Every Man For Himself!

The Ik, an African people studied and described by Colin Turnbull best typify the kind of thinking that the radical right wing tea party Republicans idealize: Everyone is out for themselves.

Of course, the Ik were starving much of the time Turnbull lived with them as a "participant observer." They were hunter-gatherers, who depended for most of their protein on the game, big and small, that lived on what had become national parks and wildlife preserves. They were forbidden to hunt for the game, and there was effective enough enforcement of the no hunting ordinances, that the Ik found it difficult to survive. They resisted agriculture.

Curiously, the Ik didn't band together for redress, or for common economic activity, like learning how to raise their own food. Everyone was out for himself, except for the children, who organized themselves into loose bands of age cohorts. They gathered what food they could find, but sometimes it was food they ripped out of the hands of aged members of the tribe, who had found something edible, but were too feeble to defend themselves.

Turnbull witnessed only one wedding, while he was living with the Ik (over a year), but daily instances of the above predatory behavior.

How is this relevant to the current campaign between Democrats and Republicans? The two parties really do represent two different ways of looking at the world, and the "I'm in it for myself and everyone is on his own," is only a little less radically sociopathic than the Ik.

Then, there's the apparent inability of Republicans to recognize the contribution of workers, as opposed to "job creators:" anything even mildly smacking of collective action they opposed. Anti-unionism may be natural to the GOP, but even Democrats who are antagonistic to unions, wouldn't think of celebrating Labor Day the way Majority Leader, Erick Cantor articulated it on a twitter message this September: "“Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.” Nothing about workers, only about entrepreneurs.

The kind of radical sociopathology demonstrated by the Ik, and only a bit less radically, by the GOP, is a symptom of deep distress in society. In the case of the Ik, it was loss of their sources for survival, and Turnbull recommended that the society be forcibly disbanded before it infects others.

In the case of Republicans, the sociopathology may be a reaction to the imminent loss of a demographic majority: whites are fast diminishing as a proportion of the population, and Republicans depend almost exclusively on whites, largely white men. They can't appeal to them without alienating others, and they can't appeal to others (minorities) without losing their appeal to white men.

That may be the major reason for all their attempts to queer the vote.

The relevance to Rome's collapse? The Ik may well be remnants of an even more ancient empire than the Roman: their language appears derived from ancient Egyptian!