#9. The Dehumanization Template

Dehumanization is one of the oldest tools of political control. And it follows a recognizable pattern.

In this episode, I identify and name what I call the Political Dehumanization Template — a five-component framework for understanding how those in power manufacture enemies, redirect legitimate grievances onto scapegoats, and license violence against targeted groups. The template is ancient. It is deliberate. And it is operating in American public life right now.

The five components are:

•  the manufactured threat, 
• the erasure of individuality, 
• two emotional weapons — disgust and existential terror — calibrated to produce either exclusion or extermination, 
• a self-sealing feedback loop immune to rational correction, 
• and the political function that serves those in power. 

Drawing on Timothy Snyder's Leib and Körper (living body vs. dead body) distinction and Isabel Wilkerson's work on caste, the episode traces the template from the European witch trials to the present moment — and offers three specific antidotes for those who want to resist it.

Transcript

THE DEHUMANIZATION TEMPLATE  

INTRODUCTION

Hi. This is Michael C. Patterson. Welcome to the Flourish In Times of Struggle podcast.

This series is an invitation to think together about how we can stay steady, compassionate, and engaged at a time when cruelty, corruption, and division have become increasingly normalized. My hope is that together we can prepare ourselves for the hard but necessary conversations and meaningful actions this moment requires. Because I believe we can still envision, and work toward, a future in which we and our grandchildren flourish with dignity and purpose.

I want to say something about anxiety before we begin — because many of us are carrying a great deal of it right now. The news is relentless. The threats feel overwhelming. And it is easy to feel that the forces arrayed against democracy, against decency, against the most vulnerable among us, are simply too large and too powerful to resist.

I believe we can lower our anxiety — not by looking away, but by understanding more clearly. When we can name what is happening, when we can see the mechanism behind the cruelty, when we know that others have faced versions of this before and found ways to resist it — something shifts. The overwhelm does not disappear. But it becomes navigable. [Understanding is not a substitute for action. It is what makes action possible.]

Today we are going to look at one of the most important mechanisms of our moment — one that is ancient, deliberate, and operating right now in American public life. I call it the Political Dehumanization Template. Once you see it, you will recognize it everywhere. And once you recognize it, you can avoid being manipulated by it.

Let's begin.

THE PATTERN

Dehumanization is one of the oldest tools of political control. And it follows a pattern. Whenever those in power feel threatened — by dissent, by economic failure, by the legitimate anger of people whose lives are not working — they find it expedient to manufacture an enemy. To take a group of human beings, strip them of their individuality, and remake them into a monster. The pattern is ancient. It is deliberate. And it is in use right now.

Understanding the pattern — seeing its components clearly, recognizing it when it appears — is one of the most important things any of us can do in this political moment. Because you cannot effectively resist something you cannot name.

I'll call it the Political Dehumanization Template. It has five core components. Let's take them one at a time.

COMPONENT ONE: THE MANUFACTURED THREAT

The template does not manufacture fear from nothing. It exploits existing fear — taking real anxieties rooted in real experiences, stripping them of their actual causes, and redirecting them onto a manufactured target.

The fear is real. The diagnosis is false.

People are genuinely anxious about economic insecurity, social change, the sense that the world is becoming unfamiliar and threatening. These are legitimate feelings rooted in real conditions. The demagogue does not invent them. The demagogue takes those anxieties, removes their actual causes — the concentration of wealth, the failure of institutions, the deliberate dismantling of the systems that once provided security — and redirects them onto a designated enemy.

It is not the billionaire picking your pocket. It is the immigrant. The Jew. The Muslim. The transgender person. The scapegoat absorbs the fear and protects those actually responsible for the conditions generating it.

This is step one: identify a target, load it with the anxieties people are already carrying, and redirect the anger that might otherwise be directed at those in power.

So. We have a designated enemy. We have redirected fear. What comes next?

COMPONENT TWO: THE ERASURE OF INDIVIDUALITY — THE FALSE MONOLITH

Once the target has been designated, the next step is to make sure that no individual member of that group can be seen as an individual. Because if you can see the specific person in front of you — their history, their complexity, their irreducible humanity — the template loses its power. So the individual must be made to disappear.

The group that is targeted — however internally diverse, however contradictory its members' actual beliefs and behaviors — is stripped of individuality and reconstituted as a single homogenized collective. Every member is assumed to share the same nature, the same agenda, the same malevolent characteristics. In their place stands a stereotype — a fixed, simplified caricature defined entirely by those doing the accusing.

In everyday life, stereotype produces prejudice. In the hands of political demagogues, it produces persecution.

