What is dehumanisation? What leads humans to dehumanise each other? How can we subvert the process of dehumanisation? How do we make monsters and how can we unmake them? Lee and Roxanne spoke about the answer to these questions with David Livingstone Smith, a professor of philosophy at New England University who studies dehumanisation. David had a career as a psychotherapist psychotherapy trainer, prior to switching into philosophy. David became interested in dehumanisation and propaganda when he wrote The Most Dangerous Animal. You can find his Substack below. You can find transcript of the Conversation below the line.
Summary :: The conversation explores the topic of dehumanization and its role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The hosts discuss how dehumanization occurs at an individual level and how it has been observed during the conflict. They also examine the language and imagery used in propaganda and the psychological vulnerabilities that make dehumanization possible. The conversation touches on the role of experts and institutions in shaping our beliefs and the dangers of labeling and categorizing people. They emphasize the importance of treating others as humans and maintaining empathy. The conversation explores the neurobiology of safety and social connection, the manipulation of fear and helplessness in propaganda, the importance of historical education, and the power and potential of religion. The speakers discuss the need for a sense of safety and the exploitation of fear in media and politics. They delve into the psychology of propaganda and the manufacture of helplessness. They also touch on the role of religion in shaping moral compasses and the need for religious education. The conversation concludes with a discussion on the power of propaganda in the digital age and the importance of critical thinking.
Keywords :: dehumanization, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, propaganda, psychological vulnerabilities, experts, institutions, labeling, empathy, neurobiology, safety, social connection, manipulation, fear, helplessness, propaganda, historical education, religion, power, critical thinking
Takeaways
Dehumanization is a psychological process that occurs at an individual level and can be observed during conflicts like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Propaganda plays a significant role in dehumanization, using language and imagery to manipulate emotions and create fear.
Experts and institutions have the power to shape our beliefs and can influence us to dehumanize others.
Treating others as humans and maintaining empathy is crucial in combating dehumanization and promoting understanding.
Labeling and categorizing people can lead to a distorted view of others and contribute to dehumanization. A sense of safety is crucial for individuals to make peace and see others objectively.
The manufacture of helplessness is a powerful tool in propaganda, especially when there is actual objective helplessness.
Religious education is important for understanding the world and developing a moral compass.
Propaganda is everyone's business in the digital age, and critical thinking is essential to evaluate the information we are exposed to.
Titles
The Role of Propaganda in Dehumanization
The Dangers of Labeling and Categorizing The Power and Potential of Religion
The Importance of Historical Education
Sound Bites
"I observed dehumanization happening during the conflict."
"The language and imagery used in propaganda contribute to dehumanization."
"Dehumanization is not a spontaneous product of the human mind."
"There's a real movement to keep people feeling threatened so that certain geopolitical solutions will look more appealing than others."
"The manufacture of helplessness is really important to these very destructive forces."
"There's a magic to all being afraid together."
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Dehumanization
02:57 The Role of Propaganda
08:04 The Influence of Experts and Institutions
13:58 The Importance of Treating Others as Humans
36:32 The Neurobiology of Safety and Social Connection
37:35 The Manufacture of Helplessness in Propaganda
39:01 The Importance of Historical Education
48:16 The Power and Potential of Religion
56:36 Propaganda in the Digital Age and the Need for Critical Thinking
Transcript
Bad Hijabi (00:02.469)
Okay, so we are gonna talk about dehumanization and I thought we would talk about what actually happens because you have said it's a psychological process that happens at the individual level. What I actually find really interesting is that I observed it happening when the massacre happened.
And then the [Hamas snuff] video started to come out and stuff. And then Ben Shapiro made his video. So I watched that video. I was not going to pay attention to it because I made a decision I wasn't going to pay attention to this [Israel versus Palestine] conflict. And then this stuff happened and people started to talk about it and it was obvious that this was something like beyond normal.
Right.
So then I watched that video and like the language that was being used, saying evil many times and like saying amalek and, using words like monster and human debris and human excrement and things like that. Right. And like it was obvious. It's obvious. I listened to it again last night a couple of times. And it's obvious that it's coming from a place of like deep hurt and a lot of anger and things like that.
Right.
But it's like you said, it's like a kind of like a storm or something that
David Smith (01:04.536)
Mm -hmm.
Mm -hmm.
Bad Hijabi (01:29.669)
When people are in a certain kind of energy frequency or something that those words and that that imagery together like create something really like and he kept saying, look at this evil and look at this and this is what evil does and very convincingly and that and matching the matching the imagery with that stuff. I didn't hear— really listen to any propaganda.
I just listened to that video and then I went and I watched every single thing. And then seeing all of the people cheering and stuff. I have had a real challenge to try to assimilate that. But then I saw the thing, I sent that to Lee, the thing about the IDF targeting, not discerning between terrorists and civilians because now according, to many people, if you were seen cheering in the streets or whatever that was that was being done, then now you're not a civilian anymore. So all of that stuff, because, at some point, I saw my daughter's face in one of the victims. So this is really primal stuff. And, if you convince, if you convince me that my child could be in danger, I would agree to, I would agree to anything.
I'm—I feel like I'm a reasonable person. I read your books and I attend, you know, Lee’s spiritual classes and stuff. So, that's really alarming how easy it is to, to go there.
David Smith (03:14.008)
Yeah, it's all too easy. Subject anyone to the right forces. Slight exaggeration because in human affairs there are always exceptions. But, you know, subject anyone to the right forces, put them in the right circumstances, and they very easily, when exposed to these sorts of notions, slip into this way of thinking and often this way of acting.
That's why I say that it's very tempting to dehumanize the bad guys, so to speak, or those whom we regard as the bad guys, or to dehumanize the dehumanizers. But that's just a way of placing them at this kind of distance from us and say, no, I mean, this has nothing to do with me. These folks belong to a fundamentally different category than...I do. That's the opposite, I think, of what we need.
Lee Weissman (04:19.534)
Yeah, I think it's interesting. One of the things that seems very clear to me and kind of, I think this particular conflict, it's especially clear how the dehumanizing is so rampant. And it didn't begin on October 7th. I think that what you sort of saw happen is kind of bubbling up to the surface you know, bubbling up to the surface, a lot of things that had been kind of brewing beneath the surface for a very long time. And then just kind of exploding, you know, both into action and rhetoric at the same, you know, action and rhetoric in the same time.
