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
A Psychological Analysis of the West’s Discontents—Risk Aversion, Pain Avoidance, Low Pain Threshold, Cynicism and Unreasonable Despair
“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing ever grew straight” —Immanuel Kant
I. Give Me a Break
Regularly I see people write in the comments, at the end of the articles I read, why is the world so messed up? I see people asking journalists how they stay so informed without becoming depressed. I asked my boss if she followed the news early in our acquaintanceship. When I beamed how I love to read the news, she said to me, the news is depressing.
People say this all the time, that the news is depressing, and they marvel in overwhelmed awe at how fucked up the world is, as if the world weren’t always fucked up, and, as if we ever had any good reason not to expect it to be fucked up. This has been bothering me, not the fucked up world (I accepted that concrete reality always falls short of human ideals long ago, thank God), but this trend of people presuming and hoping idiotically against the facts and against the historical record, i.e. assuming that the world can be changed, presuming that it should be pleasant, presuming it should be peaceful, or at least that it shouldn’t be fucked up. With idealism there is always this assumption that the world is fallen, and yet the balance the world presumably depends on (so as not be fallen) can and should be rectified.
Every time I read or I see this, oh the news is so depressing bullshit I just see people imposing an inchoate ideal of world harmony on a bunch of cruel news and then like helpless children bitching in disappointment when the news isn’t what happy? It’s just as ridiculous to be upset that we don’t hear more good news. While I wouldn’t deny the world’s suffering is depressing to contemplate, I find it an absurd and childish thing to choose to regret it, as if at the drop of a hat, we could choose one way of organizing the world that all people and all countries, and namely we, could agree on and set a goal we could all move towards, univocally, in common, without disagreement, without conflict.
II. It Rankles as well as Depresses me That People Think that Because X is Depressing, It Makes Them Entitled to Avoid X: Where in other Words, the Truth Value of Something Ranks Second in Importance to the Emotional effect it Has on Your Nerves…
At the massive corporate grocery store where I work part time as a checkout cashier, one of my customers one day gave me a pamphlet. It said on the front page, “why is the world so divided?” Then there were all these quotes from the Bible. “Ezekiel,” was one name I remember. Before I even read it (which I didn’t) I winced with how tiresome the pamphlet appeared. I said to the lady, “What are you a Jehovah’s witness? I’m not religious. I don’t believe in God.” And she smiled at me in that cringingly omniscient way that people delude themselves to do, the result to arrogantly project an aura of mystical enlightenment, and she said to me in another attempt at swindling me with a fabricated aura of mystery, “Just read it…” No. I was resolved. Evangelical. Zealot. Palm reader. Away with you—was my train of thought as I checked her out, and she left the store.
Why is the world so divided?
It occurred to me just glaring at the pamphlet with disdain, for fuck’s sake I am so tired of people who choose naiively to be in awe of our divisions and helpless in the face of them.
For the world has always been divided! For most of human history, people have been violently disagreeing with other people, and indeed for most of history, it has actually been worse than it is now. Much worse. There used to be a lot more hate and contempt when we used to publicly torture and execute and banish people, just because they were Protestants or Catholics, or when we enslaved people just because they were dark-skinned. Or when we used to shoot people who offended our touchy honor in duels. We think it’s crazy when offended millennials want to cancel people on Twitter, but 300 years ago we would shoot each other over verbal slights. America’s divisions at least were much worse in the mid nineteenth century when half the country went to war with the other half over our inability to peacefully resolve the issue whether black people were even human beings, the same as white people.
III. Human Evil is Perennial, So Get Over Yourself
And America was still rife with divisions in the twentieth century, under Jim Crow. This was before black people could even attend the same public schools as whites in the south, and drink from the same water fountains and eat at the same restaurants. Indeed when Eisenhower sent in the national guard to enforce the Supreme Court’s ruling that segregation was unconstitutional, tensions approaching another civil conflict were in the air. And the only reason Eisenhower took so long to send in the guard was because he was afraid of igniting another civil war. This was a time moreover when black people continued to be lynched. For roundabout a century after the civil war, if you look it up, you will find it appalling the number of black people who were tortured, lynched, and mutilated by marauding redneck white people.
