The drive to belong to an in-group and the tendency to observe differences in others are core parts of the human condition. But differentiating can (and often does) turn deadly when it morphs into othering. Jason, Rob, and Asher try not to other one another as they explore the roots and consequences of othering, and the ins and outs of belonging as a key organizing principle of society.
Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.
Sources/Links/Notes:
The drive to belong to an in-group and the tendency to observe differences in others are core parts of the human condition. But differentiating can (and often does) turn deadly when it morphs into othering. Jason, Rob, and Asher try not to other one another as they explore the roots and consequences of othering, and the ins and outs of belonging as a key organizing principle of society.
Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.
Sources/Links/Notes:
Jason Bradford
Hi, I'm Jason Bradford.
Asher Miller
I'm Asher Miller.
Rob Dietz
And I'm Rob Dietz. Welcome to Crazy Town where you're not invited to join our exclusive team of bloviating know-it-all podcast hosts.
Melody Travers Allison
Quick warning, sometimes this podcast uses swear words (Language!)
Rob Dietz
Hey, Jason. Hey, Asher. We have a tough topic today, so I want to start somewhere benign. Is that alright with you?
Jason Bradford
Let's ease into this, please.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. I was like, dip our toes in the nice warm water.
Asher Miller
So you're saying this is tougher than extremism, which we we did last?
Rob Dietz
Well, that was pretty tough. But I'm gonna say yeah.
Jason Bradford
Really?
Rob Dietz
I found this tough. So what I want to start with is how much I love reading to children. Like when my daughter was a four-year-old I really loved it. So I feel like I'm pretty well versed in the children's authors and the children's books. But you guys, who's the best? Who's the greatest of all time when it comes to children's authors?
Asher Miller
Roald Dahl.
Jason Bradford
Who wrote Hansel and Gretel?
Rob Dietz
Is that one of those. . . I was gonna say Aesop's fables but that's not right. Hans Christian Andersen?
Asher Miller
Oh yeah. That might be Hans Christian Andersen. We're just so erudite.
Rob Dietz
Roald Dahl is a good answer.
Asher Miller
I love Roald Dahl.
Rob Dietz
But you could at least make the case that is Dr. Seuss.
Asher Miller
Oh yeah.
Jason Bradford
Totally.
Rob Dietz
And I read a lot a lot of Dr. Seuss books, you guys.
Asher Miller
Yeah, I've memorized "Cat in the Hat." I might even be able to do most of it now.
Rob Dietz
Wow.
Asher Miller
Reading it to my boys.
Rob Dietz
I once did a presentation on ecological economics completely based on "The Lorax."
Jason Bradford
That's the classic, of course.
Asher Miller
Well then they made a great film, and you know --
Jason Bradford
I didn't see the film.
Asher Miller
And all the wonderful giveaways that they had that went with the film.
Jason Bradford
They always do that. "Green Eggs and Ham" was a highlight, probably, for me.
Rob Dietz
Asher, probably when you were a kid, you must have loved "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas."
Asher Miller
I read it to myself every day. No, we had "Yipping Yanukkah." That's what I grew up with. These two Dutch characters. Two Dutch kids. "Yipping Yannukkah."
Rob Dietz
Okay. Okay. And Yanukkah, of course, it's a pretty bad rhyme with Hanukkah. Is that . . ?
Asher Miller
Dude, Dutch and Jewish are not the same thing. Okay?
Rob Dietz
Well, and of course, for anyone who's graduating, a common gift is "Oh, the Places You'll Go."
Asher Miller
Yeah, that's kind of a . . . that's gotten to be a yawn fest.
Rob Dietz
Well, one of my favorites I wanted to bring this up there was this guy during the COVID pandemic this guy Wes Tank. He's some sort of multimedia artist and he started taking Dr. Dre and other rap tunes and he would read various Dr. Seuss books over it.
Jason Bradford
Wow. I never came across this.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, well I just . . . I sent Asher a clip. Can you play that for us? Wes Tank doing "Fox and Socks"
Wes Tank
And here's a new trick, Mr Knox.... Socks on chicks and chicks on fox. Fox on clocks on bricks and blocks. bricks and blocks on Knox on blocks.
Rob Dietz
I love that guy. Like he's kind of goofy, but somehow seems like a
Jason Bradford
Pretty hardcore rapper for sure.
Rob Dietz
And he seems almost like a dad reading to his kid but in a way more entertaining way than any of us did.
Jason Bradford
Okay.
Rob Dietz
But I got to kind of steer us to our actual topic of the day.
Asher Miller
No! Can we just stay here?
Rob Dietz
Well, we're gonna stay in Dr. Seuss world here. Okay, so one of my favorites that I read over and over and over again is "The Sneetches"
Jason Bradford
I remember "The Sneetches."
Asher Miller
I don't remember "The Sneetches."
Jason Bradford
These funny looking critters.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, they're sort of these -- You would like them, Jason, they are kind of bird like. Sort of maybe based off an ostrich, or something.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yellow.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, he published this in 1961. And basics are the Sneetches get divided into two groups. One that has stars on their bellies and the others that have no stars upon thars. And the stars weren't very big. They were quite small. Anyway, what happened is the star bellied sneetches would brag, "We're the best kind of sneetches on the beaches. And with their snoots in the air they would sniff and they'd snort. We'll have nothing to do with the plane belly sort." So anyway, you know, story goes on.
Jason Bradford
He should rap that for us.
Rob Dietz
I know. We should get Wes Tank on this program. Yeah, but the star bellied sneetches think they're superior. They get all the perks in society while denying them to the plane bellied sneetches. And then what happens? A capitalist enters the scene. This guy, Sylvester McMonkey McBean. And he offers to help the starless snitches. He's got this machine that will basically tattoo their bellies.
Jason Bradford
Nice.
Rob Dietz
Right? Yeah. And they think, yeah. I'll just pay this guy and then I'll be part of the in-group. And it doesn't work out that way. The original star bellied then pay McBean to have their stars removed.
Jason Bradford
Oh God.
Asher Miller
So he's making money left and right. He's playing one side off the other.
Rob Dietz
He's a great capitalist. Great capitalist. And anyway, eventually he gets all their money, leaves town, and they realize the error of their ways and all sneetches are created equal. And they, you know . . .
Asher Miller
So it ends well?
Rob Dietz
Yeah, big group hug on the beach.
Jason Bradford
On the beach.
Asher Miller
That's because they had someone to hate, McBean.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, they had a common out-group. Good for them now.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, well, I think that's a pretty good short. A little Dr. Seuss parable for where we're headed. So, Asher, tell us what we're talking about.
Asher Miller
Today, we're talking about otherism, or I guess we could use the more common way of describing it, othering? And maybe we should start by defining what we mean by that. I'm going to turn to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights because we've read lots of different definitions. Rob, you did a deep dive on this. And some of the definitions were a bit academic. So we decided to pick one that was a little bit more accessible.
Jason Bradford
Understandable.
Rob Dietz
It's worth othering those academic types. Put them in a box in a corner.
Asher Miller
That's never happened to academics before anywhere in the world.
Jason Bradford
Just lower your snoots.
Asher Miller
According to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, othering consists of two steps. First step being categorizing a group of people according to perceived differences, such as ethnicity or skin color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, that kind of thing. And the second step is identifying that group as inferior, and using an us-versus-them mentality to alienate the group.
Jason Bradford
And I want to just point out that we really want to also recognize that differences can be okay, or that the recognition of differences can be okay. I want to talk about this because --
Asher Miller
It's step two, maybe, that's the problem here.
Jason Bradford
Step two is the problem here. So I think we should talk a little bit about the step one is something that actually can be quite normal and appropriate. So for example, you can have benign in-groups that are around common interests. Like I've got tennis buddies, and I've got birding friends. Right? But that does imply an out-group. There are people that aren't very good at tennis, and I don't play tennis with.
