The first sign of civilization isn’t fire or some stick-figure painting of a hunter spearing a bison. It’s a broken thigh bone that had time to heal. Picture an archaeological dig—some sunbaked hellscape where scientists unearth the remains of a poor soul who snapped his femur 20,000 years ago but didn’t die. That’s the kicker. In the wild, a broken leg is a death sentence. You fall, you writhe, and before long, you become an all-you-can-eat buffet for scavengers.
But this one survived. Someone—some proto-human with a flicker of decency—dragged them to safety, fed them, kept the vultures off long enough for that bone to fuse back together. That, my friends, is civilization. Not laws, not markets, and certainly not politicians twisting scripture to justify their bigotry. Civilization is one being looking at another and deciding: I won’t let you die today. It’s an instinct even toddlers and primates understand. Helping someone through difficulty is where civilization begins.
The ink wasn’t even dry on this commonly shared story that was attributed to a pioneering anthropologist before the rabid Trumpy fanboys slithered out of their libertarian swamps, screeching. SAVAGES! Twitching and gibbering, they descended like coked-up hyenas, tearing apart any suggestion that Margaret Mead—the high priestess of anthropology—might have uttered such heresy against their doctrine of holy selfishness. A communist plot! They clutched their dog-eared copies of Friedman and Ayn Rand like Bibles at an exorcism, desperately trying to convince us that compassion is for suckers and the weak. They were foaming at the mouth over the idea that maybe, just maybe, civilization isn’t built on screwing over your neighbor and hoarding gold like a deranged dragon.
But here’s the thing: It doesn’t even matter whether Mead actually said it. What matters is that it’s true. It’s a fundamental human truth—one that anyone not teetering on the edge of sociopathy would recognize. Or at least, that used to be the case.
Now, the richest man in the world, the shadow president of America, Elon Musk, has laid bare his philosophy, on of all places, the Joe Rogan show: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” And as if that wasn’t bloodcurdling enough, he doubled down: “Like it’s weaponized. Empathy is the issue.”
This is no longer about whether certain factions make Nazi salutes. It’s not just about tax policy or weaponizing xenophobia. This is about something far deeper—the very essence of what it means to be human. These far-right zealots aren’t merely looking to dismantle government; they are attempting to strip governance of its soul. They seek to erase human agency and emotion from the framework of civilization itself.
The American psychologist G. M. Gilbert, who observed high-ranking Nazis during the Nuremberg trials, once wrote, “I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy… A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
The choice before us is stark: do we embrace what first made us civilized, or do we surrender to an age where cruelty isn’t just tolerated but celebrated? Welcome to the Age of Mean. That healed bone was a testament to our capacity for kindness. If we abandon that now, we’re not just breaking civilization—we’re making damn sure it never heals again.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
