"To Persevere in Nonviolence of Tongue and Heart" by Gerard A. Vanderhaar One of the most common psychological mechanisms people have is to project an unpleasant characteristic onto others and then dislike them because of the characteristic. We often do this when we are unable to come to terms with some weakness in ourselves. If I am greedy, I can keep an eagle eye out for hints of avarice in others, and despise them for it. If I tend to be aggressive, I can magnify signs of menacing behavior in others, then denounce them for the cruelty I can't face in myself. If I'm ashamed of my sexuality, I can point to homosexuals or prostitutes, and feel clean when I consider them sinners. We all have faults we don't like, that we have a hard time ac- cepting. The psychologist Carl Jung called this part of us our "Shadow." It's not easy to feel comfortable with all our warts and wrongdoings. Sometimes I don't even acknowledge these failings in myself. I repress them. I deny that I have them. But they pressure me, make me uneasy. I can alleviate the anxiety by perceiving these same flaws in others, and looking down on them for it. If I'm a poor workman, I blame my tools. Our crowd may want to control the neighborhood or dominate the world. Our side may have been guilty of wanton cruelty in the past, but instead of facing it and exorcizing it from our lives, we accuse the adversary of the very behavior we dislike in ourselves. In Jung's words, "It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about him- self by foisting in off on somebody else." The Catholic monk Thomas Merton described the projection process as a way of dealing with a sense of sin: "We tend unconsciously to ease our- selves ... of the burden of guilt that is in us, by passing it on to some- body else .... The temptation is, then, to account for my fault by seeing an equivalent amount of evil in someone else. Hence I minimize my own sins and compensate for doing so by exaggerating the faults of others." The original scapegoat ceremony described in the Bible involved the transferral of sins to an animal. "He (Aaron) is to lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites -- all their sins -- and put them on the goat's head. He shall send the goat away into the desert ... The goat will carry on itself all their sins' (Leviticus 16:21-22). The ritual's purpose was to lighten the load of guilt the people carried, and so relieve their fear of God's punishment. It works. Scapegoating is not the best way to face life. But it's a pattern most people fall in to fairly frequently, because it's a remark- ably effective short term remedy for anxiety. In the words of psychologist Robert Coles, "We crave scapegoats, targets to absorb our self-doubts, our feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness." It works so well that it almost seems to be a natural process. According to psychoanalyst Ireal Charny, "Knowing how to select a scapegoat and how to unload our feared weaknesses onto another seems rooted in our very being." During the Vietnam War, American officials frequently engaged in scape- goating by alluding to the bloodbath the enemy would cause if they gained control of that country. President Nixon said at a press conference, "If we withdraw from Vietnam and allow the enemy to come into Vietnam and mas- sacre the civilians there by the millions, as they would -- if we do that, let me say that America is finished insofar as being the peacekeeper in the Asian world is concerned." When he said that the enemy would massacre millions, he was reflecting the view of a majority of Americans who would rather think the worst of the other side than come to grips with slaughters perpetrated by US forces, as at My Lai. And so we bombed those enemies heavily, and the fought back fiercely, "proving" that they were as bad as our leaders said they were. Scapegoating is also the effect of another anxiety-reducing device known as displacement -- transferring an emotion from its authentic ob- ject to a substitute. When a business executive, angry from an early- morning argument at home, lashes out at the office staff, the executive is shifting the anger from the spouse or children or whever was involved in the domestic unpleasantness to another, more easily available target, the people at work. "What did we do to deserve this?" Nothing, of course. They have become scapegoats. When things are going badly, it's fairly easy to find targets for blame. Many Germans in the 1920's, upset over their deteriorating econ- omy, and chafing over the huge reparations they had to pay after the First World War, accused communists -- and later Jews -- for causing their troubles. Some scapegoats do in fact have the qualities being projected on them. At times people are greedy, or cruel, or lustful. The office staff does make mistakes. But this is not the decisive factor in the projection. It's a bonus that makes the scapegoater feel even better. "I came to the office on prowl today, ready for a fight. When I found some of my people slacking off, wasting time, I really let them have it." If we want to know that we are projecting rather than reacting, we have clues that can help. When we concentrate exclusively on the unpleasant traits in others without acknowledging failures in ourselves, we are pro- jecting. The self-righteous American Firster constantly denouncing com- munist aggression, is projecting. Or when we use the undesirable actions of others as an excuse for similar actions ourselves, we are projecting. This doesn't mean that offensive behavior out there is purely imaginary, but it does mean the projector's response is dictated more by inner emo- tional imbalance than by the perceived irregularities. Unfamiliar people are natural targets for projection and displacement. Hostility toward strangers is an ancient phenomenon. It's sometimes called fear of the unknown. We easily imagine unpleasant characteristics in people we don't know anything about. When strangers speak a foreign language, wear odd clothes, have a strikingly different appearance, our first reaction is to think of them as inferior. "They don't do things the way we do, so they're not as good as we are." And if they're not as good as we are, they might be