America's Future: Overcoming Othering and Implicit Bias with Open Hearts

1. What is America’s Future? Anger or Open Hearts?

2. We have focused on themes of “othering” and “implicit bias” this semester. We have looked at experiences of racism, conflict, hatred, and oppression. As we move to the end of the semester, we might guess about America’s future.  How does some of the information you have learned about “othering” and “implicit bias” suggest that some of the divisions in America may be overcome (or are our divisions simply inevitable)?

3. In other words, let’s try to answer: What is America’s Future? Anger or Open Hearts? 

4. Essay Three will also introduce you to “research”: How can you independently find research sources on the web that are reliable to support your interpretations of your essay topic? How do you properly integrate these sources into your writing to create an interesting and coherent essay? Your paper must include two sources you have found on your own. Include a Works Cited listing all sources in your paper and make sure your paper adheres to MLA style and format.

5. This essay is based on your careful reading of “Hate: Learning It and Unlearning It” by Frank Yeomans and Brenda Berger and the activities of Unit 3.

In your introduction, Bring out your unique paraphrase and perspective on Yeomans and Berger’s survey of Amercan anger (as in Freud, Bonime, Bion). Are Americans destined to be angry and hateful? Are our history and relationships already too tangled? Or is it possible (as Yeomans and Berger suggest in their concluding paragraphs) that we can move forward with “open hearts”? Based on what evidence that you see AROUND you, do you come to this thesis?

Then continue to write your essay on this question. Spend the second paragraph discussing some interesting ideas from Yeomans and Berger’s article regarding anger in America, connecting their ideas with any readings or discussions from the course. You can focus on one of the theories (Frued, Bonime, Bion) or whatever else from the article that you find interesting.

Then Go to research. What can you research about anger or open hearts in Americato prove your thesis? What specific stories could you summarize to support your theory that America is—or is NOT--an angry culture, and that we should (or should not) look forward to an “open-hearted” future?

Hint: You can search for “hate crime 2020” or “anger crime United States” and choose reliable sources such as Time.com, New York Times, or Washington Post.  You may have other ideas for finding reliable sources! OR, to show the “other side” (America is not an angry culture—it is already showing the signs of “open hearts”), you might search https://www.today.com/news/good-news  OR  https://www.sunnyskyz.com/positive-good-

Anger and Othering in America

At the last page of the essay, bring your own story into it—something you’ve experienced or

observed.  

An essay of approximately four typed pages (no more than four and a half), heading, double-spaced, 12-point font Times New Roman, one-inch margins, page numbers included

A Works Cited page (MLA style). Include the Yeomans and Berger article in it too.

Use of two to three sources you find on your own. These sources could be articles, TED talks, PsychologyToday.com, The New York Times, Washington Post, and the EJI (Equal Justice Initiative) or Southern Poverty Law Center.

These sources should be thoughtfully and smoothly integrated into your essay, with good context (not just a brief mention!  “Get into” explaining your source.)

Proper integration of quotes and paraphrases (MLA style, in-text citation)

Completion of two drafts (I should have the chance to review at least one draft with the sources added.)

1. So go the painfully sad lyrics from the splendid 1950's musical South Pacific. Simply and deftly, Oscar Hammerstein (composer) linked together hatred and fear, putting forward the idea that innocent children come to hatred through the business of being actively taught. Although the song is about cross cultural loveaffairs during World War II, it highlights issues alive today in our divided America, where tolerance of differences among people is ever more challenged, and fear and hatred are on the rise.

2. To keep a minuscule number of potential terrorists from entering the country, suspicions are raised about all Muslim immigrants. To exclude a relatively small number of criminals from Mexico, plans are made to build a multi-billion dollar wall and deport people who have spent their lives as hard working contributors to the American economy. The language used to describe immigrants bristles with contempt.

3. How does hate happen? Is it instinctual, inborn, or indeed taught like the Hammerstein lyric says? Who teaches it, which forces make it stick and which inflame it further? How do some people get beyond hate to create open-hearted lives?

4. Much has been written in the psychoanalytic literature about aggression resulting from pent up rage, and also about hate which is the amplification of such hostility.  Early in psychoanalytic theorizing, Sigmund Freudwrote of hate as an instinct, a natural inherent aptitude present in newborns at the moment of birth. He postulated that as babies receive pleasure and satisfaction, love is incorporated into their egos, while in the case of babies who are frustrated through repeated unpleasurable experiences, hate grows.  

Researching the Future of America

5. Later in 1976, another psychoanalyst Dr. Walter Bonime wrote of America as an “angry culture” and listed some of the reasons why: “the daily difficulties of getting about, getting ahead, getting fed, getting enough time to rest or to think, deprivations both material and emotional.”  [Here is an excerpt from “Anger as a Basis of Sense of Self”:]

6. Ours is an angry culture. This has a direct effect on the development of personality. Many who come into our offices have been particularly warped. A patient of mine says: “The only efficacy I feel, the only worth I feel, is when I'm angry and that's why I'm angry all the time.”

