Creating Freedom - Raoul Martinez Flashcards
Introduction and Preface
A discussion of the impossibility of ultimate moral responsibility.
The neoliberal version of the term ‘freedom’ surreptitiously enslaves us to a system we should despise.
A simple principle animates these pages: the more we understand the limits on our freedom, the better we are placed to transcend them.
Transdisciplinary: relating to more than one branch of knowledge; interdisciplinary.
We dissect reality into manageable parts for study, but we risk losing sight of the bigger picture. We risk losing touch with reality. The danger is inherent in modern education where the price of progression through the system is specialisation.
We need a movement born of a shift in consciousness, one that will challenge the assumptions upon which our society is founded.
Part One: The Lottery of Birth
1/ Luck
We do not choose to exist. We do not choose what environment we will grow up in. The people we become, the lives that we lead, the beliefs and values we learn to hold, owe much to the lottery of our birth.
We do not create ourselves.
Our starting point in life is one of complete dependence on forces—genetic and environmental—beyond our control. And these forces can shape us into many things.
In fact human history suggests that there’s neither a belief too bizarre nor an action too appalling for humans to embrace given the necessary cultural influences. This simple idea has profound implications for our personal and political freedom.
The act of making a choice does little to confer responsibility: we make choices with a brain we did not choose.
Consider this true story.
A middle-aged married man develops an overwhelming addiction to child pornography. Ultimately, this leads to a criminal conviction. But the night before his sentencing, he’s taken to hospital complaining of severe headaches. A scan reveals a large brain tumour. The surgeons remove it and the man’s behaviour returns to normal.
Six months later, the paedophilic tendencies return. The man goes back to his surgeon and, sure enough, a portion of the tumour has returned. Another operation, and his behaviour again returns to normal.
Now, when the brain tumour is first mentioned, attitudes towards the man change dramatically. Instead of blaming him for his behaviour, people rightly blame the tumour, which of course he didn’t choose to have. But what if he hadn’t had the tumour? What if his addiction had come about only because of his genes and environment? The fact is, he’d be no more blameworthy.
A person no more chooses their genes and environment than they do a tumour.
Here’s the key point:
Yes, we all make choices, you all chose what to wear today. But our choices are made by a brain that we didn’t choose, a brain whose workings we don’t even understand. Just as a computer doesn’t program itself, we don’t wire our own brains. They’re wired by the interaction of our genes and environment.
We have learned to attribute responsibility for abnormal behaviour to the tumour instead of the person who happens to suffer from it.
The problem with this line of thinking is that our assessment of blameworthiness is constrained by our current level of scientific understanding.
With better scientific instruments and a better understanding of the brain, we may be able to detect subtle changes in the brain’s neurochemistry that gives rise to all kinds of behaviour which today we attribute to the ‘free agency’ of the individual.
Neuroscientist David Eagleman writes:
The underlying cause [of a form of behaviour] could be a genetic mutation, a bit of brain damage caused by an undetectably small stroke or tumor, an imbalance in neurotransmitter levels, a hormonal imbalance – or any combination. Any or all of these problems may be undetectable with our current technologies.
But they can cause differences in brain function that lead to abnormal behaviour. In other words, if there is a measurable brain problems, that buys leniency for the defendant…But we DO blame someone if we LACK the technology to detect a biological problem.
The notion of ‘individual responsibility’ is just a fig leaf that covers the current gaps in our knowledge. It is an irrational dogma that causes great harm to many people.
A total understanding of the brain would eradicate the idea of individual responsibility entirely.
Perhaps we should see behaviour not as a product of individual choice or responsibility, but as a product of the person’s neurology.
Most of what goes on in the brain is completely inaccessible to the conscious mind.
Confusion about responsibility arises because the act of making a choice blinds us to the causal relationship that links a choice to a brain, and a brain to the array of forces that shaped it.
