over the line between those two things.”
Looking at this cognitively, a democracy does not invade people’s private lives. That is because it is guided by universal Perceiver truth based in the Teacher order of institutions and systems. These provide a general framework for human society giving individuals freedom to make specific choices. Democracy has discovered that giving freedom to individuals leads to the greatest Teacher order-within-complexity. This principle is explicitly stated by capitalism, which asserts that the greatest wealth for society as a whole can be achieved through a free market within an economic structure.
Tyranny, in contrast, controls people by manipulating mental networks. But a mental network must be triggered in order to become activated. Mental networks of tyrannical control can be triggered in public through propaganda, symbols, and massive spectacles. But these mental networks will not be triggered when citizens are living in private, away from the propaganda, symbols, and spectacles of the regime. Thus, the regime will view private life as a ‘lawless’ domain governed by mental networks that are not subject to government influence. This desire to invade private life will be motivated by the Teacher emotions of ideology. Ideology uses Teacher thought to magnify personal and cultural MMNs. Teacher thought feels bad when there are exceptions to the general rule, areas where the Teacher theory does not apply. Private life will be viewed as an exception to the general rule of ideology, and the regime will be driven emotionally to eliminate this exception to the rule. This explains why a radical regime will attempt to break down the barriers between public and private life.
Technical thought tends to interpret this invasion of private life as a loss of control. Technical thought naturally specializes, maintaining control within some plan or specialization, while delegating control to others outside of this specialization. An ideological tyranny eliminates the ability of individuals to develop private lives where they can specialize and becoming unique by imposing the sameness and predictability of ideology upon all of human existence.
Snyder explains, “What tyrants will do, or what people who are trying to weaken or undermine democracy will do, is get us used to crossing that line, get us used to getting ourselves away, get us used to the spectacle of other people’s private lives being constantly exposed, such that that very exposure, that very moment of revelation, even if nothing is really being revealed, that very moment of revelation becomes a substitute for the facts themselves, becomes a substitute for the things that we really need to know.” Notice that what matters is not learning facts about some private life, but rather the emotional experience of people having their private lives revealed. An ideological regime wants to create the impression within people’s minds that the ideologies of the regime also apply to private life. This can be done by using spectacles of private lives being revealed to create mental networks that ‘the regime could be spying on me’ and then triggering these mental networks through repeated spectacles of revealing people’s private lives. If people have the feeling that ‘Big daddy could be watching me’ then this will ensure that the mental networks of official ideology remain activated to guide thinking and behavior even in private life.
Snyder clarifies, “The things that we really need to know are the things that are produced by journalists, by reporters. The things that we need to know are facts that take actual work to produce. They are not revelations, they are not exposures. They are not the things which shock us, or which immediately draw our attention.” Absolute truth uses emotional experiences to overwhelm—to shock—Perceiver thought into ‘knowing’ what is ‘true’. Discovering universal truth, in contrast, means examining situations carefully from many different perspectives to determine which connections are actually repeated. As a historian, Snyder focuses upon the facts of history, which are initially uncovered and described by journalists. However, there are also the scientific truths of natural law as well as the cognitive truths of mental cause-and-effect.
Snyder adds, “Our private life, our personality, our way of being in the world, it’s our bulwark, it’s our base, it’s the weight that allows us to stride through the world, it’s what keeps us grounded, it’s what keeps us on the ground. If we give away too much of ourselves for free, we lose that weight, we lose ourselves, we lose that weight, we lose our ability to stride confidently or to take stands.” I think that this is felt most keenly by the Contributor person who is using technical thought to carry out some plan within some specialization. Perceiver confidence describes the ability to hold onto facts despite emotional pressure; Server confidence describes the ability to perform some task despite emotional pressure; Contributor confidence describes the ability to continue pursuing some plan despite emotional pressure. A modern specialized economy depends upon the ability of individuals to pursue plans within their private lives—within the specializations where they have expertise as professionals. When this private life becomes emotionally invaded by mental networks of social expectation or official ideology, then the ability to use technical thought becomes compromised, because one is always wondering, ‘What will others think?’ or ‘Am I following ideology?’ Saying this another way, people within a specialized technical economy are locally rational. Because they specialize, they are not globally rational, but they are at least locally rational within their specialization. Ideological invasion of private life limits the ability of specialists to be locally rational, invading the one area of existence where they have mental weight and self-confidence.
This vulnerability obviously becomes amplified if one’s private life contains actions and experiences that would receive disapproval from society if others found out. However, it is important to realize that public invasion of private life is a threat to personal existence even for those who have no skeletons in their closet to hide.
This feeling of losing confidence because of private life being invaded may be felt most keenly by the male Contributor technical specialist, but it applies to everyone because we are all finite creatures living within finite bodies. The advantage of this finiteness is that we can all create internal worlds that are unique, which differ from the internal worlds of others. Snyder elaborates, “Part of having a private life is reading different things than other people read. Part of having a private life is having conversations that are different than other people’s conversations. Part of having a private life is just having the time and space to think about things for yourself and to come up with your own opinions.” Notice that Snyder’s statements apply to abstract thought. One is using the Teacher words of books and conversations as a starting point for developing an internal world that is unique, which implies that this internal world is also different from the common physical world shared by all people.
This puts a different spin upon Snyder’s view of the Internet. Painting with a broad brush, Snyder views the Internet as bad and books as good. But both books and the Internet make it possible to escape from reality. There are historical books, but there are also books of fiction that have nothing to do with reality. The Internet contains social media that uses mental networks to create echo chambers that are divorced from reality, but the Internet also contains many factual articles and videos, such as this essay as well as the videos being analyzed by this essay. Snyder says in video 9, “I don’t want to idealize books, certainly not my books, but it is clearly the case that when people are at the end of reading a book they have in some way been changed in some way been enriched, something has been added to them.” I suggested in that section that this is because a book is a physical example of a Teacher theory, because it places words within the Teacher order of sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. Browsing the Internet, in contrast, is more like reading through a dictionary where the subject and/or viewpoint continually changes, and there is no consistent, coherent chain of thought. However, it is also possible to approach the Internet like a book. That is what I am doing in this essay. I am treating Snyder’s videos as a coherent, integrated analysis of tyranny. And I am being changed and enriched because I am discovering new facets to mental symmetry that I have not thought of before. Thus, it is important not to conflate the medium with the typical way that the average person treats this medium. In other words, I suggest that Snyder is idealizing books. In Snyder’s favor, evidence does suggest that learning from a book is superior to learning from digital media. And the average Internet user does not write lengthy essays on YouTube videos as I am doing. But this does not mean that books are automatically better than the Internet.
Snyder clarifies, “In order to be your own person, in order to have a private life, what you need is not just to have an ‘us’ and ‘them’ of for and against, they’re wrong and I’m right, you have to have your own perspective, which sometimes agrees with those people, sometimes agrees with those people, but fundamentally comes from its own place.” This is a fundamental point. Learning to think for oneself means using Perceiver thought to factually analyze mental networks by pulling them apart and examining the details. Choosing to believe what others do not believe leaves existing cultural MMNs intact; it simply changes their Perceiver label from ‘true’ to ‘false’ because their Mercy label has shifted from ‘good’ to ‘bad’. For instance, the typical teenage rebel shifts from regarding anything his parents said as ‘true’ to disregarding everything his parents said as ‘false’. It is much more difficult to use Perceiver thought to examine mental networks in detail in order to determine which aspects one accepts as factually true and which aspects one rejects as factually false. That is because triggering a mental network activates the entire mental network, and a mental network will generate pain when it is triggered and experiences content that is partially inconsistent with its structure. The solution is to replace one mental network with another, such as replacing MMNs of personal authority with TMNs of integrated understanding. Thus, learning to think for oneself will typically involve developing Teacher thought by reading books and having conversations.
