'The Power to Define Reality'
An edited transcript from Part 1 in the Bette Dangerous series, Understanding Dehumanization, with David Livingstone Smith
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Below, is a transcript from that interview, Part 1 in the series, edited lightly for brevity and clarity. Smith will be our guest at our next community event, Tuesday, June 30, 11 am Pacific, so please look for that invite. To understand the context for the beginning of our conversation, please review these reports:
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‘The Power to Define Reality for Us’
A Bette Dangerous interview with David Livingstone Smith from the podcast series, Understanding Dehumanization, Part 1
by Heidi Siegmund Cuda
“Fascist regimes harness powerful psychological forces, and these people should not be dismissed. It’s fine to laugh at them, but while laughing at them, we have to understand how dangerous they are. They’re not clowns, they’re not ridiculous. They have an agenda, and they have, initially, the rhetorical means, and then, secondarily, the structural means of enforcing that agenda.”—David Livingston Smith, Bette Dangerous Podcast Ep94
Heidi Siegmund Cuda: Can you please begin by introducing yourself to our audience and explaining how you came to be an expert on dehumanization.
David Livingstone Smith: I am a professor of philosophy at the University of New England in Maine. Formerly a psychotherapist, I changed careers midlife. In fact, I did my PhD in philosophy when I was middle-aged. The dehumanization story — there are two components to this — one is autobiographical. I grew up in the deep South in the 50s and 60s, and I wasn’t born in the deep South.
I was born in New York City, but the family moved down to southwest Florida when I was just a small child, three or four years old, and I grew up in an extended family with my maternal grandparents, both of whom were Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe.
Their families came over long before the Holocaust, they were fleeing the pogroms in the Russian Empire and Romania. So growing up in the deep South in those days, if you’re someone who was not acculturated to the rawness of the racism and the dehumanization of African Americans — it was palpable, the poverty, the hostility, of course, this was the tail end of the Jim Crow era on the assumption that Jim Crow has ever entirely ended in this country.
As a young child, I was appalled, really, and puzzled by the world around me. My grandmother helped me make sense of that world. She was a brilliant, self-educated woman. She had to leave school as a teenager, I believe around the age of 14, because her father had abandoned the family. She needed to go to work, but she educated herself, and she had a particular interest in in the history of genocide and racism and mass violence, and really helped me understand the world that I was living in back then.
Those experiences stuck with me. I didn’t do anything with them for a very, very long time, but they stuck with me. Now, round about, 2005 - 2006 I was researching war. I was working on a book about war, and I came across all of this wartime propaganda, which represented enemies as vermin to be exterminated, or bloodthirsty predators, or animals to be shot for fun, game animals, and I began consulting the literature, and I discovered that virtually all of it, like 99.9% of it, was done by social psychologists.
Philosophers, like myself, were not doing hardly anything on this topic…and "that inspired me to write my first book on dehumanization, which was the first, as far as I know, single-authored book in the English language on dehumanization.
I realized that there’s so much work to do on this, largely because I don’t think that the social psychologists have really gotten it right, and it seems to be a topic that is so vital for us to understand if we’re to have any hope in intervening in the kind of mass violence that dehumanization brings in its wake.
Heidi (I speak about my childhood, as a German-American youth, and my desire to understand what happened during World War II. And I ask him to comment on a documentary, where a German soldier who murdered Jewish people in cold blood said he’d been propagandized to think he was doing the right thing): As an expert on dehumanization, how can you explain what goes on in the mind of someone like that?
David: That’s really been the focus of my work. The best way to start is for me to make it clear what I mean by dehumanization, and that’s really important, because the word is used in a variety of senses and often casts more heat than light. Even in the academic literature, there are at least eight different senses in which the word is used, and many of them are incompatible with each other.
