Better Strangers

This is the first installment in a new column I’m writing called Psycho Geography! It’s an every-other-week on Monday thing, alternating with Book Rex. Reminder that if you only enjoy some of my columns, you can pick and choose which you receive here.

Modern travel is a nightmare. Tourism is responsible for roughly 8% of all global carbon emissions, mass tourism is regularly eroding and destroying cultural heritage sites and natural wonders, and the stress of millions of tourists inevitably warps the culture of local communities.

This is a hard truth for me. Travel has been a part of my DNA since I was toddler: my father owns a travel business, so I not only got to see the world at a young age, travel literally paid for my college, for the food I ate, for the roofs over my head, until I was well into my 20s. I traveled constantly in my first few decades, chalking up 38 countries by the time I was 26. Later I became a professional travel writer, so pretty much all of the money I made or spent until I was 32 was either from or towards travel. So if there’s a problem, I am not only part of it, I am born of it.

As I worked in the travel industry, my politics — which had once been conventionally liberal — began drifting leftward, and at some point I began to realize that my career and my values clashed. Me and my colleagues mindlessly parroted popular travel quotes like “buy experiences, not things,” not realizing that by buying experiences, we were still mindlessly consuming, often to the detriment of the people who lived near those experiences. Travel was, in many cases, a new form of colonialism, where our impossible wealth was thrown into the same space as their abject poverty, which inevitably led to their exploitation and abuse.

All of this was hard to square with my experience of travel, which was largely positive. It was fundamental to my education and my growth as a person. Even the bad parts of travel were experiences to be learned from. And I hadn’t felt like I was hurting anyone while I traveled. I tried to be courteous, I tried to be open, always a traveler never a tourist.

But as I learned more about the industry, I realized that to try and absolve myself of responsibility for mass travels harm was to miss the point. It was like a raindrop in a hurricane saying, well it’s not my fault what happened. Meanwhile, underneath me is a full city, flooded and drowned by billions of blameless, innocent raindrops.

The Psychogeographers

Sometime after Donald Trump’s election, I learned of a group called The Situationists. The Situationists were an avant-garde libertarian Marxist group that were at their most active in 1950’s postwar France. It was a fairly small group — they continually whittled down their numbers with infighting and personal grudges until there was only one man left, Guy Debord, who eventually died of suicide in the 90s.

But they were remarkably influential. Their ideas are often cited as the main catalyst for the 1968 uprising in Paris, and from there, their ideas snowballed. Inspired by Situationist ideas, the English band promoter Malcolm McLaren created The Sex Pistols, and, in effect, the entire Punk Rock movement. Their ideas around fighting capitalism became influential in the British Reclaim the Streets movement, which later heavily influenced the Occupy movement. The Situationist idea of détournement, which is a hijacking of elements of the capitalist system like billboards and privatized spaces and flipping them on their head, took off in the 80s, and was a major part of the burgeoning street art movement.

The idea that most captivated me, though, was their concept of psychogeography. In short, the Situationists believed that capitalism had destroyed our relationships to the places we live. We have a main space, our home, where we consume things, and a secondary space, our workplace, where we labor in the service of capital. When we leave those two spaces, the only reason we should do so is to move between the two or to go someplace where we can buy more products, thus contributing to the capitalist system.

To fight this, the Situationists recommended wandering. Just walking around with no specific routes, or with arbitrary rules: only take left turns, seek out the color purple, follow a cat you see.

In doing this, you can have spontaneous, strange experiences that are outside what the capitalist society has planned for you. You can find something unexpected that no one else knows about, or you can find some historical site that piques your interest. For the Situationists, this was an act of rebellion.

For me, it’s mostly just been fun — I live in suburban New Jersey, about a mile from the Shore, which was a place that I found impossibly boring for the first few years I’d lived here. Now I’ve got a growing body of knowledge in, for example, famous local explosions, regional cryptids, and littoral ecology. It is not a revolution, but I know that I see things that many of my neighbors don’t.

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Can this be done in places that aren’t your home?

One thing that I became convinced of in my time as a travel writer (and earlier, as an immigration activist), was that it is incredibly natural for people to move. The British-Somali poet Warsan Shire once wrote:

no one leaves home unlesshome is the mouth of a shark

She was speaking specifically of the refugee experience, but I think that it applies far more broadly than that — the shark could be an economic or political situation, it could be a bad family situation, it could be a stifling career, lack of educational opportunities, a bad relationship, and much more.

But moving prior to the capitalist era required an immense personal cost. It meant getting a covered wagon and possibly saying goodbye to your home forever. It meant coming back, if you did at all, a much older and totally changed person. We forget that tourism — traveling for leisure and pleasure — is still an extremely new human concept, at least for the vast majority of humanity.

I suspect that the forms of travel that are still worthwhile, that aren’t intrinsically damaging, are the ones that are about going to a place to do something. Moving to a place to work, moving to a place to study something, going to a place to be with family and friends — these are natural forms of travel that humans will never be able to turn off in their programming.

