Better Strangers

Hey all! Today I discussed the history of the Situationist International, and their impact on modern culture in the form of graffiti, punk rock, and modern protest. I mentioned having a list of books on Psychogeography, you can find that here.

Otherwise, here are the books I mentioned:

I also mentioned Higgs’ book The KLF: Chaos, Magic, Music, and the Band that Burned A Million Pounds. I don’t have other affiliate links set up, but consider using Thriftbooks or BetterWorldBooks (or your local bookshop via Indiebound!) before giving money to Bezos.

Header image reads “It is forbidden to forbid” in French. From the 1968 uprising, and a Situationist Slogan. Public Domain from Wikimedia Commons.

Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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

The story I’m about to tell you is true. You can look it up — the CIA’s “Acoustic Kitty” project. If you have 5 minutes, though, I highly recommend listening to this story on Nate DiMeo’s The Memory Palace podcast:

In the 1960’s, the CIA wanted to better spy on the Russian embassy in Washington, DC. But the Soviets knew that their offices were thoroughly bugged, so if they needed to have a conversation about something they really didn’t want the Americans to get their hands on, they would go for a walk in the park across the street.

In the tech of the 60’s, this presented a problem: there was no way to adequately bug a park, and no equipment that could pick up what the Russians were saying from a distance. If someone passed them, they’d stop talking till they were out of earshot, so eavesdropping was out of the question.

So the CIA came up with a solution: they’d send in a cat wearing a wire. It was perfect — the commies would never suspect a cat was a spy. But cats aren’t particularly trainable, so the CIA pumped $15 million dollars into a solution: they implanted the cat with electrodes on each side. Zap it on one side, the cat would go in the opposite direction. Now you could more or less steer it. Under the skin of its tail, they implanted an antenna, and near its head, a microphone. They tested it, and it seemed to work.

They took the cat to the Soviet Spy Park, let it out of their van, and it was immediately hit and killed by a cab.

“The world is rudderless”

One of the reasons I’ve never become a conspiracy theorist is that I’ve never believed that the government is competent enough to be so deftly pulling our strings. I’m not saying they aren’t evil enough: George W. Bush was absolutely a bad enough person to have orchestrated 9/11. But smart enough? Absolutely not. You’re telling me he could run a whole black flag operation to take down the two towers a mere 9 months into his administration, but for the next 8 years he could never plant a single piece of enriched uranium in an Iraqi power plant, thus justifying his murderous boondoggle of a war?

I mean, come on.

A couple years back, I read Tim Weiner’s massive history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes. It quickly becomes obvious: the CIA that we so often hear about in conspiracy theories, the shadowy organization that controls everything and everyone, whose malicious fingers is on every terrible thing that happens in the world, simply never existed.

The CIA, in short, is an embarrassingly incompetent organization. It relied heavily on British and Israeli intelligence to penetrate the USSR, it never successfully put a spy in North Korea, and while it should’ve seen 9/11 coming from absolute miles away, it didn’t, and bungled the whole plot. The CIA had notoriously bad intelligence (an early director estimated that fully half of their intelligence was false), and was leaky as a slotted spoon. They were regularly compromised by competing intelligence agencies.

What they did have was an insane amount of money. And with this money, which was by-and-large administered with little to no civilian oversight, they pumped money into local fascist movements all over the world, and bankrolled murderous dictators who were amenable to American bribes. With this money, they occasionally managed a real coup — as in the case of Guatemala, which was their biggest real success (and which radicalized a young Che Guevara), and Iran, which was mostly run by the British, and which obviously never blew back up in their faces.

“On September 20 [1949], the CIA confidently declared that the Soviet Union would not produce an atomic weapon for at least another 4 years.

Three days later, Truman told the world that Stalin had the bomb.”

-Legacy of Ashes

But mostly, they just lined the pockets of corrupt politicians and con artists.

Alan Moore, as usual, put it best:

“Yes, there is a conspiracy, in fact there are a great number of conspiracies that are all tripping each other up. And all of those conspiracies are run by paranoid fantasists and ham-fisted clowns. If you are on a list targeted by the CIA, you really have nothing to worry about. If however, you have a name similar to somebody on a list targeted by the CIA, then you are dead.”

We fall for conspiracies because they rhyme with stuff we know to be true. The Pizzagate conspiracy — in which the Democratic Party is covering up a massive pedophilia ring out of a DC pizza joint — is not true, but well… do I have to say it?

The Catholic Church was effectively covering up a global pedophilia ring for centuries.

And while chemtrails and fluoride mind control might not be a thing, we do know that the CIA (unsuccessfully) tried to use drugs and psychological torture to brainwash civilians in Project MK Ultra.

