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Causes of the Contemporary Crises in U.S. Politics

“Causes of the Contemporary Crisis in U.S. Politics”

Peter G. Prontzos

The frustration, polarization, and anger that now engulfs the U.S. political system – exemplified by the attack on Congress on January 6, 2021 in a brazen attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election – is the most serious domestic crisis since the Civil War. The roots of this turmoil are complex, but the most important factors are the economic changes in the last 50 years that underlie this development. 

This paper will first describe some of the major economic, political, and cultural developments that occurred as a result of the neoliberal wave that began in the 1980s, and the resulting increase in the power of large corporations. It will then consider how such changes have contributed to the growth of this extremism, as well as the psychological factors that underlie it. The final section will offer suggestions on how to create a more equitable, fair, and democratic society, which is essential if the U.S. is to significantly reduce the threats to the American people and democracy itself. 

Perhaps the most important changes began in the 1950s, as the power of corporations began to increase relative to the people as a whole and to workers in particular. The first major mention of this shift was President Eisenhower’s “Farewell Speech” in 1961, when he warned that Americans: “…must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” 1

Another milestone was the creation of the Trilateral Commission by David Rockefeller in 1973, which claimed that there was a “crisis of democracy”. As Noam Chomsky observed, the Commission claimed that this “crisis”: 

…resulted from the efforts of previously marginalized sectors of the population to organize and press their demands, thereby creating an overload that prevents the democratic process from functioning properly. In earlier times, “Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers,” so the American rapporteur, Samuel Huntington of Harvard University, reflected. In that period there was no crisis of democracy, but in the 1960s, the crisis developed and reached serious proportions. The study therefore urged more “moderation in democracy” to mitigate the excess of democracy[!] and overcome the crisis.  

Putting it in plain terms, the general public must be reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience, and driven from the arena of political debate and action, if democracy is to survive. 2

This effort was manifested primarily by increasing corporate power in a number of areas: in the workplace (e.g. destroying unions), in the economy, (e.g. “free trade” and globalization), and in the political sphere (such as putting more corporate allies into governments at all levels in the legislative, judicial, and executive branches; and gerrymandering electoral districts to favour Republican candidates). 

One telling (and predictable) result which directly benefitted the economic elites: “Under Dwight Eisenhower, top earners were taxed at 91 percent; in 2015 it was 40 percent.” 3

Not surprisingly, inequality has continued to increase from the 1970s on. As Senator Bernie Sanders has written regarding the effects of these changes: 

“…60 percent of our people live paycheck to paycheck – and real inflation-adjusted wages have not gone up for fifty years. Some 85 million of us are uninsured or underinsured, and sixty thousand die each year because they don’t get the medical care they need. We have the highest child poverty rate of almost any major country on earth…and our childcare system is a disaster. Higher education is increasingly unaffordable…Millions of seniors lack the resources to heat their homes in the winter or buy the prescription drugs they need.” 

 “Meanwhile, the richest three billionaires own, “more wealth than the bottom half of our society – 165 million people. Today, the top 1 percent owns more wealth than the bottom 92 percent and the CEOs of major corporations earn four hundred times what their employees make.” 

… 

“An estimated 112 million (44 percent) American adults are struggling to pay for health care…Over the past year, the percentage of Americans who report skipping needed care due to cost has increased to 30 percent.” One result is that, “The average American now lives six years less than the average Norwegian and South Korean…” 

… 

“Between 1979 and 2020, worker productivity increased by 61.8 percent, while worker pay increased by just 17 percent. 

… 

“…over the past forty-seven years $50 trillion in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1 percent…” 4 

Ironically, a major factor which led to the increase in power of the corporate class was the 14th Amendment to the Constitution – which was passed in 1868 and which was designed to provide civil rights to former slaves. It said that states were forbidden from depriving, “…any person of life, liberty, or property, without the due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” 

However, some Supreme Court rulings have given corporations “rights” that were intended for people, such as in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, which upheld the “right” of corporations to make unlimited political expenditures under the First Amendment’s clause to protect a person’s freedom of speech. 

At a more personal level, Bruce Alexander (SFU) has pointed out how such an increasingly corporate-driven economy: 

“…breaks down every traditional form of social cohesion…creating a kind of dislocation or poverty of the spirit that draws people into addiction and other psychological problems.”

Alexander also explains that: 

To the degree that civilizations approximate, “a free-market society, dislocation is not the pathological state of a few but the general condition. Because the expanding reach of free-market economics engulfs ever more aspects of life, dislocation is increasing.” Addiction, he adds, “is neither a disease nor a moral failure, but a narrowly focused lifestyle that functions as a meagre substitute for people who desperately lack psychosocial integration.” 5

Such a system both creates pain and deflects the blame. There are many examples of how this dysfunctional and unfair this increasingly unequal society is: 

Across the country, red states are poorer and have more teen mothers, more divorces, worse health, more obesity, more trauma-related deaths, more low-birth-weight babies, and lower school enrollment. On average, people in red states die five years earlier than people in blue states. 6

Perhaps the most striking example of this phenomenon is what have been termed, “deaths of despair”, a term devised by Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton. The American Council on Science and Health defines deaths of despair as those due to suicide, overdoses, and alcoholic liver diseases, with contributions from the cardiovascular effects of rising obesity. Bruce Bower writes:

Since the 1990s, mortality had risen sharply among middle-aged, non-Hispanic white people, especially those without a college degree…

White, working-class people ages 45 to 54 were drinking themselves to death with alcohol, accidentally overdosing on opioids and other drugs, and killing themselves, often by shooting or hanging. Vanishing jobs, disintegrating families and other social stressors had unleashed a rising tide of fatal despair…

“The most meaningful dividing line [for being at risk of deaths of despair] is whether or not you have a four-year college degree,” Deaton says.7

Specifically, “Drug overdose deaths have risen fivefold over the past 2 decades. In 2021, 106,699 deaths occurred.” 8

 (That toll is twice as many as the number of Americans who died during the U.S. war in Vietnam).

And according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, by 2021, “More than one million people have died since 1999 from a drug overdose.”9

 The CDC reported that, in 2021 alone, “there were an estimated 107,622 drug overdose deaths in the United States…” 10, more than 36 times the number of people killed on September 11.  

Rates of deaths of despair among middle-aged U.S. adults

T. Tibbitts

            An analysis of national data from 1992 to 2017 for adults ages 45 to 54 reveals an increasing risk of alcohol, drug and suicide mortality among those without college degrees, whether Black (orange line) or white (red line). For reasons that are not yet clear, Black college graduates (dark blue line) had the lowest rates of deaths of despair in this statistical comparison. 11

 These deaths disproportionately impact Caucasian males without a college degree. Anger, despair, and toxic “masculinity” are other major problems. As the Washington Post reported: 

“Males are overwhelmingly responsible for violence in the United States, according to the most recent crime data published by the FBI. They committed about 80 percent of all reported violent crimes in the country in 2020, including 87 percent of homicides.”

Caucasian men are six times as likely to die by suicide as other Americans. 12

The sources of such problems are examined in Gabor Maté’s, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture. Dr. Maté is a physician who, among other endeavors, spent years in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, Canada, working with people addicted to various drugs. His new book shows how so much of what is generally considered “normal” and even healthy in modern society is both unconscious and actually harmful. 13 As I wrote in the CCPA Monitor:

         Maté defines our “culture” as: “the entire context of social structures, belief systems, assumptions, and values that surround us and necessarily pervade every aspect of our lives.” 

     His book examines what exactly is “toxic” about our societies, and he stresses that the global health problems that we face, such as, “burgeoning stress, inequality, and climate catastrophe” have been created by a culture of “globalized capitalism” that condemns countless numbers of human beings, “to suffer illness born of stress, ignorance, inequality, environmental degradation, climate change, poverty, and social isolation.” 

