si-‘dek-shen. 1. The art of seducing. 2. Something that seduces. Temptation. 3. Something that attracts or charms. (Merriam-Webster.)

I remember when I first became aware of the artwork of Roy Lichtenstein. I was in graduate school at the time and there were a series of tee-shirts for sale in an off-campus bookstore. They were all in Lichtenstein’s style of pop images with amusing captions. For example, one tee-shirt with a cartoon portrait said “I’m not smart, but I can lift heavy objects.” I thought it was hiliarious, but some of my home boys did not. Then, later, I saw Lichtenstein’s art style in a music video by Cheap Trick. The video made me aware of the persuasive potential of mixing art with a written message or POV. Because I’m visually-oriented, I can and do employ many different techniques. As they say, “a picture is worth a thousand words.”

This post is about seduction, though not sexual seduction. It is about Intellectual seduction. Psychological seduction. Spiritual seduction. This loss of direction has happened many times in American history. Americans have routinely been led astray. Christians have routinely been led astray. They formed and joined the Antimasonic Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and other causes. Wasn’t it Puck who said:

Captain of our fairy band,
Helena is here at hand;
And the youth, mistook by me,
Pleading for a lover’s fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be! “(3.2.110-115)

The seduction that is currently more common in the U.S. involves the political right. Many prominent Republicans would tell you that the current Republican Party is not the GOP of the past. Coincidentially or not, thousands of evangelical pastors would say that there has also been a major upheaval in their congregations in concert with the feverish conservative politics in America. No longer is redemption the central focus in conservative religious gatherings but instead retribution.

Meet the Zeitgeist

The German term Zeitgeist means literally “Spirit of the Age” and is defined as “an invisible agent, force, or demon dominating the characteristics of a given epoch in world history.” No doubt the authors of this definition did not mean the word “demon” to be taken literally, but it is very possible that it could and should be taken so. Examples of Zeitgeists include the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Roaring Twenties, the Cold War, and the Digital Age among others. We know from school what the issues and challenges were for the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. With the Cold War, it was the competition between communism and capitalism, the many proxy regional conflicts between the West and the USSR. It included the Cultural Revolution in China under Mao. It involved fear as we lived with the prospect of thermonuclear war, along with suspicion and hostility. You could include the Y2K era as a Zeitgeist as well, as we approached the year 2000. People were concerned that there would be a digital glitch or “bug” that would cause computers to grind to a halt. More than a few Americans stocked up on survival products (especially weapons) expecting that our social order might disintergrate or the world might come to an end. Other Americans took a positive spin on the beginiing of a new millennia. We had reached–or would soon reach depending on who you asked–the Age of Aquarius.

If you’ve lived as long as I have, several examples of seduction will immediately come to mind. The first as I personally recall was when I was five or six years old. I was spending the summer with some family friends in New York City who came to the U.S. from Central Europe in response to Hitler’s quest for Lebensraum and the extermination of the Jews. There were horrors from the previous Zeitgeist. Our family friends were transfixed for hours each day watching their twelve inch black and white television set while sitting on the edge of their chairs as people in civilian suits and military uniforms on television were rudely questioned. There was shouting and gavels banging. The witnesses kept saying the same thing: “I refuse to answer on the grounds. . .” At the time, I had no idea what was going on, but I could sense that the adults who were watching in the room were anxious and afraid. Later, I would understand that these were the Senator Joe McCarthy hearings. There was a mood in the country that the U.S. was becoming communist. Our freedom, the followers of McCarthy said, was being undermined by the Democrats, the labor unions, the schools, the National Council of Churches, racial integration, the U.S. Army and other institutions which were all being infiltrated by communists. Later, as a teenager just out of high school, a member of the Ku Klux Klan tried to recruit me. These hate-mongers were representatives of that Zeitgeist as well.

