Robin Koerner
Robin Koerner is a British-born citizen of the USA, who consults in the field of political psychology and communication.
It’s long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible.
Donald Trump.
Never did I expect to write an article about the moderation of political communication that began with a quote from Donald Trump.
But here we are.
I saw the news about Charlie Kirk’s murder while seated in a reception room at a Seattle hospital, awaiting a procedure. I audibly gasped when I read the awful headline.
A couple walked in a minute or two later, both on the other side of middle-aged. The woman, looking at her phone, had just seen the news too. She turned to her partner to tell him what had happened to “that piece of s#*&” of a man, whose views she caricatured in a way I shall not repeat, since the caricature said nothing about Charlie and plenty about her.
My stomach churned to hear her do it. The woman did not know that I could hear her. Not wanting to be around her or create a scene in a hospital by challenging her, I got up to leave.
As I did so, a nurse walked in, all smiles and looking for me. It took me a moment and a great deal of concentration to hear what he was saying, as I was still processing what it means to share a country, a city, a room with such a human being as that woman, so breezily expounding on her hate in a place built for the express purpose of caring for people.
I couldn’t shake the feeling. It was still with me when I came around from the sedation.
Coming home, I thought about a small incident about a year ago. I was on a bus taking me from a plane parked on the runway at Reykjavik Airport to the terminal building. The American woman next to me was talkative. She said something about Trump. I gave a non-committal, polite response. Not knowing me or my views, she thought it utterly fine to tell me with a smile that she hoped that the next shooter wouldn’t miss him. I showed her my disgust.
These anecdotes matter only because these women are two among millions, representative of a profound and broad cultural phenomenon.
Two years ago, I enrolled in a philosophy PhD program at a well-respected university in the English-speaking world. My department does analytic philosophy, and my work is in the entirely non-political field of epistemology.
At the beginning of my second semester, an acquaintance at the department who was much further in his doctoral studies than I contacted me to suggest that I not come onto campus for the foreseeable future. I will call him Matthew. He wanted to let me know that he had been “invited to join a campaign of ostracism against” me.
I asked Matthew who was involved in this campaign and what on earth was motivating it. He told me that as far as he could tell, the campaign involved almost all of the doctoral students in my program, and the reason for it was a particular sentence in an article that I had written nine years prior. He advised me to remove the article from the internet.
I hadn’t read the article in years, so I did so, just to see if I now felt that I had said anything unacceptable or untrue. Of course, I had not. Accordingly, I thanked Matthew for the information and told him I had too much integrity to remove an article that was true when I wrote it and true today. He understood but stood by his advice that I should not come to campus for the upcoming semester. Why? Because these ostracizing students, he said, were looking for opportunities to make trouble for me.
I did as he suggested, attending seminars only remotely. I did not mention the matter to any university staff until, three or four months later, my supervisor suggested that I involve myself in something in the department. I had to tell him why that would be difficult and what the consequences might be. The professor took me seriously and asked me to ask Matthew (whose identity I had not revealed) if he would share his knowledge about the campaign against me with him. That would, my professor explained, put him in a better position to take appropriate action.
Accordingly, I contacted Matthew and asked if he would meet my professor and confidentially share what he knew so that the right people could address what was going on in the right way. Matthew told me that he would think about it, but was not at that time prepared to take the risk of identifying himself, even in a confidential setting. His problem was that the only person in the student body sympathetic enough to me to not be part of the campaign was he.
So, he reasoned, if any action were to be taken at all, he would become the next departmental persona non grata. Being near to the end of his doctorate, that was not a risk he could afford to take. In short, merely telling the truth about what a group of students was doing to one of their number would put his academic career in jeopardy before it even began.
To his credit, Matthew did as he promised and thought about it: a couple of months later, he decided to do the right thing and meet my professor.
Matthew’s politics are very much of the left – and, as he and I discussed, he was entirely politically aligned with all of those who were ostracizing me. Over time, though, he had become very disturbed by how “fascistic” (his word) his left-wing peers were in their treatment of me. On the other hand, he noted that I, with whom he politically disagreed, was always very willing to discuss issues of mutual interest with him and anyone else in a spirit of mutual openness and truth-seeking.
I cannot speak for Matthew with certainty, but I suspect that part of what caused him to steel himself to speak to my professor was the dissonance he felt in knowing that the people whose politics he shared seemed to want to do harm to someone (socially and academically) simply because of a point of disagreement. And how particularly absurd in a department of philosophy, of all places!
