Better Strangers

Earlier this year, for the first time in my nearly 10 years struggling with depression, I went on antidepressants. It was something I should’ve tried long ago — depression is caused by many things, and there are often many components to treatment (therapy, exercise, cutting back on alcohol, getting fresh air, overthrowing capitalism, etc.) — but in spite of what the Scientologists say, antidepressants have helped a lot of people and have saved a lot of lives.

I have not been one of them.

The reason is that, while I have experienced some of the positive benefits of antidepressants, I have had with each one I’ve tried, side effects that have made it impossible to live my life in the way I need to. With the first drug, fluoxetine (brand name Prozac), I found it too difficult to concentrate on reading. This, as someone who reads and writes for a living, is a non-starter. The second drug, bupropion (brand name Wellbutrin), has given me pretty bad insomnia. This, as the father of two small kids, is out of the question.

At the same time this year, on the heels of my home state of New Jersey legalizing pot, I began taking sativa cannabis edibles about once a week as part of a night of rest and relaxation. If I had to pick one drug that’s been better for my mental health this year — fluoxetine, bupropion, or cannabis — I’d pick the cannabis, far and away.

Psychedelics and treating mental illness

There is a growing body of evidence that psychedelic drugs are going to be the psychiatric miracle drugs that we once thought SSRIs and other antidepressants would be. Psychedelics have been shown to be extremely effective in treating depression, anxiety, PTSD, and drug addiction in ways that frankly dwarf the effectiveness of SSRIs. Michael Pollan’s excellent book How to Change Your Mind is an account of that growing body of science, and what it might mean for the future of mental healthcare.

Pollan’s account of the psychedelic revolution is a history, a memoir, and a science book on how we got to this point. Before they became the recreational drugs of the counterculture, scientists in the early- to mid- 20th century were getting wildly impressive results treating addicts and depressives with psychedelics, to the point where they were being heavily funded by institutions like the CIA.

But in the 1960s, this all changed when Timothy Leary, a renowned Harvard psychology professor, left academia in a fantastic scandal that turned him into the world’s foremost evangelist of LSD, encouraging kids to “turn on, tune in, and drop out” with drugs as a way of waging a sort of spiritual revolution against the status quo. Psychedelics became a focal point of the culture wars of the 60’s, Leary became an international fugitive, and Richard Nixon started the war on drugs as a way of marginalizing and disenfranchising his most militant political opponents.

As a result, the drugs were driven underground for decades. It has only begun to reemerge as legitimate science in the past decade or so.

The subjective experience of drugs

Pollan’s book takes a break in between the history and the science to reflect on his experiences with three different types of psychedelic drugs, and it is not the most interesting part of the book: it’s never particularly interesting hearing about other people’s trips, just as it’s not particularly easy to explain your own. But it does make a valuable point — that the strength of psychedelic drugs is in the subjective experience of the trip, which can often induce mystical experiences in the mind of (to use Pollan’s preferred term) the psychonaut. These mystical experiences can reveal truths that, when spoken to someone outside the experience, seem incredibly cliched or trite (“love is all you need,” “we are all one,”) but which to the person experiencing the trip, is monumental, often life-changing.

The problem modern scientists face is that there is no real accounting for how these experiences change people (you can’t measure subjective experience), but the point is that they demonstrably do — after one or two sessions, terminal cancer patients come to peaceful terms with death, lifetime smokers throw away their cigarettes and never look back, and the chronically depressed feel relief from decades old symptoms for up to a year.

But this new resurgence of psychedelic research has something at its disposal that scientists in the 40s and 50s didn’t: brain imaging technology. With these tools, scientists have begun to identify much about how not only the brain, but consciousness in general may work.

One theory that has been gaining traction thanks to brain imaging is that psychedelics quiet the part of our brain known as the “Default mode network,” which is late-developing part of the brain that helps keep our minds efficient. It is the part of our brain that uses patterns and experience to help us solve problems — the door is locked, the solution is to unlock the door rather than, you know, start smashing it with a hammer or jumping through a window.

The Default mode network is nonexistent in children, who have far more malleable, adaptive minds. They still do not have the patterns and experience that adults do, so they solve problems in a far more outside-the-box type of way. As a result, four-year-olds can be better at solving some outside-the-box problems than adults.

By quieting this part of the brain, psychedelics basically turn us back into kids. (The flip side to this, Dr. Alison Gopnik points out in the book, is that “babies and children are basically tripping all the time.”) This is valuable when the experiences and patterns adopted for efficiency’s sake by the Default mode network are actually causing us problems. Depression, anxiety, addiction, and PTSD are all characterized by a certain rigidity in thinking, an inability to find creative solutions to old problems. Psychedelics break the hold of these rigid perspectives and give us access to something new.

The political risks of psychedelic science

The thing about Richard Nixon and Timothy Leary: they weren’t wrong about the politics of psychedelics. The drugs do have a tendency to disrupt hierarchies. People who took acid did often become opposed to violence and war. The drugs also connect people to nature, they reduce egotism and individualism. These are potentially revolutionary tools.

What’s more is that modern psychiatrists have found that they have to develop a whole new paradigm to engage with psychedelics — you can’t do “objective” studies of the drugs in stripped down white labs, because a major component in a trip’s success is, as Leary put it, the “set and setting.” In other words, your experience is heavily influenced by your mindset going into the trip, and also the physical and psychological setting in which you do it. If the setting feels cold and impersonal, you’ll likely have a bad fucking time. If it feels warm and loving, you’re far more likely to have a positive, meaningful experience.

Which means the doctors administering and studying these drugs have to cross lines with their “subjects” that most people operating within the scientific method would find appalling. The role the researchers take, as many uneasily admit in the book, is more “shamanic” than scientific. They are more of a spirit guide than an austere clinician.

None of which invalidates the findings. But psychedelics blur the boundaries between the subjective world of experience and the objective world of science. With every astounding study showing how these drugs really, genuinely help people, science is being backed into a corner where it may have to reconsider the objective/subjective divide upon which its very existence is founded upon.

For my part, I took shrooms once in my friends basement when I was 24 years old. It was a really, really, really good experience. It was intense and sometimes scary, but I came out of it with a clearer sense of myself and my place in the universe than I’d ever had, and the effect lasted for several years before the onset of my depression. Given the positive experiences I’ve had with the far milder (and not technically psychedelic) drug of cannabis, I hope I’ll someday soon be able to legally go on a trip and feel good about my place in the universe once more.

This article was originally published on my personal website in slightly different form.

Ask the average American when fascism was defeated, and they will tell you 1945. Fascism, they say, died with Hitler and Mussolini. When did America start fighting fascism? December, 1941. Four years and we had the thing licked.

This is, of course, nonsense. Fascism continued to not only exist, but to be actively supported by the US government throughout the world as a bulwark against communism after the end of WWII.

The war against fascism did not start with Hitler and Mussolini, though: the first stage was in Spain, where an amalgamation of liberals, communists, and anarchists fought against the forces of Francisco Franco. 3,000 Americans, known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigades, went to Spain starting in 1936 to fight Francisco Franco, the general who was attempting to overthrow Spain's democratically elected republic. They fought Franco — who had the fury of the German and Italian military behind him, as Hitler and Mussolini saw this as an ideal spot to test out their war machine — with zero support from the government of the United States, which had decided to stay neutral. 

