Hidden Brain - Episode 58: Pedestals and Guillotines

Episode Date: January 17, 2017

It's inauguration season, which means balls, parades, and celebrations. We may love the pomp and circumstance, but there's another, darker side to our psychology, too. Whether we like the new president or not, human beings have a strange and contradictory relationship with power and celebrity. We idolize the rich and famous, but also enjoy seeing them fall from their pedestals. This week on Hidden Brain, we explore this paradox: from Hollywood, to the White House, to the forests of Tanzania.

Welcome to Los Angeles, the celebrity capital of the world. It's a city that conjures palm-line boulevards, crawling mansions, luxury cars. At the center of all the glitz, Hollywood. Movie stars aren't the only ones here. Star gazers are drawn here too, like paperclips to a magnet. With the Musac blaring, a handful of people on a celebrity tour peer out their van, hoping glimpse the homes of LA's rich and famous. The guide points out Gwen Stefani's house, and a clump of bushes behind which she claims is Quentin Tarantino's home. She pulls up Nyakadi Perry's compound. Do I have any Katy Perry fans aboard? Fine, your works. Okay, well here's her house. Look up to your left and you'll see the awning, the red awning. You can't really see it's red there but we are right

beneath her house. She actually owns the entire corner here and look at her view. It's amazing isn't it? One of the tours most popular sites is the home of Kim Kardashian. Well sort of. Kanye and Kim, they needed a house to have their friends over and on the left-hand side This is the house they use rented for 12,000 a month. There's somebody right behind us I can't stop. I'm sorry about that But that is the house right there Has its own little swimming pool boy. They had some big parties too. Tours like this are big business Andrew Imordino helps manage the tour company called StarTrack.

He says not just Americans, but people from all over the world sign up for these tours. And they kind of want to just get that little feel, that little taste of what it's like to see the celebrities homes and do all the crazy stuff that you see in the magazines and the televisions. But it's more than just wanting a taste of celebrity culture. The glitz and glamour, the swimming pools, the manicured grounds, the storied homes, humans, hunger for a chance to pure into and fantasize about lives of luxury and extravagance. This extends to our political leaders too.

We adore the pomp of state dinners and inaugural balls. Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States, President Liger, and President Liger, President Liger. We dream of what it must be like when presidents make life and death decisions for a nation. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. We fantasize about what it must mean to be fabulously rich and powerful. Words can't describe how beautiful it was.

Everything you saw was breathtaking. And we got to meet his girlfriend, Melania, who is amazing as well. Hi, hi, I'm Melania. Call it adulation, adoration, idolization. Humans are prone to suck up to the rich and powerful. But this turns out to be only one side of our psychology. On the other side, it's something entirely different. Many of us hate the rich because they are rich. We want to see the powerful topple from their pedestals. We enjoy seeing the glamorous fall and fail. The lure of celebrity tours is rivaled only by the popularity of tabloid magazines, detailing the rehab trips and broken marriages of those same celebrities.

If a monochist enthralled by pomp and power sits on one of our shoulders, a vengeful populist sits on the other, a populist suspicious of power, distrustful of the wealthy, eager to have the high-end mighty pulled off their pedestals. The thin line between adoring the rich and powerful and marching them to the guillotine, this week on Hidden Brain. On a pre-dawn morning, a heist occurred in Paris. Breaking news this morning, and Kim Kardashian robbed at gunpoint in Paris late last night by five men dressed as police officers. The robbers made off not only with Kim case 20-carat, emerald-cut diamond engagement ring, but other jewels and cash stodelling more than $10 million. The news media was sympathetic to Kim's ordeal.

A source close to Kim tells ET the mother of two is still very, very shaken up. Quote, she thought she was going to die. They put a gun to her head while they were searching the apartment. She was crying, begging them for her life. The sympathy didn't last long, especially on social media. Andrea McDonald is a communications professor who's interested in celebrity culture. There's a tweet here from the house of WTF that says,

quote, Kim Kardashian was held at gunpoint in a Paris hotel. Man will be charged with not pulling the trigger and saving humanity from mediocrity. Or this post. After years of desperation, Kim Kardashian finally has a reason to be in the news today. There were other snarky comments. Maybe Kim faked the robbery as a publicity stunt. Maybe she faked it so she could disappear for more plastic surgery. Where was the love, the outpouring of concern from Kim's millions of fans? Why, after a brutal robbery, did people turn on her? Andrea has a theory. Kim Kardashian is someone who has made her whole living

out of being famous and employing her fame to make money and really flaunting her success and wealth in various ways. And so when that wealth is quite literally attacked in a very confrontational and personal way, our potential empathy for her, even if we are fans of hers, may be lacking there because of our own potential envy or distaste for some of her personal presentation of wealth. In other words, as much as many of us like seeing the rich and luxurious world of Kim, we don't like the idea that she's rubbing it in our faces. And so we don't mind when she's taken down a few notches. We do the same with our political leaders. We adore the pomp and circumstance associated with

high office, but we pounce at the slightest gaff. Vice President Dan Quayle was all but drawn and quartered when he urged a little boy to add an E to the spelling of the word potato. when he urged a little boy to add an E to the spelling of the word potato. And Texas Governor Rick Perry suffered a moment of forgetfulness during a presidential debate. The third agency of government, I would do away with the education, the commerce. And let's see, I can't. Sorry. Oops. That was the end of Rick Perry's role in the National Spotlight.