The problem isn’t that there aren’t conspiracies, it’s that we mistake small conspiracies for The Big Conspiracy, in which we are all just the puppets of a malevolent Order. For many people, the Government or the Illuminati or the Deep State is simply a stand-in for a nonexistent god. Which is, in a way, perversely comforting.

Moore again:

“The truth is more frightening: Nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.”

Thank you for reading Better Strangers. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Embracing chaos

The good news is that this chaos cuts both ways — if no one’s in control, if we’re all just atoms smashing into each other, then our future is not in anyone in particular’s hands, save perhaps our own. Sure, it would be terrible if Vladimir Putin or George Soros or Rupert Murdoch were totally in control, but they aren’t. History has shown us that powerful structures always ossify and then crumble and fall. Things that aren’t sustainable, well: it’s in the name. They don’t sustain.

One of the things you learn reading about revolutions and massive, seismic changes, is just how quickly things progress. The Arab Spring of 2011 eventually deposed four heads of state and led to seismic shifts across North Africa and the Middle East, but the whole event was started by a single man, Mohamed Bouazizi, who lit himself on fire in protest of economic stagnation, and whose story became the catalyst for the uprisings.

But while the match that (in that case, literally) lit the flame came suddenly and unexpectedly, it relied on people laying the groundwork for years, even decades before those authoritarian regimes could be toppled. In those years before Bouazizi, anyone fighting for democracy in the Arab world could conceivably have said “this is going to be the way it always is,” and given up.

Some people who fight for a certain world never lived to see it. Some people are destroyed by shadowy, conspiratorial forces. But Deep State boogeymen don’t control the future. And neither do we. But we can work now to shape it in the right direction.

Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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

In last week’s column about how misanthropy is a choice, I mentioned the existence of a subreddit page called “Thanos Did Nothing Wrong,” in which hundreds of thousands of people joined and enthusiastically agreed with the genocidal villain from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It occurred to me that Thanos vs. The Avengers actually nicely illustrate the two most popular — and most castrophic — approaches to climate change and ecological collapse in the modern world.

Thanos, if you haven’t seen the movies, spends several films acquiring immensely powerful “Infinity Stones,” which enable him to snap his fingers and kill half of all living things in the universe. He does this because he believes that overpopulation leads to suffering, and that by killing half of all living things, he is bringing balance back to the universe’s ecosystems.

Thanos is opposed — and eventually defeated — by the Avengers, the alliance of Marvel superheroes that the film series centers around. The Avengers, it’s worth noting, are about as problematic as Thanos is. They have two core leaders: one, Tony Stark, is a billionaire arms manufacturer who develops an AI which attempts to exterminate all human life, the other, Captain America, is a supersoldier developed by the American military industrial complex, who violently resists global attempts to regulate his ability to act with impunity.

When looking at the problems with how humans are approaching climate change, Thanos and the Avengers pretty perfectly embody our two worst approaches: Thanos is a perfect example of the “ecofascist” approach to environmentalism. And the Avengers are the perfect embodiment of the “progress” approach. Let’s dig in, shall we?

The Thanos Approach: Paul Ehrlich and third-world sterilization

In the 1960s and 70s, it started to become undeniable to those paying attention that humanity’s ongoing industrialization and economic growth was having negative effects on the global environment.

In 1968, the biologist Paul Ehrlich published what was probably the second most influential (behind Silent Spring) science book of the 60’s: The Population Bomb. In it, Ehrlich argued that human population growth was proceeding far too rapidly, and that in the coming decades, the world would see catastrophic levels of famine, with hundreds of millions dying globally.

The solution, Ehrlich argued, was for governments to undertake drastic efforts to try and curb population growth as quickly as possible. To do so, he advocated for widely available contraceptives, public sex education, and universal access to abortion.

He also argued that governments should add temporary sterilants to the public water supply, cut off food aid to countries undergoing famine, and only offer financial aid to countries that mandated sterilization for men with over 3 kids.

Ehrlich was a charismatic speaker, and over time, his ideas became en vogue among a certain set of the global elites, and some countries aggressively, even coercively, pursued Ehrlich’s recommendations. This meant that many poor countries forced women to abort pregnancies they did not wish to terminate, and that in others, men were forcibly sterilized.

The problem — if it isn’t blazingly, horrifically obvious — is that this population control campaign is effectively genocidal against poorer, less developed countries in the global south. Which also just happen to be non-European, non-white countries. This is what has come to be dubbed as ecofascism, and it’s alarmingly high in the (white) American environmentalist community.

These countries also happen to be the ones that are the least responsible for the pressures being placed on the global environment. In another blockbuster 1972 book, The Limits to Growth, the argument was made that the earth could not sustain endless population and economic growth. The argument (sensibly) being that a planet with finite resources cannot sustain infinite growth. Or, as the environmentalist Edward Abbey put it:

Growth for the sake of growth is the 'ideology' of the cancer cell.