dangerous. Into the tiny Alpine village strides a tall, bearded man, clad in sheepskin, armed with a walking staff, a knife in his belt. He stops in the town square and looks around. The villagers peer out their windows cautiously. Nobody knows him. Some think he's a menace. "Hide the women and the children." Some think he is a robber. "Bar the doors." They have nothing to go on; they've never seen him before. The truth of the matter is that he's a decent family man who has been lost in the mountains for months after straying from his hunting party. All he wants to do is find his way back home. He's looking for help. But the villagers don't know this. They don't ask him why he's here. Nothing interferes with their suspicions. Small signs of danger on the stranger's part--a dark look, a sudden move, a hand to his knife--give grounds for their fear. The stranger's suspected hostility may well turn out to be real. Perceiving the cautious quiet, the negative atmosphere of the village, he feels threatened. "Obviously the folks here are pretty nasty. I'd bet- ter get out fast." He starts to run, brushing aside a child who has wan- dered into the street. "Look, he hit that little girl. He really is dan- gerous. Come on, everybody. Let's get him." They treat him like an enemy, and he becomes one. He fights back, hurting some of them with his staff before escaping into the hills. Many a shipload of European explorers landed on shores in the Amer- icas to find bronze skinned natives standing silently, staring inscrutably. The projected on these strange looking inhabitants the exploitative aggres- siveness they had themselves. At the slightest sign of hostility they began to attack with swords and muskets, preventive strike. In retali- ation, and in their own self protective desire to push the foreigners back into the sea, many native peoples became real enemies. The European scapegoater felt vindicated. "These savages are just as bad as we expec- ted." It's easy for me to be hostile to a particular stranger when others around me are thinking the same way. Everybody on the ship knows that European Christians are superior the the New World heathens. All my neighbors are talking about Jewish bankers bleeding our Fatherland. The people I talk to all agree that the communists will cause a bloodbath in Vietnam. When reality-testing contact with strangers is limited or non-exis- tant, our projections can go unchallenged. For years after the creation of the state of Israel, the image of Israelis shared by most Egyptians was of predatory, land-grabbing foreigners. There had been no diplomatic relations, no travel between the countries, no person-to-person contact except on the battlefield. Shortly after tensions were relaxed following the 1979 Camp David accords, a planeload of Israeli reporters landed in Cairo. The Egyptians were pleasantly surprised to see that the press representatives were decent, enthusiastic people. Their image of Israelis, reinforced by decades of isolation, gave way to an accurate assessment of the human qualities of their former enemies. When I'm overly suspicious of people, doubt their integrity, believe without evidence that they're out to get me, I'm indulging in enemy think- ing. Enemy thinking happens when I'm quick to fasten upon sights, when I interpret a careless remark as a personal affront. I'm doing enemy thin- king when I attribute disreputable motives to people whose actions I disapprove. A neighbor builds a fence. "They want to keep us out." That's enemy thinking, if what they really want to do is keep their dogs in. Enemy thinking also occurs when I'm so totally sure of the right- ness of my position that I know that those who oppose it are wrong. I don't have to wonder about their motives, because I see what they're doing. If I come home in the middle of the day and find an old pickup truck in my driveway half full of my furniture, my immediate thought is that those two men I see inside my house is robbing me. They may be, but first I'd better make sure that I'm not conjuring up something on my own. Maybe those two men really are stealing my furn- iture. But before I go in with guns blazing, I would be better advised to enlist the help of the local police to check out the remote possibil- ity that they are hired movers who have entered the wrong house by mis- take. Enemy thinking is an important factor in enemy making. It can lead me to take ill-advised steps, setting off the now familiar dynamics of provocation and defensive aggression. The carloads of teenagers who congregate at night in the church parking lot across the street may be planning to terrorize the neighborhood. Or I may be engaging in enemy thinking. If I get several large friends with shotguns and growling dogs to clear them out, I may be creating the very enemies I had hoped to eliminate. Stereotyping is another form of enemy thinking. We do this when we attribute to all people in a particular category the unpleasant characteristics that may exist in a few. "Poor people are lazy." "The rich are greedy." "Blacks are violent." "Whites are racist." Stereo- typing follows the same pattern as hostility to strangers. It's socially reinforced. It can also easily go unchallenged because we tend not to associate with people we've adversely characterized. When I recognize that I am engaging in enemy thinking, I can handle the situation better, I can defuse it before the other side picks up on what's happening. And I'm better prepared to handle the enemy thinking others might be doing about me. I should be able to cope with their hostile behavior more realistically and not automatically restort to defensive countermeasures. But if neither of us realizes that enemy thinking is going on, the hostility invariably escalates. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Gerard A. Vanderhaar is on the faculty of Christian Brothers College, Memphis, TN. This article was excerpted (placed in the booklet _A_New_ Moment:__An_Invitation_to_Nonviolence_, by Pax Christi USA) with permission, from _Enemies_and_How_To_Love_Them_, copyright 1985 by Gerard A Vanderhaar (paper, 144 pages) published by Twenty-Third Pub- lications, Mystic, CT 06355. Further Reproduction, without permission, is prohibited.