15. Contribute to Good Causes
Snyder begins, “There are countless people who are doing good things in the world and that we can sometimes help them with a little bit of money.” In a capitalist economy, individuals specialize by developing technical thought in some restricted area and then selling their goods and services to others while buying the goods and services of others. This may generate wealth, but the resulting locally rational technical thought makes a capitalist economy vulnerable to being emotionally manipulated by tyrants and ideologies. But it is also possible for individuals to guide the course of such a society by financially supporting specializations that they approve.
Such donations add an emotional element to the objective bias of technical specializations, because one is giving to some specialization because it is supporting some need or following some vision of which one emotionally approves. In Snyder’s words, “You’ll have made a free choice that supports civil society and helps others to do good.” The previous video described the ideology of the regime limiting personal choice by extending into the private realm. Giving to a good cause extends personal choice beyond the private realm by choosing to financially support other people and groups with other technical skills.
Snyder then refers to “East European thinkers in the 1970s and 1980s who are concerned about the problem of power’s ability to isolate individuals, who are concerned about the way that relationships could only flow vertically from power down to individuals.” This describes what happens when the ideology of the regime imposes itself upon the private lives of individuals. People lose the ability to have private lives where they can choose what they will do and with whom they will associate as individuals. This replaces the horizontal relationships between one individual and another with the vertical relationship of the same ideology being emotionally imposed upon everyone. When that is the societal situation, then one must deliberately choose to interact with one’s neighbor.
Snyder refers to this interpersonal interaction as civil society. “Civil society is a place where things can happen that allow us to realize ourselves as individuals and as citizens. Civil society also has an important political function. Civil society can do things that governments can’t do, and civil society can also make sure that governments don’t do some things that governments shouldn’t do.” Civil society is like social media because in both cases people are interacting with others who share similar mental networks. The primary difference is that social media occurs within the artificial, limited realm of the Internet with the interaction limited primarily to the sharing of messages, links, memes and videos, while in a civil society, people are cooperating within the real world to perform actions that will affect the real world. Social media can become totally disconnected from reality while civil society works within reality. Social media is limited to words and computer-generated media, while civil society performs actions within a real world that is governed by natural law. Social media can be hijacked by dictatorial regimes, because they are disconnected from reality and because they can be emotionally manipulated by the regime through spectacles, ‘fake news’, and conspiracy theories. Civil society, in contrast, is less susceptible to being manipulated because it deals with the facts of reality and because it uses Server actions to address actual physical needs rather than just tickling mental networks. Social media can play a role in civil society if the online interaction is factually based and the goal remains improving reality, but this does not happen naturally.
Civil society is also capable of meeting needs in a personal way that government cannot do. Democratic institutions have to apply programs in a consistent manner that respects Teacher order without being swayed by specific Mercy emotions. This focus upon Teacher order and universal truth avoids government corruption but it also leads to programs and policies that are bureaucratic and inhuman. Civil society, in contrast, can focus upon individual needs in Mercy thought. Instead of having to help everyone in an equitable manner, individuals can choose which people and which groups they will assist. This personalized focus upon Mercy emotions is more appropriate when dealing with certain issues. A properly functioning democratic government will recognize that there are certain areas where it is more beneficial for government to stay out of the way and encourage individuals to cooperate.
16. Learn From Peers In Other Countries
Snyder begins by addressing the topic of American exceptionalism. “A lot of the things that seem commonsensical to me in the book and which I think might have proved useful to Americans from the book I learned from political prisoners, dissidents, oppositionists in other countries. This in a way is where the whole book comes from. I’m an American. I care about my country. I think I do have a sense of what’s exceptional about it. But exceptionalism, the idea that your country is always and in everything exceptional, the idea that your country is always and in everything better than other countries, the idea that your country for example is automatically a democracy no matter what happens, that idea is doom and that idea almost doomed us.”
This is an unusual statement for an American to make. I would like to expand on my comment by taking some paragraphs to describe what it feels like to live next door to American exceptionalism. I am a Canadian and I live about 10 km (about 6 miles in American units) from the American border. Canadians visit the States (Canadians typically referred to the US as ‘the States’), they watch American movies and American television channels, they learn American history, they buy American goods, but they are not Americans. When I was young, I viewed the States as a sort of paradise that was richer, more exciting, and more advanced than Canada. When Americans viewed their country as inherently superior to other nations, I knew from personal experience that they were correct. However, Canadians also noticed when American movies rewrote history and gave Americans credit for what other nations had done. We also noticed how little the average American knew about Canada—or about other countries in general. But we excused this because the evidence showed that America really was an exceptional nation, a relative paradise on earth. We all knew and believed that America was a beacon of freedom, the arsenal of democracy, and the center of education and invention.
This started to change around the beginning of 21st century because we observed that America seemed to be going downhill. Malls that used to be regarded as the epitome of shopping paradise were closing. Educational benchmarks were falling and we read regularly about school shootings. We also read stories of people paying astronomical medical fees while seeing statistics of life expectancy going down. Our attention shifted away from American cities, because Asian cities started to look like visions of the future, while European cities appeared to be more liveable. When the typical American stated that America was the best place on earth, we exchanged glances with one other, knowing that this was no longer the case. But we allowed Americans to indulge in their fantasy of world supremacy as long as they kept their wishful thinking to themselves and continued to support the international rule of law.
DONALD TRUMP HAS DESTROYED THIS in the first few months of his second term. And the average American has no clue what has happened. The depths of this shift in Canadian mentality is illustrated by the change in the polls in the last three months. A poll taken on December 30, 2024 indicated that support for the Conservatives was at 45% while support for the Liberals was at 16%. A poll on March 24, 2025 indicates that the Liberals are now at 46% with the Conservatives are down to 38%. Why this shift? First, when Trump took office, he broke the comprehensive free trade agreement with Canada that he himself signed during his previous term—based upon blatant lies about fentanyl, and he then repeatedly referred to Canada as the 51st state. Second, Justin Trudeau resigned. I recently read a comment made by a Canadian public official saying that when the government makes a policy, then the first consideration is following the Constitution. This is followed immediately by the second consideration of respecting agreements with other countries. Following parliamentary legislation comes third after these first two principles. Thus, for Trump to blatantly violate his trade agreement with Canada is an act of legislative blasphemy. Even deeper, for Trump to suggest that Canada should be the 51st state is a stab in the back from one’s closest friend.
At this point, the average Canadian, as well as many citizens in many other countries, now views American exceptionalism as world-threatening lunacy. And the vast majority (about 90%) of Canadians do not want to become the 51st state.
Snyder has learned to question American exceptionalism by studying similar sentiments of exceptionalism within other countries. “I’d seen it in other countries. I’d seen similar things in Ukraine. I’d seen similar things in Russia. I’d seen similar things in history, and I was very worried by the American exceptionalist tendency to say our institutions will protect us. This was a terrible mistake because, of course, institutions, whether they’re ours or not, are only as good as we are.” Looking at this cognitively, a country or society becomes exceptional by applying principles of cognitive and societal wholeness. A fundamental aspect of pursuing wholeness is becoming emotionally driven by TMNs of personal and societal integrity rather than by cultural MMNs. The problem is that every child begins with a mind centered around MMNs of childish experience, based upon emotional respect for authority figures. This inevitable principle of cognitive development is described by Piaget’s stages of cognitive development.
