Divide and Conquer
“It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.”
Jonathan Swift
When I chanced upon the comment thread incited by the admittedly confrontational remark of a left-leaning acquaintance, defending a politician loathed by the right, I grew sick and had to stop reading. My face flushed and I felt hot, as though I were standing near a pool of corrosive chemicals. The flood of venomous responses, few addressing the writer’s point and all vilifying him personally, conjured up writhing images of savage faces at the keyboard, packs of jackals eviscerating a still-living gazelle, a sneering face on a plastic curtain, with a dead feeling of nothingness behind it—empty, silent, nauseating.
This is how you control people: oppose them to each other. You hide behind the plastic curtain as they flay each other into impotence. In those comments, a rare voice or two pleaded for us to remember our commonality, to value it above our superficial differences, to fear our fate if we should turn on each other, but those sentiments had about the same chance as the above-mentioned gazelle.
You can’t help but think, things might go better if people could just entertain themselves. Unfortunately, getting into the public mudpit tops most people’s list of having something to do.
The alpha figure people crave, they themselves invent by hollowing out a space that some opportunistic sniffer will always smell and step into. Which is how that figure knows what they want to hear. All he has to do is tell it to them in simplified, digestible form. The minions will be so grateful for not having to think for themselves, they will slide right into his pocket. For bureaucrat/politicians, with a propaganda machine at their disposal, and the infinite resources of our system enabling them to evade, distort, and lie, it’s amazing how easy it is to do.
And quite lucrative. Keeping people pitted against one another is good business. A lot of people profit from it, just as they do from any war, and the incentives to keep those handy fictions “us” and “them” alive and bickering are enormous.
I saw a vision of my hometown as it was in my young days. Orderly schools, churches flush with cash, the bustling library, PTA meetings, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, swimming lessons, dance studios, Little League. All the dads had jobs, and some of the moms, but most of the latter raised the family. The economic base was solid. It was a good life, destined to go into the books as the good ol days.
If you were white.
If only we could make America white again!
I’m as nostalgic as the next guy, and honest enough to see the injustice those enchanted days were built upon. But as I look back now, those two or three decades after the second world war seem so fragile and transitory. And mythical. About as brief and shining as Camelot.
In our current political situation, everyone seems to be thinking the same thing: if only they were vanquished and we were in control. If they were losers and we were winners. If only, one way or the other, the election would go our way. That would teach them, and we could get our myth back. But I’m pretty sure no myths are coming back, and the problems won’t end with the election—they will only become entrenched and more dangerous. Just because half the people in the country push a certain button doesn’t mean they’re going to disappear after the results are tabulated. They and their problems aren’t going anywhere. At least not overnight. Only time and demographics can do that.
In the meantime, attention must be paid.
No matter what you do, your time will pass. Especially today, with technology changing so fast. What happens to a person the economy no longer needs? Hard-working, motivated, skilled, capable of contributing much—it doesn’t matter. Once this rat-race to the cliff called human progress has no further use of you, you are done. Dressed out and not only not playing, but there’s no game. And not only that, but you have to listen to people you don’t understand saying that your story of what was good was a lie, and now there’s this new story that wants to negate your values, your experiences, and your deepest sense of what is meaningful, and replace yours.
In the end it’s always a battle over which myth wins.
What becomes of the people whose myth loses, those whom the economy no longer needs?
Make brain think again!
I think that’s mostly not going to happen. What’s depressing is that I’m pretty sure I know what the real problem is—the perennial one, fatal to all myths in the end:
Human beings acting like human beings.
We are not rational, let alone divine, creatures. We are animals who have won the current battle for survival. You know, Homo sapiens—the only surviving species of the genus Homo. An animal not particularly known for tolerance. In fact, “tolerance” is just another abstraction—one that, like all abstractions, takes a distant back seat to self-interest and survival.
We were “Homo,” along with a number of other Homo species, evolving with every other life form, over several million years before the “sapiens” cropped up—after we had lucked into some changes that allowed our brains to grow bigger. Homo sapiens have been around 200,000 to 300,000 years. The so-called Cognitive Revolution dates to about 70,000 ago.
During those long, unsapiened years, wherever Homo sapiens went, the indigenous Homo species, together with many other life forms, entirely disappeared.
Does anybody really wonder why?
Admit it: Homo sapiens just don’t like people different from themselves, and like many of their cousins in the animal kingdom, their instinct is to chase them down and kill them.
Find your tribe.
February 25, 2020