Thinking through Hate
We do ourselves no favors by obscuring paths to radicalization in the rush to codify events.
When news collapses the context of a situation, by flattening it into a headline, or a short segment of televised reportage, or a chyron scrolling across the bottom of a screen, nuance is lost. And it is the nuances that humanize us, one to each other.
Radicalization moves through society. Hate and fear mobilize violence. For our own survival as a civilized urban culture, it is essential that conflicting world views do not automatically trigger dehumanizing rhetoric — calls to immediate violence, unyielding policing of behaviors and bodies, or structural policy decisions designed to marginalize and disempower specific groups of people.
The goal is not to reduce the amount of bullshit. Bullshit is an ever-expanding, all-encompassing soup that emerges organically, an essential part of discourse. Bullshit is rube bait. It’s the barker’s call, the hawker’s hallmark. There can be no functional social conversation without a bit of bullshit in the mix.
But bullshit, by its very existence, de-legitimizes discourse. Bullshit creep, whereby bullshit ever-increasingly crowds out non-bullshit-related interactions, accelerates when citizens lack tools to sort out what is or is not bullshit. And bullshit is profitable, thanks to pay-per-click advertising. Being critically aware of bullshit, being able to identify it, by having a nose for it is the only viable way to survive the endless onslaught of bullshit.
There will be no end to it, so we must all learn to see through it.
Damien Williams references an ongoing homegrown terror threat tragically made manifest, the white supremacist who, by his own confession, drove to New York City to find black men to murder. This act was an ideologically driven political expressions of violence, perpetrated by an assailant who sought to antagonize and terrorize a community.
How we talk about violence and crime in the news affects policy decisions. When we only label ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ as the only existing homegrown terror threat, our very safety and security as a nation becomes threatened by bullshit.
Against this backdrop of white supremacists committing acts of terror, there is another circle of bullshit that threatens to collapse all context regarding patriotism, nationalism, international diplomacy and institutional norms. Corruption within political institutions generates bullshit in accordance with “Marshall’s Law” — bullshit conceived of in panic, wielded out of hatred and desperation.
Reducing the believability of both forms of bullshit is doable; bullshit detection is an acquirable skill.
Thankfully, I’m by no means the first to call for bullshit detection education. Neil Postman called for a renewed commitment to “analytical literacy” in education in his 1969 address to the National Convention for the Teachers of English, titled “BULLSHIT AND THE ART OF CRAP-DETECTION.”
“As I see it, the best things schools can do for kids is to help them learn how to distinguish useful talk from bullshit. I will ask only that you agree that everyday in almost every way people are exposed to more bullshit than it is healthy for them to endure, and that if we can help them to recognize this fact, they might turn away from it and toward language that might do them some earthly good.”
The greater the amount of believed bullshit there is in the world, the more it undermines our very foundation as a society. Neil Postman broke bullshit down into four categories:
Pomposity — the use of “fancy titles, words, phrases, and sentences,” usually employed to hide insufficiencies
Fanaticism — a malignant form of bullshit that at its worse is manifest as bigotry
Inanity — public utterances from “people whose opinions would otherwise not be solicited,” increasingly amplified through the development of mass media
Superstition — “A belief, usually expressed in authoritative terms for which there is no factual or scientific basis”
He wanted educators to use this model, and urged that educators teach students how to assess the meaning of a statement, to be numb to pomposity and to be aware of their own gullibility.
Looking back on his speech, I do wonder what kind of world we would have had, if his words had spurred institutional transformation.
I agree with his points: first, it is vital to create an educational system that enables students to use their critical assessments understand the methods of production of media that they encounter.
Second, this kind of meta-literacy is just as important as being able to read: you have to understand where what you’re reading comes from, track the origin of the text — and this extends to what you encounter as a media object or as an utterance in a given social space or public sphere.
Third, when you can, it is important to counter prevalent myths that undermine or otherwise are Othering minority groups or targets of oppression, even better when you can do so in a public way that begins to breakdown these rhetorical frames that maintain social and institutional power.
