"A tragedy for the world": How the Trump-Musk takeover is sowing global chaos

I recently interviewed social psychologist Kurt Gray about his new book, "Outraged! Why We Fight About Morality and Politics," in which he argues that we can bridge ideological divides by drawing on evolutionary evidence and developing ways of building trust. Despite the state of the world today, there’s evidence that this is possible through the use of randomly selected mini-publics modeled on jury duty, whether here in America or around the world. But creating conditions in which such examples can flourish may seems like a pipe dream as America risks descending into autocracy, where no dialogue is possible or permitted. 

The sharp disconnect between what Gray believes is possible and what we're all experience day to day was much of what we explored in that interview, in which I referenced the work of social scientist Michael Bang Petersen in exploring the evolutionary reasons why deception — such as deliberate falsehoods and conspiracy theories — may confer a coalitional advantage to anti-democratic forces, thereby undermining the social trust on which Gray’s approach depends. During Donald Trump’s first term, I interviewed Petersen about an earlier paper which found that many marginalized but status-obsessed individuals, such as internet trolls, experience a "need for chaos" and want to "watch the world burn."

Both papers shed light on sources of Trump’s appeal that conventional commentary simply couldn't see, the earlier paper more by focusing on individual motivations, the second on group frameworks. With the bridge-building promise Gray points to fresh in mind — but Democratic leaders like Sen. Chuck Schumer seemingly blind to the profound obstacles that make that impossible under current conditions — the time seemed ripe to interview Petersen again, primarily about how he make sense of Trump’s second term so far, with the world's richest internet troll by his side. 

But there was another good reason for the interview: Petersen is Danish, and his nation has a tool to analyze its democratic challenges in hopes of addressing them. Roughly every other decade, the Danish parliament commissions an expert “power and democracy” study to investigate the state of Danish democracy in the face of new challenges that have emerged since the previous study. It's not just an academic exercise. Work aimed at a for the general public is also produced, and this offers an example of what it looks like when elected leaders are serious about seeking to strengthen democracy. Petersen is in charge of Denmark's current investigation, which will run through 2028. He speaks from the perspective of a leader responsible for addressing and improving democracy at a fundamental level — a task our country sorely needs addressed. that America is sorely in need of. 

I spoke with Petersen by video from Copenhagen. This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

One of Kurt Gray's key arguments is that humans evolved as a prey species with a profound orientation toward avoiding harm, which has become the basis for all our morality. He thinks that's also a basis for liberals and conservatives to understand each other by focusing on how they both see harm. There's evidence for that in citizen's assemblies in specific contexts, but in politics at large that doesn't seem to be the case. Your work seems a lot more realistic, in terms of what we actually see right now. I want to start by asking about what's happening on the individual level, and what you've called the "need for chaos." That seems to apply most clearly to internet trolls, and now we have the biggest social media troll of all acting as co-president of the U.S. How does the "need for chaos" help explain Elon Musk and how he operates?

It's always difficult to apply these general theories to single individuals, because there's so much contextual information that isn't available and it's difficult to get people's genuine motivations from a distance. But at least we can talk about the effects that he is creating. If you look at the observable behavior and the patterns, he seems to be a person who is extremely motivated or willing to share information that is false, to the extent that it fits into his political talking points, his overall political agenda. So you have a person who is not sharing information with the objective of creating an accurate representation of the state of the world, but who is trying to mold the way that his audience thinks such that it aligns with his core interests.

We know that's an example of information warfare. That's an example of how humans use information to strategically manipulate each other. We've been doing that as a species always. The difference now is that you have an actor with these highly strategic motivations who is not only the richest man in the world and therefore has virtually unlimited resources available to broadcast that information, but is also the owner of the largest social media network dedicated to politics, which means he can craft these messages very efficiently.

And with powerful effects.

Let's talk about the effects of those messages in a second, but if we talk a little bit more about Musk's dispositions, it does seem that he has all the behavior patterns of a person who scores high in dominance-seeking, a core feature of individuals who have a high need for chaos. It does seem to be an explicit leadership strategy to use dominance to instill fear into people who are working within his organizations, and it's very clear that there has been a strategy of instilling fear into bureaucracy through the random firings, constant threats of firings, cutting funding and so on. 

