Treating Human Evil

Treating Human Evil

Gene Anderson

gene@ucr.edu

Dec. 2025

Doch ihr, ich bitte euch, wollt nicht in Zorn verfallen,

Denn alle Kreatur braucht Hilf von allen.

Bertolt Brecht

(Therefore, I pray you, not to fall into anger; all creatures need help from all.)

Basic Summary

            The great human problem, throughout all history, is the tendency of people to move from fear and stress to hate, and from hate to displacing the hate downward onto weaker groups.

Shady or downright evil politicians and super-rich corporate entities find it expedient to whip up such hatred as a way to get and hold power. It divides the public, allowing the politicians to extract wealth for themselves and their core supporters.

The United States has now succumbed so thoroughly to this dynamic that democracy and the rule of law have been abandoned by the federal government and most of the states. Democracy and the rule of law could be restored, but it will require responsibility and respect on the part of the people, and major leadership from those morally committed.

Abstract

All animals possess a fight-flight-freeze response

All mammals will fight to defend their young.

Social mammals fight to defend their social groups.

Humans are different in that their groups are far larger, more complex, and usually overlapping. Identity groups and reference groups can be defined by anything, from skin color to clothing, but the most extreme defensiveness is often connected to basic beliefs, such as religion, nationalism, and ideology.

Humans start as helpless infants and grow slowly, allowing a long time for immature defenses, conditioned on weakness, to develop. These include such things as passive aggression and constant complaining, but the most serious is displacement of aggression and anger onto weaker individuals or groups.

Violence toward weaker groups is thus a constant theme in human bad acting.

Politicians have taken advantage of this throughout history.

Giant primary-production interests, from landlords to aristocrats to church hierarchies to modern giant firms, have backed politicians—often extremist ones—in setting groups against each other, especially setting majorities against weak minority groups.

The current United States situation is an extreme case. Giant fossil fuel firms and allies, including agribusiness, mining, and chemicals, have been the core funding for Trump and his agenda.

They have thus backed a shady character who has surrounded himself with other shady characters. The United States has become a kleptocracy, run to a great extent as a giant money source, with taxes being streamed to the most corrupt and shady members of the rich.

This agenda has little (if anything) to offer except hatred, repression, and cruelty toward weaker groups.

The Trump universe has found immigrants to be the ideal target, but “racial” minorities, liberals of all sorts, religious minorities, and any other available targets have all been attacked.

This has involved abandonment of the rule of law and resort to rule by an individual and his chosen few.

It also involves abandonment of responsibility, including the government functions that helped ordinary citizens. This has reached a point of eliminating lifesaving functions, from foreign aid to health care, and random murder of innocent civilians in the United States and in Caribbean waters.

The only cure is to follow the basic civic guidelines of empathy, cooperation, and tolerance. We must learn to learn to work together, responsibly.

We now can succeed in restoring American society only by returning to the United States Constitution, because it is the only guide most people will agree to.

Restoring America will also involve not only return to education and science, but far more investment in them and attention to their findings.

It will also involve returning to the concept of investment, especially in public goods, as a government function.

Also, last and far from least, it will involve attention to human lives.

Introduction

            This skeletal paper is a summary of my work in the last few years, especially Confronting Bad Trouble (2025), which is hard to find. The book and earlier works by my wife and myself (Anderson and Anderson 2022, 2020, 2013) provide the documentation and discussion that is left out of the present short paper.

            The United States is falling under fascist dictatorship. It will soon be a full autocracy, with mass murder, unless something is done soon. Meanwhile, longer-term crises are building up: global warming and attendant disasters, depletion of fresh water, building up and desertification of farmland, elimination of tropical forests and of biodiversity, and depletion of resources in general, from fisheries to phosphorus (Sutton and Anderson 2024). We simply cannot handle these crises without a return to democracy and the rule of law. Autocracies have time and again proved their utter inability to handle resource depletion. The present work provides some understanding of the problem, and what can be done about it.

THE HUMAN ANIMAL

Consider the constant, minor scuffles in my backyard: Hummingbirds fight over flowers, mockingbirds squabble over territory, lizards chase each other. Such conflicts end immediately with the flight of the weaker or less committed animal. They keep the system going, unchanged. Rarely, the loser mounts a real challenge. This threatens the established order. A fight results.

Conflicts arise over disparate wants, but also simply to maintain control. Most conflicts are, in fact, strictly about maintenance of control over one’s space or resources.

All higher animals fight their rivals, both individual rivals and threatening groups. The more social they are, the more they fight and sacrifice to defend the group. Chimnpanzees, for instance, kill each other at rates around 500-600 per hundred thousand; human murder rates range about 1 to 100, but in war and genocide rates can go far higher, up to 1 in 10 or more.

Humans are no different from other social mammals in the causes and outcomes of rivalry and conflict. The fight-flight-freeze response is deeply embedded in the brain, and is similar across all. In humans, culture allows far more awareness of rivalry and far more to fight about, and society gives us far larger groups to indulge in battle. Nonhuman mammals may fight over burrows and dens. Humans fight over the entire world. Nonhuman social groups conflict with their neighbors. Humans hate any group they can remotely imagine as presenting a threat.

Hate is generally associated with such fear of rivalry. There is nothing wrong with competition and rivalry; the problem comes when weak, scared animals, including humans, have enough power to crush their rivals with extreme emotionality and viciousness.

Animal Heritage

Humans are basically a social animal, dependent on their social groups. They normally support each other. Reciprocity and generosity are normal and expected within groups. The main thing people have going for them is sociability. It bonds them and makes them learn from each other. The main cost is the stark terror of rejection. Another cost is abject conformity, especially when it is conformity to social hatreds.

We are hypersocial. Of all animals, they form not only the largest social groups, but the most complex and the most solidary animal societies. Few, if any, other animals die for perfect strangers, and none other than humans will die for a cause or an abstraction. Only humans can die for a god, a flag, or a dream.

            Love and care are usually reserved for family, and secondarily for close friends and neighbors, but social learning and long contact can make people live and die for wider groups and for adopted kin and friends. Love and care fade quickly with social distance, but people will still work happily and reliably with others, even strangers from utterly different backgrounds. We extend trust by default, as Malcolm Gladwell points out in Talking to Strangers (2021). We trust not only strangers’ words, but also their good faith in business, defense, and other pursuits, unless we have learned when to doubt. Newborn babies are suspicious and stressed by strangers, but not very much so, and they seem wired to trust. This allows conmen and cheats to flourish, but that is the price of ultrasociety.

We accept that helping others is good, unless mistaken and misdirected, while gratuitously harming them is evil. Staying isolated is neutral, an opposite to both.

Even so, conflicts arise. Typical humans love and care for a few close social others, hate and fear a very large but usually poorly defined set of groups, and are indifferent to the vast majority of humanity. Hate and fear are socially learned, but also come from experience, and above all from personal insecurity.

Humans are not much different from other higher animals in their conflicts, except that we have knives, guns, bombs, drones, and the rest. Most of our conflicts are over control of other people, or control of resources such as money or land.

The human condition is one of dealing with challenges, all the way from weeds in the flower patch up to world war. One can meet challenge in two ways: work with others to manage, or fight to destroy the challenge. These are not mutually exclusive. War is the type case: one joins with one’s people (whoever they are) to fight the enemies (whoever they are).

Stress and fear lead in animals to a fight-flight-freeze response. The alternatives to fight-flight-freeze are negotiating, ignoring, putting up with it, obeying, and working together to fix the whole situation. Fighting back is now usually through law, or the like, rather than actual fighting. Actual fighting remains common.

We can distinguish three levels of competition. Adam Smith argued that the butcher and the baker compete to do the best job of pleasing the customers. This can be called positive-sum gaming. More common is straightforward zero-sum gaming. As the Russians used to say in USSR times, “in capitalism it’s dog-eat-dog. Under communism it’s just the reverse.”

Even positive-sum games can go bad, when the cooperation is for an awful end. A great deal of good will and hard cooperative work was expended on developing groundwater in Arizona and California, but the end result is disaster. More seriously, a nation can unite with all proper patriotism to go after a weaker one.

Zero-sum games are obviously even more prone to go wrong; in fact they usually turn sour, though healthy competition is still good at times. Literal games—from chess to football—are usually zero-sum by definition, but can be a lot of fun, creating an overall positive sum in spite of the zero-sum outcomes. But this requires sportsmanship, and also some actual rules. Adam Smith described healthy competition, but he also pointed out that it had to be within a moral and legal shell that kept it from turning sour (Smith 1910 [1776]); this fact seems known only to those few who have actually read him, rather than merely citing him (unread) for defending free markets.

Worst of all, though, are negative-sum games. They are about competing to ruin, or at most minimally help, our own lives by ruining other people’s lives even more. This is why the free market and unregulated capitalism fail, and corporate capitalism fails worse: people, and above all the less successful giant firms, turn to tearing each other down. At first they hope to profit somewhat by making others pay greater costs. Inevitably, though, such feedback loops end in each player hurting himself or herself simpy to hurt others more. Suicide bombers and suicidal school-shooters are typical, but individual self-destruction of this sort is rare. Social self-destruction, however, is exceedingly common, and in fact drives the suicide bombing. People in groups regularly destroy themselves to destroy others. Often, they think they can avoid the crash when everything turns to mutual destruction. Sometimes they can.

Many an economy collapses this way. It is the main reason why standard economic theory so often fails; rational self-interest is assumed, but too many people believe in irrational mutual destruction. Many a dynasty fell in ancient times from such behavior. The United States may well succumb to it in near future, dissolving into insane violence.

Fascism is basically a vast negative-sum game. It has taken over in Trump’s America. The United States used to be largely positive-sum. Under Trump it became negative-sum. Trump’s program has been to tear down groups that his supporters happen to dislike, and to cut all government spending that actually benefits people.

Most of us just cooperate and do our jobs. It is better to work together to improve our immediate surroundings. It is still better to work together to save the world.

Developing Bad Trouble

The back story is the human tendency to react to stress with fear, and then with anger, resentment, and defensiveness. These are exaggerated in proportion to the level of helplessness and weakness of the people feeling fear.

This all begins in infancy. We start life as utterly helpless babies, totally dependent on parents and other caregivers for survival. This state changes very slowly. By six months, infants show every sign of loving their parents, and anyone else who cares for them and interacts with them. They also have likes and dislikes, such as liking sweet flavors and disliking bitter ones (that shows up even in the womb). They are interested in their world, engaged with it, and bored with inaction.

By a year, they care for others, taking care of younger infants, pets, and others that show a response. Neglect and trauma counteract all this. Neglected babies learn to stop caring. Traumatized ones learn fear and resentment. All infants learn to feel anger at neglect and harm, and grow in anger unless trained to put up with whatever the environment requires.

Fear of abandonment is born into all mammals. Human infants begin to understand and respond to harsh negative judgments and threatened rejection at about six months.

They are terrified of abandonment as soon as they can perceive it. Abandonment and rejection mean death for a baby, so they fear even being out of sight of caregivers. They must learn to trust being left alone at night. This fear is the most extreme and existential fear outside of extreme and obvious danger. It conditions everything in a child’s life. To the extent that they are insecure—and all babies are necessarily somewhat insecure, being almost helpless—they fear any rejection or negative judgment, however slight. Punishment is acceptable, even leaving them alone for short periods, but if it involves telling them they are basically bad or inadequate or unloved, or if it involves public shaming, it leaves a psychological scar.

They learn to cope by crying, eventually developing temper tantrums at around two years. Passive-aggressive defenses appear by four or five years. So do compassion, civility, and then respect, responsibility, and other more mature and successful coping mechanisms. Control can be pushed too hard too early, though. The “parentified child” may never get a reasonable grip on it, and remain overcontrolling for a lifetime.

Even teenagers still depend on the group. During these relatively helpless years, we learn coping strategies, based on frightened defensiveness. Both actual threats and punishment for bad or selfish behavior lead to overnegative overreactions.

Learning to help begins in the family, then expands out with work and play, first with neighbors and peers, then outward. It produces social warmth and support, and successful control of self, others, and situation. Ideally, but not always in reality, conflicts are resolved easily. Success of cooperation depends on local tradition of help, accommodation, tolerance, and conflict management.

Education must accommodate to all this. We develop immature defense mechanisms, many of which are hard or impossible to overcome when we grow up. We must develop common sense—simple rationality in approaching the world and its problems. The hardest thing of all is to develop the ability to deal with being called out for bad mistakes, especially if the calling out appears a lot worse than the mistake. Children learn to swallow this, but it hurts, and seems to me to be the major cause of later snappnig, whining, complaining, resenting everythnig, and general bad behavior. Most adults take criticism as a deadly total personal attack. Often it is, but usually the original reason they learned to react thus is that they were criticized unfairly or sharply in childhood.

By ten to fourteen, children learn to generalize these responses. Ideally, they learn compassion, respect, solidarity, patience, reasonableness, tolerance, and other virtues. Less ideally, they always learn hatred and rejection. These are all socially learned virtues, though we have varying degrees of natural tendencies in those directions. Even dogs learn to respect their owners, tolerate a lot of things, show something like compassion, and otherwise show simple forms of the major virtues. They do not, however, universalize these, to a general compassion, love for all beings, respect for the universe, or other highly general virutes that human philosophers teach.

Critically for morality, only humans can truly hate whole groups for no reason. Animals can be conditioned to fear people with certain characteristics, but cannot hate whole ideologies and whole nations. Humans are the hating animal. Many humans appear to live by hatred as fish live by waer. Whole industries are devoted solely to whipping up hatred for cynical political and financial reasons. The extremist political and religious media are cases in point.

Scared, and ultimately cowardly, defensiveness is the cost of staying immature, growing up without learning self-confidence, self-control, and self-efficacy. Conflict adds to other insecurities, thus to childish defenses and resentment. This usually comes out in adulthood as hatred. The cure must be teaching conflict resolution first and at all ages, as well as mature rational defenses. Albert Bandura’s self-efficacy model fits (Bandura 1982, 1986, 1997). Self-efficacy means, first, taking control of one’s life—growing up, taking responsibility, and figuring out what to do given those developments. The model extends to all aspects of life.

Failure to cope with punishment for demanding “my way” in spite of its disruptiveness is at least as damaging as failure to cope with external threats. As babies, we learn to be satisfied with a fair share (no more) and cannot always—or even usually—have our way. Just matter-of-fact “no” or “do it” are the best and maybe the only ways to get this across, but once children are past infancy, we have to explain. Punishment basically teaches kids to punish; it is sometimes necessary but usually a measure of desperation.

