Category: Blog

One of the reasons addressing harm is so difficult, at least in my corner of the United States, is that the frameworks I grew up with for addressing harm fail both parts of what I call the “Doctrine of Limited Consequences.” This states:

“It is important for people to experience the consequences of their actions, AND those consequences have limits.”

It is true that human beings learn from experiencing the consequences of their actions. We try something, look around at the reaction we get, and decide based on that whether to do it again. This isn’t a perfect process. Feedback is often inconsistent, someone may not have the ability to act differently, it make take time to break or develop a habit, etc. But feedback, both social and by observing the physical consequences of our decisions, is one of the main mechanisms by which human beings learn. This is most obvious in children, who are busy learning that being mean to someone results in them not want to play with you (a natural consequence) or that trying to paint the cat results in having to clean the living room (a logical consequence) and scratches (a natural consequence) or that being kind to others results in smiles and praise that feel good (a natural consequence).

What often gets lost in discussion of consequences, however, is that there are and should be limits. No matter how rebellious a teenager is, dying in a car crash is not an appropriate consequence. There are certain outcomes that no one deserves and that everyone should be protected from regardless of what they have done. This includes death, permanent injury, lack of basic necessities, denial of medical care, unwanted sexual contact, etc. These things may well happen – we live in an imperfect world – but they are never deserved, and when they happen it is a failure on the part of society that we were unable to prevent it. Visually, we can think of those limits like this:

There may be disagreement on where exactly those limits are and what should and should not out of bounds, but in a healthy society some sort of limits should exist, and they should be consistent for everyone.

Unfortunately, the United States exists in the context of hundreds of years of determined effort to create and justify highly exploitative systems. Whether in the context of slavery or factory work or mining or prison labor, humans have created powerful stories and rationalizations for why it’s okay to break and use up the bodies of their fellow human beings in order to allow a few people to hoard wealth and power. A powerful tool in this attempt has been narratives about “deservingness.” Often based on race, gender, ability, “deviance,” or criminality, these narratives divide a common humanity into one group for whom there are no boundaries on what negative consequences can be justified and another group for whom the range of negative consequences that can be “deserved” is almost nonexistent. 

This is often most visible in the context of race. In policy debates, once basic necessities like housing, food, healthcare, not being shot, or not being kidnapped become racialized, they cease to be human rights and become conditional. It is considered “within bounds” to take them away if those receiving them are “lazy,” “criminal,” imperfect, or insufficiently grateful and deferential. In contrast, the window of acceptable social consequences for someone who is perpetuating a racial harm is often extremely narrow. Even as minimal of a consequence as the person being harmed failing to provide affirmation to the person who is actively harming them is commonly considered out of bounds. The controversy surrounding Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel for the national anthem in order to draw attention to police violence is instructive. For many white people, a silent, public expression of grief that made them uncomfortable was out of bounds. Black people being killed by the police was not.

This pattern is hardly surprising given that much of the narrative about who deserves what developed specifically in order to justify vastly different treatment of slaves versus their masters. Setting different boundaries for what is “beyond the pale” creates a mechanism that gives a veneer of equality and justice to situations that are, at there core, unjust. After all, if you transgress against me in a way that violates the boundary of what I could possibly deserve, then surely it is my right to retaliate? I will even show restraint and stay with in the boundary of what someone like you could deserve. But if a transgression against me means “someone talked back to me” and nothing up to and including cutting off your hand counts as a transgression against you, then the result is terrible.

Slavery is an extreme example, but versions of this bifurcation occur regularly. The key is to watch for imbalances in terms of which harms are taken seriously and/or seen as deserved, and under what conditions those imbalances occur. The discussion above gave an example specific to one dimension of identity, but exploitative systems are not a layer cake with a single group on top and a single group on the bottom. Rather, they are flexible pyramids whose purpose is to concentrate as much wealth as possible in the hands of as few people as can be gotten away with without the whole thing becoming unstable. The more different ways there are to create hierarchy in terms of who is said to deserve what (race, gender, caste, merit, criminality, deviance, immaturity, etc.), the more likely it is that any given person will be tempted to wield one of those divisions against their fellows and, in doing so, will reinforce the system that traps everyone.

