Like weaker gorillas dominated by the latest chest-thumper, we keep doing it. Chest-pounding is part of gorilla culture. It’s just the way gorillas are. It’s a way they communicate to maintain order in a family. It’s in their DNA.

Looking at us in 2023, I wonder whether human beings are much different.

Chest-thiumping

According to the online Free Dictionary, we humans thump our chests for the following reasons and purposes:

To make an ostentatious display of one’s dominance, superiority, and pride. Typically said of men.

The manager likes to thump his chest and make a big show of his authority during our production meetings, but you’d be hard-pressed to see him doing any actual work around the office.

The politician always makes a point of thumping his chest during press briefings, never missing a chance to brag about his successes in office.

The Free dictionary

What’s “this”?

Hearing a U.S. Senator declare “We can’t allow this to stand!” following Special Counsel Jack Smith’s announcement of the DOJ indictment of the former U.S. president, one might think that the thing which “we can’t allow to stand” referred to the alleged criminal behavior for which Mr.Trump’s has been charged.

But that’s not the “this” (the thing we cannot allow to stand). It was, as Mr. Hawley saw it, the continuing investigations and indictments, the prosecutions that are persecuting the leader of his party.

Questions

The questions are farther reaching than how and why a U.S. Senator and Officer of the Court, sworn by oath to uphold the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution, would disparage the judicial system which is exercising its duty to the Constitution. The more vexing question is how and why so many American citizens concur with Mr. Hawley.

No Time to Waste

Psychologists, sociologists, and historians will offer a variety of insights for decades yet to come, but some of us can’t wait that long. I turn to historians, analytical philosophers, and theologians who have sought to understand the dynamics of illusion, anxiety, fear, and collective madness. Among them are Gabriel Marcel and Willem Zuurdeeg. Each sought for understanding during a chest-pounding momenet.

Gabriel (-Honoré) Marcel and Willam Zuurdeeg

Gabriel (-Honoré) Marcel (1889–1973), the French existentialist philosopher, playwright, and author of Homo Viator, Being and Having, and The Mystery of Being, proposes a dist between the self as ego and the self as person. The self as ego is a poseur, an actor, performing on stage, playing to the audience among whom the poseur himself is the central figure.

“I attract the attention of others so that they may praise me, maybe, or blame me, but at all events that they may notice me. In every case, I produce myself.”

Gabriel Marcel

Whereas, for the ego, other people exist as a mirror of one’s greatness, a person sees others of value in and of themselves. The ego sees others as objects to be manipulated; the person sees others as she has come to understand herself as responsible and accountable in a community.

Beyond the reach

Philosopher of Religion Willem Zuurdeeg reminds us of Marcel’s warning against identifying ego with evil and personhood with goodness. So long as the ego remains shut up in itself as the prisoner of its own feelings, desires, fears and anxiety, it is beyond the reach of evil as wall as good. It is not yet awake to reality. “There is no doubt that direct judgment cannot be applied to such beings,” says Zuurdeeg.

Like Sleepwalkers

Marcel goes on to say what none of us wants to hear. “Each of us, in a considerable part of his [one’s] life, is still unawakened, that is to say that he (sic) moves on the margin of reality like a sleepwalker.”

Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian and social commentator, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf and Stock), Brooklyn Park, MN, August 16, 2023.