“All the cruel and brutal things, even genocide, starts with the humiliation of one individual.”
Kofi Annan
Red.
That was all I could see. Red.
The colour. The smell. The sound.
It saturated my very being. Every sinew, every muscle, every nerve. I was filled with a rage, a hatred, so large, so unimaginably monstrous, that I felt myself capable of anything in response.
What was the cause of all this boiling emotion?
A series of comments, made by an anonymous person, on Reddit, directed at me, another anonymous person.
A laughing bombardment of insults and jeering which were invulnerable to my attempted de-escalations; by someone that followed me around, into threads on other communities; pursued me. Taunted me. Humiliated me. Called me “pathetic.”
All this by someone I have never known, never met, and never will. Still, it felt personal. Deeply personal.
Although it occurred many years ago, I can remember every detail.
I’ve always practised a kind of “strategic patience”. I assume everyone is just having a bad day, that they’re truly good people underneath, and that I just need to show them that I pose no threat to them, and they’ll calm down. Then we can talk like grown ups.
Very few people have actually broken my will to be patient when I’m actively putting it into practice. Those few that managed to do it live in my head rent-free.
The reason?
They made me feel utterly humiliated in front of others.
If you want to destroy me, find a way to humiliate me in a public way. Works every time. Use at your own risk, can backfire severely.
This feeling isn’t just an online phenomenon; it’s a force that has directly shaped history, and continues to do so. In her book “Making Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict”, scholar Evelin Lindner gave this force a name: “The Nuclear Bomb of Emotion”.
Since its release in 2006, the book has given international relations and violence a whole new clarity: underneath the surface, the radioactivity of feelings of humiliation poison everything, and can last for generations. The humiliating act itself may be entirely forgotten by all but the individual who felt aggrieved. It might even be seen as humiliation only by the aggrieved.
World War 2, and the rise of Hitler, was made possible by the very deliberate humiliation of Germany by the Entente powers after the end of the Great War. Hitler himself made use of these feelings, embedded in the German psyche, and his rhetoric of vengeance and reclamation of dignity and might were nearly irresistible. This is why most international correspondents who covered his rallies and speeches could not understand the reaction of the masses.
William Shirer described seeing the “distorted faces” and “extended arms” of the audience in attendance at one of Hitler’s speeches, all engaged in a kind of primal scream as they saluted “der Führer”. The general excitement and enthusiasm shown by even those Germans who he believed were the least likely to fall for völkisch propaganda seemed to defy explanation.
Shirer, being an American, did not share the feeling of humiliation. He wasn’t primed to receive Hitler’s message the way most Germans were. He was not equipped to understand the phenomenon he was witnessing.
The message Hitler was sending - the one of reclaimed dignity - was utterly non-partisan. Left or right, socialist or nationalist, democrat or fascist, all were vulnerable. People were ready to do anything to overcome that sense of humiliation; from there, killing comes easily.
Not the sanitised, abstracted kind of killing practised by the modern-day drone operator, separated as they are by thousands of kilometres, centring fuzzy blobs between virtual cross-hairs.
The genocidal kind, the up-close-and-personal kind, the kind that defines the word “bloodlust”.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, even some of the fiercest critics of Fidel Castro within Cuba declared themselves ready and willing to enlist in the brigades, to defend with their lives the sovereignty and “Dignidad” - dignity, pride - of Cuba from the Yankee aggressor, should they ever attempt to invade the island. America had made Cubans feel humiliated for a very long time, and the Bay of Pigs was yet more salt poured into an open wound.
So, when Khrushchev offered to send Castro his own weapons of mass destruction, it should have been obvious - had anyone in the Kremlin, or anywhere else, been paying attention - that the Cubans would seize on the opportunity to square up, chest against chest, with their belligerent superpower neighbour. Small bands of Cuban exiles notwithstanding, the determination to re-assert their sovereign existence was universal among Cubans, powered by those feelings of humiliation, and through this, they were unified.
This is what made the crisis so dangerous. Castro and the Cubans were deadly serious. Not even Khrushchev understood that, and by the time he figured this out, he was standing “eyeball to eyeball” with Kennedy.
The Genocide in Rwanda was fomented by a sense of humiliation, too. Hutus had long felt like second-class citizens, and saw the Tutsi as elite oppressors. Despite a Hutu “Power” dictatorship having been in control of the country for more than 30 years by the time of the genocide, those feelings were easily hijacked, and people could be turned instantly from friends and neighbours into brutal killers.
Japan in World War 2? They had felt humiliated by the United States over sanctions following Japan’s invasion of China. They believed this action to be an overtly racist double-standard: they were “merely” following the same play-book the Western powers had been following for centuries, and now the Western powers were punishing Japan for it. They felt aggrieved and deliberately excluded from the World Power club, despite having proven themselves just as militarily capable as any European country after they smacked the Russians around at Port Arthur.
School shooters, a phenomenon seen primarily in the United States, are often considered to be victims of bullying or acts of humiliation who have snapped. Although there are a few notable exceptions: Columbine, for example, was a classic case of charismatic psychopathy from the mind of Eric Harris, who swept Dylan Klebold up in a cycle of rage and hatred, which further amplified each other.
