Research

My Name Is Legion

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How digital armies shape our minds, our identities and our consciences — and what each of us can do to avoid being recruited

It is eleven at night and the phone buzzes once more. First the family group, then the building's residents' group, then a channel with millions of subscribers announcing that “the danger is imminent.” You had no intention of replying to anything. Half an hour later you are arguing with a cousin you have known since childhood, using words that had never before left your mouth.

If the scene feels familiar, you are not alone. The sense that the internet is making us more anxious, more tired and more intolerant is no longer a hunch. What we are living through goes beyond the much-discussed “polarization.” It is a form of behavioral engineering that reaches something more intimate: our sense of who we are.

To understand how so ordinary a tool turns peaceable people into combatants, it is worth travelling through three territories: an ancient biblical story, the wars of the twentieth century, and what psychology knows about how our identity is formed.

“For we are many”

The word demon comes from the Greek daimon. Originally it designated nothing evil: it was an inner force, an invisible impulse that guided human behavior. Over time, the biblical tradition and Western thought came to associate it with something corrupting — the loss of the command each person has over their own actions.

No image captures this process better than the episode of the possessed man of Gerasa, told in the Gospel of Mark. When Jesus asks the name of the spirit that dominates the man, the answer is curt: “My name is Legion: for we are many” (Mark 5:9).

The choice of word is no accident. The Roman legion was the most feared military machine of Antiquity: five to six thousand soldiers who marched and acted under a single command, with no face of their own. The man of Gerasa no longer speaks for himself. A multitude speaks through him.

Psychology has read this passage closely. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung described how unconscious impulses, when not integrated, can take over consciousness. Social psychology added the context of the group: whoever plunges into an enraged crowd gives up their own name, their own history and their own morality. They become a disposable part of a faceless army. What speaks is no longer that person's conscience, but the Legion.

An old recipe

Using the mind of the crowd as a political weapon is not a Silicon Valley invention. The idea was described at the end of the nineteenth century and applied on an industrial scale in the twentieth.

In 1895 the Frenchman Gustave Le Bon published The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. There he explained that human beings, on joining an inflamed group, descend several rungs on the ladder of civilization. They lose their critical sense, gain a feeling of invincible strength and begin to act by contagion, almost hypnotized.

A few decades later, Lenin and, after him, Stalin realized that holding on to power required turning private life into political duty. Through massive propaganda they created youth leagues such as the Komsomol, neighborhood committees and popular patrols. Ordinary citizens were summoned to be permanent sentinels, denouncing neighbors and relatives in the name of the revolution. Propaganda even made a national hero of a boy, Pavlik Morozov, for having supposedly denounced his own father.

In 1930s Germany, Joseph Goebbels took manipulation to its peak. Through radio, gigantic rallies and indoctrination films, he convinced the population that the country lived under a deadly siege by enemies within and without. Ordinary people accepted — and carried out — atrocities because the state had persuaded them that this was not cruelty but survival and patriotic duty.

In every one of these cases the formula was the same. First, plant a deep existential fear. Then, point to an enemy to blame for all evil. Finally, offer a uniformed collective in which the individual finds protection — at the price of their own moral freedom.

The spine and the masks

To understand how these techniques reach us in daily life, it helps to know the work of the American psychiatrist Murray Bowen, creator of Family Systems Theory. For him, our identity arises from the balance between two forces.

The first is what Bowen called the solid self. It is the backbone of the personality, formed slowly, through reflection, honesty with oneself and duties fulfilled. Someone with a solid self knows what they believe and where their limits lie. They do not need to shout to assert themselves. And they do not trade their principles under emotional blackmail, peer pressure or the threat of exclusion.

The second is the pseudo-self, or adaptive self. It is the flexible layer we all use to get along: the small concessions, the opinions of the moment, the outfit chosen for an event, the polite tone at work. The pseudo-self wants to belong, wants to be accepted and prefers to avoid conflict.

None of this is a defect. In a healthy life, a person uses the pseudo-self consciously, to be courteous and functional, while the solid self stays firm underneath. The trouble begins when the masks multiply and the spine weakens.

Bowen imagined a scale from 0 to 100 to measure what he called differentiation of self: the capacity to keep thinking for oneself when the group's emotion tightens its grip. Those high on the scale can stay close to others without dissolving into them. Those low on it live in fusion: they feel what the group feels and think what the group thinks. In Bowen's view, most of us sit well below the midpoint.

There are two ways of getting lost along the way. The first is losing touch with the solid self: the values are still there, but the person no longer consults them. The second is more serious. The pseudo-self takes the place of the solid self, and the mask lent by the group comes to be treated as personal conviction.

Bowen observed that the pseudo-self is negotiable. It can be traded, borrowed, seized by the pressure of others. When it becomes the center of the personality, a person's identity comes to belong to whoever shouts the loudest.

