Dyer: Enemy is our lust for power, control

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When you start shouting at the television screen, you know it’s time to take a break. I reached that point last week, watching Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech in Chicago, and what I yelled at the screen was “the enemy is us.”

She was name-checking the “enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny” in a rhetorical way, with no visible sign she saw it as anything more than a struggle against various Trumps and Putins. That’s when I lost it.

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I’m not denying such a struggle exists, but we’re looking at it through the wrong lens. Democracies are generally (though not always) less wicked than the tyrannies, but the real struggle goes much deeper than most people realize.

Human beings are primates, and our original social structure was almost certainly like that of our close evolutionary relatives such as chimpanzees. Our ancestors lived in small groups of thirty to a hundred individuals, each ruled over by a violent, despotic monkey-king.

There would have been a constant struggle between the adult males to seize the top spot, complete with alliances and betrayals, but nothing ever really changed. To see this in action, watch a brilliant Netflix mini-series called Chimp Empire.

But our distant ancestors broke that ancient pattern. They were intelligent enough to see the perpetual struggle for power wasn’t worth it. Any individual’s chance of winning the top job was very small, and the fate of the rest was to be bullied and beaten all their lives.

They also had language, so they could imagine a better future and they could plot and make alliances to create that future. At some point in our very distant past, there was a revolution. Most of the adult males banded together, overthrew the reigning boss and adopted a new rule, rigorously enforced, of absolute equality.

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How do we know this? Because that was the rule in every single hunter-gatherer group anthropologists encountered in the middle decades of the 20th century, when the first generation of anthropologists studied the last generation of genuine hunter-gatherers.

They were so strenuously egalitarian they would “cut down the tall poppies;” men giving themselves airs or claiming privileges would be first mocked, then ostracized if necessary, in extreme cases driven out of the band or killed.

So, what went wrong? Mass civilization happened.

Societies of millions of people were far richer and more powerful than tiny hunter-gatherer bands, but it was impossible to run them by discussion and debate among equals. The new, crop-growing mass societies had to be tyrannies, and they were so numerous and powerful they drove the old, egalitarian values underground.

However, those values never died. Rebellions were constant, but always crushed. Ten thousand years of tyranny and oppression and then early mass communications (just literacy, books and pamphlets) finally made it possible for large numbers of people to make decisions together as equals.

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That opened the door to the American Revolution in 1776, the French Revolution in 1789, and two more centuries of struggle to recover our older, egalitarian values and rights. About a third of the world’s people now live in countries where everybody really has equal rights before the law, and the other two-thirds live in countries that pretend to be like that.

So why did I yell “The enemy is us”? It comes from a long-dead American newspaper comic-strip called Pogo, in which the main character, a humble opossum, deliberately misquoted an American military hero who announced his victory by saying: “We have met the enemy and they are ours.”

No, said Pogo. It should be “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” It is two contradictory human heritages at war, and the right one is winning. Understand the context, and the world will start to make sense.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist based in London, England.

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