And I loved one of the things that you said about human...human animals. Because I remember hearing that and I remember thinking that's worse. That was exactly my thought. Is it that's worse than saying animals? Because what you're saying is that these are monsters.
And, and so I have, I have a question for you that, that kind of came out of my hearing some of the things you said. I agree with you that given the right conditions, pretty much,
David Smith (05:25.208)
Exactly, yeah.
Mm -hmm.
Yes.
Lee Weissman (05:48.142)
anybody can dehumanize. I really think that's true. So. What are those conditions and how do you create the conditions in which dehumanizing is more difficult? What kind of a system would that be where dehumanizing becomes less likely?
David Smith (06:13.112)
Yeah, that's a really hard question to answer. And for two reasons. One is because in human affairs, we're condemned to deal in generalities. The specifics are always so complex and so poorly understood. And the second reason that it's difficult to answer.
is that the research hasn't been done properly. Otherwise, my books would be three of many, many, many books on this topic, but they're not. So I think first off, it's important to say that in my view, dehumanization is not a spontaneous product of the human.
Lee Weissman (06:48.654)
Mm -hmm.
David Smith (07:11.)
People don't wake up in the morning and think those folks who dress different or speak differently or whatever must be subhuman. That's not how it works. In fact, I think that we are exquisitely tuned to the humanness of one another. So dehumanization, when it occurs, has to get us. We have to be ginned up. We have to be motivated by someone to dehumanize others. And in fact, I think there are fundamental psychological barriers in all of us that make dehumanization, or rather make the sorts of acts of violence that we've seen in Israel and Gaza recently, not that easy to perform. And the reason for that is that we are highly social beings. And—
Lee Weissman (08:04.59)
Mm -hmm.
David Smith (08:10.04)
And any highly social animal has to have powerful inhibitions against acts of violence against fellow community members. And we're so social that, you know, unlike ants and meerkats and chimpanzees, our communities are highly distributed. It's not the local breeding group that counts.
Okay. So.
Lee Weissman (08:36.014)
Mm -hmm.
David Smith (08:39.352)
So in my view then, dehumanization doesn't come easily or in some sense doesn't come naturally. But there's a feature of human society, and I am getting around to trying to answer your question. I'm taking the scenic route here. So where was I?
Lee Weissman (08:56.814)
Hmm, it's not an easy question. Okay.
David Smith (09:09.08)
So that feature of human culture, which is so necessary for us, is sort of a division of cognitive labor. That is, there are people who we look up to as being in particular positions of authority. The experts, let's call them the experts. And most of what we come to believe and what we come to know comes from...the experts, right? It doesn't come from our own experiences.
I don't know that the ancient Egyptian pyramids, the first ones were built in the first dynasty because I've observed that, right? Experts have told me that. And because they're experts in my eyes, I take what they say on trust. They're the people who are supposed to know. And that's why I find them dandy and important and necessary. But it exposes us to a kind of vulnerability. What if the expert is, you know, Dr. Goebbels?
Lee Weissman (10:13.806)
Mm -hmm.
David Smith (10:14.328)
Or a race scientists in a hundred years ago in the United States or whatever. In other words, once we situate someone as an expert, be they a politician, a scientist, a religious leader, whatever, then we're kind of vulnerable to being misled. It's—
David Smith (10:42.68)
We dehumanize, I think, because people in these positions of authority get us to dehumanize. When Dr. Goebbels says the Jews are subhumans, if we have entrusted him with our faith, if we have come to consider him someone who's supposed to know, then it's natural to take that on board. Like you take on board what a physicist says or a chemist says or whatever. So. So that's one thing like.
We need to understand the way that these people manipulate us, play on our psychological vulnerabilities to humanize and this is particular in the you know the explicit propagandistic ones because it's not always like that right so humanizing ideology can be well distributed through a community that you know your parents are the ones who are supposed to know or the local religious leaders the one who's supposed to know and so on and so forth but we can come to be alert to two things one is some of the methods that explicit propaganda is used to strike fear into our hearts and lead us down that road to demonization and atrocity. And we can learn enough about ourselves to kind of be vigilant, to track ourselves. And that's got to begin with an understanding of our vulnerability to these sorts of influences, right?
Bad Hijabi (12:36.165)
I really feel like in my case that I've noticed me, I was noticing it happening. And it was a really weird thing. I don't know if I could describe it properly, but I have some— a psych background and stuff. I was a nurse and stuff and I'm a observer, observer of human behavior and I I watched your thing [lectures] and you know—
David Smith (12:47.192)
Hmm.
Bad Hijabi (12:59.461)
the way it's done, right? And I was like observing myself, being, this is wow, and, but then it was really weird because then I was doing all this stuff of observing all of these things and, sort of being engaged in all that. And then on the other hand, I was going to his [Lee’s] classes twice a week and hearing about...
David Smith (13:01.848)
Mm -hmm.
Bad Hijabi (13:20.453)
all these things, you know, about the Torah and like spirituality and Gates of the Heart and stuff like that. So this really weird duality, because I would go to this over here, have this interaction and this social connection with this person over here. And then on all of his things, he talks about dehumanization and all this stuff, right? And then I'd be over there in that world, looking at all those things. And then I noticed very early on,
David Smith (13:30.616)
Mm -hmm. Hmph.
Bad Hijabi (13:49.381)
that there was this drive to manipulate, there was this drive to keep putting those images back into the public circle and keep putting those things back. And I do believe that it's important to know that I'm like a Holocaust person. Like, I've seen all the things and like, that's one of my weird hobbies, like that I take interest in those things. I think it's important to know.
David Smith (13:58.36)
Hmm.
Bad Hijabi (14:17.285)
But I also think at the same time, there's, I do believe that there is some attempt to manipulate people, to keep people in that feeling fearful, feeling helpless because, well, there's no other answer except to keep going and doing that, except that that what's happening in my opinion, from where I am in Vancouver, Canada, it's, it's killing the society. It's absolutely dividing us.
