We’re coming frighteningly close to being maddened monkeys

A story of monkey revenge in India should remind us once again how thin our veneer of civilization is and how close we are to losing it.

A month ago, in India, a dog killed a monkey infant. In revenge, over the past month, monkeys have grabbed every dog they could find, dragged those poor animals to the tops of trees and buildings, and hurled them down to a painful death. The monkeys have succeeded in killing an estimated 250 dogs; no dogs remain in the area. When the villagers attempted to intervene, the monkeys attacked them too and are now attacking children.

What’s so horrifying about this story is how incredibly human the tale is. These monkeys are taking revenge in a sophisticated, tribal way that we might see in Nazi Germany, Rwanda, the Balkans or, increasingly, America.

Those murderous monkeys are a reminder that the veneer of civilization that separates us humans from our simian ancestors is incredibly thin and fragile. The fact that we can build fine buildings, cars, and planes, or that we can write books and program computers doesn’t address our emotional development. We are, if you will, skilled monkeys but that doesn’t mean we’re smarter or better monkeys.

Events in the U.S. in the past few years are pushing us ever closer to the monkey breaking point. In 2016, leftists went insane because their candidate wasn’t elected.

In 2020, under the skilled leadership of “trained Marxists,” the unconstrained madness took to the streets. American cities burned thanks to the way in which the left unleashed the mobs’ monkey brains:

For the left, this was a calculated policy intended to get Trump out of the White House and it succeeded.

Having attained the White House, the Democrats didn’t stop. Currently, we see them aggressively demonizing those who don’t get vaccinated. They’re doing this even though it’s become patently clear that the vaccine isn’t a “vaccine” at all because it doesn’t stop people from getting COVID. (Although it may lessen symptoms which, if true, is not to be sneezed at.)

The leftists are also trying to aggregate power by attacking the idea of the colorblind melting pot—the promise of the Constitution, which it took us 200 years to attain—and are retribalizing us, which is another reversion to the monkey brain. It’s not just that they’re trying to get all non-white people in America to hate white people. They’re also doing a damn fine job of stoking racial resentment between blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and whatever other racial groups they can stir up to a sense of ill-usage at the hands of someone with differently colored skin.

For the past five years, now going on six years, Democrats have been trying to unleash their supporters’ monkey brains. We all have those monkey brains, of course, and they’re currently held in check by a belief in our systems, whether civic or religious. Leftists, however, have attacked traditional faiths and, with their relentless war against American history, the Constitution, and the rule of law, too many people are free of those constraints. Leftists have also assiduously been raising up a generation of young people who believe that the ends always justify the means and that violence in pursuit of these ends isn’t criminally offensive but is, instead, purely defensive and, therefore, morally justifiable.

Put another way, for hundreds of years, the West has been using political systems to decrease violence and to take us further away from the monkey brain. (See Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors or Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, to see what I mean.) Now, though, leftists are working to destroy those thin lines that separate us from the monkeys who throw small dogs off buildings, a behavior that make sense when revenge is the only working system left to address wrongs (real or imaginary) done to the individual or the community.

When you read about the bad things monkeys do, tremble, for we’re getting closer every day to our monkey roots.

Image: Angry Baboon Pavian – one day soon, this could be you.