So, what I mean by dehumanization is the attitude of conceiving of others as less than human creatures. So, let’s break that down a little bit. I take a fundamentally psychological view of dehumanization. So, your question about what goes on in the mind of dehumanizers is actually very appropriate for me to address — it’s psychological, but it cannot be understood in exclusively psychological terms — and this is one of my gripes with the social psychologists. To understand dehumanization, we have to understand the forces acting on human minds, we have to understand the political and social ecology that human minds are situated in.
To come back to my definition, it’s the attitude of conceiving… whole groups of others, particularly but not exclusively groups of people who have been racialized — that is, who have been represented as belonging to an alien and inferior race, this is very standard.
The Holocaust was a racialized genocide. A lot of Americans don’t understand that to the Nazis and to Europeans generally of that period, the category ‘Jew’ is a racial category, not a religious category. Nazis didn’t care about one’s religion. This was entirely racial, so this is a collective kind of thing, normally.
Conceiving of others as less than human — what do I mean by less than human? Well, I mean less than human in a particular sense, actually in the same sense that the Nazis use the term Untermensch, subhuman, with reference to Jews and Roma people, primarily, but also to Slavs, and what that means is ‘of lesser intrinsic value.’
So the phrase that became popular during the Black Lives Matter era — Black Lives Matter — to think of someone as less than human in this specific sense means their lives don’t matter as much as other lives do, so they can be farmed and and exterminated without compunction, treated as less than human creatures.
Now notice, I didn’t say animals, I said creatures, and the reason for that is very, very important. It was something I didn’t understand when I wrote my first book on dehumanization, titled Less Than Human, which came out in 2011, but I have come to understand that when people are dehumanized, although it might begin with characterizing them as simply as vermin, simply as non-human predators, it virtually always morphs into conceiving of them as monstrous, demonic beings, and that’s very, very important, both if we’re going to look at the origins, how this comes about, but also for understanding the immense cruelty that is inflicted on dehumanized populations.
Psychological Essentialism
So how does dehumanization happen? Dehumanization relies on, in my view, two psychological tendencies. One has been studied very, very extensively and it’s called psychological essentialism. Basically, this is the idea that we human beings are psychologically disposed. We tend to divide the world of living things up into discrete categories, like by biological species, and this is the core of it, to assume that what makes any individual a member of one of these biological categories is not how it appears, but what it is, in some mysterious sense, on the inside, so the psychologists who coin the term psychological essentialism refer to that wholly imaginary property as an essence, so we attribute these essences.
Now, part of the logic of psychological essentialism is that a being’s essence, which again, I want to emphasize, is a totally unscientific notion, has no real empirical standing at all, but is really the product of robust psychological bias that we find all over the world, the essence and the appearance can come apart now. Why is that important?
Well, consider this: suppose you’re, you are a Nazi, a dyed in the wool Nazi, and I’m a Jewish guy, which I am. If you were dyed in the wool Nazi, you would think of me as an Untermensch, as a subhuman, as this dangerous, monstrous kind of being. But how does that work?
I mean, I am outwardly indistinguishable from anyone you would consider to be a genuine human being. Actually, my case is pretty good. I’m over six feet tall, I have blue eyes. When I had hair, it was blonde. I was a better outwardly representative of the so-called Aryan race than any of the Nazi high command. But still, I would be considered a subhuman. Well, why? The idea would be I might look human, but on the inside, I’m something else, I’m subhuman, monstrous. So, in a sense, I’m a counterfeit human being. Now, that’s one bit of the psychological puzzle.
Hierarchical Thinking
The other factor is hierarchical thinking. This has been much less extensively studied by psychologists. In fact, when I speak to psychologists, I say someone looking for a really good research project, this is it. Hierarchical thinking is the tendency to situate kinds of beings on a hierarchy of value…. referred to by historians as the idea of the great chain of being, which was very popular in the European Middle Ages.
The thinkers who promoted this notion conceived of the whole universe as a hierarchy with the most perfect at the top and the least perfect at the bottom, so you know God was at the top, perfectly perfect, and then there were the archangels and the angels and human beings modestly placed themselves just below the angels, and then ranked lower were various kinds of animals, plants, right down to almost the bottom.
