Chapter 7 from my book “Is cruelty cool?“

Words. They can be so damaging yet may seem so innocent.

Stereotyping is when you associate red hair with being Irish. Stereotyping can also be a positive thing, such as in “all Dutch people are great ice skaters”. It becomes discrimination when you disadvantage all people with red hair on the assumptions that they are probably Irish and that being Irish excludes or disqualifies them from something. If the latter is according to the law, then it’s not considered discrimination as long as you check passports to verify whether they are Irish or not, though it is if you were to say something along the lines of “I just don’t like red hair” or “I just don’t like Irish people”.

I see prejudice as merely something that you think, not as a view that you act upon, not as something that by definition has negative consequences for others. Discrimination, by contrast, is an act, of doing something that you would not have done if it hadn’t concerned a certain quality on the basis of which you are distinguishing people or an act of not doing something that you would have done otherwise.

If you assign for example criminality to all people who have red hair or all people who are Irish, then you are stigmatising them, though you can also still see this as prejudice, as long as you don’t act on it so that the people with red hair or all Irish people aren’t disadvantaged as a result. Discrimination does. Discrimination can cause people to become marginalized. If you push them out of your community or society very deliberately, such as is happening to the Uyghurs, then you are not only marginalizing them but also traumatizing and ostracising them. In the case of the Uyghurs, it goes even further than that because many Uyghurs are effectively imprisoned.

If you have red hair (or imagine that you do), think about what would you call it if the chapel on the corner closes its open doors very quickly every time the people standing at those doors happen to see you approach on the pavement? You had no intention to go into the chapel, so it does not affect you. You probably didn’t even notice it, but someone else who lives next-door to the chapel might.

When I go to a Level 42 concert and a security guard keeps eying me because he expects me to storm the stage to accost Mark King because I am an unaccompanied middle-aged woman, until he sudden realizes that I’m actually looking at something else and turns around to see what it is, yeah, I think that that’s the result of stigmatisation. I might call it discrimination in real life, but I might not actually care in real life as long as it does not interfere with my enjoyment of the concert. That would be the point at which someone else’s prejudice begins to disadvantage me and it would turn into discrimination, if they would escort me out or would not even let unaccompanied middle-aged women into the venue.

We all engage in otherization – I do too – yet we are most aware of it when others practice it. Only others do certain bad things. That too is otherization. Both Lloyd-Roberts (“The war on women”) and Taylor (“Cruelty. Human evil and the human brain”) said very little about misogyny and otherization in Britain. They looked predominantly at what goes on beyond Dover.

The latest UN assessment of the human rights situation of women in the UK found an in-your-face sexism that is worse than in any other country, however. The difference between calling a woman names and hitting her or going berserk and battering her into a coma is a mere few pints. Domestic violence – men physically injuring women – soars in England at Christmas time and during football matches.

Again I am reminded of what Taylor wrote: “even mild otherization primes people for aggression”. Does the in-your-face sexism in Britain prime British men for aggression against women?

The same UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences was also told by NGOs in the UK that there were “serious concerns about the problematic narratives surrounding violence against black and minority ethnic women and girls.” “This then ignores the harms emanating from other sexist practices that are prevalent in the United Kingdom, and which impact women and girls of all ethnic and racial backgrounds.”

Here, otherization spreads the false belief that mainly foreign, black and other minority women suffer violence and that English people do not engage in violence against women and girls. It colours people’s expectations. In reality, the situation in the UK is worse than elsewhere.

According to the UN report, “a 2014 Europe-wide survey on violence against women found that 29 per cent of respondents in the United Kingdom had experienced physical and/or sexual violence committed by a current and/or previous partner since the age of 15. This is above the European Union average for the survey, which was 22 per cent.”

A hilarious example of otherization with regards to other species in Taylor’s book is that she described trees as involuntarily causing cracks in the pavement but overlooks that it’s humans who put the pavement there and obstruct the trees’ growth. Sure, blame the tree. Bad, bad tree. (The scarce resource is the space taken up by the pavement in this case. Taylor did not appear to believe that the tree had any rights.)