However, punishments for selfishness and waywardness are not causes of really murderous evil. Kids learn to cope. Many kids are “spoiled”—given material goodies because of parental guilt over being unable to love or like their kids—but even they learn to cope. What causes real evil—what makes kids bully, harm, and ultimately kill for no good reason—is arbitrary and cruel upbringing, and social learning. This can be due to patriarchy taught by the culture, or to chaotic disruption (as by substance abuse by parents), or a psychopathic parent, or simply to growing up in chaotic, violent environments, such as slums or war zones. Experience teaches that even psychopaths, generally considered to have an “inborn” psychosis, usually have chaotic and violent backgrounds.

Infants start out with tremendous capacity to love, but also have the capacity to be cruel and evil. Adults can be fantastically cruel without any real reason, though they always have some socially-learned justification. They develop this in response to being corrected or unfairly punished or the like. Condign or erratic punishment for minor sins is the way to turn a child evil. General chaos and violence do the same; it is hard to imagine the one without the other.

Sociopaths and psychopaths believe all punishment and criticism of them is unfair. They claim, and appear to believe, that everybody else does the same things and gets away with it, so they are singled out. But overcontrolling people have the same problem: they may admit sin to themselves, but cannot admit it openly, and have to self-justify it by prickly defense. Either way, resentment builds up, merges with hate, and is easily mobilized for evil.

So, a major problem for children growing up is feeling put down, especially if it is or seems unfair. Groups, even more than individuals, respond with anger to this. But it is manageable, being part of the wear and tear of life, unless it can be whipped up by violent, resentful parents and, in the wider world, political leaders.

All humans, from infancy onward, are mixes of love and care for their own, indifference to many others, and real fear and hate of still others. These hated people are often individuals, but more often are members of rival groups. Groups that feel they are challenged and failing to hold their own, such as rural and working-class whites in the modern United States, are easily led to hate groups that seem to be moving up and providing challenge. Essentially all people will fight to defend themselves and their families; most, especially young men, will fight to defend their group; but, usually, it is the children raised with some violence and chaos will fight simply to fight. They can be brainwashed into hate and killing in proportion to the amount of violence and chaos in their backgrounds.

HUMAN SOCIETY

Basic Fear

The core is of human troubles is fear, not hate or defensiveness. Challenge, threat, and stress are universal. Sheer self-preservation is basic, and so is fighting to defend what we love: family, friends, social reference groups. Immediate physical danger can range from a speeding car to a life-threatening disease. We never quite escape.

So, underneath, everyone is a scared, hurt kid. Nobody completely outgrows immature defenses or completely develops mature defenses. Thus, compassion is basic, and should be universal. Bertolt Brecht’s line cited above sums up what we need, along with the Serenity Prayer.

Challenge usually leads to more or less rational coping. We put up with it, or talk it out, or negotiate a solution, or, at worst, confront, stand up, and fight. On the other hand, though, it often leads to irrational and excessive anger or to the flight-freeze response. The latter, in humans, usually takes the form of escapism or depression. Excessive resignation is not much help. Anger can be against trivial things like a mosquito bite or a stubbed toe, but the real anger that leads to violence and hatred always demands a real challenge: group or individual rivalry, loss or feared weakening of control, or direct attack on one’s personhood by criticism, scolding, and on to harsh discipline.

Overnegative overreaction to challenge and stressis one source of bad things. It is not mutually exclusive with the Bible’s “for the love of money is the root of all evil” (Timothy 6:10), Mao Zedong’s “all bad things in the world come from not working,” or Tracy Fisher’s summary of Paul Farmer’s thought, “The idea that some lives matter less is the root cause of all that is wrong with the world,” but it captures the common ground of these and more. Greed for money is evil only when it involves cheating, stealing, and cutthroat competition, which are caused by issues of rivalry, control, and hatred more than by simple greed. (If you are really serious about money, you will work with others to get more of it; cooperation pays.) People think others matter less because they have learned to react too negatively to them. People don’t work because they are scared, or disempowered, or discouraged (or, of course, because they are invalids or very young or old—hardly a cause of evil).

Dualism

            Traditional in many societies is dualism: the world as conflict between good and evil. Rarely is it put in such blunt terms—there are always nuances—but the conflict between Goodness and Badness is still familiar, in one or another form, all over the world. We may see evil as merely a mistake: Satan is shaytan, “lie” or “inaccurate claim”; Devil is diabolos, “thrown apart” from the truth. However, in general, we may more reasonably see evil as working to get what we want by hurting other people disproportionately. Doing down the competition, the enemy, the rivals, or simply the family and the neighbors, is universal in the human world, and is often done for little benefit, or simply to revenge a perceived slight. We may safely take it as the core and base of evil. This said, the highest good is working together for collective improvement. This can go wrong if we are mistaken about what constitutes “improvement,” but with reason and common sense we can find collective goals that matter. Working for oneself when not at the greater expense of others is also good, though less notably so.

            The question, then, is why humans are so prone to harm others to enormous, even fantastic, degrees for little or no benefit to anyone. That concerns us for the rest of this manuscript.

Fight-flight-freeze

            The fight-flight-freeze response in mammals is a highly conserved mechanism connecting social processing sectors of the front brain with the basic emotion sectors of the hypothalamus. The amygdala is the chief immediate processor of fear. It connects with centers that entrain the actual motor responses of fighting, flying, or freezing.

To get briefly technical: Damon Dashti and coworkers (Dashti et al. 2025) found that noradrenergic activity in the brain under stress led to competition, while stress that led to glucocorticoid activation led to the tend-and-befriend response: people sought out support, backup, sympathy, and consolation. It seems that the stress response is variable and contingent. Learning probably determines which of those neurchemical responses is invoked.

In humans, if we decide to fight, the next question is whom we fight. This is not easy for so socially complex an animal. Challenge is rarely clear and simple. If it is, it usually comes from more powerful people or from society as a whole, so we are not in a position to fight back. The usual cowardly-defensive reaction is to displace the hatred and aggressioni onto weaker people.

This leads to hating people for what they are rather than for what they do. They are hated for skin color, religion, or being left-handed or red-haired, not for evil acts. Many people hate those above them in the social hierarchy, or those socially considered lower or weaker, or, in all too many cases, everybody.

Thus, one bit of rational coping is to oppose people for what they do rather than for what they are. Violent criminals, bullies, and corrupt officials are genuinely bad and should be restrained.

Hating and attacking people for being born into a particular group is also bad. Unfortunately, it is harder to avoid. We are born into families, nations, religions, social groups. We identify accordingly, and thus learn to judge people by what they are, not what they do. Unfortunately, this may be necessary in war and civil conflict. There really are sides, and we really must stand against everyone on the other side, even if we know they are good people. The hope is to avoid such conflicts and negotiate them when they occur.

In all cases, social learning, prior experience, and reactions of others to such teachings and to our applications of them, give the specifics. Usually, we learn whom to hate from our parents, peers, and elders, and mindlessly keep hating for no decent reason.

Always, thanks to childhood with its endless needs to deal with criticism, correction, bullying, negative judgments, and general put-downs, we can minimize, but cannot totally shake, infantile (and thus often cowardly) reactions. Cowardly defenses are built into our lives. Only the strongest and most independent-minded can shake them, either by loving humanity and nature or by fighting courageously against real opponents.

In my experience, the most devastating stress is to be held in hatred and contempt for being what you are: Black, foreign, autistic, talkative, red-haired, anything. Next worst is to be downjudged and rejected for a minor sin: one feels shamed and guilty but also unfairly treated. Closely following that, and a part of the same issue, is being attacked and rejected for a mistake or unintentional sin. Following those comes loss or failure of control, which I discuss at great length in Confronting Bad Trouble. These four things seem to me to cause most, if not all, of the extreme overreaction that leads to hatred, mass murder, and other huge evils. Control of other people is the worst control issue, but control of one’s image and social standing is well up the list. Control of resources, such as money, is often very serious.

Thus begin gred for money (as Timonthy said), irresponsibility (with Mao), prejudice (following Paul Famer), and so on. They are partly derivative of pre-existing cowardly defensiveness and learned hate. They cause what can be called rational evil: people hurting others out of selfish concern for themselves. When the harm outweighs the benefit, as it generally does, we speak of evil. But the real irrational evils—people destroying themselves to hurt others—have deeper roots in fear—sometimes downright panic—caused by challenge to control of one’s world. These lead to loss of self-efficacy and self-control.

Other things being equal, then, challenges to control of one’s immediate social scene and situation is the worst; to control of one’s lifeworld, next; to resources, last. A mild challenge to personhood may raise nothing more than annoyance, while a huge challenge to resources—such as being fired—is terrifying. And many challenges involve challenges to all three at once.

Minor challenges that do not imply actual loss can be absorbed with anger and annoyance; challenges that actually threaten serious loss and decline are the ones that elicit real fear and thus the fight-flight-freeze reaction, so often emotionally overdone. Thus, anger is commone than fear-based fury, but it is the latter that really fuels hatred and political violence.

The more people are scared and stressed by attacks—often in childhood—on their personhood and adequacy, the more they fall into irrational hatred. Even the cold indifference to others that allows greed to take over and become the “root of all evil” is underlain by personal problems of this sort, but sheer competitive seeking for wealth and success alone certainly has its evil side.

Responses to those challenges and fears are often the cowards’ ways. Worst and commonest is displacement: scapegoating, racism, hatred, bullying. Also universal is passive-aggressive behavior. All too common is general nastiness, snapping, whining, and complaining. A serious problem of those with brittle self-confidence is arrogance and touchy pride, including defiant carelessness. Behavioral correlates of cowardly defensiveness include lying, weaseling, cheating, corruption, and crime in general. Giant corporations and powerful people use both courageous and cowardly defensive techniques; they use anything that works.

Fear vs. Sociability

This really says that people are afraid all the time. They especially fear personal rejection and negative judgments. These are what usually cause cowardly defenses.

Society protects us from enemies, especially other social groups. The irony is that because it does this, our worst and most existential fear is of being rejected and ostracized by our society. Shifting social relationships cause shifts in fear and hate, we can never be secure. The more danger, the more competition becomes frightening and stressful.

Revenge is a large part of this (Kimmel 2025). Outrage at real or perceived attack and challenge is basic to a great deal of response. However, there seems to be no difference between actual revenge and murderous hate caused by simple fear of rival groups, so I do not make a distinction here. James Kimmel (2025) sees revenge as leading to physical addiction, as heavy drinking or drug use can lead to physical dependence. Similar pathways in the brain are activated. Vengeance involves emotion centers, and provides a dopamine rush. This remains to be settled. At the very least, brain pathways involved in intense emotional experience are activated, and become habituated to hatred and desire for violent reckoning. If he is right, the same would be true of group hate in general, and thus supporters of genocidal causes may be genuine addicts. The world would require large scale detoxification treatment to make it safe.

Yet, when not driven by hate and vengefulness, people care about others, want to be sociable, want good social relationships, want to work together, and want to love, and want to have some meaning in their lives. Forgiveness, by contrast, damps down the emotional overreactions, and provides peace.

Inevitably, the fear takes precedence. It demands prior consideration before people can feel secure enough to love and care. This is especially—but not only—true of weak people with poor self-confidence. They must foreground and prioritize any fearful situation and any challenge. Yet, recall from above that we all begin as babies, weak and helpless, and we can never entirely outgrow some feelings of insecurity and excessive fear.

This is why evil so often wins and seems so powerful and general, while good seems gentle and local. We are not creatures of hate and fear; we just need to deal with fear first of all, to the degree we are really scared. People may be about half good and half negatively defensive, but must always prioritize any challenge, real, implied, or fantasized, to self or to group. Hence the extreme touchiness, extremes of forced or hypocritical civility, extreme control, and value on considerateness in societies everywhere. People need to follow social rules. Any violation is a challenge.

Since every action has an equal and opposite reaction, at least in physics and often in behavior, people are 50-50: half good and half irrationally hostile and hateful. Evil is powerful and general. The fact that good survives, in spite of being gentle and local, proves that it is pervasive and basic. Otherwise, humans would have destroyed each other long ago. They still might.

The continuum from psychopaths to angels breaks at about the halfway point of human population. Psychopaths are very rare. Basically bad people—lawless and violent—are commoner. Conformists to negative social messages, from hate to violence, are much commoner. But so are conformists to good values. Proactively good people are not rare, but not common either. Finally, true angels and saints do exist among us, but are rare. Fortunately, they do not seem to be as rare as psychopaths, though nobody has counted. It seems that psychopaths and evil people attract much more attention.

A few saints are good and well-meaning in all occasions, at all times. I have known several such, but not enough to fill a ballroom.

Some others simply don’t care and don’t think. These default conservative, since they are stressed by change.

Others can be mean, and yet do good because they were taught early to be civil.

Finally, a few psychopaths and sociopaths are simply evil and are very hard to change. Again, I have known a few, but not enough to fill a classroom, let alone a ballroom.

Most of us seem to be balanced. We hate a few, love a few, like and appreciate a few, and for the rest, “I can put up with them if I have to.” We usually default to being good, because common sense tells us to, but we are not able to love many people. Jesus loved everyone and gave us a mark to shoot for, but it remains an unattainable ideal for most of us. Fortunately, we do not hate many either, unless we have been listening to the few truly evil people.

Resolving Conflict?

The only hope lies in rational conflict resolution. Among strong or self-confident people, stress and fear lead to negotiation, rational coping, actual successful defense (as opposed to temper tantrums), or, at worst, to bearing it all and finding some sort of release. The Serenity Prayer describes this perfectly: “God grant me the patience to accept what I cannot change, the courage to change what I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” We must take “courage” to include the courage to do hard sustained work as well as to fight back. Similarly, “patience” must include, focally, tolerance. “Wisdom” must include genuine interesti in the world, and desire to learn.

            The commonest immature response (after passive-aggression) is to displace hatred and resentment, directing it toward weaker people and groups. We see this in schoolyard bullies. They seek out smaller, weaker kids to beat up. This is a weak, scared response.

            Thus, empowerinig and encouraging—literally en-couraging—are the most basic things people can do for each other. Communities, especially religious ones, used to do this, but now community is sadly depleted, and many religious sects have drifted into hate and cruelty, making the problem worse rather than better. There is hope, especially when advocates of the good use the classic “sandwich” technique of stressing the good, then exposing whatever evil they are critiquing, and then returning to the good with hopes for a resolution.

            For ordinary anger, repair and support are needed. Fear requires more: reassurance, maintenance, and care. For hurt and stress, healing is required. We must work on this—what to do for what kinds of stress.

            In the end, after all, what holds all this together—the glue that bonds our species into a functional social universe—is the need for reassurance, sweetness, decency, support, and care. All of us are scared and hurt. All of us are angry but suffer from it. All of us need each other.

