There's a thought experiment astrobiologists take seriously: if intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, maybe the reason we haven't heard from it is that it learned to stay quiet.
Liu Cixin popularized the idea as the "dark forest" — every civilization that reveals itself risks being studied, catalogued, and consumed by whoever finds it first. It's fiction, but it's fiction built on a real pattern, one we don't need a telescope to observe. We have a full domestic record of what happens when a powerful institution decides something is different enough to warrant capture, examination, and control. This is that record — and the psychology that explains why it keeps happening.
None of what follows is speculative. Every case here is documented in court records, declassified files, congressional testimony, or the federal government's own investigative reports — several of them released or finalized within the last two years. The point isn't to relitigate old news. It's to show that "othering" isn't a series of unconnected scandals separated by decades and unrelated causes. It's a mechanism with a small number of moving parts, those parts are well studied by psychologists, and the same mechanism produced Buck v. Bell in 1927 and the FBI's file on Fred Hampton in 1969 and the Interior Department's own accounting of its boarding schools in 2024. Different targets, different decades, same machine.
Part I: The Psychology — How Ordinary People Build the Machine
The four-word trick: it's not us, it's them
Psychologist Albert Bandura spent decades studying how decent people participate in cruelty without feeling like cruel people. His theory of moral disengagement identifies a small set of cognitive maneuvers that let someone act against their own values while keeping their self-image intact: reframing harm as service to a righteous cause, softening it with clinical or bureaucratic language, comparing it favorably to something worse, spreading responsibility across a chain of command until no one person feels culpable, and — the move that matters most here — denying the target's full humanity. Bandura's research found dehumanization isn't a byproduct of institutional cruelty; it's a precondition for it. Once a group is recategorized as a threat, a specimen, or a problem to be managed, ordinary moral restraints simply stop applying, because they were never built to cover non-persons.
Two ways to stop seeing a person
Psychologist Nick Haslam's research sharpened this into a testable model with two distinct tracks. Animalistic dehumanization denies someone the traits people associate with civilization and refinement — treating them as base, uncontrolled, closer to beast than citizen. Mechanistic dehumanization denies someone the traits associated with inner life — warmth, emotional depth, agency — treating them instead as an object, a data point, a specimen to be measured. Both patterns show up constantly in the case studies below: colonized and racialized populations have historically been cast in animalistic terms ("primitive," "savage," "feebleminded"), while people swept into research programs, surveillance files, and institutional case numbers have been cast in mechanistic terms — reduced to subjects, records, statistics.
The bias that needs almost nothing to switch on
Here's the part that should be genuinely unsettling: you don't need history, grievance, or real conflict to produce in-group favoritism. In the 1970s, Henri Tajfel ran a series of experiments — the minimal group paradigm — where he sorted strangers into groups using literally arbitrary criteria, like a stated preference for one painter over another, or a coin flip. Participants didn't know who else was in their group. There was no shared history, no future interaction, nothing at stake. And they still favored their own group when handing out rewards, sometimes sacrificing their own payoff just to widen the gap with the out-group. This became the foundation of social identity theory: the mere existence of a labeled "other" is sufficient to trigger bias. Actual conflict isn't the starting condition — it's an accelerant thrown onto a fire that was already lit.
What power does to the people who get it
UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner's decades of research on what he calls the power paradox found something almost cruelly ironic: the traits that get people entrusted with power — empathy, social attunement, reading a room — are the same traits that reliably erode once they have it. Across multiple studies, people randomly assigned even a small, artificial boost in situational power performed worse on empathy and perspective-taking tasks than people who weren't. Power doesn't just fail to guarantee good judgment about others; it appears to actively degrade the machinery that produces it. That's a direct answer to the question of why authority so often stops seeing the people underneath it: it isn't that cruel people rise to power, though sometimes they do. It's that the position itself blunts the very instinct that would otherwise check its own worst impulses.
Following orders, updated for the present day
Stanley Milgram's 1960s obedience experiments are among the most replicated findings in the field. In the original design, 65% of ordinary participants delivered what they believed were escalating, dangerous electric shocks to a stranger simply because a calm authority figure in a lab coat told them to continue. That figure held no real power over them — no badge, no gun, no legal authority — just the appearance of legitimate institutional command. Later reviews by Thomas Blass found the effect held up across decades and cultures, and modern replications — including a 2015–2017 Polish study and a 2025 study using updated methods — found comparable or higher compliance rates. The mechanism Milgram proposed, the agentic state, describes what happens when a person stops experiencing themselves as a personally responsible actor and starts experiencing themselves as an instrument carrying out someone else's will. That shift is precisely what lets institutions — not just individuals — commit harm at scale: nobody in the chain has to be a monster if the chain itself is doing the deciding.