       “Of course, it’s not just about ourselves. Maté stresses that we must work to create a society which, among other needs, prioritizes the health of infants and children, e.g. one that outlaws spanking and makes sure that no child goes hungry or lacks medical care, that their feelings are treated with respect, and so on. As important as these practices are in themselves, Maté emphasizes that they have profound social and political consequences as well: “…the harsher the parenting people were exposed to as young children, the more prone they become to support authoritarian or aggressive policies, such as foreign wars, punitive laws, and the death penalty.” 14

Political socialization, for instance, usually begins in the home. George Lakoff (Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley) has shown that children whose parents are more nurturing tend to be more liberal, empathetic, and open-minded – and more likely to use empathy as their moral foundation. Children raised with a traditional “strict father” style of parenting tend to be more conservative, individualistic, authoritarian, and patriarchal – and see morality as being based on obedience.   

The conservative and progressive worldviews dividing the United States can most readily be understood in terms of moral worldviews that are encapsulated in two very different common forms of family life: The Nurturant Parent family (progressive) and the Strict Father family (conservative). 

What do social issues and the politics have to do with the family? We are first governed in our families, and so we grow up understanding governing institutions in terms of the governing systems of families. 

In the strict father family, father knows best. He knows right from wrong and has the ultimate authority to make sure his children and his spouse do what he says, which is taken to be what is right. Many conservative spouses accept this worldview, uphold the father’s authority, and are strict in those realms of family life that they are in charge of. When his children disobey, it is his moral duty to punish them painfully enough so that, to avoid punishment, they will obey him (do what is right) and not just do what feels good. Through physical discipline they are supposed to become disciplined, internally strong, and able to prosper in the external world. What if they don’t prosper? That means they are not disciplined, and therefore cannot be moral, and so deserve their poverty. This reasoning shows up in conservative politics in which the poor are seen as lazy and undeserving, and the rich as deserving their wealth. Responsibility is thus taken to be personal responsibility not social responsibility. What you become is only up to you; society has nothing to do with it. You are responsible for yourself, not for others — who are responsible for themselves. 15 

Moreover, in his Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) Study, Dr. Vincent Felitti found that the more trauma that a child has experienced, the more troubled that child (and that adult) would be. 16

This finding is compatible with the work of Dr. Arthur Janov (e.g. Primal Healing), whose work shows how a child can be damaged, (even in the womb!) in a toxic environment, e.g. poverty, abuse, stress, pollution, etc.)

It appears, however, that both liberals and conservatives are equally adept at ignoring “inconvenient truths” when making political decisions.  We all have limitations, biases, and distortions that shape our world-views. These tendencies are, for the most part, automatic and unconscious, such as “motivated reasoning” – when our thinking is biased to produce whatever conclusion we want to believe. 

For his part, Albert Einstein was more than just the most famous physicist in the 20th century. He was also an astute observer of human nature, and he had a deep understanding of the importance of social and economic factors in shaping human consciousness. In 1949, he wrote that:  

     …the personality that finally emerges is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which he grows up, by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of particular types of behavior. The abstract concept “society” means to the individual human being the sum total of his direct and indirect relations to his contemporaries and to all the people of earlier generations. The individual…depends so much upon society—in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence—that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society. It is “society” which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought…” 17

Social problems, such as hopelessness, anger, and poor health, are much worse because of the high levels of poverty and inequality in American society. This phenomenon is explored in, The Inner Level, where Wilkinson and Pickett explain that, “…inequality – the large income gaps between rich and poor, damage us all. Almost daily we see new reports of rising levels of mental illness, school shootings, depression and self-harm.” 18

They also point out that greater inequality increases the mental health of the rich as well as the working class.

Gender is also a vital factor in understanding these phenomena. For instance, “The suicide rate among males in 2020 was 4 times higher than the rate among females. 19  

More than half of people who commit suicide do not have mental health conditions. For many, negative environmental and societal conditions, e.g. lack of medical care, low wages, poverty, and the need for housing contribute to stress that may increase suicide attempts, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 20  

The CDC reported that, “there were an estimated 107,622 drug overdose deaths in the United States during 2021…” 21, more than 36 times the number of people killed on September 11.  

Increasing inequality and economic distress for the majority of Americans is directly related to government policies which have made the rich even richer at the expense of the majority. A clear example is the extremely low federal minimum wage: $7.25 an hour – unchanged since 2009! On the other hand, corporate taxes in 2017 were reduced from 35 percent to 21 percent – a bonus of $1.5 trillion in the first year alone. As Newsweek observed: “Trump’s Tax Cuts Didn’t Benefit U.S. Workers, Made Rich Companies Richer”. 22  

In 2019, tax cuts for top U.S. banks alone totalled $32 billion. 

In 2020, while 22 million U.S. workers lost their jobs in March and April due to the pandemic, U.S. billionaires increased their cumulative wealth by $282 billion! 

Not surprisingly, an NPR poll found that 46% of households report facing “serious financial pain”.23 Today, millennials are the first generation since the Great Depression who are worse off than their parents. 

Authoritarian leaders use such emotions as anger and despair to their advantage. That explains why Tr$mp has said things like: “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” 24

 “Divide and conquer” is one of the oldest methods to seize and maintain political power. The former President and most Republicans in Congress have been trying to distract Americans from the real causes of their anger by the use of scapegoats: Mexican immigrants are, “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Our nation is victim of an “invasion” by “caravans” of “vermin” from “s**t-hole” countries and we must “build the wall” to keep them out. Some of the white supremacists and neo-nazis at Charlottesville were “fine people”. Democrats are Marxists who engage in “witch hunts”. And so on, ad nauseum. 

In general, these authoritarians:

– see the world as dangerous

– are conservative (rate high on Fascism-scale)

– had difficult childhoods

– identify with powerful figures

– are tribal

– feel like victims

– feel threatened

 80% of Tr$mp voters “view the world as a dangerous place” and “feel economic despair.”

The most authoritarian Republicans are mostly Tr$mp supporters.

And: “The space for thoughtful discussion is being hollowed out by social media forums that reward the loudest voice and the most extreme attitude.” 25

Possible Solutions

Tribal authoritarians are often racist and patriarchal, but, as Nancy Fraser points out, the bourgeois solution is not, “to abolish social hierarchy but to ‘diversify’ it, ‘empowering talented’ women, people of color, and sexual minorities to rise to the top. And that ideal was inherently class specific: geared to ensuring that ‘deserving” individuals from “underrepresented groups could attain positions and pay on a par with the straight white men…” 26

Both the corporate elite and the U.S. military would be even more effective if they used the most qualified people, regardless of their identity. For example, U.S. government lies to the United Nations about the non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq was probably more convincing because it was given by General Colin Powell, an African-American.

 Then there is this example of shameless U.S. Air Force propaganda:

“Dr. King would be proud to see our Global Strike team—comprised of airmen, civilians and contractors from every race, creed, background and religion—standing side-by-side ensuring the most powerful weapons in the US arsenal remain the credible bedrock of our national defense…Our team must overlook our differences to ensure perfection as we maintain and operate our weapon systems.”

“From a U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command post to commemorate Martin Luther King Day, an American holiday in honour of one of its most committed proponents of nonviolence and anti-militarism. 27

Dr. King, of course, denounced the violence of the U.S. military, opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam, and said that the United States was, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” 28

The problems with the focus on “race” is extremely problematic.

First of all, “The Concept of “Race” Is a Lie”. That is the title of an essay that I wrote in, Scientific American. In brief, I noted that the American Society of Human Genetics, the largest professional organization of scientists in the field, explained that:

“The science of genetics demonstrates that humans cannot be divided into biologically distinct subcategories”; and it “challenges the traditional concept of different races of humans as biologically separate and distinct. This is validated by many decades of research.” In other words, “race itself is a social construct,” with no biological basis. 29

 (Note: using terms like “black” and “white” is problematic for several reasons. After all, we no longer call Asians “yellow people” or describe Native Americans as “redskins”. Worse, such words tend to reinforce the false belief that there is a clear line that divides people into different “races”. That term is a colonial construct and is rejected by the overwhelming majority of geneticists and anthropologists. It is more accurate to use the word “ethnicity” instead of “race”).