There is also a more serious display of otherization at work in Taylor’s book. The Amritsar massacre and the praise it initially resulted in at home is a prime example of what both Rebecca Saxe and Kathleen Taylor were talking about. Taylor did not mention it, however, even though it is part of Britain’s fairly recent history. Saxe limited her talk mainly to the here and now. She is Canadian. Taylor is British.

Was Taylor carefully avoiding upsetting any apple carts for some reason? On page 195, she did discuss the anti-Jewish sentiments that surfaced in London in the 1930s – adding that such blatant anti-Semitism would not be tolerated today – as well as current irrational fears regarding anyone of the Muslim faith surely busily plotting murder in order to turn Britain into a sharia state. (Remember that Taylor published her book in 2009, hence in the aftermath of various extreme-Islamist attacks and that most of the present anti-Semitism in the UK had not seen daylight yet.)

There is no word about any of the other atrocities that the British inflicted abroad either. The Chagossians driven from their home, the destruction wreaked in India’s social system through the deliberate application of discrimination, the damage done in African countries, the UK’s willingness to go to war over Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands.

Taylor did not say much about that quintessentially English example of otherization known as the class system, besides that she used the phrase “loving middle-class environment” on page 142 to refer to the life of a child that had wanted to take a cat for a walk and accidentally almost strangled the cat. Maybe Taylor said enough when she wrote that, without being aware of it. Was she suggesting that lower-class people do not love their children or did she want to stress that the child lacked nothing and had no reason to be angry about anything? Taylor also said a lot between the lines when she quipped about “uppity” women who attend university and choose not to destroy all that invested capital after they graduate but have a career in their chosen field.

However, on page 177, she gave the example of the British scientist who is likely to feel much more at ease among colleagues from Germany, China and Pakistan than with non-scientist Britons (particularly if the later are lower class or upper class) “because the shared ‘British’ culture is thin compared with the segregating force fields of class and profession”. That’s as far as she went, but for anyone who knows what she is talking about, it’s probably enough.

Taylor stated that she wrote her book in favour of two claims. One is the fact that anyone can inflict cruelty, which I think I’ve meanwhile shown too without going too deeply into the darkest abysses of cruelty. The second claim was the following:

“The difference between someone hurling verbal abuse at an immigrant and someone beating an immigrant to death
is a difference of degree, not a difference in kind.”

This is exactly why the outspoken animosity that prominent Conservative politicians in the UK so often display towards migrants continues to worry me. It worries me every time I hear a new display of this animosity, regardless of who exactly it comes from. The difference between one – yelling at someone – and the other – beating someone to death – is a mere few pints of beer, perhaps preceded by a quarrel with the wife or with the manager at work.

Kathleen Taylor wrote:

“even mild otherization primes people for aggression“

It’s also why people like Donald Trump and Geert Wilders are so dangerous, not just the UK’s politicians. That Kathleen Taylor’s claim is correct became shockingly clear on 6 January 2021 when Donald Trump turned out to have whipped up masses of people into attacking the US Capitol. They were specifically targeting many lawmakers who Trump had been badmouthing, including Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence.

I have a question about otherization (group differences) that neither Saxe nor Taylor addressed. Men are far more likely to commit lethal acts of violence than women. The difference in muscle power provides part of the explanation for that. Also in Geert Hofstede’s model about masculine and feminine cultures, we see that women are believed to place a much higher emphasis on cooperation while men are usually thought of as more competitive, fighting for a place in the male pecking order.

Does this mean that otherization predominantly comes from men? Is it instigated by men? If so, then this could provide an easy avenue towards making the world a less cruel place and prevent the deaths of people like Mr Cheese, who clearly was subjected to cruelty at his place of work.

It is well known that having even one woman present in a setting changes the dynamics and can stop men from inflicting cruelty. A woman watching what men do often has the effect of making men behave better, as belittling as it may sound towards men.

