Fear, Contempt, Disgust

Well... so far this week we've had a white guy shooting two black people at a Kroger's (after not shooting up a black church because they had their doors locked); a Mulligan-supporter sending a dozen bombs to Democratic leaders, funders, and media figures most targeted by Mulligan; and a white (I assume gentile) guy killing eight Jewish people during Sabbath worship while shouting "all Jews must die."

Which makes this Twitter thread particularly timely. It's by @Disord87, who describes himself as a "well-meaning idiot and line cook who harbors delusions of eventually getting a PhD studying emotions and inter-group aggression":

One of the most important factors to predicting which political groups are likely to exhibit violent tendencies is the use of emotions in rhetoric by group leadership. A leader's job is to reframe recent events and construct the narrative for followers to spread. Leaders provide the explanations for followers to make sense of recent events and their feelings about these events. They provide the scapegoats to blame, and occasionally provide solutions. In the process, they also tell their followers what emotions they should be feeling.

Most studies are in agreement that three emotions have to be present for violence to occur: Anger, Contempt and Disgust.

Anger is a propellant, it spurs you on to do something. It's rocket fuel, if channeled right, it puts you on the moon. If not, it burns your house down.

Contempt is feelings about hierarchy and superiority. It's the emotion that allows you to feel that your opponent is beneath you, either because they are inhuman or because they are immoral. It's the emotion that tells you that they don't deserve your respect or civility.

Disgust is the reaction to contamination. It implies that something is impure or unclean and must be removed before the contamination spreads. This could be a reaction to spoiled milk, or vermin, and because we can think abstractly, other human beings.

Any of the three emotions are caustic, but when combined, they act like gunpowder. Leaders usually transmit the emotions they are feeling to their followers in a process called emotional contagion. So if you exhibit all three, odds are so will your followers.

Martin Luther King Jr was pissed. Gandhi was pissed. Hitler was pissed. All three leaders were angry, but violence only followed Hitler's speeches. That's because in the year leading up to their respective events, Hitler's speeches had contempt and disgust where MLK and Gandhi didn't. And it makes sense. Contempt tells you that the other guys are either immoral or inhuman. Disgust tells you that you need to remove them. Hence terms like "ethnic cleansing." Inaction eventually becomes immoral because these "contagions" are seen as threats to our safety

So when you listen to the speeches made by Trump...? You hear the contempt, the disgust. Their enemies are inhuman (thus not deserving our mercy or sympathy) and dangerous (and thus need to be eliminated). The difference is Democratic leadership has shown more restraint. There have been no calls for violence, no equating opponents to animals.

At the same time, I think it's important to see how this thinking works in the case of James Hodgkinson, the left-wing white guy who shot Steve Scalise and tried to shoot other Republican members of Congress at their baseball practice. Where did Hodgkinson get his disgust and contempt from, if those are necessary ingredients in this kind of violence? I think the contempt (feeling of superiority) can arise within a person who feels very strongly about something: i.e., how can these other people not see things the way I do when it's totally obvious? There must be something wrong with them. Though having it stoked by a political leader would clearly provide a shortcut to and excuse for that feeling.

The disgust, I think, is harder to reach on your own, though clearly Hodgkinson must have. Hillary Clinton's use of the phrase "basket of deplorables" gets at the contempt, but (especially in the full quote*) I don't hear disgust there, personally, though maybe Hodgkinson did.

As I have noted, "disgusting" was Mulligan's favorite word during the campaign. It was as if he only had one adjective. The idea of contamination (from immigrants, refugees, what have you) motivates his political worldview. And it's pretty clear that the so-called MAGAbomber had no particular political notions until the 2016 campaign. He was immersed in a soup of dehumanizing rhetoric and, combined with his own instability, became a bomb-maker following a hit list laid out for all to see.

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A late addition, this cartoon that gets at the gist of it:


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*Here's the paragraph from Clinton's speech:

I know there are only 60 days left to make our case -- and don't get complacent, don't see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate comment and think, well, he's done this time. We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic -- you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people -- now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks -- they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.

It seems pretty clear to me that the "deplorables" are the isms she lists, rather than the people themselves, though I realize that's a fine line. But even so, compare this one instance of denigrating language to the multiple times in just about any Mulligan speech during the campaign (or his current rallies) where he calls his opponents criminals or terrorists, condones violence against the opposition and media, and exaggerates the contagion and criminality of immigrants. There's really no comparison.