To my international friends: If you ever wonder why Americans are the way they are, just remember that 1/3rd of all US citizens are in a cult that teaches them to suppress the activity of their prefrontal cortex, particularly when it comes to doubt, critical thinking, and differentiating emotional responses from personal values.
1/3rd of Americans are Evangelical, and Evangelical Protestantism is a cult. We just don’t think of it as one because it’s so normalized. However, it follows the B.I.T.E. model of cult dynamics.
Evangelism teaches its followers to always maintain states of bliss and ecstasy for Jesus. What this does is condition the brain to always operate out of less-evolved parts; areas that are responsible for more primal emotions like euphoria, anger, and fear. Because of how we’ve evolved to survive, the brain will actually shut down our higher functioning—including critical thinking skills—in favor of these primal emotions, when they’re active.
Always feeling bliss = never questioning or feeling doubt. Evangelicals may actually fear the thoughts that do originate from their higher brain-parts because they think it’s the devil tempting them away from their religion. They’ll engage in self-indoctrination techniques to make this stop.
This creates a cognitive dissonance so great that many Americans have no separation between how they feel and what they believe. This is really bad because their minds have literally no defense against undue influence. They’ll vote for the dude who hyped them up enough. They’ll buy into the conspiracy theory that excites them the most. They’ll side with whatever gets the best reaction out of them, and getting a rise out of people is super easy to do.
Things like financial insecurity and low employment make this worse, too.
And just to be clear, this kind of conditioning can happen to anyone, regardless of their intellectual capacity.
Cult conditioning has nothing to do with how smart or dumb people are. You can condition literally any brain with the right time and environment.
Counteracting undue influence is a skill, and like any skill, it needs to be taught.
Cult experts frequently point out that the smarter people are, the more susceptible they are to this once the initial hooks are in, and the harder they are to deprogram. This is because while this kind of conditioning does not rely on intelligence, the ability to rationalise does -- the smarter someone is, the better they can rationalise what they already believe, so if they’re committed to following their feelings, a smart person is much better at making it seem (to themselves as well as others) that they’re actually using logic and reason rather than making ad-hoc justifications after the fact.
Also, people who know (or believe) that they’re smarter than average tend to assume that this makes them harder to fool, conditon, or lie to. Which makes somebody much easier to fool, condition, or lie to.
So I am from the US but now live in Argentina, and as The American(tm) I often get reasonably asked the question, "Why are Americans, you know, like that?"
The best and most immediate answer I could come up with, and the one I've stuck to, is telling people that America is a country defined by being a haven for cults and religious extremists since its inception. And people are always like "god that makes so much sense."
But you know, the wildest thing is if I tried to tell any given American this (which I have) chances are they'd be like, "No way, that's absurd." And I think the thing is, if you're an American and have lived most or all of your life in America, this is just your normal. But when you live somewhere that is less saturated with religious dogma, cults and anti-intellectualism, it's readily apparent.
I do want to point out that there ARE WAYS to improve your personal resistance to cult indoctrination tactics. You're not immune because you're smart (or because you're not smart, if that applies), but you can learn to recognize and resist cult indoctrination.
The first and most important step is to educate yourself on what cult indoctrination looks like, the common methods used to suck people in and then keep them trapped. When you know what a cult leader is trying to do, you can resist it much easier than when you don't know.
So read up about B.I.T.E. and improve your cult resistance!
It's worth noting that smarter people are harder to deradicalize once the hooks are in. Getting those hooks in is important, and that's a thing that you can teach yourself to recognize, as said above. Though I think it's less useful to think of it as being about raw intelligence and more about specific skills that intelligence often helps with, like critical thinking skills and understanding rhetoric and propaganda.
One thing I also think is important is that the way cults play on people's feelings to recruit them is similar to a lot of other stuff you might already have learned to be suspicious of - for instance, how abusers hook in and then condition their victims, how scams do the same, and so on. If you're generally skeptical of things that seem too good to be true, of simplistic solutions to complex problems (even if they seem to flatter your own preconceived beliefs), if you're suspicious of people who come out of nowhere and instantly want to be your best friends and take care of all your needs (love-bombing), then you're going to make yourself a lot less susceptible to cults and extremist groups by extension.
