Every year, the roughly 200 Renaissance fairs and festivals held across the United States and abroad attract several million visitors. United by their raucous entertainment, elaborate costumes, and setting in the distant past, these outdoor events boast a surprising backstory.
The country’s first Renaissance Pleasure Faire, staged in Los Angeles in May 1963, was inextricably linked to the Red Scare, a Cold War-era mass hysteria prompted by the specter of communism. It was the brainchild of Phyllis Patterson, a history, English, speech, and drama teacher who’d balked at having to sign a political loyalty oath to work in California public schools. Though Phyllis later told the press she’d left teaching in 1960 to become a stay-at-home mom, her son Kevin Patterson says this was only “part of the story.” In truth, he adds, “she felt strongly about the harms and unconstitutionality of the HUAC”—the House Un-American Activities Committee—and McCarthyism overall, “and was therefore uncomfortable taking a loyalty oath.”
Many of the volunteers involved in the first fair were residents of Laurel Canyon, a haven for left-leaning creatives in the Hollywood hills. Some had been blacklisted or “graylisted” as communists, leaving them unable to find work in the film industry. The fair presented an opportunity for these individuals to use their skills and participate in a project that celebrated free thinking.
After leaving her teaching position, Phyllis started working at the Wonderland Youth Center in Laurel Canyon, where she ran a theater program for children. She held classes in her backyard, pursuing “a vision of how she could open youngsters’ eyes to their own dramatic and artistic potential by using the great themes of the past,” wrote Kevin in the foreword to a 2013 book about the fair.
Through her work at the youth center, Phyllis met actors Robert and Doris Karnes, who served on its Board of Directors. The couple had also suffered the consequences of Joseph McCarthy-era suspicion and repression. In 1959, HUAC called Doris to testify about “an alleged communist infiltration of the youth center,” writes historian Rachel Lee Rubin in Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture. Two years later, the committee issued a report identifying Doris and 19 others as communists or communist sympathizers. The accusations sparked debate among locals: Some wanted to pull their children from drama classes, while others rejected the blackballing and a proposed amendment barring suspected communists from the center.
The bloodthirsty murders of pregnant celebrity actress Sharon Tate — along with four of her friends — by members of the Charles Manson “family” tipped off a decade of national fascination with cults during the 1970s. This fascination would reach its horrific zenith in 1978 with the forced suicide of over nine-hundred followers of Jim Jones, leader of the “People’s Temple,” in the small South American nation of Guyana.
The Role of Identification with the Aggressor in Brainwashing
Key to unlocking the enigma of cult leaders like Manson and Jones, is the concept of “Identification with the Aggressor,” first described by Hungarian analyst, Sandor Ferenczi, an acolyte, and member of the inner circle of psychology patron saints, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Identification with the aggressor refers to a survival strategy Ferenczi identified in children undergoing traumatic abuse. In response to these incidents, Ferenczi believed a child might split off from reality and cease all thoughts and perceptions, becoming completely passive. Under this spell, children submit to all of their parents’ “desires, or even anticipating them, and eventually realizing that he can find some satisfaction in this.” Many followers of Ferenczi’s work went on to apply the concept of identification with the aggressor to circumstances experienced by adults who are exposed to traumatic abuse.
These theorists have observed that adults can revert to a childlike state of defenselessness and passivity in situations where they are made powerless by a complete loss of control over their personal safety. To adapt to ongoing traumatic abuse, it’s been hypothesized that victims fuse their identity with that of a charismatic, seemingly all-powerful leader. With an individual’s volitions and sense of self effectively erased, the motivations of a parasitic group or the needs of a cult leader are embraced by the victim as their own. Victims often feel gratitude for “favors” they are granted by those in power — small things like being allowed to live.
The day almost two years ago when Harvard Business School informed Francesca Gino, a prominent professor, that she was being investigated for data fraud also happened to be her husband’s 50th birthday. An administrator instructed her to turn in any Harvard-issued computer equipment that she had by 5 p.m. She canceled the birthday celebration she had planned and walked the machines to campus, where a University Police officer oversaw the transfer.
“We ended up both going,” Dr. Gino recalled. “I couldn’t go on my own because I felt like, I don’t know, the earth was opening up under my feet for reasons that I couldn’t understand.”
The school told Dr. Gino it had received allegations that she manipulated data in four papers on topics in behavioral science, which straddles fields like psychology, marketing, and economics.
Dr. Gino published the four papers under scrutiny from 2012 to 2020, and fellow academics had cited one of them more than 500 times. The paper found that asking people to attest to their truthfulness at the top of a tax or insurance form, rather than at the bottom, made their responses more accurate because it supposedly activated their ethical instincts before they provided information.
Though she did not know it at the time, Harvard had been alerted to the evidence of fraud a few months earlier by three other behavioral scientists who publish a blog called Data Colada, which focuses on the validity of social science research. The bloggers said it appeared that Dr. Gino had tampered with data to make her studies appear more impressive than they were. In some cases, they said, someone had moved numbers around in a spreadsheet so that they better aligned with her hypothesis. In another paper, data points appeared to have been altered to exaggerate the finding.