The answer to social problems, then, is NOT the tribalism of “identity politics” – the tendency of people to identify primarily with “their kind” – whichever group that is – rather than humanity as a whole. 

 But the idea of paying “reparations” to the descendants of slaves in the United States is extremely problematic for many other reasons. 

First, there would be the difficult problem of deciding exactly how much African-Americans in general should receive. 

Then there is the question of deciding how much each individual should get. For instance, if one person has 100% African DNA, do they get four times as much as somebody with only 25%? And if it’s only 12.5%? How about a person whose father arrived after slavery ended and whose genome contains 50% African DNA – Barack Obama, for example? 

Third, if the descendants of slaves are entitled to reparations for past horrors, what about Native Americans, who experienced genocide for hundreds of years? 

A fourth question: what would be the political ramifications of this narrow and convoluted approach? Tens of millions of working-class people will be angry about having to pay for an evil that hasn’t existed for over 150 years and for which they have no personal responsibility. Indeed, there are tens of millions of Americans whose ancestors arrived in the United States after slavery was abolished. 

And the first group that would try to weaponize reparations? The KKK. 

You don’t have to be a prophetess like Cassandra to foresee how such resentment would translate into even more virulent racism and “white nationalism” – which would lead to more domestic terrorism. As FBI director Chris Wray explained: “racially motivated violent extremists, such as white supremacists, have been responsible for the most lethal attacks in the U.S. in recent years.” 30 

Racism and violence are rising for a number of reasons, and as we’ve seen, the most important ones are the growing stress and alienation resulting from growing social and economic inequality. Anger is then often redirected to various scapegoats, encouraged by many on the Right.  

Fortunately, there is an approach which would be more humane, inclusive, and a smarter way to address systemic racism than the divisive approach of reparations. I also believe that it would win the support of the majority of Americans – and in doing so, it would also reduce the amount of anger amongst the population.  

When the United States was founded, one of the key elements of the new republic was the motto, “E Pluribus Unum” – “from many, One.” It was more of an ideal than a reality, and slavery was the most blatant example. 

The end of slavery did not, of course, end racism against African-Americans, so a century later it took a broad-based Civil Rights movement to eliminate some of the more obvious forms of discrimination, such as “whites only” drinking fountains and school segregation. 

The uprisings following the torture and murder of George Floyd sought to eliminate systemic racism once and for all – and the unprecedented speed and depth of these reactions signify that most Americans are finally supportive of real progress. 

In this context, it is important to remember that racism was also inflicted on immigrants, and not only from places like Latin America and China. Even Europeans – from countries such as Germany, Ireland, and Greece (like my grandparents) – were sometimes met with racist diatribes and even violence. President Woodrow Wilson was, by the dawn of the 1920s, arresting and deporting Eastern European and Italian immigrants. U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry were imprisoned in detention camps during the Second World War.  

As evil as these actions were, there was another people who were treated even worse – Native Americans. The genocide inflicted on the First Peoples of the Americas resulted in a population decline from approximately 10 million when Columbus arrived, to only a quarter-million at the end of the “Indian Wars” – a rate of genocide over 97%. 31

This slaughter was “justified” as “manifest destiny” – the belief that “white” Americans were given a mandate from God to take over the continent.  

Mexicans were also victims of this “divine” colonialism. Their territory was seized, from Texas to California, and many were slaughtered in the process. For instance, three hundred Mexicans were murdered in Texas in 1915 and 1916 alone, and tens of thousands of these “aliens” were sterilized in a mass eugenics program. 32 

George Lakoff argues that the best way to approach this problem is to: 

“Give up identity politics. No more women’s issues, black issues, Latino issues. Their issues are all real, and need public discussion. But they all fall under freedom issues, human issues. And address poor whites! Appalachian and rust belt whites deserve your attention as much as anyone else. Don’t surrender their fate to Trump, who will just increase their suffering.” 33

In other words, the most effective way for people of good will to combat this atmosphere of lies and hate is to focus on the real problems facing the majority of Americans – which are primarily about economic class – and on inclusive solutions. This approach has a deep history, especially among African-American intellectuals, who, for at least a hundred years, have argued for the intersection of ethnicity and class. Leaders from W.E.B. Du Bois to Jesse Jackson, “added an incisive critique of how race and class intersected in American society and insisted that the only way to defeat racism was through cross-racial working-class solidarity.” 34  

Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were democratic Socialists who moved away from a focus primarily on the scourge of racism to a broader critique that included an economic system which exploited the majority of Americans – the working class – regardless of ethnicity. King felt that it was necessary to address poverty and inequality in addition to racism in order to make progress on all these fronts, and that a broad program would appeal to a wider constituency than only focusing on civil rights. 

“A reckoning with racism, he insisted, was impossible without radically redistributing wealth and, by extension, power in American society…For him, race, class, and economic empowerment were therefore all intertwined”. 35 This intersectional egalitarianism was at the core of King’s, “Poor People’s Campaign”. 

King was assassinated while helping striking sanitation workers in Memphis. 

His perspective is even more relevant today, especially in the debate about reparations. As we have seen, there are some very serious problems with any program that tries to remedy this evil in a narrow manner. 

Professor Adolph Reed, an African-American scholar and professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, sees the emphasis on race-based politics as a dead-end. In his view, the problems now bedeviling America — such as wealth inequality, police brutality, and mass incarceration — hurt people of color most, but they also hurt large numbers of working-class and poor Americans of all ethnicities. 36

What is the best way to begin to address all of these problems? 

First, Congress would issue an apology for slavery and for the genocide of First Nations. 

Second, Congress would enact policies based not on ancestry, but on real economic need in the present. This approach would benefit the great majority of Americans – and especially African Americans, Latino, and Native American people, who on average have less family wealth. Any program which is based on people’s needs rather than “identity” will especially benefit those who are disadvantaged as a result of past and present discrimination. 

At the same time, all Americans who are affected by economic inequality, no matter what their ethnicity, will be better off. Fewer veterans will be homeless or commit suicide. Tens of millions of working people will benefit when the federal minimum wage is raised to a living wage, at least $20 an hour. 

This approach will also be seen as fair by most people. 

There is a precedent for such a bold vision: the New Deal. In the midst of the worst economic crisis in United States history, President Franklin D. Roosevelt enacted work programs, the Tennessee Valley Authority, social security, and other measures to improve the lives of average Americans. 

Likewise, a “Green New Deal” would create millions of well- paying jobs in order to finally address the existential danger of the climate crisis.

Free college education is another progressive option. 

Making health care available to everyone is not only the humane thing to do, it will actually lower overall costs, which are about 50% higher per capita than in countries like Canada and France. Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman notes that every dollar invested in children’s well-being results in huge savings of future costs (due to ill health, addiction, crime, and so on). He adds that: “The highest rate of return in early childhood development comes from investing as early as possible, from birth through age five, in disadvantaged families.” 37 

One political advantage of all of these ideas is that they are race-neutral: They disproportionately help African-Americans and other ethnic minorities because the policies are economically targeted. And economic-based policies are much more politically feasible than race-based policies. Polls show, for example, that slavery reparations are deeply unpopular. 38 So, “while racial disparities in economic insecurity are apparent…income is an even greater predictor of financial pain, with households earning under $30,000 per year roughly three to four times as likely as those earning over $100,000 annually to have experienced material hardship during the pandemic.” 39  

Such programs will be cost-effective in the long run, who will pay for these them in the short term? The answer: those who can best afford to – primarily wealthy corporations and individuals. Congress could start by eliminating the corporate tax cuts which, for example, resulted in at least $1.6 billion windfall for Walmart in just the first three quarters of 2018. 40  

Programs such as these will not only improve the lives of the majority of Americans, but they will do so in a way that deals effectively with such challenges as racism, poverty, the climate crisis – while reducing the division, anger, and violence that are a growing threat to democracy. Such measures are critical, since, “…one-third of Republicans support violence as a means to save the country, compared with 22% of independents and 13% of Democrats…More specifically, Republicans who have favorable views of Donald Trump were found to be “nearly three times as likely as Republicans who have unfavorable views of Trump” to support political violence.” 41

 For all these reasons and more, it is not an exaggeration to say that American democracy is facing its greatest challenge since the Civil War.

