My husband recently suggested we watch Chimp Empire, a new show on Netflix. I don’t love it. The pace is too slow, and much of the time the show focuses on Jackson, an alpha male surrounded by males who wish to usurp him.
Just Exhausting
The role of the alpha male seems to exclusively revolve around keeping one’s power. It seems exhausting. Are the benefits really worth it? Apparently, one of Jackson’s benefits is his ability to mate more than the other males (though the females don’t exclusively mate with him). Yet, even this is exhausting.
To mate, the female has to wait to be sure the alpha male is calm. The alpha male has to demonstrate he is calm and won’t harm the female’s child. The child follows the female the entire time, trying to figure out what the heck is going on. Post-copulation, everyone is tired, including me.
And to the Republic for which It Stands…
One thing I can appreciate about the show is that it has me thinking again about power and government.
Jackson is essentially a tyrant. The entire clan lives in fear. For that matter, Jackson himself lives in fear. It dawned on me that this type of leadership—living at the mercy of the unpredictable whims of an alpha male— is exactly what the founders rejected and sought to guard against. It was for this that they attempted to create a nation in which its citizens could peaceably co-exist. Though, in reality, this could only ever be accomplished to the extent human nature permits it to be so.
It is for this reason Hamilton rightly recognizes that a republic is no panacea. Indeed, “[h]as it not, on the contrary, invariably been found that momentary passions, and immediate interests, have a more active and imperious control over human conduct than general or remote considerations of policy, utility, or justice? Have republics in practice been less addicted to war than monarchies? Are not the former administered by men as well as the latter?”—The Federalist No. 6, at 51 (Alexander Hamilton)(Clinton Rossiter ed., 1961).
An Incurable Disease
Of course, man’s cruelty extends well beyond government.
In Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum, Antonia Hylton documents Crownsville State Hospital’s incredibly disturbing history. Crownsville, a mental institution formed to exclusively house Black patients—who are first forced to build the vast structure themselves—ultimately serves to extend the hallmarks of slavery—as year after year the “hospital” profited from the unpaid labor of the same patients.
Moreover, for those unfortunate enough to have grown up with a tyrant in the house—or, God forbid, to be living there still—such cruelty is particularly harrowing.
It is this disease we fight against, and, seemingly always will.
The Good News
Our disease may be incurable, but there is a counterpoint to this bleak melody.
Men/chimps are mere mortals and nothing more. Dynasties and empires fall. Oppressive systems can be, have been, and are being dismantled.
And, most importantly, faith, hope, and love are as—if not more—unyielding.