.
Credit…Illustration by Anthony Gerace; Image via TEDx Talks/YouTube
A voice says: “Close your left hand. Don’t ask yourself whether you’re asleep. Think about trees.”
I’m lying in bed. A sleep mask covers my eyes. A tangle of wires covers my left hand. At the tip of my ring finger, a sensor measures my heart rate. A flexible length of plastic embedded with circuits stretches from my palm to the top of my middle finger. This will record the hypnic jerks and spastic opening-hand motions that signal my entry into hypnagogia, the first stage of sleep, where thoughts slip free of conscious control.
There’s a laptop on the bedside table; the screen shows fluctuating green and red lines. Adam Haar Horowitz, who is running the experiment, speaks to me over Zoom, monitoring my somatic information. The device I wear is called a Dormio. It was developed by Adam and a team of professors and researchers at the MIT Media Lab to facilitate “dream incubation,” the shaping of dreams according to words or images chosen by the dreamer. I’m wearing a prototype. Adam envisions a time when the components of the Dormio will be widely available; anyone will be able to download its blueprint and, with a few cheap premade circuits, construct her own dream incubator.
The way it works is simple. The device connects to a website where you can record a voice message to yourself—“think about trees”—that will play as you begin to fall asleep. Dormio detects when you enter hypnagogia, waits a short period, then awakens you and prompts you to describe what you’re experiencing, and sends the recording to your hard drive. You can also alter the parameters of awakening, which enables you to enter deeper or shallower levels of sleep. This first time, Adam is manning the controls himself; his is the voice reminding me to think about trees.
I settle into bed. The Dormio feels light on my hand, and I soon forget about it. My eyes are closed under the mask.
“Hold the image of a tree in your mind.”
I’m not going to be able to do this, I think. A spark of nervous energy runs through my legs.
“Relax. Don’t ask yourself whether you’re asleep. Think about trees.”
(1) Nothing is eternal in this world, not even our problems. (2) I like to walk in the rain, because no one can see my tears. (3) The most wasted day in life is the day we don’t laugh. (4) The six best doctors in the world… Keep them in all stages of your life […]
The half-bearded behavioral economist Dan Ariely tends to preface discussions of his work—which has inquired into the mechanisms of pain, manipulation and lies—with a reminder that he comes by both his eccentric facial hair and his academic interests honestly. He tells a version of the story in the introduction to his breezy first book, “Predictably Irrational,” a patchwork of marketing advice and cerebral self-help. One afternoon in Israel, Ariely—an “18-year-old military trainee,” according to the Times—was nearly incinerated. “An explosion of a large magnesium flare, the kind used to illuminate battlefields at night, left 70 percent of my body covered with third-degree burns,” he writes. He spent three years in the hospital, a period that estranged him from the routine practices of everyday life. The nurses, for example, stripped his bandages all at once, as per the cliché. Ariely suspected that he might prefer a gradual removal, even if the result was a greater sum of agony. In an early psychological experiment he later conducted, he submitted this instinct to empirical review. He subsequently found that certain manipulations of an unpleasant experience might make it seem milder in hindsight. In onstage patter, he referred to a famous study in which researchers gave colonoscopy patients either a painful half-hour procedure or a painful half-hour procedure that concluded with a few additional minutes of lesser misery. The patients preferred the latter, and this provided a reliable punch line for Ariely, who liked to say that the secret was to “leave the probe in.” This was not, strictly speaking, optimal—why should we prefer the scenario with bonus pain? But all around Ariely people seemed trapped by a narrow understanding of human behavior. “If the nurses, with all their experience, misunderstood what constituted reality for the patients they cared so much about, perhaps other people similarly misunderstand the consequences of their behaviors,” he writes. “Predictably Irrational,” which was published in 2008, was an instant airport-book classic, and augured an extraordinarily successful career for Ariely as an enigmatic swami of the but-actually circuit.
Ariely was born in New York City in 1967 and grew up north of Tel Aviv; his father ran an import-export business. He studied psychology at Tel Aviv University, then returned to the United States for doctoral degrees in cognitive psychology at the University of North Carolina and in business administration at Duke. He liked to say that Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning Israeli American psychologist, had pointed him in this direction. In the previous twenty years, Kahneman and his partner, Amos Tversky, had pioneered the field of “judgment and decision-making,” which revealed the rational-actor model of neoclassical economics to be a convenient fiction. (The colonoscopy study that Ariely loved, for example, was Kahneman’s.) Ariely, a wily character with a vivid origin story, presented himself as the natural heir to this new science of human folly. In 1998, with his pick of choice appointments, he accepted a position at M.I.T. Despite having little training in economics, he seemed poised to help renovate the profession. “In Dan’s early days, he was the most celebrated young intellectual academic,” a senior figure in the discipline told me. “I wouldn’t say he was known for being super careful, but he had a reputation as a serious scientist, and was considered the future of the field.”
.
Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino became famous for their research into why we bend the truth. Now they’ve both been accused of fabricating data.
