Monkey Business
The jungle grows back
.jpg){kind=link}
Within the ornate halls of the Kremlin sits the silverback – grinning ear to ear. A man small in stature, but large in malevolence. The man instills fears, but is also fearful. He knows he is weak, and lets very few people near him as a result, but he has an appetite for chaos and destruction that protects him from challenge. As long as others worry about what he may do next, his dominance is secure.
Across the Atlantic in what is ostensibly the more powerful seat sits the blackback. In his home turf, he’s convinced many that he is the dominant male. But his bluster and shamelessness disguise a man deeply ignorant and out of this depth. His one skill has been sensing opportunity within a broken society, and using its fractures and insecurities to vault himself to its peak.
Despite having the power at his disposal to restrain the silverback, the blackback is instead deferential and submissive. He admires and fancies the silverback, and so offers no challenge. He sees his role as facilitating the silverback’s appetites. No matter how much death and destruction these cravings create. Power lies where men think it lies, and the blackback thinks it lies in Moscow.
Humanity’s hubris was to think that we had transcended this world. The grand feats of human endeavour – from our art and architecture, to scientific advancements and off-world adventures – have been a façade. Behind this, the basest instincts of our primate DNA have persisted. We may think our modern urban environments display our sophistication and civilisation, but the jungle has grown back.
We have once again become slaves to the pathetic dance of male performance. With its puffed up chests and rhetorical bravado, designed to hide its insecurities and anxieties. It’s tiresome and dismal, turbulent and troublesome, but we continue entrusting it with power. For all our great cognitive abilities, we keep thinking security lies within the authority of the “alpha”. The lesson is never learned. We keep falling for the ruse.
This is our own collective emotional vulnerability. Men like Putin and Trump prey upon our lack of confidence. The deep insecurity of our current age has made us more susceptible to obedience, more tribal and herd-like in our behaviour. Making it far easier for power to be concentrated in the hands of those with nefarious ambition.
These men have also thrived as the cancer of post-modernism has eaten away at our civic values, and in particular our empathy. Post-modernism is built on the belief that there are no universal truths or objective reality. Reason and rationality are smokescreens. The only thing that exists is one’s subjective feelings and the power to exert them. It is in this world where those with the most feelings – those with no emotional regulation – prevail.
This is a world of sociopathy.
What has made us human, and separated us from our primate ancestors has been our emotional regulation. Our ability to cool ourselves down, think about consequences, and build greater affinity and compassion amongst ourselves. To be more predictable in our behaviour. To – at our best – value and promote these traits. To give these cooperative traits power.
Yet we’re still impressionable. Men in particular are impressed by force and passion. The gym is the weirdest fucking place on Earth, but men feel bonded to the muscle of other men. It’s the soft power of hard power. And it is what drives the attraction of men like Putin and Trump. And what drives Trump’s attraction to Putin.
So we are now again bonded to the animal spirits. To the insecurity of the food chain, and the men who still think they’re in it. With the chest-beating, the strutting and grunting. The shaking of trees for attention. The spitting and hissing. It’s chimp chaos with the nuclear codes. And it’s the grim existence we are rapidly devolving into.