Author: Miroslav Filip
During the coronavirus pandemic, societies all over the world have been penetrated by a mixture of anger, distrust, suspiciousness, disgust or hatred. This trend seems to characterize the pandemic period, which is mirrored in terms such as „an epidemic of hostility“. Although hostility in the pandemic have been manifested in many forms, from the constructivist point of view, it is possible to identify its underlying principle. Paraphrasing George Kelly’s definition, hostility is a frantic effort to extort one’s view (of events, other people or the self) despite the fact that this view is failing. In other words, if an individual or a group realizes that the world does not go according to what he or she predicts or finds meaningful, he or she may force the world to fit his or her predictions.
Hostility as the effort to extort one’s own failing view belongs naturally to everyday life and does not need to be too destructive; we all get hostile sometimes. For example, a first reaction to a discrepant or negativepiece of information about an idol may automatically lead to dismissing someone who came out with that information. Normally, it is up to us me to what extent I defend my view despite the cost, or whether I acknowledge that I was wrong and reconstrue my view. In contrast to hostility in everyday life, in this article I will focus on how the constructivist definition applies to harmful degrees of hostility that are flourishing in circumstances such as the global pandemic.
The story of the people of Krikkit
An episode about the planet Krikkit and the onset of galactic wars from the third volume of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy illustrates aptly an extremely hostile reaction to a massive disruption of a worldview of a social group. Life on the planet Krikkit was quite specific. Due to the surrounding dust cloud, nothing could be seen in the Krikkit sky. The people of Krikkit never looked up and had no idea about the Universe at large. However, this does not mean that they felt isolated or alone:
„The people of Krikkit have never thought to themselves ‚We are alone in the Universe.‘ … Because of the Dust Cloud there has never been anything to see in the sky. At night it is totally blank. During the day there is the sun, but you can’t look directly at that so they don’t. They are hardly aware of the sky.”
A historical event – the crash of an alien spaceship – challenged the Krikkiters’ worldview dramatically.
“The profoundness of the shock and horror they [the people of Krikkit] emanated a few moments later when the burning wreckage of a spaceship came hurtling and screaming out of the sky and crashed about half a mile from where they were standing was something that you had to be there to experience.”
In response, the Krikkiters built their first spaceship to explore the area that had remained beyond their horizons so far:
“The period of time which had elapsed between the moment that the people of Krikkit had discovered that there was such a thing as space and the launching of their first spaceship was almost exactly a year. … Their historic mission was to find out if there was anything or anywhere on the other side of the sky, from which the wrecked spaceship could have come, another world maybe, strange and incomprehensible though this thought was to the enclosed minds of those who had lived beneath the sky of Krikkit.”
As fans of the Hitchhiker’s Guide know, the Krikkiter’s first space mission had terrible consequences:
After going through the dust cloud, the first Krikkiters’ space crew „saw the staggering jewels of the night in their infinite dust and their minds sang with fear. For a while they flew on, motionless against the starry sweep of the Galaxy, itself motionless against the infinite sweep of the Universe. And then they turned round. ‚It’ll have to go,‘ the men of Krikkit said as they headed back for home. On the way back they sang a number of tuneful and reflective songs on the subjects of peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life and the obliteration of all other life forms.“
Krikkit parallels
The Krikkiters’ story illustrates how a disruption of one’s own worldview may be threatening (“shock and horror”) and hostility-provoking; it may even result in an attempt to annihilate the source of disruption. A reader is invited to associate parallel stories from the real world. Every year, I ask students of a psychology course to do the same. So far, we have collected stories of different kinds. Besides examples showing hostility based on the extortion of a fundamentalist religious or ethnocentric views, the list contains also less obvious cases ranging from peculiar events such as the discovery of the platypus by European scientists (who were initially suspected of reporting a fabulous animal) through to revolutions in science and philosophy, such as the dogmatic and hostile resistance to the novel Helio-centred view of the universe at the beginning of the 17th century (leading to the trial with Giordano Bruno).
During the last three years, students’ associations became more frequently related to the contemporary global problems such as the pandemic, climate change, migration, or current war conflicts, which illustrates the relevance of the term “the epidemic of hostility”.
In the following, I focus only on the constructivist explanation of hostility in the pandemic. Like a crash of an alien spaceship for the Krikkit people, the unprecedented situation of the coronavirus pandemic could challenge much from our own’s worldviews and thus create a fertile soil for hostility in many forms including the well-documented phenomena such as:
– dismissing and blaming scientists or health workers, which might justify and extort one’s own belief that the infection is not dangerous or that the danger is deliberately exaggerated;
– “Covid shaming” of vulnerable groups (minorities, migrants) accused for spreading the infection, which might justify politicians’ or institutions’ inactivity or their underrating the danger of new disease and extort the evidence that they did not fail in their roles of leaders;
– many well-documented cases of xenophobia and racism that might not always be underlain by the hostility mechanism; nevertheless, in a number of cases, the pandemic was accompanied by a hostile xenophobic or stigmatizing discourse that obviously served to validate a superior view of one’s own group or nation, indicating that the pandemic is someone other’s problem or blame (probably, the most widespread was the discourse about “Chinese virus”).
A positive point of this rather pessimistic discussion is that, from the constructivist perspective, the hostility I have described in its various forms does not need to be a result of psychological characteristics such as aggressiveness, impulsiveness, poor self-control or even pathological conditions but something quite subtle such as a destructive striving to keep a meaningful view of oneself, ones’s own social group and the world. In contrast to the psychological conditions, hostility as a frantic meaning-making strategy is something that can be dealt with creatively, or mitigated at various levels. In particular, much work has been done in the field of crisis communication. The pandemic experiences gave rise to a substantial development of strategies that foster meaningfulness, reduce threat and promote collectively resilient reactions. Theoretically, the extreme Krikkiters-like hostile reactions can be prevented.
Miroslav Filip works at the Institute of Psychology of the Czech Academy of Sciences and teaches a PCP course at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Masaryk University, Brno. He focuses on the application of PCP methodology (repertory grids, qualitative grids, narrative analyses) in various fields (education, life span development, COVID-19 pandemic). Contacts: filip@psu.cas.cz; Brno Personal Construct Psychology Group