Culture of Cruelty

TIM WISE

ANTIRACIST ESSAYIST AUTHOR AND EDUCATOR

Culture of Cruelty: An Interview With Tim Wise About His Forthcoming Book

Posted on March 30, 2013

Here’s my recent interview with Felicia Gustin of War Times, in which we discuss my upcoming book, Culture of Cruelty: How America’s Elite Demonize the Poor

aka. Culture of Cruelty: How America’s Elite Demonize the Poor, Valorize the Rich and Jeopardize the Future

March 14, 2013


Tim Wise is one of the most prominent anti-racist writers and educators in the United States. He is the author of six books including Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority and his highly acclaimed memoir, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son. His forthcoming book is Culture of Cruelty: How America’s Elite Demonize the Poor, Valorize the Rich and Jeopardize the Future (City Lights Publishers). Wise sat down with War Times to talk about the book’s focus that builds on his fierce critique of racial privilege to discuss a related issue: class disparity and a culture of cruelty that demonizes those in need.

Felicia Gustin: Tim, much of your work has focused on racism and white privilege though you’ve often looked at how these intersect with class inequities. Talk about how the idea for this book came about.

Tim Wise: In some ways, I think I’ve been moving towards this in the last three books I’ve done for City Lights (Dear White America, Colorblind and Between Barack and a Hard Place) that included a fairly heavy element of class analysis. The argument that I’ve been making is that in many ways the problem now confronting white America is the indifference that white America has had toward economic injustice because it was perceived that the only people getting hit by that were people of color. So there was a certain ambivalence and that is now starting to catch up with white people with the financial crisis and the housing meltdown.

We’ve also noticed over the last year to 18 months in particular this very steady stream of dehumanizing, overly cruel rhetoric aimed at not just the poor but also the unemployed, people who are out of work for 26 weeks and need an extension on unemployment benefits, or 52 weeks. Sure, it’s been coming for a long time and we’ve certainly noticed it for years but we’re seeing more of this steady drumbeat of rhetoric, of the takers vs. the makers; there’s the Mitt Romney tape during the campaign about the 47% of the American public who just don’t want to work.

You can hear this rhetoric regurgitated on Fox and on talk radio. There’s this constant stream of critique, not just about social safety net programs which had been critiqued by conservatives for years, but a real critique of the core humanity of people who need those programs, whether it’s health care, unemployment insurance or food stamps. It’s people saying things like people should be ashamed to be on food stamps, we should drug test them, we should make them jump through all kinds of hoops, we should make it harder for them, we should make them feel pain. Literally people saying these things. Or saying the poor aren’t really poor after all because they have washing machines and color TVs and microwaves.

After hearing that for so long I just started to ask the question, why is it that the culture has come to this place when there was a period maybe 70 years ago, even 100 years ago at the turn of the 20th century, where it was understood that if there was any group that had bad values and pathological behavior, it wasn’t poor people and it wasn’t unemployed people, it was rich people. They were called robber barons for a reason. They were not venerated. They were not respected. They were despised.

In the 30s, although it was very racially unequal, there was a general sense that when people were unemployed it wasn’t their fault that they were poor. There were systemic problems that needed to be fixed in the economy, and the only people who rejected that idea were the rich. Yeah they wanted poor people to work for whatever crappy wages they were offering, but every other average everyday person looked at the unemployed – at least the unemployed white man – as salt of the earth: hard-working, struggling against all odds.

Seventy years later we’ve come to a place where those very same people – including ironically, unemployed white men – are now being looked as dysfunctional, pathological, having the wrong values, being ‘takers’ not ‘makers.’ So I wanted to look at why. Not only that it happened but why it happened.

FG: And what did you see as the reasons this shift has taken place?

TW: I’ve identified three things. One is the racialization of poverty, that is, once we came to view poverty and need as Black and Latino, the less concern that white America had. There’s study after study that demonstrate that the more we view those needing social programs as people of color, the more whites have hostility for them. Lots of scholars have written about this.

The second reason is the sexist impulse, the feminization of poverty, so that the image of the poor shifted not only from white to Black or white to Brown, but from male to female. Instead of the unemployed hobo riding the rails looking for work in the 30s or the dustbowl farmer trying to hold it together in Nebraska, it was the single mom who was called in the 70s, the “ghetto matriarch,” having children she couldn’t afford and not even needing a man anymore, letting the state replace a husband. So there’s that whole male resentment and backlash that’s part of why the safety net programs were attacked and why the rhetoric has gotten so harsh.

And the third reason that is more modern and hasn’t been talked about as much is that popular culture sends these messages every day that reinforce a notion that is long standing in America – the notion of meritocracy, that anybody can make it if they work hard. That’s always been the reigning ethos of the country. But 80 years ago most people knew it was crap. During the Depression most people were saying, “yeah whatever, we don’t really believe that and know it’s not true.” Now even though the evidence says upward mobility is less common than ever, the belief in upper mobility is greater.

And the only logical explanation that I can find evidence for is that you have a popular culture that everyday transmits signals through hundreds of television stations and dozens of reality shows that really anybody can make it because look, you’ve got people who are not particularly educated, not extraordinarily intelligent, don’t really work all that hard but they’ve got a reality show. You’ve got the guys with Storage Wars, Duck Dynasty, Hillbilly Handfishing, Honey Boo Boo. You’ve got people with a gimmick.

It’s not like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous – these are lifestyles of the working class and mediocre but by God, they got a show. So it’s those constant symbolic images of upward mobility, symbolic images of success that don’t really comport with reality but reinforce these notions that if I just work a little harder, then I can make it.

Think about it. During the Depression, if you were poor or working class, you didn’t see images of upward mobility everyday. The media wasn’t as big as it is now. You were surrounded by other poor and working-class people. And likewise, if you were rich, you were just surrounded by rich people. Today you can be pretty poor or struggling but you might still have a television that will allow you a glimpse into that world and make you perhaps hate yourself or seriously doubt yourself or certainly doubt others who are even worse off than you.

So I think when you take these factors – race, gender and popular culture – and mix them together, you have this perfect recipe for this culture of cruelty, this indifference to suffering that in the long run –as I talk about in the book – is going to vitiate what little safety nets we have left and really jeopardize the economic health of the nation in the next 20 years.

FG: We’ve seen, especially in the last two elections, white people go against their own self interests, who are so hysterical that there is a Black man in the White House, particularly poor and working class white people who have actually sided with those class interests, opposing tax cuts for the rich, opposing health care for themselves, and ultimately believing that one day they too might be rich.

