Imagine there are two subsets of human beings – one that believes might makes right, and one that believes right makes might. I’d once assumed that everyone at least aspires to the latter category, but must have been naive: it seems a portion of humanity lives quite happily in the former. I’m not the first person to notice this, but the existence of these “mightyists” presently haunts me as a central conundrum of human existence.
In reality, most of us exist on a continuum between the two beliefs – I could in fact place my every thought and act on that continuum. We have our altruistic impulses, our commitment to truth, justice, and fairness; then we have our interest in self. To be clear, I think self-interest and self-care are and should be our first responsibility: as an incarnation of God, each of us are honored and called to play the lead role in the epic movie of our life. The challenge is to be a Main Character while allowing each other person on the planet to do the same.
For most of us, life is a delicate balancing act on the might-right spectrum, searching for that sweet spot where everybody wins; but for some, the scale seems permanently tipped in the direction of self – for them, there’s only one lead actor, and might is all that matters. These mightyists might be a minority, but they have a disproportionate influence on the human condition. They basically ruin things for everyone. I’ve been trying to figure out what makes these people tick, and how they got that way: is it genetics, or their childhood environment, or dumb luck of circumstance, or a combination of the three? Looking at the most extreme examples and their trails of carnage, I ponder: exactly what creates a human monster?
I suppose the simplest answer is “nature”: the law of the jungle states that the biggest, baddest animal will rule the pack. But some of us, at least, understand that we’re more than mere animals – that other laws apply to human behavior. The mightyists have somehow concluded that these laws don’t exist, or don’t apply to them. They’re behaving exactly as nature intended.
One could also suspect that we’re all latent monsters: the socialist freedom fighter ascends to the seat of power and becomes an authoritarian dictator. But many people wield great power without succumbing to temptation – they’re the ones who usually don’t make the headlines. What makes them tick?
Trying to reduce the entire human story to one of selfishness versus selflessness might seem a gross oversimplification, but, given present circumstances, might be helpful. As the pandemic in various ways upended our stasis, and as the contours of the climate change era become clearer, humanity seems to be more starkly sorting itself into the two camps: those who can care about the entire world, and those who can care only about themselves, and maybe their kin.
Countless books have been written attempting to understand even the meaning of “right”, but I’m trying to keep it simple: the golden rule can be understood by a five-year-old, and states that we should care about others as much as we care about ourselves. We can explain this rule scientifically – 1(person)=1(person) – or in psychological terms, calling it empathy and inclusiveness, or we can get metaphysical and talk about oneness and connection; by any route, we can all understand what it means to care, to “do the right thing”.
And we all struggle. Our mightyist tendencies seem to be encouraged by stressful conditions – given enough cortisol and adrenaline, most anyone will circle the wagons and start distrusting their neighbor. When feeling threatened, our fight-or-flight instincts encourage us to tolerate or even embrace authoritarian leaders whom we might otherwise find repulsive.
Neither our exposure nor our response to stress is uniform, though, and these disparities seem to be increasing the polarization between the mightys and the rightys. The political tension we’re presently experiencing in the US seems to flow not so much from a debate about conservative or liberal policies, but about whether we want a democracy at all. In stark terms, do we want the law of the jungle, or the law of love? It’s a simple question; the mystery is how we come up with such different answers.
This mystery involves questions of nature versus nurture– of how much our moral mindset is mutable, and by what means. Apparently some of us are born mightyists, and there’s presently nothing we can do about such genetic factors, but there are also many cultural influences and feedback loops that encourage either mightyist or moralist tendencies. These group behaviors are complex and fickle – like a flock of birds – but, like the flock, they boil down to many individual choices. Free will is at the heart of the matter, but here we find a wide range of beliefs, and fundamental disagreements.
At the one extreme is a deterministic view of reality: everything that’s happening has in fact already happened, and we’re just trains running down a track. A range of philosophies – from genetic predestination to cosmic predestination to divine predestination – seem to lead to this conclusion, but I remain stubbornly unconvinced.
Some choices I make seem very, very real. They carry moral significance, and I feel their weight as I make them. Is my decision predestined? In the moment, it certainly doesn’t feel that way. Perhaps, as incarnations of God, we actually get to decide things.
So for now, maybe we can stipulate that we appear to be making choices. We each write the plot of our lives, struggle with questions of right and might, and make decisions that affect our future timelines. Some of the factors that go into our decision-making are influenceable, and, as part of the flock, our decisions in turn influence everyone else’s.
But what a strange flock we are – each of us morphing in real-time from ducks to hawks to hummingbirds to herons. Human life is crazy complicated because our free will allows us to actually decide what kind of creature we will be.
As you might’ve guessed, I’d prefer a flock of peaceful birds, whose members use their free will in a way that respects others’. This respect is one of the founding principles of democracy, so, however far we fall short of the ideal, I’m still all in on that project. Democracy will always be under siege by the mightyists, but perhaps the world is slowly awakening to the idea that peaceful coexistence is much more fun than war.
So what might we do to convince the mightys to join the party? Or at the least, how can we prevent them from ruining the party? We could work to make democracy an undisputedly superior system, for starters. Make it more efficient, representative, and honest. And in the larger picture, we could work to create a society where might isn’t so highly venerated, but rather placed among the many other virtues one might aspire to – a society based not on pecking order, but on a mutual respect of everyone’s unique personalities and gifts.
And those who consider themselves Christian could understand that true democracy – where the meek inherit the world – is the closest thing to a Christian government we can presently imagine. Even a casual reading of the New Testament makes clear that there’s no such thing as a Christian mightyist.
There’s no getting around it, though: we are animals, driven by biological impulses that pull us in the mightyist direction. We also struggle against millennia of learned behavior, and countless societal incentives. Saying “The devil made me do it” may seem like a poor excuse, but also seems entirely legitimate. But I believe that every human also possesses components and circuitry that run at higher voltages than these animal impulses, as well as “administrative access” capable of overriding these piles of precedent. When these circuits and systems are up and running, we are in a position to be fully human – that is, an incarnation of the divine.
In the Old Testament we find a lovely utopian image: “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat”. In the animal kingdom, this probably isn’t going to happen. In the human kingdom, it could.
.
.
.
.
.
Eloquent and wise!