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Episode Summary:
Opening audio: Morgan Freeman, in a well-known interview with Mike Wallace, rejects Black History Month, arguing that Black history is American history. He suggests the path to ending racism is by stopping the focus on racial labels.
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In *Revolution Now!* Episode 24 (June 3, 2021), Peter Joseph uses this interview as a starting point to discuss group identity and its divisive effects. While acknowledging ongoing racial and social inequities, Joseph critiques the excessive focus on group distinctions, which he argues perpetuates division rather than unity. He calls for a shift away from group labels and towards a broader identification with humanity as a whole.
Transcript:
Transcript:
Mike Wallace:
Black History Month you find…
Morgan Freeman:
Ridiculous.
Mike Wallace:
Why?
Morgan Freeman:
You’re going to relegate my history to a month?
Mike Wallace:
Oh, come on-
Morgan Freeman:
What do you do with yours? Which month is White History Month?
Mike Wallace:
Well…
Morgan Freeman:
No, no. Come on, tell me.
Mike Wallace:
I’m Jewish.
Morgan Freeman:
Okay, which month is Jewish History Month?
Mike Wallace:
There isn’t one.
Morgan Freeman:
Oh. Oh. Why not? You want one?
Mike Wallace:
No, no. No, I don’t…
Morgan Freeman:
I don’t either. I don’t want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.
Mike Wallace:
How are we going to get rid of racism and…
Morgan Freeman:
Stop talking about it. I’m going to stop calling you a white man.
Mike Wallace:
Yeah.
Morgan Freeman:
And I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man. I know you as Mike Wallace. You know me as Morgan Freeman.
Peter Joseph:
Good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning everybody. This is Peter Joseph and welcome to Revolution Now! episode 24, June 3rd 2021. I’ve opened up today’s episode with a fairly well-known interview actor Morgan Freeman had with reporter Mike Wallace years ago on the subject of racism and group identity. It’s provocative, implying the question of just how far do we go in our society’s attempt to combat racism and bigotry before we actually end up reinforcing it. An interesting consideration as I will address today, delicately of course, as such a consideration is certainly not to imply racism and bigotry is no longer an issue in the modern world as many right-wing folks like to declare in the kind of misguided All Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter counter-movements responding to Black Lives Matter, as an example. Or in the case of the Me Too movement feminist hashtag slogan “believe women” are not of course, literal or exclusionary. It’s quite odd, in fact, how over-literalized interpretations of these things have become in this arena.
But yet it makes sense as a knee-jerk reaction, given how group identified most people are. To “believe women” as a Me Too movement related slogan does not mean you simply ignore all evidence and believe what a woman says and that is that across the board, because women can and do lie just like everybody else for their own interests. Rather, obviously, it’s symbolic to point out that for a long time now the plight of women and the abuse they have suffered at the hands of mainly powerful men, these echoes of formal legal patriarchy, does need to be reconciled.
Likewise, the slogan “black lives matter” highlights the fact that for a very long time in America, there has been a consistent injustice in the black community coming from many directions, notably today coming from law enforcement and the judicial system. But of course, way beyond that. So obviously to use the phrase “black lives matter” as a signpost gesture is not to imply other lives do not matter. It’s a common activist tool to show a change in emphasis in the process of activist awareness. And I’m sure this is utterly obvious to people listening to this podcast, but if you look around, it’s clearly not obvious to many.
And this gets to the heart of what I want to talk about today in regard to group identity. Why do some men when they hear the phrase “believe women” say to themselves, “Well, I’m a man. Does that mean I should not be believed?” And the knee-jerk reaction is rooted in the group identification in and of itself as a response. And the same reaction for “black lives matter” and someone says, “Well, I’m not black, but my life matters too, right?” It’s juvenile, it’s truncated in thought, but it highlights just how strange our sense of group identity really is and how powerful it is, whether culturally induced or as a kind of manifestation of the categorical process we use in our minds, which I’m going to touch upon in a moment as well.
Today, we live in an extremely group obsessed cultural neuroses, which doesn’t really appear to be getting that much better as the interplay between group identity, exclusion, and victimhood synergizes to effectively paralyze progress in a certain way. Paralyzing progress in this general pursuit that we’ve been inching through for generations now, seeking harmony and shared universal human rights and respect.