Asher Miller
People like me who think birds are absolutely the worst thing that's ever happened.
Jason Bradford
I would love to go birding with you. That'd be fine.
Rob Dietz
First of all, I don't like the way you labeled some people as not being good at tennis, okay? Can we just dial it back a little bit?
Jason Bradford
I'm sorry about that. Maybe they have pickleball. That's fine for them.
Asher Miller
Okay, ouch. Shots fired.
Jason Bradford
The question is like, when does it go from healthy to unhealthy, right. And I also think when we walk around in the world and have to interact with people, we use categorizations, to understand how we should behave towards other people in ways that might be very appropriate. So it's not just common interest, but there may be reasons of politeness and social norms. Like opening a door for an elderly person who is, you know, having trouble, maybe. You're just observing differences and saying, "Okay, this is the nice polite thing to do." Or maybe actually someone could be a threat. There could be plenty of signs that that other person is threatening to you, and you should avoid or you should, you know, deflect somehow. So, there's a lot of reasons why we should think about others and differentiate, but do this in ways that are appropriate. So what do we call this, right? We call this classification, right? And that brings up my false prophet taxonomy, which I think was a wonderful --
Asher Miller
That was definitely a form of othering that you practiced there with that classification.
Rob Dietz
Well, let's give listeners who didn't listen to the Phalse Prophets season just a quick taste. So Jason came up with a whole taxonomic classification for different kinds of people who are telling us all the wrong things, right.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. So, was there something wrong with that? Was that othering?
Rob Dietz
Well
Jason Bradford
What's wrong with punching up?
Rob Dietz
I'm pretty sure we may have said some pretty derogatory things about ecomodernists. I mean . . .
Jason Bradford
Yeah, where do we draw the line? Like, should we be punishing ourselves a little? We're feeling bad about how we behaved.
Rob Dietz
See, here's the weird thing. Like you think of othering, one of the things would be dehumanizing somebody else. And the weird thing is in your phalse prophet taxonomy, some of those phalse prophets were trying to dehumanize themselves, right? They wanted to be uploaded in the cloud. They wanted machines for bodies.
Jason Bradford
Well, I created other species of humans, but I didn't dehumanize they were all part of the human family, right? I mean, was that okay? I don't know.
Asher Miller
It's probably how we spoke of them as being. And this gets to what we mean by othering as something that we need to escape, right? So othering involves zeroing in on a difference, using that difference to dismantle a sense of similarity, familiarity, connectedness between different people, right? It sets the stage for discrimination or persecution. Because it reduces empathy and prevents genuine dialogue.
Jason Bradford
I think we tried to, you know, we tried to strong man people in that season. And we often found empathy with them. Remember how often we said, God, I can see how they came up with these ideas.
Asher Miller
Like Ray Kurzweil seems to be kind of a nice dude who just went off the deep end.
Rob Dietz
Even the ones who didn't seem very nice, there was trauma in their past. And so like, oh, you're probably responding to trauma, so you have empathy for that.
Asher Miller
Did we have a lot of empathy for like, Elon Musk? I'm not sure that we did.
Jason Bradford
I think I did at the end a little bit, but it was hard for some people. They go so far that you just . . . They're such extremists in other words. So I guess, how do we deal with extremists.
Asher Miller
I think the point here is, I think what you're saying, Jason, is if we're trying to address or escape othering, or otherism, we do have to recognize that seeing difference, recognizing difference, and actually in some cases embracing difference is not a bad thing. It's what we do with that recognition or that different to differentiation sometimes where it turns into a negative. It's viewed as a negative, it's used as a tool to ostracize or to persecute people that are different than us. That's where we go wrong. It's not the fact that there are differences between people.
Jason Bradford
I embrace the ability to talk about these differences, actually, and to have a debate with people that have different ideas.
Rob Dietz
Well, you mentioned, Asher, that I did a little bit of a deep dive. And while I was on this quest to understand othering, I came across this model that looks at stereotyping and othering and how people's perceptions of others color how they treat them. And this is kind of -- It struck me. So this model, I'll try to describe it. It's very simple. It's kind of a four-quadrant model. And you classify how you perceive an out-group on two characteristics of that out-group. So you perceive they're either low competence or high competence. And on the other axis they're either high warmth or low warmth. Warmth here meaning like friendly.
Jason Bradford
Likability?
Rob Dietz
Yeah, cooperative, kind of. So, if you look at the groups, how much you think they're competent, and how warm you think they are, you can place people in a quadrant. And so when an in-group sees low competence but high warmth -- These are groups like elderly and disabled folks. And the way that the in-group then treats the out-group is kind of with a sense of pity, right? And it can get kind of worse from there. Like, if the group views a group as being high competence, but low in warmth, they might view that group with envy. And in America, what fits that category are Asians and Jews. And then you got the low competence, low warmth, which might be the most dangerous, where the in-group views those people with disgust or contempt. And I was just thinking about this, like, there's so many shades or flavors of othering. And I thought, Gosh, I think I've been susceptible to the quadrant with pity. I'm othering elderly people thinking, Oh, wow, that must really suck being you.
Asher Miller
I think you definitely see that with people who are differently abled or disabled. Another interesting thing for me is thinking about, like, how Jews are perceived. In some cases, there is this sort of low warmth, high competence. But there's other cases where it's actually low warmth and low competence. And so sometimes there are groups that are viewed in multiple ways.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, and of course, this is just a model. So you know, it's not going to fit reality perfectly, but I was just surprised in reading it. It just made me think about myself and my own problematic ways of seeing the world and recognizing that othering is something that I don't think anybody is immune to. You know, the categorizing thing that you're mentioning, Jason, in all of us. And then it's not that big a leap to get to negative connotations of othering.
Asher Miller
I worked really hard to overcome my othering of light skin people who would turn red in the sun easily.
Rob Dietz
That's me and Jason pretty bad.
Asher Miller
I was definitely seeing you guys as low competence. Took me a while to get from low warmth to high warmth.
Rob Dietz
First of all, what happens in the sun does doesn't have anything to do with our competence. We're incompetent innately.
Asher Miller
Yeah, you have other reasons for incompetence.
Jason Bradford
I can be in the shade and be incompetent.
Asher Miller
Yeah, that's great.
Jason Bradford
Okay, so let's talk about what is sort of the ways we are susceptible to othering and why do people do this. And we can think of it in sort of three main ways. One is to make sense of the world. And we've talked about this in other episodes, of course, is that people are attracted to the moral clarity of binary opposites like us versus them, and seeking the straightforwardness to understand something, you know, what is my in-group? What is my out-group? They want to see how they fit into this larger world. And it's this reduction of complexity and seeking of simplicity.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, you're right. Over and over, we say it's not black and white. It's gray and it's nuanced.
Jason Bradford
The brain doesn't like that.
Rob Dietz
We don't like that. We want an answer, dammit. Yeah, I remember being frustrated in math class when there was no definite. I want the answer to be two or three.
Jason Bradford
I think math is one of those places where it's a lot easier.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, it's a lot easier. A simple answer.
Rob Dietz
Maybe so. Well, I was in a lot more advanced math than you guys.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, obviously. You were dealing with imaginary numbers.
Asher Miller
La di dah. Fancy pants here.
Jason Bradford
Imperfect numbers.
Rob Dietz
So, one of the second main reasons that people get drawn into othering is to enhance their own social position. So through othering people try to put themselves kind of higher in the social hierarchy. And I mean, I could see that. I'm so low class, like, but I try to find somebody who's worse off and other them so that I can feel a little better about myself.
Jason Bradford
Is that even possible for you?
Rob Dietz
It's not possible for me. I'm at the bottom looking up, okay?
