We are a place that wants to see the receipts. “How do you know that? Can you prove it?” That’s healthy in measured doses, but it’s occasionally used to stifle dissenting opinion. And this is going to be an opinion piece. So allow me to lay out my bona fides before we begin.
OK. I’m Aspie and a woman. And 69, and still compos mentis. And bright enough to have earned a PhD. In this country, what that means is that I hit a Trifecta of marginalization. We don’t like women here in the good old USA, or smart people; we definitely don’t like smart women [hi, Hillary!]; and we REALLY don’t like folks who are diff’ernt in obvious ways, which Aspie folk usually are.
While being marginalized — and since I’m white, my marginalization has been far less onerous than many others experience — is obnoxious, it also sometimes confers useful skills. We who are marginalized learn to be VERY GOOD observers of the dominant culture. We have to; our survival depends on it. In my case, being Aspie has amplified that because one of my Aspie superpowers is pattern recognition. BEHAVIORAL pattern recognition. And on top of that, I spent my entire working life, except for a stint as a trade journalist, working in the area of mental health. And paying attention. [And related to three physicians, one of whom has degrees in both psychiatry and public health.]
These are some things I’ve seen, and learned, and I’m going to share their implications. Some of this will be discomfiting. I’m sorry; but I think it’s also necessary.
Homo sapiens is an apex predator. Yes, this is relevant, hang on. We evolved as killers. We’re horrifyingly good at it; ask the Quaternary megafauna, or the dodo, or the Passenger Pigeons, or Bison bison, just how good we are at it. Or ask the Neandertal, or any of the other hominins who used to share the planet with us and now are no more.
We’re also a highly efficient intraspecies predator. We’ve built museums to commemorate our most massive slaughters [to date]; you can find them both on the Mall, in Washington D.C. And our self-destroying tendencies don’t stop at death camps and enslaving one group of people for centuries; American predatory capitalism is basically an economic predation and marginalization machine. I got hints of this as a child listening to my grandparents fume every year when their Social Security increased and their rent went up right along with it; got more hints as a young adult watching the required minimum on my checking account go up, like my grandparents’ rent, every time the universities raised grad student stipends; you’ve seen it yourselves, you know.
OK, here’s where this stuff gets relevant, and I am sorry again, but some people here are not going to like this next part much.
We have never evolved away from that ancient killing urge. It’s tucked away in our archaic brain structures, and when we’re not engaging in actual warfare, our modern selves manifest it by bullying, scapegoating, ostracizing, banishing people from our social structures. Once again, we are very good at this. We have had literally millennia to perfect the techniques.
And we start young. Picking on the funny-looking kid. The fat kid. The Black kid. Then we move on to freezing the guy with the prosthetic hand out of conversations in the grad student common room. Denying the single woman tenure because her singlehood is “awkward”, without knowing or caring that she is single because the one person in the world who saw, knew, and loved her for who she was died of leukemia years ago, and her heart died with them.
Yeah, we’re good at this.
We’re also good at something else: forming warring tribes [see “actual warfare”, above]. What do you think the Friday Night Lights are really about? [that’s high school football, for those who haven’t heard of the movie or the series]. And the same impulse underlies the middle school cliques — which persist into the office, where the Bullies and Mean Girls often thrive more lavishly than they did in high school.
I did say “killing urge”, too, remember. This stuff actually kills people. Tribes seem to need enemies, and they don’t have to be from another tribe. Unaffiliated individuals make dandy targets, since they usually lack defenders. Schoolchildren, teens, college students, even working adults and retirees in active adult communities, can be, have been, and ARE bullied into suicide. Every day. By other human beings. Members of their own species.
There’s more.
We are not magically immune to this. In fact, we on the Left, and we here at DK, have our own versions of it. From time to time we will have a seemingly inexplicable banning… not just in response to troll onslaughts. Sometimes even relatively popular people end up banned, flagged under the banhammer by their compatriots, for things that look surprisingly trivial in retrospect.
We also have a tendency to warmly welcome people defecting from Republicanism — I mean warmth as in torches, to go with the pitchforks. And yes, I know, not all of us do all of this and most of us do NONE of this. But the pattern remains, and it shows up here and elsewhere on the Left. And I can assure you, the person who comes here for refuge and is driven away with the Internet equivalent of kicks and blows is NOT consoling themselves with the thought that at least Gaelsdottir didn’t pile on. That and similar facts mean nothing to them, for good reason.
