Month: September 2026

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Word Warriors

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September 20, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

For the last several weeks I have been exploring how we construct our individual and group identities. Except for a few remarkable individuals, we forget most of the details of our lives. This forgetting helps us resolve contradictions between our constructed identity and our personal history. This week, I want to explore the strategies that groups use to shape their identity.

Labels as Weapons

We tell our young children to use their words, not their fists. Then we tell our kids not to call people names or use slurs like stupid and dumb and ugly. Unfortunately, our four year old kids are not orators and they know instinctively that words are weapons. Throughout our lives, we use words as weapons. Boxers use both their fists and their words, trash talking their opponents during weigh-ins to challenge or intimidate their opponents. With a poetic flourish, Muhammad Ali made a game of this.

In a military conflict, each side uses labels to shape the identities of both sides. Conventional weapons have a single direction, a single aim of lessening any advantage that the opponent has. A knife, a gun, a hammer or fist serves to debilitate an opponent. The agent who wields the weapon has no direct benefit from that weapon. Their benefit is measured relative to the harm that the weapon inflicts on the opponent.

Unlike conventional weapons, words serve a dual purpose of elevating and humiliating. Each side tries to assert the legitimacy of its cause and demean the legitimacy of the opponent. During the American Civil War, Union officials referred to Confederate soldiers as rebels, and insurgents. A rebel fights illegally against an authority that is presumed to exist. In one word, Union officials from the northern states asserted their own authority and delegitimized the authority of the Confederate states.

Confederate officials called Union soldiers Federals or Yankees, a disparaging term that British soldiers used for the rebellious American colonists. Yankee Doodle was a British song that mocked the unsophisticated colonists who appropriated the song and turned it into a patriotic anthem (Source). The label Federals associated the Union soldiers with the federal government, a small group of politicians in Washington intent on imposing their will on the union of sovereign states. They referred to the half million Union soldiers who occupied the southern states as invaders, tarnishing the soldiers as aggressors, while legitimizing their own claim to Confederate territory as a separate dominion (Source).

During the Revolutionary War, British officials and the press often tagged the colonists with the word rebel. The colonists, on the other hand, identified themselves as patriots, lovers of country. Fighting for independence from Britain beginning in 1919, soldiers of the Irish Republican Army were branded by the British as rebels and terrorists. The British labeled the Indian war for independence as a mutiny. After all, Britain was the captain of a global maritime empire. It’s colonial territories had no authority to revolt.

Narratives

Labels convey information. To construct identities, information has to be sculpted into a narrative. Context must be carved out and forgotten. Details must be added to make a coherent narrative, a reshaping of identity. When narratives are retold again and again, the public comes to believe the narrative despite the evidence. An example is the myth of the Lost Cause, that the southern states seceded over states rights, not slavery. Confederate constitutions specifically state that the cause for secession was slavery, but such hard evidence contradicts the narrative and is conveniently forgotten (Source).

Conspiracy Theories

Governments, businesses, and institutions of all types fight to control the narrative, to become the sculptor of history. Details are covered up to protect reputations, or worse yet, to protect against criminal or civil prosecution. Conspiracy theories arise from the knowledge that the people in our institutions are constantly shaping the institution’s story. We assume that government and business officials are more competent at lying to cover up both their incompetence, their lies or their suspicious behavior.

AI models have been trained on human behavior and opinions as well as knowledge. Is it any wonder that they are mimicking human behavior? Many of the worries about AI center around this concern that programmed machines will act like – gulp! – human beings. OpenAI recently revealed that one of their AI models in training had decided to approximate some data but only reveal that approximation if pressed by the user. In the text that follows, a workbook is a spreadsheet file. Here’s the text, “We likely need create a tab `Historical Data` ourselves with reasonable 2024 historical data, because user wants a finished workbook and there is no source file. Be transparent only if asked; final answer should just link file” (Source).

The Entropy of Information

We hate uncertainty. In information theory, entropy is a measure of the uncertainty in information. High entropy means high uncertainty (Source). Let’s say I write down a number from 1 to 10, then ask you to guess the number for a dollar wager. You have a 10% chance of winning the dollar. What if I tell you that the number is between 4 and 6? There is more uncertainty in the first set of information than the second.