The distinction is an important one, because while Ehrlich wasn’t wrong that earth can’t sustain an infinite number of humans, that population growth is also tied closely to the economic growth that has come with the spread of both global industrialization and global capitalism. And the blame for the economic direction that the earth has taken over the past couple of centuries lies squarely on the shoulders of the people in the global north. Who the population doomers simply weren’t interested in targeting, because they didn’t have as many babies.

What’s so silly about the Ehrlich/Thanos approach to environmental problems is that it punishes a whole lot of people/lifeforms that quite simply aren’t to blame for any pressures placed on the environment. The Thanos Snap is ridiculous because his snap destroyed half of all life in the universe. One of the number one signs of a healthy ecosystem is abundant, diverse life. What puts pressure on an ecosystem is when one species begins destroying everything else, by harvesting, mining, and extracting more than it puts back in, and by driving other species to extinction.

Likewise, it’s not humans that are the disease in Ehrlich’s calculation, it’s the economic and political system which treats nature as something to be exploited and dominated, rather than lived within. The proof for this is in that large swathes of humanity have managed to live sustainably for hundreds of thousands of years. This current global system — which began in earnest with the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago — just happens to exactly coincide with our global growth problems.

What’s more, population in a society in decline tends to correct itself — the writer John Michael Greer points out in his book The Long Descent that:

Russia is a good model here; since the collapse of Communism, it’s seen rising death rates and falling birth rates to such an extent that the population will be cut in half by 2100, and yet there hasn’t been any massive catastrophe to account for this — simply shifts in statistics driven by economic and political failure.

Given that economic and political failure have already led to a massive drop in birth rates among millennials, it’s possible that we could stop worrying so much about sterilizing the “breeders” and instead start formulating economic systems that bring us back into harmony with nature.

The Avengers Approach: Do nothing, leave it to the Supermen

There’s a second approach to climate that is also based on dangerous fantasy, and it’s nicely represented by the Avengers. The Avengers, like all superheroes, are übermenschen. The übermensch was a Nietzschean idea about a certain type of man who would evolve beyond normal mankind, and thus would be above normal human morality. This idea appealed to the Nazis, who decided that they were the more evolved man, and that they could treat everyone else as subhuman.

Superman, the very first superhero — whose name is just a translation of the German word übermensch — was an attempt at subverting these ideas, made by two 18-year old Jewish kids from Cleveland. What if, they asked, this superhuman instead of treating other people like chattel, used his powers for good, for truth, justice, and the American way?

The problem is that after the initial subversion, the writers behind superheroes largely ignored the general problem with the übermensch ideology, and instead embraced it: their heroes were billionaires, genius scientists, and literal mutants who had evolved past normal humans. And because of these abilities, the heroes were largely allowed, in their universes, to be above the law, acting as vigilantes. They frequently served right-wing causes, allying with the police to fill prisons with incurable criminals, and allying with the American military-industrial complex in acts of espionage and war.

In this universe, the solution to all problems comes from innovation and genius. The thousands — if not millions — who are killed when the Superhumans fight (whether it’s Superman vs. Zod in Metropolis, Batman vs. Joker in Gotham, or Ozymandias vs. New York City in Watchmen) are inconsequential. They are narrative devices and side characters in a story about battling Gods.

These narratives rarely countenance the idea of these superhumans exercising restraint, and when they do, the idea is eventually discounted as the reluctant hero is called back into battle.

This, obviously, is the approach most Americans have decided to take in regards to problems around the climate: leave it to the smart people to save us. The idea is that if we allow the geniuses to innovate enough, we can find solutions to climate that will allow us to not change our extractive economy. Of course, many of the people our country has chosen as its Titans are either vainglorious morons (in the case of say, Elon Musk) or are genuinely evil (in the case of Donald Trump or Peter Thiel) and have no interest in the lives of lowly regular humans such as ourselves. Their ideas, usually, are to either leave us all to die on this planet while they flee to Mars, to engage in risky geoengineering projects to “correct” the negative effects of climate change by, among other things, turning the blue sky white, or to build fortresses for the rich and slums for everyone else.

A third way: Humility

The uniting thread in both of these approaches to dealing with our current massive problems around climate is just a staggering lack of humility. In each scenario, certain special people take on the responsibility for fixing the planet, and in doing so, condemn millions of people of their choosing to death.

But in order to adapt to and mitigate the worst effects of climate change, we’re going to need much more than certain special individuals: we’re going to need entire communities that work together to figure out problems, and which can quickly adapt and change course as needed. This means people will need to put their egos at the door and focus on solutions rather than on either becoming or submitting to saviors.

It’s worth noting that if we’re talking about the type of dynamic community that can respond to climate change, we’re not talking about communism, at least not in the sense that it was applied in much of the world in the 20th century. New ideas, dissent, and the ability to abandon systems that haven’t been working are vital for any future our society has, which means that we’ll have to build something much more democratic than we have now in the US.