On a micro scale, this phenomenon has significant implications for attempts to implement negative consequences as a way respond to harm. The key feature of the boundary between which consequences can be deserved and which cannot is a deep seated psychological feeling of injustice when that boundary is crossed. The closer a potentially deserved consequence gets to this line, the more concern and hesitation there will be about implementing it, and the more safeguards will get put in place to make sure it only happens to someone who “really deserves it.” Think about a consequence like imprisonment. Sending someone to prison who didn’t deserve it is widely recognized as a grave injustice because of the harm it causes, and the U.S. justice system is set up to put the bulk of its time and effort into attempting to determine whether the person accused is “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” before imprisoning them. This slows down the speed of implementing consequences and reduces the likelihood that they will be implemented at all. The risk of doing unjustified harm rises with the severity of the consequence, so how certain one needs to be before bringing down the hammer rises as well.

What this means is that increasing the severity of consequences may make it less likely that those with higher social status get held accountable at all. As the severity of the consequence moves closer to the boundary of what is considered to be never deserved, there will be greater and greater hesitation to pull the trigger, and it is more likely that it won’t happen. To the extent that imposing a severe consequence is held up as the only just or righteous option if a harm has been committed, people who are unwilling to implement that consequence commonly resolve their cognitive dissonance by refusing to acknowledge that a harm occurred at all. This is incredibly frustrating for the people being harmed, as often what they need does not require the perpetrator to be hurt. They simply want the harm to stop. Yet even simple acknowledgement and a willingness to try to help figure out what can be done is too often blocked by fear that taking that first step will inevitably lead to a place that the person who could intervene refuses to go. In this way, increasing the severity of consequences can shield more people by pushing the only “thing that can be done” far enough out that be will refuse to use it on them.

Paradoxically, being able to intervene effectively when harm is being done sometimes requires not harsher consequences, but rather doubling down on minor ones. The smaller and more robust to error a consequence is, the more likely it is that the right people will feel comfortable enough to repeat it consistently often enough for it to get through. A person’s friend doesn’t need to have everything figured out and get on a moral high horse to greet a disturbing comment with, “wait, could you repeat that?” or any of the numerous phrases lifted up in bystander training. A kid who tries out being mean only to be met with an expression of minor disapproval from every single friend they try it out on stops the behavior very quickly. Consequences do not need to be large to have an impact. In fact, most of our learning takes place via attending to and responding to small pieces of feedback and minor consequences. The key is consistency and that the consequences are delivered by the right people.

The challenge comes when the window of acceptable consequences has closed so much that even minor expressions of disapproval is beyond the pale. When this is the case, the first key step is to start by norming around the fact that deserved consequences do exist. That when I say something hurtful, someone else saying “that was hurtful” is an appropriate consequence that does not deserve retaliation. Similarly, finding out that someone has a lower opinion of me than I do of myself is an interaction of my behavior and whatever’s going on with them, and I don’t have a right to their good opinion. Being called racist, whether the person is correct or not, is not a violation of human rights. 
There is undeniable complexity in sorting out what true fairness looks like, complexity that is amplified by the way that the impact of an action changes based on how often it repeats and how many people do it. Furthermore, the process of negotiating boundaries on how it is acceptable to treat each other and how it is not is often weaponized to close off any possibility of higher status people getting feedback and to shift the burden of dealing with the fallout of bad behavior onto people lower down in the social hierarchy. Sorting these things out certainly requires people to attend to the ways that boundary setting has been weaponized, but it is very much possible to do, at least as long as people bring their social brains to the task. And when we choose to do so, we do our part to create a world where we don’t have to twist ourselves into knots to justify the unjustifiable. We heal ourselves into a world where we can connect as human beings without being warped by systems of exploitation. We work toward a world where everyone can thrive.

One of the most awesome things about being human is that we have really incredible brains. At our best, we have tremendous capacity to organize complex social networks that coordinate thousands of people. We can do everything from feeding people on the other side of the globe, to peering into the depths of the atom, to air lifting a child across a continent for medical care. We feel empathy for each other, take each other’s perspectives, find creative ways to get win-win solutions, solve staggeringly complex problems, learn from each other, and feel good about helping each other. All these together are what I’m going to call our “Social Brain,” the set of capabilities that let us create and effectively manage very complex social interactions.

But while our social brains are powerful, our ability to access them is very fragile. Thinking deliberately about anything is incredibly slow and energy intensive. Brains are about 2% of our bodyweight, but they suck down about 20% of our calories to power them. And they’re terrible at multi-tasking.

