Nowadays, opportunities to express misanthropic and cynical viewpoints are thick on the ground – cruel and duplicitous politicians who still bafflingly find true believers, fantastical and murderous conspiracy theories, betrayals and close-mindedness, callousness and cruelty everywhere. It makes so much sense, faced with this roiling sea of inanity and cruelty and violence, to come to the most obvious conclusion: People suck, humanity is a virus, we were always the monster at the end of this book. There’s always an accompanying sense of superiority – not necessarily in being less evil, but in being aware of it. One might question what benefit to anyone this awareness is supposed to provide. In practice, certainty of the irreducible evil of humanity is frequently a founding tenet of authoritarian belief systems and their attendant conspiracy theories, so misanthropy in response to same is, at best, counterproductive. Thus, I have recently come to hate and distrust misanthropy and cynicism of “human nature”.
Okay then, if humanity isn’t inherently stupid and vicious then what is going on? Why are so many seemingly ready to do violence upon one another simply for being an other?
The answers lie in stories, the stories we’re told as we grow up, the stories told to us and that we tell to ourselves about how the world works. Some stories do this very explicitly: “If you go to school and work hard you will be successful”. Some are less direct but still foundational: “And so the hero overpowered the villains and gave them to the police to face justice”. This sort of narrative structure has, I think, always been how we understand the world – Long before we developed the language to tell stories as such we placed our experiences into narrative models which describe what effects we should expect to follow which causes – but, as we’ve developed language and abstract ideas, these narrative models have become externalized and passed down as stories, imprinting models absent direct experience. This is tremendously beneficial most of the time, but means it’s possible to form a conception of how the world works that’s completely divorced from any material reality. Depending on when, where, and how you grew up you have a different mix of these stories stewing around in your brain, quietly setting your expectations, sometimes in ways too subtle to be easily articulated.
Every so often, one of our stories about how the world works gets contradicted by evidence. When this happens, we must stop and reassess: Does this mean the story was wrong? If so, is it completely wrong, needing to be categorically discarded, or merely flawed and in need of revision? Or perhaps the evidence is flawed and the story can go on unchanged if we just understand what those flaws are.
This is always an uncomfortable process, but it’s all part of growing up. It gets more and more uncomfortable, though, the more invested we are in a story. Right now, we’re living through a time where huge numbers of people are having many of their most foundational stories all challenged at once. American exceptionalism and the American dream both withering and turning to steam, the “justice” system and universal progress debunked and reverted, throttled by the invisible hands that supposedly guided us, living in the kinds of freedom that make a cage. We can only evaluate what we learn in relation to what we already know: So, while this rain of information seems to be dismantling everything we think we are, what can we do?
People are not wired to react rationally in this situation. We have been lied to about so much that most of us are forced to pick a few trusted voices and to believe only them no matter what – and, yeah, from the outside many of the things being said by their “trusted voices” are clearly vapid and hateful, but from a position of having no reliable information it seems as reasonable as anything else going on. If everything is nonsense, just pick the nonsense that appeals to you most. When your entire culture and structure of power is a con, don’t be surprised when a con man wins power.
Of course, not everything is nonsense, but nonsense is elevated while inconvenient analysis is smothered, resulting in a discourse where even those who cry for more accountability are seldom held accountable. People who say science or facts matter go on to make easily disprovable claims and are seldom called to task because of their performed allegiance to the idea of science and fact, rather than any scientific or fact-finding process. This hypocrisy does as much to undermine the legitimacy of science and fact as the charlatans these supposedly fact-minded people rail against, and creates the very structure of power they build careers on opposing. It is unclear whether this is intentional or not.
As odious and nonsensical as many of these current conspiracy theories are, much of what allows them to flourish is the soil of lies they sprang up in. Many of those who sneer at these wild flights of fancy believe themselves in many stories which now largely contradict the evidence – belief in a “normal” we must return to, belief in the justice and benevolence of process, belief in the crocodile tears cried by a vast and brutal empire as long as a sufficiently presentable person heads it. These cults of process and of personality each abut and abet each other, playing the role of timeless and existentially self-justifying enemy against one another, and together preserve one another against all onslaught. This double ouroboros, ceaselessly devouring and turned ever inwards, will devour us all if left unchecked.
It will not be stopped as long as people understand themselves solely as being part of one or the other of these two. We are not stupid, we are not evil, we just need one another – and the stupidest and evilest among us are ever poised to exploit that need. People aren’t innately evil or stupid, people are innately people. We build models of the world we live in within our minds, and sometimes those models are flawed. The core issue is not with humanity, but with the structure of power itself – those who seek power will eventually find it, those who wish to preserve it will build structures to safeguard it, and those who are shaped by those structures from birth, who are raised on those stories, will do anything to preserve them lest their entire world collapse – even as those structures of power starve and poison them and their children. This is the inevitable outcome of power. They say power corrupts – I have come to believe, rather, that power is corruption.
The only just use of power is to dismantle power.