Another option today’s technology offers is to enable emotionally satisfying “manufactured experiences” to creep into, and ultimately crowd out, the literal reality of our lives.

A few years ago, when news broadcasts showed pictures of the right-wing paramilitary group that had plotted to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, I found their appearance striking.  Assuming they weren’t auditioning for a remake of Duck Dynasty, they all looked like they’d spent a really unhealthy amount of time playing apocalyptic war-themed video games.

More recently, I noticed how popular drab gray or tan non-metal-flake paint jobs were becoming on many kinds of new vehicles—especially pickup trucks, but also muscle cars and even some SUVs.  I wondered why so many people would find this type of finish appealing.  Then it hit me:  it could give them the feeling of driving military or paramilitary equipment—making their real lives more like their immersive electronic games.

My hunches got some telling validation when I read an Atlantic Monthly profile of a leading voice of the alt-right, Steve Bannon.  Written by Jennifer Senior, the article touches on (among other things) Bannon’s experience in the 2000s working for an Internet gaming company, where he discovered how many people participate in multiplayer online games, as well as how intensely they play them.

This revelation stuck with him, and has shaped his understanding of contemporary people’s relationship to their world.  For example, in a recent interview, Bannon postulates a hypothetical Everyman who he calls “Dave in Accounts Payable,” and describes what happens when he dies.

In Bannon’s words, “Some preacher from a church—or some guy from a funeral home who’s never met him—does a ten-minute eulogy, and that’s Dave.”

But as Bannon goes on to point out, that’s only offline Dave.  Online Dave goes by the handle of Ajax, and he’s a virtual warrior whose fearsome prowess is revered by legions of other participants in the online game he plays.  On getting word of his death, thousands of people there stay home from work to honor him with a hero’s sendoff.

Bannon asks, “Who’s more real?  Dave in Accounts Payable, or Ajax?”

Bannon freely admits that Dave is his target audience.  He says, “I want Dave in Accounting to be Ajax in real life.”  Taking a cue from the guys who buy pickup trucks with quasi-military paint jobs so they can extend their more satisfying virtual identities into their actual lives, he exhorts his followers to redefine themselves as heroic revolutionaries, “taking back their country” from the ground up in the role of election inspectors, school board members, political precinct-committee members, and so forth.

Interestingly, one of the ways he motivates people in the virtual world of his broadcasting and podcasting endeavors is by defining three levels of increasing participation (and unhealthy absorption) in his microcosm, which he calls the posse, the cadre, and the vanguard—in very much the same manner as the multi-player online games he was professionally involved with earlier in his career.  When asked directly by Jennifer Senior, the author of the Atlantic article, if he’s gamifying politics, Bannon doesn’t hesitate to answer in the affirnative.

Clearly, Steve Bannon grasps about as well as anybody on this planet what a powerful force a desire to overcome feelings of personal insignificance can be, in today’s world—as well as how to harness that force to serve his own ends.

Unfortunately, he hasn’t displayed comparable gifts for laying out positive corrective plans and objectives.  As a former upper-level colleague during his days with the White House described his interactions with Bannon to Senior, “Way too many conversations ended with “Then we burn it all down…just burn it down.”

Based on Senior’s other descriptions of Bannon and the chaos he tends to envelop himself in, I’m inclined to think he just isn’t very good at planning and organizing things, so he de-emphasizes the value of activities that are outside his personal tool set—like the proverbial five-year-old boy with a hammer who sees the entire world as a nail.

But no matter how limited the value of the ways Bannon has used his hammer, we can’t afford to discount how powerful an insight into the psyches of large numbers of people today this hammer represents.  We just need to use it in ways that can more clearly benefit society.

Or to put it in a slightly different way, it would be imprudent in the extreme to let MAGA Republicans continue to be the only ones who have this insight in their toolkit.  Especially when the father of MAGA, Donald Trump, not only uses Bannon’s tool masterfully, but also combines it brilliantly with what he’s learned from his own time spent promoting another form of “manufactured experience”—professional wrestling.