I feel overwhelmed by the awareness that we are squandering the resource of knowledge by pandering to a majority we dare not ask to abandon their primitive base nature. We are rewarding behaviors incompatible with a species at the cusp of ever-greater enlightenment. This is a burden that weighs heavy in my mind and upon my heart.

Every day, I witness and am nearly forced by proximity to listen to banalities that groupthink and pop culture have qualified as legitimate aspects of a mature human being. By and large, we are hardly an inch away from the worst characteristics of our distant Neanderthal relatives: we are warlike, brutish, wasteful, and barely cognizant of the fertile grounds we carry between our ears. While we are certainly capable of modern communication and commerce with the wider world and have specialized skills, the same may have been said for the Neanderthals in that they were utilizing their own advanced modes of communication that were distinctly different than those of their animal neighbors. They were likely aware of the extent of their world as far as they understood it to stretch to and practiced specialized skills, be it for raising children, going on the hunt, gathering food, or entering battle.

Strength is still the largest measure of power, with its manifestation being ensconced in physical prowess or in the ability to gather money and weapons to cast the shadow of overwhelming fortitude and superiority. As a society and species, we are marginalizing the better half of our potential found in caring, thinking, sharing, and cultivating a culture that has largely been relegated as being secondary to a perceived constant threat from the “other.”

We are once again warming up our vulgar, angry selves, the part of people that starts a war and hinders human potential due to the need to cull the lower classes, who may present too much competition for resources that the powerful covet. While these epic battles have the ability to lay waste to the combatants, they also act as a filter to hide the simultaneous removal of activists and intellectuals who would otherwise try to rein in the abuses of power and give voice to those who do not have one.

This has been repeated time and again during the thousands of years of our evolution, and rather than learning from it as we have from agriculture, writing, math, and science, we continue to nurture this primitive Stone Age person found deep within and take pride in putting it back on a pedestal from time to time.

Suspicion of the other still lives on within our species, and those who would encourage this mistrust by stoking the flames of xenophobia are most likely preparing for battle. To fan the tinder of intolerance and breed this volatility is giving context to the justifications that are about to be unleashed for the pretext of a solution that, in an instant, will seem viable to those who will be set up for doing the bidding of attacking the other.

We’ve seen this specter of hostility following World War II and the perceived threat of communism when we invaded those we felt were leaning too far left. Today, we are trying to contain our rage against Islam and those countries that are producing refugees. In both situations, we identified the evil perpetrators and collaborators who became the new targets, and then, while making maximum noise about their threat to the internal stability of the republic, we entered into hostile conflicts. McCarthyism and islamophobia allowed us to focus our existential anxiety on enemies outside our borders who might otherwise corrupt our way of life. Today, we are taking aim at liberalism and intellectualism by attacking social programs, the news, and those who would protect gays and immigrants and who might change our gun laws under the pretext that once these lefties seize power, they will alter our way of life. The primitive and angry solution would amount to civil war; even if the battlefield is in other lands, our crisis is right here within our own minds.

I had once believed that America would not have a black president in my lifetime, and so it is my thought today that we will not reach escape velocity from the anchor that is the stupidity of our own doing. We carry the tribe of Neanderthal deeper within than our relatively recent adoption of racial hatred. I hope I’m wrong that the primitive dolt inside all of us is not going to rule the day.