Interrupting the rage machine

Fifty percent of us are chronically lonely in the United States. When we are lonely we might look at Facebook. When we respond to a post on Facebook with a like, love or angry symbol, Facebook logs our response. From enough of these responses the computer program of Facebook learns our likes and dislikes, our loves and hates. They know that people are powerfully motivated by hate, fear and dislike. Therefore, they feed us more posts to keep us angry because they want to keep us on their platform so they make money. They sell access to data about us so that people can target each of us.

Political campaigns, foreign governments and hate groups all target people based on their anger and fear. Because we respond almost instinctively to anger and fear, they can begin to move us to act in ways contrary to our values.

YouTube is worse. I looked at a video about building a deck. Soon that was all I saw on my feed. Thousands of videos on how to build a deck were presented to me. You would think that building a deck is the only thing people are thinking about. Well, that is annoying but not a problem – until you watch a video that has a carefully disguised and packaged message by a white nationalist group. You watch one video and YouTube’s software presents you with more. Pretty soon that is all you see. Counter arguments are not presented to you because the software is not written to do that.

The next step is that we start sharing our new views with our family. We begin to distance from them, they from us. Pretty soon our whole identity is bound up with this software enabled, hate-group created perspective. Because none of us likes to be wrong, we do not listen to other perspectives. Because our family shames us, we retreat further into Facebook and YouTube and into other sites of like-minded “patriots.” Because we have paid a high cost for our views, we cling to them more powerfully.

One of the Ten Commandments is “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” This is not just about lying. This is about spreading rumors, false information and defamatory language about others in our community. This made Moses’ “top ten” guidelines for human community because he recognized that such false witness not only harms targeted individuals and groups – it tears the community apart. It leads to fear, hatred and violence.

That is where we are.

So, when a family member is moving toward an identity bound up in fear your response can make all the difference.

Mostly, humans experience anger about something they love.

Listen beneath the anger and fear to what they are loving, to what they value.

Join them as far as you are able in that value.

Get them involved in some local group that shares that value.

Help them to see that people with different perspectives also share that value, also love what they love.

But here is a difficult point: to respond with respect and love, we will need to interrupt our own internal rage machine.

When we act out of our own rage, disdain or impatience we are likely to drive others further down their path.

The rage machine is at work, tirelessly at work in all of us. To respond to it, we need every human being to interrupt our own rage, reach out to those close to us, connect about what we love in common and act for the common good. In doing so, we might interrupt the rage machine, both ours and others and save our nation from a web of false, toxic witness that is leading us to the precipice of political violence. In doing so, we might experience less loneliness, more connection and remember who we are to each other.

Terry Kyllo is the executive director of Paths to Understanding, bridging bias and building unity through multi-faith peacemaking, built on the foundational work of Rabbi Levine and Father Treacy.