So what human beings have evolved to do is take as much as possible in our daily lives and make it so we don’t have to think about it. And we do a pretty good job. If you think of situations where you’ve been exhausted or distracted by paying attention to too many things at once, you’ve noticed that you maintain the ability to do many things without thinking about them, like navigate your commute home or make dinner or ask your partner how their day was for a lot longer than you can do complex problem solving or learn new information or fully empathize with someone you’re listening to. This is because our brain has a backup system. If you’ve read Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, this is his “System 1” versus “System 2,” but it basically means that when we do the same thing repeatedly, the more automatic it becomes, the less conscious of it we become, and the less brain power it takes. This means that as we get tired and our cognitive resources decline, we can maintain access to behaviors that have become automatic for much longer than we can access those that have not. This is true whether the draining of resources comes from exhaustion, distraction, grief, aging, or whatever source.

In a way, you can think of this as the brain putting up one of those automated phone message systems. “Hello, So-and-So’s brain is not available right now. Please press 1 to walk home on autopilot. Please press 2 for, ‘I’m fine, how are you?’” And so on. 

What people don’t realize is that something very similar happens when we feel like we’re under threat. This may be a physical threat, but it can also be a threat to our social status or our view of ourselves as a good person or anything else that’s important to us. What matters is that, rightly or wrongly, the part of our brain responsible for recognizing threat activates. When this happens, our body diverts energy away from organs like the stomach and the brain toward the heart and lungs and muscles to prepare us for immediate physical action, often referred to as fight or flight. Physically, this feels very different from being exhausted because it results in a heightened state of alertness and a rush of energy to the muscles. But for the brain whose energy is being diverted, it results in a similar loss of access to the energy our more intensive thinking processes need in order to function. Our social brain peaces out, and what we have left is the set of menu options in our message system that we’ve earmarked as being relevant to dealing with threats, what I call our “Survival Brain.”

What these menu options are will vary based on what individuals have practiced and the reception different menu options have gotten in the past. Strategies like fight, flight, and freeze are very simple and will tend to show up, though different people will have learned to gravitate more toward different ones. However, people can and do learn responses that are more subtle or more complex. Giving in and going along (known as a “fawn” or “appease” response) can be just as much of a reflexive, unthinking reaction as the more obvious fight or flight responses, but is often harder to spot. There are also more complex behaviors, like doing CPR, that can be “installed” with enough practice. The key is that when our more complex thought processes are out to lunch, our message system has access only to what has been pre-programmed into automaticity. We lose access to much of our memory, in particular our access to new skills that are not yet automatic. We have enormous difficulty learning, taking other people’s perspectives, being curious, being creative, thinking through problems, etc.

Dropping into our survival brain also changes our ability to perceive and interact with new information. One of the most defining characteristics of survival brain is tunnel vision, a hyperfocus on perceived threats and loss of peripheral awareness. This is accompanied by a sense of urgency and a catastrophizing sense that the stakes are life or death (even when they’re not). Our ability to accurately perceive what’s going on plummets as our brains start making split second decisions about what’s a threat. And the brain tends to classify any ambiguous situations as threats rather than taking the time to think them through just to be sure not to miss any danger. We end up like one of those voice based automated phone systems that is totally wrong about what it thinks you’re trying to say, but keeps jumping reflexively from menu option to menu option anyway.

Implications for working in groups

All of this has significant implications for anyone working in a group. The first thing to recognize is that just because you are talking to the same physical person does not mean you are always talking to their same brain. It can be incredibly disconcerting to get to know someone, to consider them a friend, and then to suddenly be confronted with someone going off on you about an incident they wildly misinterpreted and refusing to listen to word you say. Organizations can and do split over such incidents. What’s critical to realize is that when you are talking to someone’s message system/survival brain, you are not interacting with the creative and compassionate friend you know. Instead, you’re essentially talking to a recording of them. There is no point in arguing, because they cannot take in new information. Your only goal is to push the right sequence of buttons to get through to a live human being. This can involve having internalized a shared language that helps people come back to themselves. It can be any physical action, like taking a deep breath or looking at things behind oneself, that are not natural to do in a life-and-death situation and tell the threat sensing part of the brain that the danger is over. It can be taking a half-hour break to exercise and let the adrenaline fade. But whatever the problem is, it will be much more solvable when everyone is back in their social brain. And while people are still responsible for their actions regardless of what brain they’re in, recognizing when someone else is in their survival brain can make it easier to take what they say less personally. The job of the survival brain is to latch onto whatever sources of power it can to make a perceived threat go away right now, regardless of the damage that does. People often feel differently, or at least have a much more nuanced take, after they come back to themselves.

