Better Strangers

The 80s and 90s were a strange time for music — studio labels were tightening their stranglehold on pop music, but the world was still bursting with new genres and trends like grunge, hip-hop, and rave music. One of the strangest pop music acts of the era was the British electronic band known as the KLF.

The KLF had a string of hits, including the number one single “Doctorin’ The Tardis,” which is basically just the Doctor Who theme mixed with Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll” which you probably remember mostly from Jock Jams.

The KLF produced great music for raves, but far more interesting than their music was their politics and their stunts — they despised the music industry, and basically behaved in as alienating and as borderline criminal a manner as possible to more or less kill their career. But every stunt they pulled seemed to only earn them the adulation of the music press.

For example: they were invited to headline the BRIT awards, and they made it as alienating as possible: they played their hit song with the extremely difficult to listen to crust metal band Extreme Noise Terror and then fired blanks into the audience. They dumped a sheep’s corpse at the door of the afterparty and announced their retirement from the music.

It was applauded as a wonderful stunt, and their cachet only went up.

And then, they finally did something that the music industry couldn’t forgive. They went up to an island in Scotland with a suitcase full of money — £1,000,000 — and set the lot of it on fire.

The KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds

When the British writer John Higgs heard about the KLF burning a million pounds, he realized that there was no space in his brain for such an action — it was too outside the realm of comprehension. It didn’t fit his worldview. Why would anyone do that? Was it irresponsible? Was it brilliant? Was it political?

In order to make sense of it, he wrote perhaps the greatest non-fiction book I’ve ever read, The KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds.

The resulting book is not only an examination of the history of the KLF, but also a look into how our brains work, and how they are built to reject information that doesn’t fit the reality they’ve constructed. To do this, he goes off on dozens of tangents: he looks into why we believe in conspiracy theories, into Alan Moore’s theory of magic, into how psychedelic mystics and chaos worshippers view the nature of reality, and how Doctor Who has influenced generations of Brits.

What you come away with, after having read this book, is not only an understanding of what the KLF was trying to do, but also the process for rebuilding a worldview that has, for whatever reason, fallen apart.

The World Turned Upside Down

This is something many of us need in this moment. We are watching as the things we’ve believed in our entire life — American democracy, God’s existence, the stability of the earth’s climate, the idea that hard work gets you what you need — have started to completely crumble under the weight of late capitalism.

As your worldview falls apart, you may find yourself clinging desperately and violently into outdated worldviews. Believing in, say, the white Christian American vision of a shining city on a hill may be too hard for you to abandon. But you’re going to have to blame something for the gaping holes in that worldview, so you might start going down QAnon or Hollywood “wokeocracy” conspiracy theory rabbit holes.

Another, often scarier, alternative to this is that you may fall into a state of nihilism, where you believe nothing matters, and that we just drift through life.

Higgs book is the best thing I’ve read to date that gives us an alternative path. It shows us how our worldviews work, what their limits are, and how we can build up philosophical resilience in the face of chaos. It is also an incredibly fun read, and a special 10th anniversary edition has just recently been released.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com

During the rise of Hitler in Germany, Wilhelm Reich, a prominent psychologist and the coiner of the phrase “sexual revolution,” hypothesized that suppressing sexuality was vital to any form of totalitarian government. His reasoning was that if people learned to trust their own bodies — their urges, their wants, their needs — then they’d also learn to trust their own sense of right and wrong. This internal confidence would make them, if not ungovernable, then at least far more difficult to control and exploit.

People who are ashamed of their bodies, on the other hand, who are raised to believe that just the basic fact of sexuality is sinful, will not trust their gut instincts, as their gut instincts might lead them to do something appalling in God’s eyes, like masturbate. Which makes it easy for a strong authority to claim that they know what’s right, and therefore their moral judgments are the ones to be trusted.

While this might not be a particularly testable hypothesis (anyone want to start a sexually liberated totalitarian dictatorship?), it is certainly a hypothesis the far right has agreed with for decades.

When Hitler first came to power, among the first books his thugs burned were the research of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sex Science), which was doing pioneering research on so-called “sexual minorities,” specifically gay, transgender, and intersex identities. The burnings set this field back decades.

Now you’re under control

In the 1970’s, the French philosopher Michel Foucault developed a concept he called “biopower,” which is all of the different ways in which governments, churches, or anyone with any power exerts their will upon other human bodies.

There are lots of different ways one can do this: Parents, for example, have very real physical power over their kids: if they’re running into the street, we’re expected to physically stop them. If they’re about to hurt someone, we’re expected to intervene. Speaking from personal experience, this type of control requires a lot of energy on the part of the powerful. It’s (barely) manageable for two adults covering two kids, if you’re trying to control entire populations, you’ve got to figure out a way of doing this where it doesn’t absorb every second of your life, to the point where you never get to actually enjoy your power.

This hasn’t meant that different governments and institutions haven’t attempted total physical control, though.

American slavery, for example, had a very physical violence-heavy system of control. In some counties in the south, slaves made up as much as 70% of the total population. With these demographics, the people in power had to engage in what was effectively constant terrorism of the majority population, which made up the work of huge swathes of the Southern white population. Since the recent BLM protests, for example, it has become more or less common knowledge that modern American policing descended from slave patrols. Between them, the owners, the overseers, the bureaucracy that oversaw the slave state, and the local whites who engaged in sporadic acts of terrorism against local blacks, you’ve got an entire society that is dedicated to keeping your system going. Considering that the entire society was built around this system, it is perhaps unsurprising that it’s justifying philosophy, white supremacy, has been so hard to shake even after much of the system has been dismantled.

It is much easier, from the perspective of the powerful, if you can get the people to control themselves. Christianity, and in particular the Catholic Church, are the absolute masters of this. The doctrine of “Original Sin,” which is at the core of the religion, states that sex itself, the very existence of our bodies, is shameful, and that it is only through the Church and Jesus that we can ever be free of that stain. Sex itself, the doctrine says, only exists to give God more followers.

The side effects of this, to be clear, are still catastrophic: women are expected to bear children, and are openly attacked when they choose to have sex for any other reason. They are straight-up criminalized if they get pregnant and decide not to carry the pregnancy to term. Anyone having sex that can’t result in pregnancy — sodomy, oral sex, gay sex, lesbian sex, etc. — is vilified as a freak and is attacked, often jailed or even killed. Even straight boys, who get off the easiest in this system, are still fucked, and are put into an area of intense moral hazard. If you are told that all sex that isn’t geared towards pregnancy is evil, that it is a sin to “spill your seed on the ground,” but you still have strong sexual urges, how are you going to be able to make nuanced ethical choices? Put another way, if consensual sex is the origin of all sin, then what difference does consent make?