A psychopath may make many morally horrendous choices, but they will not include choosing the brain of a psychopath.
The idea of ultimate responsibility is buried deep in the foundations of our religious traditions, political ideologies and legal systems - implicitly assumed but rarely stated.
Its existence is implied by concepts like heaven, hell, sin and eternal damnation at the heart of the Abrahamic faiths.
A cosmic system of condemnation and salvation only makes sense if people deserve the fates handed down to them.
The myth of responsibility also has great political utility.
“For billions of people, where they are born and who gives them birth, along with their gender and native intellect, largely determine the life they will experience.”
(Warren Buffett)
Native: (of a quality) belonging to a person’s character from birth; innate, inherent, intrinsic, inborn
Our talents, attitudes, inclinations and opportunities are the products of forces we do not control.
That an idea may be used to serve destructive or oppressive ends tells us very little about its truth or value.
As our belief in the myth strengthens, so does our tendency to blame victims, advocate harsher punishments, submit to those in power, and perceive extreme economic inequality as fair and just.
Actions that we regards as unethical are - like any behaviour - ultimately a product of formative conditions.
The illusion of responsibility persists, like an optical illusion, even when it has lost intellectual credibility.
“A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgement based upon it.”
Putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes exposes the arbitrary nature of many aspects of our identity. It can profoundly change the self being viewed.
This book is not an exercise in submissive resignation. The point of identifying our limitations is to give ourselves the best chance of transcending them.
2/ Punishment
The belief in a divine system of retribution and punishment that unrepentant sinners deserve to suffer for eternity in hell, remains a core tenet for much of humanity.
The cultural commitment to retribution may be rooted in human nature. When someone engages in the act of punishing a perceived cheater or exploiter, brain scans have revealed increased activity in the ‘pleasure centres’.
“The intuitively moral idea of just deserts, the very core of the human sense of justice, the fury of our moral indignation, the visceral certainty that the culprit DESERVES punishment is no more that a by-product of evolution.” Robert Wright, The Moral Animal
In a rational criminal justice system, the justification for punishment would derive solely from the positive effects it has on society, not from notions of blame or desert.
The Norwegian prison system mentality:
We have to respect people’s need for revenge, but not use that as a foundation for how we run our prisons.
The suffering of prisoners is intentionally minimised. There is no death penalty or life sentencing. The aim is to heal, not harm.
Solutions should transcend the simplistic paradigms of retribution and deterrence in favour of rehabilitation - for both perpetrators and victims.
Small details can have a significant impact on moral behaviour.
The subconscious effect of a pleasant aroma, a modest rise in the volume of background noise, or rushing to an appointment have all been shown to impact our inclination to be kind to strangers in need.
The proportion of approved parole requests spikes after each food break. As judges grow tired and hungry, their rate of approval steadily dropped to roughly zero just before the next meal.
Prolonged mental exertion results in a drop in glucose levels in the blood.
The most established environmental determinant of violence in a society is income inequality.
In highly competitive environments, those at the bottom of the hierarchy struggle to fund ways to secure markers of status.
This explains why higher education in prisons is so effective at reducing reoffending rates: a degree is a marker of status that serves as an antidote to feelings of shame and humiliation.
Ultimately, all that separates the criminal and non-criminal is luck.
Focusing on rehabilitation and root causes makes sense once we stop thinking of crime as a product of an individual’s free agency and view it, instead, as a doctor might view the symptoms of a disease.
A legal framework functions primarily to advance the interests of those who shape it.
Martin Luther King captured the essence of this problem when he told us never to ‘forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal’.
To the extent that law is shaped and interpreted by a narrow set of elite interests, it degenerates into a means of defending privilege. In fact, the word ‘privilege’ originally meant ‘private law’.
If society was serious about reducing crime it would hold accountable, and attempt to deter, those whose actions and ideologies perpetuate the conditions that breed it: those who fight to preserve and extend enormous inequalities of wealth, power and opportunity. A politician in a suit can do far more harm than any street gang, drug dealer or petty thief.
