Conservatism has been around for thousands of years. We’ve only been talking about politics in terms of left vs right since the French Assembly of 1789, but the ideology of the right has been with us at least since the first city-states. And the common thread in conservatism has always been to defend and steepen existing hierarchies, to serve the ruling class, and to keep the poors in their place. Establishing power over others isn’t necessarily conservative in nature, but maintaining that power (by any means necessary) is.
One of conservatism’s go-to forms for achieving this is to tell a lot of myths. Outright lies, too, of course, but a ton of myths. Unfortunately, given the nature of conservative establishments and societal structures, these myths spread like wildfire and are internalized by pretty much everyone, including folks firmly on the left. One of the most pernicious of those myths is about we humans and our supposed “natures,” how we’re all selfish, greedy, prone to violence, and naturally ultra-competitive.
Recent science tells us a vastly different story, as do some amazingly prescient studies like Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902). Science depicts a species far more inclined to cooperative, even friendly, behaviors (perhaps to a fault), than the hopelessly self-centered individuals depicted by conventional wisdom. Two important books that collect and sum up much of the data on this are Richard Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox, and Humankind, by Rutger Bregman. The latter is a virtual one book Myth-Busting Fest, and, in my view, required reading. His take on Lord of the Flies is especially illuminating, as is his take-down of the Stanford Prison study, among a host of other examples.
Why is the above important? Because the myth of our supposed selfishness, greed, and violence helps isolate, separate, and pit us against each other, and alters our perspective on even the potential for collective action — which is exactly what those in power want. They also want cover for their own greed, selfishness, ultra-competitiveness, even violence, with what amounts to a pseudo-biological excuse: “Everyone does it!!”
Um, no. The percentages within American society of people one might label “naturally” self-centered (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) range from 0% to 6.2%, and even with that or similar diagnoses, manifestations of related bad behavior are never automatic or universal within those groups. Sociopaths range from 0.2% to 3.3%, and are much more likely to act in keeping with that diagnosis, but they’re a tiny percentage in any society. Ironically, as Richard Wrangham and Rutger Bregman note, “Human Nature” tends to cause us trouble (in the modern era, at least) for being too ready to cooperate and comply with the Powers that Be. The vast majority of us aren’t Caesars, Napoleons, or Musks, and don’t want to be. We’d rather not play world conquest games.
Homo Sapiens evolved into cooperative beings, and Wrangham details studies that suggest we “domesticated” ourselves to radically reduce levels of violence. If we hadn’t, we likely would have wiped each other out and ended our time on this planet tens of thousands of years ago.
Contrary to the conservative narrative obsessed with “rugged individualism,” Daniel Boonish independence, and innate Ayn Randian selfishness, we’re highly interdependent social creatures, and really like being that way. We spent the vast majority of our roughly 300,000 years on this planet living communally, sharing virtually everything, with virtually no hierarchies — very much like the Na'vi in “Avatar.” One could read that movie as depicting the battle between how we humans lived for 99.8% of our time on earth, versus how we live now, forced into artificially contrived competition by a system that is aggressively un-natural and counter to our best interests.
It’s long past time we fight back against those myths, and that system, and set the record straight. Will post a follow-up diary with some ways to do just that next week.