Asher Miller
We talked about this on our episode on escaping extremism. But there can also be this tendency towards malignant bonding, right? And that's people engaging in othering, because they see it as a path to finding their own belonging, which is kind of ironic.
Rob Dietz
Totally ironic, right? t's like, you're gonna be an out-group so that you can belong to this group that makes you an out-group?
Asher Miller
Well, I think I think it's recognizing that there is a deep-seated need to belong and bond, right?
Jason Bradford
Yeah, survival.
Asher Miller
It is a survival strategy. It's deep in our evolutionary biology. And so sometimes it takes the form, and people have preyed on this, as we talked about in our episode on extremism. Where people prey on that need to provide a place of belonging for people by focusing their energy and attention towards others, right, in their antipathy towards those -- The novelist, the great novelist Toni Morrison, once asked, quote, "What is the nature of othering s comfort, its allure, its power? Is it the thrill of belonging, which implies being part of something bigger than one solo self?" And I think that speaks exactly to that.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, it's I guess, othering and belonging are two sides of the same coin.
Jason Bradford
Right. The duality.
Rob Dietz
I'm telling you, this is a tough episode.
Jason Bradford
This is really a tough. I'm struggling already.
Rob Dietz
Well, let's get to the not tough part. We've joked throughout this season that we like sharing our personal experience with the ism du jour.
Asher Miller
In our own hypocrisy.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, yeah.
Rob Dietz
So I thought maybe we could share some personal experiences with othering and some takeaways that we got from that. So I'm gonna share . . . I gotta go back to high school.
Jason Bradford
Glory days.
Asher Miller
That's the place where he peaked.
Rob Dietz
Oh I so did not peak in high school. Let me tell you. But that's the place for the best othering that I can think of.
Asher Miller
Middle School is pretty bad, too.
Jason Bradford
Yeah.
Rob Dietz
Well, yeah.
Jason Bradford
You're more sophisticated.
Rob Dietz
You probably forget, I didn't have middle school. We went from K- 7, and then straight to 8 through 12. So I was an eighth grader in a high school.
Jason Bradford
That's rough.
Asher Miller
Boy, before you tell your story, can I just share something that struck me talking about middle school. I moved across the country in the middle of my seventh grade year, right. It was over winter break. And I moved from Philadelphia, to Portland, Oregon. And this is gonna sound like a bad John Hughes line or something. The first thing a person said to me when I showed up to school, they asked me was a carp or soc? And I had no idea what the hell that meant?
Jason Bradford
What does that mean? I don't even know and I'm a grown man.
Asher Miller
And a carp was someone who's poor. And a soc was someone who was rich.
Rob Dietz
That's straight out of The Outsiders. But it's the Soc's the Greasers. I never heard of the term carp.
Asher Miller
And I'm not making this up. This is the first thing that was said to me. So talk about othering.
Rob Dietz
That's what I'm saying. So okay, I'm in high school. And the best class I took was a course called Modern World Affairs. It was this cool social studies class where you try to understand what's going on in the world. And the teacher at one point, had this game that she set up for the class where she divided us into four groups. So each student group had like six or seven kids in it, and it was almost like a real reality TV show, right? Like Survivor or something where we would do these contests. One of them was who could make a paper airplane that would fly the farthest. And when you won, you basically became the top dog and you got to set the rules. So basically, I ended up in the group that was the worst. We were the poor --
Asher Miller
No surprise.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, you were carps.
Rob Dietz
I mean, I was in it. So I dragged us down, you know, right away. Yeah. So you know the rules of the game. That's not really even -- who cares. What's amazing to me is what happened. So one of my best friends was in the group that kind of rose to the top.
Jason Bradford
The soc.
Rob Dietz
And they got to get to rule over us carps. And it was nuts. Like my friend kind of became a dick.
Jason Bradford
The Stanford Prison Experiment.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, it's kind of like that. Like, it was amazing. I just felt like what are you doing? And you know, there was a clear othering from them, but then I also started feeling like well, these guys are jackasses. Why are they acting like that?
Jason Bradford
Did you get along later with a friend.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, you know, we made up
Asher Miller
After you burned his house down.
Rob Dietz
But the point is how fast --
Jason Bradford
Arbitrary
Rob Dietz
How fast do you start othering?
Asher Miller
Totally arbitrary.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, but look at it. How quickly. I mean, we're good friends in all of the rest of life, but in this stupid ass game, and a stupid ass high school with stupid ass kids, we're going to treat each other like garbage.
Jason Bradford
Every once in a while someone gets too serious about a board game like Risk or like, what's the one where you can take over the worlds? Whatever.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. I once got called a I hope you fucking die, you fucker, for winning at Risk.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. Or monopoly or something like that. You get too caught up in it. Yeah.
Asher Miller
Okay, well, so that's you being in some ways a victim of othering, By the way, if that's your worst experience of othering in life --
Jason Bradford
That's pretty good.
Asher Miller
You've had a pretty good life.
Rob Dietz
Just a quick timeout --
Asher Miller
I'm not trying to shit on you.
Rob Dietz
This section was not your worst experience of othering. This was a personal experience of othering.
Asher Miller
Fair enough. I'm gonna own some of the ways that I have a tendency to other in my own life. So I have become less and less patient in understanding with people who like to rev their engines, drive motorcycles that don't have mufflers on them. Basically be loud and obnoxious.
Jason Bradford
Big ass trucks.
Asher Miller
Yeah. And I have a tendency to sort of look at anyone who has one of those and immediately make assumptions about them, look at them in a certain negative light.
Jason Bradford
Yes. I do this.
Asher Miller
Because of that experience.
Jason Bradford
I'm following you. I'm getting worked up tight now.
Asher Miller
And it could be that there are people who belong to that group within the sense of they have a huge truck, let's say. And it turns out what they use that truck for is, for example, the guy who came to our house when we cut down our diseased trees, and he spent hours and hours and hours cutting down the felled trees into little pieces, not even that little to turn into firewood for people.
Jason Bradford
I don't have a problem with that.
Asher Miller
No, but the point is, okay, I can look to that guy with his huge truck. and thought, this guy is an asshole, right? Turns out he's a wonderful human being and he has a big truck, because he's actually helping people who live in parts of this county that don't have money for it.
Jason Bradford
Okay, I think you're making -- I differentiate between people who just have a big truck versus those who obviously have disabled the pollution control and basically like, you know, aggressively come up behind you and then pass you. And then like, all the black smoke comes out, and they race down the streets in my neighborhood for no reason other than to make noise.
Rob Dietz
Look, I don't want to rain on your old man angst parade, but I do, and this maybe goes to do the opposite, which is later in the show, but you could just be angry at the technology instead of at the people. That's a possibility, right?
Asher Miller
Well, it's to Jason's point that people are intentionally making noise to get attention. I'm just saying, when I see a big truck, I shouldn't assume that everyone is like that.
Jason Bradford
I think I agree with that. Okay, okay. Alright. So my thing, I don't do this so much anymore, but back in the day, college, I would make fun of, get amped up about, and debate creationists whenever I could. I like, kind of enjoyed it.
Asher Miller
How'd that go for you.
Jason Bradford
Well, I never changed their minds. But it was fun -- It was kind of fun in some ways. So the best time I had doing this was there was a billboard in St. Louis, Missouri by this guy named Dr. Dyno who was offering a $250,000 reward for proof of evolution. And I had just gotten my PhD in evolutionary biology or I was about to. I was like in my last year or whatever. And we had this thing called the Darwin party at my grad school where we organized on February 12, or the nearest weekend or whatever, a birthday party for Charles Darwin. And we would have like drinks, mixed drinks themed of the different places that the HMS Beagle traveled to, you know. We had cakes that were shaped with animals that were --
Asher Miller
A bunch of nerds.