Regardless, our future’s challenges will be immense, and we’ll need all hands on deck. We cannot wait for heroes and villains to make the decisions for us.

Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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

Happy Friday, guys! This week’s podcast is a deep dive into John Michael Greer’s 2008 book The Long Descent. I did a text-only version of this a while back, so if you prefer reading to listening, find that here:

Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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

This is going to sound bad: My wife works in politics, and occasionally, I tag along with her to fancy events where local politicians are gladhanding with donors and constituents. I sometimes go to activist events where fairly powerful people show up to speak and listen to what we have to say. And there’s one thing that always crosses my mind:

I got in here and NO ONE patted me down… It’s crazy there aren’t more political assassinations in America.

I know! I know! I know this puts me immediately on a Secret Service list! I am fully prepared to answer their questions!

BUT. But! Security in most democratic forums is virtually nonexistent, even though those forums frequently get heated. The only people who really get a lot of security are high-level executives like the Governor or people with specific threats against them. And I know that a lot of the security that does happen is happening in the background, possibly with truly horrific invasive technologies.

BUT. But! Most public officials in America are fully out in the open, subject to their public. And given this fact, violence against them is shockingly infrequent — you can remember horrific instances like Gabby Giffords (2011), the Congressional baseball shootings (2017), and of course, the January 6th riots (2021), and there’s no minimizing just how bad those moments are.

BUT. But! There are so many tense political situations, meetings, and forums across the country on a daily basis that the fact that you can remember specific instances of violence is actually astounding. Because what it means is that humans — worse still, Americans — are shockingly civil and restrained, even when it comes to the stuff that fires them up the most.

This is so counter to the narrative about America and about humanity as a whole that we all hear on a daily basis that our minds almost have no choice but to reject it. Because to accept it, we’d have to consider the possibility: humans are actually generally pretty cool.

When misanthropy is cool

(Misanthropy, if you are confused, is not the condition in which one turns into a wolf come the full moon. You are thinking of lycanthropy. Do not worry about it, literally all of us have made that mistake. Lycanthropy is cool, and I do not wish to say otherwise.)

Misanthropy is the hatred of humans, and it is one of the most accepted, pervasive attitudes in modern society. This is because the alternative, believing that humans are basically good, is widely seen as being incredibly naive and “cringe.”

The attitude is pervasive enough that when the Marvel movie Avengers: Infinity War came out, literally hundreds of thousands of people joined a group on Reddit titled “Thanos Did Nothing Wrong.”

Thanos, if you haven’t seen the series, is the genocidal villain who murders literally half of all life in the universe because he’s worried about overpopulation.

Social media is rife with this attitude, that humanity is a disease, though the inevitable outgrowth of that attitude — that we should cure the disease, and all join the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement — is less frequently spoken.

It is understandable that we would fall prey to this type of thinking — we’ve all experienced people being awful, probably in our very recent past. But there is a logical jump that needs to be made between someone behaved like a dick and someone is a dick, and it’s a jump that usually requires us to abandon any sort of complexity and understanding in our thinking. The bigger jump that many of us then make, that all people are dicks, is an insane jump, one that requires that we completely ignore all of the stuff that never goes wrong in our daily lives.

I’ve discussed the negativity bias on this newsletter before: it’s our cognitive tendency to pay more attention to negative events than positive events. If you spend any time posting on social media, you likely have extremely vivid memories of negative comments you’ve gotten, but forget all the times people told you that you were great. But if you ran the data — all the likes, hearts, “you’re so great” comments you’d received vs. the bad ones, I can pretty much guarantee the positive would outweigh the negative.

Our problem is that the negative stuff stands out in our minds as being the most significant, and so we extrapolate small data points (“that waiter was a dick to me,”) into enormous, inflexible worldviews (“all people suck”).

And when we have a worldview that’s that negative, it triggers another cognitive bias: the confirmation bias. This is when we give more weight to data that supports our worldview than we do to data that refutes it.

All of that colludes to make us congenitally miserable, anxious people who can only see a world that’s decaying, and never see the better world that might be growing out of that decay.

Thank you for reading Better Strangers! One of the best ways to support us is to share articles you like!

People are actually usually good

Break down all of your daily interactions. With your family, with the service industry people you deal with, with your customers, your coworkers, your boss, your neighbors, and your friends. How many of them are altogether negative?

My hunch is that most of them are pleasant, or at the very least are neutral. The reason for this hunch is that, on the whole, I spend very little of my day in a triggered fight-or-flight state. I would remember if I did. But in reality, in spite of all of the terrible things happening in our world right now, teachers are still showing up to their jobs en masse and teaching our kids, in spite of dogshit working conditions and bad pay. Trash is still being picked up by trash collectors. Potholes are still getting filled in. Food is still ending up on our shelves. Poop is still leaving your toilet and entering the sewer.