As far as I have been able to find – I found a group photo online of the team – Mr Cheese had no female colleagues. Could the mere hiring of a woman have prevented the development of the apparent tradition of setting trainees on fire at Mr Cheese’s place of work? Do women ever habitually engage in practices as daft, cruel and destructive as trying to set fire to colleagues? What was the situation at Mr Hayward’s work?

Taylor seems to believe that otherization exists to help steer us away from pain and towards pleasure. That could explain why I started otherizing other migrants after I became otherized as a migrant in England. It matches my idea that it is something you do in an attempt to protect yourself. This is partly related, obviously, to whether we see others as posing a threat to us. This in turn is tied into the notion of scarcity, of whether there is enough to go around. (Non-human animals can display an astonishing level of compassion towards other species if they feel secure and have plenty of food at their disposal.)

You can see this idea of the avoidance of pain and the seeking of pleasure as a reason for otherization reflected in utilitarianism, when Jeremy Bentham proposed to round up the beggars and disabled, along with others whose visible presence decreased the happiness of the more fortunate, according to him. He wanted them tucked away in workhouses, out of our sight, in an order that, also according to him, would reduce unhappiness. He wanted the deaf and dumb “next to raving lunatics, or persons of profligate conversation”, aged women next to “prostitutes and loose women”, and the blind next to the “shockingly deformed”.

You can also see how something like this may once have made sense from a biological perspective, our instincts wanting to protect us against disease, just like we white people from Europe exposed indigenous populations to infections that they had no immunity against when we began exploring the planet. During the pandemic, we quarantined people just because they might be carrying COVID-19. The difference is that we let them go and gave them access to the rest of the country if they still hadn’t fallen ill after their two weeks of quarantine. If they became ill, then we looked after them and nursed them back to good health to the best of our abilities. We didn’t deport them to an uninhabited island.

The idea is that we apply rationality when we quarantine people coming into a country in such conditions, particularly from countries with a known high incidence of infection. We did not respond with utter paranoia, but there were attacks on people who looked as if they might be from Asia even if their families had been in the UK, the Netherlands or the US for generations. The attackers asked no questions. Their focusing illusion instantly caused them to jump to conclusions; their fear did the rest. As far as I know, there were no mass demonstrations at airports to stop people from coming into the country, however.

Instead, many other protests occurred during the pandemic, namely against otherization of black people and its massively damaging effects, the many preventable deaths as a result of police brutality and health disparities.

The colleagues of Mr Cheese treated him as if he had a virus and posed a lethal danger. You could say that the rituals with which they reacted to him when he joined their firm came from the “crocodile” parts of their brain, that they quite literally treated him as if he carried the plague, even though the response was a drawn-out, delayed one. They set him on fire. That probably goes for Mr Hayward’s experiences too.

We are cruel because we are emotional and insecure, responding from our gut rather than from our rational thinking, no matter what we tell ourselves. We are not cruel because we are clever or suave or experienced or seasoned. And the more cruelty we inflict, the more cruelty we receive in return.

Do I believe that if everyone were to read this book, the world would instantly become a better place? Of course not. Do I expect everyone who reads it to understand exactly what I mean, with regards to every sentence that I have written in this book? No. I am not perfect and neither is my writing.

Beliefs can be changed, however, if sufficient evidence can be shown that the belief needs to be adjusted, according to Taylor. While people will always continue to try to stick to beloved misconceptions, as Kathleen Taylor also pointed out in her book, education helps a lot, she adds. I refer you back to the end of the previous chapter.

Education can only do so much, however. As adults, we need to do more than agree and nod. We need to put our learning into practice. Maybe this book can help people reach out to each other. Maybe organizational psychologists can play a role in such a transition from an otherizing environment to an inclusive one.

Portsmouth City Council comes to mind again. From the media and from other people’s freedom of information requests, I have learned that bullying has been reported to be taking place within the housing department, the city council itself and the local Lib Dems. In its interactions with the public, Civic Offices staff has also been setting national records in how it deals with non-visible disabilities and illnesses such as Parkinson’s and autism. False beliefs held by these employees are resulting in incorrect expectations of how for example autistic people behave but also of the abilities of poor people and older adults.

