Dr. David Eagleman

For all kinds of reasons, people are perfectly willing to take their friends and neighbors.

Look at the Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda.

They had lived together.

They were friends.

There was intermarriage.

And then the Hutu, you know, raised up their machetes and slaughtered Tutsi at a rate faster than the Germans were able to do with gas chambers and Jews.

How these things happen, it's so important for us to understand what are the elements that lead to in-group and out-group stuff.

One of the things I've been very interested in is propaganda.

And it turns out across place and time, all governments do propaganda in exactly the same way, which is you simply –

dehumanize the other group by calling them an animal or any like a virus, you know, a pestilence.

Rats nowadays, you can even call them robots, whatever.

Anything that's not human that turns off these networks that we have in the prefrontal lobe that care about other humans and how to interact with other humans.

Our colleague Lasana Harris has studied this stuff.

And what happens is when you're dealing with an object now, like, oh, the famous thing that happened in Rwanda is the Tutsi were described as cockroaches.

And the radio was blaring that all the time.

The Tutsi are cockroaches.

So, you know, killing a cockroach isn't so hard to do.

So you grab your machete and you go do that.

And that's the kind of thing I am essentially dedicating my life to.

This kind of thing is an education.