A few ideas on hate this AM. Looking to see if there are potentials for solutions. We seem to be struggling with this concept of hate and we are currently in this process of dealing with such behaviors on a national level. However, on a local level we have sort of a different issue because our national values and laws don't always carry their way into local decision making. The same elements that would not be acceptable in our national arenas then become more acceptable in our local arenas. A few toxic souls split communities and do so with intent. They should not be the last voice echoing as we emerge from our cave of unawareness. Let a whisper resonate with the clarity of a gong.
Flip Flopping of Societal Values
In my life I have met accomplished humble people who have done amazing things, don't brag about it, and also not have the moral dilapidation to ask for anything, treat anyone poorly, or put themselves above others in an arrogant manner. They are amazing people who are 1 in a million to make it through their challenges and accomplish their goals (I can tell you stories of people who have seen horrors of this world and are still contributors to society. They are not the takers that rob us of our unity.).
We know we have an issue when amazing and accomplished people are seen as not worthy of basic civility or respect because of superficial perceptions of race, religion, and social acceptance. I have stumbled across a few professional sports players, inventors, doctors, survivors and even a few extremely wealthy and influential people in my life and I have not seen the level of arrogance that I have seen among the core members of this group. I'm shocked by it and how sort of out of place it is within our modern world (I mean, it does happen but in my experience I have never seen it so bold and confident before without any accountability or backstop. That must come from years of small group socialization to norms and rules developed at a young age.)
Some of the more vocal members of this group engage in wholesale rumor manipulation to influence their environment in ways that help their social position. You can scratch your head and think, "How did that become this and where was that connected to this? How did kids be worthy of mistreatment and how might unconscionable now become acceptable? Why were other kids encouraged to be involve in hate based behaviors? 🤔" What you will likely find as a potential answer is that someone(s) is/are manipulating information and intentionally trying to create narratives and rumors to distance themselves from responsibility as well as create social barriers designed to block and harm their targets.
Their association with a few police officers, and general familiarity to many different officers, creates an escalated extension of risk because of the influence of distorted rumor networks that set the stage for what appears to be pseudo cleansing behaviors (May not be psuedo, it may be full scale but I am trying to be polite about it. Such as perhaps attempting to orchestrate an arrest on Good Friday to teach ____fill in the blank______ what religion's will be allowed in "their town". It might be a sign of subconscious or conscious extremism where they are using the law as extension of seriously distorted misunderstanding of their religion and the very root values that make America free. Maybe not? 🤷)
By deduction we come to realize that there may be a number of toxic souls pushing a story that puts all the focus on the victims "worthiness" of hate while triangulating others, official or unofficial, to be extensions of their feelings and goals (Official is the laws as intended. Corruption is not official and is shadow market behavior seen in third world nations based on sociological fears. I can't go into that in this post because it is in and of itself could be a whole subsection of history and sociology. Its not like we should cold morally discount the tens of other millions of Americans that have also witness similar behaviors without risking low institutional trust in similar arenas. Something we are currently struggling with). Others become tools and flying monkeys within the system.
Toxic Souls and Tight Groups
Most of the people in this group are in really good people but there are a few toxic souls who prompt others on how to behave and what types of relations with "others" (i.e. some of it appears to be based in a dark triad personality trait.) I don't really blame most of the group because they were raised together and so they trust each other to the point of group irrationality. However, acting on that in any way beyond recognizing the mental health, and general maliciousness of behavior, is concerning to say the least.
While group members recognize the targets as generally polite and friendly people they have no alternative sources of information to counter the hate narrative (A distinct characteristic of intent and method.). The very purpose of ostracization as a control method that separates communities and creates segregation (The people who do this don't care about their communities or about the 60% of other Americans. They have something to gain that is both psychological and tangible. Trace each action and you will find it go back to self gain each time pathologically. If you were to dig deeper you might ask what are those goal directed behaviors? I think you will find three possibilities.).
The same voices that dominated their conversations in childhood still dominate the group today. Its almost as though they are frozen in time and because of that homogenous isolation have not learned that their in-group perception might be a little distorted when it comes to others in the world around them (Its actually interesting to see how interpretations default back to basic false assumptions that were never questioned during the normal development process. You can tract that logic if you pay attention to the assumptions inherent within the dialogue.)
