An Anthropological Fable

1 The Bushmen’s Rise
     Recent discoveries newly deciphered have uncovered fragments of the history of an ancient tribe.  They gave no name to themselves in their own records but were called by others the Bushmen.  They were the dominant tribe of their era in their region.
     Actually this name “Bushmen” referred to only one faction or sect within the larger scheme of the tribe but because of its clear domination of tribal politics throughout this period its name was adopted by others to describe the entire tribe.  Legend has it that they rose to power by vanquishing the other major group in the tribe called the Carterites.  The Carterites themselves were one time reformers who had gotten sloppy and either forgot how to reform or at least forgot that the reforms they did enact actually were required to work.  The founder of what would become (some might say ‘devolve’ into) the Bushmen was someone named Reagan or Regan.  It is not clear whether this was a man or a woman as the term used to describe his former status in the community was a gender neutral word close to our concept of actor or actress.
     Contrary to type this Regan, who was ordained by the tribe to reform the reformers, was not a youthful reformer at all, but apparently an older personage quite long in the tooth. Though his group adapted the trappings and portrayed themselves as populists and reformers, they were really driven by the anti-reform sentiments of an elitist fundamentalist faction which believed that the concept of economic and religious equality had spread too far in the tribe.  This throwback group promised to engineer a return to the halcyon “old ways” of doing things when a few powerful men and institutions ruled the tribe to the benign satisfaction of all.
     Because this famous Regan or Reagan (who our sources only refer to tangentially as if knowledge of him was presupposed and who some, presumably his enemies, actually called “Ragman”), was apparently past grand master of a series of annual tribal festivals.   Hence the term “actor” to describe him and his status in the community was more accurate than dismissive.  
    The regime he established was likewise unsurprisingly laden with theatricality, repetition and rote, theoretically to make the movement itself seem larger and more pervasive than it actually was.  Each and every one of whom came to be known as the Bushmen had to be schooled in the use of certain catch phrases which they used repetitiously to mark their new freedom from progress away from the old innovations of the deposed Carterite reformers.  Religious rites were also established and old dogmas reemphasized which, as is always the way with religious rites, soon became smitten with more form than substance.
     So before long, just as the Carterite reformers had mislaid the point of all their reforms, the Bushmen forgot the purpose that all their promises, elaborate rites, rituals and terminology were designed to bring about.   Although they continued to criticize and ostracize anyone who was not strictly “pure” according to their own definition of purity and even as they styled themselves morally superior to others in the tribe not of their sect, they were soon acting just as badly and in many cases even worse than the Carterites had before them.  And of course, once in power, with complete abandon, both sides acted far worse in their public positions than any of the normal members of the tribe not already in prison ever did.
     As the Bushmen became more and more jealous of any encroachment on their power they became more shrill in defense of it.  Soon they were injudiciously enforcing an increasingly sterile societal structure that restricted all but the most loyal of their members from sharing in the generalized riches of the tribe.  As the Bushmen leaders became greedier and greedier, this naturally led over time to the atrophy of the well being and prosperity of the tribe as a whole.  Finally, their initial feint of populism came to be seen by most members of the tribe as a dishonest facade and their formulaic rituals less a return to the principles of their fathers than a movement farther away from them.  
     This was the rough backdrop of the tribe’s prior history, only alluded to briefly and incompletely in the surviving documents, just as a new struggle for power in the tribe erupted.  The texts we have take up the story just as the last of the direct line of the Bushmen was staggering to the end of his rule.  He was apparently a particularly crass, ignorant and incompetent ruler who carried the principle of loyalty to himself and his office to such an wild extreme of self-destruction and cronyism and unworkability that he had not only brought the tribe to the point of ruin but undercut his own base of support in the process.

2 Tribal Succession
among the Bushmen
     Tribal succession throughout history has often been a tortuous, brutal, messy and even sometimes bloody affair.  The ruling party has generally spent a significant portion of its time in power rigging the framework of succession in every way they can and can get away with to ensure their own continuing domination.  They design their rule to exploit their own strengths and to expose the weakness of their opponents.  They set up artificial rules and beliefs which must be rigorously adhered to precisely in order preclude all but those of their own type and persuasion from qualification.  Then they use these entrenched powers to obdurately resist any change which might challenge their self-serving and self-perpetuating regimen.
     Therefore, though the ruling party of the Bushmen had become exceedingly unpopular it did not follow that they would be easy to unseat.  In fact, structural impediments artificially created to protect stagnant regimes are at their worst coincident to when they are hardest to overturn.
