People Are People – Divided We Stand United We Fall

I heard an interview years ago between the DJ Zane Lowe and Damon Albarn of Blur and Gorillaz. During it, Albarn recounted a story of how, on a visit to rural China (I believe), he got lost while walking and ended up on the other side of a mountain from where he was staying. He waved down a local passing on a motorbike and, despite them not sharing a common language, the local knew that foreigners were staying nearby and motioned for Albarn to get on behind him and returned him to his accommodation.

Zane Lowe listened to this intently and at the end exclaimed slowly something like, “wow, man, how do you express your gratitude to someone like that when you can’t speak their language?” like he was pondering one of the deepest and most perplexing questions to ever trouble the universe.

“I gave him some money,” Albarn deadpanned.

People are people. People like money. It doesn’t matter where you go, money is near-universally loved by all of us or at least we love what it allows us to do.

We’ve never met, but I know your most fundamental desires and wants.

You want to be safe, with a home to call your own and have access to sufficient water and food. You want to have a job that you enjoy that pays you enough to cover all the costs of living and lets you enjoy interesting activities in your free time. You want to have access to healthcare whenever you need it and social care during the times of your life when you’re vulnerable. You want to be free to travel where you want and when you want. You want to be treated fairly and with respect. You want to be free to live your life as you want and love whoever you want. You want to find someone to love and who will love you back. You want others to see and value you. You want to be happy.

It doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re from, the colour of your skin, your gender, your political views, your religion or spiritual beliefs, etc. You want the same things as everyone else.

People are people.

Yet, by and large, we still believe ourselves to be different.

Generally, we believe we’re on a higher level. It’s an effect known as Illusory Superiority¹, among other names.

A study found that 93% of American drivers thought their driving skills were above average, while a study of university staff found 94% considered their teaching ability to be above average.

It also feeds into the Downing Effect, which states that people with a lower-than-average IQ overstate their IQ, while those with above-average IQ understate their IQ. So someone who claims to have a really high IQ is likely be really stupid in reality.

And it’s a driver in the bias blind spot, where we recognise that bias affects the judgement of others, but fail to see it affecting our own judgement. A study of US residents found 85% considered themselves less biased than average.

We consider ourselves to be better than others and not fallible as others demonstrably are.

Such self-confidence in our abilities is almost certainly misplaced.

Would You Fight in a Civil War?

Would you fight your neighbours, perhaps some of your friends, even members of your own family?

Unless you’ve got a neighbour from hell, I’m guessing you probably thought there’s no way that you’d behave like that. Yet civil wars have been happening for as long as humans have been on the planet.

In 1994, more than one million people in Rwanda were killed during 100 days of killings when the ethnic majority Hutus turned on the minority Tutsi group and even moderate Hutus.² So, basically a Twitter or Facebook pile-on, but in person and with machetes and guns.

Couldn’t happen where you live? Why not?

Because that was black people? Of course, that’s no reason.

Maybe it was the heat. Africa’s super-hot most of the time isn’t it?

Remember that time Trevor’s whole family went to Torremolinos and on the first night his Auntie Janine got thrown out of the club for doing lineups in the men’s toilet for tequila shots before she head-butted that Guardia Civil officer and it took five of them to hold her down and handcuff her.

That was the heat. Trevor’s granny swears it was. Does funny things to the head, it does.

How about Srebrenica in 1995.³ During the Bosnian War, more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were rounded up and murdered by Bosnian Serbs. These were people who had lived largely peacefully side-by-side as part of Yugoslavia.

These were Europeans slaughtering other Europeans. Does that make it feel a bit more like you could get caught up in fighting friends and neighbours?

Or was that just that fiery Latin temperament breaking through? Couldn’t happen around these parts.

The Troubles seems almost a quant name for 30 years of violence that took the lives of 3,532 people and injured almost 50,000 others.⁴ In Northern Ireland of all places. No heat to affect the mind there or fiery Latin temperaments driving the violence. Just good old-fashioned white Anglo-Saxon stock killing their white Anglo-Saxon neighbours because they disagreed about how they wanted to be governed.

If you can make people angry enough and emotional enough, you can make almost anyone descend to the level of animals and act without emotion and empathy.

We are both of us easily manipulated in the right circumstances. We both have buttons that when pressed will make us fight those who are identified as our enemies.