Catastrophe aside, this is a much easier, much cheaper system of control than constant policing. It teaches kids that their bodies are shameful, their urges are shameful, and with this internalized shame, they will put their trust in someone else — namely, their priest. Who definitely doesn’t have any sexual issues of his own.

Your body, your choice

It is no mistake, during this fascist resurgence, that what we’re fighting over is almost always control over our own bodies. Pride month has become a fight because the LGBTQ+ community is on the front lines of battling for bodily autonomy, and Pride is deadly to any movement whose basis relies on Shame.

A woman’s right to choose is a battleground because it’s literally choices over her own body: neither the Christian ideology that sees humans as potential worshippers for a specific god, nor the Capitalist ideology, which sees humans as labor to be put to work in service of the machine, can possibly sustain themselves if women retain control over their bodies and choose not to have kids, or choose to have fewer.

Libraries have become a battleground because they are a place designed around the concept of self-directed learning. A librarian isn’t going to give you shit if you’re a teenager and you want to check out a book on gay, trans, or nonbinary identities. They aren’t going to tell on you if you look up “how to escape an alcoholic parent,” or “how to deal with sexual assault.” But for people who want control over you, allowing you to have access to liberative information is a disaster. If you are choosing what you’d like to read, then they can’t control the information you’re receiving, and can’t count on you to police yourself.

Policing has become a battleground because it is the front lines of where control is exerted. It is no mistake that the BLM movement emphasizes the phrase “black bodies” when they discuss the harm that the police state does in black communities. Speakers like Ta-Nehisi Coates have pointed out that this is in opposition to the earlier Christian iteration of the civil rights movement, which emphasized your soul and getting to heaven. For Coates and many others in the BLM movement, the body is what is valuable, and it is what is constantly being exploited and destroyed. Liberation from this system must be in this life, not the next, for it to truly matter.

As I mentioned on Monday in my recommendation of Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, modern trauma therapies have discovered that we can’t simply talk or drug our way out of mental illness — we have to address the battle going on over and within our own bodies. Van der Kolk, while a scientist and not a political animal, comes to the conclusion that the current trauma epidemic is a direct consequence of policies that cut funding to schools and make healthcare unaffordable, and which instead throw people into prisons and thus compound their traumas.

When we discuss the mental health crisis in young people, we have to recognize — any meaningful change has to come from a revolutionary shift in the way we view the world. It has to include an emphasis on bodily autonomy, on healing instead of punishment, and on viewing the human body as something sacred, not some crass receptacle for a metaphysical soul that’s only purpose is to sing eternal praises for a Supreme Autocrat in the Afterlife, nor as something that’s only purpose is to be thrown onto the cogs of the economy’s machine.

The current popular sentiment is that humans are garbage, a disease upon the face of the earth, and that it would be better if Thanos snapped his fingers and wiped us all out. I would argue that this is the exact opposite mindset from the one we need.

Actually, you are fine the way you are. Your basic urges and desires and orientations are normal, and shouldn’t be legislated by anyone but yourself.

Actually, you and everyone around you deserves to be respected. You are not a means to an end. You don’t exist to make someone else money, to fulfill your parents wishes, to worship someone else’s god.

Actually, your body is incredible, it allows you to do all sorts of really nice things like eat nachos, listen to music, create art, give puppies belly-rubs, and fool around with someone sexy. It should be treated not as a disease to be cured, but as a frankly lovely coincidence in which the universe organized itself, for a few short decades, so that its energy and matter could be conscious of itself and could explore and enjoy the universe that it is part of.

Life, contrary to what literally everyone says, has the capacity to be incredibly fucking cool, and we might all be a bit better off if we started acting like it, and treating our bodies, the vehicles that move us through this life, as something lovely, and not something grotesque or profane.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com

My favorite internet publication is going out of business this week. The Nib published political cartoons, mostly on the internet, but also in the form of stunning themed magazines which I now own every one of (you can buy them here), with the exception of the art I cut out of them and hung on the bulletin board over my desk. The Nib was founded by artist Matt Bors — most famous for the “Mister Gotcha” meme — in 2013, and managed to struggle along through the internet’s worst era for just shy of 10 years.

The art they made was unapologetically left-wing and pro-human: the artist staff was diverse and phenomenally talented. They always punched up, they never punched down. They published dope shit like:

* Ben Passmore’s unapologetically radical anarchist cartoons

* A crowd-funded compendium of comics by queer artists titled Be Gay, Do Comics

* Mattie Lubchansky’s swole, communist Dilbert

* Mike Dawson’s lovely comic on “life in interesting times”

* Erlend Sandøy’s visually stunning history of Green Parties (which literally came out in the Nib’s last week)

And a trillion other things that brought me joy during this dogshit decade. Unfortunately, this is the era where billionaire ghouls own the publishers (the “memes of production,” if you will) and artists and writers live in near-poverty so the world’s worst people can have even more money to be the worst with.

This comes at a time where it seems that America’s entire creative class is revolting: the Screen Actors Guild, led by Our Red Queen, Fran Drescher, is striking because actors are getting shafted on streaming royalties. The Writer’s Guild of America beat them to the punch by about a month, in part over streaming, but also over the issue of whether studios should be allowed to steal their work and funnel it into AI so they don’t have to pay those pesky writers at all in the future.

We are such a fundamentally disempowered society that most of us have taken the appearance of AI art and writing and have said, “welp, can’t put the genie back in the bottle, this is the future.” But it very obviously doesn’t have to be the future, because using AI to create the art we consume is an absolutely dogshit idea that clearly benefits no one but the rich owners of media corporations. In a society where the people actually held the power, we’d say, “nah, we’re not going to do that, also, why do you own a spaceship? You have too much money. Give it back.”

AI could be relegated to doing fun filters on TikTok or Snapchat that build our self-esteem, and to writing boring ad copy that no real writer actually enjoys.

It is not a huge surprise that this is happening: the creative class that is my age and younger came up in a time where our success relied heavily on our ability to build an audience on social media, and in order to do that, you have to give away a lot of your work for free. This was the explicit business model of companies like Facebook, who understood early on that the goal of social media was not to give people access to the whole internet, but to catch their attention and hold it on their platform. In doing this, they drove countless publications out of business and, as a side effect, dealt a mortal blow to many of the world’s democracies.

(I wrote more on how they did this earlier on this week’s Book Rex, if you’re interested.)

Art as magic

As someone who has worked as a “content creator” during this degrading-ass time to be an artist, I’ve found hope in the ideas of famed comics writer Alan Moore. When Moore is covered by the press, it’s normally as a cantankerous old kook who is mad that they’re making another adaptation of his work.

On paper, he sounds like a kook. Moore calls himself a magician, but not like your Davids Blaine or Copperfield: he is an actual magician, and dabbles in the occult. He worships a snake god with a fabulous head of hair, and just in terms of looks, he resembles William Blake’s painting of Nebuchadnezzar.