We all suffer from biases, even those of us who are convinced we are right. We are so convinced that we are right that we have trouble seeing the merits of other people’s beliefs.

In her talk, Rebecca Saxe pointed out that some people – notably liberals, she said – tend to believe that more parochial people are less empathetic, but that is not the case. I have seen this in the automatic rejection of American Democrats of Republicans. Republicans are merely committed to a different distribution of their empathy. The level of empathy they have is just as high. It’s very useful to keep that in mind. We tend to overlook this because we simply don’t see where their empathy is going. It makes it appear absent. People who appear to share our values, on the other hand, we will experience them as related to us and it will be much easier for us to be empathetic towards them.

Did you know that when you challenge someone else’s beliefs, you are bound to be experienced as unpleasant? Were you aware that having one’s beliefs questioned can be quite stressful?

Did you know that people who do not behave according to what they are believed to be like (weak, disgusting, evil etc) are experienced as most threatening?

Read that again.

I am emphasizing that for a reason.

Many people still believe that England is an open and welcoming nation that knows no such thing as racism. I was dumbfounded to see how many people commented that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) surge that began sweeping the world after the killing of George Floyd had nothing to do with Britain and was a quintessentially American thing. Labour Leader Keir Starmer was one of them. Excuse me?

On 23 June 2020, the CNN website headlined “We have an unhealthy culture in the UK that calling out racism is more offensive than racism itself” (Nova Reid) and “The greatest trick racism ever pulled was convincing England it doesn’t exist”. CNN added: “Most Black people think that Britain is racist, most White people don’t.”

See how this clicks with what I just wrote? Unwelcome ideas such as the existence of racism in Britain are rejected and one’s worldview, if necessary, is adjusted to fit the belief that there is no racism in England. That black man who was stopped and searched after that TV interview in which he talked about racism, well, he clearly must have acted suspiciously. That Italian pizza restaurant in London that treated one of the world’s top jazz musicians in such an atrocious manner because he was guilty of being black, well, they couldn’t have known that he was not some kind of street thug, could they? (I do hope that Julia Roberts has stopped endorsing the place.) That black man who was tasered in front of his own home and who did not in any way behave like a suspect but seemed to resemble another black man who was a suspect, well, those police officers couldn’t have known that they were tasering one of the police’s own race relations advisers, could they? After all, he looked like that black suspect.

Remember the video of the dad whose small child apparently took a doll from a store without him noticing? The police treated him as if he was a suicide bomber with an invisible suicide vest. The target had to be disarmed a.s.a.p. in front of his two young daughters. But that’s okay, eh? Because he was black. Not a real human. Not one of “us”. That happened in the States. I’ve lived there too. I was living in the city where two waves of riots broke out after Tyron(e) Lewis was killed. I’d just left.

Racism is a major problem in Britain that is costing lives here too. Whether you are aware of it and hence believe it exists or expect it to be an American thing may, depends on who you associate with and which accounts you interact with (follow) on social media.

A few years ago, I looked into tasering incidents. That was sparked by a tasering case in the Netherlands, This concerned excessive tasering – in so-called compliance or pain mode – of a mentally unwell patient who had already been put in isolation. I wanted to know how often tasers were deployed against patients in hospitals. What I found was that, in Britain, tasers were also often used against black people (people of colour, people whose skin is not lily-white or ivory-white or milk-white; I hate having to make these distinctions but in contexts like these, I have to, and I struggle with it because it shouldn’t make a difference). I found that people were dying here as a result of police violence and these people were often mental health patients and black people. One of them was a trainee security guard who had called the police and was subsequently attacked by police officers.

White people have to learn to adjust their beliefs and expectations about black people just like I want English people also to adjust their beliefs and expectations about women and about older adults and about disabled people and migrants and poor people and everyone else who is constantly being otherized in England.

