Pavlov’s Troll: How Memes and Mimesis Shut Off Thought
What changed in 2016?
The first time I noticed something different was in 2016. Many of my friends on the left end of the political spectrum had developed a visceral contempt for Hillary Clinton that did not seem appropriate to the facts on the ground. This was especially noticeable on Facebook with Bernie supporters. It wasn’t just disagreement, dislike, or even hate about the most qualified candidate to ever run for president. It was disgust. Friends who I agreed with about everything else could not even talk about her.
“We wanted to know why the emotion of disgust—which clearly originated as an emotion that keeps us away from dirty and contaminating things—can now be triggered by some moral violations (such as betrayal or child abuse) but not by others (such as robbing a bank or cheating on one’s taxes).”
—Jonathan Haidt, creator of Moral Foundations Theory, The Righteous Mind (2012)
Disgust is one of the most biologically and evolutionarily important emotions. It gives an immediate signal to the brain that something is wrong, seriously wrong. It’s saying: “Stay away!” and, critically, you aren’t thinking about it. When you open that borderline milk carton and take a sniff—you’re ready for it—that involuntary nauseous feeling that makes you immediately turn your head and want to put it down like it’s on fire.
That response can be conditioned, like any other response. That’s why you involuntarily tense up before you sniff. Your body is ready for it before your conscious brain is. In 2016, a system of psychological entrapment turned Hillary Clinton into a carton of bad milk.
Most folks know about Pavlov’s dog but here’s a simple reminder:
A dog doesn’t need special conditioning to salivate when food is nearby, that is an unconditioned response, but if you pair feeding the dog with a bell, the dog will eventually salivate from hearing the bell only, which is a conditioned response. This is Pavlovian theory or classical conditioning.
You can do this with almost anything. For example, let’s say you wanted to make someone feel disgust every time they see Hillary Clinton, how would you do it?
You would need an unconditioned stimulus for the emotion of disgust. For example, as psychologist Jonathan Haidt noted, child abuse and betrayal have been pre-wired to the emotion of disgust. These are the exact two accusations most often leveled against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election.
As a reminder, Hillary Clinton was the most admired woman in the world for many years. While many people have disliked or even hated her, they were not disgusted by her until 2016. Here are a few representative memes about Hillary alleging Satanism, child abuse, and betrayal of America. The last one is by Elon Musk last year.
It works like this:
Unconditioned stimulus (US) → Pedophilia / Satanism / betrayal imagery or claims
Naturally triggers disgust (unconditioned response) in most people.
Neutral stimulus (NS) → Hillary Clinton’s face, name, or imagery
On its own, pre-conditioning, it may trigger disagreement or dislike in some—but not the visceral disgust response.
During conditioning → Meme pairs Hillary (NS) with pedophilia claims (US)
Each exposure strengthens the association between her and “moral contamination.”
After conditioning → Hillary alone becomes the conditioned stimulus (CS)
Seeing her image triggers the same disgust (conditioned response) as the original child abuse imagery—no pedophilia content required anymore.
This is exactly why memes are so effective for creating emotional mimesis. Memes both strengthen and spread the conditioned response to others, cementing the connection between the emotion (disgust) and the conditioned stimulus (Hillary Clinton). When a group of people share that same conditioned response, they are in what I have called mimetic synchrony. They are all imitating each other involuntarily, like the dog salivating, or the turned nose at spoiled milk—but together.
As I’ve described, mimesis is just the involuntary instinct to mimic people that we admire or want to be connected to. A baby smiling at her mother. A friend laughs at something and you laugh before you know what it’s about. A stranger passes by crying, you feel upset in sympathy. But when paired with Pavlovian conditioning it can be weaponized in a larger system.
When Mike Flynn started the chant “Lock her up!” at the RNC in 2016, the people there had already been conditioned through propaganda to feel rage and disgust at her name. Flynn focused on the emotion of betrayal, which elicits the same emotion as child abuse in the subject.
The crowd is acting in mimetic synchrony, all feeling the disgust that Flynn was expressing about Hillary because they were already conditioned for it. How else did they get this crowd to call for the imprisonment of a candidate at a major party convention? This was not normal—at the time—even though a decade later, this is pretty mild stuff.
This basic behavior of conditioned response is the underlying mechanism for emotional mimesis, for involuntary imitation of the leader or the prophet’s emotion. It is the way that large crowds of people who have been brainwashed, end up in emotional synchrony, behaving more like a large school of trout than a political movement.
A tweet, or a meme, or a line from a Trump speech is both the signal and the payload in the system. These provide the subject with an object and an emotion to feel about it—and crucially, a way to spread the contagion, without ever touching the conscious, or thinking part of the brain. It’s all involuntary, almost like magic. If you say Hillary’s name, a cascade of groans will pour down. A carton of milk, soured.
But these memes and conditioning could not have worked in isolation. Full psychological capture requires breaking down the target through trauma as I have described in the Five Step Brainwashing Process—Redpilling, Dissociation, Salvation, Refreezing, Mimetic Synchrony. To create the disgust-conditioning of Hillary Clinton required social engineering, gamified environments like “Q”, and operant conditioning, which adds the response behavior of the subject as a variable to the conditioning regime and makes the process addictive.
This sort of conditioning doesn’t just go away. Mention Hillary’s name to a fervent 2016 Bernie supporter or a MAGA / QAnon believer today and you will see a conditioned response almost immediately—despite the fact that she has been almost entirely out of the news for many years now. The expression you see on their face will be almost exactly like spoiled milk. It’s also why Donald Trump’s tie to his base is so impenetrable. The emotion his followers feel is involuntary, automatic and contagious.
And that is the deeper danger. Once emotional response is wired in, it becomes a permanent part of the subject’s psychological landscape, ready to be triggered on command and spread to others without conscious thought. This is why dismantling an authoritarian psychological system isn’t about “changing minds” through debate—it’s about severing the mechanical link between stimulus and response, disrupting the mimetic feedback loops, and jamming the operant reinforcement that keeps the reflex alive. Until that machinery is understood and dismantled, the same tactics can be—and will be—reused on new targets, like immigrants, trans people, and the unhoused.
It’s time to sabotage this system of control. Or bow down to it. Those are our only options.
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Thank you JIm - I've learned so much from you and appreciate your clear explanations and moral clarity. I am able to live through this terrible time because I can turn to writers like you to help me understand what is actually happening ... and not feel so alone. You are doing so much for so many people and I really, really appreciate it.
Brilliant. Twenty years ago, as bad as things were, no one would have believed that Hillary disgust would lead like a cancer to the total collapse of American democracy. But it did. And no discussion could stop it. Nothing stopped Rush Limbaugh, or any of the rest of them. They were fearless in their evil. OUR disgust for them was nothing compared to their wealth and power, fueled by their unstoppable hatred. Haidt argued that our democracy would have a catastrophic failure by 2050. I think his date needs to be moved up to 2030.