And when these things don’t happen, it’s often because of something outside the realm of the question “do humans suck?”

If your teachers don’t show up, perhaps they are striking for a raise and benefits they fully deserve. If your potholes aren’t getting filled, maybe it’s not because people don’t want to take care of their community, but they live in a system that discourages any sort of community. That’s not people sucking. That’s capitalism sucking.

And if you are getting shouted at, maybe it’s not because that person sucks! Maybe that person shouting at you is in the midst of a mental health crisis that came as a result of extended societal neglect! Maybe they’ve lost a home, maybe they’re going bankrupt, maybe they’re being abused, maybe they can’t afford health insurance, and you bumping into them was the only outlet for frustration available amid a day of constant systemic frustrations with no easy person to yell at on the other end!

None of this is pleasant, and it doesn’t say great things about the people who run our society. But that doesn’t have to be extended to people overall. People keep life moving, keep it livable, keep it fun and interesting, on a constant basis. If they didn’t, life would actually look like those dystopian movies we love so much, where everyone is stabbing each other in the back.

A world like that, a world where people suck, is easy. It’s simple. A world where people are trying hard but are struggling, where they are good but regularly have to deal with frustration, trauma, and structural oppression, is a world with more complexity and nuance. But embracing that complexity, we can start believing in each other, and we can start building something better.

Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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 was going to publish something different today, but then my video last week about disaster utopias on TikTok got a quarter of a million views in 24 hours, sooo… welcome new followers! For older followers, here’s the video:

That was a short video! I feel like delving into the book it was based on would be helpful for fleshing out some of the questions people had in the comments. So without further ado, let’s discuss Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell.

Solnit’s book is based upon the work of “disaster studies” scientists. This field really took off during the Cold War, when the United States government realized it needed information on how people respond in the event of disasters, in case there was ever a nuclear war and they needed to restore order.

The post-WWII view of human nature was bleak. Which was understandable. We’d just been through two meat-grinder wars, we were uncovering the horrors of the Holocaust, new and terrifying forms of totalitarian government were arising in the forms of both fascism and Soviet-style communism, and the old empires were violently crumbling. Also, we seemed to be on the brink of literally destroying all life on earth.

But what people tended to do with this information was view it as an indictment of human nature rather than an indictment of power itself. The Holocaust could be chalked up to Original Sin and man’s dark nature, rather than to totalitarianism, racism, and mass propaganda.

What the findings of disaster studies showed was the opposite: when something terrible happened and order crumbled, people consistently, spontaneously organized to help each other out. The response was more or less instinctive, and did not require centralized organization.

Media myths in disasters

Solnit’s book looks at five separate disaster case studies and compares the similarities and differences: the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, the Halifax munitions explosion of 1917, the Mexican Earthquake of 1986 (which resulted in the toppling of decades of one-party rule), 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina.

In each of these situations, spontaneous, decentralized disaster responses appeared. In the earthquakes and the explosion, people joined together to dig people out of the rubble and distribute food and water, in the hurricane and 9/11, people with boats spontaneously organized rescue crews.

The reason people think that there’s so much violence and chaos during these events is that the press usually tells them that this is what going on. Predictably, the first comment on my disaster video brought up the “rapes in the Superdome” after Katrina. It was worse than the commenter suggested: the reports, which were amplified by both the Mayor of New Orleans and the Chief of Police for the city, were that babies were being raped, and that at least one infant had its throat slit. Chris Kyle, the mass-murderer glorified in the book and movie American Sniper, reported that he camped on top of the Superdome to murder “looters” with his sniper rifle.

The problem is that there was no evidence that these stories were ever true. The press simply reported on rumors as if they were fact, without bothering to confirm them. While the disaster response in the Superdome was its very own disaster, there have never been any corroborated reports of rapes, and certainly none of infanticide, during the Superdome debacle. These stories were used as a justification for a mass police crackdown after the Hurricane, and were also used as an excuse for a sheriff in a nearby parish to basically tell his deputized (white) vigilantes that they could murder black people they saw fleeing the floods through their neighborhoods.

Maybe the third comment was from an actual Louisianan, who said that he’d lived there long enough to know that in a hurricane, help was not coming from the authorities, but rather from his neighbors and the “Cajun Navy.”

Reports of looting, disaster studies has consistently found, are over-reported, and often include people “looting” stuff like food. This is obviously unfair, as in a disaster, much of that food would spoil, and it makes perfect sense for people to requisition it so they don’t starve.

These exaggerated or totally fabricated horror stories are used by authorities as reasons they need to re-exert their authority and control over the situation, which often results in repression and violence not from ordinary people but from the state.