So he's navigating using fear as an instrument, and we also see other dominance displays. One of the most visually striking is the happiness with which he wielded that chainsaw. You can say that was just a pure dominance display. So this does seem to be an individual with a personality — again, from observable behaviors — that tends towards dominance. He certainly seems to be using a tactic of prioritizing messages that fit his own agenda, rather than that is aligned with an accurate portrayal of the state of the world. 

When it comes to leaders who are making heavy use of propaganda, it's important to understand that it's not necessarily because his audience is convinced of what he's saying, in any normal sense of the term. We humans use information for strategic purposes, on the basis of whether that is aligned with our social goals. Often we don't process information for epistemic reasons. It's not a game where we are trying to build an accurate understanding of the world. We use information in order to signal, and we absorb information in order to signal our place within the group. 

Right. This segues into the subject of your second paper, the one where you explain that there are multiple levels at which group needs, and group members’ individual needs, are met. 

Yes. The point is that if you are a person who already has a somewhat similar worldview to whoever is the leader within a group, then when you're closely tracking the information that leader is putting out, what you're trying to figure out is what kinds of beliefs I need to hold in order to be a loyal group member. In that sense, you should think of propaganda and things like that as fashion shows. It's more like fashion than about an actual description of what is going on. 

You're getting these signals that, today, in order to be a good MAGA Republican, Ukraine was responsible for Russia invading it. And then, the next week, you need to have the idea that tariffs are a beneficial thing for the economy. So essentially we can think about beliefs the same way we think about football jerseys — it signals what team you are on, and you constantly need to track information flow from the leader, who is setting the latest fashion. Therefore, you adapt to those beliefs not because you necessarily believe all of them for reasons of accuracy, but because you want to learn the social signals that are going around in your group. 

From the perspective of introspection, one or the other belief doesn't necessarily feel different. It doesn't necessarily feel different to think that Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world and to believe that Ukraine was responsible for Russia invading it. They feel the same. But those two pieces of information are processed and absorbed for fundamentally different reasons. One is because you are actually interested in understanding which mountain is the largest in the world — you want to have an accurate understanding of that — and the other is because you want to be a good MAGA Republican. 

In that paper, you broke down the coalitional functions of falsehood into three stages. The first of those was mobilization. You said, "By enhancing the threat — for example, by saying things that are not necessarily true — then you are in a better situation to mobilize and coordinate the attention of your own group." I thought of that when Trump made the claim about Haitian immigrants eating pets: Clearly that was false, and they didn't care that it was false. That didn't seem to matter at all to Trump's followers, who seemed to revel in claiming it, regardless of whether it was true or false. Could you say something about how that works?

When you're trying to mobilize a coalition, you need to overcome a fundamental problem, which is the coordination problem. Even if everyone within a group wants to do the same thing, it is actually difficult to get the group to do that thing, because their attention is scattered across multiple different issues. It's not the only thing that they want to do. So they need to agree: Is it now that we're doing that thing? That problem of coordinating people's attention at the same time to do X is a difficult problem. A lot of propaganda is about creating that coordination, to say it's now that we need to do something about it, and we need to do this. 

We have seen those kinds of processes operate over human history. It's well documented in the context of ethnic massacres and riots, to the extent that one of the leading authors on the social dynamics behind ethnic massacres, Donald Horowitz, says that when you see propaganda spread prior to an ethnic massacre, you should see it as essentially a recipe for what is going to happen. A lot of that propaganda is always filled with the atrocities that the other group has done, but more than an accurate description of what they have actually done, it psychologically functions as a recipe for what we are going to do against them. We see this on many occasions with the rhetoric coming from Trump and Musk. 

Can you be more specific?