At least until President-elect Donald Trump chose him to leave the department he couldn't remember. Energy. Governor Howard Deans 2004 campaign for President came to a crashing halt when he ended a televised speech with slightly too much enthusiasm. We're going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico. We're going to California and Texas and New York. We're going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan.

And then we're going to Washington, DC to take back the White House. Yeah! Goodbye, Mr. Dean. You get the point. We can adore our leaders one moment and skewer them the next. Not long ago, I was watching all the way, a wonderful movie about Lyndon B. Johnson, starring actor Brian Cranston. There's one scene that stayed with me.

It sums up the contradictory feelings humans have toward people in power. LBJ has just been elected president. He walks through an enduring crowd and he says this to himself. Right now we're going party like there's no tomorrow. Because there's no feeling in the world happens good as winning. But the sun will come up and the night will come out. And all these smiling faces will be watching me. Wait for that one first moment of weakness.

And then they will cut me like a deer. It's not a bad analogy, given that so much of our psychology was formed in the ancient past, when humans lived in small, nomadic tribes of hunter-gatherers. Some researchers believe the roots of our love-hate relationship with power lie in this evolutionary history. If we look carefully, we can still find evidence for it today in the forest of Tanzania. Stay with us. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. To understand the contradictory relationship that humans have with power, we need to go back

in time, way back, to prehistory, to our evolutionary past. One way to do this is to observe the behavior of a close relative, the chimpanzee. As a young woman, the evolutionary anthropologist Ann Pucy walked deep into the Tanzanian forest. She was there as a student assistant to the great primatologist, Jane Goodall. Anne's job was to observe and record chimpanzee behavior in the wild. Sometimes she'd watch the chimps at a feeding location loaded with bananas, other times she'd simply trail them. And following them around was pretty tough because it's, as I said, a rugged place. And so you're going up and down, you're crawling through vines, the paths, if there are paths that the chimps walk on are small

and you have to often have to scramble through the vegetation. And if they didn't want to be followed, they could very easily lose you. Over time, and began to understand how the chimps engaged with each other. Chimps society is very male-dominated, the headhound show is the alpha male. He's often the center of attention. The other males will groom him, he's probably groomed more than other males are, and the same the females pay particular attention to the alpha male as well partly because they get chased around by him more. So there's certainly probably a benefit

to individuals from having a good relationship with the alpha male from their own, you know, point of view of safety and maybe support that they may gain from him. Often the younger males appear to idolise the alpha. Some of the males I watched, especially one in particular, just followed the alpha male around, and you know, he, the alpha male would do a charging display and the little male I was watching would sort of charge along behind him and kick the same buttress of the tree. But the relationship between the alpha and others in the group is more complicated than it might first seem.

Christopher Bohem is a cultural anthropologist who also worked with Jane Goodall observing the chimps. Basically, if you look at the individual chimpanzees and how they behave around their superiors, it's rather ambivalent. You can see the sembivalence each time the alpha male intimidates the other chimps. He basically goes crazy.

He runs around there, like, all of his hair to look as big as possible. Uproots, trees, and throws them, picks up boulders, heaves them in the air, swings aggressively on fines, races around, and attacks any member of the group that doesn't show deference by going up a tree in a hurry. What Chris found interesting as he watched the chimps is what happened next. As they race up the trees, they are screaming, which is a fear of vocalization, which tells

the alpha male I'm scared of you, so it's also a deference. But as they get up to the top of the tree, they then stop screaming and they give another call called the Waw Bark. And a waw sounds something like this. Waw, but ever so much louder. And the waw call is one of defiance and hostility. And so once they're up in the tree tops and they know he isn't going to take the trouble to come up and punish them, they all start whying at him.

And this tells him and me that they don't like what he just did, because he's basically dominated and frightened them and forced them to run up a tree when they'd rather be on the ground feeding and so on. So in terms of ambivalence, political ambivalence toward the alpha male is pretty easy to identify once you know the species well. In other words, woven into the fabric of adulation and submission are strands of defiance and rebellion.