This means that what one generation does for rational reasons, the next generation will do for cultural reasons. Even if one generation succeeds in becoming internally motivated by TMNs of rational understanding, the next generation may exhibit the same behavior, but this behavior will be motivated by cultural MMNs. The internal TMNs of rational understanding that produced the genuine exceptionalism will then become replaced by external institutions that physically represent and express these TMNs of order and structure. Therefore, any society that becomes exceptional is always one or two generations away from ceasing to be exceptional. The only way that a country or society can continue to remain exceptional is by ensuring that every generation is taught to make the transition from cultural MMNs to rational and internal TMNs. A cultural mindset of exceptionalism leads inevitably to the end of exceptionalism, because it treats exceptionalism as a fundamental aspect of cultural MMNs, rather than recognizing that each generation must pay the personal price to become exceptional.
Going further, Postmodernism made it impossible for America to remain an exceptional country. That is because postmodernism questions the very concept of being guided by TMNs of rational understanding. Quoting from Wikipedia, “Postmodernisms share an attitude of skepticism towards grand explanations and established ways of doing things... In science, it emphasizes multiple ways of seeing things, and how our cultural and personal backgrounds shape how we see the world, making it impossible to be completely objective. In philosophy, education, history, politics, and many other fields, it encourages critical re-examination of established institutions and social norms, embracing diversity, and breaking down disciplinary boundaries.” Thus, once postmodernism became established in American academia, it was inevitable that actual American exceptionalism would cease within a generation and all that would remain was the fantasy of American exceptionalism.
Snyder then returns to the right to vote. “One of the things we can learn from other countries, from people who have behaved more courageously often than we have, in places like Slovakia or Belarus, is that people really do care about voting, that people who have had harsher experiences than Americans, have people whose lives have been further down the line towards authoritarianism, realize just how important a vote is.” As was mentioned before, the right to vote is fundamental. But what is even more fundamental than choosing between candidates is shaping the mental networks that determine which candidates one will be allowed to choose between. In places like Slovakia or Belarus, the right to vote is critical because voting makes it possible to replace a dictator with a more democratic leader. Given such an alternative, the right to vote is central. But what use is the right to vote if one has to choose between one form of dictatorship and another, or between one form of exceptionalism and another?
Looking at the current American situation, Trump obviously invokes cultural MMNs of American exceptionalism. MAGA, Make America Great Again, implies that America has a natural right to greatness—to exceptionalism. But Trump is currently pursuing MAGA in a manner that guarantees that America will not return to greatness. Instead of pursuing the rational TMNs that make greatness possible, Trump is imposing cultural and political MMNs of America upon opposing groups and countries, while violating and suppressing the institutions and legal structures that bring Teacher order to America and to the world.
But the alternative is the Teacher overgeneralization of universal tolerance. ‘One person, one vote’ is a significant principle, but it is also a Teacher overgeneralization that treats everybody the same without looking at factual details. Going further, when a Teacher overgeneralization of universal equality is taught, then the group that teaches this Teacher overgeneralization will feel that it has the right to tell others how to apply this Teacher overgeneralization in practice. Looking at this cognitively, Teacher overgeneralization leads to sweeping statements and not valid Teacher theories. But if one continues to use some Teacher theory, then it will turn into a TMN that emotionally imposes its explanation upon the mind. This will happen even when the theory that one is using is not a legitimate Teacher theory but rather an overgeneralization. Thus, those who think and teach about universal equality will feel emotionally driven to impose their views of universal equality upon the rest of the people.
This imposition of universal tolerance upon others will happen inevitably if those who think and teach about universal equality are professors and educators who already feel that they are special people with Mercy status who have the right to teach others. And there is no way to recover from such a situation because any attempt to discuss the topic in a factual matter will be rejected because Teacher overgeneralization transcends factual analysis and is threatened by factual analysis. The end result could be described as liberal academic exceptionalism, emotionally backed up in this case not by cultural and national MMNs but rather by TMNs of overgeneralization combined with the cultural MMNs of academia. This academic exceptionalism will tend to become implicitly blended with national exceptionalism, leading to the feeling that American liberal academics teaching in American liberal universities are inherently more intellectually and morally enlightened than other academics teaching in other universities. This will express itself as universal tolerance that is intolerant of other viewpoints. And this universal tolerance will be most intolerant of those who attempt to use Perceiver thought to make factual statements about morality or social interaction.
That was the choice which voters faced in the 2024 American presidential elections. They could choose between Trump’s blatant conservative American exceptionalism based in American cultural and religious MMNs or Kamala Harris’ implicit liberal American exceptionalism based in academic TMNs of universal tolerance. When one has to choose ‘between the devil and the deep blue sea’, then having the right to vote is not enough. Snyder deeply understands the dangers of Trump’s form of American exceptionalism. I am not certain that he fully understands the dangers of liberal American academic exceptionalism, especially since he is an accepted member of the American academic elite. However, his research has led him in the direction of a fuller understanding, because he has studied both the Nazi form of right-wing dictatorship and the communist form of left-wing dictatorship.
Snyder’s understanding may be incomplete, but his conclusion definitely needs to be heeded. “If you really want to be a free American, you have to drop the American exceptionalism. You have to drop that right away. And you have to realize we are all in this together. Democracy is rising or falling around the world. The lessons that we can learn are common, and the moment that we’re capable of learning from other people we actually become more free ourselves.” Amen! Preach it! Notice that Snyder is addressing both the right-wing form of American political exceptionalism as well as the left-wing form of American academic exceptionalism. Thus, it may be possible that Snyder continues to hold to the Teacher overgeneralization of universal tolerance not because he is convinced that this is the best theory, but rather because there is currently no alternative theory. The right wing is fixated upon attacking wokeism without providing an alternative theory to universal tolerance. But Thomas Kuhn pointed out that a scientist will not let go of one paradigm unless presented with an alternative, superior paradigm. One of my motivations for developing mental symmetry is to come up with a rational meta-theory that can provide an alternative paradigm to the current overgeneralization of universal tolerance.
17: Listen For Dangerous Words
Snyder begins, “Listen for dangerous words. Be alert to the use of the words ‘extremism’ and ‘terrorism’. Be alive to the fatal notions of emergency and exception. Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.” The previous video discussed the topic of exceptionalism, and a distinction was made between the myth of exceptionalism and the actual requirements to become exceptional. A country or society becomes exceptional by allowing MMNs to be guided by internal TMNs of rational understanding. This describes the basis for democracy, science, civil society, the rule of law, and monotheistic religion. The problem is that when some society meets these requirements for becoming exceptional, then the next generation will grow up within this exceptional society and build their childish minds upon cultural MMNs acquired from living within the exceptional society. A similar cognitive transition happens with the children of someone who became wealthy. The children know how to live within wealth, but they do not necessarily know how to create wealth.
This will eventually lead to an existential crisis because the cultural MMNs of being exceptional are no longer matched by the reality of being exceptional. For instance, Americans still feel that America should be Number One, but America no longer is Number One. Instead, it is slipping down various ranks of societal development. Existential crises go beyond the normal bottom-line thinking of technical thought because they threaten the framework within which technical thought functions. Thus, it will become apparent that core mental networks society need to be changed.
