What mattered in our election was not an intelligent strategy but catering to primal urges

 

I was born in the 1940s and grew up in the 1950s. The ‘50s was a strange chapter in American life: banal, antiseptic, and claustrophobically conformist: swearing or even mentioning sex was forbidden. If you questioned anything about America, you risked being called a Communist.

That’s not just my opinion.

 

Andrew Hartman writes that the 1950s were more coercive than before or after, exhibiting “an extraordinary degree of conformity.“ “An unprecedented number of Americans got in line—or aspired to get in line—particularly white, heterosexual, Christian Americans.”^⁠1

I rebelled: I wanted freedom!

I found it as a teenager through Sigmund Freud. Through him, I discovered – beneath my button-down, crew-cut-shorn, prudish existence –  a subterranean world of primal drives, clarifying everything the ’50s considered taboo. Freud snapped the chains that confined me, changing life into an adventure rather than a gulag experience.

He also piqued my interest in psychology, leading me to Columbia, where my excitement was dashed. In true 1950s fashion, academia banished Freud in favor of experimental psychology. Rather than studying people, we conducted animal experiments with white rats and then expected to magically extrapolate our rat data to humans. 

I dropped out of Columbia because the chains had tightened around me again: The rats lost, Freud won.  You might say that Freud greased the skids that launched me into the ‘60s, but only after a heart-rending detour to Vietnam.

The 1960s liberated not only me but our country, overthrowing the age-old conservative mandate of patriarchy, white man rule, and missionary-only sex; In its place, we advocated equal rights for all.

Unfortunately, our cultural revolution produced a vicious backlash, accelerating after the election of our first black president and coming to a head today. Unprecedented social change at whiplash speed was too much for the old guard.  Conservatives called the 1960s a “crisis in democracy.” This was an Orwellian phrase that meant the opposite: they were livid because we had too much democracy.

Over the intervening years, Democrats contributed to the problem by overplaying their hand, ignoring 70% of their base, white, working folks, and instead catered too much to special interest groups, no matter how valid their claims. 

Brewing inside this combustible mix, a counter-revolution was gaining momentum.

Traditionalists and increasing numbers of the working class, along with the business class, gathered under the Republican banner, asserting they were the silent majority, promoting biblical religion, punitive justice, and white supremacy while railing against homosexuals, abortions – and, god forbid, trans people. At first, Republicans hid their intentions by using dog whistles or coded language to speak to their base without promoting outrage.

That is until Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator, ditching code words to point-blank call a spade a spade: Mexicans are rapists, blacks come from shit-hole countries, democrats are communists, and women are nasty with blood coming out of their wherever. NY Times columnist Ezra Klein considers this disinhibition to be “the engine of Trump’s success.”^⁠2

The fact that Trump is reveling in the primal dregs of his unconscious is a sure indication that Freud’s concept of the irrational unconscious is back in vogue. Then, as now, regular folks are yearning for freedom, triggered by existing in a stifling, bureaucratic world with no agency. Of course, Trump eggs them on,  yearning to be their pied piper.

Psychoanalyst Eric Reinhart has accused liberals of ignoring the crucial importance of irrational drives to fuel mass political movements – drives first identified by Freud: “Proponents of progressive ideals must instead take the reality of aggression, racism, and sadomasochism seriously as enduring political feelings, including in their own ranks, that require constructive political redress,” 

Rather than surrendering to these primal feelings, as the Republicans have done, it’s up to Democrats and Independents to promote politics that restrain and redirect these urges. The first step  is “to stop vainly demanding that people be more reasonable.”  That’s like Nancy Reagan’s solution to drug addiction, which was to just say no. 

The truth is people aren’t always reasonable.  As Freud showed us – each of us has destructive, irrational desires swirling around our cranium, always primed to pounce. 

In the ‘60s, we channeled our unconscious rage by breaking free of the Puritan ‘50s and speaking truth to power about military overreach, patriarchy, and rampant discrimination against all who were not white. Now, Trump is doing the opposite by speaking power to truth.