TW: Part of that is an old tradition, particularly among white struggling people, that’s been going on for 400 years going back to the colonies; an attempt to convince them that their real interests were with other whites even if they were rich whites, rather than with their Black and Brown brothers and sisters. And it’s worked with every generation to different degrees.

What was interesting during the Depression, one of the reasons there were such high levels of support for social safety net programs was precisely because people of color were basically excluded from them. So whether it was the New Deal programs, the jobs program, the FHA Loan program or later on, the GI Bill program from which people of color were routinely blocked – as long as you thought the only beneficiaries of big government looked like you it was all good.
But as people of color gained access through social movements, protests, and the civil rights struggle to some of those things that white people always had had, then the backlash happened and all of that confusing one’s interests and thinking of one’s interests in racial terms rather than economic terms became possible again.

Now, at the very moment when white folks find themselves, not in the state of the Great Depression, but in the worst economic situation since then, a lot of those programs are being cut to the bone and they still seem to gravitate toward cutting them even more. I think part of that is the longer trajectory of false consciousness that has been instilled by whiteness and by certain notions of masculinity.

Some of this is definitely connected to – and I write about this in Dear White America – the changing demographics and the changing culture of the country which leave white folks under the impression that just about everything that gets done is going to be about “taking from us” and “giving to them.” So that’s why they can say that health care reform, as mild and moderate as it is, is “reparations for slavery.” And even white folks who need better healthcare will fall for that and go, “oh my God, they’re going to give to those people who aren’t deserving.”

There’s a study that was done a few years back in ’08, that when white voters were shown the 10 basic key points of Obama’s healthcare plan and told it was Bill Clinton’s plan, 2 to 1 supported it. When they were told it was Obama’s, there was 2 to 1 opposition. So what is that? Same plan. But when they hear it’s Obama’s plan they either assume it really must not be about helping “us” or even a crazier thing which is, “I’d rather not be helped at all then have a Black man help me.” It just goes to show that that notion of confusing one’s interests can really be part of this racial conversation that we’ve been having for hundreds of years and haven’t resolved.

FG: With the emergence of Occupy movement, there were some powerful shifts that popularized the notion of a 99% and a 1%. Granted there were issues within that movement in terms of racism, but that frame became pretty widespread in the national dialogue and in popular culture. What are you thoughts on this?

TW: I think that the thing that Occupy accomplished for those of us who talk about inequality is that it put that on the map of our political consciousness as a society in a way that had not been done in awhile. Yes, there had always been some of us who talked about those inequities, but for the most part those were third rail politics. You didn’t talk about inequality, you talked about opportunity, you talked about how we need to have better jobs and better income, better schools but you didn’t by and large frame it in the mainstream imagination as not just a matter of some people having too little but also some people having too much. And that was new for a national political conversation.

It even became a little piece of the presidential campaign. Not only did it prompt President Obama to talk, however limited, in a way he hadn’t before but I also think it ultimately prompted Romney to say the things he said and Paul Ryan to say the things he said about the ‘takers’ not the ‘makers.’

Interestingly, Occupy forced the conversation about who’s on top and who’s on the bottom and that forced the Republicans to out themselves as the party of the top and how we’ve got to stop those people who are coming to take what we’ve earned. So in a way, Occupy influenced the outcome of the election indirectly. That certainly wasn’t their goal and President Obama may not be a progressive on economic issues, but it is the first step in saying this is a conversation we need to have. I hope that with my new book and works by others who are trying to deepen this discussion that Occupy started that we figure out how to take what was this very germ of an idea that was brought to the American public and turn it into a longer, more steady and fulfilling narrative.

FG: What is it going to take to shift things to an understanding of class solidarity?

TW: We’re going to have to invert the blame and get back to understanding who the people are with the truly bad values. It’s not the people who are poor. So we not only have to defend the poor and working class from those attacks by explaining the myths that are held about them and exposing them for the lies they are. But we also need to be aggressive in saying that the people whose values we need to worry about and whose behaviors are sociopathic and even psychopathic are the ultra rich, the super elite. They’re the ones with the bad values and here’s the evidence, the studies, the research that prove this. It’s about flipping the script on the demonization of poor people and holding the mirror up to those people who are the problem: the rich and the elite.

FG: How do you do that when the rich and elite own the media, Congress, prisons, the criminal justice system, etc.?

TW: They owned all those things 100 years ago too but there was still a counter narrative that existed among working people at the time. Working people didn’t have social media that they could try and counter it with. They didn’t have their own newspapers, radio and TV shows. They may have had little tabloids. The rich have always controlled politics and the media. If anything right now, despite the concentration of media power, there’s also a contravening trend which is that communities around the country – and granted there’s an economic division to this and a racial division to this and a cultural and language division – but there is more opportunity today I would say, for working class folks to counter those messages in ways that especially young people are hearing.

Young people are not getting their news from those media outlets that big corporations that have an interest in maintaining things own. Yes, internet companies and social media companies are owned by corporations. But young people don’t get their news from Fox or CNN or the New York Times; from any of these bought and paid for sources and they don’t trust any of the politicians. They know there is something wrong.

So the good news is that we have a whole generation now who are seeking out alternative forms of information. So if we’re thinking as organizers, we can stay one step ahead of those forces who are trying to limit and manipulate information, and counter it through music and through art and through alternative media and various sources of social media exchange on the internet. We can move the conversation in a positive direction and show that it is the culture of affluence and power that is to blame for America’s economic and social crises.

Systemic American Racism: US Airways Tells Black Passengers to Change Out of Jeans and Hoodies Before Boarding First-Class

Culture  

AlterNet / By Steven Hsieh

US Airways Tells Black Passengers to Change Out of Jeans and Hoodies Before Boarding First-Class

Systemic racism is apparent as ever at this major U.S. airline.

 

April 12, 2013  |  

When McCraig and Miles Warren tried to claim their first-class seats on a US Airways flight, an employee told them to first change into more appropriate attire, according to a federal discrimination lawsuit filed Wednesday.

A ticket counter employee repeatedly told the Warrens, who are both black, that their jeans, hooded sweatshirts and baseball caps violated an alleged first-class dress code. As the complaint states:

Doe employee informed plaintiffs that it was US Airways policy that everyone in first class is required to wear slacks, button up shirts and no baseball caps. Doe employee demanded plaintiffs to change from jeans into slacks, a button-up shirt and told plaintiffs to remove their baseball caps.

The Warrens reportedly headed to the restroom where Miles conferred to a white passenger, Michael Heffernan, that he was worried he’d miss his flight because of his apparent dress-code violation. So, imagine Miles’ surprise when he saw Mr. Heffernan and a friend sitting in first-class, wearing almost the exact same outfits that barred the Warrens from sitting in their seats—jeans and hoodies.

