Why People in Civilization Are So Often Irreconcilably Divided

In “When ‘Good’ People Support Evil Rulers,” I presented one important part of the answer to the question: how can a person like Donald Trump — with such obvious defects of character that he is the LAST person one should entrust with power — get the votes of enough Americans to be elected President of the United States for a SECOND time, even after Trump had shown quite openly how destructive he would be.

I was asking in particular about a particular major component of Trump’s base of support. I was NOT asking about people like the Proud Boys, who are this nation’s equivalent of the brown shirts that helped Hitler come to power when Germany had come to the state where its resistance to the rise of thuggery had weakened. Nor was I talking about those “Low Information” voters who knew so little, and understood so little, that they could think that “the price of eggs” was a reasonable basis for making a choice of this catastrophic magnitude.

No, what I was talking about were those conservatives — of whom I know quite a bit from having lived among them for thirty years — who are exemplary in the other domains of their lives, but who in their politics throw their support behind a leader and a political force that represent THE VERY OPPOSITE OF THE VALUES THEY “SINCERELY” DECLARE THEY HOLD SACRED.

(I’ve learned that a great many liberals reject the idea of anyone “good” supporting this “evil” man. They are often residents of liberal-majority areas, and they tend to know the people they condemn only by their politics– which they regard as sufficient to condemn them. But I and a great many other liberal people have had significant human contact with people of this sort, and almost universally the liberals in conservative-majority areas, like the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia where I lived, simply KNOW that there is a remarkable amount of goodness to be found on those people.)

Wrestling with mysteries in the human world has been my life’s work. And never have I wrestled with a mystery more intensely, over so long a period of time, only to come up with a LESS satisfactory answer than with this mystery: How can these people support the opposite of their values?”

But in that previous piece I presented an answer that I believe captures an important part of the solution to that mystery– indeed, I think it lies at the heart of it.

The answer had to do with the failure of many people to integrate the two main forces that operate in governing a human being:

• One of those forces is the requirements imposed on the growing human by the surrounding culture, as we humans are cultural animals, who get “finished” by the society into which we are born. That has been at the heart of the human condition for probably hundreds of thousands of years; and the history of civilization, and the record of anthropology, conclusively demonstrate that it is true that we humans get shaped to act in the way the culture requires.
• The second set of forces are those of our inborn human nature. Some modern thinking has imagined that humans have no inborn nature to speak of, but are purely putty for the surrounding world to shape howsoever it pleases. But that makes no evolutionary sense. We evolved as animals and continued to live in “primate bands” until about 10,000 years ago. There’s no way a TABULA RASA can arise out of such an evolutionary history. Culture can channel the river of our inborn human tendencies, desires, needs– but there is that River nonetheless. We humans really want to get certain needs met, that are part of what it means to be a human being.

The mystery of good people supporting evil draws our attention to a problem in how many human beings are shaped: they are placed by their culture in the unenviable position of having two major forces within them that cannot be reconciled, and are thus in a state of war within the psyche.

If the demands of the culture are TOO HOSTILE to the inborn human needs, the psyche will split into warring camps. And with cultures that demand that people identify solely with the internalized authority, that lack of integration can become unconscious. The upright right hand does not know that the left hand is clenched like a fist in rebellion against the cultural requirements.

This condition—of angry rebel forces within the self—has probably been widespread in civilized societies for millennia. In many conservative cultures, those forces have been kept in check by strong moral structures. A cost is paid in unfulfillment, but lives function and the social order holds. Yet the rebel force remains a latent threat: even when it does not take control, it creates a standing vulnerability.

And when it does gain the upper hand, the suppressed impulses—charged with anger from long frustration—can become a destructive force. In American politics over the past generation, we have seen how those forces can take control of people in a crucial domain: the political arena, where power is decided.

(And this is how we arrive at the catastrophe that has been inflicted on America and the world: many good people cast their political support behind a figure who openly embodies the very defects their moral lives reject. A generation of propaganda has helped activate the rebel side of the psyche in the political realm—stoking hatreds and inflaming the desire to dominate. What had long been suppressed now finds expression and gratification in a drama where making the other side suffer becomes a source of satisfaction, and where the lust to dominate has become so intense that it is gratifying to have a bully as one’s leader.)

The part of the self that never bought into the “GOOD” that culture was selling, at the cost of suppressing important parts of oneself, can get seduced into attaching itself to a particular drama, in which making the other side suffer is a source of great gratification.

That’s what I presented as the solution to the mystery: if a culture makes demands TOO HOSTILE TO HUMAN NEEDS AND NATURE, the psyche is apt to split, and there is the vulnerability that some “Force of Brokenness” will exploit that division in order to pull good people over to the side of Evil.

But this points to something much deeper than the mystery in contemporary American politics. It points to the mystery of “Why has human civilization evolved in such destructive and tormented ways?” And the bridge lies in asking the question with which that previous piece ended: “Why are so many people divided in this way to begin with?” And there’s an answer to that question. And that answer lies in a really big truth: THERE IS SOMETHING THAT HAPPENS WITH THE RISE OF CIVILIZATION — INEVITABLY — THAT ASSURES THAT THERE WILL BE THAT INJURY OF BEING DIVIDED BECAUSE THE CULTURE IS TOO HARSH.

