What constitutes socially acceptable behaviour is often relative. Absolutes are rare. Even ‘thou shall not kill’ can be bargained, and frequently is.
We live in a time when the drive for clicks and advertising revenues is forcing legacy media to adopt clickbait headlines and spurious debates driven by extreme agendas. The unquestioned logic in many minds is this: ‘If it’s good enough for the BBC, the gold standard if impartial journalism, then it must be fine for others to follow suit’. But is it? Can that logic remain unquestioned? Are media which claim impartiality or rigour ever really so? Who decides? Are the terms of impartiality and rigour standardised across cultures, and geographies?
As the dial turns towards an extreme, like toads in a bubbling cauldron society swiftly normalises extreme tropes failing to notice the approach of the boiling point. What was once unacceptable, becomes acceptable.
Arron Banks bankrolled UKIP, Brexit, Farage, and now Reform UK. He makes money from causing disruption and formenting hate. It’s the same tactic used by others to profiteer from economic turbulence they cause.
How do evil, empathy, and mobs intersect?
Gustave Gilbert, an American military psychologist, spent months interviewing Nazi war criminals during the Nuremberg Trials.
Gilbert’s core finding in his 1947 Nuremberg Diary was that the perpetrators of the Holocaust weren’t uniquely insane. Instead, they shared one devastating, defining trait; a complete, and genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow human beings. Empathy was absent. This exact mindset is resurgent today.
Across far-right and conservative institutions, an intellectual and theological war is being waged against the idea of empathy. Human virtues are being painted as vices. We see this most clearly with the mobs targeting the RNLI in Portsmouth and other coastal regions; the humanitarian principle recast as anti-patriotic.
With empathy depicted as a weakness or liberal fabrication, theological cover for this cruelty acts as a justification based on scripture and the word of god. In the USA Catholic Bishop, Robert Barron, attacked empathy for being a “wokeist philosophy”. Instead, he argues, empathy is morally neutral and that willing the “good” of another can be a “harsh and dreadful thing” that requires disregarding their feelings.
History shows us what happens when you decide that ‘willing someone’s good’ requires ignoring their suffering. We have seem that when you untether morality from the ability to feel another person’s pain, you open the door to absolute cruelty. These were the lessons of the genocide carried out on the Armenians, the genocide perpetrated against Jews in Nazi Germany and its occupied territories, in Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and today in Israel with the genocide being carried out against Palestinians.
Put simply, dehumanisation is the goal. The method is a rhetorical shift, a calculated psychological tactic, to destroy a group of people by first building a framework that shields your followers from guilt or remorse for what they witness, inflict, and harm.
By presenting their targets as devoid of human emotion, it becomes impossible for the public to empathise with the victims; their own absence of empathy is projected onto the victims to justify an atrocity.
With empathy absent from the public square, violence ceases to feel like violence. It gets reframed as ‘necessary toughness,’ ‘defending the truth,’ or ‘preserving the social order.’
The attempt to demonise empathy is an attempt to erode the foundational psychological trait that keeps human communities from consuming themselves in hatred.
Broken reporting, mobs roaming Britain’s streets, and a supine political response
Sensationalist and poor journalism, for example conflating skin colour with criminality to demonise entire groups, has also been aided by weak political, and policing responses. These have fed mob violence of the type we’ve seen in Bristol, Thetford, and elsewhere.
What is being demonstrated is that nobody is safe from having an uncontrolled mob descending on a hotel they may be staying at, and this likelihood multiplies if you are from the Global Majority. The lack of a robust response in the decade since Brexit, arguably since 2008, makes hunting you down permissible.
Evil, and a lack of empathy, licence mob vigilantism based on lies and misinformation.
We have not been hijacked by ‘patriots’. We have been hijacked by failures, and the smart people who manipulate those failures for personal profit. What a mess.
But it’s not too late, is it?
The false equivalences being constructed between targets of hate and those instigating or carrying out hate attacks is not ‘impartiality in practice’. Instead, we need to expose those standpoints to scrutiny.
Too often we see those whom the law and state was designed to protect, having to fight to be heard while those who wish to oppress them in some way have the upper hand.
That has to change. Now, more than ever, good people must stand up and stand against racism and the far-right in all their forms.
I believe in the goodness of people. There are lessons from history. What we need to do is to learn from those lessons and act fast. We can gather together and talk, and plan, and create – together. Citizens panels which bring together diverse viewpoints and experiences are an example of this. The reinvigoration of civil life is a worthy goal, and a starting point for facing the madness head on. We know what do. We just need to do it. Now.
Sanjit Chudha 