In 1955, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein urged us, above all, to “Remember your humanity”. To the extent that the people of the United States do so, they will create a better America for everyone. 42

References

1. Dwight Eisenhower. “Farewell Address”. [https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/research/online-documents/farewell-address/1961-01-17-press-release.pdf]

2. Noam Chomsky. Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies. South End Press. (Boston) 1989.

3. Arlie Russell Hochschild. Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New Press. (New York) 2016.

4. Bernie Sanders. It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism. Crown. (New York) 2023.

5. Bruce K. Alexander. The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit. Oxford. (New York) 2008.

6. Hochschild, op. cit.

7. Bruce Bower. “‘Deaths of despair’ are rising. It’s time to define despair”. Science News. 2 Nov. 2020. [https://www.sciencenews.org/article/deaths-of-despair-depression-mental-health-covid-19-pandemic]

8. Center for Disease Control. [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db457.htm#section_1]

9. Center for Disease Control. “Drug Overdose Deaths Remained High in 2021”. [https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/deaths/index.html]

10. CDC. 11 May 2022. “U.S. Overdose Deaths In 2021 Increased Half as Much as in 2020 – But Are Still Up 15%” [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/202205.htm]

11. Anne Case and Angus Deaton. Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Princeton UP (Princeton) 2020.

12. Mark Berman, Lenny Bernstein, Dan Keating, Andrew Ba Tran and Artur Galocha. “The staggering scope of U.S. gun deaths goes far beyond mass shootings.” Washington Post. 8 July 2022. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2022/gun-deaths-per-year-usa]

13. Gabor Maté (with Daniel Maté). The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture. Knopf Canada. (Toronto) 2022.

14. Peter G. Prontzos. “Review: What is Normal?” CCPA Monitor. Spring 2024. [https://policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/publications/National%20Office/2024/04/CCPA%20Monitor%20Spring%202024%20WEB.pdf]

15. George Lakoff. “Understanding Trump. 23 July 2016. [https://george-lakoff.com/2016/07/23/understanding-trump-2] 

16. Prontzos, op. cit.

17. Albert Einstein. “Why Socialism?” Monthly Review. May 2009. [https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism] 

18. Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. The Inner Level. Penguin. (London) 2018.

19. CDC. “Suicide Data and Statistics”. [https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/suicide-data-statistics.html]. 

20. Sabrina Tavernise. “U.S. Suicide Rate Surges to a 30-Year High”. NY Times. [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/health/us-suicide-rate-surges-to-a-30-year-high.html]

21. CDC. “U.S. Overdose Deaths In 2021 Increased Half as Much as in 2020 – But Are Still Up 15%.” [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/202205.htm]

22. “Trump’s Tax Cuts Didn’t Benefit U.S. Workers, Made Rich Companies Richer”. Newsweek. [https://www.newsweek.com/republican-tax-cuts-trump-wage-increases-879800] 

23. ‘I Try So Hard Not To Cry’: Nearly Half Of U.S. Households Face A Financial Crisis. NPR. 10 Sept. 2020. [https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/09/10/910724801/overview-of-poll-data-on-pandemics-damage] 

24. Charles Homans. “Donald Trump Has Never Sounded Like This.” N.Y. Times. 27 April 2024. [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/27/magazine/trump-rallies-rhetoric.html]

25. “Who’s drawn to fascism? Postwar study of authoritarianism makes a comeback.” CBC Ideas. 24 October 2022. [https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/who-s-drawn-to-fascism-postwar-study-of-authoritarianism-makes-a-comeback-1.6403074]

26. Nancy Fraser. “Trumpism: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump—and Beyond.” American Affairs. (Winter 2017) [https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/progressive-neoliberalism-trump-beyond/]

27. “2013 Year in Review: USA”. Georgia Straight [https://www.straight.com/life/551821/2013-year-review-usa]

28. Viet Thanh Nguyen. “The MLK Speech We Need Today Is Not the One We Remember Most.” Time. 17 Jan. 2019. [https://time.com/55054

29. Peter G. Prontzos. “The Concept of Race is a Lie: Even the Ancient Greeks knew it”. 14 May 2019. Scientific American. [https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-concept-of-race-is-a-lie]

30. Eric Tucker and Ben Fox. “FBI director says antifa is an ideology, not an organization.” Associated Press. 17 September 2020 [https://apnews.com/bdd3b6078e9efadcfcd0be4b65f2362e]

31. Michael Smith, David. “Counting the Dead: Estimating the Loss of Life in the Indigenous Holocaust, 1492–Present” (PDF). Southeast Oklahoma State University.

32. David Dorado Romo. “Massacre, Look to the Long Legacy of Anti-Mexican Violence at the Border”. Texas Observer. 9 Aug. 2019. [https://www.texasobserver.org/to-understand-the-el-paso-massacre-look-to-the-long-legacy-of-anti-mexican-violence-at-the-border] 

33. George Lakoff. “Understanding Trump”. University of Chicago Press. August 2016. [https://press.uchicago.edu/books/excerpt/2016/lakoff_trump.html]

34.  Sylvie Laurent. “Martin Luther King and the Other America.” The Nation. [https://www.thenation.com/article/martin-luther-king-and-the-other-america-sylvie-laurent-book-review] 

35. Ibid. 

36. Michael Powell. “A Black Marxist Scholar Wanted to Talk About Race. It Ignited a Fury.” N.Y. Times. 14 Aug. 2020. [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/us/adolph-reed-controversy.html] 

37. Heckman: Invest in Early Childhood Development: Reduce Deficits, Strengthen the Economy. [https://heckmanequation.org/resource/invest-in-early-childhood-development-reduce-deficits-strengthen-the-economy] 

38. “How to Close the Racial Wealth Gap: A new online calculator has a winner: Baby bonds.” NY Times. 7 Aug. 2019. [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/opinion/baby-bonds-booker-race.html] 

39. Kenny Stancil. “Survey Shows Nearly Half in US Suffering Serious Economic Hardship–and Situation ‘Going to Get Worse”. Common Dreams.11 Sept. 2020.  [https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/11/survey-shows-nearly-half-us-suffering-serious-economic-hardship-and-situation-going] 

40. Jim Tankersley. “Trump’s Tax Cut One Year Later: What Happened?” N.Y. Times. 27 Dec. 2018.  [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/us/politics/trump-tax-cuts-jobs-act.html] 

41. Ashley Lopez. “More Americans say they support political violence ahead of the 2024 election”. NPR. 25 Oct. 2023. [https://www.npr.org/2023/10/25/1208373493/political-violence-democracy-2024-presidential-election-extremism] 

42. “The Russell-Einstein Manifesto”. [https://pugwash.org/1955/07/09/statement-manifesto/]

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The Roots of Authoritarianism in the 21st Century – Part 3

by Peter Prontzos

Einstein was right (again!) when he wrote:

“…the personality…is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which he grows up…The individual…depends so much upon society—in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence—that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society. It is “society” which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought.”

Indeed, the power of one’s culture is so profound – and subtle – that it can even reorganize the neural pathways in our brain. As Montreal neuroscientist Michael Meaney explains: “…the development of an individual is an active process of adaptation that occurs within a social and economic context,” e.g. poverty increases maternal distress and poor parenting, which then may lead to lower “cognitive outcomes” for children. And other studies have shown that “lower general intelligence in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology [emphasis added].

Wilhelm Reich, in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, was among the first to point out that repressed, unfulfilled, and angry people are more disposed to violence and authoritarianism. Eric Fromm, who, like Reich, escaped from Nazi Germany, viewed authoritarian childhoods as likely to create adults who see obedience as the best way to win the approval of father figures in power, who, “…offered the atomized individual a new refuge and security. These systems are the culmination of alienation.”