Andrew Christie, a spokesperson for US Airways told AlterNet, “We’ve received the complaint and are currently reviewing it.”

This apparent double standard in US Airways’ planes is just a microcosm of widespread, systemic racism in the United States, where minorities encounter discrimination everyday in institutions, whether private or public. In the same country where the Warrens face a stricter dress code than Michael Heffernan, African Americans are jailed for drug offenses at ten times the rate of whites, even though nearly five times more white Americans use drugs.

Steven Hsieh is an editorial assistant at AlterNet and writer based in Brooklyn. Follow him on Twitter @stevenjhsieh.

The Southern State Fast Becoming Ayn Rand's Vision of Paradise

AlterNet / By Les Leopold

The Southern State Fast Becoming Ayn Rand's Vision of Paradise

Tennessee lawmakers have elevated hatred for government and disgust for poor people to an art form. 

 

 

April 10, 2013  |  

 

The following article is part of AlterNet's ongoing series on poverty, Hard Times, USA. 

If you're worried about where America is heading, look no further than Tennessee. Its lush mountains and verdant rolling countryside belie a mean-spirited public policy that only makes sense if you believe deeply in the anti-collectivist, anti-altruist philosophy of Ayn Rand. It's what you get when you combine hatred for government with disgust for poor people.

Tennessee starves what little government it has, ranking dead last in per capita tax revenue. To fund its minimalist public sector, it makes sure that low-income residents pay as much as possible through heavily regressive sales taxes, which rank 10th highest among all states as a percent of total tax revenues. (For more detailed data see here.)

As you would expect, this translates into hard times for its public school systems, which rank 48th in school revenues per student and 45th in teacher salaries. The failure to invest in education also corresponds with poverty: the state has the 40th worst poverty rate (15%) and the 13th highest state percentage of poor children (26%).

Employment opportunities also are extremely poor for the poor. Only 25% have full-time jobs, 45% are employed part-time, and a whopping 30% have no jobs at all.

So what do you do with all those low-income folks who don't have decent jobs? You put a good number of them in jail. In fact, only Louisiana, Georgia and New Mexico have higher jail incarceration rates.

From the perspective of Tennessee legislators, it's all about providing the proper incentives to motivate the poor. For starters, you make sure that no one could possible live on welfare payments (TANF: Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). Although President Clinton's welfare reform program curtailed how long a family can receive welfare (60 months) and dramatically increased the work requirements, Tennessee set the maximum family welfare payment at only $185 per month. (That's how much a top hedge fund manager makes in under one second.) As a result, the Volunteer State ranks 49th in TANF, just above Mississippi ($170).

Kick 'em when they're down or tough love?

In the Randian universe, it's not enough to starve public education and the poor. You also must blame the poor both for their poverty and for the crumbling educational system. If a poor child is failing it must be the fault of low-income parents. So how do you drive the point home? You take away their welfare checks if their kids don't do well in school, which is precisely what the Tennessee House and Senate are about to do. TheKnoxvilleNews.com reports:

The bill is sponsored by Sen. Stacey Campfield, R-Knoxville, and Rep. Vance  Dennis, R-Savannah. It calls for a 30 percent reduction in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits to parents whose children are not making satisfactory progress in school.

More amazing still, the bill originally applied to all children of TANF parents, even if they were severely disabled. Realizing that they had gone too far, the bill was amended so that, "it would not apply when a child has a handicap or learning disability or when the parent takes steps to try improving the youngster’s school performance — such as signing up for a parenting class, arranging a tutoring program or attending a parent-teacher conference."  (Imagine the uproar if those provision were applied to upper-income parents, assuming any still use the public school system.)

Dennis told the House Health Subcommittee the measure now only applies to “parents who do nothing.” He described the measure as “a carrot and stick approach.”

Obviously, this is insane, right? Not if you've already started down the road of whipping the poor into shape. The proposed draconian cuts are just an extension of previous policies that already made welfare contingent on school attendance. As Travis Waldron reports in ThinkProgress:

When Campfield introduced the legislation in January, he said parents have “gotten away with doing absolutely nothing to help their children” in school. “That’s child abuse to me,” he added. Tennessee already ties welfare to education  by mandating a 20 percent cut in benefits if students do not meet attendance standards, but this change would place the burden of maintaining benefits squarely on children, who would face costing their family much-needed assistance if they don’t keep up in school.

By the way, the Tennessee legislature is lily-white: One percent is Latino, 6% AfricanAmerican and 91% Caucasian. But the complexion of poverty is darker. Nearly 80 percent of Tennessee's poor children are black and brown.

Attacking the poor as the answer to the Wall Street crash?

These attacks on the poor, rather than on poverty, are not peculiar to Tennessee. In fact, similar concepts circulate among political and policy elites in Washington. For Ayn Rand acolytes, Wall Street's reckless, greedy casinos couldn't possibly be the real reason the economy crashed. After all, the rich get rich because they are terrific at what they do. We should reward these creators, not blame them for their foresight, their ingenuity and their obvious success. The blame instead should fall on the poor -- the takers -- and on the collectivist government liberals who cater to them. Didn't the government force banks to put unqualified poor people in homes they couldn't afford? (It doesn't matter that the data shows that low-income buyers who gained loans through the Community Readjustment Act didn't default in higher numbers than anyone else. The idea of blaming the poor has power.)

Blaming low-income people for chronic unemployment is the next move. As the rate stays stubbornly high (precisely because all Republicans and even a few Democrats don't want the government in the business of job creation) we hear talk of "structural" unemployment. That's code for the jobs would be there if only the workers were qualified. But you know, those lower-income workers just don't have the skills and work habits to compete in our globalized economy. Even older middle-class workers are hopelessly out of date. So there's really nothing government can do about it.

The final twist is to claim that the richest country in human history doesn't have the means to eradicate poverty. Instead, we are told, rising debt is forcing us to tighten our belts -- rather, we need to tighten the belts of the poor by taking away a few more dollars from Medicaid and Social Security.

How to justify meanness?

It's not easy to be cruel to someone who is down and out. After all, most of us feel ashamed when walking by a homeless person or watching kids crammed into over-crowded classrooms. It requires several psychological twists and turns to make life even harder for low-income Americans.

