The axioms of behavior

Earlier this week, Keith Raniere, the founder of an organization known as Nxivm, was arrested in Mexico, to which he had fled last year in the wake of a devastating investigation published in the New York Times. The article described a shady operation that combined aspects of a business seminar, a pyramid scheme, and a sex cult, with public workshops shading into a “secret sisterhood” that required its members to provide nude photographs or other compromising materials and be branded with Raniere’s initials. (In an email obtained by the Times, Raniere reassured one of his followers: “[It was] not originally intended as my initials but they rearranged it slightly for tribute.”) According to the report, about sixteen thousand people have taken the group’s courses, which are marketed as leading to “greater self-fulfillment by eliminating psychological and emotional barriers,” and some went even further. As the journalist Barry Meier wrote:

Most participants take some workshops, like the group’s “Executive Success Programs,” and resume their lives. But other people have become drawn more deeply into Nxivm, giving up careers, friends and families to become followers of its leader, Keith Raniere, who is known within the group as “Vanguard”…Former members have depicted [Raniere] as a man who manipulated his adherents, had sex with them and urged women to follow near-starvation diets to achieve the type of physique he found appealing.

And it gets even stranger. In 2003, Raniere sued the Cult Education Institute for posting passages from his training materials online. In his deposition for the suit, which was dismissed just last year, Raniere stated:

I discovered I had an exceptional aptitude for mathematics and computers when I was twelve. It was at the age of twelve I read The Second Foundation [sic] by Isaac Asimov and was inspired by the concepts on optimal human communication to start to develop the theory and practice of Rational Inquiry. This practice involves analyzing and optimizing how the mind handles data. It involves mathematical set theory applied in a computer programmatic fashion to processes such as memory and emotion. It also involves a projective methodology that can be used for optimal communication and decision making.

Raniere didn’t mention any specific quotations from Asimov, but they were presumably along the lines of the following, which actually appears in Foundation and Empire, spoken by none other than the Mule:

Intuition or insight or hunch-tendency, whatever you wish to call it, can be treated as an emotion. At least, I can treat it so…The human mind works at low efficiency. Twenty percent is the figure usually given. When, momentarily, there is a flash of greater power it is termed a hunch, or insight, or intuition. I found early that I could induce a continual use of high brain-efficiency. It is a killing process for the person affected, but it is useful.

At this point, one might be tempted to draw parallels to other cults, such as Aum Shinrikyo, that are also said to have taken inspiration from Asimov’s work. In this case, however, the connection to the Foundation series seems tangential at best. A lot of us read science fiction at the golden age of twelve, and while we might be intrigued by psychohistory or mental engineering, few of us take it in the direction that Raniere evidently did. (As one character observes in Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum: “People don’t get the idea of going back to burn Troy just because they read Homer.”) In fact, Raniere comes off a lot more like L. Ron Hubbard, at least in the version of himself that he presents in public. In the deposition, he provided an exaggerated account of his accomplishments that will strike those who know Hubbard as familiar:

In 1988, I was accepted into the Mega Society. The requirements to be accepted into the Mega Society were to have a demonstrated IQ of 176…In 1989, I was accepted into the Guinness Book of World Records under the category “Highest IQ.” I also left my position as a Computer Programmer/Analyst and resumed business consulting with the intention to raise money to start the “Life Learning Institute.” At this point in time I became fascinated with how human motivation affected behavior. I started to refine my projective mathematical theory of the human mind to include a motivational behavior equation.

And when Raniere speaks of developing “a set of consistent axioms of how human behavior interfaced with the world,” it’s just a variation on an idea that has been recycled within the genre for decades.

Yet it’s also worth asking why the notion of a “mathematical psychology” appeals to these manipulative personalities, and why many of them have repackaged these ideas so successfully for their followers. You could argue that Raniere—or even Charles Manson—represents the psychotic fringe of an impulse toward transformation that has long been central to science fiction, culminating in the figure of the superman. (It’s probably just a coincidence, but I can’t help noting that two individuals who have been prominently linked with the group, the actresses Kristin Kreuk and Allison Mack, both appeared on Smallville.) And many cults hold out a promise of change for which the genre provides a convenient vocabulary. As Raniere said in his deposition:

In mathematics, all things are proven based on axioms and a step by step systematic construction. Computers work the same way. To program a computer one must first understand the axioms of the computer language, and then the step by step systematic construction of the problem-solution methodology. Finally, one must construct the problem-solution methodology in a step by step fashion using the axioms of the language. I discovered the human mind works the same way and I formalized the process.

This sounds a lot like Hubbard, particularly in the early days of dianetics, in which the influence of cybernetics was particularly strong. But it also represents a limited understanding of what the human mind can be, and it isn’t surprising that it attracts people who see others as objects to be altered, programmed, and controlled. The question of whether such figures as Hubbard or Raniere really buy into their own teachings resists any definitive answer, but one point seems clear enough. Even if they don’t believe it, they obviously wish that it were true.

The fall of the foundation

Note: Spoilers follow for the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov.