But when you start to actually explore Moore’s worldviews, they begin to sound disturbingly sane. He calls himself a magician because he believes magic and art are one and the same. Artists manage to take something that exists only in their brain and bring it into the actual world. If anything is an act of conjuring, then that is it: literally anything we interact with that is manmade must have existed in someone’s mind before it was brought into the world.

Moore bolsters this stance by pointing out that the language of language and the language of magic are one and the same: magicians cast spells, they curse the people they dislike, even their magic book, the grimoire translates simply to “grammar.”

The reason Moore is so prickly towards movie studios and comics publishers is that he takes this magical work somewhat seriously. The act of bringing an idea into the world is no small job, and Moore has seen his own ideas grow beyond his control (most notably in the Guy Fawkes mask from V for Vendetta, which has become a worldwide symbol of anarchist resistance).

When Moore discusses the history of magic, he points out that at one point, artists/magicians were immensely powerful. They served as shamans and storytellers, they told societies who they were, they helped people build their identities and ridiculed those in power: a shitty leader could be killed in battle, which would suck for them, but it wouldn’t suck as bad as being memorialized for all eternity in a satire that portrayed them as dumb or ineffectual. Warriors had power over life, but artists had power over eternity.

It is understandable, then, that the powerful would attempt to control the creative classes. If you manage to keep the artists (or “creatives” in today’s weird Newspeak-y parlance) poor and dependent on the rich, then they can be forced to prostitute their powers to write advertisements, or towards making more safe and “marketable” content, like the 700th superhero movie remake.

If, on the other hand, the creative/artist class could be convinced that what they are doing matters, if they could be shown that we need people to imagine a better world before we can build it, and that they can lead the way, we might actually have a chance at escaping the worst case scenario for this planet. AI simply can’t do that — AI is imitating the work of other artists. It doesn’t create new ideas, it just reforms old ones. What we need are new ideas, and we’re not going to get that without human creativity.

The era we live in will be quick to write off this sort of belief in creativity, originality, and magic as naive or pretentious or cringe, but that’s fine. The world’s artists seem to be standing up and saying, “we’re worth something” while the billionaire owners of the studios and media corporations scoff at them from their yachts. What they miss is that old world’s always collapse, eventually, and when they do, we rely on the artists and the visionaries to build new ones.

The Nib may be gone, but the artists that wrote it are not. May the new world they build be one in which they own their work and are recognized as the visionaries they are.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com

At I write this, Ben Shapiro is lighting Barbies on fire because he’s furious about the “woke” movie about a plastic toy. Jason Aldean, a country music star, is currently riding a wave of right-wing joy on the heels of putting out a song that kinda sounds like he’s advocating the murder of leftists. Elon Musk has turned the platform “Twitter” from one of the most vital spaces for journalists and activists on the internet into a right-wing troll hole, which he has renamed X — though the site remains, confusingly, non-pornographic.

This, as you read, maybe two weeks in the future, is insanely old news, because I’ve gotten a bit ahead of the curve on my publishing schedule, and the discourse has been through maybe 70 other controversies since I wrote these words.

All of these other controversies will have faded into a blur as well, in spite of having taken up hundreds of hours of media coverage and hand-wringing. In 20 years, no one will remember the Barbie controversy, or the Aldean controversy. Because these things never truly mattered, they were just media spectacles designed to capture and hold our attention.

This is what the modern internet is — it’s an attention capture machine. The more attention seized, the more ads sold. So if you want to sell ads, it behooves you to have a media landscape that is as outrageous as possible. I have written about this attention machine elsewhere (see the article below), and since the election of Donald Trump, more and more of America has woken up to the very real dangers of having this toxic of a news cycle. The problem is: we all still want to be informed citizens.

Books over Feeds

In his book Humankind: A Hopeful History, writer Rutger Bregman tells of an experiment he did where, for a while, he gave up digital news media. This is unthinkable for a lot of us in the modern era, but Bregman suspected that he would not only get more information but better information if he switched from reading Tweets and Facebook posts to reading actual books.

What he found was that his attention span increased, the quality of his knowledge deepened, and he was less pessimistic about the future.

This is not because the writers of books are inherently more optimistic. The structure of books, however, requires that its writers deploy a different set of tools to hold your attention over the long run than they would if they were writing, say, a Substack post or a TikTok video.

This is because shock and outrage is good at getting attention, but it is really bad at holding attention. The reason is obvious, if you’ve ever spent a few too many hours on the internet: sustained outrage is depressing and exhausting.

For book authors, the length of the form means that you have to reward your readers with something other than pure emotion. It is a medium that rewards complexity and nuance in a way that essay writing simply doesn’t. What this means is that the information you get in long form writing is, on average, less depressing and more nuanced than it is in article or essay form.

To give an example: The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert should be a stone-cold bummer of a book. It tracks the ongoing sixth mass-extinction in earth’s history. This current extinction is caused by mankind’s industrial expansion into the natural world. It’s a sad, even terrifying story. But Kolbert’s telling of it over 319 pages fails to ever reach the same levels as the worst bleak, doom-scrolly content on the internet. This is because she contextualizes the Sixth Extinction in mankind’s history: mankind has always been a destructive species, destroying the megafauna on every continent it has migrated to, and always altering the landscape. Further, she emphasizes that life will continue after the Sixth Extinction, much as it did in the others, it’ll just look different, and it will give new species a chance to shine. Finally, the book concludes with efforts mankind is making to stop the Sixth Extinction. These efforts are the difference between this mass die-off and the others: the Dinosaurs had no capability to turn back the massive asteroid that caused their deaths. We have the ability to turn back ours.

It is this sort of complexity and nuance that makes books less depressing on average. An article or social media post — even a well-written one — about the Sixth Extinction would not be able to get to the core argument and still have time and space for the complexities.

The Internet Cleanse

There’s an argument to be made then, for purging your feed of internet trash for a while, as a sort of mood and informational reset. The librarian in me would love to tell you to do as Bregman did, and just read books, but that’s not necessary: you can still be on the internet. The question is just which internet.

The thing is, there still is a good internet out there — one structured more to inform mankind than to hold it, zombie-like, in a trance. The most prominent example of this internet is Wikipedia, which we were told as kids was an unreliable resource because “just anyone” could edit it.

As it turns out, this is actually an excellent model for crowd-sourcing a universal encyclopedia, as it means misinformation can quickly be clarified, corrected, or removed by one of the sites thousands of volunteers. Because of this, it has been found to be at least as reliable as its primary competitor, the Encyclopedia Britannica. Modern journalists and fact-checkers frequently rely on Wikipedia because of its rigorous sourcing system — even if something on the page is incorrect, any reader can check its source themselves to find out how reliable it is.

A huge part of the reason for Wikipedia’s reliability is that its model is inherently democratic and, vitally, it is a non-profit. While Wikipedia is the seventh most-visited website in the world, its founder Jimmy Wales is not even a billionaire. His net worth, the New York Times estimates, is just over $1 million.