• You have to blame low-income parents for their own economic problems. Even if the unemployment rate is sky-high it must be the poor person's fault.
• You need to feel superior -- that somehow you got to where you are today not by an accident of birth but rather by your own hard labors. Anyone not as successful as you, by definition, is inferior.
• You have to believe that meanness really is tough love -- that by taking benefits away from the poor you are actually helping them on the road to self sufficiency. 
• It's helpful to have access to the broader Randian/libertarian philosophy that argues all forms of collective government action are an attack on freedom. In this view, altruism is seen as a curse that justifies collective government programs which essentially steal money from the makers and to waste on the takers. All collective caring by the state, therefore, is evil, so that all support for the poor via government is evil as well.
• It's psychologically crucial to have your prejudices confirmed by charismatic alchemists like Ayn Rand, Rand Paul and Paul Ryan who peddle selfishness as the highest form of morality (although only Ayn Rand had the guts to say it so bluntly).

Is Washington locked into increasing inequality?

While the Republicans in Congress are committed to supporting the rich and crushing the poor, smug Democrats can too easily look down upon the bumbling Tennessee legislators. Tie welfare to school success? How crude. But many of these same Democrats also are totally in sync with the Wall Street hucksters who have, for a generation, siphoned off America's wealth into their bottomless pockets. In fact, both parties again are in competition for Wall Street campaign cash as if nothing much has happened. And both parties clearly are unwilling to break up the big banks, cap obscene financial incomes, or create public banks to serve the public interest.

Washington politicians and pundits from Obama on down (with very few exceptions) are enthralled by Wall Street wizardry. Making a million dollars an hour no longer seems strange or repugnant. Too big to fail, jail and regulate are just the natural order of things. In fact, more than a few public servants can't wait to race through that revolving door to get in on the big casino games.

This should tell us that the path to social justice requires a new political movement that operates outside the two great corporate parties.
Is it too late?

I ran into a young woman who is very concerned by the enormous gap she sees between life on campus and the hardships of the low-income people. She wants to know what she can do with her life to really change things.

What can we say? I look back over a lifetime in the cause of social justice and I don't have much to show for it -- more war, more poverty, more inequality, more disinvestment in critical human infrastructure. Yes, we've made great strides on gender, sexual preference and overt racial discrimination compared to a generation ago. But how can we explain why America has the world's highest incarceration rates? Why couldn't we prevent a criminal justice system from sending 40% of young black males to prison? How, on our watch, did our relatively egalitarian country develop the most obscene wealth gap in the world? How is it possible that so many of our cities are in worse shape than a generation ago? It's almost to impossible to comprehend, and even harder to change.

But that young woman already senses that we have no choice but to try. And that requires building a movement that targets the core of the problem --- the systems that allow the economic royalists and their political minions to hijack our country.  

It's a long-term project. After all, it required almost two generations of painstaking work for the Ayn Rand right to take over the national debate. It may take just as long to recapture it. Let's hope there are enough caring young women and men who still have a sense of the common good. Altruism may have died in Galt's Gulch, but it's still alive and well in the hearts of those who share a passion for justice, even in Tennessee.

 

Les Leopold's latest book is How to Make a Million Dollars an Hour: Why Hedge Funds are Siphoning away America's Wealth (John Wiley and Sons, 2013).

Why We Cheat (Three Sources)

Why We Cheat [Preview]

Scientists are unraveling the causes of fraud and dishonesty and devising new strategies for rooting them out

By Ferric C. Fang and Arturo Casadevall

nShare

 

 
Image: Aaron Goodman

In Brief

Decoding Dishonesty

• Cheating is astoundingly common. One survey revealed that about three fourths of 1,800 students at nine universities admitted to cheating on tests or assignments.
• Fraudulent work squanders resources. It may also harm patients and misdirect scientists or public policy makers.
• Researchers are trying to better understand cheating in hopes of minimizing its impact on society. So far they have discovered that creativity, fear of loss and observing dishonest behavior can motivate cheating or make it more likely to happen.

More In This Article

• Photo Album

  Natural-Born Cheaters: A Look at Double-Dealing Animals [Slide Show]

   

Cyclist Lance Armstrong has apologized for using performance-enhancing drugs to win seven Tour de France titles. He attributed his cheating to a determination to “win at all costs.” Psychologist Marc Hauser of Harvard University, who once wrote an article entitled “Costs of Deception: Cheaters Are Punished…,” is now out of a job after the U.S. Office of Research Integrity concluded that he “fabricated data, manipulated results in multiple experiments, and described how studies were conducted in factually incorrect ways.” Sixteen banks have agreed to settlements or are under investigation for manipulation of the Libor, an interest rate at which banks may borrow from other banks, in what is said to be the largest financial scam in the history of markets.

These cases are only part of a seemingly unending stream of cheating scandals in the news, affecting sports, science, education, finance and other realms. Although it is comforting to think that most people are essentially honest, cheating—defined as acting dishonestly to gain an advantage—is actually astoundingly common. In a 1997 survey, management professor Donald McCabe of Rutgers University and Linda Klebe Treviño, a professor of organizational behavior at the Pennsylvania State University, revealed that about three fourths of 1,800 students at nine state universities admitted to cheating on tests or written assignments. In 2005 sociologist Brian Martinson of the HealthPartners Research Foundation in Bloomington, Minn., and his colleagues reported that one third of scientists confessed to engaging in questionable research practices during the previous three years.

This article was originally published with the title Why We Cheat.

__________________________________________________________________________

Lifestyle

The Science of Why We Cheat

Feb 23, 2011 3:53 AM EST

A lack of morality can lead to bad behavior—but can behaving badly make us lose our morals? Casey Schwartz on how lying, cheating, and stealing warps our sense of right and wrong.

 

 

A lack of morality can lead to bad behavior—but can behaving badly make us lose our morals? Casey Schwartz on how lying, cheating and stealing warps our sense of right and wrong. 


Before you hack into your boyfriend’s email account, or sleep with the married guy, or overstate your billable hours, take note: Telling yourself it is "just this once” is an unlikelier story than ever before.

Or at least that is the conclusion of intriguing new research that examines the way our actions influence our beliefs, reversing the traditional direction of cause and effect. In their study, published in the current issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Lisa Shu and her colleagues at Harvard University found that behaving badly actually altered their subjects’ sense of right and wrong.

Defiant behavior often changes our mental attitude after the act is committed. Credit: Getty Images

Humans are invested in seeing themselves as ethical creatures. We want to believe in the rightness of our own conduct, to see our lives as a series of mostly well-intentioned decisions. And it appears that we'll go to great lengths to feel that way, even if it means warping our own sense of morality to suit our needs.
The famous psychologist Albert Bandura coined the term “moral

disengagement” to capture the process by which people pervert their own sense of right and wrong in order to give into a questionable temptation.

