Wanting to “watch the world burn” is a type
Speaking of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), I won’t this morning. Much. At The Garden of Forking Paths, however, Brian Klass offers study results that might address her type.
Movie buffs know Alfred Pennyworth’s speech from The Dark Knight in which he offers Bruce Wayne an explanation of The Joker’s motivations: Some men just want to watch the world burn. Researchers find it is a type, actually. Alfred was right:
The researchers—Michael Bang Petersen and Mathias Osmundsen from Aarhus University in Denmark, and Kevin Arceneaux from Sciences Po in Paris—focus on a specific behavior to create a typology of “Need for Chaos” individuals. Specifically, they focus on those who share “hostile political rumors,” which they note, “portray politicians and political groups negatively and possess low evidential value.” In plain speak, they like spreading malicious political lies.
Jacob Wohl, for example. He pleaded guilty to telecommunications fraud in Ohio in October over a robocall scheme to convince targeted Black voters that voting by mail would risk “giving your private information to the man.” Wohl and an accomplice each received two years of probation, $2,500 in fines, and 500 hours of community service registering voters.
Or right-wing influencer Douglass Mackey, convicted Friday. He conspired in 2016 to disseminate ads encouraging Black voters to “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home,” “Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925,” and “Vote for Hillary and be a part of history.” The Department of Justice notice adds, “On or about and before Election Day 2016, at least 4,900 unique telephone numbers texted ‘Hillary’ or some derivative to the 59925 text number, which had been used in multiple deceptive campaign images tweeted by Mackey and his co-conspirators.” He faces a maximum of 10 years in prison.
Researchers defined the Need for Chaos personalities as having “a general destructive mindset.”
In particular, people who score high on this metric tend to answer that they agree with several of these statements:
1. I get a kick when natural disasters strike in foreign countries.
2. I fantasize about a natural disaster wiping out most of humanity such that a small group of people can start all over.
3. I think society should be burned to the ground.
4. When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking “just let them all burn.”
5. We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over.
6. I need chaos around me—it is too boring if nothing is going on.
7. Sometimes I just feel like destroying beautiful things.Then, to make sure that people weren’t just ticking the box next to every question mindlessly, the researchers included two additional statements that were the opposite of the other seven:
1. We need to uphold order by doing what is right, not what is wrong.
2. It’s better to live in a society where there is order and clear rules than one where anything goes.Interestingly, when they looked at other toxic personality profiles — such as psychopathy (being a psychopath) and social dominance orientation — they found that the Need for Chaos was a separate dimension to destructive individuals. It wasn’t just capturing the same impulse. It’s a unique trait.
Democrats and Republicans? The trait is ecumenical. Those scoring high on the index just want to burn things down in hopes that their status will increase among the ashes.
The researchers explain:
[T]hey indiscriminately share hostile political rumors as a way to unleash chaos and mobilize individuals against the established order that fails to accord them the respect that they feel they personally deserve.
Considering sex and race, Hullabaloo readers won’t have to guess what the research found:
As is clear, the association between status concerns and the Need for Chaos is stronger among white men compared with any other group. The differences between white men and all other groups are significant for all status concerns, except personal status loss. While group-based marginalization tempers a Need for Chaos among Black individuals, group-based feelings of being unable to advance in society fuels a Need for Chaos among white men. Consistent with notions of aggrieved entitlement among historically dominant groups (Kimmel 2017), many white men are preoccupied with their societal standing and react with aggression against any threat.
Not all — traditional white status still buffers the impulse. But a subset of white men experiencing a perceived loss of status score high on the scale. Such scoring is not confined to “individuals low in socioeconomic status” either.
Increased inequality intensifies status competitions across the entire status hierarchy (Turchin 2016) and can induce even those who are objectively well off to feel that they are losing ground as others pass them.
Klass considers the implications:
The problem is that a relatively small group of people with Need for Chaos traits can now inflict a lot of damage in society. That’s partly because of the advent of social media, in which malicious lies travel much faster than they used to; partly because it’s easier for like-minded chaos agents to mobilize and organize; and partly because these individuals are more prone to political violence—a particularly important finding in the context of a post-January 6th United States political environment.
The researchers explain that this is nothing new, but that the trait may have more impact than in the past. “Every society contains disoriented radicals,” they write. “In the age of social media, however, these radicalized individuals can more easily find like-minded others and can more easily share their views.”
Their studies also show that people who score high on the Need for Chaos index express a greater willingness to participate in violent acts on behalf of a political cause.
“White women have, on average, the lowest score of Need for Chaos,” researchers find. That makes MTG an outlier (based on her statements and behaviors), but you knew that.
Klass suggests that when tempted to engage a troll online, remember (as Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes should have), “you’re likely not dealing with someone who cares about truth, or social progress, or justice.” Fact checking and “small nudges” will neither moderate nor mollify such persons.
The team concludes that “silencing, ridicule, and other exclusionary reactions will only exacerbate the feelings of marginalization that drive anti-systemic views in the first place. A key political challenge of our time may thus be to address anti-systemic sentiments in ways that remedy the underlying frustrations while remaining committed to democratic norms and principles of equal treatment.”
So, help mainstream them as CBS did last night? Will granting them a greater national platform for distributing hostile political rumors help ease their Need for Chaos? Good luck.
The words fascism and fascist appear nowhere in the scholarly report. Some men (and women) just need to be soundly defeated and their memory rendered permanently toxic.