Early humans seem to share the straight. Chris has studied nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes who have had almost no contact with the outside world and whose lives have changed little over thousands of years. What he found again was a deep ambivalence about the powerful. Take for example one of the most powerful members of a hunter-gathra tribe, the skilled hunter. And people love this guy, but the minute he tries to turn that meat into power, that is to keep the meat for himself and give it to his cronies and develop power that way. The group will treat him with extreme discuracy, they may criticize him. If it gets too bad, they may ostracize him. If it really gets too bad, and the guy is a real despot and is trying to

basically take other people's autonomy away, they'll kill him. The great hunter is admired and revered, but if he becomes too big for his boots, he's quickly taken down. In his book, Hierarchy and the Forest, Chris concluded that early human society was marked by a remarkably egalitarianism. The roots of democracy he concluded weren't in the American Declaration of Independence or even in ancient Greece. They are woven into the DNA of human beings. Really, humans are somehow disposed to look up to those who are rich and powerful, and also to subject them to special scrutiny morally. And again, if you have a leader

and you're watching out carefully that he doesn't overdevelop his power, that kind of scrutiny is very important. Our contradictory attitudes about power aren't lost on the rich and powerful. It's one reason handlers work so hard to make leaders and celebrities look down to earth and humble. President Reagan was often shown in jeans and flannel shirt cutting wood on his ranch or saddling up his horses.

I'm not used to riding with the chest plate on him and I forget and girth up before I remember. The Kennedys went water skiing for fun and remember to bring the media along. It's a family outing in Louis Bay, Hianna Sport for the Kennedys. The president, accompanied by his kind of a blessing father, his brothers and a full compliment of children, relaxes from the cares of Washington for the day on the water. Beloved leaders are the only ones who've learned this trick. In 2011, Vogue ran a puff piece about Asma Alassad and her husband Bashar. She was the rose in the desert.

Together, they were the beautiful, down-to-earth couple deeply committed to empowering citizens in Syrian civil society. Two years later, the Assad regime used chemical weapons on its own people. Or consider this. Decades earlier, various international newspapers wrote about the domestic life of a well-known leader. Readers learned the interior spaces of his Bavarian retreat were painted in various shades of green. There was a portrait of his mother in his bedroom. He breakfasted on milk, bread, honey, oatmeal, and cheese. They talk about his vegetarianism.

They talk about his dogs and how much he loves his dogs, and his dogs love him. They talk about how much he loves children. The man was Adolf Hitler. In her book, Hitler at Home, the Spina Stratigacos explores how the Nazi propaganda machine created an image of Hitler as a humble man of the people at ease in nature. In 1937, the New York Times magazine featured a sympathetic glimpse of Hitler living in the mountains thinking about the destiny of his nation.

Shockingly, after this 1937 New York Times article, there is absolute puff piece that appears on August 20th, 1939 in the New York Times again. again and that one has absolutely no critical edge to it. It is by a woman who I haven't been able to identify who talks about the fact that Hitler loves Gooseberry Pie and how wonderful the tomatoes are on its table and it appears, you know, just less than two weeks before Hitler invades Poland. Gooseberry Pie, a photo of a waterskin in Kennedy, a president grooming his horses like a cowboy, what these images do is say, don't worry, I may be powerful, but I haven't lost touch with you. We're still connected.

We're the same. Thousands of miles from the Bavarian Alps, Taurus and Hollywood are balancing the twin impulses we have toward the rich and powerful. As the tour winds through the Hollywood hills, it comes to a stop, a new one. And whether you hit the new president or you love him, I can just tell you this, this is his house on the right hand side. This is Donald J. Trump's winter estate here in Beverly Hills right here on the right hand side, the house there. And we're going to pop the pools right there. It's the tiniest little pool. And here's the servants' quarters back here.

Donald Trump's election has ignited the contradictory feelings we have toward the rich and powerful. To his critics, Donald Trump has broken with the precedent of modesty set by many leaders. He's rich, he's powerful, he's famous, and he flaunts it. In the language of evolutionary anthropology, he is the boastful hunter in the tribe. But to his supporters he's very much a man of the people, someone who's promised to level the playing field, a populist. In the language of evolutionary anthropology he's the skilled hunter who vows to share the meat. You can be sure of this. As the cameras flash and the motorcades go by, there will be lots of adoring smiles

and concealed daggers. This week's podcast was produced by Jenny Schmidt, Maggie Penman and Chris Benderev. It was edited by Tara Boyle. Our team also includes Renee Clark, Raina Cohen and Chloe Connelly. We had original music this week composed by Louis Weeks and Nick Dupre. Our unsung hero today is Neil Karuth. Neil oversees a number of NPR's podcasts including Hidden Brain. He's kind, calm, very measured.

Thanks Neil for being a graceful leader and an enthusiastic supporter of Hidden Brain. We really appreciate it. For more Hidden Brain, you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter and listen for my stories on your local public radio station. If you like this episode, please tell one friend who doesn't know about Hidden Brain about our show. Tell us on social media whom you've tapped. We're always looking for new people to find our show. I'm Shankar Vidantam and this is NPR.