Have you ever heard a news story or read a post online that made you angry? Something that really drove an emotional response in you. How did you feel when you heard about the Hamas October 7 attack on Israel or perhaps some of the actions in Gaza in response? Did anyone say something during the 2024 UK election that really annoyed you or perhaps an action in the US during that same year’s run-up to the presidential election?

The 9/11 attacks in 2001 were terrorism on a new scale. Seeing aircraft deliberately flown into skyscrapers was horrific and something that previously might only be witnessed in a film. About 3,000 people lost their lives in those attacks. The following afternoon, as I parked outside my house in Redfield, Bristol, a young Muslim woman passed by with a young child. I loved Redfield because it had a great multicultural mix. There were people whose heritage stretched back to most corners of the world and it was a fascinating and friendly place to live. Yet, for a brief moment that afternoon, I felt angry at that woman. I didn’t know her and she appeared to be a loving mother, but just because of how she was dressed, I felt animosity towards her. That moment passed quickly, but it gave me an insight into myself that shocked me.

If I could feel that emotion briefly once, could I be sure that I couldn’t feel it again for longer or that others couldn’t intensify that feeling within me, so that in specific circumstances I might behave in ways I’d have never imagined? I tell myself that no, that couldn’t happen. But…

Over my lifetime I’ve seen politicians become more and more partisan. Rather than seeing people with different views as equal members of society who generally want the same things, but believe differently about how to achieve those things, they paint them as traitors and enemies. As people who should be punished, imprisoned and even executed.

There’s a simple reason for this approach, that places the personal ambitions of the politician above the common good of society.

The Big Lie

People don’t get excited about little things. If you want people to protest, vote or even fight for something, it’s got to be a big idea. It has to make them excited, emotional and, ideally, angry. Really angry. When we’re emotional and angry, we act without thinking.

Can’t you recall a fight with someone close to you where you said something hurtful that you didn’t even believe? Maybe you even physically struck someone close to you in the heat of an argument. Anger loosens our grip on self-control and when a crowd is made angry, the emotion feeds the anger like a nuclear fusion reaction, with more and more anger building up within the group.

It’s like pushing a small snowball down a snowy hill. As it gains momentum, you see it physically growing in front of your eyes.

On 15 June, 1920, in the Minnesota city of Duluth, police arrested six black men on suspicion of rape and robbery. By the end of that day, a mob of up to 10,000 people forced their way into the city jail, took three of the black men and murdered them. You can see a photo on Wikipedia of the aftermath, the dead bodies of two men hanging from a light pole and a third corpse dumped on the ground, while a crowd of men lean in to be captured in the image.⁵

If you chose to look at the photo, did any of those men immediately stand out to you as a monster? They all look pretty normal and non-threatening to me, but as a group they behaved like animals. Alone, maybe a few would have been capable of such an act, though probably just one or two in a hundred, but as a group they drove each other on. That’s the power of emotion and anger.

Consider income tax being applied at a rate of 20%. Should a government choose to increase the rate by 1% to 21%, everyone’s going to feel a bit irritated, but it’s unlikely to be a big enough deal to make people react in a big way and protest against it. It would be too much hassle for a relatively minor issue.

Samuel Adams, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, used taxation as one of the sparks to light the rage of revolution in the American colonists. In that case, he drove home to everyone who would listen that it was hugely unfair that they were forced to pay taxes without representation. Free societies should be free to elect the representatives who decide what taxes should be paid, but the colonists had no such right. A 1% tax increase is a small thing. Being forced to pay taxes with no say in who creates those taxes or how they’re spent is a big thing.

People may get irritated by 1%, but they get furious at being taxed with no rights in return. And from there it was easy to funnel their anger to make them fight against the British.

This is why the concept of The Big Lie is so attractive to politicians who care about themselves rather than the people they’re meant to serve.

The following is a quote translated by James Murphy from the original text of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.⁶

All this was inspired by the principle – which is quite true within itself – that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

To simplify, you and I are more likely to believe a big lie than a small one because we assume that, like us, no-one would have the bare-faced-cheek to tell big, improbable lies. It worked quite perfectly for Hitler with the German people turning on Jewish neighbours, taking their property and eventually their lives.

Here, from the same Wikipedia page is a second quote on the subject, which may or may not have originated from Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda.

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

This aligns with the effect I’ve described previously of a lie that’s repeated so many times, it becomes truth. More chilling is the revelation that the State needs to repress dissent or, put another way, repress democratic freedoms.