I find it quite ridiculous how depressing we find the world nowadays considering how far we’ve come since black people were routinely getting lynched. That’s not to say we don’t have new extremely depressing things to be worried about, and division. Black people aren’t getting lynched anymore, but still as the DOJ found the other day in their Louisville investigation, racism predominates among too many of our policemen. And, though I’m very much on the side of law and order, and I revile the excesses of the police reform and racial justice movement, I acknowledge, we still have a serious police brutality problem in America.
But probably the thing I find the most depressing of all is the innumerable mass shootings, particularly the school shootings. If there is one thing, that is the bane of living in this century, it’s the school shootings for me. Uvalde is the uppermost in my mind. There is simply nothing more terrible in recent American history than Uvalde. But you can add Russia’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine, regarding the rest of the world. That’s also up there with human evil and tragedy. So while people who stand in incapacitated awe at how depressing the suffering of the world is piss me off, and while I argue in a million unacknowledged ways things are actually better than we realize, I’m not saying there aren’t any honestly atrocious things going on nowadays. I would add our constitutional crisis on January 6th 2020.
And on the level of culture I will admit one of the things that depresses me the most, is the widespread lack of collective willingness to confront reality and use reason dispassionately to evaluate phenomena for their truth quotient, and to make nuanced, fair-minded decisions and reasoned judgments, by ourselves. The apparent collapse of rational thought, and independent thinking, coupled with the newfound contempt for logical reasoning, as a guy who loves to use his intellect, who, like Socrates would find no point in existence, without inquiry—the thing that really gets me down on a daily basis is the moral failure of contemporary people to be responsible human beings, and it’s just as much a moral as an aesthetic failure. It’s a failure to live a mature as well as an abundant existence, if you refuse to confront and embrace concrete reality, with your instincts as well as your intellect.
It’s depressing to me how many people seem to desire to retreat from perceiving, let alone embracing, the suffering of the world and the pain of existence, betraying a life-denying instinct for pain-avoidance. More banally, risk avoidance. It’s depressing to me how decadent and immature and shallow people have become to assume and to have internalized that they have a right not to be in pain or even to witness it (trigger warnings, safe spaces). My boss said to me the news is very depressing—as if that could be a justification for neglecting to watch it, as if perhaps one had on the contrary the permission to do whatever they like that makes them feel good rather than bad, or even just not good. Whatever makes you happy right? You do you. You have to put your own needs first. —I feel like I hear people say this shit all the time. It’s immoral on one hand, but it is also a prescription for a soul-crushing way to live.
IV. Since We Have the Deepest Aesthetic Interest in Suffering Well, We Should Confront, if Not Actively Seek Out, Life’s Cruelty, and Not Insulate Ourselves from It or Live in Spite of it
The unabashed license with which people singlemindedly pursue pleasure and pleasantness and obsessively seek to avoid and reduce pain and displeasure, especially when it comes at a cost to the well being and sometimes the rights of other people, has been galling to me for years. And it strikes me as simultaneously natural and age-old and quite contemporary that people wonder at how divided we are, and stand back in awe at how terrible the world is. Suffering from time to time is good to contemplate. You’re not human if it doesn’t get you down. But it’s the contemporary framing and understanding of suffering which I think is novel and, when it’s not aggravating, concerning.
I find people behave now as if suffering and pain of all kinds it were in our collective interest and capacity to systematically eradicate from life. What I wanted to say to that lady who handed that pamphlet to me, why is the world so divided, was, the world has always been divided, so so what? What’s your point? What are you living under a rock? Human nature and life is in essence perpetual conflict and strife. Life always was, and in so many ways, it very much still is: nasty, brutish and short, as Thomas Hobbes said.
Katherine Boyle in “Get Serious: About Suffering,” part of a series of her articles on Bari Weiss’s Free Press makes the provocative claim that,
“Though we may not realize it, nearly all of our modern cultural debates and ailments stem from the contemporary belief that suffering is not a natural or essential part of the human condition.” What she calls, “The war on suffering has not only robbed us of resilience; it has sold us a mirage that is making us miserable.”
Her thesis is that our war on suffering makes us fragile, an argument not that original which was advanced by Nassim Taleb before her, and now Jonathan Haidt too. And she notes pertinently, not unlike Haidt or Taleb,
“And resilience in our people, our institutions, and even the physical infrastructure of our cities is increasingly deemed the missing ingredient in all aspects of American life.”