About a third of them died. Those who returned were considered heroes for a few brief years until the Red Scares of the 50's started up, and they were labeled as "premature antifascists." The man they were fighting went on to rule Spain until his death in 1975 — 30 years after the end of World War II.

While the Republicans (the broad name for the anti-fascist side in the war) eventually lost to Franco, the fight itself has left a massive impression on American culture. Some of the greatest works of art in the past century have been centered around or have referenced the war. Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (not to mention Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four), Picasso's Guernica, the 1942 classic Casablanca, the 2006 classic Pan's Labyrinth, and Carlos Ruiz Zafon's beautiful gothic novel The Shadow of the Wind, all revolve around "the good fight."

In a time of resurgent fascism — and when “antifascism” has again become a slur — it seems appropriate to look back at some of the great works that came from this honorable, doomed fight.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemingway was a reporter in Spain during the Civil War. He was one of the last journalists to leave the country after the fall of the Republicans, and he used his experiences to write his masterpiece For Whom The Bell Tolls. The title comes from a meditation written by the English poet John Donne:

"No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee."

While in Spain, one of the people Hemingway met was Robert Hale Merriman, the young Californian leftist who commanded the Abraham Lincoln Battalion during the war. Hemingway was impressed with the young man, and likely based his principled, loner hero Robert Jordan off of him.

It's a very typical Hemingway book, which is to say there's a lot of machismo, a lot of short, declarative sentences about courage and bravery, and a lot of (let's call it what it is) dick-swinging.

But it is a great book. Hemingway's politics were a weird brand of testosterone-fueled leftism, but he came down firmly against fascism. There's a telling passage from the book where Jordan explains fascism in America to two Spanish guerrillas.

"But there are not great estates that must be broken up?"

"Yes. But there are those who believe that taxes will break them up."

"How?"

Robert Jordan, wiping out the stew bowl with bread, explained how the income tax and inheritance tax worked. "But the big estates remain. Also there are taxes on the land," he said.

"But surely the big proprietors and the rich will make a revolution against such taxes. Such taxes appear to me to be revolutionary. They will revolt against the government when they see that they are threatened, exactly as the fascists have done here," Primitivo said.

"It is possible."

"Then you will have to fight in your country as we fight here."

"Yes, we will have to fight."

"But are there not many fascists in your country?"

"There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes."

"But you cannot destroy them until they rebel?"

"No," Robert Jordan said. "We cannot destroy them. But we can educate the people so that they will fear fascism and recognize it as it appears and combat it."

Interestingly, For Whom the Bell Tolls was not particularly loved by the actual Americans who fought for the Republicans during the war -- they did not think that Jordan's independent, lonely, all-American male was super representative of the actual men who fought in Spain. Most of them were working class. Most of them had minority or immigrant backgrounds. Most of them were believers in left-wing ideologies. 

Casablanca and Pan’s Labyrinth

On their face, Casablanca and Pan's Labyrinth are not very similar movies. In Casablanca, this dude is the villain:

And in Pan's Labyrinth, this dude is the villain:

They are united, though, by a common thread: their heroes cut their teeth in the Spanish Civil War. Ofelia, the heroine of Pan's Labyrinth is young girl struggling to survive in a fascist military camp at the tail end of the war. And Rick Blaine, Humphrey Bogart’s hero in Casablanca is wanted by the Nazi's because he fought with the Abraham Lincoln Brigades.

Both stories also look directly into the eyes of nihilism and despair. It is hard, in retrospect, to not see Spain as a cautionary tale. Spain gives us a glimpse of what the world would've looked like if World War II had been lost. Franco's Spain was isolated for a decade or so after the end of World War II, but in the 50's, the United States had new enemies, and could no longer resist allying itself with anti-communist forces in mainland Europe. In part, this is why the fascists were able to stay in power for decades. When democracy was finally restored to Spain in the 70's, Franco's men were granted amnesty, and many continued to work in the government. The Basque and Catalonian separatist movements, still very much in the news today, got their start as leftist separatist movements during the Franco era.

Spain, then, is a country that we failed. And this hurt was still fresh in the early 40's: Casablanca's Rick is depicted, when we meet him, as a wounded idealist who has lost wars and the love of his life, and has sunk into a sort of self-centered nihilism. 

"I stick my neck out for nobody," he says. But as the other characters point out to him, this was not always the case:

Captain Renault:In 1935, you ran guns to Ethiopia. In 1936, you fought in Spain, on the Loyalist side.

Rick:I got well paid for it on both occasions.

Captain Renault:The winning side would have paid you much better.

His nihilism, over the course of the movie, is revealed to be a façade that Rick adopted out of necessity after the heartbreak of losing so much. The movie itself, released in 1942, was something of a call to arms for Americans in the early days of the war, long before it was clear that the Allies would triumph. Many Americans had, until just recently, been broadly in support of the European fascists (their non-interventionist motto, "America First," has since been reused in the 45th American President's inauguration speech).

At the end (this is a spoiler, but honest to god, if you haven't seen Casablanca yet, what the fuck are you doing with your life?), Rick forgoes his own personal happiness in the cause of fighting back against the Nazis. Selfishness, in 1942, was a luxury the world could no longer afford.

Pan's Labyrinth is somehow even darker. Ofelia is the daughter of a fascist Captain's new wife. The Captain is tasked with rooting out and murdering the last surviving members of the Republican resistance. Ofelia's mother is pregnant and can't take care of her, so she's surrounded at all times by soldiers and truly horrific brutality. She also happens to be surrounded by some genuinely horrifying actual monsters, and finds that she has to overcome a set of fairy tale-like tasks to survive.

I don't want to spoil the movie (because it is literally the best movie I've ever seen and I still cry like a goddamn child every time I watch it), but it is through Ofelia, the weakest, most marginalized person on that military compound, that some form of hope is able to arise. It is perhaps best summed up by the modern writer Rebecca Solnit, in her book Hope in the Dark:

"The grounds for hope are in the shadows, in the people who are inventing the world while no one looks, who themselves don’t know yet whether they will have any effect, in the people you have not yet heard of who will be the next Cesar Chavez, the next Noam Chomsky, the next Cindy Sheehan, or become something you cannot yet imagine. In this epic struggle between light and dark, it’s the dark side — that of the anonymous, the unseen, the officially powerless, the visionaries and subversives in the shadows — that we must hope for."

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

George Orwell is best known for his books Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. When I was in school, the books were taught as if they were cautionary tales about the dangers of communism. But in reality, Orwell himself was a socialist. In the late 30's, while working as a reporter, he decided to go to Spain to try and write a few articles about the Good Fight. When he got there, he changed his mind, and enlisted in the POUM, a communist sect within the Republican army. 

During the fighting, Orwell was shot in the throat by a fascist sniper. "No one I met at this time," he wrote, "doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients — failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all." His throat injury meant he had to be moved back from the front to Barcelona. 

In any war, there are uncomfortable unions. Groups of people in allied forces who do not particularly agree with each other, but whom are committed to fighting a common enemy. In Spain, the Republican side was a wildly diverse hodgepodge of leftist and liberal ideologies. There were the people who wanted to create autonomous democratic governments for their home regions (Basques, Catalonians, Galicians), there were democrats, there were anarchists, and there were communists. The communists alone had a handful of splinter groups: Stalinists, Trotskyists, democratic socialists, trade unions.

