[FRIAM] projection propaganda

[Santafe]

I don’t know that it holds up, or furnishes evidence, but it seems to me our common language is strewn with metaphors showing that people cognize groups as if they are individuals, whether or not they actually would deserve it under a proper composition.  I will give examples in a moment.  But first a bit of something that was research:

Before he became America’s Morality Guide, Jonathan Haidt did some work that I liked, looking at the language around social emotions, and arguing that it still showed explicitly metaphorical marks of its origins in body sensations.  The cases I remember are things like social uses of “disgust”, which of course uses the roots for being (literally) food-sick.  Haidt had a list of these, which he argued showed a common pattern, going from the more embodied-concrete to the social-abstract.  It seems to me like i remember Jessica Flack’s making arguments of a similar sort within comparative primatology, for embodied actions, like grimacing, grooming, or things of that sort.  That they are early attested in primate groups in concrete contexts, like aggression and submission, and then keep their form while mediating more abstract categories (in this case, more stable social roles) of dominance and subordination, in primate branches that seem to have more hierarchy in the social structure and more complexity it its categories.  The difference being stark: that in the aggression/submission dichotomy, these are behaviors that occur when fights happen, as parts of settling their outcome short of one of the fighters incapacitating or killing the other, whereas dominance/subordination are social roles that head off fights, by acting as if their outcome has already been established without actually having the fight.  (the _actual_ function of the lightning rod, which precludes lightning strikes, as contrasted with its common-language gloss, which people think of as drawing them to itself).

Anyway, the obvious examples that everybody knows, in language:
Patriotism and Fatherland
Mother tongue
Alma Mater
I have a sense of knowing there are another 1 or 2 that use explicit family-words that I am not remembering.  There was a time when I was alert to these things, and seemed to have a running list of maybe a dozen such expressions.

So the question of whether individual behaviors _actually do_ compose to group-level phenomena while preserving their type is a legitimate one, and the thing that micro-to-macro in economist most relies on and doesn’t generally fulfill.  But for the projection effect Glen talks about below, is it the reality, or the heavy weight on metaphors in people’s reception that needs to be demonstrated?

This seems like Nick’s bread and butter, and also an area where EricC can inject some much needed professional criticality.

Eric



> On Jul 4, 2025, at 0:34, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I'm used to interpersonal projection. E.g. Joe Rogan's supplements vs. his accusations re the mRNA vaccines:
> 
> Rogan's Big Pharma Scandal Keeps Getting Weirder
> https://youtu.be/bogYSu3cCLg?si=U1Jk93n5DC4gppdx
> 
> But I'm not habituated to the analogy of projection ("lady doth protest too much") to national/party scale propaganda:
> 
> Projection as an Interpersonal Influence Tactic: The Effects of the Pot Calling the Kettle Black
> https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01461672012711010
> 
> I expect man-babies like Trump to accuse their targets of their own misdeeds (https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2ftheconversation.com%2fwhy-trump-accuses-people-of-wrongdoing-he-himself-committed-an-explanation-of-projection-237912&c=E,1,dsyRQszQSTlWaQaHOPF40m7xy43QaKWsPNAEXRnHbHFzA8jfwedUvqHsFVDlkQsR_FZO1zlBJ7LxxE8JR1bS_27IDlBZq91dUf32AtMWDN86gTzHCFEyuxQs&typo=1). And to the extent that the right in the US (including SCOTUS) believe in and achieve the unitary executive, the analogy between interpersonal projection and national or group projection will be more accurate. This is one reason why "projection propaganda" worked well for Russia and China but not so much for the US, because the difference in scope between an individual and a regime was smaller there than here in the US.
> 
> So given that one of my whipping posts is that we bear the burden of showing how group behavior composes from individual behavior before we assert that the map is in any way coherent, I can't use "projection propaganda" without coming up with that composition. If any of you historians or journalists have any clue sticks to hit me with, I'd very much appreciate it.
> 
> -- 
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