That’s all true. And I am in wholehearted agreement. However, something these pro-suffering advocates miss is that suffering is absolutely necessary to create art and beauty too. There’s a separate cultural-flourishing argument. And if Suffering then is an essential component to experiencing life’s beauty, it is integral to life’s joys, so far as joy derives from aesthetic experience.
Nietzsche says somewhere that actually he who would reap life’s most sublime joys would also desire to undergo it’s worst tortures to better appreciate them. So I’m getting a little tired of people like Haidt or Boyle nowadays who say we need to be tough only to be resilient. That’s only a fraction of the argument for suffering. There is an even stronger argument, which no one is making perhaps except for Paul Bloom, that we actually need to suffer or at least be open to it, to have fun and to be happy actually. Suffering here doesn’t have a negative valution, which it does in the case for resilience. Suffering also has a positive valuation, particularly regarding beauty which cannot be overstated.
Nietzsche also says somewhere,
“Every beautiful surface conceals a terrible depth”
There’s a great video a friend showed me once where the German documentary filmmaker Warner Herzog is standing in a rainforest. He says to the camera, many people think the jungle is beautiful. But that’s not what I see. And then he goes on to describe how cruel, inhospitable, and inhumane nature is. I thought that was great.
My theory of beauty as my aesthetic philosophy comes from Nietzsche, is that nature and life’s cruelty, and the experience of tragedy, are actually essential to the creation of beauty. Which we could not live without. I think Nietzsche says in The Birth of Tragedy, his first book, that we have art to save us from the truth. This was the core of his critique of Christian morality for which he is the most famous. Christian morals by suppressing artistic genius, by duping he or she who would buy into it, threaten to water culture down and impair its flourishing, because Christianity imparts to us the moral imperative to relieve pain with compassion, similar to his critique of democracy that it promotes mediocrity by lowering the value of something to the lowest common denominator.
Nietzsche denounced as nihilistic any scheme of valuation that by denying the importance of suffering to creating beauty, devalued life, when the experience of beauty in fact was the most fundamental component to the art of living well. Since Nietzsche said the only goal of philosophy should be to promote life, and the highest mode of existence would be one that affirmed rather than negated life, he said that life can only be justified in aesthetic terms. This made beauty and art the most important thing for him, also the suffering which are its precondition by necessity. I should mention that when I drafted this blog post, as it happened I was actually listening to Gustav Mahler’s 8th “Symphony for a Thousand.” Mahler was a hell of a sufferer. For his whole life he lived with the trauma of his father beating the shit out of him and his mother, when he was a boy. His 5 year old daughter died. He was openly discriminated against and ridiculed for being Jewish in turn of the century Europe. And he was often stricken with depression.
With my Nietzschean worldview, when I look at the political and cultural landscape in the west, I am struck by the misery and despair of people who consider avoiding pain and misery the things of the highest value. And I think the despairing oversensitive, thin-skinned psychology of the contemporary person in this sense is one of the central reasons for which democracy and capitalism are threatened or eroding. If psychologically open societies, free speech, free association, free markets depend on a certain measure of physiological willingness to confront and tolerate uncertainty and the possibility of harm and loss, and if innovation for markets to work, depends on risk and competition—as the cost of living in an open society, then if we don’t have the strength or the temperament to be free, then we are in serious trouble.
V. The Hatred of Suffering Saps One’s Will to Live
A herd mentality predominates nowadays where people value social acceptance and belonging for the synthetic cohesion and artificial sense of self it offers, as opposed to the cold isolation and burdensome strain of independence, competition and freedom. The popularity of social media use has strangely coincided with a terrifying rise in social conformity, and it has opened up a yawning abyss of lonesomeness while stoking an insatiable craving for status and recognition, which no society or state has the capacity to gratify.