A dictatorship uses dangerous words to trigger the wrong core mental networks. Instead of questioning cultural MMNs of exceptionalism, as Snyder recommended at the end of the previous video, a dictatorship will attempt to reassert cultural MMNs of exceptionalism by using dangerous words to question the TMNs and institutions that make exceptionalism possible. Saying this another way, society faces a choice between supporting the mental networks of the myth of exceptionalism or supporting the mental networks that produce exceptionalism. The dictatorship will make the wrong choice. Thus, it is appropriate to ‘be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary’, because the dictator is not using patriotic vocabulary to actually protect the country but rather to make citizens feel as if the country is being protected.
For instance, trade between US, Canada, and Mexico is officially governed by a free-trade agreement that Trump negotiated in 2020. This was preceded by a free trade agreement between the three countries that was negotiated in 1994. And that was preceded by an automobile manufacturing free trade agreement between Canada and the US that was signed back in 1965. Such agreements may be flawed, but they are at least partial examples of countries interacting economically guided by TMNs of the rule of law. When Trump took office in January 2025, he immediately used the dangerous words of fentanyl addiction to violate these trade agreements and impose tariffs. Despite the fact that less than one percent of the fentanyl seized at the American border comes from Canada, Trump kept asserting that America was being flooded by fentanyl from Canada. One can tell that this dangerous language had no substance, because Trump was at the same time weakening government programs that investigate the laundering of drug money. It is now clear that Trump’s actual goal is to ‘make America great again’ by emphasizing cultural MMNs of American exceptionalism.
Snyder also mentions the German ‘stab in the back’ myth, which maintained that Germany did not really lose World War I but rather was ‘stabbed in the back’ by the German political elite. “Another very dangerous idea which reappeared in late 2020 was the idea of a stab in the back. The stab in the back is the notion that the good guys would have won if not for the traitors at home. The stab in the back idea comes precisely from Germany in the early 20th century. It’s the idea that Germany would have won the First World War had not the Jews and the Socialists betrayed Germany at home. One of the things that I realized was dangerous, or that I recognized as a dangerous word in late 2020, was this this idea that mister Trump articulated of being himself stabbed in the back, the idea that he, the most powerful man in the world, was a victim, that everyone was lined up against him, that he would have won had it not been for those traitors.” Stated cognitively, a ‘stab in the back’ means that someone who claimed to be a close friend, someone whom you depended upon to preserve the core mental networks of your existence when they were threatened, suddenly turned on you, and used your relationship of trust as an opportunity to attack you at an existential level.
Ironically, at the same time that Trump is claiming that America is being ‘stabbed in the back’ by the rest of the world, Trump is stabbing America’s closest ally Canada in the back (as well as betraying other countries such as Ukraine). Quoting from a February 2025 PBS article, “The ties between the two countries are without parallel. Nearly $3.6 billion Canadian (US$2.5 billion) worth of goods and services cross the border each day. Canada is the top export destination for 36 U.S. states and 77% of Canada’s exports go to the United States. Each day, about 400,000 people cross the world’s longest international border. There is close cooperation on defense, border security and law enforcement, and a vast overlap in culture, traditions and pastimes. ‘He wants to come after us?’ said Doug Ford, the leader of Canada’s most populous province of Ontario. He has said that it feels like being stabbed in the heart by a family member.”
Promoting a ‘stab in the back’ myth is dangerous because it triggers core mental networks of personal and social survival in order to destroy opponents to the dictatorship of the regime and its ideology. ‘Stab in the back’ myths function at the core emotional level of mental networks of existence. Nazi Germany illustrated that such myths are capable of emotionally supporting government programs of genocide in which the official goal is to wipe out the existence of entire groups. Saying this another way, a stab in the back myth is capable of driving actual ‘stabs in the back’.
Similarly, what really bothers Canadians is not that Trump is imposing tariffs upon Canada, but rather that Trump continually belittles Canada’s very right to exist as a sovereign nation. Unlike Hitler, Trump has not threatened to eliminate all Canadians; his threats have not reached the level of genocide or Holocaust. But he has repeatedly threatened to eliminate the country, history, and culture of Canada. At the level of national existence, Trump really is stabbing Canada in the back. How should such a country respond?
The danger is to descend emotionally to the level of the dictatorial regime, responding to the receiving of existential threats by making existential threats. It is important to recognize factually that the relationship has changed; one really has been stabbed in the back by one’s close friend. But the emotional outrage needs to be redirected into the positive direction of pursuing the TMNs of legitimate exceptionalism that the failing superpower used to practice but now only claims to practice. In other words, if America abandons the American dream, then other countries should not respond by condemning America but rather by taking the American dream, cleansing it of its American cultural biases, and then applying the American dream in a more universal manner. This is different than proclaiming Teacher overgeneralizations of universal equality, because one is using rational thought to examine at a factual level what really brings greater prosperity and well-being to the most people.
I know that these two sections have been focusing heavily on Canada. This is partially because I am a Canadian. But as the quote in a previous paragraph pointed out, ‘The ties between the two countries are without parallel’. The average American may ignore Canada and know almost nothing about Canada (another example of American exceptionalism) but factually speaking, the ties between the countries really are without parallel. Going further, I encountered Snyder’s videos because of an article stating that he was going to start teaching at the University of Toronto in Canada.
There is also the matter of psychological projection. Trump seems to have a habit of consistently blaming others for the evil behavior that he himself is committing. Thus, at the same time the Trump himself is stabbing American allies in the back, he is claiming to be stabbed in the back by the rest of the world. I think that this relates cognitively to what Snyder refers to as the predictability of Internet memes. The mind that is driven by cultural MMNs has a rather limited mental vocabulary. When I commit some crime against another person, this will usually form a MMN within my mind because emotional intensity is being combined with extensive sensory input: I used my physical body to perform some action within some factual location. And I interacted emotionally with another human being. When some similar situation arises, then this mental network of my crime will become triggered and emotionally impose its structure upon the situation, causing me to interpret this situation in the light of my crime. In other words, my mental networks create an internal ‘highway system’ of interconnected emotional schema upon which my thought naturally travels. Thus, I suggest that Trump is not necessarily choosing to project his evil behavior onto others. Instead, Trump’s evil behavior has formed mental networks within his mind which are being triggered and are guiding his thinking.
Going further, if one makes a habit of committing evil behavior in predictable ways, then this will form TMNs of implicit understanding within one’s mind. When these TMNs are triggered, then they will impose their explanation upon the mind, causing all behavior to be interpreted in the light of one’s own evil behavior. Stated simply, those who habitually treat others in evil ways will assume that everyone always treats others in similar evil ways.
Going still further, suppose that one feels guilty for committing some crime against one’s neighbor. One can suppress these feelings of guilt by twisting the facts of the situation, or one can suppress feelings of guilt by altering responsibility for the behavior. Projection maintains the facts of the situation while changing the people who are responsible for these facts. For instance, a stab in the back was committed. These facts are acknowledged. But instead of admitting that I stabbed someone else in the back, I maintain that someone else stabbed me in the back. In other words, it is cognitively easier to change the connections between mental networks than it is to alter the structure of a mental network itself. A dictator generally exerts power not so much by creating new mental networks but rather by appropriating existing societal mental networks. Projection can be interpreted cognitively as internally appropriating existing mental networks.
Snyder finishes by describing Trump’s 2020 claim that he actually won the election as ‘the big lie’. “The big lie that Mr. Trump won the election, the big lie that the election was not carried out well, those dangerous words are still with us. We recognize them. Many of us did, and that was very important. The next step, of course, is to become good enough patriots that we can find truths, and that we can find reassuring words, and then we can find better electoral institutions so that nothing like this ever happens again.” Trump’s claim to have won the election was a big lie, but the idea that it was ‘the big lie’ conveys feelings of American exceptionalism, because it assumes that the entire world will collapse if American democracy fails. It also focuses again upon the universal tolerance of ‘one person one vote’. I am not trying to minimize Snyder’s statements, but rather point out that bigger ‘big lies’ are now being spoken in 2025 which threaten deeper mental networks of democratic society. And I am warning that the Trump regime may resort to yet bigger ‘big lies’ in the near future.