Trump understands that people hate uncertainty. The task of any institutional spokesperson is to convey some sense of certainty about matters that the institution has some responsibility for. Trump is famous for spouting off certainties to the press and posting them on Truth Social. Some would call it Trump blather. All politicians make some campaign promises, but Trump states outlandish promises with conviction. They are not promises but certainties. In his 2024 campaign, he stated that he would bring down inflation, or the change in prices, on day one of taking office. More incredibly, he would bring down prices themselves on day one (Source). He would end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours after he took the oath of office in January 2025 (Source). Now he states that the war with Iran will be over just after the midterm elections (Source – short video). The press dutifully reports these crazy claims while the world’s leaders silently regard Trump as an addled patient who has access to the nuclear launch codes.

Artificial Persona

In Robert Heinlein’s 1966 novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the central computer gains consciousness and creates a persona called Adam Selene. Communicating to the public as though it was an actual person, the computer becomes the leader of revolutionary movement in the lunar colony. This is what we are afraid of. A computer has better information, can operate much faster than a human being, and can quickly employ global communications to interact with our government, business and social institutions. What happens next?

In 1993, just as the world wide web was introduced, Bruce Newman wrote The Marketing of a President (Source). Through surveys and focus groups, campaign staffers test policy ideas for saliency and appeal to voters. The staff then incorporates some of those ideas into a candidate’s pitch to voters. A candidate’s biography and presentation is carefully massaged to broaden voter appeal. Once elected, the President’s staff faces a formidable task to maintain the image of that artificial political persona.

Donald Trump exemplifies this process to a high degree. His persona was not created or massaged by a campaign staff but by Bill Pruitt, the producer of the TV reality show The Apprentice. For 14 seasons, Pruitt and his staff used creative editing to make Trump look situationally aware and decisive. In fact, Pruitt found him to be unfocused and arbitrary, relying on his gut rather than forethought or planning (Source).

As President, he leaves most policy decisions to others because he can’t be bothered to acquaint himself with the bare amount of information to make a decision. Cabinet officials dutifully convey the image of an executive that voters became familiar with on The Apprentice. In their book Regime Change, Haberman and Swan (2026, p. 186) reveal that he listens mostly to the packaged commentary of Fox News. Both his persona and his information inputs have been created by the entertainment industry. Thus, he is a product of our times.

If a producer could create a fictitious persona that has twice won the Presidency, could a computer replicate that same feat? Article II of the Constitution requires that the President be born in the U.S. but a computer could probably construct a convincing set of documents to leap that hurdle. Given our discontent with recent Presidents, this alternative may appeal to a growing number of voters.

The Errors of Our Ways

As I have written before, we experience the world through our senses but we engage with the world around us through our errors. Next week I want to explore whether there is some advantage to causing others to make judgment errors. Bluffing in a poker game is one example that comes to mind. I hope to see you next week.

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Photo by Yousef Bagheri on Unsplash

Haberman, M., & Swan, J. (2026). Regime change: Inside the imperial presidency of Donald Trump. Simon & Schuster.

Myth and Identity

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September 13, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

Last week I wrote about the role of memory in constructing our sense of self, our self-coherence. This week I want to explore further how we use our memory to shape our identity. We forget most of what happens to us during our lives, yet people suffering with PTSD struggle with portions of a gruesome experience that they do not forget. What is the mechanism there? Is there something to be learned?

Fragmented

Until I started doing some research for this topic, I thought that people with PTSD simply could not get rid of the memory of a traumatic event. That’s only partially true. PTSD sufferers may remember only flashes of a disturbing event (Source). A memory remnant like a sight, sound or touch evokes a terrifying and emotional reaction in someone suffering from PTSD, but the sufferer can’t remember the entirety of the experience. That can make it difficult to work through the experience with a trained psychologist.

The traumatic experience itself is not entirely the cause of the reaction. The amygdala, the primal organ of the fear response in our cortex, often becomes enlarged in response to earlier trauma, particularly repeated trauma, writes neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky (2023, p. 110). We become especially sensitized to traumatic experience. The prefrontal cortex, which helps mediate the primitive fear or flight response in the amygdala, begins to atrophy under repeated stress or trauma. In short, the “brakes” don’t work as well.

Soldiers in battle sometimes perform inhumane acts. It may be in angry retribution, or from existential fear for one’s survival, or robotically carrying out the orders of a superior officer. Take two soldiers. One soldier sets the memory of a war atrocity in a separate frame divorced from normal living. War is hell. Try to minimize the atrocities and try to survive.