Yes I know he’s married, but it’s OK to sleep with him, the logic of moral disengagement goes, because, insert excuse here: I can’t stand his wife. If not with me, it would be with somebody else. This is his moral dilemma, not mine. The institution of marriage is a meaningless concept.

The options are many.

Moral disengagement essentially allows people to behave in ways that, at another moment, in a different mood, that same person would never consider. For years, research has shown again and again that moral disengagement influences how people will behave in a given situation. But now, in a chicken-and-egg twist, Shu and her team have shown that it works both ways: How people behave influences the moral beliefs they have about their behavior. Moral disengagement is the result of unethical behavior, they have now shown, not just the cause.

Shu’s research is based on a string of four related studies, each using a different group of undergraduates as subjects. In one, 138 subjects were asked to read an academic honor code that reinforced in their minds the idea that cheating is wrong. Then they were given a set of math problems to solve, and an envelope of cash that they would be rewarded from, according to how many problems they answered correctly. The subjects were divided into two conditions: one where it was possible for them to cheat by misreporting their own scores, and a control condition where their scores were tallied by a proctor in the room. Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the subjects in the first group, who were allowed to report their own scores, inflated those scores in order to get more cash.

We want to believe in the rightness of our own conduct, to see our lives as a series of mostly well-intentioned decisions.

Afterward, they were given a questionnaire to fill out that they’d also been given at the beginning of the study, consisting of questions designed to measure moral engagement with a focus on cheating. Shu and her colleagues developed this measure themselves, and tested its validity in other circumstances before using it for the current research. The results? Those subjects who had cheated on the math problems demonstrated a greater degree of moral disengagement in their responses the second time they filled out the questionnaire.

What's more, Shu found that the students who had cheated also had a harder time remembering the academic honor code that they’d been given to read before the task, compared to those subjects who hadn’t cheated. Shu calls this phenomenon “motivated forgetting,” citing it as yet another strategy we deploy to avoid the disquieting recognition that we’ve done something wrong.

In fact, what initially led Shu to this research was her sense that beliefs and values are not fixed, stable traits that we tote with us like a wheelie bag everywhere we go. On the contrary, she believes we bend or break them according to circumstance.

“It didn’t seem intuitive to me that our beliefs never change,” Shu said. “But what really led me to the question was the debate, both in academia and in the business world, about how much of peoples’ dishonest behaviors and bad actions is due to the situation, versus who that person is and how their upbringing was.”

Shu notes that given the “permissive environment” that she created in the lab by allowing one group of subjects the opportunity to cheat, she produced a greater likelihood of cheating—which in turn produced a shift in the way the cheaters thought about cheating.

On the bright side, Shu found that if participants did something as simple as sign their names to the honor code, rather than just passively read it, they were less likely to cheat on the math problems they were given to solve.

As a whole, Shu and her colleagues’ study is further reason to doubt that people have an unbudging, ingrained ethical compass guiding their every action. Indeed, ignoring that compass seems to make us forget we have it at all, at least temporarily.

The implications of Shu’s findings align with the existing research and paint a troubling picture of how morality can easily spiral out of our grip without us even noticing. If both things are true—that attitude influences action and action influences attitude—it becomes easier to understand scenarios of runaway transgressions. You do something you know isn't good, you talk yourself out of feeling bad about it, you become more likely to do it again—and, having done it again, you’re back to telling yourself it doesn’t matter, it’s no big deal, it was just this once…

And just like that, you’ve done nothing wrong.

Casey Schwartz is a graduate of Brown University and has a master's in psychodynamic neuroscience from University College London. She has previously written for The New York Sun and ABC News. Currently, she's working on a book about the brain world.

___________________________________________________________

WALL STREET JOURNAL

Why We Lie

 

We like to believe that a few bad apples spoil the virtuous bunch. But research shows that everyone cheats a little—right up to the point where they lose their sense of integrity.

By DAN ARIELY

—Mr. Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Behavior Economics at Duke University. This piece is adapted from his forthcoming book, "The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves," to be published by HarperCollins on June 5. 

Research shows that nearly everyone cheats a little if given the opportunity. Dan Ariely, author of the new book, "The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty," explains why. (Photo courtesy Shutterstock)

Not too long ago, one of my students, named Peter, told me a story that captures rather nicely our society's misguided efforts to deal with dishonesty. One day, Peter locked himself out of his house. After a spell, the locksmith pulled up in his truck and picked the lock in about a minute.

"I was amazed at how quickly and easily this guy was able to open the door," Peter said. The locksmith told him that locks are on doors only to keep honest people honest. One percent of people will always be honest and never steal.
Another 1% will always be dishonest and always try to pick your lock and steal your television; locks won't do much to protect you from the hardened thieves, who can get into your house if they really want to. The purpose of locks, the locksmith said, is to protect you from the 98% of mostly honest people who might be tempted to try your door if it had no lock.

We are all cheaters, but we don't do it rationally, according to Duke University's Dan Ariely. In a Big Interview with WSJ's Rolfe Winkler he explains the psychology that makes us willing to cheat more or less depending on the circumstances and what we can do to resist temptation.

We tend to think that people are either honest or dishonest. In the age of Bernie Madoff and Mark McGwire, James Frey and John Edwards, we like to believe that most people are virtuous, but a few bad apples spoil the bunch. If this were true, society might easily remedy its problems with cheating and dishonesty. Human-resources departments could screen for cheaters when hiring. Dishonest financial advisers or building contractors could be flagged quickly and shunned. Cheaters in sports and other arenas would be easy to spot before they rose to the tops of their professions.

But that is not how dishonesty works. Over the past decade or so, my colleagues and I have taken a close look at why people cheat, using a variety of experiments and looking at a panoply of unique data sets—from insurance claims to employment histories to the treatment records of doctors and dentists. What we have found, in a nutshell: Everybody has the capacity to be dishonest, and almost everybody cheats—just by a little. Except for a few outliers at the top and bottom, the behavior of almost everyone is driven by two opposing motivations. On the one hand, we want to benefit from cheating and get as much money and glory as possible; on the other hand, we want to view ourselves as honest, honorable people. Sadly, it is this kind of small-scale mass cheating, not the high-profile cases, that is most corrosive to society.

Which two numbers in this matrix add up to 10? Asked to solve a batch of these problems, most people cheated (claiming to have solved more of them than they had) when given the chance.

Much of what we have learned about the causes of dishonesty comes from a simple little experiment that we call the "matrix task," which we have been using in many variations. It has shown rather conclusively that cheating does not correspond to the traditional, rational model of human behavior—that is, the idea that people simply weigh the benefits (say, money) against the costs (the possibility of getting caught and punished) and act accordingly.