If anything, his definition of bullshit is somewhat too narrow. I prefer a different analytical model through which to analyze a given public utterance or text, particularly when rhetorical entrepreneurs are attempting to instigate ideologically driven violence.
Groups which formulate around certain rhetorics will also develop along predictable lines of behaviors. In wondering how it is that people can so deeply buy into bullshit, enough to kill their neighbors through the provocations of words and fear, I found myself re-reading the work of Kenneth Burke, specifically his analysis of Adoph Hitler’s text Mein Kampf, which lists specific tropes and analyzes their functions.
Here’s Burke’s initial framework:
“(1) Inborn dignity. In both religious and humanistic patterns of thought, a ‘natural born’ dignity of man is stressed… After the defeat of Germany in the World War, there were especially strong emotional needs that this compensatory doctrine of an inborn superiority could gratify.
“(2) Projection device. The ‘curative’ process that comes with the ability to hand over one’s ills to a scapegoat, thereby getting purification by dissociation… This was especially appealing to the middle class, who were encouraged to feel that they could conduct their business without any basic change whatever, once the businessmen of a different ‘race’ were eliminated.
“(3) Symbolic rebirth… The projective device of the scapegoat, coupled with the Hitlerite doctrine of inborn racial superiority, provides its followers with a ‘positive’ view of life. They can again get the feel of moving forward, towards a goal (a promissory feature of which Hitler makes much). In Hitler, as the group’s prophet, such rebirth involved a symbolic change of lineage.. whereas the Pope, in the familistic pattern of thought basic to the Church, stated that the Hebrew prophets were the spiritual ancestors of Christianity, Hitler uses this same mode of thinking in reverse. He renounces this ‘ancestry’ in a ‘materialistic’ way by voting himself and the members of his lodge a different ‘blood stream’ from that of the Jews.
“(4) Commercial use. Hitler obviously here has something to sell — and it was but a question of time until he sold it (i. e., got financial backers for his movement). For it provided a noneconomic interpretation of economic ills. As such, it served with maximum efficiency in deflecting the attention from the economic factors involved in modern conflict; hence by attacking ‘Jew finance’ instead of finance, it could stimulate an enthusiastic movement that left ‘Aryan’ finance in control.”
Times have changed since Kenneth Burke first reviewed the book “Mein Kampf”. Since then, other tropes have been equally effective in spreading fear and hatred. A specific trope is apocalyptic dualism: rhetoric that sees violence as inevitable, if not divinely ordained. This is a consistent theme in conspiracy folklore journalist Chip Berlet has extensively documented.
It’s easy to laugh at the simplistic, disruptive, sloppy language of sales, but the historical facts illustrate that conflict, violent aggression within geopolitical boundaries, is sold, just like a product.
Dr. Robert Cialdini has taught advertisers how resistance to manipulation can be cognitively deconstructed. I’ll let the late George Carlin bring all of this together:
Ideas are spread with the intention of normalizing behavior — humans are never entirely rational, and the catalyzing, emotional events that trigger violence have precursors, periods of conflationary rhetoric that indicate the ideological apparatus, or provides a structure through which to understand the violence as a component of social action, around which our cultural and economic systems continue to reward principal and capital interests.
Scott Straus found three themes dominated his ethnographic research in Rwanda: the language (and logic) of warfare, the collective ethnic categorization, and the institutional authorization of genocide. Neil Kressel emphasizes that the use of animal imagery increases the risk of murderousness, and Philip Zimbardo cites studies to show that the use of anonymizing uniforms also increase the likelihood of antagonism and bloodshed.
Neil Kressel additionally points out that ideologies of hate rely on revenge motifs, exaggerating past persecutions as ongoing or contemporary. Further studies into institutionalized genocide, hate groups online, and eliminationist rhetoric’s role in mass murder provide additional insights into the role of cognitive deconstruction and apocalyptic dualism in galvanizing what is described in Daniel Goldhagen’s book and documentary Worse Than War as a “mental fog.”