A thousand masks in your pocket

Only a few decades ago, a person's social world fit into a handful of places: home, work, church, the neighborhood club. The boundaries were physical and clear. On coming home, we took off our masks and rested.

The Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman gave this change a name. In Liquid Modernity (2000), he described a world in which nothing holds its shape for long: jobs, loves, communities. In it, identity ceases to be an inheritance and becomes an endless task. It must be assembled, displayed and remade all the time.

Two decades later, the American futurist Jamais Cascio coined another acronym for the same unease: the BANI world — brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible. And the smartphone tore down, once and for all, the boundaries that still remained.

On the same device, the same person takes part in the family group, the building group, the school parents' group, the football team, work and ideological communities. Each group has its own moral code, its own jokes and its own expected reactions. Over the course of a day, we switch masks every few seconds without leaving the sofa.

Those with a solid self can handle the juggling. Those without one — adolescents still forming, but many adults too — wear out. They begin to feel like a fraud everywhere and lose track of who they really are. Then comes the dangerous temptation: to find a strong tribe that tells them exactly what to think, how to speak and whom to hate.

Freud had already sensed this danger. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), he wrote that life in society exacts a price: to live together, each of us must restrain our own aggressiveness, and that renunciation breeds a permanent dissatisfaction. The digital tribe offers a perverse relief for this discontent. It releases the pent-up aggression and assures us, to boot, that hating the enemy is a virtue.

Pocket soldiers

It is on this fragile ground that digital armies flourish. The most visible example of the 2026 election was the WhatsApp channel “Exército do Lula” (“Lula's Army”), run by federal deputy André Janones. Created in April, it had about 4 million subscribers on October 12. Eleven days later, two days before the runoff, it passed 10 million and became the platform's second-largest channel in the country. In its videos, followers were called “soldiers.” On the other side of the race, supporters of the rival candidate organized themselves in the “Tropa do Flávio” (“Flávio's Troop”).

What makes this phenomenon new is not the ideology of one side or the other. It is the method of capturing behavior, which works equally well for any banner. It rests on three pillars.

Fear as fuel. No army holds together without panic. Day after day, highly dramatic messages arrive: “the danger is imminent,” “if you don't act now, all will be lost.” This triggers the fight-or-flight system, run by the brain's amygdala. In a state of chronic alarm, the prefrontal cortex — the region that weighs consequences and makes moral judgments — loses its voice. People begin to obey before they think.

The mission of the day. The follower stops being a spectator and is given tasks: push a hashtag, flood a journalist's profile with comments, “cancel” an opponent, forward edited videos to relatives. Each completed mission is rewarded with likes, the tribe's approval and the feeling of making a difference. It is the old mechanism of reinforcement, studied by psychologists for a century: rewarded actions tend to be repeated.

The mask that sticks. Little by little, the person adopts the channel's playbook as if it were their personality. They use the same terms, the same ready-made insults, the same heated tone at Sunday lunch and at the work meeting. They no longer speak from their own life. They speak through the mouth of the Legion.

The American psychologist Irving Janis, of Yale University, named this state in 1972: groupthink. Studying fiascos such as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, he showed that very intelligent people make disastrous decisions when the desire for unanimity overrides judgment.

Janis listed eight symptoms. Among them are the illusion of invulnerability, unquestioned belief in the group's own morality, caricature of the adversary, self-censorship and the illusion of unanimity. There are even “mindguards,” who block any information capable of shaking the collective certainty. Janis studied cabinets of a dozen people. In a channel with millions of subscribers, the same mechanism operates on an industrial scale.

Weeks of trance

For those who spend days immersed in this state of readiness, the bill comes due quickly — in the body, in the conscience and in their relationships.

The first sign is hypervigilance. With the phone buzzing dozens of times an hour with top-urgency alerts, the nervous system cannot rest. Sleep fragments, the stomach knots, and the stress hormone, cortisol, soars.

Then comes something subtler: the habit of departing from the truth. In 2016, researchers at University College London published in Nature Neuroscience a study that examined volunteers' brains while they had the chance to lie for their own advantage. The amygdala reacted strongly to the first lie and less and less to the following ones — while the lies grew bigger. It is the slippery slope in biological form. Those who pass on distorted information while repeating that “the ends justify the means” run the risk that their moral alarm simply stops ringing.

Finally, bonds break. In a climate of war, the friend of decades or the brother by blood who thinks differently becomes a traitor, an “agent of evil.” The French thinker René Girard described this mechanism as mimetic rivalry: the more alike and the closer we are, the more any disagreement is felt as a mortal offense.