By choosing not to monetize his project, Wales is a modern Jonas Salk, giving up a vast fortune for the public benefit.

This internet still exists out there, buried underneath all of the advertisements and algorithms, and this internet is still worth your time and attention. There are huge research databases that are publicly available to you as well (this TikTok post won’t embed properly, but it has a list of some of them), and most academics will send you free copies of their research if you email them.

That type of information might be slightly less digestible than the zingy, quippy, doomscrolly clickbait on social media, but choosing it will have the same effect as choosing a salad over 6 slices of pizza: you’ll have an easier time getting out of bed after consuming it.

Another way to do an Internet Cleanse (without leaving the internet entirely) is to avail yourself of your local library’s resources: libraries are far more than books these days, and many of them now offer eBooks, audiobooks, streaming video and music, research databases, and online learning courses. The most common app employed to these ends is OverDrive, better known as Libby. I actually have OverDrive synced to my eReader, so I can borrow books automatically through their search function.

Regardless: if you’re in a place where you’re prioritizing your mental health, you need to know that you don’t have to sacrifice being informed to have a little less doom and outrage in your life.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com

I spent the bulk of the 2010s working as a “content creator” online for a travel publication. It was meant to be my dream job — I’d fantasized about being a jetsetting journalist since I was a teenager — but after the 500th time I told someone what I did and they said, “That must be so cool!” I finally realized that 90% of what I was doing was writing horseshit listicles in a desperate bid for the only metric that mattered in that world: internet traffic.

Ben Smith was the editor-in-chief for BuzzFeed’s news division in those heady years, and his recent book, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion Dollar Race to Go Viral is an insider’s look in how just a few rich white men managed to totally fuck up the internet, journalism, and global democracy in little more than a decade.

Smith’s account doesn’t present the story this cynically: he clearly has at least some admiration for the two main characters, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton, and HuffPo and BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti. But from the perspective of someone who has lived in this world (and who has to deal with the consequences of that atrocious decade), the story he tells is horrifying.

The Two Founders

Denton’s empire was a cynical and combative one: it was the early success of the two businesses, sprawling out from the original sites’ success into a media network that included websites like Jezebel, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, and Deadspin. Denton had a tabloid journalist’s belief that nothing in the lives of the rich and powerful was off limits, including publishing their private nude photos and videos, as well as their revenge porn.

This ethos made the Gawker empire extremely popular, but it also made it powerful enemies: when it outed billionaire venture capitalist (and openly fascist ghoul) Peter Thiel as gay, Thiel vowed revenge. He gave an extravagant bankroll and a high-powered legal team to Hulk Hogan, who managed to sue Gawker Media out of existence for invasion of privacy when it published a sex tape of him cheating on his wife.

Where Denton was a classic H.L. Mencken-style journalist and cynic, Jonah Peretti was more of a Silicon Valley beast. Peretti got his first taste of virality in the early 2000s, when he attempted to personalize his Nike sneakers by having them print “sweatshop” where his name should go. Nike refused, and Peretti forwarded their email exchange to his friends, and it blew up from there.

Peretti continued pulling viral “stunts” for the next several years, but remained an outsider in the New York blog world (at Gawker’s lavish parties, reporters noted the presence of his comedian sister, Chelsea Peretti, but failed to mention him) until he was brought on by Arianna Huffington to help found her website, the Huffington Post, which was designed to be a liberal alternative to the Drudge Report.

Huffington was hopeless at the viral business — she had a lot of famous friends, and she gave column space to people like Larry David, John Cusack, and George Clooney, but shockingly, the Hollywood Elite did not produce enthralling political writing, and the project stagnated until Peretti and his team realized they could drive traffic by manipulating Google’s search engines (figuring out, for example, that at least some people who wanted to know about Heath Ledger would mistakenly search for “Keith Ledger,” and tagging articles about the celebrity as such) and by producing sleazy tabloid articles featuring celebrity sideboob, which would stay off the front page of HuffPo but would drive most of the traffic.

As time went on, Peretti’s focus shifted to his new company, BuzzFeed, which was designed purely to drive traffic, and which would define the early 2010s internet.

The demise of democracy

The most enlightening part of this book is just how clueless the people on the inside were about what they were doing to American democracy, and to journalism in general. I had a somewhat backseat to all of this: in 2010, I worked at an SEO farm where my job was literally just to write bullshit articles based on popular Google Search Terms. You have every right to hate me for polluting the internet with this shit: It was an early form of SEO spam that was driven out of existence when they tweaked their algorithm. It also happened to be the only job I could get writing during the recession.

Later, I worked for a slightly more legitimate website that tried to copy the model of sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy to drive traffic. We were told that we could write more substantive, meaningful work with the rest of our time, but clickbait ended up cannibalizing the majority of what we did, and our traffic was largely dependent on what Facebook’s algorithm was up to that specific morning. It was clear to us, at the time, that our work was full-blown garbage and that what we were creating was not particularly useful or meaningful to anyone.

Jonah Peretti never seems to have quite understood this. There was something valuable, he figured, in capturing that much attention, but he seems to have had no real driving ethos outside the metric of traffic, which is what he measured BuzzFeed’s success by. It was this ethos that led Smith, in the days after Trump’s election, to publish the spurious Steele Dossier, which claimed the existence of a “golden shower” video that Putin’s government was using to blackmail Trump. This claim, while never proven, was gobbled up by liberals who were grieving their loss, and became a red herring for the next several years. In searching for the tape of hookers peeing on the President, these same liberals utterly ignored Trump’s other, totally provable, conflicts of interest which he refused to divest himself of when he became president.

Smith defends this act under a sort of half-baked “open information” argument, but also acknowledges that the driving reason for publishing the memo that other outlets had passed on (because they failed to verify it) was because it would, for once, give his BuzzFeed News page the type of clicks the site usually only got by publishing kitten photos, quizzes, or confusing pictures of a dress, which some saw as white and gold, and others saw as blue and black.

At the edges of Smith’s story about the chase for clicks is something more sinister: when Peretti was hired to Huffington Post, he was hired with another early internet guru, Andrew Breitbart, who didn’t last long, and instead went on to create a far-right Drudge Report rip-off that would spread misinformation about Barack Obama. When Breitbart died, his job was taken over by Steve Bannon (apparently that particular outlet only hires editors that resemble a waterlogged corpse), who closely studied the work of BuzzFeed, and understood the potential of such an attention capture machine.

Smith and Peretti were clueless about this right-wing resurgence while it’s happening under their nose. Peretti, who was chummy with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s developers, was liberal in his politics, but effectively viewed conservatism as just another identity, like being Italian, or from New Jersey — something that could easily be mined for clicks and shares. Smith seems incredulous when one of his former hires — who he’d had to fire for plagiarism — was invited to Trump’s White House, crowing “the internet is ours,” and is flabbergasted to watch one of his former BuzzFeed colleagues enthusiastically livestreaming the January 6th Capitol Hill attack.