Mortifying and pathetic as this might sound to self-satisfied globalists like us, who just want to pursue life and liberty and reap the public benefits of economic growth, limited government, and international peace, we who only desire the cosmopolitan liberty to move and live and and say and do what we please within reason, with the barest minimum of restriction by central authority—I do think that today’s mass politics is driven by a deranged hatred of individual freedom borne of profound loneliness, a complacent lack of historical memory about the horrible consequences of collectivism, and a narcissistic oversensitivity to pain, suffering, and sacrifice. This is a psyche that favors unchecked administrative power without consequence. The prevailing mentality licenses, even privileges, the compulsive desperate need of insecure individuals to act on every whim, but protects one from having to bear the consequences of one’s actions, whatever they may be. It has morphed into a moral/political ideal among the masses in the digital age, that one is entitled to everything and responsible for nothing. I will never forget the progressive lawmaker who I heard one day had proposed a sexual entitlement. Seriously in addition to medicare, medicaid and social security, imagine government-provided sexual security. The Affordable Sex Act. A sexual security fund.
This is because in these bizarre times we like to assume the situational nature of every event. We have all become Debordian situationists. Where reality used to be a heroic place where free individuals made tough decisions, now little things happen to us, and we helplessly overreact as automata, passive spectators to fate. We have ceased to believe in the precepts of natural law, that all people are equal individuals, with equal dignity with the same intrinsic nature and the same moral worth. We have stopped believing that government is instituted to secure our natural rights. Now we don’t even believe in natural rights anymore. We believe everything is a construct of whatever the situation is, and there is only power and privilege which only the dominant ruling class can confer. We can’t distinguish between rights and privileges, fundamental rights and civil liberties moreover. This is all just a tangled mess of BS which we think the government or the status quo either grants to deserving parties or it takes away. Hence no one believes the supreme court the constitution or the law even has any purpose unless it serves their exclusive interest. The law has no objective value external to political interests. If everything is a social construct then there can be no impartial institutions and everything is political and partisan. There is no objective truth or universal moral truth either. Only the subjective situational interest of class or race, or what news you watch and what food you eat, your background at any rate. If no one has any intrinsic worth, that’s because human dignity has been engulfed by one’s cultural identity.
I have a friend who’s in law school who told me that when one of his classes was asked to name their most important freedom, the majority of the class said “bodily autonomy”— whatever the hell that means, as if we were all amoeba who were permitted to define themselves like liquid taking up the shape of whatever space we occupy. Bodily autonomy just sounds to me like: limitless personal freedom. And I have heard that progressives in New York City have begun referring to convicted felons as the “justice impacted.” And homeless people now are “people with homelessness.”
I googled it
Furthermore people have internalized a sort of inability and unwillingness to face the future, which for some reason scares the shit out of people, and they have made this fear a pathology, conditioning their whole perception. Predominating in the modern psyche here is no less than what Nietzsche would deride as European nihilism. Nietzsche caricatured our malady with his concept of the last man. He says the last man has discovered happiness as the primary end to his existence to which he should strive. He says the last man discovered happiness “and he blinks.”
I think all these postliberal reactions, whether with the woke left or the MAGA right, are examples proving Nietzsche’s last man hypothesis. I think as we discovered material abundance among rich countries in the first world, and since we have gained civil rights for minorities, now for lack of somewhere greater to go or better to do, we have decided to make goals up to pursue, fabricating matters of existential import, combating grandiose things like systemic racism, fighting wokeness, saving the environment, saving America, goals which sound imperative in the most superficial way. Actually they are the opposite of imperative, malignant and destructive moral crusades when not cheap conceits and bumperstickers, which just reveal our sorrow that the gains we have already made, in terms of social and material progress, just weren’t fulfilling enough.
Just over the last several years, not in any order—
Britain for example decides impulsively to leave the EU. America decides impulsively they want Donald Trump for president to rock the status quo. Metoo is borne and women go around shaming men for chauvanistically expecting things of women, as if every man alive all the sudden were a misogynistic sadist Patrick Bateman character. Putin invades Ukraine impulsively without planning, as a part of an insane goal to build a Eurasian empire. Trump pulls out of the Iran deal impulsively. Elon Musk buys Twitter all the sudden. Biden withdraws from Afghanistan impulsively, and to cap off 20 years of fighting a global war on terror, hands a whole country to a terrorist group. Everything is impulsive and all is geared towards display, excitement and showmanship. Biden proclaims he’s going to nominate the first black female supreme court justice. Trump says he’s going to pardon everyone who stormed the Capitol. No one says anything true anymore. And they do everything just to say they did something, post on social media about it, and react and broadcast to other people how they feel.