Demons were off the tree, because the tree, the hierarchy, the great chain of being, is supposed to describe how the whole realm of the demonic was supposed to be unnatural. They were supposed to offend against the natural order — I’m mentioning this because this is very, very important for understanding dehumanization.
There is one authoritative book on this, written in the 1930s called The Great Chain of Being. It’s a brilliant book by a man named Arthur Lovejoy, philosopher and intellectual historian. It is truly a brilliant book, but I think it has a number of very significant errors — two crucial errors that I think are widely and uncritically accepted by historians of ideas, and which appear in Lovejoy’s books. One is that Lovejoy claims this was really a distinctively European way of thinking about the universe, that it was sort of cobbled together in antiquity out of elements from the work of Aristotle and Plato. That’s just not right. We find traces of it all, literally all over the world. So it’s much more ancient and more widespread than Lovejoy thought. Second, Lovejoy basically says it arose in antiquity, enjoyed a career through the Middle Ages, died out during the Enlightenment era with the rise of scientific biology. I think that’s incorrect. It has never died out.
Because our continued existence requires us to kill and exploit other living things, even if they’re just vegetables, that’s still an act of killing, so we need some way to justify the fact that, like many lives, our lives feed on other lives, so these two psychological biases — cognitive biases — working in unison make dehumanization possible. So when we dehumanize others, then we attribute to them the essence of a creature ranked lower on the hierarchy than the human.
Heidi: What I hear in this is something that then becomes very useful in the rise of authoritarian, very useful in fascism, and two things come to mind. One of them is in Bella Fromm’s book, Blood and Banquets.
She was a Jewish reporter, who kept a diary on the rise of the Nazis, because she was a reporter in Berlin at the time. She did such an incredible job of giving us firsthand reporting on people like Hitler, who was described as looking like an out of work hairdresser; she described Goebbels as ‘that raging dwarf,’ she said that you could hear Herman Goering’s medals clanking on his chest before you could actually see him enter a room. Goering would say, ‘I decide who’s Jewish.’ In other words, if there were people that were useful to him who were Jewish, then he could decide who was in and who was out. And Hitler actually could give a metaphorical hall pass if somebody was useful, he would write some decree. And then combine that with this book I read about an Armenian American man who went undercover in Nazi America in the early 40s.
He would pretend to be one of them, he was pretending to be a fascist, and when he would talk to the people who were radicalizing people in rallies and the Madison Square Garden, when he would talk to the worst of them, one of them in particular told him, ‘I don’t really believe this stuff, I’m just using it to bait the masses,’ just using it to gather people together. I bring that up because you’re describing something that is so evil, and yet that type of evil and that type of cruelty is used by people, because it has some utility for their ends, so I don’t know if that’s something you can comment on.
The Role of ‘Expert’
David: That really takes us to the third of the three components. Dehumanization does not spontaneously arise in the human mind, it is a product, invariably of ideology and propaganda of one sort or another, and let me explain how that works, so one of the really important features of human life for untold 1000s of years is a division of cognitive labor, so we place certain individuals in the role of expert.
Now I describe this as a role because I want to be neutral about whether the attribution of expertise is justified or not. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. But that’s what we do. The expert is someone who is supposed to know, and we endow them with the power to define reality for us, and this is really, really important. We simply could not have the quality of life that we have unless we deferred to those in the role of experts, so for instance, I’m sitting at a chair in my study at home, and the chair looks to me perfectly without gaps in it, but if I talk to an expert, a microphysicist, in this case, that microphysicist will tell me, ‘David, it’s mostly empty space.’
Now this contradicts what my eyes tell me, but I accept it. Why do we accept it? Because the physicist is supposed to know.
