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Let's refrain from dehumanizing our opponents, lest we dehumanize ourselves in the process [1]

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Date: 2023-01-10  

I don’t know how many people have noticed, but there has been a groundswell lately of users who want to be able to use a certain slur against MAGA true believers. It’s a common enough word, because its homonym is that of an everyday grub, the maggot.

No one wants to talk about maggots, because we associate them with filth and disgust. We don’t treat them like ancient Egyptians treated scarabs, for example. No, we look at or think about maggots and we associate them with rotting flesh, dead things, decay.

There’s an injunction here against the use of that word with regards to our political environment, and some folks here have bucked against this. Personally, I’ve encountered it four times within just the past week, and to me that’s honestly alarming. What is driving the need to say that word? And why here, when it has been added to the Rules of the Road to refrain from using it? Is it a territorial thing? I really want to know.

What burning desire has got hold of the tongue to make it want to form that word? What is the thrill? What’s getting satisfied here?

Neuropsychologist Kathleen Taylor, author of Cruelty, speaks to why this use of language is so pernicious:

(cued to 3:18)

When you get that kind of spiraling Otherization, what happens is that the people in the in-group start viewing the people in the out-group differently. You don’t get the same brain activity as you did when there were, when you’re for example talking to an in-group member. It’s almost as if they are processing the out-group member as if they are less human. If you use—if you look at the language that people use about hostile out-group members, they they talk about them metaphorically as beasts or animals. They talk about them metaphorically as cancers or diseases, infections, swarms, insects. You get a whole set of language that is very, very hostile that is depicting these people.

She goes on to describe how people who respond to this language can internalize it to an extreme. This can happen, no matter which point on the political spectrum one might land. It’s about what that language engenders. It leads to bad outcomes. It’s precisely what we’ve been shouting to the rooftops about what the MAGA types and QAnoners, the ethnic extremists and flat-out white supremacists, bigots of all stripes, have been doing. They’ve been ramping up their rhetoric for years. It is not a betterment for those of us who oppose them to use that language, too.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/10/2146471/-Let-s-refrain-from-dehumanizing-our-opponents-lest-we-dehumanize-ourselves-in-the-process

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