“Negativity is not, strictly speaking, a news-maker problem; it’s a human problem—or, more to the point, a collective-action problem, in a dual-sided marketplace” —Derek Thompson ~ The Atlantic
Yesterday I was gratified to get a notification from the Atlantic, giving me the link to an article called, “The Internet Loves Bad News. And That’s Bad.” Provided therein is a timely example proving my point that people have a vested interest in news that depresses them, even for the very reason that it depresses them. This is what I attempted to describe in my post a week ago, “We Who Volitionally Stoke Outrage Just to Enjoy the Spectacle It Incites Have No Right to Complain About How ‘Divided’ We are, or How Depressing the News is.” I don’t know how successful I was. Feel free to let me know if I’m making no sense.
For any of you who might have missed the central point I was trying to make (and probably took it for just another one of my sweeping indictments of mass culture which it was partly), what I was trying to say is that, contrary to conventional wisdom and commonsense perhaps, if only for lack of anything better to do nowadays, in the 21st century we create and stoke, incite, manufacture, fabricate and foment drama, and elevate trivialities to the realm of existential urgency and personal significance, because as human beings we need to worry and suffer meaningfully in order to live, even if there’s no good reason for it. Especially when we have no good reason to be angry, we need to make a reason up. Because, a little like what Voltaire said, if, “God didn’t exist, it would be necessary for man to invent him.” And you crave meaning or status for yourself more, the less hungry you are and the better healthcare you have etc.
There is no real reason to suffer and worry anymore. Why is there—or should there rather—be nothing to worry about though? Because in rich industrialized western countries with modern medicine from penicillin to Covid vaccines, food surplus, lower infant mortality than ever, higher purchasable incomes than ever, longer life expectancies, we should be happy. But all this material progress and abundance actually makes people immensely unhappy and ungrateful, self-absorbed, inward looking, and resentful and envious towards others. So because we have all the time and all the resources in the world, we have willfully, stupidly, arrogantly, cruelly decided to wage culture wars against each other to sate our deranged status envy.
We only have the luxury to be butt hurt (a colloquialism I got from school that I have adapted for sociological purposes)—hence the anal character of all the aggrieved—that progress doesn’t happen evenly, and that the march of progress always leaves someone out, who can’t quite keep up. Because with all this abundance, the matter of status is the one thing humanity conspicuously has not conquered yet, and the more abundance you have the more status—however the pettiest concern imaginable!— becomes an issue. This is why we have identity politics. This is why social justice radicals delude themselves that old white men collude behind a curtain to control everything and oppress everyone who’s not white and male systematically.
It is also why the MAGA radicals delude themselves of the reverse, that black people, women and trans people, on the contrary, control everything, systematically. And this is why we think that either one faction or the other has to be right, and the other group has to be wrong. Or else…
We can see no in between. Zero sum commitment to our tribal identity groups and slogans compels that if you’re not completely for, then that makes you against. Indeed we don’t want to see or think about any compromise. Since we have no imagination or foresight and of course because people are stupid, we don’t want cultural issues to go away, because then life would be boring and complex. It would be boring and life would probably be yet more depressing without all this fun moral crusading, recrimination, banning—banning Muslims, banning immigrants, banning abortion, banning books, banning Tik Tok—and cancelling—cancelling Kyle Duncan, JK Rowling, Megyn Kelly, Amy Coney Barrett’s book, and sterilizing Roald Dahl’s books. This is why we have all this righteous blind hatred for everything that doesn’t go our petty personal optimized way.
To do the responsible, mature thing, on the other hand, and limit oneself to addressing issues that actually matter with deliberate policy and sustained inquiry, like the war in Ukraine, funding social security, reducing the deficit—and to limit oneself to the idea that progress can only happen gradually and incrementally, and with the knowledge that the best chance of progress happening is to refrain from using the government to enforce it—that would be boring. That is if people even wanted progress. Most of us one way or another seem to want to roll everything back to the premodern age of banning and killing whatever and whoever you don’t like, and submit to an all powerful state. To actually sit down and read a fucking book even, and go an hour without checking social media, and cultivate a fucking attention span, would be too hard. Or going to work. What about working? Doesn’t anyone have a god damn job anymore?
Lane Hickenbottom Reuters
Damian Dovarganes AP
Olivier Doulieri Getty Images
Ana Venagas The Times
I think I might have actually mentioned this already. If I did sorry, but I’m saying it again— I read somewhere that young people increasingly want more time off work to devote more time to political activism! It was one of the most absurd and decadent things I have ever read—where we used to resort to politics in order to get better jobs to raise our standard of living—now young people want to leave their jobs to engage in politics!!!!!!
Furthermore
Now that we all have so much in terms of income and civil liberties, now we just can’t stand that other people have any more than we do. Hence we have chronic low self-esteem and no one in the west is ever happy unless their neighbor is losing. We only are this way after all the progress we have achieved, because it is human nature not to be happy, and we have a strong desire to deny rational thought, if we feel like we don’t need it, or it doesn’t amuse us. My friend Claire Berlinski, who runs the great “Cosmopolitan Globalist” Substack (which you should all pay to subscribe to), shared this online exchange she had with someone who sympathized with the pension rioters in France—
“I might understand it, I replied, if the underlying grievance made any sense. But it didn’t.
