Gene Anderson
July 2026
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.)
Significance: 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.
Super-rich corporate entities, especially ones facing decline or challenge, find it expedient to whip up such hatred as a way to get and hold power. They divide the public, allowing them to extract wealth for themelves and their supporters.
Privileged groups facing challenge to their privilege are the most susceptible to reactionary corporations and organizations. Rising but out-of-power groups are more prone to go with progressive movements.
Shady or downright evil politicians are used by the corporations. They prefer real extremists, such as Trump, over ordinary conservatives.
The United States has now succumbed so thoroughly to giant corporations and resentful majorities 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.
The cure is care, cooperation, and loyalty to humanity and the historic American ideals of freedom, democracy, and rule of law.
Introduction
“Lord, grant me the patience to bear the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
The Serenity Prayer, often attrib. to St. Francis of Assisi
The United States is falling under fascist dictatorship. It will soon be a full autocracy, with mass murder and probably full-scale genocide, 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.
Whatever else is true, whatever else is necessary, we must begin by restoring some degree of civility, and working to fight hatred and the open expression of it (see Gray 2025). We must recapture the ability to discuss politics and change in a rational and civil manner. Bertolt Brecht’s grim line and the Serenity Prayer summarize the cure. They are harder and harder to follow.
Othrwise, we face doom. “Mutual assured destruction” is not confined to atomic war. It also occurs in everyday life. American society in the last few years has fragmented into enemy camps, each attempting to destroy the other. All human history shows that this will inevitably succeed. “A country divided against itself cannot stand.” The Civil War of 1861-65 was bad enough, but the social and economic conflict of all American groups, even if it does not reach the level of civil war, will bring down the nation. Global climate change, epidemics, pollution, and other processes that are now threatening us will take over even if mutual killing does not.
Good peopole are those who are friendly and helpful. They put up with everyone. They keep an open mind. They can remain quite judgmental about opinions and behaviors, though. Racism in an otherwise tolerable person is not grounds for rejecting that person, but certainly grounds for negative judgment, and hopefully for teaching and transforming.
Beyond that, good is the ability to love without barriers or reservations. Religions teach this, but very few people can manage it beyond their own familieis and habitats.
This brief paper expounds themes from Confronting Bad Trouble (2025), which is hard to find. The book and earlier works by my wife Barbara Anderson and myself (Anderson and Anderson 2022, 2020, 2013) provide the documentation and discussion that is left out of the present short paper.
PART 1 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 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 of these backyard conflicts are, in fact, strictly about maintenance of control over one’s space and resources.
All higher animals fight their rivals, both individual rivals and threatening groups (Clutton-Brock 2016; Dugatkin 2022). 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 (Anderson 2025).
A significant insight into conflict among our closest relatives came from a long-term study of chimpanzees at Ngogo in Kibale National Park, Uganda. The Ngogo group is huge, around 200, in a very rich environment. It was cohesive and harmonious from 1998 to 2014. “Adult males at Ngogo formed a linear dominance hierarchy, associated in mixed-sex parties, hunted together, and cooperated in territorial patrols” (Sandel et al. 2026, p. 216). There were, however, clusters, notably “a Western cluster and a Central cluster.” The Western one was smaller.
The first actual split and competition was observed 24 June 2015. Sharp, sudden change followed. Territorial patrols against each other came in 2016 (Western), then 2017 (Central). No further mating between groups after 2015. In 2017 a respiratory disease killed at least 25 in the overall group, stressing networks more. From 2018, Western males killed at least six and probably seven or more Central males. Then in 2021, this expanded to infants. Western males killed at least 14 Central infants and probably more. No killing of Western individuals by Centrals was reported.
The authors of the study say: “It is tempting to attribute polarization and war that occur in humans today to ethnic, religious, or political divisions” (Sandel et al. 2026, p. 219). But these are not issues for chimps. So pure group separation can turn to civil war very rapidly, without any cultural factors.
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 cruelty.
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 we humans have going for us is sociability. It bonds us and makes us 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.
Humans are hypersocial. Of all animals, we 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. They seem wired to befriend and trust. This generalized trust in people 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 only a few close social others. They work with many others, and cowork has its own morality of caring and responsibility. But humans also hate and fear a large and ill-defined set of groups. Beyond that, they are indifferent to the vast majority of humanity. Hate and fear are socially learned, but come 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. As among other animals, our conflicts are over control of people or control of resources. The main difference is scale: other animals can kill only a few at a time.
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 (animals do negotiate—watch two angry dogs), 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.
Developing Bad Trouble
The back story is the human tendency to react to stress with fear. They can then bear it, or seek solace and security, or respond with anger, resentment, and defensiveness. These are exaggerated in proportion to the level of helplessness and weakness.
This all begins in infancy (Hassett 2022). 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. 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.
Human infants begin to understand and respond to harsh negative judgments and threatened rejection at about six months. 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.
By the time they are a year to two years old, 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 better behaviors. They learn 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.
Teenagers still depend for survival on the family or equivalent 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 be social and to help others begins in the family, then expands out with work and play, first with neighbors and peers (Harris 1998), 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. The most dangerous problem, and the source of perhaps most human conflicts and woes, is failing to mature out of infantile defenses. Freud pointed this out long ago. He believed our bad side is innate and priorthe dark, gloomy idl Today, this is known to be wrong—we begin as creatures of the light. However, we soon 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 disproportionate to 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.
Selfishness and temper tantrums are the earliest problems. There is also natural but “unacceptable” crying, and other behaviors normal to the human animal but socially unwelcomed by adults.
By ten to fourteen, children learn to generalize their 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 general compassion, love for all beings, respect for the universe, or other wide-flung 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. Resilience is learned, largely in the family (Werner and Smith 2001).
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.
Children can cope by “adult” methods from a very early age. They learn to bear, to talk things out, and to fight bullies. However, it is far easier for them to fall into childish defenses, from whining to bullying.
Feeding the good wolf then means warm socializing and teaching cooperation and unselfishness by gentle correction. Then over time, more effort and correction.
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, leading to social learning of such behavior. This can be due to patriarchy taught by the culture, or to chaotic disruption (as by parental substance abuse), 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. 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.
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 claim some socially-learned justification.
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. Overcontrolling people have the same problem: they may admit sin to themselves, but cannot admit it openly, and justify it by prickly defense. Either way, resentment builds up, merges with hate, and is easily mobilized for evil.
Even children from good homes often find it a major problem to feel 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.
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.
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.
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. Bad behavior starts in childhood, not as rivalry but as simple selfishness and acting out, but it soon centers on rivalry with siblings and defiance of adults.
Overnegative overreaction to challenge and stressis one source of bad things. It is not mutually exclusive with the Bible’s “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.” 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. When people fail to work, they are usually scared, or disempowered, or discouraged, unless they are simply too young, too old, or too infirm.
On the other hand, a great deal of what looks like selfish greed is done simply from considering only short-term and narrow payoffs instead of long-term and widely extended ones. This is a major problem in all economic activity. It needs separate treatment. People stressed not only by fear but also by poverty or immediate needs are prone to go for the short-term, but so are many others. We tend to discount the long-term far too much, usually on the theory that we can deal with that when the time comes, but also on the theory that we may not be around to care, or we may have gotten rich in the interval. Excuses for discounting the long-term are legion, and dangerous. The most infamous ones involve slow environmental declines, like overdrawing groundwater. One can overdraft groundwater only so long until it runs out, and then there is very little to do about it.
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 Hebrew shaytan, “lie” or “inaccurate claim”; “Devil” is Greek 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, individualism is fine, but 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. On the other hand, individualism, from the ancient Greeks onward, has been tightly linked with progress and improvement, while extreme collectivism has not. The difference between individualist and collectivist societies is complicated, however. Many Asian societies are collectivist but recognize individual accomplishment enough to progress with the individualist west. (On these complexities, see Akaliyski et al. 2026.)
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 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 problematic and should be restrained. People who simply differ in religion or skin color or language from the majority should not be. Everyone knows this at some level, but fear keeps racism and other hatreds alive.
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 good 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.
Hate and fear cause self-absorption. This causes people to hurt others out of concern for themselves. When the harm outweighs the benefit, as it generally does, we speak of evil. Still worse are the irrational evils that occur when people destroy themselves to hurt others, as in suicide bombing. These lead to loss even of self-preservation.
Other things being equal, challenges to control one’s immediate social scene and situation is the worst; to control one’s lifeworld, next; to resources, last. The size of the challenge does matter: 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. In such cases, people default to fear-threat-defense, then prefer to follow a leader (as opposed to the law or rules).
Responses to those challenges and fears are often the cowards’ ways. All too common is general nastiness, snapping, whining, and complaining. More serious but very common is a whole range of unpleasantnesses: passive aggression, defiant sloppiness, rigidity, extreme intolerance including racism and religious bigotry, bullying, cruelty, cringeing, servility, scapegoating, dogmatic and overstated negativism. Also somewhat immature, but at least not defensive, are escapism, giving up, deflecting, distracting, and the like.
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.
The counter—courageous and adult defenses—cover a narrow and well-defined range: Clear and reasonable statement of a problem; then negotiation or simply bear it, then fighting if there is no other way to protect oneself and one’s loved ones. More elaborate could be seven steps: 1) Proactive good to prevent and forestall the need. 2) People can be generally civil and sensible, for the same reason. 3) Bear it or negotiate with civility from a position of mutual respect. 4) Organize. Be a leader if possible. 5) March, demonstrate, write letters, contribute—Be a good follower if leading is too much. 6) Only when all else fails, and there is real physical challenge, actually fight.
