Gorillas in Disguise

In 1983, the hit movie Trading Places was released. In it, two wealthy brothers amuse themselves by manipulating the fates of two men, played by Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd. Some may remember the film as a comedic critique of American inequality and the social irresponsibility of capital. Others will remember it because Jamie Lee Curtis bares her breasts. What stuck with me was one of the final scenes, where the villainous henchman, dressed as a gorilla, ends up locked in a cage with a romantically inclined real gorilla. The scene ends with a close-up of his wide, panicked eyes—everything else is left to the imagination.

A man dressed as a gorilla is also the central figure in a psychological experiment by American researchers Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, described in their 2010 book The Invisible Gorilla. The two won an “Ig Nobel Prize” for the most trivial scientific research that year—which, in my view, was well deserved.

In the experiment, volunteers were asked to count how many times players in white shirts passed a basketball. The observers were so focused on the task that they failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through the scene. The point of the experiment was to demonstrate that people intensely focused on one thing can easily miss everything else. I haven’t read Chabris and Simons’ book, but I do know a joke where the proverbial Bosnians Mujo and Haso use experimental psychology to unhook and steal a German tourist’s trailer.

Distraction and misdirection are key political skills as well. That’s understandable—everyone would rather be known for their successes than for their mistakes. But populism elevates this “experimental psychology” to a much higher level. The aim isn’t just to distract from failure but to intentionally manipulate voters, to bring them to a state where they fail to notice—or even actively support—policies that objectively harm them. You have to keep people busy so you can steal their trailer.

The self-harm involved in supporting populists is twofold. First, there’s the loss of political freedom. Claims of exclusive rights to represent “the people’s will” are used to delegitimize opposition and undermine independent judiciaries, free media, and civil society. Once populists dismantle the democratic checks and balances “in the name of the people,” it becomes very difficult for that same people to democratically remove them when they’ve had enough.

Second, there are economic consequences. While populist Mujo keeps the German tourist entertained, neoliberal Haso unhooks the trailer. In Europe, this threatens the collapse of the post-war social model, based on a private economy balanced by protections of the public interest and a form of capitalism that accepts it needs the rule of law, democratic governance, quality education and healthcare, and infrastructure. For this to work, capital must be willing to give up some profit. This model was perfected in Scandinavia, particularly in the welfare state pioneered by Denmark, which was long guided by Nikolaj Grundtvig’s idea of an ideal society “where few have too much and even fewer too little.” Grundtvig wasn’t a leftist or a revolutionary—he was a Protestant pastor, who died in 1872.

The Western European welfare state flourished after WWII. Rooted in liberal democracy, human rights, and the rule of law, it was both a response to wartime atrocities and a bulwark against communist ideology from the East. Postwar leaders couldn’t have known the Soviet dream would end in such failure. When it did, neoliberalism saw its chance to go after the welfare state and the European model of socially responsible capitalism. The process began in the early 1980s with the neoliberal triumph of Reagan and Thatcher, both intoxicated with Hayek.

Of course, the welfare state wasn’t perfect. It struggled with rigidity in adapting to modern global challenges. Some responses have been panicked: Denmark’s new Social Democratic government, for example, has taken a populist turn on migration, in an effort to preserve its welfare system. But this is unlikely to work—you can’t carve up the principles of the welfare state like salami and serve them only to “your own.” Solidarity in society is for all or will ultimately be for no one.

Neoliberal capital hates the welfare state even more than it hated communism—at least communism is gone, and not coming back. It has no problem with Putin’s Russia, which inherited the Soviet legacy and aligns ideologically on key issues. Since the welfare state is inseparable from liberal democracy, neoliberalism hates that too. Its holy trinity—deregulation, minimal taxation, and aggressive privatization—is incompatible with a society based on the social responsibility of capital.

Right-wing populism enables neoliberalism to attack the foundational values of both the welfare state and liberal democracy: solidarity, human rights, political freedoms, social justice, non-discrimination, tolerance, dignity, empathy, openness, and dialogue.

Trump’s recent tweets targeting four U.S. congresswomen offer a perfect example of racism and intolerance weaponized for political and economic dominance. He told them to “go back to where they came from” because they supported such values—branding them “socialists,” a worse insult in parts of America than being from Murgle neighborhood in Ljubljana, where the first Slovenian president Milan Kučan resides..

The tragic fate of people lured into populist hatred is that they may become its greatest victims. Their hostility toward outsiders helps build a world in which they themselves may one day be forced to flee their homeland. When a society is stripped of empathy and solidarity, it becomes inhumane to all but a select few at the top. And most of populism’s supporters won’t be in that select few.

You don’t need to be clairvoyant to see it coming—just think critically about the real substance of populist promises and their inevitable consequences. But because populism is emotionally driven, only a small portion of its supporters are capable of rational thought and behavior.

In that regard, human behavior deviates from Chabris and Simons’ model. In their experiment, once observers were alerted to the gorilla, they couldn’t see anything else. In populism, it’s the opposite. Despite all the signs of looming disaster, many still keep counting the ball passes. They won’t see the neoliberal gorilla until tears are streaming down their panicked face.