Here is a great summary in a nutshell of the moral depravity of contemporary society. When the great Peggy Noonan reviewed Prince Harry’s book in WSJ, this is an excerpt of the patent insanity she found,
“This is the book’s great flaw, that Harry doesn’t always play it straight, that he thinks “my truth” is as good as the truth. There are other flaws, and they grate. There’s a heightened-ness to his language—he never leaves a place; he flees it “in fear for our sanity and physical safety.” He often finds his wife “sobbing uncontrollably” on the floor and the stairs, mostly over what he fails to realize are trivial things. He is grandiose: “My mother was a princess, named after a goddess.” “How would I be remembered by history? For the headlines? Or for who I actually was?” Lord, he was an attractive man fifth in line for a largely ceremonial European throne; it would hardly remember him at all. (Unless he wrote a scalding book and destabilized the monarchy!) He repeatedly points out that he’s a Windsor and of royal blood. His title means a lot to him. He is exhibitionistic: “My penis was oscillating between extremely sensitive and borderline traumatized.” (Frostbite.)”
VI. The Fear of Suffering Makes It Worse
People decide they would rather have chaos than peace, because anarchy is more entertaining and you get to feel yourself acting as a part of something, a movement or a period in history. I have a friend who lives in the city who told me people he knew during the George Floyd riots, were asking him why he didn’t want to protest with them, if only to become a part of history. My friend to his credit, abhorred the notion that one should do something to make history. With the antiracism movement, the left embarks on a messianic mission to eradicate racism from the face of the earth in the minutest possible forms, whether something is even racist or not. Even the subjective interpretation of something as racist is grounds for an objective case of racism (“unconscious bias,” “microaggressions”) which makes absolutely no sense.
Kat Rosenfield recently wrote in an essay for Persuasion, Yascha Mounk’s Substack, “The Illusion of a Frictionless Existence,” If the old mode of thinking was that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, the new one is something like: What makes you feel bad must be eradicated.”
When I watched the George Floyd protests on tv, I saw no one coherently protesting. But everyone had a smart phone as if they were just happy to feel a part of something. I was struck with the amount of pasty young anguished white people desperate to assert a faux solidarity with theoretically conceived, only cognitively understood, victims of systematic oppression. When I remember the George Floyd protests what comes to mind chiefly is the staggering amount of young liberal white women wearing Covid masks, carrying signs like these.
David Maialetti
White silence is violence. It’s a grim source of ironic mirth for me that the left at once attacks white privilege, and demands that privileged white people march on behalf of black people.
We have also seen a bunch of full grown adults storm the capitol in funny costumes and mostly bearing smart phones (except for the guys with guns), taking gloating pictures of themselves before barging in—content just to pretend as if what they were doing were grand and dramatic and revolutionary, when all they were doing in fact was stage a half-witted half-hearted, very very poorly organized rather spineless insurrection, just because a rotund florid-faced old guy who made them feel important told them to, and later told them they were, “very special.”
Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
For lack of a better thing to do in a rich democratic first world country, people would rather turn life, and all their freedoms first and foremost, and turn the world, upside down and plunge every god damn thing into a zero sum game, and troll people with saying offensive things on the internet, just for the hell of it. People also take offense to those offensive trolls way too easily and overreact and exploit an opportunity to victimize themselves for attention, whether as a woman, as a person of color, as a gay person, as a this and as a that. Just for the hell of it.
We do all this just for the hell of it. You can argue that we keep adding letters to the LGBTQ+IA (I know there’s more)—we keep adding letters and making up sexual and gender identities just for the hell of it too. Do you think gender identity could have emerged as a concept in colonial America? No because we didn’t have the 21st century luxury to think about our “gender identity” back then. Concerns about identity are totally particular to rich industrialized digitalized first world countries, with the time and the resources for people to pretend to be whoever they feel like being (I had a customer once whose Trump tee shirt Buffalo bills hat seemed to politics and sports as brands one associated with) with the result to make trivialities existential in importance, entertainment reality and vice versa, conflate fact and fiction indistinguishably in the romantic quest for authentic self-expression of one’s own particular truth. And in a general way we overthink and micromanage the living shit out of everything, between pondering our gender and sexual identities: counting the carbs in everything we eat, editing our social media photos to look perfect, conserving our energy use, and fretting over whether we should get rid of our gas stove.