The basic matrix task goes as follows: Test subjects (usually college students) are given a sheet of paper containing a series of 20 different matrices (structured like the example you can see above) and are told to find in each of the matrices two numbers that add up to 10. They have five minutes to solve as many of the matrices as possible, and they get paid based on how many they solve correctly. When we want to make it possible for subjects to cheat on the matrix task, we introduce what we call the "shredder condition." The subjects are told to count their correct answers on their own and then put their work sheets through a paper shredder at the back of the room. They then tell us how many matrices they solved correctly and get paid accordingly.

The Forces That Shape Dishonesty

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In a variety of experiments, Dan Ariely and his colleague have identified many factors that can make people behave in a more or less honest fashion.

What happens when we put people through the control condition and the shredder condition and then compare their scores? In the control condition, it turns out that most people can solve about four matrices in five minutes. But in the shredder condition, something funny happens: Everyone suddenly and miraculously gets a little smarter. Participants in the shredder condition claim to solve an average of six matrices—two more than in the control condition. This overall increase results not from a few individuals who claim to solve a lot more matrices but from lots of people who cheat just by a little.

Would putting more money on the line make people cheat more? We tried varying the amount that we paid for a solved matrix, from 50 cents to $10, but more money did not lead to more cheating. In fact, the amount of cheating was slightly lower when we promised our participants the highest amount for each correct answer. (Why? I suspect that at $10 per solved matrix, it was harder for participants to cheat and still feel good about their own sense of integrity.)

Would a higher probability of getting caught cause people to cheat less? We tried conditions for the experiment in which people shredded only half their answer sheet, in which they paid themselves money from a bowl in the hallway, even one in which a noticeably blind research assistant administered the experiment.

Once again, lots of people cheated, though just by a bit. But the level of cheating was unaffected by the probability of getting caught.

Knowing that most people cheat—but just by a little—the next logical question is what makes us cheat more or less.

One thing that increased cheating in our experiments was making the prospect of a monetary payoff more "distant," in psychological terms. In one variation of the matrix task, we tempted students to cheat for tokens (which would immediately be traded in for cash). Subjects in this token condition cheated twice as much as those lying directly for money.

Another thing that boosted cheating: Having another student in the room who was clearly cheating. In this version of the matrix task, we had an acting student named David get up about a minute into the experiment (the participants in the study didn't know he was an actor) and implausibly claim that he had solved all the matrices. Watching this mini-Madoff clearly cheat—and waltz away with a wad of cash—the remaining students claimed they had solved double the number of matrices as the control group. Cheating, it seems, is infectious.

Other factors that increased the dishonesty of our test subjects included knowingly wearing knockoff fashions, being drained from the demands of a mentally difficult task and thinking that "teammates" would benefit from one's cheating in a group version of the matrix task. These factors have little to do with cost-benefit analysis and everything to do with the balancing act that we are constantly performing in our heads. If I am already wearing fake Gucci sunglasses, then maybe I am more comfortable pushing some other ethical limits (we call this the "What the hell" effect). If I am mentally depleted from sticking to a tough diet, how can you expect me to be scrupulously honest? (It's a lot of effort!) If it is my teammates who benefit from my fudging the numbers, surely that makes me a virtuous person!

The results of these experiments should leave you wondering about the ways that we currently try to keep people honest. Does the prospect of heavy fines or increased enforcement really make someone less likely to cheat on their taxes, to fill out a fraudulent insurance claim, to recommend a bum investment or to steal from his or her company? It may have a small effect on our behavior, but it is probably going to be of little consequence when it comes up against the brute psychological force of "I'm only fudging a little" or "Everyone does it" or "It's for a greater good."

What, then—if anything—pushes people toward greater honesty?

There's a joke about a man who loses his bike outside his synagogue and goes to his rabbi for advice. "Next week come to services, sit in the front row," the rabbi tells the man, "and when we recite the Ten Commandments, turn around and look at the people behind you. When we get to 'Thou shalt not steal,' see who can't look you in the eyes. That's your guy." After the next service, the rabbi is curious to learn whether his advice panned out. "So, did it work?" he asks the man. "Like a charm," the man answers. "The moment we got to 'Thou shalt not commit adultery,' I remembered where I left my bike."

What this little joke suggests is that simply being reminded of moral codes has a significant effect on how we view our own behavior.

Inspired by the thought, my colleagues and I ran an experiment at the University of California, Los Angeles. We took a group of 450 participants, split them into two groups and set them loose on our usual matrix task. We asked half of them to recall the Ten Commandments and the other half to recall 10 books that they had read in high school. Among the group who recalled the 10 books, we saw the typical widespread but moderate cheating. But in the group that was asked to recall the Ten Commandments, we observed no cheating whatsoever. We reran the experiment, reminding students of their schools' honor codes instead of the Ten Commandments, and we got the same result. We even reran the experiment on a group of self-declared atheists, asking them to swear on a Bible, and got the same no-cheating results yet again.

This experiment has obvious implications for the real world. While ethics lectures and training seem to have little to no effect on people, reminders of morality—right at the point where people are making a decision—appear to have an outsize effect on behavior.

Another set of our experiments, conducted with mock tax forms, convinced us that it would be better to have people put their signature at the top of the forms (before they filled in false information) rather than at the bottom (after the lying was done). Unable to get the IRS to give our theory a go in the real world, we tested it out with automobile-insurance forms. An insurance company gave us 20,000 forms with which to play. For half of them, we kept the usual arrangement, with the signature line at the bottom of the page along with the statement: "I promise that the information I am providing is true." For the other half, we moved the statement and signature line to the top. We mailed the forms to 20,000 customers, and when we got the forms back, we compared the amount of driving reported on the two types of forms.

People filling out such forms have an incentive to underreport how many miles they drive, so as to be charged a lower premium. What did we find? Those who signed the form at the top said, on average, that they had driven 26,100 miles, while those who signed at the bottom said, on average, that they had driven 23,700 miles—a difference of about 2,400 miles. We don't know, of course, how much those who signed at the top really drove, so we don't know if they were perfectly honest—but we do know that they cheated a good deal less than our control group.

Such tricks aren't going to save us from the next big Ponzi scheme or doping athlete or thieving politician. But they could rein in the vast majority of people who cheat "just by a little." Across all of our experiments, we have tested thousands of people, and from time to time, we did see aggressive cheaters who kept as much money as possible. In the matrix experiments, for example, we have never seen anyone claim to solve 18 or 19 out of the 20 matrices. But once in a while, a participant claimed to have solved all 20. Fortunately, we did not encounter many of these people, and because they seemed to be the exception and not the rule, we lost only a few hundred dollars to these big cheaters. At the same time, we had thousands and thousands of participants who cheated by "just" a few matrices, but because there were so many of them, we lost thousands and thousands of dollars to them.