Jason Bradford
Oh, it was completely nerded out.
Rob Dietz
It culminated in someone being handed the Darwin Award after --
Asher Miller
They had to drink and fell off.
Jason Bradford
Well, we had a Darwin Film Festival too where we would make movies on any kind of Darwin theme or evolution theme. So I did this whole thing --
Asher Miller
I really want to other your group right now.
Jason Bradford
Oh, I did this thing where I actually interviewed this guy, Kent Hovind, aka Dr. Dyno in Pensacola, Florida. And I spent like an hour on the phone with him trying to figure out the rules for his contest and how I might win and recorded it using Radio Shack technologies at the time and it was a total hit. Like it was a hoot. I basically trolled the shit out of this guy. And everyone was just laughing hysterically at what he said and how he would just -- I would kind of lead him on calmly and make him say stupid stuff.
Rob Dietz
I don't feel like you've --
Asher Miller
Learned a lesson from this?
Rob Dietz
Yeah, gotten like over your othering ways. I feel like you would gladly break out your Radio Shack technology and talk to Dr. Dyno.
Jason Bradford
My takeaway is it can be a lot of fun to troll wackos. It really can be a grand time.
Asher Miller
That's great. How does this help us escape othering?
Jason Bradford
I don't know. I'm just saying like, obviously, I'm susceptible.
Asher Miller
Okay, so you're taking some ownership over that.
Jason Bradford
I'm taking some ownership. You tried to take ownership.
Asher Miller
Right. Yeah. I don't hear a mea culpa in here.
Jason Bradford
No, I don't know what to do about this. I think they're just ridiculous.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, well, just it's a good point. We're vulnerable to doing this. So let's dive a little bit into the history of othering. As Asher said, I did a little deep dive. I read, "Belonging without Othering: How we Save Ourselves in the World." It's a new book by John A Powell and Steven Menendez out of the Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. And something they said, a big statement about history, is there's no known human society, over all of history, that's free from the dynamics that marginalize or stigmatize particular social groups. So Jason, maybe you're in the clear, a little bit with your treatment of Dr. Dyno and company. But this was an interesting side point to that is that even though othering occurs everywhere, and across time, there's also no natural or inevitable other. Like who is the other goes all over the map from place to place, and there's no set rules or common patterns there. So in other words, people conduct othering in different ways, and towards different groups of people.
Jason Bradford
Sure.
Asher Miller
So it may be that, you know, we're talking about escaping othering. Maybe it's recognizing it's not something we can completely escape from, but try to navigate and manage in some ways, right?
Jason Bradford
Yeah.
Asher Miller
But I do think we have to recognize and name and combat the truly dangerous and vile forms of othering that's happened. And a lot of it does, you know, we're talking about the history. It comes from the playbook of colonizers, right? We talked about this on our season on watershed moments. I think it was episode 51. When we talked about the papal bulls in the doctrines of Christian discovery. And in a sense that was the papacy rubber stamping, authorizing the Spanish government and the Portuguese government and others to go out and conquer and divide up Muslim and pagan lands to authorize slavery, authorize exploitation of the natural world. They codified that basically, and led to a sort of a playbook of doing this around the world.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, I think that, you know, that ties into economics, of course, too. So, and that season, you know, related to these watershed moments. We talk about this as well. And this was covered really well on the seeing white podcast. There's really interesting teachings of Suzanne Plihcik of the Racial Equity Institute. And the story of sort of what is defined as a different race or what is an inferior race versus superior race. It can't be separated from the story of labor. And Rich landowners in colonial America needed this reliable consistent labor force. And they didn't want labor forces that were poor bonding together. Bonding about their social status. And so they pitted you know, white laborers against these racial African American slaves.
Asher Miller
So endentured white slaves with cattle, you know, those into cattle slavery.
Jason Bradford
And so that prevented sort of coming together because of class solidarity, right? So this is how othering can be used in power dynamics to sort of prop up the status quo and those in power.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, and so starting in like the late 1930s, I think, or after World War I, or something like that is when they stepped up that dynamic. And then it really culminated 60 years later into this genocide.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, and this is where it gets so heavy. It's just even hard to think about all the examples throughout history and into today of this sort of divide and conquer approach the colonizers have used. Maybe a more recent example and horrendous is the genocide that happened in Rwanda about 30 years ago. The numbers are staggering. As many as 800,000 people were slaughtered, and mostly one ethnic group, the Tutsis, were killed by another ethnic group, the Hutus. But the whole tension between them was initiated by the colonizing forces, the Belgians kind of gave the Tutsis these positions of power, largely based on skin color.
Rob Dietz
That to me is the, I mean, we're going to talk about the consequences of othering. But that's getting at it. You start something moving at a point in history, and it can end in utter tragedy and violence like that.
Asher Miller
And we see, unfortunately, we see that playbook still being adopted by those in power. And it can work across political structures, right. I mean, you see it in places in the world where you have authoritarian regimes who find and other to pick on and to shine a light on as a scapegoat for the problems the populace might feel because they don't have economic opportunity or civil rights of any kind. But you can also see it in democracies, you know, where people rise to power because they played on the fears or tensions between different groups. And unfortunately, that playbook really works because of what we were talking about before, which is this maybe innate tendency in us to other or difference.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, well, let's really bring it to what's happening today in our culture and some examples of the worrisome signs of othering. And I want to recognize that this is not just something that happens on the right. And it can even happen between groups that have been othered the past. So for example, there's this tendency now of trans activists calling certain feminist TERFs, which stands for trans exclusionary radical feminists. And so, certain feminists bring up concerns about trans women in college and professional sports or in bathrooms prior to full transition, and how this might affect women who maybe are really scared of men, for whatever reason, have been traumatized themselves. And so they're trying to have conversations about this and get shut down or get yelled at. And so it's ironic in that, you know, people who have been working on women's rights issues for a long, long time are now getting called out or, you know, abused in some cases, by trans women, or advocates for trans women.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, that's rough. And you're right. It's not just for the right wing. But let's be real, the right wing is really good at othering from time to time. There's a certain leader in recent U.S. history, Mr. Donald J. Trump, who has used othering kind of to its fullest extent in his remarks. I can give a couple of direct quotes. He had this remark about immigrants where he said, "You wouldn't believe how bad these people are. These aren't people, these are animals." And then he had a recent one in a 2023 campaign event in November where he said, "We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country." Now, he already kind of went to these people and the thugs, but then he's really good. He takes it another step further, right. He's completely dehumanizing. I mean, vermin has a horrid history. And when you start hearing that kind of speech, you're on the way toward much more dangerous consequences.
Jason Bradford
Well, the irony is he says, "root out the fascists," but this is classic fascism speech right here.
Rob Dietz
He was talking about himself there.
Asher Miller
It just gets to the power of language and the use of language to other. And we could spend a lot of time talking about that, you know, comparing people to animals, for example, which is also an implicit othering of animals.
Asher Miller
Exactly, yeah.
Rob Dietz
Don't forget our episode on humanocentrism, where we said, "Hey, it's a community of life, okay?"
Asher Miller
Right. Can people define communists or Marxists, or, you know, it's like, they use these terms to just attach them to people because they've gotten negative connotation where it's like, this person is not Marxists.
Jason Bradford
The people that are talking to you have no clue what they're talking about.
Rob Dietz
Actually, who can define vermin anymore? Like who uses that word? What is that supposed to mean?
Jason Bradford
Vermin Supreme. Great presidential candidate.
Asher Miller
Okay, so I don't want to give you guys like really bad flashbacks. But do you remember our episode on Marc Andreessen?
Jason Bradford
Very well.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, with his techno optimist manifesto
Jason Bradford
That sent me down a rabbit hole.