It should not have been a surprise — at some point in the early 2010s, Facebook realized that there was a problem with the way their algorithm treated virality. If something received a lot of likes, it meant that people were likely clicking on the link a lot. If you click on the link, it is taking you away from Facebook’s website. That is bad for their core business, so instead, the began favoring “engagement” over likes. This meant that anything that was controversial was more likely to blow up on the platform, because controversial content got more comments. This inherently favors conservative politics, because racism, misogyny, classism, homophobia, and religious discrimination are all baked into that particular cake.

Bannon understood this immediately, and he let this metric — engagement — basically choose which candidate Breitbart backed in the Republican Presidential race. He picked Trump not because he believed in him the most, but because he was the candidate that Facebook was basically designed to be a megaphone for. Similarly outrageous right-wing candidates across the world — from Narendra Modi to Jair Bolsonaro — have been propelled to power by the same metric that keeps Facebook afloat. Bannon asked a perplexed Smith, after Trump’s election, why BuzzFeed didn’t do the same with the most engaging Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders.

Juking the stats

While I can’t say I particularly liked any of the heroes (or even the writer) of this book, I think it’s an important read for understanding our current moment on the internet, and in American democracy.

For one thing: If we want a progressive future — and if we are stuck with our current internet — we need to stop looking for the least offensive candidates. Focus-grouped politicians are just not going to hack it on an internet that prefers engagement and sensationalism. We’re more likely to win with unapologetic firebrands.

For another, we need to stop treating numbers as more important than content. Modern outlets have had diminishing returns chasing traffic, and as a result, have laid off countless of people in the media industry. Why would this happen? Well, because Facebook was so fixated on keeping you on their site that they turned their platform into a hellscape of screaming Boomer Uncles. Because they couldn’t handle you clicking away to other sites, they single-handedly ended the age of Democracy.

This is the problem with being led by metrics rather than ideals — metrics can fail, and they can also be exploited. The classic TV show The Wire is basically just five seasons explaining how public policy gets totally fucked because institutions “juke the stats” of the metrics their government decides are the most important. So rather than, for example, solving murders, the cops try to get the murders assigned to other jurisdictions. Rather than creating legitimate drug programs, the justice system prioritizes “drug arrests” by going after low-level offenders. From any human standpoint, this is degrading, backwards-ass policy, but from a numerical standpoint, it’s a success.

Likewise, in the media, pursuing the traffic metric means “scooping” other outlets by publishing a fraudulent document like the Steele Dossier because doing so will get you traffic. The claim that this is in service of “open information,” and “letting the American people decide,” sounds nice. One could make a pretty penny applying that same argument to the publication of, I dunno, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Finally, if we want to build an internet that works better for us, we need to focus on building smaller communities. This is less profitable, but we’ve learned that the owners of the megacorporations that control the internet have absolutely zero regard for how they are fucking up our world — they will tank a website that has been a repository for crowdsourced journalism for a decade and a half out of sheer vanity. Perhaps the way for us to build something that works for us is to build something that is unappealing to them — we can build something that just doesn’t scale, that just doesn’t bring in the traffic.

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One of my favorite bits in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is when he settles in his hotel room, his body absolutely chock-full of illegal chemicals, and tries to calm himself out of a frenzied panic:

By this time the drink was beginning to cut the acid and my hallucinations were down to a tolerable level. The room service waiter had a vaguely reptilian cast to his features, but I was no longer seeing huge pterodactyls lumbering around the corridors in pools of fresh blood. The only problem now was a gigantic neon sign outside the window, blocking our view of the mountains -- millions of colored balls running around a very complicated track, strange symbols & filigree, giving off a loud hum....

"Look outside," I said."Why?""There's a big ... machine in the sky, ... some kind of electric snake ... coming straight at us.""Shoot it," said my attorney."Not yet," I said. "I want to study its habits.”

Thompson was an expert on both fear and loathing, and spent much of his life on a frenzied, paranoid, drug-addled bender that would’ve killed most rhinoceri. It is perhaps fortunate that he did not make it till 2023 — he would not have handled the rise of far-right politics particularly gracefully for one thing. For another, Las Vegas now has art installations that are pulling shit like this:

I love that moment in Fear and Loathing, though, because it’s one of those rare moments where Thompson breaks through the violent paranoia into a moment of lucidity, and instead of being crippled by fear, he becomes curious about what he’s experiencing.

The Death of the American Dream

I first read Fear and Loathing in one sitting while my mom drove me to the first week of my freshman year of college. It was a fortuitous time to read it, as it ended up defining the next decade of my life. I was coming out of a conservative Catholic upbringing and was beginning to suspect most of what I’d been told about the way the world worked was bullshit.

The next few years would prove me right: the economy would collapse in 2007, right before I graduated, and my generation would never recover. My degree in journalism — I’d decided to switch to this profession from film shortly after reading Fear and Loathing — became effectively useless the year I graduated, as newspapers across the country shuttered their doors. I completely abandoned (and later actively opposed) the Catholic faith of my childhood, and any sense I had of America as the “land of opportunity” fell apart as I went abroad and, quite simply, saw more opportunity in other places, including fucking Communist China.

Hunter Thompson, then, was the perfect author for me: the main theme of his work was “the death of the American Dream.” His most famous bit from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the “Wave Speech,” in which he discusses the end of the hippie era in San Francisco:

There was madness in any direction, at any hour... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

For millennials like myself, adulthood has been a series of breaking waves. The promise of the economy broke in 2007, the promise of a better political future broke in 2016 with the election of a literal fascist, the promise of a livable planet for our kids seems to be breaking now as we choke on the very air we breathe.

All of this despair is overwhelming, and it is no surprise that so many of us are struggling with depression and anxiety.

Thompson himself is maybe not the model for how to deal with disappointed hopes — the man’s writing severely dropped off in the late 70’s as his drug use became even more excessive, and his career more or less bumped along until his death by suicide in 2005.

But as an 18 year old, his attitude was particularly admirable to me: he looked his fears dead in the eyes, and then documented them for us as they ate him alive.

The antidote to fear

For a long time, I thought that fear was a fundamental element of my personality. Growing up, my family was obsessed with the pseudoscientific Enneagram personality typing system. The system, if you’ve never heard of it, is similar to Myers-Briggs (also considered pseudoscience by modern personality experts) in that it divides all people up into discrete personality types.

The Enneagram was developed by Jesuits and Christian mystics who were attempting to explain human personalities in terms of which of the Seven Deadly Sins the person was more disposed to. They found this didn’t neatly describe all personality types, so they added two more sins (fear and deceit, though neither are canonical Deadly Sins) on for good measure, rounding us out to a neat 9 (Having 9 also allowed them to divide the types into three groups of three, and we all know the Catholics love a Trinity).

