Being alive is a risky business; we live in a predatory world, a living system where life feeds on life. As such, risk and the threat of injury and/or death is always present. This is true for the smallest and the largest of living things.
As human beings, the nature of risk depends upon one’s place in the environment. For most of our species’ existence, we lived in concert with the natural world, subject to predation from wild beasts, life-threatening weather, infectious disease, and physical injury. Only during the past 10,000 of many hundreds of thousands of years have Homo Sapiens lived within an environment of their own making – in permanent homes in large cities with fixed institutions of health and government, enjoying products produced by human imagination and industry.
Among the enjoyments, however, threats remain. Weather still challenges survival, earthquakes destroy infrastructure and buildings, and infectious diseases cause severe illness and death. And there is one more continuing threat: that imposed upon us by each other. As the world’s apex predator, living off each other is something we’re wired to do.
Economic structures based upon winners and losers, political systems of power and control over others, legal systems of ownership and punishment; these all present opportunities for manipulative predation. Predation in the business world includes manipulative advertising, stock swindling, the arts of deception and playing upon human desire. Politics too is wound up in manipulation and is corrupted by money. American law and enforcement, supposedly a level playing field where no individual is above the law, is anything but level. Essentially, most of the systems created by people can be threatening.
And then there are those among us who, as practiced predators, openly threaten and extort, not just through violent acts of robbery or theft but by using the very systems we have created. Such behavior includes threats of withholding – medical help, food assistance, research grants, funds to recover from natural disasters. The panoply of ways we have developed to support ourselves are easily used as tools of power and control.
When life is viewed as purely competitive, a zero-sum game of only winners and losers, it produces suffering. Suffering is a normal part of our human condition; we all suffer aging, sickness and death, but suffering at the hands of others is not mandatory. Accordingly, our capacity for cooperation provides an alternative, but as complex social beings of imagination, cooperation easily gets mixed with fixations, obsessions and neurotic behavior. Cooperative models break down under the pressure of threats and intimidation.
The threat of being detained without warrant and sent to the maximum security CECOT prison in El Salvador is suddenly real. This is different than the overseas “black op” sites the CIA has used in the past to confine people; CECOT in El Salvador is a punishment-oriented concentration camp. Men are being subdued, caged, warehoused, and treated like zoo animals, without the benefit of legal due process. If it can happen to them, it can happen to any one of us, a threat not lost on those of us who have witnessed tyranny.
As apex predators, we lie, cheat, steal, and murder, behaviors that all the major religions of world warn against. Risk of punishment is the common approach to regulating people’s behavior. The threat of being sent to hell now has its counterpart at CECOT, and we all should be afraid, very afraid.