The slow tourism movement embraces these principles to an extent — traveling less frequently, traveling slower when you do, immersing yourself in local life when you arrive — but it’s worth noting that you do not need to travel to truly connect with a place. You can connect with the places that are around you right now.

Have you, for example, ever gone on a foraging walk near you? Have you been to all the museums in your immediate vicinity? Even the small weird local history ones? Have you done every nearby hike? Have you sighted and catalogued every local bird? Have you seen if you’ve got a good local geocaching or urban exploration scene? What’s going on with the local mycologists? When’s the last time you tried out local theater?

This sort of travel isn’t particularly profitable for the global tourism industry, so it’s never going to be the type that they really push. But it is the most sustainable sort of tourism. It involves little in the way of emissions, and you aren’t likely to accidentally vandalize or exploit your own community. And it leaves financial space for those rare times in your life when you may get to go somewhere for the long term — while working from home, while studying, while on sabbatical — and can give another place the same treatment you’ve already learned to give your home.

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with dystopias. I watched every zombie movie I could, I read every book about every bleak wasteland, I obsessed over Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, I got into impassioned debates about The Dawn of the Dead slow zombies vs. 28 Days Later fast zombies, and as a game with my friends, I’d strategize about what I’d do during a zombie apocalypse.

Around the time of my daughter’s birth, though, I recognized that I didn’t have any sense of what a positive future could look like. And that was a bleak thing to confront during dark nights staying up with a crying infant.

The reason I was so hopeless about the future was simple — I’d never engaged with utopias. Only dystopias. And it was not just me. As the British writer John Higgs put it in an interview with The Ransom Note:

I think the problem is that at some point in the 1980s we gave up on the future. Before then there were all these positive futures imagined in things like Star Trek. It seems to me that the last ditch attempt to say something positive about the future was in 1989 in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, when they say ‘The future will be great — it’s a bit like now, but with really great waterslides’. That was the best they could do. Ever since then the future has been shown as environmental apocalypse, zombie films, all of these things. And to create the future, first you have to imagine it, so this is a very worrying thing.

In Higgs’ other writing, he’s discussed how the science-fiction of the 50s and 60s, while often flawed, was at least aspirational. We were imagining ourselves among the stars, learning more about the universe and our place in it, engaging with alien life, pushing the bounds of human consciousness, and so on.

Now, an enormous chunk of our YA fiction — the stuff that we’re feeding our kids on a massive scale — is Hunger Games and its rip-offs.

We have simply lost the ability to imagine a better future.

The purpose of -topias

In 1891, Oscar Wilde wrote an essay called “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” in which he argued that capitalism forced us to live lives that weren’t truly our own, and that if we wanted to build a better world, we should focus less on giving to charity and more on simply changing our system. The essay, which was heavily influenced by Wilde’s readings of the revolutionary anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin, contains one of his most famous quotes:

Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

This is not a particularly modern stance. To be seen as optimistic about something in 2023 is synonymous to being seen as naive. It is impossibly cringe to hope that things could get better.

We’re far more comfortable with dystopias. And in their defense, dystopias when done right are incredibly useful tools. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has enormously important things to say about how power wields truth and language. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World eerily predicted how capitalism would exploit entertainment and spectacle to keep people distracted and docile.

For me, growing up in the 90s and 00s in conservative Cincinnati, a big part of the appeal of dystopias was that they seemed to acknowledge a nagging feeling that I had, that actually we weren’t in the best country in the world, that this wasn’t the end of history, that things did actually kind of suck.

But that idea is no longer subversive. The conservatives that I grew up with also now think that the country is terrible, they just blame minorities and sinister liberal cabals instead of the capitalist class and the people who are actually in power.

What’s more, we’re now far more aware of just how bad things could get, because we lived through Donald Trump. We’ve watched our government totally fail to protect us from a global public health crisis, and we’ve watched our collective mental health decline enormously in the wake of COVID-era social isolation and our growing addictions to depressants like alcohol and smartphones.

What’s more, many of the more recent dystopias have sacrificed the social message that they’re supposed to serve in the name of character-based drama. I can’t particularly distinguish a strong social message, for example, in The Hunger Games, as it seems that we, the audience, are no different from the rich in our leering at these children killing each other book after book. And as great as The Last of Us has been, it seems to have a pretty dim, bleak view of humanity, one that is contrary to our best evidence about how humans really respond to calamities.

This immersion in dystopian hellscapes has an effect on our mental health. When we picture our children’s futures, we are only picturing civil wars, rising oceans, irradiated wastelands. It is only adding to our mental health crisis. We need to think of something better.

We need to imagine beautiful futures

The best thing I’ve discovered in my brief time on BookTok, the book corner of TikTok, is the idea of hopepunk literature. Hopepunk is not really a genre — it is more of a literary stance against a more popular classification known as grimdark. The quintessential grimdark series is Game of Thrones. The quintessential hopepunk series is The Lord of the Rings.

