Guns, Germs, and Stealing Truth (2: The Boer Stronghold)

““Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” – George Santayana

There is no simple answer to our question of “Why do we see behaviors such as experienced with Sandy Hook?” (here)

This will no doubt confuse and irritate many.  Ironically, the fact that confusion and irritation arise is actually a validation of the complexity of the answer(s), pieces of which run like a thread through most of these posts over the past few years.  These include concepts of,

Bubbles – we all live in bubbles.  When asked, most people will acknowledge that they live in something of a bubble defined by their experiences, friends, neighborhoods, values, beliefs, etc.  In actuality, we live in at least two bubbles, one is cognitive (as suggested just above) and the other is our physical reality.  We do not perceive or sense everything that is physically real, and we are often naively content with that – after all, Perception trumps Reality.  Bubbles can become comfort zones, echo chambers and even strongholds.  (More on the Reality Bubble in a later post).

Incomplete or Missing Information – because of these bubbles we are often blissfully unaware of (or, if it is outside our bubble, intentionally ignore) other pertinent information that can affect our values and understanding, if we let it.

Attitudes become Behaviors by Choice – Based on our values, our attitudes, how we think about our perceived reality within and without our bubbles, reveal themselves through our behaviors, especially when we are confronted by something that lies outside and does not agree or resonate with the tenets of our bubble but rather threatens them.

Regression to the Cultural Mean – The external forces from outside our bubbles and the internal forces in ourselves and from others within our bubbles massage and/or manipulate our values and attitudes such that everyone within the bubbles converges on common values and attitudes (the cultural mean).

While Sandy Hook occurred ten years ago, anti-social behaviors had been visible in humans long before and even continue today.  For instance, in the last two plus years we have experienced increasing levels of crime.  These increases can be attributed to social disruption and isolation (due to Covid-19), lawlessness (in response to George Floyd’s death), police timidity and/or overreaction (due to destructive, not constructive criticism), and a typical American reaction to crises with an increase in gun sales.

All four of the above themes (among our Fundamental Principles) can be seen to be active in the above events, if one looks.

Our three villains from Sandy Hook (and the fourth I’ve identified: Every other active “fact propagator,” here) have in common one particular attribute: extreme frustration with society, government, and fellow citizens as they have experienced these outside their own respective bubbles.  The result is what is called anomie,

Anomie – in sociology, anomie is a social condition defined by an uprooting or breakdown of any moral values, standards or guidance for individuals to follow.  Anomie was believed to possibly evolve from conflict of belief systems and causes breakdown of social bonds between an individual and the community.  (Émile Durkheim; Wikipedia)

Our villains seem to be acting out their frustrations with what they perceive as a breakdown of (others’) moral values, standards and guidance for individual behavior that deviate from those they have defined as correct within their own bubble, which has now evolved to become a fortress (for defense against felt disaffirmation) or a stronghold (as an offensive base to counter this disaffirmation).

Aspects of our default human nature that contribute to this process of “fortress-ification” (“bubble building”) are the two we generally “know” but rarely admit we are susceptible to: Confirmation Bias (where we seek information and/or others’ opinions that confirm what we already believe (perceive) to be true) and the Availability Heuristic (where we confine ourselves only to immediate (experiential?) examples that come to mind when evaluating a topic, concept, method, decision or event.  This could also apply to limiting ourselves only to specific available (biased?) information sources).

Given these often subconscious default human nature processes, it should be easy to see how often and quickly bubbles develop, and how these can easily progress into hardened fortresses and strongholds where anomie and conspiratorial thinking take hold and direct subsequent social behavior, often contributing to increasing polarization.

The victims of this cognitive drift and isolation are both the concept of and expectation of shared values and an individual’s recognition of one’s responsibility to the larger community and society outside his or her bubble.  As was recognized centuries ago (Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians), “And if the ear should say, ‘Because I am not an eye I do not belong to the body,’ it would not for that reason stop being part of the body.”  And with the implication that its respective responsibilities to the body still remain intact.

We as a society are reasonably early in this polarization trajectory, but there are historical examples, if we will pay attention to them, of where this can be heading.  One example is the history of the Boers in South Africa.

The Boers are descended from Dutch settlers who, in the middle of the 1600s, were stationed at the African Cape to provide fresh food and meat for British ships on their voyages to India.  Few other settlers followed them during the next century, and it was through a high birth rate that this “little Dutch splinter” grew into a small people.  Completely isolated from the current of European history (an imposed bubble), they set out on a path “such as few nations have trod before them…” ^(1a)

Environmental factors and forces that existed around this bubble that contributed over two centuries to the development of the Boer culture were “the extremely bad soil which could be used only for extensive cattle raising, and the very large black population which organized as tribes and lived as nomad hunters.  The bad soil made close settlement impossible, and large families, isolated from each other, were forced into a kind of clan organization and only the ever-present threat of a common foe deterred these clans from active war against each other.  The solution to the double problem of lack of fertility and abundance of natives was slavery.^{“ (1b)} (Bubbles transformed into Fortresses, aggravated by human pride and intensified by isolation, regressing to narrow cultural values and attitudes).

