Whose Idea Is That?

The present-day devotion to the “strongman” is more or less a throwback to the Neanderthal times and that may be unfair to Neanderthals. There is no doubt that the strongman popularity dates back to the years shortly before I was born when the Third Reich gripped Germany and Il Duce strutted around Italy.

I get it. For Neanderthals huddled in their cave, having a strongman—literally a strong man—must have been a practical necessity. Out there, outside the relative safety of their cave lurked all sorts of dangers, mostly real. There might be saber-toothed tigers and mastodons out there. More aggressive outside Neanderthals might attack them if not for the strongman in the cave. The strongman was protector.

It would have been personal for the Neanderthal strongman. To maintain his strongman status he had to eliminate, one way or another, anybody in the cave who would challenge his primacy—the enemy within. He had to be able to beat up other Neanderthals. The strongman would soon learn the utility of telling lies about the dangers of the Neanderthals outside. He would make up names for them and accuse them of carrying pestilence because the greater the dangers outside seemed, the greater the devotion of his followers.

Of course, those days are long gone. We have evolved. We have become enlightened. We have made great progress as a species, and yet, there lingers deep in our DNA the remnants of Neanderthal thinking. The fear and uncertainty that surrounds us—beyond the bounds of whatever cave we now live in—makes the emergence of a strongman appealing and even comforting.

There were, of course, female Neanderthals. I imagine that many of the females were physically very strong. A male strongman would naturally feel threatened by any strong Neanderthals in the cave—male or female. Probably there were fistfights and wrestling matches that would decide who the real strongman would be. Sometimes a female would win those contests, but if most of the time a male was the victor, male contestants would learn to promote the idea that a female just shouldn’t try to become the strongman. True or not, it just didn’t feel right.

This may have been the birth of culture. For the first time, an idea became a thing. The idea that the strongman had to be male eliminated the need for so many fist fights and wrestling matches with possibly stronger females. It wasn’t truth. The fact remained that a strong woman could overcome in a physical contest. It was an alternate fact that only a male could be the strongman.

These days a fist fight might still be effective to settle a dispute, but ideas have become more powerful. Ideas have proven utility far beyond person-to-person conflict resolution. Ideas have progressed way beyond the bounds of the cave. There are ideas for practically everything. New ideas are happening all the time. Ideas are still very much involved in conflicts. The earliest ideas led to weapons, and weapons led to wars. Ideas made our nation possible. Our Constitution is a bunch of ideas written down and agreed to. Ideas make literature possible as well as symphonies, science and art as well as architecture and telescopes and so much more.

There are so many ideas in our time that we need computers and search engines just to scratch their surface. But we have often squandered this bounty of ideas that is available to each of us. That is because among the wealth of good ideas there are many truly bad ones. Many ideas are lies, or to use a contemporary idea about ideas, many lies are “disinformation.” Disinformation is itself disinformation. It is a way of polishing up a lie to make it sound less nasty.

If the strongest Neanderthal in the cave was a male, that would be information. But even a weak male Neanderthal could be the strongman if the idea of his power became strong enough. If everyone in the cave was disinformed that he was the strongest, the idea would be enough.

Today’s bad ideas—deliberate lies, fear of others, doubts and uncertainties—can make turning government over to a strongman appeal to many.

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Some other stuff for later,