Marin Voice: We can’t keep normalizing outrageous behavior

Our president recently threatened several members of Congress with hanging. How did we respond? After a brief media kerfuffle, we collectively murmured, “There he goes again” and moved on.

How did we arrive at this strange place, where we indulge leaders acting in socially destructive ways, with no apparent guilt and certainly no responsibility?

One common explanation is the frog in the cook pot. The water warms so slowly the frog doesn’t notice, until it’s boiled alive. Similarly, we are lulled by repetition into tolerance.

Well, I just don’t buy it. We aren’t frogs. Something pre-boiled our emotions, so we don’t respond to these outrageous acts.

Here are three explanations: our human nature, our cherished mercantile democracy and our industrial consumer culture.

We are social animals, acutely aware of our place in the group hierarchy. Knowing and accepting our social position, and our deference to tribal leaders, is deeply rooted in our genes and culture. In medieval times we accepted as truth the divine rights of kings. The one at the top had legitimate authority to decapitate you at will. They often did.

The Enlightenment brought new ideas but did not change human nature. In 1763, Jean-Jacques Rousseau declared that “man is born free.” American colonialists got the message. They had already experienced one working democracy when negotiating with American indigenous tribal alliances. The Colonials revolted against their distant king, then created and signed the US Constitution in 1788.

These radical social ideas coincided with the expanding Industrial Revolution, started by Scotsman James Watt’s steam engine in 1776.

In pre-industrial times, most people were serfs working for landowners, or were craftspeople creating and selling essential goods such as food, cloth and iron wares. Today’s parallel is that most people work for corporations and businesses producing consumer goods and services. Whatever the time and culture, the constant is how naturally we accept our society’s unique authority and power structure, and our place in it.

Today we give ourselves to corporations. In return we receive money to buy the goods and services corporations provide, including a safer, longer and healthier life.

But it is a Faustian pact. In addition to giving our time, power and authority, the trade includes our values and independence. Our bondsman is a soulless legally created nonhuman entity, the modern corporation. It does not care for us as people. It does not have human values. It does not know love. Corporations speak one language – profit – and they will seek it however and wherever they can. They will force down wages, pollute the environment, sell unhealthy and unsustainable products, even kill if it smooths the path to profits. With no soul or empathy, their actions come guilt-free. If corporations were actually people, instead of merely legally defined persons, they would be institutionalized as sociopathic Titans, a danger to society.

We understand this. We accept their nature and power. So at each new corporate assault on people or the environment, after another brief media outburst, we murmur, “There they go again” and move on.

Therefore it is a small step when President Donald Trump all but shouts, “Off with their heads!” We are briefly angered but soon shrug our shoulders, saying, “There he goes again” and move on.

It is an all-too-familiar (boring?) pattern: assault, brief indignation, resignation. With both corporations and politicians, we have normalized the outrageous. Now, that is outrageous.

I’m hoping it is not too embarrassing to look in the mirror and admit our complicity. We can do better. Let’s not turn “belly up.” Let’s speak out. We have the tools, and hopefully the will, to demand that corporations and political leaders show in their words and actions, those qualities and values that make us indelibly human: love, care, kindness, and compassion.

Barry Phegan, PhD, lives in Greenbrae. He is a retired company culture consultant who now volunteers to help local communities make more effective, caring decisions.