David Smith (14:42.2)
Mm.
Bad Hijabi (14:45.253)
And I really feel that strongly that we are being manipulated. And all the things, we've had these conversations, Lee and I, and we both agree, everything is terrible. We never said it wasn't. But then I read about how, these are the children we kept alive in 2014, and these are the people that will grow up. And I can't endorse that.
Like, and I really feel like that's— in the past I've met, I've had like, abuse, periods of my life and stuff. And to me, it feels like that. It feels like I'm being—like someone's trying to hijack me to, you know, for a thing, right? I I feel very strongly that, and it just annoys me every day. And I don't like, I...
David Smith (15:13.176)
Mm -hmm.
David Smith (15:37.432)
Mm -hmm.
Bad Hijabi (15:38.725)
I don't know how to combat that except to be aware of it and push back a little bit on both sides. Lee might tell you, he's got friends, obviously he's in the Jewish community, but he's got a lot of Muslim friends and he's an interfaith person and he sees everything. And I don't know, I feel like for me, the antidote or the remedy or the whatever is having that, realizing that because I was totally on that path. And let me tell you, that's a real slippery slope. I was rethinking capital punishment could be a good idea. And I was turning into this real like hard edge person. But the reason I could pull myself out of that is because I'm smart because I read a lot of stuff and I know a lot of things. And you said that that like knowing things helps you inculcate humility.
David Smith (16:15.928)
Hmm. Hmm.
Bad Hijabi (16:32.901)
But I really do think this is a matter of taking responsibility and realizing yourself and having a connection that is not like poisonous. I don't know.
David Smith (16:42.648)
Yeah, no, I think that's right. I think a thoroughgoing humanism is the way to go rather than these ultimately destructive loyalties that...we have to certain groups simply because we had the fortune or misfortune to be born into them. And that's important. I think that the trick is how to get there. I mean, you have to understand there's some place to get in order to pursue that route, right? And also how to safeguard it. Because, you know, historically there have been... Historically, every genocide is...committed in the name of ridding the world of evil, right? We're not dealing with cackling villains. We're dealing with people who think they are acting righteously. And it's like vital to...I think that's really vital to understand. I mean, that righteous hate is an immensely powerful force.
Lee Weissman (17:58.99)
Yeah, I think part of the issue is a kind of black and white, a kind of black and white good versus evil kind of vision of the world. When you carry around the idea that there can be an absolute evil and that you can identify that absolute evil, which seems to me so counter, it seems so counterintuitive
David Smith (18:10.392)
Mm -hmm.
David Smith (18:20.984)
Mm -hmm.
Lee Weissman (18:27.31)
in terms of what I know about human nature. We all have dealings with human beings and we all understand that human beings are a mixed bag. And the people that we know, very few of us know any monsters, right? I mean, very few of us know any monsters personally, but somehow or another the experts are able to tell us. And I think you're right about that. It could be.
David Smith (18:36.344)
Yeah.
David Smith (18:42.392)
Yeah.
Lee Weissman (18:54.286)
It could be a white lab coat, it could be a turban, it could be a kippah, it could be, the identification of the expert can vary, but the expert can tell you that this is absolute evil. What's amazing to me, and I think Roxanne alluded to this, is that there's this sort of counter empathy that's created. Because on the one hand, when I see, okay—
David Smith (18:57.816)
Mm -hmm.
Lee Weissman (19:23.31)
When I look at the hostages, what did I see? I saw my daughter, I saw people who were like me, I saw people who were like me, and there are many reasons for that. But at the same time, when I see the images from Gaza, I have the same feeling. I see people who look like me. I see fathers who are crying for their kids, just like I would cry for my kids. I see people—
David Smith (19:47.096)
Yeah, that's right.
Lee Weissman (19:53.198)
who are staring at their destroyed home in the same way that I would stare at my destroyed home, right? But somehow or another, we're able to override all of that very, and I think, and I hate to use the word natural, but I'm gonna use the word natural. All of that kind of, that natural empathy that human societies would not survive without, right?
David Smith (20:05.944)
Mm -hmm.
Lee Weissman (20:22.542)
We somehow or another managed to allow that to be overcome so that we can see a broken body and we can see a broken body and just go, that's like a deer by the side of the road. And it's amazing that we're able to overcome that. And maybe one of the things is to have a very healthy skepticism about the experts.
David Smith (20:36.472)
Right, yes, yes.
Lee Weissman (20:52.078)
That might be a good start.
David Smith (20:53.08)
Yeah.
David Smith (20:56.76)
Yeah, so that's become more and more difficult. Well, maybe that's not the case. Maybe it's always been super difficult. That's probably more realistic. The problem is that … we are doomed to defer to experts. Human life, human social life depends on it. And we're often not in a position to be skeptical. We just don't know enough. So what we need then are, and all of this can be subverted, right? That's the problem. I'm not a utopian in any respect. In fact, I'm pretty pessimistic, but hopeful. So it's just so easy to be led astray because our trust needs to be placed somewhere. That's why I think we need robust institutions to separate the sheep from the goats as a—
Bad Hijabi (22:09.637)
I think that's kind of the issue is that our institutions have been weakened by the trend. I'm going to call it a trend. I don't want to give it a name or anything. We all know what we're talking about. That's weakened the ability of institutions that are supposed to be places of discovery and places of being able to exchange and tolerate different ideas and stuff and they've become places of absolute radicalism and intellectual fragility and just I sometimes feel like I could go to a church and have a little bit more open -minded conversation and then to go to a campus sometimes and that didn't you said we somebody said at the beginning of this Conversation that didn't happen overnight.
That's been something that's been brewing for quite a while. I remember, just to continue one last thought, I remember years ago hearing progressive people calling the Jewish guy, you're a white whatever. And I was like, holy, wait a minute. Are you okay? Because I'm old enough to remember, you know, all about the KKK and all about white supremacists and stuff. And no Jewish people are not in that club. How did where did we get to that? And I just remembered filing that away in the back of my head because I thought that that was going this is going somewhere really not good. And that was five years ago.