My type — the Six — was defined by the sin of fear, and so, for much of my early life, I believed this was an irrevocable part of my personality, something I would never be able to truly overcome. The so-called “virtue” of the Six type is “bravery.” But I never felt particularly brave, so I imagined myself as more or less screwed when it came to transcending my type. It is perhaps understandable that I became so smitten with Hunter S. Thompson, a man who embraced his fear (and also loathing, for good measure!).

For whatever reason, it took me a lot longer to dismantle my belief in the Enneagram than it did to dismantle my family’s conservative politics or Catholic faith, but once I did, I began to think of fear differently.

First: Fear is not a personality trait. Neither is anxiety. Fear is a natural response to real or perceived threats, and your body is correct to use it in certain situations. Anxiety is just fear directed at future events. Anxiety can be legitimate — something bad is coming and you can’t stop it — or speculative — something bad might happen and you can’t stop it — but it’s more likely to be a trauma response than just some innate part of who you are.

Second: I am convinced that the opposite of fear is not bravery. It’s curiosity. Frank Herbert’s Dune regularly employs the phrase “Fear is the mind-killer,” and if we believe that’s true, then what could we truly say awakens and animates the mind? Is it facing those fears head on? Or is it slipping to the side and trying to view the fear from a different angle?

The Benefits of Curiosity

One of the core components of anxiety is a sense of lacking control around the outcome of future events. I would argue that given our species current trajectory, anxiety is a rational thing to feel, because there are many ways in which our future feels outside of our control. When we try to take that future into our own hands, by say, putting pressure on our leaders, our leaders usually tell us it’s just not possible.

Given that it’s an age of disempowerment, it’s no surprise that it’s also an age of anxiety.

How exactly is one to be brave in this context? “Climate change may be raising the oceans and filling our skies with smoke, but I’ll face it head on!”

Great! Good luck breathing beneath the waves, or with a sky that’s on fire!

This isn’t to say that bravery is unimportant, it’s just to say that, in the process of facing our fears, it’s maybe 10 or 15 steps down the line. If you want to put your life back into your own control, first, you need knowledge, and to get knowledge, you need curiosity.

For example: It is not inherently brave to learn how to grow your own food. You just need to be willing to go out in your garden and, quite literally, muck around. You need to experiment with how certain plants grow and get a sense of what keeps them healthy and what kills them. People who get frustrated and give up when a plant dies never become gardeners, but people who are curious and are willing to learn from their mistakes will. And this is no small thing: if we wish to build more sustainable economies, we must begin to get as much of our food from close to home as possible. The point at which we must be brave — when we, say, start relying exclusively on ourselves and our neighbors for food — comes after years of learning.

Likewise, if we wish to build stronger, healthier, more equitable communities, the bulk of the work isn’t going to consist of iconically standing in front of a line of tanks. It’s going to be getting to know our neighbors and learning to work with them to build networks of support and care. To do this, you need to be curious: curious about their needs, curious about their histories, curious about how you can bring your different skills together to build something new.

It is a curious aspect of our society that we exalt the Brave, the people who run into burning buildings and save kittens. We give the Brave keys to the city. But it was not the Brave who developed flame retardant chemicals or insulated wiring: it was the Curious. The Curious undoubtedly saved infinitely more kittens in nearly every city on earth, but they will never get the keys to the city for the catastrophes they prevented, simply because we’ll never know what would’ve happened otherwise.

So by all means: If you can steel yourself to go out and slay the giant electric snake coming right at us in the sky, we’d all very much appreciate it. If you can’t, just study its habits.

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Imagine for a second: What do you think your dog experiences when you walk into your home? What strikes it first — the sound of your car pulling into the driveway, the jingle of the keys on your door, your smell wafting in with the outside breeze? Are you imagining the dog basically as yourself, but a few feet closer to the ground? Are its thoughts in English? Is it thinking something like “TREAT!” or “WALK!” or “SQUIRREL!”

Ed Yong’s 2022 masterpiece An Immense World deals with this question, and how humans are woefully unsuited to imagining the subjective experiences of other creatures — when we do, we can’t help but imagine our own mind simply transplanted into theirs, and the result is books like The Art of Racing in the Rain, in which the dog narrator spends long periods of time lingering on descriptions of human women’s breasts.

The reason we can’t imagine an animal’s world, Yong explains, is because they have different sensory capabilities, and these abilities make up a totally different umwelt from ours. Umwelt is a German term that literally translates into “around world” or “environment,” but basically refers to a creature’s subjective experience of the world. And we humans can’t possibly comprehend that because we have totally different sensory capabilities. We can’t imagine a dog’s experience because a dog’s sense of smell is far superior to ours, and as a consequence, they learn things that we would never assume they’d figure out.

For example, a dog would probably be able to figure out pretty quickly how recently you pooped, masturbated, or had sex by smelling your butt, hands, or crotch. If you slept with someone who wasn’t your spouse, they’d probably be able to catch a whiff of it. These are not the pieces of information we like to think of our dog knowing, but animals see things we’d never even know are there.

Beyond our imagining

Across the entire animal kingdom, the expanse of sensory abilities is genuinely mind-boggling, and Yong’s book is the type you only put down to say, “Holy SHIT” and then run to tell your wife the cool fact you learned. Here are just a few of those facts for me:

* Birds (and many other animals) see a wider range of color than we do. This does not just mean they see different wavelengths of light — infrared or ultraviolet rays, for example, though many of them do see those — it means they see more colors within that range. Yong jokes that they would see colors that we could possibly conceptualize as rurple, gruple, and yurple. More interesting — some humans have a mutation that allows them to see in more color. They usually never find out, because it’s impossible to communicate this difference without checking the structure of their eyes.

* Certain types of moles don’t experience pain in the same way. Because they live underground, there is less ventilation, which means atmospheres with much higher concentration of carbon dioxide, making the atmosphere more acidic. At these levels, we’d feel our lungs burning, but moles are unphased, and don’t even seem to react when they touch actual fucking acid.

* Fin whales are so loud their calls can be heard up to 13,000 miles away. It’s believed they use this noise for echolocation purposes, and it helps them chart the sea floor. But scientists in Bermuda have heard blue whales singing off the coast of Ireland.

* Bats (as many of us know) use echolocation to catch prey in the dark. What we don’t know is that their squeaks are often insanely loud, up to 130 decibels, which is as loud as a jet plane. Our ears mercifully can’t hear the frequencies they sing at, because if they did, we’d go to bed every night to the sound of jet-loud bat screams.

