For a long time before and after President Obama was elected Americans debated whether he was truly one of us.The opposition harangued about his incompetence as a community organizer turned senator. They maintained that he was not American, impugning his birth certificate from the State of Hawaii. Donald Trump had a trial run for president on the theme that Obama was not American. Others say even today that Obama is not a Christian. They focus on his father’s Kenyan origins,  his schooling  in Indonesia, and middle name Hussein  which even now at near the end of his second term, I see mentioned in demeaning articles about him. Never is this non-Christian middle name used by Obama’s defenders. When I was young, when patriotism was more popular, we would gladly have given our lives, for the policy enunciated by our president. Times have changed. Hatred for Obama is as visceral as I have ever witnessed for any president.

In Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper men are broken into three groups, sheep who can’t defend themselves, wolves who take advantage, and Sheepdog heroes who defend the defenseless. The sheepdogs are the men who can look at themselves in the mirror, men of the courage and strength to end the fight. Chris Kyle, hero of the movie, takes this to heart as defender fellow soldiers, protector of his kin at home.   The American Sniper is the just slayer of 160 souls.  Karen Armstrong, makes a fairly similar distinction in her book Fields of Blood  which argues to exonerate religion as cause of war and violence.  Armstrong finds two types of men, the sober type, who increase net worth by their own labor are rewarded by being granted admission to an oppressed underclass, and a second type of  bold violent men, noble warriors, hunters or priests. This is a distinction which as she herself points out, is a little like the Apollo and Dionysius  The bolder Dionysian fearless group of man, kills and accumulates booty in battle, is the meat eating hunter of animals and voracious consumer of flesh of sacrifice.  The bold brave masculine rapacious and physically violent man stands over the sane gentle plodding worker. The passive weak, sniveling, cowardly physically incompetent man, unready or unwilling for the fight, belongs in the untouchable caste or becomes a slave. If not expressed in war, it is mirrored in gladiatorial struggle, in sports arenas and football stadiums where we have players and fans, and the others, left out entirely. Our civilized hoards today root for their home teams. If your remain unmoved by football of basketball, you are not with other men. You’re an outsider.

What is obvious is the irresistible urge of  humans and a variety of other primates especially chimps, our nearest relatives, to form groups. Once the groups are formed, the most important step is to determine who is in and who is out, who is them and who is us. From then on violence and cohesion are strongest of any emotions found anywhere in human nature. From the earliest times, men banded together, no where better illustrated in the writings of Napoleon Chagnon who studied the most elemental groups of men untouched by any modern civilization, the Yanomamos  of South America. Yanomamos  exist in small marauding warlike bands in a violent struggle  for scarce resources and access to nubile women who are vessels for  reproduction

E.O. Wilson, famed for Sociobiology, has written a wonderful chapter on Aggression, in his classic pathbreaking book, On Human Nature. He develops the idea that humans, among animals, are only moderately aggressive and their tendency to kill, is not the same in all instances. Scarcity of resources such as access to women and food and other resources will serve to increase or decrease conflict. But men have traits that make them highly social in certain ways with advanced loyalties and ties, tit for tat accounting of favors and insults, strong rules for bonding. People tend to form ferociously inclusive and exclusive groups.

In groups and out groups are not always formed on the basis of race or along family lines, even if there are strong biological incentives to do so.  Any commonality from the most banal of opinions serves to excuse us from including some and rejecting others from groups. The New York Times “How one Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life” by Jon Ronson especially perceived racist comments (NY Times Magazine February 12, 2015) was about a lady relentlessly persecuted after a single tweet she must have thought few would see (she had few followers)  suddenly went viral on her way to a flight to South Africa. She lost her job, and was vehemently and meanly ostracized from social circles. I have been a person to feel things strongly myself. Yet I am amazed by the vehemence of opinion I see, and how quickly and efficiently a simple difference in opinion, particularly on political issues, ends in rejection and hatred of others. I think it’s because today we have more contact with two dimensional screens and less with real people. Emotion is out of control.  I wonder about people who senselessly reject others on the basis of  certain opinions. I see ostracism on the basis of vehemently held beliefs all too often.  Certainly over human history and we still see this especially in patriarchal and autocratic societies, loyalties occur mostly on the basis of familial and tribal lines. You can always find examples in the daily and international news.

We are members of multiple groups, sibships, marriages, families, partnerships, committees, companies, teams, cities, states, religions and nations and so forth. All of these require an ideal balance along a compliance v. authoritarian spectrum, and all exact surrender of one’s own interests. The exception is the case except in the case that an individual is the dictator himself. Then he or she will enjoy and extension of his individual will expressed as power, wealth, and influence.