The problem arises when the expert is someone like Joseph Goebbels or Hermann Goering, right? They, too, were placed by very many people in that social role of expert, and they could say to the populace, ‘Jews might seem to be human, but they’re really subhuman,’ and that carries weight because of their social role as experts. So although some propagandists, like the fellow you mentioned, who went undercover in the United States, and spoke to a particularly repulsive American fascist — some people like that fascist cynically promote dehumanizing propaganda, but others certainly believe it. I think Goebbels pretty much believed a lot of the stuff that he distributed to the German public. People need to be ginned up in order to dehumanize others.
Heidi: You’re absolutely right. This sort of discourse is used particularly by people on the far right, but not exclusively, to promote their political agendas. This is a perfect place to bring up the reports that I would love your comments on.
As a reporter, I don’t like responding to the Daily Awful of the Trump regime. Seems too many smart investigative reporters waste their talent just basically playing whack a mole with lie after lie or outrage after outrage. So I always try to go above the headlines, under the headlines, and see what the overarching stories are, and where the most useful solutions are. But there are times when something so truly heinous happens that I think it’s very important to draw people’s attention to it, and I find that you actually, in your writing, kind of had a similar experience and reaction to the video that we’re going to talk about. Anybody who studied anything from the fascist playbook will know that the White House ‘alien’ video is as dehumanizing and as othering as I’ve ever seen, and it’s coming from the White House, which, in a time when nothing is really shocking anymore, this still was something that… no words.
Why did that video require such triage from somebody with your background?
David: I’d like to begin my response with an account of a backstory, and this goes back to 2015 when Trump came down the escalator and threw his hat into the ring. I watched Trump’s first speech in the run up to the Republican nomination, and I followed pretty closely what was going on. When I heard that first speech, I was really scared and I was really scared, because I study fascism, and there is a particular paper that has influenced me very, very profoundly, which was published in 1941. It was based on observations made in Germany in 1932. It was written by a man named Roger Money-Kyrle. He came from an aristocratic English family. He was a fighter pilot during World War I, he was shot down, so it ended his military career.
But he went off to Cambridge University to do graduate studies in philosophy in 1932. He got his PhD in philosophy, and also a PhD in anthropology, and became a practicing psychoanalyst 1932.
A diplomat invited him to visit Germany. 1932 was a crucial election year immediately preceding Hitler’s rise to power, and Hitler and Goebbels were campaigning furiously, flying from one city to another. Hitler would sometimes be making six speeches in a single day, and Money-Kyrle observed some of these rallies that Hitler and Goebbels held, and he said in this paper published 1941 that they always did the same thing, and it involved three steps.
One, the first step is counterintuitive: they began by making their audience depressed, which was pretty easy in interwar Germany. Germany was suffering tremendously in consequence of its defeat in the First World War and the Great Depression, which followed. So they would go on about how ‘our great nation has been brought to its knees and humiliated, and we’re the laughing stock of the world,’ and so on, and Money-Kyrle says once they’re rolling around in an orgy of self-pity, Hitler would change his tune and switch to inducing paranoia. ‘Oh, it’s not you, it’s not your fault. We were stabbed in the back. It’s the communists and the Jews. It’s the enemy within that’s destroying Germany.’ So, when the audience is then worked up into a state of panic-fear, then we get the magical solution, with what Money-Kyrle calls the ‘manic solution.’ ‘Join the Nazi party, we will initiate a 1000-year Reich of unprecedented glory,’ and so what Hitler would do then is offer salvation from the terrors that he had invoked in the hearts of his audience.
Now, why am I talking about all this? Because Trump’s first speech, and many of his subsequent rally speeches, followed that pattern to the letter, and that’s why, from the beginning, I was worried. I wrote about this, I gave talks about this, and all of my well-meaning friends would metaphorically pat me on the head and say, ‘Silly boy, this is just amusement. Trump will never get the nomination. We get nomination. Oh, Trump can never win.’ I was even assured it was mathematically impossible. ‘No you don’t get it. This is powerful stuff. This is dangerous,’ I explained.
