The "Third Wave" Wave, pt. 5: Principles of Modern Metapolitical Folklore
Establishing some rules of thumb for a new mode of information transmission
I. Intro
Welcome back. If you’ve been following along from the beginning of this series, you’ll recall that we’ve so far discussed The Third Wave social experiment as it was first recounted by Ron Jones in 1976, we spent a great amount of time attempting to disentangle fact from fiction about what actually happened at Cubberley High School in 1967 when the experiment actually took place, we discussed the made-for-TV movie The Wave from 1981, its novelization by Todd Strasser that appeared in the same year, and the German film adaptation Die Welle from 2008. I want to note that even more could be said about other variations and adaptations that have been cut from the discussion — mostly to help me preserve my own sanity. One of them is Ron Jones’s later small-budget production The Third Wave Musical. You can see interviews with Ron Jones about it here and here. These videos include plenty of clips from the show that give off big Waiting for Guffman vibes, and the script is available for purchase and still performed by grade schools from around the world. There’s also a Netflix series loosely inspired by Die Welle called We Are The Wave, which was produced by Die Welle’s director Dennis Gansel and went for one six-episode season. It has not been wildly successful and currently has a user rating of 6.3/10 on IMDB, which is pretty bad for a new series.
And then, there are still so, so many retellings of this story that continue to surface, all of which certify that the original story still belongs to a genre of modern folklore. A 2022 article on Upworthy (which apparently still exists!) argues for the continuing relevance of the ABC Afterschool Special. Another article from the same year on Coffee Or Die, the official “news and military culture” website of Black Rifle Coffee, also discusses the story. On Reddit, here’s a meme with 19,000 upvotes:
That this meme could gain that much popularity without providing any background information in the original post is impressive; it suggests a whole bunch of people already knew the story. There’s also this 26-minute YouTube video, which has 279,000 views — again, pretty impressive for what looks like a student presentation with amateur-level editing. And there’s also another YouTube video entitled “The Third Wave Experiment Explained | The Study That Proves We Were All Born Evil,” which has an impressive 1.8 million views. Many of the most popular comments on it are critical, but not because the “experiment” was essentially a hoax. They’re critical because the video creator used the word “evil” in the title to garner attention. Beyond that, virtually everyone in the comments section is totally credulous, and yet this video is the most bogus, exaggerated, unsubstantiated non-fiction account of the Third Wave story I’ve seen thus far. In the scheme of things, the Third Wave Experiment is a minor story, but it’s a story that refuses to lay down and die.
So what’s going on, exactly? Why are retellings of it only growing more hysterical and exaggerated even as it’s easier than ever to track down evidence of what actually went on and appreciate the experiment’s lack of importance for what it truly was? Understanding this requires us to think about the nature of what I call modern metapolitical folklore: a mode of transmitting information that contributes to the mythologization of events that have supposedly happened in history. What follows will be my attempt to sketch out a basic sense of how this process works — essentially testing the waters to determine its viability as a legitimate category. As I understand it, modern political folklore occurs only with a specific kind of story, in a specific media environment, and it achieves specific effects on collective memory. So we’ll go into each of these subjects one by one.
II. Folklore as Argumentum
In Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae (an influential encyclopedia from the 7th century AD) the author, during a lengthy discussion on rhetoric, makes a threefold distinction between fabula, argumentum, and historia. A fabula is a purely fictional story, something that never happens and never could happen (Isidore uses the phrase contra naturam in his definition). A good example would be animal stories, like those of Aesop — or the later Mother Goose Tales of Charles Perrault. A historia is, of course, history: a written record of things that indeed did happen in narrative form. Isidore elsewhere divides types of history into a) diaries (for day-to-day ephemera), b) annals (for a record of a single year), and c) history proper (for many years). And the third item, argumentum, is wedged somewhere between fabula and historia. An argumentum is a narrative account of something that didn’t necessarily happen, but it could have, and it’s up to the skilled rhetorician to make the story seem plausible. While discussing the concept as part of Isidore’s schema in the 11th century, Bernard of Utrecht and Conrad of Hirsau both later used the phrase dubiae rei fidem faciens (“lending credence to dubious things”) to emphasize the importance of believability.
For Isidore, a history can’t be a history until it is written down. Its written-ness is what makes it official. And as we surely recognize, fabula, or fables, throughout history have travelled from person to person through oral means. By the time these stories were written down by Aesop, Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, or whoever, they had already been told for many generations prior. All the more important, then, that Isidore couches the narrative concept of the argumentum in the language of classical rhetoric, since rhetoric itself was how scholars codified into a written science the means of communication best suited to oral delivery. The argumentum thus lies somewhere in the middle of multiple polarities — not just the factual validity of an event, but also the mode of transmission in which it’s related.