These events can vary wildly in scale, yet they are all powered by similar psychological mechanisms. To understand why it’s so potent, we have to distinguish humiliation from simple embarrassment; because humiliation is so much more than that.
Humiliation is external and relational. It can even feel existential.
Its core ingredients are powerlessness, public exposure, and a sense of injustice.
It’s an attack on the social self which, more even than the physical self, is essential not only to our own survival as part of the herd, but also to our own sense of identity. It introduces us to a whole new dimension of vulnerability, one we could never have imagined, one which we have not had time to make peace with.
“…one of the defining characteristics of humiliation as a process is that the victim is forced into passivity, acted upon, and made helpless.”
Evelin Lindner: The Anatomy of Humiliation
The perpetrator, the victim, the witness: this is called the “humiliation triangle”. Indeed, this is a defining characteristic of humiliation: it requires a minimum of 3 actors.
The psychological and the physical are deeply intertwined when it comes to perceptions of pain. The same regions of the brain are lit up when experiencing either physical or emotional pain. Yet, these mechanisms are incredibly complex, and there is no single shared pathway which begins with the experience of emotional pain and ends in extreme violence.
Moreover, “Perpetrator” is not always a strictly accurate description of one of the actors in the triangle; nor is “victim”.
“…a perpetrator may want to commit humiliation but not succeed, some people may wish to be humiliated rather than wish to avoid it, a ‘do-gooder’ may cause humiliation while trying to do good, and a third party may identify ‘victims’ who do not see themselves as such, or fail to see victims in those cases where they do exist.”
As with all human social interactions, there is a highly complex interplay of individual intent, perceived intent, intended perception, the act itself, the interpretation of free will behind the act, the view of 3rd parties, the reputations of those involved, their social caste, the dynamics of culture, politics, power and sexuality, and much else besides.
What matters in the end is that someone has perceived a deliberate, malicious act on the part of another actor, identifying that actor as a perpetrator and themselves as a victim, and believes the act to have reduced their own social standing in the eyes of the witnessing parties.
Regardless of the accuracy of this perception, it is the perception itself which creates the emotion and embeds it deeply into the psyche of the aggrieved.
Thankfully, it is not always thus.
Lindner found that, on rare occasion, leaders who deny themselves the kind of vengeance and retribution which might otherwise seem their right have emerged.
Nelson Mandela did not unleash genocide on the white elite in South Africa. After 27 years of humiliation in prison, he emerged as a wise peacemaker, not as a humiliation entrepreneur like Hitler.
Although today it is a bit of a cliché to cite Mandela as inspiration, no doubt Mandela’s example is particularly powerful, no less for the catastrophe that he had the power to unleash had he wanted to. He could have had all of white South Africa eradicated in an instant, along with anyone considered “collaborators”. After the treatment he experienced at their hands, we might have expected as much.
Instead, he welcomed his perpetrators with open arms, without waiting for an apology, or a show of remorse. He told them they were welcome by his side, and indeed, he even kept the white men of the security service in place to protect him when he ascended to head the government. He was determined that one way or another, they would learn to make a new world together, as comrades. The Truth and Reconciliation process made it possible to forgive without forgetting.
There are other examples where a deep sense of awareness of the perspectives of others may have prevented catastrophe: Ronald Regan eventually came to realise the cycle of humiliation, outrage and fear which pushed the two Cold War super-powers towards the precipice - one which he had continued to perpetuate when he first entered office - and took radical steps to change his behaviour, to recognise the Soviet perspective as real, and to do everything he could to make it clear that the United States legitimately wanted to live together in peace, not in fear.
It went a very long way toward ending the Cold War.
Imagine if the Germans had found a leader with the wisdom and humanity of a Mandela following the Great War.
Imagine if the leaders of Hutu Power had taken a few pages from his book.
Imagine if Donald Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu had even the smallest scintilla of a Mandela, or even a Ronald Regan, in them.
Imagine being such a positive influence on the world that mentioning your name actually becomes cliché.
This finally brings us to the morals of this story, and they are important ones.
The same dynamics of psychology play out both in a twitter pile-on, and during the drawing-up of the Treaty of Versailles; while the ultimate consequences may be distant in both time and space for most, the unfortunate fact is that someone will be saddled with the pain. Now and again, that pain can lead people down the darkest paths.
That doesn’t mean a perpetrator isn’t responsible for their actions; but while we don’t bear any blame for their final choices, we can’t be blind to the climate our own words and attitudes help create.
Commit to the dignified treatment of others. If there is no need to twist the knife, don’t do it. Be mindful of the fact that words do hurt. We can tell ourselves all day long how we shouldn’t care what others think of us, but the reality is that we do.
When delivering any message, the only thing more important than its content is its delivery. How you deliver a message is critical to ensuring it is received. It’s possible to deliver hard truths without the extra salt. We can’t guarantee that a message, no matter how well packaged, will be received the way we intended, but the very least we can do is to give it the best chance we can.
After all, we humans are a beautiful mess of sophisticated applied chemistry.
In this constant process of mutual reactivity, dignity is one of the most powerful catalysts there is.
