Chapter 6 from my book “Is cruelty cool?“

In 2019, neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe gave a presentation at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law School that had as its topic “the neuroscience of hate” (Vimeo). She had been asked to talk about this. She normally works on human social cognition and the development of the human brain. Saxe dove into the matter and decided that the question was “How do we humans tolerate and even perpetrate violence against weak and defenceless strangers” as that is most baffling.

The intuitive answer, she said, is that it has to be something like hate that causes it. She went on to say that if you look at this kind of anomalous behaviour as the result of a form of brain damage, then you might also come up with ways to remedy hate from an almost medical point of view. That intuitive approach, however, was not the one she chose to take. As it turns out, it probably would not have led anywhere as hate is something we are all capable of. So is cruelty.

The tolerance of disparity – treating others as less and the damage it results in for them – does not require hate, Saxe said she had found. Saxe then talked about group differences, about parochialism (investing in and helping exclusively our own as opposed to helping others as well) and the creation of imaginary groups and even imaginary resources to fight for. Is a mother’s first goodnight cuddle worth more than the second? Is the first comment on a YouTube video worth more than the tenth? It is if you want it to be.

Is hate an extension of typical human behaviour or is it anomalous?

I have the feeling that Saxe might say that attacks such as on Janice Morris and myself are likely not an anomaly but an expression of our shared humanity, in the sense that we were both perceived as not being from the same group as the attackers and the people around them. That boils down to what I have said so far, that we were perceived as different and that that was the reason for the attack, not in itself the fact whether someone is, for example, disabled. So one way to do something about this kind of hate, or to protect yourself, is to do things that cross boundaries between groups.

Breaking through group boundaries can be done in many different ways, but before you do this, you first have to have become aware that you are perceived as being from a different group. Secondly, people often assign you to a particular group on the basis of externalities. I have mentioned the fact that working from home can make people assume that you are on disability benefits and that the fact that you are not married means that you are “not right in the head”.

Ditching glasses in favour of contact lenses can instantly put you in a different group. You know how kids who wear glasses sometimes get teased about their glasses. That is the group thing. “Wears glasses. Not one of us.” The same sometimes happens with kids who have red hair.

When I left the area in which I grew up and moved to the central part of the Netherlands, I instantly announced myself as a member from a different group as soon as I spoke, through my strong regional accent. I found that very annoying because it always led to the question “I bet you’re from the southeast.” It became pretty boring after the first few times it was said and I was relieved when I started to lose my accent.

As I am typing this, I have a sudden realisation. I used to have a beautiful British accent before I moved to the US in the 1990s. Not wanting to lose that, I “parked” it in my mind – ditched it – and decided to learn American English as a sort of new language. Later, I found myself often automatically switching between a British accent and an American accent and I’ve even found myself automatically mimicking someone else’s broken English on occasion. I found it embarrassing, as it might come across as mockery if someone noticed it, what I was doing was crossing that group boundary between the stranger and myself. Do I have a natural strong urge to want to cross group boundaries? If so, then it seems to come from my natural tendency to want to make people feel accepted and safe.

In those days when I was still trying to get rid of my regional Dutch accent, I experimented a few times with what I wore and how people treated me when I went into a shop. Amazing! Whether I was wearing a long grey coat or something casual really impacted how people saw me. This was in the city of Leiden where I briefly studied the German language and its literature.

Several decades later, I accidentally did something similar. I dyed my hair blue and turquoise. Gone was the instant trustworthiness I used to radiate because of my often stern, studious dark-haired exterior (yes, in spite of everything!!). I had to make a conscious effort to convey the nature of my character. Dying your hair in a certain colour is not necessarily associated with trustworthiness. Why is that? What it is about dying your hair pink that makes you less trustworthy? It’s because it marks you as someone from a different group, as not “one of us”. On trains and buses, very different kinds of people would sit down next to me. Certain people would spontaneously see me as “one of them” and one guy yelled loudly and enthusiastically “Where did you have your hair done?” “Did it myself!” Some people were downright wary of me and I have gotten some highly disapproving looks from strangers. I also remember one occasion when I was using an ATM and an older woman walked up with clear hesitation. Eye contact and a smile were enough to break the ice and convince her that I was likely not about to rob her.

I also noticed with a sense of pleasure and something akin to gratitude that, after I stopped colouring my hair and allowed myself to go grey again, I became a very safe person for young women to sit next to on benches in waiting areas at stations and in public transport. I like being able to provide that source of comfort and if I place myself in these young women’s shoes and think back to how I used to approach various situations, then I realise that I am happy to play that role. I have meanwhile gotten into the habit of dying my grey hair a vibrant henna-red, though, and that too brings its own peculiar responses (from men), usually depending on whether I am wearing glasses or contacts.

