You know the type: the Alpha Baboon. They beat their wives and children, physically or emotionally, they are apt to attack anyone weaker than themselves to get their way. They swagger and brag across their world, big tough men. They threaten, slug, shoot; their solution to not getting their own way is to use physical force. God forbid they should wheedle their way into leading a whole nation. Yet, there is Donald Trump, an Alpha Baboon in power.
Fearful people worship the Alpha Baboon. He (or she) will protect them from the threats he and his ilk have implanted in their brains. The real threat is the Alpha Baboon himself. May humanity see that one day soon.
Professor Sapolsky has been studying baboons for decades; specifically how stress kills. The alpha baboon has very low stress levels. The ones on the bottom of the smacking order have very high stress levels. Stress has it’s place in the wild, according to Sapolsky: “It’s three minutes of screaming terror on the savanna after which it’s over with or you’re over with.”
Stress in the baboon troop comes in a form you may recognize: “you spend about three hours a day getting your calories…you’ve got nine hours of free time every day to devote to making somebody else just miserable…they’re not being stressed by lions chasing them all the time, they’re being stressed by each other.” He continues, “sounds like a terrible thing to confess after 30 years, but I don’t actually like baboons all that much …they’re these scheming, backstabbing, Machiavellian bastards… they’re awful to each other.” A typical scenario: “a big male loses a fight, chases a subadult, who bites an adult female who slaps a juvenile who slaps an infant out of a tree.”
You might say humans are just naturally baboons. No. No, no, no. We can do better and we’d better do better.
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