18. Be Calm When The Unthinkable Arrives
Snyder talked about American exceptionalism in video 16. He opens this video by demonstrating an attitude that goes beyond American exceptionalism. “The book I wrote very quickly had a much longer life than I thought it would have. It’s been very gratifying to see it used not just in the United States, but also around the world, from Eastern Europe to Hong Kong. This has been humbling for me and very important for me in various ways.” This type of statement shows genuine respect both for people of other cultures and countries and for individuals outside of academia. Snyder continues, “As readers of the book will know, I tried not to be too specific about the US, tried not to be too specific about political parties or individuals, because I think the threats to democracy are both international and also run deeper.” Similarly, I have found when developing mental symmetry that it is both possible and necessary to state cognitive principles in general terms in Teacher thought that extend beyond the Mercy experiences of specific individuals, groups, and nations. For instance, one can speak about Perceiver persons having problems with judgmentalism rather than personally attacking some Perceiver person for being judgmental. This shift from specific Mercy experience to general Teacher theory is one byproduct of letting go of exceptionalism; another byproduct is that one becomes less predictable because general Teacher theories can be expressed in many different specific ways.
Snyder warns, “When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.” This sounds easy when describing it in a book or video. It is much more difficult to do when in the midst of the crisis.
Looking at this cognitively, technical thought is guided by medium-level emotions while stronger emotions are guided by mental networks. Technical thought typically switches from rational thinking to irrational mental networks when some emotional threshold is crossed. For instance, the technical specialist often skips directly from using rigorous thinking within some specialization to using sarcasm, overgeneralization, or mysticism when dealing with larger issues. Extending the ability to use rational technical thought to more emotional issues requires using normal thought to build Perceiver and Server confidence.
A crisis such as a terrorist attack causes the mind to leave the rational technical thought and enter the emotional realm of mental networks. The average technical specialist who spends all his or her time solving technical puzzles within the specialization has no defense against this. Preparing for such an event must be done ahead of time by repeatedly choosing to acknowledge Perceiver facts within emotional situations. The objective technical specialist who avoids subjective feelings and general theories will succumb to the emotional machinations of the regime, as will the postmodern wokeist who rejects any attempt to add Perceiver facts to the Teacher overgeneralization of universal tolerance.
Looking at this in more detail, ‘checks and balances’ help to ensure that Perceiver facts are not affected by subjective bias. Similarly, ‘opposition parties’ help to prevent the cultural MMNs of the ruling group from imposing its opinions upon society as ‘truth’. ‘Freedom of expression’ means that Teacher thought is able to develop verbal theories without being suppressed by cultural and personal MMNs. And ‘the right to a fair trial’ ensures that individuals will be judged by Perceiver facts and not have the MMNs of some group imposed upon them by force. These are all critical elements of society. But they are also external expressions of an internal desire to go beyond cultural and personal MMNs in order to be guided by Perceiver facts and Teacher understanding.
A terrorist attack bypasses all of this by directly threatening the MMNs of some culture or group at an existential level. The only way to defend against such an attack is to go beyond the childish mentality of building upon cultural MMNs to being emotionally guided by TMNs of rational understanding. This process of personal transformation has to be done ahead of time. Unfortunately, we saw when looking at exceptionalism that when some society does become exceptional by becoming emotionally guided by rational TMNs, the next generation will grow up with minds built upon the cultural MMNs acquired from living within an exceptional society. Thus, each generation has to learn afresh what it means to become exceptional in order to become immune to the emotional manipulation of some tyranny.
Snyder describes this mental transition from rational thinking to defending threatened mental networks. “When we are surprised, when we are made vulnerable by some event which seems to have been unthinkable and which therefore is such a surprise, such a shock that we open ourselves to the leader, we allow the leader to do things which otherwise perhaps we wouldn’t have allowed the leader to do.” An unthinkable event is one that utterly violates core mental networks. When a mental network is violated and faced with annihilation, then it will respond with a hyper-emotion that exceeds normal emotional pain. This emotional shock will overwhelm Perceiver confidence, causing the mind to shift from using rational thought to preserving threatened mental networks at any cost.
A terrorist attack goes beyond grand spectacles that create mental networks of ideology within the citizen. And it goes beyond the regime appealing to core mental networks of culture and religion. Instead, a terrorist attack causes core mental networks of culture to feel threatened with annihilation. When this happens, then the instinctual reaction is to turn emotionally to powerful mental networks for protection, especially if these powerful mental networks convey the emotional impression of protecting and preserving the core mental networks that are feeling threatened.
Snyder illustrates, “What people in 2020 generally still found unthinkable was the notion that there could be a coup d’état on American soil in late 2020. This is one of the things that I wrote about. I took a fair amount of heat for it at the time. I anticipated that Mr. Trump would try to carry out some kind of coup d’état. I wrote in a number of places that he would lose the election but nevertheless try to stay in power in late 2020.” Notice that Snyder was preparing ahead of time by attempting to use Perceiver thought to factually analyze core mental networks of society that the average person found unthinkable. Similarly, over the years I have been using mental symmetry to analyze core mental networks of religion, culture, science, history, and society—mental networks that others regard as unthinkable or as transcending rational thought—in order to prepare ahead of time for a coming time when these core mental networks will face an existential threat. And, like Snyder, I have taken major heat from many individuals and groups for daring to do such factual analysis. However, not only has my factual analysis proved to be accurate, but it has repeatedly proved to be more accurate than even I feared. Similarly, carrying out some American coup d’état may have been unthinkable in 2020, but Trump in his first three months of office has pushed the boundaries of what used to be unthinkable far beyond what was regarded as unthinkable in 2020.
Snyder suggests that the solution is to become historians. “We have to speak plainly about what happened in the United States. There was a coup attempt by a sitting president. We have to record those events. We have to have digital forensic specialists, historians, journalists, lawyers, a broad coalition of investigators and investigations, to make sure that those events become things that children 20 years, 50 years, 100 years from now can read about and understand.” Accurately recording history is necessary, but it is not enough. There is no point in recording the events for posterity if one’s children are not interested in reading about these events. Instead, each generation has to be taken through Piaget’s stages of cognitive development to move from childish MMNs to adult TMNs of critical thinking and rational analysis. Similarly, it is vital to speak plainly. But there is no point in telling people to speak plainly when political correctness damns and/or cancels those who dare to speak plainly about cultural MMNs. As before, Snyder is accurately describing from the viewpoint of the historian what it externally looks like to follow the correct response. But Snyder is not describing from the viewpoint of the psychologist or the cognitive researcher what it internally means to follow the correct response. However, Snyder’s historical description actually goes beyond what the average psychologist or cognitive researcher is saying. That is because Snyder has studied the historical accounts of real individuals who have struggled painfully to emerge from real dictatorships.
And Snyder concludes by pointing out that there is an internal, personal component to this. “The willingness to lay down, let other people interpret events for you, that’s what makes tyranny possible, that’s what makes authoritarian regime changes possible. We can’t do everything by ourselves. For some things we really do need other people and institutions. But this reaction of being calm when the unthinkable arrives, that is something that we can do for ourselves.” When rational thinking becomes overwhelmed by the extreme emotions caused by some core mental network being threatened, then one becomes emotionally vulnerable to being manipulated by the ideology of the regime. This is ultimately an internal battle of being able to continue to use rational thought despite the extreme emotions.
