All across the world, we have perfected the mathematics of fear. One Muslim man accused of rape becomes all two hundred million Muslims as predators from whom Hindu women must be protected. One Black man running becomes all Black men as criminals fleeing. This is the algebra we have learned: how to multiply one into millions, how to divide humans from humanity.
The politicians know this algebra better than any mathematician. They understand that fear, properly manipulated, is more powerful than any manifesto, more binding than any ideology. In India, I have seen what happens when the mind's desperate need to categorize meets the politician's desperate need for power. In 2002, in Gujarat, a train caught fire in Godhra. Fifty-nine Hindu pilgrims died. Before investigations could determine the cause—which remains disputed to this day—the verdict was delivered from the highest offices: Muslims did it. Within three days, over a thousand people were killed in orchestrated violence—790 Muslims were burned alive, hacked to pieces, raped. Women's wombs were cut open, children were thrown into fires. All for a crime whose very nature—accident or arson—remains contested. Just like that, a Muslim man's beard became a target. The mob didn't see Ali or Hassan or Naseer. The mob saw only Muslim, Muslim, Muslim. A word repeated until it stopped being human.
To study how fear towards a group spreads, in one experiment, we recruited 284 people from diverse backgrounds and taught them to fear two faces: one Black, one White. Then we showed them new faces—faces that varied in similarity to the original ones. When judging Black faces, people required less similarity, less evidence, less reality to say: “Yes, this is the one who threatened me.” This is the power of systemic biases against Black people, woven into our institutions and generalized until it dehumanizes entire groups.
Susan Fiske at Princeton discovered that when we dehumanize people, the medial prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that recognizes humanity, simply shuts down. We process these people the way we process objects. Garbage. Furniture. Things. Joshua Correll’s research shows that in video game simulations, people—including police officers—shoot armed Black men faster than armed White men.
And is this not what the Nazis also did to Jews? What the colonizers did to us all? What is happening between Israel and Palestine?
Every war begins with the same lie: that they are not human like us. The Hutus called the Tutsis "cockroaches." The Nazis called Jews "vermin." The American colonizers called Native people "savages." In India, we have our own taxonomy of subhumanity—the Muslims as "invaders," the Dalits as "polluted," the Adivasis as "primitive."
The psychologist Albert Bandura called this "moral disengagement." We learn to turn off our empathy as deliberately as switching off a light. We tell ourselves stories: they don't feel pain like we do, they don't love their children like we do, they don't deserve what we deserve. The brain, eager to comply, changes its firing patterns accordingly. We then literally see less humanity in the Other.
In our experiment, we also found that people who are generally fearful, who see threat everywhere, were even worse at distinguishing between Black faces. But who wouldn't be fearful in a world organized by fear? Who wouldn't see threat everywhere in a system built on threat?
The British taught us that Muslims were dangerous, Hindus were devious, Sikhs were savage. They wrote it in the ledgers of divide and rule, and we, their grateful students, have been perfecting their curriculum ever since. In America, they have built a carceral system that teaches everyone that Black means criminal. These are the structures that train our brains, day after day, to fear in categories rather than see in specifics.
Gordon Allport's "contact hypothesis" suggests that prejudice dissolves when groups interact. But proximity without equality is just surveillance. Contact without justice is just friction waiting to ignite. In Muzafer Sherif's Robbers Cave experiment, young boys at a summer camp were divided into arbitrary groups and set against each other for resources. Within days, there was war. Researchers tried to increase contact between them, but failed to make peace. There was only one thing that brought them together: a manufactured external threat. A broken water supply they had to fix together. Shared endangerment became shared purpose.
Politicians know this in their bones. They know that the easiest way to unite us is to give us someone to fear together. They know that as long as they are serving the interests of “us” against “them,” we will never unite to fear the true threats they represent.
Every partition between “us” vs “them” is first a partition of the mind. Before Pakistan and India drew their bloody line across the Punjab, that line was drawn across consciousness. Muslim and Hindu, who had been neighbors, suddenly became archenemies. Not because of what they had done to each other, but because of what they might do, based on what someone who looked like them had done.
Psychology explains how such divisions take hold through "implicit biases"—the prejudices we carry without knowing, the associations that fire faster than thought. Mahzarin Banaji's Implicit Association Test has shown millions of people their own hidden equations: Black with bad, Muslim with terrorist, woman with weak. These associations predict behavior better than what people say they believe.
Studies show that exposure to counter-stereotypical examples can weaken these associations. A Black doctor. A Muslim philanthropist. A Dalit scholar. But how many counter-examples does it take to outweigh centuries of programming? And who is counting?
In the ruins of our categorical thinking, we must build our resistance. The resistance of seeing. Patricia Devine's research distinguishes between automatic activation (the implicit bias that activates in milliseconds) and controlled response (what we choose to do with that activation). We cannot stop the first. But we can interrupt the second.
When they tell us to fear Muslims, we must look for Naseem, who sells the best chai at the corner. When they tell us to fear Black men, we must see Jamal, who teaches mathematics to children. Every act of seeing is an act of rebellion against the empire of fear. If anything, we should fear the systems that divide us, not each other.
This is my favorite photo of all time. Surabhi Tandon took this while reporting on COVID in India. She writes: “But if there is an image to remember, beyond the utter horror of government failure - it’s this. A Muslim auto-driver brought a young breathless Hindu man, to a Sikh gurudwara’s “oxygen langar”. Why am I pointing out identities? Because those are the identities our central government tries to weaponise against us, yet here we are - ordinary citizens banding together, reminding us, that humanity thrives when the going gets through”.
In the streets of Delhi, Mumbai, New York, there are people refusing the mathematics of fear. They are adding up individual encounters, subtracting propaganda from reality and actual threat from manufactured terror. This is slow work. Painful work. The work of generations. But it is the only work that matters because tomorrow's grammar must be different. We can start by seeing each other, one face at a time, one story at a time, one moment at a time, until the categories collapse under the weight of actual humans, until the fear that spreads like oil meets the fire of love, and burns itself out.
Yes, our brains are wired to categorize and to fear the Other. But the brain that is wired for fear can be rewired for love. Which wolf, as the old story goes, will we nourish—with our attention, our policies, our poetry?
To read more about our research, see: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5396611