Collateral Contempt

To be contemptuous toward someone or something is to despise, disdain, and/or generally lack respect for that person or thing.

This stance is sometimes described as a sort of anger toward something or someone we consider to be beneath us—a person of lower status, for instance, or an activity that we would never engage in, ourselves—and it often overlaps with emotions and responses like disgust and pity.

Contempt can be a useful emotional valence to trigger and harness for those who want to unify groups of people around a cause, because if you can make a group of people feel contempt for another group of people (your political or ideological opponents, perhaps), you can make them feel superior to those Others.

This is a common tactic in politics for this very reason. Making the opposing party seem not just bad, but less than your party makes it more likely your party will hold together, because who would want to leave the obviously superior group to join up with such pathetic, dismissable alternatives?

The common ground-seeking nonprofit More In Common coined the term “Collateral Contempt” to refer to a tendency by folks in highly polarized political ecosystems to apply their sense of contempt not just to those in the opposing party that they’ve been trained to disdain, but also people and things associated with that party.

It’s via this mechanism that businesses, celebrities, and even government agencies get lumped in with groups toward which we’ve been trained to feel contempt, and this can expand our scope of contempt rapidly. We may come to feel contempt toward those who associate with people who vote incorrectly (according to our standards), who listen to a podcast that has a guest with whom we disagree, or people who wear shoes that have come to be associated with someone who has come to be associated with someone who speaks in favor of things we don’t like.

None of which implies disagreements or deep-set feelings like contempt are wrong, but it does suggest that because of knee-jerk assumptions and implied connections we may unfairly include all sorts of people and groups on our ideological enemies lists.

This, in turn, may severely distort our sense of Us versus Them, and lead to habitual Othering (and dehumanizing), even when it might make more sense to build bridges rather than walls.