For the likes of Orwell, the splintering of ideologies seemed silly.

If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I should have answered: 'To fight against Fascism,' and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: "Common decency.' I had accepted the News Chronicle-New Statesman version of the war as the defence of civilization against a maniacal outbreak by an army of Colonel Blimps in the pay of Hitler. The revolutionary atmosphere of Barcelone had attracted me deeply, but I had made no attempt to understand it. 

As for the kaleidoscope of political parties and trade unions, with their tiresome names -- P.S.U.C., P.O.U.M., F.A.I., C.N.T., U.G.T., J.C.I., J.S.U., A.I.T. -- they merely exasperated me. It looked at first sight as though Spain were suffering from a plague of initials. I knew that I was serving in something called the P.O.U.M. (I had only joined the P.O.U.M. militia rather than any other because I happened to arrive in Barcelona with [Independent Labour Party] papers), but I did not realize that there were serious differences between the political parties.

At Monte Pocero, when they pointed to the position on our left and said: 'Those are the Socialists' (meaning the P.S.U.C.), I was puzzled and said: 'Aren't we all Socialists?' I thought it idiotic that people fighting for their lives should have separate parties; my attitude always was, 'Why can't we drop all this political nonsense and get on with the war?'

The splintering would end up being the downfall of the resistance. Since the United States and other democratic countries didn't pitch in with the Republican efforts (with, incidentally, the exception of Mexico), most of the shots were called by the USSR under Joseph Stalin.

Over the course of the previous decade Stalin had been brutally consolidating power in the Soviet Union. His biggest rival -- a man who had escaped the USSR and continued to be a global figurehead, a man who Stalin was insanely jealous of -- was the revolutionary Leon Trotsky.

Stalin, in consolidating his power, had encouraged the idea in the USSR that there were subversive capitalist enemies everywhere, and that Trotsky was their ring-leader, that all of his revolutionary achievements were actually part of a sinister plot (it helped Stalin, no doubt, that Trotsky was Jewish, and people were already prone to believe this strain of anti-Semitic thoughts about Jews). His paranoid approach to politics did not, unfortunately, remain in the USSR. It spilled into Spain, where the Stalinists began to target the main Trotskyist sect: the POUM, where Orwell, so coincidentally, had found himself fighting.

To recover from the throat wound, Orwell returned to Barcelona right around the time that the Stalinists started accusing his militia of sedition. This meant Orwell was now an enemy of the people. He and his compatriots were accused of actually working with the fascists, and Orwell found that it was impossible to find any honest reporting back home in England on what was actually happening in Barcelona. "The Daily Mail," he wrote of the infamous right-wing shitrag, "amid the cheers of the Catholic clergy, was able to represent Franco as a patriot delivering his country from a horde of fiendish 'Reds.'" But the left wing papers were just as willing to lie. The New Statesman, Orwell mentions, "was treating us to tales of Fascist barricades made of the bodies of living children (a most unhandy thing to make barricades with)." 

"One of the dreariest effects of this war," he wrote, "has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right." He'd noticed, while at the front lines, that he never seemed to be able to find the reporters who were writing about all of these atrocities. "Perhaps when the next great war comes" he said, "we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him."

This lack of commitment to truth meant that when Stalin turned his sights on all of the other left-wing militias, the mere concept of "truth" had been so diluted that it was impossible to reliably refute a false claim. The only newspaper that reliably told the truth in his home country, Orwell found, was The Manchester Guardian, which is still in print today at The Guardian. But how could everyone else know that? They hadn't been at the front. It was easier (and more comfortable) to just believe the conspiracies.

In a final, horrific act of self-destruction, the Stalinists attacked all of "disloyal" members of the coalition, and effectively destroyed any final chance of resistance against Franco and the fascists. Orwell himself fled the country. A year after the Civil War ended in 1939, Stalin signed the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, effectively letting the Nazi's turn their eyes from Russia towards the rest of Europe.

Orwell maintained his leftism for the rest of his life (he actually says in Homage that he personally liked the anarchists more than the Trotskyists), but his later books were echoes of Catalonia, of what happens when lies are given the same value as truth, and what horrible hellscape awaits us when people, who all broadly have the same interests at heart, allow themselves to be divided.

Shirley Jackson is, among most Americans, only remembered for her deeply unsettling, controversial short story “The Lottery.” When it was first published in The New Yorker in 1948, it quickly became the most talked about work of fiction ever published in the magazine, with many writing in to complain or cancel their subscriptions.

This was in part because “The Lottery” is an amazing short story (the link above is to the full text, now available without paywall on The New Yorker’s website), but it was also in part because in the story, Jackson touched a sensitive American nerve. Americans, Jackson knew, are extremely prone to succumbing to a mob mentality, and can be totally thoughtless when it comes to their traditions.

For members of later generations, the story is still ubiquitous — it’s on most high school English class syllabi, and among the many stories I read as a high schooler, it is easily the most memorable. Until recently, this has been the extent of her notoriety outside horror circles.

Mercifully, the western world is reconsidering its literary canon, this time to include some writers who are not white men. And one of the quickest rising stars (though she died in 1965 at the age of 48) is Shirley Jackson.

The Haunting of Hill House

Her most famous novel is The Haunting of Hill House, which for my money, has the best opening paragraph of any horror novel:

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

This is a common theme in horror: that it might not necessarily be the supernatural that makes a place haunted, but instead its architecture. Horror icon (and virulent racist) H.P. Lovecraft loved to give alien buildings eeriness by referring to the fact that they were built with “non-Euclidean geometry,” and as such were beyond our mind’s ability to fully comprehend.

As I’ve mentioned maybe a dozen times in this newsletter, this jibes well with Alan Moore’s understanding of how places can drive us mad, because places we perceive as “rat traps” will make us feel like rats.

Jackson’s Hill House has successfully been adapted a number of times, but the Netflix miniseries (which did not stick close to the source material) was one of the spookiest things I’ve seen in years.

Dark Tales

As my first spooky book of spooky season, I’ve been reading Jackson’s short story collection Dark Tales. Horror as a literary genre is especially well-suited to short fiction. This is because the true greats in the horror genre understand that what’s most scary is the stuff that’s left up to our imaginations, and short stories as a form by necessity give you a lot fewer details and let you fill them in yourself.

If you are looking for one story from this collection to seek out, it’s “The Story We Used to Tell,” which is so eerie it sent a literal chill down my spine. It is also a very obvious predecessor to my favorite book of the year, Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Jackson’s final work was We Have Always Lived in the Castle, about two sisters and a sick uncle who live in a mansion on the outskirts of town. The family is ostracized because, six years earlier, the older sister was accused of murdering the rest of the family. She was acquitted, but the question of who poisoned the family lingers, and only the younger sister has any contact with the outside world.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a dark look at what domestic life can feel like (Jackson herself raised her four children and supported the family with her writing while her husband had affairs with his students at the local college), and like “The Lottery” deals with the suffocating dread of living in small town America.