One doesn’t have to be a Marxist to agree that, overall, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” Marx is not saying that ideas do not matter, only that the primary determinants of our worldviews are the concrete conditions of our existence. Our views are different than those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors because the world we live in is so dissimilar. So even though we are the most social and empathic animals, those central emotions are weakened because, neoiberal ideology promotes, free market capitalism is one of the most powerful of empathy-reducing belief systems, especially as manifested in cultures like the United States.

Social psychologists like Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo  of the Stanford Prison Experiment pioneered our understanding of just how powerful our social situations can be – even stronger than one’s individual disposition. The corporate media are a major factor in the construction of both the social unconscious and political ideologies. One reason for their influence, as Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman notes, is that “people tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory – and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media.”

Powerful and wealthy elites tend to control what is taught in schools and, more than ever, in the mass media. The corporate media give us a very biased view of reality. As Einstein noted:

“…private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions…”

A dramatic example was provided after the attacks on September 11, when the major U.S. media blindly went along with the obvious lies of the Bush regime as it carried out a vast propaganda campaign to get public support for two illegal wars. A current example of media manipulation is the lie that Iran has not lived up to its treaty obligations regarding nuclear weapons. A related problem is the fact that the corporate media almost never mention the one country in the Middle East that does have nuclear bombs – Israel.

These examples are only a few of the many ways in which our society and culture can determine our thoughts, feelings, and behavior.

In my next post, I’ll provide a conclusion to this essay.

 

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The Roots of Authoritarianism in the 21st Century – Part 1

by Peter Prontzos

The rise of authoritarian movements and leaders around the world, from the Philippines to India to the United States, is one of the most dangerous developments in modern times. Not only are they anti-democratic and often xenophobic, but they are one more significant obstacle to dealing with such other dangers as the climate crisis and war.

This danger is not trivial: a 2018 report by the democracy watchdog group Freedom House suggests that…”democracy is facing its ‘most serious crises in decades.’ Seventy-one countries experienced net declines in the guarantee of political and civil rights.” And this is not just an aberration. “For the 12th consecutive year, global freedom declined. Since 2006, 113 countries have reduced their commitments to individual and collective freedom.”

“France, the Netherlands, Britain and the United States have experienced the rise of extremist groups and rising intolerance toward ethnic minorities and immigrants. Germany and Italy have seen a resurgence of neo-fascism. Systematic measures to weaken the rule of law, attempts to eradicate judicial independence, curtail civil liberties, restrict voting rights and intimidate journalists have occurred in Poland, Hungary, Turkey and the United States.”

“The Great Recession of 2008 was the social and economic context for the emergence of contemporary autocracy in Europe and the United States. The reaction to the recession…reflects what Harvard economist Dani Rodrik calls the, “political trilemma of the global economy”: the incompatibility between democracy, national [self-]determination and economic globalization. Right-wing extremists were able to effectively link job loss, “uncontrolled” immigration and loss of national identity with globalization.

Continue reading “The Roots of Authoritarianism in the 21st Century – Part 1”

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Our selves are created by our social experiences

By Peter Prontzos

Your “self” is composed of three fundamental elements: your brain, your body, and your relations with other people. This insight was one of the central themes in the keynote talk given by Dr. Daniel Siegel at the conclusion of University of British Columbia’s fourth Brain Development and Learning conference.
Siegel was not being poetic or metaphorical. As he explained, your mind (“your consciousness, which includes your ‘heart’)…is shaped by both the connections we have with others and by the connections we have within the synaptic structures of our embodied nervous system.”

As he put it: “The mind is within you and between you.”

Not surprisingly, the most important influences are those experiences that we have in our earliest years – including in the womb.

His talk, entitled, “Interpersonal Neurobiology of the Developing Mind”, explored how a “healthy” mind functions and can be nurtured.

The definition of a healthy mind is one in which “energy and information flow” freely in its three aspects: in your brain, through your body, and also between people.

When childhood or other trauma interferes with this flow, “chaos and/or rigidity result”, both of which “are reflections of impaired relational or neural integration.”

Throughout his talk, Siegel, who teaches at UCLA, emphasized how our increasing understanding of interpersonal neurobiology can greatly improve our treatment of children – in the home, in school, and in society in general.

Children need to be seen, to feel safe, and to be soothed when they are distressed, in order for healthy attachment to develop.

Siegel also stressed the monumental importance of how experience can affect the functioning of our genes, turning them on and off. Moreover, these “epigenetic” changes can be passed on to our children and grandchildren – and perhaps even further.

One question that came up in several of the talks this weekend was: can therapeutic intervention heal the epigenetic damage caused by trauma? Like some other presenters, Siegel believes that this approach is very promising.

Siegel explained the concepts of “implicit” (unconscious) and “explicit” (conscious) memory, and how our ideas and feelings can be shaped by past memories of which we are not only unaware, but which nevertheless feel like they are in the present.

The second part of Siegel’s talk focused how complex systems, like the mind, are both embodied and relational. It can self-organize and self-regulate. He defined a healthy mind as one in which “optimal self-organization depends on the linkage of differentiated parts to create integration and harmony.” (Siegel even got the some of the audience singing on-stage as an example of these principles!)

The take-away point was that, both within the individual and in groups: “Integration creates kindness and compassion.”

Siegel went on to explain that we need “to apply science to make the world a better place.” For instance, we know that when people feel threatened, they readily divide others into “in-group and out-group”. This is a natural legacy of our evolutionary history. Siegel stressed how “we have to rise above the tendencies of the human mind” that are dangerous and which have led to so much unnecessary suffering.

Echoing the insight of Socrates, that, “the unexamined life is not worth living”, Siegel said that becoming more mindfully aware is necessary for both mental and social health.

Finally, we need to go beyond the excessive individualism of our culture to emphasize our shared lives.

The cultivation of our natural empathy is another critical step toward a more humane world.
Siegel’s two hour talk – without notes or powerpoint – was relaxed, humorous, and extremely informative.

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HOPE ?

By Peter G. Prontzos

Is hope a good thing? Many people think it is, but all depends….

It may help to remember the story of Pandora, the first woman and the one to whom the gods of Olympus gave a jar full of evils: old age, toil, insanity, greed, and so on. Pandora was warned not to open the jar, but her curiosity got the best of her, and when she lifted the lid, she unleashed those plagues on humankind. When she quickly closed the lid, only one evil remained: delusive hope.

Many who have interpreted the story of Pandora did not realize that even hope can be problematic – it all depends on the circumstances.

In The Optimism Bias, neuroscientist Tali Sharot explains that one of the unconscious biases that our brains produce is hope. She writes that the tendency to see the world through rose-tinted glasses evolved primarily because, “optimism may be so essential to our survival that it is hardwired into
our most complex organism, the brain.”

Her basic argument is straightforward: that while this distortion of
reality can be dangerous in some situations, it generally pays off in the long
run. As Sharot explains, this “illusion” has a tendency to lower stress and
anxiety while increasing one’s motivation to act, thereby improving the chances
of a positive outcome.

(She does not, however, accept the silly “secret” that one’s thoughts have the ultimate power to determine reality).

On the dark side, however, hope can be personally and socially a trap that leads to disaster.

The main problem is when hope is unrealistic, and that usually happens when it is an automatic – and usually unconscious – defense against painful feelings. As Arthur Janov and others have shown, we often cope with our traumas and fears, not by facing them, but by repressing them. This defense is very common in unhealthy relationships, when people don’t leave because they “hope” that – somehow – things will work out.

In the science fiction series “Dune”, the Bene Gesserit sisterhood use their, “Litany Against Fear” – a very Primal approach – to help focus their minds and calm themselves:

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

Unrealistic hope can also prevent people from combating the many political and ecological threats that we face today, such as militarism, patriarchy, racism and the climate crisis. Derrick Jensen explained that:

Hope is what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth.
To start, there is the false hope that suddenly somehow the system may inexplicably change. Or technology will save us. Or the Great Mother. Or beings from Alpha Centauri. Or Jesus Christ. Or Santa Claus. All of these false hopes lead to inaction, or at least to ineffectiveness.”