It may be noted, in relation to leading, that the most effective and respected leaders throughout history have usually been those who marshalled the good people and their good will. The great ideological leaders, from Confucius and Jesus to Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., did this, but so did many rebels and fighters, even if they were rough and at times merciless. The founders of the Han and Song Dynasties of China come to mnid. It is certainly true that many an utterly ruthless killer achieved vast power. Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and Mao Zedong certainly managed it. Still, I continue to hope for more noble power.
Displacing by going off to fight strangers for no reason is not a mature or sensible strategy. Hating and attacking people for being born into a particular group is also problematic. Unfortunately, it is harder to avoid. We are born into families, nations, religions, social groups. We identify accordingly. 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 mostly good people. The hope is to avoid such conflicts and negotiate them when they occur.
There are psychopaths, hyperaggressive persons, and pervasively malevolent souls who appear to be the result of unfortunate genetics. They can sometimes be redeemed with proper treatment. They more usually fall into a world of outlaw biker gangs, drug cartels, and similar social groups that encourage them.
Very often, also, cowardly defensiveness is a reaction developed in early childhood to protect the very thing that most defines an individual as a person. It is defense of what one most cares about and is most insecure about. As a mildly autistic kid, I was constantly put down and avoided because of my “rudeness”—a mix of social ineptness and odd physical tics common to people “on the spectrum.” Another in my circle was faced with a dying mother, a father falling apart as he watched the love of his life decline, and a set of younger siblings—she had to be the caretaker for the whole family. This gave her a lifelong need for control and a stark terror at any threat to it. Another came from a famous family, and crumbled at last under the pressure to live up to his father and uncles. Others were taught that their validity as people lay in their intelligence, or their ability to get money, or their tolerance for violence.
The common ground is that there was one thing that their parents and peers agreed was absolutely necessary to their personhood and yet also under constant threat. I suspect the evil billionaires that now run America had backgrounds of this kind. Their money and their mercilessness in getting it were their defining attributes—the things that gave them personhood in the public eye. In Donald Trump this is so obvious that no one misses it. It seems true also of individuals like Elon Musk and Pete Hegseth, and probably the whole Trump circle.
Fear vs. Sociability
Humans 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 when anger leads to heavy drinking or drug use and onward to physical dependence. Vengeance involves emotion centers, and provides a dopamine rush. 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, 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, 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 rare. Lawless and violent people are commoner. Conformists to negative social messages, from hate to violence, are commoner still. 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.
Most of us seem to be balanced. We love a few, like and appreciate a few, hate 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 goal of doing so, 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.
Average Humans Make History
The mythical-average person, an analytical abstraction too wishy-washy to be real but still interesting as an “ideal type,” loves family, likes neighbors and coworkers, and gets alnog with most people. There are always conflicts and issues, and a few people that our mythical average human rejects. The average human is not an original thinker. He or she goes with the teachings of family of origin. Peers, however, introduce new things, mostly new musical forms, new political concerns, new sports and amusements, and other things not deeply essential.
This mythical average human satisfies material needs first, but is not materialistic. What matters is, above all, love, acceptance, sociability, and—ideally—a warm, supportive group. Slights are deadly, and “honor” becomes a thing. Stress from all manner of everyday occurrences leads to anger, anger often leads to resentment, and both are easily mobilized into hate.
Within a shell of innocent socializing–care, help, cooperation, fairness, and civility—come mild bad traits. Our average is a bit selfish, greedy, dishonest, resistant, and prone to run a bit wild. Then this person may develop worse, reactive bad traits after being punished for the minor sins. Here enter real nastiness, defiance, sulking, whining, lying, and, worse, hate. Then may come violence and cruelty.
Touchiness in the face of slights and personal attack is deep and universal.
Need for control over one’s social world is a different thing, stemming from the basic control need shared by all mammals. It feeds into group hate, but only if the hatred is whipped up, always for the most evil reasons.
So ordinary people hate according to direction by not-so-ord people. The same is true of conformity: all people conform, but conformity to evil ways is driven by evil leaders.
The average grade-C country, over history, has an autocratic government, a significant amount of corruption, a good deal of murder and violence, but also control, reliability, and functionality. Its leaders, like all humans, are very prone to going with short-term, narrow interests as opposed to long-term, wide ones. People discount the future, exaggerate their chances of good outcomes, and are “in denial” about future dangers, and thus lay themselves open to disasters when resources or luck run out.
Such “average” conditions were those of ancient and medieval states when not faced with chaos and decline. They are also the conditions of much of the less affluent world today.
Above-average countres (Grade A) are those that provide better livings to all, more security, and relative personal freedom. Such societies existed in the past, but largely they are confined to modern free democratic stable countries with honest governments and low violence. Switzerland was the first modern state to reach this level, because of the needs of different ethnic groups to cooperate or perish. It has been reached in Scandinavia because of labor activism and other grassroots civil organizations. A few nonwestern countries, such as South Korea and Taiwan, have achieved this. Britain and France achieved this for their homelands in the 19th century, but the vast majority of the population under their control was in colonial hellholes, where C to F conditions obtained.
Grade F goes to countries that cannot provide even minimum security or stability. Currently this state exists in Afghanistan, Haiti, and several other nations.
The US has dropped from A to C under Trump, and will rapidly drop to F if he continues in power.
People in general want to destroy their challengers, or displace destruction onto weaker possible challengers. This creates average societies. Grade-A societies require more self-awareness and self-sacrifice. Conversely, in grade-D and grade-F countries, people want to destroy truth when it inconveniences them. The problem is maintaining order and civil society without succumbing to the temptation to invoke autocracy, oppression, and injustice, and more generally to work for the common good rather than for the ruin of opponents.
The old-time societies would collapse regularly, because of growing inequality and corruption, but today we have much faster and worse resource drawdown, guaranteeing a crisis in a few years. That plus the surveillance state, with AI and strongmen, would guarantee human extinction.
So, change must depend on the original thinkers, leaders, and persons who put new ideas together. These exceptional people must convince the rest.
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.
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, and suffer from the anger. 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, when they forgot to send one or two, faced skyrocketing absenteeism by the one or two neglected. 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 both right and 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.
Fear and defensiveness can take many forms: anxiety, depression, withdrawal, surrender, or resistance. Resistance requires some level of courage mixed with fear, and also a degree of aggressiveness. Extreme aggressiveness coupled with serious fear leads to hate. Most hatred is socially influenced, or socially constructed outright; people learn to hate the structural-opposite groups in their societies. Hatred is routinely deployed against the largest or most salient minority. It is also routinely deployed against weaker people of all sorts. As well as minorities, it is deployed against women, the poor, immigrants, less able persons of all types, and even such arbitrary categories as redheads and left-handers. The worst and most virulent hatred is normally felt toward less powerful groups that might move up the scale and challenge the dominant groups. Of coruse, these groups respond with hatreds of their own.
The key realization is that challenge and fear are not enough to explain hatred and its violent and cruel effects: people must be aggressive. They are trained by society to fight, but they bring varied degrees of innate aggressiveness and defensiveness to the table. Psychopaths present an extreme case, but ordinary combative people are routinely whipped into psychopath-like extremes of maniacal violence and cruelty. This is seen from Saturday-night barroom brawls to the highest levels of war and conquest. It is most horrifically visible in mass murder and genocide. The cure must involve full-scale debunking of hatreds and hateful lies, but also teaching courage, leadership, and negotiating skills so that alternatives to cowardly cruelty are known and can become defaults.
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. An ill person needs rest and support, not the physical activity a healthy person needs.
Adam Smith (1914 [1776]) taught capitalist competition, but he taught 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 with care.
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 constantly. 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. The Hobbesian savage, in a state of “warre of each against all,” never existed. 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 20th century run around 2500 per 100,000 throughout the whole century (Anderson 2025). Some are lower, but some are much higher. (So far, the 21st 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.
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. Rudolph Rummel, in his magistral book Death by Government, continues this in the first sentence of the book: “Power kills, and absolute power kills absolutely” (Rummel 1994:1). 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 hierarchy in those two societies.
Inequality has many ill effects (Piketty 2017, 2020). It 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. Egalitarian societies do better (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009).
Then there are those who hate all, up or down. Traditional revolutionaries hate up; this is typical of folk society, but almost nonexistent now. Obviously, the serious and best alternative is tolerance.
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 led to further research, which found that the reality is even worse than he originally thought (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.
Dictatorships maximize power and might at the top, bully, and kill, domestically and if possible internationally. All of them censor speech and media. All of them privilege the dictator’s ethnic and religious groups, usually the majority, but not always; Stalin privileged Russians, but also his own Georgian ethnic group. Extreme ideologies like fascism and communism add anti-intellectual, anti-science, and anti-education values, replacing education with indoctrination. And they commit genocide. Fascism adds the Master Race idea and the national-socialist economy (see Applebaum 2024; Ben-Ghiat 2020; Dikötter 2019; Mann 2004; Paxton 2004).
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 or for being downright crooks. These are the people who trade on privilege, and feel most shot down when that is challenged. Trump and Musk are good examples.
Kunst et al. (2026) found that offensive and defensive intergroup violence differ quite profoundly. Defensive intergroup violence is, obviously, about defending one’s group from attack by another group. Anyone can and will do it. Offensive intergroup violence is a different matter. It is more associated with individuals who are dominant or powerful and who feel the need to go after others to maintain and establish dominance. Extremism is associated with psychopathy in both cases. Extreme defensiveness toward other groups is associated with Machiavellianism and with narcissistic personality traits. Not only extreme, but even everyday, offensive intergroup violence is associated with religious fundamentalism and social dominance orientation (Altemeyer 2010; a fairly long literature on this is summarized in Anderson 2025). Defensiveness is much commoner overall, and much less associated with cruelty and oppression. Both conservatives and militant liberals can be quite offensively violent to groups they dominate or want to dominate.