Modern metapolitical folklore generally extends outward from a story that assumes the form of an argumentum. It can’t be a work of pure fiction, and it can’t be a work of pure history. It has to be more or less unverifiable and yet plausible. A good basis for metapolitical folklore will typically be an account of something that supposedly happened but which couldn’t be corroborated by another source (at least, not immediately). It could also be a theory pertaining to a general situation surrounding historical subjects that could be potentially captured in narrative form. This incipient argumentum could be created by one author (like Ron Jones, in our case study), a group of authors (like Craig Haney, Curtis Banks, and Philip Zimbardo, the authors behind the first accounts of the Stanford Prison Experiment), or it could be assembled collectively (like the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which was developed on the 4chan message board but then over time indirectly led to the QAnon movement). Importantly, the inciting argumentum will combine the account of what happened with its own interpretation. That is, it can’t merely be an account of events that took place; it has to impose some sort of interpretation upon the purported facts. The first account of an event is the basis upon which subsequent iterations can develop, and so this account should already be bound up with its own analysis to point people in a certain direction. The more difficult it is to disentangle a) the true and factual information, b) the potentially factual information, and c) the author’s interpretation of what took place, the more valuable the account will be for generating folklore.
Just as a medieval argumentum belongs to rhetoric and thus lies somewhere between the polarity of oral and written discourse, a good basis for modern metapolitical folklore will lend itself to possible iterations through a variety of media. What I mean here is that in the same way that vernacular discourse was essentially lowbrow during Isidore’s time while written discourse was highbrow, a good basis of modern political folklore today will similarly lie somewhere between the two, thus optimizing its chances of being recounted over and over. It will be an intelligently reasoned account, but it will also be understandable and rendered in the common vernacular. While a peer-reviewed study could be a potential source of modern metapolitical folklore, it has to be at least accompanied by a popular account of what happened palatable for a mass audience. The latter account won’t be conveyed according to the standards of scholarly rigor, and it won’t be as information-dense as a typical academic journal article from the sciences.
For example, consider the Stanford Prison Experiment: the study in social psychology that has been the richest source of metapolitical folklore, generating constant retellings of what supposedly took place in a variety of media. Zimbardo and his colleagues didn’t initially publish it in peer-reviewed journals. Instead, it was published in the obscure and less scholarly journals Naval Research Reviews and International Journal of Criminology and Penology. Then, before it could be more carefully scrutinized, Zimbardo was able to publish an account of what happened in the New York Times Magazine. That NYT article did more for the mythologization of his work than the others, and its popularity even helped legitimize it in the eyes of specialists who ought to have known better. Similarly, while Stanley Milgram’s shock experiments were first published for scholarly journals in 1963, it wasn’t a source of metapolitical folklore at all, not until he published a book about his findings for a mass audience in 1974 called Obedience to Authority. Only then did the work start to be mythologized, when just two years later a CBS made-for-TV drama appeared entitled The Tenth Level, presenting it in a characteristically over-the-top way, with Hitler being explicitly invoked in the first two minutes.
III. Further Media Conditions
Modern metapolitical folklore requires some kind of taboo or ingrained ideological stance in order to give the story its significance — i.e., the reason for it to be retold over and over. Though not always the case, this stance will often have been made part of one’s educational upbringing in order to form a distinct attitude or prejudice. For instance, a strong commonality between the Milgram Shock Experiments, the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the Third Wave together is that they all are supposedly meant to teach us something about what’s known as “the authoritarian personality,” a bugbear of a specifically liberal ideology justified through the language of scientific impartiality (hence all of these examples being psychology experiments). It’s a kind of antitype of virtue that young people are warned about from an early age, both in the school system as well as mass media entertainment. Therefore, in common retellings of how each experiment happened, Hitler is frequently invoked as the avatar of authoritarianism. Now, whether or not these experiments really do teach us anything substantive about authoritarianism or Hitler in particular doesn’t really matter. The embedded interpretation of each experiment is inextricable from what actually took place in them, and the blurry line between what happened and what it actually means encourages their various retellings.