Shirley Jackson is not the scariest horror writer in American history, but she is among the best — any anxiety you’ve felt about this country and its culture is reflected in her work, and if you’re looking for a way to process those fears in a frightening time, you could do a lot worse than picking up literally any book she has written.

As of this writing, Bruce Springsteen is in the middle of a string of arena shows in the New Jersey Meadowlands. This is a big deal in the state: Bruce Springsteen is New Jersey’s most famous son, and here in Monmouth County, nearly everyone has had an encounter or a connection with the man: My former coworker used to live next to the shack in Long Branch where he wrote the Born to Run album, and was on her porch one day when Bob Dylan stopped by the house on a musical pilgrimage. My wife’s uncle knew a girl that dated him back in the 70s, and he still maintains that Bruce was a “bum” and a “slob.” And countless friends have bumped into him in the gym, have been at the Stone Pony concert venue on a night when Bruce dropped in, or have looked to their left on the Garden State Parkway only to see the Boss riding alongside them on his motorcycle.

The relationship the state has with Bruce — and that Bruce has with the state — is complicated though. Because Bruce Springsteen is the bard of American working class angst and disappointment, and in his early life, he wanted nothing more desperately than to get out of New Jersey.

This is most evident in his breakout album, Born to Run. Bruce was raised in Freehold, New Jersey, and made a name for himself in the Asbury Park music scene as a young man before attracting the attention of record executives. He produced a few albums that were critically acclaimed but weren’t hugely successful, and Born to Run was what he saw as his last chance to break through to the big time. Bruce thought he could be something great, but the Jersey Shore was peppered with men who thought they’d be big, shot their shot, and missed. These men slunk back home, got factory jobs, and spent their nights drinking and reminiscing about better times.

So he poured every last ounce of himself into the production of Born to Run. “Everything was on the line for him,” Springsteen's biographer Peter Ames Carlin told the publication The Week, “he was either going to continue living his dream or get sent home with nothing but debt. So he agonized over individual notes, over the silences between the notes, and on and on. He needed to put every ounce of himself into getting it just exactly right — because from his perspective his entire life rested in the balance.”

And it shows — Born to Run is an absolutely massive album, and at its core is a frenzied, crawling-out-of-his-skin desperation to leave New Jersey in the dust. The title track is probably the greatest rock song of all time, so it was understandable that in 1980, the New Jersey State Assembly tried to designate it the unofficial anthem of the state’s youth. Members of the press pointed out that maybe it was a bad idea to give that honor to a song that includes lyrics like:

Baby this town rips the bones from your backIt’s a death trap, a suicide wrapWe gotta get out while we’re young’Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run

The legislation was shelved.

The final song of the album, “Jungleland” remains the single most desperate song I’ve ever heard. It’s two-and-a-half minute sax solo by Bruce’s right hand man, Clarence “The Big Man” Clemons, is a devastating, beautiful wail for attention and recognition. Bruce was so fixated on the solo, knowing it was the great, showstopping finale of his final shot at the big time, that he made Clarence play it for 16 hours straight to get every note perfect.

Of course, we know now that it worked. Bruce made it, and off of the success of Born to Run, he moved out to California, married a movie star, and became the biggest rock star on earth. But his songs — from “Born in the USA” to “The River” — continued to be haunted by the idea of what he might’ve been if he hadn’t made it, if he’d ended up back in Asbury Park like so many of the friends and family he left behind. Bruce ended up leaving his movie star wife for a girl he knew back at the Jersey Shore, and today, he lives just a few miles from where he grew up.

He’s now thoroughly written himself into the DNA of the state — when he performed at the MetLife Stadium in the Meadowlands this summer (my wife and I were in attendance), one of the songs he played was “Wrecking Ball,” which he wrote and first performed at the final show at the old Giants Stadium, which was shortly thereafter destroyed to make way for MetLife. The song, once again, is a haunted commemoration of the people who never quite made it:

When the game has been decidedAnd we're burnin’ down the clockAnd all our little victories and gloriesHave turned into parking lotsWhen your best hopes and desiresAre scattered to the windAnd hard times come and hard times go andHard times come and hard times go andHard times come and hard times goYeah, just to come again

Bring on your wrecking ball

Bruce is, in the long tradition of Great (White Male) American Artists like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Arthur Miller, Hunter S. Thompson, and Kurt Vonnegut, a chronicler of the false promise of the American Dream. There’s an inherent tension to this — Bruce is, after all, a true rags-to-riches Horatio Alger story. But he made good by mining the lives of the people he left behind for material. There are some pockets of New Jersey who resent the fact that the Boss has presumed to speak for them, and who see his success — sometimes at New Jersey’s expense — as hypocritical at best.

I’ve never met Bruce Springsteen, but unbeknownst to him, we have an intense parasocial relationship. Before I left my hometown of Cincinnati, Born to Run was my constant companion. I hated Cincinnati, and was desperate to leave it in the dust. It was this love of Springsteen that first bonded me with the Jersey Girl who became my wife, and — how this happened still perplexes me — somehow, my desperation to leave Cincinnati resulted in my living in Asbury Park, the very place Bruce was so desperate to escape.

I still to this day adore Bruce Springsteen’s music, but since moving to the Jersey Shore, it has been a nagging thought in the back of my head — a thought that I am far from the first New Jerseyan to have — that I am perhaps one of the people he was singing about, the people who shot their shot and missed. And it’s hard to have an entirely positive relationship with someone you suspect would see you that way.

But Bruce is in me whether I like it or not. My wife quoted “Born to Run” in our wedding vows, I got married across the street from the Boardwalk where he played as a busker before making it big, and the dedication he placed into his song “Badlands” — “For the ones who have a notion, a notion deep inside, that it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive,” — rings so true to me that it might as well be etched into my heart.

Which is why I’ll scream “BRUUUUUUCE” with the rest of New Jersey in the Meadowlands, for as long as he deigns to keep playing for us.

The terrible thing about stigmas is the way in which they linger in the mind long after they are gone. When I was a kid in the conservative Ohio suburbs, tattoos were intensely stigmatized. They were derided as a sort of vandalism of the body, as something that respectable people didn’t get because respectable bosses wouldn’t hire someone with visible tattoos, as youthful mistakes that would inevitably lead to regret.

By any reasonable measure, this stigma could not be said to still exist except in small conservative pockets: Fully 41% of Millennials have at least one tattoo, Gen Z is already in the 20% range (though many of them have still not come of age), while Gen X, in their middle age, have settled at about a third. Boomers are the least tattooed generation, with a mere 13%.

Though many of my friends have tattoos, and though a furtive part of myself has wanted to get tattoos for a long time, the stigma lingered with me. I couldn’t, I realized, guarantee that I wouldn’t regret a tattoo. So I talked about getting one to anyone who would listen. For years. And just didn’t.

Until a couple weeks ago, when I got my first tattoo at the age of 37.

“a love letter to my body”

For the past few years, I’ve been trying to build a better relationship with my body. My physical health is something that I’ve ranked fairly low in importance for the majority of my life. Even though I left the church in my teenaged years, I’d internalized the Catholic idea that my body was merely a vessel for the soul (or the mind, or consciousness or whatever), and as such, was of limited importance. The Catholics see the body as something that at best is animalistic and profane, a vehicle for the original sin that’s trying to separate you eternally from God.