A word of caution, however, about weaponizing the distinction between survival and social brains. Everyone drops into their survival brain, sometimes multiple times a day. It shows up whenever you find yourself reflexively responding to a perceived threat, whether writing back a nasty email to someone who criticized your work (fight), whether it’s avoiding conflict with a friend (flight), or keeping your head down during a tense meeting (freeze). We can choose to compassionately support each other to come back to ourselves, but we can also choose to add “You’re in your survival brain, so I don’t have to listen to you!” to our list of verbal weapons to whip out in an argument. Needless to say, one of these is helpful, and the other is not. What we can do is use our own calm, relaxed nervous system to help draw the people we’re talking to to match the brain we’re in. 

We can also train ourselves to have better menu options when we do get our social brains knocked off line, ones that are less destructive and that encourage us to slow down, take a breath, and get help to come back to ourselves. The key is to recognize that programming a new menu option is not at all like the cognitive learning most of us associate with school. What we pack into our memory does little good when our memory itself is not accessible. Instead, it is much more akin to the physical learning that we do when learning to ride a bike or play an instrument. It is repetition of tiny and simple pieces of actions until they have sunk in so deeply that they are automatic. It is very much possible to create new menu options for the survival brain, but it can be disconcertingly slow and fumbling.

Implications for safety and accountability 

Understanding the survival brain also has significant implications for how we think about safety and accountability. In the U.S., the default response to harm is try to “teach the person a lesson” by implementing unpleasant consequences in hopes that it will deter them from doing it again. To the extent that this works, it works only when people are in their thinking, social brain. The survival brain is not aware of anything beyond the immediate threat. One of the biggest dangers in crisis situations near roadways is actually that people will step into oncoming traffic without looking, not because they don’t care about the consequences, but because the survival brain can’t process the very idea of consequences even when they are as immediate and devastating as getting hit by a car. Being deterred by fear of longer term consequences isn’t something the survival brain can even engage with.

What does work are things more along these lines: keeping/getting people out of their survival brain, retraining what is in the survival brain’s message system, distracting the person or otherwise diverting them from the situation, some sort of new stimuli that jolts them to a different and less destructive message option in their survival brain, or (more risky) physically blocking the harm. All of these have a substantial community component, since it is extremely difficult for someone who’s operating on reflex to do any of these things. The goal for all these interventions, however, is the same as in the preceding section: push the right sequence of buttons to get through to a real, live person – or at a minimum a less damaging survival brain response. 

Once people are out of their survival brain and stabilized in their social brain, the immediate danger is generally over. The need then is to change the environment to reduce the prevalence of triggers that will knock someone back into their fight response (e.g. letting people know ahead of time if something is coming so they’re not caught off guard) and also to practice a different survival brain response than the one prone to cause harm (e.g. call a friend to come mediate a conflict if you know you’ll get into a fight if you try to handle it yourself). These are very doable, but they are interventions that work on building specific skills in the person and their community, not assuming that the just need to be motivated to try harder.

This is not to say no harm comes from people who are in their social brain. Property crimes do show a deterrent effect in part because they are more likely to be calculated than reflexive. Similarly, the social brain can be hijacked, particularly in situations where belonging to a group has been set up to require doing harm to an outsider. We do also see people who have been persuaded, through the best of intentions, that doing grievous harm is necessary for the greater good. All of these sources of harm can be just as, if not more, serious that the harm coming out of someone’s survival brain, but the mechanism for dealing with them is very different.

The survival brain and authoritarianism

As difficult and humbling as it may be to recognize and work with our survival brain responses, it is particularly critical to do during times of rising authoritarianism. When threats are real and scary, it will trigger people to drop into their survival brains more and more. Authoritarians rely on this because it makes opponents less effective by taking their most powerful problem solving tools off line. It also makes supporters and the general public easier to manipulate. Things that make absolutely no sense when people are thinking critically (e.g. driving out farm workers will lower grocery prices) do make sense to a reflexive survival brain for whom “immigrants bad, lash out” is about the level of complexity it can handle. 

At its heart, the struggle against authoritarianism is the struggle to stay in our social brain rather than our survival brain. Authoritarian leaders gain power by telling a simple story: that people’s problems are the fault of a group of enemies, and if they lash out and destroy those people, then their problems will be solved. This isn’t true, and even a brief inquiry into how exactly lashing out is supposed to lead to better conditions makes it all fall apart. But that sort of simple story is what the survival brain wants to be true, and just as importantly, is what its reduced capacity is able to comprehend. 