Let me try to explain the logic a bit here. People don’t typically ask, “Well, wait, does what occurred in that situation actually have anything to do how you’ve interpreted it?” because whether or not the story is meaningful hinges upon whether people accept the importance of the interpretation in the first place. Only a weirdo would be interested in the facts for their own sake if there’s no readymade interpretation. So, even if The Third Wave experiment doesn’t really teach us anything particularly helpful about the Nazis, the simple fact that it contributes to and reinforces the overall impression that “Nazis = bad” is enough to justify its existence, and people who care deeply about the Nazis will typically care about the story insofar as it relates to them (even if it doesn’t). With rare exceptions, if someone doesn’t particularly care about the Nazis, he’s not going to care enough about such a story enough to debunk it, and so it’s embedded ideological significance can allow it to spread around. And, of course, all this occurs amid the broader backdrop of respect for scientific inquiry and skepticism toward authoritarianism.
Similarly, the Pizzagate story, along with the subsequent development of QAnon, requires an ingrained prejudice towards pedophilia to attain its political significance — obviously. And that’s a strong prejudice that almost everyone in the west shares today. But the concern over “pedophilia” resides within a larger web of concerns regarding child rearing, child care, and the wider access to sexual content that young people now have. It requires a culture that values high parental investment and the concern for a child’s psychological well-being (both of which are not culturally universal ideals), along with the view that premature exposure to sex can prove psychologically jeopardizing. And believe it or not, America’s unique strain of Protestant Christianity is the most prominent constellation of ideas through which these concerns can be expressed. This is why the so-called Satanic Panic of the 1980s was particularly concerned about pedophilia (and also relied on elements of the therapy industry to justify some of its accusations), and why QAnon has thrived strongly in evangelical churches, often resembling a distinct offshoot of millenarianism.1 So, in the same way that “Hitler” forms a pars pro toto signifying authoritarianism more generally, “pedophilia” forms a pars pro toto signifying a culturally left-wing, secular attempt to warp and contaminate children.
These ideological dispositions, with their specific prejudices and taboos, can be seen as ur-texts. And as I said in Part I of this series, the existence of these ur-texts can give the transmission of today’s folklore a particular zeal that one will not find in pre-literate cultures, even as it remains somewhat logically rudderless and agglomerative. For instance, the German Netflix series We Are The Wave, which I alluded to earlier, is a work of left-liberal ideological zeal, it shares the same prejudices concerning authoritarianism and groupthink, and it invokes the Third Wave experiment in its title, but its actual plot has virtually nothing to do with either Ron Jones or Die Welle — at least, not beyond some superficial similarities and a basic moral lesson about starting a politically-oriented club that “takes things too far.” Instead, it represents a warning against the left not to become excessive, which is a different concern. This is a kind of malformation not too different from what you’ll occasionally find in folk tales that transfer one theme or plot point onto an altogether different story. But it is still sustained by the same basic ideological backdrop.
Because the use of these stories and themes may need to change over time, modern metapolitical folklore can only exist in a complex, relatively decentralized media ecosystem. It requires an ideological ur-text and an incipient argumentum whose valuative meaning is provided by the ideology, but it also requires the ability for people to create entirely new productions that develop from the argumentum, perhaps giving the original story some new features, taking away others, and even slightly shifting its putative purpose over time. For instance, the Stanford Prison Experiment was originally done because Zimbardo wanted his research to inspire prison system reforms. To emphasize the point, he affixed plenty of literary quote flourishes about how prison can be dehumanizing into the New York Times Magazine article that he and his team wrote. But eventually, retellings of the story reassigned Hitler and the holocaust as the main significance to his work, and people comfortably accepted that new interpretation.
Although modern metapolitical folklore is a byproduct of the electronic media landscape, as I’ve tried to show by focusing on an earlier example that hasn’t exclusively relied on internet-based retellings, the internet has certainly given it a grander significance and additionally sped it up. The internet allows common people to retell these stories through a variety of presentations — streaming videos, podcasts, and so on — with an immediacy that approaches oral narration. While much of this electronic-age folklore has been mostly metapolitical so far, contributing to a constellation of myths that bolster an ideology, it is now increasingly becoming directly political, with the potential to affect major developments.