It’s not true that every older adult is senile and the perceived slowness of slightly older adults is often a mere appearance, the mere result of declining near-vision. In this digital world, that matters. Mobile phones are not designed with the over-40s in mind. Not being able to read the numbers on your screen may make you look like you don’t know what to do with your phone, but does not mean that you don’t know what to do with your phone. (It used to be that all number pads had the numbers in the same places, but that is no longer the case.) This alone can so easily turn into the belief that all older adults are, well, senile, sort of. Of course, neither is it appropriate to make fun of people who do have dementia. They did nothing to deserve dementia and they certainly do not deserve ridicule and abuse.

It is also not true that women are defective humans. If we were defective, then how come the entire world depends on us? It’s not true that migrants are thieving, lying, low-skilled cheap labour and out to take from you what is rightfully yours. It’s not true that a great deal of the poverty in the UK is not deliberately caused by the government. (Read that again.) It’s not true that that is the fault of the poor sods who weren’t born with a silver spoon in their mouths. It’s not their genes that cause it. It isn’t the result of character flaws either.

These beliefs, where do they come from? Well, some of them are installed in us by devious politicians and other demagogues. And we are not even aware of it. Want an example of how this works?

If the first thing you heard about abortion was that this was when little babies were yanked out of their mothers’ wombs, ripped apart and discarded like garbage, that likely produced a strong emotion in you that you may from then on forever associate with the word “abortion”. If the next four occasions on which you hear the word are similar, that association becomes reinforced. It will then be so much harder for you not to feel pain, horror and disgust when you have to consider abortion as a solution to stop a mother from dying during childbirth or a young girl who has been raped from having to discontinue her education and abandon her plans for a bright future.

If the first time you heard the word, it was in association with, say, a mother in her forties who did not want to bring a child into a life of deep poverty as she would have been forced her to quit her two jobs or as a solution to stop a mother from dying during childbirth or a young girl who had been raped from having to discontinue her education and abandon her plans for the future, you will have a very different, much more positive association with the word, hence a different belief. Am I right? It has to do with where your empathy is directed, with who your compassion is for.

If the first dog you encountered bit you, hard, you may expect all dogs to bite. If you grew up with dogs, you likely roughhoused with them and learned that a playful bite during horseplay is very different from a dog biting you to bite you. So based on your belief, you expect a certain behaviour from dogs and you know what, with dogs, that often determines how they behave towards you. So, sometimes, your beliefs can make your expectations come true. That’s worrisome, isn’t it?

The strongest beliefs, the hardest to change or root out, “come with an emotional booster“, Kathleen Taylor explained. That is what happens during the application of rhetoric, such as when you are told about little babies being yanked out of their mother’s womb to stop the mother from dying during childbirth, even if that baby is only still a clump of cells at that point, not a baby.

Accomplishing otherization, Taylor elaborated, depends on three casually spread core messages. Core beliefs. The first one is the one that causes distancing. It portrays people as disgusting and not quite human. The second one is installing the belief that these not-quite humans are out to harm you or have already done so, wrote Taylor and she continued with the third “removing these people will solve your problems”.

Here you suddenly have the Brexit rhetoric in its full simple glory. Migrants are low-skilled. (This is part of the reason why I was often believed to be delusional. Migrants are low-skilled, after all. Everybody knows that.) Migrants are the cause of England’s low wages. (No, they’re not, unless the English have been keeping them as slaves. Minimum wages are set by the government and people like Richard Branson voluntarily choose to pay their employees low wages.) “We will bring their numbers down.” (Priti Patel about EU citizens in the UK) Migrants must go home. They must be stopped from renting homes and making a living, must be hunted, rounded up, kept in removal centres for an unlimited duration during which they lose their jobs and homes, often also their bank accounts and their driving licence and possibly their passports. Surely, they’ll bugger off after that.

