On the Nature of Things.

A scorpion wants to cross a river but she can’t swim, so she asks a frog to carry him across. The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting him, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that she would drown if she killed the frog in the middle of the river. The frog thought for a moment, then agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why she had done it. The scorpion replies: “I couldn't help myself. That is my nature.”

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In the US, the last Monday in May is a Federal holiday, Memorial Day, for the purpose of mourning people who died on military service. Traditionally, there are ceremonies at war memorials and people visit military ceremonies to leave flowers or small flags. It’s the equivalent of Armistice Day in the UK (Nov. 11^th) and Anzac Day in Australia and New Zealand (April 25^th), solemn and sombre days of commemoration. It was a bit unexpected when, early last Monday, Mr Trump messaged his followers with just three words: “Happy Memorial Day.” However, an hour later, and probably actually awake, he let fly with a bizarre, all-capitals post that attacked his many enemies but didn’t once mention the fallen troops:

HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY TO ALL, INCLUDING THE SCUM THAT SPENT THE LAST FOUR YEARS TRYING TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY THROUGH WARPED RADICAL LEFT MINDS, …” (the whole absurd and grievously insulting thing here).

Veteran journalist and author, Thom Hartmann, was quick to point out that Trump also used the word “scum” when he was working up the attack on the Capital building, Jan 6^th 2021 and that this wasn’t a slip of the tongue: “Words matter,” he said. “In every fascist movement of the 20th century, it started with the words. Before the arrests, before the beatings, before the camps, there were the words. And in every case, those words went unchallenged until it was too late.” He’s so right. All the people who didn’t vote for Trump or now regret doing so will just sigh and get on with whatever they were doing, but his supporters will get the message, straight from the horse’s mouth: “Pass it on, we’re the true patriots, all those terrible people are trying to destroy our country.” The hidden dog whistle is “So are we just going to sit here and do nothing until they let all those foreign commies and rapists and drug dealers come and take over?”

Words count. Directly and indirectly, overtly and covertly, words set limits by conveying what’s acceptable and what isn’t. Trump has just said to about 40% of the population: It’s fine and dandy to hate those “monsters who want our country to go to hell” (his words). Of course, he didn’t say “I want you to hate them,” but he pushed tens of millions of people to make a choice: “The person I voted for says monsters want to destroy our country. Is he right, or is he talking shit? Do I stick with him, or do I admit that he’s fooled me these past ten years?”

People don’t like admitting error. This is the self-selecting process that extremists use to split the country, to lead people along until genocide becomes, if not a national duty, then not worth fighting against. But before they can be thrown into concentration camps, the opposition has to be hammered into submission, and the hammer is words. The process is well-advanced in the UK, as journalist Owen Jones reports on his Substack Battlelines, but it’s also underway in Australia. Last week, Ms K.A. Ren Wyld, an Aboriginal writer from South Australia, was flown to Brisbane to receive a fellowship worth $15,000 in the Queensland government’s literary awards. An hour or two before the ceremony, she was told the state government had decided to cancel her award because of a comment she briefly posted on X (ex-Twitter) in October last year (I can’t find the original). She referred to the former leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, who had been killed by the Israeli military, as a martyr. According to reports, the (right wing) arts minister, John-Paul Langbroek, told parliament that her comments were “deeply offensive,” divisive and justified terrorism. The president of the Qld Jewish Board of Deputies, a Mr Jason Steinberg, said the author’s comments “clearly demonstrated an anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and antisemitic position”. Subsequently, a number of the judges of the award resigned in protest against the government’s action. Just to be clear, the word ‘martyr’ is defined as:

1: a person who voluntarily suffers death as the penalty of witnessing to and refusing to renounce a religion. 2: a person who sacrifices something of great value and especially life itself for the sake of principle, ex. a martyr to the cause of freedom.

Manifestly, and regardless of whether one agrees with his politics or not, Yahya Sinwar met the definition of ‘martyr.’ Justifiably distressed, the writer herself asked: “It’s pearl-clutching hyperbole, and for what purpose? To silence me, a nobody. I don’t have a big spread of influence, I don’t have power and privilege.” And that, of course, is precisely the government’s point. It is to send a message to all the nobodies out there that there is only one narrative acceptable in this state, the narrative cooked up in secret by the right wing government acting on instructions received. BTW the Murdoch newspapers were notified of her cancellation before she was, and promptly made A Big Deal of it. They were, however, careful not to make any mention of events in Jerusalem earlier this week.

