The road to destruction

Many people believe the way to safety is to put on dominance displays, expecting others to recognize who is stronger and act accordingly. Through threats of violence, or actual violence, we show off our strength, our power, attempt to intimidate the threat. Many animals do this, and humans are no exception. It’s in our instincts. On a broad social scale, we make public displays of power, use our numbers to show not unity and shared values, but the potential to overpower others, to harm them. We talk about how much we love and respect our military, how ours is the greatest, sometimes going so far as to reject diplomacy all together because that can require putting aside our need to feel more powerful than our opponent - to pull back on all that goes against our instincts when we’re afraid of what the other might do if we give them a chance, afraid of being overpowered ourselves.

But we are not like other animals because we can communicate complex ideas and values with words and empathy, and large-scale existential threats posed by dangerous ideas are not the same as one-on-one confrontations. Our fight-flight-or-freeze response didn’t evolve to help us navigate such complex social structures where threats can now come from a continent away without ever directly confronting us, where the danger we face from others isn’t dependent on us having things they want, but from those very group/self-preservation power-based instincts themselves.

Supremacy of any kind is a product of our own minds, of our own innate bias that comes from the simple reality that we know, understand, and therefore value ourselves and those like us best, and from our own innate, subconscious need to protect ourselves and the things and people we know from those less-understood others who would cause what we know to become different, to be overpowered. Harmful ideas that depend on believing in a potential threat of others - memes like white supremacy - can’t be intimidated out of existence and will always return, escalate, if we don’t understand it’s roots in all of our unavoidable but overcome-able cognitive biases.
It’s hard, I’m having a hard time, but even still, I can’t give in to that instinct to overpower, to violence, if I want progress, if I believe in the human capacity to work out our fears and differences and needs and find a way for everyone to live. If the only way to make progress is through violence, then we haven’t really made progress at all.

But then, maybe it’s all too late for this now anyway. Maybe hope of progress is gone and survival is really all that’s left. Maybe if we as a society had learned this sooner, better inoculated ourselves and each other against white supremacist ideas and learned to recognize the appeal of power within each of us, there would have been hope. But now…we’re running out of time. The planet’s very ability to support our life is dying, with some doing everything in their power to hurry that along, and we’re still repeating the same cycles of violence and hate and ultimately war like we always do, still believe this time we’re justified and will be the last to have to do this. The beautiful future we were promised…was it really nothing but a dream?