Now, before I jump into all that, there is a common question I’ve gotten a few times and I’ve meant to address on the subject of keeping sanity and motivation as an activist. Activist, of course, being a term that we really should not even need in this world, right? As the late great Rutger Hauer once said at the second annual Zeitgeist Media Festival years ago, paraphrasing, why do we need these terms to talk about people who simply care? Who simply care about the world? It’s unfortunate that we label people that decide to actively care when everyone should care.
Yes, there are career activists and what I generally call the activist industrial complex, as a pejorative label, to describe the treadmill of outrage, false solutions, and status seeking, and gain seeking, that defines the vast majority of people’s activist behavior, whether they know it or not. But the very idea the vast majority of people in the world take only a peripheral interest in ecological problems and social problems reveals a very unique detachment within the species where we don’t even really understand where we are and what we’re doing and what we depend on and what sustainability means. And I’m not as much sure it’s always a case of character, but a kind of entrapped desperation.
I’ve often talked about how to be an activist is really something of a luxury in the sense that most people are so strained by general survival, the thought of thinking about things outside of their family and their next paycheck is simply too overwhelming. So the system is reinforcing a feedback loop of that nature and limiting people’s ability to care about things besides their immediate selves. Hence, the soft sociopathology as I often talk about.
So we really shouldn’t even have words like environmentalist because by force of the idea categorically, it implies the contrary exists as well. Which of course it does, yes. We have this value system disorder in our society where literally people walk around and are completely apathetic to the world around them. But that’s a kind of conditioning that’s been created for them, I think. And they need to be educated out of that to realize the importance, needless to say.
Anyway, for those out there that do care about the state of the world and realize the complexity of what needs to happen to emerge out of the problems, how do you not get burnt out and tired of the conversation? Or more specifically, get burnt out after realizing the odds are pretty much against all of it in terms of change. Analysis of the cultural, economic, institutional, and overall systemic feedback loops that preserve the toxic socioeconomic system we have, which is at the root of the ecological and social crisis as argued in this podcast repeatedly and throughout all of my works, quantitatively, it suggests that we are probably not going to get out of the mess that we’ve created any time soon. We should expect, unfortunately, a great deal of increased suffering that hasn’t even begun yet because of the trajectories that we are on and the feedback loops that are present once again. And I’m going to talk about this in my June 16th lecture as well.
But just because the probabilities are against the kind of change required in the immediate sense, doesn’t mean it’s impossible. And hence, how do you relate to that potential, knowing you’re not going to get any immediate satisfaction? People have been so conditioned in all walks of life for immediate gratification and some kind of incremental reward or success that when it doesn’t happen, they get discouraged and they move on to something that will give them that gratification. This is why the activist industrial complex psychologically remains in the place that it is, because protest movements serve as catharsis. They energize, they unify people. Best-selling authors dealing with social change get money and reward. Top-rated podcasts get accolades, notable interviews. Public acknowledgement creates an incentive, a reward system that keeps people going, even though it’s not necessarily the proper direction or the proper context.
In the prior podcast, I talked about cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, and it’s similar. How we have this community of “activists” that have become delusional about the potential of Bitcoin, and it’s reinforced by the reward they physically are getting as they see the price rise in Bitcoin and hence the material benefits. Conflating that material financial success to some kind of righteous social act, which of course it is not.
But what about people like us taking a very big picture analysis, structurally? Realizing the only true change is economic change, which of course is by far the most difficult type of change any civilization can create. Why? Because those who are most successful in this kind of system are also defining the power system and hence control. And hence the power of self-preservation is very, very strong and coming from multiple angles.
And my simple suggestion is that you have to turn this kind of focus into a practice, into something that you do for the sake of itself without getting lost in expectation. It can be considered a Zen Buddhist disposition if that satisfies you. But ultimately it’s about doing the right thing, being mature enough not to expect reciprocation for that loyalty.