By these, and by others socially conditioned to think this way, the weak get attacked: women and children, the poor, the minorities.
Mass murders of one sort or another killed at least 400,000,000 people in the 20th century. Most died in the two World Wars or the related violence, but countless smaller wars added up to enormous totals. Ugo Bardi estimates more, up to a billion (Bardi 2024).
Genocide alone accounted for about 100,000,000 deaths. Genocide is a special case of violence: mass murder of its own innocent and noncombatant citizens by a government (Hinton 2005; Rummel 1994, 1998; Waller 2016). 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. Genocide need not be bloody; it can be done by mass starvation, a technique used from ancient times to the Irish potato famine and the Ethiopian Dergue years (Howard-Hassmann 2016).
Democracies less often commit genocide, but they often exterminate subjects who are not citizens, as the United States did with many Native American groups before citizenship was extended to them in 1924. (Even that did not totally stop 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. All these risk factors are operating now in the United States. Genocide is all too likely (Anderson and Anderson 2020, 2022; Hinton 2021).
Another notorious occasion for mass killing 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 Rservices, 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. The cycle 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 again (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 arose from the individualism of western society—notably in the Reformation—and from the ideas of equality and liberty that culminated in abolishing slavery for the first time in world history. The Quakers first came up with the idea that slavery was morally wrong. This idea started as a small-minority view, but gained followers rapidly as the Enlightenment waxed. The philosophers who started the Enlightenment movement had the prejudices of their time, but almost immediately the anti-slavery movement won them over. Kant came out against slavery in his treatise on the movement, What Is Enlightenment? (Kant 2009). Soon the peasants insisted on being equal to the aristocrats. (We forget today that “peasant” was a legal designation putting them well below common citizens, let alone the aristocracy.) Them women demanded equality too. Mary Wollestoncraft was an early voice. For the first time in the whole history of civilizations, humans were being considered all equal and all individuals with free agency. Rationality—reason—was a defining element of society and culture. Responsibility and personal respect were highlighted more than ever before.
This freed us from adulating hierarchy and groveling before authority. As a part of that, it gave us not only modern science, but the whole idea of a society ruled by rationality and attention to evidence in self-conscius opposition to ancient teachings. It has been an increasingly pervasive force in world consciousness for 250 years. It 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. We are now in another collapse situation, comparable to those decades, but no leader is emerging as of this writing
Why Are Some Good and Others Bad?
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you add the tendency or certainty of corruption by full authority.” Lord Acton, 1887, in letter, commenting on the then-new idea of Papal infallibility
The big question, then, is: why are some people good? Social pressures make almost everyone try. Psychopaths may not try, but usually must pretend, most of the time. Weak people in control situations often turn evil. On the other hand, highly controlling people who are raised with good values may do good things for the world. Conversely, persons who learn bad values generally turn out bad. Saddest are those who are raised to do good, and generally do, but lack 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 rulers. The famously mild and tolerant Cambodians and Rwandans committed more extreme genocides—proportionately more murders, in less time—than the Germans under Hitler. (On genocide perpetrators, see Robben and Hinton 2023—a superb, terrifying, and far too little known study that should be much more widely read.)
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. It is in these cases 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 liberal agitators. My own case reached absurd levels of inertia. Like my father, I was a professor in the University of California system, sharing 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.
The bad is, objectively, anythng that causes net harm. This may result from ignorance, mistake, carelessness, short-term thinking, psychopathy, or cowardice.
Desire to win at others’ expense is a major part of real evil, but far from the only form. Add arrogance, defiance, loudmouth behavior, amd sheer meanness, and evil results.
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, 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. In the early 20th century, the Progressive movement taught that businessmen would profit by helping and being honest with their workers and the public, since it would produce better workers and more affluent consumers. This was tried, it worked, and it has now been abandoned by the biggest corporations—not because it failed, but because their CEOs simply do not want general welfare. They want to profit at the expense of others, even if it brings down the system. Crushing the others is what matters most; the money is far less important. Elon Musk’s behavior as Trump’s chainsaw taught us that, if we did not already know it. Small businesses often maintain the old Progressive ideology, simply because they cannot abandon it—they would lose skilled workers and customers.
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 in a sting operation, the photographs being widely shared) 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 religious bigotry including anti-Semitism have 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, however much ignored, but earlier than that, justice and mercy were barely concepts. Modern right-wing religious people from this tradition—Jewish, Christian, or Muslim—clearly feel they are embattled people with their backs to the wall. They return to pre-Books-of-Kings morality out of fear.
Much prejudice involves dehumanization (Smith 2011, 2020. 2021) or partial dehumanizataion. The hated group is seen as not even human, or not the sort of humans that matter. Often, however, hated groups are seen as fully human—all their vulnerabilities and all the ways to make them suffer are exploited.
Competition and Game Theory
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 conquering the frontier, and now we wish for its resources again.
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 of pleasure in spite of the formal zero-sum outcomes. But this requires sportsmanship, and that, in turn, requires 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 of two types. First, they may involve competition in which the winner wins something, but the losers lose much more. Second, and worse, they can be about hurting the winner simply to hurt others 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. This sometimes works. Often, 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; usually, they cannot. International war is the constant, chronic, endless example. The winner may get more territory or glory, but only at enormous expense. The losers can lose everything.
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.
Negative-sum gaming must be carefully distinguished from privileging short-term and narrow gains over wider long-term ones. This latter tendency is a natural human cognitive bias, as we have seen. It is universal, and generally a good way to bet, since the future is uncertain. Those kindergarten lessons in which a child learns to skip one marshmallow now in order to get five in several hours do not reflect the real world. In the real world, somebody else could grab the marshmallows before the time was up, so it makes sense not to defer gratification.
Negative-sum gaming is often caused by hate, but often simply by learning that it is the way to play. Hockey games traditionally involve a good deal of gratuitous violence. Scaling up, we get the Turk and Mongol hordes, fighting because their only defense was offense. Not taking the initiative made them vulnerable.
Hi-tech turned. right-wing when the billionaires got more and more involved in negative-sum gaming, thanks to leaders like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk (Silverman 2025 is definitive on this). This does not fit the usual story of downward-bound industries turning right-wing. It does fit the idea that overproduction of elites (Turchin 2016) leads to destructive competition.
It has reached the stage at which “antagonistic cooperation” is seriously used as a phrase, to refer to cooperating only to be able to destroy the cooperators in due course.
Fascism is basically a vast negative-sum game. It failed under Hitler. It fizzled out in Spain and Portugal, ending when the dictators died. It has a bad track record in fascist-dominated countries from Chile to China. 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.
Deeper into Positive-Sum and Negative-Sum
We must decide all the time: do we work with or against people?
If against, positive-sum, zero-sum, or negative-sum?
If negative, do we hate and fight or merely play hard?
Either way, do we compete with those above, those below, or evreyone?
Peace and love are goals of many religions, but sometimes hate and violence are, also. Sometimes violence is necessary, as when loved ones are attacked. The hope is to maximize the peace and cooperation and minimize the rest.
Fear must be prioritized, and hate and violence tend to dominate the response to it, making up a large part of human activity. We want to imitate Jesus or the Buddha or some other figure embodying love and compassion, but it is almost impossible to do. Some manage, but those who work hard for good causes fall too easily into fighting, and those who are loving and peaceful fall too easily into living within small, safe worlds.
This leads to social defaults. People usually, and far too easily, default to going for strongmen instead of the rule of law. The US abandoned freedom and democracy for Donald Trump.
Fortunately, not all defaults are bad. People generally prefer egalitarianism to hierarchies when given a free choice, but they are used to hierarchies from family life and ordinary politics, so it is a difficult issue to balance. Peer groups and work groups tend to teach more egalitarian values. Also, according to upbringing, people default to cooperation. If that fails, they move to negotiation. Ideally, at least in most societies, they default to peace and friendship. They always default to the most irenic and caring choices, then proceed down the chain, fighting only when necessary and only in a far and courageous manner.
Only after that do they compete, with cut-throat competition abjured and violence a last resort. People raised in violent, unstable, or highly competitive surroundings reverse that. They start with violence, and only under duress do they move back to civility. They fight in underhanded and cowardly ways.
Most people are in the middle. They can go either way, according to social pressures from their reference groups.
Negative-sum games occur at the highest levels of society, when people really believe that their greatness is directly proportional to the damage they do to others. Over history, this has inspired the greatest mass murders. A classic case was Genghis Khan. He was raised in a murderous society. His father was killed in a local feud. He grew up with his life in constant danger. He literally had to kill or be killed.
Next most common historically has been the cruelty and brutality required to run slavery-dependent plantations and industries, prisons, and other situations where restive subjects must be forced to obey by threat and punishment. The story of plantation slavery from ancient times to the United States South is the type case. It has been told often enough that we know that negative-sum gaming is inevitable. There is no way to run such a plantation except by terror, which usually escalates over time. The plantation owners are notoriously degraded and corrupted in the process.
Modern business tycoons often find themselves in a similar situation, or they think they do. They must not only destroy the competition; they must kill mnay ordinary innocent people, by releasing toxic pollutants, taking resources needed by others to survive, or by burning enough fuel to increase global warming. This often gets out of hand, and the tycoons occasion vast numbers of deaths purely to obtain more wealth and power. This reached an extreme with the tobacco and oil industries (Auzanneau 2018; Mayer 2016).
There is also sheer hate. This motivated the mass murders of the Nazi regime, the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides, and countless other genocides and local massacres. Psychopaths often take over in these situations, and release orgies of murder.
Finally, weak and cowardly people very often fall into thinking that can can succeed only by doing others down. This was the whole message and philosophy of Ayn Rand, and many other frightened reactionaries.