“That is the whole f*cking point,” he replied. “It’s not about the grievance per se. The rioting is the point. It’s about the visceral assertion of power by ‘the people’—whoever that happens to be at the time.”
But that was irrational, I said. “The people to whom you’re proving this are yourselves. And the damage you’re doing, likewise.”
“This is the disconnect. If you answer like Spock, you cannot get it. French people are doing this because it makes them feel better about themselves, who they are, and their sense of agency.”
In my favorite line of this piece of hers, Claire says,
“These outbreaks of violence are thus a curious exercise in collective emotional regression, a mass auto-infantilization: The French are fantasizing into existence a parent against whom to rebel—a parent so powerful he could swell the Treasury’s coffers at will, should he wish, a cruel parent who declines to exercise this magical power and solve France’s budget arithmetic because he is neglectful, because he feels contempt for them—and they will show him.”
Ian Langsdon/ EPA Shutterstock
The Burden of Conscience
Moreover humans are the only animals with a conscience. So our lives are rife with excessive concern for other people, and what their status is, and we’re always judging our wellbeing by comparison with someone else’s. Claire noted that the French aren’t so miserable about the pension reform as much as they simply hate Macron for personal reason, because he is an educated elite who’s “out of touch.”If you want to best understand the psychology of the aggrieved, bitter, resentful contemporary person, read Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky.
The Strange Proximity of Entertainment to Misery
Our problems resulting from our inability to know what to do with our own abundance have proliferated in the age of information and indeed have come to define our experience of reality as one damn existential crisis after another, as Derek Thompson observes in his Atlantic article,
“In the early 20th century, car companies used assembly-line manufacturing to speed up the production of automobiles. To keep up with supply, auto executives needed new ideas to boost consumer demand. Alfred Sloan, the CEO of General Motors, reportedly came up with the idea of releasing annual vehicle models, with new colors and specs. Over time, advertisers called this concept “planned obsolescence”—putting arbitrary expiration dates on products to get people to buy more of them. Abundance birthed advertising.”
He says, “What does this have to do with news headlines? Well, the communication revolution in tech has expanded the marketplace for content, creating a crowded news environment where headline writers compete viciously for attention. In a marketplace of news abundance, the oversupply of content encourages posters to adopt the psychology of an advertiser: “How do I juice demand for my thing?” Just as a surfeit of auto production created the conditions for planned obsolescence, a bounty of content has given millions of people an advanced degree in the fluid dynamics of attention, and many of them seem to have arrived at the same conclusion: Five-alarm fires move traffic. Once again, abundance has birthed advertising”
So look, here interestingly our pathological unwillingness to go one second of our daily lives without drama has become a staple feature of the news industry. And we have the ridiculous arrogance to wonder at the “mental health crisis” when we manufacture drama for pleasure! It would be one thing if either we just wanted mental health, or we just wanted deranged existential drama. What appalls me is that we think we’re entitled to both.
The Problem of A Bad Conscience
All I was trying to illustrate in my volitional outrage post, not to moralize, but just to point out how hypocritical it is to wonder why we’re so divided or why the news is depressing, when we have a vested interest in being depressed. Which is not something I actually disagree with. It’s human nature. It’s a fact. If we need drama in order to enjoy ourselves, then fine. Just don’t complain about our divisions, your mental health, or stand in awe at how fucked up the world in the news is. When I informed you all, my dear subscribers, boasting, that soon I will be a volunteer firefighter, throwing myself headlong into burning buildings, I just meant to give you an analogy of how I’m giving my own will-to-suffer a good conscience.
How I Have A Good Conscience
I consume all the god damn depressing news I can. And I contemplate depressing god damn things on a daily basis. Not because I’m morbid, but just because I feel like it. We’re all morbid. I read about the war in Ukraine every day, and the banking crisis. I’ve been reading a lot of depressing stuff about the Iraq war since it’s the 20 year anniversary. I am trying to revive political commonsense in the western world on this blog. I have been out of college for three years, and I live with my mom, and I am not not moving out, because I cannot afford it, any time soon. I have a mountain of depressing student debt to pay off. I go to work as a depressing cashier at a large depressing corporate grocery store, where a lot of my morbidly obese customers depressingly buy lobster tails, steaks, and crab legs with depressing food stamps. And now I am signing up to join my volunteer local fire department, ideally to hurl myself in harm’s way, depressingly, and hopefully save people from depressing death. If reading or writing about the war in Ukraine or inflation, Iran’s nuclear capabilities, Xi Jinping’s mind-blowing geopolitical conceit, and how Biden is wrecking the economy or whatever, and leaping into fires—if this is all bad for my emotional well being, then Fine. Good. Great. If this is not good for me, then living is bad for your mental health then.
Suck it up.
— Jay