Is It Just Me?
October 19th, 2008 by 
Rory Harper
Sorry, guys, but this is the angsty self-absorbed post that I threatened you all with a couple weeks ago. My unfunny ‘True Christian Conservatives’ post a few weeks back was perhaps a prequel to this one. I think I have to spit out the poison before I can move on to more enjoyable and interesting writings. Feel free to quit reading when you get bored.
Throughout my life, I’ve often thought that my attitudes and major concerns were on the fringe, only to discover, dismayingly, that I was in the middle of the bell curve. I don’t like feeling ‘normal’.
So I’m asking for a reality check from my fellow Brainiacs today, because for once, I’m hoping that I’m just insane, and could use some bucking up and advice about where to go from where I find myself.
All of us who post here have radically dropped off in participation since this past Spring. There are some obvious reasons. Many of us have been so busy with work that we’ve had little energy left to give to EOB. I know that I’ve also felt ‘written out’, needing to refill the well of interesting ideas.
But I’ve also been generally lethargic and withdrawn in a lot of areas of my life. I find it difficult to complete projects that require a lot of concentration and multiple steps. I don’t answer email. I deliberately withdraw and isolate, even more than usual. I have this odd sort of flattened depression much of the time, where I’m not so much overtly saddened as just blunted in my responses to everything. (This is all diagnosable in DSM-IV, incidentally.)
There are some personal life events that have contributed, but it’s this goddam election season that seems to be driving it.
The past eight years have been nearly unendurable, as we watched almost everything good and decent and functional in our country attacked and, largely, demolished. Lotsa depression and rage for all of us to share, I think. And now it feels like the norm.
But it looks like we’re about to see a tidal wave of electoral change happen (assuming that this series of elections doesn’t get stolen, too, of course…). Why am I not happy?
Even if Obama wins with 350+ electoral votes, even if we get another 30+ congressscritters, even if we elect a filibuster-proof 60 Senators, I’m disheartened.
And, no, it’s not about knowing that Obama won’t be the new messiah, or knowing that we’ll still be governed largely by corruptible self-serving sociopaths. Since my stereotypical radicalization in the idealized Sixties, I’ve been clear that anyone who strives for huge amounts of power and/or money is broken and dangerous, so that’s not a problem for me.
It’s taken me a while to sort through the wreckage that is my mental process, but I think I’ve identified the central issue.
It’s not really about the politics per se.
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It’s what this election has finally made me admit to myself. I’m being forced to change my view of humanity, against my wishes.
I’ve clung to the belief that almost all of us want to grow toward the light. That we’re innately kind and generous. That we want to do right by each other. That the Golden Rule is born in us all, and only needs to be freed from the chains of ignorance and fear. That the exceptions are twisted rarities.
I’ve told myself that the people in our country who kept the monsters in power just need better information, that they were being fooled, and it wasn’t their fault.
But — With the rise of the Internets and the blatant, bluntly obvious worldwide and local effects of our behavior as a nation and a species throughout this decade, everybody by now knows everything they need to.
We’re in a mess, and it’s not subtle, it’s not contestable. By every measure that I can find, we’re seriously fucked up. I won’t rant in detail, but the entire planet is breaking rapidly, and the
….And the damned, depressing polls consistently tell us that more than 40% of this country wants to keep the same people and policies in place that have wrought this destruction. And another 10% are undecided. Undecided? How the hell can you be undecided at this point?
It’s not that they still don’t know any better. I’m unable to convince myself of that any more. They’ve watched their neighborhoods and cities crumble, their life savings evaporate, their children increasingly unable to get an education, their country driven into such a hole in almost every way, so that it’s almost impossible to imagine how to climb out.
And up to half of them still want more of the same.
We’ve all read the explanations. It’s about evangelical extremism. It’s about propaganda put out by politicians. It’s about learned intolerance for gays and minorities and abortion. It’s about xenophobia.
I finally understand that it’s about stupidity and selfishness.
Occam’s Razor keeps forcing me back to that simple explanation. It’s not complicated. A terrifyingly large percentage of people are assholes and morons, and they aren’t going to change, no matter how bad it gets. This may sound simple and obvious to some of the more cynical here, but it hasn’t been to me.
I’ve never believed this before, and I don’t like believing it now.
