A Conspiracy Theory Worth Considering

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, January 13, 2021

 

This sounds dumb and almost conspiratorial, but I just want to say it: I suspect that the general sense of unease and panic in our politics is partly a physical and hormonal reaction to a novel substance introduced into the human environment by giant and somewhat nefarious corporations.

 

Let me preface this by saying that I’m a bit of a weirdo and faddist. I occasionally relieve stress by lying in a sensory-deprivation tank. I don’t like to diet to lose weight; I prefer extreme fasting. I write my columns for National Review at a standing desk. I’m too embarrassed to even tell you, dear reader, the remedies I’ve tried for snoring. I’m probably a crank, really.

 

Let me grant that the COVID-19 pandemic and the measures to contain it have massively inculcated a general sense in much of the population that “we are under siege,” making people more sensitive to slights and fears.

 

Let me also grant that the polarization of our politics along cultural lines is leading people to be scared for perfectly rational reasons. In the last twelve months, we’ve seen the biggest wave of riotous violence and destruction in half a century, we’ve seen a massive spike in violent crime, we’ve seen a recession that has had direct negative effects for many people and has introduced massive uncertainty about the livelihoods of many more, and now we’ve seen a riot in the Capitol building.

 

The novel substance in our environment is a “smartphone,” and I think it’s literally inducing people to a kind of low-level panic, and paranoia, especially in conjunction with social media.

 

We tend to think of the danger of social media as a disembodied one, because modern people tend to think of themselves as minds that control a body, rather than an embodied person. So the “danger” of social media is framed as ideas acting upon ideas. Maybe exposure to radical ideas slowly erodes the grip of reasonable and moderate ones. Surely, it seems something like that happens. But what I mean is more physical. And it might sound simple-minded. But hear me out. The smartphone itself is physically causing us to be stressed out, emotionally dysregulated, anxious, and fearful. It therefore primes us for radicalism.

 

A smartphone, when operating, is a small, backlit screen. Let’s start with “backlit” part. You’ve probably read that phones emit blue light. We have lots of scientific research about the effect of blue light on the circadian rhythms that are an important part of human sleep. Blue light is particularly effective at suppressing the secretion of the sleep-aid hormone melatonin. As almost anyone knows, good sleep improves hormonal regulation across the board, and with it, mood and outlook.

 

But it’s not just the backlit nature of the screen that’s messing with our hormones. It’s also the relatively tiny size and vertical plane of it. First of all, a small screen in the hand often changes our posture. Staring into a cell phone for hours a day can feel like flying coach from San Francisco to Sydney, Australia — you spend lots of time with your shoulders falling forward, hunched over with a sunken chest, and a head tilted downward. This posture dramatically increases the release of stress hormones. It can also lower oxygenation and activate subtle and not-so-subtle fight-or-flight responses. Using our phones often causes us to literally take on the posture — and subsequently the hormonal dysregulations — of a depressed and fearful person.

 

Maybe it’s making us worse people, too. One study found that hard-core online gamers showed gray-matter atrophy in the right orbitofrontal cortex, bilateral insula, and right supplementary-motor areas of the brain. These parts of the brain are related to impulse control, planning, organization, and even compassion. As social media have become “gamified,” maybe we all lose some impulse control and the ability to sympathize. There are studies on how focused attention to a task — being in the zone — helps to regulate our emotions and to give us a sense of well-being and accomplishment. Self-induced attention-deficit disorder would seem to disrupt that well-being.

 

There’s been an explosion of research into the relation of eye movement to hormonal regulation and mood in recent years because of the apparent success of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy for relieving trauma. The gist of it is that patients suffering from trauma recount their experiences while moving their eyes back and forth across a lateral plane. It sounds utterly kooky. But it turns out that lateral eye movements do regulate the function of the amygdala, which stimulates fight-or-flight responses. You use lateral eye movements naturally and almost subconsciously whenever you’re walking forward with your head upward, assessing the environment around you and finding no threat in it. This is one reason why a long walk can take away stress and you feel clear-headed after it.

 

What kind of eye movement do you use scrolling through Twitter or Facebook on your phone? Short, rapid, vertical movements. Perhaps this is too speculative, but if lateral eye movement across large horizons tends to reduce stress and anxiety, maybe “doom-scrolling” induces it.

 

And finally, maybe humans aren’t well-adapted to social media. We know from sociology, from common experience, or just from the novels of Tom Wolfe how importantly the human mind rates social information and status. Social media are like a 24/7 peek into the Sun King’s court of cultural power. One reason people become addicted to it is that people who are talented at processing social information can almost always gain seemingly useful impressions there about who and what is up or down in the social hierarchy and why. But the great parties of King Louis’s court were not 24/7. If they had been, the French nobility would have gone bankrupt and perished from the pressure to be present as much as possible. The trove of social information online — which is especially valuable to politicians and other manipulators in a democracy — is just seemingly too valuable, and so we overdose on it, and underfeed our other human needs for rest, contemplation, and focused attention. Overstimulation leaves people frazzled, nervous, and angsty.

 

Does that sound like our political culture today? I think it does. Anyway, it seems dumb to think that our posture, our eye movements, and poor sleep contribute a great deal to the parlous state of our politics. But I can’t help thinking that it does. And I can’t stop thinking about how the pandemic restrictions reduced normal convivial social interactions, confined people inside their homes more, and sent them to social media for stimulation. How much of our social distemper is self-induced? Maybe the only return to normalcy is to turn off, log out, and drop the phone.