I think a lot of what goes on with Canada is similar. There is this constant talk about injustice: Canada is treating the United States unfairly, Europe is treating the United States unfairly. It's very unclear how that is the case. But essentially that serves as a pretext for going with the tariffs, and this understanding that, OK, we need to do something about this problem now. 

If we go back to the story about the Haitian immigrants eating pets, I think it shows something slightly different but also quite interesting about our psychology of falsehoods. Because I think it's absolutely true that neither Trump nor his core audience cared whether it was true or false, but part of the reason is that they cared about the underlying direction of society that was implied by the misinformation. Trump and the core of the movement wanted to do something about immigrants. They wanted them to be deported. As long as the specific piece of information that you are giving out has implications in the direction that you want to go, then the actual circumstances matter less. In that sense, you could see what Trump did as a clever form of agenda-setting. 

I don't think he believed that the migrants were eating dogs. I don't think that a lot of his followers believe that cats and dogs were being eaten. But it didn't really matter, because it had the right implications. By messaging those implications in the form of misinformation, it got everyone to talk about it, which meant that the underlying issue of immigration was kept high on the agenda as people were trying to debunk the underlying falsehood. 

So that also shows something about how difficult it is for benign actors to navigate strategically in an information environment where some people have absolutely no regard for the truth, and perhaps to figure out: Is this a falsehood we should just sort of ignore? Or is this a falsehood we should strongly push back against? Because the risk is that by pushing back against the falsehood you are keeping the underlying issue at the top of the agenda. 

What you're talking about there involves both the mobilization and the coordination functions. But there's a third aspect you talk about, regarding commitment. A good way to signal group loyalty is to take on a belief that's the exact opposite of what the other group believes. That creates pressure to develop bizarre beliefs about the other group being evil. That sums up what I see, as an American, in Trump openly claiming to be king while simultaneously claiming that his enemies are trying to destroy America, which of course was founded on rejecting the rule of a king. What does that look like from your perspective?

I think that's a very good example of the kind of dynamics that we are trying to describe in our work. Going back to these different forms of beliefs, it's not a good team signal to believe that Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world, because everyone believes that. So if your basic goal is to figure out who's loyal and who's not, you need to push a narrative that is against a large number of people's basic way of understanding things. 

In the U.S. context, proclaiming you are king is very much in opposition to a large number of American values and therefore it's a pretty good signal of loyalty if you're actually going along with the narrative. Just as it's a good signal of loyalty if you go with the narrative of Trump buying Gaza and turning it into a beach resort. Because from a European perspective, that looks so bizarre that I almost don't have words for it, especially for the video that that he used to communicate this on Truth Social. 

But it really makes it helpful from a leadership perspective, especially if you are a leader looking for blind obedience. Because by making it bizarre — where people will feel pressure and tension in going along with it — then it becomes what we in psychology call a "costly signal." You need to pay something to go along with it. And we're seeing this not just at the level of rank-and-file voters in the MAGA movement but among elected Republicans who are putting out legislation or proposals to put Donald Trump on Mount Rushmore, who are suggesting that Donald Trump should be on $100 bills, who are suggesting to turn Trump's birthday into a national holiday. 

All these over-the-top proposals are signs of loyalty. You cannot show loyalty to a dominant leader just by doing something that doesn't cost you anything. You need to do something that will make other people turn their backs on you. 

So Trump is dominating U.S. politics, but the problems he represents are common to the rest of the world. You're involved in a project in Denmark to try to understand and address those problems. Tell me something about what you and your team are trying to do.

This is a particular toolbox in Scandinavian parliaments. Every other decade or so, parliaments in Scandinavia — Denmark, Norway and Sweden — have initiated these power inquiries or "power and democracy" studies. The idea is to let independent researchers audit the state of democracy in the given country. So here in Denmark we had the last of these democracy audits around the turn of the century, just before the. advent of social media. And now because of digitalization and how that has changed the way politics work, they want us to do a new audit, and I was appointed by the government to lead that team of researchers. 

So what does it involve?