We’re persistent vermin, aren’t we? Many of us have so many friends and relatives here, including children and parents. We often have none in other countries. Just like you. But these days, the main questions I still get as to who I am is “Where are you from?” and “How long have you been here?” The same people who ask these questions never ask me my name.

I probably switch between “us” and “you” and “them” and “we” and “they” and “I” so often in this book that it is hard to keep track of who’s who. Maybe that’s intentional. The people who lost their homes, jobs and more during the Windrush debacle suffered similar damages as the many people on disability benefits that were illegally cut by the DWP with the hope of the poor sods not noticing it or at least not being very able to fight back. “Blatantly discriminatory” ruled the English High Court in 2017 (RF v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions [2017] EWHC 3375 (Admin)) with regard to one of those cuts. The UK government has been taking its time paying its dues after such debacles, hasn’t it? Remember the bedroom tax, the suicides and evictions that led to? And most of you’ve read how badly Jack Monroe used to struggle to feed herself and her kids. Do you see now that there may not be such a big difference between us as you may have been led to believe?

Why is it that the same politicians who demonise foreigners go abroad as soon as things are not going very well for them in the UK? Prime example: Nigel Farage, of course. If foreigners are such dangerous, low-skilled criminals out to rob you blind and eat your gorgeous English swans, then why do these politicians spend their leisure time among these dangerous, low-skilled criminals that are out to rob you blind? Yet you continue to believe them. Okay, maybe not you literally, but you know what I mean. Theresa May took two walking holidays that summer break – yeah that one, the one after which she returned to work later than expected – but she had not been walking in the Lake District or in Cornwall. She went abroad. That’s where all those filthy dangerous foreigners live, you know.

In my sweeping generalisations, you get a glimpse of how otherization works. It’s not true, of course, that everyone in England demonises foreigners. I, for example, remember a conversation with an older gentleman who I encountered at one of the local launderettes who told me about all his travels and waited a very long time to ask me where I was from to make clear that he was genuinely interested and that he really enjoyed experiencing and interacting with other cultures. I also remember what may have been my first conversation here, with a bank employee whose name I don’t recall. He too wanted to make clear that he had nothing against us foreigners but I was so new to the country that I wasn’t aware of the anti-foreigner sentiment yet and didn’t get what he was going on about. Initially, some people had nothing against me because they believed that I was American whereas they had a bit of a problem with Polish people.

I have seen mild otherization at work in the African-Caribbean community in the UK as well. When we feel threatened, we all build walls around us and we may even lose the connection that we share with other otherized people. (I am from Holland, not Poland. The Netherlands, you know. Amsterdam.)

Very important, however, is that stories intended to accomplish otherization, said Taylor, use a familiar language that fits the local culture. That makes them much more palatable. It lulls people into a state of sleep and stops them from acknowledging the reality behind the lies that they are fed.

“Otherization,” continued Taylor, produces the effect that while you normally consider it wrong to hurt people, declaring some people “not really people” allows you to get away with hurting them.

It enables you to justify to yourself why you threw stones at someone, doused someone in flour or why you spread nasty rumours about barmy Dutch madwomen. Or set fire to trainees…

If I don’t go around spreading the rumour that you are a nasty paedophile who hurts little children, then why do you go around spreading similarly damaging rumours about me? Why do you go around telling people who don’t even know me that I am delusional, that I merely imagine that I went to university and perhaps that I might throw acid at people?

I consider you a human being, just like me, and I do not consider it right to spread nasty made-up rumours about other people, people who don’t even know me. Yet to you, I am “not really a human being” – and in your mind, you have a whole list of arguments that “prove” to you why that is so – and that makes it okay for you to spread rumours about me that marginalise me in so many ways. Is it? Is it really okay to do so?

Adjusting your belief about me is not “a deathly threat to your identity” in the sense that it will literally get you killed, but it may push you out of your in-group of people who believe that I am a barmy Dutch madwoman. That takes guts. It also requires you to admit to yourself that you were wrong about me. That too takes guts.

