In September, Khalilah Worley Billy from Greater Cleveland Congregations and psychologist Ben Kearney, Ph.D., joined Signal Cleveland editors at the Beachwood branch of Cuyahoga County Public Library for a panel discussion on politics — specifically, difficult conversations about the election.

We followed up with both guests so that we could share some of their comments widely. Here is our interview with Billy. 

Kearney is managing director of Professional Counseling Services. He’s also a behavioral health consultant for the Ohio Department of Medicaid and the former vice president and chief clinical officer of OhioGuidestone. His work focuses on building relationships. (In 2018, Kearney and Frank W. Lewis, now Signal Cleveland’s associate editor, collaborated on a book, “Building Together: How Relationships Make Families and Communities More Resilient.”)

The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Q: Why does politics seem to make us all so angry?

Evolutionarily, we are hardwired to assess strangers. But we’re not built to dislike the stranger. We were just built to be a little leery of them if they were not well. We are hardwired to find that which is attractive in our field of vision, and to be on alert for that which is not safe. Our brain does all these processing triggers before we’re even conscious of it.

The problem is that marketing has really taken advantage of this and builds all kinds of ways to get into our biased processes and use them to build brand loyalty. The greatest example is our phones. The functionality of an Apple phone and a Samsung are not that different. But we don’t want to examine how similar they are. And it’s the same way in politics. We want to focus on how different [the parties] are, and it normally takes some super event to get us to look at our commonalities instead of our differences — World War II, 9-11. We do set our brand loyalties aside at that point.

But we have a long history of people and organizations taking advantage of our less-than-conscious processes to drive brand identity and then using that to gain power.

Q: In the presidential election, both sides are describing the other as an existential threat to democracy. Why is that so effective?

Hate is the easiest emotion to trigger, because it lives in fear. And fear, in its exaggerated form, is ultimately irrational.

There are things we should be afraid of in life, and most of us are aware of them and keep them managed. But when fears are stoked and artificially increased by exaggerated danger statements, we start to feel out of control. And then we start hating that feeling, and we project that feeling on an object or person. And that anger and animosity enhances brand loyalty.

Q: Is there an evolutionary basis for this? What purpose did this serve in our hunter-gatherer ancestors to get hardwired in our brains?

Hunter-gatherers didn’t have to be on alert all the time. There was not a lot of contact between tribes or animals of prey. It really became problematic as we moved into cities 10-12,000 years ago [a small fraction of human evolution], and we started to have to fight over limited resources. That’s when hating the stranger really became part of our brain processes. So it’s recent, and that’s why it’s so powerful now, because we haven’t mastered the capacity to handle these deep, existential, aggressive fears. Our brains haven’t yet developed good modulation processes to protect ourselves from this extremely unhealthy emotional state that produces all kinds of stress hormones in our bodies that increase our blood pressure and interfere with our sleep.

🗳️For more on this year’s November election, visit our Election Signals 2024 page.

Q: At the Signal Cleveland panel you joined, Khalilah Worley Billy talked about describing voters as depressed rather than apathetic, and you strongly agreed. Can you explain why?

When we look at depression, it’s really a state of hopelessness. The biggest indicator on the Beck Depression Inventory that indicates a person is at risk for self harm is hopelessness. When people are hopeless, they don’t have the energy, the forethought or the passion to change their state.

Q: You also talked about how feeling hate is easier for us than to empathize with others. Why is that?

Hate, if it comes from fear, doesn’t require a great deal of cognitive process. It’s hardwired in our brains because fear is hardwired in our brains. If someone startles you, you get an adrenaline rush and you jump. You don’t have to think about it.

Empathy isn’t hardwired in our brains nearly as deeply. We don’t have an emotional response that makes us feel empathy like our emotional response that’s triggered to make us feel afraid. Now, some of us have greater capacities for compassion than others. Some of us are more hardwired to be attuned than others, but even that level of attunement is not as powerful as that startle fear response.

Empathy does have a physical process. When we see somebody in pain, we can be empathic and feel their pain, but it also requires us to be cognitive about what’s going on with that person. Empathy is much more work.

Q: Can we build that muscle?

Well, the first thing we have to do is recognize that we have an implicit bias to fear, and we are vulnerable to hate, but we don’t have to be. We’re not even supposed to, because if the stranger is safe, we’re supposed to welcome the stranger into our tribe. We’re capable of attunement with others, but we have to move into our higher angels.