How We All Contribute to Violence

Many social, economic, and psychological factors contribute to violence. Primary among them are wounds inflicted by the loss of emotional bonds—through death (particularly violent death), abuse, abandonment, or betrayal.

Bonding wounds gouge holes in the heart that do not remain hollow for long. For some, they fill with compassion and a sense of basic humanity, which strengthens other social bonds. We become better people for a while after a tragedy.

For some, attachment holes fill with a psychically deadening depression that admits no light of value, meaning, or purpose.

For still others, the holes torn in the heart by the loss of social bonds fill with anger, resentment, and an impulse for revenge. Add ideology to the mix, and you have terrorism.

Compassion and revenge are both empowering, compared to the alternative—collapsing into depression or despair. Both make you feel more alive. Natural selection favored both for aiding group survival. Compassion and a sense of basic humanity strengthen social bonds at the center, making the group more cohesive and cooperative. The impulse for revenge serves as a deterrent to external threats.

Most people who suffer the loss of emotional bonds eventually choose compassion and basic humanity.

Some regard themselves as different from other people, in some sense misfits, and, in many cases, less than fully alive, much like the self-descriptions of jihadists and terrorists in Anne Speckhard’s stunning interviews. These are not psychopaths who never formed emotional bonds. These are the collateral damage of an increasingly resentful, angry, and cruelly narcissistic world.

The Culture of Emotional Violence

Due to the enormous power of emotional contagion, devaluing and disrespecting others prompts them to devalue and disrespect still others, who then are apt to devalue and disrespect others, in an ever-widening dynamic web of resentment. Those at highest risk, who feel the most wronged, become dangerous. We’ve created a culture of emotional violence wherein those who feel different can find meaning and purpose by opposing the basic humanity of everyone else. When people cannot feel more alive by connecting, protecting, appreciating, and improving, they feel more alive by destroying.

Emotional Pollution

The largely autopilot and indiscriminate transmission of defensive-aggressive emotions creates a kind of emotional pollution. The psychological equivalent to litter and secondary smoke, emotional pollution is the spread of defensive-aggressive emotions, in complete disregard of their adverse effects on others.

The most casual contact with emotional polluters—in person or on the Internet—can make you feel dismissed, ignored, defensive, impatient, sullen, or depressed, with little inkling of what's causing those feelings.

What A Perfect Storm Looks Like

Everyone who knew Rebecca believed she was a nice person—pleasant, mannered, and willing to give a hand to anyone who needed it. Earlier on this fated commute, she had stopped to pick up a stray dog running in the street near her daughter's school, amid the stress of Katia’s shouting about being late for homeroom.

Although she felt she could have handled her daughter's temper tantrum a little better, she never would have guessed how on edge she remained on the way home, when the driver in the black SUV tried to cut in front her from the left-hand merge lane. Like so many before him, he had sped by the line of cars inching forward in the heavy traffic—the same line in which Rebecca had plugged along for 15 minutes after dropping Katia at school.

Every morning there's someone like him, she thought, some jerk who can't wait in line like everybody else. She always let them in, but this time, it was the look on his face, like who the hell does she think she is, not to stop her stupid little car for him. She decided that she wasn't going to take it anymore. She hit the gas pedal just as he tried to cut in front of her. He jammed on his brakes, and she swerved into the lane to her right to avoid him, forcing the driver in the van in that lane to jam on her brakes.

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Mike, the driver of the black SUV, was still seething about how "stupid that woman was” to have risked an accident over a silly thing like a merge into heavy traffic. He couldn't believe that he had to put up with such nonsense, on top of dealing all morning with his teenage son, who had broken curfew the night before. Not to mention the fact that he was anticipating a hassle with the new kid on his sales force. He wasn't going to take any lip from this guy who had backed him into a corner by not turning in the paperwork for the few measly sales he made, after repeated warnings.

The young man Mike fired that morning stopped in a bar on his way home. He bristled about the humiliation he felt when Mike called security to have him escorted off the premises. He was only trying to stand up for himself and explain why he was late turning in the paperwork. The security guard was Mike's way of humiliating him.

He drank more at home that night, imagining that Mike was somewhere laughing at him. Yet, all his wife could do was nag him about getting another job right away and how she was afraid that they couldn't pay the bills. He slapped her as she persisted and, before the evening was over, brutally punched her in front of their young son.

This was a perfect storm of emotional pollution—people primed by a series of small responses that accumulate, until the players react badly and uncharacteristically. Rebecca was a client of mine, who related her part of the story to me that very day. A week later, Mike became a client, in part because he felt terrible having learned that the young man he fired beat up his wife that night. As fate would have it, the young man showed up a month later in a court-ordered domestic violence group I led in Maryland. None of them knew the others.

Although few of us are guilty of direct abuse of other people, and, for the most part, we try not to be rude to others, we all unwittingly contribute to rudeness, abuse, and violence by increasing the emotional pollution around us. We’re responsible for rude, abusive, and violent behavior to the extent that we increase the likelihood of it occurring, even though only those who enact the behavior are guilty of it.

In the extremely complex social structure of modern living, we cannot self-righteously condemn those who abuse without accepting responsibility for the fact that our own contributions to emotional pollution increase the likelihood that they will.

In the web of emotion, we either put out respect and positive regard or automatically download resentment.

Good/Evil

Human nature is such that we love our brothers and sisters and sometimes suffer at least a faint impulse to harm them. Shame about the latter makes the impulse more important and increases the likelihood of it emerging from the shadows into overt behavior. Only when we admit our capacity to do harm can we invest fully in our capacity to do good. We must be proud that the drive to love overrides the urge to harm, proud that the desire for good inhibits our capacity for evil.

The road to evil begins with failure to admit that we’re capable of doing harm, at least by contributing to emotional pollution. It progresses with failure to take pride in doing good.