3/ Reward
The richest 1% now own more than the remaining 99 per cent combined.
In pre-capitalist societies, large inequalities in wealth and power were often justified by religious teachings, which claimed that the social and economic hierarchy was ordained by God, so that those with great wealth had a divine right to it.
Ethical considerations play little or no part in the practice and study of modern economics.
Our economic system delivers vast rewards to the rich not for what they do, but for what they own. What’s more, the greater the fortune, the faster it tends to grow.
The main reason why ownership capital is so extremely concentrated is due to inheritance.
Researchers in the UK found that, over the last 150 years, the effect of inheritance has consistently overcome political efforts to improve social mobility.
‘There was a significant correlation between the wealth of families 5 generations apart.’
As Thomas Piketty points out, ‘no matter how justified inequalities of wealth may be initially, fortunes can form and perpetuate themselves beyond all reasonable limits and beyond any possible rational justification in terms of social utility.’
No concept of reward sits comfortably with our lack of ultimate responsibility.
Great wealth is never deserved. The fact that some people attain it is merely the product of strange institutions, emerging from an odd culture, developed by a flawed species.
The growing concentrations of undeserved wealth are not a sign of market failure but a natural outcome of the power dynamics within a market system. In the real world, deregulated markets favour those who own capital.
Every political and economic system has at its core a conception of human nature. The one underpinning the leading economic models of today assumes you are rational and self-interested with unlimited wants and tastes that do not change.
‘There is something extraordinary in the fact that economics has…evolved in this way, characterising human motivation in such spectacularly narrow terms.’
Studies have shown that when money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity.
Part of the problem with so much of the work in today’s economy is that it is not very meaningful or useful.
High salaries can be viewed as a form of compensation for the absence of real purpose in these jobs.
We forsake higher pay for greater freedom. Developing our minds and bodies, and feeling that we are contributing meaningfully to the world around us, is central to our sense of self-worth and well-being.
One study found that spending money on others makes us happier than spending money on ourselves.
In societies where income differences between rich and poor are smaller, the statistics show that community life is stronger and levels of trust are higher.
Part Two: The Illusion of Consent
4/ Control
Ultimately, all conflicts arise from the desire to control the future.
Although we are not ultimately responsible - because we make choices with a brain we did not choose - we do still make choices. And this power to choose is extremely valuable, the starting point for all the freedom that is available to us.
The decisions we make emerge from the interaction of identity and context. Control of a person’s actions can be achieved by shaping either of these elements.
From the 1500 to the 20th century, almost every country on Earth came under the direct or indirect control of European colonial powers. Native populations were wiped out or dispossessed of their land.
Just 2 centuries ago, over three-quarters of humanity were held captive by systems of slavery or serfdom.
Now, control of human labour manifests itself as highly constrained, temporary forms of consensual ownership: EMPLOYMENT.
To survive, most people must pass through the tight bottleneck of employment. That money is paid does not change the fact that at the heart of this arrangement is a relationship of control.
Every community socialises its young according to dominant ideas about what is valuable or necessary.
Maintaining a highly unequal social order requires the propagation of justifying beliefs and the stamping out of dissent.
The battle to control narratives is continuous.
Hitler, who devoted 3 chapters of Mein Kampf to the subject of propaganda, was acutely aware of the importance of shaping belief and opinion as a means of control.
When the Nazis took power, the German education system was comprehensively revamped so that subjects were approached from within the state’s ideological framework.
History lessons focused on German military achievements, biology classes taught Aryan superiority and, across the board, Jews were demonised and blamed for the economic hardships Germany had experienced.
In all modern states, a massive infrastructure exists to shape people’s identities.
It is safe to assume that some of our beliefs, loyalties, biases, habits and values exist simply because they serve the interests of those who have the power to shape them.