So I had Trump pegged as working from the fascist playbook from the beginning, and given that, his subsequent trajectory, his blatant dehumanization of primarily racialized immigrants, has not been surprising in the least. The video that that you began speaking about and invited me to speak about is simply the latest and most disturbing example of this, It’s ostensibly humorous, which is grotesque in itself. There’s this X-Files music playing in the background, and it’s talking about aliens walking among us, and it’s quite clear these are not human beings, they’re described with by the pronoun ‘it.’ And the idea is they will be captured and released into their natural environment, here they’re really, really, represented as subhuman creatures. It’s unthinkably dangerous,
Heidi: Right, and combined with what we know about the methodical, meticulous job they are doing of demolishing all the structural integrity of our democratic institutions, while building what look like camps for housing people, none of this is to be taken lightly.
David: These are concentration camps.
Heidi: Yes, I believe so. I’ve written about this — what else would be the intent? I’d like to wrap with for this Part 1: I would love for you to comment from your decade of writing and warning about the rise of Trump in America to the people who still continue to say, ‘Oh, he’s just a clown, oh, Robert Kennedy Jr. is just a weirdo, oh, Tulsi Gabbard’s just a cultist, and Pete Hegseth is just a talk show host’ — I’m sure that you have seen these people before in history, and I think that there has always been this kind of underestimating of the danger that we are facing.
David: Yes, that’s absolutely right. In the early days, people spoke of the Nazi regime in precisely that way. Hitler was a clown, he could be kept in control, particularly the business people, who sucked up to Hitler because they thought he could aid them in combating the Social Democrats and the Communists. They thought, ‘We can control him,’ or ‘this is just talk, you know, this is just his antisemitic stuff. Yes, just talk, he’s just using it to get political traction. This will fall away.’ And ‘Goering is a buffoon,’ and so on.
This was quite standard, right? So I think people do not understand the power that fascist regimes when they’re successful, and most fascist movements fail, but there are enough of them that succeed for this to be a real worry. And fascism is able to harness powerful, powerful, powerful psychological forces, and these people should not be dismissed. It’s fine to laugh at them, but while laughing at them, we have to understand how dangerous they are. They’re not clowns, they’re not ridiculous. They have an agenda, and they have, initially, the rhetorical means, and then, secondarily, the structural means of enforcing that in that agenda.
(Part 1, Understanding Dehumanization, from Bette Dangerous podcast Ep94 interview, June 16, 2026)
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More about David Livingstone Smith:
Described as “a philosopher seeking not just to interpret the world, but to change it” by the Times Literary Supplement, Smith is the author of 10 books. He won the 2012 Anisfield-Wolf Prize for nonfiction (awarded jointly with Yale historian David Blight), the 2023 Joseph B. Gittler Prize awarded by the American Philosophical Association for outstanding contributions to philosophy of the social sciences, the 2024 Dr. Martin R. Lebowitz and Eve Lewellis Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution, awarded by Phi Beta Kappa and the American Philosophical Association (awarded jointly with Cornell philosopher Kate Manne), and was shortlisted for the Nayaf Al-Rodhan Prize for Transdisciplinary Philosophy, awarded by the Royal Institute of Philosophy in the UK.
All of these awards were for his work on dehumanization. He is frequently interviewed in the national and international media on dehumanization, race, racism, national and international affairs, and related topics. He has given presentations at such venues as the 2012 G20 economic summit, where he spoke on dehumanization and mass violence.
Before transitioning to philosophy, Smith was a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and Freud scholar, and director of the MA program in psychotherapy at Regent’s College in London, England. Smith is a professor of philosophy at the University of New England in Maine, and he will be spending the 2026/27 academic year as the Tage Danielsson Professor at Linköping University, in Sweden.
You can find links to his books and published works here and for his Substack, go to Dehumanization Matters.
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