On the other hand, liberating oneself from false hopes is necessary to actually have any real hope of success. Jensen concludes that,

When you give up on hope, you turn away from fear. And when you quit relying on hope, and instead begin to protect the people, things, and places you love, you become very dangerous indeed to those in power. [https://orionmagazine.org/article/beyond-hope/]

In one very important sense, hope may also be irrelevant. Even if optimism is not “realistic” – given the terrible state of the world – people still need to organize for progressive change. Indeed, the more desperate a situation appears to be, the more urgency there is in creating a healthy resistance.

To cite just one powerful example: secret White House tape recordings of Richard Nixon show that he was ready to drop nuclear bombs on the Vietnamese, until it was explained to him that the reaction of the peace movement – and of other people in the U.S. and around the world – would make such a war crime politically disastrous for him.

So, while we can never be sure that any situation is truly hopeless, we can be sure that our inaction will lead to disaster.

Note: Here is a link to an up-to-date discussion of hope and the climate crisis.

The Guardian 21 September 2017

Climate optimism has been a disaster. We need a new language – desperately

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/21/climate-optimism-disaster-extreme-weather-catastrophe

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Review: THE NEUROSCIENCE OF HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS. By Louis Cozolino (W.W. Norton & Co.)

Review by Peter G. Prontzos

Although Buddha never claimed to be a neuroscientist, some insights which have been attributed to him resonate strongly with the findings of modern researchers. One of the most profound of these understandings is the idea that our deepest “self” is not a “thing”; rather, it is an on-going natural process, one which continues to evolve throughout one’s life.
In fact, it seems that a baby doesn’t have a substantial self when it is born. As Louis Cozolino explains in his remarkable book, The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: “The awareness of being a separate and autonomous self appears to emerge gradually over the first decade of life…from how our brains construct our experience of others”.
He emphasizes how the quality of our relationships with our parents (and the other significant people in our lives) affects us more than we know. A primary reason that we are unaware of these most basic feelings about ourselves and the world is that they are formed when we are so young that they usually become unconscious “givens”. Nevertheless, they influence and guide “our moment-to-moment experiences” throughout our lives.
It is hardly surprising, then, that the survival and healthy development of infants and children depends, “on the abilities of their caretakers to detect the needs and intentions” of those who depend on them.
Cozolino, who is a clinical psychologist as well as a Professor at Pepperdine University, outlines how these early experiences also guide the construction of our brain and central nervous system. Our thoughts and feelings don’t just float around somewhere in our consciousness; rather, they are biologically embedded in the very structures and functions of our brain as it adapts to its environment – healthy or otherwise.
Hence his profoundly important point: “The brain is a social organ of adaptation built through interactions with others” [emphasis in original]. Nurturing connections create healthier brains in which the various areas are harmoniously integrated, while hormones, neurotransmitters, and other neurochemicals are present in the appropriate amounts. “This experience-dependent sculpting is accomplished through attunement and information exchange with the right hemispheres of the parents.”
This focus is based on the relatively new field of, “Interpersonal Neurobiology” (IPNB), in which the “social construction of the brain and the role of attachment relationships are particularly important…” The ramifications of this insight for our understanding of human nature in general, and the “self” in particular, are revolutionary; and they apply to adults as well as to children.
It is difficult to overestimate the impact of our early environment on the health of our growing brain. Indeed, that is one advantage to being born at a stage of development that is immature compared to other primates: it allows human infants more flexibility when it comes to adapting to their specific family situations.
This openness to our social environment means that the kind of person that we eventually become is, to a very significant extent, the result of the quality of our relationships in the early years. “The most important aspect of early attachment relationships”, Cozolino notes, “is the establishment of a sense of safety”.
A baby (or child) will obviously feel safer to the extent that more of its needs are met: to be held, to be fed when hungry, to experience warm interactions with its parents, and so on. Providing for these needs is a concrete demonstration of love, and a baby will thrive in such a nurturing social environment.
Healthy relationships create secure attachments between infants and caregivers, which also helps children to learn emotional self-regulation, reducing the tendency to overreact to negative situations.
Findings such as these, which show how much we are shaped by our experiences, undermine the simplistic form of genetic determinism which claims that our fate is overwhelmingly decided by our DNA. The more complex reality is that, as Cozolino elegantly explains, “Our brains are built in the enigmatic interface between experience and genetics, where nature and nurture become one”.
The author also points out the vital but often overlooked corollary that: “there are no single human brains – brains only exist within networks of other brains.” More specifically, the self develops as reflection of the interactions of three factors: our brain, our body, and our relationships with other people – along with the rest of the natural world.
That’s why it is impossible to understand a person outside of the social contexts in which they matured: their family, community, culture, and nation. (Einstein held the same view. In his essay, “Why Socialism?” he wrote that: “It is ‘society’ which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought”).
Cozolino employs the metaphor of our, “social synapse” in conveying his view of the nature of our personal interrelations. Just as each individual brain cell communicates with others via the spaces between them and no neuron could survive by itself, people build families and communities across social spaces in order to communicate, survive, and flourish.
Our high level of openness and sensitivity towards other people is the reason that we are both the most social, and the most adaptive, of all species. Cozolino suggests that, “our social brains emerged during natural selection because being social enhances survival.”
On the other hand, “the radical individualism of the West is one reason why we experience a higher incidence of psychological distress, drug addiction, and violence”. Social pain (isolation, rejection, and so on) is far from a trivial matter. Like physical pain, it is a sign that something is wrong and that we may be in danger. Pain demands that we pay attention to a threat. It is extremely significant that both physical and emotional pain are processed by the same neuroanatomical systems. In other words, social pain can be so powerful precisely because toxic relationships and/or social isolation are also serious dangers to our physical health.
That’s why, as Daniel Kahneman has argued, avoiding (both kinds of) pain is a stronger motivation than the attraction to pleasure. Cozolino puts it this way: “Based on the way our brains operate, evolution appears to have been far more interested in keeping us alive than making us happy.”
The book also discusses such critical issues as epigenetics, mirror neurons, stress, interpersonal trauma, social phobia, autism, healing relationships, and – of course – love:
“There is no doubt that evolution has shaped us to love one another…Loving relationships help our brains to develop, integrate, and remain flexible….And when the drive to love is thwarted – when we are frightened, abused, or neglected – our mental health is compromised.”
He also provides a number of moving stories about some of his patients to illustrate how real people develop – and often resolve – old hurts.
There is a fair amount of sometimes technical neuroscience in the book, and while the reader may choose to skip some of the more detailed accounts, even the relatively simpler ones can deepen and enrich one’s understanding of both the brain and of our shared humanity.
In Jean-Paul Sartre’s play, “No Exit”, one of the characters declares that, “hell is other people.” No doubt that is often all-too-true. Cozolino not only provides valuable insights for treating old wounds, but, much more importantly, he describes the kind of nurturing social environments that can prevent such the damage in the first place.