It explains why so many people from all points of the political spectrum now turn viciously on anyone who has the nerve to denounce lies told by others. They’re trying to repress dissent to ensure as many people as possible will hear the lie and accept it as truth. While free speech allows the birth of big lies, it’s also the biggest threat to those lies.

Early in 2024, it was reported that the British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, paid tax in 2023 on his income of £2.2m at a rate of 23%.⁷ While the normal rate of tax on income over £150,000 should have been 45%, there’s no suggestion he did anything wrong. Still, it surprised me this didn’t register as a bigger deal with the British people, but perhaps it shouldn’t have because everyone paying income tax in the UK starts at 20%, so he paid more than that. Whatever the reason, the British people clearly didn’t get excited about this, despite it being a time when the cost of living remained high.

What if he’d paid no tax on earnings of millions? Surely a super-privileged and super-wealthy person paying no tax would cause outrage.

Not necessarily. During the 2016 US presidential election debates, Donald Trump said he was smart paying no tax. While some people were outraged, many weren’t. Why?

Remember we’ve already considered how we all have to pay more when the heffalumps don’t pay their share into society. So why would so many people not only tolerate his admission, but even celebrate it?

This is one more aspect of the big lie to consider. Find a common enemy. In the case of paying no tax, the tax man is the common enemy. Everyone hates the taxman, so when Trump says he’s smart for not paying tax, he’s actually doing it for the team. You, I and the others at the bottom of society have no choice but to pay the taxes demanded of us. For most of us, the tax is taken before we ever get paid. So by paying no tax, it seems some people saw Trump as sticking it to the man on their behalf.

For Adolf Hitler, the Jewish people were built up to serve as a common enemy. Immigrants continue to serve that very role across the world even today. We’ll consider this further in The Secret Sauce of Autocracy, but for now, while illegal immigration is obviously wrong, the immigrants aren’t our enemies. The powerful whose actions drive illegal immigration are the enemies we should focus on.

But as more and more politicians start using the big lie, we’re seeing more politicians highlight their opponents and supporters as enemies, building a surge in hatred and distrust between fellow members of society who generally want the same things, but differ in how they believe society should achieve those things

The big lie works because we let it work. We let heffalumps and their politician pets lie to us and manipulate us to do what they want, not what is best for us.

The Bell Curve Of Humanity

I know I’ve gone a bit dark and that all sounds very negative. It’s important to understand the worst of us, but also to realise that we have the power to change the course of our societies and ensure that their government works for all, not just the few.

That image is a bell curve, of sorts. It’s probably a bit steep as bell curves go, but I think people are much more similar than they are different, so my ball, my rules.

It represents all of humanity. To the left is dark, where the worst of us are represented. To the right is light, where the best of us are represented.

Most of us are in that middle section. Our morals and ethical beliefs may vary a bit, but generally we’re decent enough people. We have our list of wants and desires, but we’re also happy for those around us to enjoy the same things that we aspire to. Regardless of their skin colour, gender, language, religious or political beliefs. It’s a simple truth that happy neighbours make life better for us too.

Based on 1991 rates, in the USA, 5.1% of the population will spend time in prison.⁸

I don’t know about you, but I found that figure astonishing. Astonishingly high that is.

The good news for me though, is that it still supports my insistence that people are people.

Sure five out of every hundred serving prison time sounds a lot, but 95 will live their life free. On that evidence, 19 times as many people don’t do hardcore naughty stuff as those who do.

I can share no evidence of people doing hardcore good stuff, but is it unreasonable to assume about 5% of us fall into that classification? That puts 90% of us together in the middle of the bell curve and 95% in total not doing evil to our neighbours.

Some people will insist that everyone is out to get as much as they can for themselves and will trample everyone to achieve it. They’ll swear that it’s a dog-eat-dog world and you have to kill or be killed. That’s how some people do feel, but they’re a small minority. They’re not part of that big bell in the centre, they’re out towards the left edge.

They want as much as they can get for themselves, regardless of how that affects others. They convince themselves that everyone else is the same as them as it makes it easier for them. If everyone is evil, there’s no harm in being evil to them.

But they’re wrong. Very few of us are really evil, in the same way that very few of us are really very good.

Put simply, we’re mostly quite astonishingly averagely kind of alright.