Trump is channeling our primal distress at being unmoored and over-regulated to mount a counter-revolution against the ’60s. ‘Make America Great Again’ is a code word for a return to ‘the good old days’ of slavish conformity, misogyny, and blatant discrimination aggressively enforced by rich, white men.

Personally, I prefer the Sixties. How about you?

xxx

¹ https://s-usih.org/2016/11/trump-out-of-the-shadows-of-the-sixties-social-movements/

² https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/11/maga-trump-psychological-appeal/680722/

Humphrey & Donald

 

                                                      Stock photo from Dreamstime: l_61704269.jpeg

I have been in a state of suspended animation since Donald Trump won the election: it’s like I was peacefully walking down my driveway when I  suddenly slipped on an invisible patch of black ice that catapulted me up in the air like a leaf in the wind. A rash of images is flashing in front of my eyes. All I knew for sure was that it was going to hurt like hell when I land.

Contradictions abound.

It was 80 degrees last week, setting a new record. Even this late in the season, the winter rye I planted last week in my garden as a cover crop has sprouted like it was spring. Yet, our incoming president assures us climate change is a hoax. Isn’t life grand living in a world of denial? 

Increasingly, parts of the world are becoming too hot for the human body to survive, to say nothing of being able to grow traditional crops This is sending increasing waves of refugees out into the world like the seeds from exploding milkweed pods. In response, Trump is choosing to close our borders, ignoring America’s perennial promise inscribed on the Statue of Liberty to “send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.” 

A case in point is the behavior of Kristi Noem, slated to be Trump’s new Homeland Security czar, who has bragged about shooting her 14-month-old dog cricket in a sand pit because it was a “less than worthless’ hunting dog.”^⁠1

I’m reminded of a quote by Hannah Arendt: “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.” Other examples include Trump’s devious stance on social security. His 15 trillion tax cut plan, catering mainly to the rich, will bankrupt that fund by stealing the cash that was slated to go to old folks like me.

My mind still cartwheeling through the air,  flashes back to the piece I wrote about primates last week: about how primitive drives control chimpanzees. Then I remember, serendipitously, Jane Goodall just wrote a new column this week that adds teeth to what I had written, based on her studies with chimpanzees.^⁠2

At the beginning of her research in 1960, her community of chimpanzees was “using and making tools and greeting one another with kisses and embraces.”⁠  But this big happy family didn’t last for long before she started witnessing them initiate increasingly brutal attacks on the neighboring chimpanzee community.

This violence was initiated by one chimp, an alpha male named Humphrey, who the researchers considered to be “something of a psychopath” because he was abusive to the females in his own community. 

“This marked the beginning of a series of savage attacks by males of the northern, larger group, led by Humphrey, on males and adult females in the south” until by 1974, the original single happy community had split in two. “From 1974 to 1977, we witnessed the northern males commit what among humans would be called atrocities.”

Scientists have conclusively shown that humans share this bloody aggressive side with chimps, which is not surprising since they are our closest relatives, with 98.8% of the same DNA. Luckily, however, there is one BIG difference!

Because we have bigger brains, our species, over time, has developed sophisticated methods of controlling our aggressive behavior. We have learned to resolve conflict through debate and dialogue –  “at the ballot box, in the halls of a congress or parliament, or around a negotiating table.”

It has been proven that where democracy has flourished, violence has receded. Unfortunately, democracy is fragile. French neuropsychiatrist Roger Mucchielli, along with others, has shown how bad actors can mortally wound democracy by purposely igniting our primitive drives. “Knowing how to do this allows someone to direct another’s behavior. And it can be done without the person even knowing it is being done.”

That’s what Trump is doing to us today.