The philosopher Timothy Snyder, in his book On Freedom, draws on two German words that name what this erasure does at the level of human perception.

Leib describes a living, breathing human body in its full humanity — sensing, feeling, irreplaceable, worthy of care simply because it is alive.

Körper describes a body that has been stripped of that humanity — reduced to a thing, an abstraction, a unit in someone else's calculation. The word shares its root with corpse — and that is not coincidental. To Körper-ize a person is to treat them as already dead to moral consideration. Or worse: as a zombie — a body that moves and threatens but carries no inner life worth protecting.

The dehumanization template is, at its core, a machine for converting Leib into Körper. And the antidote — which we will come to — begins with the reversal of that conversion. The deliberate act of seeing the specific, irreducible human being rather than the label attached to them.

So now we have a designated enemy, stripped of individuality, reduced to a threatening abstraction. What happens next? The abstraction needs to feel dangerous. And for that, the template has two very specific emotional weapons.

COMPONENT THREE: TWO VARIANTS — AND THEIR EMOTIONAL WEAPONS

The manufactured collective is cast as threatening in one of two ways — sometimes both simultaneously.

The first is what I call the inferiority variant. This portrays the target group as subhuman — dirty, animal-like, a source of contamination. The emotional weapon is disgust. Disgust evolved as a contamination-detection system and operates faster than conscious thought. Once successfully activated against a group, it is extremely resistant to rational correction. This is precisely why demagogues reach for it deliberately. Trump calls immigrants an infestation. Nazi propaganda depicted Jews as rats. Colonial powers described colonized peoples as disease-ridden and primitive.

These are not casual insults. They are calculated activations of a biological alarm system — designed to stimulate a negative gut reaction towards the   target that takes hold  before the mind has had a chance to evaluate the claim. The response disgust licenses is suppression and exclusion — contain and expel the contaminating element.

The second is the inflation variant. This one works very differently — and it is more dangerous. The target group is not portrayed as subhuman. It is portrayed as supernaturally powerful — secretly coordinated, cosmically malevolent, possessing capabilities that exceed ordinary human limits. The emotional weapon here is not disgust but existential terror. And the response it licenses is not suppression but extermination. The supernatural cannot be controlled. It cannot be merely excluded. It must be destroyed — utterly, completely, preemptively — because if you do not destroy it first, it will destroy you.

Jews have been subjected to this inflation variant with particular intensity and persistence across centuries — accused not of inferiority but of supernatural power, of cosmic conspiracy, of controlling the hidden levers of civilization. Not as corpses. Not as zombies. As vampires — beings whose supernatural power makes exclusion insufficient and extermination necessary. This is not a new or spontaneous accusation. It is a precise recycling of a template that has been in continuous use for centuries. When deliberately spread and left unchallenged, this myth has produced not just exclusion but extermination. This mechanism of inflationary dehumanization must be recognized, named, and consistently challenged.

So. We have a manufactured threat, a stripped-down stereotype, and two emotional weapons calibrated to produce either exclusion or extermination. But how does this system protect itself from challenge? How does it avoid correction? That is Component Four — and it is the most insidious component of all.

COMPONENT FOUR: THE SELF-SEALING POSITIVE FEEDBACK LOOP

The template's most insidious feature is its immunity to correction.

Any challenge to the dehumanization framework is reinterpreted as evidence of the challenger's own corruption or complicity. Skepticism becomes proof of guilt. The corrective signal — the challenge that might have stopped the persecution — is converted into confirming evidence.

The European witch trials are a textbook example. The inquisitors constructed a system in which denial was itself taken as proof. To question whether witches existed was to reveal that your own mind had been corrupted by their influence. To deny an accusation of witchcraft was to confirm your own guilt.

And the logic ran as follows. Accusation produces denial. Denial, within the system's own logic, confirms guilt. And if guilt is confirmed, the truth must be extracted — which is what torture is for. Torture produces confession. Confessions confirm guilt. Confession produces names. Names produce more accusations. The system expands by feeding on itself — and on the bodies of its victims.

Tens of thousands of people, the vast majority of them women, were tortured and executed as a result.

Simultaneously, lies repeated often enough and without effective challenge acquire the presumption of truth through sheer ubiquity. Some people were genuinely convinced that witches existed. But many were not — and stayed silent anyway. Not because they lacked the evidence to doubt. Because the claim was everywhere, the social cost of disputing it was high, and too few of the people they trusted had the nerve to publicly name it as a lie.

This is why rational argument alone is insufficient against the template. You are not dealing with a claim that can be falsified simply by presenting better evidence — the closed information system has been specifically engineered to absorb and neutralize contradictory evidence.