Focusing on the apparent options available to people in the voting booth and the market while glossing over the way in which people’s options and identities are manufactured, conceals the profound imbalances of power at the heart of the system.
5/ Elections
Walter Lippmann was an American political commentator famous for being among the first to introduce the concept of Cold War, coining the term “stereotype” in the modern psychological meaning, and critiquing media and democracy in his newspaper column.
He called the practice of managing democracy ‘the manufacture of consent’.
He repeatedly emphasised the potential for exploiting our limited capacity to make sense of an infinitely complex world.
Milton Friedman defended the view that the corporation’s only moral obligation was to maximise corporate profits for stockholders.
Ideally, every corporate prefers to monopolise the market in which it operates and raise entry costs to prohibitive levels, thereby eliminating all competition.
Those most empowered by the market have never stopped working to free it from democratic control. Since the 1960s, the ideological vehicle for this task has taken the form of ‘neoliberalism’.
At the heart of neoliberal thinking is the belief that the only way to guarantee individual freedom is to protect ‘market freedom’.
It is the moral and utopian character of neoliberal theory that makes it such a powerful cover for the advancement of business interests.
Margaret Thatcher described her greatest achievement as Tony Blair.
She also said ‘There is no such thing as society’.
She declared that there was no alternative to neoliberal capitalism.
The neoliberal consensus is deeply embedded in the British establishment.
The ‘market’ for political parties is defined by major investors who generally have good and clear reasons for investing to control the state.
Blocs of major investors define the core of political parties and are responsible for most of the signals the party sends to the electorate.
Therefore, if all major investors happen to share an interest in ignoring issues vital to the electorate, such as social welfare, hours of work, or collective bargaining, so much the worse for the electorate.
6/ Markets
Commodify - turn into or treat as a mere commodity (basic good).
Expropriate - (of the state or an authority) take (property) from its owner for public use or benefit.
“their assets were expropriated by the government”
synonyms: seize, appropriate, take possession of, requisition, commandeer
One pervasive externality, often overlooked is the negative psychological effect on society of private consumption. To the extent that material consumption is equated with status, it is a competitive activity for those seeking to maintain or increase their position in the social hierarchy.
Widespread attempts to increase status with material goods are self-defeating and wasteful.
Externalising costs is a form of theft. It is taking something for nothing and leaving others to foot the bill.
It is in the financial interests of business to keep large sectors of society poor and powerless. Profits rise when workers are compelled by circumstance to accept poverty wages in order to survive.
John Rawls = liberal political philosopher. He wrote ‘A Theory of Justice’ which became a moral manifesto for liberalism.
Libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick argued forcefully against government interference in the market. In the 1970s, he helped lay the philosophical foundations of neoliberalism.
To establish whether an economic choice is voluntary or forced, the proper object of our attention should be the available choices, not the behaviour of other market participants.
History is testament to the dangers of subordinating people to the demand of an abstract, idealised system (in terms of neoliberalism).
Producing consumers
The idea of transforming of the individual into a commodity lies at the heart of consumer culture.
‘The economist’ writes Friedman ‘has little to say about the formation of wants; this is the province of the psychologist’.
Corporations now produce goods AND consumers, on an unprecedented scale.
It is no longer enough to dream of meeting one’s basic needs; the advertising industry has created a grander vision of prosperity to which the public were taught to compare themselves.
The 1920s saw an explosion and redefinition of consumption. You could now buy an identity, a way of life, a dream.
The consumerisation of the worker would be a mission for the public relations industry.
Effective advertising ‘helps to keep the masses dissatisfied with their mode of life, discontinued with ugly things around them. Satisfied customers are not as profitable as dissatisfied ones’.
The idea at the heart of consumerism - that happiness and self-worth increase in line with material possessions - is a lie. It is psychologically damaging.
The policies and values that were advanced by Reagan and Thatcher have been correlated with extremely high rates of mental illness.