In my 30s, as I struggled with depression, I began to realize that a lot of what was causing me grief was the fact that, by neglecting my body, I had been hurting my brain (I wrote more on that in the article below).

I’ve begun to believe that an enormous part of the Christian (and colonial and capitalist and patriarchal) project is convincing people that they can’t trust their bodies, and that they would be better off handing over their autonomy to someone wiser and stronger. That person may be a priest, a ruler, a boss, a parent, or a partner, but regardless, it’s an absolutely devastating thing to do to yourself. And much of our society is built around convincing you that it’s not.

Though I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between our bodies and Christianity/Capitalism/Every Other Form of Domination, I’d never thought about tattoos in this context. Then a couple months back, a friend of mine shared a poem by Fara Tucker on Instagram:

I started collecting ⁣

Midwestern masculinity and the taboo against looking nice

This was the opposite of what I’d been taught about tattoos: my understanding had been that they were a form of peacocking, a way of showing off to others, not so much an act one did for themselves.

Shortly after I read this, my friends Jesse and Cara visited. Jesse grew up in the same hometown as me, and had recently gotten his first tattoo. Cara, who grew up on the East Coast, had two full sleeves and a handful of other tattoos as well.

“I couldn’t stop looking at it after I got it,” Jesse told me. “I told this to a buddy of mine and he said, ‘yeah, we tell ourselves that there are these big meanings behind our tattoos, but at their core, they’re really just an act of vanity.’”

Cara compared it to that impulse, endemic in the Midwestern male, to dress badly and not take care of oneself. “It’s because you guys were told that any sort of personal grooming was at worst gay, and at best was ‘metrosexual.’”

I had first understood just how fucked up this was when I moved to London. Before I went, Jesse, who had been my roommate at the time, had told me, “Hey man, no offense: but they dress nice over there. You need all new clothes.” This sounded like a burden to me, but I found, when I got there, that I liked looking nice all of the time, in part, because it didn’t identify me immediately as an American.

On our school’s campus, you could easily spot the Americans: they were the only ones wearing sweatpants. Everyone else was nicely dressed, no matter how casual the affair.

When I moved back to America and settled on the East Coast, I found that looking nice was less important than it was in Europe, but still more important than it was in the Midwest. As I sunk into depression, I stopped dressing nice. I told myself it was because I didn’t need to show off, but really, I had stopped caring about myself, and was letting my body fall to pieces.

Self-care and the tattoo

My first tattoo is on my forearm. It’s a raven in the style of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comics. It has a meaning to me, but that meaning is, frankly, none of your business. And I don’t care (I repeat to myself over and over again, hoping one day it’ll come true) if you like it, because I do, and I stare at it all day long.

I have been surprised at the sheer amount of care that goes into getting a tattoo — after getting it, you need to rub Aquafor on it for several days, and then after that, you wash it several times daily, rub lotion on it, and attempt not to pick at it as it scabs and heals into your skin. You skip swimming (as it’s literally an open wound), you keep it out of sun, and you just pamper the little guy.

This is not something I’m used to doing with my body. I regularly forget to moisturize even though dry skin makes me feel like I’m being eaten alive by ants. I regularly forget to put on sunscreen. But as I take care of the new work of art on my body, I am regularly reminded — hey, you can do this with the rest of your body, too.

In the meantime, for the first time, I feel like I own a little bit of myself. I want to care for it and protect it. I want to show it off, even if I somewhat defiantly tell people it’s not for them, it’s for me. It is, perhaps, a little bit of vanity, a little bit of pride. But the Avett Brother’s song “The Perfect Space” has this lovely line:

I wanna have prideLike my mama hasAnd not like the kind in the BibleThat turns you bad

I’m old enough now to know that the Bible was wrong about a lot of stuff that turns you bad. And I’ve done enough hating myself to have earned, I think, a little bit of vanity, a little bit of pride. My body is mine, and mine alone, after all.

A few years back, after my friend realized that I hadn’t seen like, any of the truly great movies of the 1980’s (Big Trouble in Little China, The Goonies, Better Off Dead, Gremlins 2, etc.) he arranged for a year-long, once-a-month event he called “Matt’s Movie Mondays,” as a way to further my cinematic education.

I was a little surprised that I’d seen so little of the era — before I’d gone into journalism school, I’d been a film major, and instead of partying and kissing girls, my entire high school experience had been sitting in my basement with my buddies and watching movies. I was hardly illiterate — so what had happened?

Now that I have two small kids, I know the answer: my parents had three small kids in the mid-to-late 80’s. They weren’t hitting up the movies. They weren’t doing cool shit. The movies they were watching were largely kids movies, at best animated features like Aladdin or Beauty and the Beast, but they weren’t like, doing deep dives into John Carpenter’s back catalogue.

So when the time came for my cultural education, they covered all the stuff that had been cool when they weren’t parents — 60’s and 70’s shit, and a few of the franchises (Indiana Jones, Terminator, Star Wars) that had gotten kicked off before we arrived.

My kids will similarly get a blank spot in their cinematic and musical education for the early 2020s. Today, my favorite soccer team, Tottenham Hotspur, posted a picture of the team’s captain, Heung-Min Son, with a young man who I assumed had won a contest.

The comments were very excited, but not about Son. So I clicked the young man’s name, and found out he’s Declan McKenna, a very famous musician with over a half billion listens on Spotify. I never wanted to be the dad who’s like “What’s a Dua Lipa?” but when you’re a parent, you just miss out on a bunch of cool shit because you’re doing a bunch of kid shit.

Cartoons and highbrow culture

While diving back into kids shows, I’ve realized just how much of my cultural knowledge comes from cartoons. While casting about for good music to work to one day, I found a playlist of classical music tunes. As I listened, I realized — I knew virtually all of these through cartoons. When Richard Wagner’s Tannhauser Overture came on, I instantly recognized it as the part in “What’s Opera Doc?” in which Elmer Fudd sings “We-TOIN my WUB, I want you always beside me!”

The Looney Tunes guys specialized in sliding classical music into their cartoons, but it hardly stops there — all of my favorite classical music has, at some point, been incorporated into a cartoon. Camille Saint-Saens “Danse Macabre” was set to an incredibly low-budget cartoon we watched every year around Halloween in elementary music class.

Modern parents’ favorite kids show is — to my knowledge, almost universally — the Australian show Bluey. My favorite episode of the show is the truly lovely “Sleepytime,” in which Bingo, the four-year-old who is struggling with sleeping in her own bed all night, dreams her way into a new phase of life. The full episode is below:

The final moments of that show has really lovely music, which I did not know when first watching it was from an extremely famous orchestral piece, Holst’s The Planets. I was working at my desk and suddenly, during the “Jupiter” section of that suit, I was crying. I had to pause for a second until I realized why I was crying — because this was the music that played while Bingo’s mom said “Remember I’ll always be here for you, even when you can’t see me” at the end of “Sleepytime.” (You can listen below, the moment I’m talking about is at 3 minutes.)

What was even more ridiculous is that the reason I had even listened to The Planets in the first place was because another part of that Suite, “Mars,” plays at the beginning of one of my favorite episodes of the TV show The Venture Bros:

Between the highbrow world of classical music in Bugs Bunny and Bluey, the deeply progressive ecological thinking in movies like Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind or Moana, the psychedelic weirdness of 80’s animation like The Last Unicorn or Heavy Metal, and the family therapy of Encanto or Coco, I’m starting to think that by limiting your cultural education to cartoons… you still get a full cultural education?

