Some political tactics are as ancient as those fossil specimens being dug up in various pre-Cambrian geological settings. That is, these strategies are almost as old as time itself. None is more time tested than ‘if you are unhappy, it is this other guy’s fault.’ This is otherwise known as the ‘scapegoat’ trick. And who is this other guy? That’s the beauty of this transparent distraction, it can be anyone you want.

For the earliest homo-sapiens spreading out of East Africa into Europe some 70,000 plus years ago, the ‘other’ of that era likely was the remaining Neanderthals they ran into as the glaciers retreated north. For King Solomon in the Old Testament, it might be the Hittites. For the early Romans, it probably was the Carthaginians. For the Spanish during the Age of Exploration, it was the the Portuguese for a while and then the Dutch and then the English. As nation states evolved, it was the English hating the French and the French returning that animosity in kind. When the Ottoman Empire struggled during the WWI period, the Armenians proved a useful scapegoat leading to one the earlier genocidal efforts in modern times. Northern Ireland had their Catholics, or Papists. Sunni Muslim’s had Shiites and vice-versa. The Nazi’s had the Jews. And the American’s cycled through a series of easy targets … Native Americans, the Irish, the Chinese, the Slaves and Italians, Hispanics and Latinos, along with the usual suspects … Jews and Blacks.

It is as if identifying and then blaming the ‘other’ is embedded within our genetic makeup. Then again, the appeal of the scapegoat tactic has an intuitive and obvious appeal. Who in their right mind wants to take responsibility for their situation and their fate. After all, that is just so … mature!

When Hitler, after recovering from his gas attack wounds late in WWI found that Germany had lost the war and signed a humiliatiing cease fire treaty, he found the very concept of national defeat impossible to accept. He quickly convinced himself that his homeland was ‘stabbed in the back’ by a perfidious cabal of Jews. That one man might easily convince himself of such a delusion is not surprising. But he was able to convince an entire nation of that falsehood, or most of it anyway … a society considered among the most cultured and sophisticated in the world of that time. In truth, Germany was exhausted by the Fall of 1918 and being over run by vastly superior forces.

Let us look at an example closer to home. In the anti-bellum South during the first half of the 19th century, only about 1 or 2 percent of Southerners owned significant numbers of slaves. They were the 1 percenters of that era given that the exploitation of human suffering led to egregious accumulations of wealth available only to the favored few. Here is the odd thing. Not only were African-Americans suffering, but poorer whites faced harsh economic conditions and few real opportunities for upward mobility. This was a feudal and authoritarian society in a classic sense. Political and economic power had been secured by the few at the very top of the pyramid and inequalty was hardening year by year.

You would think that struggling white laborers and hardscrabble farmers would confront such an unfair system. But no, just the opposite. Most, though not all, defended both slavery and the economic and cultural frameworks that supported this hideous institution. More remarkably, they went off to war by the millions to suffer and die for a cause that clearly repressed them and which materially dimmed their futures.

What did they get in return? They were able to look down upon their darker skin bretheren, people they were closer to in most respects than the elite who sent them off to suffer and too often expire in gruesome ways. It is hard to imagine such a bargain as making any rational sense. But a hundred years after that horrific conflict, the South yet practiced legal apartheid with enormous public support, at least until federal power enforced a limited form of de jure equality.

Recently, the scapegoat tactic continues to weave its magic in many places … Hungary, Turkey, Poland, Venezuala, and even England (Brexit was partly a reaction to immigration fears). The rise of Trumpism and today’s Republican Party is a direct result of ‘blaming the other.’ Almost half of America is convinced that barbarians from south of the border will steal ‘their’ country and, if they live too far away from the Rio Grande, that ‘woke’ liberals will confiscate their guns and their religion and their culture. As the latest generation of conservatives cower in the face of such threats, an ecomomic elite gathers more of the economic pie along with the power attached to that money.

We are, at the same time, an odd and fascinating species. With our technologies, we now can peer into the origins of our universe and create awsome forms of artificial intelligence. At the same time, we are driven by the same hate, fear, and divisions that infected our earliest ancestors.

Late at night, I often ponder a conundrum that has intrigued me for decades. Which will prevail, our primitive fears or our better angels. As of today, I have no freaking idea.