It’s not what we possess that gives us status but what we have relative to those around us - that’s the psychology of materialism.
Writing in the 1950s, psychoanalyst Erich Fromm argued that materialistic values encourage us to experience ourselves as commodities, resulting in anxiety about our ‘saleability’.
He characterised a highly materialistic person as ‘passive, empty, anxious, isolated, alienated, bored and for whom life has no meaning’.
Boredom, he argued, is compensated for by ‘compulsive consumption’.
This would explain why advertising has become less and less about the product itself and more about the kind of people we could be if we possessed it: sexy, fun, powerful, distinguished and ethical.
The dynamism of a consumerist society is maintained by the dissatisfaction it creates.
The bypassing of reason ‘is what good advertisement aims to achieve’.
Psychologists have identified a powerful phenomenon called ‘priming’ which occurs when exposure to a stimulus unconsciously affects a person’s response to a subsequent stimulus.
Where we draw the boundaries of the market is not a technical question. Economists have no more right to answer it than you or I.
7/ Media
Information is the oxygen of democracy: its health depends on the quality of the ideas and facts circulating through society.
Rupert Murdoch ‘expects his papers to stand broadly for what he believes: a combination of right-wing Republicanism from America mixed with undiluted Thatcherism from Britain.’
Not only is ownership of the media limited to the super rich, it is also highly concentrated.
Oxbridge graduates make up less than 1 per cent of the population as a whole but account for 47 per cent of newspaper columnists.
Rather than being a tool of social enlightenment, exposing truths and informing the public, the media have become a weapon of social control.
Using their privileged position, advertisers are able to influence the material that appears around their adverts, favouring content that puts people in a buying mood.
Presenting the unsupported claims of the powerful as fact is not journalism, it’s propaganda.
If austerity is bad economics, why did business leaders and politicians support it? The simple answer is ideology. It is an article of faith for neoliberal that the state must shrink, welfare and social security must be cut and everything from healthcare to prisons must be privatised.
The forces that shape media output combine to create a structural bias which favours the selection of information and perspectives that are supportive of elite interests, state and corporate.
Tolerance of limited dissent within the mainstream plays an important propaganda role: it helps to maintain the illusion of a free media.
Familiarity and repetition are not easily distinguished from truth.
The rise of ‘citizen journalism’ has been a democratising force, turning anyone with a smartphone into a potential on-the-ground journalist with a global audience.
Just as in the offline world, whether the web is used to inform, manipulate, control or liberate ultimately depends on how vigorously people fight the encroachments of state and corporate power.
The press writes the first draft of history.
Part Three: The Fight for our Freedom
8/ Creativity
‘Often it is not the kind of person we are that determines how we act, but rather the kind of situation we find ourselves in.’
Total obedience reduces the status of a person’s autonomy to that of a machine: goals are determined externally requiring no further thought or reflection.
Hannah Arendt observed, “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
Obedience and conformity are often confused with neutrality.
In Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment, participants ‘became so absorbed in the narrow technical aspects of the task, that they lost sight of its broader consequences.’
The appearance of neutrality requires the obliteration of context.
We might even ask questions about our ultimate goal - why, for instance, we are striving to attain happiness rather than say, justice, peace, knowledge or meaning?
Perhaps, the important thing is not to stop asking the question, to take time to scrutinise our reasons for living as we do instead of sleepwalking along paths laid down by convention and habit.
As we change ourselves, we transform how we perceive. A rich inner life, a powerful imagination, a good sense of humour, a reservoir of peace and equanimity are powerful creative tools.
With the flicker of consciousness that interrupts an eternity of non-existence, we can do valuable things with our power to choose. The more inspiring our vision, the more meaning we will take from participating in its creation.
Ignorance keeps us bound to schemas that with greater understanding we would reject. Fear ties us to schemas that we detest.
Each of us must ‘play’ the position we inherit.