The examples I’ve listed were seductive in their own way. In Vietnam when I was there, the Cold War Zeitgeist seduced young men and women to leave their villages and move to the cities to avoid the Viet Cong fighters and to look for a more prosperous life. Their parents were grief stricken to see their children leave, afraid that their peasant life could not continue without their sons to help with the harvests. They also feared that their daughters would be caught up in a life of drugs and prostitution. First and foremost, they were afraid they would not see their children again.

Fear

Fear is an important component to any social, cultural or political movement. Fear is one of the consequences of a Zeitgeist, if not a hallmark, and is an important component in seduction. Today, Americans of color fear the police. GBLTQ individuals fear their civil rights will be taken away. Gun owners fear their weapons will be confiscated eventually. Women fear the loss of their reproductive choices. Men fear they will lose their jobs to robots or AI, or their political influence will be diminished. Pastors and priests warn that a religious persecution is near. Boomers (like me) fear they will lose their Social Security and Medicare benefits when they need them the most. At the moment, probably most of us are afraid that events on this planet are spiraling out of control.

When right is wrong

Some of these panic driven notions are almost laughable when viewed in hindsight. Others are much more serious. Today, the prevailing Zeitgist leads some people to question your patriotism unless you support shutting the borders to illegal immigrants and cleansing the country of them as well. They say that these immigrants are “poisoning our blood.” What exactly does that mean? One is also viewed with suspicion if he or she is a liberal (or, and in any case, not a conservative.) Your allegiance to the U.S. is questioned if you believe in global warming, and if you watch any sort of news programming other than One America News Network, Newsmax, or Breitbart. Anti-gay sentiment and racial intolerance are also on the rise and if you mention the year 1619, the phrase “critical race theory,” the term “woke,” or you affirm that Joesph Biden won the election of 2020, you do so at your perile. It could cost you your job. What’s more, this very same criteria is increasingly being used in some churches to judge your spiritual maturity and your very salvation. Yet, every one of the characteristics I mention (hate, racism, xenophobia, anti-semitism, violence and sedition, even fear, itself) are antithetical to the Christian faith and to those civic virtues needed to sustain a healthy republic.

The Left does not get a pass, either

The political left has a different take-away from the current spirit. If you are not pro-GLBTQ, you are a bigot. If you are Catholic or a member of a church that does not ordain women, then you are misogynistic. If you as a white person condemn the widespread looting by black gangs or urban violence, or if you as a white person adapt black affects such as locs for your hair you are racist and you are misappropriating element of another culture. If you do not favor the Palestinians at the expense of the Israelies, you are supporting genocide. If you condemn Muslim violence, you are Islamophobic and so on. There is no incongruity in the contradictory characteristics of each Zeitgeist. The devil plays it both ways. Neither of the two major political factions in America has a monopoly on the truth or on moral issues. However, citizens and Christians have been seduced by one aspect of the prevailing Zeitgeist or another. Citizens, of course, are free to chose whatever notions they wish, but Christians should be more circumspect, not taking sides but rather standing in the middle showing where the Kingdom of God is

How did we get lured off the path? How do we show Ben Franklin that we can keep a republic barely two hundred and thirty five years after his warning?

We need to think critically to begin with. Not everything is evil. I had a professor in graduate school once tell us that early in the twentieth century, many people wanted to ban saxophones, because the music coming from these instruments was seen as too seductive. For example:

The Ladies Home Journal [went] so far as to accuse it of rendering listeners incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong, good and evil.”

What sort of person is vulnerable to political or religious seduction?

As a rule, a group vulnerable to seduction is supportive of the institutions of our society so long as they have confidence in these institutions. However, there has been an unprecedented, concerted, ceaseless effort to question and criticize the three branches of government from far right commentators, either on talk radio, cable news, podcasts, or websites for the last thirty years or more. People vulnerable to authoritarian seduction will generally if not grudgingly admit that diverse groups in society do have civil rights even as authoritarian groups do. However, the political left has pushed either through legislature or court cases, civil rights for even more groups that in the past never existed under law (such as transgender groups.) I recall the debates in the seventies over the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Conservatives even then voiced concern that passage of the ERA would mean there would be women in mens’ restrooms and vice versa. Progressives denied this would ever be an issue, and yet, even without the ERA, it has become an issue. There is an outrage among conservatives that high school girls must share bathrooms and locker rooms with biological males who now claim a gender different than that assigned at birth. This issue outrages me as well. Yet, to provide separate but equal accommodations to youngsters with dysmorphia takes us back to the days of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896.)

