A BRIEF HISTORY OF US.

We live in strange times and that's probably because we're strange creatures.

Sometimes it seems to me that this is not just the beginning of the end of days, but it’s half way to a grim eradication of a past that was always part cruel and occasionally part glorious as just about everything collapses into a mess of our own making.

I don’t want to discuss nationalism here, though I will point out that one of the most confusing qualities in the human mind is our, that’s yours and mine, love of being on the winning side of just about any argument. It’s not merely a matter of right versus wrong or black versus white but of anything versus something else. It’s behind the curious phenomenon of gambling. I know there’s the something for nothing desire, but above that Casino owners are fully aware that the average punter gets more of a thrill from choosing the right outcome in a game of chance than he does from the small reward he gets for being right. It’s what’s behind the suggestion that we gamble responsibly, don’t risk more than we can afford to risk, because the flip side of that is we’ll win less than we’d like to win if the only reward was hard cash. No, the psychologically huge reward lies in backing the right side, and conversely backing the wrong side can be quite depressing.

And it’s this tendency, I don’t know whether it’s an instinct we have that has somehow got itself parcelled in with our strands of DNA that form the basis of who and what we are, is what lies behind the way our world is organised. Just think about it.

It doesn’t matter where we live, there is just about always a leader at the pinnacle of our society and we give scant thought as to why he or she is there. To represent us, we might think, as if we’re not capable of representing ourselves, to make decisions on our behalf ... that’s closer to the mark, and because those decisions rarely have much to do with the immediacy of our daily lives, we treat them as if they were a choice from on high, which they probably are, and generally accept them.

But once upon a time things weren’t so clear cut. Once upon a time our ancestors, maybe some of them Neanderthal it was so long ago, lived in fairly scattered groups and the leader or elder of the group was most likely a family member with the seniority to be worthy of the epithet Elder. Our ancestors knew who he was and probably revered him because of his seniority and vast worldly experience together with his tribe of grandchildren if he’d lived a long enough life to witness them. Groups got larger, multi-family affairs, and at the same time the leader became more powerful. In some he forged for himself a mystical quality, was in touch with whatever gods they’d invented for their world at the time. He most likely demanded tribute because how could a spiritual wise man go out into the dangerous wilderness hunting for himself when there was other more cerebral work to be done? And that was the birth of his power.

And we ended up, forty thousand years later, with a Prime Minister who leads us (or a President or any one of the names societies give to the big man in the big house).

And he’s stolen the instinctive power from where it originated. Most societies had something a great deal less democratic than a President or Prime Minister elected by the people, but a monarch. The tribal leader had evolved over ages to be a King (it wasn’t a Queen so often, women being always considered to be the weaker sex on account of their superior understanding of most things).

The King was originally a leader in battle. There were always wars, inter-tribal affairs in which our instincts probably first learned the trick of needing to back the winning side. Reward and punishment were involved. Fight on the same side as your King and you were rewarded with lands (that the mighty king said were his to give but actually weren’t) if you proved useful to him and managed to lop a few heads off when it came to close encounters with those he decided were his enemies. His enemies, please note, became yours as well. Strange, eh? You’d chosen a side, a winning side. If it was the losing side you were probably dead.

Time moved on and the King became increasingly ceremonial when it crossed his mind that not only minions got hurt by vicious weapons, but monarchs might suffer also, and he learned to hover in the background, watching from afar. This led inevitably, I suppose, to his actual power being diminished to the point when it could have been written on the back of a postage stamp whilst the reverence with which his name was spoken remained mighty indeed. Witness our present Queen: a mouthpiece for an idiot Prime Minister to use as he will but loved by many and rewarded with largely unearned riches, trailed by a family who do a huge amount of touring round the world, a sort of expensive paid holiday, and calling it work. I don't want to give the impression that I’m anti-monarchist, just that they fulfil very little useful function when they can’t even call the aforementioned idiot Prime Minister a traitor and order that his head be lopped off.

I dared say it’s time for Prime Ministers to be held to account for their idiocy.

Anyway, back to my point.

We are instinctive creatures who like to back the right side when more sensible creatures would dither, and having selected that right side we’re very reluctant to shift our position even when the right side turns out to be proved manifestly the wrong side. And we are hard-wired to follow rulers, even when they’re shown by the words they speak and the thoughts in what passes for their brains to be idiots.

And if we struggle to remember that we might find ourselves with a much brighter future.

Amen.

And ps: don’t anyone get upset when I suggest Neanderthal ancestry because there is clear evidence in each and every one of our DNA that thousands of years back a homo sapiens ancestor of ours did what a prudish age years later might suggest was slightly naughty indeed, and did it with a Neanderthal member of the opposite sex.

© Peter Rogerson 06.10.19