Just defining people as “them” results in devaluating them.46 Conversely, devaluation makes it more likely that a person is seen as belonging to an outgroup. Distinctions in race, religion, status, wealth, power, and political views are the main sources of ingroup-outgroup differentiations. They produce stable devaluations: of slaves by slave owners, of the uneducated by the educated.
Sometimes the ingroup devalues most strongly another group that is highly similar: this serves to protect the identity, integrity, and purity of the ingroup. The communist hatred of “revisionist” social democrats was often greater than their hatred for capitalist enemies. Small differences in dogma often resulted in the persecution of religious heretics. The intense anti-Semitism of the early church fathers probably served their need to create an independent identity for Christianity.
How a culture or society shapes its members’ evaluation of other people is profoundly important. We rarely harm people we greatly value. When members of an outgroup are highly valued, they are probably regarded as being in a more fundamental sense members of the ingroup. For example, we recognize our shared humanity with the Polish people. We admire their bravery in creating the Solidarity movement and see them as similar to us in their desire for freedom.
Devaluation makes mistreatment likely. In one experiment each participant was to be a teacher and administer electric shocks to a learner who made mistakes on a task. When teachers “overheard” a conversation in which the learner was described as one of a rotten bunch of people, they administered much stronger electric shocks. Learners described positively received the weakest shocks.47 Derogatory labels are often used to create antagonism and prepare people for action against an outgroup. One writer described the psychological conditions for guilt-free massacre in the following way:
The most general condition for guilt-free massacre is the denial of humanity to the victim. You call the victims names like gooks, dinks, niggers, pinkos, and japs. The more you can get high officials in government to use these names and others like yellow dwarfs with daggers and rotten apples, the more your success. In addition you allow no human contact. You prevent travel or you oversee the nature of contact where travel is allowed. You prevent citizens from going to places like China, Cuba, and North Vietnam, so that men cannot confront other men. Or on the homefront, if contact is allowed, or if it cannot be prevented, you indicate that the contact is not between equals; you talk about the disadvantaged, the deprived.48
Societies differ in their tendency to devalue outgroups. These devaluations may be present in stereotypes or negative images of a group in literature, art, folklore, theater, television, and shared beliefs. They can also be expressed in discriminatory social institutions. In general, the Nazis were able to kill more Jews in those countries where anti-Semitism and discrimination against Jews were already strong.49 This was especially the case in countries allied to but not occupied by the Germans. In countries where Jews were less the objects of social differentiation, the government was less likely to hand over the Jewish population to the Nazis.
Sometimes enemy groups are selected or “created” by an emerging ideology, usually on the basis of cultural devaluation, societal rifts, or real conflict. In Argentina an anticommunist ideology was used to define people with liberal views and “leftist” connections as the enemy. In Cambodia their ideology led the Khmer Rouge to kill, starve, or work to death as many as two million people who were thought either opposed to or incapable of a new way of life. What happened in these cases was a result of real conflicts of interest and violent confrontation, speedily emerging devaluation, and overgeneralization in which the definition of the enemy was extended to include large groups of people.
Sometimes a group is identified for the purpose of assigning blame to it. Consider the ill-defined “secular humanists,” who have been the object of attack by the Moral Majority and other fundamentalists since the 1970s. As Leo Wine of Oregon said in a series of radio programs on humanism:
Why are the humanists promoting sexual perversion? Because they want to create such an obsession with sex among our young people that they will have no time or interest for spiritual pursuits.... So what do we have? Humanist obsessions: sex, pornography, marijuana, drugs, self-indulgence, rights without responsibility.
Humanists control America. America is supposed to be a free country, but are we really free?.. .Now the humanist organizations – ACLU, AHA (American Humanist Association) – control the television, the radio, the newspapers, the Hollywood movies, magazines, porno magazines, and the unions, the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation... .They, 275,000 humanists, have infiltrated until every department of our country is controlled by the humanists.
Humanists will continue leading us toward the chaos of the French Revolution. After all, it is the same philosophy that destroyed France and paved the way for the dictator Napoleon Bonaparte. This time the humanists hope to name their own dictator who will create out of the ashes of our pro-moral republic a humanist Utopia, an atheistic, socialistic, amoral humanist society for America and the rest of the world. In fact, their goal is to accomplish that takeover by or before the year 2,000.5°
Changes in American values and ways of life are a source of confusion and threat to many people. An ancient way of coping with such threat is to find or create a group to blame. Wine’s language is like the language Nazis applied to Jews. The Nazis found the Jews; the Moral Majority has created the conspiratorial “secular humanists,” the enemy within, the source of corruption.
When people are devalued, they may be seen as objects rather than human beings with feelings and suffering like our own. As we shall see, certain culturally accepted ways of raising children diminish their awareness of their own human frailty and therefore make them less likely to