Goldhagen delved into distinctions of dehumanization that help highlight just how destructive political metaphors become:
“The term dehumanization is rightly a commonplace of discussions of mass murder… A belief… exists that can properly be said to constitute the dehumanizing of others. It is that other people inherently lack qualities fundamental to being fully human in the sense of deserving moral respect, rights, and protection. Such beings are said to lack human capacities or powers and, as a definitional matter, do not need to be treated as humans… A second belief… is the demonization of others. This belief is about other people’s moral quality, including their moral intentions. It holds the people to be, literally or figuratively, demonic, morally evil.
“…analysis of eliminationist assaults’ can be greatly furthered by categorizing victims according to the perpetrators’ conception of them, using these two dimensions. This produces four victim categories: existential enemies, heretics, subhumans, and demons. Language and images dehumanizing or demonizing others communicate to those listening and sharing the discussion’s assumptions that an eliminationist drive against the disparaged and despised people makes sense. … [I]f a being is evil incarnate, then it follows that one must eradicate the disease, squash the bug, kill the wild animal, expel or slay the barbarian, destroy the threat, or extirpate the evil. Not to do so would be negligent folly, like leaving your young child in a bear- or devil-infested forest. The language of existential or national threat itself, or of the necessity to usher in the millennium, also often takes on dehumanizing and demonizing tones toward the putatively problematic groups, providing a similar, powerful justification for eliminationist assaults.
“Analyzing potential perpetrators’ views of potential victims along these two dimensions provides critical distinctions for understanding their conception of the victims, and eliminationist politics’ internal logic, including what perpetrators do (or potential perpetrators might do) to deal with disparaged and despised groups. Category 1, existential enemies, contains people who are not dehumanized or demonized. They are targeted as enemies because they compete for resources or political power and, in the natural and unalterable struggle for domination and existence, must be vanquished before they vanquish you. In category 3, subhumans, are groups of dehumanized but not demonized people. They are seen as potentially but not necessarily dangerous barbarians or brutes or animals, unworthy of moral consideration. In category 2, heretics, are capable, demonized but not dehumanized human beings. Conceived of as not biologically different from other people, they, for some articulated reason — usually in the grip of a pernicious religious or secular ideology — willfully dissent from the hallowed creed and seek to harm you or prevent humanity’s salvation. And category 4, demons, are demonized _and_dehumanized beings. They are deemed inhuman creatures, willfully malevolent, a Christian secular incarnation of the devil or his minions.”
According to Sam Keen in his book “Faces of the Enemy” (1984) there are several different ways that hate speech helps to produce an enemy in a population.
Hatred for enemies can be constructed, using cultural ideologies and current events. This enemy may be characterized as any of the following:
• Enemy of God: If the enemy is more than human and becomes the devil it is easy to inspire hate and fear
• Barbarian: When an enemy is painted as a barbarian, horde instinct says to fight against one’s own annihilation
• Greed: The enemy has an insatiable appetite and devours everything, leaving nothing for you
• Criminal: An enemy that supposedly commits crimes goes against civilized ideals
• Anti-Family: The fear of danger towards women and children can rouse hate for an enemy quickly
• Death: The enemies are portrayed as being the Grim Reaper bringing death everywhere they go
• Animalized: An easy way to dehumanize the enemy. Animals are easier to kill tha humans
• Abstraction: Turning humans into something other than a life form, like a number, equation, or statistic can monetize hate and death
Mass violence manifests frequently during times of war, however, institutional violence — genocide — requires co-opting of the state by a sequence of eliminationist memes, all easily mapped to textual rhetorical tropes.
These memes are normalized in micropublic spheres, demarcated by protocol language and ritual environments where specific agendas for social action are reified. The same is true for any social action, but it is with this understanding the rest of these processes can be explored. These micropublics are expressions of traditionalist state powers withheld until the moment of complete co-option of the state by traditionalist elements of the larger public sphere.
There is a lot to unpack here: nestled within public society are groups which organize around priorities held by special interest groups. In other words, politics as usual, but much, much faster.
Above, I outlined how institutionally driven genocide occurs when eliminationist memes co-opt the official apparatus of the state. These memes need not be the dominant ideology, and do not need to be institutionally driven to affect mass violence.