Asher Miller
You know, this is the guy who thinks that the precautionary principle is like the worst thing ever. It's evil, right? Well, I want to introduce you to someone, another Silicon Valley visionary, Balaji Srinivasan who Andreessen described as having, quote, unquote, "The highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I've ever met."
Jason Bradford
That's a great metric. He's measured the metric.
Asher Miller
So, Andreessen loves this guy.
Jason Bradford
Oh wow.
Rob Dietz
I want to know who has the highest output per second to have good ideas. I mean, minute, come on. We're talking Silicon Valley. You've gotta be fast.
Asher Miller
Time is money here. Well, last year at Balaji went on a podcast called, "The Moment of Zen."
Jason Bradford
Sounds mellow.
Asher Miller
Yeah, it's a moment of Zen. But it was like four hours long. To share his utopian vision for a tech governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe, clad in gray t-shirts. I'm not making this up.
Jason Bradford
And this is San Francisco he's talking about? The city of San Francisco.
Asher Miller
Yeah. So, and I'm going to quote here, "And if you see another gray on the street," right? "You do the nod," he said. "You're a fellow Gray."
Rob Dietz
I'm sorry, but I keep thinking of those gray aliens. You know from . . ?
Asher Miller
Why'd he pick gray?
Jason Bradford
I don't know. It's like the worst color. I guess it's neutral. Anyone could wear it.
Rob Dietz
You know grays, that's a term for the archetype of aliens. So if UFOs come down and aliens abduct you, they're called greys because they're sort of gray in body and they've got the black eyes.
Asher Miller
Interesting. I'm hearing conspiracy theories here.
Rob Dietz
We want to up our ratings on this podcast.
Jason Bradford
This is an episode about UFOs --
Rob Dietz
Bigfoot.
Jason Bradford
The lluminati.
Asher Miller
And Tech Bros. So as Gil Duran at the New Republic described Balaji's vision, Grays would receive special ID cards, providing them access to exclusive Gray-controlled sectors of the city.
Jason Bradford
Oh my gosh.
Asher Miller
The Grays would make an alliance with the police department funding weekly policeman's banquets to win them over.
Jason Bradford
Nice. Who is this fucking guy?
Rob Dietz
That means policemen are going to be dressed in gray instead of blue.
Asher Miller
I guess they have a policeman's ball every week. Everyone would be welcomed to the Gray Pride March. Not the Gay Pride March, the Gray Pride March.
Jason Bradford
I've gotta hand it to them, that's cool.
Asher Miller
Yeah, everyone that is except the blues. Okay? And Srinivasan defines the blue political tribe as the liberal voters he applies that are responsible for the city's problems right? And they're gonna be completely banned from gray controlled zones. But the Republicans who are reds, they're allowed in, right? Reds should be welcomed. There's a quote, "Red should be welcomed there and people should wear their tribal colors." He compared this color-coded apartheid system to the Bloods and Crips gang rivalry. "No blue should be welcomed here."
Rob Dietz
This brings so many alarms. Like first of all, who wants to emulate the Bloods and Crips gang rivalry?
Jason Bradford
Yeah, this is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist CEO who gets hours and hours on top of their podcast, who billion dollar CEOs call him the greatest idea producer of anyone. This is scary as hell. This is a tech fascist nightmare right here.
Rob Dietz
It's also unoriginal. We've already had a war with blues and grays. That was called the Civil War, okay? Can we . . .
Jason Bradford
Remember Kurzweil where you'd have the gray bots and the blue bots? The gray goo in the blue goo.
Jason Bradford
I think that's the reds. The blue was the police goo.
Jason Bradford
The police bots, nanobots, would try to keep you. There were blue bots that would go after the gray nanobots.
Asher Miller
You sound insane.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. Where are we?
Asher Miller
And you are quoting Kurzweil.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, pretty much. Okay. They float in the same circles I think.
Rob Dietz
You're right. That's a dangerous sounding othering that's being taken seriously.
Jason Bradford
Right now. Right now this is going on in San Francisco.
Asher Miller
And Trump is doing his thing, too.
Jason Bradford
And Trump is kind of nuts. It makes my creationist thing look very pedestrian, doesn't it?
Rob Dietz
It sure does. I'm gonna go back to high school and Modern World Affairs. Okay, so
Jason Bradford
Okay. Let's talk about what the consequences are for this. Of course, there's health effects. We covered this in the episode on individualism. Being othered leads to isolation and loneliness. It takes a toll on your mental and physical health. And remember, we talked about that being socially isolated is like taking up smoking or not exercising in terms of its health effects.
Asher Miller
Yeah, right.
Rob Dietz
That's great.
Asher Miller
And of course, as we discussed in our episode on extremism, you see hate crimes including violence against people based on their race or ethnicity, or religion, gender, disabilities, sexual orientation. These rose nearly 12%, between 2020 and 2021, just that period of time in the U.S.
Rob Dietz
Well, and of course, where this all really gets to is after you've othered people and dehumanized them, it's easy, you know, next step to start killing them. And we've had horrendous instances of genocide in a lot of places. In Myanmar, in Darfur region of Sudan, in Rwanda, as we mentioned, Cambodia. I'm just naming a few. But this has been with us for a long time, and it's still with us.
Asher Miller
And I worry, it is something we're going to have to increasingly face. We haven't talked a ton about this, but one of the drivers of othering, or a seeking of belonging to a group that might be a form of malignant othering, or malignant belonging, sorry, is a sense of scarcity, perceived scarcity, fear and uncertainty. And as we talk a lot about at Post Carbon Institute, if we're entering a period of what we've been calling the great unraveling of environmental systems, like the climate system, or social systems, you know, that just heightens those tensions, or heightens that fear, heightens that uncertainty, heightens at least perceived scarcity that people feel. And so the risk of othering is even more real, I think now, and will be a more significant issue for us to contend with looking forward. It really, if there's a thing that keeps me up at night, this is it.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. I mean, we talk about coming together in times of crisis, but also, we can fall apart in a time of crisis.
Rob Dietz
Well, I think there's a dichotomy there. So it's like, if you are a society, and you face an acute crisis, yeah, it's like, I'm going to help my neighbor. Whatever they look like, whoever they are. But if you are subject to chronic crises, I think that's more where you're going, Asher, with the great unraveling. It's like, over and over and over again, you're hit with this. You probably lose that sense of cohesion pretty quickly.
Asher Miller
And you have people coming in to say this is happening because of those people. Right? So it's a combination of those, especially from people who want to maintain their power and the status quo for as long as possible, trying to deflect and say, we don't need to change the fundamental way that we operate society because that's what's brought us here. It's like, No, we can get back. We can make America great again if we deal with those people,
Jason Bradford
Rob, can you just pull out my copy over there of "Green Eggs and Ham," and just read it for a little bit?
Rob Dietz
Let's go back to Wes Tank.
Jason Bradford
Alrighty, welcome to the Marvin Harris Memorial lens of doom section of the show. We're talking about cultural materialism, which is the theory that if you want to understand society, you look at it at three levels, infrastructure, like the physical world, how they get the material needs, food, energy, etc. The structure, so that's the rules, both legal and social norms. And then the superstructure. These, these are the cultural belief systems, mythologies, stories they tell about themselves. Okay, so we're going to look at otherism or othering through these lenses. And we'll start with infrastructure. And I just want to repeat what we talked about earlier in the episode about our brain wiring. We are set up to differentiate and categorize. And this can be good. We need this. But it can be a precursor to othering. And so, we've got to worry about when we start treating people unfairly or being evil doers because of that differential view and treatment. Now, there's also something about, I think, the complexity of the world right now and the sheer scale of the planet. So there's 8 billion people. You can imagine how many affinity groups this ends up enabling. And the fact that we have mass communication. So, you're dealing with the social complexity and this knowledge of it, which will tend to lead to more capacity for othering.