Now, please understand, I’m not diminishing the potential of all of this. As I will talk about in my June 16th lecture, there is a very viable strategy. And if we can get people on board with it, it could have very radical and possibly even rapid effects. But again, it’s not with the probabilities as I see it. And it’s not going to have immediate satisfaction once again, so you have to find a new level of operation if those are your expectations.
I’ve watched large movements rise and fall. I’ve watched people burn out. I’ve watched people get upset and attack their friends and peers in the movement, looking for someone to blame for their own dissatisfaction. Become depressed with confusion about why things are not progressing and so forth. People turn jaded and bitter. And I’ve had all these feelings myself to one degree or another. And the trick is to find your own level and create your own comfort zone, which is relatively obvious, but it needs to be stated.
By example, you may notice that I don’t really self-promote much anymore. I don’t have fancy publicists promoting this podcast and beyond. I rarely show my face as I prefer the message come forward and not some branded identity. I’m not interested in the status game. I don’t play all the typical games of, “Hit the subscribe button and ring the bell.” I have created a very simple meditation out of all of this. Very active, but very simple. And I reject the kind of marketing gimmickry that so many, pretty much everyone I know, proceeds with.
I’ve also maintained a comfort zone in the sense that I am very careful with who I engage. Not because I’m not wanting to be challenged, but because I have a lower tolerance these days for certain personalities or circumstances. People get confused by that and say, “Why did you turn down going on Joe Rogan or Howard Stern,” or whatever, when the fact is I choose not to be that person. I don’t want to be well-known, frankly.
So all of this is to say that I’ve curtailed my activity and adopted it to fit comfort in my life in a way that reduces stress and is not overbearing, and of course is not all-encompassing. Obsessiveness is not a good thing to have in this kind of arena. And whether 10 people listen to this podcast or 10 million people listen to this podcast, it doesn’t change anything because it’s no longer about this anticipation of recognition in my mind, it’s my own loyalty to the stewardship of my existence to you, society, and the earth that gave birth to me. Sorry to sound cheesy, but that is the way I think about it.
So take what you will from that disposition. Don’t be an activist, be a human being that cares. And dedicate part of your life to furthering the betterment of everything, because you are a part of that everything one way or another, and it’s all going to come back to you one way or another.
However, I will say that community is indeed important. One of the great failures of The Zeitgeist Movement is it failed to foster the kind of community support that was really required to keep global activity going. So finding like-minded people and sharing that is indeed a very good technique to keep yourself focused because obviously we are social organisms and we want to feel like some kind of community exists, even though we are deeply in the fringe at this point.
And finally, to be clear, I’m not suggesting arbitrary acts of social concern. You have to have some kind of concentrated focus in a networked capacity. Something, again, I’m working on for my June 16th lecture, and will also be in Zeitgeist Part 4.
So those are my 2 cents on the subject. Now let’s return to the subject of group identity. Going back to the opening audio, I do wish to acknowledge that just because Morgan Freeman poses this provocative consideration, that maybe society’s obsession with group identity and by extension victimhood is actually having, to some degree, a detrimental effect on social relations and social harmony, does not mean I think Morgan Freeman himself has thought these ideas out very well.
I want to get this out of the way, because in other interviews he takes it too far, with a kind of rejection in fact of systemic racism, seeing the problem of racial and ethnic injustice in America as less relevant than it really is. He has referred to himself as an example of progress in race relations in America, which of course is true on a certain level, but it’s also anecdotal and definitely not representative of what is happening across the whole population in terms of inequity and oppression affecting black and minority communities. From wage gaps, to police brutality, to incarceration rates, disproportional levels of punitiveness, to lack of economic opportunity, lower education, to toxic lower socioeconomic status, to deep long-standing political oppression, to most recently, by example, vulnerability to disease, as we have seen with the disproportional effect on the black community afflicted with COVID-19 and so forth.
So we have indeed seen progress in the United States and beyond, largely a result of the mid-20th century civil rights movements, but we still have a very long way to go. And to highlight one’s personal success is definitely not viable enough to indicate that the rest of society is somehow now equalized by extension and the conversation is over.
