12 Ways We Teach Each Other to Hate

 

We humans have always been a contentious sort. But now it seems we are devolving collective hate. Hate can be triggered or taught. From personal, corporate, or political agendas, we observe a widespread effort to challenge and denigrate others, and they in turn resent it.

Courtesy Uriel-Soberanes, Unsplash

Linguistics professor Deborah Tanner at Georgetown University has written a disturbing book, The Argument Culture. The thrust of her analysis of our culture is that people divide into competing camps and develop a compulsion to win arguments by criticizing and diminishing those in other camps. In discussing issues, people with differing views become considered as enemies that must be defeated.

In such wars, many tactics are used to bolster our own positions and defeat the enemy. Here are  12 ways we teach each other to hate:

 

1.    Egotism. We are egotistic and self-absorbed. What we think is more important than what others think. If others don’t agree with us, we need to let them know they are wrong, which of course they similarly respond.

2.     Absolutism. Our own views are seen as absolute and irreconcilable principles continually at war with alternative views of others, who we imagine as our enemies.

3.     Categorizing People. We assign identities to people and place them in categories. Thus, we make it more convenient to attack many people at once as members of an identity group. Divide and conquer.

4.     Polarization. We habitually think of issues of having just two sides of an argument. This inevitably polarizes the issues and creates two camps of competing enemies.

5.     Exaggeration. To justify one’s position, it helps to magnify the flaws in the positions of others, and even to denigrate their character for holding such unacceptable positions.

6.     Threatening body language. We use threatening body language in advancing our arguments with others. These include scowled faces, loud voice, punching the hand toward others (often with an object in hand), and pounding the arm up and down. We “get in their face.”

7.     Character assassination. The accuser assumes a false mantle of virtue signaling, which in turn is not appreciated by those accused of being morally deficient.

8.     Assuming victimhood.  Claiming unfair treatment allows us to accuse others of oppression and thus assign to them guilt and shame. Name calling is the linguistic first choice of weaponry. Another weapon is to recall past abuse, even when such abuse no longer occurs. Next, current examples of presumed abuse are magnified and harped upon. In that way, opponents become irredeemable. Those accused of creating victims in turn come to hate their attackers.

9.     Excuse making. A basic reason for assuming victim status is that it provides excuses. We don’t have to take responsibility for any of our own missteps that contributed to our misfortune. We save face by blaming others, and thereby create another reason to hate them. I explore all this in my book, Blame Game, How to Win It.

10.  Demanding equity. We expect equity, not just the equal opportunity of a level playing field. We assume everyone is equally entitled, irrespective of effort, education, or ability. Thus, when others deny us equity, we hate them for being unfair.

11.  Revenge. Sometimes, we create enemies out of jealousy or desire for revenge over perceived imposed inequity.

12.  Cancel culture. We censor or otherwise “cancel” others, which of course generates reciprocal hate.

 

All this shreds the fabric of social harmony. It creates resentment and anger that otherwise would not occur. It becomes self-perpetuating. I fear our current situation will only feed upon itself and make things worse. Is this the price are willing to pay to win arguments?

.

How Can a Country Learn from Its Erased Past?

I am reading a book about George Washington (Washington’s End) that is highly relevant today. Near the end of his first term, George decided he did not want to run for re-election. U.S. anarchists, inspired by the French revolution’s “reign of terror,” led Washington to conclude that Americans were unworthy of the government he and the other founders had created for them. Washington just wanted to get away from the rabble rousers and retire to his farm to enjoy his wealth. Then, as now, we were a country bitterly divided. Then, as now, large numbers of citizens wanted to cancel the culture of the American revolution. Jefferson convinced George that nobody else could hold our country together.

Today, Black Lives Matter and Antifa anarchists pose a similar test of citizen worthiness. Will we have the courage to stand up to those who threaten to “burn it all down” if we don’t give them what they want? Are we going to vote to sustain a government that gives us opportunity to care for ourselves or to exchange our freedom for a government that we hope will be our nanny?

Today’s voters are being tested for their worthiness. Their response seems to prefer a new “progressive” government to be our nanny. Our new government is spending money we don’t have to make life easier and better for everyone. The goal even includes providing public services to everyone outside our country if they will just come through our open borders. With that all that largess comes control, expressed in terms of cancel culture and political correctness.

Donald Trump, like Washington, could have just retired and enjoyed his wealth. But, like Washington, he sought an onerous second term in the hope he could save the country from destruction from within. Unlike Washington, Trump was rejected by the public. He faces great opposition from globalists who think it is wrong to put America first, that America is in fact a flawed and evil country.

We are supposed to learn from history, and this present generation has concluded that this history only shows all that was wrong with this country. By erasing this history, we eliminate the chance to appreciate how we have corrected so many of our past flaws. Canceled history prevents future generations from making the same mistakes. Canceled history prevents us from knowing what was good and right about our founding. We are told to begin anew. Will this fresh start prevent us from making new mistakes?

School systems throughout the U.S. have been negligent in teaching U.S. government philosophy and history. Students are being taught utopian Marxist ideas. Students are not being taught about the good things this country has done. I remember asking my grandson what he learned about WWII in his public high school. He said they only spent one class period on that. Most of the U.S. history instruction dealt with U.S. barbarism in the Vietnam war.

Decades ago, schools used to have civics courses that taught the philosophy and values of our founding and the God-given rights specified in the U.S. Constitution. Now, we have enemies of the Constitution. Freedom of speech is most obviously under attack. If you say things that are not politically correct, you may well be shunned and canceled. Book and magazine publishers are selectively rejecting manuscripts that express unpopular ideas. Conformism is the new standard not only for speech but general behavior as well. We are being herded like sheep into behaving the way our betters require. Communist China is becoming our new model for personal behavior.

The New York Times is sponsoring a new U.S. history curriculum called the 1619 project that asserts that the U.S. was founded as a systemically racist country. The evidence presented is that in 1619, a ship appeared near point comfort, a coastal port in the English colony of Virginia that carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed. On the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, the Times says it is finally time to tell our story truthfully. Of course, the Times does not mention that this is not the whole truth of our history. The new curriculum aims to erase the whole truth of our history.

I just had a book published on truthfulness (Realville. How to Get Real in an Unreal World). We surely do live in an unreal world, dominated by lies, cheating, denial, delusion, deception, withholding, and pretense. All these forms of untruthfulness are being expressed by political activists who promote the agenda that all our history was bad and therefore needs to be erased. Worse yet, the cancellation has the hidden agenda of advancing control over us. It seems to be working as the activists intend.