I don’t know of any system, mechanical, biological, or physical, that can keep working when half of its parts are broken and obstructing the function of the other half. Prior to the 20th Century, things were uncomplicated enough that we had breathing space to work around each other and still move forward. I think we’ve gotten so interconnected that this high percentage of assholes and morons now has the power to kill us all, just by keeping us from being able to do the things we need to do to survive. And that they’ve been doing so for most of my life. We’re finally seeing the worst of the results.
Again, going into detail is unnecessary for this audience – the rising tides of hatred and war worldwide, the growing absolute destruction of our natural resources, the almost daily revelations that the effects of global climate change aren’t coming, they’re here now and going to get exponentially worse than predicted. And on and on.
On a good day, I find myself dimly hoping there are enough non-asshole, non-moron humans on the planet to somehow pull through. That there are just barely enough of us to begin to reverse the wholesale destruction that we’ve enabled in the last half-century.
Less dimly, I hope that technology will come up with the fixes we need. Maybe we’ll be okay, maybe my grandchildren won’t have to live in a world of endless war while a planetary civilization dies around them.
But, no matter how it all goes, I badly miss my belief that we’re all brothers and sisters on the inside, that we’re all really one huge tribe, that when we see the work that needs to be done, we’ll somehow come together to care for each other.
I’ve lost my core belief, the thing that has informed how I’ve interacted with everyone else for my entire life, that we’re almost all of us worthy of respect and love.
All I can wish for now is that the unreconstructable assholes and morons are brushed aside, marginalized, silenced, so that the rest of us can figure out a way to survive. I desperately wish that there weren’t so many of them.
*******
My intellect tells me that this post is evidence of a process I’m going through, rather than an endpoint that I’ve reached. But it doesn’t feel that way at this moment. I’m pretty sure that I’ve lost any balanced perspective. But I’m not sure that there’s any balance left to be had.
My life on a personal level is actually pretty good. I’ve repeatedly written about the many joys in it here. Whenever I find myself attending to the macro level, though, it’s gotten increasingly bleak this year. I’m hoping that I’m just suffering from some temporary, and reversible, bad neurochemistry, or projecting my personal feelings about my own impending age-related decay.
I’ll appreciate it if any of you have the energy or time to at least briefly rip into me and tear this unjoyous new belief apart. I’d like to expel it, or at least trivialize it. Because I’m finding myself not liking most people these days, and that’s a bad change for me.
Maybe this sort of angsty cynicism is fun when you’re fifteen years old and ranting on your LJ, but I’m finding it to be damn tiresome.
And I’m more than a little curious about whether any of you have been going through some of the same lugubrious processes that I have, and whether this has informed any of the decline in posting here.
Hugs to you all, my non-assholic non-moronic tribe.
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Pic credit to Rachael Harper. All rights reserved to her.
Posted in Daily Life | 
12 Comments »
October 19th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
Nah, it’s not just you. I’m going through a lot of that.
But you have to remember that people are astonishingly ignorant, and not by accident. The CIA and the NED and hundreds of greedy, greedy promoters of disinformation are out there confusing people so the rich can stay rich. It’s not folks’ fault they’re ignorant–though I do wish intelligent people weren’t so often determined to use their intelligence to rationalize what they’ve been taught rather than look at the world clearly.
Anyway, take a break. I’m thinking about doing it, too. Barring total disaster, Obama’s in. Start thinking now about how to push things after he’s elected, because electing him is only a tiny start.
Uh, sorry if talking about more work is depressing. If it is, just take a break now. Making new plans once Obama’s elected is also fine.
October 19th, 2008 at 11:38 pm
Your position is not to be expelled or trivialized. You aren’t a foolish or unobservant person and the fact that you’ve come to this conclusion after long, hard, serious thought means that it should be taken seriously.
But your earlier beliefs are, equally, not to be scorned.
Listen. We’ve communicated with each other a bit. You’ve probably picked up on the fact that to a degree I’m a mean-spirited misanthropic bastard — but when you say that you want to believe that most people are deserving of respect and love all I can say…
… is that it’s true.
What we are facing does not change that. Every abomination and atrocity that people have committed is real – but none of them can change or alter in any way an act of love and kindness. Most people are willing to sacrifice for the people they care for. And in my book that’s enough to make them worthy. I’ve seen it, you’ve seen it — don’t let the accumulated mistakes of the species blind you to the fact that the most essential of the values we hold dear are hardwired into us. These values recur throughout history, all over the world. You know how you feel about those you care for. You know what you’d be willing to do for them.
And you are far from alone. Yes, the need to have a tribe and an enemy is basic to the human species. But so is the desire to help those in need.
