What's Wrong With The World?
It's not just a rhetorical question. I'm actually going to attempt to answer.
The world baffles and alarms me. Quite a lot. At insomniac levels, really. Which is why running into this meme a few years ago stopped me dead in my tracks: “Not too far down, we are panicked monkeys. Down deeper, we are a lizard.”
Boom.
Sometimes the epiphany we’re looking for appears as though by deus ex machina. I needed this reminder: we are far from fully evolved. We’re not even partially evolved. Psychologically, we are no different than we were two-hundred-thousand years ago knuckle-dragging our way through the forest primeval.
Every time I find myself gobsmacked by my own or anyone else’s behavior, I force myself to remember that we are nothing more than panicked monkeys, and pretty much all of our unsavory behavior can be explained using this construct. This came in handy about seven years ago when I made the foolish mistake of reading some of my book reviews.
A steamy romance I’d written called Carnal Sacrifice had just been released by a boutique publisher. Between life, single motherhood, moving to Italy, and general exhaustion, it had been a hot minute since I’d had anything published, and I forgot the rules, which are to never, ever, under any circumstances, not even if someone holds a gun to your head or wallops you with a frying pan, read the things that other people write about your work. Because you will panic. You’ll feel naked and afraid, as though everyone’s laughing at you. The senseless cruelty of these attacks, the lack of constructive criticism, the personal and unreasonable violence levied against you for no reason will stand your hair on end. You’ll worry that potential readers will see these one-star reviews and scroll right past the BUY button because of them. One minute, you’re an award-winning published author; the next minute, you’re picking your teeth off the ground.
But here’s the deal. Our brains make no distinction between being shunned online and being shunned in the forest primeval. A few thousand years ago, doing something that got you cast out of your group of hunter/gatherers meant you were probably going to die. Being in a group afforded you protection from the many things that wanted to eat you. Being alone meant it was only a matter of hours before you were devoured. That’s why we humans are susceptible to mob mentality (there’s safety in a mob) and sadly vulnerable to criticism.
Rejection, quite literally, feels like death.
To prove our panicked monkey theorem, we need look no further than our own former president, Donald J. Trump. The good thing about Trump is his transparency. It doesn’t take a Carl Jung to analyze his deep-seated insecurities (e.g., penis size, hand size, crowd size, poll numbers, Nielsen ratings). Every time Trump crowed about his “very stable genius,” the more likely we were to remember that he barely made it through school and was brutalized and shamed by Fred Senior for what was likely Trump’s undiagnosed dyslexia.
Imagine the rage he must have felt toward children who could read, who were “smarter” than he was (note: dyslexia is not actually linked to intellectual capacity; case in point, Albert Einstein was a dyslexic.) Now consider the hostility Trump exhibited toward a brilliant scientist like Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the wildly self-aggrandizing stories he made up about his own achievements.
Trump’s panicked monkey was his fear of being exposed as a fraud, of being cast out of the tribe due to stupidity and incompetence. Losing the 2020 election, for instance. He will never believe the election wasn’t stolen from him. Admitting otherwise would require that he come to terms with his own failure. To our lizard-monkey brains, failure is tantamount to death.
Russian president Vladimir Putin’s vulnerability is harder to suss out, but only because he’s a bit more devious about hiding it. Given the carefully crafted images of Putin riding around on horseback with his glistening torso on display, or staged photos of him defeating judo opponents twice his size, I’d say that Putin’s panicked monkey is his short stature and masculinity. Runts of any litter are culled via natural selection. Underneath all the aggression and bombast is a little boy, small for his age, who never outgrew his paranoia of being left behind.
Remember that lizard-monkey brains function like a computer’s operating system, which means they run silently in the background. We’re not always conscious of why we do the things we do; we simply do them, regardless of the consequences.
We’re a planet of 7.9 billion souls at this point, slated to hit 10 billion by the year 2057. Every single one of us is motivated by fear of exclusion and the id-driven pleasure principle, which strives for the immediate gratification of all desires, wants, and needs. What did we think was going to happen? That we were going to create some utopic version of Karl Marx’s collectivism, where the self is subordinate to the needs of the many? What reality was Marx tuned in to to think for one minute that humans are even capable of that? As much as I rightly despise the hypocrisy of Objectivist Ayn Rand, she wasn’t entirely wrong when she ascribed all motives to selfish ones. Objectivism’s four main pillars—objective reality, absolute reason, individualism, and laissez-faire capitalism—are just as delusional as collectivism. “Objective reality”? Seriously? Been on social media lately?
Humans have an inborn need for hierarchy, just like any of the higher primates. A wealth of evidence indicates social hierarchies are innate. According to the National Library of Medicine, social hierarchies and status perception are characterized by “the ranking of group members who vary in physical and intellectual capacities.” In 2022, we do that with brands. Buying Canary Diamond cufflinks, a bespoke Ares S1 Project luxury automobile, or a summer house in the Hamptons is as showy and obvious a mating call as a red velvet spider mite’s urge to create a “love nest” out of leaves, sticks, and its own sperm.
If monkeys use cues, such as access to food, physical strength, dominance, and problem-solving abilities to make status judgments, the ones we make are not wholly dissimilar. On us, “access to food” looks a lot like access to money. “Physical strength” can be equated to physical attractiveness. Job titles and educational attainments are just as hierarchically important to humans as pack dominance is to bonobos.
Like any lizard sunning itself on a hot rock, we humans are wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Everything we do can be attributed to this duality. Leaving a successful thirty-year marriage for a much younger woman? A very panicked monkey hoping to trade in the pain of ageing and inevitability of death for a partner who makes him feel like a younger version of himself. Staging the invasion of a peaceful country? A reptilian need to be seen as dominant and untouchable on the global stage. The deliberate, state-sponsored persecution and machinelike murder of approximately six million European Jews and at least five million prisoners of war? Let’s just say that little Adolf’s expulsion—twice—from art school and later residence on a park bench did nothing to improve his character.
None of us wants to believe we are this primordial. We tout achievements like Quantum Mechanics or the International Space Station, but scratch the surface and you will still find panicked monkeys and cold-blooded lizards. Humans may have swapped out the window dressing, but nothing behind the window has actually changed.
Remembering this may help you understand why the entire world is in chaos. As much as it frightens me to say it, nothing will change until we change.
And the odds of changing in time to save ourselves are pretty much nil.
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Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin
No doubt the negative cumulative impacts our lizard brains have and continue to have on "others" including Mother Earth and her carrying capacity are devastating and urgently need shifting as you conclude. Maybe this is because for 30+ thousand years now, ever since our brains have created language and self awareness it seems our "external worlds" have developed at a far more faster rate then our "internal" worlds. The more we let our hearts rather then lizard brains lead us the more we are being the change/shift so needed now. PEACE XX
If you want to understand the panicked monkey, the best place to begin would be the Russian oligarchy. Pure acquisitiveness and materialism at its most primal. Possession of the biggest, best, fastest, most expensive is pure status. It matters not the corruption or the stack of bodies one must climb to acquire such wealth, only that one attains it. It goes without saying that it comes with the youngest, hottest, most willing and nubile women.
Underneath it all, though, I can't help but wonder how scared the oligarchs are that it could all disappear in the flash of an assassin's silencer. Because none of it's real and none of it's intended to last. It's merely a placeholder that will last only until someone smarter, richer, and more ruthless comes along to dethrone and decapitate you.
It's a dog-eat-dog world, and everyone's wearing Milk-Bone underwear.