Who can argue with Jane Goodall’s assessment: “If we hope to ensure for following generations the peaceful existence many of us have enjoyed, we need leaders and active citizens in all levels of our societies who will stimulate the compassionate and cooperative instincts we share with other primates,”

The future of our species depends upon it.

xxx

¹ https://www.vanityfair.com/news/kristi-noems-new-book-includes-a-bizarrely-detailed-account-of-killing-her-pet-dog?srsltid=AfmBOooxMMS-8XhQaGzPUSSw7Q9XFJarCfGKS6YqmnPArf59lR5h_Qrp

² https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/05/chimpanzees-humans-dark-side-aggression-cruelty/

Our upcoming election is between Bonobos and a Chimp

I recently read a mind-popping piece in the Atlantic by Melvin Konner about the evolution of early humans and primates.^⁠1 It’s an incredible saga well worth repeating here. I follow up on that by predicting an evolutionary revolution on November 5^th!

Darwin gives us a hint at what Konner is proposing when he wrote that if you want to understand human behavior, look to baboons, not philosophers. That’s in keeping with the long-held notion that our behavior is governed by our genes.

As proof of that, Konner cites field studies showing  that chimpanzees, our near relative, are violent by nature: “Males often coerce and beat females, and would sometimes gang up and attack a chimp from another group.” Recent books like “Demonic Males” drew  “a dire portrait of humanity (the male version) as inherently violent by evolutionary legacy.”

However, the idea that all primates are violent by nature has been upended by research on bonobos, our other closest relative. “No more removed from us genetically than chimps are, they are a radical contrast to them, often called the “make love, not war” species.^⁠2

Based on this research, Richard Wrangham, a leading anthropologist on this subject,^⁠3 has upended conventional thinking: he has amassed convincing data that human aggression is largely determined by social learning in our environment – not our genes! He says the die was cast early in our evolution when we discovered how to use fire, extending day into the night. 

“Given how important we know conversations and stories told around the fire are to human hunter-gatherers, it’s easy to see how this process could have accelerated the evolution of language—an essential ingredient for less physically aggressive interactions.”

Then, Wrangham uses a variety of animal studies to demonstrate how humans have successfully tamed animal species by human-directed selection over many generations. “For instance, in a fox study begun in Russia in the early 1950s, the pups in each litter least likely to bite when approached by humans were bred forward.” The results were dramatic in progressively lowering aggression.

Next, he applies this knowledge to bonobos, a close relative of Chimps, who separated into their own species 1 to 2 million years ago. Because bonobos were isolated in a remote crook of the Congo River,  they were“protected from competition with either chimps or gorillas. In relative safety, that gave them the luxury of decreasing their own reactive aggression.”

Wrangham defines “reactive aggression” as attacking another animal that gets too close, as opposed to tolerating contact long enough to allow for a possible friendly interaction.  Over generations, these changes in social structure reduced violence in the same way the Russian experiment tamed foxes.

Over time, in this more trusting environment, female bonobos took over, forming strong coalitions “…that keep a lid on male violence.  Males didn’t attack them, and even male-on-male violence was extremely limited. “ 

Maybe that’s how evolution works for the greater good of the species. 

And it could be happening again, according to Harvard psychologist and famed intellect Steven Pinker.  In his book “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” he presents a strong case that “humans are now living in the^⁠4 most peaceful era in the history of our species.”

Interestingly, the history of America coincides with that of the bonobos: We have thrived in relative safety in a stable society since our founding, protected by two oceans that isolated us from much of the chaos and danger plaguing the rest of the world. Under this scenario, as with the bonobos, women have gained power until, on November 5^th, they will be able to overthrow the orange-haired chimp.

I think this is an example of the evolutionary power of natural selection: It’s Mother Nature’s way of saving the world.

xxx

¹ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/how-humans-tamed-themselves/580447/

² Ibid

³ Ibid/

⁴ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/steven-pinker-this-is-historys-most-peaceful-time-new-study-not-so-fast/#:~:text=Pinker%20cites%20a%20number%20of,in%20the%20history%20of%20civilization.