May 26^th is marked in Israel as “Jerusalem day,” the anniversary of the day in 1967 when Israeli troops and tanks stormed into the unarmed city of East Jerusalem and began an occupation that has lasted to this day. As usual, there were demonstrations in the city where tens of thousands of Zionist fanatics stormed through the remaining Palestinian areas, waving flags and screaming “Death to the Arabs, may your village burn.” Before the actual march, and also in keeping with tradition, bands of young thugs rampaged through the area, harassing or spitting on the few non-Jewish pedestrians still on the streets or attacking shopkeepers. The Israeli national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, gave his usual inflammatory speech, talking of expelling all Palestinians from Israel and Gaza. Earlier in the day, he had led 2,000 people to storm the Al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam. At one stage, a gigantic Israeli flag was carried to a religious site in the centre of the city. When the chief of Israeli police came to have a look at the festivities, he said he hadn’t heard any provocative chanting but added he had served in artillery (other reports here, here, here; anybody who wants to watch three hours of it can click here; if there were any reports in Australian media, I haven’t found them).

It's true that humans have some nice points, such as we speak (practically all species communicate in some form or other), we look after our children (but so do spiders and crocodiles), play (but so do most larger mammals), decorate things (as do bower birds), use tools (as do birds and chimps) and possibly a few others, but they’re not our dangerous bits, they’re not going to finish us off. It’s also true that there are plenty of clever people who say we shouldn’t talk about “human nature,” that we can’t tell what’s nature and what’s nurture. An influential paper from 40 years ago set the scene, arguing there is no such thing as human nature [1]. The author, who trained in biology and philosophy, rested his case on all sorts of stuff like blood groups, blue eyes and other tangentially relevant matters but concluded with an important question: “But why is it so important for the human species to have a nature? One likely answer is to provide a foundation for ethics and morals.” Since then, the drift has been to say that that there is no human nature. I disagree. I think it’s there, but it’s hidden in plain sight, and it has nothing to do with ethics and morals. In fact, ethics and morals are largely devised to control our ghastly innate nature.

When we talk of human nature, we’re not implying there’s anything uniquely human that sets us apart and dominates our lives. We use fire, but that’s a tool, a trick we’ve learned but it’s not innate, and cats soon learn that the best place to be on a winter’s night is in front of the living room fire. Black kites are attracted to columns of smoke over bushfires where they can catch the swarms of insects trying to escape; they aren’t scared of fire at all. When it comes to our innate features, it’s better to ask a Martian scientist who, hidden under the red planet’s dust, nervously watches as we pirouette toward the same disaster as overtook their society a million years ago. What are their conclusions? First, and like practically all higher apes, they see humans as social animals, we always gravitate together. Second, they recognise we are intensely hierarchical. As soon as we form our little tribes, we form dominance hierarchies, and then try to dominate the neighbours, which leads to innate drive No. 3: we are xenophobic. We fear/hate The Other. We don’t trust people we don’t know, especially if they look different or wear silly clothes or eat strange things or have sex with the wrong people, or all of the above. The fact that they worship the wrong god is an excuse to fight, not the reason, which leads to No 4: we are violent. We use aggression in order to dominate, in order to get to the top, and then we use aggression to stay there. And, as the Martians fully understand, therein lies the central and potentially fatal paradox in human nature: Yes, we like to dominate and we don’t care how many people we have to kill in order to get to the top but, at exactly the same time, we also don’t like being dominated and don’t care how many people we have to kill in order to make sure nobody stands over us. If people feel threatened, they will react to protect themselves, that is the other side of the dominance coin. Impasse.

These are innate, genetically-determined biological drives, especially for male dominance, which is practically universal in nature. For humans, there is clearly wide variation in how they are expressed in adult life, largely the result of early life experiences. Some people hate to mix, others faint at the thought of violence but they’re outliers, as we find in any biological tendency. Culture, in the broadest possible sense of the term, is entirely built on these two foundational tendencies. Language allows us to build complex social groups, which in turn demand a code of ethics and morality to stop the tribe tearing itself to bits – over who is going to dominate. Apart from “get it while you can” and “be polite to the big man with the gun,” nobody has ever found any universal ethical principles. Trouble is, we have very largely promoted dominance to the level of a virtue. Children are taught from the beginning to run fast to win the race, to try to come top in the class, to sing louder, fight harder for the ball, dress better, wear more makeup, have the coolest haircut or the most expensive gems, the biggest house and fastest car… It doesn’t end, but unless we bring it under control, it’s going to end, whether we like it or not.

If we want the world to survive, if we want our great-grandchildren to remember us with affection and not loathing, then we need to accept that all talk of the nobility of the human species is just self-glorifying claptrap. The reality is that taken together, our four most fundamental drives, to build ever-bigger societies, arm them to the teeth and then try to subjugate the horrible people next door, just are our nature. That’s who Homo sapiens are. Everything we do is designed to dominate and suppress. True, there are some nice people around but they aren’t running the show. Nice people don’t get to the top, they’re stabbed in the back along the way. So let’s go back to Mr Trump’s bizarre message on Monday in which he was fixated on all his enemies (fixations are a classic sign of early dementia). Why does the US have so many military cemeteries? Because they are always fighting. Why are they always fighting? Because the people who survive to get to the top are all agreed: the US has to be No. 1 in all respects.