Change Your World and Change your PerceptionOne of the reasons why I like the Allegory of the Cave is because if you are unaware then you just don't know, what you don't know. As confusing as that may sound, to some of us know the world is full of layers of depth. One of the telling signs of how different people seem to others is through changing of environments. Through my experience I have come to recognize that the various communities and people (even here) do believe in our shared American values on a root level because they have a benefit to everyone. We all want some basic things but it is the toxic souls in our communities and in our politics (national or local) that often derail our common causes. Changing our perception from 'American' and "American" as separate into a single shared identity is helpful. Its hard to sell to some.
(I'm adding the single quote mark ' to the first word because neither of the pendulum perceptions are truly accurate. There is some sociological justification in other studies why that occurs. I'm now using the term American as a fuller conception of 'American' and "American" as anchored to Our Shared Principles. I won't use caps there either because I guess that the term such as AMERICAN PRINCIPLES or OUR PRINCIPLES infuriates some members of this corrupted network. Perhaps they didn't want our American principles to be noticeable and emboldened. Maybe they want those values to be in the back ground and not emboldened in our conscious. 🤷
If you have been following the writings for a while you will kind of understand what I'm saying. See the beauty of developing shared perspective and higher performance, whether local or nation, is to be able to bridge the mental gap of two or more different perspectives in order to create a better shared perspectives that are more scientifically accurate. If you can't see any validity in any varying information, you can't really lead people to a positive end. Your just pushing an unvetted, uncritically examined, ideological perspective that you don't know makes sense because you haven't played devils advocate. If you can't understand the "others" perspective you can't even truly understand your own perspective. Just saying!)
People’s Group-Oriented Moral Values
Let me sort of conclude with this study...
"Our results, from these U.S. based studies, suggest that moral values oriented around group preservation are predictive of the county-level prevalence of hate groups and associated with the belief that extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice against marginalized groups are justified. Additional analyses suggest that the association between group-based moral values and EBEPs against outgroups can be partly explained by the belief that these groups have done something morally wrong." (Atari, et. al, 2021, Abstract, para 1.) (Hmmmm, makes you think. 🤔💁)
When we look at the section below I'm debating if I'm understanding correctly because it seems to indicate that hate gravitates toward local and social by nature. That is what I see but the authors may intend something else so I'm curious if they have input on that. It doesn't mean they have more insight because research is limited by scope, but they do note that future research is needed to understand this variance.
Discussion section, para 1,
"Even though we argue that local spatial smoothing is the more appropriate analysis for our data because (1) neither binding values nor hate groups are meaningfully constrained by state boundaries and (2) fixed effects estimators are likely to be underpowered when applied to data with low within-group variation, we note that, when state-fixed effects were added to the model, the relationship between binding values and the rate of hate groups was not distinguishable from null (Atari, et. al. 2021, Discussion para 1)."
Discussion section, para 2,
"These results suggest that the association between binding values and justifying acts of hate depends, at least partially, on people’s perceptions of outgroup moral violations. In Studies 2 and 3, we found that this association was positively mediated by PMW for two marginalized groups in the U.S. context, Muslims (Study 2) and Mexican immigrants (Study 3), even after adjusting for participants’ political ideology. (Atari, et. al. 2021. Discussion Para 2.)"
One might wonder if the Capital Riots were a collective of semi associated, ideologically aligned, partially coordinated (..except probably a central group and maybe another more formal one in the background.) funneling of local hate into a collective result that might have thrown our country into serious chaos and could potentially have ended the long running 250 year democratic experiment (I mean for some its not really a big deal so we just sort of think of such things as tailgate parties and toga parties that got out of hand.
I talked to what I believe in hindsight was an extremist once on the phone. He was so angry he denigrated the dead, insinuated all Muslims are terrorists and said that people around here don't care about people like that as he referred to the dead person's dark skinned race. A kind of all encompassing hate with different targets. He felt very secure in his beliefs and confident in sharing those beliefs with me. I politely stated that I'm very happy his kind lost the Civil War. He hung up.
Such rage likely has a mental health component and I think there would be studies to show that connection of pathology and behavioral outcomes. Its an uphill battle to get decision makers to see the connection between hate and mental health. Some of it might be based on empathy capacity and with the right environment we can grow these seedlings of moral conscious and compass. This is why I advocated for the perpetrators to be require to have a mental health evaluation. I'm aware that one, if not more, have a diagnosable mental health issue which I believe is a contributing factor in their displayed and observed behaviors.
