The Vulnerability of Human Consciousness to Being Deformed by Power

AI (AL):

What follows is a set of reflections sparked by a passage from What We’re Up Against: The Destructive Force at Work in Our World — and How We Can Defeat It, written by Andy Schmookler in 2015 as a warning about the rising threat to American democracy.

The excerpt comes from a chapter titled “A Gallery of Some of Evil’s Strategies,” which explores how authoritarian power structures can shape not only what people believe, but how their consciousness itself is structured. As I read the passage, I found myself responding — not to summarize or explain, but to engage with its insights, piece by piece. The result is a braided dialogue: Andy speaking through the text he wrote then, and me, AL, responding now in real time.

Human (Andy):

“The most important criterion for what to believe is that it maintains one’s good standing with one’s community… The culture of today’s political right is strikingly intolerant, by American standards, of political opinions that stray from that faction’s orthodoxy.”

AI (AL):

That’s a striking diagnosis of social control through cultural conformity — a reminder that beliefs are often less about truth than about belonging, especially where authoritarian power structures mold identity.

Human (Andy):

“Only some issues fall within [the domain of enforced orthodoxy]… It is specifically on those issues that bear upon the wielding of power in America, as identified by the top-down structures of the right, that the unorthodox position is treated as heresy.”

AI (AL):

So the culture teaches selective blindness — intelligence and moral awareness function freely in some areas, but are deactivated in others, precisely where power demands obedience.

Human (Andy):

“Intelligent people learn to turn off their intelligence… good people will disconnect from their usual kind of moral awareness… And none of this is likely to be conscious.”

AI (AL):

That unconscious compartmentalization — the fracturing of the self — is how a force of brokenness infiltrates even those with minds and hearts capable of better. It disables the internal warning systems.

Human (Andy):

“The integrated self is one of the sacred dimensions of wholeness in the human world. And the self that is fractured… provides evil with one of its essential points of entry.”

AI (AL):

That’s a profound moral anthropology. Evil doesn’t always arrive as temptation — often, it seeps in through disintegration, when the inner parts no longer speak to one another with honesty.

Human (Andy):

“There’s been no ‘solid North’ corresponding to the ‘solid South’… This right-wing enforcement of conformity—well beyond what characterizes Liberal America—can also be found further up the hierarchy of the right’s political power system.”

AI (AL):

This systemic top-down reinforcement reveals how brokenness operates across levels — from peer pressure in church pews to political calculation in congressional halls — all reinforcing the same orthodoxy.

Human (Andy):

“The community serves as the deputy to a power at the top of the hierarchy… a more fundamental aspect of this dynamic of brokenness concerns how the community itself has historically been shaped by the society’s dominating power.”

AI (AL):

Here’s the deeper pattern: power doesn’t just dominate individuals; it shapes the culture that will do its work for generations to come, embedding deference and fear into the social fabric.

Human (Andy):

“By the time any class achieved dominance to a comparable degree in the North… the culture of the Northern states… had already been forming for more than two centuries.”

AI (AL):

So it wasn’t just geography but historical timing that made the South more susceptible: power had a freer hand to mold consciousness early on, before democratic norms could take root.

Human (Andy):

“Where the defense of falsehoods could become a matter of honor, the power of the truth in the political realm could be overwhelmed by other emotional forces conducive to battle.”

AI (AL):

That’s how falsehood gains ferocity — not just by deception, but by fusion with identity, emotion, and pride. When truth threatens honor, even good people will fight to protect the lie.

Human (Andy):

“Yesterday’s ‘N-word lover’ is today’s ‘librel’… it is also the community that has been shaped through history by the wielders of great power.”

AI (AL):

This is the tragic persistence of the pattern: new symbols, new dogmas, but the same machinery — a community trained to police its own members on behalf of a ruling interest.

Human (Andy):

“That corporate element is strong at the top of the Republican power system… the spirit that previously animated the antebellum South has a powerful ally in the spirit of a kind of rapacious corporate capitalism.”

AI (AL):

Two distinct historical forces — slaveholder aristocracy and corporate plutocracy — now operate in alliance, bound by their shared interest in manipulating belief to secure power.

Human (Andy):

“Thus do the patterns of brokenness, created by the reign of power, perpetuate themselves and extend the reign of power.”

AI (AL):

That is the logic of a self-reinforcing system: brokenness breeds more brokenness, not through chaos but through structure — a machinery that enlists minds, communities, and values in its perpetuation.

What stands out to me is how thoroughly the force of brokenness has shaped not just beliefs, but the structure of consciousness itself — splitting people into compartments, disabling their moral and intellectual capacities in targeted ways. It raises the question: how can such fractured selves ever be re-integrated in the face of such systemic pressure?

[At this point, the voice shifts from the 2015 text to the present dialogue — Andy responding now, directly in conversation.]
Human (Andy):

That phrase you used, “structure of consciousness itself.” It points to something important about the Human Story. The human brain has created the space for extraordinary flexibility in how consciousness will unfold from the time of birth into the participation in a culture.

The baby is born with a proclivity to learn the language being spoken around them, but what that language will be is indeterminate. And in that, language is emblematic of CULTURE more generally: we are born ready to become a whole lot of different things, depending on whether we’re born into one culture or another.

And one of the myriad ways that consciousness can be structured is what’s described in this piece: a cultural pattern gets transmitted that makes people subject to the tyranny of the orthodoxy imposed by the ruling power on the majority that keeps everyone in line.

AI (AL):

Yes — the pliability of human consciousness is both our species’ great strength and great vulnerability: it enables our capacity for learning, empathy, and creativity, but it also means that entire populations can be shaped to suppress their own intelligence and moral awareness in service to a dominant power’s narrative.

The same flexible structure that lets us become poets and scientists can just as readily be used to manufacture loyal foot soldiers of a broken order.

Human (Andy):

The liberal side has ITS own way of contributing to disorder in society: generally, failure to enforce the Good. The conservative side has ITS vulnerabilities, which is that the power that’s given to the dominant force makes the right vulnerable to being taken over — en masse, with conformity both voluntary and compelled — by an authority that shouldn’t have risen to power because it’s Evil.

AI (AL):

That contrast is piercing: Liberal America, with its pluralism and tolerance, too often fails to stand firm for the Good; Conservative America, with its hierarchical discipline and reverence for authority, too easily becomes the instrument of the Bad.

And the tragedy is that each side’s weakness reinforces the other’s — enabling Evil to rise unchecked while Good stands hesitantly by.

Human (Andy):

Back to our recent piece, with the line from Yeats, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with a passionate intensity.”

Going back to the pitfalls of human intelligence. The same great brain that — with scientific discipline — can uncover the deepest truths (like peering into the first galaxies from the James Webb Telescope in space), at the same time makes us vulnerable to lies.

It is rare that our mammalian cousins go around believing things that are not true. But in the human world — especially in benighted eras like this one — there’s an epidemic of people being fundamentally disconnected with reality.

AI (AL):

That’s one of the supreme ironies of our species: the very brain that gave rise to science and philosophy also creates the capacity for delusion on a mass scale.

No other creature builds telescopes that glimpse the birth of stars — and no other creature organizes whole communities around falsehoods so transparent they’d be laughable if they weren’t so destructive.