Yes, there are bad people. And their desire for power and control are backed up by a willingness to do anything they can in order to achieve their desires. There is a potency in extremism that is an object of worship in current American culture.
But those people are pulling against each other. Every act of selfishness is by nature solitary. Yeah, they accumulate and bear down on the rest of us…
… but every act of humanity is part of something larger. Every time someone tries to make life better for someone else they are acting in concert with everyone else who has had the same desire.
Not to blow things out of proportion or grow maudlin but I think of you as a friend. Your communications with me have made me feel good. And that has helped me be a kinder person to those with whom I’m in more intimate contact. And that’s helped them to feel good about me. Which helps me to expand my humanity, to try and be more kind to more people.
The doom you are worried about is real. But it is particulate in nature; it’s an accumulation of individual atrocities. It is not a massed and deliberate force.
Decency is. The desire to see people fed and clothed and housed and most importantly loved is common to the vast majority of people – and every time that desire is acted upon it is in concert with every other expression of that impulse.
I believe there are hard times ahead for America and harder times ahead for the human species. I believe that ignorance, fear, and tribalism are the forces most actively working against us. I believe that there are aspects of human nature that act against our best interests with great effectiveness.
But I also feel that humanity matters. That decency counts. That showing each other kindness in the face of what is surely to come means more than any disaster we may suffer. And that resisting fear is very important. We cannot avoid fear; we can refuse to let it dictate our behavior.
The state of America is not the state of mankind; it is something that has been induced by specific conditions. And conditions change. And people can change conditions.
You alone cannot change the country or human nature to fit your desires. But you have control over what you do to those around you. You have the ability to put some force, however small, behind the values you hold dear. And that matters. That counts. And when you behave in a fashion that you find proper you act as an example to those around you.
Right now there are less deaths due to war than there have been in the past. The same with starvation and disease. Violent crime in America is on the decline. And worldwide there is a greater percentage of people who believe in judging an individual by their actions and person rather than their nationality or class or religion than there has ever been in human history. Progress has occurred.
This is in no way to deny that we are in a perilous situation. But there is real hope.
And as individuals we can help realize that hope through our behavior.
I know this is thin soup. I know this is not something that is going to miraculously reverse your emotional state. But the only thing you have control over is your own behavior; the only thing you can have faith in is your own goodwill.
Don’t give up. Don’t give in. The only way to know whether or not your state is a temporary one is to live through it until the end. Recognize and embrace those moments, few and fleeting though they may be, when you are able to rise above what you’re going through now. You do have those moments – what you have written about your daughter makes this plain. The flat dull pain of normality is not the significant part of your life – the spots and flashes of joy are what count. And the more you recognize that the more frequent those moments will be. Do not shun or denigrate or minamilize anything in your life that gives you real pleasure, no matter how trivial it may be.
And while you’re going through this pay attention to the way you conduct your life. I may be projecting here but one of my problems is that when I start feeling crummy I tend to stop taking care of myself – but when you don’t feel good it’s important to keep up with the little things. Flossing, greens, exercise, sunlight, socialization… Take care of yourself, man. Try to be as kind to yourself as you want to be to your friends or your daughter. When you’re miserable it doesn’t seem as though these things matter.
But you’ve seen enough to know that they do.
Life is an elephant on a plate. You know how you eat an elephant?
One bite at a time.
October 20th, 2008 at 3:35 am
You mention that a large percentage of people are morons. I find it helpful to remind myself, no matter how silly this sounds, that half the people in the country have below average intelligence.
After living my life for a number of decades, I’ve come to the conclusion that people are not inherently honest or caring. We are all born self-centered. I believe that integrity and empathy are learned behaviors. And it’s hard for parents to teach these behaviors if they themselves weren’t taught them very well. It’s not black and white; some people learn a little, and some learn a lot. And many people keep learning these things throughout their lives.
My personal definition of “civilized” is the ability to separate a feeling from acting on the feeling (essentially delayed gratification) plus the ability to imagine what it would be like to be in another person’s place. Clearly we all do these things imperfectly; it’s a matter of degree. These are things that are implemented in your “higher mind”. And under stress, more “lower mind” functions take priority, so we see people acting abominably precisely when we would like them to be acting civilized.
So people aren’t built well to not be assholes. It’s something that takes a lot of effort and constant attention. Some of us do it, and some don’t.
(With this tiny box to type in, I didn’t structure this very well and just rambled on. I apologize if I didn’t work out the thoughts very well.)
