David Livingstone Smith discusses COVID dehumanization on popular web series

David Livingstone Smith, Ph.D., professor of philosophy at the University of New England, recently appeared on “The David Pakman Show” — one of the largest news and politics channels on YouTube with nearly 1.3 million subscribers — to discuss dehumanization, or how people can come to see other humans as “less than human.”

Smith has researched dehumanization for the past 12 years, and he has authored three books on the subject. His most recent, “On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It,” was released this past summer.

On the show, which aired online on Jan. 29, Smith discussed the origins of dehumanization, which he said almost always is the product of propaganda.

“[Dehumanization is] not something that spontaneously arises in the human mind. Rather, it's the result of people in positions of power who want us to do terrible things to one another,” said Smith, who recently penned an editorial decrying the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. “If those in power, those who are in positions of authority, can convince us that others wish to harm us — and that they are dangerous, toxic, subhuman creatures that we must destroy on our own self-defense — then that allows us to overcome a very natural resistance human beings have to doing awful things to one another.”

Smith also elaborated on the ways in which xenophobia as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to dehumanizing discourse.

“The pandemic is blamed on others, racial others, because race and dehumanization are very closely tied together,” he explained. “When you start talking about people as diseased, as dangerous outsiders, you are either well on the way towards dehumanization, or actually there. What we get in this pandemic, as wth previous pandemics, is an upsurge in that kind of feeling, which has historically led to all sorts of horrible things.”