Elaboration: Overreaction and Social Effects

The common, everyday form of conflict is the endless bickering that characterizes families (especially dysfunctional ones), children’s playpacks, and badly-managed workplaces. People are constantly taking offense, usually at imagined slights, and vastly overreacting. (Hodor et al. 2025 found that a company that usually sent out birthday greetings to its workers faced skyrocketing absenteeism by the neglected, when they forgot to send one or two. So trivial an omission caused enormous offense.) They see a need to crush the critic, rather than simply responding to a minor cut.

The extreme form, seen in everything from spouse abuse to genocide, is giving first priority to crushing the opposition. This may be real opposition, wrongly-feared opposition, or victims of displacement: weak groups that are attacked because of fear of strong and powerful groups. This privileges working against other people, as opposed to working with them or for them. Exaggerating the threat, overreacting to it, and then overdoing the fight response are the hallmarks of human evil. Such fearful and often misdirected violence is exacerbated by feeling oneself to be downwardly mobile. 

The three most conspicuous forms of extremely angry or fearful overreaction are selfish greed, psychopathy, and group hate.

Selfish greed means prioritizing cutting down the competition in negative-sum games. Psychopathy is a hereditary condition, though it can be exacerbated by bad upbringing, especially chaotic and violent upbringing. Group hate is usually socially learned, beginning with prejudice against weaker or vulnerable groups. These groups are seen as challengers, but usually they are innocent or nearly so.

Really serious evil, and also serious good-doing, both depend on personal commitment. They require high motivation. Accomplishing anything in either direction requires social skills. Good demands enthusiasm; evil requires hatred. All evil prioritizes crushing opposition, ideally by the most drastic means possible.

Four types of people are particularly susceptible to hateful beliefs. First come sheer dupes—the victims of hateful lies, from propaganda to sacred social tradition. Second come old-time believers led down the garden path. Third are weak people who were entitled and privileged but dread equal opportunity, such as the less successful whites in modern America. Fourth are the people raised in chaotic or dysfunctional situations, and thus never really learned to keep emotions down or handle difficult situations.

Genuinely downbound groups are the most scared and worried, and the ones who fund and drive it. On the left, the more neurotic and otherwise difficult ones become real haters.

Challenge is the beginning of fear. The more stable and ambitious will see challenge as a spur to get richer and more powerful. This can lead to working with people to make everyone better off, but in defensive people it can lead to selfish greed. The evil person will take it as all cutthroat competition, mostly negative-sum gaming. It means prioritizing the destruction of rivals and competitors, not just ordinary selfishness.

Any society that lets greed and hate run out of control is doomed. Societies must therefore teach working with other people, instead of against them. Societies should recal the Serenity Prayer. They also need the Platinum Rule. This differs from the Golden Rule in that it advocates doing what others need or want, not what you need or want. The Golden Rule assumes far too readily that others will want the same things. If I love Brussels sprouts, I should feed them to everybody. As John Rawls taught, this is not justice. Rawls (1971, 1993, 2001) advocated putting yourself in another’s position, and then working out the justice of a response. A paraplegic’s needs are different from mine. A girl needs different things from her mother or grandmother. A ill person needs rest and support, not the physical activity a healthy person needs.

Adam Smith (1914 [1776]) taught capitalist competition, but he taought that it had to be in a moral shell: fairly simple straightforward morals that children can learn. He also pointed out that a functional society must have rule of law (even if, as in small-scale societies, it is unwritten custom), accountability and recourse, a checks-and-balance system, distribution of knowledge, and ways of teaching the morals. If this sounds like what the Founding Fathers tried to arrange for the United States—well, Smith’s work was new and exciting at the time, and they read him and listened up.

Above all, though, people must learn how to cope with challenge, including self-imposed challenge, and how to avoid getting overemotional about coping.

The opposite—being nice, in the ordinary meaning of that phrase—is basically being peaceful, though angering at injustice. It means help, not harm.

Good and Evil

From Plato and Aristotle on down, philosophers have pointed out that it sometimes necessary to hurt people in order to help them; surgeons do it all the time. It is also necessary to harm some people to stop them from harmnig others more. Conflicts between individuals, factions, and whole polities happen all the time. Helping our side then, all too often, means harming the other side, hopefully not too much before resolution occurs.

This being said, it is generally better to work with people than to work against them. Almost no one lives the life of a Hobbesian savage, in a state of “warre of each against all.” Overwhelmingly more common is peaceful coexistence. When conflict does happen, it is usually group vs. group. A lone warrior lasts only as long as it takes for two strong people to band together to take him down. The tough loners of our society are privileged people; they succeed only because nobody has stopped them yet. Looked at another way: The murder rate in the United States, one of the relatively murderous countries of the world, is less than 6 per 100,000. Estimates of the death rate from group violence—war, genocide, and gang brutality—in the world in the 20^th century run around 2500 per 100,000 for the whole century. Some are lower, but some are much higher. (So far, the 21^st century has been less violent, though there have been some horribly bloody events.)

Typically, people have options, and choose reference groups they think are powerful, successful, upward bound, or morally right. If possible, they find a group that combines all these traits. Perhaps more often, they delude themselves into thinking their group does.

Usually, we stay with the groups we are born into, but adopt some subset thereof that pleases us. Most people carry these loves and hates throughout life, though many learn and change.

Today, the problem is that groups are set more and more against each other. Worse, they are fragmenting. Decades of divide-and-rule strategies by powerful people have reduced the wrold to a set of conflicting nations, territories, and groups.

The United States is in a near-Hobbesian state of “warre,” but it is war of political groups against each other, and of majorities against minorities, not of individuals against each other. Civility has declined, political violence has risen, and hostility is increasing. (My wife Barbara and I have explored these issues in four books: Anderson and Anderson 2013, 2017, 2020, 2022; also I have done some wild thniking in my book Confronting Bad Trouble [2025], of which the present text is a summary. References for everything in this paper are found in those books; several hundred scholarly and scientific references back us up.)

Overnegative reactions to people are, thus, a measure of insecurity.

Conflict and challenge can invoke three types of reactions. One can bear them and accept them. One can deal rationally. Or one can overreact, by cowardly defensiveness and hatred.

The first of these is unlikely unless the person doing the bearing is either very confident of support or unable to do anything about the problem. The second is the behavior of a secure, knowledgeful individual who is not scared to cope. The third tracks insecurity, and thus dominates among people raised in chaotic, unpredictable, often violent situations.

The Need for Control

            Control appears to be the most pervasive and deadly back story to hatred and mass murder. The resulting cruelty is worse according to the weaker the individual, the more people he or she has to control, and the more total that control must be. From residential schools and old-time orphanages to Central Asian Medieval states, from slavery-worked plantations to militias in wartime, from fascist torture camps to communist gulags, it is the need for total control that leads to the extremes of cruelty and violence.

Humans are murderous enough, greedy enough, and brutal enough to kill at a fairly high rate in ordinary times, let alone in war, but only a felt need for direct and immediate control leads to the levels of violence seen in genocides and endless all-out conflicts.

Animal models are perfectly adequate to explain ordinary murder and personal conflict—all mammals will kill to get resources, protect their young, hold mates, and the like—but no other animal does anything remotely close to the mass murder of millions of people simply because the rulers need control, and assert it most easily by stirring up public hates and rivalries to the point of mass killing. Social place—personal “honor,” status, appreciation, acceptance or rejection—is very close psychologically, and personal touchiness notoriously potentiates control-driven violence. Honor societies are dangerous.

            Control and power are even more so. Lord Acton was right: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And corrupted powerful people will kill. The one common theme of all politicides and genocides is the authoritarian power of the leader over the people being killed. Another can do it, and will do it if faced with a crisis (see Anderson and Anderson 2013, 2017, 2022).

Direct motives for evil always seem to involve selfish greed or control of personhood and other people. Controlling people is dangerous. Taking more control of them is the most absolutely deadly thing—the prime source of wars, genocides, brutality of all sorts.

Another way to group people who do bad things as a regular and routine lifestyle is by immediate background that may determine politics. One large group is the vast and diverse group of those who feel they are downwardly bound in the world, especially in relationship to other groups that are rising. The less educated white males in the modern United States feel threatened by more educated minorities and immigrants. Another is a related group: those who come from a world that really is challenged, threatened, or declining. This ranges from the fossil fuel industry with its billionaires down to the impoverished but usually stalwartly conservative small-farm sector of the world economy.

Perceived threats are often economic and physical, but the common, everyday currency of anger and hate are personal slights. Harsh words and lack of expected deference are the commonest forms. People take slights seriously in proportion to how much they value sociability, and in proportion to how insecure they are about it and about their own social standing. In some situations, we are all weak and insecure. We all value social skills and status. Thus, we are all vulnerable.

Slights and threats are both serious in unequal societies, especially among insecure and defensive people with strong desires to move up in the system.

The best-off person is the self-confident one who is content with a social place that is achievable and not too depressing. Such people endure threats, in proportion to self-efficacy and self-confidence. Unfortunately, such people are not often prone to go for leadership.

Thus, the extent of inequality and hierarchy in society (in so far as it is believed-in and accepted) is one predictor of the level of hatred. It is not by any means the only predictor, but it is certainly one major factor. Unequal societies can be peaceful and tolerant, but that requires serious effort.

Germany’s turn to fascism in the early 1930s is often ascribed to defeat in World War I and then the Depression, but fascism triumphed in Italy and Japan in the 1920s and 30s, in spite of hope and stability. This was due partly to the overwhelming importance of up-down ties in those two societies.

Inequality leads to different lifestyles that get ranked in prestige. It also invariably leads to corruption. In unequal systems, people learn to hate down and adulate up. This allows the bosses to resort to the classic “divide and rule” strategy. With that, even good people get corrupted and shift toward hating others.

Equality does not always prevent labeling and consequent hate, but good lateral ties prevail over the up-and-down evaluation and hatred.

People put in situations where they must exert control, but feel shaky in their power because of personal weakness or a genuinely desperate situation, very often resort to cruelty and terror to keep control. This is classically observed in imperial and colonial situations, on plantations worked by enslaved people, in prisons, and in hierarchies generally. Philip Zimbardo analyzed this in classic experiments. Criticizing of his work has led to finding that the reality is even worse than he originally found (Zimbardo 2008).

When People Perform Worst

Inequality in power naturally produces cruelty and oppression. The more people are controlled by a few bosses, the more frightened those bosses are of the possibility of rebellion and disorder.

Slavery is the very worst—the boss must force many people to do hard work, against their will, without due compenation.

Prisons are next. Again, people must be kept and dealt with against their will. They may not deserve better, but they are usually treated worse than they deserve. Cold-blooded killers are rare; people are far more often imprisoned because of sheer misfortune, or trivial drug charges, or in many countries simply for opposing the powerful.

Next come conquered areas, and it goes on forever if the conquered are not made citizens: see dramatic proof in the treatment of Indigenous people in the United States and Australia.

Then come total institutions in general: orphanages, residential schools, group homes. The most important insights into human evil come from contemplating the horrible histories of these institutions. They start with good intentions, at least theoretically. Yet they often end in abuse.

The military must allow a lot of freedom and independence of soldiers to function well, so it does not usually degrade to the extent of the above cases, but a military unconcerned with victory in actual war—or, like Hitler’s, convinced of victory in spite of reality—may become fascist.

Workplaces require even more freedom and also some sort of compensation, and bosses usually realize workers must have some consideration.

In ordinary everyday life, the rich can oppress the poor. The more power the rich have, the more they can potentially use it to crush the poor. Eventually, highly unequal societies, such as the “Old Regime” in Europe, become much like slavery-based ones.

Above all, groups (and individuals to some extent) want to control rivals. Pleasures turn to cruelties; sex becomes a way of torturing. Even families turn cruelly repressive when discipline must be maintained in large units. The classic patriarchal families are notorious. Matrilineal societies are not necessarily better. Mothers’ brothers can be as repressive as any patriarch.

The simplest underlying dynamic begins with resentments for ordinary irritations and putdowns, especially if deserved and one is ashamed. In hierarchies, and proportional to degree of inequality, those resentments get displaced down. The ones most prone to translate resentments into hate, and displace hate to the weak, are psychopaths. Next come those who have been put down frequently, especially for being underqualified for their jobs or lifestyle. These are the people who trade on privilege, and feel most shot down when that is challenged.        

By these, and by others socially conditioned to think this way, the weak get attacked: women and children, the poor, the minorities.

Genocide is a special case: mass murder of its own innocent and noncombatant citizens by a government. It occurs in thoroughly predictable contexts, as frist shown by Barbara Harff (2012) and confirmed by us (Anderson and Anderson 2013): when a dictator takes power, drawing on what Harff called “exclusionary ideology,” and consolidates his rule by exterminating vulnerable and unpopular moralities. Exclusionary ideologies are usually extreme religious ideologies, but also include fascism and communism. The more extreme the ideology, the more blood spilled, other things being equal. Dictators invoke genocide when they take over, and thereafter when they face real challenges. Democracies less often commit genocide, but they often exterminate subjects who are not citizens, as the United States did with some Native American groups before citizenship was extended to them in 1924. (Even that did not stop all the killing.) Countries with histories of genocide are notably apt to commit genocide again, but there are almost no cases of long-established regimes without genocide in their histories.

Another notorious case is the collapse of a regime. Briefly, inequality leads to corruption at the top and overproduction of powerful elites (Turchin 2016, 2023; Turchin and Zefedov 2009). Government workers become more and more corrupt, and do not deliver government services, at which time the government collapses. Various external matters, such as climate change, increase the risks. There is now a huge literature on this (Anderson 2019; Kemp 2025; Turchin 2023). The cycle is predictable, though not to the exact year, and is merely a human example of the standard “resilience cycle” found throughout nature: collapse with population crash, slow recovery, boom time with high population levels, overconsumption and inequality, collapse (Gunderson and Holling 2002). The fact that humans cannot escape these cycles is proof of the basic nature of such ecological systems.

All this suggests that the Enlightenment may be merely a cyclic phenomenon. It has been an increasingly pervasive force in world consciousness for 250 years, and is now collapsing on all fronts. It will not survive the resource crunches of the future unless major attempts to save it are carried out.

From the above, one can predict the social problems of a country from its history of slavery, conquest, inequality, and rivalry. In all stable countries, after three or four generations, a crisis sets in from growing inequality.

The strength of the leaders in maintaining government services to ordinary people actually sets the timing. In the United States, crises in the 1850s and 1920s were resolved by strong leadership reasserting itself and reducing the immediate problems: antislavery under Lincoln, economic reform under FDR.

Why Are Some Good and Others Bad?

The big question, then, is: why are some people good? Social pressures make almost everyone try. Psychopaths and weak people in control situations turn evil. On the other hand, highly controlling people who are raised with good values generally do good things for the world. Conversely, controling persons who would otherwise be good but who get really bad values turn out bad. Saddest are those who are raised to do good, and generally do, but haven’t the sense or social networks to allow seeing through the lies of Trump and other politicians.