Asher Miller
Interestingly, provides a lot more opportunity for people to identify themselves in different groups and belong to things. But also more groups to other.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. Well, and you talk about mass communication. I think another piece of the infrastructure is the media. First of all, you've got fractionated and opinionated and fear mongering people all over the media landscape right now. And then, couple that with the recent development of social media and the kind of silos and echo chambers that the algorithms there put people into. And you've got a whole nother set of infrastructure that gives you a kind of leg up on othering.
Asher Miller
Yeah. And again, thinking about infrastructure, we have forms of physical segregation as well, right? Often these had been a consequence of racism, redlining, how you build infrastructure, roads. We've talked about this before. Putting highway systems in certain neighborhoods. But if you segregate how people live, sometimes it's voluntarily, sometimes it's not voluntarily, that reinforces this idea of separation. It reduces interaction between groups.
Jason Bradford
Right. Okay.
Asher Miller
And then we also have a form of ableism, I guess you could say, in terms of infrastructure. And, you know, the truth is that the physical world, the way we've actually built buildings, modes of transport, all these things have been designed for people that are ambulatory people who are able to walk around and can see and hear. And so, that is a form of othering, in the sense, where maybe it's unintentional, but it's certainly not taking into consideration or hasn't historically taken into consideration people with different physical abilities.
Jason Bradford
Okay, so let's talk now about structure. This is the rules that help create or foster or reinforce othering. And there are laws, like legal systems are a really important part of structure. And in Uganda right now, gay people, for example, are very much discriminated against. It can be life threatening to be identified as gay. And so that's one of those sorts of classes where legal systems can punish you.
Asher Miller
Yeah, look, I think we've made big strides in this country. It's not perfect, but we have changed a lot of the discriminatory laws that we've had in this country. Unfortunately, they still exist in many other parts of the world. And just as one example, and it's not to pick on a particular culture, necessarily, but you know, in Saudi Arabia, for example, if you drive down, and this is actually maybe even an infrastructures thing. You drive down the highway there, you know, heading towards Mecca, for example. There's an exit that people have to take if you're non-Muslim. Because you're not allowed to go into Mecca.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. You can't go into the proper center of Mecca if you're not Muslim.
Rob Dietz
It's true othering infrastructure. It's an exit. It's a piece of highway. Amazingt! Well, you said here in the U.S., we've made progress. Certainly the civil rights era and the passing of a bunch of Rights Acts that tried to prevent putting people into these different classes and discriminating against them. But there's still vestiges from that, right? I mean, we still see things like a gender pay gap in this country even though you're not legally allowed to discriminate in those sorts of ways. So, these kinds of things can take a long time to work out even if you do have remedies to the structural -- the laws and the policies.
Jason Bradford
Okay, so now let's talk about superstructure. There's a lot that overlaps here with our episode on humanocentrism, right? This is sort of a belief in the superiority of your group versus, you know, inferiority of another group. So, when you see that as sort of part of what's happening in your society, that's an example of superstructure. And so, just think of the stories that may be told at the dinner table or about other groups.
Asher Miller
Nationalism, we haven't talked about it, but that is, in a sense, a form of othering as well. We certainly do that in this country, right? The story of America is number one. We're the best.
Jason Bradford
Now, let's talk about some of that. I think this is another important part about it. The story that we tell ourselves as Americans, right. And there's an interesting kind of tension that arises. So we call ourselves this nation of immigrants. Along with this giant melting pot kind of idea, we have these libertarian protections of individual rights of expression. And sometimes we acknowledge, like, you know, the heritage You know, you might be an Italian American, or an Irish American, for example. And individuals vary in their tolerance to differences. We've talked about the Big Five personality traits and openness and how important that was. So this feeds then I think, into cultural assimilation versus welcoming of plurality. So, people are going to maybe have more tendency to see that immigrants are assimilating versus people are gonna be more open to immigrants maintaining their own identity and culture. And so there's a tension between this acceptance of diversity and the ease of governance and cohesion. So othering, in certain circumstances, may be a reaction by some against higher rates of change that are increasing cultural diversity and the costs of the resulting complexity. And I think a good example you find is sort of school systems that are dealing with all the languages. So I think New York City schools have like 100 different languages, native languages, that are in New York City Schools. And so, think about the cost of managing interacting with families when you have 100 different native languages you're trying to sort through. And this becomes a real challenge then on governance and the cost of complexity of cultural diversity.
Rob Dietz
Well, this is why we messed up on that episode on escaping technologyism. Because that will solve your little language problem.
Jason Bradford
The little AIs are going to teach us in the classrooms now helping translate. I think so. I think that's actually true.
George Costanza
Every decision I've ever made in my entire life has been wrong. My life is the complete opposite of everything I want it to be.
Jerry Seinfeld
If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right
Rob Dietz
Aright, thanks George Costanza. A very simple starter for do the opposite is just don't other. So Jason, no more hitting Dr. Dyno upside the head.
Asher Miller
Didn't we talk about how hard it is not to other.
Rob Dietz
It is hard. So, if you're gonna do it, okay, maybe being devoted to your sports team and othering your sports team s rivals.
Jason Bradford
There you go.
Rob Dietz
That's kind of a benign way to do it.
Jason Bradford
Thank you. Throw me a bone.
Asher Miller
I mean, it's a good point. I have to say, I went through a very hard time as a Red Sox fan growing up.
Jason Bradford
The Yankees are awesome.
Asher Miller
I had my heart broken a bunch of times. And part of what fueled me was hating the hell out of the New York Yankees, and I've lost something since the Red Sox won a bunch of World Series. I've lost that fire for the other. It just doesn't mean as much to me to hate the Yankees.
Jason Bradford
No, because you're a winner now too.
Asher Miller
So I need to find another group or team or fans to hate.
Rob Dietz
You mentioned that you lived in Philly as a kid. Like, this is the Philly sports. It's not so much support for their team as hating all the other teams.
Asher Miller
And Santa Claus.
Rob Dietz
But let's also be careful, because we know in sports, this can go too far. You've seen racism in soccer. You've seen soccer hooligans, you know. I once read a book about that, where there's all this extreme violence, you know, in support of your team.
Jason Bradford
I saw Reggie Smith for the Dodgers beat up a Giants fan during the middle of the game.
Rob Dietz
Yeah.
Jason Bradford
It was awesome.
Asher Miller
God. Okay, let's talk about visions for what doing the opposite might look like.
Rob Dietz
Besides rooting for a sports team, you mean.
Asher Miller
Besides rooting for a sports team. And I think you talked about don't other. Another opposite is belonging, right? Belonging as the opposite of otherinig.
Rob Dietz
I can buy that.
Asher Miller
So let's just define belonging for a minute. Belonging means having a meaningful voice and the opportunity to participate in the design of political, social, and cultural structures that shapes one's life. If you belong, then you have the right to both contribute and to make demands upon the society and political institutions. And so by this, we're talking about not just belonging to a small in-group, but belonging to society, you know, more broadly. It's going outside of the completely homogeneous group. And the idea of belonging is radical because it requires mutual power, right? It requires access for everyone, opportunity for all the groups and the individuals within a shared container.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, like that's it, right? It requires those with power to give up and share some of that.
Jason Bradford
Or just to say like, well, that's our goal. We have power, but our goal is to be sharing that power and to listen to others. And I think we have to be very careful then about who we elect. And do they have those values or not, I would say. Okay, the need to belong is, of course, fundamental to universal human survival and flourishing. And so bonding is part of surviving and thriving as a human. And there's these consistent findings, right, of infants and children. You can have all the nutrients and physical care set up, but if you don't have love and emotional bonds, you're stunted in brain development and IQ and impulse control and emotional empathy as well as your physical growth. So it's absolutely critical that that people feel that they belong to something.