In short, very few people steal to a maximal degree, but many good people cheat just a little here and there. We fib to round up our billable hours, claim higher losses on our insurance claims, recommend unnecessary treatments and so on.
Companies also find many ways to game the system just a little. Think about credit-card companies that raise interest rates ever so slightly for no apparent reason and invent all kinds of hidden fees and penalties (which are often referred to, within companies, as "revenue enhancements"). Think about banks that slow down check processing so that they can hold on to our money for an extra day or two or charge exorbitant fees for overdraft protection and for using ATMs.

All of this means that, although it is obviously important to pay attention to flagrant misbehaviors, it is probably even more important to discourage the small and more ubiquitous forms of dishonesty—the misbehavior that affects all of us, as both perpetrators and victims. This is especially true given what we know about the contagious nature of cheating and the way that small transgressions can grease the psychological skids to larger ones.

We want to install locks to stop the next Bernie Madoff, the next Enron, the next steroid-enhanced all-star, the next serial plagiarist, the next self-dealing political miscreant. But locking our doors against the dishonest monsters will not keep them out; they will always cheat their way in. It is the woman down the hallway—the sweet one who could not even carry away your flat-screen TV if she wanted to—who needs to be reminded constantly that, even if the door is open, she cannot just walk in and "borrow" a cup of sugar without asking.

—Mr. Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Behavior Economics at Duke University. This piece is adapted from his forthcoming book, "The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves," to be published by HarperCollins on June 5.

Why Americans Are So Ignorant -- It's Not Just Fox News, There Are Some Reasonable Reasons

Tea Party and the Right  

Consortium News / By Lawrence Davidson

Why Americans Are So Ignorant -- It's Not Just Fox News, There Are Some Reasonable Reasons

Sure propaganda, government secrecy and Fox News have a lot to do with it. But there are broader societal pressures as well

 

 

April 8, 2013  |  

 

In 2008, Rick Shenkman, the Editor-in-Chief of the History News Network, published a book entitled Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth about the American Voter. In it he demonstrated, among other things, that most Americans were: (1) ignorant about major international events, (2) knew little about how their own government runs and who runs it, (3) were nonetheless willing to accept government positions and policies even though a moderate amount of critical thought suggested they were bad for the country, and (4) were readily swayed by stereotyping, simplistic solutions, irrational fears and public relations babble.

Shenkman spent 256 pages documenting these claims, using a great number of polls and surveys from very reputable sources. Indeed, in the end it is hard to argue with his data. So, what can we say about this?

One thing that can be said is that this is not an abnormal state of affairs. As has been suggested in prior analyses, ignorance of non-local affairs (often leading to inaccurate assumptions, passive acceptance of authority, and illogical actions) is, in fact, a default position for any population.

To put it another way, the majority of any population will pay little or no attention to news stories or government actions that do not appear to impact their lives or the lives of close associates. If something non-local happens that is brought to their attention by the media, they will passively accept government explanations and simplistic solutions.

The primary issue is “does it impact my life?” If it does, people will pay attention. If it appears not to, they won’t pay attention. For instance, in Shenkman’s book unfavorable comparisons are sometimes made between Americans and Europeans. Americans often are said to be much more ignorant about world geography than are Europeans.

This might be, but it is, ironically, due to an accident of geography. Americans occupy a large subcontinent isolated by two oceans. Europeans are crowded into small contiguous countries that, until recently, repeatedly invaded each other as well as possessed overseas colonies.

Under these circumstances, a knowledge of geography, as well as paying attention to what is happening on the other side of the border, has more immediate relevance to the lives of those in Toulouse or Amsterdam than is the case for someone in Pittsburgh or Topeka. If conditions were reversed, Europeans would know less geography and Americans more.

Ideology and Bureaucracy

The localism referenced above is not the only reason for widespread ignorance. The strong adherence to ideology and work within a bureaucratic setting can also greatly narrow one’s worldview and cripple one’s critical abilities.

In effect, a closely adhered to ideology becomes a mental locality with limits and borders just as real as those of geography. In fact, if we consider nationalism a pervasive modern ideology, there is a direct connection between the boundaries induced in the mind and those on the ground.

Furthermore, it does not matter if the ideology is politically left or right, or for that matter, whether it is secular or religious. One’s critical abilities will be suppressed in favor of standardized, formulaic answers provided by the ideology. Just so work done within a bureaucratic setting.

Bureaucracies position the worker within closely supervised departments where success equates with doing a specific job according to specific rules. Within this limited world, one learns not to think outside the box, and so, except as applied to one’s task, critical thinking is discouraged and one’s worldview comes to conform to that of the bureaucracy. That is why bureaucrats are so often referred to as cogs in a machine.

That American ignorance is explainable does not make it any less distressing. At the very least it often leads to embarrassment for the minority who are not ignorant. Take for example the facts that polls show over half of American adults don’t know which country dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or that 30 percent don’t know what the Holocaust was.

We might explain this as the result of faulty education; however, there are other, just as embarrassing, moments involving the well educated. Take, for instance, the employees of Fox News. Lou Dobbs (who graduated from Harvard University) is host of the Fox Business Network talk show Lou Dobbs Tonight. Speaking on March 23 about gun control, he and Fox political analyst Angela McGlowan (a graduate of the University of Mississippi) had the following exchange:

McGlowan: “What scares the hell out of me is that we have a president . . . that wants to take our guns, but yet he wants to attack Iran and Syria. So if they come and attack us here, we don’t have the right to bear arms under this Obama administration.”

Dobbs: “We’re told by Homeland Security that there are already agents of Al Qaeda here working in this country. Why in the world would you not want to make certain that all American citizens were armed and prepared?”

Despite education, ignorance plus ideology leading to stupidity doesn’t come in any starker form than this. Suffice it to say that nothing the President has proposed in the way of gun control takes away the vast majority of weapons owned by Americans, that the President’s actions point to the fact that he does not want to attack Syria or Iran, and that neither country has the capacity to “come and attack us here.”

Finally, while there may be a handful of Americans who sympathize with Al Qaeda, they cannot accurately be described as “agents” of some central organization that dictates their actions.

Did the fact that Dobbs and McGlowan were speaking nonsense make any difference to the majority of those listening to them? Probably not. Their regular listeners may well be too ignorant to know that this surreal episode has no basis in reality. Their ignorance will cause them not to fact-check Dobbs’s and McGlowan’s remarks. They might very well rationalize away countervailing facts if they happen to come across them. And, by doing so, keep everything comfortably simple, which counts for more than the messy, often complicated truth.