    But in this society the door for change was always wisely left ajar.  Every few years there actually existed a nod to democracy, a formalized debate over who should be the next tribal leader which resulted in a vote, what we might call an election or plebiscite, to determine who should be in charge of setting the future course of the tribe.  
    Surprisingly, this was not just sham and pretense.  Apparently, it was such an integral part of the way the tribe thought of itself that it could not be completely corrupted or entirely done away with (much as some would try).  Therefore, it is remarkable from our sources that just prior to the reign of the last disastrous Bushmen leader there had actually been a tribal leader from the clan in opposition to the Bushmen (a natural heir of the formerly beaten Carterites) who had triumphed in two successive plebiscites and run the tribe for eight years.  
    This would seem to suggest that the Bushmen were not as unassailably dominant in their control over the tribe as has been previously thought.  But in fact, on closer scrutiny, despite the presence of this opposition leader as titular head of the tribe it seems clear that behind the scenes the Bushmen still maintained the predominance of effectual control over its direction.  Not only could they often block what this opposition tribal chieftain (Whose name has been lost to us, probably erased by angry Bushmen scribes.  Only a nickname remains, roughly translated as “Slick” in the sense of tricky - undoubtedly a term of grudging derision by his enemies.) wanted done, they even tried to depose him by some crude, primitive parliamentary type coup which fell just short of succeeding.  
     To prove the old axiom that the more things change the more the stay the same, this interloping anti-Bushmen tribal leader was apparently accused of breaking some secret tribal taboo (perhaps of a sexual or prurient nature, though this is unclear from the texts, which seem embarrassed by the entire episode).  Shockingly, according to our unimpeachable sources, the hypocritical accusers were frequently guilty of breaking this very same taboo themselves, even as they tried to depose a political enemy for the same low crime or misdemeanor.  
    Seen from afar through the hazy mists of long discarded time, it seems inescapable to us now that this attempt to depose the opposition leader was more a crude attempt by the angry Bushmen to regain power than an expression of genuine outrage or shock over any alleged ethical failure of the otherwise “slick” opposition leader.  This rather tends to enforce the sense of a growing abasement of Bushmen tribal standards rather than providing evidence of their superior allegiance to them.
     The only thing this failed, semi-legal coup does illustrate to a careful observer is that the Bushmen considered themselves so powerful and impervious to recrimination that even such a bald power grab as this would not be held against them.  At least in their own minds, and probably in fact, this proves that the Bushmen still exercised the predominance of power in the tribe, even down to controlling the two main councils necessarily to approve the tribe’s general, day to day governance.  Therefore, even when the tribe seemed nominally controlled by their opponents the Bushman belligerence was boiling just beneath the surface.
    But on a deeper and longer level, perhaps their belief that they were above the law’s recrimination was short sighted.  The very fact that they did not succeed in deposing the “slick” opposition leader would seem to indicate a mistaken overreach beyond the limits of their power.  Historians tend to oversimplify history so apparently the Bushmen’s hold on power was more tenuous and complex than the traditional record has shown.  Our newest research tends to imply that this power was steadily weakening even during the entire period of their domination.  
    To illustrate this, the last Bushman leader, the one we have previously referred to, was just barely able to win the last two times the tribal plebiscite had placed the position up for grabs.  The first win was so closely contested and contentious that it even led to dark claims by the losers that corrupt practices had been engaged in to put him over the top and allow the Bushmen party to regain the unassailed leadership of the tribe.   
    In the main, the basis of Bushmen power seems to have been built upon luck, clever political maneuvering, disorganized and dispirited opposition and individual one time threats from outside which allowed them to unite the tribe through fear, more than any intrinsic governing ability, fairness or brilliance displayed in leading the tribe. 
    In any case by the time of our documentation there seems to have been significant erosion of the Bushmen’s strength since their optimistic founding by the aforementioned Reagan. 

3  The Bushmen in Crisis 
    At the point our particular narrative begins - but unfortunately does not end, as its conclusion is never adequately elucidated in the record - there had developed a new and dangerous threat to Bushmen power.  The details of individual issues which may have affected the tribe in those times have been washed out by time and faded beyond the point of reclamation and understanding.  From afar it seems that the tribe was faced with a classic narcissistic crisis of a generational change in leadership.  
    To this end a new opposition leader arose to confront the waning Bushmen power.  From all our sources he was a much favored son of the tribe, brilliant, young and gifted in the rather arcane mores of the tribe, or at least the obscure means and pathways to acceding to power within it. For the Bushmen the stakes were enormous.  Should he succeed at what he promised they might well be placed in eclipse for a generation.