October 20th, 2008 at 7:26 am
Tim, I have to respectfully disagree with you here. I’m coming from a position where my own instinctive stance is that people are scum; this is something that stems from early life experience.
But when I really look hard at the way people act it seems clear to me that yeah, there is a root level of selfishness and short-sightedness, but that is not all there is to people.
If you spend enough time around children you’ll start to notice that altruism is something that seems to spring from a fairly deep set of roots. When a child wants to help or wants to give it is clearly a powerful impulse that has little to do with socialization.
And recently I’ve found that my observations may well be accurate — take a look at this.
http://www.yale.edu/infantlab/socialevaluation/Helper-Hinderer.html
I’m of the opinion that if you see a type of human behavior occur throughout human history and across cultures there is very likely a biological basis for it.
This includes positive as well as negative behaviors. And I’m of the opinion that someone regarded as a ‘good’ person in one culture is very likely to elicit similar judgments in other cultures.
Look at the behavior of our close relatives. Do you believe that altruistic behavior in animals is the result of socialization? Heck, altruistic behavior isn’t even limited to animals of the same species.
The very fact that we judge behavior as good or bad shows that there is reality to what we regard as good. If we were born selfish and nothing but we never would institute social structures intended to foster what we think of as good behavior. It would never have occurred to us.
Listen, as I said my position when I began to examine this question my feeling was that humans are brutes worthy of extermination. Now? I think we’re actually kind of a cool species.
For someone who’s seriously invested in the idea of people as angels who are corrupted by the world the facts can be very hurtful. For me? It’s gone the other way.
October 20th, 2008 at 10:10 am
I agreee that people as a group just plain suck. Individuals may be cool, but people suck. They will vote to steal money from those who have earned more than they have. They will give away their liberty in exchange for empty promises from lying candidates that the government will take care of them. Neither of the pseudo-socialists representing the major parties has any respect for the concept of individual liberty and individual responsibilty. Government is inherently bloated and wasteful. By nature it will grow and seek more and more power. We have certainly passed the point of no return here. No matter who wins the election, we have all lost. With that nasty witch running the house and that evil weasel running the senate it doesn’t matter who goes to the White House. We may slip into the grip of big brother sooner with BO, JM is as bad in his own way. All they care about is lining their pockets or chasing some insane unatainable verstion of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. All it means is, grease up and bend over – big brother is gonna stick it to you.
October 20th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
While I feel things are bad and crappy, I can identify certain times in history (even during my life) when they were as bad and things improved. So, to a certain extent, there’s some Pejorism going on as I get older. I hang around my kids to try and offset some of that.
Look at the FBI during the last part of Hoover’s career. Like now, the illicit surveillance of protesters and, at one point, allowing four innocent men to be sentenced for murder to protect one of their informants.
The whole crappy House Un-Ameriacn Activities Committee crap in the fifties.
Our history of lynching or otherwise mob murder of minorities, whether they be black or gay or whatever.
Keep in mind that in the history of the world, it wasn’t until the 20th century that the general consensus was that war was an abnormal state of affairs instead of the status quot.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that we are making progress but it goes in cycles with dips back into the darkness.
(And yes, corporations and the rich have far too much control of the system. In England, you can’t spend more than the allowed amount to run for parliment. Period. They watch you like a hawk. I would love to see a system like that here, but then I would also like to see a system that allowed more than one party.)
October 22nd, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Granted, I type this with all of the retrospective capabilites of one who can only lay claim to the introspection of a twenty one year old (only a few years away from your fifteen year old angst mark). And truly, I have never been more terrified. I am graduating from college as a practicing thespian (slash waitress. Jab away.) who fully recognizes their career is dependent upon a thriving entertainment economy. This is surely not happening as we spiral into a recession, dragging the global economy along for the ride. Intrest rates on my student loans are five to ten percent higher than when I started college and scholarships for graduate school are at an amazing all time low. My favorite hobbies include hiking, rock climbing, camping, and otherwise enjoying natural resources that are dissappearing. Even with the intense surge in the youth vote, as well as promising ratings for Obama (not to mention the kicker of Powell’s approval), the mere murky political dogma that Palin has kicked up makes me sad that not only are people convinced by this, but that these ideas are even somewhat prevalent just makes me sad.