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How Good People Turn Evil

The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
Philip Zimbardo
New York: Random House, 2007
576 pp, $27.95 (hbk)

Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide & Mass Killing (2nd ed.)
James Waller
New York: Oxford University Press, 2007
384 pp, $24.99 (pbk)

Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide
Barbara Coloroso
Toronto: Viking Canada, 2007
248 pp, C $30.00

To prevent future genocides, we must understand the conditions and the forces that produced such unimaginable horrors. Unless and until we see past the myths about the causes of such slaughters, which have claimed the lives of fifty to sixty million people in the last century, they are certain to be repeated – especially given the numerous dangers which are now threatening to undermine social and political stability around the globe.
Three recent books have attempted just this task, with varying degrees of success: The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, by Philip Zimbardo; Becoming Evil, by James Waller; and Barbara Coloroso’s Extraordinary Evil. While there is a fair amount of agreement among these authors, each approaches the subject of atrocity and its root causes from different angles.
The most powerful and insightful effort is by Zimbardo, who is, of course, the pioneering social psychologist most noted for his (in)famous “Stanford Prison Experiment” in 1971, in which male students were randomly assigned to take on the roles of either prisoners or guards in a study originally planned to last for two weeks. The experiment had to be terminated less than halfway through, because of the deleterious and dangerous changes that affected both groups of subjects. The power that the guards were given created a strong tendency for them to act brutally and sadistically towards their fellow classmates. Those assigned to the role of prisoner, on the other hand, became by and large passive, fearful, and subservient. In fact, half of them had to be released even before the “prison” was closed early.
About a third of Zimbardo’s book consists of his detailed analysis of the Stanford Prison Experiment, which is the starting point for his investigation of the forces that compel otherwise ordinary people to commits acts of extraordinary horror and brutality. He offers three fundamental explanations for human behavior. The first and most common approach he labels dispositional. This view focuses primarily on the level of the individual and his or her personality, experiences, genetic inheritance, abilities, and beliefs. It holds that, most of the time, the locus of control over actions is internal. By this psychological explanation, individuals are held to be usually, indeed almost completely, responsible for their actions – regardless of any other external explanations or forces. Nelson Mandela, for example, is a hero primarily because of the type of person that he is (compassionate, intelligent, and principled), while Saddam Hussein was a villain because of his personal vices (sadism, a hunger for power, vanity).
The problem with this focus is that most of the people who commit atrocities are not psychopaths, and individual variables alone can account for only a relatively small part of their actions. Indeed, after carrying out their crimes, most return to their “normal” lives and never again exhibit such pathological behaviour.  Zimbardo therefore offers a second level of explanation, based on situational variables outside of individuals that usually provide more robust and comprehensive answers about the sources of inhuman behavior. At this level of analysis, factors such as ideology, deindividuation, domination, socialization, and dehumanization contribute to producing irrational and cruel actions. This focus on social dynamics does not deny the role of personal qualities, but it assumes that on most occasions, there is an interaction between individual and their environment in which the latter is most salient for most people in most circumstances.
For all three authors considered here, this view is the most essential: that given the right “situational variables,” practically anyone will do terrible things to other human beings.  Zimbardo stresses the insight, also made by Waller and Coloroso, that mass slaughters can be committed by “normal” people because human behavior is extremely malleable, allowing contradictory behaviors to be manifested by the same person in different situations. He writes:  “Perhaps we are born with a full range of capacities, each of which is activated and developed depending on the social and cultural circumstances that govern our lives. I will argue that the potential for perversion is inherent in the very processes that make human beings do all the wonderful things that we do” (p. 229). In other words, the simplistic dualism of believing that “an unbridgeable chasm separates good people from bad people” ignores the reality that human behaviour is characterized by its variability, so that evil is “something of which we are all capable, depending on circumstances” (ibid).
The problems begin when socialization accentuates the negative potential present in us all. A telling example is the almost automatic tendency to divide people into categories of “us” and “them” – a function which can easily be exaggerated, so that those defined as the “Other” appear both threatening and less than human. In one telling study, subjects who “accidentally” overheard a remark that students in a test were “animals” gave them higher levels of electric shocks than subjects who did not hear the “animal” comment. Moreover, subjects who overheard a reference to the students as “nice guys” gave the mildest shocks of all (p. 308-9).
Another natural tendency that can be twisted is the need for community and for connections with nature (or “first nature” and “second nature,” as Murray Bookchin called it).  Frans de Waal, one of the world’s leading researchers on primate behaviour, writes: “There was never a point at which we became social: descended from highly social ancestors – a long line of monkeys and apes – we have been group-living forever … life in groups is not an option, but a survival strategy.” As a result of this evolutionary heritage, de Waal explains, “sociality has become ever more deeply ingrained in primate biology and psychology.” In fact, the main reason for the large cortex in human brains is our need to associate in complex social groups.

One problem, however, is that the fear of feeling isolated and alone, if combined with the mental categories of “us and them,” may be twisted into an unhealthy form of nationalism and arrogance, while dehumanizing the Other, whose life counts for little.
This polarization is much more likely to occur when people are fearful, a problem that is clearly illustrated by the changing relationship between Serbs and Croatians over the last sixty years. For centuries, the history of these two peoples was drenched in blood, and mutual hostility was part of their cultural legacy. After the Second World War, however, the new Yugoslav government under Tito designed political and social arrangements which stressed peaceful cooperation and unity among all peoples of Yugoslavia. The economic situation of the ordinary Yugoslav improved dramatically, and over a relatively short period of time the ancient hostility eased. Serbs and Croatians began to live together, work together, and even marry one another. Human nature did not change in these few decades, but the social environment did, and that made all the difference. Anger and hatred were replaced by empathy, friendship, and in some cases, love.
When economic and political conditions began to deteriorate in the 1980s, however, many people experienced insecurity and fear. Those feelings played a large part in nationalist appeals that led to the rebirth of communal violence, producing horrible atrocities and the genocide of “ethnic cleansing.” In some cases, the very same people who had been neighbours and friends just a few years earlier now turned on each other, committing violent and inhuman acts. Clearly, when people believe their very lives are at stake, they are more likely to do what they are told – including, if “necessary,” slaughtering other people.
The Yugoslav example points to a larger problem regarding the so-called “realist” view that human beings are innately aggressive and that war is in our genes. Zimbardo’s research leads him to inquire about the nature and origin of those situations that foster war and violence in general, and genocide in particular. He explains situational variables by reference to an even more fundamental factor, that of “systems of power” (p. 10) which create diverse situations and manipulate people in ways that benefit those in control – the “power elite,” to cite the concept advanced by the sociologist C. Wright Mills.

For Zimbardo, the “military-corporate-religious complex is the ultimate megasystem controlling much of the resources and quality of life of many Americans today.” (ibid.) To his credit, he is not afraid to name names. After examining the lies that spawned the illegal invasion of Iraq and the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Zimbardo concludes that the blame rests with “the very top of the long chain of command – all the way up to Vice President Dick Cheney (‘the Vice President of Torture’) and President George W. Bush” (p. 432, quoting the Washington Post, October 26 2005).
In the second edition of his incisive work, Becoming Evil, James Waller takes a somewhat more general approach than Zimbardo. He makes a similar point, namely that it is mostly “ordinary people committing extraordinary evil,” and adds that it is not simply a matter of a person having a “pathological or faulty personality.” Among the evidence he adduces is the finding by half a dozen psychologists that the Nazi génocidaire Adolf Eichmann was normal, rather than diabolical. Throughout the book, Waller emphasizes the unsettling thought that, “given the right confluence of contributing factors, we are all capable of some terrible deeds” (p. 161).
Along the same lines, Waller effectively deconstructs the view that a given society must be pathological if it carries out mass murder and genocide. He accomplishes this by reviewing Daniel Goldhagen’s influential book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, the main thesis of which is that the Nazi Holocaust resulted from an especially virulent strain of antisemitism in German culture. On the contrary, Waller not only shows that “there is little evidence that the antisemitism of Germans was eliminationist” before the rise of Hitler, but also demonstrates that Goldhagen’s belief “that eliminationist anti-Semitism was the central motive of the Holocaust fares no better. The fixation on one over-arching explanation – rather than many overlapping, reinforcing, perhaps partially competing explanations – is too simplistic” (p. 52).
The heart of Waller’s study are the chapters devoted to examining the conditions that contribute to mass violence. At the cultural level, he considers such models as “authority orientation” and “social dominance,” which may help to construct ideologies that in turn serve to legitimize mass violence. Waller then studies the psychological factors that make it possible to dehumanize people as Others without rights – even the right to exist. Indeed, it helps psychologically to consider such Others as a threat to one’s own values. Finally, Waller examines the “social construction of cruelty,” in an analysis that, like Zimbardo’s, dissects the situational variables that allow people to commit atrocities, including deindividuation and peer pressure.
Finally, although Waller argues that “social conflict is ubiquitous” throughout human history (p. xiv), he is not referring to Marx’s view that history “is the history of class struggle.” Indeed, class plays almost no role in Waller’s explanation of mass killing and genocide. One wonders, though, if it is entirely irrelevant that the capitalist classes in Germany offered Hitler “their full support and cooperation” as the Nazis crushed the trade union movement and established an extremely profitable “military-industrial complex” as a preparation for war? Or that “The Fuehrer personally stressed time and again during talks with … industrial leaders … that he considered free enterprise and competition as absolutely necessary”? ii

