Category: Uncategorized

Pegean says, “Please say no.”

Originally published on Engaging Peace, Inc, June 29, 2019. More relevant than ever.

by Ian Hansen, PhD

Sibling Values Drawn into Psychopathic Civil War

In the 20^th and now 21^st centuries, human beings have done grievous violence to each other largely on the pretense of defending some beloved ideology or other from others’ atrocities .  The nodal points around which most 20^th and 21^st century ideologies gather are 1) divinely-ordered sublimity in a spirit of bounded fraternity (2) liberty-protecting electoral democracy, or (3) communism/socialism (note: the three ideology nodes are not necessarily listed in order of associated carnage magnitude).  In the inventory of popular human values compiled by cross-cultural psychologist Shalom Shwartz, these ideology nodes reflect, respectively, value commitments to:

(1) a combination of “Benevolence”, “Tradition” and “Conformity” values, which capture the embrace of what could be a called a “religious”, or at least tribal-communal, life;

(2) “Self-Direction”, which emphasizes personal liberty; and

(3) “Universalism”, which emphasizes peace, equality, and unity with nature.

Schwartz identifies these values as part of a circumplex of human values.  Interestingly, all three value regions are adjacent to each other on Schwartz’s data-derived circumplex. This suggests that those who embrace one value are somewhat likely to embrace the others also, all else being equal. Interestingly, two of the values most opposed to this tripartite cluster of values are “Hedonism” and “Power”, which are also the values most enthusiastically embraced by subclinical psychopaths.  And it does appear that powerful psychopaths have managed to have some perverse fun over the centuries playing horrifically with ordinary people’s values.

Over the last hundred years specifically, psychopathic systems of militarism and war have pitted against each other the sibling values of liberty, equality and sublimity/fraternity—and millions of flesh-and-blood humans too.  The military atrocities that salient advocates of these value systems have committed have stained all of these values with blood, oppression and genocide.  Yet each of these values has also had a chance to embody its promise in various ways.  The state of Kerala illustrates why all of these ideologies—stripped of their violent hatred for the others—might be worth working for, even worth dying for.  It also illustrates why none are worth killing for—certainly not worth genocidal extermination of the other ideologies.

If your interest is now piqued, you can read more of my clearly opinionated, and off-narrative, but nevertheless empirically-informed musings on Kerala here.  Whether you dig deeper into this inquiry or not, here’s wishing you some peace, for real.