“Nasty, brutish, and short”

The powerful people in our society have always needed the threat of chaos and disorder to scare us into thinking we need them. And this is not to say there aren’t benefits to our current society — I enjoy quite a bit about modern civilization — but if the premise of our society is that, without benevolent rulers, life would be “nasty, brutish, and short,” as the pro-monarchy philosopher Thomas Hobbes said, then our society is built upon a lie.

None of this is to say humans aren’t capable of horrific acts of violence and cruelty. It’s just to say that these acts are often not expressions of our most basic human nature, but instead are a result of unequal power structures. A white man believes the black man coming down the street in the midst of a hurricane is coming to loot him because of what he’s seen on his TV, so he shoots him. The reasons behind this murder are racism and misinformation from the media and the police. Those are both expressions of power — not necessarily of human nature.

What this also shows us is that the way you behave is influenced by what you believe. If you believe people are untrustworthy and are coming to hurt you, you’re likely to stock up on guns and eventually hurt someone in an act of “self-defense.” But if you believe people are usually trying to help, then you’re more likely to pitch in yourself and try and be part of a collaborative solution.

The good news is that we know humans are social creatures, and have been self-organizing dynamic solutions to difficult problems since before we first stood erect. Some people like to argue that this is proof that humans are inherently communist, or that they are inherently anarchist. But it’s equally true that some humans have always organized power structures and hierarchies, have always engaged in competition.

Which makes the truth about human nature far more interesting: if we have communism and capitalism, anarchy and totalitarianism all within us, if there is no one way we inherently are, then it is all just a choice.

So tell me: which would you choose?

Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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

There is a single person on the internet whom you do not want to negatively engage with your content, and that is Greta Thunberg. If Greta Thunberg owns you, you will literally go to jail. That story, if you missed it, came at the end of 2022, when “Manosphere” personality and general all-around douchebag Andrew Tate attempted to troll Thunberg by bragging about his car emissions. Thunberg responded.

Tate did not handle her response well, and filmed an angry response in which he insisted that the pizza boxes he was eating out of not be recycled. The problem was, the pizza box was visible. It had the name of a local Romanian pizza chain on the side of it. Which gave Romanian authorities, who wanted Tate on human trafficking charges, all they needed to find him. Tate is now in prison awaiting trial. Authorities seized 15 of the cars he bragged about.

As delightful as this story is, I need to note: this is not how owning people usually works.

Generally speaking, if you hate something someone is posting, you should not engage with it. Social media algorithms reward content with high levels of engagement, because high-engagement content keeps people on their website longer. So if you hate something and you are commenting on it, sharing it, giving it a frowny-face — whatever — you are promoting it. For free.

How content becomes “sticky”

Recently, I’ve had a few videos do well on TikTok, the best getting between 35k and 142k views on the app. In my personal terms, that’s enormous, but as far as TikTok goes, where the big videos get millions upon millions of views, it’s not particularly out of the ordinary. TikTok (like all social media) has an analytics tool that allows me to see the video’s stats, and I can see from these that, in the case of the video that got 142k views, people have spent an accumulated 14 weeks watching this 3-minute video.

That is an insane amount of time for all of humanity to be listening to me babble about Lord of the Flies.

What’s made the videos that have taken off work is that I start with something that sounds like a strong, harsh opinion (“Lord of the Flies is bullshit!”) and then I give an actually pretty tame reason as to why (“Because I think kids are generally pretty goshdarn swell!”).

It is the second message that I’ve made the video for (I actually liked The Lord of the Flies as a book, even if I disagree with its underlying messages), but it’s the first part that gets me tens or even hundreds of thousands of views. This is because people hear a strong opinion and they want to fight you about it (“Lord of the Flies is actually about the British ruling class you MORON,” “Shut up, commie,” “This guy’s a RACIST,” etc.).

As a (god help me) influencer, I engage with the first few comments on the things I post, as this can help the piece get a toehold in the deluge of content that is TikTok, and then when it starts to blow up, I step back and largely ignore the people who despise me. They are being mean, yes, but they are at the end of the day doing me a solid by engaging with and promoting my piece. I will sometimes — and these are my favorite commenters — have people tell me I am wrong, and then will tell me that the correct opinion is… the one I expressed in the video. It’s a beautiful thing.

Your attention is literally a commodity

From a “building my brand” perspective, this knowledge of how the algorithms work is all pretty useful, but from a media consumer perspective, it is dangerous. Because our instinct, when faced with something we view as wrong, or evil, or abhorrent, or whatever, is to immediately go fight that thing. But in the attention economy, that gives the thing you hate more power.