Deirdre Barrett’s body was in bed, but her mind was in a library. The library was inside a very old house, with glowing oil lamps and shelves of beautiful leatherbound books. At first, it felt snug and secure and timeless, exactly the sort of place an academic like Barrett, who teaches in the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School and edits the scientific journal Dreaming, might find inviting. But as the dream went on, she remembered later, “I became less able to focus on the library and more overwhelmed by the unseen horror outside.” Beyond the windows of the softly lit library, “a terrible plague was ravaging the world.”
When Barrett woke up, it was mid-March of 2020. She had been reading about the novel coronavirus in Wuhan since it began to make headlines, and she wondered, as she often did when she read about events in the news, how this one might be showing up in the dreams of the people who were experiencing it: residents on lockdown in China, overwhelmed doctors and nurses in Italy. The dreamlife of collective catastrophe was something she had studied repeatedly during her academic career — analyzing, for example, the dreams of Kuwaitis after the Iraqi invasion and those of British officers held prisoner by the Nazis during World War II, to see how the dreams compared with one another and with dreams from calmer times.
As a child, Barrett was fascinated by her own dreams, which were often vivid. They tended to stay with her well after she woke up, making nights feel like a time for slipping in and out of new worlds and adventures, often ones she’d read about but was now able to interact with and inhabit fully. When she grew up, she decided, she would become a writer of fiction; many of the early stories she wrote were set not just in worlds that she imagined, but also in and out of the various dream worlds of her characters. She was deeply curious about the dream lives of other people: When she started writing for her high school newspaper, she occasionally asked her sources if they’d had dreams related to whatever she was interviewing them about. Dreams were a window, albeit a very strange one, into the way that other people and their minds worked. In college, Barrett decided that fiction was not her future (though she did develop a practice of making visual art about what she saw and felt while sleeping). What she wanted was to be a scientist who studied what happened inside dreams.
If You Are Looking For Wealth, Somebody else Is Looking For Health. If You Are Looking For Health, Somebody else Just Dièd. If You are Looking For Power, Somebody else Has Acquired And Used it, And he/she is now Powerless. Each Time You Drive A Fancy Car, Somebody, Somewhere Is Dying In A Car Crash. […]
In the world, human beings are facing various problems. People who are full of greed, anger, and ignorance are seen to be fighting with each other in words and deeds. As the fighting continues, various problems such as civil wars, wars of aggression, and wars of aggression are occurring. As world peace is being destroyed, humans are facing unbearable problems. Innocent children and women are not getting the rights they deserve and deserve. I can't think of one thing every time. What is it? The United Nations. If we look at the responsibilities and duties of the United Nations, I think it is not suitable for solving the problems that are happening in the world today. In fact, the United Nations and the World Security Council, such an organization must rule the world, must be able to give orders, and must have various ways to obey orders. There must be no organization that can influence more than that organization. There should be experts from each country. They can even dominate the superpowers like the US, China, and Britain. Only then will global peace be achieved quickly. Now, if a country with power develops more militarily, economically, or socially than its own country, then powerful countries will jealously seek out enemies and wage war. Or they will attack with fighter jets. In this, innocent people are losing their lives. No one understands the value of a life. You should think about how to achieve global peace by controlling these. If the US continues to be the permanent president of the UN, world peace will never be achieved. If you think carefully, no one sees that they are working for the common good, but for their own benefit, for the benefit of their own country. The permanent president of the UN and the Security Council has rejected this, As a young Rohingya, I have come to realize that only by electing the president and secretary from among the countries in the world through a secret ballot system and governing the world fairly can we achieve global peace. The United Nations and the Security Council are organizations in which any country must govern, give orders, and make them obey their orders. For example, only when a defendant is tried in court can we hold the leaders of the countries in check and control them, can we achieve global peace smoothly. Otherwise, it will not be easy for powerful countries to use various excuses to end this war every year, every year, for the benefit of themselves and their countries. No country's leaders pay any attention to the words of the United Nations and the Security Council. If we look at it in practice, look at the Rohingya issue. Myanmar is a small country. Even that country has been under siege for 8 years. What action can be taken? Why is the UN and the Security Council Powerless? Without such Power, how can the organization bring about global peace? Everyone should think about it. Whether there is a veto or a strong one, all countries in the world can only achieve global peace if they are subject to the UN and the Security Council. Seek peace in the quiet embrace of nature. Peace is an indispensable need of the human race. It is not as if one person can kill another person, and it is as if one country can attack another country, but instead of trying to build peace, we must try to destroy the peace now, and the world is getting hotter and is on the verge of collapse. I especially appeal to all the world experts to urgently try to bring about peace in all parts of the world. Mr, Noor Muhamed Arkhan Rohingya Youth Myanmar
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/18/5e/185ed3c8-94be-49bf-a61d-5afcf5ce29a7/dancers.jpg)
Performers at the 1963 Renaissance Pleasure Faire. Ron Patterson, a co-founder of the event, appears in orange at the far right. Marv Lyons / © Red Barn Productions (RBP) 2023
Sharon Tate
Illustrations by Beppe Giacobbe
Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino became famous for their research into why we bend the truth. Now they’ve both been accused of fabricating data.
