Dr. Gray,

“Dyadic Morality” and “Moral Typecasting”  were referenced on a 2019 podcast by Dr. Tania Reynolds called “Men as Stereotypical Perpetrators of Harm” in reference to her upcoming paper “Man Up and Take It: Gender bias in moral typecasting.”  This paper was accepted one week before the Death of George Floyd.

I’ve since read your book “The Mind Club” with Dr. Daniel W. Wegner.  

You posit that people are typecast as either “Agents”, perpetrators of harm/facilitators of care, or “Patients”, deserving of care.  It’s difficult to see someone as both.  

The moral landscape splits Agents into Heroes and Villains, and Patients into Beneficiaries and Victims.

In the case of George Floyd:

He was perceived as an Agent responsible for his death. ie High on meth and fentanyl, passed a counterfeit bill to a Black owned business, Felony Sitting Behind the Wheel of a Vehicle in MN

-OR-

He was a helpless Patient, deserving of care when a cis, white, male, Chauvinist Pig.

Either way, he died handcuffed under the knee of Derek Chauvin and his friends who are currently on trial in federal court for violating George Floyd’s civil rights.

People have a hard time viewing both of these scenarios. Instead, they picking one view or the other as the morally correct way to view the world.

The rest, of course, is history, heard around the world.

I’ve had a peculiar interest in social movements, groupthink and propaganda since the 1970’s.  The words and pictures that move crowds and bend nations have always intrigued me. All seem to exploit this model of moral landscape.

Beginning in the 80’s, local news stories that Twin Cities adults would talk about, would end up becoming national news, only later to be uncovered as hysteria.

In the 1990’s, I first heard the story of Marxist Feminist dogma. 

• A male patriarchy has been oppressing women since the dawn of time.
• Gender is a social construct; Men and women are the same.

This conformed to similar biases and taboos I’d seen my mother, aunts, and other women vigorously enforce. Women were to be seen only as patients, never agents, and they were never to be stereotyped in any way.

Logically, of course, this would mean that some women have testicles.

My instinct immediately told me that this dogma would stick and spread because it conformed to beliefs that already had a social enforcement mechanism. 

The stickiness and taboo enforcement of these ideas make it easy for fact-resistant ideas to attach to it. (ie. Intersectionality or Applied Postmodernism)

For decades, I watched as variants of this dogma spread through the education, legal, and counseling fields, both in Minnesota and throughout the world. Any pushback to these sacred ideas was enforced with the same histrionic taboo mechanism and reality distortions.

The outrage caused by Donald Trump, the riots at Evergreen, C16, and the Red Pill Movie hysteria, was exactly what I was seeing in the Twin Cities echo chamber and was ready to spread.

In 2017, I wrote my first series with the best science I had available to create a hypothesis. 

I made the most precise and explicit predictions I could. Minnesota Policing and other media chatter that fit the model I’d been seeing from police activists and the media. 

The Sex Trafficking (QAnon) and White Nationalists (Charlottesville) came within weeks… 

Then I waited.

The global waves of destruction and violence following the death of George Floyd allowed for visualization of the network path I’d been observing. 

I began writing again.  My research revealed several social justice moral movements that began in Minnesota and followed similar global network paths.  

Moral Movements Bind and they Blind

The Vatican II Reform Movement began in a Stearns County Monastery in the 1930’s, before becoming the new operating system for the Catholic Church. 

The Modern Pro-Life Movement spread through Conservatives by Sociologist Fr. Paul Marx, named “Apostle of Life” by Pope John Paul II. Marx wrote the influential best seller “The Death Peddlers” and founded Human Life International (hli.org) and the Population Research Institute (pop.org).

Minnesotan Roy Wilkins wrote the N.A.A.C.P. press release that catalyzed the Civil Rights Movement. Wilkins co-organized or attended every march, including the March on Washington, of which he was a speaker as Executive Director. He was an N.A.A.C.P. executive from 1955-1977.

To my astonishment, I found that not only had Kate Millett, the architect of Marxist Feminism, come from Minnesota, she’d attended St. Paul Catholic Girl’s High School with my mother and my aunts. I speculate this is a literal mass hysteria, with Millett as the index case, my mother, aunts and early Women’s Studies Professors and downstream sympathetics. 

While there have been other moral movements that catalyzed from MN (Women’s Suffrage, Prohibition, Black Lives Matter, Backwards Records etc.), Vatican II, Modern Pro Life Movement, and Marxist Feminism all have deep, dyadic frameworks and in-group effects that I’d like to discuss with you.

Would your research suggest:

• The issues of a group or class stereotypically perceived as perpetrators of harm might be met with antipathy, disgust, contempt or outrage? (Men’s Rights, EWWWWWW!)

• A political group or class perceived as stereotypical ‘patients deserving care’ might have a moral or political advantage? (Women’s Rights, Hooray!)

I have reason to believe the large-scale spread of these movements and the discoveries of  Dr. Rudman and Dr. Reynolds may very well explain the Culture Wars, the woke_mind_virus, and Trumpism.

I’d be very interested in your thoughts on the above questions.