Most people act and think like their parents. Peers are important, but usually less so in regard to basics. They retain the same values and basic behavior, even if they change minor and peripheral things. Even highly angry people will be peaceable if they come from strongly pacifistic religious traditions. Even mild, meek, gentle people will gladly commit genocide if they are raised in traditions that direct hatred to minorities, stress obedience to leaders, and have genocidal leaders. The famously mild and tolerant Cambodians and Rwandans committed more extreme genocides than the Germans under Hitler.

It also occurs that two parents might differ greatly in some values. In this case, children generally pick the values of the parent they are closest to, but all sorts of family issues, as well as peer pressure, make the decision. The upshot is that children often go with their wider social circle.

People who change dramatically from their parents usually have strong identification with peer groups to thank for it (Anderson and Anderson 2022). Peer pressure matters greatly in all aspects of child development, especially in adolescence, as Judith Rich Harris (1998) argued. There are, however, other ways to change. Every family has one or two rebels, who go off in another direction just to be different. More serious family rebels are very often people who were raised in chaotic conditions or whose lives are fairly chaotic from mental problems or sheer situational difficulties in the home environment. They tend to seek security and stability in hierarchies. Under peer pressure, they may go even farther out into real hatred, as studies of radicalized Muslims have shown (Atran 2010; Kruglanski et al. 2019). On the other hand, people from extremely stable, hopeful, forward-looking backgrounds often become more liberal or more successful (or both), as compared to their parents.

They lead to the thoroughly mistaken conclusion that people determine their own destiny. They usually do not. They usually do what their parents did. (We have examples of all these outcomes in my family, from right-wing rebels to brilliant and liberal successes. My own case reached absurd levels of inertia. Like my father, I was a social-field professor in the University of California system, with all his political and social views and even his taste in art. I married a woman like my mother. At least I rolled far enough from the tree to have wider tastes in food and music.)

Finally, there is the biggest group of all: innocent people, neither very good nor very bad but not intending evil, who are convinced by the lies of the fascists and criminals. They often show motivated belief: faced with alternative claims, they accept the one that is least disruptive to their values and sense of reality. The fossil fuel corporations have been particularly effective at exploiting this; they have convinced a truly incredible number of people that global warming is a myth or hoax, in spite of virtually universal experience of rapidly rising temperatures.

Unity and Disunity

Unity and disunity are all around us: help vs harm, working with people vs working against them, cooperation vs antagonism, care and love vs hate and cruelty. Disunity is part of life; the problem comes when it leads weak, downbound, or otherwise overly challenged people to overnegative overreactions.

Rational analysis shows life can be modeled as a set of games. Positive-sum games involve working to make everyone better off. In zero-sum games, the winners gain as much as the losers lose, and the total is thus a draw. Working against others involves negative-sum games: games in which the system loses. In ordinary selfish greed, the selfish and greedy person wins by causing much greater losses to his or her rivals. In Trump’s games with America, everyone loses. The rich get a bit richer for a while, but the environmental damage and public health damage alone are enough to crash the economy in time. Even the rich cannot survive the future’s pandemics, pollution crises, and global climate catastrophes that will come unless policies are reversed. I admit that I would benefit humanity more by giving money to charity than by eating out, planting flowers, or buying presents for my wife, and thus am playing a negative-sum game in a small way, but I differentiate this from selfish greed. The latter is about destroying competitors, not about actually wanting more goodies.

The human norm seems to be to assume that life is mostly negative-sum games with opponents. The results are assumption of bad dealing, leading to anger, and ultimately to extreme cruelty—the natural and inevitable fate of negative-sum gaming that escalates over time.

Already, science, public health, and personal freedom have been largely sacrificed. Economic policies such as rapidly shifting tariffs and summary expulsion of illegal but vitally important workers have gone beyond anything remotely rational, sustainable, or sensible. Environmental protection has been dismantled. Corruption is possibly the most extreme in all human history in terms of the money involved; hundreds of billions have changed hands. It is so open that a sting operation caught one leading functionary accepting $50,000 in cash in a bribe (unreal, as a trap) and suffered no consequences.

Motivated Belief

            All this makes sense in the light of human cognitive processes. Broadly, humans believe what they want to believe, subject to feedback from reality (as usual, this summarizes material in Anderson 2025, which in turn summarizes a wide psychological literature). People can ignore reality with amazing skill when the pressure on them is high enough. The extreme case is denial of global warming. Republicans still maintain it is a “hoax,” in spite of obvious rapid warming temperatures all around them. Usually, the real world does not allow such extreme denial, but religions often manage to maintain blatantly counterfactual beliefs indefinitely. So do some political systems, including, apparently, Trumpism. Racism and anti-Semitism have also persisted for centuries, in spite of clear and continuing evidence against them. They grow from displaced or historical hatreds, and appear to have no other grounding.

I have done more research on folk medical beliefs, which must accommodate actual perceived reality, and thus cannot stay quite so detached from evidence. They tend to develop plausible (but usually wrong) explanations rather than sheer mythmaking. Politics, it seems, puts people under more pressure to believe the impossible. Above all, there is no claim so outrageous and insane that it will not be believed if it justifies oppressing weaker people.

Prejudice and Hatred

Contrary to popular error, we do not naturally hate or fear strangers, or different people, or anyone, unless we are taught to or unless they present a perceived challenge. We need some sort of threat. It can be small, or even imaginary, but we do not anger, let alone hate, without reason. Babies seem to have some instinctive fear of strangers, but get over it quickly and easily unless taught to hate.

Learned hates are applied to actual enemies. They are also applied to family members and peers who scold us, hit us, or otherwise act unfriendly. Far more common is hatred of all identifiable groups that seem to be somehow a threat or rival to “our” group, whatever it is.

Since all of us are members of many groups, we can change reference groups, shifting identity. We can hate all sorts of groups. Hated groups are defined by ethnicity, religion, skin color, hair color, neighborhood, clothing style, sports fandom, handedness, psychological and medical stigma, and anything else that sets any group apart. Most hatreds are directed toward weaker groups, especially minorities. Even hatred of “the rich” is usually found among people who think the rich are few and vulnerable. However, the most stable and cross-culturally universal rivalries are with groups that are neighboring and differ in language and culture, and groups that are part of the wider society but are defiined by very different takes on basic ideology. These latter are the “heretics,” “dissenters,” “infidels,” and so on. In traditional societies, they are usually religious minorities. In modern societies, the opposition is more often liberal vs. conservative, hard-line vs. tolerant, or otherwise defined by political ideology. They constitute a threat to basic shared social ideas and morals.

Anger can be against anyone, but hate is based on fear and defensiveness—basically, cowardice—and thus is usually directed down.

Many modern Christians, Jews, and Muslims model behavior and politics after the total war mode of the early Hebrew Bible. It was a world of total war. Victory meant killing the men and enslaving the women and children. By the time of the Books of Kings, justice and fairness were concepts, but earlier than that, justice and mercy were barely concepts. Modern right-wing religious people clearly feel they are embattled people with their backs are to the wall.

General Points

            In summary, people can go wrong for four general classes of reasons:

More or less innate problems: Psychopathy, sociopathy, and the like. These can be countered by good psychiatric care.

Personal weakness and insecurity.

Level of challenge and threat to resources, to social control, and to personhood: standing, respect, acceptance.

Culture: education, public opinion, truths, lies, accepted ideas.

These all combine to produce bullying, motivated belief, political evils, and other everyday problems, which often escalate into serious conflicts at all levels.

            The old idea of people as “tabula rasa” is limited. As John Locke pointed when introducing the tabula rasa idea, people have a whole range of inborn tendences, from sociability to anger, from psychopathy to autism (yes, he recognized and described it). The tabula rasa comes in when we act on those. People naturally learn language unless extremely damaged, but can learn any 1, 2, or even 50 of a potentially infinite number of languages. People naturally anger when attacked, but can express it by fighting, passive-aggression, displacement, or any of a number of other ways, according to what they learn. People are terrified of abandonment and rejection, but can see many things as evidences of those, and can deal with them by a vast variety of coping mechanisms. People naturally feel a need to control their social contacts, but that can vary from following the Golden Rule (in hopes of reciprocation) to subjecting dependents to brutal torture and cruelty to keep them subordinate.

            Selfish greed and lust for power are generally individual matters, but looting and war scale them up. Then, levels of emotion about competition and rivalry are all-important: from fun to tolerance to anger to hate to violence. The back story of the latter is fear of challenge. If the challenge is by weaker groups, bullying and ultimately genocide are the results.

Evil can be seen as forms of bullying. Selfish greed is bullying to get material wealth. More obvious and direct bullying acquires control and status, and ends in violence unless actively halted. These two forms of evil grade into each other.

All involve excessive competition over wealth, personhood, and above all control and power. The last is usually worst, because apical hierarchies are usual in this world, and there is less and less room at the top as one rises. This leads to rapidly escalating conflict as one moves up the power hierarchy. Competition for billionaire-level wealth is similar; there is room for economic expansion, but only so much room for the super-rich.

All this allows us to pick out certain important points.

            First, excessive anger and hatred comprise the main problem, for humanity in general and for our time in particular. By far the most dangerous form is group hate, which is often part of popular culture, but is whipped to a frenzy by bad politicians. Individuals also whip up hatred in themselves, but usually on a more narrowly personal level, brooding about a social slight or a combative family member.

            Second, it is controllable: it does not need to lead to war, murder, or genocide. Some societies are almost totally peaceful. These include the Semai and Temiar of Malaysia, and many religious communities. On the other hand, some are notoriously violent, such as the Dani of New Guinea, the Yanomamo of Venezuela, and the Afghans. The Yanomamo have dealt with land pressures in recent decades, but the other two, and several other societies, are historically violent. Peace is achieved among the Semai and Temiar by negotiation and discussion. War is constant among the Afghans and many others because of honor: these are “honor societies,” in which personhood is extremely vulnerable and the proper response to insult or any dishonor, however trivial, is murder (see Cohen and Kitayama 2019, passim, especially Uskul et al. 2019). Culture can save or kill.

Third, currently—and very widely throughout history—it is mobilized as a struggle of losers and winners. The losers are either genuinely losing, or are faced with progress that is running against them. The former may be people with genuine grievances, who are increasingly shunted into losership by the wider society, such as the rural sector in modern America. Religious minorities almost everywhere may fall into this trap.

Others may be people who are losing for real reasons—they are simply incompetent and inept—yet they are part of a privileged and entitled group. People who were riding high but are endangered by progress include the oil, coal, tobacco, and other companies that produced highly valued commodities that are now increasingly seen as dangerous and in need of replacement. Against these are ranked upbound groups—minorities in a society seeking more justice and equity, rural groups in a more agrarian world, rising companies and interests.

The same demographcs, generalized, seem to occur throughout history and throughout the world as conservative: rural, small-town, traditionally religious people; members of dominant groups who are somewhat shaky in their personal ability to dominate; and highly-placed lords, landlords, or administrators in sunsetting occupations. They support strongman regimes very consistently, from ancient Greece (when the general phenomenon was noticed) to the present. In contrast, as Marx saw, the bourgeoisie tend to be the ones advocating more freedom, democracy, the rule of law (as opposed to strongmen), and change. More generally, the progressive elements are those who feel they gain from change and opening up mobility. The poor and downtrodden tend to be conservative unless given a real hope, through solidarity, strong leadership, and a genuine sense that upward mobility is possible. “Revolutions of rising expectations” may occur, but many rebellions are in the service of “returning to the good old days.” “Make America great again” is only the latest of a history-wide set of such movements.

            Among common tactics of losers are the classic tactics of cowardly defensiveness: cheating, weaseling, lying, passive aggression, temper tantrums, bullying, and other tactics used by bad children caught snitching cookies. At worst, they resort to cruelty. Regimes based on lies and enforced by terror, as in Orwell’s 1984, are the result. The tactics of the upward-bound groups include mass peaceful demnstrations, honesty (getting the word out on what is really happening), organizing, and (if absolutely necessary) violence that is actually targeted at enemy leadership or vulnerable key points. (Random violence, such as rioting and looting, is a cost to both losers and winners; it merely mobilizes opposition.) Of course, all dictatorships use the cowardly tactics, and most use some of the strong ones too, and all regimes use some sort of mix of both. The current United States situation is a very unusual case of losers succeeding in taking over every branch of government. It has never happened before in the US, and rarely anywhere. It gives us an interesting unique limiting case to observe.

            Conservatives are particularly prone to the “sore loser” mentality, because, by definition, they believe that hierarchies are natural and desirable, or at least necessary to society. This has been more or less the definition of conservatism from the ancient Greeks, with the opposition of Plato’s “natural nobility” and Aristotle’s “people born to be slaves” with the robust democracy of Athenian leaders. The vast majority of Athenians were not citizens and not allowed to vote, so the conservatives basically had the day.

The right-wing worldwide ideology is patriarchy first and foremost, so women are weak, inferior, and subservient; then extension of this to the state, with tyrant ruling by terrror, oppression, lies, arbitrary acts to keep people taking, and cruelty. This implies rigid puritanism for all but the patriarch, conformity, “honor,” and idealized violence.

All the right-wing ideologies stem from cowardly defensiveness, but are historically very comprehensible even among normal nondefensive people, given the reality of ancient Near Eastern herding, southern US slavery, and other institutions founded on control and management, and the societies that they developed.

In the Middle Ages, nobility followed from exemplary military service, or just from luck, and noble families were considered divinely appointed, even if they knew their ancestor was just fortunate. China had comparable oppositions between hierarchy-loving conservatives and equality-loving liberals. And throughout all history and all societies, strong but otherwise inept people have physically bullied physically weaker ones.

In the modern world, the extreme conservative position sees whole ranges of hierarchies: racial, religious, economic, personal, and so on. The extreme egalitarian position is Pyotr Kropotkin’s anarchism—everyone equally his or her own boss, on the assumption that everyone is qualified to do a good job at that.

            Those who both believe in the necessity of hierarchy and the God-given nature of their own society’s hierarchy swell the MAGA ranks today; they see women, gays, minorities, the poor, and almost every other group that is “down” in some sense as deserving to be deprived of rights and, at worst, even of humanity. White males who are mediocre at best are particularly prone to extreme forms of this; they want to maintain white male dominance. But almost anyone can fall into the trap. Simply believing that their society’s hierarchy is God-ordained is both common and highly divisive, mobilizing otherwise reasonable people into bullying and bigotry.

It is my no means restricted to the right. Left-wing hierarchists talk of “rednecks,” “white trash,” “ignorant” voters, and so forth; intellectual snobbism replaces racism and religious bigotry. But, on the whole, the left is more democratic and egalitarian, and thus reacts with less extreme violence and hatred than does the right. There are clear exceptions on both sides, however.