This fortress mentality and the “absolute dependence on the work of others and eventual complete contempt for labor and productivity in any form transformed the Dutchman into the Boer.” ⁽²⁾  “They degenerated into a poor white race living beside and together with black races.  They lived on the same subsistence level, primarily the result of the Boers’ inability or stubborn refusal to learn agricultural science and wandering from one area to another, tilling the soil until it is no longer fertile, shooting the wild game until it ceases to exist.” ⁽³⁾  (Regression to a Cultural Mean; disaffirmation leading to altered values and resulting new Attitudes becoming Behaviors by Choice).

Their “unique race concept seemed to define their own condition and eventually led to the Boers concluding that they themselves were more than human and obviously chosen by God to be the gods of black men.  In practice it meant that their Christianity for the first time could not act as a decisive curb on the dangerous perversions of human self-consciousness, a premonition of its essential ineffectiveness in other more recent race societies.” ⁽⁴⁾  The Boers “simply denied the Christian doctrine of the common origin of men, believed in themselves as the chosen people, chosen not for the sake of divine salvation of man but for the lazy domination over other species.  This was God’s will on earth as the Dutch Reformed Church proclaimed it and still proclaims it today (1951) in sharp and hostile contrast to the missionaries of all other Christian denominations.” ⁽⁵⁾  (The transformation of Fortresses into polarized Strongholds, and the justification of the redefined values in order to obtain some form of self-affirmation).

When “the British arrived in the 1800s and eventually attempted to abolish slavery (after 1834) and to impose fixed boundaries upon landed property, they provoked the stagnant Boer society into violent reactions.  Boer farmers escaped British law by treks into the interior wilderness of the country, abandoning without regret their homes and their farms.  Rather than accept limitations upon their possessions, they left them altogether.  They demonstrated that they had transformed themselves into an essentially non-European tribe.” ⁽⁶⁾  (The result of the transformation of fundamental values and attitudes into new, self-defensive behaviors to avoid new felt disaffirmation).

These transformations were strong enough that when gold and diamonds were discovered (1886), the Boers reaction to the uitlanders arriving to find riches was the same: abandon their homes and farms (where gold and diamonds were eventually discovered) and trek into the wilderness.

The continuous friction (polarization) between the British and the Boers eventually led to the Boer War (1899-1902).  Although defeated, the Boers continued to exist as a separate population (Afrikaners), “which had lost contact even with the lower incentives of European man (they could not be lured back into European civilization even by profit motives) when it had cut itself off from its higher motives, because both had lost their meaning and appeal in a society where nobody wants to achieve anything and everyone became a god.” ⁽⁷⁾

The Boers’ anomie and frustration with the externalities to their bubble (society, government, and natives) is palpable and demonstrates the slow erosion that can occur if people do not pay attention to the positive foundations of their values and attitudes and to the negative forces active both in the environment and in each individual.

It did not help when one of their foundational institutions, the church, apparently lacking an understanding of the fundamental tenet (“the equality of all men before God”) underlying one of its basic doctrines (“the common origin of mankind”), strayed from applying this tenet to guide and develop the Boers’ societal relationships (practiced behaviors), and instead altered its doctrines and beliefs to accommodate and justify man’s “dangerous perversions” already practiced in their selfish behaviors.

There are lessons from history here.

The first is the danger in having conveniently fluid and opportunistic values.

The second is that while the isolation and devolution of the Boers’ culture occurred over a period of 250 years (~1650 – 1900) due to isolation and the slow means of communication, the current availability (and misuse) of near instantaneous social media has contributed to our isolation and devolution into polarized strongholds in less than 20 years.

Realistically speaking, the Boers were thrust into an unknown and hostile environment which was made up of the external forces that overwhelmed what internal forces and stamina for resistance they possessed, resulting in the stronghold that became the Boer/Afrikaner culture.

There is another example that is both current and strikes a bit closer to home but is an example of the reverse – internal forces, values and attitudes of a few that have been used to overwhelm the external forces and environment to create a specific and unique cultural bubble.  That is Russia’s view of itself and its relationship with outsiders, particularly the West.  It has a long history.

Thoughts on this bubble in the following segment.

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1a,b – Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arndt, 1951, p 191-2
2 – Ibid., p 193
3 – Ibid., p 194, and note 20
4 – Ibid., p 195, and note 22
5 – Ibid., p 195, and notes 23-26
6 – Ibid., p 196
7 – Ibid., p 197