We are inseparable from our environment, and we change with our surroundings whether we are aware of it or not. You are looking at a photo of some of the skulls of the approximately 800,000 Tutsis killed by their Hutu neighbors in the 1994 genocide. It is easy to pretend that the inner workings of the Hutus who did the killing are categorically different from our own. Else, how can we explain the way that so many people took to the streets with machetes, slaughtering their neighbors in several horrifying months?.
But the Hutus’ brains worked in the same way as ours. We all have the potential to dehumanize, to draw walls that divide each other into “us” versus “them,” and to see the “thems” as more homogenous, less susceptible to pain, or even to allow us to transform the “thems” in our minds into pseudo-species, using ideas of pollution, infection, and swarming — such attitudes can cultivate the very worst in human nature.
One of the ways ordinary humans absorb such ideas, of course, is through propaganda. In the days leading up to the Rwandan killings and after, the state-controlled radio station incessantly promoted messages that spoke of the threatening Tutsis who planned on destroying the Hutus. They referred to the Tutsis in dehumanizing terms, such as “cockroaches.” “Stamp out the cockroaches, save yourselves, kill the cockroaches,” quotes Robert Sapolsky. As he writes, “and with insular cortices ablaze, machetes in one hand and transistor radios in the other, most Hutus did”.
Source(s): Robert Sapolsky _Behave: the Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst_ (Penguin, 2017), pp. 572-573.
