The toxic collective guilt mentality

ONE of the most baleful ideas to poison human thinking is that of collective guilt. It links the killer who murdered Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand, with those who carried out vicious bomb attacks focused on Christians in Sri Lanka, as well as a multiplicity of acts of extreme violence in the past.

Such acts have rightfully been called hate crimes. There has been a growing recognition that those who carry them out shape their thinking within broader groups of people who subscribe to similar views and who feed one another's prejudices and frustrations. Most do not resort to extreme violence themselves, but the stories they swop and the highly selective and distorted religious, historical or statistical fragments they circulate are the medium in which violence is nurtured and excused.

It would be comforting to be able to say that the assumptions that underlie such thinking have no credibility beyond a small minority, but unfortunately, that would not be true. In particular, there is still an all-too-common human readiness to assign collective responsibility to entire communities for the actions of a few individuals or organisations within them. It has been expressed in many ways, across the world, from the communal violence that occurred during the partition of India to surges in support for anti-immigrant movements in Europe and the US at times of increased immigrant arrivals.