On top of that, as I rewatch these old animated movies, I am realizing that a good chunk of movies I’d put on my list of “best films ever made” are cartoons: The Nightmare Before Christmas, Into the Spider-verse, and Princess Mononoke, to name a few.

If you’re at all interested in animation, might I suggest following Animation Obsessive ? They do weekly deep dives into the industry, and you can find all sorts of cool cartoons you’ve never heard of on there.

In journalism school they teach you it’s lazy to finish an article by quoting someone else, but I’ve got to set my computer aside: my kids are watching cartoons. Here’s my favorite animated short of all time, The Missing Scarf.

For my money, Carl Sagan wrote one of the most beautiful speeches to be given in the last century. I am speaking of his famous “Pale Blue Dot” speech, in which he looks at a picture of earth taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990. Earth, in the photo, is a mere speck of light, a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” It is impossible, looking at it, to feel significant.

The Voyager 1 was one of Sagan’s greatest projects: the famed astronomer, with his wife, science communicator Ann Druyan, placed a Golden Record inside the spacecraft which was meant as a kind of gift, a time capsule, to any alien civilization that should ever discover it. Among the sounds included were songs by Beethoven, Bach, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Azerbaijani folk music. There was also a recording of the brainwaves of a woman in love — Ann Druyan herself.

The Golden Record project itself was a hilarious encapsulation of humanity’s problems — EMI, who owned the Beatles song “Here Comes the Sun,” insisted on a $50,000 payment for its inclusion, which was more than double the project’s budget, so in some distant future, aliens may know something of earth, but will know nothing of the Beatles. Public outcry also kept Sagan from including nude images of human beings, because the aliens, presumably, would share our prudish sense of indecency.

Sagan was a scientist by trade, but in his later life he became a science communicator, best known for his hit series Cosmos. He also wrote one work of fiction, which was, after his death, adapted into a movie starring Jodie Foster: Contact.

“Where is everyone?”

Contact is a book by an inexpert fiction writer (no one ever taught Sagan the “show, don’t tell” rule), but it is interesting to me as a utopia. Sagan, after all, was perhaps the best communicator of the value of science in accessing feelings of awe that were usually reserved for the religious.

Sagan was a lifelong agnostic, believing that God could neither be proven or disproven, but he was also an optimist. He believed in humanity’s better angels (though it’s doubtful he’d use that term), and believed that it was best embodied by science as a whole.

Contact is his vision of how science could save humanity: in it, radio astronomers receive an alien message from the Vega system. They spend years decoding the message, finally understanding that the message is telling them to build a large machine.

The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) was another of Sagan’s lifelong projects, and the main question this project posed was an enormous one: in 1961, astrophysicist Frank Drake created what is now known as the Drake Equation, which calculated the probability of there being other intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy. Conservative readings of the equation suggest that there are very likely lots of civilizations out there, which begged a second question, most famously asked by physicist Enrico Fermi:

“Where is everyone?”

This question is now known as the Fermi Paradox — if there are likely many civilizations out there in our massive universe, why haven’t we heard from them yet?

The unifying threat of aliens

Sagan, among others, believed that the reason was that technological civilizations tended to self-destruct, either through war or through ecological collapse. In Contact, he imagines the possibility that we escape this fate through a sort of alien intervention — if an intelligent civilization contacted us, would we get our shit together?

Written in the context of the Cold War, one of the main conflicts of Contact is between the scientific community and the political community. Science flourishes best in openness, but much of science’s funding comes from military “defense” projects, which require high levels of secrecy. This is an eternal tension between science and politics: the recent movie Oppenheimer was an excellent demonstration of some of the difficulties of scientific cooperation with the military.

Because of the rotation of the earth, in Contact, nations across all longitudes would be required to listen for the full alien message. Radio telescopes in the United States could not, for example, collect the transmission from Vega for 24/7, because during certain times of day, Vega would dip below the horizon.

This basic feature of the planet earth means that a transmission like the one in received Contact would require humanity’s cooperation across national lines. U.S. military brass would obviously worry that they’d be giving away technological secrets to the Soviets (and vice versa), but a transmission from another star — which implies a level of technological advancement far beyond ours — might work as a sort of unifying threat.

Sagan’s aliens are, of course, benevolent, wise creatures who hope that humanity can transcend its petty rivalries and join the galactic community — the first transmission they receive from earth happens to be one of the earliest television broadcasts, of Adolf Hitler opening the 1936 Munich Olympic Games.

But his broader question stands: could humans begin to embrace a cosmic perspective? Would we ever be able to stop thinking of ourselves as Americans, Soviets, Chinese, etc., and start thinking of ourselves as humans?

Can science save us?

Sagan died in 1996, and did not live to see the modern climate change era, when scientists are now being roundly ignored even by nominally “progressive” Democratic politicians. As scientists have become more and more strident in their warnings about our planet’s future, the people in power have become more and more deaf to their warnings.

A more modern sci-fi author, Kim Stanley Robinson, put it succinctly in his book 2312:

“The space diaspora occurred as late capitalism writhed in its internal decision concerning whether to destroy Earth’s biosphere or change its rules. Many argued for the destruction of the biosphere, as being the lesser of two evils.”

It would be interesting to see how Sagan would’ve responded to this modern era, but it is worth noting he was living, while writing Contact and the “Pale Blue Dot” speech, through another existential crisis, the Cold War nuclear arms race. Contact is a far from perfect book, but it does understand that scientific enquiry relies on at least some level of political cooperation to function properly, and these two worlds are at best tense bedfellows. The President in Sagan’s Contact is a pro-science President, which in itself was an outlandishly optimistic literary device for a book being written in the age of Ronald Reagan.

The question for us now is a harder one to answer: can the scientific community save us when the political world is working actively against them? Can humanity come to terms with its insignificance and work together for a longer life out there among the stars?

In her classic gender-bending sci-fi book The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin makes a point about how our enemies can end up defining us:

“To oppose something is to maintain it… To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”

This idea has been rattling around my brain since 2015, when it felt like everyone I knew was engaged in fighting the brutalities of the Trump campaign and later his administration — fighting his anti-immigrant policies, fighting his appointments, fighting his racism, fighting his homophobia, fighting his neo-Nazi footsoldiers.

Centrist liberals in the town I was living in at the time were somewhat in thrall to the old Michelle Obama credo, “When they go low, we go high,” and attempted to define themselves as “civil” in comparison to the “crass” MAGA chuds. At first, they took the low blows in stride, believing that it was decorum that would win them the day. But, as the old Scottish song goes, they took the high road, Trump took the low road, and he got into the White House before them.

Eventually, the high road became the road less traveled by. Because if you’re punched in the dick over and over again, you’re just not gonna keep your chill. After a few years of Trump, our local Democratic Party had begun to look very Trumpy. Our town’s Democratic Chair started spreading rumors about his opponents within the party, and no blow was too low: he slut-shamed, he body-shamed, he invented controversies out of whole cloth. The whole party fell into infighting and name calling and schisms. Lifelong friendships ended, jobs were lost, and a previously tight-knit community was rent asunder.