Understanding what inevitably happened puts the whole human story in an importantly different light. One way of stating the issue is: civilization inevitably gets importantly SHAPED by forces that are NOT A FUNCTION OF HUMAN NATURE. They are shaped, instead, by a SYSTEMIC FORCE that inevitably arises out of the SYSTEM that a creature’s breakthrough into civilization inevitably creates.

And — as I will show below — it become inevitable that the WAYS OF POWER will dominate in determining WHICH OF HUMANKIND’S CULTURAL OPTIONS WILL SURVIVE AND SPREAD. And one can now see that if people are required to internalize what societies shaped by the demands of power, there will be a mismatch between those two forces within the psyche. Therefore, the civilized world will be plagued by the challenge of seeking human fulfillment in a civilization that is to a greater or lesser degree hostile to human needs. The harsher, the greater the division.

So what explains why something like “THE WAYS OF POWER” would have an unfortunately powerful role in determining what kind of cultures human beings would live in.

And then we run into the irony that humanity’s unprecedented achievement — being able to invent its own way of life — plunged the civilization-creating creature into a circumstance that hurtled beyond control, leaving humanity injured in its wake.

Here’s why that would be inevitable.

A world of societies on the path of civilization inevitably has a dynamic that is quite different from all the systems of life that had preceded it. The rise of civilization represents a break out from the natural order, because the essence of civilization is that it is generated by the creature’s own creative intelligence, the first thing in the almost four BILLION years of the evolution of civilization that is NOT fashioned by natural selection.

Natural selection—continually selecting among alternatives—shapes whole systems that operate together to keep the flow of life going. “The lion and the zebra and the grass work together to create a perpetual motion machine—even as they devour each other.” In the order created by natural selection—everything from cells to organisms to species to whole ecological communities—the interactions among the actors have been shaped so that it works for the Perpetuation of Life.

The breakthrough into civilization is also a BREAK-OUT from the natural order. An unprecedented step gets taken by the first creature with the creative intelligence to start inventing a way of life. And so it LOOKS as though ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE for this creature who can invent anything he wants, and has the smarts to come up with good innovations. But it is not to be.

Indeed, we should have realized that it was not to be when we saw how improbable was the path that led from hunter-gatherers to the civilized populations of the early empires. How can there not be a problem when the mass of people have given up basic human freedom to become essentially the slaves of tyrants? Who could imagine that humankind would have CHOSEN THIS? So, we need to ask, if people didn’t choose it, what DID?

And the answer is that a systemic dynamic inevitably arises among these societies—who, unlike the lion and the zebra and the grass – have no ORDER containing us that has made sure that what the actors do fits into a synergistic and viable way of operating, such is always what biological evolution finds its way into. No order to make sure that the interactions among these civilizing societies is compatible with the comprehensive picture of “the needs of life.”
In other words, Bad things can happen.

Not only CAN happen, but inevitably WILL. Because No Order means Anarchy, and Anarchy inevitably produces the dynamic of “a war of all against all,” and a war of all against all inevitably produces a selective process where winners go on and losers get eliminated, and the winners inevitably will be those whose properties enable it to PREVAIL in that anarchic circumstance, which can be expressed as: THERE INEVITABLY WILL BE A “SELECTION” FOR THE WAYS OF POWER.

Imagine a group of tribes living within reach of one another. If all choose peace, all may live in peace. But if one chooses expansion and conquest while the others do not, the peaceful tribes face only bad options:

• defeat and annihilation,
• conquest and absorption,
• flight, or
• self-transformation for self-defense, which requires becoming powerful enough to resist the threatening society.

Four different possibilities, but in every one the ways of power spread through the whole system.

So for millennia, that selection for the ways of power has been a poison in the human condition, because the kinds of societies that prevail often impose requirements that are hostile to human needs. The conflict between societal demands and the needs embedded in human nature results in pain, a failure to integrate the self, and thus a vulnerability that the Force of Brokenness can exploit—enabling that Force to use “good people” in the work of making the world more broken.

The inevitable social evolutionary process I’ve just sketched explains why it is that in all six places on earth where hunting-gathering societies evolved in that area into pristine civilizations, the pattern was much the same—the tyrants and the exploitation. Which is exactly what you’d expect would happen if those who prevailed in an anarchic war of all against all would be given a DISPROPORTIONATE SAY in how civilized societies would operate and develop over the centuries and millennia.

THE SPIRIT OF THE GANGSTER inevitably is a powerful determinant, not because that’s what we are by nature, but because the inevitable Anarchy inevitably brings warlords – gangsters – to power. We’ve seen it in Lebanon and Somalia decades ago, and we can see how that unfolded wherever hunter-gatherers used their creativity to invent their own way of life, and inadvertently loosed ANARCHY onto the civilization of the clever creatures who stumbled into something they couldn’t control.