The more extreme negative-sum game, in which one worsens one’s own lot to worsen others even more, seems confined to hatred and real conflict. Defensive war is one case, possibly the only case, in which hurting oneself to hurt others worse is both necessary and good, assuming the defenders are the “good guys.”
The hi-tech billionaires who have espoused negative-sum gaming are now committed to negative-sum games. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks may be typical in some ways. They were born to rich families in South Africa in the apartheid days (Silverman 2025). They grew up in a world of people above the law who viewed over 80% of their fellow countrypeople as subhuman and good only for menial work. They seem to have espoused destructive-competition values, seeing profit only if others lose more. Musk eventually became a mass murderer, through his oversight of eliminating USAID and eliminating or reducing all other United States federal programs that helped people stay alive. Much of this was probably done to ensure a flow of tax breaks, subsidies, and sweetheart deals to his own companies, which have profited handsomely by working with the Trump government. Other tech lords have less excuse; they did not grow up in an apartheid world, but instead often benefited considerably from policies tolerant of diversity and human variability. Enculturation into the Trump world clearly has had an effect.
General Points
The shortest short form: People are always scared. Some degree of fear is the human condition. Fear must be prioritized if it is immediate and serious. Endangered and traumatized people, but also immature and cowardly people, are seriously fearful all the time. This brings out the fight-flight-freeze response, blanking or sidelining rationality. Fighting normally plays out as cowardly defense, unless the person is mature enough to negotiate first and then act as rationally as possible. Flight takes the form of escapism. Freezing often presents as depresion or “tuning out.” One can watch TV and do all three at once.
The root problem is gneeric fear. This leads to reacting with unnecessary anger and resentment. The more fear lies behind this, the more it turns into hate and is directed at weaker rivals.
Then enters each person’s particular problem. Each person has one special concern that is the source of self-worth and self-respect, but that is also a source of insecurity and fear. Generic background fear feeds directly into this.
The great alternative is to help others. Start, as Jesus did in the Beatitudes, by focusing on actual needs: work for food and shelter, then cooperate and care for others to assure security, control, and social connection, the three truly great and dominant needs beyond mere food and water.
Self-interest can be narrow and short-term (“unenlightened”), or wide and long-term (“enlightened”). Beyond it, social values can be invoked. Ultimately, the need for status, personhood, and simple social integration and acceptance prevailed most of the time, and we fight back the anger and bear the problems.
The human tendency is to try to eliminate the threat, and to assume that threat is other people.
Then, the human tendency is to go for the weakest enemies first, and not to try to fight the powerful. The only common exceptions occur when people can assume their apparently powerful enemies are actually weak. This occurs in revolutions when the revolutionaries are truly numerous and the rulers are few and isolated. Thus, revolutionaries usually try their best to create that belief. The only other exception occurs when a small group is attacked and must fight or die. Even if they must die, they will often fight, figuring death with honor is better than death without it. Sometimes, miraculously, they win.
Within this framework, 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, under a different name). 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. Hate is fear plus aggression. 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. Fear by itself causes anxiety, depression, grief, sorrow, worry, and more, but not hate and cruelty. Those depend on people being aggressive and believing that only aggression will fix problems.
Hate is often redirected from family or the system to vulnerable people. It is safe to hate them, when it is not safe to hate the real problems. This is not always cowardly. It can be real fear from real danger, as in many honor cultures, such as so much of the Middle East.
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 had to deal with land pressures in recent decades, but the other two, and several other societies, are historically known to have been violent for a long time. 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. The Republican Party was quite consciously playing this old card.
Among common tactics of losers are the classic tactics of cowardly defensiveness: cheating, weaseling, lying, passive aggression, temper tantrums, bullying, and all the 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 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 an extreme right-wing movement succeeding in taking over every branch of government. It has never happened before in the US. It did happen in Germany under Hitler, and in many other times and places. The results have always been violent.
Conservatives who are not personally successful 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 a hierarchical one. In it, 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 defensiveness. Most are historically comprehensible: they must maintain ranks in such tense situations as ancient Near Eastern herding, southern US slavery, modern mining operations, 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 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. It reacts with less extreme violence and hatred than does the right. There are clear exceptions on both sides, however.
Hate triumphs when reactionary firms and amoral, evil, or psychopathic politicians mobilize it. Then the worst psychopath wins, takes over, and destroys the state.
The fix must begin with controlling crime and bribery, especially by the powerful. This involves dealing with psychopaths so they don’t rise in politics or business. Above all, it means dealing with hatred, especially social and group hate and displacement of hatred onto sociopolitically weaker or low-status groups. This must be the start of any political fix.
Still deeper: The only long-run cure is a movement to bring everyone 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 18th 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), Cheoweth and Stephan (2012), and references there. Civil resistance works. See 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.
PART 2. THE RISE OF FASCISM IN MODERN AMERICA
“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
Thomas Jefferson (in a letter to George Logan in 1816)
Fascism and Conservatism
Reactionary elites whip 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. 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 cabinet and his captive congresspersons: a world of white male supremacy, rigid far-right Chritianity, negative-sum games played against minorities of all types, political retribution, money politics and outright corruption at the top, full executive power (basically, dictatorship), and violent repression of dissent. This is the “America” of Mike Johnson, currently Speaker of the House of Representatives, and it is the one that says the liberals hate. Indeed they do hate it, and they know America as a far gentler and more law-governed country.
In fact, the United States has always had a double identity, a split personality. The Founding Fathers wrote beautiful and inspiring passages about freedom, equality, the rule of law, and other Enlightenment values. They meant what they said: they risked their lives for these values. They were more tolerant than modern writers usually assume; Alexander Hamilton was “black” by modern reckoning, and many Jews and Muslims did well and prospered in the world of that time.
Yet many of them were slaveowners. They not only failed to extend the vote to enslaved persons, but also to women and to men without “property.” Women did not get the vote until 1924. Many of the Founding Fathers, including George Washington, had indulged in genocidal murders of Native Americans, and even the otherwise idealistic Declaration of Independence speaks of “bloodthirsty savages.” All these attitudes were British—they were the legacy of British colonialism.
They survive as the alternative America idealized by Trump and Mike Johnson. The modern American right wing not only ignores New Testament Christianity; it also ignores the whole Greek and Roman side of western civilization. The Christian Nationalists are fond of citing the Ten Commandments as Western civilization’s source. They see it stemming from the Old Testament: genocidal kings, favorable-outcome rape, and all. They condemn democracy, republics, personal freedom, science, learning, free enquiry, and following the evidence rather than ancient writ.
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 (in general), 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). In Judaism, they are justified by the extreme right in Israel appealing to the bloody early books of the Hebrew Bible, and holding that the calls for justice and mercy throughout that work do not apply to the present situation.
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 real charge on the men to be responsible for the women, even their wives. The slogans “idealizing womanhood”: are sometimes mouthed, but repression of women and acceptance for male infidelity, pedophily, and outright rape are not new to Trump. They were there in Hitler’s Germany and elsewhere. They were there in the ancient emipires. They are attested in the Bible.
Fascism is also defined by dishonesty—not just the old time-honored fables of religion, but the fast-changing lies of an Orwellian world. Orwell’s vision of government defined by endless but constantly changing lies was taken from Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, and somewhat from things he saw in English politics. Goebbels’ policy of the Big Lie was great news to dictators. It is now literal reality in America and a dozen other countries: governments lie constantly, changing the lie often to make sure the followers are loyal enough to swear fealty to contradictory narratives. 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. Thus, one of the first things an autocratic government attempts to do is take over the media.
Fascism is basically bullying: weak people, or people in power but over a huge dissident workforce (as in slavery). It is basically about using power to oppress weaker people because of insecurity on the part of the oppressor. That predicts the core: lies, brutality, bullying, cruelty to all weaker categories (minorities, women, gays, etc.), ideological rigidity and intolerance, religion as hate and violence rather than peace and compassion, and above all the glorification of war, cruelty, torture, and violence, with men as warriors and women as domestic support.
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 to tyranny is extreme religion, as in Afghanistan and Iran. Tyrants in those days were not the losers. They were highly intelligent and competent. They were also psychopathic, or at least acted so.
By contrast, 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. One may mention Pete Hegseth’s constant efforts to hamstring the armed forces by continual meddling, including elimination of women and people of color from higher ranks. 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 went to subsidies, sweetheart deals, and tax breaks for the rich. It also went, increasingly, to vanity projects for Trump, with the enthusiastic support of the super-rich who got sweetheart deals for his projects.
Clearly, rich ripoff artists with no sense of responsibility do not make reliable leaders, even to their cronies. Unlike the folklore-Chicago idea of an honest polician, they do not stay bought. Their indifference to the consequences of their actions spell enormous trouble for the United States, even for its billionaires. The great retailers and those who depend on retail advertising—Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and others—are lured to 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. The corporation heads must realize that ruining the workers and consumers of America cannot be good for anyone, and indeed will be fatal to the corporations, but they see no alternative to supporting Trump.
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 timid and passive. 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 the Democratic leadership something, but responsibility is as far from the Democrats as it is from the Republicans. As of this writing, the Democrats 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. Factions of the Democratic Party, and independent parties like the Green Party, continue to struggle with each other instead of against the Trump machine. Uniting against a deadly threat to America and its democracy is not attempted. 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 with 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 21st 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.
The United States liberalized dramatically from the Klan-heavy 1920s into the 1970s. What the nation had, increasingly, from 1930 to 1970, was grassroots community. This was dominated, and largely produced, by three community movements: the labor movement, the rise of liberal religion, and public education that taught a lively sense of the Constitution and its guaranteed freedoms and democracy. This enabled responsible media and politics. It was expressed in both liberal and conservative politics. The civil rights movement and environmental movement of the 1950s-70s grew to a great extent from the labor movement, and were fueled by liberal religion. They drew heavily on the organization and organizational capacity of these.