But rational argument is not useless. Clear, specific, evidence-based challenge is essential — it reaches those who have not yet been fully captured by the system, it maintains the integrity of public discourse, and it signals to wavering observers that the accusation is a weapon, not a truth. What rational argument cannot do alone is break the emotional grip of disgust and existential terror that the template has already activated.

For that, something more is required — and we will come to it.

But first — who deploys this template, and what do they get out of it? That is Component Five.

COMPONENT FIVE: THE POLITICAL FUNCTION — POWER, DIVISION, AND CASTE

The template is not merely a psychological phenomenon. It is a political technology deployed to serve specific purposes — to acquire, consolidate, and preserve power.

It creates the us/them binary that mobilizes group loyalty and suppresses internal dissent. A community united against a cosmic enemy does not examine its own leadership or its own failures. It cannot — its attention and energy are consumed by the manufactured threat. It will not — this is not the moment for criticism when survival is at stake. And it dare not — to question the leader is to weaken the protection the community depends on.

The permanent emergency is the permanent suspension of accountability. The demagogue does not merely exploit existing crises — he manufactures them when needed. 

A war started without congressional authorization, without consulting allies, without a coherent rationale or an endgame, serves multiple purposes simultaneously. It redirects public attention from domestic failures and from mounting calls for accountability. It wraps the leader in the flag at exactly the moment democratic oversight is most urgently needed. And it creates the conditions — emergency powers, national security justifications, the silencing of dissent as unpatriotic — under which free and fair elections can be postponed, compromised, or contested.

This is not speculation. It is the documented playbook of authoritarian consolidation, repeated across the 20th century with sufficient consistency to constitute a pattern. The template we have been describing is not ancient history. It is the operating manual of the present moment.

It divides people who might otherwise recognize their shared interests and act collectively.

And — in one of the most powerful insights from Isabel Wilkerson's work on caste — it creates or reinforces a hierarchical social order in which even those near the bottom of the economic ladder maintain a psychological investment in keeping someone below them. However much the system is failing you, the demagogue who promises to maintain your position above the scapegoated group is offering something that feels more immediate than any abstract promise of justice. As Lyndon Johnson reportedly observed: convince the lowest white man he's better than the best Black man, and he won't notice you're picking his pocket.

Demonization is not merely prejudice. It is a tool for the consolidation of authoritarian rule — and it works most effectively on the very people it most directly harms.

WHY THIS MATTERS — AND WHAT TO DO

The Political Dehumanization Template is active in American public life right now — against immigrants, against Muslims, against transgender people, against political opponents cast as traitors and enemies of the people. It has produced real violence and real terror. And it is producing the normalization of language that, wherever it has been allowed to run unchecked, has preceded catastrophic mass atrocity.

So what do we do?

Three things.

First — recognize it. The template is most powerful when it is invisible, when it feels like common sense or obvious truth rather than a manufactured construction. Once you can see its components — the manufactured threat, the false monolith, the emotional weapons, the self-sealing loop, the political function — you can see it operating in a city council comment, in a campaign rally speech, in a social media post, in a casual conversation. Seeing it is the beginning of resistance.

Second — name it. Not with rage, not with contempt, but with clarity. This is the dehumanization template. This is what it does. This is what it has always been used for. Historical literacy is itself a form of resistance. You cannot shame people out of a belief system. But you can show them the machinery behind it — and for some people, at some moments, that is enough to break the spell.

Third — refuse to let it pass without honest examination. This does not mean political correctness — the suppression of ideas through social punishment, which replicates the template's structure while reversing its targets. It means asking the questions the closed system has been designed to prevent. What specific act is being described? What is the evidence? 

What purpose does this accusation serve? Who benefits from it? These questions do not tell people what to think. They demand that they think.

And underneath all three of these — the antidote to Körper logic is Leib perception. The deliberate act of seeing the living human being rather than the abstraction. Not as a category, not as a threat, not as an instance of a stereotype — but as a specific, irreducible person, with their own history and complexity and inner life, worthy of moral consideration simply because they are alive.

That is not a political position. It is a perceptual one. And it is available to all of us, in every moment, as an act of resistance against the oldest tool of political control.

CLOSING

If today's episode was useful to you, please share it with someone who is trying to make sense of this moment. And if you want to read the companion article — which covers the same material in written form with additional depth and historical detail — you will find a link in the show notes.

Thank you for thinking alongside me. This work — the work of staying clear-eyed, compassionate, and engaged — is not easy. But it is necessary. And we are not doing it alone.