The socially corrosive effects of fear and prejudice as public policy

Perhaps because of my early training in psychology and my exposure as a young adult to the graphic depiction of the Vietnam carnage, I developed a strong desire to understand how human beings arrive at the point where they can torture and kill one another. I have read fairly extensively - perhaps to the point of obsession - about torture and mass murder as instruments of political regimes, particularly in Nazi Germany.

Like those who lived through the horror of the Holocaust and its aftermath, I have asked how ordinary people could have become "Hitler's willing executioners", how doctors could have employed their skills to experiment on and kill disabled people, communists, homosexuals, gypsies and the Jewish people. How was it that so many could stand by as their Jewish neighbours were first branded and excluded from normal life, then herded into ghettoes and cattle trucks, and say that they did not know what was happening? How could so many otherwise unexceptional men become expert in torture and murder for tyrants like Stalin, Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot. How could they so completely deny their victims' humanity, slaughtering them with no more thought than they would give to swatting a fly?

The easy answers are that they were terrorised into complicity, or that they were somehow deranged or, even less satisfactorily, that they were simply evil. These glib assessments allow us to escape the uncomfortable conclusion - which I think is closer to the mark - that under certain conditions we may all be capable of brutality or, at least, indifference to it. Oppressive regimes could not operate without the "willing executioners", without technocrats to keep the wheels of the system turning or without the majority of the populace being willing to turn a blind eye to the disappearances and the brutality taking place around them.

The uncomfortable suspicion that any of us could be persuaded to deal with our fellow human beings as non-human is difficult to accept and many would want to exempt themselves from such a damning conclusion. Yet we know that, in the recent past, cultivated men and women were comfortable with owning, buying and selling other human beings. In our own history, Indigenous Australians were treated as less than human, murdered, mistreated and taken from their families. We know that, in living memory, many Germans voted for a man who made it clear that he regarded the Jews as a "problem" requiring a "solution". In Rwanda the bloodbath that erupted involved so much of the population that the idea of individual psychopathology simply will not do as an explanation. In Bosnia neighbours who had lived peaceably together slaughtered one another without apparent regret.

In all of these situations, and others like them, one of the factors contributing to the oppression and bloodletting is the continued depiction of the targets of brutality as non-human, as dangerous, as unworthy of being treated with respect and decency. Very often, this characterisation is the result of a very deliberate and carefully constructed propaganda campaign by political figures exploiting - indeed cultivating - primitive fears. At other times, it reflects the longer, slower process of the formation of prejudice. The most lethally effective of these campaigns feeds on ancient group prejudices.

There are many less spectacular, more mundane, examples of our all-too-human tendency to diminish the humanity of others; read the letters pages of most newspapers and sample popular talk back radio for a few examples. Hateful attitudes toward Indigenous people and Muslims abound, often with the predictable disclaimer - "I'm not a racist, but…."

Asylum seekers as "the other"

The last election in Australia was dominated by the dehumanisation of asylum seekers, by fear and xenophobia - the fear of strangers - and a rejection of "the other". While similar prejudices have attached to previous waves of migrants to our shores, the difference this time was that prejudice was officially sanctioned, indeed encouraged.

In the lead-up to the last election, we appeared to be operating in a moral vacuum when our political leaders were as one in refusing to allow a refugee holding a temporary protection visa permission to leave (and re-enter) Australia when he wished to do so in order to visit relatives in Indonesia who lost family members in the tragic sinking of a leaky vessel transporting asylum seekers to our shores (the SIEVX). Indeed the fate of the 352 people who perished when the vessel sank appeared to be a matter of almost supreme indifference to our leaders and most of our community. The lack of compassion was breathtaking.

This suggests that our moral compass is awry. Put simply, as Robert Coles does when discussing moral intelligence, "a moral person has room in his or her heart for others".

Recent events showed there is not much room in our hearts and that our policy on refugees does not have a strong moral basis. We live, increasingly, in a world in which we - and our children - are told that we should take care of ourselves first; a value system which lauds individual action at the expense of co-operation, which denigrates the compassionate as "do-gooders", "bleeding hearts" or, more recently as "elites" out of touch with the so-called "aspirational" class.

