Aging Well: News & Insights for Seniors and Caregivers
What is the price we pay when we give people permission to act on their hatred towards others?
Because the Supreme Court preapproved all actions of the president, we pay for his unrestrained vengeance, retribution, and disregard of political and legal norms. We pay when unbounded Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents invade communities, workplaces, and homes, arresting and deporting immigrants and citizens without due process.
This sanctioned anger against others is a long-standing well-established tradition. Between the 11th and 13th centuries Popes blessed bands of Western Christian crusaders that ravaged the holy lands, killing nonbelievers. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Jews were slaughtered in the name of Christ. Many of our nation’s early colonists were fleeing similar European religious persecution. During the colonial era, millions of indigenous people across the world were starved, displaced, enslaved, and slaughtered. The customs and beliefs of indigenous people were so alien to westerners that they were hardly even seen as people. Authorities approved of their elimination by any means.
The recipe for this sanctioned brutality has three ingredients. Two we each possess, the third is widely available.
The first ingredient is our urge to gratify our impulses through immediate action. This impulsiveness is starkly obvious in infants. Though it usually comes under control as we mature, it is always ready to jump on stage if needed. What parent would not leap to protect an endangered child? For some people impulsiveness regularly overrides social restraints, delivering rage and violence on others.
The second ingredient is our need to belong, to identify with our group, our family, our tribe. The opposite of “us” is “them”, those others who are dissimilar or even threatening. They might have a different religion or appearance, an unfamiliar sexual orientation, or do something that you think is or should be illegal. If they are vulnerable or weaker than you, you might feel safe and justified in verbally or physically controlling or abusing them.
The third ingredient is approval from those in power. This could be formal legal approval through the courts, the president or other elected official, or a religious leader, or whomever. The authority deliberately approves of the violence or tacitly approves through inaction. For example, in the 100 years following emancipation in 1863, southern law enforcement and the courts not only refused to arrest or convict whites who killed Blacks, they often celebrated it.
If he were still around, the famed psychiatrist Sigmund Freud might have called combining these ingredients the unholy alliance between the Id — our innate delight in immediate impulse gratification, and our Superego — our judgmental set of learned rules that tells us who is right (obviously we are) and who is wrong (those others).
Law enforcement agencies tend to select people who enjoy enforcing rules and controlling others. Certainly, legalized control is necessary for an orderly society. We need our police, and we need legally approved rules on immigration, although history shows that cultures vary widely in their beliefs of what is right and wrong, true or false. The problem comes when you hand legal authority to someone who enjoys enforcing rules too much, someone who gets deep pleasure and gratification from administering obedience and controlling others, violently if needed.
Some years ago, I was on a panel reviewing applicants for a local public safety department. We unanimously gave the thumbs down to one applicant who was overly enamored with his years in an elite military unit. We could not approve hiring somebody who excessively enjoyed order and control, who might use his badge of authority to escalate a broken taillight traffic stop into a deadly shooting.
Concealed behind masks, without visible identification, with no warrants, armed with lethal weapons and bulletproof vests, bolstered by comrades and cheered on by our national leader, ICE agents in the name of social purity (keeping out those ‘bad’ people) terrify individuals and communities as they round up, 
incarcerate, and deport undocumented and documented immigrants, and sometimes full citizens, without any legal due process. That is heaps of fun for those who enjoy enforcing authority in the name of righteousness.
Apparently human nature hasn’t changed since the Crusades. A thousand years from now, we will probably still be Killing for Christ.
Thank you for reading.
Barry
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