Looking at this personally, I have found repeatedly that when some core mental network is threatened within my mind, then my initial response is to react emotionally like the average person. However, I have also found that this is then followed by the TMN of my understanding of mental symmetry reaching down emotionally and putting my mind back together, making it possible for me to return to rational thinking. I suggest that internally preparing for existential terrorists attacks by the regime goes beyond gaining sufficient Perceiver and Server confidence to going through enough of these mini-crises of falling apart inside and being put back together by rational understanding.
19. Be A Patriot
Snyder begins, “Be a patriot. Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it.” Snyder clarifies, “I try to make a distinction between a patriot and a nationalist. A nationalist defends ‘what is’ about his or her country, whereas a patriot is someone who wants the best for his or her country, who wants his or her country to live up to the ideals that the country is supposed to live up to.”
Looking at this cognitively, ‘what is’ refers to MMNs acquired by the experiences of living in some country or society. The mind of a child who grows up in some culture is based upon the MMNs that encapsulate the ‘what is’ of that culture. Ideals, in contrast, come from Platonic forms. A Platonic form is the internal imaginary image in Mercy thought that emerges when Teacher thought comes up with a simple theory that summarizes the essence of some set of Perceiver facts. Using a simple example, Perceiver thought will notice the presence of many round things and come up with a Perceiver category of circles. Teacher thought will then come up with a simple theory that summarizes the essence of roundness. When one thinks about a circle, one imagines a perfect circle that is more perfect than any real circle, which summarizes the essence of circle-ness. When mathematics talks about a circle, it refers to this Platonic form of circle-ness and not to any specific, real circle. Stated simply, ideals are internal images of perfection that emerge within Mercy thought as a result of pursuing TMNs of rational understanding. This essay has emphasized the need to pursue TMNs of rational understanding. Being guided by internal ideals is a sign that one is pursuing rational TMNs. Such a mind will assign greater value to specific experiences and behavior that resemble more closely the internal Platonic forms of idealism. And the greatest value will be assigned to experiences and behavior that make it possible to develop and follow such internal Platonic forms.
Snyder continues, “If you defend whatever people do in the name of America as normal, then you’re participating in that decline. A patriot is someone who recognizes that values are real, that democracy cannot function without values.” Stated cognitively, the default is for an American to become a nationalist by preserving the cultural MMNs of American exceptionalism. This will naturally lead to the decline of America, and it will also lead naturally to the citizen described in the first video who allows feelings of normality to be altered by changing social expectations. In contrast, a patriot is internally guided by values based in Platonic forms of idealism, and a patriot pursues these values in order to ensure that America remains an exceptional society. A patriot will ‘step off’ the dictator-driven train of shifting normality and take a stand, motivated internally by Platonic forms of idealism. Similar principles would apply to any society that achieves success, but it applies especially to America because no country has ever generated so much wealth and prosperity for so many people.
Snyder then shifts from a general discussion of ideals and values to specifics. “I think perhaps most fundamentally what’s at stake is the right of Americans to vote for their elected representatives.” What Snyder says about preserving values and ideals is both accurate and significant. But the values and ideals that one preserves will be determined by one’s general Teacher theory of human thought and behavior. As was mentioned before, the right to vote is a Teacher overgeneralization based upon the Teacher overgeneralization of universal tolerance. Thus, when Snyder describes which values and ideals he thinks are worth preserving, he turns from rational analysis to Teacher overgeneralization. As was also mentioned before, Snyder is not really to blame for this inadequacy, because no adequate Teacher theory of human personality exists. Mental symmetry is attempting to fill this void.
Snyder looks in more detail at the right to vote. “That right to vote is being taken away from a lot of our fellow Americans, and we don’t recognize that Native Americans, and Latinos, and above all African-Americans are going to have a harder time voting in 2022 and 2024 than they did in 2020.” I suggested earlier that the right to vote is critical but it is not the most critical. My suggestion is backed up by what happened in the 2024 election. The results of this election were not ultimately determined by minority groups losing the right to vote. Instead, the results were determined by Democrats not having a presidential candidate that the average voter found acceptable. Too many American voters felt that the universal tolerance of wokeism was being imposed upon them, something which Snyder does not mention in his videos. In addition, the Teacher overgeneralization of universal tolerance cannot be overcome by asserting the Teacher overgeneralization of ‘one person one vote’. There is more to value than this single sweeping statement.
Snyder adds, “One thing that will happen is that people whose votes are suppressed will be upset, and understandably. And if they are upset and they do something, then the people who have suppressed their votes will use their reaction against them, will try to start a culture war and try to change the whole subject of our politics away from democracy and representation and policy towards polarization and racial hatred and spectacle.” This is an accurate assessment that describes the response of many of the followers of Trump. But what is not being mentioned is the suppression of cultural and personal mental networks that is being done by liberal academics upon conservatives. And when these conservatives have attempted to voice their opinions, they have been demonized as imbeciles, colonialists, and oppressors by liberal academia and its adherents.
Unfortunately, most of these conservatives have not responded with rational analysis, but rather have reacted at a gut level to what they regard as ‘unthinkable’ academic ‘terrorist attacks’ upon conservative cultural MMNs. I am not trying to justify the supporters of Trump. Many of them are uneducated bigots, and most of them are incoherent. In other words, they are responding at the cultural level of Christian nationalism rather than responding as ‘Christian patriots’ who driven internally by ideals of what it means to be a follower of Christ.
But Snyder is only mentioning one side of the story. He has gone beyond conservative American exceptionalism, but I am not certain that he has broken free of liberal academic exceptionalism. I have been forced to confront American exceptionalism as a result of being a Canadian living next to America. I have been forced to confront academic exceptionalism as a result of having to do most of my research outside of the academic system.
I am not questioning Snyder’s remarks. They are accurate and profound. Instead, I am suggesting that the principles which he describes have wider applicability.
Snyder concludes, “Being a patriot is not about just what is. It’s not about resting on your laurels, or talking about how great you are, or saying the institutions are good, or praising your own constitution. Being a patriot is not about ‘what is’. Being a patriot is about what ‘could be’.” I agree totally, and I have often made this distinction between ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’ in my essays.
20. Be As Courageous As You Can
Snyder begins by pointing out that his discussion on tyranny is important. “Since I wrote the book a number of my friends have been imprisoned for shorter terms or for longer ones. In the five years since I’ve written this book some people who I care about or respect or value have been killed or have died in ways that are connected to courage: courage for values, courage for rights.” Stated succinctly, this is a matter of physical life and death.
Snyder recognizes that his analysis of courage has focused upon political history. “That testimony is often from African Americans. In the part of the world that I work on—Eastern Europe—that testimony comes from those who survived Fascism or Nazism or Stalinism. Those are the examples as a historian I tended in this book to draw from.” Stated more carefully, governments have a monopoly on physical force. Governments reserve the right to use force and to wage war. A good government makes it possible for its citizens to conduct their lives without having to worry about being physically harmed. By the same token, a corrupt government can use its monopoly on force to punish those who oppose the regime, and a Fascist or Communist government can use its monopoly on force to commit genocide or even a Holocaust.
