“Learned Helplessness” and the 2024 Election

Imagine my surprise when, nearly eight months ago, commenting on the state of the country as it approached the 2024 presidential election, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg noted that “Biden has set himself the task of trying to jolt the country out of its learned helplessness in the face of Trump’s exhausting provocations.” Unbeknownst to most Americans, that term, “learned helplessness,” was profoundly and inextricably tied to this country’s disastrous post-9/11 Global War on Terror and, in particular, its horrifying torture program. Yet there it was, being used in a new context — one that, while perhaps altered by the president’s recent decision not to run for a second term, has been employed with remarkable frequency in the intervening months, especially recently, when it comes to this country’s presidential future.

As the pundits weighed in on Joe Biden’s abysmal performance at that June 27th debate with Donald Trump and cast doubt on his prospects for reelection, “learned helplessness“ was used over and over again in the days leading up to his withdrawal from the presidential race in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris. Two days after the debate, for instance, The Economist, focusing on Biden’s refusal to declare himself a non-candidate for the presidency, concluded that “many [Democrats] have fallen into learned helplessness,” as evidenced by the gap between their private doubts and their public assertions.

Writing for the San Francisco-based progressive daily, 48hills, Bruce Mirkin chastised the Democrats for choosing hopelessness over hope. “Instead of ‘yes, we can,’” he wrote, “the instinctive response from a good portion of the folks who should be helping to defend democracy seems to be ‘no, we can’t.’” He then labeled the party’s inaction “learned helplessness.” Jordan Zakarin, writing for the Center for American Progress Action’s Progress Report, extended that diagnosis from “the worst debate performance in modern history” to the larger moment in Washington. He pointed, for instance, to Attorney General Merrick Garland having “slow-walked prosecuting Donald Trump.” “It is,” he concluded, “a learned helplessness,” a “preemptive surrender.”

The question is: What should we make of the concept of “learned helplessness”? Where did it come from and what are the remedies writ large? In this distinctly disturbing moment in our history, is it possible that an all-American version of despair and hopelessness has changed in light of Joe Biden’s backing out of the presidential race?

The Psychological Concept

To better understand the sudden shower of references to “learned helplessness,” a little history is in order. In the late 1960s, psychologist Martin Seligman coined the term while conducting experiments with dogs. He had accidentally stumbled on the fact that dogs that experienced electrical shocks without having any control over starting or stopping them were ultimately rendered strangely passive. They proved unwilling to move, even to escape further mistreatment.

After more experiments demonstrated that being subjected to severe pain or stress did indeed induce a state of inaction in dogs, Seligman then turned to humans and discovered that individuals who had suffered an act or acts of trauma and abuse continued, well after the painful incident, to show signs of depression and anxiety that rendered them completely unable to act. They continued to exist, he discovered, in a state of profound resignation and inaction, long after the traumatic moment in which they found themselves powerless. Afterward, they were convinced that nothing was under their control, that any action they might take would be futile, and that failure was inevitable, should they even try to act. (Later studies suggested that some elderly individuals might also experience such a state of profound resignation and inaction in response to “stressful life events,” at times in association with dementia.)

But here’s the truly strange thing: more than three decades later in the years after the 9/11 attacks, Seligman’s concept of “learned helplessness” would be quite purposely baked into the interrogation and torture program created and implemented for war on terror detainees by American officials during the administration of President George W. Bush. As the executive summary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s torture report explained, one of the two psychologists contracted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for the purpose of devising its interrogation program “had reviewed research on ‘learned helplessness,’ in which individuals might become passive and depressed in response to adverse or uncontrollable events. He theorized,” the report added, “that inducing such a state could encourage a detainee to cooperate and provide information.”

That psychologist, Bruce Mitchell, even met with Seligman while designing techniques to use on war-on-terror detainees suspected of ties to the 9/11 terror group al-Qaeda and its leadership at the secret “black sites” the CIA set up globally. (Seligman, it seems, had no idea of the horrors Mitchell and his associates were planning.) Ironically enough, Seligman’s findings and his concept of “learned helplessness” would indeed become a basic part of the development of the CIA’s torture program. (Seligman would come to condemn the use of the concept for interrogations at those black sites. As The Washington Post reported, “When [Seligman] later learned through media accounts how it was employed — for enhanced interrogation — he issued a statement: ‘I am grieved and horrified that good science, which has helped so many people overcome depression, may have been used for such bad purposes.’”)

To induce a profound state of helplessness, those post-9/11 captives were sent to the CIA’s black sites where they were subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques” designed to elicit information from them. Their torture included beatings, being smashed into walls, being hung by their limbs in excruciatingly painful positions, forced nudity, sodomy, and repeated sleep deprivation, among other things. The CIA also used waterboarding (subjecting detainees to the feeling of drowning), placed them in coffin-like boxes, and threatened to use a gun or a power drill on those who refused to give answers sought by their interrogators. Just last month, in a pre-trial hearing at the forever prison the Bush administration set up offshore — and away from the federal court system — at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in 2002, such techniques were once again described in detail, this time by John Bruce Jessen, the psychologist who, along with Mitchell, designed the nightmarish interrogation program. In addition to his testimony, he also demonstrated the technique of “walling,” which involved slamming a detainee’s head against a wall.