            The only long-run cure for this is a movement to bring the losers back into the fold, by giving them self-respect, including (but not limited to) hope for the future through united action. This must be a movement with ideals and solidarity. We simply must explain over and over that hierarchies are social creations, not natural; that there are no “races” and no consequential intellectual differences between populations; and, above all, that all humans deserve respect and consideration, whatever their age, condition, or inborn abilities.

Merely appealing to pocketbook interests has always failed, because acting for a progressive movement invariably requires self-sacrifice: going on strike, boycotting evil stores, and on to facing death. A movement of actual people, united in mutual support, is required—yet another reason why working with others is key. Such a movement must work against some people, its enemies, but solidarity and cowork are what matters. Cowork depends on responsibility, civility and tolerance.

            Third, money is also key. In politics, it very often comes from the powerful but downward-bound groups: oil companies and tobacco companies in today’s world; the nobility in the 18^th century; and so on.

Bibliographic note: Standard sources on human evil include Simon Baron-Cohen’s Zero Degrees of Empathy (2011); Bartlett’s The Pathology of Man:  A Study of Human Evil (2005); Roy Baumeister’s Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Violence (1996); Aaron Beck’sPrisoners of Hate (1999). Surveys of genocide and mass murder include Ben Kiernan’s Blood and Soil (2007); and Martin Shaw’s and Erwin Staub’s studies of genocide (Shaw 2013; Staub 1989, 2003). Standard surveys of violence worldwide are Alvarez and Bachman (2017) and Collins (2008). Studies of dictators are extremely numerous, but Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Strongmen (2020) stands out for comparative treatment, and Timothy Snyder’s works—the most accessible is On Tyranny (2021)—are exemplary. On what to do about it, see Erika Chenoweth, Civil Resistance (2021), and references there; also the cited works of Erwin Staub. These authors, as well as Barbara Anderson and I, have covered the material in the present paper in much greater depth in the cited works. The present paper provides an updated explanatory model.

THE RISE OF FASCISM IN MODERN AMERICA

Fascism and Conservatism

Reactionary elites whipped up group hates to divide and rule. This is a standard fascist playbook. In autocratic takeover after takeover, throughout history, the rich and powerful who are motivated by selfish greed—working against others, not with them—employ psychopaths to divide the public and whip up hatreds. That is the history of the United States in the Trump years, in one sentence. It sums up a good deal of world history throughout the human record.

A perfect example of a case in which it got out of hand is the rise and fall of the Ku Klux Klan in America in the 1920s. Extreme leaders, notably the clearly psychopathic D. C. Stephenson, whipped up hatred, with generous funding from extremist businessmen. Timothy Egan’s book A Fever in the Heartland (2023) tells the story in stark, clear terms. The application of this book to Trump is clear, and evidently intended. Egan presents the America envisioned by the Project 2025 authors, and Trump’s captive congresspersons, such as Mike Johnson: a world of white male supremacy, rigid far-right Chritianity (without any of the mercy or help called for in the New Testament), negative-sum games played against minorities of all types, political retribution, money politics (not to say corruption) at the top, full executive power (basically, dictatorship), and violent repression of dissent. This is the “America” that Mike Johnson, currently Speaker of the House of Representatives, says the liberals hate. Indeed they do hate it, and they know a far gentler and more law-governed country.

Group hate is the problem. In humans, it is always easy to mobilize. The hatred is there, waiting. Any power-mad leader can employ it. The worst, like Trump, do nothing else. More gifted leaders promise anything and everything, but really go for group hate in the end. 

Fascism is quite different from classic conservatism. Both face real problems with control. Classic conservatism is associated with rural and agrarian societies, fascism with military-industrial complexes. The classic conservative base is rural, small-town, traditionally religious, and devoutly trusting in traditional hierarchies. In the modern world, it is associated with the primary-production sector, less educated groups, and older people. Fascism draws on the same general demographic, but adds disaffected younger people, angry and violent people, resentful majorities who have not done well and blame the minorities for it, and above all with the downwardly-bound industries—the old polluters and destroyers. It is associated not with traditional religion but with the harshest form of the locally dominant religion or ideology. This can be communism—Stalin and Mao in particular were communists but pass all the definitional tests for fascism. But, also, new and savagely cruel forms of Islam and Judaism have appeared in recent decades. In Islam they are frankly heretical (bida’a, “innovation,” i.e. non-Quranic).

Fascism is defined by giant firms linked to government; by highly militarized; violent, repressive, governance; by torturing; and by highly sexualized society with extreme male supremacy. It is not real patriarchy, because there is no charge on the men to be responsible for the women, even their wives. It is also defined by dishonesty—not just the old time-honored fables of religion, but the fast-changing lies of an Orwellian world now made literal and real in America and a dozen other countries. The values of a news source, an ideology, or a politician are easily assessed by looking at their levels of honesty. In modern America, especially, the ratio of lies to truth is a perfect measure of the worth of a political platform and its sponsors.

Losers backing a loser is the name in most dictatorships now, and was true with Hitler and Mussolini, but highly competent psychopaths tended to lead in the past: Stalin, Mao, and before them Tamerlane and other historic tyrants. Another route is extreme religion, as in Afghanistan and Iran.

Trump and his inner circle are inept and irresponsible. Think of Robert Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health, and his destruction of the whole public health and epidemic-fighting capacity of the United States, as well as medical research. Hitler and Mussolini at least ran a tight ship. Xi Jinping today is a highly intelligent and competent leader, though prone to genocide and repression. To match Trump, we must go to African leaders of the past: Idi Amin in Uganda. Bokassa in Central African Republic (his “Empire”), Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and others like them. The sheer irresponsibility of the Trump administration has been breathtaking. They have even sacrificed their own most stable and loyal bloc—the rural sector—to tariff and trade wars.

Trump betrayed his worried supporters. The farmers were hit by tariffs and by cutting the rural help programs. Business was hurt by tariffs and multiple cuts to education and consumer support. Above all, nonaffluent people—not only the poor, but the middle class—was stripped of the main government programs and benefits affecting them. The tax money all went to subsidies, sweetheart deals, and tax breaks for the rich.

Clearly, rich ripoff artists with no sense of responsibility do not make reliable leaders, even to their cronies. Unlike the Chicago idea of an honest polician, they do not stay bought. Their complete indifference to the consequences of their actions spell enormous trouble for the United States, even for its billionaires. I cannot imagine why the great retailers and those who depend on retail advertising—Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and others—support a president who is sure to drag the US down. The Trump administration is, among other things, a vast looting operation. Trump and many of his circle are quite openly corrupt—taking money for services, up to the level of billions. Government investment in people and infrastructure has been almost totally shut down.

Responsibility is not even a concept among the current rulers. They are not even responsible enough to serve their own interests. This seems to be the general theme of the day. The Democrat leadership is not notably responsible, especially about denouncing corruption, dishonesty, and creeping fascism in clear and no-nonsense terms. They have done little with their near-majority in congress. The British idea of a shadow government is alien to them, and they have not seized on the Republican idea of drawing up a thorough-going platform and marshalling personnel to carry it out, as was the case with Project 2025. It would seem that such an obvious and extremely successful example would have taught them something, but responsibility is as far from the Democrats as it is from the Republicans. As of this writing, they have no coherent platform, no agreement on basic issues, and no organized way of countering the Republican impetus in dealing with “illegal immigrants” and other hot-button issues.

The general attitude of destructive competition is spreading to the left as well as the right. The country will collapse into chaos or fascist dictatorship if these trends are not reversed.

Sidelight into History

Karl Marx’ theory requires a bit of updating. He saw modern history as a trumph of bourgeois private ownership, vs. his dream of public ownership of the means of production. However, communism has generally failed, because it replaced the old oligarchy by a new one, the Communist Party leadership. Instead, a successful regime needs public power: labor unions, citizen groups, democracy.

Marx focused only on ownership because he had not really seen successful democratic republics. His disillusion with France is well known. He was also disillusioned with Germany, England, the slavery-racked United States, and other states. No genuine popular democracy existed in his time, except for tiny Switzerland and a few even smaller states.           

What he saw instead was rule by elite landlords, rentiers, and lords of resources in general, plus the grand owners of factories. He saw the rural sector as being hopelessly reactionary, but rural rebellions by small farmers have proved revolutionary from China to Mexico, so he is not always right. However, in the 21^st century, the rural sector has been reliably right-wing. The left wing is the natural home of caregivers and mind-workers, but there too, generalizations fail.

            In the United States, the computer and hi-tech movement was really revolutionary. For a while, hi-tech was allied with mind-workers in general, and liberal. But when the hi-tech billionaires took over, they turned right-wing. The richest and most powerful people in the United States today—Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and the rest—are hi-tech lords with heavy media presence. However, media and banks now depend on hi-tech, so it is the key means of production. The giant resource-lords who rule fossil fuels, agriculture, and above all the military-industrial machine are also powerful, and maintain their long-standing tradition of supporting the far right. This has led to government fusion with the giant corporations, including Trump actually buying into them with taxpayer money. This is actually national socialism—Nazism—in its literal sense: government fusion with giant right-wing firms to run the economy and the polity. This is the policy Hitler developed in 1930s Germany.

This makes the Enlightenment project of “liberty, equality, solidarity,” democracy, rationality, and the rule of law increasingly difficult to maintain. It has failed in many countries, and is collapsing in the United States, though it could rise again.

Is the Enlightenment dead? It grew with expanding commerce, communication, and exploration. Today, the world is filling up. Negative-sum games seem all too reasonable. Thus, country after country is abandoning democracy and freedom, subjecting itself to strong-man or strong-woman rule.

MAGA Rises from Bullying

I am sure that the boys who bullied me in my youth are now MAGA. I am almost equally sure that the MAGA leaders—Trump, Hegseth, Noem, and the rest—were bullies as children.

General hate of the system, combined with fear of failure or challenge, leads to hating minorities, poor people, disabled people, and other vulnerable groups. This is the typical form of hate in the modern United States, by far the most common, though there is also no lack of hatred directed toward powerful individuals and groups. The haters also hate good people (“goodie-goodies,” “pearl-clutchers”). Anyone conspicuously moral, responsible, civil, and helping is a natural target. Every playground bully and every bullied child knows this. Nothing changes as such people grow up.

Roy Baumeister describes in his book Evil (1996) people with high but brittle self-esteem, often based on physical strength, accompanied by defensiveness about social status. The risk factors for Baumeister bullies are patriarchal family, honor society, and hierarchy with definite belief that higher is better. The worst bullies display combiations of two or three of these. Also, ordinary people can be slowly pulled into worse and worse levels of bullying, which comes out as political extremism.

In bullies, in bullied people, and in those who double down on infantile coping, we can think in terms of the “four selfs”: Self-control, self-confidence, self-respect, and self-efficacy. Those who have plenty of these are courageous, confident, and prone to resolve conflicts by negotiation. Those weak in all four will fall into flight and freezing. The problems come in the intermediate group, with high but brittle self-regard and an insecure, defensive attitude toward the world. These are the ones “with a chip on their shoulder,” always ready to fight, always ready to persecute weaker people. The most visible ones are young and male; this appears to be not only human-wide, but general throughout higher animals. However, they can be anyone of any age.

Such people also are attracted to each other. They tend to form “brotherhoods of the damned,” groups of people who seek each other out to share hate, malevolence, and viciousness. Schoolyard bully gangs grow into criminal gangs and ultimately terrorist organizations or brutal governments—right-wing, left-wing, or military centrist. Orwell’s 1984 showed us a mix of fascism and communism—right and left inseparable in strategy and tactics. In Orwell’s novel, and in modern society, social media enabled this. Many modern totalitarian societies appear to have actually taken 1984 as a textbook—literally using it as a source of plans rather than as a horrible example of what can happen.

Morality and conscience are real motives, and usually for good, but extreme ideology and Brotherhoods of the Damned lead to evil morality, and it too motivates. Then, people feel they are against the world, and feel that only destruction and violence can help them. They may start out with a violent and troubled family, expands to friend and peer groups, then get involved in teen years in the local criminal gang, and so onward to world rule.

Marginalized Groups Take Over

The most dangerous trend today is that the Trump administration is converting about 50% of the people of the United States to a politics of hate. Trump has made no pretense: his entire plan for “making America great again” relies on crushing groups he does not like. Immigrants have suffered the worst, but attacks on trans people, liberals, minorities in general, the media, and anyone else available continue. Most dangerous of all, from the point of view of the future, are the attacks on science, medicine, and the environment.

No positive measures have been taken and few have been proposed. Taxes on the rich have been cut, and then replaced partially by tariffs, which impact consumers—everyone—rather than those who can afford to pay more. Basically, the whole program is wide-flung group hate targeting the weak. This has always been the most dangerous and counterproductive of political games.

The right-wing half of the votership always included some outright fascists, and a few corrupt billionaires, but also many good, hard-working, caring, patriotic people. These have now been fooled—all too often by religious leaders—into voting their hate rather than their rational self-interest, as Tom Frank (2004) pointed out long before Trump in What’s the Matter with Kansas?

They are typically people who felt they were losing from the way America was going. Rural people see their way of life erode as urban civilization encroached, with everything from urban values to the more direct effect of protecting urban recreation from rural income-winning. In fact, the less affluent rural people in the United States have been given short shrift by both Republicans and Democrats. The Democrats tend to write off the rural sector, and far too many liberals use terms like “redneck” as putdowns and insults. The left thus copies the right in down-judging whole categories of perfectly worthy and deserving people.

This and the decline of ordinary Americans, economically and environmentally, leads to a crisis of loss of self-respect. Self-respect includes acceptance as a person, respecting yourself as a living being, the same way that we respect trees and mountains. It should, however, go on to include recognizing that you have something worth respecting: some special ability or personal quality or simply the ability to survive.

More serious is the need that almost all people have to feel that they are part of something larger: a movement united by ideals. This can be religion, or political activity, or even a local literary movement. The major ones leading to progress and improvement in the United States have been liberation, anti-slavery, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, and similar unified movements. Countering these have been movements leading to repression and reactionary politics: pro-slavery, anti-Indigenous, anti-women, anti-civil-rights, and so on, climaxing in the Ku Klux Klan and later in MAGA.These movements unite every evil, hateful, cruel, and oppressive aspect of American history into one. Unfortunately, groups that are downwardly mobile, or fear they might be, in the United States have found it to be the only thing they have going for them, as the Democrats lose their working-class and popular edge and become the party of urban white-collar workers.

Working-class whites feel peripheralized, and whites in general feel their privileged status was directly threatened. In general, people who felt they were privileged, or just hanging on, were more and more challenged by pressures for equality. They saw “diversity, equity, and inclusion” as the war cry of “others” who wanted equality and were suspected of wanting and often getting rather more than that. These privileged but frightened people, who felt they were challenged, spent decades coping, adapting, resisting some, and getting more and more scared and embittered. Especially bitter where white groups that had been victims of prejudice themselves, such as the Appalachian mountain people condemned as “hillbillies” and “rednecks.” They did not suffer as much as African-Americans, but they were not “privileged,” and did not react well to being called such.