For instance, the Russiagate theory, which proposed that Donald Trump was secretly working in collusion with Vladimir Putin, follows the basic pattern I’ve laid out here. The ur-text is the lingering post-cold-war mistrust of Russia combined with a liberal distaste for authoritarian figures. The argumentum was the Steele dossier, which contained quite a few ideas that later folkloric renditions could expand upon (the most notorious of which being the claim that there was a video tape of Trump urinating on prostitutes in a Moscow hotel). The Steele dossier was further popularized on network television as well as in the bestselling book Collusion by Luke Harding. And various retellings of this theory captured the imaginations of Democrat-voters everywhere. One was a 127-tweet thread on Twitter by Eric Garland, and another was a front-page article for New York Magazine by Jonathan Chait, both fancifully describing what it might look like if Donald Trump had been a Russian asset since 1987 if it were indeed the case (and they both seemed to think so). Although no evidence was ever produced, there are still many who strongly believe that Donald Trump has been and still is a Russian agent, and plenty of them engaged in conspiracy theorizing about how his recent assassination attempt was staged using Trump’s alleged connection to Russia as its basis. It is clear that the internet has been a great resource for Russiagate and its other bodies of folklore to spread, its spreaders constructing whole edifices of such stories as if architectonically, even as more and more information becomes available to discredit each one of them.
IV - Collective Memory
The rational part of my brain always finds it fascinating how exceedingly few people show any interest in tracking down these stories, researching them, looking into them, and learning about what really went on. But then, I have to remind myself that the rational faculties of the human mind always work in a motivated fashion, and we are always motivated to confirm our own beliefs. Although the YouTube video entitled “The Third Wave Experiment Explained | The Study That Proves We Were All Born Evil” has about 1.8 million views, Ron Jones, the guy who created the study, is on YouTube, his channel has 51 subscribers, and his most popular video has 5.9 thousand views. So, although everyone seems fascinated by his experiment when presented on another channel, believing with no trouble that it’s all real, almost none of them have any desire to actually learn more about the man who conducted the study and offered the first account of how it went.
Now, knowing that, the question one should ask is: let’s say we take someone who completely believes the story and also feels that it serves a very important purpose because Hitler is truly evil, and then we demonstrate all of the proof indicating that the Third Wave experiment didn’t go the way Ron Jones claims. He didn’t do it with one class period, but rather three, meaning that the high turnout for his final Third Wave Rally wasn’t very impressive. And even then, he grossly exaggerated the number of students who attended the rally. The whole experiment didn’t take one week but rather a week and a half. The students decided on most of the activities and most of them turned out to be arts & crafts. They were elated that they could avoid doing real work. Several students who were aware of The Third Wave later claimed that most of the kids didn’t take it very seriously. Let’s say we present this person with all of that information — will it really matter that much? The answer is probably not.
We can discern the answer to the question because several students who were involved with the experiment itself deeply believe in Ron Jones and what his experiment stands for, even though so much of what actually happened contradicts his original account, as they themselves understood and occasionally hinted at in their documentary interviews. Clearly, they believe the story contains symbolic truth to it, the importance of which supplants the factual record. But they are not completely guilty of ideologically motivated lying tout court. They are also likely remembering the actual events differently based on what the subsequent retellings have managed to convey emotionally. It is an established principle of human memory that when someone has gone through a certain experience, he may wind up recalling his emotional state during that experience differently based on the emotions he feels about it presently. This human tendency is so extreme that a subject can even conjure up imaginary memories that never in fact took place (this is one of the reasons that the false accusations of child rape during the so-called Satanic Panic seemed credible — some therapists encouraged patients to “recover” memories of things that never actually happened). Essentially, the emotional understanding of an event is more important than its factual details, even if such details entirely contradict its putative meaning.
When a story from modern metapolitical folklore has been given a big-budget production, like a made-for-TV movie or some sort of agitprop documentary, it has achieved a strength that it previously didn’t have in how it has emotively conditioned one to think about a specific event. That event, which had already been preserved in collective memory due to its moral or ideological significance, has now been attached to intense feelings that will augment one’s understanding of the original event. For instance, if you consider the film Die Welle, that is a clear work of fiction, and everyone understands this rationally. But because it’s at least based on the story of the Third Wave, the melodramatic final sequence in which people die and others get arrested is sure to instill the viewers with a cocktail of strong emotions that they can retroactively superimpose upon Ron Jones’s comparatively silly little week-and-a-half stint. And since this kind of metapolitical folklore often concerns minor events surrounding people whom no one would recognize from anywhere other than the story itself, there is not only little incentive for people to get the facts straight, but little reason as to why they would even care about the facts should they have done so.