Self-radicalizing actors, primarily paramilitary or ‘lone wolf’ insurgents, or small organizations driven to violence, are likely to be motivated through (and ‘produsers‘ of) the same dehumanizing rhetoric.
The difference is one of scale, while the language games remain bound to the same set of rules — dehumanization of the enemy, an apocalyptic call to arms through a dualistic frame, and appeals to commercial, spiritual, and communal rewards, to be won through a united front against a given common threat, propagated by small groups, banded together publicly or in secret, formed around these principles. Individuals from these groups will, when given a catalyzing event, arm themselves and commit violent acts. This is the core purpose of eliminationist rhetoric — universal appeals used to create resentment in all instances of perceived social injustice against the articulated audience.
Think of it as a virus, encoded through mediated forms (textual, oral, filmic) that can co-opt social bodies — be they governmental, corporate, religious, or political — that then uses that social body’s power to disenfranchise and eliminate a particular group in a systemic way.
When this occurs among a few children, it can manifest as organized bullying. In teens and young adults, larger social bodies provide access to a greater range of physical response tactics, creating instances of transformative aggression. Public social institutions aggressively campaigning to spread eliminationist messages through main stream media channels create climates where spontaneous performances of murderous violence are triggered in those sufficiently impaired cognitively to ‘immediatize,’ and then react to, the existential threat: think of this as reactive aggrievement.
As highly motivated actors perform ideologically driven violent acts, the focus on warfare moves from fourth generational warfare to fifth. T. X. Hammes, USMC, wrote in the 2007 May-June issue of Military Review that 5GW (Fifth Generational Warfare) can be seen as the “emergence of super-empowered individuals or small groups bound together by love for a cause rather than a nation.” This evolution, this new paradigm of warfare has already occurred — the anthrax attacks in late 2001, the beltway sniper, the Fort Hood shootings, and the Oslo massacre perpetrated by Anders Brevik are all manifestations of the 5GW tactics that Colonel Hammes describes.
He concludes the article by emphasizing that this kind of warfare results “from the continued shift of political and social loyalties to causes rather than nations… networks will distribute the key information, provide a source for the necessary equipment and material, and constitute a field from which to recruit volunteers” — in other words, knowledge and information are the radicalizing tools and weaponry of this new generation of warfare.
Attacks which are planned months in advance such as the Virginia Tech, Columbine, and Oslo shootings are smaller 5GW events; in the case of Anders Brevik and his book “2083: A European Declaration of Independence”, it is clear he planned for several years — yet his act, brutal as it was, was also marketing for the sake of the manuscript’s dissemination.
In a theater of 5GW, ideological actors are performing for an audience decoupled from the event which they have internalized in the form of a cognitive model which they query with each act of violence or instance of aggression.
These acts are planned, often obsessively so:
“All of the adolescent and adult subjects had the ability to carry out an organized plan and did so. This finding is very robust across previous research and challenges two assumptions made by some law enforcement and mental health professionals. First, the assumption that mass murder is a sudden, impulsive act wherein an individual ‘snaps’ and kills those around him is fallacious. There is no evidence, given the parameters of the mass murder research to date, that such a phenomenon occurs, and data instead support the hypothesis that mass murder is a planned and organized event, at least until the killing begins. Planning and preparation likewise appear to be necessary components of most targeted violence (Calhoun, 1998; Fein & Vossekuil, 1998, 1999; Meloy, 2001). Second, the presence of certain or probable psychosis in two-thirds of the adult mass murderers contradicts the assumption that psychotic individuals cannot engage in organized behavior. In fact, we have found that active delusions will often bring a certainty and resolve to the planning of a mass murder that, in their absence, would be marked by ambivalence.” — A Comparative Analysis of North American Adolescent and Adult Mass Murderers by J. Reid Mely, Ph.D., Anthony G. Hempel, D.O., M.A., B. Thomas Gray, Ph.D., Kris Mohandie, Ph.D., Andrew Shiva, Ph.D., and Thomas C. Richards, Ph.D., published in Behav. Sci. Law 22: 291–309(2004)
For every ‘successful’ 5GW attack, we can assume there are others in various states of planning often just waiting for the right catalyst to trigger what can become an incredibly violent sequence of acts.