Now all the losers have a champion. Trump is a prototypic loser. He encourages them to sink into hate. They are lured into bullying and increasingly into violence.

Among those who fuel the Trump movement are people who really have been unfairly treated by the system, especially rural people and working-class whites. Then there are people who are members of a dominant majority—whites, or, often, Christians, including nonwhite ones—who fear their dominance is at risk from rising religious minorities. Many of these are highly insecure, sometimes—to be blunt—because they have trouble competing on their own. There are also the guilty rich: those who are rich from fossil fuels, tobacco, dangerous chemicals, and the like (the sunsetting industries), or because they are outright crooks.

Trump and his cabinet are failed businessmen, failed politicians, failed humans, put down all their lives for incompetence, and often for sociopathic or psychopathic behavior. They are powerful, but they are scared, defensive, and weak. They have entitlement, but are insecure in it. They appear immune to guilt, but are easily shamed. They want and expect adulation, and are angry when it is not forthcoming. They fear dislike, and become vengeful toward challengers and critics.

Particularly significant, and disturbing, is the takeover of government by people paid to lie by the giant reactionary interests. Critical to such movements is big money. The rich who support, and broadly control, these movements have long been centered in the fossil-fuels world. They are allied with big agriculture—the rural sector again—and with polluting interests. They are allied with the shadier end of the finance world. They are closely allied politically with big tobacco and other genuinely harmful interests. They often covertly ally themselves with outright criminals. Former oil and coal company lawyers and public relations people, former Fox News commentators, former bankers in shady hedge-fund and crypto realms, and others who made an entire career out of lying and shady dealing are now our secretaries of government departments and often our chief justices. Recently, even fossil fuel billionaires have seen the troubles with Trumpism, and backed away.

The Heritage Foundation was long funded by Charles and David Koch, who turned it from a responsible right-wing center into a hive of dishonest denials of the problems of fossil fuels. Few would stand for this, and the few who did were often zealots of Christian Nationalism and extreme “Old Testament Christianity,” a mix of the patriarchy and early kingship portrayed in the Hebrew Bible. Zealotry in religion has always been coupled with indifference to honesty, a point made from ancient Greece through the Reformation and the Enlightenment on down to modern investigations of extreme Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism as well as Christianity.

The wider context, though, is short on active liberals and moderates. It is particularly instructive to see how quickly both Democrats and Republicans shut down Joseph McCarthy and the whole extremist “anti-communism” movement of the 1950s. That level of activity today would have sidelined Trump in early 2016. Neither he nor his minions would be known today.  

In premodern times, a ruler had to be competent enough to hold power, especially if he turned vicious. Clearly, this is no longer the case.

The result is a government of delusion and inconstancy. As in Orwell’s 1984, the Trump administration governs by constantly shifting lies and by stark terror. It terrorized at first only illegal immigrants, but now it expands the terror, eventually to everyone.

Project 2025 coded much of this agenda. It announced a “revolution,” basically to reverse the revolution of 1776. Old-Testament Christianity, largely the part relating to sexual puritanism, was to be established as the national religion. Freedom of speech and assembly were to be sharply limited. Action for civil rights of minorities was to be sharply limited also, if not outlawed. Government services that help ordinary people were slated for abolition. Subsidies to farms were to be cut, but nothing was said about subsidies to fossil fuel corporations and other giant destructive interests. (Nobody in power has said a word about subsidies since Jan. 20, 2025.) Many other changes were proposed, all eliminating Constitutional rights and guarantees in favor of allowing giant firms to do as they wished.

To this Trump added a ferocious anti-immigrant program and other actively hostile measures. It should be remembered that subsidies basically pay corporations to be corrupt and to avoid change. Subsidies are sometimes necessary for national security—as for saving US agriculture in case of invasion—but must be rigorously tied to performance, including conservation, pollution control, and human resources.

Thus, many people and firms are willing to go along with a program that they believe will help them by taking everybody else down. They will suffer too, and some of them know it, but most think they will maintain relatively high status by kicking other groups down faster. To the MAGA faithful, tearing others down is the best or even the only way to get ahead. Life is a negative-sum game.

Trump ran through almost every hatred-of-the-weak that has ever existed in the United States, from old-fashioned racism and sexism to anti-Semitism. He finally settled on anti-immigrant hatred as the easiest to whip up, the most popular, and the only one that would allow him to arbitrarily arrest and brutalize people. Hatred of “liberals” and “radical leftists” is, of course, part of the plan, but defining these dreadful groups is impossible, so brutality has been confined, so far, to protesters. This will change if and when Trump seizes total power. He will then carry out genocide of identifiable opponents, liberal or conservative. All extreme totalitarian leaders, right, left, or center, do that.

Trump’s core program is shutting down whatever helps people, in order of how much it helps: public health, civil rights, science, education, arts, even school lunches and aid to disabled students and veterans. This is done in the service of worse cruelty: giving full power to crooked billionaires—the kleptocracy. Trump has little use for the honest rich, let alone the liberal ones, who are demonized. His behavior and that of his favored few are those of a looter as well as a loser.

The shutdown of action on global climate change and other environmental issues could very well lead to the extinction of life on earth. Some scenarios suggest that current releases of greenhouse gases could start a runaway process that would heat the earth to boiling point. This is unlikely, but far from impossible.

There is little countermovement to Trump, because the left has gotten caught up in supporting smaller and smaller minorities while neglecting the working classes. Also, some fractions of the left hold the false idea that US wealth was based entirely on stealing Native American land and then using enslaved people to work it. In fact, those unsavory practices, all too obvious throughout US history, probably hurt long-time wealth accumulation, but making people depend on exploitation rather than on innovation and hard work. Many on the right have now become convinced of the truth of the sour narrative, and want to return to it as their ideal. Societies which really did depend on slavery and never recovered from it—such as Bahia (Brazil), Nicaragua, and Surinam—should convince otherwise. Even the rural American South survives economically only because of enormous transfer payments by the government and the giant corporations from more enlightened parts of the nation. The United States got rich in spite of theft and slavery, and had to fight a war and then deal with endless political conflicts to maintain progress. Progess was due to scientific innovation above all, but also to the freedom and enterprise often deplored by leftists and conservatives alike.

The back story includes, above all, the growth of inequality. Also, the current generation in power is the one matured under Reagan and the Bushes. They are used to far-right-wing ideology, even when they do not believe it.

All this gradually undercut and eventually replaced the Founding Fathers’ messages. Those Founders were raised on French liberal thought, with the core values of liberty, equality, and solidarity. These are now vanishing.

The Supreme Court’s six right-wing justices have consistently ruled for the Trump administration. They have ruled to give Trump essentially dictatorial powers—he can do anything he wants, if he states it is for official reasons. Profiling of Hispanics as suspects for crime and illegal immigration has been approved without limitations, by ruling of Sept. 8, 2025. Hispanics and Muslims are assumed to be criminals unless proven otherwise, and are routinely denied due process, in flagrant violation of the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act.

The Supreme Court justices do not seem to be especially racist; they seem to be entirely in the pay of those corporations. Two—Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch—come from right-wing oil corporation backgrounds. Barrett’s father was a lawyer for Shell Oil; Gorsuch’s mother was an operative for the Coors corporate interests. The Coors family openly backed Hitler in the 1930s, and did not change their politics after WWII. In fact, Hitler fascism continued unchanged in the United States, but had to go more or less underground after 1945. The real fascists could write off the American Nazi Party and other fringe groups, while maintaining a solid devotion to extreme causes. The current administration is straight out of that universe. Many of the administration leaders had right-wing extremist backgrounds. Racism and religious prejudice were common.

The most extreme corporate leaders are apparently less than 1% of the United States, but by steadily calling for right-wing hatred of weaker groups, they mobilized 50% into their camp. They then could corrupt the administration and the Supreme Court—outright bribery is evident, to say nothing of huge “gifts” and “donations.”

The left has so far been completely unable to cope with, or even state, the above facts. They more often return hate for hate: if the right hates blacks and browns, the left will hate poor-whites and older people. Only somewhat better is indiscriminate hate of “the rich.” The problem is narrower and more specific.

A Dreadful Future?

            At present, with Trump and his minions in full control of the United States, and the business community largely backing him, we have not only a fascist government but a kleptocratic one. Trump is interested in revenge on his opponents and in cheating his way to ever greater wealth. His support is heavily concentrated among the “ripoff rich,” the billionaires who got their wealth by dubious means.

Worst, he has attracted the support of billionaires who actually worked for their money, and once performed real services. They have been corrupted, and they go on to corrupt the courts, the legistlatures, the media, and the public. The result could well be a regime where money buys anything, including immunity from the law and the ability to kill anyone who dissents. That level of corruption was not seen even in the classic fascist regimes of Europe. It may never have been achieved in the world. Asian courts in the old days, and African dictatorships like that of Idi Amin, may have approximated it, but they lacked the wealth, surveillance capacity, and power to be cruel of the modern kleptocrats.

HOPES FOR A FUTURE

Curing Evil

The only cure for society and for individuals is learning to work together with very different others, united by common dominant values. This traditionally happened within religious communities, neighborhoods, public schooling, and friendship groups. It developed in work situations, and eventually in the labor movement. Recently it appeared in movements for civil rights.

Today, these institutions are all under threat.

Even if we must defend ourselves by war, a negative-sum game by definition, we have to work together to defeat the enemy.

Everybody wants warm, supportive, caring social life. Everyone also knows that for that and for everything else, you must have reciprocity: fairness, integrity, and responsibility, at least to the point of survival. This requires the full panoply of support, reassurance, healing, and encouragement, as noted above. That is key to the whole enterprise, even though the most immediate needs are for stopping hate, stopping threats to democracy, and getting corrupting money out of politics.

Being Good

This brings us to the alternative: being good. Most of us learn how to be good from our families, who model it as well as teaching it. Goodness is, more or less, healthy family behavior, extended. We learn spiritual and practical components. We learn about reciprocity. We learn what other people like and don’t like.

In helping people, we can begin with the needs: food, water, air, health, and so on. The most problematic and hard-to-satisfy needs are for social life and for control of one’s life, including security.  Most of these can be satisfied; we eat enough, drink till no longer thirsty, sleep eight hours.

The control need, uncomfortably, is open-ended for many. It includes the drive for wealth, whch is more often about control than about money. Usually, doing good involves helping people fulfill their needs in the most beneficial way, but good-doing also involves setting the firmest of firm limits on desires for control, and above all for desires to get control by negative-sum games. There is no simple cover for good, in the way excessive anger and fear due to scary challenge to control and resources become a cover for evil. General desire to care for others is a broad cover, but inadequate to describe those many people—and there really are many—who devote their lives entirely to the good, often to the point of self-sacrifice. “Care” captures the general principle, but not the intensity.

            Psychology has only recently confirmed the old perception that doing good feels good. (The technical term is “eudaimonia.”) Normal humans actually get pleasure from helping, socializing, working together, working with people who need care, working to give pleasure or satisfaction to others, and, of course, joining in fun. Much more common is doing good in the expectation of getting at least some good in return: gratitude, recognition, liking, praise, rise in prestige, and, best of all, reciprocity. The old Latin tag do ut des—“I give so that you give”—is not just about business. It is about almost every social transaction. We are nice so others will be nice. We smile and greet in expectation of return, but the return is often eudaimonia, not material wealth. Notably important is gratitude: it feels good to be grateful, and benefits us psychologically a great deal; also, we hope and expect to get gratitude in return when we do anything for anyone. It’s good to get tangible benefits from “mere” words.

            Doing good requires tolerance, at least of the people we want to help. Hopefully, that is the whole human race, or at least the part of it we can reach. Even more hopefully, we want to help the whole environment.

            Good-doing is also done simply because think it’s right. Our parents and peers told us how to be sociable, we tried it and it sometimes worked, and thus we developed a conscience. Usually, we mindlessly follow our childhood training, with appropriate greetings, conventional conversation, little acts of kindness, and so forth. Rarely, but importantly, we draw on abstract principles of morality to calculate what would be best in a given situation.

This is the place for the Silver Rule: Do not do to others what you do not want for yourself (as Confucius put it). Also the Golden Rule, but it comes with the major problem that what I want is not always anything like what the other person wants. If I’d done for my children in their infancy what I wanted for myself (such as a 20-mile mountain hike followed by a six-pack), they would not have survived.

So, far better, and best of the guiding principles, is the Platinum Rule: do for others what they actually want and need, or at least your best educated guess at that. This is not far from Bentham’s utilitarian calculus—the greatest good for the greatest number over the greatest time—and Rawls’idea of justice (Rawls 1971).

However, we do not really know what people want or need. We assume they need food, water, and air, at least, but beyond that the choices are difficult. Therefore, we must default to compassion—assuming that the most merciful choice is best until proven otherwise.

Even more important is admitting ignorance of what people need, and asking them and others about that. Brief experience on the Riverisde crisis line, and rather more with studying drug and alcohol treatment, taught me that we need to be very humble about our assumptions of what others need. Nor should we always trust their words on the subject. Too many want suicide, and those lucky enough to be talked out of it are notably grateful later. And we all know what chaos and human misery have come from assuming that we know best for people of other cultures and situations.

Otherwise, we give it our best guess. This requires being ready to change, if experience and greater authority require it. Ability to correct yourself and stand correction is possibly the most important single moral value. It also may be the rarest.

Also, like all behavior, it requires some degree of self-confidence, self-control, and self-efficacy.

So the real need is to get society to praise good works and reward them with prestige and compliments, and hopefully with a job keeping them up, but to outlaw bad deeds outright. Legislating the good is sometimes necessary, but legislating against the bad is always necessary, given the enormous temptations people face.

Ideally, we find work that allows us to “do well by doing good.” Teaching was my way. I earned a fair living and helped people as much as I could. Spending money is another real choice. Americans are fond of spending fortunes on homes, house repairs, and useless lawns and shrubs. Living simply and giving the money to effective (not phony) charities is preferable.

Good-doing is often actual help and increasing enjoyment and overall satisfaction, but it also includes forestalling evil by actual defense, which returns us to considerations of defense raised above. Infantile defenses—passive aggression, whining and complaining, meanness, and displacement of hate onto weaker people—do not work.

Mature defense, recall, begins with bearing it; if that is enough, further steps and rational coping, negotiation, verbal conflict, and ultimately physical conflict if there is no reasonable alternative. We protect what we love, and also what we need. Some people do only actual good. Some do good, but also defend and fight evil as part of the mission; many great human beings fall into that pattern, from Abraham Lincoln to Martni Luther King Jr. Most of us do some good, some fighting against the bad, and a lot of “motivational anhedonia” (the technical term for just not having enough get-up-and-go to fight about anything—a lack of what the Mexcans call ganas, desire to act for some real purpose). Some do good almost exclusively by fighting the bad. I think some civil rights activists would fit that pattern.