David Smith (23:52.952)
Yeah. So a couple of things. One is I think it's really important. I think the internet, for all of its wonders, and this is the ambiguity of our life, right? That the very things that are wonderful also have the potential to be terrible, has created an alternative world of authorities.
And consumers are not in a position for the most part to recognize that they're being fed bullshit by people who don't know what they're talking about with agendas, with political agendas. I think that's a really, really, really big problem. And because it's so easy on the internet to segregate oneself from criticism. You know, to block, right, to not engage, which is something I always try to do, to engage with people, have respectful conversations. That's been really bad at eroding the guardians of intellectual standards.
I think also it's very, very important to bear in mind that the...the scenes of awfulness that we've seen on some university campuses reflect both a minority of students on those campuses and a minority of campuses, right? It's typically...elite institutions, for the most part, where students are saying things which are, at the very least, morally ambiguous and, at the worst, clearly destructive. But these things get hyped up, right? They get hyped up by commentators with political agendas that want us to think that—
Bad Hijabi (25:56.773)
Mm -hmm.
David Smith (26:07.)
Universities are a hotbed of the most extreme kind of radicalism. They're not, believe me. Universities are basically conservative. Young people have always done stuff like that. There are examples from the 19th century of students protesting at Harvard and locking the president in his office and stuff like that. But you see all these things get used.
Bad Hijabi (26:25.925)
Mm -hmm.
David Smith (26:35.192)
And frankly, you know, if I weren't an academic at a fairly typical, you know, non -elite school, I wouldn't be able to think that because all I see on the news is Yale and Harvard and Stanford and so on. So I would assume this is generally the case.
Lee Weissman (27:02.606)
Yeah, a lot of this is also used for loyalty building. I feel like the internet has become kind of like the place to develop loyalties. And I remember years ago, there were issues. I was in Irvine, California. There were issues between Muslim students and Jewish students.
And I spent a lot of time with both the Muslim students and the Jewish students. They met in my house, all sorts of things happened. And there was an organization that made a film about the conflict. And I looked at this film and it was horrible. I mean, it was just, you know, it made it look like there was a pogrom on this campus. I spent a lot of time on that campus and there was no pogrom there. And...
David Smith (27:50.584)
Mm.
David Smith (28:00.439)
Mm -hmm.
Lee Weissman (28:01.55)
The students were fine with each other. Everything was fine. And I asked the businesses and they said, well, it's fundraising. It's good fundraising and it builds loyalty and it's a way of raising money. So a lot of these things, I think you're right. I think you're right. I think young people kind of doing these things. I'm not so concerned.
David Smith (28:03.992)
Mm.
David Smith (28:09.496)
Of course, yeah.
Lee Weissman (28:31.438)
I'm not so concerned about that. What I'm more concerned about is the way in which loyalty building completely obliterates being able to see human beings. That's where the language of total evil becomes—
David Smith (28:44.152)
Yeah, yeah.
Lee Weissman (28:55.63)
Where there's no possibility of considering a person as a rational actor, they can only be a monster. And monsters, the only thing you can do to monsters is to kill them. I mean, it's not, you know, there's, right, with monsters, and this, that we keep coming to this, and I'm gonna speak from the religious perspective, you know, that—
David Smith (29:07.832)
Yeah, yes, that's right. There's no holds barred with monsters.
Bad Hijabi (29:11.141)
Mm -hmm.
Lee Weissman (29:23.054)
This has become, I mean, the rhetoric, the rhetoric of monsterhood, you know, has become so much a part of the religious rhetoric. I would have said, if you had asked me five years ago whether or not what was going on in Israel and Palestine was a religious conflict, I would have said no. I would have said no. Now I would say yes. Now I would definitely say yes.
And I would say that the central issue, is dehumanization. That is absolutely the central issue and it has become a central religious tenet on both sides. And that to me is of course extremely dangerous and I think part of what we saw on October 7th and what we saw after October 7th and everything subsequently has really been and we've seen and of course, each side is very good at showing how the other side dehumanizes them. Without owning up to their own, of course we dehumanize them because they're not human, no wonder. Of course.
David Smith (30:36.952)
Right. Right. Yeah …
Bad Hijabi (30:38.725)
Like it's the it's the FAFO thing, right? You know, FAFO, fuck around and find out. That's given us the excuse, right?
Lee Weissman (30:44.622)
David Smith (30:48.856)
Yeah, we're, I'm ethnically Jewish by the way. We're laughing, laughing with the Yashikas, roughly translated is laughing just to keep from crying.
Lee Weissman (30:49.102)
Bad Hijabi (30:55.877)
Yes, yes.
Lee Weissman (31:06.126)
Right, yes. Yeah.
Bad Hijabi (31:10.725)
I feel like in a lot of cases, to just to give a back to this campus thing, I feel like that's not, I think you're right. That is not, I'm in Canada, in Canada's absolute, it's so weird. And I don't actually really know if that's really the way it is or if that's the way it's being portrayed because our media situation right now is really weird. It's basically subsidized. And then we have some independent journalists going around and reporting things.
David Smith (31:30.008)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.
Bad Hijabi (31:40.389)
So, I feel that actual university students are not like that, that's not really who is doing this, all these encampments and having all of these, sessions and all of this stuff. I have this feeling and it's being confirmed by other people who are smarter than me that like, this is like outside actors, you know, coming in and like, you know, there's all sorts of groups and things that like, you know, like they pray on, you know, campuses, you know, cause this is like fresh young meat, right? And I, like, I think that there's, I was listening to somebody, his name is John Kay. He's the editor of Quillette and like, he's, he's a journalist, whatever. And he was saying like, to make a distinction between like actual, like real, like genuine anti-Semitism and hatred of Jewish people and this really weird, Marxist trend that needs to put everyone in either the oppressed or the oppressor box and looking at this conflict through that lens takes people to some really weird places and that that's what we have here.
So like I sort of really appreciate that kind of analysis that takes people out of labels. I really am seeing how the need to label people like I saw the other day, tribalists and collectivists. And I feel like this need to put a name on people or a label on people, as you said, is the need to centralize people. Because then when you've given somebody a name, you can attribute a whole essence to them. And then you've made a decision about their fate in the hierarchy of the chain of being and all of these, the morality falls from that and stuff.