And startlingly the main reason we give a shit is for what in the nomenclature we call “the clout,” short for status. Because hardly anything matters anymore but gaining status, love, respect, envy even pity from other people, attention whether positive or negative in a world where everyone is watching and ready to weigh an opinion online which they would hardly state in person from sheer anxiety, because people spend so much time online comfortably making judgments anonymously indirectly, and nothing matters more than other people and what the group thinks of you. The average person has achieved a historic level of conscientiousness, which is downright embarrassing for western society.
Moreover, since no one can fucking sit still anymore and accept the reality of a global pandemic, and since they haven’t confronted their mortality like this in God knows how long, they throw massive protests and tirades, and they politicize it and become antivaxxers. Of course France freaks the fuck out. But even Canada flipped as well. Germany, an orderly place you would think, also rioted as I remember.
And American liberals flatter themselves that they’re smart enough to listen to whatever “the science” dictates wear a mask everywhere they go proudly for an indefinite length of time, not because they want to live so much as they are just determined to be “smart” in the progressive sense of the word, meaning a snob and a narcissistic empath. As for a progressive person health and longevity are doubtless at all times infinitely more important than liberty. Except for when you get an opportunity for a social justice protest. Then you’re totally justified to leap into the George Floyd fray, especially during a pandemic as a mark of your commitment to social justice. But in general if you’re a progressive, and “the science” tells you to jump off a bridge, you’ll do it because that’s being smart.
As regards the right, for lack of anything better to do they assert and invent their constitutional right not to wear a mask or sit still. They demask and mob elementary schools protesting CRT. And they just act belligerent and raise hell absolutely everywhere at the slightest provocation with the vainest pretext. Drama queens. Spoiled children.
We do everything now just for the hell of it and we can’t appreciate anything. Because we’ve given up on appreciating things. We’ve bargained contemplation and evaluation, beauty, toughing things out, having confidence, and we have thrown good sense away for the cheap satisfaction of freaking out 24/7. Then we have the insane arrogance to wonder why we’re so divided.
If you want to know why we’re so divided at this moment in time, (considering humanity has never ever been properly united in history, and war and bloodshed and oppression used to be so much worse), in my opinion we’re divided to the extent that thin-skinned humanity is willfully violently upset over the narcissism of small differences. I believe we are really making our strife up and making things up, and exaggerating everything volitionally to go to war with each other over anything and everything, contentedly. It gets us down, our divisions sometimes, when we get tired; then we love to take a step back and whine and bitch about how broken government is or the system or how no one can agree with the other side, but we spend most of our time willing our own destruction gladly, because we’re too smug, lonely, and bored with our wealth and freedoms just to sit still and shut the fucking hell up.
Now the right wants religion. Freedom of religion is not enough. They want to live in a Christian nation. They want grand Roman things like border walls and antimodern national abortion bans and laws to prohibit anything LGBT. The socialist left wants everything to be provided for by a paternalistic government, and they want it all for free. The left with the most nihilistic desire for self-preservation, concealing a profound and unhealthy oversensitivity to pain wants to end deprivation of all kinds, which since we’ve already achieved it in a rich country, it’s not so much because they think poverty or inequality is a real problem; they’re just so arrogant, they want to appease the overzealous demands of their chronically troubled conscience by feigning virtue in all its forms. The world is wealthier than ever. In general there’s more material equality than ever too. But they choose to focus on the inequality between billionaires and the rest, as if billionaires by being billionaires were hurting the rest of society, who on the whole are doing pretty damn well. Better than ever as a point of fact. Really the standard of living globally has risen enormously just over the last thirty years (thanks to neoliberalism).
To be upset, or aware of injustice, gets approval from progressive ingroups too. You can’t disentangle a leftist’s progressivism from their desire to be accepted and approved of by other progressives. Every progressive is an extrovert with a fuck ton of friends. That’s because half the reason they’re progressive in the first place is to make friends and acquire status. They all have low self-esteem and demand approval from other people, to boost one’s self-esteem with adopting conformist values that demonstrate how useful one is willing to degrade oneself for the benefit of the group. These people in colleges and coastal cities are a very cliquey bunch who are all competing with and quietly hate each other. It’s not very social if you’re one of us at a party pontificating on the growth of government and the necessity to cut spending. Anti-statism is the least popular political ideology.