Defining what we are not

In their book The Dawn of Everything by Davids Wengrow and Graeber, the authors point out that most societies define themselves not only by what they believe they are, but what they believe they aren’t. Athenians prided themselves on reason and debate, their rivals in Sparta prided themselves on brute strength and proficiency in battle. The Victorian British prided themselves on sensibility and restraint, their rivals in France prided themselves on epicurean delights and sexual license. Capitalist America defined itself by its free commerce and its individualism, Soviet Russia defined itself with collectivism and unity under the party.

This practice extends back to tribal times, when you could often find rigidly hierarchical, patriarchal tribes living right next to egalitarian, communistic tribes. The tribes would be in direct competition with each other, and would define themselves as the opposite of the other tribe. Knowing who you are, it turns out, often means first understanding what you are not.

And it’s not just societies that do this — people do, too. Siblings often define themselves against each other (I am the rule-follower, she is the rebel), workers define themself in opposition to a coworker or a boss, “cool” students define themselves against “nerds,” “hipsters” define themselves against “poseurs,” etc. In his memoir Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen explains how he became best friends with his lifelong accompanying guitarist, “Little Stevie” Van Zandt, through bonding over what music was good and what music they both hated. Knowing what you aren’t can be a unifying and clarifying experience. It’s a good way to build out an identity, and it’s a good way to make friends.

It’s also incredibly useful as a weapon: American Republicans, for example, are excellent at defining the fights they want to have. They would rather engage with culture war bullshit (like is the Barbie movie too woke, is there a War on Christmas, etc.) than in the much harder-to-win fights of “should we let the entire planet burn,” “is it ethical for US bombs to be dropped on children,” “do the poors deserve affordable healthcare,” and so on. By having frivolous arguments about “wokeness” and “cancel culture,” they are able to keep the spotlight on their chosen fights rather than on the stuff they’d prefer the public not see.

Liberals, on the other hand, with their belief in the power of reasoned debate, are often fucking terrible at defining the terms of a fight, because they will write spirited theses on why the Barbie movie is actually a good thing instead of screaming “STOP TRYING TO DISTRACT FROM THE FACT THAT THE THREE HOTTEST DAYS IN HISTORY HAPPENED IN RAPID SUCCESSION IN EARLY JULY.”

Know your enemy

Le Guin was a student of Taoism, and she infused the philosophy into many of her works, and her “to oppose something is to maintain it” is a very Taoist quote. The second chapter of the Tao Te Ching reads:

Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness.

All can know good as good only because there is evil.

Therefore having and not having arise together.

Difficult and easy complement each other.

Long and short contrast each other: High and low rest upon each other; Voice and sound harmonize each other; Front and back follow one another.

The symbol most affiliated with Taoism is the yin and the yang. The symbol — which at the very least you remember from your childhood Pog collection — shows two sides that complement and contain each other.

The implication is simple — you cannot have a conception of light without having the dark. Either concept would be meaningless without the other.

Now — what this does not mean is that you shouldn’t take sides in conflicts. It does not mean that good and evil are equivalent, and therefore everything is meaningless. It just means that you should know — the things you fight, the things you hate, these become a part of you. So you better be sure you’re fighting for the right things.

Alan Moore is another writer who plays around with Taoism, specifically in his classic comic The Saga of the Swamp Thing. My favorite panel in that book is when the main character, who is a giant vegetable, consults with the elder spirits of the world’s forests on how to defeat an evil force that threatens to consume the world. The forest spirits are unconcerned.

Note that this does not stop the aphid from eating the leaf, or the ladybug from eating the aphid. They still know who they are, they still hold their place in nature. It would be silly for the aphid to not try to protect itself. Like it or not, you are a part of nature, and there are things that would like to hurt you, and it is perfectly natural for you to fight against those things.

The question then, when you fight your battles, is: What are you? Are you spending a lot of time and energy fighting things which, in the large scale, are not things you want to fight? What is it you really think is worth fighting for, struggling against? Are you fighting Republicans, Capitalists, Misogynists, Homophobes?

All of these are forces worth fighting against, but be aware: a good chunk of who you are will be defined by who they are. And you don’t want your life to end up being defined by fights that just weren’t worth having.

Writer’s note: my specialty is in neither science nor math, so I would ask the reader to be aware that I come at this with a spirit of curiosity rather than as any sort of expert, and thus may very well explain some of this badly. I encourage you to read the source book for a better understanding of what I’m saying here.

At the end of Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, he draws our attention to an arresting fact: most of what we see is, in a sense, a hallucination.

Intuitively, we suspect that the way our eyes work are as follows: They see something, then they send a message to our brain, and our brain constructs an image based on the signals our eyes sent it. But neuroscientists have recently discovered that it is the reverse: many, if not most, of the signals being sent are from the brain towards the eyes. The brain tells the eyes what it expects, and the eyes serve as a corrective — if they see something that doesn’t fit what we expect, the brain corrects the image and tries to make sense of it.

The implications of this are wild: it means that much of the image we have of the world exists within the brain. “Instead of calling ‘hallucination’ a false perception,” the French philosopher Hippolyte Taine wrote, “we must call external perception ‘a confirmed hallucination.’”

To be clear, I didn’t understand quantum mechanics before reading this book, and I still don’t understand it after reading it. Rovelli is a theoretical physicist who has dedicated his life to quantum mechanics and, he says, even he doesn’t really understand the topic. No one does. But what we do know about this strange field on the edge of scientific inquiry is forcing us to reimagine our entire world.

Accepting human limitations

The book is named after a small archipelago off the coast in Germany in the North Sea, where the scientist Werner Heisenberg first discovered and explained the basics of quantum mechanics. I don’t understand the math at all but basically what happened was this: in the early 20th century, the laws of classical physics began to fall apart. Discoveries from people like Albert Einstein and Max Planck were verifiably true, but directly contradicted the normal laws of physics.

In order to explain these contradictions, physicists like Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrodinger developed new mathematical theories that were demonstrably true, but which also seemed to contradict the idea that we live in a clockwork universe that we would, eventually, be able to totally understand and grasp. The universe quantum mechanics portrays is a probabilistic universe — when observing the smallest observable particles, we can’t say they’ll do just one thing, we can only say they may do one of several possible things.

Even the people who studied this early on were totally flummoxed by the implications. The “Schrodinger’s Cat” thought experiment, which has become a sort of pop culture punchline, was one of the field’s founders attempts to point out the ridiculousness of some features of quantum theory.

Many of the questions raised by quantum mechanics remain unsolved to this day — some people suggest that the probabilistic nature of the theory implies that with each possible outcome, the universe splits, meaning there are an infinite number of alternative realities (which I admit, is an idea I really, really like, especially when I’m stoned).

No matter what the explanation is, the answer is going to be really trippy. Rovelli was a hippie in his teens and twenties, and dabbled in psychedelic drug use. He credits that experimentation with his interest in physics, as LSD and other drugs seemed to blow a hole in his perception of reality.

One thing that we may have to accept, in our quest to understand the universe, is that we simply can’t ever truly understand it in its totality. This is anathema to anyone who believes in the power of human rationality, but it is very obviously true: We have no problem accepting that, for example, a cricket can’t do algebra, or that a dog couldn’t build a rocketship.

