Is "Othering" Human Nature's Deadliest Instinct?

Now we have an opportunity to bring Americans together, to embrace a collective and inclusive “us,” and to repudiate hate and “othering” as a political strategy...

Image by Peter Schmidt from Pixabay

The song that was inspired by this article is available here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is available here.

“Identity politics” can be either helpful to society or destructive of social cohesion and democracy itself. When used to bring people of different races, religions, and gender identities into the larger structure of society — to empower and lift up those who’ve traditionally been oppressed — identity politics becomes a platform for ultimately ending itself; once everybody has equal opportunity, it’s no longer needed.

The dark side of identity politics occurs when the dominant race/religion/gender (in today’s America that’s white Christian men) identifies people who aren’t part of their group as an “other” and uses this otherness as a rallying cry to enlist members of the powerful in-group against the “outsiders.”

This is what the GOP has been doing ever since 1968, when Richard Nixon picked up the white racist vote that Democrats abandoned in 1964/1965 when LBJ pushed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act through Congress.

Nixon talked about his white “silent majority.” Reagan emphasized “states’ rights” to suppress the civil and voting rights of minorities. GHW Bush used Willie Horton to scare white voters in 1988 the same way his son vilified Muslims to win re-election in 2004. And, of course, Trump has been “othering” nonwhite people and women ever since he started his notoriously racist and hateful birther movement in 2008.

Science, however, is catching up with the Republican’s strategy, and showing us both how powerful it can be and also how to defeat it.

Rob Henderson’s excellent Newsletter turned me onto the new book The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution by Richard Wrangham, who does a deep dive into the past 600,000 years of our species and its immediate predecessors.

Wrangham points out how violent our chimp cousins are: female chimps are routinely beaten into submission before being raped and impregnated by the most powerful of the male chimps. He notes, “One hundred percent of wild adult female chimpanzees experience regular serious beatings from males.”

The consequence of this is that over generations genes for aggression have come to dominate that species; chimp society very much operates along the lines Thomas Hobbes argued human society would without “the iron fist of church or state.” Chimp life is nasty, brutish, and short.

But at some point in our prehistory, as humanity was evolving into its modern form, we developed language. Using that new ability to communicate, we developed complex societies.

Citing biologist Richard Alexander, Wrangham writes:

“In his 1979 Darwinism and Human Affairs, Alexander argues that at some unknown point in our evolution, language skills developed to the point where gossip became possible. Once that happened, reputations would become important.

“Being known as a helpful individual would be expected to have a big effect on someone’s success in life. Good behavior would be rewarded. Virtue would become adaptive.”

For human societies to survive and prosper in the face of an often-hostile natural world, cooperation became more important than dominance. We left behind the violence of alpha male chimps and instead embraced human teamwork and social harmony.

In my most recent book, The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living, I document how Native Americans had, at the time of first contact in the 15th through 17th centuries, shared with Europeans how they’d developed highly democratic systems of governance. To a large extent, our Constitution was based on things learned directly from native people.

As I showed from that era, and Wrangham does with hunter/gatherer tribes across the world while examining anthropological evidence of early humanity, psychopathic and hoarding alpha males were consistently brought under control by the rules of human society itself.

Wrangham shows how, in multiple ancient and modern hunter/gatherer societies, when what we’d today call sociopathic or psychopathic alpha males would begin hoarding wealth or asserting dominance over others, they were simply killed.

Over thousands of generations, he posits, this altered our gene pool in a way that only a very small percentage of us — psychologists estimate between one and five percent — still carry and can act out the alpha male role in a way that involves high-level hoarding and social dominance. We call them sociopaths, billionaire hoarders, and violent psychopaths.

The good news is that they’re very much in the minority; the majority of us are not psychopaths, and are deeply wired for cooperation and social cohesion.

This evolutionary process, which I also document in American Democracy, makes societies more stable, enhances a culture’s or nation’s chances for survival in the face of crises, and improves the quality of life for the largest number of members of a society.

But, as both Wrangham and I point out, when societies are taken over by hoarding, violent, psychopathic men (Hitler, Saddam, Mussolini, Putin, Trump, Iran’s Ayatollahs, etc.) they become top-heavy and brittle, and thus more vulnerable to disruption by both external and internal events (including the death of the leader).

While the evolutionary basis of this, which Wrangham brings to us in his book, is new, the idea of a society or nation being most resilient when it’s most democratic is not; it’s been the subject of speculation, documentation, and scientific and social inquiry from the time of Socrates through the Enlightenment and the creation of the United States (as I detail in American Democracy).

What struck me from Wrangham’s book as most relevant to this moment, though, was his assertion that we humans are, both genetically and socially, vulnerable to psychopathic alpha males taking over when they use one particular strategy to gain and hold power: identifying an “other” who they can successfully characterize as a threat.

On the one hand, Wrangham points out how we’re capable of great tenderness and compassion. In his book’s introduction, he writes:

“In short, a great oddity about humanity is our moral range, from unspeakable viciousness to heartbreaking generosity. From a biological perspective, such diversity presents an unsolved problem. If we evolved to be good, why are we also so vile? Or if we evolved to be wicked, how come we can also be so benign?”

The answer, in short, is that we’re tender and loving to our own group, but perfectly willing to be astonishingly violent toward any “other” group that we see as substantially different from us and believe is a threat to us.