It's a slow-working, long-term project, so I'm 100 percent out of all regular university responsibilities until 2028, when we are to hand in our final report. We’re trying to mobilize all the researchers in the social sciences and in the humanities with relevant expertise to bring together their research in order to make this evaluation of how robust Danish democracy is, what core challenges we are facing and what the potential paths are ahead for facing some of those challenges. The background is not only digitalization, but also democratic backsliding, as we have seen in in a number of countries, including countries that are close to Denmark, members of the EU such as Poland and Hungary. But of course we have also been following very closely what is happening in the United States, in one of the oldest democracies in the world. 

So what do you see?

When things go bad, it's always interesting for a researcher — although it's not interesting to live through it! One thing that seems to emerge from the current U.S. experience is how fragile our institutions really are. A lot of stable democracies work not because of formal institutions, but because of cultural norms and traditions. That means that if you are a person with absolutely no regard for tradition and an exclusive focus on your own interest, you can create a lot of chaos and destruction very quickly, especially if you combine that with instilling fear into the bureaucracy. Because it is really the bureaucracy and the judicial system who should be stepping up against politicians overstepping their power. But if you are able to make them fearful of following their professional norms and you exploit that to the fullest, then things can go bad pretty quickly. 

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We are still early on the project, but we can see a lot of what is going on in Danish democracy, which has a lot less problems than the U.S. democracy. A lot of what makes Danish democracy work is also cultural traditions and norms. The unique thing about this project is that it's parliaments themselves that ask to be audited: “Please come and see if we are wielding our power in the interests of democracy.” I imagine that it is only possible to have such a project in stable, high-trust societies. 

I know it's early in the process, but are there any lessons or directions that have emerged so far, in terms of how to improve things?  

We will be publishing a series of books over the next four years, and then will publish our final report. We will publish the first three books here in the beginning of the summer. They will be laying the groundwork for the rest of the audit. One of the key problems that we are focusing on is, again, how a lot of the functions of democracy rest on these norms, but we are pointing to a large number of challenges that have emerged and are putting pressure on the Danish democratic system. I think probably the most important, from a U.S. perspective, is rising inequality. 

In Denmark, inequality has gone up since the turn of the century. Not to the same extent as in the United States, and Denmark is still a relatively equal country. But I think a lot of the problems the United States is facing right now have to do with rapidly increasing inequality since the beginning of the '80s. I think a key lesson is that politicians need to have a strong focus on the slow building of societal tensions that emerge out of inequality, and fixing them as soon as they can. 

That's a lot more difficult to do in a two-party system than it is in a multiparty system, as we have in Europe, because when you have these sort of social tensions that are slowly building up, there will always emerge a new political party. In a multiparty system, that party will grow larger and larger until the political establishment fixes the underlying issue that they're campaigning on. But if you have a two-party system, then it can take a really long time before those tensions reach the top at the political level, and then suddenly you have this takeover by ideological extremists, such as we have seen with the Republican Party, and then things can go really bad very quickly.

I think at this point it is really up to politicians to disregard short-term electoral incentives, and disregard also the economic incentives from lobbyists, interest organizations and so on, and really do the job they were elected to do, which is to take care of society at large. Sometimes that means you need to sacrifice short-term electoral gain and economic benefits. That's at the core of what they need to do.

OK, so what's the most important question I didn't ask? And what’s the answer? 

One thing we could talk about is whether what is happening in the United States is sort of your problem, in the United States, or whether it's our problem. This is followed extremely closely — what is unfolding in the United States — in European media. Politically interested people across Europe are talking a lot about the situation in the U.S., because what is happening in the U.S. is a tragedy, in my view, for the American people, but it's essentially also a tragedy for the world. 

The signs are that the international order is collapsing, and that will create massive problems for all of us. The threats against former allies — well, still formally allies like Canada and Denmark, in the case of Greenland — but also the constant threats that the U.S. will not back up NATO, those are destroying a large number of alliances. Essentially the whole world is changing over just these past few months. What is happening in the United States is definitely not just affecting the United States but affecting people across the entire world. It's a huge problem for all of us when the most powerful country in the world turns toward authoritarianism.