Why should it be so hard for us to accept that we, too, may have limits to what we can wrap our brains around? Rovelli implies that quantum mechanics may be one of the places that we butt up against our limitations, but doesn’t give up hope on the possibility that we may be able to one day understand the nature of the universe better, or that we could one day unite relativity and quantum mechanics in the elusive “theory of everything” that everyone from Einstein to Hawking has sought for the past century.

The web of existence

Rovelli’s personal favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics is relational quantum mechanics, which the latter half of this book is dedicated towards explaining. It is fascinating, even if you don’t fully understand it: what he suggests is that there is no overarching, external “God” reality in the universe. Reality is, instead, just the relationship between one object and another.

Take something simple: The sky. If I were to ask you to describe it, like the the first thing you’d say about it is that it’s blue.

But the sky isn’t blue — that is a result of the light traveling from the sky interacting with your retina. Your retina, communicating with your brain, then builds an image in your head that perceives the sky as blue. An animal that couldn’t see “blue” wavelengths (or that could see even more complexity in color, as discussed in previous Book Rex entry An Immense World), would have a different experience of the sky.

This doesn’t mean that nothing is real — obviously, there are real things outside your mind that interact with it and make it see stuff like blue skies or cats or smell stuff like a newborn baby’s head. It just means that what we see as real is real in relation to us. The sky couldn’t be blue if there wasn’t someone who was capable of seeing it as blue.

This is wild, dizzying stuff, and it is impossible to wrap your head fully around. But Rovelli’s vision of the universe — which is as plausible an explanation of reality as parallel universes — sees us not as individuals, but as nodes in a massive web of reality. There is no “I” in this conception of reality — instead, all human bodies are ongoing, infinitely complex processes that are also part of much larger processes in the world, in the solar system, in the galaxy, and in the universe as a whole.

The universe, as the saying goes, may not only be stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine. Some may hear this and get sick to the stomach, but for my part, being part of a dizzyingly complex universe which I am an inextricable part of is wonderful, and I will happily spend a life exploring it, even if I must resign myself to never being fully capable of understanding it.

Our mindset is a huge factor in helping us survive chaotic times. People who have trouble with change just don’t do well in moments of upheaval, whereas people who are flexible and adaptable tend to roll with the punches a little bit better.

It’s forgivable that most of us fall into the former camp — our lives have been lived in an era of almost unprecedented stability and material wealth. Major, seismic societal change is barely in living memory, as the so-called “Greatest Generation” that survived the Depression and World War II slowly dies out. Moreover, modern humans are dealing with truly epidemic levels of trauma, and (as discussed with last week’s Book Rex on The Body Keeps the Score) trauma inhibits our ability to creatively adapt to changing and challenging situations.

But given just how quickly things are becoming more chaotic, it would behoove us to fill our philosophical toolkit with ideas, systems, and methods for coping with change in an adaptive, composed way.

Fortunately for us (but not for those that lived them), history has had no shortage of chaotic eras, and there has been no shortage of ideas and schools of thought that have taught how to take the chaos in stride. I’m hoping to cover a number of these in this blog over time — at the very least, I’ll be touching on Taoism, Stoicism, Buddhism, Discordianism, Witchcraft, and, if I’m feeling generous, some of the more radical and/or contemplative branches of Christianity. But today, let’s dive into Stoicism by looking at the book How to Be a Stoic by Massimo Pigliucci!

Stoicism as a philosophy is wildly misunderstood by the general public. Because Stoics are traditionally calm in the face of chaos and adversity, it’s come to be conflated with the idea of being stone-faced, shut off, or having a “stiff upper lip.”

Stoicism, to be clear, is not any of these things. The philosophy arose in ancient Greece in response to the teachings of Socrates. Many people complained that philosophers spent too much time discussing ideas, and not enough time developing practical applications for them. Stoicism was a response to that, in that it remained a fairly simple philosophy with a set of practices that made life much easier to bear.

Pigliucci’s book is a breakdown of the philosophy for the common reader — the author himself is a practicing stoic as well as a philosopher at the academic level, but he believes that stoicism should not be confined to the halls of academia. His book is an attempt to make the philosophy clear and easy to use.

At it’s most simple, stoicism about understanding control. Stoics have divided the world into things we can control, and things that we can’t — you can’t control if someone chooses to burn down your house, for example, but you can control your response towards the event. The philosophy is fairly well summed up in the Alcoholic’s Anonymous Prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

The courage to change the things I can,

And the wisdom to know the difference.

Stoics believe that regret is a fairly useless emotion, because things that have already happened are things we can’t change. Instead, they advocate learning from our past and changing our responses in the future to something we’d be more proud of.

They also emphasize that everything is impermanent, and we should not attach ourself to the idea that we’ll have anything forever. This is a good practice for when you break something of value — say, a plate that was passed down from a grandparent, or a video game console, but is even more important when applied to the humans you love. Pigliucci suggests when you kiss your spouse, parent, or child, that you think to yourself, “I am kissing a mortal.”

While this type of utterance sounds pretty fucking heavy on its face, in a practical sense, it reminds you that you get this, here and now, to enjoy, and are not guaranteed anything else. If you accept that, you’ll appreciate your current moment a whole lot more.

On dealing with ignorance and cruelty

The Stoics believed that all evil acts came from ignorance, not from a person just naturally being evil. They used two different words for the concept of ignorance: Agnoia, which literally translates to “not-knowing” and “amathia” which translates to “not learning.”

In your debates with people you disagree with, this distinction is important. Do they disagree with you because they just don’t know information that you do? If so, great! You can teach them. But if they are unwilling to learn, your problem has nothing to do with just supplying them with the right facts: it has to do with why they are resistant to learning a new thing. And the reasons for that likely have nothing to do with the argument you’re engaged in. (They likely, once again, have something to do with trauma! The Body Keeps the Score popping in again!)

The Stoics also emphasize that you cannot control the way anyone else treats you. You can ask them, and if they respect you, they will hopefully oblige. But that is ultimately out of your control. And whenever something is out of your control, the stoics say: let it go.

Stoicism as a philosophy has helped people get through pretty horrific ordeals, from concentration camps to torture to POW camps. It emphasizes the importance of maintaining your integrity in these situations, while accepting the fact that you alone aren’t the sole master of your fate.

Practical philosophy

The Stoics understood that for a philosophy to be practical, it had to become a practice, something you learn to do through repetition and make into a reflexive response. They fortunately offer a number of techniques for how to do this (they are what you’d expect: deep breathing, making a habit of reflecting on your day, reminding yourself of your permanence and lack of control, etc.) and Pigliucci goes into them in more detail.

Fortunately for us, there are an enormous amount of resources on the topic, including the Daily Stoic podcast and a whole subgenre of TikTok videos.

A word of warning if you go down that rabbit hole: this is a favorite philosophy of bullshitty Silicon Valley entrepreneur bros like Tim Ferriss. So there will be a lot out there that has that slant. It is also, per Pigliucci, a misunderstanding of stoicism to suggest that one should be disengaged from politics if one wishes to be a stoic. You can be political and stoic about bad things that happen in the world around you — you just need to have an understanding of what you can influence and what you can’t.

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