It declined after 1970, and especially after Reagan became president in 1981. The labor movement was shattered by the steady successes of the rich and powerful in whipping up divisive hatreds to set workers against each other instead of against the powerful. Liberal religion lost out to agnosticism and atheism, while right-wing religion of the Ku Klux Klan variety rose spectacularly. Public education declined. It was less and less well funded. It was diluted by more and more currents that had value but directed attention farther and farther from American freedoms. The student movement of the 1960s, fueled by Vietnam veterans and children of economically rising groups, slowly declined. Students in the 2020s are largely nonpolitical and inactive. Part of the reason is that the expansion of college education went with a dilution of student involvement. More important has been the steady decline in good job opportunities. Work no longer pays as well as it did. The average wage-earner can no longer buy a house and support a stay-at-home mate raising several children. Even owning a house is now close to an impossible dream for young people in most of the United States.
Reagan and his group advocated small government and fiscal responsibility, but did not supply it. They greatly expanded the subsidies, repressed dissent, and otherwise strengthened government in its help-the-powerful aspects. They allowed the national debt to balloon. There appear to be very few cases in which “small government, fiscal responsibility” regimes do what they advocate. They usually appear to be enthusiastically favoring the rich and powerful, repressing ordinary people in the process. Hong Kong in the British colonial period was a partial exception: the British government actually kept government small, economical, and responsible. I lived there for a couple of years, and saw the free enterprise flourish. Even so, favoring the rich and enforcing stern measures on the poor was policy.
In the United States, newspapers and TV news have declined. Reporter employment is down 75% since it peaked in the late 20th century. More and more papers and TV stations have been bought by right-wing extremists and turned into swamps of lies and hate. One devastating blow is the loss of the Washington Post, formerly the voice of liberal America. It was bought by Jeff Bezos of amazon.com and turned into a right-wing minor paper. Earlier, Reason magazine, the voice of the more “reasonable” right, was bought by the oil-billionaire Koch brothers and shifted rightward; it has now gone even farther. CBS News has now been bought by right-wingers and changed accordingly. Honest reporting, both liberal and conservative, is seriously diminished. The outpouring of liberal books and papers seen in the 1960s and 70s has no current parallel.
In the United States, the computer and hi-tech movement was, at first, revolutionary. For a while, hi-tech was allied with mind-workers in general, and its workers were 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, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and the rest—are hi-tech lords with heavy media presence (Silverman 2025). They are also outright and extreme fascists, who have brought Hitler’s “National Socialism” to the United States: far-right government working hand in hand with far-right giant firms, each supporting the other with financial resources (De Jong 2022). Ellison and his family have bought as many of the legacy media as they can, guaranteeing a domination of the airwaves by themselves and Fox News, to the detriment of honest reporting.
Media and banks now depend on hi-tech, so it is a key means of production. The giant resource-lords who rule fossil fuels, agriculture, and above all the military-industrial machine are still powerful, and maintain their long-standing tradition of supporting the far right, but the lords of hi-tech are now far richer and more powerful. Trump’s government has therefore fused with the giant corporations. It has bought into them with taxpayer money, while Trump himself buys stock in corporations and then gives them publically-announced deals.
More and more economic fields are downbound: fossil fuels, toxic and polluting chemicals, big agribusiness, and others. Thus there is more and more pressure for subsidies This creates further competition between the giant firms and the poor and middle class. The giant subsidized firms vie with the public and its interests for every tax dolllar. Politically, this leads to more divide-and-rule and whipping up of hatreds. The steady increase in corruption brings more and more failure of government and loss of government services. The Trump administration is rapidly eliminating all aspects of government that benefit ordinary people, and moving toward a government whose only activities are war and support of the giant firms.
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 Over?
Is the Enlightenment dead? It grew 2022)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.
The United States has always had a deep problem, stemming from the Founding Fathers’ gap between ideals and practice. They started from the finest ideals humanity has ever produced: the dreams of the Enlightenment for “liberty, equality, solidarity,” peace, justice, and freedom. They worked out a utopian vision based on democracy and the rule of law, supported by institutions based on the concepts of accountability, recourse, checks and balances.
The core values, in addition to the rule of law rather than of individuals, were freedom (largely tolerance and freedom from oppression vs. freedom to act), equality before the law, and due process. These were enabled by equal treatment, equal opportunity, and equality before the law.
They wrote a Constitution that over time has been amended to add to and refine the vision. They also—outside the Constitution—developed arts, sciences, public health, and economic methods to a high order. They saw that religion had caused endless wars in Europe, mostly between nominal Christians, and they were aware that many of the Colonies had been settled by people forced out of their homelands for being the wrong kind of Christians; they thus tried their best to insure separation of church and state and to downplay religion and religious rivalry. Environmental conservation was already a well-known idea, with game limits and pollution controls in force in many areas.
Their practice was something else. The land had been seized from the Native Americans, by violence that often reached genocidal levels. Later generations seized land from Mexico by the same method. The economy was supported by slavery. Independence came at the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, with its appalling human costs. Slavery-based plantation agriculture, a regressive and anti-human way of making a living, was the support of half the Colonies. Slavery even dominated some manufacturing industries.
Women were not citizens, did not have the vote, were under the control of their fathers or husbands, or lacking those any other males in the family.
Society was hierarchal, with rich white males at the top, and almost no one else counting as human. Initially, only propertied white males had the vote.
Nature and natural landscapes were considered inimical, or at best in need of being destroyed in the name of progress. Not only did the forests and swamps give way to farms, but European crops and animals replaced native ones. Only a few Indigenous crops were too valuable to ignore. The most important one was maize. Beans, squash, and several other crops were adopted. Many more were ignored simply because they were Indigenous.
The personal ideologies of the Founding Fathers ranged all the way from forward-looking thinking—seeing the end of slavery, the need for real peace, and the need for inclusion—to absolute racist bigotry and religious hate. Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush exemplified the former, and were far ahead of their time. It is important to remember that no reformer, religious leader, or other thnker of note—not Jesus, not the Buddha, not the few enslaved rebels who succeeded in leading revolts—had advocated outright total elimination of slavery before the Quakers originated that idea in the 17th century. They propagated it, especially in Pennsylvania, in the 18th. (Muhammad, however, had forbidden Muslims from enslaving other Muslims. This idea did not always hold, but it made many Muslims think about the issues.) Total abolition was a radical new idea in 1776.
The more progressive ones, fueled by Enlightenment ideology, were largely from the northern cities, and engaged in trade and commerce, education, and knowledge-based work (as were the European Enlightenment thnkers). Some were plantation owners, but lived near corridors of power, trade, and information. Conservatism increased as one went farther from such centers.
Southern signers of the Declaration of Independence were less enlightened. Patrick Henry was a champion of liberty, but not progressive in other ways.
It remained for Andrew Jackson, John Calhoun, and other early 19th-century thinkers to develop a real counter-ideology, based on racism, religious intolerance, male supremacy, slavery, genocide of Native Americans, and hierarchic thinking in general. They also began, but did not really develop, a trend of opposition to science and intellectual activity.
This, and all American right-wing ideology since, was based on slavery, colonialism, and the old royalist regimes of Europe. Advocates repeated Aristotle’s old claim that some people are simply born to be slaves. More pernicious was the fact that enslaved people were forced to work, with punishment for inadequate performance the only feedback. They might get tiny favors or promotions, but basically the system ran on punishment. Free labor must be attracted by wages and perquisites, and punishment is confined to firing. Servile labor is managed by punishment and oppression, which inevitably lead to cruelty and sadism.
The owners of the plantations were trapped in the system: they were forced to punish and grow more and more cruel; they were forced to abuse and limit their workers. It was a world where any innovation, any new idea, any progress was a threat. It was a world that was fundamentally run and controlled by hurting people. It was a vast negative-sum game: wealth and glory for a few, increasing oppression and cruelty for the rest. Contemporaries saw that the slaeveowners were typically degraded and brutalized (see e.g. Stedman 1988 [1790]).
The “poor whites” were free laborers—wage workers or independent small farmers. They lived in competition with enslaved plantation workers for the limited resources available in such a system. They came to be arch-enemies of the African Americans, and maintainers of racism. Small businessmen and local professionals were hardly better off. They had to serve the plantation owners, the only source of significant money. They came to support the system, out of necessity.
Some fractions of the left today 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. Societies which really did depend on slavery have never recovered from it. These include Haiti, Bahia (Brazil), Nicaragua, and Surinam. 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.
In the north, where slavery existed but was less common or important, free farmers expanded at the expense of Native Americans and at the expense of the natural environment. This pulled them in two ways: they could create new settlements that were at least somewhat utopian, following ideals and dreams, or they could develop their own negative-sum games by fighting Native Americans and then vying with each other. Idealists and “Indian killers” were opposite types, but most people were somewhere in the middle, “rugged individualists” who could be both dreamers and vicious fighters. It produced a different sort of conservatism, based on individual competition. Whether that competition was healthy or destructive depended on local circumstances.
By 1860, this had jelled into the ideology of the hard-core Confederates. Many simply advocated states’ rights, but many or most were racist advocates of slavery. The Civil War forced them to pick sides; it was basically a one-issue war over slavery.
After it, the racists turned on the Native Americans. The “Indian Wars” of the 1870s-90s were genocidal in intent and frequently in practice. I went to Sheridan Elementary School in Nebraska; I was later sad to learn that General Philip Sheridan turned from Union hero in the Civil War to murderer of Native Americans in the Indian Wars.