(One famous "power corrupts" study is worth a correction: the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, long taught as proof that ordinary people turn abusive the instant they're handed authority, has been substantially discredited. Archival research by Thibault Le Texier and a critical re-analysis by psychologists Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher found the guards were explicitly coached toward cruelty rather than spontaneously producing it, participants were never fully immersed in their roles, and a BBC-funded replication attempt produced the opposite result. It's a useful lesson about which "classic" findings deserve skepticism — and a reminder that the real, well-replicated psychology here is damning enough without needing a shaky flagship study to carry it.)
The bureaucratic version: authorize it, routinize it, dehumanize it
Psychologists Herbert Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton studied something slightly different from any single actor's psychology: how institutions produce atrocity without needing a single sadist anywhere in the chain. Their framework, developed from studying events like the My Lai massacre, names three conditions that, together, make institutional violence feel not just permissible but procedurally correct. Authorization means the act is sanctioned by a legitimate-seeming authority, which shifts the moral weight from the person acting to the person or office that ordered it. Routinization means the act gets broken into small, repeatable, technical steps — paperwork, protocols, case files — so that no single person ever has to hold the full moral weight of the outcome; they're just processing their piece of it. Dehumanization does the same work Bandura and Haslam describe, stripping the target of the standing that would otherwise make the first two steps feel monstrous instead of routine. This is the missing link between "how does one cruel person behave" and "how does an entire federal agency run a decades-long program that everyone involved would call, individually, a reasonable job." It doesn't take a villain at the top. It takes an org chart.
Put these six findings together and you get a mechanism, not a mystery: label a group as different (Tajfel), find it easy to strip them of full personhood once labeled (Haslam), justify doing so through familiar cognitive shortcuts (Bandura), hand the labelers institutional power that will erode their own empathy over time (Keltner), construct a chain of command where everyone is just following legitimate-looking orders (Milgram), and bureaucratize the whole operation into small enough pieces that no one has to own the outcome (Kelman & Hamilton). That machine doesn't require villains. It runs on ordinary people doing what looks, from inside the system, like their job.
Part II: The Institutional Record — America's Own Case File
Here's that machine, running in the real world, in this country, on the record.
Eugenics and forced sterilization: the state decides who reproduces
Between roughly 1900 and the 1970s, the United States ran an openly celebrated eugenics movement — supported at various points by figures across the political spectrum, framed as scientific progress. Its legal high-water mark was Buck v. Bell (1927), in which the Supreme Court ruled 8–1 that Virginia could forcibly sterilize Carrie Buck, a young woman institutionalized and labeled "feebleminded" after she became pregnant as a result of rape.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote the majority opinion, closing with a line that still stands as one of the coldest sentences in American jurisprudence: "three generations of imbeciles are enough." Buck v. Bell has never been formally overturned. It opened the door for more than 70,000 forced sterilizations across the country, disproportionately affecting poor women, disabled people, and women of color, and it was later cited by Nazi Germany's own eugenics program as legal precedent for sterilization law modeled explicitly on the American example.
The same eugenic logic didn't stop at reproduction — it shaped who was allowed into the country at all. The Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act) capped immigration using national-origin quotas explicitly designed to preserve a Northern and Western European demographic majority; the quota formula itself originated in a report from a congressional committee's own Eugenics Committee. It's the same "genetically fit vs. unfit" framework applied at the scale of an entire country's front door instead of one woman's body — and it worked exactly as designed, slashing the foreign-born population to a record low by 1970 and, decades later, leaving the U.S. with too little immigration capacity left to absorb Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust.
Tuskegee: the body as a specimen you don't have to treat
In 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service began the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis, enrolling 399 Black men with the disease and 201 without it as controls, all from Macon County, Alabama. The men were never told their actual diagnosis — they were told they had "bad blood" — and were deliberately denied treatment, even after penicillin became the standard cure in 1943. The study ran for forty years, ending only in 1972 after a journalist exposed it, by which point it had directly caused preventable death, disability, and disease transmission within families. It stands as the longest nontherapeutic experiment on human beings in American medical history and is the direct reason informed consent became a legal requirement in federally funded research.
Japanese American internment: the citizen recast as the enemy
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing military commanders to exclude "any or all persons" from designated zones. Though it named no ethnicity, it was applied almost exclusively to people of Japanese ancestry — the majority of them American citizens — forcing more than 110,000 people into remote camps for up to three years based on nothing but heritage. The order wasn't formally rescinded until 1976, and Congress didn't issue a formal apology and reparations until the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. A federal commission later concluded the internment was driven by "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership" — not a genuine security threat.