     To inoculate themselves against this formidable opponent the Bushmen put forward a well known tribal elder to confront him.  Once, back in some long forgotten war he had been a hero, but now was merely an upholder of the status quo.  Formally an outspoken opponent of the last discredited Bushman leader –which is apparently what lent him his appeal as an independent thinker - he was now tasked to be a staunch defender and heir of all the failed policies of the previous Bushmen standard bearer.
      True to form, this quite well respected Bushmen tribal elder comes across in our records as a surly and unrepentant defender of Bushmen policies, even ones he may have formerly properly disagreed with.   Instead he played on age-old tried and true principles of (for lack of a more historically evocative and detailed description) fear and smear, not unknown to us today, and pander and slander, to try to hold down his youthful challenger.  As far as we can tell, a new word, loosely transcribing to a word equivalent to “terror” or “terrorism” in English (a concept never seen before in the tribal records of the proud tribe) highly evocative of fear and self-doubt, starts to frequently appear in all Bushmen tribal statements and documents. 
    With this specter of fear was real, a figment of their imagination or a pillar of their continuing control of their people is hard to judge from this distance.  Let it suffice to point out that to our knowledge the Bushmen people were never then or later overcome by any outside force.  This would lead one to believe that this recourse to fears of terror were either overblown for effect or a telltale sign of the degraded lack of will of the Bushmen obsessed by them.
    Meanwhile, predictably, just as any older politician faced with a younger one might today, the old Bushmen frequently alluded to the challenger’s lack of experience and résumé in a leadership position – a failure obviously rendered necessary by the Bushmen’s stranglehold on power – and inferred him a traitor to the old ways, an enemy of tradition; all the while questioning his parentage, his loyalty to the defense of the tribe, his religious piety and his shocking freedom from allegiance to policies which had obviously long since ceased to work.
     At the same time, the elder Bushmen insisted the challenger show elaborated allegiance to all the recondite rules and rites and regulations which the ruling power had erected precisely to preclude people exactly like him from ever having a chance to rise within their eccentric, concentric and corrupted system.  
    This ancient Bushmen and his supporters did their best to ridicule the challenger and obscure all favor from him and disguise their methods and employ their offices and shift and reinterpret their rules differently, in order to “wrong foot” the challenger or goad him into an immature reaction all in order to claim he was unfit for succession to their august positions due to an entire list and blithering disarray of technicalities.  
     Apparently there was an old saying in this tribe that the old warhorse the Bushmen had put up against the vigorous challenger took to heart which, loosely translated, read something like – “the universal tendency in life for youth, vigor, idealism and change to struggle to rise in life may always be beaten down and kept in check by the persistent efforts of money, power, old age and treachery.”  This seems to be a perfectly clear reflection of the methodology the old Bushmen employed in this contest.  
    Even from a distance as far as ours from theirs it is obvious that the Bushmen had come to embrace their role as devoted enemies of progress.  Over time they had positioned themselves as enemies of innovation, arguers against consensus and testing of alternatives, opportunistic devotees of the expedient half truth and shameless upholders of misconceptions which they knew to be untrue but thought played best to the worst tribal superstitions.  Their sole effort in this plebiscite was not to justify their own actions, or convince the tribe of their intention of doing better, but only to discredit the alternative choice to their rule by any means and method they could possibly devise and get away with.  The Bushmen had fallen so low in expectation that they claimed value not as proponents of good or seekers of excellence but only positioned themselves as the default leadership role, the lesser of evils, not so that things might grow better under them but that they could grow even worse under anyone else.
    Such a platform, if they did succeed, would surely not augur well for the future of the tribe.

4 The role of the challenger 
    in a Bushmen election
     The challenger’s role in such a struggle was infinitely more delicate than the defender of the status quo – even one that has obviously failed.  He has to first thoroughly learn the very system which he is seeking to gain control of solely in order to transform it. He has to prove he can operate well within the rules of this system even though it has been designed specifically to preclude people like him from being able to aspire to be successful in it.  He must participate in this corrupt system while being scrupulously careful not to be captured and have his own principles compromised by the very system he is plotting to overcome.  
    At all times he has to show elaborate respect and obeisance to the current older leadership no matter how jaded and discredited they have become.  He can not appear uppity or entitled.  And even as he roundly criticizes the results of these desperate supernumaries, he must take care to make a distinction between the actors and their actions (as if the two could be separated).  While staying humble and showing elaborate respect to his elders he must be bold and show enough vigor and pride, independence, ideas and strength of spirit left over to change the very system he is vying to lead.  
