Veteran songwriter and bass guitar player Roger Waters believes it is all too easy to bring out a “thug mentality” in people.
The Pink Floyd veteran suggested there was an easy way to manipulate members of the public into hate and anger that he tapped into when writing for the legendary progressive rock band. Waters would go on to enjoy a successful solo career and shared how the modern world had “dehumanised” some groups of people to others. Speaking back in 2010 in an interview to celebrate The Wall, Waters outlined how the world had changed and how these experiences affected him when writing Pink Floyd’s 1979 classic. Waters’ thoughts on “thug mentality” and opposition against it appears to have been established from an early age.
He said: “My mother. I read Bertrand Russell when I was younger. Some of the works of literature that we’ve talked about before. There’s so much humanity in a lot of great literature. Other kinds of science fiction stuff… [HG] Wells. And, fundamentally of course, around the feelings of loss around my father when I was a very small child. And my extreme frustration at that has, with my mother’s influence as well, led me to the belief that…
“You know, my mother used to say to me when I was young, ‘You know, not all Germans are bad.’ Well, it’s a bit like after the Second World War in England, after those fuckers were dropping bombs on us for three or four years, that was an interesting position to take, so she was obviously very strong intellectually and emotionally, and her husband had been killed, so I think that had a profound effect on me, seeing her humanity come out.
“She didn’t believe in God either, but she believed in goodness. So what we need to be doing is to explain to ourselves and remind ourselves constantly that there is no ‘them,’ there is no us or them, we’re all the same people. We all have, on our side, people who will, with a thug mentality, people who couldn’t be happier than to be given a stick and told to go and hit somebody over the head with it. But we have just as many people who have a propensity for people with that kind of behaviour as they do.
“There’s no difference between us and them. Imagine how different it is when you’ve been told that they are the them. They’re the gooks, they are the enemy. They’re the ones who believe differently, they’re the ones who killed everybody on 9/11, they’re the enemy. It’s very easy then to bring out the thug mentality in people, when you’ve dehumanised a whole other group of people by identifying them as the enemy.”
Further on from this, Waters would claim that the point of returning to The Wall decades on from its release was to show how “divided” people were. The veteran songwriter confirmed that his adaptation of The Wall in 2010 was to show how the world had fractured between the original release of the album in 1979 and now. Waters would criticise those who had taught the next generation to be hateful to one another.
Speaking in 2011, the veteran songwriter behind Another Brick in the Wall and The Dark Side of the Moon claimed that his anniversary show was meant to showcase how the world had fallen apart. He said: “I hope that I’ve developed the show from just being about the story of one man who hides behind a wall because he’s frightened, to being a more general piece about the way ideologies and nations are divided from one another. We’re fearful of those beyond our borders and those who may seem to be different from what we are.
“We have three characters that are kind of graffiti on the wall: there’s a Muslim girl, a Jewish kid and a Christian girl. And during the show I try to make the point that they have to be taught hatred. If you’re a Jewish kid, you’re born not believing that Palestinians are filthy pigs, or vice versa; if you’re a Muslim kid in Iran, you’re not born believing Israel should not exist and should be wiped off the Earth; you’re taught this stuff.”
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