There are certain character traits in people that make them more susceptible to pulitical or religious seduction, just as there are certain character traits that make someone vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking, alcoholism, narcissism, greed or anything else. For example, people who are vulnerable to authoritarian seduction will consider the legal right of someone to be POTUS separate from his moral right. In the case of Barak Obama who undeniably defeated Senator John McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012, this group believed that Obama had no moral right to be POTUS because, they believed contrary to fact, that Obama was born in Kenya. As a result, they resisted his presidency. Bob Altemeyer, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada published a seminal study in 2006. Here are some of his findings.

Traits of people vulnerable to political or religious seduction

1. Illogical thinking:  In one study, subjects were shown the following statements:

Premise A:       “All fish live in the sea.

Premise B:       Sharks live in the sea.

Conclusion:     Therefore, sharks are fish.”

People vulnerable to political seduction agreed that the premises A & B were correct because they believed that the conclusion was correct.  “If you ask them why it seems right, they would likely tell you, ‘Because sharks are fish.’” In other words, they thought the reasoning was sound because they agreed with the last statement. If the conclusion is right, they figured, then the reasoning must have been right.  But someone with experience in critical thinking understands that this is not necessarily so.  What’s more, the premises should validate the conclusion, not the other way around.

2. Highly-compartmentalized minds:  People who are vulnerable to political or religious seduction seem to store ideas in separate “file folders” in their minds.  If they did not do so, they would become aware that some of their beliefs conflict with their other beliefs.  “But that’s the point: they don’t seem to scan for self-consistency as much as most people do. Similarly they tended to agree with “A government should allow total freedom of expression, even it if threatens law and order” and “A government should only allow freedom of expression so long as it does not threaten law and order.”

3. Double standards:   People vulnerable to political seduction and to an extent people who are vulnerable to religious seduction tend to side with authorities (those in power.) If a black person provokes a fight with a police officer for no reason in our society, the person vulnerable to manipulation will side with the police officer.  All else being equal, this seems to make sense.  However, if a police officer beats up a black person for no reason, then the black person should expect to receive no sympathy from an individual vulnerable to manipulation, either.

4. Hypocrisy:  People who are vulnerable to political or religious seduction can be hypocritical.  They support censorship in schools with “Don’t Say ‘Gay’” policies but oppose censorship when a school prefers a winter greeting that says “Happy Holidays” rather then “Merry Christmas.”  Yet, both liberals and conservatives can be equally guilty of hypocrisy depending on the issue.

5. Blindness to themselves:  People who are vulnerable to political or religious seduction are often blind to themselves.  If you were to ask people to list their faults on a sheet of paper, those people with the shortest lists are the ones most vulnerable to seduction and manipulation.  “In fact, despite their own belief that they are quite honest with themselves, authoritarians tend to be highly defensive, and run away from unpleasant truths about themselves more than most people do.”  Altemeyer lists some examples of this (p. 86), but suffice it to say, vulnerable people are interested in finding out specifics when they did good, but much less interested in feedback when they did poorly.

6. A Profound Ethnocentrism: People with this trait have a “they” vs “us” perception of events. You are either with them or you are against them. There is no middle ground.

7. Dogmatism: People who are vulnerable to political or religious seduction are absolutely certain that they are right and others are wrong. Again, there is no middle ground.

Plato-What might happen in the U.S. 2025

Plato was not the first to coin the term “democracy” which comes from two Greek words: Demos (or “people”) and kratos (which means “to rule.”). We say then that democracy is rule by the people. But Plato, who wrote about democracy in his book “The Republic” published circa 375 BC, was not a fan of democracy, and he predicted that there were certain stages in the evolution of government, the last stage of which was an authoritarian rule (e.g., dictator.) The next to the last stage was democracy. So, if Plato was right, then a dictatorship is in the future we may be facing.