This, on the other hand, is a key part of preparing soldiers to fight in wars and violate that core human imperative of not killing: First, we must “other” the enemy. My dad, who volunteered to fight in World War II straight out of high school in 1945, referred to Germans and Japanese as “krauts” and “japs” to his dying days. Such a racist “other” perspective was pounded into our soldiers throughout basic training, just like veterans of George W. Bush’s Middle Eastern wars often refer to Arab people as “ragheads” and other slurs.

This “othering” of members and supporters of violent dictatorships we must go to war against is arguably a useful or even necessary tool to prepare our young men and women to kill or be killed on the field of battle.

Because it’s grounded in genetically-mediated survival instincts and strategies as ancient as humanity, it’s relatively easy to intentionally program into people, and, once they come to believe there is a real threat from an “other,” very hard to defy. During both WWI and WWII in America, for example, those who protested against those wars were vilified, ostracized, and, in some cases, even imprisoned, all with popular support for that separation from society.

It becomes particularly dangerous, though, when violent psychopathic alpha males in a political leadership position turn that same strategy against members of their own society, turning average citizens into monsters. As Wrangham writes:

“The killers who committed genocide in World War II, Cambodia, and Rwanda were caught up in societies where moral boundaries became excessively crystallized. Yet most were not sadistic monsters or ideological fanatics. They were unremarkable individuals who loved their families and countrymen in conventional moral ways.

“When the anthropologist Alexander Hinton investigated the Cambodian genocide of 1975–79, he met a man called Lor who had admitted to having killed many men, women, and children. ‘I imagined Lor as a heinous person who exuded evil from head to toe….I saw before me a poor farmer in his late thirties, who greeted me with the broad smile and polite manner that one so often encounters in Cambodia.’ The combination of horror and ordinariness is routine.

“According to the anthropologists Alan Fiske and Tage Rai, ‘When people hurt or kill someone, they usually do so because they feel…that it is morally right or even obligatory to be violent.’ Fiske and Rai considered every type of violence they could think of, including genocide, witch killings, lynchings, gang rapes, war rape, war killings, homicides, revenge, hazing, and suicide.”

Like Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler used this “othering” strategy against Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals so successfully that “good Germans” largely went along with the Holocaust, often enthusiastically. Stalin did the same against Ukrainians who were part of his Soviet Union, starving to death over four million human beings — men women, and children — in the Holodomor.

And now Donald Trump and his followers and enablers in the Republican Party — and thirty or so almost certainly psychopathic alpha male billionaires — are using this “othering” strategy against American citizens and immigrants to gain and hold political power.

In doing so, they’re playing with the most deadly form of fire known to humanity.

Because our instinctual willingness — or even enthusiasm — for dominating, destroying, and killing any “other” we see as a threat is deeply rooted in  our genetic code, it’s damn near impossible for people who’ve been inculcated with a clear identification and deep fear of an “other” to resist embracing forms of violence ranging from discrimination to excessive policing and imprisonment to outright extermination.

It’s so archetypal that it’s the essence and message of every Bruce Willis-type movie: “Use violence to destroy the bad people.” As we watch that story play out on the screen, and we cheer the murder of the bad guys, we feel a release and exhilaration that keeps bringing people back to the theater.

We didn’t “learn” to love this violence: it’s wired into our DNA. All of us. We are all vulnerable to this type of emotional manipulation.

Trump’s open embrace of rounding up 12 million “other” immigrants and putting them into concentration camps prior to deportation seems unspeakably cruel, but we forget the brutality of his family separations and caging of young Hispanic children at our own peril.

He and his acolytes are fully capable of committing horrors like the world sees in various places every few generations when an alpha male psychopath uses “othering” to gain and hold wealth and political power.

In both Wrangham’s book and mine, we find the way to combat this: shatter the “othering” meme by converting the “them” Republicans identify (queer people, racial and religious minorities, “liberals,” and women) into a massive, collectively diverse “us.”

This fracturing of the GOP “othering” efforts was hugely on display last week during the Democratic National Convention, as people of all races, religions, gender identities, and disabilities were featured as part of a grand, collective “us.” Increasingly, we’re also seeing it in our media, from commercials featuring queer and multiracial couples to movies and TV programs with diverse casts.

To restore to our society the kind of resilient culture that has helped humanity survive to this point, we must defeat Donald Trump, JD Vance, and the psychopathic hoarder billionaires funding their attempt to take over America.

We must stop their effort to convert us into a fractured society with rich white Christian men in charge and everybody else subservient for another generation or more. As President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his prescient farewell address:

“…America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.” He added: “We pray … that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.”

America defeated fascists who had used “othering” to seize and assert power eighty years ago; they forced us to do it on the battlefield. Here at home, we fought back against and thwarted the psychopathic alpha male Robber Barons of the 1880-1930 era with antitrust law, union organizing, and heavy taxation of the morbidly rich.

Now we have an opportunity to bring Americans together, to embrace a collective and inclusive “us,” and to repudiate hate and “othering” as a political strategy.

If successful, we’ll usher in a new and beautiful America, and a grand example for the rest of the world. This could quite literally be a positive turning point for humanity for generations.

If only enough of us show up at the polls this November, and then stay engaged for at least a few years thereafter. As Tim Walz said, “We can sleep when we’re dead.”