On the Eve of a Great Defeat
I expect the elections tomorrow to go very badly. But, unlike with previous elections, I am not here today to talk about my predictions...
Back in my early adult years in the 2000s, I was quite the narrativist when it came to my perception of our politics. Hyped up on my own coming of age and my personal "Springtime of Youth" as some might put it, and full of Roddenberryesque notions of humanity outgrowing its infancy and culturally progressing toward a more enlightened era; while at the same time lacking knowledge of the world and people in it, life experience, and self-awareness as to my own subconscious enactment of a fate of fallacy that the Josh of that era nevertheless knew about in Latin ("What mates wish, they like to believe"); I constructed an interpretation of world events that basically agreed with the conceit of "the end of history." I thought that we were on the verge of permanently leaving behind the ignorant, tribalistic old, in favor of embracing the wise and reasoning powers of the new, and that all of these unfortunate "Republican" convulsions of ignorance and bigotry in our country were simply the gasps of the wretched, who will have always dwelled in no other place but their pits of woe. In shorter language, I thought that enough people in this country knew well enough to tell right from wrong on most of the issues. I thought that ideas, and people's sagacious apprehension or comprehension of them, would carry the day and win elections, smashing the GOP that even in those days was well on its way to radicalism and insanity, and ushering in a new liberal era where people would recognize what to me had been so obvious, and choose to discard old prejudices in favor of making life better for all of us. I particularly interpreted the Democratic wave elections in 2006 and 2008 in these terms. "Aha!," I would think to myself. "They've finally had enough of Dubya's ignominy. They finally see the light."
I was wrong.
But I wasn't just wrong about that bottom-line result, which was convincingly discredited in the 2010 elections. I was wrong about the whole thing. Humanity hasn't seen the light; we are no wiser than before; and the arc of our civilization is not on a steady upward climb. This present moment we live in, of unprecedent rights and material wellbeing (with some noteworthy asterisks that I won't dwell on), is mainly the boon of a fusion between technological advances, declines in religious-moralistic censorship, and the relative cultural health of our society in earlier generations that sprouted many powerful artists, activists, thinkers, and doers. Electricity is here to stay, but the female right to vote...maybe isn't. We are not on an upward cultural arc, in spite of standing atop a local peak of rights and liberties. We are on some kind of as=yet undefined oscillation of an at-least multigenerational scope but otherwise indeterminate magnitude and consistency. Today, rights are already falling away even as new ones continue to be won. It wasn't like this twenty years ago. The times are changing. If I may mix my metaphors and go from mountain to mar, the tide is turning. Just how far out will the waters flow? Just how much are we going to lose? Will it be a pesky nuisance, resolved this side of the midcentury, or will it be a centuries-long decline that erases virtually everything we have achieved?
I understand now why some people hate humanity so much. It doesn't have to be this way. We could walk that ever-higher road toward Utopia. There's nothing stopping us. Nothing, that is, but ourselves. There are too many human beings who bear too much terror and malice in their sparks for other human beings, and too much greed and entitlement at the expense of our common interests. There are too many ignorant people.
Too many mooks.
There are many meters of a society's wisdom and insightfulness, but one of them is the outcome of our partisan general elections here in the United States, where there is indisputably a consistently right and a consistently wrong choice-and has been at least since 2004. If people were smarter, Republicans would not have won in 2004. They would certainly not have won in 2010. And that's to say nothing of 2016, when a paragon of the obscene was at the top of the ballot.
I am not interested in predicting the elections this time, partly because I expect the results to be terrible and partly because I have paid very little attention to the domestic news since Desert Bus last year (which is coming up again this Saturday!) and therefore do not have a very granular sense of where things stand, but mainly because I simply don't have the pridefulness anymore to exult in such an exercise. Instead, I am interested this time in interpreting the results of the election, whatever they may be.