Additionally, there is a lack of attention on the definition and representation of vigilantism versus terrorism, and how those divisions are driven by negotiated ideological frames of action in the immediate aftermath of a given performance of violent spectacle.
This problem of who gets to be a terrorist, and who gets to be a vigilante, portrayed as a ‘troubled individual’ rather than an extremist or terrorist, is problematized primarily by what is or is not ‘acceptable eliminiationism’ at a given moment. Eliminationist rhetorics provide acceptable frameworks for vigilantism, and an active campaign provides a seamless narrative discourse for acceptable mass violence within specific micro-public spheres.
“Two key factors, distinguish eliminationist rhetoric from other political hyperbole:
“1. It is focused on an enemy within, people who constitute entire blocs of the citizen populace.
“2. It advocates the excision and extermination of those entire blocs by violent or civil means.
“Eliminationism — including the rhetoric that precedes it and fuels it — expresses a kind of self-hatred. In an American culture that advertises itself as predicated on equal opportunity, eliminationism runs precisely counter to those ideals. Eliminationists, at heart, hate the very idea of an inclusive America.” — David Neiwert, from the book “The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right”
Those who prepare for violence almost universally send out signals. Coded self-disclosure in the form of journals, online posts, or other media objects are ways of discharging tensions prior to a catalyzing event, and can often be found to be mocking, filled with delusions, or clinically specific in terms of lists of targets. The audience is always present in the moment in the mind of the perpetrator(s) that prepared disclosure. (Self-disclosure is a form of perceived omniscience imago which projects upon the individuals ego as performance for the preferred non-local audience).
In instances where self-disclosure is or becomes public through internet posts, it would be ideal to have developed ways to apprehend the individual prior to a catalyzing event. Surely named entity matrices like GDELT could eventually develop AI resources that could tackle sophisticated disclosure detection.
However, factor identification presents a great deal of complexity: hate speech, or eliminationist rhetoric, does not immediately create a 5GW actor or ideological assassin. It is the combination of exposure to the rhetoric and other factors, most notably an individual exhibiting characteristics of cognitive deconstruction, especially centered around dehumanization of a singular enemy. This mental state can be created through institutional forces, or smaller social groups, or through the individual discovering and initiating a path through found media made available by environment, or due to environmental factors.
Still, eliminationist rhetoric is the vector through which violence is modeled and performed initially, which, should it overtake the apparatus of the State, becomes the precursor to genocide — and if it overtakes the apparatus of a given subculture, or micro public sphere, can catalyze incidents of mass murder.
Since the mindset of the perpetrator is often in a chronic state of cognitive deconstruction, I feel it is necessary to approach this research with an eye to all the variants of behavior that can be tied to eliminationist rhetoric. Knowing the history of genocide is only half the puzzle — understanding that the blinding red fog of “Amok” or “Berserking” is a psychological fugue produced from an ongoing sequence of events that could have been predicted from social stress would provide early warning systems for NGOs and international peacekeepers.
Yet this is not enough.
I am convinced that it is not a specific task for some “trained elite task force” to monitor all of the world for a specific outbreak of rhetoric — instead this awareness of the danger of these memes should be widespread. As I wrote above, the greater the amount of believed bullshit there is in the world the more it undermines our very foundation as a society.
The definition of genocide itself, the eight stages of genocide, the twelve steps of genocide denial, and the psychology of evil — all of this should be common education so we are prepared to meet these eternal, insidious forces. The only effective inoculation is a literacy of sorts which reaches the at-risk population. With economic hardship, the American cultural landscape is fertile ground for 5GW recruiting and the rhetorical tropes in use. The language of recruitment is rooted in dehumanization — which itself is the transactional language of cognitive deconstruction. In essence, suicidal ideation and other mental illnesses can be weaponized through rhetorical triggers.
