All Power to the Demented.

Propaganda as a Senile Illness of Society

I wrote this post in December of last year, but the recent events in the US have turned dementia into an important subject of discussion. So, I am reproposing it in a shortened and slightly edited form

The last photo of Benito Mussolini alive; taken a few days before he was killed on April 28, 1945. He looks tense, even though he maintains his mask of strong man. But it may be that his mind was already affected by an early form of dementia. Many modern leaders have been affected by similar problems, and I argue here that propaganda may be seen as a form of social dementia. Society, apparently, reflects the structure of the brain of its leaders.

Liminal Dementia

If you have experience with a relative suffering from dementia, you know how it progresses faster and faster until the person is nothing more than an empty shell. It is truly horrible to see that your father or your mother don’t recognize you anymore. It is an especially cruel way to die, not so much for the victim. but for everyone around them.

Before arriving at that, though, there is a liminal period on the cliff's edge where the malady is hidden behind a behavior that superficially appears normal. The people affected still react and behave as they used to but, if you pay attention, there is something mechanical in their actions. Your relative looks now like a robot programmed to behave like the person you knew but without a soul: more assertive, more willing to take risks, less interested in hearing suggestions, and often unwilling or unable to change course. More than all, he/she has lost a fundamental characteristic of the human brain: empathy, the capability of understanding other human beings' feelings and needs. (this is, incidentally, one of the main limitations of the current generation of AI programs. They have no empathy).

This kind of dementia may be much more common than most of us realize, and it is a dangerous period not just for the person affected but for everyone. The onset of the malady goes unrecognized, resulting in all sorts of mistakes and disasters. I saw it happening with my father. He had always been a generous man, ready to help others whenever he could. But, in his 80s, he lost the capability to evaluate the intentions of the people he interacted with. He fell victim to scammers and petty thieves who managed to cut a large dent in his savings. I think it is typical of the liminal dementia phase. Even good traits of one’s personality can be exaggerated and performed in a mechanical way so that they become liabilities.

Benito Mussolini’s Dementia

In some cases, dementia affects powerful people; heads of state are a typical example. I spent some time looking at documents about Benito Mussolini, trying to understand what led him to make the incredible mistakes he made during the last years of his rule — declaring war on the US, for instance. One possible explanation is that he was simply a mediocre mind influenced by a narcissistic personality. But it is also possible that Mussolini’s mind was slowly gnawed away by dementia. He was relatively young (62) when he was killed, and a post-mortem examination of a fragment of his brain didn’t reveal evident damage, but that doesn’t mean his brain was functioning well. The problem didn’t escape from the bright intelligence of Margherita Sarfatti, his former lover, who gave us a description of dementia as clear as it can be:

That Mussolini of the early years was now more than dead to me. I do not even consider him the same man of the later years: A different spiritual being, bound to his original identity only in the physical aspect. But even this one, as in The Portrait of Dorian Gray, had become weighed down and distorted under the influence of such a profound spiritual change. So I can think back, sadly but without hatred, to the man who once was, as one thinks back to someone long dead. The man who was shot by cruel and indignant patriots in April 1945 was only the degenerate shell of the first Mussolini, like cancer compared to the previously healthy flesh and limbs. Perhaps the disease was darkly at work even then.

Few in Italy realized what was happening at that time, but it was probably dementia that enhanced Mussolini’s personality traits in a grotesque manner. He used to be assertive, but he became aggressive. His willingness to take risks became recklessness. His habit of choosing goals and attaining them became a tendency to ignore all suggestions and to stick to flawed ideas. Just as an example, in 1941, he ordered the Italian air force to “destroy all Grek cities with more than 10,000 inhabitants.” Fortunately, the Air Force could not possibly have done that — but what if Mussolini had control over nuclear weapons? The final result of Mussolini’s madness was a humiliating defeat from which Italy has not yet recovered and maybe never will.

Demented leaders of our times

Are the world’s governments in the hands of demented individuals? That would seem to be perfectly possible from the events we see unfolding in the world. The historical example that comes to mind is that of Ronald Reagan, who left the presidency in 1989 and was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 1994. It is clear, though, that he already had symptoms of dementia during the final years of his term. As president, Reagan avoided major military engagements, but he was aggressive in foreign policy, and his “Star Wars” initiative could have destabilized the world’s global strategic equilibrium. It is a good thing that the US presidency has a limited duration.

