Thanks mainly to the Twit in Chief, the topic of hate speech is trending again. There's a widely-accepted theory to explain what's going on with people who use demeaning, insulting language:
As far as I can see, Trump hasn't turned off his sense of empathy. He acts as if he believes that other people are like him and share his overwhelming neediness and desire to be respected and loved. He also seems to view social relations as a zero-sum game - there's only a limited amount of respect and love out there, so the best way to get some is to take it away from somebody else. So he uses his instinctive empathy, his innate feeling for the things that would most hurt him (loss of status, mockery, belittling), and turns them against his targets.
This isn't the behaviour of somebody who needs to overcome feelings of guilt about treating others in a shabby way. It's the behaviour of somebody who feels no guilt about inflicting distress. I suspect that acting badly doesn't make him feel ashamed - only losing status can do that.
If he was just one bad apple, however influential, this wouldn't be a problem. But, of course, he's not. Most of us share some Trump's desires for love, respect and status, although not in such grotesquely hypertrophied forms - he wouldn't keep on trying to humiliate people if it didn't sting.
And Trump fits into the structures and mechanisms of humiliation that we've created. His own T.V. show, The Apprentice was both the perfect vehicle for Trump and the perfect example of an engineered environment made for the perpetuation of Trumpist values. It's an arena where desperate supplicants compete for the patronage of the highest-status individual in the room, who acts as judge, jury and executioner.
Social media was sold to us as the opposite - an anti-hierarchical space which would democratise speech and give everyone a voice, but many aspects of it seem to have replicated the values of The Apprentice's war of all against all - the endless competition for followers and reach, the new opportunities it gives to the powerful and shameless to shame and silence the less powerful.
This sort of thing can only happen where inequalities of power enables bullies - if the person doing this doesn't wield power, you can walk away, or decide not to care. Maybe this partly explains the current fashion for rediscovering Stoic virtues* and the idea that, if we can't take up arms against the slings and arrows of outrageously powerful buffoons, we can at least suffer them with dignified equanimity. It might be worth a shot, as we endure the depressing wait for the day when the Trumps of this world finally overreach themselves and bring their gilded age of toxic inequality and status-obsession to an end.
*Is Stoicism the new mindfulness?
"If we’re experiencing guilt about our treatment of some person, or group, or class, and having trouble reconciling that guilt with our notion of ourselves as good people, our brains are extremely adept at resolving the situation by othering the people we feel that we’ve wronged. If we dehumanise someone, and distance our empathy with them, then we won’t have to feel bad about the shabby way we’ve treated them."So we inoculate ourselves against our instinctive empathy with language that disables our better instincts towards others. This may be true in a lot of cases, but it doesn't quite ring true for a lot of Trump's own outbursts. The mindset behind a lot of Trump's own tweets seems closer to the one characterised in a recent article by Paul Bloom:
"At some European soccer games, fans make monkey noises at African players and throw bananas at them. Describing Africans as monkeys is a common racist trope, and might seem like yet another example of dehumanization. But plainly these fans don’t really think the players are monkeys; the whole point of their behavior is to disorient and humiliate. To believe that such taunts are effective is to assume that their targets would be ashamed to be thought of that way—which implies that, at some level, you think of them as people after all."This so captures the essence of Trump that you could bottle it. His instinct to go for the emotional jugular, to goad and humiliate others, seems to be the flip side of his own limitless appetite for status, respect and adulation.
As far as I can see, Trump hasn't turned off his sense of empathy. He acts as if he believes that other people are like him and share his overwhelming neediness and desire to be respected and loved. He also seems to view social relations as a zero-sum game - there's only a limited amount of respect and love out there, so the best way to get some is to take it away from somebody else. So he uses his instinctive empathy, his innate feeling for the things that would most hurt him (loss of status, mockery, belittling), and turns them against his targets.
This isn't the behaviour of somebody who needs to overcome feelings of guilt about treating others in a shabby way. It's the behaviour of somebody who feels no guilt about inflicting distress. I suspect that acting badly doesn't make him feel ashamed - only losing status can do that.
If he was just one bad apple, however influential, this wouldn't be a problem. But, of course, he's not. Most of us share some Trump's desires for love, respect and status, although not in such grotesquely hypertrophied forms - he wouldn't keep on trying to humiliate people if it didn't sting.
And Trump fits into the structures and mechanisms of humiliation that we've created. His own T.V. show, The Apprentice was both the perfect vehicle for Trump and the perfect example of an engineered environment made for the perpetuation of Trumpist values. It's an arena where desperate supplicants compete for the patronage of the highest-status individual in the room, who acts as judge, jury and executioner.
Social media was sold to us as the opposite - an anti-hierarchical space which would democratise speech and give everyone a voice, but many aspects of it seem to have replicated the values of The Apprentice's war of all against all - the endless competition for followers and reach, the new opportunities it gives to the powerful and shameless to shame and silence the less powerful.
This sort of thing can only happen where inequalities of power enables bullies - if the person doing this doesn't wield power, you can walk away, or decide not to care. Maybe this partly explains the current fashion for rediscovering Stoic virtues* and the idea that, if we can't take up arms against the slings and arrows of outrageously powerful buffoons, we can at least suffer them with dignified equanimity. It might be worth a shot, as we endure the depressing wait for the day when the Trumps of this world finally overreach themselves and bring their gilded age of toxic inequality and status-obsession to an end.
*Is Stoicism the new mindfulness?
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