We have lately chosen world leaders who embrace anger, fear and lies; does this affection for fascism confirm that our worst nature is our true nature?
By Ransom Stephens
The Cherokee metaphor of two wolves goes like this: Within each of us is a good wolf and an evil wolf. The two wolves battle for preeminence in everything we do. The good wolf thrives on peace, hope, kindness, honesty, humility, generosity and love, and the evil wolf thrives on anger, fear, resentment, lies, jealousy, greed and ego. The conflicts within each of us reflect the conflicts we face as a species.
The polar interpretations of natural selection follow the two-wolves metaphor. At one end, survival of the fittest: evolution of the intelligence necessary to create weapons for a constant state of war. And at the other end: evolution of minds capable of making the social connections necessary to unite defenseless creatures into societies that are greater than the sum of their parts — survival of the friendliest.
The pendulum of civilization swings between our two wolves.
We find ourselves in a historic epoch of anger, fear and lies, but on the heels of decades of generosity and hope. Within three lifetimes, humanity has made radical strides in civil rights, accepted gay marriage as the freedom of love, implemented DEI programs to right past wrongs, beat fascism and shed the oppression of empire and monarchy in favor of self-representation, and dispensed with slavery. Progress has been brutally flawed and remains deplorably incomplete. But compared to the previous 10-plus thousand years of feudalism in one form or another, our evil wolves have gone hungry.
And now, across the world, we have chosen leaders who inspire us with Anger, Fear, Resentment, Lies, Jealousy, Greed and Ego.
In the last moments of battle, the loser makes its final push. The Nazis threw everything they had into the Battle of the Bulge, fighters in the ring or cage muster the energy to throw their most desperate punches before falling. A certain freedom of will emerges at the instant when all hope is lost. With nothing left to lose, fighters dispense with defense and deploy depravity. And sometimes they win.
Are we experiencing the inflection point of history when we will confirm that our worst nature is our true nature? Or is this most recent affection for fascism the last gasp of our generation’s evil wolves, its Battle of the Bulge?
Our list of challenges is long — nuclear weapons at the command of insecure strongmen, life-threatening climate change, religious extremism as an excuse for wanton destruction, our Anthropocene era of extinction — but not insolvable.
Will ours be the generation that destroys this life-giving world? Will we extinguish ourselves and leave our amazing planet, perhaps to some other sapient species? One with the courage to embrace their differences? Differences that they know, just as we know but can’t seem to accept, are our greatest strengths?
The wolves that prevail are the wolves we feed.
Ransom Stephens, Ph.D., is a physicist, novelist, and science writer who lives in Ashland; find him at ransomstephens.com.
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