Rob Dietz
Okay, so if belonging is the opposite of othering, and we're going to promote belonging, let's look at what are the elements. What makes it up? And I read from the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley that there are four elements. Okay, so the first of these is that belonging requires inclusion. This is probably the most obvious. But something I want to point out is you can be included somewhere, but still feel like you don't belong. So including is sort of a necessary step, but it certainly isn't sufficient. You know, an example would be Jason, you belong to a male only tennis club, right?
Asher Miller
You do?
Jason Bradford
What are you talking about?
Rob Dietz
Okay, I know. Let's pretend it was the 1930s and it was male only and you started inviting women to participate.
Jason Bradford
They can play sports?
Rob Dietz
Yes.
Jason Bradford
Okay.
Rob Dietz
Don't get into trouble.
Jason Bradford
I'm pretending it's the 1930s. I'm sorry. I'm being ridiculous.
Rob Dietz
Okay, so . . . but that's the thing. If women are treated as outsiders or tokenized, or even, you're expected to serve as kind of the representative of all women everywhere, then we're not really getting past othering at that point.
Jason Bradford
Right, I understand.
Rob Dietz
But it's the first step in including.
Jason Bradford
Mixed doubles is a great game by the way. It's fine, okay?
Asher Miller
So belonging, you know, that's one element. Belonging also requires a sense of connection. And, of course, it's subjective. But when an institution, or an organization, or a community engenders feelings of attachment and fondness, safety, warmth, that creates a sense of connection and belonging that's really critical for people.
Jason Bradford
And it also requires visibility or recognition. And my wife tells me this all the time, but the simple act of being seen, heard, and understood can be quite powerful for making people feel that their social group is respected and valued.
Asher Miller
And I think it's particularly true for groups that have been long marginalized. And there can be, you know, often situations for people where, because they've never really felt that they had a voice at the table, it's not just a matter of saying, "Oh, now you have a voice." It's really trying to encourage that and creating a sense of trust. That gets back to that sense of connection. Because people need to feel like they can actually trust to be able to feel recognized.
Rob Dietz
Okay, so we've got inclusion, we've got connection, we've got visibility or recognition. And then the fourth element, maybe stepping it up even farther, is agency. Belonging requires agency. And that means that people have a voice and a say. They have a meaningful degree of influence over how the group or the institution operates. And it doesn't mean that when people who are formerly marginalized come into the group that any demand or anything they ask is going to automatically be incorporated or change the group. But it does mean that it would be considered that you would have exactly the legitimate, listening, weighing, and then, you know, maybe you would have a compromise or an amendment to how the group operates. But that agency is key for belonging.
Asher Miller
So part of doing the opposite to othering or otherism is practicing anti-othering. So we should talk a little bit about what that looks like. And, I would say it begins with a commitment to not just tolerating or respecting differences, but ensuring that all people are welcome and that they feel like they belong in society. It's an active form, it's not a passive form, of ensuring that people are feeling comfortable and welcomed.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. I think all of the anti-othering that we can suggest is you have to be active. And one of the ways you can be active is to challenge and reject negative representations and stereotypes of other social groups, you know. You hear something, see something, then you kind of got to speak out. And on the flip side of that, be welcoming to out-groups. Send them messages that they belong, that they're welcome in your community and your society.
Jason Bradford
And there has been a lot of legislation in the United States that help make groups that formerly have been othered feel more included and belong. And so for example, legislation like the Americans with Disabilities Act, ADA, and that has helped change the actual infrastructure to allow people with differences in physical abilities to gain access to public spaces, right. And this is something that's actually in progress. Like, we haven't instantly changed our infrastructure, and you'll see there's projects in your community to help with this and support those.
Rob Dietz
But really cool, too, from a Marvin Harris perspective, right? Like changing that infrastructure, it can help change our culture and our beliefs and certainly the policies and rules.
Asher Miller
Now, anti-othering can sometimes require or force people in situations that they're being othered to stand up for themselves. And an example of that is a story that was recounted in that book, Rob, that you talked about, "Othering without Belonging." In 2018, a white woman in the city of Oakland called the police on two black men. They were holding a cookout along the edge of Lake Merritt there in the city. And the incident occurred against a really tense backdrop. You know, Oakland had been going through a period gentrification. It had been historically a real African American community. And because of gentrification, it had transitioned a bit from being predominantly black to being predominantly white over that decade. And the response to this incident was a community of people organizing a series of events that they called Barbecuing While Black, where they demanded essentially equal access to the lakeside area. There was a social media campaign that was #westillhere. And that was, you know, with a goal of creating a more equitable and inclusive local community. But it's really important. It shouldn't be just on those who are being othered in a situation, or marginalized, to stand up for themselves. I mean, we do want a situation where people feel empowered to do something like that. But those of us who are not in the position where we're being marginalized, or othered, it's on us to stand up as well. And sometimes it's about standing up in solidarity. And sometimes it's actually standing forward proactively ourselves when we see something happening as you had talked about, Rob,
Rob Dietz
Yeah. I really liked that story. And there are definite times when you have to stand up. I have a story. I watched this TED talk from this guy, Christian Picciolini. I hope I pronounced that right. But his is not so much about standing up, it's more about the deep listening and empathy side of things. So this guy, he was kind of an othered young person. He came from an immigrant family. I think he didn't really fit in. And he found himself as one of these troubled wandering teens. And he got scooped up into essentially a white supremacist gang. And all through his time growing up and into his early adulthood, he was tatted up with white supremacist tattoos, and he ran a book and record store that, you know, sold all kinds of racist crap. Anyway, he was able to get out of it. And he ended up helping 100 other people disengage from white supremacy extremist groups. And he didn't do this by arguing or debating them, you know, taking a page out of Jason's book and dealing with creationists.
Jason Bradford
I knew you were going to say that.
Rob Dietz
I know, I'm sorry.
Jason Bradford
I was so young at the time.
Rob Dietz
But yeah, we all kind of know that you're not going to convince somebody who's irrational to suddenly be rational by pointing it out to them. So what he does is he draws people in and he listens for the problems in their life, what he calls the potholes. And he helps fill them in so that they can develop skills and self confidence, so that they can rely on that rather than finding scapegoats and othering people. And, you know, he realized that people often participate in othering simply because they want to belong to a community, like we were talking about. And so, you know, his deal is if you can find someone who is undeserving of your compassion and give it to them, they're probably the ones who need it the most, and you might help stop them from othering.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. Well, I guess this, this leads to that another way we can help is by supporting what we would call benign belonging. And so these are groups or associations that aren't going to be engaged in othering, like white supremacist groups, and breathe life into these institutions. America in the early 20th century experienced this period of building all these groups, you know, like the Lions Club, or whatever, and neighborhood associations, the formation of colleges and universities. And now, we are in a decline of a lot of these institutions. So how to rebuild existing institutions or create new ones, you know, more applicable to that today, affinity groups that are really pro-social.
Asher Miller
And actually, what you're just talking about, Jason, really connect, I think, to what you were saying, Rob, when you're talking about the story of that guy Christian, which is a lot of those associations that were in communities actually helped provide for basic needs that their members had. They were the social safety net before we had things like --
Jason Bradford
Insurance.
Asher Miller
Insurance, or social security, or any of those kinds of things. And it gets to supporting people with their material needs. And if we lift people up, in a sense, to provide them with a floor of safety and security, it might reduce the risk of them falling prey to othering or blaming others. So I think that's a really important one. It's weird to bring this up, but the military, which is not an institution I typically think of as benign belonging. . .
Rob Dietz
Yeah, we've recommended demilitarizing, right?