At the World Science Fiction Convention two years ago in Kansas City, I attended a panel where an audience member asked a question about Donald Trump. There were audible groans from the room, but one of the panelists—I think it was David Brin—drew a parallel between Trump and Nehemiah Scudder, the religious demagogue who casts an ominous shadow across Heinlein’s Future History. It was a clever comparison, but as time goes on, I’ve come to realize that there’s an even better surrogate from the golden age of science fiction. I’ve seen it mentioned here and there online, but the most thorough treatment is by Chris Taylor of Mashable, who writes of the psychohistorians of Asimov’s Foundation series:

They hope to preserve all the knowledge of civilization after the collapse of the Empire, as predicted by foresighted futurist Hari Seldon. We see them overcome various “Seldon crises,” gaining more and more star systems—until the Empire collapses halfway through the second book, Foundation and Empire, ahead of schedule. At this point in the story, the Foundation seems as secure as Obama-era technocracy did. It’s the end of history, basically—and though a group of underground democrats grumble about its rigid political system, the rational, enlightened, science-friendly Foundation has clearly triumphed over the forces of darkness and anarchy…Then out of nowhere comes the Mule, a terrifying warlord who conquers the entire Foundation in the space of a year. Seldon’s…prediction turns out to be badly wrong—as useless, say, as pre-election polling in November 2016. He didn’t see the Mule coming…[The Mule] turns out to have developed a one-in-a-trillion genetic mutation that gives him a strange power: the ability to implant the emotion of his choice in others. So the Mule instills his followers with ecstatic, fanatical loyalty, and sticks his opponents with despair and “a miserable sense of defeat.”

Taylor’s excellent article, which is worth reading in its entirety, highlights passages from Asimov’s stories—much of which the Mule spends in disguise as a clown—that have taken on an uncanny resonance. Here, for instance, we see Han Pritcher, a decorated military hero who once opposed the Mule, only to be converted by him after a failed assassination attempt:

Pritcher caught a mental breath and tried to think back. How had he been before the Mule had Converted him from the diehard democrat that he had been? It was hard to remember. He could not place himself mentally. He could not break the lining wires that bound him emotionally to the Mule…There had been no sensation the first time. There had been no pain, no mental jar—not even a feeling of discontinuity. He had always loved the Mule. If there had ever been a time long before—as long before as five short years—when he had thought he hadn’t loved him, that he had hated him—that was just a horrid illusion. The thought of that illusion embarrassed him.

And a little while later, when the First Speaker of the Second Foundation addresses the Mule directly at last:

Emotional contact such as you and I possess is not a very new development…but the faculty of direct emotional contact tended to atrophy with the development of speech a million years back…[But] you were born with it…We calculated the extent to which a megalomania would take control of you and we thought we were prepared…The added psychic distortion due to your inferiority complex passed us by. We allowed only for megalomania—not for an intensely psychopathic paranoia as well.

And if you’re wondering whether these parallels might have occurred to anyone within the Republican Party itself—well, it’s possible. Here’s what one prominent conservative wrote two decades ago in a book titled To Renew America, which seems now like a slightly less catchy version of Trump’s favorite slogan:

While Toynbee was impressing me with the history of civilizations, Isaac Asimov was shaping my view of the future in equally profound ways…For a high school student who loved history, Asimov’s most exhilarating invention was the “psychohistorian” Hari Seldon. The term does not refer to Freudian analysis but to a kind of probabilistic forecasting of the future of whole civilizations. The premise was that, while you cannot predict individual behavior, you can develop a pretty accurate sense of mass behavior. Pollsters and advertisers now make a good living off the same theory.

The author was Newt Gingrich, whose love of science fiction has been amply documented elsewhere—he wrote science fiction novels, participated in Jerry Pournelle’s think tank on the Strategic Defense Initiative, gave a controversial speech at the Nebula Awards, and mused during his last presidential campaign about placing a permanent base on the moon. And he really likes the Foundation series. As Ray Smock, the former historian of the House of Representatives, wrote in a fascinating article on the subject: “The greatest influence on Newt Gingrich, the conservative Republican, was the liberal atheist Isaac Asimov…Newt saw not just entertainment but a master plan using the Foundation trilogy as his political handbook, a guide to how one man creates a new force for civilized life.”

Gingrich, like the economist Paul Krugman, wanted to be Hari Seldon, and at first, he pursued his goals in the manner of any aspiring psychohistorian. (As Smock writes with a straight face: “While Hari Seldon created the Foundation to carry out his work, Newt used a variety of foundations and organizations to foster his work.”) So how did he become such a vocal defender of our generation’s equivalent of the Mule? Helpfully, Gingrich published an entire book on the subject, Understanding Trump, which includes a passage that sheds some light on the problem, mostly by speaking of Trump as if he were a super empath:

[Donald Trump] has a sixth sense about connecting with the American people. For instance, Trump routinely spoke to crowds of ten to twenty thousand people, but if you watched his gestures and body language, you saw that he was connecting with audience members one by one…Trump’s familiarity and comfortableness with working-class Americans also enables him to intuit what people care about and what they are looking for…In addition to giving strength and resolve to his supporters, I am sure the rallies were critical to maintaining Trump’s spirit as well. He was able to stay in tune with, and be guided by, the will of the people.

And if you want to understand the fundamental strangeness of what remains of the Republican Party, it helps to see it as an organization of men who thought fondly that they were a foundation of Hari Seldons, but who turned out to be embarrassingly eager to throw in their lot with the Mule, contenting themselves with “wins” on specific issues even as their party was irrevocably transformed. Trump, like the Mule, seems to have only gradually understood the extent of his power: “Slowly, I learned that I could reach into those minds and turn the pointer to the spot I wished, that I could nail it there forever.” Now he clearly knows what he can do. And he fooled many of us for a long time into thinking that he was a clown.