Counteracting this early is particularly critical because with enough repetition, these simplistic stories about the need to destroy enemies become internalized into a worldview and a set of assumptions that are just how we do things. Once this happens, the danger becomes much greater because they can be maintained even after the social brain comes back online. As discussed above, the social brain can be hijacked to do enormous harm if a person has come to believe that doing harm is actually doing good. Once that is the case, the incredibly powerful tools of problem solving and altruism and self-sacrifice become misdirected, and it’s much harder to persuade people to stop. All is not lost, however. The more that we challenge the underlying logic that safety requires hurting others, the more that we chip away at those foundational beliefs. The more that we practice other ways of staying safe, the more that collective lashing out stops making sense.
The problems we face – ensuring everyone has access to basic necessities, responding compassionately to migrants, reducing climate change, ending mass incarceration, etc. – can’t be solved by the simplistic reflexes that make sense to the survival brain. On the contrary, we need creativity, compassion, and curiosity. We need people to be willing to make long term changes to their consumption habits, act compassionately in conflict, share resources, and work together. All of these the social brain has in abundance – if only we can keep our personal and collective access to it.

Children are magic.

I never realized it, though, until my future self knocked on my front door.

“I’ll trade you,” she says when I answer, “for a week.” She peers over my shoulder at the screaming baby whose heels seem bent on turning his tantrum into dents in the floor. A fond smile softens her face.

She looks maybe twenty years older than I am, hair starting to thread with grey.

“Someone invented time travel?” I ask, surprised. So far, we haven’t even managed viable nuclear fusion.

She tips her hand back and forth in a “so-so” gesture. “Turns out it was there all along. The trouble was people kept trying to find a way to do something dramatic. Go back and assassinate Hitler, that kind of thing.” She shakes her head. “That’s why it never worked.”

Questions pile up behind my tongue, but I hesitate. I’ve read too many stories not to know how dangerous this could be.

“What can you tell me?” I ask at last.

“You, nothing.” She peers past my shoulder again, wiggling her fingers at the child whose screams have turned to sniffling wails. “Him on the other hand…”

“Come in.” I step aside and wave her in. I ought to feel a twinge of anxiety as she reaches him, but I don’t. On some level, I know who she is.

Kiddo does, too. She drops crosslegged onto the floor, and he flings himself into her lap, sobs muffled against her shoulder. Her arms curl around him, and her eyes close. A soft smile spreads across her face.

I settle tentatively on the floor next to them. I could never manage that. Not with the last half hour of screaming still reverberating in my ear. I study her peaceful expression more closely. She looks careworn. A little sad, even, under the smile. One hand moves on the child’s back in a gentle caress.

I swallow around a lump in my throat. Twenty years. That sadness could be no more than an empty nest. It doesn’t have mean… anything.

“You mentioned a trade?” I venture. “Would I… take your place?”

She shifts him away from her shoulder, her eyes opening. I search her face, looking for some sign of what I might find if I did. Do I want to know what’s coming?

“At a week long silent writer’s retreat. It’s in the forest in the middle of nowhere. No electronics, no communication with the outside world. Back to writing by hand, if you can believe it.” She takes a moment to look me in the eye. “That was what they discovered about time travel. You can trade places with yourself, but only as long as the experience feels utterly mundane.”

The baby’s sobs have stopped. She holds him up on front of her, his chubby feet braced against her legs.

Mundane… and precious. Three weeks alone with the baby while my husband is incommunicado at his archeology dig, and I can only see the preciousness through her eyes. My husband will be back in a week. I’ve been telling myself I’ll make it.

“What do you think?” she asks. “Trade?”

I went. It was marvelous.

When I first learned about sexism, racism, etc. I learned that they were structured essentially as layer cakes. There were two groups (more or less): a privileged group on top and an oppressed/marginalized/disadvantaged group on the bottom. As my understanding of interlocking axes of identity and the complexity of intersectionality deepened, the layer cakes might have gotten mashed together, crisscrossed, and warped a bit, but they were still recognizably there.

Such a view, however, misses the point of oppressive systems. Functionally, they are pyramid schemes. Their entire purpose is to extract labor and wealth from as many people as possible while concentrating wealth and power in the hands of as few people as can be gotten away with. This is why they are so flexible and hard to dismantle. Group categories and stereotypes that purport to be natural and unchanging are actually constantly adapting, becoming whatever the system needs to keep the wealth flowing upward while preventing so many people from getting fed up that they overthrow the whole thing.

Continue reading “The Pyramid of Oppression” →