A Field Guide to Humanoids

In one of Woody Allen’s best films, Manhattan, he portrays a television comedy writer who gets fed up with the triviality of his job. He doesn’t want to make audiences laugh at people anymore, because he no longer finds people very funny. Only as he’s quitting do we learn the name of the program for which he writes: Human Beings — Wow! There are surely times — perhaps daily — when our sentiments echo those of that title. Sometimes we find the fellow members of our species funny, but painfully often we can’t.

Equal parts children of the gods and descendants of the apes, we possess about the same number of traits from each. If aliens from outer space were to come to earth, intent on learning all they could about us, they’d probably be puzzled. Just as birdwatchers consult field guides to the species native to their area, our visiting aliens might make good use of a field guide to humanoids. Having studied the human drama all my life, I think I could write a pretty decent one. I know just what I’d want to tell them, especially if they ever obtained the vote.

The political forces that would control us want to keep us alienated from one another. They employ the time-tested tactic of divide and conquer. They don’t want us to understand human nature, because then we would learn how to get along with one another. We’d never achieve perfect harmony, no matter how much we understood, but we’d certainly be able to function without constant, heavy-handed government supervision.

One of the main strategies of statists is dehumanizing the opposition. It must be evil, and it must never change. If it could be seen to improve, gradually becoming less evil and generally better, the state would no longer be needed to protect its minions from that wicked force.

What does it look like when people change their minds about an issue? Our statist lords and masters don’t want us to know. If we came to recognize it, we might be more patient with those who disagree with us. If we realized how effective nonaggressive persuasion can be, we’d be willing to use that instead of the coercion to which we feel we must resort if we’re sure nothing else will work.

Most of my friends and relatives are leftists. When I try to get them to understand what’s really going on in this country — as opposed to the twaddle they’re told — I get dogged resistance. They don’t want to understand the changes that are taking place. Their heads are stuck deep in the 20th century, and a mythical version, at that.

When people change their minds, the process is usually one of gradual evolution. They usually think (or want to think) that they arrived at their new opinion totally on their own, without having been persuaded by anyone else. Sometimes they even try to pretend that they never thought any other way.

They’re not going to publicly flagellate themselves for their errors, no matter how cathartic the spectacle might be for others. I know that I don’t like getting even a private flogging for mine. I sometimes do from conservatives, when I admit that I used to be a leftist. “So you know you were wrong, now . . . huh, huh, huh?” They actually think that treating me like a poorly housebroken dog and grinding my nose into a pile of poop will get me properly trained.

It shouldn’t be made personal, because it really isn’t, as the trite saying goes, “about us.” Truth existed for eons before we were born, and it will endure long after we are gone. It’s bigger than we are. We need it, but it does not need us.

I’ve seen tremendous change in many conservatives, particularly on issues like gay rights. Leftists are deathly afraid to admit this. Donald Trump is probably less hostile to gays than any president in history before Obama, but the LGBTQWERTY left has utterly convinced itself that his administration is going to herd them into boxcars and ship them off to some new Dachau.

After hearing this fear expressed for at least the five thousandth time, I finally blew my stack. I asked a sad and quaking, safety-pin-wearing friend exactly what he thought it would look like if conservatives finally changed their minds about gays — humoring him by assuming, for the sake of argument, that a great number of them already haven’t. He gave me a long, blank look, like a schoolboy who’d failed to study for an exam. Then he launched into a litany of government actions that conservatives “must” support to show how really, really, really, really sorry they are for having been such meanies.

The concept of change happening organically in society — instead of being engineered by government — is totally foreign to him. He can’t fathom the possibility that people might be persuaded by logic and experience. Everything must be forced to happen. People who think this way are abysmally and inexcusably ignorant of human nature. It’s almost as if they came to this planet along with those visiting aliens and — like them — were seeing it now for the very first time.

If we don’t learn to understand each other, eventually we will destroy each other. There have been legends about extraterrestrial visitors since the days of the Pharaohs. We keep scaring ourselves by speculating that they might someday try to conquer and colonize this planet. I don’t think we need to worry.

They’ve been watching us through their binoculars and muttering, “Human Beings — Wow!” Like Woody Allen, they may not mean that as a compliment.