Making Monsters

The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization

De: David Livingstone Smith

Narrado por: Timothy Andrés Pabon

"I wouldn't have accepted that they were human beings. You would see an infant who's just learning to smile, and it smiles at you, but you still kill it." So a Hutu man explained to an incredulous researcher, when asked to recall how he felt slaughtering Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. Such statements are shocking, yet we recognize them; we hear their echoes in accounts of genocides, massacres, and pogroms throughout history. How do some people come to believe that their enemies are monsters, and therefore easy to kill?

In Making Monsters, David Livingstone Smith offers a poignant meditation on the philosophical and psychological roots of dehumanization. Drawing on harrowing accounts of lynchings, Smith establishes what dehumanization is and what it isn't. When we dehumanize our enemy, we hold two incongruous beliefs at the same time: We believe our enemy is at once subhuman and fully human. To call someone a monster, then, is not merely a resort to metaphor - dehumanization really does happen in our minds. Turning to an abundance of historical examples, Smith explores the relationship between dehumanization and racism, the psychology of hierarchy, what it means to regard others as human beings, and why dehumanizing others transforms them into something so terrifying that they must be destroyed.

©2021 The President and Fellows of Harvard College (P)2021 Tantor

Clarity of Mind Regarding Dehumanization

Dr. Smith meticulously lays out what dehumanization is along with a clear detailing of conceptions of it which may occur as murky.

Smith, a race abolitionist, make it clear that racialization seeds the construction of humans into monsters, along with the moral gymnastics and social contradictions that accompany a dehumanizing mindset.

Logichole sweetspots.

Hard to find follow up on moral, horror and sacred, is here in this book. David Livingstone Smith in his surprise ending tells us he's
he's spent 10 years thinking about this. It shows in his book, a mogul crushing ski down the mountain. Not an inch to pinch in his story. Righteous Mind, Joseph Henrich and Jonathan Haidt's Happiness Hypothesis opened new fields of human motives in my mind. They are happy with David's book carrying forward. Dave's delivery I say "Sweet logic holes" as once he starts an explanation, it felt like a fast rabbit hole with a very sweet landing/understanding, not really knowing how I understood. I'd like to see Mark Solms (Hidden Spring) brainstem this stuff.