The Men on the Ramparts

The genesis & anatomy of tribalism

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Nobody starts out hating anyone. Every villain (and hero) was a baby once. Back then, the world seemed a boundless playground of as-yet unwritten possibility! Everybody we met was a new friend! …Until we got old enough to walk, talk, and attend public school, where most of us met our first bully.

New people are not necessarily friends, it turns out. Some want to hurt you, just for the fun of it. Aghast at this discovery, your tribe shrinks. At first encompassing all living things (and thus all of humanity) you realize the need for selective inclusion.

Maybe not the first time you’re beaten up, stolen from or teased. Maybe you were made from tougher stuff, and brushed it off in good humor. But then you met another mean person. Then another, and another. Each adding a new brick to your emerging fortress mentality.

”Wouldn’t it be awesome”, you might’ve thought, “if nice people had our own private world, with a wall to keep out bullies?” A great idea! But not very original, forming the basis for several major religions, and the reason why until the modern era, cities had well defended walls.

A problem arises. You want a walled utopia with only kind people allowed in it. But keeping bullies out requires profoundly unkind acts. In medieval terms, if you’re the Lord of the castle, you want well behaved peasants for the sake of social cohesion and a lawful, harmonious citizenry.

You do not want docile, pacifist knights! You want big sturdy men capable of great violence, who will neither hesitate to inflict it, nor feel debilitating guilt after the fact. This is the paradox of the “kind people club”. It doesn’t last long unless defended by intensely unkind people.

Like a single celled organism with all the soft, warm, vulnerable bits inside of a tough membrane which accepts only what’s healthy for the cell and excludes everything else. If this were Spore, you’d slap a hundred out-facing spikes around the exterior too.

This appears hypocritical at first blush, but your goal is unreachable any other way. You must constantly filter through the peasantry inside the castle walls, finding and banishing thieves, rapists and murderers. A process of never-ending internal purification. But at the same time, maintain a separate caste capable of ruthless, unhesitant, remorseless murder.

These are the Men on the Ramparts (he said the thing!) and the friction between them and the peasantry will be the focus of this essay. In “A Few Good Men”, Colonel Jessup said “We live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know.”

He goes on to say “You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall -- you need me on that wall. We use words like “honor,” “code,” “loyalty.” We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punch line.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.

I would rather that you just said “thank you” and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand the post. Either way, I don’t give a DAMN what you think you’re entitled to!”

This is the friction I meant. The problem with cultivating soft, peace loving peasantry in a costly bubble of historically unprecedented safety is that some eventually forget what the walls are for. Their hearts hurt as they imagine all the new friends yet to be made on the other side, and tremble at the fearsome men patrolling atop the wall.

Perhaps those fearsome men are the baddies? They sure look scary. They do mean, scary things to outsiders. Maybe they were never needed, and utopia is a world where they’ve been abolished? A world in which the walls come down, and every poor deprived urchin on the outside can come in, to enjoy the same rich life of comfort and safety that we do! How can we accept less?

Scattered voices warn against it. Elders mostly, who remember what life was like before the wall. They say it was built for a reason, and we only live as comfortably and safely as we do because of the men who patrol it. But that sounds mean to you, so you ignore it. Instead, you and your like-minded rebels breach the wall in secret!

That’s when something unfathomable happens. “New friends” from outside the wall begin flooding in by the tens, then hundreds of thousands. They immediately begin raping women and young girls conditioned by generations of safety to be relatively helpless against such organized, shameless aggression. (Certainly men from within the wall rape as well, but at a proportionally much lower rate due to different cultural conditioning.)

Those women, convinced of your narrative, don’t know what to think. You told them the opposing voices are villains, to be hated and fought, even to the point of death. They dare not say anything which would put them into that group.

You told them outsiders are all merely hungry, scared babies being trod upon by the mean ‘ol Wall Men, appealing to their protective maternal instinct. And yet, the conditions you’ve created by breaching the wall are brutally unbearable for women and girls in particular.

The tragedy here is that the peasantry's moral intuitions (kindness, individualism, benefit of the doubt) are correct for intra-group relations, which is why we’ve cultivated them. But those same intuitions become exploitable vulnerabilities when dealing with inter-group competition.

It only gets worse from there. Besides trafficking and raping hundreds of thousands of minors with relative impunity, (the government covering for them rather than appear bigoted) the invaders use their swelling numbers to vote their own into positions of political power, from which they widen the breach. At the same time, enriching themselves by the most brazen corruption, swindling you and everyone else born inside the wall.