V. Conclusion
At this point, the reader might be wondering, “What is to be done about this strange and novel situation?” And I think that whatever the answer may be, it is definitely not to produce works of scholarship that correct the factual record. That is, at best, insufficient. As I’ve tried to explain, the facts don’t particularly matter once something has been fully mythologized. Much of mass media information in the western world has devolved into an array of clashing narratives, and the winners are usually the ones who can assemble a positive vision. Negative words typically don’t stick in people’s minds. Saying, “So-and-so… is bad,” “such-and-such… is fake,” will only keep so-and-so and such-and-such prominent in one’s consciousness, while “bad” and “fake” will gradually dissipate. Childcare experts recognize something similar when they instruct parents never to say, “Don’t eat the cookie,” because the negative word “don’t” is the least impression-forming one, while the rest reinforces the child’s concentration on the cookie.
There are a few things you can do with these metapolitical folklore narratives if you want to steer people in a different direction, and painstakingly trying to prove them wrong can only work as a step one, if it’s worth doing at all. Another thing is to ignore them entirely and work on the construction of your own narratives. That can be useful if you’re interested in competing in an oversaturated “marketplace of ideas” — which is really a bad metaphor, since it implies that the ideas have to be marketed with a supplemental message acting as an advertisement, when in truth the idea has to essentially be its own marketing and advertising. But even if you have such an interest, you won’t achieve much if you don’t already have a foothold in the culture industry, which may be deteriorating in total influence but still matters quite a bit.
One thing you can also do, however, is “roll through” with these folklore narratives rather than resist them, like a wrestler who realizes that if goes with his opponent’s momentum during an offensive maneuver, he can sometimes cause the opponent to overshoot the mark while he regains an advantageous point of leverage. It’s possible to take a story, recognizing that it won’t simply die, and keep it alive while simultaneously collapsing its ideological meaning. And I don’t mean necessarily doing this with straightforward satire, either, since satire can sometimes create the opposite effect, such as Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron,” which was originally written as a mockery of reactionary paranoia rather than egalitarian excess.
So instead of satire, consider this approach. In the 1990s, critics used to call the insertion of psychological realism into incongruous genres a kind of “deconstruction.” Alan Moore, for instance, was apparently “deconstructing” the superhero narrative with The Watchmen simply by asking himself the questions, what would a superhero in this situation actually do? How would he actually behave? Why would he be the way he is? and so on. But in reality, he wasn’t deconstructing anything. He was simply a telling a story commonly associated with one genre while using a mode of reasoning that happened to be foreign to it. The heterogeneous approach to human psychology in this case was a force of disruption, knocking the readers of a well-established genre out of their sense of complicity.
Well, in the same way that superhero comics present their own mode of psychic life that can be upended by forcing the characters into a different mode of it, the most influential experiments in social psychology also suggest their own mode of psychic life. And despite these stories being recognized as scientifically valid and indicative of a greater universal truth, they are in fact conventional and ideologized. They stem from a liberal worldview, and they’re popular in this context because they warn liberal citizens in a free society to take their own freedom with a heightened sense of responsibility. Yet they also do so by reinforcing a one-dimensional view of man — about as sophisticated as what you’d find in Superman or The Phantom. I think keeping them alive by driving home a lighter and breezier tone is worth some consideration (though this is one such possibility, and of course the approach should differ based on the content of what’s being addressed). As I said last week, the story of The Third Wave, as I understand it, is actually quite amusing and lighthearted.
But there are other possibilities. Another is to dramatize the creation of these folkloric tales, which is always risky but often quite popular. In probably my least popular post “Metadramas of Media Creation,” I pointed out that people have a heightened sense of “media literacy” as opposed to a weakened sense of one as so many people assume, and one reason we know this is that so many narratives from various media are themselves about creating media. And importantly, people don’t perceive any of this as “postmodern” or “deconstructive” at all. No one even seems to mind how lazy and circular this sort of writing really is. You can simply make a TV show about making a TV show, and it’s fine. There is nothing necessarily wrong with peeling back the curtain, though these meta-dramas of media creation do have their own conventions and in many ways can quickly become predictable and bland. Plus, exposing how a modern folk tale became concocted can quickly resemble a vindictive and petty exposé rather than something genuinely interesting. One should always challenge oneself to be fresh and interesting.
Regardless of whatever one chooses to do about our current situation, the transmission of information in the electronic world has grown fast and potentially limitless, meaning that stories are once again an endlessly renewable resource that can do potentially great help or great harm. Learn how to master them. You can come up with the reason for it later.
I should also point out: these concerns are not altogether unjustified. People often forget just how strongly the specifically secular, non-Christian cultural left was invested in de-stigmatizing pedophilia, as this article shows.