Unfortunately, one can multiply this scenario many times. There are millions of Americans, most of whom are quite literate, who believe the United Nations is an evil organization bent on destroying U.S. sovereignty. Indeed, in 2005, George W. Bush actually appointed one of them, John Bolton (a graduate of Yale University), as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Likewise, so paranoid are gun enthusiasts (whose level of education varies widely) that any really effective government supervision of the U.S. gun trade would be seen as a giant step toward dictatorship. Therefore, the National Rifle Association, working its influence on Congress, has for years successfully restricted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from using computers to create a central database of gun transactions.

And, last but certainly not least, there is the unending war against teaching evolution in U.S. schools. This Christian fundamentalist effort often enjoys temporary success in large sections of the country and is ultimately held at bay only by court decisions reflecting (to date) a solid sense of reality on this subject. By the way, evolution is a scientific theory that has as much evidence to back it up as does gravity.

Teaching Critical Thinking?

As troubling as this apparently perennial problem of ignorance is, it is equally frustrating to listen to repeated schemes to teach critical thinking through the public schools. Of course, the habit of asking critical questions can be taught. However, if you do not have a knowledge base from which to consider a situation, it is hard think critically about it.

So ignorance often precludes effective critical thinking even if the technique is acquired. In any case, public school systems have always had two primary purposes and critical thinking is not one of them. The schools are designed to prepare students for the marketplace and to make them loyal citizens.

The marketplace is most often a top-down, authoritarian world and loyalty comes from myth-making and emotional bonds. In both cases, really effective critical thinking might well be incompatible with the desired end.

Recently, a suggestion has been made to forget about the schools as a place to learn critical thinking. According to Dennis Bartels’s article “Critical Thinking Is Best Taught Outside the Classroom” appearing in Scientific Americanonline, schools can’t teach critical thinking because they are too busy teaching to standardized tests.

Of course, there was a time when schools were not so strongly mandated to teach this way and there is no evidence that at that time they taught critical thinking. In any case, Bartels believes that people learn critical thinking in informal settings such as museums and by watching the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. 

He concludes that “people must acquire this skill somewhere. Our society depends on them being able to make critical decisions.” If that were only true it would make this an easier problem to solve.

It may very well be that (consciously or unconsciously) societies organize themselves to hold critical thinking to a minimum. That means to tolerate it to the point needed to get through day-to-day existence and to tackle those aspects of one’s profession that might require narrowly focused critical thought.

But beyond that, we get into dangerous, de-stabilizing waters. Societies, be they democratic or not, are not going to encourage critical thinking about prevailing ideologies or government policies. And, if it is the case that most people don’t think of anything critically unless it falls into that local arena in which their lives are lived out, all the better.

Under such conditions people can be relied upon to stay passive about events outside their local venue until the government decides it is time to rouse them up in some propagandistic manner.

The truth is that people who are consistently active as critical thinkers are not going to be popular, either with the government or their neighbors. They are called gadflies. You know, people like Socrates, who is probably the best-known critical thinker in Western history. And, at least the well educated among us know what happened to him.

Former Prisoner's Dire Warning: America's Prisons Turning Out Violent White Supremacists "Mentally Fighting Civil War"

News & Politics  

AlterNet / By Alex Kane

Former Prisoner's Dire Warning: America's Prisons Turning Out Violent White Supremacists "Mentally Fighting Civil War"

 

Does the Aryan Brotherhood have anything to do with the killings of two Texas officials and a state prison chief in Colorado?

 

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

April 2, 2013  |

Is a white supremacist group called the Aryan Brotherhood linked to a string of killings of state officials? That’s the burning question for federal investigators as they seek to find out more about the deaths of two Texas law enforcement officials in recent weeks, and whether those killings are linked to the murder of a Colorado state prison chief in late March.

The scrutiny on the white supremacist gang has prompted an ominous warning from a former prisoner, who wrote anonymously in the Daily Beast  why law enforcement “may have a real problem on their hands.”

The prisoner, a black man who said he got on the Aryan Brotherhood’s good side after assisting them with a legal request, says that law enforcement should know about the danger of the prison gang because “it’s something they should have been aware of for decades,” he writes.

“If these recent killings represent the Brotherhood’s twisted form of retribution, the fact that it has taken so long to begin is all the more chilling. To me this would demonstrate a hard-nosed determination that all citizens should find frightening,” the prisoner said in the Daily Beast. “America’s harsh judicial system, coupled with a growing national affinity for utilizing complete isolation at super-max prisons as a corrections tactic of first choice, in many cases turns men into monsters.”

The prisoner warned that “many of the first men locked up when our nation embarked on a policy of for-profit mass incarceration near the end of the last century are now returning into society.” He also provided details on what motivates the members of the Aryan Brotherhood gang.

"They were still mentally fighting the Civil War (like so many other whites) and traced their roots back to men like Confederate guerrilla William Clarke Quantrill, whose Quantrill’s Raiders sacked the pro-abolitionist town of Lawrence, Kansas, at the beginning of the Civil War," the prisoner wrote.

Meanwhile, security has been beefed up for courthouses and prosecutors in Texas, especially near Kaufman County, the location of the two killings in the state. Some fear more attacks. And a joint local, state and federal investigation is probing whether the Aryan Brotherhood, a white supremacist prison gang, is involved. Still, there is no hard evidence that links the killings to the gang yet. The Southern Poverty Law Center has stated that the Aryan Brotherhood is one of the most violent groups in the country.
 

Two months ago, the first of the shootings under investigation took place. Mark Hasse, a prosecutor in Texas, was gunned down in broad daylight by men with their faces covered and who had black clothing and vests on. He was killed the same day that that two members of the Aryan Brotherhood pled guilty to racketeering charges in a case that Hasse handled.

The other shooting in Texas occurred on Saturday. Texas district attorney Mike McClelland and his wife, Cynthia, were found dead in their home. Shell casings from a powerful rifle were found in the house, and the district attorney was shot multiple times. The last of the shootings that investigators are looking at to see whether they are linked occurred in Colorado. There, Tom Clements, the Department of Corrections head, was killed, and the lead suspect was a member of a white supremacist gang. That suspect, Evan Ebel, was killed in a shootout with police officers in Texas.

Officials have stressed that, so far, there is no concrete evidence linking the three killings and the Aryan Brotherhood together. Still, a number of officials have also mentioned the Aryan Brotherhood as a group to look at.

Alex Kane is AlterNet's New York-based World editor, and an assistant editor for Mondoweiss. Follow him on Twitter @alexbkane.