Slings and arrows.

[Cross-posted from MeWe.]

Now, this is just a notion that came to me this morning; I haven’t decided how much I believe it. But it’s certainly a plausible speculation.

While reading several novels recently set in pre-modern conflicts — especially Chuck Dixon’s Bad Times series, in which modern ex-Rangers end up in historical war zones like the siege of Taiping and see savagery and suffering that dwarfs what they had previously considered “hell on earth” — I was thinking how basically anyone living pre-now had a hard enough life to stun our sensibilities.

The default existence for almost all human beings has been a life of poverty, malnutrition and starvation, war, disease, etc. It may not be overstating it to say that what we consider “PTSD” was actually the standard operating procedure of the human psyche.

Compared to that default, our modern norm of what life “should” be and what we “deserve” disappears as a rounding error.  Not that everyone hasn’t always wanted a carefree paradise, but that was a goal so far out of reach that it was usually relegated to the next life.

Then I thought: As a species, then, aren’t we adapted to a much harsher existence? Isn’t our instinctive behavior optimized to fight against an environment and milieu much more antagonistic to our wellbeing than the one in which we find ourselves in the modern West?

And then it hit me.

Microaggressions. Invisible-but-omnipresent “systemic oppression.” Burn-shit-down protests.  The tyranny of mathematics and merit and objectivity.  Treating Jordan Peterson as the antichrist. People enthusiastically losing all rationality as they passionately fight about matters that are little more than a hangnail.

Are people instinctively looking for a Big Bad World to fight because it’s literally bred into them?

Could the roots of virtuous victimhood and the need to tar the most prosperous era of human existence as festering dystopia at least partly because the human organism has adapted to EXPECT an antagonistic existence, and needs to create one if it can’t be found?

Take the big news of the week, the trial of Derek Chauvin in the death of George Floyd.  Leave aside, for the minute, the exact degree to which Chauvin’s actions contributed as one of many causes of Floyd’s death; why is it notable national news that an unremarkable and unknown individual with a hobbling criminal past, a drug-abusing present and no great prospects for the future died in police custody while resisting arrest?  And why did he immediately become an icon to the terrors of systemic racism and police brutality — an iconic status which persists even when any rational person should be thankful that examination of the evidence clearly shows that he was NOT targeted because of his race and that this ISN’T evidence that the police aren’t out hunting people because of the color of their skin?

Because (in the model I’m presenting) people with a literally biological need to confront a hostile reality aren’t presented with that hostile reality in their own daily lives, and so must invent one, using the death of a man they didn’t know and didn’t care about as an avatar for their own “struggle” to tilt at windmills.

Obligatory (and, to all rational beings, unnecessary) disclaimer: Yes, injustices exist. Pain exists. But the upper-middle-class white kid with a $40,000-per-year degree from Amherst in Colonialist Studies, protesting against capitalism on xer latest iPhone doesn’t have a claim to overwhelming existential oppression; in the face of omnipresent luxury and security, xe ends up suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that exist only in xer nobler mind — one might call it “cosplaying oppression.”

There are, of course, more constructive outlets for this instinct; when channeled, it becomes less “lash out at a benign existence” and more the virtue we call “striving.” There are things to make; there are flaws to correct; there is happiness to spread.  But I think we need to realize, if my layman’s attempt to reinterpret the entire science of human psychology is close to being true, that the instinct to claw out a section of wilderness is basic to the human condition, and that ignoring it (or assuming that it will immediately fade as the literal antagonism of the environment lessens) leads to our uniquely modern problems.