WAR: The Father of All Mind Viruses

Fear of an enemy -- real, perceived, exaggerated, or fabricated -- is the emotional incubator and superspreader of all mind viruses.

Yesterday Tucker Carlson announced that the CIA has been reading his text messages and may be preparing a criminal referral against him to the Department of Justice. As he explained.

The other day I found out that the CIA is preparing some kind of criminal referral against me, a crime report to the Department of Justice on the basis of a supposed crime I committed. What’s that crime? Well, talking to people in Iran before the war. They read my texts.

Carlson further explained that the alleged violation pertains to the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), the 1938 law requiring individuals acting on behalf of foreign governments or entities to register with the DOJ and disclose their activities. He emphatically denied any wrongdoing, insisted he is NOT a foreign agent and has always been fiercely loyal to the United States.

News of this incident has prompted me to post the following excerpt from my forthcoming book, Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions, about WAR, and how it is the father of all mind viruses.

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On February 23, 1942, a submarine of the Imperial Japanese Navy, commanded by Kozo Nishino, fired its 14-cm deck gun at an oil field on the coast of Ellwood, California near Santa Barbara. The crew fired around twenty shells, destroying an oil derrick and pump house. Commander Nishino believed that, despite doing almost no damage to the oil field, he accomplished his mission—namely, to spread fear of a Japanese attack among the residents of California. Nishino was aware that the residents and military personnel in Southern California were already suffering from highly inflamed “war nerves” after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and his objective was to throw fuel on the fire. For as Nishino correctly understood, fear causes people to do extremely foolish things.

Fear is a critically important emotion for rapidly detecting and reacting to mortal dangers and avoiding them in the future. Fear keenly sharpens one’s focus on a threat and prepares the body to fight it or flee from it. Within the hostile natural environment in which human evolved, fear kept people alive. Without it, the human species would not have survived. However, as the conditions of modern life have become more secure and complex, fear may greatly impair the ability of individuals and societies to respond to events in a rational manner that serves their best interests. Unless fear is checked by strong mental habits, it can quickly take over the brain and suppress critical reasoning and perspective. A mind gripped by fear sees the world in categorical, black and white terms and may interpret ambiguous, neutral, and even good-intentioned signals as threatening. Fearful people find it difficult to grasp complexity and nuance, and they may grossly overreact to a perceived threat in destructive and dangerous ways.

Japanese Commander Nishino’s ineffectual shelling of the Ellwood oil field was reported on the radio, which caused the civilian population and military personnel in Southern California to enter a mental state of extreme hyper-vigilance. A hyper-vigilant person is so sensitive to all conceivable signs of danger that he becomes highly error-prone in distinguishing true signs of it from harmless phenomena. Hyper-vigilant people may feel themselves to be in grave and immediate danger even when their environment is perfectly safe.

About thirty hours after Commander Nishino shelled the Ellwood oilfield, at 2:25 AM on February 25, 1942, an errant weather balloon over Los Angeles, triggered an air raid alert and blackout. This, in turn, triggered a massive anti-aircraft barrage of approximately 1,400 shells fired into the sky over Los Angeles at perceived enemy aircraft, even though none was clearly detected and identified. Five people died during the incident from stress-related heart attacks and traffic accidents caused by the panic. Later, the Army declared the incident to have been the result of “war nerves and imagination.”

The Battle of Los Angeles is an example of how intense and widespread fear can trigger an extreme reaction to a perceived threat that doesn’t exist. The Imperial Japanese Navy never sent more than a few submarines to the California coast. At no point during the war were the residents of California in danger of attack or invasion from the Japanese Pacific fleet. Nevertheless, war nerves ran so high in early 1942 Lt. General John L. DeWitt, Commander of the Western Defense Command, argued for the mass removal of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans—two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens—from their homes in California, and transferring them to internment camps. DeWitt claimed they were potential saboteurs and spies, and that it was impossible to determine if they were loyal to the United States. California’s Attorney General, Earl Warren, agreed, as did Governor Culbert Olson and the renowned Hearst Newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann.