This played no small part in making Donald Trump President. That man maintained his power — truly — until Twitter finally decided to deplatform him after January 6th. After that, his Tweets could no longer be engaged with by every third person on the planet, and they could no longer dominate the news cycle. Sure — he could put them onto Truth Social, or send them out as genuinely unhinged “press releases,” but none of the people that hated him were reading those. So he lost his power.

Now, much like Andrew Tate, he’s GOING TO JAIL. (We are not sure how much Greta Thunberg hating Donald Trump had to do with this, but our best guess would be: it didn't have nothing to do with it!)

Part of modern media literacy is understanding this dynamic, and learning to not engage with the stuff we find vile. The internet, and social media in particular, is genuinely an attention economy, and you should try to treat your attention like you treat your money, and spend it responsibly. Does this mean you can’t occasionally splurge and spend it on nonsense? Of course not! Watch “The Cheese Tax” as many times as you want!

But otherwise, try to consider how you spend your attention on the internet. The late, great, Ursula LeGuin wrote in her book The Left Hand of Darkness:

To oppose something is to maintain it.They say here “all roads to Mishnory”. To be sure, if you turn 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.

Consider what you want to lend your attention to, and then do so consciously. Otherwise, you’re just being manipulated into elevating the voices of vile people.

Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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

Juan is a medium. He can see ghosts and he can summon an eldritch entity known only as “the Darkness” from other dimensions to ours. Because of this ability, Juan has been forced into becoming the unwilling servant of an occult coven of brutal, wealthy dark art practitioners who collude with the right-wing Argentine military junta of the late 1970’s to throw “disappeared” victims as a sacrifice to their dark god in exchange for hints at how to achieve immortal life.

Though Juan is virtually enslaved by the Order, as it’s called, he is immensely powerful, and capable of shocking violence. In the fifth page of the novel, he becomes irritated at a waitress:

The woman was still apologizing, and Juan felt drained. When she reached out to take the money, he held on to her wrist. He thought about marking her with a symbol that would drive her mad, that would put the idea in her head to skin her grandson’s feet or cook her dog in a stew. But he held back.

Juan’s recently deceased wife, Rosario, was a prominent member of the Order, and his six-year-old son, Gaspar, seems to be showing even stronger abilities than his father’s at a young age. Juan is desperate that his son not suffer the same fate he has.

This is the premise of Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez’s immense, perfect novel Our Share of Night. It is the first of her novels to be translated into English, though I’ve previously raved about two of her short story collections (Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed) on this newsletter before. This book cements her status as the greatest horror writer alive. Absent maybe Frankenstein, The Shining, and The Haunting of Hill House, I simply do not have other contenders for “Best Horror Novel of All Time,” and I am pretty sure this beats them all handily.

What makes this book special is the relationship between Juan, Gaspar, and Rosario. The novel switches intermittently between their perspectives, first showing us Juan’s desperate efforts to save Gaspar, then showing Gaspar’s uncomprehending horror at the grotesque and evil things his father does in the name of “saving him,” and then cutting to Rosario’s torn relationship between the Order that gave her everything, the man she loves, and the son who, if she so chose, she could destroy in the name of becoming one of the most impossibly powerful people in existence.

As a father (and a son) what was most devastating was how unflinchingly it shows the ways in which parents and children hurt and misunderstand each other, how quickly protection can turn to violence, and how what’s meant as love can feel like oppression and hate. The passage that gives the book its title encapsulates this perfectly, and is perhaps the most beautiful thing I’ve read in years:

On the other side, on a muddy path through tall grass with pools shining like mirrors under the moon, he took Gaspar’s face in his hands, leaned down to look him in the eyes, and caressed his hair, the box on the ground between them, and he said, You have something of mine, I passed on something of me to you, and hopefully it isn’t cursed, I don’t know if I can leave you something that isn’t dirty, that isn’t dark, our share of night. I like this, said Gaspar, and his father replied, Of course you do, because now nothing can hurt you. Nothing? Right now, nothing. They walked without dodging the puddles that were impossible to avoid, soaking their feet, muddying their pants, Gaspar stopping from time to time to let his father catch his breath, it was so hard for him to walk now, I’m going to miss him, he thought, I’ll be glad when he’s gone because without him it’ll be easier to stop being sad, but I’m going to miss him.

Enriquez, like Gaspar, was born in the early 70s, was a child during the dictatorship, and came of age in the tumultuous years following its collapse. Her Argentina is a haunted place, by ghosts literal and figurative, and she manages to show innocence butting up against lurking evil in a way that no one save Stephen King has ever quite so effectively managed.

If you like horror, you need to have already read this book. If you don’t like horror, that’s fine — this book is occasionally very scary, but it’s a family epic more than anything else. If you’re a parent and want to process the terror of having a child in dark times, this is your book — we all want to save our kids from pain and horror, but our protection and care has the ability to also smother and destroy.