That out of the way, there is still an important underlying intuitive observation in his comments about something like Black History Month being actually a subtle perpetuator of the racial divide rather than its assumed intent to the contrary. Across the whole of society today, we do see this tendency. This tendency to try and highlight historical oppression by creating placating symbols or events, like awards, months, days, or slogans, or even organizations, that on one side of the equation are acts of good faith with positive intent to try and heal things, a kind of sociological reparations, if you will, to symbolically apologize for what has happened to certain groups of people.
But the problem is the very act of those goodwill expressions, such as Black History Month also perpetuates a climate of division by force of the acknowledgement itself. It presupposes that recognizing a group in a divisionary way, translates to a further culture of equality. When again, by force of the recognition itself, it actually accentuates a sense of separation.
And if you don’t think that, let me put it a different way. Subtly, this can be evidenced by the very idea of White History Month. The very sound of the phrase White History Month would make most people a little uncomfortable, even though it’s consistent with the idea, right? Why? Because the idea brings to mind white supremacy. The so-called white person has been associated with a great deal of harm through power abuse and dominance and colonialism, colonialism on many levels, in fact, for a long, long time. So what you have is, in fact, a double standard.
Likewise, we celebrate cultures such as the huge annual Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City, something I witnessed over and over again, when I lived there. Seems positive enough. But imagine instead you witnessed a parade simply of a bunch of white folks. And of course I’m being abstract here because once again, what’s considered white is really a range of European descent, and it’s simply a non-scientific concept along with, in fact, all notions of race, of course. But if you did see a full parade of just white people marching down the street, the first thing that would likely cross your mind is white supremacy and images of Nazi Germany and so forth. So the double standard is real given the power imbalances society has seen historically, challenging the logic of the whole thing.
And I’ll do one more of these. The same observation could be said if a bunch of straight people decided to march and celebrate their heterosexual culture. Right? It’s just strange to think about that, since heterosexual culture has been so normalized that you can’t even imagine why they would do that. And yet it’s still consistent with the general idea of acknowledgement.
So the general theme here is, as a function of seeking equality, fighting oppressive circumstances and stigma, we have a tradition of recognizing and emphasizing groups that have been historically oppressed in the ideal interest to see eventually absorbed into normalcy, generating equality. So then the question becomes, at what point are these group expressions no longer needed? If the goal of civil and human rights is to foster a social condition of acceptance and equality between once historically oppressed groups, how do we know when it’s no longer needed? Where the need for this separatist group approach to achieve equal conditions, ostensively, actually fades away and we’ve accomplished our goal in unification.
And that is a question that isn’t really asked much because group identity has a life of its own, not necessarily with negative intent, perpetuating a climate of division as opposed unification in contradiction of the interest of social equality. And no, you can’t have it both ways. There’s an old Jiddu Krishnamurti quote that goes, “When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or Christian or a European or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence.”
This is not just some feel-good statement by some rogue poet. This is validated in modern psychological and sociological research. And it’s a very difficult problem because our minds are organized, our mental schema gravitates towards categorical separation. That’s how we organize life. That’s how we organize reality. We are wired to categorize and separate for comprehension. It’s also the way our language works as has been talked about before. And hence we create associations and define properties to these categories, and often superficially so, forming opinions about whatever, and it becomes reinforced through community and suddenly you have gender, race, and group bias.
But at the same time, it’s not inevitable if people are aware. Nothing is inevitable in the human mind if people choose to be aware of it. And yet of all the subjects I’ve talked about over the years when it comes to sociology, this appears to be one of the most difficult for people to get their heads around. As people become so easily offended. We are born into cultures, programmed by this biological tendency to adapt into the prevailing characteristics of that culture, and hence who we think we are is inevitably related to some preexisting culture and tradition and ultimately some group.
I suppose the most artificial and toxic of this development over generational time, of course, has been religion, since it’s completely intangible and ideologically driven without any kind of physicality required, as opposed to say gender relationships or race. Religion creates a deep association and sense of loyalty. And no doubt, a great deal of conflict and destruction has commenced over time because of people’s religious loyalties and hence antagonisms created against other religions that don’t fit the profile. In-group, out-group antagonism, born from completely ideological concepts. Which is really quite fascinating when you think about it.