Bullshit can be a weapon, and will cause more and more acts of increasingly violent mass killings.
While individuals may never be able to take on the level of violence capable of being perpetrated by the State, the exterminatory intention of Brevik’s attack in Oslo is as clear as the same intents in previous genocides. With his publication of 2083, he may yet incite many more copycat attacks, part of a vanguard of transnational nativists united in defiance through adaptation of eliminationist texts and ideological frames. The difference is one of scope, not rhetoric. The rhetoric of elimination — purging, ethnic cleansing, and extermination always precedes physical violence.
Hate is a complex of memes taught to each of us, it is contagious, and that contagion can be fought.
What is easy to call ‘evil’ can be more accurately thought of as cruelty. It is cruelty that creates the resentment and hostility in people who previously show no signs of wanting to commit violent acts. When people do evil things, there is often a series of steps that they take to get there.
It’s important to remember that no matter how institutionalized cruelty may be, it is the decisions of individuals that ultimately can launch evil acts: whether these acts are genocides, shootings, bombings, or other atrocities. As Goldhagen describes, cruelty that arises from institutions is only one kind of cruelty observable in an actual genocide. Other kinds of cruelty include believing someone deserves their punishment, or the cruelty that arises from apathy from complete disinterest in another person’s condition.
Cruelty is not necessarily a political tool, but it emerges through fear and hatred. Institutional hate is a social group dedicated to performing bias — splitting people into groups, isolating them, creating divisions — sometimes for personal reasons, other times in concerted effort with others. These actions divide the public against itself.
At its most extreme, hate speech feeds a complex of rhetorical tropes which model abstract violence in preparation for — and anticipation of — genocidal acts, mass murder, and criminal assault. These rhetorical tropes rely on specific cognitive devaluations to incite immediate aggression, but usually their influence is felt insidiously through socio-economic pressure, institutional bias, and anti-immigration (or ‘nativist’) political posturing. These rhetorical tropes are a part of a complete model of eliminationist rhetoric, which, when performed in a theater of social action, provoke aggression amongst those receptive to its message.
We become more intelligent by seeing through the manipulative, emotionally deceptive rhetorics of marketers, spies, lobbyists and other bullshit artists. Those who appeal to our worst instincts to improve their stature in the world cannot triumph without the attention and support of the common people. And that support comes at a huge cultural, physical and psychological cost, impacting the individual minds, the collective experiences, and the communal spaces we share.
Ultimately, when we are overwhelmed by hatred, we turn that cognitive devaluation lens upon ourselves. We flatten our own best attributes into falsehoods, myths, embellishments — we begin to think of ourselves as unassailable, paragons of virtue, unattainable icons which generate culture and history in the wake of our arrogance. We dehumanize ourselves, in order to justify the violence we perpetuate on others, when we dehumanize others. A world more underscored by democratized accessibility to address grievances as a foundational virtue of civil society is the antidote: re-humanization, demobilization of hate, and a world made better through more equitable practices.
Organizations like Leslee Udwin’s ThinkEqual are essential in reaching this better world.
How Does Bullshit Lead to Genocide?
To begin, I should start with differentiating those areas of mass violence and cultural genocide which are affected by rhetoric, from those which are not. Bullying (both online and offline), ideologically driven violence, and institutional eliminiationism are all rhetorically driven. Serial murder, muggings and covert operations are necessarily outside of my focus.
Secondly, I differentiate eliminationism from other, more pervasive, less concerning rhetorical modes. Divisive political rhetoric is an immediate precursor to eliminationist tropes but is not strictly speaking a call to violent action.
In her 2010 article “Killing the Microphone: When Broadcast Freedom Should Yield to Genocide Prevention,” Carol Pauli makes a clear case for a specific kind of speech to be classified as “Incitement to genocide so as to justify international prior restraint such as jamming of broadcast signals” and while she lays out a framework for radio specifically, it stands to reason that similar content analysis can be applied to other media communications.
