Tag: religion

What’s the Difference?

Rainbows over Australia – ©2023 Bard

Waiting in an airport lounge I couldn’t escape seeing the news that was broadcasted on TV’s on every wall. And I can’t say that what I saw made me very happy.

The world is full of conflict. North fights South, East fights West, Left fights Right, Children fight Parents, Parents fight each other. Neighbours become bitter enemies; former friends fierce foes. Every slight becomes an issue, every issue a reason for battle.

What pains me to see is that most of those hard-fought conflicts are about imaginary differences and perceived divides. We have a million ways to see another human being as an other instead of an us. Their beards are funny, their eyes too dark, their hair too light, they speak the wrong language, sing the wrong songs, believe the wrong stories. Once categorised, they become less than human. They are different, therefore they are wrong. And because they are wrong they must be fought and punished for their wrongness.

Why is it so hard to see us for who we really are? If you set aside the minuscule variations we rank and divide people by, we are much more similar than we are different. We are all very close relatives with DNA that is practically identical all across the globe.

It may be true that we speak an amazing number of different languages but linguistically speaking the similarities between all human languages are much greater than what sets them apart. Any human child can learn any human language in existence, if exposed to it early enough.

The religions we fight so many bloody battles over all have common themes and images, symbols and stories, similar concept of good and evil, right and wrong. I believe that an alien visitor observing humanity would scarcely be able to keep them apart.

Please, people, for the love of humanity, try to keep in mind we are all the same in spite of those superficial differences we get so hung up about. We are all human, all beautiful and flawed, all magnificent and insignificant at the same time. There are no good guys or bad guys, just people doing things we judge as better or worse. Remember that plenty of good things were done for questionable reasons, and terrible things for the most glorious ideals.

Remember, always, that our shared humanity is what matters more than our perceived otherness. When we have to fight, let’s fight together rather than each other. Let’s unite to fight for justice, equality, peace and happiness. And when we fight such battles make them about the systems, ideologies and dogmas that ruin those ideals, not against the people driven by ideas that threaten what we hold dear. Those people are us, seen from the other side. Let’s not hate them for the flaws we ourselves are just as prone to.

On Petulant Kings and Childish Tyrants

I often wonder about humanity’s tendency to choose and follow petulant kings and childish tyrants; not just allowing them to rise to power, but enabling them to commit abhorrent crimes against humanity and destroying whole civilisations, not seldom including their own.

You would think that a tendency to choose bad rulers would, over time, be bred out of our genes. What evolutionary benefit can there be in this penchant for leaders that do more damage than good? Yet, we fall for the same types again and again.

Why? What mechanisms are at play here that not only let those types rise to power but help them grow their power to ridiculous heights, even when their childish and destructive behaviour is clearly visible to any discerning adult?

Since this pattern is so common across civilisations, I suspect it must be encoded deep in our DNA. I can only speculate – since we don’t really know how our DNA encodes our behaviours – that petulant kings and childish tyrants rely on the misapplication of otherwise healthy and necessary instincts.

Humans have deeply ingrained parental instincts, for example, that lead us to want to protect and care for helpless infants. Maybe infantile tyrants trigger that same instinct, in an exaggerated and dysfunctional way, like oversized and unnaturally brightly coloured eggs trigger a fanatical breeding impulse in birds. This could make us want to protect and even cherish an overtly childish and irresponsible leader.

Another pattern I suspect is our instinctual longing for the superhuman parent we lost when we grew up and saw our parents exposed for the frail and flawed human beings we never thought they were. There is something deeply comforting in the belief that our parents are all-knowing and all-powerful. It allows us to be the innocent child, powerless but safe under the protection of beings far superior to us.

Maybe we all still long to be that child, bowing in awe to the will of our superhuman parent. That could explain why we are drawn to individuals that openly and defiantly break laws, rules and social conventions. It would make irresponsible, boastful and arrogant leaders strangely attractive to the inner child we lost in early childhood. It would also explain why kings and tyrants through the ages have always been portrayed as larger-than-life, close to God or Gods, and possessed with magical and mystical powers.

David Graeber and Marshall Shalins in their book “On Kings” argue that we don’t want our kings and rulers to obey the law but to stand above it. A king that is constitutionally limited lacks that superhuman, even supernatural appeal that a ruler that answers to nothing and no-one seems to have. If I see what tyrants historically got away with, and often still do, it could be because of their followers’ need for someone who is truly above all human laws. That could be an echo of what the powerless child saw in its parents before they fell from grace.

The paradoxical combination those two instincts – the drive to protect and cherish our children, triggered by adults that behave like over-sized toddlers and the need for superhuman parent figures, triggered by ruthless individuals openly flaunting laws and conventions – can explain the fanatical devotion and protectiveness paired with unquestioning obedience you so often see destructive tyrants and misbehaving kings surrounded with.

If my suspicions are true, humanity is constantly at risk of being tricked by some of our deepest instincts into admiring, enabling and obeying deeply flawed, psychopathic and destructive individuals. Not because we consciously choose to do so, but because our instincts drive us to it.

So, what can we do about it? Are we doomed to fall for infantile bosses and ridiculous rulers forever?

I certainly hope not. I believe we are more than our instincts. I believe we can train our self-awareness and self-control to recognise and self-correct when our instincts trick us and are being used against us. I also believe we can shape our culture – the shared assumptions, behaviours and stories that our society lays on top of our instincts – to protect us from such abuse and trickery. It does mean we cannot let our culture be dictated by those who want to take advantage of such manipulation. We must, collective, choose to steel ourselves against the abuse of our vulnerable instincts, so we are less inclined to run blindly after rulers that lead us astray.