THE UNCOMFORTABLE MONKEY IN THE MIDDLE

 

THE UNCOMFORTABLE MONKEY IN THE MIDDLE

 

In the natural world we often talk about the phenomenon of fight or flight, about aggression and the reaction to it, but one that is omitted and which applies even more so to the human world, is fright, the uncomfortable monkey in the middle.  Fright is a paralyzing, passive reaction; an emotion based on fear which affects most of us when escape is elusive and doubtful, whereas fight and flight are active verbs.  Action, not inaction.  An escape is attempted so that you may live another day.  We’re not exactly inspired by a character trait like fright that affects most of us, and that mostly includes running with the herd.  An instinctive herd reaction that is neither perceived as noble nor worthy of any prize winning medals.  Fright and fear are regarded as shameful attributes, cowardly and unworthy.  Yet fright and fear have played a huge part in human history and have led to the slaughter of millions of innocent men, women and children, the hapless victims of aggression.  And another uncomfortable truth: the longer people cower in fear and fail to resist, the worse the aggression gets out of hand.  Violence that is not checked spins out of control as wars and conflicts drag on.  Fright and fear dehumanize the victims of aggression.  They’re no longer treated as human beings, but as a lesser species that deserves to be exterminated.  Ukraine and Gaza come to mind!  Nearly 100 million people across the world are refugees.  When it comes to innocent victims the numbers are staggering.

During World War II millions of Jews were systematically rounded up, put onto cattle cars and shipped to concentration camps where most of them met a gruesome death.  There are images of thousands of Jews standing on railroad platforms with only a handful of armed guards in attendance.  Why didn’t they try to overpower their captors?  Yes, dozens might have been shot, but it could have saved hundreds!

Fight or flight is only effective in small numbers.  Aggression and resistance is the domain of those who are hardwired for action.

And ask yourself.  Where would a large group of people go?  There is no realistic escape and most are filled with disbelief.  Where is the flight plan?  The organization?  Very few Jews actually dared to escape and most were rounded up and housed in ghettos.  They were devastated by the fact that suddenly they were hunted down like animals and despised, that it was open season on Jews and that flight was the only option left.  Flight, so that you could fight another day.  Most of them didn’t!

Fear and fright belong to the masses.

Instead it was fright and fear that struck the masses and it zapped any kind of resistance.  A passive, helpless surrender because flight and fight require purpose and organization.  What connects the masses is fear.  And the answer I have alluded to is so simple because most of us are not wired for fight or flight.  Over time all resistance is bled out of the victims and a sense of defeat and resignation takes over.

The masses have always been the easy target.

The scariest part: evil wears a normal face.

Look at the images of the tens of thousands of Gazan citizens snaking their way through the rubble of what once was their city, now lying in ruins around their feet.  Deliberately forced to constantly move.  From one tent city to the other and never feeling safe.  Beaten into submission by hunger, thirst and by fear and fright.  And all around them the aggressors keep up the pressure and it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.  Aggression brings out the worst in people.  The kind of suffering that is inflicted will leave behind a psychological damage that will fester for decades.  And there is no doubt in my mind that a deep seethed hatred and resentment will set in once the violence stops and a rebuilding takes place.

Why are we turning a blind eye to genocide and ethnic cleansing and do so little?  Glad it’s them and not us?  Fear!  Deep down in our hearts we know that we would not act or behave any differently.  Not that we’re cowards and would willingly allow ourselves to be slaughtered, but because we belong to the masses and we’re not raised to fight or know how to fight back when the unthinkable happens and a nation or race is caught up in vindictive struggle for survival.

We, the masses, when disaster strikes, we’re that uncomfortable monkey in the middle.

During and after the holocaust many Jews made their way to Palestine in the hope of establishing a new state of Israel in what once was their ancestral home, before the diaspora and the pogroms and before being evicted and persecuted from one nation to the other.  Determination and hope and a renewed sense of identity and a political resolve never to let this happen again.  A renewed sense of cultural and national identity is not unique to the Jews.  It takes place all around the world and throughout human history nations have reasserted their identity, culture and language.  In happened in Poland on a number of occasions.  A nation attacked numerous times, divided, occupied and destroyed and yet they keep coming back stronger and more determined every time.  However, a growing sense of nationalism and patriotism only takes place with intent and purpose in a small percentage of the population.  The masses will go along with the current flavor of the month because it is easier to follow than to lead.  What comes to mind is the Blue Jays baseball fever that hit Canada in 2025 when the team made it to the world finals.  They have always had a hardcore base of fans and followers, but the nation as a whole was temporarily infected by their enthusiasm, excited to follow and cheer on the team.  Friedrich Nietzsche: Insanity in the individual is rare, but quite common in the masses.

However, another uncomfortable truth: enthusiasm in the masses never lasts long.

Follow and obey.

We, the masses, are raised to be followers, to work, to be compliant and behave.  It’s a group thing.  We’re following a pattern that applies to most animal species.  There are a few who lead, a small group of enforcers, soldiers, protectors, and the bulk consists of workers.  In a military family the offspring is much more likely to follow in their parents’ footsteps and join, than for someone with no military background signing up. 

We don’t raise our offspring to become strong individuals, critical, taught to take charge and aggressively pursue a unique and individual path through life.  Our institutions guide and mold people into predictable patterns of behavior, to induce cooperation, conformity and compliance.  The domain of fight and flight belongs to a select few and what we have induced in the masses is a longing for peace, normality, food, shelter and security.  It is a basic structure that has served the natural world well.  Does it make sense that a few rule and live well while the masses struggle and go out of their way to provide wealth and all the essentials to those lucky few?  You would probably say no, yet most of us fall into that pattern.  Fear and fright paralyze the masses because there is no easy way out.