Dismantling your own beliefs about me is unpleasant. It may also lead you to start questioning your beliefs about many other people, specifically other older women and other foreigners, and also people like George Cheese and Janice Morris. That idea may really scare you. It will likely rattle your sense of identity, your sense of self.

Next time, it could be your nephew who gets set on fire at work and then hangs himself or your mother who gets attacked while sitting on a bench. Consider that possibility. Isn’t that a better starting point for figuring out whether an attack was “deserved” or “excusable” than instantly otherizing victims so that you can continue to feel safe and secure?

For me, breaking down the boundaries that trap people in poverty became very and probably far too important after I moved to Portsmouth. Instilling a sense of abundance for the locals, I dreamed of that for a long time. I often found the widespread poverty in Portsmouth very hard to stomach. I remember a day on which I felt like screaming and running out of the local large Tesco. I no longer could bear the sight of all those poor sods literally counting their coins. I later started going to an extra large Tesco that had much more affluent customers. I couldn’t stand the massive pervasive poverty and misery any longer. It’s so depressing and it really robs you of your hope and perspective. You can taste people’s misery and despair. They often get treated as if they are rotting potatoes.

I thought that it sucked that “free” food festivals were often announced at which nothing was available at no charge. Walking around was free. That was the only thing that was free about it. There wasn’t even any free food tasting. So among many other things, I cooked up the idea of a sponsored annual festival by pairing the city of Portsmouth and the city of Amsterdam. There would be music for the young folks (no lindy hop dancing but trippy hip hop and of course Dutch buskers with barrel organs), free food and free orange juice, there would be tourism stands and there would be something there for everyone, for all sorts of people from within Portsmouth and people from around Portsmouth. I figured that the appeal of Amsterdam alone would draw people from within England to Portsmouth and I figured that I would be able to find enough Dutch sponsors. I envisaged it in Guildhall Square. This was before Brexit, when Portsmouth was still interested in drawing more visitors to it. The music festivals that take place in Portsmouth nowadays bring in a lot of money – also for the police – and large masses of people, but are a big practical burden on the local population.

I have also fantasized about Europeans flying across the UK in small planes and dropping pound notes all over the place as a way to breach that boundary between us and them and shake up these beliefs that the EU is only out to shaft Brits. I do think that breaching stubborn negative beliefs about others requires physical acts that are accompanied by emotions. It might be good to do unexpected and possibly barmy things, such as people from the EU dropping pound notes all over the UK.

I’ve thought about us EU citizens in the UK all going to their local job centres and handing out goodies from their countries, such as Dutch stroopwafels, to everyone coming out of the place. This would be sufficiently unexpected to be able to affect people. But could it be so unexpected that it might be met with a lot of distrust? I’ve never gotten around to it.

I have, however, left Danish pastries on the counter of a local advice agency once. They were eagerly instantly tucked into by a guy who happened to be standing there and had not eaten anything yet that day. He recognised me in Kingston Road weeks later and thanked me a second time. After the pandemic, I went out a few times to offer a bag with goodies and a stylish black thermal turtleneck to random people I encountered. Sometimes, it really is as simple as that.

I did that because the negativity around me was really affecting me and I had to keep fighting against incorporating the belief that everyone around me was rotten. It wasn’t healthy. I didn’t want to go around distrusting everyone, even though I was surrounded by excessive insularity. So I went out, and crossed boundaries.

The answer to otherization is humility. Not humiliation.

Ask psychologist Abigail Marsh. According to Marsh and many others, altruism is increasing in the world and altruism goes hand in hand with humility. She also believes that many and probably even most people can become altruistic. So, care. Help make the world a better place for everyone. That’s how we can slowly diminish otherization and hate in the world and the resulting cruelty.

It might be good if embassies and consulates in the UK did more outreach that touches a much broader range of people than diplomats, captains of industry and government officials. It might be good if embassies in the US and the Netherlands did that too. Allow people from different backgrounds to familiarize themselves with those backgrounds and do it in a positive, giving way. Hand out stroopwafels at train stations.