So I really think that one of the solutions is to just, like Lee said, just treat people like humans. Just everyone's human. And there is no, going back to this, when I listened to this thing again last night, this is evil. I don't believe there is evil people. I'm sort of religious, but I don‘t—I wasn't raised in an environment where the devil's coming to get you and it's the devil and the devil put these things in your head and stuff. How can I believe in free will and free, like that I choose some things and also believe that then there's like some absolute evil. Like to me, there's so many things that don't make sense when you think, when you unpack it.
So I just think that people are sometimes put find themselves in some really unfortunate. social situations and makes them really bad judgment calls. I think that's it. And this is really, really a very, very unfortunate one. And, how do we know even all those people? I remember seeing people seeming to be celebrating in the streets. How much of this is, like you said, how much of this is people trying to make us think these things? Who made these videos?
David Smith (34:49.016)
Mm -hmm.
Bad Hijabi (34:49.093)
Who made those videos and who put them on the internet and who wanted us to see that and think these things?
David Smith (34:55.64)
Yeah, I think it's a really basic question to ask is where is my attention being directed? And, you know, by implication, what is it being directed away from? And it's easy not, it's easy, or rather, I should start differently. It's difficult to get the sort of distance when something is emotionally compelling to ask questions like that.
Bad Hijabi (35:02.405)
Exactly.
David Smith (35:25.368)
I want to add something, which is, you know, when we read about people talking about outside actors in the protests, but they're always outside actors. There are outside actors in civil rights protests and in the anti -war protests. So it's sometimes made to sound very ominous, but people...
Bad Hijabi (35:36.293)
Mm -hmm.
Mm -hmm.
Lee Weissman (35:39.214)
Right, right?
Bad Hijabi (35:45.765)
But I just think that people think that this is a bunch of kids going to university doing this. And I think that it's a bit more, like it's not that easy, you know? So it's not as cut and dry as it's made to seem in the, yeah—
David Smith (35:53.08)
of course, it's socially complex. Absolutely right.
Lee Weissman (35:54.414)
All right.
David Smith (35:59.064)
No, no, it's not it's not cut and dry, but it also we're kind of led to think in a kind of conspiratorial or paranoid fashion about these these. It's like the Red Scare, right?
Bad Hijabi (36:09.413)
Yeah, yeah, the evil, the evil people are coming to invade the yeah, yeah, yeah, I get that. And there's that element there of that. But like, I don't think I think that's a wrong way of thinking. I think it's a social process that's just happening. I think that there's a real a lot of this comes from a real failure to understand how we connect to social creatures. I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Stephen Porges. He—
David Smith (36:32.472)
Yeah, for sure.
No, I'm not.
Bad Hijabi (36:38.661)
… started out in like the late 60s, noticing heart rate variability when people were concentrating on things and stuff. And so he's done this whole thing about, the neurobiology of safety and social connection and stuff like that, right. And so, you know, fight and flight and, then there's, mammals have another level which is, you know, feeling safe. So—
David Smith (36:46.232)
Mm -hmm.
David Smith (36:55.768)
Right. Right.
Bad Hijabi (37:07.493)
There's, you need to have a sense of safety in yourself and safety has been so exploited, but I mean like a specific, the feeling that you are safe and that you don't feel you're, you know, in a threat state. Okay. And so if you're feeling, if you're in a threat state, you can't make peace and you can't see people objectively. And I feel like now this is tying into the manipulation thing. There are a lot of people—
David Smith (37:20.696)
Yeah.
Bad Hijabi (37:35.845)
whoever running the media, whatever. I don't want to sound conspiratorial, but I really feel like there's a real movement to keep people feeling threatened so that certain geopolitical solutions will look more appealing than others and to make people feel like it's helpless and despairing and stupid to try to treat everyone like a human. Basically, I feel like that's what's going on.
David Smith (38:02.168)
Hmm. Well, you know, they are, everyone's competing for views, right? And it's the scary stuff. The scary stories are the most powerful ones, unfortunately. But yeah, you know, I mean, you've read my stuff, you know that I have a certain take on how the really destructive forms of propaganda work, you know—
Bad Hijabi (38:10.309)
Mm -hmm.
David Smith (38:31.64)
… coming from my background in psychoanalysis, actually, starting with Freud and going to this man, Roger Monte Carlo. But for listeners who haven't read that material that I wrote, the Freud bit is in his 1927 book, The Future of an Illusion, which is about religious belief. And...particularly monotheism, particularly Christianity, actually. Freud kind of saw himself as a one man Jewish army against the Roman Catholic Church. He was pretty explicit about it, too. So Freud says that the psychological motivation for religious belief comes from an awareness of vulnerability—
Bad Hijabi (39:11.853)
I'm going to go ahead and close the video.
Lee Weissman (39:12.43)
Ha ha ha ha.
David Smith (39:31.064)
… helplessness, to use the word that he used. And because it's part of the human condition, A, to be helpless on several fronts, helpless against the forces of nature, against human injustice, as he put it against fate, the fact that we're all going to die, our loved ones are going to die. We look for something to deliver us from helplessness.
And religion, certain forms of religion, and he would fulfill that function. But Freud was writing against a very volatile political background when he wrote that. There were mass demonstrations in the streets of Vienna, a few minutes walk from his apartment. Hitler to the north was holding his first Nuremberg rally. Political antisemitism was becoming rampant and so on. And I think that Freud's writing is suffused with a background awareness of that. The analysis he gives to the psychology of religion is very applicable to an analysis of a certain kind of politics, a certain kind of authoritarian politics, where the leader is God and is all-knowing and...all good and so on and so forth.