The community's response to events like the arrival of asylum seekers and their prolonged detention in appalling conditions shows that much prejudice remains among our people, although it is, most of the time, underground. It is usually expressed in indirect and subtle ways; it is encrypted. Such prejudice is, however, easily mobilised; it is very agile and can find many hooks on which to hang itself, no matter what the landscape. "Race" is one such hook, religion is another - both social constructs around which fear and prejudice can easily be mobilised and used for political purposes.

Much of the debate in Australia about the "asylum seekers", especially from those promoting exclusionary policies, has been designed to provoke a racially based, xenophobic response. Much of the argument to exclude refugees takes the form of a denial of moral responsibility; it ranges from indifference to focusing on formal equality, often ignoring the facts (for example, insisting that people should join an orderly queue to apply for passage to Australia when their circumstances preclude such action).

I agree with Paul Keating that we have moved from being on the brink of creating a tolerant, creative society in which xenophobia was on the wane to one in which "tolerance looks frailer and xenophobia more robust". As he also said in the third Manning Clark lecture in 2002: "this government [the Coalition] has consistently looked inward and backward" and its predominant theme is captured by its actions in closing borders and keeping people out. The emphasis is on exclusion rather than inclusion, on fear rather than hope.

In deliberately portraying asylum seekers as a threat, the Howard government has succeeded in gaining traction for the bizarre notion that desperate people in leaky boats were somehow a threat to our national security. He counted on being able to arouse our fear of being overwhelmed by strangers envious of our good fortune, to speak to our old dark fear of invasion. Perhaps our own deep knowledge that we are alien invaders who have stolen the land we occupy allows him to feed this anxiety.

As Anthony Burke pointed out in In Fear of Security, Australian political figures have often portrayed Australia as vulnerable to loss of sovereignty and have generated levels of fear and anxiety that are disproportionate to the actual threats. It is no accident that Ruddock chose to represent the arrival of an increased number of asylum seekers during 2001 as an "urgent threat to Australia's very integrity" and invoked the phrase "national emergency" to describe the increase in numbers. The government began with the assumption - no doubt carefully tested in publicly funded opinion polling - that to simply mention "illegal migrants" to some Australians would cause them to lose their grip on reality.

As Burke sees it, a community which sees itself in terms that emphasise threat and vulnerability "is always an exclusive one, bounded by a power which seeks to enforce sameness, repress diversity, and diminish the rights (and claims to being) of those who live outside its protective embrace".

Burke posits the question that I regard as the crucial battleground for the hearts and minds of the Australian people: "Whether an 'Australian' community would be thought of on the basis of a walled and insecure identity, or a generous and outward looking diversity?" Successive governments have often justified their actions by the "awful moral calculus", as Burke puts it, of defining our security in such a way that it justifies the massive insecurity and obliteration of others.

In all of his pronouncements about the need for Australians to attack Iraq, Howard returned again and again to the threats to our security, even invoking the Bali bombings, despite the absence of any convincing evidence that we were threatened by Iraq.

Ours is a time in which the politics of fear is in full flight, although it may be argued that exploitation of fear is the politicians' normal "stock in trade". But it seems that now, more than ever before, we are invited to feel insecure - worried about becoming victims of crime or disease, afraid of terrorist attacks and invasion by hoards of greedy strangers.

Those who raise these fears hope that, by concocting threats to our survival, by pushing the panic button, they can control us. Such appeals to fear are used simultaneously to justify restrictions on our civil liberties and the detention of persecuted asylum seekers. It reached its hilarious zenith in the "fridge magnets" mail out.

We're encouraged to believe "it's them or us." Such fear is functional. It is needed to justify such policies and distract from policy failures. And it's clear that fear always serves the real elites - as opposed to those concocted by the conservative commentators - the privileged who throughout history have claimed to be uniquely positioned to identify the "dangers" from which they must protect us; witches, Jews, blacks, Muslims, communists, terrorists, illegals.

Fear sells and it gets people elected.

Fear also sows mistrust in the community and reduces people's desire and ability to come together for constructive social change. How can we work together if we do not trust one another? If we come to trust the experts and mistrust our own judgments, we are less likely to see the point of being involved in political life. Those in a high state of impotent anxiety are likely to feel overwhelmed and withdraw into their private worlds. As many authoritarian leaders have well understood, a populace is best controlled when it's afraid - controlled and diverted.

Without a moral dimension to public policy, we are all vulnerable to appeals to self-interest over co-operation and hostility over empathy. And we know from history the consequences of such deterioration in civic life.