The Chimpanzee Coup
When people stop being polite...and start getting real
I know I shouldn’t — or maybe I should? — but I can’t help obsessively reading the news lately. What fresh hell will be unleashed upon us today? I must know.
The unelected Elon Musk and his band of college-age tech bros gleefully feeding American institutions “into the wood chipper”? The president saying we’re going to turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East,” and the people who lived there will just have to go somewhere else? Attributing every tragedy and societal ill, including a plane crash, on DEI policies, which seems to be the US’s own version of Mexico’s chupacabras?
If there’s one thing that’s clear, it’s that Trump and his supports feel they have been treated, oh, very wrong indeed. And what needs to happen when someone’s been treated badly?
Punishment, of course. Retribution for the victims.
Do the powerful who insist they are victims truly believe they are victims? I’m not buying it. Look closely and you’ll see pure projection: accusing “the other side” of their own sins is the main strategy from their playbook. “You are suffering because of people I have deemed psychopathic and uncaring elites, but I, a true psychopathic and uncaring elite but with a trucker hat, am going to make everything better for you. You’ll see.”
Meanwhile, prices are going to skyrocket as social services and civil protections are rescinded. Those who gripe about “the bloated Federal government” are about to realize all that that bloated Federal government previously did for them. The cheering might die down once they realize there are no school services available for their special needs kid or that it’s impossible for a loved one to join the rest of their family in the US “the right way.”
But for now, they’re reveling in all that winning.
Last week, the comments to my “Karen” essay got me thinking a lot about rules, which is something I think about a lot anyway.
Rules, for me, are very important. They’re what literally separate us from chimpanzees, our closest (and very murderous) relatives. Without them, we’re all vulnerable to the most violent common denominators among us.
There always seem to be two competing theories about the nature of humans. One is that we are, basically, chimps... and that we perhaps shouldn’t fight it.
Especially those who see themselves as “the fittest” among us (or who believe, usually erroneously, that they’re under the protection of the fittest) are prone to this view: “I am the strongest so imposing my will is natural, and everyone else needs to fall in line behind me because this is the way it’s meant to be. Any resistance to my strength will inevitably be met with defeat, sooner or later.”
We all know people like this. Some of them are simply obnoxious people in our social circles that we have figure out how to deal with. Others are presidents and their henchmen.
A competing view is that humans are ultimately cooperative beings: the only way we move forward is collectively, as a group, by helping each other. No one person is a solo hero; we know that the idea that all currently successful people have achieved greatness “without anyone’s help” is simply fiction.
Did Margaret Mead really say that the first archeological sign of civilization, for her, was the presence of a healed human bone? Likely not, but it’s still a fact that humans have spent a long time helping and healing each other rather than simply tossing the weak aside.
Some of us, anyway.
Team Chimp, as often happens throughout history, is having a moment.
This is bad news for the majority of us who depend on everyone, or at least most people, to follow the rules in order to survive and lead lives mostly free from overt suffering.
I, for example, am never going to win a fight, even if it’s just a shouting match. I can’t, physically, for one, but I also have little interest in trying; I’d literally rather eat rocks. “No thanks, I’ll sit this one out. You win. Yea for you! I’ll be at the snack bar.”
Okay, that might not be totally true. I’d fight to protect my young. I’d fight to defend those I love. And even I’ve felt the flash of hot rage, a primal fury that says “get ready, we’re doing this.”
But I’d really rather not. Can’t we just sit down and talk about this, please?
Team Chimp says, “No, we cannot. We’re tired of being beat with words when we’re the stronger ones who should rightfully be running things around here. It’s time to teach everyone who ever made us feel like they were smarter than us a lesson. We’re not playing by your dumb rules anymore because we can’t win that way and we’re tired of not winning.”
And that’s basically the story of how we got our current president: enough people felt ignored by the establishment, and a strain of the Republican party knew just how to capitalize on it by framing it as “truth-telling strongmen vs lying pussies.”
But to me the scariest part is this: saying “this is against the rules” is meaningless when the other side openly refuses respect the rules.
This isn’t two opposing sides. This is one side saying, “I really think we should establish some rules and all follow them,” and another saying, “Fuck your rules, I do what I want.”
Now where does that leave us?
If only we could remember that this is a bet that does not usually go well for the majority of us. If only we could stop collectively making the same mistakes over and over again, in waves.
In the meantime, it’s time to dust off our history books — the ones that haven’t been replaced by the Texas State Board of Education, anyway — and figure out how to fight against Social Darwinism. Yet again.
Sigh.
Michael Moore said it, and I agree: Donald Trump is the most honest president we’ve ever had: he’s doing just what he’s said he would do. The fact that so little of it legal is beside the point; this is what people voted for. “Rip it up!”
Saying “this is against the rules” is meaningless when the other side doesn’t respect the rules. It’s like trying to argue with me that women should have no rights because that’s what they say in the Bible. It doesn’t matter to me what it says because I don’t accept the Bible as The Moral Authority.
Wow! You said all of the things I'm experiencing in a way that I haven't been able to gather myself to express. I always love your writing - but this is special. I am at overload with the stress of a worsening disability and being the target of at least three groups that MAGA is targeting. I really need that Social Security and Medicare. People keep pleading with them, as they close one agency after another, but what about the people who need those services? They would like to be rid of "those people" just like Hitler did - he made his way through the most vulnerable. So pleading with them is a waste of time.
Good column! Those of us who did not want Trump are trying to deal with the chaos and outrage. Hard to know what to do to save our country.