Asher Miller
But they have done a pretty amazing job of bonding people together across lots of differences, right? They've managed diversity throughout their ranks. They've done this by setting like four conditions: equal status, intergroup cooperation, common goals and support by social and institutional authorities. They draw from every sector of society, but often from the least privileged sectors, right. And it becomes a practical necessity in their case to tamp down on ethnic and racial divisions and to foster belonging. And that's partly by having a shared vision, a shared mission, the shared sense of purpose, which I think is also what people are seeking very much in life. I might not align with the mission of the military in all cases, but sort of the ingredients that are used to do it.
Jason Bradford
How to do it.
Asher Miller
Yeah, how to do it, I think is really worth looking at. And it'd be wonderful if we actually adopted some of the structures of the processes that the military has employed to either redirect the military infrastructure to doing things like rebuilding America, you know --
Rob Dietz
Or ecology restoration, or social justice --
Jason Bradford
Well, I actually think there's a system in place for doing that already called AmeriCorps. And I remember meeting a group of AmeriCorps volunteers. Maybe there was 10 of them, and these are people in their late teens to early 20s. Very diverse group. And they were wonderful. They had a sense of cohesion. They traveled around a certain region, and they'll spend weeks to months at a time doing work related to ecological restoration and social justice. Honestly, it was quite amazing. So, what if they had the budget that was more of the military scale budget, and that was your service to your country.
Rob Dietz
It's funny, I've often thought I missed out on doing something like that because it does feel like such an opportunity to belong to something greater than yourself and probably come away with just best buddies, right? Okay, well, in trying to engender belonging and trying to anti-other -- Is that a verb? I guess so. Let's remind ourselves that we're not necessarily talking about getting rid of differences and we're not talking about building some homogenous society. You know, we're saying it's okay to have distinct groups out there. But, to try to push down or tamp down that other thing that can happen you've got to build bridges among these different groups. And so, the idea of bridging is it's a practice where members of different social groups are not just brought into contact, but you have a chance to build actual social connections, build rapport with one another. And you can think of some examples like hosting interfaith dinners, or having a multicultural concert doing various leadership trainings. I don't know. There's a lot of ways that you can build these bridges. But the key to it all really is that you have to be there with listening. And you have to be there to learn about the people who are perceived as being the other. You're not listening just to figure out, you know, what are the facts here. You're listening to affirm their humanity. Maybe it gets back to some of that validation, that feeling that we were talking about when we were describing the elements of belonging.
Jason Bradford
Let me give you an example of sort of a project or process that represents this. It's called Marnita's table. And it uses the dinner table as a means for bringing people together and solving some of the community's biggest, toughest issues. And food you know, is the denominator for this event, these Marnita's tables events. And this was founded in 2006 by husband and wife team Marnita Schroeder and Carl Goldstein. And the mission is to bridge cultural, generational, and socioeconomic differences. So the way this works is that a community or an organization recommends a topic of concern. It could be race isolation of refugees, graduation rates. And then staff and volunteers for Marina's table set up the table. They create an intimate dinner in maybe the home of these hosts, or one of the many volunteer. And then the meal is a big part of it. There are also cards with questions on them. They're spread around. It's not so much designed to talk about your problems. Instead, it's designed to talk about what you have in common. And so the smallest group that has happened at these Marnita's tables events has been 12 and up to 150 people have been at their home at one time.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. It's a stunningly simple and stunningly awesome example, I think. You know, you just get people together to discuss the issues and to having a good meal together. I mean, what not to like about that?
Jason Bradford
Yeah.
Asher Miller
To me, this speaks to the listening that we've been talking about in the need for building our capacity to practice empathetic listening. And there's an organization actually that I was involved with years ago called Listening for Change that really sought to do that. They trained volunteers in the community to specifically go out and to interview others in the community that were different than them. And part of it was an educational project where they created posters or videos that showcased the stories of the people that were interviewed. Just to kind of remind people in the community that these are members of our community that maybe are invisible to you. You don't understand them, or they look different. But when you can hear a conversation with them, you understand that there's a lot of commonality there. But to me, the key thing about the project was this skill building of learning how to be an empathetic listener, which is something we unfortunately don't really teach people to do. We teach them a lot of hard facts in school. We don't teach kids or even adults how to listen with deep inquiry, you know. And an example of that is to just, this is a very simple practice, you ask an open ended question versus a closed question. You don't look for a yes or no answer. You ask them a question that opens up a story. This is especially true when people may not feel that comfortable, but you're listening, you're creating a safe space for them to really express themselves in a genuine and authentic way.
Rob Dietz
I missed that training, because I find I'm more of an empathetic talker than an empathetic listener. I do think that familiarity and empathy are some of the kind of antidotes to othering. But one of the other ones, I think it maybe ties in with the military or maybe better with the AmeriCorps idea that you're sharing, Jason, is that you need to focus sometimes on what are called superordinate goals. So that's the kind of objectives that people across differences care about. Like everybody together can agree on, you know, some value or some work that they want to achieve together. And to overcome othering and to have belonging, then we've got to find those. We have to engage and work where we realize a shared vision. Yeah, again, I think the military maybe is a one of our better examples of that.
Asher Miller
Yeah, it's clear that it takes a lot of organizing effort to do something like this. So we have a lot of work to do. So. . .
Jason Bradford
Yeah. I'll say there's a lot of work to do. And I think I can simplify things quite a bit. The best way to get an in-group tight and cohesive and working together is to create an even bigger out-group. And so you remember that Arthur C. Clarke Childhoods End?
Asher Miller
I want to share something about the Needham Resilience Network, which is a project that was started by one of our advisors, Nicole Argo, who's worked for a very long time in the realm of othering and belonging. And she was responding to some incidents that were happening in her community in Massachusetts that were really around hate crimes in division of that kind of identity based stuff. And the projects, it's not actually set up to specifically address this or that issue, it's really around, in some ways, creating a council that's outside of the city council. She has brought together representatives from different stakeholder groups in the community, and they meet on a regular basis together. The people that are there in this council are trusted representatives of the communities that they're there to represent, in a sense. And what they do is explore topics that are relevant to them. And they build this kind of relational tissue, and bring in a different perspective on whatever topics that they're exploring at the time. And the purpose is to really show that, you know, and this could be ethnic groups, but it can also be groups that are working on different issues, you know, health care or faith based communities, to recognize that working on these issues together is what's going to be key for them to be able to resolve them as a community. And it's that relational tissue that, and this is part of why it's called a resilience network, allows the community to be more resilient in the face of coming shocks or challenges that they may face. And I would say for our listeners, we've talked about different examples of doing this, of building relationships, we've talked about mutual aid networks. All of these things are really key. We talked about it from the standpoint of when you build those relationships, you strengthen social ties and social cohesion. It allows a community to be more resilient in the face of the crises that we face. But it also addresses this othering issue, right. And if we're able to do both things at the same time, in a sense, sorta working together across differences on stuff, we're in a better position, I think, to respond, to tamp down on one, and to build a capacity to do the other.
Asher Miller
Yeah.
Rob Dietz
No.
Jason Bradford
Well, space aliens show up, and you know, it's kind of like, "Oh, that other is more powerful than all of humanity." And they tamp down on all of our bullshit and just have all this technology to keep us from fighting each other. So we just need to get those --
Asher Miller
We need to invent a space race. So the risk of an alien species.
Jason Bradford
Well, that's the thing. We can't rely on showing up. We just gotta make them.
Asher Miller
Let's get the AI on it.
Jason Bradford
Exactly.
Rob Dietz
Have you guys learned nothing?
Melody Travers Allison
That's our show. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, and you want others to consider these issues, then please share Crazy Town with your friends. Hit that share button in your podcast app or just tell them face to face. Maybe you can start some much needed conversations and do some things together to get us out of Crazy Town. Thanks again for listening and sharing.
Jason Bradford
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