These are archaic behaviors. Oust the stranger. Defend the tribe. They may have had survival value when we lived in caves, and before that, in trees; but they don’t help us quite so much now.
For whatever reason, we lefty folk have a special variant of this that seems to manifest whenever we think or know that the stakes are really high. [I told you this would be discomfiting.] I’ll bow to Mary Renault, and call it The King Must Die. How it works is this: when there is a tremendous amount at stake, and we cannot manage or control our own anxiety, we hyperfocus on our designated or emerging [Hi, Howard!] leaders. And we put all our hopes and dreams, and all our DEMANDS, on that one single solitary human being [Yo, Lyndon!].
And the moment that human being shows himself or herself to be human, imperfect,
DELENDA EST. And the mob pounces.
We did it to Howard Dean, over a second’s worth of perfectly normal exuberance.
And now we’re doing it to Joe Biden, over a cold, a stutter, a stutterer’s need for processing time, visible exhaustion, and astonished expressions while in an artificially structured competition with a blatantly abusive, sociopathic liar. [While he was still dealing with what just recently happened to his son. What say? you’d forgotten all about that? You damn betcha HE hadn’t.]
Yes we are. All our pent up fury at the burgeoning of fascism, the warning signs of which we ignored and brushed aside for decades; all our toxic, corrosive ageism; our unacknowledged fear of anyone bearing a “handicap”, especially when it manifests inconveniently, as Joe’s stutter did in that travesty of a “debate”; resentment of the fact that global politics isn’t a half hour TV series with nice simple plots, where only the guys in the red jerseys buy it, and Joe isn’t solving it instantly; our anger at bullying bosses, churches that preach hatred instead of peace, and a planet that is incinerating itself while we cheer refinery fires and the blasting of cities into airborne dust… all of this, circling, growing, looking for a target…
We are frustrated and afraid. We want to destroy something. Our ancient impulses are telling us we NEED to destroy something. RIGHT NOW.
We are running off our limbic systems and our hindbrains, and when peril is complex, our limbic systems and hindbrains are NOT our friends.
We’re letting our ancient programming override our cerebral hemispheres.
We just want to DO. We don’t want to think about the consequences, especially that trifling business of there being no seriously competitive “replacement” for Joe on hand if we succeeded in jettisoning him… or all the other issues that would immediately arise, that we’d then have to face and live with. [Though maybe we wouldn’t be living with them, or anything else, for very long, if we help our resident fascists make their dreams come true.]
We don’t want to think about the fact that the same lamestream media that adamantly refuses to cover Trump’s blatant, criminal sociopathy and increasing dementia, while working like demons to make an issue of Biden’s age, is … oh look … right behind us, gee how strange is that, they’re never this perceptive, but now they’re encouraging us, urging Joe to resign NOW for the good of the country [my featherless tail. For the good of Bezos and Sulzberger and Harlan Crow. As several others have pointed out, not once have these sudden heroes insisted that TRUMP withdraw from the race.]
Nope, we’re running our legacy software, running on those old, old, archaic instincts now.
Our limbic systems just want to tear someone up, and we think we found a target.
Elijah Cummings, late of my birthplace, would say at this juncture “We’re better than this.” And he, being Black, knew marginalization in ways that even a smart white Aspie woman can’t begin to imagine. And though I mourn him still, and though when I too am dancing with the angels at last, I will seek him out to humbly kiss his hands, I have to dissent.
We’re not [yet] better than this. We’ve spent the last two days and change proving that yet again. And not caring that we’re being played, for all we’re worth, by the Bezoses and Sulzbergers and perhaps others even more nefarious, as well. Because the limbic system wants what it wants.
But we can be better than this.
If we can stop blindly reacting and start thinking about what we are doing, and why.
If we can tolerate our discomfort, instead of instantly seeking someone upon whom to displace our anxiety-turned-to-rage.
If we can begin to focus on SOLVING THE PROBLEM instead of the default setting of LET’S DESTROY THIS, IT’S RIGHT HERE AND WE NEED TO DESTROY SOMETHING.
If those of us who are a bit more practiced in these skills just keep standing up to this, protesting it, deflecting or defusing it whenever possible.
If we stop, as Klaatu said, substituting fear for reason. [It’s the Number 2 “top” quote, at one minute and forty two seconds into the countdown video linked below.]
I Am Fearful When I See People Substituting Fear For Reason.
Just for the record, I will be tending this diary off and on. I’ll respond where I can, but I won’t respond to comments that seem abusive or look like dropped bait…
Klaatu barada nikto.