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans from the West Coast without charges or trial, and no presentation of evidence of disloyalty. This caused them enormous distress and the loss of their homes and businesses, many through forced sales at fire-sale prices. Other properties were looted, defaced, or seized for unpaid taxes. Standing up to this outrage, a twenty-three-year-old Japanese American man named Fred Korematsu refused to leave the newly declared “exclusion zone” and challenged the order on the grounds that it violated the Fifth Amendment. His case eventually went to the Supreme Court.

In Korematsu v. United States in 1944, the Court upheld Executive Order 9066, stating it wasn’t based on racial prejudice but military necessity to neutralize “the grave imminent danger” posed by Japanese Americans residing on the Pacific coast, where they could allegedly serve as spies or saboteurs for Imperial Japan and assist an invasion fleet. Associate Justice Hugo Black wrote the majority opinion. In a remarkable concurring opinion, Justice Felix Frankfurter—renowned for his fine grasp of jurisprudence—stated that the U.S. government’s pressing need to wage war effectively superseded Constitutional protections for individual citizens such as Fred Korematsu. Frankfurter’s sentiment in this case reminds one of James Madison’s warning about the grave threat that war poses to liberty.

Of all the evils to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops every other. War is the patent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes, are the known instruments for bringing the many under the dominion of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people! No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

Here it is important to note that not all nine Justices upheld Order 9066. Three vehemently dissented, and as Justice Frank Murphy wrote in his dissenting opinion.

[Racial discrimination] is unattractive in any setting, but it is utterly revolting among a free people who have embraced the principles set forth in the Constitution of the United States. All residents of this nation are kin in some way by blood or culture to a foreign land. Yet they are primarily and necessarily a part of the new and distinct civilization of the United States. They must, accordingly, be treated at all times as the heirs of the American experiment, and as entitled to all the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.

Looking back at Korematsu v. United States, many legal scholars have found it unfathomable that six justices found Order 9066 to be constitutional. The case seems to be an example of how even the most intellectually agile men, capable of the highest level of reasoning, may still fall into something like a trance when they are under the influence of war nerves.

In 1943—one year before the Supreme Court heard the case of Korematsu v. United States—the Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was arrested and incarcerated in Tegel Prison for his participation in a plot to assassinate Hitler. There he pondered the question of why the German people—despite their education, culture, and intellectual achievements—had fallen so far from reason and morality. He concluded that they had been afflicted with collective stupidity (German: Dummheit). He was not being flippant or sarcastic, and he made it clear that stupidity is not the opposite of native intellect. On the contrary, the events in Germany between 1933 and 1943 had shown him that perfectly intelligent people were, under the pressure of fear and propaganda, rendered stupid—that is, incapable of critical reasoning. As he put it:

There are people who are intellectually agile who are stupid, while intellectually inept people may be anything but stupid. We discover this to our surprise in certain situations. One gets the impression that stupidity is often not an innate defect, but one that emerges under certain circumstances in which people are made stupid … A closer look reveals that the strong exertion of external power, be it political or religious, strikes a large part of the people with stupidity. Yes, it seems as if this is a sociological-psychological law. The power of some requires the stupidity of others. Under this influence, human abilities suddenly wither or fail, robbing people of their inner independence, which they—more or less unconsciously —renounce to adapt their behavior to the prevailing situation.

The fact that stupid people are often stubborn should not hide the fact that they are not independent. When talking to him, one feels that one is not dealing with him personally, but with catchphrases and slogans that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell; he is blinded; he is abused in his own being. Having become an instrument without an independent will, the fool will also be capable of all evil, and at the same time, unable to recognize it as evil. Here lies the danger of diabolical abuse. Through this, a people can be ruined forever.

But it is also quite clear here that it is not an act of instruction, but only an act of liberation that can overcome stupidity. In doing so, one will have to accept the fact that, in most cases, real inner liberation is only possible after outer liberation has taken place. … The Bible states that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. Thus, the inner liberation of man begins by living responsibly before God.

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Author’s Note: If you found the above excerpt interesting and informative, please click on the cover image below to preorder you copy of Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions. Recent events have prompted me to augment and elaborate the typescript, thereby delaying the publication date to June 23, 2006. For my readers who have already pre-ordered a copy, I beg your pardon for the delay, and hope you will trust it is for the sake of making the book as timely and cogent as possible.