All minority groups, political, ethnic, racial, and sexual, seem prone to this strange reversal. After all, outsiders no less than insiders are the sons of their fathers and acquire a common heritage. Intolerance, in some form, has always been part of that heritage. Because of their presumed inferior status, children reared in an adult world, might be considered the most fundamental minority group-one to which we have all belonged. Perhaps, herein lies an empirical basis for human brotherhood. Be that as it may, children soon learn to identify with their persecutors, albeit benevolent persecutors. Parental identification usually includes internationalization of the disposition to reject "inferiors" even if the specific familial and social scapegoats are eventually accepted. And all too often, inferior means nothing more than different.

This developmental process has many derivatives in adult life. Current socio-political attitudes provide one rather conspicuous example. With the exception of the few periodicals adopting a frankly humanistic or scientific orientation (e.g., Daedalus, The Realist), one becomes accustomed to the various forms and degrees of ethnoand egocentricism endorsed. Bigotry, often disguised and implicit, cuts across liberal-conservative distinctions. The major difference between many conservative and liberal views is in the choice of scapegoat. The conservative choose traditional "popular" scapegoats, e.g., communists, homosexuals, while the liberals choose "unpopular" scapegoats, e.g., advertisers, Protestants. While the differences between these positions are often stressed by their advocates, their essential similarity is usually quietly ignored, namely that both want to put down somebody in the name of decency, goodness, or justice. This is called hypocrisy.

At the risk of gross oversimplification, two other positions will be distinguished. These positions are neither liberal nor conservative. One is radical including the extreme. right and the extreme left. This group reduces complex issues, imperfectly understood by even the most astute observer, to simple black and white terms. Eric Hoffer (1951) calls them "true believers" and Alan Wheelis, in Quest for Identity (1958), presents a psychological analysis of their origins. This group is characterized by wanting to put more people down, harder. The intensity of the radical's commitment and the fact that the force behind his pronouncements is more reaction than action renders him particularly vulnerable to the other extreme. Thus, the Birch Society has its ex-communists and some of the mostrabid atheists become Catholics. Similarly, a "latent" or "reformed" homosexual might feel compelled to out-hate his current affiliates in order to reinforce his unstable resolvement.

mattachine REVIEW

The second position includes a group of people who are alienated, caught in an insoluble dilemma. They have been described most aptly as "hung up." Peculiar contradictions in their value-systems prevent them from joining the crowd-any crowd. Norman Mailer's "white negro" is one example. Or in a very narrow sense, consider a Protestant homosexual. One possible resolvement of this problem is disaffiliation, i.e., abandoning social, future-oriented reality in favor of immediate, private experience. The disaffiliates have been called "beat" or "hip." Whatever else might be said of them, they don't seem to hate anyone.

A second possible resolvement of conflicting loyalties involves dissociation from one horn of the dilemma and enthusiastically embracing the other. Psychologists have coined the term, "identification with the ag gressor," which summarizes this resolution. Like the prototype "inferior" child referred to earlier, the process involves disowning the "inferior" part of oneself, internalizing the values of the oppressor, and emulating him. Specifically, those who identify with the aggressor adopt the scapegoats of their former oppressors, i.e., they begin to hate themselves. In order to neutralize self-hate, the oppressed portion of the self is rejected. Instead, hate is directed toward others with the same stigma. This process is succinctly stated in the witticism, "if you can't beat them, join them." James Baldwin has criticized the socially-mobile, middle-class negro for taking this way out. Unlike most "liberal" writers who confine themselves to the white man's burden, Baldwin is deeply aware of the negro's complicity. He has also exposed the true significance of what often passes for greater tolerance of the negro, namely, "we will accept you to the degree you become more like us." One wonders if "the hundreds and thousands of heterosexuals" referred to in the reader's letter might not have something like this in mind. To complete the analogy, we find light negroes maligning dark negroes as well as "respectable" homosexuals condemning faggots. During the second world war, Jewish inmates of concentration camps adopted the mannerisms and cruelties of their sadistic persecutors and tormented their fellow prisoners. Apparently, there were degrees of Jewishness. In Eugene O'Neil's play, The Iseman Cometh, two prostitutes who refer to themselves as "tarts" find the conduct of "whores" reprehensible. Examples abound.

It should be emphasized that these considerations explore only one facet of man's inhumanity to man. Attempted generalizations about human conduct inevitably fail to do justice to the complex motivations of an individual. Yet, examining instances of intolerance found among its public victims may sensitize us to our own vulnerability. Hopefully, then, reason, evidence, and humaneness will replace righteous indignation.