The goal was simple: to reduce that prisoner to a profound state of complete paralysis and disempowerment in which, having no hope of relief or escape, he would do whatever his captors wanted. Detainees would see that there was no way out but to answer their captors’ questions, which, it turned out, often led them, in desperation and a state of learned helplessness, to confess to things they hadn’t done, to confess to whatever their captors wanted to hear.

Having studied and written about the nightmare of those prisoners and Guantánamo for so many years now, it’s been supremely jarring to see the term “learned helplessness” re-emerge in connection to the current unnerving state of American politics and the 2024 presidential election. Yet, in many ways, it seems a strangely appropriate lens through which to view the world of Donald Trump and the rest of us. It was true, as many commented, that a sense of learned helplessness indisputably crept into the mindset of so many of us in this country — at least prior to Joe Biden’s decision not to pursue a second term as president.

The American people have indeed suffered multiple stressful, even traumatic experiences in recent years. The shock of a government that didn’t protect them on September 11, 2001; the devastating experience of a president who refused to protect them from Covid, as bodies piled up on the streets of this country; the winnowing away of rights and liberties once protected by the Constitution and the Supreme Court — from the overturning of Roe v. Wade to a rash of recent decisions, including one that gave a president essential immunity in relation to more or less anything he did, no matter how devastating; the inability of the courts to proceed in their prosecutions of Donald Trump; the nearly paralyzed state of a riven Congress amid an economic reality that has led so many younger Americans to be unable to purchase their own homes or send their children to college — all have collectively cowed the population. Even before both the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision and the dismal debate performance of Biden, a sense of learned helplessness seemed well in place, and understandably so.

The Republican Party has also succumbed to a state of learned helplessness. One after another, former opponents of Trump and the MAGA ideology he stands for have succumbed to his agenda and given up on pursuing their own independent goals. Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance is certainly a case in point. Having formerly called out Trump for his lack of morality, his xenophobia, and his racism, as well as for being a “total fraud” and “America’s Hitler,” he is now on board with the ideas he once said he deplored, including, for example, an untethered anti-immigration stance that calls for massive deportations of illegal immigrants. Similarly, Trump’s Republican election opponent Nikki Haley has given up her “legacy of blunt assessments and brutal takedowns” of the former president, as The Nation’s John Nichols has aptly described her opposition to Trump, whom she once described as “a dangerous stooge of Russian president Vladimir Putin.”

The question is: What, if anything, does the research tell us about curing such a state?

Is There, in Fact, a Cure?

Psychologists do point to remedies for such a profound state of hopelessness. They suggest several healing paths forward, including therapy to examine the causes of one’s despair and to discover constructive paths beyond it; exercise to stimulate the body and the mind; and a commitment to “learned optimism,” a pattern of reaction geared to expecting the best rather than the worst out of any situation. As Psychology Today points out, “Seligman later developed the concept of learned optimism. By explaining events to ourselves in a constructive manner and developing a positive internal dialogue, people can break free from their cycle of helplessness.” Small wins and an energized commitment to positivity are basic tenets of finding a way to “learned optimism.”

If a turn towards optimism offers a way out of the helplessness of our times, perhaps we are seeing the beginning of just such an event. Recently, Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick, again invoking the term “learned helplessness,” suggested that reports of the plans of the Biden administration to back Supreme Court reform were a sign of the kind of future “systemwide cognitive reboot for American voters that seems almost inconceivable in the generalized torpor and despair of July 2024.” The headline of her article read, appropriately enough, “Are We Finally Letting Go of Our Learned-Helplessness Syndrome Around the Supreme Court?”

So, too, the outpouring of energy and excitement following Biden’s decision to bow out of the presidential race and the enthusiasm for newer, younger Democratic Party leadership — and for Vice President Kamala Harris, in particular — already seems eons removed from the head-shaking resignation of Democratic voters confronting a “choice” between an aging Joe Biden and You Know Who on election day. In fact, in many ways, that new turn of affairs could be just what the doctor ordered, though, of course, a possible November election victory for Donald Trump could still put the phrase “learned helplessness” in a grimly new light.

For Democrats, the idea that there could be a brighter future, one in which a sense of control replaced one of powerlessness — an election in which their presidential candidate has a viable chance of winning — has taken hold. In place of anxiety and depression, there is optimism, or at least a “cautious hope.” Declaring her “immense pride and limitless optimism for our country’s future,” Nancy Pelosi echoed the importance of this newfound optimism when endorsing Kamala Harris as the party’s candidate for 2024. As Tim Alberta summed it up in The Atlantic, “As far back as springtime, the numbers told a straightforward story: Biden was not going to win. Democrats could only look on, powerless.” However, now, he concludes, it is the Republicans who are feeling hope and control fade away: “Sunday brought an unfamiliar feeling of powerlessness. For the first time in a long time, Trump does not control the narrative of 2024.”

Whether or not such optimism gains momentum in the potentially tumultuous days ahead remains to be seen, as does whether the Republicans can find a way out of their own potential sense of learned helplessness in the face of a changing scenario. Whatever happens, given what I know about the past use of that phrase and the nightmare of the war on terror’s use of torture, my own hope is that, with election 2024, the very concept of learned helplessness and the realities it represents, whether it applies to torture at the hands of the U.S. government or suffering at the hands of Trumpian politics, can finally be politically laid to rest.

Call it learned optimism, if you wish, but fingers crossed.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

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