New Zealand Listener – June 01, 2019

JUNE 1 2019 LISTENER 43

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early three months after the Christchurch
mosque attacks, we’re all, tragically, a little
better informed about why such events
happen. Or more appreciative of how little
we know. Over the years, when asked questions
such as “People who post their murders of hostages
on YouTube are psychopaths, right?” about similar
events, I’ve given two answers: “We don’t know”
and “Probably not all of them.”
There are numerous reasons that we don’t know
enough about why people commit atrocities. One
is that atrocity is, fortunately, relatively rare. It’s
what statisticians call a “low base rate” occurrence.
So, we don’t have a lot of examples to work with,
and in New Zealand we have fewer still.
Remember the Wellington Trades’ Hall
bombing? Well, probably not if you’re
under 40, but we still don’t know who
committed the 1984 crime that killed
the building’s caretaker and, therefore,
whether it was a terror attack. If the
perpetrator isn’t caught, we’re left
trying to guess the motives.
Since March 15, I’ve come to think
that what we know about “everyday”
prejudices shouldn’t mean we assume
terror is an expression of everyday prejudice on
steroids. I think it’s qualitatively different.
Sadly, the question of why people engage in
terror has become rather more pressing since the
events of September 11, 2001, and there are a few
threads to pull together from those efforts.
For instance, who is the “us” and who is the
“them”? Just days after the March 15 killings,
Stephen Reicher, professor of social psychology
at Scotland’s University of St Andrews and an
occasional visitor to our shores, wrote a thought-
provoking commentary on Christ church. Using
some of the words of the alleged killer, Reicher and
his collaborators showed how the man had come
Is it prejudice
on steroids?
We simply don’t
know enough yet
about why people
commit atrocities.
to define the boundaries of who is
us/them and define “them” in ways
that denied humanity, morality and
“their” right to exist. This is a consist-
ent thread in his article – a line has to
be crossed whereby potential killers
define the outgroup in such terms
and it becomes their personal obliga-
tion to take action.
In contrast, the words of Prime
Minister Jacinda Ardern are exam-
ined to show how they skilfully
redefined “us” in a way
that included “them” to
impressively subvert the
hate manifesto.
C
lark McCauley,
emeritus professor
at Pennsylvania’s
Bryn Mawr College, has
spent 20 years building
towards a two-pyramid
model of terror. The two-
pyramids idea is simple: fewer people
(at the bottom of his “opinion”
pyramid) care about a particular issue,
be it inequality or perceived victimisa-
tion, than do those on the next level
up. Among those who care about per-
ceived injustice, more don’t condone
violence than do. At the penultimate
step of the pyramid, there are people
who care and who feel that violence is
justifiable, but they sit below the even
smaller number of people who see it
as a moral duty to support violence in
the name of their cause.
This is still “just” opinion, and not
action, which leads to the second,
“action”, pyramid. Again, the founda-
tion is the largest group of people
who do nothing, below activists
who seek out and engage in legal
action. Above them is the smaller
group, who engage in illicit actions,
but haven’t reached the top of the
pyramid where illicit action means
targeting civilians. The people we call
terrorists are those perched at the tip
of these intersecting pyramids.
But another part of the recipe is
why a particular person perches there,
and not someone else? Another line
in this recipe is something to do with
need: a need to matter, to make a
difference. And who needs to feel
they matter more than those who feel
disenfranchised and out of the loop,
as if their place in the world is being
eroded? The irony is that almost all
of these historical theories of terror
explicitly, or implicitly, involve a pro-
totypical Middle Eastern protagonist.
For me, it doesn’t quite fit March

15. l

by Marc Wilson

PSYCHOLOGY

Psychology professor

Stephen Reicher

We still don’t know

who committed

the 1984 Trades’

Hall bombing and,

therefore, whether it

was a terror attack.