* Many animals have the ability to sense electric fields. While most of these animals are fish, because water conducts electricity better, it also includes bees. This is useful because the earth has a negative charge, while the sky has a positive one (this is part of the reason we have lightning). By flying through the air, bees give themselves a positive charge, and seek out flowers which are grounded with a negative charge. This difference in charge means that before they even touch the flower, the pollen jumps from the flower to their fur, like your hair does to a charged-up balloon. Scientists have found that bees ignore flowers that do not have the proper charge.

Yong’s book asks how these differences in senses would alter an animals perceptions of the world. If we navigated space not through sight but through echolocation, what would our internal map of the world look like? If we communicated with each other through smell or vibrations rather than sound, what would our communication look like? Would we be sniffing each other’s armpits, or simply holding hands? Further, how would the different type of information change our understanding of the world? If we could smell the last time someone pooped, rubbed one off, or had sex, it would take some of our most private, secretive facts of life and make them public knowledge.

What information, then, would we want to keep privileged?

For me, this is delightful as a thought experiment because it urges us to understand that there is so much more to the world than we can even possibly imagine. Scientists are doing their best to understand these senses, but it’s kind of like explaining music to someone who’s been deaf since birth — they may understand it as vibrations, but they won’t have a good sense of it as complex sound. Worse still for scientists, unlike the deaf and the not-deaf, there’s no common language through which we can communicate with these animals.

The world, as Yong suggests, truly is immense, and there are astounding things that other creatures are perceiving that exist totally beyond our understanding.

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There’s a lovely moment in the play Hamlet where the title character tells his friends that he has sworn an oath of vengeance to a ghost, and he will now be feigning insanity in order to get to the bottom of the ghost’s claims. His friends, Marcellus and Horatio, are understandably taken aback.

HORATIO O day and night, but this is wondrous strange.

HAMLET  And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

My wife and I have had those last two lines hanging in our home for nearly a decade. It is a good daily reminder to know that there are limits to human knowledge, and that all of our philosophies are, at best, partial.

When I was a teenager, I left the Catholic Church I was raised in. This was a good thing (because the Catholic Church sucks) but leaving that religion behind has never stopped causing me problems. Catholicism — like most religions — tells its followers that there is One Right Way, and that it is our duty to follow it. We are sheep to the shepherd’s flock.

If you leave a religion behind, it is likely because you’ve realized that some core tenet of the One Right Way was bullshit, and that you’d been lied to. The impulse in this moment is to seek the actual right way of thinking about things, which means you are very likely to switch from one sort of fundamentalism to another.

For me, the hard-earned truth was that human philosophies were, by their nature, incapable of encompassing and explaining everything. The New Atheism that I adhered to after leaving the Church, the Nihilism I adopted after that collapsed, the radical left politics I moved to after Nihilism just made me depressed: none of these philosophies managed to explain everything.

At some point, I had to accept that it wasn’t about finding the right philosophy, it was about staying open to new ideas and allowing myself to change over time. This skill, I have found, has been helpful as the world becomes more frightening and more chaotic — I no longer need to reconcile climate change with capitalism, or my “life is worthless” nihilism with my deep intuition, while spending time with my kids, that life is actually lovely and is worth living.

Philosophy in this mindset is not a complete and unimpeachable worldview, it is a toolkit, and not every tool is necessary for every situation.

The Discordians

I’ve talked before about the Discordians, the chaos worshippers who view human belief systems as something to have fun with, rather than to take too seriously. One of their early leaders, Robert Anton Wilson, called himself a “multiple model agnostic,” which meant that he applied different models and worldviews to different situations: Marxism, for example, might be very good at describing how capitalist economies work, it is less excellent at predicting how its brand of socialism would work in practice. Capitalism might be very good at describing how markets function, but it is pretty fucking bad at grappling with finite resources and ecological destruction.

By thinking of philosophies as toolkits rather than as 100% accurate explanations of the world, we can engage with several different types of belief systems. We can get meaning from them where we can, and abandon them when they cease to be useful.

Given the rather apocalyptic moment we are living in, this is helpful: it allows us to shrug off belief systems when they fall apart. To every thing, as per Ecclesiastes (or the 60’s band The Byrds, if that’s more your jam), there is a season.

Chaos philosophies

Some philosophies lend themselves to chaotic times particularly well — in the West, probably the best known chaos philosophy is Stoicism (which I covered in Book Rex a few weeks back), while in the East, the best known chaos philosophy is Taoism (which I covered last week).

One uniting feature of these philosophies is that they place moral authority and wisdom firmly in the individual. There is no outer authority you have to refer to for guidance or confirmation that you are doing the right thing. The Stoics of Ancient Greece and Rome put a high premium on integrity, and on acting in a way you could always be proud of. This meant that a lot of Stoics, in doing what they believed to be right, were executed by tyrannical emperors.

Taoism is similarly anarchistic, and is often seen as the foil to the other major Chinese philosophical school at the time, Confucianism, which is very fixated on rules, order, and hierarchy. Both Confucianism and Taoism put an emphasis on harmony, but for the Taoists, harmony is not achieved by everyone knowing their place in a rigid social structure, but instead by getting into harmony with nature.

These aren’t the only philosophies suited to chaos, of course: there are anarchistic strands of Christianity (like Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You approach), Buddhism (particularly Zen), and neo-paganism that have also helped people through stormy times.

If you’re in the market for a new philosophy (or better yet, you’re taking the agnostic approach), here are some books to check out:

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com

Look: I can’t say I’d recommend depression. It’s not a particularly fun time. In terms of enjoyability, I’d put it at zero out of five stars. BUT, it has been a weirdly fascinating experience? Without fetishizing it, it has taught me an enormous amount about the world and myself, to the point where I can’t imagine myself without having experienced it, and am skeptical that I would want to.

If you are one of my paid subscribers, you’ll know that last week I couldn’t manage to churn out a Book Rex due to the lack of focus that was a side effect of my antidepressant. I’m good now, for the record: I went off the offending antidepressant and switched to a new one, which has yet to fuck me up with side-effects (fingers crossed!). In the intervening week and a half, I’ve finished about half as many books as I did in the previous four months. So. Things are on the right track.

But drugs are just the latest chapter in this work — I’ve been in therapy for the better part of a decade, unpacking all of the reasons that I got to a point where everything was just so adrift. And unpacking has been painful: it’s revealed some hard truths about my family and my upbringing and my place in this society that have been hard for me to swallow. It seems to me that every time I peel a layer off the Depression Onion, there’s just another, more tender layer waiting there to get picked at. It is a bummer.

Easily the most fascinating book I’ve read on this subject is Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, which came out in 2014 and, as of this writing in 2023, remains on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, currently in second place.

I only finished the book this weekend, but it has already had an impact on my life. Van der Kolk has spent decades as a psychiatrist focusing on the issue of post-traumatic stress, dating back to the days in the 70’s when there was not, as yet, a term for PTSD, even though it was clearly affecting thousands of Vietnam War veterans.