As far as predictions go, there are only two: History and the current economic climate together foretell a colossal Republican victory tomorrow. This is completely incongruous with the model based on people's ethics and reason and existential fear for our democracy and way of life, which foretell a sweeping Democratic victory. The model of the former assumes human ignorance, self-interest, pettiness, mercuriality, and lack of principle. The model of the former assumes the wisdom which I once assumed of my fellow mates. I think we all know which model is going to end up being the more accurate.
If I am wrong, and Democrats do well-not just middlingly but definitively well-that will be a very good sign for the coming years.
If I am right, and Republicans do well, the meaning will be less obvious. If they do middlingly well, it might suggest that things are not as bad as they could be and that the fascists haven't necessarily won the hearts of the public so much as the public is childishly and ignorantly outbursting against the party in power as per usual. If the Republicans do very well, it might suggest that there is a fascistic element at work too, and that the cultural fabric of this country is metastasizing even more quickly than we feared. Either way, a Republican victory will serve the cause of fascism by giving Republican officials more power to steal future elections.
It is very disorienting and bewildering and alienating for me to have to recalibrate my respect for humanity in general so far down the scale from where it stood when I was young. I am an optimist at heart and a kind soul, and I really have (nonreligious) faith in people. And, over time, I've just had to slide the weights on the scale downward and downward and downward as society continues to demonstrate for me its collectively unworthiness.
People who travel a lot or interact a lot often say that, in their experiences, most people are basically good. That's been my experience as well. What has changed is that I now think we were always wrong about this, and that what we perceived as goodness is not necessarily filled with the nutrients upon which true goodness depends for its strength: wisdom, kindness, compassion, interest, and so forth. Rather, I think what we have taken for goodness is just social affability. Sociopathic smiles concealing crude convictions fabricated by menial minds.
In place of yesteryear's narrativism, which told tale of a species that was getting its shit together and growing up, today I am more inclined to look at humanity as I would look at other animals. We are cunning enough to be very dangerous, yet foolish enough to be equally destructive and corrosive.
I think the logical conclusion of this line of thought is that we can simply never be a truly equal species, and that the "final boss battle" of our supposed "infancy" will be to defeat those whose definitions of our inequality are malevolently wrong. That is a battle far in the future, if it ever comes. For now, we must simply survive this fascist groundswell, and, if we survive, try to rehabilitate the cultural degeneracy and lunacy which permitted it to flourish.
There is a fever taking over this society. A mass insanity. I see it everywhere. I feel it in the fabric of our society. Intelligent people are going crazy. Reality is routinely banished from the discourse of things. The forces of light are scattered, visionless, leaderless, passionless, and timid. Our society is very, very sick. And I don't know where it's all heading. Violence, probably. Tyranny, quite possibly.
This...multigenerational oscillation...this "life cycle of cultures"...has quite a gaslighting effect. But I am quite confident that this is not all merely in my head. I am quite confident that we are in the midst of an enormous and quite likely destructive change. I think that too many minds are lost to the fever now, and that only widespread physical destruction or else long-term generational change will be able to break it, if (in the case of the latter) our society still affords our descendants the means to bloom in their own way. And I wonder what they will be like, as a consequence of all of this.
Where did we go wrong? It was probably all written down before we were even born. The course of history, unlike the arc of humanity, very much is a linear narrative, each era proceeding logically from the one before it. So maybe we didn't "go wrong" so much as enter into a predictable era of decay and dissembly. But if I were to intrude with my personal opinions, I think it has something to do with the fact that people don't see the world anymore. They don't know how anything works. They can't bear to pay attention to anything. They want immediate gratification for everything all the time. They will sacrifice anything for convenience. And they don't know how to think or be alone with themselves.
Maybe, in our less convenient past, when things weren't so automatic and impersonal, the physical rhythms of daily life helped keep people in touch with reality better. But, regardless, the fact remains that history is littered with "fever eras," times of insanity.
Humanity is so weird. There are so many amazing individuals, yet collectively we are dumber than the caricatures of us in the cartoons. We really are our own joy and sorrow.