So, I mean, really to get to the point, I'm mainly influenced, though, by a later psychoanalyst who builds on that foundation, a man named Roger Moneycarl, who visited Germany in 1932 on the invitation of a friend who was later murdered by the Nazis. And he goes and he listens to Hitler and Goebbels doing their speeches. You know, Hitler and Goebbels are flying all over Germany to give these political speeches to boost the Nazi party, which for the first time has become a real contender for political power in Germany. They always had minority appeal before the early 30s. And Monicar wrote this article published in 1941 called The Psychology of Propaganda. And in the article, he says, initially counter -intuitively, he—
So based on what he observed Hitler and Goebbels doing, he says, well, they always did the same thing. At least when I listened to them, they got their audience to feel vulnerable, to feel helpless. First by making them feel depressed, that everything is bleak, we're the laughing stock of the world, we've been humiliated, et cetera, et cetera. And then getting them to feel paranoid. Well, it's really not your fault. It's the communists and the Jews who...who are destroying us from within and then offering this magical solution. So the manufacture of helplessness is like really important, I think, to these very destructive forces. And the manufacture of helplessness works best when there is actual objective helplessness, right? You know, to the degree that people don't have jobs, they don't have healthcare, they're...barely getting by and so on. Propagandists can play on all these things. And that's why just by the way, I think the whole notion of, well, let's say, let's call it the rhetoric of hate is misplaced. We have terms like hate speech and hate crimes and so on. But that's a very thin, a very—
kind of a trivial take on the forces at play. Hate speech is often fear speech, helplessness speech, even love speech. You know, if you think that they, whoever they are, are trying to destroy us, whoever we are, it's out of love for one's own family and one's own culture and so on that one can be motivated to do terrible things. These—
Bad Hijabi (43:32.293)
Mm -hmm.
Bad Hijabi (43:38.853)
Mm -hmm.
Bad Hijabi (43:55.909)
Yeah, just to interrupt you there, I think that that's what this was a conversation between Adam Gold and Jon, Jonathan Kay. And that's one thing Jon said. I'd like to call Jon my intellectual valium because he always will look at a situation and be like, yeah, that's not what's happening and just be like, to diffuse the fear and stuff. And that's essentially what he did. He said, it's not, there's when you're talking about actual real hate—
David Smith (44:15.648)
Yeah.
Bad Hijabi (44:22.981)
… like, you know, the Nazi …, actual— in Canada, we have like a hate in the criminal code. Like that's a high bar to meet. That's a really, really, really high bar to meet. And I think it's really disingenuous for us to sit here and be like, there's so much hate in Canada. That's a real threat. You know what I'm saying? Like not to diminish anything, but I think you have a real point. And it really does, it really does mock what's really happening—
David Smith (44:43.256)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bad Hijabi (44:52.869)
… now. So that's why I like, like that, you know, that mention that, l Jon Kay, they were having that and he was making that distinction, which I think is important. And I haven't really heard other people mention it before, that it's not, it's not that easy. And like, it is like, it's a bit simple, no, of an oversimplification or a bit of a misrepresentation.
David Smith (45:16.44)
Yeah, yeah.
Bad Hijabi (45:16.741)
But there are people, sorry, one more thing, there are people that want us to feel that way. There are people that want us to be scared and stuff.
David Smith (45:22.36)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes, yeah, go ahead, go ahead, Lee.
Lee Weissman (45:26.222)
Yeah, no, I was really struck. Again, with the October 7th, I was very struck by, of course, I'm Jewish and fear and vulnerability are kind of built into the culture and to the religious system. And it was amazing how fast that kicked in.
David Smith (45:51.96)
for sure.
Lee Weissman (45:55.822)
Because the vulnerability that people felt, and I'm saying even in my community and so forth, people felt very, very, very vulnerable after October 7th. Nevermind that Israel has one of the most powerful armies in the world, right? I mean, in that respect, the Holocaust was not happening over again.
I can't, how many times I heard that in the chorus of since that time, the Holocaust is happening all over again, it's going to happen all over again, it's going to happen all over again, this incredible fear when that's not realistic. You're the regional superpower. I mean, it's, and so there's not.
David Smith (46:40.724)
Yeah. Yeah.
Lee Weissman (46:51.406)
There's a way in which that vulnerability is so overwhelming and it's so easily manipulated, but it also has, I don't know the word, I'm thinking of like Max Weber's social effervescence. It has a magic to it, right? There's a magic to all being afraid together. There's a magic—
David Smith (47:13.08)
Hmm. Hmm.
Bad Hijabi (47:14.853)
Mm -hmm.
Lee Weissman (47:20.75)
… to everybody huddling together in fear and then in revenge, right? I think there's something, because when I saw very recently, so it's interesting. So the other day when the hostages were freed, when the four hostages were freed, in my synagogue, literally they handed out candies.
Bad Hijabi (47:25.861)
It's like a mass taking of cocaine or something like that and you all had a big party.
David Smith (47:28.824)
Mm -hmm.
David Smith (47:42.392)
Mm -hmm.
Lee Weissman (47:48.654)
Okay, literally they handed out candy. Okay, the same thing right to me, they handed out candies. Now, if I were Palestinian, I would look and I'd go 200 something Palestinians were killed and they're handing out candies, right? Because in that moment, in that moment of kind of, in that moment of solidarity, those kinds of moral issues, those kinds of moral issues are just kind of, they drop away.
And you're involved in that social effervescence. You're involved in the group solidarity and in the feeling of some kind of relief that we've accomplished, that we've kind of broken out of our fear and broken out. And in the moment, I sort of thought to myself, this is, well, now I understand handing out of the candies. I at least—
David Smith (48:24.472)
success.
Lee Weissman (48:44.238)
… have at least a window into the emotion that goes into that.
David Smith (48:51.)
For sure. No, I agree with you entirely. There's something, there is this phenomenon of people feeling they're not poor, vulnerable individuals. Even huddling together in fear is to fuse with some larger entity and paradoxically creates a sense of security.
But it's like you pointed out, it could be really, really dangerous. Right? Yeah.
Lee Weissman (49:20.942)
Yeah, it's very dangerous. It's very, very dangerous.
