alias Bruce.

A new study finds that even mundane disorder spurs discrimination.

The study, by Dutch researchers Diederik A. Stapel and Siegwart Lindenberg, appeared in the April 8 issue of the journal Science. It found, in field and laboratory experiments, that people were more prone to stereotype and discriminate against others in what the two scientists called "disordered contexts" – a train station littered with garbage, a broken-up sidewalk, a graffiti-filled space – than they were in more orderly settings. In one train station experiment, whites surveyed were much likelier to express hostile stereotypes of Muslims and gays when the station was dirty and littered (due to a railroad cleaning workers' strike) than when it was clean and tidy. White passengers were also less prone to sit close to a black person during the strike.

The reason? According to Stapel and Lindenberg's article, people feel "a heightened need for structure" in such disordered situations, and so we fall back on simple constructs to appease ourselves. Even if the disorder is no more than litter or badly cracked concrete.

That explanation makes sense to me. Bigotry has for centuries proven itself to be a fabulous outlet for anxiety about one's lack of control. An unemployed white guy sneering "nigger" at a bus driver; an angry black resident attacking "the gay agenda" as she watches families disintegrate in her impoverished neighborhood; a man clinging to two low-wage jobs while he rails against illegal immigrants – these are all amplified versions of Stapel and Lindenberg's train-station dynamic. And they work like gangbusters to redirect anxieties toward designated bogeymen and away from the actual causes of the problems. As I have said before, bigotry began working as an American wedge issue the day the first dirt-poor white was sent into the swamp to chase down the first escaped black slave.

Stapel and Lindenberg's conclusion about what their research means for public policy: "Diagnose environmental disorder early and intervene immediately." I'll buy that – if by "environmental disorder" we mean greed-driven economic policy and the political tactics of dog-eat-dog race-baiting.

A nod to PRI's The World, which aired a story on Stapel and Lindenberg's study.

Joy DeGruy did an interview

that I have been meaning to share with you since I learned of it months ago. It's a conversation she had with a reporter at City Newspaper in my hometown of Rochester, NY. And it is exactly on time – up to the minute, really – in spite of its having taken place in 2009.

Joy DeGruy, (formerly Joy DeGruy Leary), in case you don't know of her, is the social worker and psychologist whose book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing has brought the not-so-well-absorbed poisons of our racial history boiling up out of the national pores. What moves DeGruy's analysis beyond the usual arguments about American slavery and racism is that she had the brilliant insight to analyze slavery-based racial relations and their lingering aftermath not simply as brutal and wrong, but as clinical trauma. Suddenly we are not speaking the squishy language of "injustice" toward black Americans and "progress" toward fairness. We are speaking the more precise and clinically-understood language of traumatic-event-based loss of healthy psychological function – and methodologies for healing and regaining healthy function. On a personal and national level.

An excerpt from the interview with DeGruy will give you an idea of where this goes:

When I studied PTS [Post Traumatic Stress], what fascinated me most was that a person can be diagnosed with PTS as a result of a single trauma. And not only that, they can experience trauma indirectly. They can hear about something happening to a loved one and be traumatized to such a degree that they require assistance.

I looked at that construct and thought, O.K., if a person can conceivably be diagnosed with a stress-related mental illness by having heard about a trauma, what in the world must have occurred with people who not only experienced trauma directly, but those who experienced the trauma of all those around them? And this traumatic episode occurred over centuries. So what people have to understand when I say "post traumatic" is that I'm giving you an etiology of some of the things we passed along from generation to generation.

When you look at the symptoms of PTS, you're looking at hyper-vigilance, outbursts of anger, difficulties going to sleep and waking up a lot, thoughts of a foreshortened future, and it goes on and on. Now just imagine the people living in those environments with people with those symptoms. After a while, with it never being diagnosed, never being treated, and never given a chance to heal, what you have is a culture with broken behaviors.

That's just for starters. The entire interview is here.

The suicide of a Rutgers University student

after his romantic dorm-room encounter with a male was secretly videoed and streamed online by his roommate and another student -- according to charges filed by police -- raises an age-old question: from whence does such soul-shredding wickedness come?

I do not know the answer. Or answers, really, because there are uncounted reasons why people carry out such evil. To pick five off the top of my head: early emotional damage; blind desperation to be in the spotlight; utter cowardice in the face of peer pressure; pathologically out-of-control insecurity/fear/rage; clinical psychopathy. And those are just for starters.

It is obvious, though, that whatever the underlying emotional pathology, its vehicle in this case was homophobia, which, alongside racism and other obsessive fears/hatreds, has pretty much limitless potential for depravity.

We opinionizers will grasp for words and come up short, gasping in search of sounds sufficient to such a horror. From all quarters -- politicians, columnists, religious figures, activists -- will come the revulsion, the shock, the condemnation, the blaming, the calls for social action and moral stances: all appropriate, and all inadequate.

I just don't know what to say about this casual ghastliness on the part of two kids. At least not at the moment.

Facts or Fears.

Decision day approaches.

I had the good fortune to be part of a 2-hour radio special on the election, hosted by psychologist Pamela Brewer, entitled "Facts or Fears" -- on Halloween, no less. Other guests included psychoanalyst and Bush on the Couch author Justin Frank; former UN Iraq WMD inspector David Goldberg, who has spoken out against the dishonesty of the war; and state Rep. Angela Bryant of NC, who is active in racial justice issues.

We had a terrific conversation about the reasons why people believe collective lies. You can listen here to the show in 4 parts.

See you at the polls on Tuesday. Be there and be a party to actual progress -- or be sorry.