This approach to intervening in broadcast communication arose from what has been called the “magic bullet” or “hypodermic needle” propaganda model which assumes a passive audience. Today’s more nuanced understanding of media effects shows that messages have stronger or weaker resonance based on a number of other factors, including the context of political instability. Social structures cannot be stable without equality. It imparts resilience. Resilience in this case translates into effective social resistance to power imbalance. The value of equality cannot be overstated, as it is always lacking in cases where genocide does occur.
Community-based public forums are the theater and stage of democratic growth. As these dwindle, are restricted, infringed, and decimated, and the groups within a society ostracized, demonized, or otherwise singled out for verbal or physical attack, then the path is there for genocidal fever to take hold, and become institutionalized into structural eliminationist agendas. Calls for hate crime legislation for specific groups should be seen as warning signs, signals calling for deeper investigations.
Here are the core components of the worst kinds of bullshit thinking, the secret ingredients that poison people’s minds with hatred. Techniques are used to cut resistance to manipulation by overloading the rational mind with simplified, emotional language. It begins by reducing the individual listener into another part of the greater crowd — the listener is only an object within an audience. The speaker speaks as the will of the people in attendance — this is the beginning of a state of “Cognitive Devaluation:” ultimately these states can reduce critical thought, triggering crowd entrainment. Once one’s mind is baffled by bullshit, it can become entrained and aligned with a speaker’s intent.
The basis for directing rage is in identifying a consistent “Common Enemy”: a threat that a speaker uses to justify hatred and rally support for their own agenda. Any action this group takes becomes viewed in a negative way, and almost always the enemy is dehumanized or demonized through propaganda.
The speaker then rallies with a “Unifying Voice”: the speaker ‘is’ the voice of the audience. They speak as and for the audience.
Speaking like this can create an all-too-compelling message such as “We’re in this together” and, “We like this, not that.” This is a kind of entrainment, whereby you are pressured to assent by those around you. Don’t let a leader force you into positions you know are wrong by speaking for you.
Repeated calls to the soul or spirit of the people as inherently pure, what Burke calls a trope of “Inborn Dignity” — that sense that there’s something special, something more important about you than any other culture in the world. This appeal implies that you as a member of the articulated audience have some magical quality that places you in an elite space above another group.
This is effective — everyone wants to feel special, to be praised by a perceived voice of authority. It can lead to acceptance of purge — if you are “pure,” anything that might threaten that “purity” must be eliminated.
Overriding appeals to the pocketbook, or what is called “Commercial Use” of the people, are a useful abstraction for cultivating public support. Pundits and politicians will blame all money situations on a group or situation, sans evidence, as a justification for any and all responses. All scarcity of resource is filtered through the notion that essentials are being taken away or will be withheld from a specifically patriotic community.
This is paired with a kind of “Projection”: a speaker, writer, or leader pushes all of the blame about a given social issue or state concern onto a minority scapegoat. This tactic takes pressure off the majority to address their own shortcomings and projects all reason for failure on to an individual or group.
These last two kinds of bullshit are controversial in that you will find a lot of religious statements that use these two — both “Apocalyptic Dualism” and “Symbolic Rebirth” — act as a “promised reward…” the reward being that once a certain group or people is eliminated, the “superior” group of people will inherit a new fruitful world. It caters to those who feel an inborn dignity. In other words, a feeling that they have the right to do anything because they are chosen by fate or a higher power.
That conflict, that Us-or-Them bullshit is “Apocalyptic Dualism”: a rhetorical brinksmanship creating conflict and fear through prophecy as threat. This tactic is to declare that a holy war will happen to end all wars, and then uses this fear to control public policy. Hate for others and violence are tools to further this wildly profitable propaganda.
Bear in mind that these work in conjunction with one another. Cognitive devaluation tropes build on abstraction to de-individuate, dehumanize, dis-engender, and demonize. They use up the mind’s defenses to persuasion and prepare the way for social (or mob) action. When a listener or follower absorbs this rhetoric, their identity becomes interwoven with the beliefs and experience needed to commit horrible atrocities. These dehumanizing and cognitively dissonant frames become the basis for future experiences with the targeted group.