Bad Hijabi (49:22.405)
What's really interesting is that a lot of the Jewish teachings, like religious teachings, are actually the opposite of helpless. Like I've been sitting through the past two times a week listening to how to not be helpless and how to not be all of these things. And listening to like the, the pleas of the psalmist in the forest running away and all of this stuff. And he's like, this really sucks, God, but okay, I'm still grateful. Like that's the whole point of being Jewish to be in a desert and keep going. So it's really an interesting phenomenon to watch this, like this tide of like fear-based behavior. And it's very, it's been very fascinating to see how basically like threat states are driving. I was listening to an interview that Stephen Porges gave with Mayim Balik, who was like Amy Farrah Fowler in the Big Bang Theory. And he was saying, if you imagine that like the world is like a matrix of threat states, that we're all just basically trying to navigate threat states all the time. If you just could see the world of people like that, it would really go a long way to helping us get out of this chaos. Because I really have seen, and that's the antidote. I think I said that before, but the antidote is basically individual, is realizing that everyone's vulnerable. And so I really, really, really feel like we all need to watch all, like not watch all the things, but like be aware of what happened and familiarize ourselves with all of the terrible, genocides that happened in humanity. People have been nice enough or whatever enough, rigorous enough, diligent enough to study them. And it's— there's a process that anybody, all three of us can like, you know, be given the right conditions. We can all be in that position so the thing is to take responsibility because the reason it happens is because people don't take responsibility.
David Smith (51:33.56)
Well, but I'll say again, they have to take responsibility. Certain things have to be in place. For instance, they have to have some kind of understanding, in this case, historical understanding, right? That, well, every human group has got blood on its hands somewhere along the line. And unfortunately, I don't know that much about Canada, but—
Bad Hijabi (51:40.581)
Yes.
Bad Hijabi (51:48.197)
Mm -hmm.
David Smith (52:03.512)
…in the United States, the education on these matters is very, very poor. They don't understand. My students, I teach a course on race and racism. They don't, they have what I call the cartoon version of the history because the history isn't presented in all of its rawness. They don't really understand anything about the Holocaust. They don't understand it was a racial—
Bad Hijabi (52:17.765)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.
David Smith (52:33.144)
program rather than the religious ones. When I tell them there were Christian churches in the Warsaw ghetto, they were shocked out of their heads. People aren't given the information to motivate them to push back and to be self -critical and to be vigilant. And I think that's absolutely terrible. I mean, what?
Bad Hijabi (52:40.549)
Mm -hmm.
Bad Hijabi (53:00.773)
There is, in Canada, there is a need to see everything through a particular lens. It's very centralized in Canada. Everything is basically coming from one, ultimately one place. You know, we have provinces, we have jurisdictional, you know, whatever and stuff. But ultimately all the funding comes from one pot. And—
David Smith (53:19.512)
Mm -hmm.
Bad Hijabi (53:20.837)
…you know, we have a lot of problems with, you know, foreign interference and all of the stuff like that, right? It's very radical. So all of the education system and everything is affected by that. In fact, I just saw something that was like, I think this was in B .C. The B .C. Teachers Federation rejected a request for funding for a Holocaust education program.
There's so much, think like knowledge that's been distorted to fit through like a particular lens. It's going to, I don't even know, I don't want to seem—it's probably not as bad as it seems, but, it's going to take a bit of untangling and it's going to take a bit of work and people knowing things. Cause I, you're right. It is, it is failure to educate.
Lee Weissman (54:13.518)
And I think, you know, to be, you know, I was a Jewish educator for a long time and I taught kids, high school kids, and I taught a number of different Holocaust curriculum, curricula and so on. That's really interesting because of the fact, because of the fact that so few people are doing the kind of work that you're doing, a lot of the material on...on genocide, on propaganda, on all these things is really very primitive. I mean, it's not, it's really, there was one program that was a little bit better, I did Facing History and Ourselves, which was a kind of a better program out of New England, yay New England, but which was a better, which was much better. But, you know, in general, in general, there was really no—
David Smith (54:46.264)
Yeah, that's true.
David Smith (54:55.48)
Mm -hmm.
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Yeah, I know it.
Lee Weissman (55:08.238)
… attempt to kind of deal with the basic issue of dehumanization and and they sort of genocide was genocide was sort of understood as kind of an independent human phenomenon which it is not at all it's it's it's connected to normal human fears connected to normal human loyalties it's connected to to to a whole bunch of normal things that people do it's not some it's not some—
David Smith (55:27.576)
Mm -hmm.
David Smith (55:35.16)
That's right.
Lee Weissman (55:38.254)
… it's not some, you know, bizarre act of sorcery that just suddenly comes on people. And I think that that, it's a pity that there isn't more, there's more work and that work isn't available to people in a way that can help them to learn, you know, how to monitor themselves, you know, and to really, and to kind of, to be able to evaluate the stuff, you know, that, you know, that we're exposed to. I mean, of course, now with the internet, you know, propaganda—
David Smith (55:44.696)
Yeah.
Lee Weissman (56:08.238)
Propaganda is everybody's business. Anybody who's got a computer can become a massive propagandist. And that is a terrifying prospect for people who don't understand how it works. People who don't understand how to evaluate those images, how to... It's terrifying.
David Smith (56:11.384)
Yeah.
David Smith (56:19.256)
That's right. Right.
Bad Hijabi (56:36.101)
I can't tell you like how many times when I in the early days when I was looking through all of these images and I looked at from both sides, you know, from the Arab world and stuff to how like demoralizing it was to have to look at every image and be like, okay, I don't know if this is real and put this through like a like a thing that determines whether it's human or not. Like it's it was like really like a not I'm getting that not many people did that.
David Smith (56:54.936)
Yeah.
Bad Hijabi (57:02.629)
But I did, because I wanted to know. And I did it for a while. And then after a while, it becomes a pointless exercise. But I proved to myself that it's not obvious. And when you see something, someone else said, who worked in this intelligence world, if you see something and it triggers an automatic, intense emotional reaction in you, stop and think about the fact that it was probably created to do that.
David Smith (57:30.2)
—it is that.
Bad Hijabi (57:31.557)
And I also just wanted to say that I really, really wish that people could see religion as the solution, not the problem. Because, you know, religion can be like this cool thing where you could just help yourself. You don't need to pay some like smarmy, slimy psychotherapist $300 an hour to, you know, so he can make his house payments or whatever. Sorry, I like you. I have a real issue with that whole industry.
David Smith (57:58.104)
Good, yeah.