7. There are many forces at work to account for the pathology: the daily difficulties of getting about, getting ahead, getting fed, getting enough time to rest or to think; deprivations, both material and emotional; frustrations of the normal struggle for autonomy; and the consequent desperate struggle for the pseudo-safety of dominating.

8. What we live in, and live with, is a pushy, angry culture at its best, and at its worst it is savage. Personalities evolving in such circumstances, shaped by them, show serious derivative distortions of the sense of self.

9. The sense of self is a subjective experience, the feeling of one's own self functioning. People develop a sense of individuality, of a familiar unique being, in terms of the feelings they experience while performing, perceiving, sensing, responding, cognizing, in isolation or in interaction. The sense of “me” develops slowly, with intellectual, affective, sensory, and physical growth. The forces active in the society at large are also active in the family. . . In a family milieu which has predominantly nurtured the individual's potential for this growth, a healthy and vigorous sense of “me” evolves. Such an individual, by and large, can “cope.”

10. Bonime believed that, as a culture, these forces [or “stressors”] frustrate many people as they strive for autonomy and create a desperate struggle for what he called the “pseudo-safety of dominating” others. 

11. But hateful adults shaped by culture, are not simply inevitable. . . . [W]hat happens in the family clearly seems to matter, and to shape outcomes. Well nurtured children who are encouraged toward their optimal potential generally develop healthy senses of self. They have egos buoyedby love rather than insides swirling in fury and disappointment. But millions more whose growth is thwarted or exploited can become hostile within their families. 

Your Own Story

12. Without intervention, many hold on to angeras an armor against the outside world.   Fairbairn, writing on anger, quoted a patient who said “when I’m very frightened I can only keep going at all by hating.”There are also millions of other people who experience “healthy” anger in response to being scorned or denigrated as women, blacks, unemployed, immigrants, young, old, unemployed, disparaged, or gay.   

13. Into this stew, we can then add the ideas of psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, who studied unconsciousirrational processes in groups. He wrote about ubiquitousbeliefs in even large populations that arise because powerful, regressive emotions get activated within the group’s members, in instinctual, instantaneous and inevitable ways. One such group Bion called “fight-flight” and he described it as having an emotional tenor of being endangered; [this group] feels it must fight against something, or run away from it. The leader of this kind of group only succeeds if he or she believes and supports its sense of being at risk.

14. Unchecked and unexamined, this black-and-white thinking in groups or even countries, can become very dangerous and actually amount to the stuff of fascism.  This phenomenon was carefully studied by a group of researchers headed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer who created an infamous psychological scale in their attempt to understand authoritarian personalitiesand explain racism and the atmosphere that led to the Holocaust. The measure they created was called the F (Fascism) Scale. On it were statements designed to assess people’s tendencies toward “good us” and bad “them” kind of thinking, the kind that results in dangerous scapegoating.

15. When we hear terms like “enemy of the people” describing news reporters, or suggestions that some Americans want to make America great while others should not even belong, we might wonder if America is operating these days in what Bion would have called “fight-flight” mode. With the impacts of understandably perplexing forces like globalization, terrorism, and rapid technological shifts, the pulls to divide along “them” and “us” lines are very strong, to meet aggression with counter aggression, hurt with revenge. 

16. So if indeed the hate deck is so heavily stacked, if it is inborn and its flames get fanned by frustrating families, cultures, and within irrational groups, how can we humans possibly surmount our pulls towards aggression and enhance  kindness instead? This is a profound challenge, not easily answered.

17. Perhaps first and foremost we can acknowledgeour own personal hate and admit that it does not simply reside in other people who are different than we are. In this way we can attempt to take conscious control over backward pulls, present in all of us, and hopefully move away from festering anger before it erupts in dangerous ways. We can speak and do things in ways that affirm both ourselves (when we feel scared or attacked) and others as well. Often people need help with this, from therapists, clergy, organizations or supportive friends. 

18. Exemplary human models can also guide us in this struggle, lives that pulled hard against hate and toward open heartedness and inclusion. Nelson Mandela for me is most moving because I grew up in apartheid South Africa. It was indeed a fight-flight culture encouraged through fear and hate which brutally disenfranchised people of color.It finally ended some 46 destructive years after it began. Astoundingly, despite his first hand experience of decades in jail, and enormous humiliation and cruelty, Nelson Mandela negotiated with Frederik Willem de Klerk (South Africa’s president at the time) the peaceful end of apartheid. Mandela has been heralded internationally as an exceptional example of leadership which favors forgiveness, reconciliation and unity rather than revenge. There are other such examples, many who drew their inspiration from their religious faith: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, St. Benedict, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the anti-Nazi dissident. 

19. Clearly we cannot all lead human rights movements, but we can actively think about hate, how we learn, and must unlearn it. It’s particularly important in abrasive political times, to sustain respectful debate, particularly around our differences. Hate disorganizes thinking and ideology exacerbates the problem. We need to challenge ourselves, to unlearn what we have learned, to struggle against hate’s pull, especially now, when many of us are so frightened with our cultural identities deeply shaken and at sea. Show

Frank Yeomans, M.D., Ph.D., is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University.  

Brenda Berger, Ph.D., is a Clinical Assistant Professor Of Medical Psychology In Psychiatry, at Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.