When rules and values become dominant, they can appear immutable and the behaviour that results from them can seem natural and inevitable.
The game of capitalism requires certain kinds of player. Reorganising society for profit requires the moulding of identities - beliefs, values and habits.
Instead of belief in a powerful, unseen god, faith is placed in a powerful ‘invisible hand’.
Capitalism has imposed its value system on the world more successfully than any empire, ideology or religion.
We must not attempt to reduce the plurality of life’s incommensurable values to one unit of measurement.
People are paid to achieve their employer’s goals, not their own.
When we enter the corporation’s world we become operatives for its imperatives, subsuming our own personal values to its institutional demands.
Every social system is an experiment to be revised and renewed by each generation.
According to Victor Frankl, the most powerful human drive is ‘not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life’.
This meaning is to be found in the ‘striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task’.
9/ Knowledge
If we are not to be misled by the mental constructs we inherit, we have to question them.
To question effectively we need to place a higher value on the elusive ideal of truth than on loyalties to nation, religion, race, culture or ideology.
As Hannah Arendt puts it, ‘To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one’s imagination to go visiting.’
Adam Smith argued that we should put ourselves in the shoes of an ‘impartial spectator’.
To commit unequivocally to a system of belief is to render it impervious to reality.
‘If we suppress all discussion, all criticism, proclaiming ‘This is the answer, my friends; man is saved!’ we will doom humanity for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination.’ (Richard Feynman)
‘No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.’ (Einstein)
To subject our beliefs to experiment is to begin a dialogue with reality.
Confirmation bias is a tendency to privilege information that confirms our beliefs over information that challenges them, so we are drawn to media, people and institutions that reinforce our worldview.
We’re predisposed to create coherent narratives automatically from whatever information we possess.
Consciously directed thinking takes effort.
The more general and encompassing a label, the more subtlety and complexity it conceals. It is easy to learn the label, far harder to understand the reality to which it refers.
The danger of the symbol lies in its ability to discourage thought by providing simplistic shortcuts to beliefs and judgements.
To challenge the worldview of our cultural group risks losing valued friendships, a sense of belonging and the privileges that come with membership.
‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it’. (Upton Sinclair)
Privilege is a persistent obstacle to knowledge, a comfortable cage in which we insulate ourselves from reality. It gives no special insight into what makes life valuable of meaningful, but it does give us a reason to postpone finding out.
‘Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth – more than ruin – more even than death…. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid.’ (Bertrand Russell)
‘Science advances one funeral at a time.’ (Max Planck)
Ideological bias is pervasive and highly convenient for those who wish to defend the vast inequalities of our present system and the power of private capital.
Each generation is trained to fulfil functions within the machinery of the present system, not to fundamentally change it.
Movements for freedom demand that we try to look at the world through many eyes, and in doing so expose the hypocrisies and injustices concealed by self-deriving narratives and ideologies.
History teaches us that it has always taken ‘dreamers’ to improve things.
10/ Power
No major famine has ever occurred in a political democracy.
Mary Wollstonecraft was scorned by contemporaries for suggesting that for society to escape from tyranny, not only must ‘the divine right of kings’ be contested, but the ‘divine right of husbands’.
We cannot separate a system of education from the society it functions to serve.
There is no such thing as a neutral education process.
Education is not praiseworthy for having merely imparted information and skills.
Along side the traditional school disciplines, why not include:
1/ War and Peace 2/ Identity Formation 3/ Empathy and Dehumanisation 4/ Climate Change and Survival 5/ Equality and Oppression
Children should be equipped to perceive the links between history, politics, economics, philosophy, psychology, media and literature.
It requires a holistic approach - one that is precluded by a curriculum emphasising strict specialisation, one that isolates rather than connects its subjects.
In Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, he warned that ‘specialisation could produce workers ‘as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become’.
Control over our working lives is good for our health.
