Part 3: How to change the world

#47—Prejudice, power and the common thread that binds us.

Welcome to Mind Flexing, your fortnightly thought expedition to everywhere and anywhere. Strap on your boots (or put your feet up), take a deep breath, and let’s get flexing.

Read Part 1 | Read Part 2

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When we sow the seeds of change in our pursuit of a calmer, more peaceful world, what we’re really seeking to convert is the human mind. We’re trying to open society’s eyes to something it hasn’t yet, can’t, or won’t see. We’re trying to create understanding so that ignorance, with its fears and illusions, shatters like a glass shard dropped on a stone-cold floor. What many struggle with, however, is that in seeking to instigate change, we find ourselves in a tug-o-war with prejudice.

Prejudice puts up a hard fight. It’s quick to form and slow to dispel. To beat it, many hands are needed pulling at the rope. Reassuringly, throughout history, the hand of ‘the arts’ has been a critical team player.

Often, as we explored in Part 2 of How to change the world, individual works of literature, art, film and music work together like a team that, as it grows in number, strengthens its influence on the social discourse. Sometimes, however, a work of art has the power to take the lead, as was the case in 1850 when Harriet Beecher Stowe picked up a pen and began to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a fictional story detailing the real-life brutality towards African American slaves. That year she wrote to the editor of the anti-slavery newspaper The National Era, saying:

"I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak.”

The paper published her story as a serial the following year and, given its popularity, a book followed in 1852. Within a year, more than 300,000 copies had sold in the United States and a further 1.5 million in Great Britain. Telling of its influence, Stowe’s story was so popular that the only book to outsell it in the 19^th Century was the Bible.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin catapulted the anti-slavery movement to the forefront of the Western discourse. Its effect was profound, so much so that when the American Civil War broke out in 1961, many credited Stowe with having started it. On December 6, 1865, eight months after the end of the Civil War, the United States adopted the 13^th Amendment and abolished slavery for good.

The arts have always been a vessel for ‘activism’. They are a wonderful conductor of information and emotion, and as such, possess the ability to disseminate feelings quickly through the populace. From Jonathan Swift’s satirical essay, A Modest Proposal, published in 1729, that raised awareness of the British Government’s long neglect of the Irish people by suggesting their poverty could be solved if they were to sell their starving children as food to the rich, to Pablo Picasso’s 1937 mural Guernica, which revealed the horrors of the Spanish Civil War; Bob Dylan’s 1975 song Hurricane, co-written with Jacques Levy, that highlighted the racism behind the unjust incarceration of boxer Rubin Carter; Jonathan Demme’s 1993 film Philadelphia that confronted homophobia and HIV/AIDS stereotypes, and Tim Winton’s new novel Juice that imagines a dystopian future created by our society’s inability to act on climate warnings—creative minds have produced countless examples of activism throughout history. These creations work to extinguish prejudices by drawing humanity closer, which is a feat easier said than done.

To understand how prejudices can be overcome, it helps to understand how they are formed. It’s frighteningly easy, as former primary-school teacher Jane Elliott discovered in 1968.

In the wake of Martin Luther King Junior’s shocking assassination, Elliott engaged her third-grade class in Iowa in an exercise to help them understand discrimination. She told them that people with brown eyes were smarter than those with blue eyes, an idea inspired by the Nazi colour palettes for eye-colour classification, though reversed. What she learnt that “terrible” day changed the course of her career. Elliott says she observed divisions quickly spread through the class as a new balance of power emerged—one that ironically affected her own authority as a ‘blue-eyed’ teacher. Interestingly, Elliot was amazed at how a changed mindset gave some brown-eyed boys with learning difficulties a sudden ability to not only read, but to read well. Otherwise, the overall mood of the day was quite unsettling.

“… the [blue-eyed] children who until that day had been model students—bright, happy, smart, quick, interested, involved, caring little people—became frightened, timid, dull, disinterested, academically challenged children. They were afraid to speak up because it was obvious that none of their contributions were going to be positively reinforced and, indeed, might be ridiculed by those fellow students who, until they got those great eyes, had been their friends. Those former friends were now malicious, provocative little brown-eyed despots.” ¹

The exercise showed that by seeding a difference, particularly one that offered one party a privilege—a perceived power—participants were quick to slip into their new stereotypes. Once the division had been planted, prejudice filled the gaps and strengthened like a self-feeding organism. Elliot said:

“I suddenly realized, as a by-product of this exercise, how easy it is to hold onto power, no matter how underserving you are of having it.”