This was such an unfathomable outcome (because it’s what those hateful naysayers predicted) that you didn’t plan for it. Or, persuaded it’s a good thing (because the mean ‘ol Wall Men drove these poor babies to rape, traffick & swindle), maybe you even help the invaders learn how to set up scams? Depending how much of your own Kool-Aid you’ve drunk.

The thing is, the invaders have their own “kind people club”. It just defines kindness very differently, affirms its own sovereignty as arbiter of what is good, and demands your club be absorbed into it or suffer horrific violence. It’s a product of more brutal formative conditions, not to excuse it.

These two utterly incompatible fortresses, or cells, each regard everything inside them to be good and pure while everything outside them is evil and impure. The goal of such organisms is to expand by assimilating those who may be conformed to its ideals, and destroy or exclude those who cannot.

The endgame is when your superorganism has swallowed up all of humanity. Then, it is naively imagined by true believers in the infallibility of their home team, the entirety of humanity will be kind forever. There will no longer be anything outside the walls, nor any need for them.

It hasn’t worked out that way. When you have multiple such superorganisms, all vying for global domination, with conflicting ideals and a worldview in which it is the rightful exclusive holder of absolute power, coexistence is impossible.

And when you forget the purpose of the walls, breaching them to welcome in people whose worldview defines you as subhuman (especially if you’re gay or a woman), what did you think would happen? Writing the consequences off as the actions of individuals misses the systemic forest for the trees.

Every superorganism has its separated castes of docile worker drones and warriors, like an ant colony. This is how you can suffer dozens of car bombings, hundreds of stabbings and thousands of rapes annually (committed by the invading culture’s warrior caste) while the peaceable peasantry of that culture (worker drones) expresses shock & disbelief, insisting that violence isn’t what their culture’s about. Because that’s genuinely not how they experience their own culture from inside its walls.

If they don’t understand that it’s their own warrior caste perpetrating these horrific acts, not the peasantry (or they play dumb about it) dissonance & confusion ensue. They may then enjoy the best of both worlds, expanding via bloody conquest while disavowing the conquerors, characterizing them as aberrant and not representative (of the peasantry).

In this way the peaceful majority provides demographic weight, political cover, and moral legitimacy (as victims of discrimination), serving as a kind of human shield for the aggressive minority while it does the ugly work of territorial expansion.

You assumed your own ideas of decency were universal. That tenderness in their hearts would restrain them. Surely only a reasonable number will come, it’s not like the entirety of their nation is going to try to come in through whatever breach they can, however narrow. Surely they will respect consent and boundaries.

When they don’t, instead imposing themselves in the most barbarous and grotesque ways as far as they possibly can until a meaningful barrier is struck, maybe reflect on “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie”. That mouse truly just keeps on taking, so long as you keep letting it. Your home, your city, your country, your life.

Maybe you couldn’t bring yourself to believe until now that anybody’s actually like that, but surprise! Not just one either, billions. You’re the anomaly, not them! Shame will never stay their hand. Within their cultural framework, they’re clever for taking advantage, and you’re simply foolish for letting them.

Maybe you’re in too far to admit error by this point. Committed so completely to your beliefs that mass trafficking and rape of minors (or hundreds of daycare/autism center scams, stealing billions) isn’t an outrage or tragedy, but “bad optics”, inconvenient for your movement’s narrative.

If you find yourself in that position, resorting to downplaying or gaslighting such horrors (or simply biting your tongue when it’s brought up, unable to proffer any defense) strongly consider that you may have taken a wrong turn somewhere.

You needn’t keep going in that direction out of pride, or to spite your ideological opponents. You can reverse course any time you choose. If humiliation at your admission of trusting too widely & readily is the worst you suffer for it, consider that a bargain.

Most of all, help repair the breach, and don’t compromise the walls again. Like C.S. Lewis’ proverbial fence, you only didn’t see the immediate purpose it served because it was doing its job, and it would be better to fully understand why it was built before tearing it down.

Men like Lewis are the precisely the Christians you want inside the walls! The men patrolling those walls, on the other hand, had better not be Christians. You need two different moral operating systems, each fit for purpose.

Lastly, you might seek forgiveness from the men on the ramparts, or at least not impede them. They’re cut from different cloth than you or I. They do many violent things to invaders which shock and upset you. But by now, having put yourself (and your wives, and daughters) at the mercy of those same invaders, you hopefully understand why that is.

1. Image by NanoBanana Pro