KATRINA'S GROWL

We're down to two dogs at the rancho, Negrita and Katrina. Both are friendly, good-natured female dogs, but they're very different from one another. Negrita is a young adult, eager to play all the time, and not much of a thinker, still not having realized that it's no good barking and leaping beneath a tree with a high-up squirrel in it. Katrina is old, mellow and she thinks things out, makes plans, and looks disgusted when Negrita jumps toward treetop squirrels.

Both want to stay with me at the hut all the time, but Katrina won't let Negrita come without growling and baring her fangs, at which time Negrita must flop onto her back, expose her belly, look pitiful, let Katrina smell her all over and stand beside her for three or four minutes. Only when Katrina looks away can Negrita slink onto the hut porch and curl up in her designated spot. This happens, even though Negrita is by far the stronger, more agile dog, and easily could beat Katrina in any fight. However, Negrita is as submissive as Katrina is insistent on constantly being recognized as Top Dog.

The situation upsets Negrita and causes her to stay at the tool shed much of the time. Then Katrina misses her, for they're close friends, loving to roam the woods together. When Negrita is gone, Katrina spends hours gazing up the trail down which Negrita eventually will come. Katrina looks forlorn, and Negrita at the shop looks sad. But, the moment Negrita approaches, the growling begins and Negrita has to flop. Both dogs look sad most of the time, missing being together.

Dog sociology is cartoonized commentary on human society, thinking and feeling. Basically, both dogs and humans habitually are victims of their own headsets, their own belief systems, their own genetic and social programming, the main difference being that sometimes humans can consciously and consistently overcome their programming.

But, it's hard to overcome programming. As I've thought about the matter this week, I've come to agree with many others that, at least for humans wanting happy, sustainable lives, at the heart of the difficulty lies our egos -- our self centeredness, our pride, our self indulgences, our Top Dogism. It's Katrina's obsession with her personal status that brings canine disharmony to the hut.

Among others who have focused on the ego as the prime source of human misery are the Buddha, who taught that to achieve nirvana one must lose all sense of self. In Hinduism's concept of reincarnation, the goal is to be born into ever more enlightened states of being until the rebirths stop and, again, there's no self.

Nature, though, seems to indicate that human self-awareness/ego is important, for She takes care to create among us humans all degrees of self centeredness, from the most miserly, self-serving, self-indulgent tyrants to the most generous, community-minded, humble, self-disciplined among us. Maybe Nature's teaching here is that for internal peace and happiness the problem isn't having egos, but rather that we should manage them -- manage our selves -- ourselves.

An insight that can help in ego managment is that the egocentric predisposition seems, at least to me, to be distributed throughout humanity according to the Bell Curve. The vast majority of us function more or less in the Bell Curve's middle, between the most self-centered and the most other-minded. The masses in the middle can sway toward either side, depending on which side has the most charismatic leader -- right if it's a Hitler, left if it's a Jesus.

To support these notions, there's history. I'm reading now about ancient Greece, and it's striking how equally the population back then was divided between the right-wing, dictator/oligarch-loving Spartans and the relatively left-wing, democracy-craving Athenians. Before Hitler, Germany was fairly equally divided between right-wing fascist tendencies and left-wing socialist. And today, there are the Trumpists and anti-Trumpists.

The sad thing is that history also shows, again and again, that once a certain threshold of animosity between the right and left of the Bell Curve of Self-Centeredness is reached, compromises no longer are possible. Things get worse and worse until one side makes the other side flip onto its back, display total submission, and look pitiful. Eventually the winner's imposed order does fall apart, and things start all over again, but by then both sides -- and normally also the environment, ravaged by wartime resource extraction and destruction -- have suffered awfully.

For humanity, all these conflicts have fueled biological and social human evolution. However, the fragile, vulnerable little Earth just can't stand being the stage for many more of humanity's self-inflicted conflicts between right and left.