The American professor Luke Burgis, in his 2021 book Wanting, shows how social media supercharged this mechanism. Girard taught that we learn to desire by imitating the desires of our models. On the screen, models number in the millions, and desire comes to be copied in real time. Burgis distinguishes thin desires — contagious and fleeting — from thick desires, formed over a lifetime. The former race from phone to phone. The latter are precisely the stuff the solid self is made of.

When the mask becomes the face

For Bowen, symptoms appear when anxiety exceeds what a person — or a family, or a group — can bear. The lower the differentiation, the lower that threshold. And the damage tends to show up on three fronts: in the body, in the emotions and in social behavior.

In the body, chronic anxiety settles in as insomnia, muscle tension, digestive problems, high blood pressure. The psychiatrist Michael Kerr, Bowen's foremost successor, argues that many different illnesses share the same physiological processes linked to prolonged stress.

In the emotions, the picture familiar from clinical practice appears: anxiety attacks, panic, depression, constant irritability. The English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who studied what he called the false self, noted that those who live behind a mask tend to carry a sense of emptiness and unreality, as if their own life did not belong to them.

In behavior come dependence — on the phone, on alcohol, on the next dose of outrage — impulsiveness and aggression. And two mechanisms Bowen described in families, and which can be seen today in messaging groups, come into play. The first is triangulation: when tension between two people becomes unbearable, they discharge it onto a third. Nothing unites like a common enemy. The second is emotional cutoff: severing ties with parents, siblings and friends so as not to have to live with difference.

None of this licenses diagnosis at a distance, but the map helps. Those who have lost touch with the solid self feel anxiety and fatigue, and can still find their way back. Those who have traded the solid self for the group's pseudo-self run a greater risk: ceasing to feel anything the tribe has not told them to feel.

After the battle

What if these armies stop being campaign episodes and become the normal way of doing politics? The effects on the collective mind are likely to be deep and lasting.

The first is the hangover. After the euphoria of combat comes emptiness. The ancient monks had a name for this weariness of the soul: acedia. People conclude that “everything is rotten,” lose faith in truth and give up the values that once moved them.

The second is a malaise hard to name, born of incoherence. Living for a long time a life that is not your own exacts a price. Sooner or later the mind perceives the gulf between the group's virtuous rhetoric and the baseness of the actions it demands — and short-circuits.

The third is the erosion of the solid self. Like an unused muscle, the moral compass atrophies. People lose the ability to decide what is right without the collective's approval and are left at the mercy of the next demagogue who comes along.

The fourth is a paranoia that spills out of the screens. Those who spend months in a trench mentality start to distrust flesh-and-blood people too. The result is more isolation and more helplessness.

Bowen had a name for this: societal regression. Like a family in crisis, an entire society can lose differentiation when it lives under chronic anxiety. It starts deciding by feeling rather than reason. Instead of solutions, it looks for culprits.

Reprogramming a human being, then, requires neither microchips nor surgery. A steady dose of panic, a welcoming tribe and a lit screen in one's pocket are enough. When the pseudo-self takes over someone's entire life, that person ceases to exist as a moral subject. They become a number in a channel, marching toward the precipice certain that they are saving the world.

Casting out the Legion

You do not defeat one demon by creating another. Founding a digital army on the opposite side only accelerates mutual destruction: it is contagion fighting contagion. Liberation begins at what Bowen called the I-position — the place from which someone says, calmly and without asking permission: “This is what I think. This is what I will not do.” Getting there requires three ruptures.

Turn off the alarm. Mute the groups that live on urgency and return your attention to what is concrete: work, the body, home, flesh-and-blood people. Fear is the Legion's fuel. Without it, the Legion loses its voice.

Accept being called a traitor. Whoever refuses to march will be called a “fence-sitter,” “lukewarm,” an “enemy.” That is the price of keeping one's own conscience — and it is cheap next to the price of selling it. Someone with a solid self does not need the tribe's applause to know who they are.

Reclaim your voice. Do not pass on lies, not even those that favor your side. Do not cast the stone, even when the whole crowd is casting. And leave the channels that profit, in money or in power, from your panic.

The story of Gerasa does not end with the possessed man. It ends with the casting out. The spirits leave the man and enter a herd of swine — “about two thousand,” the Gospel says — which rushes down the steep slope and drowns in the sea. The image could not be more timely: it is the herd, not the individual, that runs toward the abyss.

What comes next is even more revealing. The people of the region find the man “sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind.” Instead of celebrating, they are afraid and beg Jesus to leave. Every crowd recoils from whoever refuses to run with it.

The healed man wants to follow Jesus, but is given another mission: “Go home to thy friends” (Mark 5:19). The cure is not to switch armies. It is to go back home, to family, to real life — and to learn again to say one's own name.

The Legion is many. You are one. And that is exactly where your strength lies.

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