The Mirror Moment
A quiet chat in a desolate building with an old friend now in his sixties. Over cold coffee, he discloses the chronic regret that has festered for fifty years. In an all-Christian school heavy in the Roar of conformity, he joined the herd bullying the lone Jewish boy. The standard gas jokes of the time, casual cruelty dressed up as "just how things are." The boy's frightened eyes downcast, shoulders in their now usual hunch under the weight, history, and isolation. The pack laughed drowning any quiet internal doubt.
It weighs heavy on him now, the old child’s mortification. But why only now? There is something in the air now resurrecting the once quiet voice that gently nagged at him back then.
The Roar of that era, baked into cruel school norms and unspoken prejudices, drowned out any quiet voice of compassion. Turning ordinary kids into unwitting “eroders” of those at the edges of the herd.
Think back to the slave-owner cracking the whip across a sweat-soaked back of a now “contacted” tribe. Blistering in the fields, human property chained, families torn apart as they were introduced to "civilization." We saw that almost in real time before doubting the history where the camp guard herded families into gas chambers. Those ordinary hands flipping ordinary switches making ordinary mountains of corpses because “orders”.
Feel the righteous disgust boil. “I could never… I wish I had been there to stop it!” But pause here, in this mirror moment
Add this to the reflection. How do you look in the mirror, clothes stitched by hands in faraway factories enduring slave-like conditions. Today's Roar calls it "necessary progress" or "affordable convenience." Facts stare back. Children labouring in cobalt mines for the battery in your phone as you are scrolling past the migrant crisis news. Can you feel the opposite of a shock surprise revelation as you read this?
Think about all the times you have been part of something like that? If you can. A group pile-on at work, a silent nod to exclusion in a social circle. That small quiet nagging inside, only to be pushed aside because "everyone else is doing it." That is the same quiet drowned in the slave-owner, as well as the guard that certainly existed.
The Myth of the Monster
The comforting story we tell ourselves is simple and naive. There are monsters and there are good people. Monsters are born different, twisted from the start, evil to the core. Good people like us somehow are beyond that line (no matter how many times we cross it). We watch documentaries about the Holocaust, read about the slave trade, see grainy footage of lynchings scroll past the persistent modern-day equivalents on our phones, casually horrified. If only we could rid the world of these monsters. Wipe their disgusting smiles off the face of the earth, they are nothing like us?
Consider Reserve Police Battalion 101, the “Ordinary Men” Christopher Browning studied in his book of the same name. Average middle-aged working-class German, truck drivers, bakers, office clerks, family men, who had never fired a shot in anger. We can know they were “ordinary” as all the violent, psychopathic, or ideological fanatics were drawn to the SS and other such divisions. In 1942, these reservists were sent to Poland with orders to round up and shoot Jewish villagers. No special training, just orders. Commanders had even offered them the unusual chance to opt out, with no punishment, just a quiet release. Few took it. If you read the book, you can learn this was because they never wanted to let their colleagues down. That is the Roar in the group all around them.
At first many were hesitant, with some vomiting and others silently crying. The Roar, ever patient, relentlessly took them there one small drunken step at a time. “Everyone is doing it.” “These are the orders.” “If you don’t do your bit, someone else will have to.” “letting comrades down!” One by one, yielding till by the end they had murdered over 38,000 men, women, and children. Most were shot at close range in pits they had to dig themselves. Not because they were sadists. Not because they hated Jews more than the average German did. But because the Roar drowned the quiet voice screaming this was wrong.
My friend in the schoolyard? He was not born cruel. He was not a monster waiting to emerge. He was an ordinary boy in an ordinary school, with the Roar of the time’s norms. Anti-Semitism still half-normalised, a bit like today, where difference is targeted. Violence feels like belonging. The quiet voice was there as it is now. A faint, twisting in the gut that you can try silence with extra cruelty on the victim you blame. But belonging with all its vehemence is so much more satiating. So, we never stop yielding! Again, and again.
The monster myth protects us for a while as the weak are trampled upon and forgotten in their horror.
The Roar's Mechanism – How It Happens
Let us add one more layer to what we saw in Chapter 1. The Roar is not a booming voice controlling drone apes. In the same way that our disguised primal instincts drive us to shift alliances, betraying the weak to edge closer to the centre. Similarly, the Roar has its own competing trajectories, splintering and clashing like rival forces testing which path survives. Almost like it has a life force of its own.
In our minds we can imagine a troop of fifty chimps that have fragmented into two main subgroups. One faction backs a brutal rising alpha (the Roar of aggression), another is behind a clever alliance-builder (the Roar of strategy). They ferociously war for control, betraying the weak or isolated as the internal hierarchy of the troop adjusts. The blind mathematics of group survival mechanism at work in the bloodied flying fur and screaming of the canopy. For the survivors of the defeated, they are either exiled or exist at the dangerous edge of the colony, and the troop persists with a newly invigorated core.