The rest of the story played out these conflicts, over and over. Reconstruction was aborted by President Andrew Johnson after a good start under Lincoln. The Ku Klux Klan arose after that, and became extremely powerful and murderous in the early 20th century. It stated the counter-democratic views in the clearest possible form: white supremacy, Jim Crow laws, subservience of women, and the rest. It still exists and works its deadly will, serving as a source for ICE recruits and support for Donald Trump and his agenda.
One Ku Klux Klan principle that has much wider appeal is Old Testament Christianity. This is Christianity based on the Hebrew Bible, ignoring, to varying degrees, Jesus’ actual teachings in the New Testament. Love, peace, charity, and tolerance are viewed as “impractical right now,” or downright irrelevant to the human condition, or too perfect for the “real world.” The Old Testament is read selectively. The many calls for justice, helping the poor, tolerating the stranger, taking care of the environment, and other ideas echoed in the New Testament are downplayed or ignored. The taboos on homosexuality are taken very seriously. So are the very frequent use of death penalties for minor crimes.
Closely related to this has been an increasing opposition to science, historical truth, and education in the old sense of expanding thought and teaching students to evaluate for themselves after seeing all sides. Education for the Old Testament Christians is indoctrination in Old Testament Christianity, and little else. Belief in the literal truth of the Genesis myths leads to distrust of science. Right-wing Christians have been stalwart opponents to recognizing scientific facts, from global climate change to the dangers of pesticides in agriculture. Many oppose teaching the obvious facts that slavery was a bad thing, and that the “races” of American stereotype do not exist.
Women and Native Americans finally got the vote in 1924, and civil rights finally became an issue in the 1950s and 1960s, with major legislation resulting. It is well to remember that the Civil Rights Act, which actually extended the Constitution to minorities, was passed only in 1964.
Meanwhile, immigrants had been welcomed in the Colonies, but anti-immigrant sentiment became a major force by the 1840s. Much of it was then directed against Irish and Germans, who flooded into the Americas after the desperate starvation years of 1846-48, when potato blight led to mass famine. The level of anti-Irish hate and stereotyping was appalling. Few now realize that Huck Finn was Irish; his father was a stereotypic Irishman. In his later years, Mark Twain confessed to anti-Irish bias. Eventually the Irish and Germans were accepted, but not until well into the 20th century, and anti-German sentiment surged in WWI and WWII. Kids of German descent in my elementary and junior high school days hid their backgrounds.
Throughout all this, the Founding Fathers’ vision continued, and slowly gained ground. The antislavery movement in the United States remains shining light in our history, and one now almost forgotten, partly thanks to right-wingers getting at the history books and school curricula. The movements of save Native Americans, support immigrants, and develop religious tolerance are even more thoroughly forgotten. Another childhood memory is of comic-book heroes that modeled tolerance of immigrants and of all cultures. (Who remembers Joe Palooka or the Blackhawks?) These heroes have somehow escaped the revival of comic-book stars that dominate films now. Modern comics do not seem to do much along this line.
Within the 20th century, the success of the vision was first associated with the labor movement, which dominated liberal and left politics through the Depression and into the 1950s. The civil rights movement rose alongside it, becoming suddenly vigorous and successful in the 1950s and 1960s, as the United States internalized the implications of the fall of fascism. The environmental movement arose at the same time. It has less influence and less political impact than the other two, but major environmental legislation was maintained. Other social movements of the center and left have had notably less impact than these.
All have been devastated. The labor movement was hit extremely hard by the rise of giant corporations. These found allies in the Reagan presidency. The government turned against labor, and this process was vastly accelerated under Trump.
The civil rights movement was enshrined in history and taught in schools until the Trump era, but now is obliterated from schools in half the United States. The labor movement has suffered the same fate, though in the 20th century it probably did more to save the Founding Fathers’ vision than any other movement.
The environmental movement has been especially targeted by the giant corporate interests. Under Trump’s presidencies, the United States government became extremely anti-environment. Not only the successes of the 1960s and 1970s, but even successes from the 19th century, were reversed. The National Forests, America’s first major national conservation set-asides, dating to the late 19th century, were thrown open to looting. The National Forest Service was substantially dismantled.
Throughout American history, at any given time, about 2/3 of the country supported freedom, democracy, and expanding equality. About 1/3 supported slavery. They broke off and became the Confederates during the Civil War. About 1/3, mostly in the south and midwest, had favorable views of Hitler in the 1930s. About 1/3 supported the extreme policies of the second Trump administration. Support for backward and bigoted causes waxed and waned, peaking in the 1820s, 1920s and 2020s, waning sharply in the 1860s and 1960s, but typically converging on the 2/3 to 1/3 figures.
Always, of course, there have been many people in the middle, holding mixed views, able to believe in liberty and equality while still practising intolerance and bigotry. What matters is that this middle view—though generally politically dominant—has not really been advocated very often or very openly. Most people maintain a rhetoric of Enlightenment virtues. The rest openly support the whole darker agenda: white male supremacy, dominance by rich who are above the law, destruction of nature simply to destroy it.
This has led to a schizophrenic state in modern American thinking. Many Americans see the Founding Fathers’ vision as what we “really” are. Others see the reality of the early 1770s as what we “really” are: a country based on slavery and robbery, run by the rich, white and patriarchal. The far left deplores this, the far right idolizes it. The only agreement is on the economic roots of it all: unregulated economic expansion in the name of “Progress.” Both our virtues and our vices stem from what looked good on bank statements in the 1770s.
The truth is deeper, older, and more interesting. It lies in the opposition of hierarchy to equality and equity, and then, within that, to the opposition of predatory and exploitative hierarchy to more benign power differences. This plays out even within families: equality of husband and wife and some attention to the rights of children plays against dominant father, subservient mother, and children literally beaten into submission (as was perfectly standard when I was a child).
Any society must have some hierarchy. Parents do need to control children. Police are needed to stop murders and thefts. Government is needed, in spite of Tom Paine (and my own early sympathy with his views). Game limits and pollution laws have had to expand along with human agency since 1776. We have seen the results of too little governance in the destruction of natural resources and the rise of crime.
We have, however, seen the result of too much of the wrong kind of governance in the continued repression of minorities, women, and gender nonconformists, neglect or outright discrimination against the disabled, vast subsidies to the rich, endless wars, and other repressive and cruel behaviors. America’s endless conflict between ideals and bitter reality goes on.
There is one, and only one, clear predictor of the evil turn in American life: fear of those “below.” “Slave rebellions,” “Indian massacres,” and “wild beasts” were the terrors of the ruling groups in the early 19th century. “Rising tides of color,” “immigrants,” “liberated women,” and “Bolsheviks” were the terrors of the early 20th. These lasted into the 21s, to be joined by “trans people,” “climate change fanatics,” and the like. (One may note, parenthetically, that the fears get more and more ridiculous; modern MAGA people seem to be genuinely terrified of vast hordes of trans people taking over and forcing sex changes on kids.)
In other words, in all cases, the reactionary and anti-ideal ideas stem from cowardice. They are the cowardly bullies’ answers to the threat of a world where people who are in power, but who are not brilliant or confident, face competition on a level playing field with minorities and immigrants. They are the cowards’ measures and beliefs and teachings.
This cowardly defensiveness has enormously increased in the last 50 years, because of increasing inequality. More and more Americans are being converted into mice, with little control over their lives. The decline of incomes relative to expenses is the clearest and most obvious issue. There are, however, countless smaller ways in which Americans have been progressively disempowered. Home-made music has given way to canned music, now often written by AI. Cooking has declined as frozen dinners and fast food take over. Home gardening has almost vanished. Participatory sports decline as TV sports increase. Most pervasive of all is the steady loss of power to giant, faceless corporations that can be reached only by long sessions on the computer.
This may seem like “convenience,” but consider the degree to which natural human beauty has been replaced among well-to-do women by conformism to style, through cosmetics, plastic surgery, and hair reworking, with costs ranging from high to astronomical, and great inconvenience. In short, we face the decline of anything and everything with a trace of originality and agency, and the rise of increasingly remote and alienated satisfactions. Countertrends certanily exist, and have saved us so far, but the future is troubling.
If the United States survives Trump’s presidency without falling hopelessly and irrevocably into fascism, along with Afghanistan and Russia, Americans must choose. The choice is between the old ideals, based on courage and progress, and the old counter-vision, based on weakness and fear.
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 many or most 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 solely 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 Thomas 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 liberals, meanwhile, are falling into increasingly strident opposition to “the rich” and “the billionaires,” without separating the liberal ones—there are many—from the right-wing extremists. The left thus copies the right in down-judging whole categories of 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 need 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. Trump and his cabinet 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. They 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. The giant oil and coal companies led in creating the climate of lying (Oreskes and Conway 2010; Speth 2021). Recently, even fossil fuel billionaires have seen the troubles with Trumpism, and backed away.
Many of the firms now backing Trump depend heavily on government subsidies. It should be remembered that subsidies basically pay corporations to avoid change. Subsidies reward rent-seeking and stagnation. They are sometimes necessary for national security—as for in maintaining US agriculture and thus food security—but must be rigorously tied to performance, including conservation, pollution control, and human resources (Anderson and Anderson 2020).
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. After David died and Charles substantially reformed (Koch 2020), the Foundation got worse; it was taken over by zealots of Christian Nationalism. 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 purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries,” as James Madison wrote (Letter Objecting to the Use of Government Land for Churches, 1803).
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. They then rallied and brought down Nixon in the 1970s. 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.
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. Little has been said by either conservatives or liberals about subsidies since Trump took office in 2025. Many other changes were proposed, all eliminating Constitutional rights and guarantees in favor of allowing giant firms to do as they wished. Even more targeted were civil rights, which are to be essentially abolished except for white males. The right, for instance, now advocates reversing the Constitutional amendment that gave women the vote. The agenda is exactly that of the Ku Klux Klan, and seems to be quite literally and directly taken from their program.