What is now called ‘full spectrum dominance’ has been declared US policy for 25 years, and it means dominance in all respects, over all people, everywhere, for all time. Why do they believe this? Because they can, and because if you ask why it’s necessary, you won’t get past the starting line. The system selects for violently aggressive people who will stop at nothing to get to the top. Of course the politicians and financiers and generals don’t go around punching people in the face, they have police and troops to do that for them. But it’s all about “You must do precisely as we say or we will shoot you.” The only difference is that now it’s out in the open, or more open than it used to be.

It’s the same in this country. There is no doubt that the writer, KA Ren Wyld, earned her fellowship, but a group of people who fastidiously follow social media, carefully logging anything that could possible go against their political ambitions, decided that she should be dumped by the side of the road. So they quietly pulled strings until the new LNP government realised they’d better do as they’re told and dumped her by the side of the road. She was absolutely correct to describe Yahya Sinwar as a martyr (and now, it seems, his brother, who was murdered while in hospital), and absolutely within her rights to say that in public. The fact that the group who identify themselves as Zionists stooped to this shows how panicky they’re becoming, but that’s cold comfort for Ms Wyld.

And so to Jerusalem Day in Jerusalem. What we see is that the descendants of people who suffered brutally during World War II are now doing exactly the same things to their neighbours. The Nazis said: “We want the lands to our east to build our Third Reich,” and so they invaded with the intention of driving out and/or slaughtering the inhabitants. Starting decades ago, the hard right religious fanatics in Israel said: "We want the lands around us to build Greater Israel,” and so they invaded with the intention of driving out and/or slaughtering the inhabitants. After the Nazi invasion, the Jewish people in Warsaw were crammed into a ghetto and starved, so they rebelled. The Palestinian refugees of 1948 were crammed into a ghetto called Gaza and starved, so they rebelled. There is no difference, just because Homo sapiens. Whether the rebellions were moral, or justified, or anything else doesn’t count. All that counts is whether they were predictable, and they were, just because Homo sapiens. Marek Edelman, the surviving deputy commander of the Warsaw uprising, supported the Palestinians in their rebellion against oppression and dispossession, as it was predictable.

None of this has to be, but as long as people are told: “We are the Master Race, we are the Anointed Ones, the Chosen People, we are better than everybody else so get out of our way,” and they believe it, then there will be trouble. All ethical and moral systems, all the religions and philosophies, are simply feeble attempts to keep this under control. Why are ethical systems not robust and successful? Because the people who lust for power will coopt or crush anything that looks like a threat to their hegemony. All too often, religions are used to justify what people want to do, which is dominate. The same goes for “making the world safe for democracy” or “spreading the joys of socialism” or “liberating the oppressed.” The reality is: “Do exactly as we tell you or we will bomb you back to the stone age.”

Probably 95% of people have little or no interest in dominating other people, they don’t care about getting to the top as long as they can lead a happy life. They’re not the ones we have to worry about. It’s the 5% who want all the land, all the money, all the power and glory that are the danger. They’re in it for No. 1, they don’t believe any of that stuff about loving your neighbour or turning the other cheek but, when it suits them, that’s what they’ll tell you to do. They’ll tell you to lay down your life for your country/religion/race, etc, because none of them have any intention of putting themselves at risk. So Trump says “Happy Memorial Day” (truly bizarre; what’s happy about it?) but just remember what he’s said about troops in the past: “Losers and suckers.” He’s no different from the rest of the power-hungry crowd, he just blurts out what the others think.

Why did the scorpion sting the frog? Because that was its nature. The danger we and all the world’s helpless animals and plants face is that the wrong people get to the top, just because that is human nature.

And a final note: What would the Hon. John-Paul Langbroek, MP, have to say about this?

What Israel is doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians. It is not doing this due to loss of control in any specific sector, not due to some disproportionate outburst by some soldiers in some unit. Rather, it's the result of government policy – knowingly, evilly, maliciously, irresponsibly dictated. Yes, Israel is committing war crimes ... Yes, Israel has been denying Gazans food, medicine and basic living needs as part of an explicit policy. Netanyahu, typically, is trying to blur the type of orders he's been giving, in order to evade legal and criminal responsibility in due course. But some of his lackeys are saying so outright, in public, even with pride: Yes, we will starve out Gaza. Because all Gazans are Hamas, there's no moral or operational limitation on exterminating them all, over two million people … When a Palestinian village in the West Bank burns down, and quite a few already have, they'll tell us that the perpetrators are a small, violent group that does not represent settlers. This is a lie. They are many.

Is this an “anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and antisemitic position” that is ““deeply offensive, divisive and justifies terrorism”? The speaker is the former prime minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert (a few words were changed to conceal this; for the original, go to Owen Jones lengthy and current report). At least he had the courage to change his mind and admit he was wrong.

Reference 1: Hull DL (1986). On Human Nature. Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers. pp. 3-13. Cambridge University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/192787