Any of us who have worked in an office or any confined space witnesses how easily cliques form even among small numbers of people say over 10 or 15 persons who happen to be placed together and interact. A caste system and in and out groups quickly emerge with strong inclusion and exclusionary rules.  Larger groups breed uniformity as with the goose-stepping vehement militarism of North Korea or Nazi Germany.  We observed control of masses of humanity in the immense performances of thousands in the Beijing Olympics. This may have entertained some, but was positively fearful  and grotesque as far as I was concerned. It is said that Albert Einstein disdained these marching masses of the militant and on this particular issue, I am with him. It’s about the cult of mass conformity vs the person, that is a major divide in how different cultures view our human brethren. For some, stereotypically the Asian point of view, but common in many cultures around the world, the individual exists for purpose of furthering the collective. For others, the dignity of the person is paramount. For example, according to some, it’s fine for a few people to pay the ultimate price of merciless death merely to inculcate fear about breaking the law, even if they did not commit the crime, just to prove a point, perhaps even to save other person’s lives. Perfectly OK to hang a man for drug dealing, even if innocent, to prevent the crime from being committed in the future, or cut off-hand for robbery, all for the cause of eliminating crime and putting fear of infraction in the populace. In those places you have more security. You can walk the streets without fear a crime will be committed. Personally I don’t think so. The goose stepping and impeccable coordination of waves of humans in crowds gives me the creeps. But I am an American Westerner.

The history of Mao Zedong as presented by Jung Chang has its repetitive and convincing theme the efficacy of Intimidation as the method of curbing individual human impulses and effectively neutralizing the opposition.  Vicious paroxysms of public humiliation peppered with all manner sadistic acts such as burying masses of humans alive and public torture and humiliation, are the best means of bringing others around to one’s cause. The cause of the collective is excuse for the most cruel and gruesome inhumane fearful acts known to man.

As long as you are acting in the interest of your group, any kind of cruel and inhumane act is allowed. There may be personal conscience, but group conscience is non-existent. It is the morality of the mob. For a long while I could not figure out why so many persons in the holocaust and of other 20th century crimes, had committed heinous acts caught red-handed and implicated in hundreds of thousands or even millions of deaths never ever apologized for their acts or even seemed to feel the least little twinge of guilt. I absolutely had been unable to figure that out. I’ve come to understand that a different kind of morality holds sway as an individual versus the member of a group-no morality at all.  In the interest of a group morality is absent. Once men form groups, which struggle for supremacy,  form associations by opinion, or more often by type, then any behavior for the defense of the group, however savage, is accepted and the individual totally subjugated in fact ignored, not seen as an individual. In the ancient world groups slaughtered cities full of people and animals. In  the twentieth century carpet bombings and mass murder of hundreds of thousands or millions of civilians became the accepted norm. The victims of such atrocities were never ever perceived as persons and the well-being of one’s group was all that mattered.

It is said that most humans end life with a clear conscience. Most of us believe until the end that what we do is right. We seek to rationalize our own behavior.  Mass murderers end their life, even if condemned by others, go to the gallows or firing squad serenely, with a clear conscience. Genghis Khan, Eichmann, Hitler, Hoess, Stalin, Mao, Milosevic, Pol Pot, Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, never expressed a twinge of remorse. These men may have been sociopaths lacking the brain module of a conscience. That is part of the story especially in certain cases such as for Stalin or Mao. Far more important, they went to their graves, acting in what they believed to be the interests of their group.

On the model of the group vs the individual anti-Semitism is comprehensible. Jews have been strangers and minorities in all lands. Try as they might, they were always unable to convince their majorities that they are true members of a majority group. They were quintessential outsiders. No act of cruelty, no atrocity was  ever too much to perpetrate upon them. Alas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century many of them sought to show they were as much part of the ethnic culture as any citizen.  No act of assimilation was too much for them. They fought courageously in wars, installed organs in their synagogues, spoke the native languages without accent, changed their names, converted to the Christian religions, became exemplars and pillars of their societies, all to no avail. Differences were perhaps magnified by intellectual, artistic and financial successes which bred jealousy that was to doom them to mean and inhumane treatment. Never were they perceived as individual persons and were persecuted as being members of an out group.  It is possible to find myriad other examples conforming this model of persecution of in and out groups, The cases of Hutu and Tutsi, Serbian and Croatian go to prove the counterintuitive position, that the more groups are alike even to the point of speaking the same language, the more violent and lethal is intergroup hatred.

So history can be understood in this way, the power of the group, family, ethnic, social, national religious. Homo sapiens belongs to a subset of primates that sees others as either being in or out of a group. Of course many other animals, the best example is wolves, form the same kinds of groups.  That is why dogs and men get along so well.  This strong inbred tendency to form groups and defend them seems to have a biological basis. The cruelties we inflict are based very much upon this principle which is about the most powerful in human nature,  laying the basis for wars and atrocities. The will to conform and be part of something lies behind all forms of discrimination and racism. Should you be part of the larger majority group, you have a feeling of inner peace and accord. But should you are unlucky enough to be  an outsider, that is the road to misery.

Anyone who fails to recognize this tendency will be defenseless against its negative consequences. Given the technological and military tools now at our disposal, this may lead to the destruction of all of humankind.