But! Despite the knowledge that I will almost certainly not be rewarded fiscally for my in-depth appreciation of absurdist drama or avid readership of psychology texts, I continue to do so. Even though approximately ninety eight percent of my fried-chicken-eating, NASCAR-cheering, McCain-supporting state sickens me, I have faith that there can be a revolution. Not one where we overthrow the oil aristocracy and bathe in their black blood, but one where the consumerist consciousness can finally be pushed to enough of an extreme that we may finally react for the better. Hoping that everyone will is just too optimistic. But maybe gas prices over four dollars a gallon would make someone realize that their Hummer is a little overkill for suburbia. Maybe rising food costs will make us re-think over buying and overeating. The collapse in the housing market is a reminder of what happens when we try to overstep our fiscal means. I know that these problems have many other, deeper issues as well. But I have to hope that the scarcity of what we value most will force us to re-evaluate what exactly we are spending so much money on. Maybe we will value something more than ourselves.
I do not, nor have I ever, I suppose, truly believe that humans are born good. (have you ever watched an unsupervised group of two year olds?) But I believe we can change where average falls. I think we can rise above. And while I know not everyone can be changed, I think we can slowly restructure the education system so that the next generation does not reach this point.
The future is coming regardless, and I think we can still stand in the sunshine for some small while yet. The election determines politics, but I think-I hope, that this year the break of an eight year reign of ideology is enough to finally get something changed.
Get thee to arms! Man the thought-battle stations! Realize what the invasion of CCTV means! Beware the suspension of Habus Corpus! And remember that to enjoy the sunshine all you need is it upon your face. No government or politico backwash can take that away.
October 22nd, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Rory, for a dose of hope, read this essay. It’s by a primatologist and shows that the roots of altruism go deep in our genes. It’s also a fascinating reflection on the intersection of science and storytelling.
October 22nd, 2008 at 10:40 pm
From an interview with Tommy Smothers in today’s SF Chronicle:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/22/DD5013G5AT.DTL
—
It took three years to get my sense of humor back,” he says. “I started taking everything seriously. I became the temporary poster boy for the First Amendment, freedom of speech. Twenty years later, there’s Howard Stern.”
…
He leaves and returns with a calligraphic print he and his wife sent out some years before as a Christmas card. It is a quote from Alistair Cooke that reads:
“In the best of times, our days are numbered anyway. So it would be a crime against nature for any generation to take the world crisis so solemnly, that it put off enjoying those things for which we were designed in the first place: the opportunity to do good work, to enjoy friends, to fall in love, to hit a ball, and to bounce a baby.”
—
which is a bit more somber than the rest of the article, but it made me think of your post.
October 23rd, 2008 at 11:49 am
Nice, persky.
October 26th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
Hey, guys — My apologies for being unresponsive here this week. I’ve enjoyed my own personal apocalyptic flu pandemic for the past 13 days, and I’m totally blown out physically and mentally by it.
I kept putting off commenting, hoping that I’d have something intelligent to say, but that that doesn’t seem to be happening yet. I’m a bear of very little brain right now.
Anyhow, I do appreciate all your feedback and encouragement and analysis.
I think part of the cognitive dissidence (thanks for that phrase, Sean!)I’ve been experiencing for some time flows from the fact that I live in one of the more monolithically conservative communities in Texas, and feel pretty alienated and isolated as a result.
My opinions, my lifestyle, and certainly my votes, are on the fringe here. But all of my co-workers, though mostly mainstream conservative and religious, are among the nicest, most decent, most generous people I’ve ever known.
I can’t resolve that personal experience with the demonization of the right that us lefties are prone to.
Except to surmise that they’re happy and well-adjusted within their own community and more relaxed about everything in general as a result. But they still are part of the monster machine that keeps the Other suppressed as much as possible.
I just can’t work out how they can cling to some of the social and political and economic beliefs that they do, when the real world, which even they experience pretty directly, is so obviously telling them to re-think.
I don’t know where to go with that these days, other than to start believing that there’s something really broken inside a much larger percentage of people than I previously thought. And that’s a bummer.
It’s been a tough, complex couple of months, and I haven’t been able to spend time in Austin the way I normally do, with my daughter and the Babies, and the Wild-Assed NeoPagans. And that’s probably at the root of a lot of my angst.
It has been privately suggested to me that a good antidote is to just refocus on spending more time and energy with the people that I love.
I can’t change the real world out there with these real people in it, however they may be, so that sounds like the smartest, sanest thing I can do.
Thanks for all your good wishes.
October 28th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Rory, here are a couple of other cheer-inducing links:
Heinlein’s ‘This I Believe’ talk
yeearrrgh! I can’t find the second link. I’ll post it later, if I can find it.