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 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, so it is a certainty if Trump does indeed follow his many threats to institute dictatorship.
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 looters as well as losers.
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 their own losing games of mutual attack. More important is the back story to this: center and left are divided and depressed. They are literally dis-couraged: robbed of their courage by years of right-wing growth.
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.
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 often 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 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 (Bellant 1990). In fact, Hitler fascism continued unchanged in the United States, though it 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 comes from that universe.
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.”
A Dreadful Future?
Trump’s special government force, ICE, committed more and more violent acts, including outright murder of dissidents and observers. Force and terror became normal instruments of governance. A line circulated: “the cruelty is the point.” Trump’s aide Stephen Miller commented to CNN (Jan. 5, 2026) that “the real world…is governed by strength, is governed by force, is governed by power.” This is the fascist creed, going back to Mussolini and Hitler almost word for word.
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 making 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 at the level of the modern kleptocrats.
PART 3: HOPES FOR A FUTURE
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalieanable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Power from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes desturctive to those Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
From the United States Declaration of Independence
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Preamble, United States Constitution
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. (This section of the paper sums up the “Moralities” chapter in Anderson and Anderson 2022 and extensions in Anderson 2025.)
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. 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.
For this, we must restore community. This must be at grassroots level, involving everyone possible in the national project of freedom and democracy. This will require restoring the labor movement to its role of leadership, restoring public education in Constitutional rights, and restoring the media to telling the truth and debating ideologies seriously, with decent funding and employment.
The real problem is the 50-50 nature of humans: half well-meaning and wanting the best for themselves and others, half motivated by deep inner insecurity, fear, and defensiveness. The latter leads to deploying immature coping mechanisms overlearned in childhood. The problem for those who want to improve the human species is appealing to the good side—feeding the good wolf and starving the bad wolf. Appealing to “reason” is inadequate. Throughout history, only appealing to higher and better group morals has worked. The group has to provide security first, to deal with the fear, then teach ways of coping that involve emotions of love, care, and cooperation. It also must teach ways to deal with actual threat by mature and reasonable means.
A particularly unsavory aspect of the Trump movement was convincing ordinary, formerly decent and civil, people to lead with their hate. All the appeal was to the bad wolf. The MAGA movement valued hatred of the weak. It converted many to this faith. Hatred became a test of membership, like the requirement by criminal gangs that a new recruit must commit a murder. Doing evil makes you a slave to evil—so runs the thinking. You have committed yourself.
What actually motivates good behavior is, first of all, the sheer enjoyment of socializing. Family, friends, workmates, people in general are just plain fun to be with.
Beyond that, though, we need a conscience: the knowledge that some things are so good that we must do them even if unobserved and unrewarded, and other things are so bad that we do not do them even if we can get away with it. Failing that, we are good because other people call us out when we fail. Last of all comes actual punishment. These get more important as one moves from good behavior and social enjoyment to real bad acting. Psychology has only recently confirmed the old perception that doing good feels good. 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.
I doubt if very many people are good enough to be motivated solely by eudaimonia—the enjoyment of socializing and in doing good to others. To motivate people to be responsible, there must always be a “what will people think?” and “people won’t like you” component.
People are about half sociable and half antisocial and desirous of harming. But it is the harm that wins most of the time, because good is gentler and more local, but also because of the bitter truth that it is easy to chainsaw down in a few minutes a tree that took centuries to grow. We will find the same if we ever get out of the fascist nightmare in America. It took us 250 years to build a democracy, and it was still imperfect. It took Trump a couple of years to destroy that. We will have to rebuild if we want to restore democracy. It will be slow.
It is fiendishly difficult to forge solidarity, and even minimally rational self-interest. People want to hate. It is terribly easy to hate, especially those weaker than self. It is thus always easy for evil leaders to divide the people. Humans will unite when against something, but then only when they are also for something socially valued. So, unite and press on.
Being Good
This brings us to the alternative to MAGA: being good.
Christianity and other religions hold out the ideals: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, consoling the bereaved, helping all. Beyond this is the mindset of human goodness. We want to see a good world, in which everyone can flourish by helping each other, with each person using his or her special gifts as best they can be used in helping. “Having thus gifts differing,” as St. Paul said, we do our best with what we do best.
Most of us learn how to be good from our families, who model it as well as teaching it. Goodness begins, more or less, with healthy family behavior. 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 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.
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 made my children do 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—but it is also close to Rawls’idea of justice (Rawls 1971). It thus unites utilitarian and Kantian philosophies. It even transcends the philosophers’ opposition of “deontological” and “assertoric,” in case you care (on such moral matters, see the extended discussion by my wife and me in Anderson and Anderson 2022).
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 Riverside 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 at crisis points in their lives. 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, following any moral rule 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. What follows is the true “woke” agenda.
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 thout 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. 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 was stated by James Madison
in the Federalist Papers: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary…the great difficulty lies in this, you must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place oblige it to control itself” (James Madison in Hamilton, Madison, and Jay The Federalist, #51, edition of 1961, p. 337). 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
“My son, everyone has two wolves inside them. One is a good wolf, courageous and social, always trying to protect and help. One is a bad wolf, always trying to hurt, destroy, and harm. And you too have those wolves within you.”
“Father, that’s disturbing. Which wolf wins out?”
“The one you feed.”
This folktale is allegedly Native American, but sounds a bit too Manichaean to be pre-Columbian. Missionary-inspired or no, it is absolutely the most insightful line ever spoken about humanity.
The problem is that, as always, the wolf that wins is the one you feed (Anderson and Anderson 2020). 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.
Unfortunately, humans are creatures of hate. Hatred—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.
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 much of Africa.
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.
Tolerance
They divide us by our tongue
They divide us men and women
They divide us old and young
But they’ll tremble at our voices
When they hear these verses sung
For the union makes us strong.
Solidarity forever,…
Classic labor union song
If you’re worthy (jun) there’s room for others
If you aren’t there’s none for you
Praising the adept and consoling the inept
A disciple of kindness finds his place
[lit. one who goes with humanity [ren] is in the place of virtue [de]]
Han Shan, paraphrasing Zizhang, tr. Red Pine, p. 139
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.
The major counter to hate is not love but acceptance. This includes tolerance and valuing diversity, but is more basic and extensive. The basic principle is simple: if you want to find people, go where they are.
Most of us know that one cannot assume that because they are black, or white, or Christian, or Muslim, or young, or old, they are some particular sort of people, but this breaks down when it comes to functional categories like “students.” “Students these days” are, as we all know, disrespectful to their elders, lazy, insolent, and neglectful of their studies—teachers have been saying this for literally thousands of years. The same nonsense is recorded in ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian writings. Presumably, the human race has been deteriorating since the Pyramids. Similarly, people on the autism spectrum were once (and still sometimes are) routinely considered to be “bad” or “spoiled” or “refusing to engage” when all they had was a simple brain glitch. The same goes for the dyslexic; Trump expressed the opinon, in regard to Gavin Newsom, that dyslexia is a form of stupidity. I had a student who related having her rather minor dyslexia identified when she was around 11, and promptly went from “idiot” to “genius.” She was a straight-A student at our university.
In more general terms, this means that acceptance is assuming the best until proven otherwise, and then dealing with whatever bad things turn up. This means dealing in a rational, serious manner. If a student really is lazy, the way to deal with it is not to say “students these days…,” but to motivate the poor kid.
On the other hand, acceptance means being realistic about the bad issues, and not trusting human goodness any farther than it goes. The ideal is to begin with acceptance, trust, and expectation of good, but also some wariness. The latter varies according to situation. Trusting your friends and their friends is one thing; trusting an “offer too good to miss” on the computer or in an unsolicited phone call is quite a different thing. Humans like to trust, and every conman in history knows it, so contnue to expect the good but never drop the vigilance. On the other hand, human society is premised on the assumption that people will be civil and reasonably nonjudgmental with each other. Starting from expectations of bad behavior becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and makes the person doing the expecting act badly, as well. Default anger, intolerance, and negative judgment of people simply for being what they were gave us the Medieval campaigns against “heretics,” Hitler’s fascism, Stalin’s extremist murders, Trump’s rule of destroying minorities until the “white” majority was destroyed as well. Evil people profited from the ruin of the rest.
Corollaries of acceptance are, first and foremost, respect for individuals for being what they are. Second, behavioral corollaries area clear and open communication, sharing what can be shared, and empathy, up to and including consolation for hard times. Third, people need encouragement—literally giving courage. Insecurity leads to fear, and fear leads to flight or hate.
All the main religions teach something like this, and thus teach the morality that can ideally control it. All teach unity versus disunity. All teach, to varying degrees and in varying ways, sharing, open communication, acceptance (at least of fellow believers), and compassion. Religion supports and consoles.
Different ones foreground different virtues. Christiianity puts love forward, Buddhism foregrounds compassion, Islam teaches responsibility, Confucianism and its Asian relatives foreground responsibility, and cowork. The various fusion sects, such as Kabir’s fusion of Islam and Hinduism, mix these all together in various intresting combinations. They should stimulate more thought than they have done so far.
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 is not supposed to be. Nationalism is supposed to be antagonistic from the start.
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.
Religion usually includes a strong spiritual component involving mystic love or divine love. It is also, much more generally, what Durkheim called “the collective representation of the community.” The community of beleivers represents itself in divine orders, to maintain solidarity and provide a shared values system. This leads especially to caring as moral choice: love, sharing, open communication, acceptance, trust, and respect. Religion also provides what a community should provide: comfort, consolation, empowerment, mentoring, and often simply listening.