Back in my early adult years in the 2000s, I was quite the narrativist when it came to my perception of our politics. Hyped up on my own coming of age and my personal "Springtime of Youth" as some might put it, and full of Roddenberryesque notions of humanity outgrowing its infancy and culturally progressing toward a more enlightened era; while at the same time lacking knowledge of the world and people in it, life experience, and self-awareness as to my own subconscious enactment of a fate of fallacy that the Josh of that era nevertheless knew about in Latin ("What mates wish, they like to believe"); I constructed an interpretation of world events that basically agreed with the conceit of "the end of history." I thought that we were on the verge of permanently leaving behind the ignorant, tribalistic old, in favor of embracing the wise and reasoning powers of the new, and that all of these unfortunate "Republican" convulsions of ignorance and bigotry in our country were simply the gasps of the wretched, who will have always dwelled in no other place but their pits of woe. In shorter language, I thought that enough people in this country knew well enough to tell right from wrong on most of the issues. I thought that ideas, and people's sagacious apprehension or comprehension of them, would carry the day and win elections, smashing the GOP that even in those days was well on its way to radicalism and insanity, and ushering in a new liberal era where people would recognize what to me had been so obvious, and choose to discard old prejudices in favor of making life better for all of us. I particularly interpreted the Democratic wave elections in 2006 and 2008 in these terms. "Aha!," I would think to myself. "They've finally had enough of Dubya's ignominy. They finally see the light."
I was wrong.
But I wasn't just wrong about that bottom-line result, which was convincingly discredited in the 2010 elections. I was wrong about the whole thing. Humanity hasn't seen the light; we are no wiser than before; and the arc of our civilization is not on a steady upward climb. This present moment we live in, of unprecedent rights and material wellbeing (with some noteworthy asterisks that I won't dwell on), is mainly the boon of a fusion between technological advances, declines in religious-moralistic censorship, and the relative cultural health of our society in earlier generations that sprouted many powerful artists, activists, thinkers, and doers. Electricity is here to stay, but the female right to vote...maybe isn't. We are not on an upward cultural arc, in spite of standing atop a local peak of rights and liberties. We are on some kind of as=yet undefined oscillation of an at-least multigenerational scope but otherwise indeterminate magnitude and consistency. Today, rights are already falling away even as new ones continue to be won. It wasn't like this twenty years ago. The times are changing. If I may mix my metaphors and go from mountain to mar, the tide is turning. Just how far out will the waters flow? Just how much are we going to lose? Will it be a pesky nuisance, resolved this side of the midcentury, or will it be a centuries-long decline that erases virtually everything we have achieved?
I understand now why some people hate humanity so much. It doesn't have to be this way. We could walk that ever-higher road toward Utopia. There's nothing stopping us. Nothing, that is, but ourselves. There are too many human beings who bear too much terror and malice in their sparks for other human beings, and too much greed and entitlement at the expense of our common interests. There are too many ignorant people.
Too many mooks.
There are many meters of a society's wisdom and insightfulness, but one of them is the outcome of our partisan general elections here in the United States, where there is indisputably a consistently right and a consistently wrong choice-and has been at least since 2004. If people were smarter, Republicans would not have won in 2004. They would certainly not have won in 2010. And that's to say nothing of 2016, when a paragon of the obscene was at the top of the ballot.
I am not interested in predicting the elections this time, partly because I expect the results to be terrible and partly because I have paid very little attention to the domestic news since Desert Bus last year (which is coming up again this Saturday!) and therefore do not have a very granular sense of where things stand, but mainly because I simply don't have the pridefulness anymore to exult in such an exercise. Instead, I am interested this time in interpreting the results of the election, whatever they may be.
