There's a scary tendency you find in human societies. You find it across nations, across cultures,

religions, centuries, social classes. It may have its roots in our primate ancestors, something we see

today in chimpanzees called coalitionary aggression. Anthropologist Renee Gerard explored it

in something called memetic theory

or the scapegoating mechanism.

It's this tendency of human beings

who form groups to then divide their in-group,

to find some minority within their in-group that the majority then begins

to bully or pester or pick on or insult or marginalize.

What tends to happen is the majority calls itself clean and this minority they call unclean.

The majority is acceptable. The majority is normal and the minority is queer or odd or different or some other epithet. The majority eventually creates a kind of coalitionary

aggression against the minority. And in so doing, they make themselves feel good, they make

themselves feel superior, they make themselves feel clean and righteous.

And they unite themselves because now they've created a common enemy close at hand.

Two quick examples from American history. While white Americans were maintaining the segregated south

and maintaining a segregated north, too,

they were not preoccupied with facing their own racial problems.

Instead, they were engaging in prohibition where alcohol was seen as the great enemy and alcoholics were the big problem.

And they were engaged in a long struggle against evolution.

This, by the way, is not only the period of maintaining the Jim Crow South,

but it was a period during which horrible atrocities were being done to Native Americans.

And it's as if it's almost a method of distraction to distract ourselves and others from these

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