The Dehumanization of Our Political Rhetoric
Or how it is possible for words to remind us of our ancient heritage of violence
What would Epictetus say to the intellectuals who control our national discourse?
While President Trump was speaking on July 13th 2024, he was shot at – and grazed – by a shooter with a 5.56mm caliber rifle from one hundred thirty five meters away through a five mile per hour wind.
It was a short shot, a light breeze, and a reliable rifle. If the shooter had an ounce of competency, a former President of the United States would be dead.
I was a sniper during my time in the military. It would be tempting to “what if” every aspect of the shooting. It would also be boring. I have a bigger question gnawing at the edge of my brain: why was a former president of the United States shot? And yet another question gnaws even deeper: what role did our political rhetoric play?
Our intellectuals – the men and women who make a living through their words such as writers, journalists, politicians, academics, social activists, and so on – are those who shape our national discourse.
Intellectuals swing one-or-two syllable slurs at their enemies like sledgehammers. Republicans have been called Hitler, Nazis, and Fascists, while Democrats have been called Maoists, Commies, and Marxists, by some of the most influential and affluent men and women in America. There was a brief period of time in America when labels that insinuate mass murder were not used lightly. But now it is a given.
This is an opportunity to understand something fundamental about the human condition.
My feeling is that the words we use can ignite ancient – and violent – impulses within our two hundred thousand year old brains as fast as the bullet that struck the former Presidents right ear. On a civilizational level, I posit mere words can not only civilize our conduct on a mass scale, but barbarize it as well.
There are those who claim we are not killers by nature, that we must be taught how to kill. Actually, we are not taught how to kill – we are taught how not to kill. Let us look at human-on-human violence as it occurred in the state of nature for the majority of our tenure on planet earth.
Thirty-four skeletons in Talheim Germany bearing death fractures from six different axes is not the result of wood chopping gone wrong1. Holes cratered into skulls from seven different axes in Ofnet Cave in Bavaria – each separated from its body and neatly arranged facing west – are not the result of an accident-prone family who happened to trip down a rocky hill2. Skulls in the American Midwest with crude circular cut marks around their crowns did not have a bad day at the ancient hunter-gatherer version of the barber3. Bones do not lie.
So much for our brief glimpse into archeology. Now for ethnography.
Broad jumping across time to 1961, one anthropologist described a night when the pre-state Dani tribe of New Guinea killed a man and brought the corpse back to camp. “His body was dragged to the dance area, young boys ran alongside it, piercing it with their toy spears. On the dance ground, under the light of the full moon and a few meters from the corpse, men, women, and children danced with joy.”4 It is eerily easy for the mind’s eye to see children dancing beneath the moon with flickers of fire illuminating their bright eyes, their stone tipped spears wet with blood, and the smiles of their parents.
Our ancestors fought for survival, food, and mates – they fought to sustain the lives of kith and kin. It is also true that they fought for joy. Hormones – adrenaline, serotonin, and dopamine – are automatically pumped into our blood streams in extreme physical effort such as that found in fighting and combat. Humans learned that by engaging in combat they could tap into these hormonal pathways5. The MMA fighters of today, like the Dani of yesterday, are not fighting for salmon or to protect their loved ones, and not even necessarily for glory. They are after a “high” from a shotgun blast of hormones. For much of mankind, violence simply felt – and still feels – good.
All of this violence was preceded by rhetoric. Many of the names of pre-state peoples that are used in ethnographies are labels created for them by the anthropologists who studied them. Bands across the globe referred to themselves as “we”, or “people”, or “human beings.”
This provided a strong sense of us-versus-them. The Pygmies called anyone who is not a Pygmy an “animal.” The Yanomamo thought the white ethnographer living among them was a “subhuman”6. The Goilala call themselves the “true human beings”7. Everyone else fell into some lower form of Homo; something other, something inferior, something they could kill.
Our ancestors did not ask their enemies to catch butterflies with them. They dehumanized them. The animalized them. They Hitlerized them.
At present, our intellectuals control our language, which means they hold the key to the pre-state house of horrors.
It is assumed that our intellectuals, whether flying a flag of blue, red, or purple politics, have the knowledge to govern national discourse due to their education and pedigrees. On the other hand, their form of knowledge is not based on real world experience – the experience of lost limbs in war or of mass slaughter in Fascist, Nazi, and Communist systems of government, all of which, sure enough, were dreamed up by intellectuals. Our intellectuals know only words, not the gulags and gas chambers these words can bring about. They know only a priori logic, not the real world logic that leads to the Odessa and Katyn Forest massacres.