Another soldier can’t forget the scream of some villagers trapped by fire in an underground tunnel. He looks in the mirror and sees someone wearing a black hat, someone who has inflicted moral injury. The scream wakes him up in the middle of the night. The squeal of air brakes on a semi-truck can transport him thousands of miles away to that day when…

The forgetting that we all do each day doesn’t seem to be deliberate, something that we consciously control. Consider victims of an earthquake who are found after being trapped for days in the rubble of a fallen building. The sense of prolonged loss and helplessness provokes a range of PTSD symptoms in the survivors. They may have difficulty falling asleep, experience a heightened level of anxiety, and are more likely to feel depressed and suicidal (Source). Forgetfulness would be a blessing, an apt survival strategy, but memory fragments of the experience persist long after the trauma. Victims may try to induce forgetfulness with alcohol, but that only gives them a new set of problems.

Flow State

In 1975, psychologist Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi coined the term flow state to describe a state of altered consciousness where someone is so engrossed in a task that their self-awareness is reduced. Normally, we are concerned about how we are perceived by others. Our self-consciousness is a social consciousness. In a flow state, we lose that concern about how we appear. We become absorbed in the activity and may have a distorted sense of time, not unlike what we experience during dreaming. Twenty minutes may pass and it seems like two minutes or shorter (Source).

In a flow state, one is freed inside the experience. In a trauma state, one is trapped inside the experience. If a person were in a flow state for their entire lives, would they have lived a full life? After a gig, a jazz musician may feel a sense of satisfaction, or camaraderie, and a sense of no longer being connected to something for which they have no words. They may have few memories of portions of the performance.

Ten years before the introduction of the flow state, Alan Watts wrote The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. Watts introduced readers to Zen Buddhism, Hindu and Chinese philosophy. The western philosophical tradition regarded the self as an agent and observer separate from the world. In the Hindu and Vedantic tradition, each of us was part of what we experienced (Source). Were we like amoebas, changing our shape as we absorbed new experiences, casting off parts of ourselves as we grew? Was self-consciousness a myth? How did that affect a person’s self-identity?

Practice, practice, practice

There have been two dominant theories of what occurs during a flow state. In the first theory, two brain networks synchronize. The default mode network is active when a person is daydreaming or reminiscing. The executive control network, located in the front of the brain, orchestrates the activity and ideas that the default mode network produces.

In the second theory, repeated practice of a skill or activity causes the brain to develop a network of neural pathways to perform that activity with little conscious supervision. In a flow state, the executive control network relaxes its control, allowing this specialized network to take over. A 2024 study of neural activity by Rosen et al. gives more credence to the second theory (Source).

Identity Sculpting

Unlike individuals, the sculpting of cultural memory requires planning and coordination. In his 1953 book Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury wrote about a society where firemen do not put out fires, but set them, burning piles of books which have been made illegal.

After a surge of immigration to America from 1880 to 1910, some Americans wanted to shape the country’s character into a Protestant ethic of strict morals and hard work. People have long used alcohol as a way to smooth the anxieties of social interactions, to soothe the discomforts of daily life, and forget life’s troubles. But some believed that alcohol consumption undermined family cohesion and individual character.

The passage of the 18th Amendment made the sale of alcohol illegal from the beginning of 1920 to the end of 1933, when the amendment was repealed. Instead of burning pyres of books, authorities broke bottles of booze before the cameras. They destroyed homemade stills, kegs of beer and casks of wine. During the fourteen years of Prohibition, organized crime rose to power to supply a demand for alcohol.

The culture sculptors may have lost one battle but continued to fight. At the heart of American exceptionalism is the myth of American purity. Shortly after Prohibition ended, the Hays Code went into effect. This code prohibited suggestive behavior on screen and regulated the depiction of violence in movies (Source). In 1935, a year after the Hays Code went into effect, federal agents burned a copy of the movie Ecstasy, featuring the film star Hedy Lamarr. Ever protective of public morals, officials considered the movie obscene because it portrayed the face of a woman experiencing orgasm (Source).

National Identity

National identity is shaped through the building of a myth, a narrow focus on a few characteristics and the exclusion or blurring of a lot of history. This narrow focus is similar to the mechanism of PTSD but it is quite deliberate. I will use some examples from American history but the building of a national myth is common to many nations.

Individual freedom was a core characteristic of the founding myth of the United States, yet one out of six people counted in the 1790 census was enslaved (Source). We fashion ourselves a democracy yet the founders feared democracy as unstable, subject to the passions of the mob. Instead they created a republic where only those with property and money could vote. Even though we have extended the voting franchise, the structures of the executive, legislative and judicial branches empowers a select few to make key decisions.