Bad Hijabi (57:58.981)
You could just show up to this guy's class, you know, and he could just like for free. He's happy to do it. Exactly. And he we just show up and that's payment enough. Okay. Somebody who chooses the moniker, Jihadi Jew, I feel like, you know, he's getting a payment from.
Lee Weissman (58:04.078)
And nobody pays me anything. Nobody pays me anything. Nothing. Nothing. Just exactly. That's it. That's my payment.
David Smith (58:06.072)
Ha ha ha.
David Smith (58:17.32)
That's pretty awesome. Yeah.
Lee Weissman (58:18.382)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
David Smith (58:22.968)
Yeah, well, religion is power. I mean, it's dynamite. It's very, very powerful. I think this is another problem with our culture, says me, the atheist Jew, that young people aren't given religious education, real religious education. It's simply not addressed apart from the occasional history class. And I don't think you can understand the world.
Without that. And you know, religion is...in my view, immensely powerful for good and for evil. I mean, it's the power of it that makes it applicable to both spheres.
Lee Weissman (59:03.694)
Yes, for sure.
Bad Hijabi (59:10.085)
I really just think that like I was raised in a household and so was Lee raised in a household where our parents were like varying levels of religious, but religion meant be a good person. Don't be a dickhead. Like to be sorry to be blunt, but like that's like, you know, my mother was devout and we did all the things, whatever, right? And I learned all the things, but ultimately bottom line was religion was don't be an asshole. Be a good person.
Lee Weissman (59:38.51)
That's the 614th commandment.
David Smith (59:40.663)
Yeah, yeah. Subsuming this 613.
Bad Hijabi (59:40.869)
Okay? Don't don't let the asshole inside your head run everything, okay? Take the keys back once in a while.
David Smith (59:49.016)
Yeah, but that's great. But of course, religion can also tell you, as it told medieval Christians, go out and kill the infidel, right? And if you don't kill the infidel, you're an asshole, right?
Bad Hijabi (59:57.721)
Mm.
Exactly, exactly.
Lee Weissman (01:00:02.254)
Right. Right.
Bad Hijabi (01:00:06.757)
Exactly, exactly. And like we I've had these discussions with Lee, we in our other episodes, that's one of my biggest things is like grappling with the like the conscience or the moral compass that I have with like the herd compass, because sometimes the herd compass is not like my moral compass. And so then people have to decide and that's basically religious life, deciding which compass you should go with.
Lee Weissman (01:00:07.182)
Right, right, right, right.
Bad Hijabi (01:00:35.749)
And I don't know, I feel like religion is supposed to be something that equips you to be able to be, you know, resilient enough to be like, okay, well, the tribe says this, but that's wrong. So I'm just gonna go over there. But I guess I'm like religion has the opposite effect on most people and it helps them. It depends on your gang signaling, whatever, and your all of these things that.
David Smith (01:00:54.776)
like anything else.
Mm -hmm.
Bad Hijabi (01:01:02.085)
We've sort of arrived at the conclusion that it's largely temperamental, that some people are border collies and some people are sheep and I don't know. Yes.
Lee Weissman (01:01:13.742)
Some people are border collies, some people are sheep. I have to, unfortunately, I have to leave you, because I have to go take somebody to an orphanage. You can't argue with that, okay? You can't argue with that. I have to go to an orphanage, literally. So, my one hour limit, yes.
David Smith (01:01:16.28)
No.
Bad Hijabi (01:01:22.213)
So do we have, well, you know, and it's your one hour limit. Lee has a one hour limit. So do we have last thoughts?
David Smith (01:01:26.424)
No you can't, that's good.
David Smith (01:01:32.408)
I, I, last thoughts. My last thought is that someone's, a workman's going to be here in a few minutes, so I have to leave this. It was very nice talking to both of you.
Lee Weissman (01:01:41.742)
Ha ha ha ha!
Bad Hijabi (01:01:46.309)
We'll have to do this again. I wanted to talk to you for a very long time and there's like a bunch of stuff I want to talk to you about. So.
David Smith (01:01:51.064)
Well, you know where I am. I'm going to be recovering from surgery for about three weeks, starting less than a week. So I'll be here. Yeah, it's an ankle replacement. So I'm hoping that really—
Lee Weissman (01:02:01.422)
Bye.
Bad Hijabi (01:02:03.045)
I wish you well, whatever's going on. I hope everything goes well for you. And OK, it's not a thing.
Lee Weissman (01:02:04.59)
Okay, I've...
Bad Hijabi (01:02:12.741)
You're gonna be bionic.
David Smith (01:02:14.616)
Yeah, well, once I got two shoulder replacements that need to be done, too. So it's too bad they can't do them all at once, you know, like if you take your car down to the mechanics, they just put it on the lift and replace everything. Can't do that. Yeah. Yeah. No.
Bad Hijabi (01:02:17.349)
Woohoo. damn. Yeah, well, that would be—
Lee Weissman (01:02:19.63)
Okay. Okay.
Lee Weissman (01:02:25.742)
Just put it on the lift, do everything all at once. We can't do that, yeah. Well, I hope it goes well. And it's really nice to meet you. And keep writing more books on this topic and inspire your students to write more books. And keep talking.
Bad Hijabi (01:02:27.109)
Yeah. Yeah. All right.
David Smith (01:02:32.664)
Thank you.
Likewise.
There's a story there of a book that my wife and I have been trying to get accepted. Yeah, we want to co-author a book on race, but all the publishers are just scared shitless, you know. But our agent is determined. Our view is a rather unpopular view on both sides of the political spectrum.
Bad Hijabi (01:02:44.229)
Your wife is awesome, too. Just you guys are amazing. I love you guys. I would love that. I would love that. Of course they are.
Lee Weissman (01:02:56.43)
well.
Okay, keep it up.
Bad Hijabi (01:03:03.941)
It's a fabulous view. It needs to be get more airplay. All right.
Lee Weissman (01:03:07.758)
Okay, that's because you're a border collie, not a sheep.
David Smith (01:03:08.6)
Okay. I'm more sheepish than you might imagine.
Lee Weissman (01:03:14.318)
Okay. Thank you so much. Bye bye.
Bad Hijabi (01:03:15.205)
Well, thank you guys. All right. Bye.
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