For example, one of the ways that Jews were portrayed in Europe was through the publishing and critiquing of a hoax titled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, itself a plagiarisation of Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu or Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, an 1864 political satire by Maurice Joly, and a chapter from Biarritz, an 1868 novel by the anti-Semitic German novelist Hermann Goedsche.
Despite its sources and obvious resemblances to these other works, the hoax book was taken at face value and was printed throughout all of Europe and even imported into the United States as a factual text. This document fueled hate crimes against Jews wherever it was printed, justifying violence, vandalism, and murder, long before Adolph Hitler’s rise to power.
By the beginning of the 1920’s, this hoax perpetuated a stereotype around the world that created a scapegoat for those who would rule by manipulating fear. Belief in this hoax led to politicians being assassinated, and Hitler referred to this hoax by name in his own book Mein Kampf (1926). In it, Jews are depicted as the source of all conflict, behind all international disputes, and to blame for the collective woes of the people. Propagandists used this stereotype throughout Europe to stir up hatred for Jews long before World War II began.
Hate begins in people as an excuse for bullying and a motivation for policing identity, becoming the primary way to negotiate difference in relational performances. Jealousy, misunderstandings of intent, lack of understanding about the broader economic and political landscape in which both groups are only one part, all play a role in wrongly applying negative emotions onto non-related situations and individuals.
In the worst cases, hate speech results in violent, irrevocable acts.
On a national scale, manipulative hate speech espousing isolationist ideology creates national intolerance, cultivating a culture that can support ethnic cleansing. But genocide doesn’t begin on the national scale, it begins on the individual level.
It takes individuals to conceive and perform individual acts of genocide.
For these individuals to be able to commit acts of genocide, most of them must compartmentalize mentally to be able to see their victims as inhuman. The perpetrators are primed through an ongoing discourse, which asserts the “inherent correctness” of these acts. These acts of violence are — by the time they are performed — seen as necessary no matter how excess the cruelty.
The term ‘stochastic terrorism’ describes situations where an implicit symbol of intolerance, such as the cross-hair target, is deployed as part of a communication strategy. This coded messaging, laden with symbolism for a privileged and empowered community, allows a ‘respectable facade’ of plausible deniability for the wielders of the messaging when it triggers a receptive, violence-primed individual. Hate is usually tied into ethnic identity, sense of ownership, and politics of class. When an individual externalizes hatred it leads to conflict, violence, and, in extreme cases, murder and terrorism. In times of great social conflict populations are particularly vulnerable to the manipulation of their emotions. High conflict issues are presented in such a way as to appear to be connected to a separate issue of concern having to do with an unrelated target population.
Different depictions help to contribute to the propaganda of a group in a participatory way. The more a hateful characterization appears in a culture, (i.e., the more regularly it is spread,) the more it becomes accepted and acceptable within a culture. This is when people should be on the lookout for the probability of manipulative and hateful speech to begin calling for violence. While speech such as this might not always lead to genocide, it creates the language environment for genocidal events.
While several international organizations have come together to try and end all genocidal events, often it is too late, as we see playing out in today’s world. By the time an international situation has been identified it takes government and military powers, outside of the nation where the event occurs, in order to stop it. Understanding the consequences of displacement, and finding methods to safely accommodate refugee populations and displaced people is another major concern for the international community.
Ideally genocide should be prevented through demobilizing hatred before violence ever begins. Proving that genocide is occurring and that it is a specific government at fault has consequences, and the history of the UN highlights the struggle to make leaders accountable for genocidal regimes. Goldhagen suggests reframing acts of genocide by the more direct name ‘war against humanity’ as a way to focus international attention on genocides. In his book Worse than War he writes, “[w]hen someone says that entire classes of people do not deserve to live, or live among us, he essentially declares war on part of humanity, which qualifies… as war on humanity in general.”
Each of us has the power to learn to identify the bullshit rhetoric, sloppy thinking and incendiary hate speech in the world around us, but identifying the patterns of intolerance and deception are only part of developing that herd immunity to bullshit.
I’d love to see some of your solutions to the problem of fake news… go viral.
