Early this morning I read and listened to this multi-media article in the New York Times:
Very very scary. Millions of Americans are living in a strange world of their own beliefs, reinforcing one-another’s strange fantasies, completely unattached to reality. It is hard for most of us to comprehend how people can live in a bizarre fantasy world where their truth is only what they want it to be. When people are this disconnected from reality then can be led to do things they otherwise would never condone.
The Nazis blamed all their troubles on the Jews (“we lost WWI because they stabbed us in the back”). Hitler amplified pre-existing hatred and put discrimination and murder of Jews into practice. Millions of Germans happily went along.
The Hutus were primed for hatred and action by months of anti-Tutsi radio broadcast (“they are cockroaches”). Next, the systematically slaughtered nearly a million of them. Much of the population participated.
A major aspect of the Indonesian democide/genocide was the murder of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Chinese. The over story was that many were communists and needed to be destroyed.
Mass killings of all kinds, including democides, genocides, and civil wars, cannot occur unless a large proportion of the population, not necessarily half, actively participate, give assent or withhold disapprobation, or at least avert their eyes.
It is hard to understand how this happens. Don’t we all have a”conscience”? Don’t we all have a “sense of morality”? Aren’t we all taught to avoid harming others? Our usual “explanations” for these unexplainable behaviors is to ascribe them to “hatred” or “evil”. We assume that those who took part “knew better” but were overwhelmed by those other forces. In truth, these “explanations” explain nothing. Evil can only be defined as a behavior; to use it as a means to explain behavior is clearly a circular argument, not a winning one. Evil is also defined as behavior, and even though we often speak of it as if it is an embodied thing (“there is evil among us”) we either mean that some people are “evil” or we are referring to a non-corporeal religious concept, impossible to define. If we mean that some people are evil, calling them that does not explain much. Are they always evil? How often do they have to be evil to be declared so? How did they get that way? How can an evil person also do acts of grace and charity?
It isn’t easy to get masses of people to overcome their innate sense of morality. It takes time. Requires preparation. Social conditions must be right. People must feel themselves to be loosing out. In danger. Discriminated against. Insecure. It helps to disconnect them from reality. To lead them to believe an alternate reality. The Tutsis are cockroaches, not human. Jews are vermin who control the banks. The ethnic Chinese are turn our government towards communism.
Now, in real-time, we see it happening right here, under our noses. It is an opportunity (albeit a dangerous and scary one) to observe this phenomenon first hand. In real-time.
We have just experienced a pandemic, dangerously ignored and denied, take over 400,000 of our fellow citizens (so far) and force many governments to temporarily close our cities and states. We have watched a president lie to the American people over 30,000 times, deny science, bully people he wants to denigrate, especially women and people of color. We have watched a mob, whipped up by the president over the course of weeks, set upon the US Capitol. But, a new president was elected and inaugurated and we are primed to expect a return to normal. We want to believe that things will get better, that we will experience a regression to the mean.
Unfortunately, that is far from a fait accompli. We will only know if things will now get better or will continue to disintegrate when we look back on events.
So how did we get here? What set off the chain of events that caused so many Americans to feel so threatened? When did so many of our fellow citizens start to loose out, and fall behind? Was there a time to which we can trace a major loss in confidence in our institutions, in science, in reality?
It would be wrong to blame one person but primarily, I blame a major shift in economic thinking in the US and abroad that began around 1970. Then, the so-called “Austrian School of Economics” took hold. It is often bizarrely called “neoliberal economics” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism). This ideology was championed by many economists Friedrick Hayek, Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan, as well as politicians including Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan.
I am not an economist and I encourage you to read more. Some of the results of this shift in thinking have been overwhelmingly positive and include an increase in global trade and an enormous decrease in world-wide extreme poverty. But much has been very damaging to advanced economies including a redefinition fo the meaning and responsibilities of “public companies” (not for the better!), a decline in service (impossible to navigate phone-tree anyone?), a decline in companies’ social responsibility, a huge squeeze on wages for the vast majority of Americans, a huge increase in the wealth of those already at the top, a decline in social services, and an explosion of income disparity.
Income disparity is the great “invisible hand” (pun intended) behind the health, happiness, and stability of societies (see, for example, https://hbr.org/2016/01/income-inequality-makes-whole-countries-less-happy and https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02052/full. A strong case has been made that longevity, falling in the US for the first time in history, goes down, when income disparity goes up. Yes, longevity appears to be declining in the US die to drug abuse, suicide, and alcoholism, but these are just the “tools” by which income disparity lowers life span.
At least five people died as a result of the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. That mob represents millions of very angry people who believe in “the big lie” and are not living in reality. They, and their enablers in positions of power, remain a great threat to our society. We have one last chance to heal our nation, to reconnect these people to the land of facts. We must help them, help all of us, despite their reticence and the resistance of the enablers. We need bold action. It is obvious what must be done.