Going back to the disgruntled attorney their aspirations of greatness and daddy's help, might go on someday, when he gets more experience, to have an important role in one of our institutions as a judge making decisions over people that he despises and in which he would like to removed for "soiling" his society. In our current distorted wisdom, we might go on to assume that this person is not going to make fair and impartial decisions over others he belittles no matter how much he can fake it while people are looking. Bias goes a long way in outcomes. We now have the capacity to check into such things but it takes years of unempathetic damage to build a case.
Stopping hate before it gets out of hand has its merits for society and for our institution integrity, growth and stability. Its hard to sell liberty politically sometimes because the centuries of deep human sacrifice to get us where we are today cannot fit into a jingle or slogan. We owe it to the next generation to finish our fathers, grandfathers, and national founders work of freedom; even if it doesn't fit into a catchy tune. That is here, that is everyone within our country. I'm a believer in democracy and liberty. I have also put in my time the best I can to support the pillars of our democracy. I can't say that for everyone.)
Let us look at this study a little more to see who likely would engage in hate and the hate narrative.
Discussion Section, Para, 4,
"Accordingly, our results suggest that people who attribute moral violations to an outgroup may be at higher risk for justifying, or perhaps even expressing, extreme prejudice toward outgroups; however, our results also suggest that people who prioritize the binding values may be particularly susceptible to this dynamic when they perceive a violation of ingroup loyalty, respect for authority, and physical or spiritual purity. In this sense, our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that acts of hate—a class of behaviors of which many have received their own special legal designation as particularly heinous crimes
4—are partly motivated by individuals’ moral beliefs. This view is well-grounded in current understandings of the relationship between morality and acts of extremism or violence."(Atari, et. al. 2021, Discussion Para 4.)
I'm a light right Republican, not a politician, and I have become someone saddened by the far right and left ideologies that do not take into account the greater needs of society. If we are going to make it through our transformational hump as a nation that wants to compete at a top game level, we will need to find a better way to effectively handle those who only want a small sliver of society to receive its benefits; whether or not they earned it. We have a responsibility to go to the next stage in democratic and national development. Motivating the masses with fair treatment and opportunity is one of the best things we can do (The devils in the details of course.)
Good thing such grotesque behaviors are seen by some as an impossibility in modern life. Maybe a fictious fable to scare adults and kids alike into appropriate social expectations of appropriate personal association that excludes "those people". (Perhaps a modern version of Hansel and Gretel ? Beyond all stories is a piece of truth. Most people can't see it or reflect on the essential message of such stories.) . The problem is that "those people" are more a figment of their selective imagination than a reflection of observational accuracy. Monkey Blindness, Morality, and Monkeys Teach Social Rules and one of my favorites Does Hyper-Politics Limit Freedom of Speech, Knowledge Sharing, and National Development?.
What me might wonder is whether corruption wins or not in this situation? I can't be sure, but it does appear there are no local backstops when justice defaults. So, there can only be three main outcomes and each one determines our values as a people and in some ways our nation through I suppose the outcomes of a long line of choices based on such thinking. Decision making is never truly isolated to one location but connects a series of choices together that leads to specific short and long term outcomes. We can't profess one thing and do another because it impacts not only our present state of cultural chaos but also our future cultural stability (
Sociological and Economic). Each of the three rabbit holes is a reflective choice; albeit not an easy one.
If I make a probably selection based on history alone and some of the witness experiences of others in society I might see defaults of oaths, values, and justice. If I go by those who are starting to see the errors of their prior choices and how those outcomes impact communities, and even the nation, then we might say today we might
turn a new leaf. (
Its just my perspective. I bet there are a lot of people who disagree and agree what the role of justice should be in preserving our essential American values. I have my own esoteric beliefs about the values of life and the value of democracy. Others have their beliefs about that and who is invited to the democratic table of opportunity. An unexamined component might be, why are not all the craftsman who built that table invited to eat on it and is that a collective community table or does that belong to a particular group?)
Hoover J, Atari M, Mostafazadeh Davani A, Kennedy B, Portillo-Wightman G, Yeh L, Dehghani M. Investigating the role of group-based morality in extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice. Nat Commun. 2021 Jul 28;12(1):4585. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-24786-2. PMID: 34321479; PMCID: PMC8319297.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8319297/