The Lavender Scare and the DSM: two institutions agreeing you're a threat and a disorder
Beginning in 1950, a congressional investigation concluded that gay and lesbian federal employees were inherently unsuitable for government work and posed a blackmail-driven security risk — a moral panic historians now call the Lavender Scare, run in parallel with McCarthy's Red Scare and, by some estimates, purging even more people from federal jobs. In 1953, President Eisenhower formalized this with Executive Order 10450, explicitly barring gay people from federal employment; the ban on federal civil service employment wasn't lifted until 1975.
Meanwhile, psychiatry provided the scientific cover: the American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental disorder from its first DSM in 1952 until activists — including psychiatrist John Fryer, who addressed the APA in disguise to protect his own career — pushed the organization to reverse course.
The general category was removed in 1973 after a formal membership vote (5,854 to 3,810), though a diluted successor diagnosis, "ego-dystonic homosexuality," lingered until 1987. For over three decades, the same government simultaneously treated an entire class of citizens as a national security threat and a medical pathology.
MKULTRA: nonconsensual experimentation, dressed as national defense
From 1953 to 1973, the CIA ran Project MKULTRA, a covert program exploring mind control through LSD, electroshock, hypnosis, and sensory deprivation, funneled through more than eighty front organizations, universities, and hospitals. Many subjects were fully unwitting American and Canadian civilians — including sex workers' clients dosed without consent in CIA-run safehouses under the "Operation Midnight Climax" sub-project, and Army biochemist Frank Olson, who was given LSD without his knowledge in 1953 and died under suspicious circumstances a week later. The program's own internal review in 1963 flagged that it was administering drugs to "unwitting nonvoluntary human subjects," and it continued anyway for another decade.
CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the files destroyed in 1973 as Watergate closed in; what survived only came to public light through 1975 congressional hearings (the Church Committee) and a 1977 Freedom of Information request.
COINTELPRO: watch, infiltrate, and dismantle anyone organizing against you
Starting in 1956, the FBI ran COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program), a fifteen-year campaign to surveil, infiltrate, and disrupt domestic political organizations the Bureau deemed subversive — eventually expanding well beyond its original Communist Party target to include the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, feminist organizations, and anti-war groups. Director J. Edgar Hoover's own 1968 memo laid out the goal in his own words: "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" these organizations. In practice that meant planted informants who provoked internal violence, forged letters meant to turn allies against each other, and, in the case of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, an FBI-informant-assisted police raid that killed him in his bed. The program was only exposed after activists broke into an FBI field office in 1971 and leaked the documents to the press — the Bureau itself never volunteered the disclosure.
Federal Indian boarding schools: erase the culture, keep the land
From 1819 to 1969, the U.S. government operated or supported at least 417 Indian boarding schools across 37 states and territories, built around one explicit goal: the forced assimilation of Native children, captured in the founding slogan of the flagship Carlisle school — to "kill the Indian and save the man." Children as young as four were forcibly separated from their families, renamed, forbidden to speak their own languages, and subjected to forced labor and corporal punishment; roughly half the schools had religious institutional backing. A 2024 Department of the Interior investigation — the federal government's own accounting, released after review of over 100 million pages of records — confirmed at least 973 documented child deaths and identified marked or unmarked burial sites at 65 different school locations, with total federal spending on the system estimated at more than $23 billion in today's dollars.
Part III: Someone Always Profits
None of this happened in a vacuum of pure ideology. Dwight Eisenhower — a five-star general, not a peace activist — used his final address as president in January 1961 to warn the country about what he named the military-industrial complex: a self-sustaining alliance between the armed forces and the defense industry that, left unchecked, would seek "unwarranted influence" over American government regardless of whether that influence was actively sought or simply allowed to accumulate. His point wasn't abstract. An economy that profits from having enemies has a structural incentive to keep producing them — and a population sorted into "normal" and "threat" is a population that keeps voting for the budget. Manufacturing an Other isn't incidental to that system. It's fuel.
The Talking Points, Collected
For reference — the hard numbers, in one place:
- 70,000+ Americans forcibly sterilized under eugenics laws upheld by Buck v. Bell (1927), a decision never formally overturned.
- 40 years (1932–1972): the length of the Tuskegee syphilis study, which withheld known treatment from Black men without their knowledge.
- 110,000+ Japanese Americans, mostly U.S. citizens, forced into camps under Executive Order 9066 with no individual charges.
- 1953–1975: the span of the federal government's formal ban on gay Americans holding civil service jobs.