Virtues: Aristotelian, Kantian, and Others

All virtues might be seen as coming from actually seeing the world as it is, without prejudice or irrational blocks. This leads to full appreciation, without barriers.

This high level of appreciation gives us four overall virtues:

Care, in the widest sense: caring for, caring about, caretaking, taking care. This leads, among other things, to helping and not hurting

Love

Respect

Tolerance, including both putting up with the world and appreciating it as it is.

This opens up the four personal virtues: patience, industry, courage, and learning that leads to reasonableness, rational evaluation of the world, and ultimately real wisdom. This rules out mindless conformity. Note the importance of en-courage and dis-courage as valuable words.

These meet with the four great overall virtues to produce the interpersonal virtues:

Help (and not net harm)

Responsibility

Caring for and caring about others and the world

Cowork, cooperation, mutual aid

Compassion (incl forgiveness and empathy)

Considerateness

Civility

Unconditional positive regard

Generosity

Appreciating the beauty, interest, and excitement of the world.

Making these political and social gives us the political rules:

Justice as fairness and equality

Accountability and recourse

Checks and balances

Science and arts as a way of life.

Helping can be from caring, conformity, or reason. What is actually necessary is rationality, tolerance, and fairness.

A country must also have education that fights hate and teaches proactive fairness.           

The overall value for the future must be help without unnecessary harm.

Within this, there is a personal care and love cluster, but it rarely extends beyond the family. Alas, we very rarely can love all others as ourselves, let alone as much as we love our children.

We need the patience, courage, and wisdom of the Serenity Prayer.

But for social life, we need several other things, which do extend to all humans, or should. These include responsibility, respect, fairness, cooperation, and enforcing consistent universal laws. From observation of children, my observations are that teaching children by giving them real responsibilities is the basic, focal necessity. Getting them to take care of younger children is best, but care for the house, animals, neighbors, anything, is all to the good.

Chinese fishermen I studied consciously gave freedoms and rights to children only when they learned to fulfill their duties, which, on fishing boats, required a lot of intelligence, independence, self-reliance, and care. The children turned out very well indeed. I found the same among the Maya of Mexico. Raising children accordingly drove it home. Strict discipline destroys the needed independence and decision-making skills, which is bad enough, but personal problems and chaotic upbringing are the great opponents of teaching responsibility.

Tolerance is the other great necessity to keep children from sliding into hatreds when social influences and hierarchic societies impinge. Also needed are encouraging their natural interest and appreciation of the world—nature, arts, and human diversity. Without that, they become dull, narrow conformists.

            The sad truth, stressed by James Madison in the Federalist Papers, is that we are humans, not angels, and we need governance according. We will not manage anarchic societies. Small-scale societies in the past did well without formal government or laws, but they were strictly regulated by traditional laws. Modern anarchic communities have a very poor record. Left to themselves, people are far too prone to fight, which in modern nations escalates regularly into war and genocide.

We will not function without strict laws strictly enforced. These must include the usual rules against murder, theft, and so on, but also strict sanctions against unfair and intolerant treatment, and some sort of protection of public honesty, including scientific truth. Science-based policy is absolutely necessary now. Education must be arranged accordingly, with some serious consideration of teaching tolerance (at least the evils of genocide) and state-of-the-art science.

Hate and Valuing

Risk factors for national collapse include climate and war, but internal collapse is usual, and comes from hatred and selfish greed combining to produce runaway corruption. Usually, as in the US, the few psychopaths and scoundrels whip up the vastly greater number of haters or potential haters. The hate comes more from touchiness due to putdowns than to actual offense, and most of all to social pressure on people smarting from putdowns.

Unfortunately, humans are creatures of hate. Hatred—recall, worst when over threats to control—weighs equal to all the laws and moral principles that we can design, and also to the sociability, good times, religions, love, care, kindness, and all we fondly call “humanity.” Only a combination of strong, and universally taught, morality with strong laws supporting equality, accountability, and recourse can stop mass violence. If humans were basically good, all the anarchist utopias in literature would have happened long ago. The problem is that humans are half and half, and, as always, the wolf that wins is the one you feed. Most societies spend far too much effort on feeding the hateful, cruel wolf, and far too little on feeding the good wolf. Education and public morality should take full note of this.

Societies that have many ethnicities but one clear majority always oppress minorities. The United States tried spasmodically but heroically to change this, but white Christian supremacy kept rising. Other societies deal with ethnic differences by chronic civil war, as in the Balkans and the Horn of Africa.

The few societies that have prevented mass killing over control and hate did it by incorporating groups that depended on each other. Switzerland is the main example (see below). Scandinavia has done it more recently. Such societies must formalize tolerance by legislating for due proccess, accountability, and recourse. But beyond that, they must have a wider ethical system that strongly moralizes the above values, with peace, tolerance, rationality, and responsibility above all. Patriotism must be phrased in terms of mutual dependence, mutual responsibility, mutual help, and need for due process and basic rights. Defense is necessary or at least inevitable in war and sometimes in dealing with large-scale crime. Due process is necessary in declaring war and dealing with criminals. Otherwise, what starts as good turns bad rapidly, as people release criminals and enemies, and imprison or kill innocent people. We have too many cases of good guys turning bad for lack of it.

All the main religions teach something like this, and thus teach the morality that can ideally control it. All teach unity versus disunity. Different ones foreground different virtues. Christiianity puts love forward, Buddhism foregrounds compassion, Islam teaches responsibility, Confucianism and its Asian relatives foreground care, responsibility, and cowork. The various fusion sects, such as Kabir’s fusion of Islam and Hinduism, mix these all together in various combinations.

The best thing about religion is that it teaches people to work together and share values, no matter how different they are. Atheists can have perfectly good values, but they have major trouble in sharing these widely. The labor movement and the fraternal orders drew on religion quite consciously. So did nationalism—the whole idea of nationalism was a secular religion—but it introduced far too much antagonism. Basic to the idea of the nation is opposition to other nations. Religion is far too often equally antagonistic, but it does not have to be.

The good leaders in the ‘50s and ‘60s were very often from religion (think of Martin Luther King Jr. and Dorothy Day) or the labor movement. They led the way on civil rights. We have invested rather little effort into understanding such people, religious or not; the effort goes into investigating Hitler and Stalin and their like. This seems a shaky allocation of effort.

Basic Moralities

The opposite of psychopathy, hypraggressiveness, and related conditions is empathy . This takes the form of compassion much of the time. The opposite of selfish greed—that is, negative-sum gaming—is cooperation and mutual aid. The opposite of hatred is tolerance, and at best valuing diversity.

These are core public virtues. The other virtues may be more basic, or at least learned earlier, but are dependent on the basic three for social life.

Empathy is really compassion writ large. Cooperation is, or at least depends on, responsibility, fairness, reasonableness, and tolerance. Reasonableness depends on interest, learning, knowledge, and appreciation. Tolerance depends on appreciation and respect. So the Big Three collapse down into more direct, everyday virtues, the ones we teach our children as early as possible.

Three types of moral orders can be deduced from this and from the records of human evil. At best, people adopt the reasonable and rational standard of empathy, working with others, and tolerance. This was the ancient Greek and Roman ideal., and it led to the ideas of democracy, the rule of law, and personal liberty. Another morality, including traditional Christian virtue, follows from love and care. Finally, evil morality—which is a real thing—sees opprression and cruelty as virtuous, especialy to enforce proper hierarchic relationship. At worst, the hierarchy itself is created to do evil, as in criminal gangs and fanatical religious sects. Hierarchies created out of violence, greed, or hate track this. This is a true moral order, not just crazy cruelty. Fascists and hard-core criminal leaders genuinely believe in it.

Thus, we need to train children not to see themselves as better than others, no matter where they are in a hierarchy, or how strong or smart or rich they may be. We need to train them not to bully, or start fights. We need to teach them to resolve conflicts, talk out, negotiate. Parents who will not talk out disciplinary problems with children, even when the children are clearly in the wrong, are hurting society in the long run.

Compassion, considerateness, civility, unconditional regard, tolerance, and the entailed help, responsibility, cowork, and generosity are all products (or parts) of one thing: equal respect and regard for all beings, depending on their direct actions. It takes a passive form in tolerance and simply putting up with things—patience—and an active form in the other virtues. All are needed in dealing with evil. We have tried for thousands of years to counter evil with love, or with good will. They are not enough. Active responsibility for maintaining human social life is needed, and is a different call entirely.

Working together is the opposite of working against other groups. The US has shifted from solidarity as a frequently-realized ideal to seeing mutual hate and antagonism between groups as normal, natural, inevitable, and even desirable. Trump ran on literally no other issues; all his issues, from tariffs to changing geographic names, turn on harming the weak.

We have considered above the dangers of even positive-sum games, let alone zero- and negative-sum ones. Anything done out of hate, anything done out of opposition to another group simply for its existing, anything done out of desire to crush the opposition first and worry about consequences later, is sure to prove not only evil but disastrous in the end. We must, above all, teach the rising generations to work together for the common good, doing down the opposition only when absolutely necessary for that end. Criminals must be stopped; ordinary people who appear to disagree or simply differ with us must not be stopped.

One major priority if democracy survives will be regaining solidarity, cooperation, mutual aid, and bipartisan rulemaking. Working together is a key part of helping others; working against other groups is by far the commonest and worst way of harming both others and ourselves. It comes out in everyday hatreds, but also in war and genocide. We cannot afford that.

Demonstrated performance, a basic category in assessing people, is shot farther and generalized. Cowork and help require more than love and care: they require putting up with, and working with, less than ideal people—sometimes even bad people. Responsibility, duty, tolerance, and civility become as essential as love and respect.

This is really considerateness, in a very broad sense. All beings are considered, seriously and on a level field. “Considerateness” should not mean mere civility.

The many shades of meaning of the word “care” can actually include all this. “Care” stretches from from respectful consideration all things to caring about individuals and caring for them.

The widely-shared Indigenous concept of respect for all beings is also fundamental. It gives us equality, and real personal involvement. It is absolutely critical for traditional resource management, which was successful partly in proportion to how much respect could be developed for other beings (Anderson 2014; Anderson and Pierotti 2022; Kimmerer 2015).

Also, since all of us are to some extent scared, hurt, and suffering (as the Buddha said), we need consolation, reassurance, cheering up, and above all hope. Hope is a rare commodity in today’s world. We must maintain it. Caring requires reasonableness, and some degree of enjoyment and happiness in life, but dealing with fear and trauma is part of the basics of caring.

Some good values are built into us from birth: love, basic care in the sense of caring deeply about others (at first the family), appreciation and liking, and compassion. Others must develop with time. Often we learn these from parents, and have to talk ourselves into doing them in the real world. These are the great moral concerns: helping, cowork, tolerance, considerateness and civility, and most of the rest of the list. There are a few bad things that must be done to prevent worse bads: control over others, defensive fighting, punishing.

Jonathan Haidt (2012; Graham et al. 2011) has pointed out that the above list is basically Enlightenment values. He notes alternative values systems from traditional societies. Purity—avoiding ritual pollution as well as real contamination—is emphasized by religions, and in a very different way by health profesionals. Another very different world of values comes from hierarchy. The hierarchic values of people as subjects are deference, obedience, loyalty, and “knowing their place.” We need to limit these quite sharply if we want freedom and anything remotely like equality. More worthwhile are the hierarchic values for leaders: generosity, paternal helping, and maintaining control. However, unfortunately, repressing to maintain order is also a high value in hierarchic systems. In totalitarian regimes, cruelty becomes a real value, idealized and cultivated.

Adulthood generally implies reasonable and judicious behavior. Faking adulthood and competence is easily identifiable by insecurity that results in at least some bits of fear, hate, and cruelty.

The above leads to morality based on helping, and on avoiding unnecessary harm. Help-based morality is not difficult. Usually, conflicts can be resolved by cost-benefit analysis. Just analyze rationally what the problem is, and how it can be resolved with least damage to anyone. The basic caveat is Hippocrates’ classic first principle: “First, do no harm.”  As a doctor, however, Hippocrates knew that you must sometimes hurt people in order to heal them. The corollary thus becomes: “If you are doing certain harm for expected benefit, you must be sure the benefits will really happen and will clearly outweigh the harm.”

Recall that losing something you have is psychologically worse than getting something you didn’t have. It often is in fact worse. Losing money we counted on to pay the rent is worse than not getting money we didn’t confidently expect.

Above all, people need more than “pocketbook issues.” Liberals often talk and think as if people were walking stomachs. People need a cause to die for. Whether it is one’s children, one’s ideals, or one’s dreams of a better world, humans need to have something that is existentially valuable to them. Appealing to pocketbook issues is absolutely necessary in politics. If I starve to death tomorrow, I can’t achieve my real dreams. But once the belly is full, a human must have something beyond that.

When the people with real dreams and values give up, or talk only of “pocketbook issues,” the politicians always, invariably, fill the void with hate. People without higher ideals may become slugs, or fall into despondence and depression, but usually they become haters. That is my experience, from a long life. I have rarely seen it stated, but surely everyone has exeperienced some of this.

Countering Bad Heritages

The damage, as noted above, comes from a few psychopaths, but largely from people who are scared of losing what they have; security, resources, personhood, and above all control of their social world and any people they must control or maintain. People who are genuinely losing their lifeway—rust-belt industrial workers, small farmers faced with climate change, people displaced by automation, and many others—are particularly in need of help. They easily fall into fear, and lose any chance of staying calm, stable, and empathetic.

The psychopaths, extremely amoral operators, and some others may need to be restrained and treated. Extreme anger and aggression, negative-sum gaming, and consequent hate and cruelty must be prevented at all costs. The fact that humans naturally anger at rivalry and challenge, and can descend into extreme mass cruelty with horrifying speed, must not be forgotten.

Successful and upward-bound groups acquire self-confidence from real strength and good coping strategies. The rest need empowerment, encouragement, and help in self-efficacy. We all need hope. Above all, we all need to be responsible. All these work against the anger-hate-cruelty escalation.

Finally, people are too lacking in interest. They do not track what is going on in the world, or analyze it critically, or subject it to reasonable common sense. They are also deficient in appreciation of the good. Most people are too prone to abject conformity, and to obeying and imitating their “superiors” in hierarchies. The other problem with most people, liberal or conservative, is excessive focus on self, family, and house. In the old days, band or community meant as much, and best friends still may, but we are too isolated—not only in the notoriously individualist United States, but all over the world. This inhibits the good, which requires concerted effort by a large and united group of people. Labor movements and citizens’ associations fill the bill in the most progressive countries, such as Scandinavia’s nations. Political parties do not make the grade; they are soon taken over by bosses, often corruptible.

