Why are people so mean?

In my last job I took a required workshop on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. One of the exercises paired me up with a young woman whose parents were born in India, although she’d been born and raised in the States. We were supposed to talk about where we’d grown up. Who did we feel comfortable around? And who not so much?

She grew up in Dallas, Texas. At first, she lived in a neighborhood with a bunch of other brown children. She liked it. Then her parents moved her to a “better school.” She was the only kid with brown skin there.

So she said she felt most comfortable with people who looked like her. She felt least comfortable with (looking at me) old white guys. I said I totally got that.

I’d grown up north of Chicago, on the shore of Lake Michigan. My mother was consistently kind and competent. My father was often mean and drunk. I was raised on the dividing line between the Black and white parts of town so was definitely aware of race. I’m comfortable with people who are kind. I’m least comfortable with people who are mean. But I didn’t find that one race (or sex, or sexual orientation) was any more likely to be mean than another. Why lower the odds of finding kind folks?

There are lots of things we have no choice about. We can choose to be kind. We can make decisions about our character. Many people choose instead to be mean. They revel in it, even or especially at public meetings. Why?

It could be “the mean world syndrome.” If you spend your days reading and thinking about all the crimes and accidents and illnesses around the globe, then you come to think of life itself as a jungle. You need to be suspicious. You need to strike first.

Sometimes people are mean because they’re walled off. Most of us start out pretty open to experience. If you get mocked, abused, and generally mistreated physically or emotionally often enough you toughen up. You get numb. Some people are so swaddled in armor they have no idea how much pain they cause others.

It could be projection. There is something about yourself you fear and reject. So you want to stamp it out in others.

Too, sometimes the people so puffed up with righteous indignation are just insecure. They have so little tolerance for ambiguity that any dissent is seen as threatening. They cannot admit they were wrong or their whole self-image shatters.

I have also met some people who seemed to me mean-spirited. I’m always surprised to meet them. And my own armor flares.

But meanness is behavior not identity.

My granddad once told me that you have to have respect to people’s opinions, even if you don’t have any respect for them. It’s a useful distinction. I think the best of people until I can’t, until their own actions demonstrate ill will. I have learned (mostly) not to care about what such people think about me. I stay polite, because that’s how I prefer to conduct myself, but their attacks don’t really wound me. I can come up with plenty of things to judge myself on without their help. Their judgments are never as rough as my own.

Beyond that, I think there is profound value in civility. A little politeness, a little holding to protocol, a little thoughtful adherence to policy, goes a long way to restrain the beast within us.

[This column originally appeared in the Sopris Sun on February 18, 2026.]