A distinction was made in video 16 between American political exceptionalism and liberal academic exceptionalism. Political exceptionalism can lead to political tyranny which can threaten the physical lives of citizens. That is because governments demand the right to control physical violence. Universities, in contrast, demand the right to control education and higher learning, and information becomes academically accepted by being published in peer-reviewed academic journals. Thus, in the same way that government has a monopoly on physical force, so academia maintains a monopoly upon information and rational understanding—the source of intellectual force. Academic exceptionalism uses academia’s role as the official arbiter of knowledge to suppress knowledge that is inconsistent with current academic consensus.
I have found it very difficult to publish the theory of mental symmetry in official journals because current academia emphasizes using technical thought based upon empirical data in a specialized, objective manner. Mental symmetry, in contrast, uses the patterns of normal thought to point out that that mental wholeness includes technical thought, normal thought, and mental networks. When academia as a whole emphasizes technical thought, then peer-review will automatically reject any questioning of the pre-eminence of technical thought. Going further, the natural tendency of technical thought is to jump straight from rational technical analysis to irrational mental networks. Thus, academia now recognizes the ‘narratives’ of cultural MMNs as a form of ‘alternate knowing’ while continuing to downplay the semi-rigorous normal thought used by mental symmetry.
Academic exceptionalism arises when academia uses its monopoly upon knowledge as an excuse to impose its methodology and biases upon the search for knowledge. Going further, liberal academic exceptionalism uses the academic monopoly upon information to impose Teacher overgeneralization upon society, transforming the search for knowledge into advocating for or against various cultural groups in a way that gives the emotional impression of preserving the Teacher overgeneralization of universal quality. The end result has been a postmodern ‘genocide’ of the soft sciences. This is not a physical genocide but rather an emotional and intellectual genocide. Instead of destroying people physically, people are being destroyed mentally and spiritually.
That brings us to the question of priority. When society faces both political and academic exceptionalism, then which form of exceptionalism needs to be dealt with first? According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, physical needs have to be dealt with before mental and emotional needs. Thus, political exceptionalism should be addressed before academic exceptionalism. But the way that people behave physically is ultimately determined by how they think and feel internally. Thus, any attempt to deal with political exceptionalism will fail if underlying academic exceptionalism is not also addressed.
This leads to a sort of chicken-and-egg problem in which one has to waddle one’s way to a better society. People need to have sufficient physical protection to give them the freedom to start thinking without having to worry about being killed. In Europe, this happened in the Middle Ages where medieval monks could do their thinking in relative physical safety by hiding behind monastery walls. Once people start to think, then they need to be given sufficient academic freedom to be able to come up with academically unpopular ideas. The idea of academic freedom was one of the fundamental concepts introduced by early European universities.
A more painful path is for a group of people to practice academic and spiritual freedom even if this means being persecuted or killed by government. In this case, the example shown by the persecuted group inspires others to adopt their thinking. Stated crudely, being willing to die for one’s beliefs substitutes for academic peer review. For instance, I come from a Mennonite background, and Mennonites practiced their religious beliefs for almost two centuries before finally being granted freedom from political persecution. As Snyder points out, political dissidents under Fascism and Communism paid a similar price.
Snyder observes that courage is typically interpreted as something exhibited far away by important people, but it also involves small actions taken personally. “We make courage something which happens on the mountaintop. We make courage something that happens in some far away country. But in my limited experience at least with people who I admire as courageous, in my experience as a historian I think what we often see is that courage can take small forms. It can take everyday forms. It doesn’t belittle the courage that people show in an uprising, or in a protest, or on a battlefield to say that it can be very hard to make eye contact; it can be very hard to say that word which contradicts what everyone else thinks. It can be very hard just to be that different personality who is not swayed by what everyone else is doing.”
Looking at this cognitively, absolute truth is based in the examples of esteemed people from distant societies. Some group of people from another time or place are regarded as fathers of the faith, founders of the country, establishers of the organization, or writers of the constitution. But that is how believers in absolute truth view the situation: people with great Mercy status made important statements, these statements were written down, and we are now reading the statements of these god-like figures from the past. But those who lived during the time of those that we now regard as heroes probably did not view these same people as heroes. Instead, these founders of the faith and fathers of the country spent most of their time exhibiting everyday courage that involved small actions taken personally. Going further, Perceiver and Server confidence grows through repetition. Therefore, most of the real choosing happens in the myriads of tiny decisions that one makes before a crisis, because all of these little decisions will guide the choice that one makes when faced with a crisis. Thus, it is vital to emphasize the need to make many small, courageous decisions.
However, Snyder’s insightful emphasis upon small decisions is also consistent with a Teacher overgeneralization of universal equality. That is because Teacher overgeneralization can handle rational content, as long as the overgeneralization is viewed as transcending the rational content. Thus, limiting the choosing to small decisions avoids threatening any TMN of overgeneralized equality. Thus, Snyder’s advice is sound but it does not necessarily challenge liberal academic exceptionalism.
Snyder finishes by pointing out, “This isn’t just about what we do, and how we feel, and how others think of us, and how we will think about ourselves as we get older and look back on the choices that we made. It’s also about the chances that the tyrants have to rule us, because if prospective tyrants, if the people who want to rule us, look out and see people who are willing to take small chances, willing to take risks, people who are ‘being as courageous as you can’, they’re less likely to take risks. They’re less likely to do the things that they need to do to seize power.”
Here Snyder does move from personal small choices to global and universal consequences. But he takes this step externally, moving from small personal choices to political tyranny. What Snyder says is valid. If enough people take enough personal courageous small steps, then the average person will acquire sufficient Perceiver and Server confidence to be able to resist the emotional onslaught of a growing tyranny. But what is missing from this conclusion is any reference to the internal step from small personal choice to the mental dictatorship of a Teacher overgeneralization, which may be expressed academically as some form of universal tolerance or religiously as some form of mysticism.
Gaining Perceiver and Server confidence in lesser areas does build resistance against the mental dictatorship of some Teacher overgeneralization, but the ultimate solution is to replace Teacher overgeneralization with a legitimate meta-theory and/or a rational concept of God. That transition is described biblically in Revelation 10:6-7. “And he swore by the One living to the ages of the ages, who created heaven and the things in it, and the earth and the things in it, and the sea and the things in it, “There will be no more delay! But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he is about to sound the trumpet, then the mystery of God would be completed, as proclaimed to His servants, the prophets” (BLB). This is the only time in the entire book of Revelation where anyone swears, which indicates that this is a rather significant transition. Completing ‘the mystery of God’ implies the end to a mystical God of Teacher overgeneralization. ‘As proclaimed to his servants’ implies that the new concept of God is consistent with the biblical content that was previously taught as absolute truth. And swearing by the content of heaven, earth, and the sea implies that this new understanding is based upon a legitimate meta-theory that is consistent with existing ‘heavenly’ theory, ‘earthly’ knowledge, and the ‘oceans’ of human experience. This angel then gives a ‘small scroll’ to a human in verse 10 and tells the human to digest it, suggesting that the old mystical concept of God is being replaced by the rational theory of a ‘little scroll’.
Jordan Peterson versus Timothy Snyder
I would like to close this essay with an interesting parallel. I recently wrote an essay on Jordan Peterson’s book on the Bible and theology. Peterson was a professor at the University of Toronto but recently moved from Canada to the United States because of a lack of academic freedom. Peterson is a psychologist and well-known right-wing author. As mentioned at the beginning of this essay, Timothy Snyder just announced that he is moving from the United States to the University of Toronto in Canada because of a lack of academic freedom. My essay on Jordan Peterson describes a deep resonance between Peterson’s statements and mental symmetry. This essay has pointed out the deep resonance between Snyder’s statements and mental symmetry. If both of these researchers are compatible with mental symmetry, and one is moving from Canada to the US because of academic oppression while the other is moving from the US to Canada because of academic oppression, what gives? This almost conveys the impression that ‘A is not-A’.