This is all part of our being creatures of fear. As noted above, we remain in many ways babies—helpless, unable to defend ourselves, dependent on elders. Education must be about growing up, first and foremost.

All this will require much more education in civics and morality. We simply must face that. Yet, today, even education in the facts of science and history is increasingly discouraged and even outlawed. If we refuse to teach even the realities of global climate change, we cannot teach anyone to act to stop it. The same is true for all environmental and medical truths.

So, reach out to the right-wing world, counter their religious and ideological messages, and teach the good, focusing on help vs. harm.

The American Experience, and Government in Future

            Obviously, if fascism does not succeed, we will need to reverse all the actions of the Trump administration, and return to status quo ante.

            However, we will need to control money in politics—getting rid of the “Citizens United” decision, regulating donations, banning outright bribery (currently legal under many weasel-clause rulings), and otherwise regulating donations and gifts, especially when these are returns for special favors and subsidies. We must also return to sane tax policies, basically those of the 1940s and 1950s, when there were few exemptions, marginal tax rates were high, and everyone was expected to pay.

            We will also need to counter harmful lies with scientific truth, which is absolutely necessary on a large scale in the cases of pollution, resource exhaustion, and racism. Of course, truth must be deployed against lies in politics, including political history. The damaging effects of extreme inequality on social and political systems also needs to be taught, discussed, and kept in the foreground.

            Beyond these obvious measures, there are philosophical issues to discuss.

America’s basis in the Enlightenment was specified in the American and French revolutions as “liberty, equality, and fraternity”—we would now eliminate the sexism of the last, and call it “solidarity.” People either unite to progress or they try as individuals or groups to take down the competition. Even marriage comes down to this: cooperation to improve, or harmful competition.

One corollary was turning definitively to the rule of law, rather than the rule of one man, or even a group. The rule of law was already a concept, furthered by learning that in China it was supposed to be the case (though in actuality the emperor had his way). The rule of law appealed because the Founding Fathers had seen up close the rule of one man who was mentally ill; George III suffered from a still somewhat obscure illness. Yet his whim was law, as Trump’s is today. Even an enlightened despot makes mistakes, and his courtiers do not dare tell him he is making foolish choices. The Founding Fathers were also aware of the dangers of succession in an imperial society: the endless coups in the late Roman Empire, the fratricides in China and the Middle East, the wars in Central Asia.

The United States based its whole ruling philosophy strongly on this tradition, only to see it overturned in 2025 by the Supreme Court, which ruled 6-3 that the President could do anything so long as it was claimed to be an official act—which, of course, turned out to be always the case, with Trump.

The Enlightenment owed a great deal to the successful forging of republics with considerable tolerance and freedom in Switzerland and the Netherlands. Switzerland, in particular, needed to unite four disparate linguistic-ethnic groups, following various branches of Christianity, into a united force that could withstand invasion by powerful neighbors. They hammered out a successful state (Te Brake 2017) that survives today. The Netherlands played host to Enlightenment by allowing freedom of thought, and thus allowing refugees from French repression to flourish in exile.

The other great characteristic of the Enlightenment was rational judgment. Reason, rationality, learning, and wisdom were sacred or nearly so. Responsibility followed as a major personal trait. People raised with the Enlightenment set of values—freedom, equality, solidarity, rationality, responsibility—are particularly secure from being misled by hateful lies.

Of course, in reality, conflict is inevitable. Dinner choices, bedtimes, any minor aspect of life leads to disagreement. The goal then becomes to negotiate a reasonable settlement. The Latin word “negotiation” literally means “giving up on your relaxation”—neg as in negative, otium “leisure time.” A bit of ironic but hard-headed realism. Yes, negotiating is hard, but the alternative is worse.

Appeals that worked, historically, in those Enlightenment days, included honesty and fairness, solidarity, and civility. Constitutional freedoms and balances led to caring for the environment, the economy, and good causes. Patriotism, loyalty, honesty, learning, and humility remain basic to national survival. These include sharply protesting and correcting when the country’s leaders go wrong. Patriotism is a responsibility to fight for justice, not a duty to put up with jingoism.

The biggest question for government is whether it is to serve the elite or to serve the people. Totalitarian regimes generally serve only the bosses, but can be quite socially responsible, especially during good times. (I lived for a while in Singapore when it was theoretically free but in fact totally controlled and managed by Lee Kuan Yew, but he tried to follow Plato and Confucius.) Conversely, democracies tend to move slowly toward inequality and toward serving only the rich. The evolution of the United States from the 1930s to the 2020s has been in that direction. Today, in the Trump era, we taxpayers pay our money to fund subsidies and giveaways to billionaires. 57% of our taxes go to “defense” (often simply giveaways to giant armaments corporations) and another huge and unspecified amount to direct and indirect subsidies of giant firms. Benefits to ordinary people have been cut and are threatened with total elimination.

Conversely, the Scandinavian countries have moved more and more toward government that serves ordinary people. Taxes go to education, medical care, infrastructure, scientific research, environmental protection, and other public goods. Yet they do not have much larger governmental sectors than does the United States. The difference is not the ratio of public to private, but the degree to which giant firms have been able to capture the public agenda. In Scandinavia, this has not happened, because of the strong labor movement and the strong backing it and other social movements have from the general public. The strong public educational system also helps. Finland now leads the world in education, and had one of the highest literacy rates in the world by the mid-19^th century.

We can thus evaluate governments on the basis of who is served, and how. The worst are concerned only with maintaining control by brutal oppression. The US is joining the ranks of such countries today. The best are concerned with maximizing everyone’s welfare. In between are various shades of concern for the rich, the middling, and the less affluent. An ideal country will maximize the middling group and prevent extreme inequality—eliminating true poverty and taxing the rich into upper-middle-class status. Note that this totally crosscuts the “capitalist”-“socialist” distinction, especially given the strong tendency of socialist countries to become dominated by an elite that sees more and more need to oppress the masses to maintain control. China has been an interesting case to watch: Oppressive and controlling under Mao, liberal and increasingly interested in the general welfare for the next few decades, controlling but not so disconnected from general welfare under Xi.

There have been a few benevolent dictators, such as Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore, who do good, but so do some authoritarian leaders. They are both murderers and builders, like Lenin and Mao in recent times and various Chinese and Arab emperors before them.

Democracy works astonishingly well in a few East Asian countries: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and formerly Hong Kong. They have strong public support for democracy and fairness. Here, the Confucian tradition idealized education for cooperation and mutual benefit 2500 years ago, and this tradition has lasted, in spite of counter-pressures from Imperial tyrants and local warlords. It has finally found true expression in the post-colonial world of today. It also developed a philosophy of being civil and sociable in ways that maximize human flourishing, which involves, among other things, observing basic social roles: being a good parent, an effective and not domineering leader, a moral worker, an attentive and caring relative, and so forth. This has been widely misunderstood, especially by the Chinese themselves, as an excuse to boss people around, and even to hurt them, but the great Confucian philosophers from Mencius to Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming are perfectly clear on the point.

In both cases, the entire explanation is popular power adequate to insist on public goods more or less fairly distributed. The resemblance of European Enlightenment ideals to Confucian ones is not mere coincidence. Jesuit writings on China introduced the west to China’s theoretical rule of law rather than by one man. The Chinese didn’t take that too seriously, but the west did. There were some western antecedents. Also from Confucianism came the idea of caring for everyone, according to their needs, as part of government.

Native American ideals of respect, talking things out, and mass participation in policy-making were notable also. The Jesuit missionaries and some early colonists had reported them, and then the highly successful League of the Iroquois served as a model of unification and federalism to the Founding Fathers. There were other nonwestern ideals. Of course, ancient Greek, Roman, and Christian values were foundational, but the nonwestern input was a critical addition.

The opposite is fascism on the one hand and totalitarian socialism on the other: both cases in which giant primary-production corporations rule the economy and dictate politics. It makes no difference whether the corporations are “public” or “private.” They rule in either case. They maintain firm control through mass murder. The core of totalitarianism is control through divide-and-rule: society is divided into vertical silos and into dominant and oppressed groups that are claimed to be “natural” and are set against each other. Not only did Hitler and Stalin act alike; there was no change—not even in personnel—which the Soviet Union fell and was replaced by fascist Russia. Vladimir Putin ran the secret police before and runs the whole country now. We see another evolution in Israel: a capitalist country increasingly dominated by giant firms slips into fascism under pressure of extreme external threat by much more populous neighbors, and moves to exterminate its own minorities.

In all cases, control by powerful interests, especially primary-production interests, leads to bad government and eventually to killing, while distributed control with organized popular power leads to good governance. Love, religion, conventional categories of political economy, conventional morals, family values, race, and so forth have little to do with it.

This, of course, stands in dramatic contrast with ordinary everyday life, in which love, morality, family, and the rest are all-important. Nation-building is not ordinary life.

The counter is equal rights to life and legal treatment, backed up by education for help, equality, and responsibility to all. We are never going to love everyone as much as we love our families, nor can we treat a newborn infant exactly the way we treat a fully rational adult, but equality before the law, equality of opportunity, and equality in respect and responsible care are the foundations of successful polities, from families to the world.

In short, once again, helping all versus hurting “the others” is the core of morality and life. We must double down on honesty, limit executive privilege, restore the independence of government agencies, require expertise and state-of-art science, and eliminate graft and corruption. We must reduce to a minimum the institutions that give total control to a few; prisons may be necessary, but we can do without forced labor, residential schools, and other notorious breeding grounds of overcontrol.

Government is basically there to protect. Today, this means protecting public health and the environment. The military is still required, and so are police and crime-fighting, but the real threats to nations and humanity are disease and environmental collapse. But government also needs to deal with human fearfulness. It needs to protect us from economic crashes.

Government must also invest: governmentt must still provide public goods that private sector just can’t adequately do. These include science, conservation, education (which must be accurate, and deal with uncomfortable facts), the post, infrastructure, etc. It also includes a minimal safety net—SNAP, FEMA, etc. It also includes investment in raising the quality of life and experience through museums and the arts. The National Parks return $17 for every $1 the government expends on them. Science and education pay off at high rates also. They do not make 17 to 1, but that is partly because careers in science, health professions, and education are so enjoyable that they do not pay well. So many people want to do them that the market is flooded. Graduate departments are blamed for turning out “too many” teachers and scientists, but the world needs them, and we are desperately short of them in terms of social and moral needs. The problem is that governments do not want to invest, so do not hire them, and then the large numbers lead to competition.

Is There a Future?

We could have Utopia, and ecotopia, but we have a fascist nightmare, because people are easily led to hate and not easily led to work together. That is the main thing I have learned in 84 years of trying to cope.

If, as is now likely, the United States falls to a fascist dictatorship with full electronic surveillance and mass murder of opposition, the only hope for the future would be in building on current civil rights, human rights, and civil liberties organizations, to develop an underground organization to preserve the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, Tom Paine’s Common Sense, and other classics of American freedom. We can hopefully sustain some commitment to tradition until times improve.

Small Indigenous societies survived without formal governments by teaching respect and responsibility. Young people absorbed those lessons, developed a conscience, and kept the system functioning, in spite of frequent crises. The details appear in Indigenous accounts of their world (Kimmerer 2012 is basic), and I have covered it with the help of Indigenous coworkers (Anderson 2014; Anderson and Pierotti 2022).

With respect and responsibility, we could save the world, but it would require a major effort of teachnig civics and civic decency. Enforcing the law is no longer enough. We once could rely on Americans agreeing, minimally, on the need for democracy and the rule of law. That must be restored.

Overall Summary of Conclusions

The basic importance of hate: generalized to include all extreme emotional negative overreaction from resentment to cruelty, it explains far too much of human life and action. All the other things we do and think are only enough to balance it. Voting is the best evidence: Hatred gets out the vote. Self-interest (normally considered the key to winning elections) is only half the story at best.

Hate is learned early, when we have only childish coping mechanisms.

Therefore, it is usually handled in immature, weak, or cowardly ways: hating more and more, passive aggression, and above all displacement toward weaker people. We tend thus to adulate or at least respect the strong and hate the weak: women, the poor, minorities, anyone weaker. People are basically insecure and scared. Even the smallest slight or imagined slight is taken as an attack, and any real competition or rivalry can unleash a desperate response.

Thus, bullying is the basic and classic evil.

Politicians take advantage of this, by whipping up hate. Thus, a highly disproportional percentage of political leaders are psychopaths. Money that backs them is not always self-interested: rich backers are not infrequently extremist themselves. Hate loses when self-interest adds to more humane ideals in leading people to support less hateful leaders, or at least to split the hate such that hate for the powerful balances out hate of the poor and the minorities.

Genocide, much of aggressive war, harassment, overcontrol, bad bossing, and similar social problems are bullying writ large, and powered up by cowardly defensiveness about weath, status, and control—particularly control. This explains the ways control gets out of hand in everything from genocide to Philip Zimbardo’s classic experiments (Zimbardo 2008) to residential-school murder of children.

A corollary is that society can function decently only if ordinary people, including the weak and anyone deprived of control and power, are give not only a voice but recourse when abused, and if accountability is forced on the powerful, from parents up to dictators.

Thus, capitalism and socialism are irrelevant dichotomies. The real opposition is between concentrated power and egalitarian distribution of power. Balance of powers and mutual checks are essential, as the Founding Fathers saw. Abuse of power must be balanced by organized bottom-up ability to stop it. Capitalism and socialism both have a long history of producing tyrannies, as do feudalism, theocracy, and every other form of state-level governance. The only systems that have been relatively successful at preventing tyranny are the mixed systems that have a government that supplies public goods, a private sector that supplies consumer goods, and and large and independent social movements, notably labor unions, that balance out the power of government. Anarchist and “free market” systems collapse upward into tyrannies as soon as predatory individuals see they can exploit hate and competition to get ahead.

Love and care are important, but not enough. To survive, any modern society must put a high priority on fighting hatreds and outlawing the actions they incur. Respect, responsibility, and reasonableness are the social virtues that allow such accountability and rcourse to be implemented and maintained.

The old “Serenity Prayer,” with its call for patience (tolerance), courage, and wisdom says more. The fact that it has endured for centuries shows that people, if they are secure and thoughtful, can come up with better things than hate. We do not need to be ruled by hate. We can be ruled by wisdom and compassion. Thousands of societies throughout history have shown this. Many nations flourish and succeed today. We need to be clear-eyed about the enemy: the worst enemy is hate, not failure of economic growth. We need care and love, but we also need respect and responsibility.

Above all, empathy, cooperation, and tolerance are the key. They are the direct opposites of the psychopathy, negative-sum gaming, and hatred that now rule the world. The other virtues add up to these.

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