I cannot recommend Our Share of Night enough. Enriquez’s writing is somehow both poetic and fast-paced, and Megan McDowell’s translation is breathtaking. Buy it here.

Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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 am not in any sort of marginalized group, but I try to be an ally. I don’t really have the ability to speak for trans people or people in the LGBTQ+ community, but I can speak to my own struggles with both toxic masculinity and trying to develop something better. So that’s what today’s podcast is about.

Consider donating to the Trevor Project, which supports LGBTQ young people.

I’d love to hear anyone’s take on how straight, cis dudes can be better allies, get more vulnerable, more capable of handling emotions, and better at building their own communities of support in the comments! They are open to all today.

Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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

One of the things that irritated me most when I worked as a librarian was that if there was an outcry about a book, it invariably had something to do with sex or just the existence of certain bodies — usually trans or queer. The books people objected to were often comics, as text-based books have to be read in order to object to them, whereas comics require only a glance.

This irritated me because my comics shelf was absolutely drenched in blood and gore. Sometimes it was stylistically drawn, sometimes realistically, but it had torsos that have been ripped apart, it had bodies that had been grotesquely disfigured, it had limbs being comically severed, faces disintegrating as they got hit with a bullet. Not a single objection that I heard from anywhere in the country at a library for graphic violence. Most of the time, it was about sex.

I have written before about the mid-life realization that I do not have a body, I am a body, and the way this realization has changed my life (see below) but in the midst of the current national debate, I think it’s worth discussing what we as a country seem to value more — death or life.

Freudian psychoanalysts often distinguished between two drives that humans seem to have, the “death drive,” and the “life drive.” The death drive is essentially any act we commit that is self-destructive, that moves us closer to death. This is any act of aggression or violence, any act of self-harm or self-obliteration. If you’ve ever gotten into a dumb fight, or if you’ve ever drank yourself in a stupor to numb your feelings, that’s the death drive, and it’s often referred to as “Thanatos,” which is the name of the Greek God of Death.

The life drive is anything that is fundamentally life-affirming — it is the act of surviving, of procreating, of creating. Every time you’ve eaten healthy food, exercised, had sex, gone on a date, built something, or created a work of art, you’ve been engaging in the life drive, which is often referred to as “Eros,” after the Greek God of Love.

It is telling to me that as a country, we’re more scared of our kids seeing drag queens than we are of them getting murdered in their classrooms. State legislatures are unleashing a flurry of laws criminalizing the existence of LGBTQ bodies, and predictably, will lift nary a finger to curb gun violence.

I grew up Catholic, so I too was taught to hate my body, I too was shown a gory corpse every Sunday and told that the violence was God’s true love, and that the vehicle of God’s true love was created with absolutely zero sex involved. When I was a teenager, I was — as is the teenager’s right! — just astonishingly horny. I was told that sex was a sin, that abstinence was the right way, and also that masturbation wasn’t okay either. I was made to watch the first scene of Saving Private Ryan, where everyone is getting blown to bits (because it was important for patriotism reasons) but it was not okay to look at sexy ladies on the internet or in magazines.

It was bad enough to be a young man in turn-of-the-century Ohio: boys that live in Florida now are being told that Michelangelo’s David is pornographic. Even having a penis is considered pornography in this country. There are even people in the psychotic corner of the internet known as the “Manosphere” who are telling kids that they’ll be healthier, more manly men, if they practice “semen retention,” a practice that has no scientific basis whatsoever.

Is it any wonder that this noxious cocktail turns so many young men into angry psychopaths? That so many of them fantasize about war and murder? And that so many of them have such a violent attitude towards sex?

What if, instead of telling kids that sex is evil, we admitted that sex is the absolute most fun we get to have? That it’s the thing that helps us connect with partners, that gives us our children? That taking care of our bodies makes us feel better and therefore makes it easier to feel happiness and joy? And that part of taking care of your body includes masturbating, which is a fun and healthy activity that allows you to relieve stress, sleep better, and improve your focus?

What if we treated violence and aggression, the things that bring our lives nothing but pain and misery, as the drive we should try to quell, and that instead there is no shame in enjoying your body, no matter what type of body it is?

My wife and I have discussed this from a parenting perspective, and it means learning to basically do the opposite of what our parents did, which includes telling our kids sex is okay when they are ready for it. It also means teaching them about their bodies, even though we have learned to be ashamed of ours. It means teaching them to trust and listen to their bodies, even though we are still learning to trust and listen to ours. It means teaching them the correct words for their parts, even if their own doctors and school nurses insist on calling it “privates” or “pee-pees.”

This has been a chore of a project, but I’ve become convinced that the only way you can hate another person’s body and sexuality so intensely is only if you hate your own. And I’ve become convinced that you have to see your body, your life, as precious if you wish to stand up to all the people who think it’s worth nothing, and that its death deserves no more than thoughts and prayers.

Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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