    He has to do all these cross purposed things while remaining ever cautious not to scare the middle members of the tribe – often a majority - who don’t really care who leads them as long as nothing is asked of them.  He must convince them to accept a reformation of the old order they simultaneously fear and yet desperately desire.  The danger for him here lays that in trying to balance these competing forces it is easy to lose sight of oneself and suffer from a deadly lack of definition. And in trying to please everyone, he may become so timid that he winds up pleasing none.
    It is clear from the records that the younger challenger’s goal in this race was always to seek to unite the tribe behind him and lift them up by preaching to the hope of the future.  He had to breathe fresh air into the decaying carcass of a failing system.  And according to our texts he had the youthful air, the confident mien, the optimistic outlook which made all of these things seem possible.  
    Such optimism was portrayed by the Bushmen as being all wrong for the times.  The older candidate’s efforts to beat off the usurper revolved around keeping the tribe frightened not only of the ascendancy of a new man (and a new generation) among them but of a multiplicity of other visceral and unexpressed fears.  The Bushmen knew they must keep the tribe confused, angry and divided against itself in order that they not unite and throw them out.  This would not only deny them further gains but threaten the unjustifiable prosperity their own elitist preferments had already allowed them to amass.  
    The irony of this argument, from all other available sources, was that this was far and away the most powerful and prosperous tribe in the region with very little to fear and everything in the world to be optimistic about.  Yet the Bushmen were still preaching - quite successfully our sources infer - fear, greed, prejudice, hate, internal division and limitations.
     What to make of a powerful tribe consumed by its own angst and internal prejudices and greed?  No one seriously disputed the harmful affect the rule of the Bushmen had had on the tribe but, even against their own best interests, its members still somehow credited them.  They allowed themselves to be strangely bullied and consumed by these past hates and fears that they were afraid to put them aside to embrace a more optimistic and hope filled future.  The danger of history is that blind adherence to a long forgotten past and entirely discredited present by a society leads directly on a certain line to its antiquation and a future of endless decline.

5 The Fall of the Bushmen?
     Here, unfortunately this compelling narrative comes to a sudden stop.  Clearly the entire future of the Bushmen and this tribe was left hanging in the balance of this decision.  Would they let the new man correct their problems by investing him with the power to meet them head on and forcefully subdue them as their ancestors had obviously done to make the tribe uniquely powerful in the first place?  Or would they pause and reflect, fright and quail at the difficulties which faced them and succumb to fear and internal divisions, be befuddled at the vexing complexity of the changing world around them, sag under an discredited status quo and continue to fall toward obscurity by blindly supporting the Bushmen?  
    We have studied many such junctures in other societies. They are not uncommon.  These turning points, either up or down, forward or back, toward progress or toward decline, are of paramount importance to history.  A society that learns to tolerate the mediocrity of failure and ceases to hold its leadership accountable for some modicum of performance commensurate with the needs and aspirations of their society is on a slow trajectory to ruin.  That society which is not slowly progressing is rapidly regressing.
    By use of these vituperative and divisive tactics it is clear not only that the Bushmen were more than willing to accept the continuing failure of the tribe with them in charge but would almost rather destroy the tribe than see its leadership pass into anyone else’s hands. It is a dangerous prospect for any society to contemplate, when the lack of care that one part of a society has for the remainder has diminished to such an extent that it has become self-destructive of the tribe itself and no longer bows to a common purpose in pursuit of a common and greater good.
    Maddening as our lack of certainty is on the topic, the indication is, unfortunately, that through whatever means and guile and against all odds, the Bushmen somehow managed to beat down or outmaneuver the presumptive challenger - acknowledged even by many of the Bushmen to be the most promising new leader to have come along in the tribe for several generations - and kept his succession from occurring.  
    At this time this all lays beyond our ability to prove one way or the other, of course.  All we know for certain is that the decline and respect and notice of this tribe built up in the region over generations seems to have from this time steadily diminished.  
    Our deduction is that apparently this generation of tribal members couldn’t summon up the courage to successfully leap to the other side of the rushing stream that confronted them.  They went the way of all great nations and fell prey to fear of their own future which rendered them captive to the mistakes of their past until, unable to correct their present problems, they fell off the map of the notice of the world.  It seems their leaders had grown too incapable to arrest the death spiral of internal division, futility, greed, and fear of the future which so marked the League of Bushmen. 

     Moral – a nation that is too corrupt or grown fearful to change with the times will soon be buried by its passing by, continue to lose ground against the curve of time and eventually be forgotten as time marches on without it.