As far as predictions go, there are only two: History and the current economic climate together foretell a colossal Republican victory tomorrow. This is completely incongruous with the model based on people's ethics and reason and existential fear for our democracy and way of life, which foretell a sweeping Democratic victory. The model of the former assumes human ignorance, self-interest, pettiness, mercuriality, and lack of principle. The model of the former assumes the wisdom which I once assumed of my fellow mates. I think we all know which model is going to end up being the more accurate.
If I am wrong, and Democrats do well-not just middlingly but definitively well-that will be a very good sign for the coming years.
If I am right, and Republicans do well, the meaning will be less obvious. If they do middlingly well, it might suggest that things are not as bad as they could be and that the fascists haven't necessarily won the hearts of the public so much as the public is childishly and ignorantly outbursting against the party in power as per usual. If the Republicans do very well, it might suggest that there is a fascistic element at work too, and that the cultural fabric of this country is metastasizing even more quickly than we feared. Either way, a Republican victory will serve the cause of fascism by giving Republican officials more power to steal future elections.
It is very disorienting and bewildering and alienating for me to have to recalibrate my respect for humanity in general so far down the scale from where it stood when I was young. I am an optimist at heart and a kind soul, and I really have (nonreligious) faith in people. And, over time, I've just had to slide the weights on the scale downward and downward and downward as society continues to demonstrate for me its collectively unworthiness.
People who travel a lot or interact a lot often say that, in their experiences, most people are basically good. That's been my experience as well. What has changed is that I now think we were always wrong about this, and that what we perceived as goodness is not necessarily filled with the nutrients upon which true goodness depends for its strength: wisdom, kindness, compassion, interest, and so forth. Rather, I think what we have taken for goodness is just social affability. Sociopathic smiles concealing crude convictions fabricated by menial minds.
In place of yesteryear's narrativism, which told tale of a species that was getting its shit together and growing up, today I am more inclined to look at humanity as I would look at other animals. We are cunning enough to be very dangerous, yet foolish enough to be equally destructive and corrosive.
I think the logical conclusion of this line of thought is that we can simply never be a truly equal species, and that the "final boss battle" of our supposed "infancy" will be to defeat those whose definitions of our inequality are malevolently wrong. That is a battle far in the future, if it ever comes. For now, we must simply survive this fascist groundswell, and, if we survive, try to rehabilitate the cultural degeneracy and lunacy which permitted it to flourish.
There is a fever taking over this society. A mass insanity. I see it everywhere. I feel it in the fabric of our society. Intelligent people are going crazy. Reality is routinely banished from the discourse of things. The forces of light are scattered, visionless, leaderless, passionless, and timid. Our society is very, very sick. And I don't know where it's all heading. Violence, probably. Tyranny, quite possibly.
This...multigenerational oscillation...this "life cycle of cultures"...has quite a gaslighting effect. But I am quite confident that this is not all merely in my head. I am quite confident that we are in the midst of an enormous and quite likely destructive change. I think that too many minds are lost to the fever now, and that only widespread physical destruction or else long-term generational change will be able to break it, if (in the case of the latter) our society still affords our descendants the means to bloom in their own way. And I wonder what they will be like, as a consequence of all of this.
Where did we go wrong? It was probably all written down before we were even born. The course of history, unlike the arc of humanity, very much is a linear narrative, each era proceeding logically from the one before it. So maybe we didn't "go wrong" so much as enter into a predictable era of decay and dissembly. But if I were to intrude with my personal opinions, I think it has something to do with the fact that people don't see the world anymore. They don't know how anything works. They can't bear to pay attention to anything. They want immediate gratification for everything all the time. They will sacrifice anything for convenience. And they don't know how to think or be alone with themselves.
Maybe, in our less convenient past, when things weren't so automatic and impersonal, the physical rhythms of daily life helped keep people in touch with reality better. But, regardless, the fact remains that history is littered with "fever eras," times of insanity.
Humanity is so weird. There are so many amazing individuals, yet collectively we are dumber than the caricatures of us in the cartoons. We really are our own joy and sorrow.