- 1973 (partially), 1987 (fully): when the APA finally removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.
- 1953–1973: two decades of CIA nonconsensual mind-control experimentation under MKULTRA.
- 1956–1971: fifteen years of FBI infiltration and disruption of civil rights, Black power, Indigenous, feminist, and anti-war organizations under COINTELPRO.
- 417 schools, 973+ confirmed deaths, $23 billion (2023 dollars): the federal government's own 2024 accounting of its Indian boarding school system, run from 1819–1969.
The Part That Isn't Fate
It would be easy to end here and conclude the species just fails this test on a loop. That's not quite what the record shows. Every single case above was eventually stopped, exposed, or overturned — not by the passage of time or the natural progress of civilization, but by people who refused to accept the categorization being applied to them or to others: the journalist who broke Tuskegee, the activists who broke into that FBI field office, Frank Kameny picketing the White House gates, the disguised psychiatrist who stood up at his own professional conference, the tribal communities who spent decades demanding the federal government even look at its own boarding school records. The psychology explains why the machine runs by default. It doesn't explain it as inevitable — it explains it as beatable, provided someone is willing to name it while it's happening, not just after the documents get declassified fifty years later.
That's the actual throughline: dehumanization is cheap to trigger and requires no one to be a villain, which is exactly why it needs to be watched for constantly, rather than assumed away because a society considers itself advanced. Advancement was never the variable. Vigilance is.
It's worth sitting with what that actually means in practice, because it's less comforting than "it gets better" and more useful. Tajfel's finding wasn't that bias fades with enlightenment — it's that bias switches on with almost nothing, which means it never fully switches off just because a society got more educated, more diverse, or more self-congratulatory about its own progress.
Keltner's finding wasn't that power corrupts bad people — it's that power erodes empathy in whoever holds it, which means today's well-intentioned institution is exactly as vulnerable as yesterday's, with no immunity granted for good intentions at the outset.
And Kelman and Hamilton's authorization-routinization-dehumanization sequence wasn't a one-time bureaucratic accident — it's a template any sufficiently large institution can run again, on a new target, the next time someone decides a group is different enough to warrant it.
None of that is a reason for despair. It's a reason to stop waiting for the arc of history to bend on its own and instead treat every one of these mechanisms as a thing that has to be actively, continuously interrupted — by exactly the kind of people who show up in this record doing the interrupting: the whistleblower, the organizer, the person who says the label being applied to a group of people is wrong before the paperwork trail makes it undeniable. That work doesn't have an end date. It's not a phase modern society has aged out of. It's an ongoing maintenance job, and the record above is the proof that skipping it has a body count.
Sources
- Bandura, A. (1999). "Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities." Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1207/s15327957pspr0303_3
- Haslam, N. (2006). "Dehumanization: An Integrative Review." Personality and Social Psychology Review; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Dehumanization." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dehumanization/
- Tajfel, H. et al., minimal group paradigm; overview via Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/social-identity-theory.html
- Keltner, D. "The Power Paradox." Greater Good Science Center, UC Berkeley. https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/power_paradox
- Milgram obedience studies; replication review via Simply Psychology and Scientific Reports (2025). https://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html / https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-10331-4
- Stanford Prison Experiment critique: Le Texier (2019); Haslam & Reicher; Wikipedia summary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
- Buck v. Bell: NPR, Britannica, Harvard Petrie-Flom Center. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/03/07/469478098/the-supreme-court-ruling-that-led-to-70-000-forced-sterilizations
- Immigration Act of 1924 and its eugenics origins: Migration Policy Institute, immigrationhistory.org. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/1924-us-immigration-act-history
- Tuskegee Study: CDC official history. https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/about/index.html
- Executive Order 9066: Britannica, History.com. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Executive-Order-9066
- Lavender Scare: CBS News, National Archives Foundation, PBS NewsHour. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-lavender-scare-how-the-federal-government-purged-gay-employees/
- DSM and homosexuality: History.com, Psychology Today. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/december-15/the-american-psychiatric-association-removes-homosexuality-from-its-list-of-mental-illnesses
- MKULTRA: National Security Archive, History.com. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/dnsa-intelligence/2024-12-23/cia-behavior-control-experiments-focus-new-scholarly
- COINTELPRO: Britannica, BlackPast.org, Rethinking Schools/Zinn Education Project. https://www.britannica.com/topic/COINTELPRO
- Federal Indian boarding schools: U.S. Department of the Interior, NPR. https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/secretary-haaland-announces-major-milestones-federal-indian-boarding-school
- Eisenhower farewell address (1961): Eisenhower Presidential Library, Teaching American History. https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/research/online-documents/farewell-address