An earlier case in the US is that of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was in office from 1933 to 1945. He almost certainly suffered from dementia during his last years. Of him, we have an unflattering portrait of a person “incapable of personal friendship with anyone” and an “egomaniac.” During WW2, he was a major force behind the Manhattan Project, which created the first nuclear bombs in history. He died before these bombs could be used, but his successor, Harry Truman, had little choice but to implement a plan that had already been decided. Before his death in 1945, Roosevelt approved the “Morgenthau Plan,” which would have led to the death by starvation of tens of millions of Germans. It is unclear whether Roosevelt understood what he was doing; his dementia was rapidly progressing. The secretary of war of the time, Harry Stimson, reported that the president told him that he had "no idea how he could have initialed [the Morgenthau Plan].” The role of Roosevelt’s dementia in affecting his decisions during WW2 is hard to assess, but at least his death avoided the destruction of Germany.

Are there other examples? Yes, plenty. A table from a (2020) paper by Hans Förstl lists the cases of leaders of the 20th century who were affected by mental decline.

The table misses some notable examples, such as Mussolini, whose dementia is probable but not certain, and Adolf Hitler, who suffered from Parkinson's during his last years of life. It includes several Western leaders and 5 US presidents. To that, we may add the current president, Joe Biden, now 81, clearly showing signs of cognitive decline. A recent post by John Rember argues that Donald Trump shows evident signs of dementia, too. So, it may be that voters will handle the country to a demented person in the 2024 elections (it may be the case already).

Fortunately, though, in most cases, dementia leads mostly to reduced activity and stasis. So, there is a limited time window in which a leader is dumb enough but still aggressive enough to start a major war — that is what happened with Mussolini. But it is also possible for a demented leader to become easy prey for aggressive collaborators eager to implement their personal plans. It may have been the case with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Leonid Brezhnev, and maybe the current US president. In the case of Donald Trump, if he becomes president again, he could do a lot of damage in several areas, but he was never a warmonger. So, dementia can’t reinforce a trait that he never had, and it is unlikely that he will pull the nuclear trigger. (hopefully).

Propaganda as social dementia

Having demented individuals as heads of state is bad enough, but the real problem is that people follow them and obey their orders instead of sending them to a mental asylum. Unless we want to admit that most people in a whole country suffer from dementia, too, we should attribute this behavior to the power of modern propaganda.

Propaganda is one of the features of society. It has existed in different forms all over history, but in modern times it has taken an especially vicious role by taking a shape that looks like a form of social dementia. If you think about it, propaganda has all the characteristics that signal dementia in an individual.

— Lack of Empathy (“They are human animals”)

— Simplified concepts and lack of in-depth analysis (“War on Terror”)

— Refusal to accept different ideas (“You are Putin’s troll”)

— Indifference to other people’s suffering (“We had to destroy the village in order to save it”)

— Focusing on oneself (“My country, right or wrong”)

— Rigid behavior and inability to change course(“Better dead than red”)

— Obsessions (Bringing them democracy, wokeism, face masks, and many more)

Framing propaganda as a form of societal dementia gives us some insights into how it works. One is that the structure of a demented society seems to be patterned around the structure of the brain of a demented leader. There seem to be fractal elements in this arrangement. Then, as there is no cure for Alzheimer’s or senile dementia, there doesn’t seem to exist a cure for propaganda. Once a successful propaganda campaign has taken hold of people’s minds, it is extremely difficult to dislodge the implanted “memes” in them. For example, not even a major military defeat could convince many Italians that their Duce was not always right after all. The idea that Mussolini was “betrayed” remained popular for many years after the end of WW2. The same happened to those Japanese soldiers who were stranded in remote islands and continued fighting for decades after the war was over.

People can sometimes be deprogrammed, but it is expensive, uncertain, and traumatic. Fortunately, societies periodically replace their members (something that an individual brain cannot do) so they can eventually shed away the obsessive memes imposed on them by propaganda. But it takes at least a couple of generations, much too long to avoid the disasters that propaganda generates, from wars to mass exterminations.

It is said that one of the best ways to avoid personal dementia is to keep one’s mind active and alert. That can be done by maintaining a range of sources of information that are not controlled by the government. Not watching TV and avoiding certain social media helps, too (there officially exists such a thing as “TikTok use disorder” (TTUD), linked to memory loss). At the societal level, avoiding the generalized dementia generated by propaganda requires maintaining at least some information sources not under government control. That goes under the name of “free speech,” but it always was more a slogan than a reality and, recently, Western countries saw a return in force of censorship. It faced stiff opposition from the so-called “alternative media,” entrenched in their internet bubbles. The struggle is ongoing: the powers that be are still using propaganda tools developed at the time of the mass media, and it is unclear how effective they will be in the Internet age. So far, propaganda has been unable to overcome dissent, but it remains an enormously powerful force in our world. It is a struggle that will shape our future.

Something more we can learn from individual dementia is that it is not a necessary event in one’s life. My mother-in-law, Liliana, died at 101 two years ago, and her mind was free of dementia up to the last moment (she never used TikTok!). Would it be possible to build a sane society? It won’t be easy, but I don’t see it as impossible.