And of course it’s cliché to criticize religion and all the violence that’s happened through history, but it’s really not just religion and what we understand about the diversity of religions, it’s really the underlying group frameworks that are born, revealing this underlying tendency for us to clump together for whatever reason with very unproductive ends.
And as an aside, yeah, there’s some behavioral biological research that I’ve talked about before that shows the brain reacting to foreign faces, faces that one is not familiar with because they were not exposed to such diversity as a child, and that creates apprehension as an immediate biological reaction. But as with all apparent biological propensities or tendencies, it doesn’t mean group conflict is inevitable and racism and group bigotry is unavoidable. The subjectiveness of it all is something to pay attention to. We turn on a dime to figure out which groups we like and don’t like.
And speaking of race relations, particularly in America, it’s as if we’ve forgotten that it’s all a construct, that there’s no such thing as a white person, just as there’s no such thing as a black person, by force of science itself. There are no outstanding longterm biological differences, despite what modern proponents of scientific racism unfortunately still talk about, using bogus statistics about IQs or this propensity or whatever.
And yet we still continue to foster groups and cultures that are self-identified. And if victimhood is in the history of any of these groups, it becomes that much more reinforcing. A mindset that does not actually contribute to social progress, but rather serves to paralyze progress because of the group identity association to oneself or one’s gender or one sexuality or one’s nationality and beyond. So you end up with this self-fulfilling prophecy of division and antagonism. It’s all really messy.
As a personal note, I used to live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, right on the edge of the Hasidic community, the Jewish Hasids. And when you walked into that very large community, it was like you were in a different country. Everything was in Hebrew. It was very self-contained. And I would go, just in general normalcy, to a store that was around. You know, you go and buy something and you’d go to their cash register. And they would never look me in the eye. And they would drop the money down when they gave me change in front of me and they didn’t want to touch me. And of course the feeling was that I was an outsider. And hence there was this feeling of exclusion. And you could absolutely see how that feeling of exclusion could generate animosity even though it’s not intended. It’s very hard not to feel left out or disrespected when people behave that way towards you.
And of course, that’s not exclusive to the Hasids. I’ve had similar interactions with the Muslim community, and in fact the Christian community. So I hope you see my point here. We have created sort of a systemic inverse racism or inverse group antagonism, and we try to compensate for that by saying, “Well, we should have tolerance,” or, “We should co-exist.” But all of that is actually contradictory. There are really only two levels. You are an individual that embraces all sorts of diversity of influence in your life experience. You might like Chinese cuisine. You might like Buddhist philosophy. You might like some New Testament scriptures. And so forth. All of that defines who you are.
But the moment you start to group is when everything goes haywire. Groups just fuck everything up. To believe in something that’s been associated to a group doesn’t mean you should be now part of that group. Your personal, philosophical, cultural, or whatever identity should not be associated to any group. Stop the labels.
And hence the second level, there is the human club. There’s you as an individual and then there’s humanity as a whole. And of course we have to be sustainable and in harmony with our ecosystem, so there’s that. But that’s not for this conversation. So I’m going to stop here as I’m a little under the weather today, and this is kind of a short podcast. But I did an hour-long podcast last episode, so I think I have a little credit there, right?
And to reiterate the fact that even though we are stuck in a nasty condition of group antagonism and we do need to bring groups that are historically oppressed to the forefront to help draw attention to the problem and resolve the issue, at the same time we have to remember that the whole point is inclusion and equality and seeing people eye to eye. And hence it’s time people stop this soft bigotry of group identity, thinking that you can be separatist in a group and somehow not create negative chain reactions. Whether it’s religion, whether it’s gender, whether it’s race and beyond. Stop it. The only group you belong in is the army of one, coupled with humanity as a whole.
And finally, remember the greatest agitator, the greatest perpetuator of group division is capitalism itself.
This program is brought to you by my Patreon. I think I’m going to be skipping the next podcast, or it will be at least delayed because it will overlap with my upcoming lecture, and I will be working very hard on that, probably unable to complete that podcast in a timely manner.
All right, folks, thank you very much for listening and I’ll talk to you soon. Take care out there.