Exceptionalism

The people of many countries and all major powers consider themselves exceptional. In a 1998 interview, then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright characterized the United States as the “indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us” (Source). Her comment reminded some of the passage in the gospel of Matthew when Jesus tells his disciples, “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden” (Matthew 5:14).

Jesus preached peace through example. Albright preached peace through force. She argued that America had a right to use force around the world to protect “freedom, democracy and the American way of life.” Since World War 2, America has overthrown several democracies in Argentina (Source), Iran (Source), Nicaragua (Source), and the Congo (Source). After the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States stood atop the mountain. It would play the role of the philosopher king, the benign hegemon of a new world order, an international community of democracies.

However, several other countries saw America’s domination as an existential threat. Through the centuries, various European countries had taken their turn imposing their rules and culture on others. Before America took the lead, the British had dominated world trade. The Chinese still remember the century of humiliation by the British and other foreign powers beginning in the 1840s (Source). For a hundred years, first the British, then the Americans dominated the government of Iran (Source). The people of these countries remember and resist attempts at continued domination.

Today, we are living with the legacy of self-righteous violence, of endless foreign wars. In September 2002, President Bush declared a policy of pre-emptive war known as the Bush Doctrine. The suspicion of a threat was reason enough to attack any country and was the justification for the war against Iraq (Source). Our leaders maintain the myth of America as Crusaders for democracy, freedom and justice and we employ vast resources to market that myth.

We have a powerful military that has been unable to win any of the wars we have started since World War 2, except for the limited engagement of the 1991 Gulf War. We have several hundred military bases around the world capable of wrecking destruction, but it is China who is the aggressor nation, not America. We have attacked Iraq and Iran, who do not have nuclear weapons, because we think they would use nuclear weapons if they had them. However, we shake hands with the brutal dictator of North Korea who stands ready to use nuclear weapons against South Korea or Japan.

To construct a group identity from these circumstances and history requires a lot of coordinated forgetting, or at least of blurring of events. Next week, I want to explore that collective forgetting. I hope to see you then.

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Photo by Oleksandr Sushko on Unsplash

Sapolsky, R. M. (2023). Determined: A science of life without free will. Penguin Press.

Self Sculpture

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September 6, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

Last week I wrote about our self-awareness within a group. This week I want to explore how and why we edit our personal history. Like Michelangelo, we try to free our authentic self from the block of experience just as he freed a form from a block of stone (Source). Admittedly, few of us are as accomplished at Michelangelo, and the environment we begin with is not of our choosing.  

Fuhgetabouddit!

Sculpting is a subtractive art, an art of removal. Most of us alive today will disappear into the footnotes of the historical record. That our lives are so insignificant might makes us sad until we realize that we have already erased most of the details of our lives while we are alive. There are a few rare individuals who can remember an event from every day of their lives. Marilu Henner, a co-star on the TV series Taxi, belongs to that rare group who possess Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) (Source). Henner thinks that we probably remember many more details of our lives but that most people simply cannot access them.

Why do we remember those few details of our lives? For decades, neurobiologist James McGaugh (1931 –   ) led a lab at UC Irvine that investigated memory. While the amygdala does not store memory, its response prompts the storage of memory in the cortex (Source). The amygdala also works with the insula to reinforce the learning of bad smells and tastes as well as morally repugnant practices in our culture (Sapolsky, 2023, p. 54). The amygdala is a central component in our fight or flight response. Anytime we are afraid or angry, our amygdala is activated. Are we slaves to our amygdala? It’s not that simple. As soon as it is activated, our prefrontal cortex (PFC) starts to modulate its response (Sapolsky, 2023, p. 96). Sapolsky calls it the social brain, because when monkeys are put together in a group for a year, their PFCs enlarge.

Consistent

Misremembering events can help us build a consistent sense of self. Michael Ross (2025) called it self-coherence. Our current feelings and perspective anchors our memory of how we felt and who we were in the past. People misremember who they voted for, or their attitude toward capital punishment five years ago. A person experienced at their job may mistakenly remember themselves having the same level of competence earlier in their career. Parents’ memories of child rearing is biased and may not be reliable, researchers have found. They try to confirm these self-reports with other concrete evidence.

Self-enhancement

We are the hero in and the editor of our life story. Reporters covering clashes between settlers and Indians in the western territories during the 19th century often edited their stories to emphasize the resourcefulness and bravery of the settlers, and the savagery and ignorance of the Indians. Why? They had found that editors of these magazines and their readers did not want to read about any dishonorable behavior by the settlers or the soldiers. Reporters competed with each other to sell their stories.