Whether my hair is red, grey or blue, it’s me. I am the same person, yet I am perceived very differently. That shows you some of the silly ways in which otherization works. This is how group differences play out. What group of people I get assigned to tends to be based on what I look like. Con artists know this very well. Catch me if you can.

Speaking of groups, in England, men and women have their own separate activities and don’t socialise in groups, or so I was once told. It’s my impression that this is very different for younger English people. Also, I know that it’s not entirely true. I was a member of an English samba band for a while and also a member of an environmental forum. I was the only foreigner, but both groups contained men and women in fairly equal proportions.

Several times I was an accepted member of the group within a specific setting and treated without any animosity within that group in England, yet treated as a complete stranger outside of that setting. Sometimes, any association with me was even clearly felt to be embarrassing. I assume that this came from local gossip. From time to time, I could tell that a fresh new wave of rumours has been unleashed about me in the pubs over the weekend, but I was never privy to what the rumours were about. The town where I was based has been dubbed “the UK’s biggest village”. Everybody there thinks they know everything about everybody else in town. As they don’t, they have to make stuff up. The less people know about you, the more likely they are to make things up about you in that kind of environment. The locals also whipped up deep-fake porn with my face in it one time. That too caused expectations around town, I noticed.

Years ago, I attended workshops organised by Her Majesty’s Customs and Revenues (HMRC, that’s the tax people, the British version of the IRS or the Belastingdienst) for self-employed people and people intending to incorporate a company or just having done so. I was the only one who handed out business cards and engaged in conversation with the others, asking them about their businesses and so on (to the amusement and pleasure of the guys running these workshops). This social awkwardness is an expression of insularity. It expresses that every English person sees himself or herself as an island that must be carefully guarded.

It is very hard to do something about group barriers against a background like that. The entire world saw it and continues to see it within the context of the Brexit negotiations as well. What negotiations? You can sum it all up with a cartoon of an English person crossing his arms and stubbornly saying nothing and not hearing a word, proudly being an island all by himself on his chair, like a concrete mule. The thought cloud over his head might read: “That’ll show them!”

Socialising as a goal in itself is not something the English do a lot of, not within a professional context either, even though they may think they do. Networking often is no more here than an expression of the old boys’ club phenomenon in which people rigidly stick to members of their own group and only trust and help each other. It’s not socialising. It’s an exchange of favours. If you scratch my back, I will scratch yours. My neighbour across the road, who is not in your social circles, might actually do a much better job scratching your back than I as his company provides the services that you need while I don’t. Sadly, that is not what this is all about, getting a job done well, solving something proactively and interactively. It is about gathering favours to be cashed in on later. It’s about keeping outsiders out and insiders in.

You could also see it in July 2020, with all those government contracts going to personal friends of a small circle of people in government (several mysteriously enough for the exact same amount). It’s the same thing. I am pleased that plenty of people in England are not happy with these injustices either. For injustices is what they are. Favours exchanged within a small circle of friends are injustices, certainly when public funds are involved and when getting the job done well is of no concern. It’s also happening in the US and in Canada. The Netherlands had one contract for PPE that stank and the Dutch state – not some counterpart to Jo Maugham’s Good Law Project – is pursuing the matter.

Rebecca Saxe said that just the positive effects of what she calls parochialism alone – helping our own kind – can create a massive degree of disparity. It does not require hate or negative feelings towards members of another group to cause that group to become hugely disadvantaged. All it takes is that one group has more power.

(That’s also what is so tragic about Portsmouth,)

This matches what Daniel Goldberg (attorney, historian, public health ethicist) said on Twitter on 8 June 2018) about how to tackle stigmas, namely by “addressing oppressive macrosocial power structures”.

Parochialism combined with an over-the-top sense of entitlement also explains a lot of the UK’s animosity towards the EU and the way the negotiations went. There was a strong feeling that the other members of the EU were part of a different group and a strong feeling that membership in the EU had resulted in a loss of sovereignty even though the British government has publicly admitted that no such loss had occurred. That’s part of official government documentation, yes.

Remember what I wrote about Seth Godin’s findings and Roland Imhoff’s work about how conspiracy theories come about?

It’s British exceptionalism all over again. Predominantly the English see themselves as fiercely independent and immensely different, and then use their own view of themselves and their own attitude as an excuse to distrust and reject others.

English entitlement is the story about the cake. You can’t eat it and expect to still have it and keep it. You can’t leave the EU and then demand from the EU that it continues to treat you as if you are still a member and then make that non-negotiable just like you can’t join the EU yet at the same time insist on not being a member of it. The UK has often held the EU’s decisions back.