Eye Colour, by Alia Parker

To explore just how susceptible humans are to the magnetism of power, artist Marina Abramović, in a 1974 performance piece called Rhythm 0, stood passively at a gallery in Naples, Italy, alongside a table of 72 objects: a feather, a bottle of perfume, some grapes, a selection of knives, a loaded gun… The audience was invited to do whatever they desired to Abramović between the hours of 8pm and 2am. The purpose of the work was to discover how the public would use their power over her motionless body. Thomas McEvilley, an art critic present that dark night said:

"It began tamely. Someone turned her around. Someone thrust her arms into the air. Someone touched her somewhat intimately. The Neapolitan night began to heat up. In the third hour all her clothes were cut from her with razor sharp blades. In the fourth hour the same blades began to explore her skin. Her throat was slashed so someone could suck her blood. Various minor sexual assaults were carried out on her body. She was so committed to the piece that she would not have resisted rape or murder. Faced with her abdication of will, with its implied collapse of human psychology, a protective group began to define itself in the audience. When a loaded gun was thrust to Marina's head and her own finger was being worked around the trigger, a fight broke out between the audience factions."

At the end of the performance, Abramović, as planned, began to walk toward the audience. As she reclaimed her power, the audience ran away.

Power’s attractiveness, buttressed by fear, makes it a formidable ally to prejudice. Let go of power, and someone will take it. Will there be a consequence? As such, it’s easy for humans to be fearful of things we don’t understand, people whose language we don’t speak, those who love differently. It’s easy to allow our desire to maintain the life that comforts us by forming prejudices against others. It’s not as easy to convince us otherwise. The task becomes particularly challenging given we tend to censor our information to our tastes, avoiding knowledge that may confront our prejudices. This has become increasingly the case in an online world. So how do we break through?

When Allen Ginsberg imagined that spectacle of flowers as a form of resistance to the Vietnam War, he did not stoke the fears of the Hells Angels or the army, he did not threaten one’s ‘power’. A flower offered in peace was an invitation to travel together, an invitation to be part of a new power, to become one with humanity. And here, I believe, is the key to ‘changing the world’ for the better.

It's a theory social and political psychologist Sam McFarland calls Identification With All Of Humanity. He says:

“…the extent to which people identify with all humanity varies, reflecting an important individual difference that merits intensive study. It reflects an absence of prejudice but also refers positively to a sense of belonging to one human family and a proactive concern for all humanity, just as one might have for one’s own family.” ²

McFarland’s research has shown that those who identify with all of humanity don’t exhibit the authoritarian tendency for power. Connectedness dissolves prejudices, and this is crucial to effecting lasting change. Without it, change merely sweeps prejudice into a corner ready for the wind to blow it back out again.

The arts have a unique ability to connect us, to cross-pollinate our individual experiences with those of others. They make us laugh and make us cry. They can propel public discourse and rise with the tide. Through the stories shared by writers, musicians, artists and filmmakers, we can connect the dots that join us—realise, in a non-confrontational way, our shared place in humanity and in this world.

This year has been hard. War, death, politics and environmental catastrophes have weighed heavily on people’s minds, and I’ve noticed a sense of helplessness among many. I have felt it too. And I guess what I’m saying to you, and to myself, in this long three-part series is this: what you do matters. Share your stories, share your creations. No matter how small or insignificant you feel they may be, there are people here with open eyes. Eyes of all colours. Here on Substack, the creative community is more connected than ever.

The cogs are turning, my friends. Go get ‘em tiger.

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Thank you

I wish you all a festive holiday season and a happy New Year and extend my gratitude to you all for choosing to spend time reading my words. A special thank you to those who log in to comment on my essays. Your insights, thoughts and conversations make this a wonderful place to hang out. It’s just about a year now since I joined Substack and I feel like I’ve finally found my feet. Now that I have them, I’ll be taking a break throughout January to spend time with family and friends.

I look forward to returning to you all in February 2025. Until then, keep 💪.

Things I’ve enjoyed on Substack this week

• I Compared How the Same Post Performs on Different Social Media Platforms—by

  Alexander Verbeek 🌍

  I’m not interested in spending time on social media beyond my interactions here on Substack, which I contain at a level I enjoy. Having said that, I do find social media’s changing dynamics fascinating. I got a kick out of Alexander’s comparison of his performance on Bluesky, X, Substack, and Threads.

• Auraist’s best-written books of 2024—by

  Picking the best-written books

  There’s plenty to inspire your holiday reads in this wrap of 2024’s most wonderful writing. I was happy to see Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy make the list. It’s intimidating me from my shelf this very moment.

• The age of whaling—by

  Amie Pearce

  Though a little disturbing, these memories from a not-too-distant past are a worthy reminder of the devastating impact rampant exploitation has on our environment.

Etymology Monday

For those who missed it, this week’s word is:

pioneer

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1. The Cambridge Handbook of the Psychology of Prejudice, Cambridge University Press, 2016: Chapter 29, Jane Elliott, ‘It’s All About Ignoriace: Reflections from the Blue-eyed/Brown-eyed Exercise’, pg 655.

2. The Cambridge Handbook of the Psychology of Prejudice, Cambridge University Press, 2016: Chapter 28, Sam McFarland, ‘Identification with All Humanity: The Antithesis of Prejudice, and More’, pg 633.