In the politics of human apes, pro- and anti-factions clash, with each amplifying its own Roar. Sometimes this takes the form of fear and conformity on one side, change, and rebellion on the other. In the benign case war takes place in the abstract, until one curtails the other via an election. Sometimes the shift is through unrest, social collapse, hot war with all its death. In the schoolyard of my friend’s memory, mini-Roars competed. The dominant Christian conformity of the time drowned quieter doubts to betray the Jewish boy as “other” in its effort to “fortify” the herd.
When it happens, the disgust and fear rise quickly in us as an instinctive sour twisted hatred. Our primate signal co-opted for moral culls, dressed as “concern” or “boundaries” that flip compassion into suspicion and then betrayal.
This devastation and renewal arrives in a temporary, horribly obvious truth of the age, rich in ready-made excuses, as we override our previously lauded morals. “It’s the particular year!” “For the greater good, to right a previous injustice!” “Those disgusting rabble deserve it after what they did in the past!” The Roar shields the emotion. This allows nuance to be the first casualty, before embracing brutality without horror or guilt. Often with pride and joy. The herd moving forward, faster, unburdened
The quiet voice inside us lifts that shield, forcing the awful question: “What have they… we… I done?” Most of the time, the competing Roars are too loud. The quiet voice gets drowned below the waves of adrenaline, hatred, fear and belonging. All nicely wrapped up into the fragile permissive ideology of the moment we are now subscribing to. It waits, faint and persistent, pulling down on your delicate ego for the right moment to bump the path forward in a better direction.
Friendship – A Mirror Moment
There is a learning moment here if we dare to face it. We usually learn how transactional our friendships are as we find ourselves at the edge of them. That warm family-like feeling while you’re the laugh or the sober ride home. Become chronically ill and watch that party move on. In that quiet time when your phone never rings, you realise what you never saw in front of your eyes. How easy and quick, and what it felt like pushing the others out that went before you. Like the defeated chimp with the dull coat, appetite gone and flat eyes, waiting for its neighbour’s shove. There is a weird freedom if you don’t beg or chase, just let go. No resentment or rage in the awareness as you move sideways or down.
In the same way, don’t form too much attachment as you find your way moving toward the centre of the tribe either. The centre is just the loudest spot where the Roar is thickest. You feel chosen, alive, safe. The moment your contribution drops, a new favourite with a new story and new energy emerges. The vibe shifts. The circle closes behind you. It’s the same equation. Only the direction changes. So, give what you can while you’re there but hold it lightly. The herd doesn’t love. It moves. And you can dance with it or beside it without pretending it’s forever.
Erosion & Restoration – The Full Cycle
We have seen how the Roar operates: patient, relentless, splintering into competing forces that test and prune until one path survives. But the mechanism is not one-sided. There is erosion — and there is restoration.
The Roar erodes. It betrays, isolates, discards. In the chimp troop, the weak are shoved to the edge or attacked outright — not from hatred, but from the blind math of speed and survival. In human tribes, the same happens: the colleague's schoolyard pack turned on the Jewish boy to fortify the centre; the Battalion 101 men yielded step by step until murder became routine; the workplace faction gossips and sabotages to gain favour. The disgust rises quick as compassion flips to suspicion, then to betrayal. The Roar dresses it as necessity: "for the team," "for the greater good," "they deserve it." The herd moves faster, unburdened.
We have all been part of that erosion. We have laughed to drown the doubt. We have stayed silent when someone was shoved to the edge. We have added one small jab, one nod, one scroll-past — and felt the quiet nag twist, only to push it down because belonging felt safer. We have been the Roar ourselves.
Ordinary hands. Our hands.
But there is a quieter voice that restores. It does not roar back. It does not demand statues or vindication. It lifts the shield and forces the question: "What have I done?" Then it acts quietly, locally, at great cost.
Imagining my friend was able in his aged competence and physical prowess to return to that schoolyard. A proud YouTube moment, standing defiant, screaming about the injustice of it all. A moment certain to earn him the mark of a traitor, deserving of more violence. He would be eroded fast, ostracised, and soon regret ever stepping out of line.
The quiet pivot is smaller, subtler, more survival shaped. A quiet word to the boy during recess ("Ignore them, come sit with me?"). A deflection in the moment ("Come on, he's not bothering anyone"). A whisper to one ally (“what if this ever happened to us?").
These moves do not rewrite history in one stroke. They do not get statues. They create a tiny pocket of restoration making one person a little less eroded.
The Roar erodes for speed. The quiet restores for persistence.
We have been the monster more often than we can face.