I am only able to tell this personal story now (for the first time) because Matthew obtained his degree and secured a position a long way away in a foreign land: the osctracisers cannot harm him there.
Does what happened to me have anything really to do with the delight of millions of people in, or at least their indifference toward, multiple attempted and actual political assassinations in my adoptive country?
I think it does.
What all of these stories have in common is the psychopathological instinct to hurt those with whom one disagrees.
To those of us old enough to remember the before-times, these ‘woke’ times feel different because we never saw that instinct to hurt manifest in political discourse. Back then, live and let live was the fundamental assumption that enabled Western politics. Today, for all too many, it is not: literally, politics has become, for millions, live and let die. That is the honest feeling of the woman in the hospital reception room and the woman in the bus in the airport, and they find themselves today in a culture in which that feeling is openly and easily expressible. Similarly in kind (although of course not in degree), the students in my department are operating in a culture where organizing against a person in an institution in which he has earned every right to participate seemingly requires no pause for thought.
And that is the problem. It is not so much that the psychopathological instinct to hurt one’s opponents exists: it is that it has become normalized; it has become accepted. People voice it without fear or shame. It is so normal, and so accepted, that it has buried in large swathes of our population the most basic and formerly ubiquitous moral sentiments.
That this single phenomenon – an instinct to hurt those with whom one disagrees – is the sine qua non of what ails us is obvious when written down.
So why bother writing it down?
Because last week a man died on its account. So this week, we are faced with what this instinct means; what it produces; and where it ultimately leads.
Distilling it to its simplest and shortest expression is a prerequisite to seeing it in all its guises, wherever it prevails, with whatever political views it may be associated with. Eight words are as simple and short as I can make them. These are eight words that differentiate those who live and let live from those who live and let die. They can help us, therefore, distinguish those with whom we can share a political culture from those with whom we cannot.
I have always been skeptical of those who try to blame the violent and malicious actions of individuals (and all actions, ultimately are actions of individuals) on their political or cultural opponents for allegedly ‘creating the environment’ for those actions. The world is so much more complex than that. It always seemed to me that such accusations were themselves willful acts of polarization and division of the very same sort as the accuser pins on his opponents: a kind of fake, hypocritical moralism.
But in the West today, a clear fact must be squarely faced.
The will to hurt those who disagree is a singular psychological, moral, and pathological phenomenon. Just as surely as it is manifest by Charlie’s murderer, it is manifest by those who state their hope that such violence will be done (like the woman in the airport in Reykjavik), those who exclaim their contentment that such violence has been done (like the woman in the hospital and millions like her on social media today), or those who do whatever more limited harm they can to someone in their community with whom they have a political disagreement.
In other times and places, political assassinations have occurred as cultural anomalies, not obviously reflective of the zeitgeist or historical moment, and certainly not approved of by some significant minority of the population. But Charlie’s murder does not feel like that. On the contrary, it feels like a direct manifestation of a psychopathological instinct that no longer raises enough eyebrows or is met with sufficient morally courageous resistance wherever it appears.
Some time ago, I wrote about this cultural shift in more philosophical terms, suggesting that what counts as morality today has ceased to be something personal – the integrity of a person, or the standards of behavior to which she holds herself; rather, it has become something positional – what one says or believes rather than what one does; the reasons one gives for one’s behavior rather than the standards of that behavior.
I believe today, with a heart as heavy as it has ever been, that I was right about all of that. I am writing here only to add that underlying this sweeping moral and cultural change that we have been living through are the instincts – the psychology – of certain people who are responsible in small ways and large, and being allowed by the rest of us to get away with it.
We must learn to notice those instincts so that we can signal appropriate disgust wherever we encounter them.
American hearts are breaking. I am worried that America will break, too. If it does, the consequences will be horrific and for the ages.
My hope is that we begin to look out for the operation of this instinct to harm those with whom one disagrees, wherever it manifests. Preventing the breaking – so it seems to me – requires us to resist the pathological and call it what it is.
What does this mean in practice? Something like the following.
Having a view that I hate does not make you hateful; sharing an opinion I hate does not make your speech hate speech. If I wish you harm for either, then I am the hater.
This article was originally published by the Brownstone Institute.