I’m going to let ChatGPT explain this, because the AI program provides an easy to understand sequence:

In Plato’s “Republic,” he criticizes democracy as a form of government and argues that it tends to devolve into tyranny. Plato’s concerns about democracy are rooted in his views on human nature and the inherent flaws he sees in democratic systems.

Instability and Lack of Order: Plato believed that democracies are characterized by a lack of order and stability. In a democracy, the government is influenced by the will of the majority, which can be fickle and easily swayed. The constant changing of policies and leaders can lead to a lack of continuity and consistency, creating an environment of instability.

Excessive Freedom: Plato was critical of what he saw as excessive individual freedom in democracies. He argued that too much freedom could lead to chaos and a breakdown of social order. In a democratic system where everyone has the freedom to pursue their own desires without sufficient restraint, there is a risk that the pursuit of individual interests may override the common good.

Manipulation by Demagogues: Plato was concerned about the influence of charismatic leaders or demagogues in democracies. He argued that these individuals could manipulate the emotions and desires of the masses, leading to the election of leaders who might not have the best interests of the state in mind. This manipulation could eventually lead to the rise of a tyrant who promises stability and order in exchange for more power.

Erosion of Virtue: Plato valued the concept of virtue and believed that democracies could undermine the development of virtuous individuals. He was skeptical about the ability of a democratic society to cultivate the wisdom and virtue necessary for effective governance. In his view, the pursuit of individual desires in a democracy might prioritize personal gain over the common good.

Plato’s views on democracy and its potential for devolving into authoritarianism should be understood in the context of his broader political philosophy. While his ideas were influential, it’s important to note that they are just one perspective among many in the long history of political thought. Different philosophers have offered contrasting views on the merits and challenges of democratic governance.”

(OpenAI, personal communication, December 12, 2023). When asked to explain Plato’s thoughts on democracy, OpenAI’s ChatGPT’s response included the paragraphs above.

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So, today, in upstate New York two weeks before Christmas, people are complaining about crime and how either the police do not arrest people stealing Christmas packages off of the front steps of people’s home in broad daylight, or if the authorities do arrest someone, it’s just a waste of time because they will be out on the streets again later that day. Supposedly there are cars that follow FedEx, UPS, USPS and DHL trucks around the streets looking for drop offs to steal. The people ask “Why don’t the Democrats who run state government do something about this?” The people want a crackdown on crime, which is exactly what the presumed Republican nominee for president is promising. Nevermind that this crackdown might violate the U.S. Constitution. But this is nothing new. In “The Republic,” Platos said that criminals condemned to death could be seen walking the streets of Athens after being sentenced. Then, there are the thousands of undocumented migrants who slip across the border and disappear into the U.S. each week walking our streets. In France, Louis XIV was absolutely ruthless. His authoritorian reign led to the French Revolution which saw anarchy and bloodlust in the name of democracy. Those excesses were countered and supressed in turn by the rise of Napoleon.

Do we in the U.S. currently have any demagogues who “manipulate the emotions and desires of the masses, leading to the election of leaders who might not have the best interests of the state in mind?” You bet we do!

And now, the door is open for a dictator, whether for four years or only a day. An American Caesar! People chuckled when “dictator-for-a-day” was mentioned recently. But suppose Barak Obama would have made that statement in 2012? Would these same people have been grinning then? Even as our country moves closer to an authoritatian regime, so does the Netherlands, and so has Hungary, Turkey, and other countries as well. Add to these nations the current authoritarian regimes in Russia, China and North Korea and you can see the potential for trouble.

The best solution to ward off seduction is to think for yourself. Challenge your assumptions. Don’t settle for one news source when you can just as easily consult ten others. Be aware of confirmation bias. Vote in the Presidential Election next year, but choose your candidates carefully. It is a very important election. If you are a Christian, encourage people in your congregation to remain true to the gospel which unites us, and not drift off into politics which divides us.