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 Moral Orders
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
Gustav Mahler
There are three moral orders: love and care; cooperation and mutual aid; and loyalty. The first is seen in the traditional and literal teachings of New Testament Christianity, as well as in Buddhism and many other religions. The second is the most complex and involved, but is also the commonest, being the day-to-day mutual aid, reciprocity, fairness, and help endemic to all co-work and neighborliness. The third is found in hierarchies.
Love and care values oppose hate values, including the classic right-wing version of the Golden Rule: Do unto others before they do unto you. Ideally in families, love is a dominant emotion; caring is the cognitive-behavioral correlate. In cooperation, tolerance is the emotion, mutual aid the cognitive-behavioral result. In hierarchies, loyalty is the ideal emotion, good management the cognitive-behavioral correlate. All require responsibility.
Hate is the worst pathology across all of them. The more functional emotions should neutralize it, but do not in the real world. We depend, to counter hate and mutual destruction, on the Enlightenment virtue of reason and rationality. Without it, even love degenerates into anger, then hate, then cruelty, as in extreme patriarchy.
The morality of love and care is learned in the family, but extended to friends, neighbors, and sometimes the world. This is the traditional Christian morality. Extended to humanity and even beyond that to all life, it becomes mysticism, and is expressed in Buddhist values. Extended to nature, it gives us loving nature and treating the world as family, as Native Americans traditionally do.
Second is a morality of cowork. Cowork does not require love; one may dislike many of one’s coworkers and still work with them. It is a practice that leads to a specific form of morality. Its values are opposed to destructive competition as well as irresponsibility. They include respect and doing good work with a will. This begins with fairness, reciprocity, tolerance, and mutual respect. These are necessary for successful cooperation. At best, people adopt rational standards of empathy 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. It also led to the rise of education, science, codified law, and seeking evidence for beliefs rather than finding them in ancient works.
Mature coping with problems, including mature defense, is part of this moral order; it depends on rational assessment, cooperation and backup (almost always), negotiation and compromise (when possible), and responsibility. It develops in families, from settling family squabbles in a reasonable, “grown-up” way.
Third and finally, there is a morality of hierarchic systems. This also begins in the family, with the authority of parents over children, and is developed to much greater levels in patriarchies. These often arise in stockraising or otherwise mobile societies that must defend themselves, and in areas of high population density but little law and order. Early states naturally developed such hierarchic, authoritarian systems to a high level. Obedience, loyalty, and personal reliability became the moral standards. Personal “honor” in such systems involves extreme touchiness about personal status. Hierarchic values that privilege loyalty oppose egalitarian ones. This recalls Confucius and his five relationships: parent-child, elder sibling-younger, husband-wife, friend-friend, and ruler-subject. The first three are forms of love and carr, but for Confucius, they were also hierarchic, and indeed there is a necessary hierarchic component to parent-child relationships, at least when the children are not mature. Unfortunately, hierarchies, even in families, often end in repression by the powerful.
We can admire loyalty, obedience, and faithful following, but only to the point at which it does not involve oppression. Hierarchies are necessary in society, but deadly when not controlled by checks, balances, accountability, and recourse. The contrast of egalitarian vs hierarchic values comes through clearly in religious organizations.
Evil morality stands on two basic principles: first, it is God-given (or at least necessary); second, the dominant group is innately superior. It can be the group of the noble-born, divinely created to rule. It can be the learned, or the powerful, or simply the majority. In the United States, we see “white supremacy” as one part of it. Indeed, hatred and intolerance are always part of evil morality, and are ruled out by the other two moral orders. This order develops in families too, but in patriarchal ones where discipline is strong, obedience is demanded, but erratic (and even chaotic) discipline and authority are typical.
In many empires and in fascist states, opprression and cruelty are seen as virtuous, especialy to enforce proper hierarchic relationships. The hierarchy itself may be created to do evil, as in criminal gangs and fanatical religious sects. Even benign hierarchies select for these traits in elites. Any hierarchy that becomes extremely unequal winds up with this morality, as we see from the wealth hierarchy in the United States and its horrific effect on the morals of billionaires. Fascists and hard-core criminal leaders genuinely believe in it.
Moralities of care, cooperation, and hierarchy intergrade into each other. The basic values are the same. They are essential and basic to all. However, the three orders demand different emphases. Caring requires special attention to love, compassion, and considerateness. Cooperation requires special attention to mutual aid and tolerance. Hierarchy demands special attention to loyalty, and to obedience below and protective mentoring above. 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
People compartmentalize: some parts of life are guided by one, some by others. All of them depend on experience of coping in childhood. Love and care arise naturally in families. Cowork starts with desire to help and orders from parents and peers. Then responsibility develops, hopefully not just obedience and conformity. Ideally, learners go with social conventions, but creatively transcend them and work out better methods of working. Tolerance and respect follow. The rule of law appears: all people (even rulers) subject to law. In hierarchic morality, might often makes right, and the ruler is the authority.
The evil morality can start with the real necessity of condign control of people in prisons, wars, and rebellions. Philip Zimbardo (2008) showed what happens if there are not real checks, balances, accountability, recourse, and monitoring.
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.
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).
Respect takes a passive form in tolerance, in 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 and governs on literally no other issues; all his issues, from tariffs to changing geographic names, turn on harming the weak. Unfortunately, the left is corrupted too. Hate spills over into the most tolerant groups.
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. Criminals must be stopped, but 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.
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.
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.
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, occasionally comes from a few psychopaths, but much more often from people who are scared of losing what they have; security, resources, personhood, and above all control of their social world, including 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 too often lackng 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.
Education
James Madison, in letter, 1822
Morality requires intervention at every step: educating to provide coping mechanisms for insecurity, reassurance and encouragement for fear, direct and thorough countering of hate and cruelty.
We remain in many ways babies—helpless, unable to defend ourselves, dependent on elders. Education must be about growing up, first and foremost. It must focus on developing moral courage. People must become adult enough to defend themselves withot cowardice, and moral enough to be repelled by injustice and to work with others to make sure it is universal. We have recently tended to educate children to “go along to get along,” to be passive, to be calm, to meditate rather than protesting, to tolerate not so much different people but flagrantly unjust and cruel behavior.
It is now possible, and vastly preferable, to trani for leadership. We should train all children to be leaders, in a positive sense: getting to work together for a common desirable end, and being an organizer, motivator, and guide in the process. Leadership in the real world is too often about puling authority and bullying. Some forms of training merely add to this. Actual leadership training as practised in competent educational institutions has everything to do with producing organizers who bring out the best in people, and nothing to do with teaching ways to keep followers down.
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.
Education must, above all, teach people to avoid the worst of human behavior. The worst problem created by fear and immaturity is oppression and cruelty to weaker people. We hate downward on the power scale.
The next worst is the reverse: our tendency to adulate up. We grew up respecting the powerful father figure, and are far too prone to want a strongman. Even liberals who resisted the strongman figure of Trump and sought equality and the rule of law often sought a counter-savior—Bernie Sanders or some other liberal politician. But, in general, adulate up, hate down is the conservative creed, now and throughout all history.
Another deadly problem that has been with us throughout all human history is the tendency to play negative-sum games, especially with those weaker groups.
Finally, thoroughly human is the tendency to privilege short-term, narrow interests over wide-flung, long-term ones (Anderson 2013).
These four things define the human problem. All future education must begin and end with showing how hopeless they are as life plans, and how to counter them with rational common sense and evidence-based agency. We must drive the rule of law against strongman worship, equality against adulating up and hating down, cooperation or at least fair competition against cutthroat, and common sense against extreme short-term thinking. This is more or less the Enlightenment project in a nutshell.
So, reach out to the right-wing world, counter their religious and ideological messages, and teach the good, focusing on help vs. harm.
At present, we must do everything possible to educate rising generations in the need to deal with fears by cooperation to improve the situation, negotiation if that fails, and clean honest fighting if nothing else works. Currently, education far too often fails to teach effective cooperation.
We must also teach full appreciation of the world, including the natural world and the great creations of the human spirit.
We must do everything possible to prevent the use of hatred to divide people and set them against each other. Telling the truth about racist lies and historical lies about racism is part of this story. The same applies to religion, gender, and other matters that can either unite or divide people. Rights of free speech must be respected, but laws must be passed to prevent states and school districts from teaching blatant lies about any social groups.
Education in science, including the whole scientific mindset of double-checking and then going beyond received wisdom, is critical.
The American Experience, and Government in Future
“Never despair; but if you do, work on in despair.”
Edmund Burke
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 do more. We must control money in politics—getting rid of the “Citizens United” decision, regulating donations, banning outright bribery, which is currently legal under many weaseled court rulings. We must regulate 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 rule by one man, or by one 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 (possibly bipolar disorder). 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. Courage consists of negotiating till it fails, then standing up and fighting cleanly and directly, without hesitation. Cowardice consists of trying to succeed by oppressing weak foes and giving in to strong ones, without either negotiation or honest fighting.
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.
In the past, especially from the 1930s through the 1960s, evil was fought down by organized demonstrations and voting. Labor unions and liberal churches provided the background organization and leadership. Remember Martin Luther King, Jr. Often, student groups and citizen organizatioins helped. Today, with unions devastated by giant-firm repression, and with liberal churches decimated by the rise of atheism and agnosticism, we have weak basic citizen organizations left to confront evil. This has produced a leaderless, disorganized citizenry.
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 Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. However, he tried to follow Plato and Confucius, and Singapore was well run.) 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 savagely, 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-19th 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.
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 the fall of the USSR, and runs the whole country of Russia 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 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 85 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.
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.
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.
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: accountability and recourse. 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, care, 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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