Back to the right. The right on the other hand rather than desiring material self-preservation, want something equally pathetic, spiritual consolation. These sorry losers find it impossible to share a nation with drag queens. Their simple provincial psyche can’t abide it. It can’t be easy to be a Christian conservative, where you basically despise everyone who’s not a Christian conservative, because you think God, yourself, your family, and the unborn are so fucking important and superior that homosexuality and transgender people and basically everyone and anyone’s who’s different from you are all impossible for you to countenance.
Both the woke left and the MAGA right seek total control over an increasingly complex modernity, in their vainglorious tribal communities, a modernity that they are fundamentally too fragile and arrogant to withstand on their own, independently. Because a perfectionism aroused through an internalized pathological infantilism, a permanent adolescence, makes it so that no one will be happy unless one’s identity with others is understood, appreciated, recognized, vindicated, validated by everyone else in full, or unless other people give up their identity to convert to yours. A troubled anxiety-ridden soul craves totalitarian purity and absolution in their life, for themselves and others. The end of perfection for oneself justifies the antidemocratic means.
VII. Eating Each Other
I think this psychological malaise which you can describe as a profound fear and discomfort with uncertainty, prompting petty antidemocratic impulses to provide relief to one’s grievance, a spiritual psychological condition which Nietzsche diagnosed as a bourgeois nihilism borne of too much progress, is the essence of the decay of liberalism in the west. It’s much bigger than the failure of elite leadership, or the overstated wealth inequality, or the persistence of racism in policing. What we are witnessing is a revolt against all things modern pure and simple—either to utopianly plan the future regarding the left, or to catapult us to a traditional soulful past, regarding the right.
Freud called the nihilistic instinct “Thanatos” (Greek for death drive) and he talked about this in his book Civilization and its Discontents. Freud noted there is a death drive and an innate desire for conflict, at war with eros (life drive) in every soul. I think the most immature people for lack of anything better to do will exaggerate the most banal, trivial differences to manufacture conflict, because they lack an outlet for their grievances and there is nothing like war and existential conflict to give one’s life the meaning it lacks but uncreative weak people need. It’s a crisis of modern life. I wish people would acknowledge this more. Hardly anyone will say this.
Modus Vivendi for Neoliberals
I think the solution for neoliberal globalists like us mainly is to improve and grow our institutions and practice classical liberal values every day, and impress them on the radicalized others with persuasion and patience, not to force them on the populists. Then we would fail at our own liberalism. We should be rational and we should be patient, reflective and circumspect. You might have friends and family who are so so MAGA or woke that they’re beyond helping. Know that you can’t fix everyone. Best to let crazy people alone. And some people are truly beyond helping. But live by example and don’t preach or go around trying to persuade, eschew dogmatizing at all cost, but better embody the liberal principles of fairness, openness, and tolerance in your behavior inwardly and outwardly.
Don’t be depressed. Don’t be cowed by the extremism of people or what you see in the news. Seek to be above resentment, grievance, fear, and bitterness of all varieties. It’s contagious. Do not hate. Do not be angry. Don’t give into extreme emotion. Be contemptuous of irrationality. Be patient with the slow-witted. Be gentle in all your relationships where hardness is futile. Be generous with your knowledge and open-minded. Know that you don’t have all the answers either. Know that you nothing like Socrates, arguably the first classical liberal in history.
The world was always divided, and everyone in a sense is ignorant, and people seek brute dominance over others and the more fragile and vulnerable, feeble and weak someone is, the more they desire to control and subordinate all of reality, for pain relief.
This knowledge of the childishness of human nature, from which not even we being human too are secure, should inform how we approach populism, and high passions, and this willful volitional consensual chaos.
Recently so as to affirm my life by embracing suffering and danger to maximize life’s joys, in a dyonysian fashion, I have decided to join my volunteer local fire department. If we all love to fabricate drama just for the hell of it, while other people get their jollies bowdlerizing the constitution by using interventionist government as an arena in which to prosecute a brutal self-defeating culture war, I rather shall be plunging into burning buildings.
“Live dangerously,” Nietzsche advocated.
Here’s to facing things.
—Jay