Under capitalism, a powerful pressure exists to broaden the scope of the market through an endless process of commodification.
The key function of bank is money creation, not intermediation.
Once our money is deposited, it no longer legally belongs to us.
The financial crisis occurred because we failed to constrain the financial system’s creation of private credit and money.
11/ Survival
Geo-engineering solutions remain dangerous fantasies that reveal a greater willingness to gamble with the survival of our species than to challenge the logic of capitalism.
Climate change is the greatest security threat humanity has ever faced.
‘Our economic model is at war with life on Earth’ (Naomi Klein)
At the heart of this war is a battle of narratives.
The result is a society stumbling into the future, blinded by the imperatives of power and profit.
Growth has become the organising ideology for corporations and individuals.
When confronted with questions of ecological limits, the typical response is to speak of technological salvation.
In an unequal society, social comparisons fan the flames of an aspirational culture in which people strive to attain the symbols of material success.
People acquire goods simply to keep up with others: overall consumption increases, the economy expands, but no one gets any happier.
As wages are pushed down to boost profits, money for increased consumption must be found elsewhere: the result is high levels of indebtedness. In effect, debt is a promise of future productivity. People borrow today with the expectation of greater productivity tomorrow: debt exacerbates the growth imperative.
The aim of society should not be to produce more jobs but to enable better lives.
A war against nature cannot be won.
Climate change compels us to recognise our interdependence.
Beyond the thin layer of gases that comprise Earth’s atmosphere is a cold, desolate, unforgiving Universe. Remove this protective layer and we perish.
12/ Empathy
Primatologists have no doubt that our cousins on the evolutionary tree of life, the great apes, regularly display empathetic behaviour. Chimpanzees frequently console and reassure one another.
Distance makes killing and torture possible…Distance makes it possible to lose sight of the victim as an ordinary human being.
The neuroscience of dehumanisation has demonstrated just how powerful the act of categorisation can be.
The philosopher Peter Singer uses the term ‘moral circle’ to describe how we place some beings in a privileged category - worthy of our full moral concern - and others outside it.
Research into moral exclusion suggests that humanising privileged ‘in-groups’ while dehumanising ‘out-groups’ is a ubiquitous phenomenon.
Capitalism has to foster moral exclusion to justify the extreme inequality it creates.
Language reinforces psychological distance. From Nazi Germany to apartheid South Africa, labels that reduce people to the status of animals has been a standard way of justifying persecution.
The philosopher Jonathan Glover has identified degradation as a common feature of dehumanisation. It is far easier to think of people as objects of revulsion if they are forced to live in conditions that provoke disgust.
Distance may not be morally significant but it is psychologically important. ‘Few could stand by and watch a child drown; many can ignore a famine in Africa.’
Society and nature are damaged by excessive consumption of the finance, the trivial and the luxurious, but our economic system demands such consumption so it is celebrated.
‘Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.’ (Ian McEwan)
“I was also guilty of adhering to a reduced view and of not perceiving the other’s full humanity.”
What is possible when we decommission the framework of entitlement?
Life is not fair, but society can do a lot to compensate for this. Politics should be about fighting the inherent unfairness of existence.
A commitment to empathy, truth and freedom needs to be the starting point for economics, politics, culture and education - the foundation for our civilisation.
What makes his arguments unusual is that they lead to some chastening conclusions. Here are a few:
Prisons need to be emptied of all but those who pose a threat to society.
Elections must be exposed as a shabby trick on a deluded populace, a lie of democratic choice in a system controlled by money.
The media must be revealed as what it is – a corporate capitalist machine to mass-produce stupidity (with the happy exception of this article).
The planet needs to be conceptually reconfigured as something other than a resource to be despoiled to keep us in lifestyles that don’t make us happy or fulfilled.
The pursuit of economic growth, profit and consumption must be shown up as a damaging value system that, as he puts it, “drives us to chase things that don’t matter and disconnect from things that do”.
