(Sorry that this is my first post in almost a month! I had deadlines and the flu, a combination I don’t recommend. But thank you for your patience and as always, for reading.)
I can’t lie: the past few years have really shaken my faith in humanity. I mean, it wasn’t like I had a lot of faith before. I’ve always been a critical thinker, particularly when it comes to people (thanks, mean suburban children of my youth). But I did always tend to lean toward the idea that things work out for the best — if for no other reason than because they’re going to work out the way they work out, and you have to make the best of it. But 2016 was a real kick in the kneecap on that one, and let’s just say that things haven’t improved a heck of a lot since. Particularly these days, watching the insanity of the run-up to the 2024 election, the war in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, our inability to do much about climate change, the ongoing migrant crises around the world, the rise of white supremacy/Nazis and anti-immigrant hatred and anti-semitism and authoritarianism everywhere, etc etc etc, I am not assured of much of anything. I can look at the positive (yay, Poland!), but that doesn’t really contradict the overall conclusion that one must draw from the state of the world: human beings are, as a whole, shit.
The reasons why don’t seem that complicated to me. People have to choose daily between their emotions and their rationality, and almost always, emotion wins. It’s so much easier to give in to anger or fear or even joy, because those emotions feel true in a way that data can never quite equal. Add on to that
1) that complex ideas and issues are hard for most of our puny little minds to grasp
2) the basic anti-intellectualism of a U.S. culture that is our main export into the world
3) that selfishness cadged as “individualism” is on the rise everywhere — thanks, again, in large part to American capitalist values that we also export like a motherfucker
4) the way all media these days has basically become a hype machine for whatever bullshit is screaming the loudest
5) the slow and quick options for annihilation provided by climate change on the one hand and multiple nuclear-armed states run by corrupt regimes — which can be largely tied back to irresponsible actions by the U.S. government historically right on up until today
and you have an easy and delicious recipe for humanity’s self-destruction. I mean, if aliens came down here with a master plan to eliminate us, it really couldn’t go any better than how it’s going now.
You might think that my conclusion then is that this makes our side (I’m assuming we share one because you’ve signed up to listen to me rant — thanks again by the way!) better than the rabble to which I’m referring, but the truth is: nope. We are it. One example is the Democratic voter I encountered on Threads who said she would have voted for McCain if Hillary had been nominated in 2016 because of the racism she saw among Hillary supporters. She was so angry — not at the candidate, mind you, but at her supporters — that she would vote for someone who represented literally none of what she wanted. Another example is how many young people on the left, particularly those activated by the abortion rights movement, are refusing to vote for Biden because of Gaza, knowing that this means essentially giving support to a candidate who is infinitely worse on both of those issues (not to mention every single other issue they supposedly care about: climate, LGBTQ rights, voting rights, democratic norms, gun control, etc).
At first I thought, in the latter case, that maybe this was just a side effect of kids not having been alive long enough to have a sense of even recent history, but now I think maybe this is just how people vote now: driven by whatever emotion has been whipped up by whatever media — especially the feedback loop of social media — they are consuming at the moment. You have the Right basically living in an entirely separate information ecosystem that feeds their grievances and tells them what they want to hear, despite zero evidence to support any of it. On the Left, you see people so whipped up into moral outrage they can’t seem to see beyond it to what the result will be. As humans we have this great capacity for reason, and yet, we resist using it. Reason doesn’t motivate or mobilize us the way emotion does, as every demagogue ever could tell you. You’ve never heard a dictator say, “And now I’m going to show you the data.” No, they act from their gut, and they expect you to act from yours.
And here’s the thing: I’ve done tons of stupid shit because of my emotions too. I have road rage on a regular basis, so much so that I will risk my beloved new(ish) car’s well-being in order to not let people cut in front of me because, dammit, they should have gotten in line in the right lane like the rest of us — even though there are plenty of times when I’ve mistakenly been in the wrong lane and had to cut in myself. I have gotten so irked about people keeping stuff in our bike/storage room that doesn’t belong there that I’ve removed their things from the top of my storage locker, even though there’s no way they are causing any damage to me or my stuff (it’s in a storage locker). Even when I know that I’ve been too busy or lazy to make plans with my friends, I get sad and self-pitying when I find out they’re doing stuff without me. I’ve gotten into online political arguments with both total strangers and people I know, becoming so angry at their irrational views that I become entirely irrational and say terrible things — knowing full well that this only pushes them farther into their corner rather than changing their minds in any way.
In all of these cases, it took me a while to ask myself, Wait: am I the asshole? When I finally did, I didn’t like what I saw, but I knew it was the right question to ask. I realized that because I wanted to see myself as better, as aggrieved, as deploying my moral, righteous anger — and not the Jesus kind or the Old Testament kind because I don’t believe in any of that shit, just the I’M RIGHT GODDAMMIT kind — I fucked up. Let’s face it: humanity is really nearly all fuck-ups all of the time. But unless we are narcissists surrounded by yes-people (you know who you are. Oh wait, no you don’t because you’re a narcissist), we also all have the ability to catch ourselves fucking up, or at least step back after we’ve fucked up and think about how we’ve fucked up, and get perspective on just how fucked-up we were to do that. And then of course we go right out and do it again. But what’s unique about us as a species is that we nearly all contain the potential for both great emotion and great reason. When it comes down to the choices we have, as organisms, there is no us and them. There’s just us.
I’m not going to end this by telling you to go have a heart-to-heart with your Trumpy neighbors, oh no. I’m just telling you that both not to demonize them and not to become them — both of which you definitely have the capacity to do. Our humanity — our ability to think with our brains and feel with our emotions, recognizing that those are two separate and vital capabilities — is both the best and the worst thing about all of us. And unless we each individually take a step back from time to time to think and try not to fuck it all up, we, collectively, most certainly will.
Shockingly-- I totally feel this. Without getting too deep into this, a college pal used to say that Budweiser was an OK beer- anything not as good was a bad beer, anything better was good beer. I used to think of my self as a good person. Now, I am happy to be the Budweiser of humans. (I'd also suggest the last three paragraphs of today's NYT obit of Charles V. Hamilton - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/18/us/charles-v-hamilton-dead.html)
Here here! Don’t let the turkeys get you down!