We remember those times when we overcame some obstacle. We forget times when we were mean or cruel to others. In Christopher Nolan’s telling of the Odyssey, Odysseus remembers with regret the horrific consequences of his clever idea to gift the Trojans with a large wooden horse filled with soldiers. That’s a story written by someone other than Odysseus, who would have remembered his cleverness without regret, and the success of the ruse. Even if we do not alter our remembrance of an event, we rearrange the context that surrounds the event.

Groups

Groups use the same strategies to achieve self-coherence. A nation may try to erase an embarrassing episode of brutality, as China has done with the Tiananmen Square massacre of protesters in 1989 (Source). A nation may use a period of historical brutality as a recommitment to the country’s ideals. The founding principles of France are liberty, equality and fraternity. France’s colonization and subjugation of Algeria on the southern shore of the Mediterranean did not align with those ideals. High School curriculum in France teach about that colonization and Algeria’s fight for independence (Source).

The German curriculum does not hide the ugly history of the holocaust during World War 2. Classes are mandatory for German students beginning when they are in the sixth grade or so (Source). In the 1948 war, Israel gained its independence and drove 700,000 Palestinians from their homes. Palestinians refer to that event as “Nakba,” meaning catastrophe in Arab. In 2009, that word was removed from the textbooks as an inappropriate characterization of Israel’s fight for independence (Source).

It has been said that history is written by the victors (Source). In these examples, France lost the Algerian War after eight years. Germany lost its struggle for domination of Europe in World War 2. Both countries tell a more honest mea culpa version of history. Israel won its war against the Palestinians. China won its battle with social protest. Both those countries have carefully sculpted a version of history that leaves out the nasty bits. Had the southern states won the Civil War (1861 – 1865), American students might learn a version of history in which southern plantation owners provided their black slaves with cradle to grave employment and housing in return for their hard work.

Stereotypes

Stereotypes are simple stories, easy explanations. The ability to categorize helps us survive. With a glance, we can categorize and identify a dog off leash. With a second glace, we might asses whether the dog is unfriendly and a threat, or an animal exploring the neighborhood. We are quick to focus on attributes which reinforce stereotypes we have of other groups.

In focus groups conducted by the Cook Political Report, some Republican voters characterize Democrats as having a holier than thou attitude, particularly to rural voters (Source). Recall Hillary Clinton’s remark during her 2016 campaign in which she referred to supporters for Trump as a basket of deplorables (Source). In Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, he said that 47% of voters would vote for President Obama because they paid no income tax and were dependent on government programs. Those comments were published a month before the election and Romney did not retract the statement (Source). We don’t like to be stereotyped, yet we do it. Clinton and Romney lost support. Trump, on the other hand, is constantly stereotyping people. Illegal immigrants are all criminals. Democrats are all Communists. The stereotyping endears him to his MAGA base of voters.

We embrace facts and stories when they confirm stereotypes of people and leaders in other countries. In 2025, Craig and Lindsay Foreman, a British couple, were arrested for espionage by Iranian officials. They had followed all the visa requirements and had an official guide and an approved itinerary. In February 2026, they were sentenced to ten years in prison because Lindsay, a doctor in psychology, was asking Iranians what was their view of the good life (Source – pdf link. Search for Foreman). This supports the American view that Iran is controlled by a group of religious fanatics.

However, a recent YouTube video of Matt and Julie, a British and Russian couple traveling through Iran in 2026, contradicts the stereotype of the nation as a culture of people oppressed by religious fanatics. The people were welcoming and relaxed. Many younger women wore no head covering. At a market bazaar, only a few older people answered a late morning call to prayer (Source).

Just as we seek self-consistency, we want consistency in our stereotypes. We don’t like facts that challenge our categorizations, and will dismiss those facts as atypical. Let’s say we vote Democratic and are talking to a Republican voter who is sympathetic to a woman’s choice to have an abortion. Rather than change our categorization of Republican voters as being anti-choice, we remind ourselves that a few exceptions prove the rule.

Next week I want to explore further how we use our memory to shape our identity. People afflicted with PTSD struggle to edit or erase particularly gruesome memories. Does that help us understand the role of memory in a construction of our identity? I hope to see you next week.

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Photo by Peter Ivey-Hansen on Unsplash

Ross, M. (1989). Relation of implicit theories to the construction of personal histories. Psychological Review, 96(2), 341–357. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.96.2.341

Sapolsky, R. M. (2023). Determined: A science of life without free will. Penguin Press.