Closer to home, is the lack of action by the United States, Canada, and other G-8 nations in Rwanda and Darfur connected to the lack of economic interest on the part of the business classes in those countries? In his postscript, Waller admits that “the UN and the United States have been very slow” to take any serious actions to halt the genocide in Darfur (p. 302). But there is little attempt to explain that inaction.
The relationship between bullying and genocide is the central metaphor in Barbara Coloroso’s, Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide. Coloroso argues that “the concept of genocide in general, and the Rwandan genocide in particular, are macrocosms of the drama known as bullying” (p. xx). She does a reasonable job of pointing out similarities between these phenomena, such as the social origins of much cruel behavior. But the metaphor is stretched thin at times.  Coloroso is at her best in describing some of the psychological aspects of violence, and especially the other side of the coin – when “ordinary” people perform extraordinary feats of bravery to help victims of mass violence. One famous example of mass heroism occurred in Denmark under Nazi occupation:

When the Nazis invaded Denmark in 1940, citizens of all ages united to form a strong resistance movement. Refusing to cooperate with the planned deportation of Jews, the Danes began spiriting their neighbors and relatives across the channel to Sweden in small fishing vessels. Scientists and fishermen worked together to come up with ways to numb the noses of dogs used by the Nazis to search the vessel for stowaways. The small boats, with their undetected human cargo, met up with larger Swedish ships in the channel. In all, 7,200 of the 7,800 Danish Jews and 700 or their non-Jewish relatives were smuggled safely out of Denmark (pp. 125-26).

On the other hand, there is a surprising void when it comes to considering the inaction of the United States, and President Clinton in particular, during the genocide in Rwanda. While Coloroso notes that Clinton eventually apologized to the survivors, she passes over the question of his guilt in silence. She does quote Canadian scholar Gerald Caplan, who argues that nothing “can substitute for political will among the powers-that-can” (p. 20). But there is no indication that Caplan has also pointed to “Five Culprits of Genocide” in Rwanda, including the UN, France, the Catholic Church, Belgium, and the United States. In fact, Caplan is the author of “Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide”, a report of the international panel of eminent persons that investigated the 1994 slaughter. He later wrote:
During the genocide, it was the U.S.’s turn to betray Rwanda…the craven Clinton administration, under pressure from the Republicans, ensured that the UN Security Council would do nothing…Thanks entirely to contrived American stalling tactics…not a single reinforcement of man or machine from abroad had reached Rwanda. iii
In spite of the long litany of depressing and horrific stories of violence and cruelty, all these authors agree that things can be done to reduce mass violence. At the core of these prescriptions is the need for critical thought, compassion, and action. Ultimately, systems of power need to be democratized and every human being needs to be treated with respect.
There is another question that all three authors tackle, and on which all three are found wanting – the question of personal responsibility. For instance, while Zimbardo challenges “the rigid Fundamental Attribution Error that locates the inner qualities of people as the main source of their actions,” he adds that this position does not “negate the responsibility”of individuals, “nor their guilt” (p. 445).

For his part, Waller rightly warns of the danger of dealing with evil “from the heights of moral condemnation rather than the depths of human understanding,” but then declares that, nevertheless, “we are all responsible for our deeds – evil or otherwise” (pp. 18-19). In her insightful chapter, “Restoring Community,” Coloroso explores important ideas about necessity of forgiveness, restitution, and reconciliation, but insists that those “who have committed crimes against humanity” must “take full responsibility for their actions” (p. 208).
There are at least four major problems with the notion of individual moral responsibility and guilt. The first is that all three authors have done a very convincing job of showing how a multitude of forces beyond individual control – social, economic, cultural, situational, psychological, and so on – can combine to elicit very uncharacteristic behaviour from a person, behaviour they would never exhibit in less extreme circumstances. Therefore, is it logical or fair to assign “full responsibility” from “the heights of moral condemnation” to those hapless individuals? Is this not making the same “Fundamental Attribution Error”?
In addition, according to cognitive scientist George Lakoff, research has discovered that there is “a vast landscape of unconscious thought – the 98 percent of thinking your brain does that you’re not aware of.” iv Does it make sense, therefore, to condemn someone who – like all of us – is aware of only two percent of the thoughts and feelings that drive their actions?
Third, I believe it is arrogant to pretend to godlike omniscience and claim to fully understand the contributions of all of the above-cited variables to an individual’s actions. Human understanding is limited. Moreover, as the authors remind us many times, any one of us might do horrible things in the “wrong” situation.
Last, not only does a focus on individuals at the bottom of the chain of command obscure the responsibility of those at the top, but more importantly it diverts attention from the ultimate cause of most mass inhumanity – the systems of Power which Zimbardo emphasizes.
Perhaps the most desirable road is to focus more on the prevention of mass killing than to waste time in futile debates about “guilt.” As Coloroso wisely points out, forgiveness is a “gift” that victims can give to themselves, as part of the process of healing.
All three writers stress that there are always some people who are able to resist the inhumanity that takes place around them, and the authors provide many examples of such heroes – people who may have led “ordinary” lives until they found themselves in a situation that brought out the best in them. As critical as those actions may be, Zimbardo is right when he says that “disobedience by the individuals must get translated into systemic disobedience” if it is going to have a significant impact (p. 459). Such widespread disobedience on the part of US citizens – and within the armed forces – was one of the main reasons that Washington was forced to end its attack on Vietnam, and why Nixon could not carry out his threats to attack the Vietnamese with nuclear weapons.
Of all the stories of the heroic resistance to the Vietnam War, perhaps the most moving is that of the late Hugh Thompson, who was a US helicopter pilot in Vietnam in 1968, when he came across the My Lai massacre while it was in progress. As Zimbardo relates the tale:

An estimated 504 Vietnamese civilians were rounded up and killed … the soldiers gathered up all the inhabitants of the village – elderly men, women, children, and babies – and machine gunned them to death (some they burned alive, raped, and scalped).
While the massacre was unfolding, a helicopter piloted by Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, Jr. set down to help a group of Vietnamese civilians … They saw Captain [Ernest] Medina and other soldiers running over to shoot the wounded. Thompson flew his helicopter back over My Lai village … ordered the massacre to stop and threatened to open fire with the helicopter’s heavy machine gun on any American soldier or officer who refused his order… He then ordered two other helicopters to fly in for medical evacuation of the eleven wounded Vietnamese. His plane returned to rescue a baby he had spotted still clinging to its dead mother (pp 475-75).

Thompson and his crew embodied the appeal made over a decade earlier by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, when they called on the people of the world to “Above all, remember your humanity.” v
Most acts of resistance to the evils demanded by systems of Power and the situations that they create will not be as heroic as that Hugh Thompson. But the most hopeful aspects of these studies are the examples they supply of individuals who in the most terrible situations, from Auschwitz to Abu Ghraib, remembered their own humanity, as well as that of the people around them.

Notes and references:
i (de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. 2006, p. 4).
ii (Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. 1960, p. 201).
iii (Caplan, “A Ridiculously Brief History of Rwanda” in The Walrus, October 2004).
iv (Lakoff, The Political Mind. 2008, p.3).
v (Russell and Einstein, The Russell-Einstein Manifesto. 9 July 1955 www.pugwash.org/about/manifesto.htm).

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The Social Determinants of Health

by Peter Prontzos

This post contains a portion of the talk that I gave last month at the 16th International Conference of the Association of Psychology and Psychiatry for Adults and Children in Athens. While I began with a short discussion of primal theory, I also wanted to stress how social and economic factors create the basis for much of the pain in our lives.

Research has now clearly established that economic, and social variables – more than individual or family behavior – are the most salient factors overall in determining a child’s well-being.

Continue reading “The Social Determinants of Health”

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