The answer is that each of these is applying similar cognitive principles to a different realm. The essay on video 16 suggested that exceptionalism currently exhibits itself in two different forms. Trumpism appeals to right-wing American exceptionalism. Canadians of all political stripes are vehemently opposed to Trumpism because Trump has been mocking Canada and threatening the sovereignty of Canada. Snyder is moving from the US to Canada because of Canada’s strong stand against Donald Trump. Snyder is a historian who specializes in eastern European history and political tyrannies. Thus, Snyder is sensitive to America’s current plunge into Fascism driven by would-be Führer Trump.
Canada under Justin Trudeau championed the universal tolerance of left-wing academic exceptionalism. Peterson became well-known because of his academic stand against the irrationalism of universal tolerance. Peterson moved from Canada to the US because Trump is harnessing a backlash against the wokeism and alternate knowing of left-wing academic exceptionalism.
Looking at this more carefully, the fundamental cognitive problem with American exceptionalism is that it is an ideology. It claims to be driven by TMNs of American freedom, the American dream, and the American Constitution while actually being based in MMNs of personal status and culture. America was driven to a large extent by the TMNs of American institutions, but Trump’s desire to Make America Great Again is appealing to the cultural MMNs of conservatives who are used to living within a culture of American freedom, the American dream, and the Constitution. However, if one goes beyond rhetoric to reality, one observes that Trump is limiting American freedom by threatening illegal immigrants as well as those who disagree with him. He is limiting the American dream by following economic policies that attack the American economy. And he is overriding the American Constitution by ruling as a dictator through executive orders that bypass the process of government. Snyder, a student of European political oppression, wants out. So do I.
The fundamental cognitive problem with liberal academic exceptionalism is that it is an overgeneralization. It claims to be following a universal Teacher theory that brings unity to the Teacher paradigms of academic specializations. But what is actually being taught is overgeneralization of universal tolerance that transcends the scientific facts of various specializations. I have discovered through repeated personal experience than what academia really wants is not a meta-theory, but rather the feeling of a meta-theory. University started as a universe-ity, a community of academic colleagues held together by a common desire to discover solid Perceiver facts in order to construct rational Teacher theories. The overgeneralization of universal tolerance claims to bring Teacher unity to academic specializations, but Teacher overgeneralizations, by their very nature, are intrinsically opposed to Perceiver facts, because facts limit overgeneralization. Going further, postmodernism rejects the idea that it is possible for Perceiver thought to come up with facts but rather insists that all ‘truth’ is a result of using emotional status in Mercy thought to overwhelm Perceiver thought. But if all ‘truth’ is imposed by social and personal power, then postmodernism itself is merely ‘truth’ being imposed by the social and personal power of liberal academia.
The end result is liberal academic exceptionalism. Liberal academics claim to be following in the footsteps of their predecessors who built rational theories upon experimentally verified facts, but in fact, they are actually using their Mercy status as academic professors to impose their personal viewpoints upon the rest of society. And instead of being guided by Teacher paradigms that provide simple explanations to the facts of technical specializations, they are being guided by various Teacher overgeneralizations of universal tolerance which are by their very nature opposed to the introduction of solid Perceiver facts.
When a Teacher overgeneralization of universal tolerance turns into a TMN, then it will emotionally impose its explanation upon the mind when triggered, causing tolerance to be intolerantly imposed upon any perceived contradictions to universal tolerance. Going one way, when some societal group is encountered that conveys the emotional impression of being oppressed or marginalized by society, then the MMNs of that group will be championed in the name of restoring universal equality. Going the other way, if some societal group is encountered that conveys the emotional impression of imposing its views upon society, then that group will be denounced in the name of restoring universal equality. This championing and denouncing will be done in an emotional manner that avoids any factual discussion of why a group has become marginalized or why it has become dominant. That is because overgeneralizations resist the application of Perceiver facts.
The greatest scorn will be reserved for those who dare to use Perceiver facts to analyze these various groups. Thus, liberal academia will view conservative Christian morality as public enemy number one, because Christian morality asserts that there are solid Perceiver facts of morality that apply to cultural MMNs. This conflict between liberal academia and conservative Christian morality will turn into an irreconcilable religious war. On the one hand, liberal academia claims to be driven by rational Teacher understanding, but in practice, liberal academia is using its Mercy status as part of academia to arbitrarily promote and demote various cultural groups. On the other hand, conservative Christian morality claims to promote universal morality, but in practice, it is actually submitting to absolute truth based in MMNs of respect for the Bible, as interpreted by various respected church leaders.
Now let us place Peterson and Snyder within this structure. Peterson is a psychologist who is using rational thought to study psychological mechanisms, attempting to analyze why groups and individuals experience success or failure. Stated simply, he is using rational thought in areas where liberal academia has declared that rational thought should not be used. But the psychological principles that Peterson is discovering are compatible with the moral principles of traditional Christian ethics. Peterson’s book on theology examines this extensive correspondence. Thus, Peterson has left Canada because of the academic persecution that he is experienced from liberal academia. And he has moved to the United States because of the Christian conservative minority that is currently supporting Trump’s attacks upon liberal wokeism. Stated briefly, Peterson is using rational thought in areas that are suppressed by Canadian liberal academia but supported by American conservatives.
Snyder is a historian who is using rational thought to study political freedom and tyranny, attempting to analyze why governments turn from freedom to tyranny. American conservative society is not interested in these principles, because American evangelicals are convinced that using the Mercy status of some dictator to re-impose absolute biblical truth upon American society is more important than maintaining the political institutions that make American society possible. Thus, Snyder is leaving the United States because of threats from the growing political dictatorship of American society. And he is moving to Canada because Canada is strongly opposed to Trump’s political threats. In addition, Snyder is guided by the Teacher overgeneralization of ‘one person one vote’, an overgeneralization that is compatible with the liberal overgeneralization of universal equality. And Snyder focuses upon the external institutions and behavior that result from various cultural and religious MMNs rather than addressing these MMNs directly. Thus, Snyder avoids the internal realm of psychology where Peterson has run afoul of liberal academia. Stated briefly, Snyder is using rational thought in areas that are suppressed by American conservatives but consistent with the assumptions of liberal academia.
In both cases, what is missing is an integrated Teacher theory of cognition. Peterson describes many significant cognitive and moral principles, but he lacks an integrated theory to tie these principles together. This lack is illustrated by Peterson’s inadequate concept of the ideal woman. Mental symmetry suggests that female thought combines the beauty and elegance of Teacher thought with the subjectivity and sensitivity of Mercy thought. Peterson defines the ideal woman as ‘mother of a child’, focusing upon the Mercy side of female thought while ignoring the Teacher side. Snyder’s lack of integrated Teacher theory is illustrated by his inadequate concept of societal equality. Mental symmetry suggests that everyone shares the common goal of pursuing mental wholeness and suggests that mental wholeness can be defined by the cognitive meta-theory of mental symmetry. Instead of pursuing a cognitive Teacher theory of personal and societal wholeness, Snyder promotes the Teacher overgeneralization of ‘one person one vote’, backed up by the Teacher order of the various institutions of democratic society.
In summary, Peterson has part of the puzzle, Snyder has another part of the puzzle, and mental symmetry provides the big picture that makes it possible to assemble these various fragments of the puzzle. Mental symmetry may have the big picture, but it is also a meta-theory that requires the more specialized analyses of researchers such as Peterson and Snyder to add details to the big picture.