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It's only after watching this video that I had to do a little research on exactly how powerful these gorillas really are. What you just watched in the video I shared is a Western lowland gorilla.
A silverback gorilla could crush a car door with its hands. It could pull a tree apart like cardboard. And what does it actually do with that? They mostly sit around watching and thank God they don't have as much intelligence as we do, they would have taken over and dominated humanity. They just let the younger ones play around it.
That's not signs of weakness obviously, but it's passivity. That's something more like authority without performance. The chest beating, the charging, that's all theater and it's intentional theater. It's really all about not having to fight. They put on all that show to make fighting unnecessary. Unnecessary fighting and war is just bad math for everybody involved and the gorillas seem to understand that on some level, even if a whole lot of people around the world, especially those in political power never manage to figure that out during the course of their entire lives.
What's worth thinking about is the way the power, the strength, the restraint, all of these are not opposed to each other. They are the same thing working together. The restraint is only effective because the strength is real. A silverback that had no power and no strength, would be nothing more than a speed bump to be gotten out of the way. So technically the peace is real because the war is possible. Perhaps that's the logic of the politicians who think war is necessary.
We think of physical dominance as a synonym for aggression almost instinctively. Gorillas blow that association out of the water. The most dominant animal in the group is often the least dangerous looking on a given day.
And they're critically endangered too. That changes the color of everything else that has to do with them. So much sophistication, such nuanced social interaction, all of that is playing out in a group that's dying.
