June 2, 2020

The protests across America about police brutality and racism are deeply disturbing. Though I’ve been writing fiction for the last twenty years, I have a Ph.D. in psychology and some idea about how the mind works, so maybe writing my thoughts here could further collective thinking about change.

I have come close to tears watching and reading news reports. But rather than wallow in empathy for the victims of racism, burn with resentment at institutional bias, or rage at the idiots, I focus on opportunity.

For all their egregious faults, Trump and his supporters and enablers have done us some good. No one could claim to misunderstand the situation now. We starkly see what happens when the powerful put greed and racism at the highest priority. These people fall into two overlapping groups. The insatiably greedy want money and power above all. Morality and human decency mean nothing to them. Self-worth is net worth.

The second group is the racists. Their self-definition depends on imagined superiority over an inferior other. Since reality does not support that delusion, they must expend a lot of energy shoring it up. For these people, a government that supports their faulty psychology is a blessing.

People in these groups have a defect in their psychology. Each individual believes they are an autonomous, self-made, self-righteous individual, what’s called a “monad” in philosophy. They cannot understand that their world-view is incorrect, psychologically, historically, and sociologically. The psychological fact is that human beings are intersubjective. We exist only with each other. We die apart.

The monadologists avoid perishing alone by clumping into paradoxical groupings. We, the greedy. We, the white supremacists. We, the monadologists. Have I just alienated or “othered” a third of Americans? I’m afraid I have, though without malice. They cannot be reasoned with and must be managed behaviorally. I don’t hate them. It’s a practical problem that needs a practical solution.

Behavior management is required because neither of these groups can change. I hear repeated calls in the media for dialog. Let’s have a “national conversation” about race. Let’s talk about justice and equality.  We can do that. We should do that. But no minds will change nor will any attitudes be adjusted or behavior reformed. At worst, such dialog can be co-opted by monadologists as evidence that all is well.

The insatiably greedy and the racist fearful are not susceptible to persuasion. Their psychological deficiencies are sub-personal, below reflective self-awareness. They genuinely believe what they imagine they are. Persuasive talk flows over them like rain over an umbrella.

The election is six months out.  The monadologists control the fortress now and they will defend it with arrows and pots of boiling oil. The election will be rigged in every feasible way and voting suppressed without conscience. Still, it should be possible to win at the ballot box because numbers matter. That’s my optimistic vision.

Then what?  Previous rational governments have achieved only tweaks at the margins. Meaningful policies aimed at systemic racism and greed always have fallen to timidity, appeasement, and corruption. Those forces will remain. Monadologists don’t go away, even if they lose an election. They can’t. Their psychological lives depend on continuing to assert their defective world-view. Like cornered animals, they will fight relentlessly and ever-more viciously against change.

However, we are uniquely positioned in time to make change happen. Political apathy is at an all-time low and that’s a chance for decency to prevail. With a new government, laws, regulations, orders, procedures, and appointments could be executed to balance the scales of social justice which have been tipped since the country’s founding.

As a psychologist, I am sure that the changes we need must be behavioral, not guidelines and best practices. It will be necessary to ride roughshod over the monadologists, with whom no genuine conversation is possible. The nature of their psychological defect prohibits intersubjective engagement. Real conversation depends on empathy, respect for the other, compassion, and ability to listen. Without those elements, you have pseudo-conversations, verbal gambits in a never-ending struggle for power. Behavioral change can be imposed. Psychological change will come later, across generations.

Most people resisted seat belts at first. Seat belts were mandated, the law was enforced, and the penalties were financially painful. Insurance companies lowered rates if you used seat belts and car-makers were required to install them. Highway deaths fell and everyone could see that. Now, most people wear a seat belt as a matter of course. It took about thirty years. School desegregation took at least as long. Attitude change follows behavioral change, given enough time.

A government agenda committed to behavior change needs to make it possible by facilitating health care, child-care, transportation, low-cost housing, education, and training. Society needs to re-think the role of policing, especially recruitment. Gun laws need to be revised. We can easily pay for social-behavioral change by taxing wealth (not just income), by ending tax breaks on fossil fuels, and by taxing carbon.

Attempts to change things will produce howls from monadologists wanting compromise. They must be resisted. Structural changes must be transparent and legal, but they must also be uncompromising, well-thought-out, and well-enforced. Behavior management only works when it is tight.

Finally, the lid on this jar of changes must be hermetically sealed against spoilage. This is the weak spot in my optimistic vision. The monadologists will flow back in like the tide, the flotsam of racism buoyed by the rising waters of greed. History shows and predicts it.

My only answer to counterrevolution is intense education of the public, especially in civics and critical thinking. As a lifelong educator, however, I am not sanguine. I tried; I failed; I apologize.  Younger people with fresh enthusiasm might succeed.