The book takes us through the development of this field, through psychoanalysis to talk therapy to the psychiatric drug revolution, the neural imaging revolution, and through today, with promising innovative (and as of yet, not widely accepted) therapies that seem to help different people in different circumstances.

The reality is that every human, to some extent, experiences trauma in their life, but for some, it can be crippling. There are many different reasons for this — violence, neglect, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, traumatic accidents or disasters, etc. — but they affect the brain in such a way that it has difficulty moving on and adapting to changing circumstances.

Van der Kolk summarizes what scientists currently believe cause these behavioral issues in the brain, and suggests that the solution lies not entirely in treating the rational brain, but in treating the emotional brain and the body as well.

The first part of the book examines the evolution of this field and also discoveries about the effects of trauma on the body, and the second half of the book examines various treatments that have been useful. These include yoga (particularly useful for people who have undergone any sort of physical trauma), neurofeedback (particularly useful in treating ADHD, anxiety, depression, insomnia, and even epilepsy), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR, a controversial therapy that nonetheless has produced impressive results in many patients), Internal Family Systems Therapy (which involves imagining the different aspects of your personality as individuals whom you can speak to and work with) and even confidence building exercises like working in local theater or joining local choirs.

Van der Kolk’s approach is a curious one, which is to say he’s not particularly dogmatic about which therapies are “right” or “wrong,” he’s more interested in the results they show, and in researching why they work when they do.

What he’s most strident about is the fact that we’re currently facing a massive public health crisis when it comes to trauma (and keep in mind this was written 6 years before COVID), as trauma tends to play out in all sorts of unwanted behavior, from violence to suicide to abuse to drug addiction to criminality. By treating this core affliction, he suggests, we’d go a long way towards fixing many of our society’s problems, many of which stem from bodily autonomy (which, incidentally, is the topic of my Wednesday column, so stay tuned).

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One of the things I bump up against a lot by posting hopeful content on the internet is anger and scorn at the idea that I’m saying, “hey, maybe things will turn out okay.”

One comment on a recent post of mine suggesting that we could transition to something new said, “The world will be destroyed by 2031. 95% of the population will be dead.”

I was impressed by this commenter’s confidence, and was tempted to ask about how he arrived at his calculations (not to mention question him on the methods of stalwart 5% who would manage to continuing existing in a world that didn’t do the same). It is worth noting: I think he is wrong. I think things could get very bad, but people in every civilization ever have been predicting the end times, and inductive reasoning would suggest that believing the people who claim to know the actual dates is a mistake.

But I am sympathetic to this sort of thinking. We live in an age of toxic positivity, where we are expected to put our trust for the future into the hands of a hapless and greedy class of elites whom anyone with half a working mind would have stopped trusting long ago.

You are where you are

One of the curses of writing on the internet is that you give these short little glimpses into yourself, and people have to fill in all the gaps, and they do this on the basis of other stuff they’ve seen or heard. So if I say, “hey, let’s try to imagine a better future!” they could reasonably interpret it as me, a middle-class white dude, saying, “Joe Biden/Elon Musk/Bill Nye will fix this! We don’t have to worry!”

What they do not see in those videos or articles is the ten years I’ve spent struggling with depression, nihilism, and despair. They do not see the years of therapy, the years of grappling with a problematic identity, the years of guilt and shame that I internalized growing up as a conservative Midwestern Catholic, or the slow decay of any faith I’d ever put into the concept of American Democracy.

They do not see the cognitive dissonance I’ve felt reading books by scientists, activists, and thinkers pointing at our civilizations catastrophic trajectory and begging us to pay attention, and then turning around and spending time with peers and family who often shrug off climate change and the impending collapse of industrial civilization with a thought-ending cliche like “the politics just aren’t there to fix it.”

But because I’ve felt this way a long time, because I’ve been in treatment for my depression for years now, and because I have kids and owe it to them to fight for their future, I’ve decided not to just feel angry and depressed forever.

One of the revelations I’ve had in therapy is that depression, rather than being some sort of biochemical anomaly, is often a totally normal way for a body to respond when fucked up shit happens to it. It can be brought on by physical or emotional trauma, by isolation, by excessive consumption of drugs or alcohol, by lack of physical activity, by nihilism or ennui.

Given that our modern society seems thoroughly committed to constantly traumatizing and abusing us, to denying us any sort of access to community or care, and to distracting us from any sort of healing human activity it can’t profit off of, it is no surprise that so many people are depressed.

I do not write about hope because I’m no longer depressed. I am! I take daily antidepressants and still sometimes have trouble getting out of bed! I still sometimes lose all hope! But my depression really started in 2014, which is when I moved to New Jersey. I had a work from home job and I knew no one in the area, so I was isolated. My previous belief system was collapsing (this collapse sped up precipitously when Donald Trump was elected president), and my relationships with my family were shifting in uncomfortable ways. I was also drinking too much and exercising too little.

The reason I write about hope is that virtually everyone else in the country went through something similar in 2020, and are now about where I was circa 2017. A lot of these people don’t see any way out, and it seems important for me to stand up and say, “Hey, I’ve been through this, the anger and sadness don’t necessarily go away, but you can also eventually rebuild space for happiness, hope, and joy in this world, even if it seems like it’s heading towards shit to you.”

Anger and despair are reasonable responses to our current civilizational predicament. They just don’t have to be our only and permanent responses.

A dope world

One of the dumbest things I watch on a regular basis (like literally every time I’m high) is the cartoon Major Lazer, which features the music of the eponymous band. One episode has a time-traveling villain named Lady Vanessa Rothschild (voiced by Charli XCX), and in it, she says maybe my favorite line in television history, right before getting into an across-time kung-fu fight with the bionic rastafarian hero of the show:

I love this line so much I put it in my Instagram bio. Does Lady Vanessa Rothschild say it because she’s gone time-mad and wants to kill Adam and Eve and become the mother of humanity with Major Lazer at her side? Sure. But out of context, it seems like the most hopeful statement one could make: it says, hey, things could be better, and I could be a fundamental part of that. I have agency, regardless of what everyone in power tells me.

Come to think of it, our society seems pretty intent on making the type of people who say that either villains or people who have been pre-ordained as “special.”

I wrote in my (paywalled) article from a few weeks ago that there’s a distinction between hope and optimism, that the latter is a faith in external events, while the former is an internal orientation, or, as Vaclav Havel put it, “a dimension of the soul.”

I also said that optimism that ignores reality is pointless, and pessimism that ignores possibility is pointless.

You may still be in the “reality” stage. And when we start to come to terms with the horror of what’s happening in our world right now, it can be paralyzing, totally overwhelming. If that’s what you’re still feeling, then please: don’t let anyone’s talk of hope and possibility stop you from feeling it. You need to feel it.

But you will at some point need to feel more than just that. And when you do, we’ll be waiting for you, ready to talk about the possibilities.

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