Sep 12 (edited) • Perspective & Meaning
Get Yourself Out Of the Cave, No-One is Coming to Save You
A week that should have changed minds and didn't
Undercover reporters from Channel 4 and the investigative outfit Verbatim filmed Reform's head of policy James Orr and Farage aide Dan Jukes talking to someone they thought was an American donor. Orr was recorded saying Farage "doesn't know, won't know. It's the kind of thing he would rather not know." They discussed funding opinion polls through the donor rather than directly, and a further £500,000 donation that in the end was never paid. Foreign donations to UK parties are illegal under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000. Both men resigned, and Reform has been reported to the Met and the Electoral Commission.
Two days later, at the party conference in Birmingham, a protester who stood up during Farage's speech was pulled out by security while people around her grabbed her hair and jaw, and one attendee hit her with a walking stick. Farage laughed and called her "a screamer." Robert Jenrick's response when asked about it was "oh, boo hoo." West Midlands Police are appealing for her to come forward.
You'd expect a story like that to cost a party support. It didn't. That's the part that does a logical mind's head in.
Your brain doesn't experience being wrong. It experiences being attacked.
In 2016, researchers Jonas Kaplan, Sarah Gimbel and Sam Harris put 40 people with strong political convictions into an MRI scanner and showed them evidence that contradicted their beliefs. The study, published in Scientific Reports, found that the regions lighting up when people refused to budge were the amygdala and the insula, the same regions that activate when someone is facing a physical threat. Being shown that you might be wrong doesn't register in the brain as new information. It registers as danger. Facts aren't landing in the part of the brain that does reasoning. They're landing in the part that does threat.
Why arguing with your mate doesn't work
If someone close to you has been pulled into this, sending them articles is fighting the wrong battle. It isn't an information gap. You're not up against what they know, you're up against a threat response, and you can't out argue an amygdala.
What's actually shown to help, in the deradicalisation and cult exit research, isn't debate. It's reduced exposure. Less time in the group. Less of the algorithm that keeps feeding the same material back to them. People leave these worldviews when the input dries up, not when they lose an argument, because losing an argument feels like being attacked, and nobody changes their mind mid attack. Not everyone comes back either way. But you trying to win the argument is very often just more input, and more input is the thing keeping them there.
The cave is still just a cave
Plato's allegory. Prisoners chained in a cave their whole lives, watching shadows on a wall, calling the shadows reality because it's all they've ever seen. One gets free, sees the actual world, comes back to tell the others, and they don't believe him. Some of them would rather kill him than have the cave disproved.
If someone you love is in there, they might have twenty people in that cave agreeing with them, and you standing outside on your own. That doesn't make you wrong. The number of people inside a cave was never a vote on what's actually outside it.
Hamlet says to Horatio, "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." The cave has its own internal logic, its own agreed reality, its own people backing each other up. None of that makes the cave the whole world. There's more outside it than anyone inside has bothered to look for.
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Get Yourself Out Of the Cave, No-One is Coming to Save You
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