It is the mass in masses that prevents an escape. 

The Russian revolution was supposed to usher in a workers paradise.  The masses first.  Shedding centuries of abuse and neglect by the nation’s nobility and the Romanov family that ruled with an iron fist.  In reality communist rule created a whole new layer of control that didn’t differ much from the yoke they had just shed with a whole lot of fanfare and international hoopla.  The apparatchiks and the party elite created a society along similar lines as that of the Tsar.  A few living well and the masses continuing to struggle as usual.

Although democracy has to be the most fair and equitable system of governance it is not immune from abuse.  Fail to corral greed and unchecked power and it degenerates into a society where the elite have all the wealth and exercise all the control.  For reasons I cannot fathom we continue to worship wealth, status, titles and possessions.  Tesla shareholders granting Elon Musk ludicrous bonuses, artificially inflating share prices and extorting huge lucrative government contracts and concessions is but one example of how deep we have sunk in protecting our democracies from blatant power grabs and abuse.  Every century spawns a whole new collection of the Super Rich who don’t hesitate to flaunt their wealth and influence.  And we, the masses, are eager to assist them with tax havens, exemptions and loopholes big enough to drive a truck through.  We have perpetrated these ludicrous schemes throughout human history.  And it doesn’t matter how you dress it up.

Evil chills the heart in so many ways that even love shivers in its presence.

Aggression in the masses only erupts when demanded by a nation’s leadership and the highest level of aggression is predominant in those who lead.  And the main reason why there is such a willingness at their level to use violence is simply due to the fact that not a single one of them will be first in line at the battlefront.  The natural world is rife with similar examples and I always like to go back to the lion pride.  Every pride has a dominant male and female and then there are those who lead a hunt and the rest of the pride are followers.  Why mention this?  We’re neither unique nor special.  Most of our behaviors hark back to our primitive past and we follow similar power structures because it seems to work.  If we programmed our youngsters to question and explore, to raise them to aggressively pursue their own path through life, we would be at each other’s throat in no time flat. 

I have stated in previous articles that most of us are basically underachievers and lazy and we’re not alone in this department.  Almost all animal species are wired that way and we’re no different.  Just worse!

Politicians start wars with words and the masses end up fighting them with bullets.  It is an insane scenario that is played out over and over again and with the same predictable results.  We’re either workers and contributors or cannon fodder.  We’re the uncomfortable monkey in the middle.  War is the worst thing to be exposed to and I hope that my explanations about fear and fright are hitting home.  There is no leeway for the masses.  If all of us were raised as aggressors we would be killing each other in record time.  Few of us are able to kill and there is a reason why we recruit youngsters barely leaving their teens to become soldiers.  Most of them are unattached and don’t have families of their own.  They’re easy to manipulate and indoctrinate.  And the masses are pressured to glorify their contribution to the nation’s so-called freedom.  War is a net-negative activity that doesn’t make us stronger or turns a society into warrior addicts.  Celebrating the needless killing and glorifying it as noble is the kind of stuff left to historians and writers, who will turn everything into an epic battle, heroic and totally justified.  Why we resorted once more to violence is an inconvenient detail.

We have become experts at massaging the minds of the masses so that we accept sacrifice and the loss of human life as a necessary sacrifice.  We do lie a lot and love to put a positive spin on even the most gruesome events in human history.  Remembrance Day in Canada is getting bigger and bigger, despite the fact that few survivors remain of the last big war.  Sentiments are being ramped up to new highs and there is a valid reason why we try to make it personal and that all of us feel obliged to wear a poppy.  We’re cranking up the emotions within the masses to new highs because we’re being primed for the next battle.  Farfetched?  Canada is investing billions more in upgrading its military capacity.  It is being pressured by the US and NATO to increase its spending well past 2 percent to 5 percent of GDP.

Ramping up the threats and the conflicts.

Setting the stage for a new global was.

The US has bombed a nuclear facility in Iran, dropped bombs on suspected Yemen rebel bases, verbal threats about invading Sudan, military strikes obliterating suspected fishing boats from Venezuela carrying drugs.  Threats and belligerent statements are issued on a near daily basis.  When aggressive rhetoric ramps up around the world and ongoing conflicts show no signs of a solution, it usually ends up in a violent confrontation.  And again, history is proof that once verbal threats escalate, real violence is just around the corner.

And don’t get me wrong.  When I see the faces of old veterans on Remembrance Day my heart weeps because I can empathize with their loss.  They came back while they left thousands of their comrades behind in mass military gravesites.  I know loss.  Our first born died at age 32, a dear friend and my youngest sister died from cancer at an early age and I lost my mother at age 21.  But I have never suffered the deprivation brought on by war, the dehumanizing brutality.  I am at a loss to comprehend our aberrant aggressive behaviors because it doesn’t correlate with that supposedly higher and advanced intelligence of ours.  What we’re doing to each other and the planet defies all explanations. 

If you are a faithful follower of my articles you will have noticed that I don’t subscribe to the notion that we’re the product of divine inspiration.  Our actions and activities belie that fact despite the promissory notes slipped into every major religion that leave us filled with hope, even if we totally screw up on Earth, that somehow resurrection and eternal life awaits believers.

What do you think?  Do you think we’re headed in the right direction or the wrong one?  We, the masses, we have been lied to, taken advantage of, used and abused.  We’re that uncomfortable monkey in the middle.  Is it by design or by choice?  Will it ever change?

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