My first career was as a sociobiologist (See my book The Sociobiological Imagination, SUNY Press, 1990). The late EO Wilson was my mentor. By 2000, I moved into Law, but I’ve never stopped looking at how law exists in relation to our evolved instincts.
Karen Testerman, current candidate for NH Governor (You go, Karen!), handed me a book last week, which I knew would include the texts of the NH Constitution and the US Constitution. It did, but, as I should have guessed, she prefaced those items with a more basic plan: The Ten Commandments.
This series of articles on a moral militia wants you to stop thinking of a bunch of nice hearty Minutemen raising their guns against…um…er… It’s not clear who the target is. We’ll get to that. But first, try to draw a distinction between the role of a small-r republican government and the state-of-nature type thing. They are vastly different.
My Baby Boomer generation has had a cushy life. We innocently believed that the Constitution of 1787achieved what was needed, and that it was able to keep naughtiness in check. Remember when some Congressmen get ousted for taking cash in the Abscam sting? And didn’t Martin Luther King solve the problem of segregation? Didn’t we go all over the place to stop the threat of Communism?
Yeah, maybe, but the big Takeover is always being stealthily plotted and planned. It’s hard to see it, as it does not fit the reports that government makes about itself. Our blindness to this extra-legal phenomenon is a serious problem. There really is a cabal, any zoologist would predict it for our hierarchy-prone species.
In order to show it up more clearly, I’ll take a zoologist perspective. Let us consider a state-of-nature in the rough. Remember when Thomas Hobbes said life would be nasty, brutish, and short? He was not exactly correct, but the Hobbesian picture is at least part of reality.
People Are Awful
All humans, being mammals, are selfish. Each person must operate to save his own life and improve it by wealth. (You also help relatives, and so the family is a source of strength.) If this means hurting another human being, don’t worry — there are ways to justify it.
Indeed there are ways for you to cover up — to yourself — that you are acting cruelly. The instinct for self-deception was a biggie in Homo sapiens’ evolution. Plus, a separate instinct prompts us to hate an enemy group and try to destroy it completely.
I was enlightened to read a few years ago about a genocidal non-human species, namely, the hyena. What I am about to describe — the “finishing off” of one group of hyenas by another — is not to be confused with the everyday predator-prey relationship. Any predator regularly eats his prey which are not members of his own species — the cat eats the bird. Hyenas acts at a group level; their victim is not a prey but a competing group of hyenas — same species.
It must be that each group wants to survive and sees a neighboring group as a lethal competitor. Hyena Group A starts to sense that Hyena Group B is getting big. This is a worry. Maybe they depend on getting water from the same water hole. At some point, one of the two groups will try to kill the other. Humans do this too. We learned about it in grade school as a nice thing called “conquest.”
Interestingly, in the hyenas, when they are still in a pre-war stage, Group A may notice a few B hyenas straying into neutral territory. It will kill them, for no other reason than it’s easier to get them as loners, unprotected by their brethren.
You can see that humans, over the ages, have committed many genocides of foreign group or even nearby competitors. Some of it is strategic. The Roman empire kept growing and growing as
The “necessity” factor puts paid to any feeling of guilt or remorse. Killing, in war, is virtuous; everybody knows that. We despoiled the ancient treasures of Iraq in 2003? So what. Who gives a damn.
Rules
Even in domestic society we are pretty bad. All humans are fitted out with basically the same DNA. We will lie, cheat, steal, kill, and be unfaithful to a partner, when tempted. Oops, that’s what the Ten Commandments is about, isn’t it? But humans need to live peaceably so we don’t openly steal, murder, get adulterous, and so forth. We submit to rules.
The enforcer of rules is often assumed to be supernatural. People imagine that “rightness” is up there somewhere, and that it’s a real thing. Indeed we are taught that it’s all of a piece — there is a realm of goodness, and if you are a good individual you are in touch (somehow) with that realm.
I guess the Constitution could work like religion. It does set out what one must do and must not do. Both our state and federal constitutions are directly aimed to control a specific type of bad behavior, namely, the oppressive behavior of the powerful. Thus in place of “Thou shalt not commit adultery” we have “Thou shalt not [2A] disarm the people” or [5a] “Thou shalt not accuse a guy, and hang him, without giving him a chance to show that the accusation is a crock.”
The persons who drafted constitutions in the 1700s did not think that a piece of paper was sufficient to hold the powerful at bay. They tried to check interest against interest. They even foresaw the possibility of all the interests coagulating. Oh-oh, that would mean a strong ruler is pitted against a relatively weak conglomerate of citizens. “A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.”
Some Instincts Are Cleverer Than Others
Sinning wholesale is quite the breezy way of life. Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), who boasted that he was the most evil man in the world, gave as his motto: “Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law.” Please try to picture a group pf powerful people who boast that they are free from all scruple. They will be pleased to know that the masses do have scruple. In fact they will manipulate that situation to the max.
For at least 17 years solid, since 2005, I have been tracking the behavior of the unscrupulous. They run our nation behind the scenes. I call them The Globalists to indicate that they have no ethnic unity themselves. (Some say it’s a Jewish thing, but clearly it’s a motley crew.)
Very likely the globalists command all nations, including ones that are nominated as “outsiders,” such as Iran or China. If a national leader stands up to them, he/she will soon be in the grave. This happened to John Magufuli of Tanzania in 2021 for “daring” to say No to vaccines.
I think it pays to congratulate The Globalists on their huge achievements, some of which benefit us. They do make the trains run on time. They do fetch sugar and spices from distant lands to your table. They — I hate to say it — make the communication of all of us possible via the Internet.
Among their mortal sins — very mortal, about as mortal as you can get — are the instigation of wars, the disbursing of diseases, the attack on the family, the disestablishment of Christianity. All these were carried out by first gaining expertise into human psychology.
You can hardly blame the poor creatures for being scared now that they have painted themselves into a corner. At the moment, though, they are still largely able to deflect anger against themselves. They get us to believe that it’s, say, “Biden” who is doing such a thing as bringing illegal immigrants in.
On the hustings, I raised the question, “Who opened the southern border?” The answer I got was, “the Democrats do it to bring in more voters for them.” No. The transmigrasie that is going on in the US now is well known in other countries. It’s a plot to destroy each culture. Clever men are in charge, and, as far as I know, not one of the 435 Congresspersons has any plan to identify them or punish them. This is pathetic.
In a later part of this series, I will show how we can get over that paralysis.
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