Britain wants to feel as unique as the people who believe that Princess Diana passed away yet faked her own death and the people who insist that Elvis Presley is alive yet at the same time mourn his death. Some are convinced that the earth is flat because the planet is so huge that they cannot conceptualise its shape. They, therefore, conclude that the earth is flat and keep trying to find its edges. Some people die trying to prove that, you know.

How can you not form a highly divided country that way, if everyone has such a strong urge to want to be part of an exclusive and elusive group? It’s a form of poverty to live this way. Self-inflicted spiritual poverty.

Education has to be part of the answer. Educations must not only take place at schools, and involve ditching the ridiculous school uniforms (unless all schools start requiring the same uniforms) but also at businesses. It must included revealing people’s own intersectionality to them and make them realise that they have a lot more in common with everyone around them than they probably thought.

Against the background of current developments, I feel a duty to keep repeating what Saxe said. In-group favouritism – refusing to help those who are not part of your own group – can do great harm without there even having been any dislike of the out-group.

This probably explains why white people in the UK feel that there is no or very little racism in the UK whereas black people feel that there is and why many of the British see themselves as highly tolerant and certainly not xenophobic. They are merely so extremely focused on themselves and on protecting and favouring people in their own group that they push other people out without realising it.

Rebecca Saxe defined parochialism more or less as “at least devoting more resources to the in-group than to the out-group”. Resources do not have to be of a financial nature, but can also be for example empathy. It is conscious and explicit. If it is conscious and explicit, isn’t in-group favouritism racism, then, if the in-group is “whites”? This is also at the heart of the English class system. If you’re from a lower class you are paid less for the same work than someone from a higher class. The lowest wages are very low. That’s not an accident. That’s deliberate.

Rebecca Saxe ended up concluding that hate has a lot to do with whether people have the feeling that there is enough to go around for everyone. A sense of scarcity induces people to want to look out for “their own kind” first. In other words: inequality fosters hate.

Greater equality benefits everyone, including those in the top layers of society, English researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett found. They’re saying the same things that people like Rebecca Saxe are saying. It’s not the EU. And it’s not me, because I am not English. It’s you. You, the English, do this to yourself. Because you all want to be unicorns and you all want to claim that migrants are forcing you to be poor abused unicorns. You refuse to accept that you’re as human as everyone else on the planet. You refuse to accept that even among yourselves, you all have the same need for food, shelter and all the other things that you need (besides diamond tiaras and private cinemas and basement swimming pools). In continuing to insist that you are unicorns and must be treated with exceptional care and be granted exceptional favours, you short-change yourself. That also applied to the negotiations with the EU.

If you don’t see how this is connected to the infliction of cruelty, well, then I will have to stop by, hit you over the head with a frying pan, hand you the frying pan and ask you to prepare a meal for me, oblivious to the fact that you are bleeding from a cut caused by my frying pan.

What Saxe said in her talk also more or less matches what neuroscientist Kathleen Taylor wrote in her book “Cruelty. Human evil and the human brain”. Otherization, as Taylor called it, can be the excuse that overcomes the threshold to cruelty. Cruelty is often only considered cruelty when other people do it, certainly when they do it to your kind of people instead of to others. Most people don’t see themselves as people who are capable of cruelty. But we all are.

Rebecca Saxe concluded that hate is a natural extension of these phenomena, of feelings of scarcity leading to parochialism, and that it is not an aberration. All over the world, among widely varying groups of people of various ages, when there is a scarcity of resources and a conflict with another group, violence against that group or, more generally, harming that other group is seen as justified, as required for the own group’s survival.

(She was, in essence, also explaining how acts of terrorism come about, without explicitly saying it. Various terrorism experts have already said this out loud.)

Thankfully, from a very young age, humans also feel a strong need to cooperate and help altruistically. Toddlers will hurry over to open the door for a stranger, said Saxe, and love to play cooperative games. So to make the world a better place, we really should teach these things in schools. We should teach kids how we create disparities in the world. We should show them that we often do this without consciously setting out to do so, sometimes even without being aware of the existence of the disadvantaged group. We should open their eyes to how this can ultimately lead to hate without each of us having a clue of the role that we played in the creation of that hate. We should also provide positive antidotes. We should invite that sparkling bright and bubbly, not to mention often hilarious, former BBC news journalist over from Plum Village to talk at British schools. Write to her, teachers. She studied History & Political Thought at Cambridge University and worked at BBC’s politics news desk in London. She is now called Sister True Dedication. Her address in France is Meyrac 47120, Loubès-Bernac and the central phone number is +33 xxx xxxxxxxx.