Law 10 — Give Them a Common Enemy

Give them a common enemy.

Sherif's Robbers Cave experiment in 1954 is the cleanest demonstration in social psychology of how fast this works. Twenty-two eleven-year-old boys, matched for background, split into two groups at a summer camp before either knew the other existed. Within days each group had a name, a flag and an internal hierarchy. Then the experimenters introduced competition — a tournament with prizes — and within a further few days the groups were raiding each other's cabins, burning flags, and describing each other in terms the researchers had not anticipated.

Nothing separated them. The hostility preceded any difference and produced the differences afterwards.

Two things follow, and both are operationally useful to anyone building a movement.

An external threat raises internal cohesion, disciplines dissent, and increases tolerance for a leader's overreach. Criticism from inside becomes disloyalty in the presence of an enemy, which is chapter 72's false dilemma arriving as a byproduct.

And the enemy need not be real, need not have done anything, and need not be capable of responding. What is required is that it be nameable, that it be plausibly connected to whatever the audience is suffering, and — this is the operational specification — that it be difficult to check. Chapter 209 sets out why a foreign private individual is the ideal target: a domestic opponent can reply, and an abstract force cannot be hated.

The escalation from enmity to violence runs through dehumanization, and chapter 79 is the documentation. RTLM's broadcasts called Tutsi inyenzi — cockroaches — for months before April 1994. Harris and Fiske's neuroimaging work found reduced medial prefrontal activation, associated with thinking about other minds, when subjects viewed extremely dehumanized targets. The vocabulary is not decoration; it removes the target from the category to which moral obligations attach.

The boundary is not a matter of degree, and this is the one law in the codex where the endpoint is stated in the ICTR's judgments. Ferdinand Nahimana and Hassan Ngeze were convicted in December 2003 of direct and public incitement to genocide, on the basis of broadcasts and articles. The line between mobilizing a constituency against an opponent and mobilizing a population against a people is a line the operator crosses in stages, and the vermin vocabulary is where it is crossed.

The counter is written for this guide, at the pairs page.