There may be some intellectuals who call their opponents “Hitler” or “Mao” because they are ignorant of textbook history. But I do not believe this is the case. I believe they are dehumanizing the “other” with veins bulging in their necks and a bit of spittle on their lips for a number of reasons, but one above all – to elevate and unite their tribe. They are succumbing to the primal and ancient allure of us-versus-them, of human-versus-subhuman, of “I am righteous” versus “You are deplorable.” I also suspect they use inflammatory words like this to encourage a vocal minority to bear hug these labels as a form of protest and actually become fanatics. To what end? It may be to widen the gulf between the two ideologies like a rubber band: the greater the stretch, the more violent the eventual contraction.
If the true believers actually accept that someone is Adolf Hitler, then it would be logical for them to feel a moral obligation to kill him. Calling someone Hitler is saying without saying, “This man intends to murder tens of millions of Jews, gypsies, soldiers, sailors, and civilians. This man will lock you and your family in a shower with Zyklon B.” Calling someone Hitler is asking without asking: “Why is he still alive?”
The idea of violence is all too easy to accept by those who do not know its reality.
Why does any of this matter? When we dehumanize the other, it is not unimaginable that mere words can motivate a twenty-year-old living inside of a two-hundred-thousand-year-old killing machine to take aim at a former President – or for twenty million twenty-year-olds to take aim at each other. Our intellectuals have failed us.
The rhetoric of our intellectuals might wreck a candidates election bid. That is politics. But if the rhetoric is toxic enough, it might ignite the chain of events that get that candidate killed. What then? Who will be deified by the governors of our national discourse? Who will be given permission to rule? My feeling is that if our intellectuals double down on their rhetoric, a time may come when a wall is built around America once and for all. A tall, thick wall. A tall wall with machine guns and razor wire and watch towers and spotlights. A wall that is not built to keep people out, but to keep them in.
What then? What can we do about it?
Chimpanzees use simple hand gestures. One means "stop that" and yet another means "follow me.”8 It is ironic that in their efforts to dehumanize their opponents, the orders issued by our intellectuals are more akin to the clipped commands of chimp-talk than to the reasoned requests of human-talk. Maybe I am wrong; maybe the house of horrors will not open to the pre-state violence of tomahawk and spear, but to the pre-human violence of tooth and knuckle.
On the other hand, thinkers like Epictetus have a different view of mankind: “When you come before a man of authority, remember that there is a higher power looking upon what comes to pass, and that you ought to answer to that power rather than to this authority.”9 Who then is this higher authority that we should answer to? God, Nature, Reason, Cosmos, Breath, Love, Earth, Gaia, Zeus; anything, in other words, that is life-affirming – anything except our current crop of intellectuals.
We have been given a choice: we may listen to the dictates of madmen, or we may tell them we answer to a higher power.
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See you for the next essay on Tuesday.
Golitko M, Keeley LH. Beating ploughshares back into swords: warfare in the Linearbandkeramik. Antiquity. 2007;81(312):332-342. doi:10.1017/S0003598X00095211
Meyer, Christian et al. “The massacre mass grave of Schöneck-Kilianstädten reveals new insights into collective violence in Early Neolithic Central Europe.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America vol. 112,36 (2015): 11217-22. doi:10.1073/pnas.1504365112
Miller, Elizabeth. “EVIDENCE FOR PREHISTORIC SCALPING IN NORTHEASTERN NEBRASKA.” Plains Anthropologist, vol. 39, no. 148, 1994, pp. 211–19. JSTOR
Heider, Karl G., 1935-. The Dugum Dani : a Papuan culture in the highlands of West New Guinea / Karl G. Heider Aldine Pub. Co Chicago 1970
Gat, Azar. War in Human Civilization. Oxford University Press, 2008.
Chagnon, Napoleon A., 1938-2019. Ya̦nomamö, The Fierce People. New York :Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977.
Hallpike, C. R. (Christopher Robert). Bloodshed and vengeance in the Papuan mountains : the generation of conflict in Tauade society / C. R. Hallpike Clarendon Press Oxford 1977
Hobaiter, Catherine, and Richard W Byrne. “The meanings of chimpanzee gestures.” Current biology : CB vol. 24,14 (2014): 1596-1600. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2014.05.066
Epictetus 1.30.1
“Actually, we are not taught how to kill – we are taught how not to kill.”
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I came to this conclusion a while ago - it is in our DNA. It is the classic “nature vs nurture” discourse.
A very clear explanation about the use and abuse of language and human nature.