While the two series often feel thematically similar, you can easily spot the difference in their tones: Lord of the Rings depicts the good life as one of singing songs, drinking ale, and stealing carrots from Farmer Maggots crop. Game of Thrones is all murder and rape and mutilation.

What distinguishes the two is not the presence of dark, terrible deeds, it’s their attitude towards them. In GoT, they are inevitable, part of the human spirit, and in LotR, they are perversions, a break from the natural order, something that is overcome with kindness, bravery, and teamwork.

These are the types of stories that frankly need more telling — stories which do not take brutality and annihilation as a given, which take hope seriously.

A second genre that we need to pay more attention to, if we want to have any chance at a future, is solarpunk. Solarpunk is a genre that imagines a sustainable future, in which people figure out a way to live in harmony with nature, rather than by constantly exploiting it. The two highest-profile practitioners of this genre are probably Ursula K. LeGuin, with works like The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home, and the animator Hayao Miyazaki, who made sustainability and communion with nature the core theme of his masterworks Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Princess Mononoke, and Castle in the Sky.

These works already exist, but they are not absorbing enough of our attention if we truly want to build something better. It is all well and good to recognize that which is wrong with the world, but unless we also have a positive vision for the future, nothing will change. You can’t walk down a road you can’t even see.

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In (slightly belated) honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I wanted to offer an Irish-themed Book Rex. My ancestry is that of an American mutt — if you looked at my DNA breakdown, you’d notice that my ancestors seemed particularly indiscriminate about what sort of white person they coupled with, and you’d maybe mutter to yourself, “well, at least they were indiscriminate about something.”

But the strongest cultural connection my family had was to its Irish roots, which we celebrated by doing extremely American things. As I’ve deconstructed my identity as a white American, with all of the horrific baggage that involves unpacking, I’ve found myself casting about for an identity to replace it with, and the Irish bit has been the most accessible, with its English-language cultural offerings, its holidays, its music, and the fact that, unlike my English and American ancestry, it is the history of a colonized people rather than a colonizing people.

This is — and I know how bad this sounds — something of a relief for a cis, straight, white American man, who otherwise has to grapple with an ancestral legacy of brutality, cruelty, exploitation, and oppression. It’s nice, for once, to be able to identify as the underdog. Because as a leftist, I want to fight on the side of the oppressed, but as a cis, straight, white American man… well. I usually know who’s being fought.

My wife has a print of this painting hanging over her side of the bed:

It’s a lovely clarifying picture, particularly for a woman who works in politics, to look at every morning when she wakes up. It is hard not to be jealous. Nothing is quite as clear to me — so much of my identity growing up was rooted in toxic masculinity, right-wing politics, homophobia, and coded racism, and so much of any alternative identity has been so thoroughly severed from its roots, that I have to live vicariously through other people’s struggles, and try to imagine what I would be like in their place.

Which is why I read Say Nothing. But the book did not oblige — it had no easy answers for me.

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

In 1972, Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten, was "disappeared" from her flat in Belfast by masked men and women, never to be seen again. Hers was one of hundreds of deaths in "The Troubles," the struggle between the Irish Republicans and the pro-British Unionists in Northern Ireland, but her death was unique in that it exposed a major tension in a country trying to mend itself: sometimes peace and justice are conflicting forces.

Patrick Radden Keefe tells the story of McConville's disappearance mostly through the eyes of the woman responsible for it — Dolours Price. Price was raised in a gung-ho IRA family, and was thoroughly radicalized in the fight for Irish reunification. The IRA, while nominally aligned with Catholicism, was in this era a politically socialist organization, and viewed itself through a revolutionary lens.

Price was the ringleader for a series of bombings in London, and also participated in a number of hits and assassinations. She was caught by the English and was thrown into prison, where she began a hunger strike in order to be moved to a prison in Northern Ireland. The English shoved a tube down her throat and force-fed her. She developed a lifelong eating disorder after that.

When she was released, Price began distancing herself from the IRA, who had begun seeking a peace agreement. Sinn Fein, the political party that was strongly tied to the IRA during the Troubles, was led by a man named Gerry Adams, who for years insisted that he had never been a member of the IRA, and was a major actor in the eventual Good Friday Peace Agreement. But Price later openly testified that her leader when she was in the IRA was Adams himself.

Worse, Price said Adams was the man who ordered Jean McConville’s death, on the intelligence that she was passing information to the British.

This complicated the peace process, because to go after Adams was to risk antagonizing and alienating members of Sinn Fein who had up until then been committed to the peace process.

This is just a spectacularly written book, it reads like a thriller and is an astounding work of journalism. It is 100% worth the read.

Ireland and me

I have been to Ireland: not for a long stretch, maybe three days. But that’s long enough to know that most of the things I associate with being Irish in America — drinks that are astoundingly called “Irish Car Bombs,” the Fourth of July-style parades, the absurdly kitschy shamrock paraphernalia — are not Irish at all.

The last family member that I know of who lived in Ireland came over to America in the late 1800s. Most of my Irish ancestors were escaping the Famine. I think, though, that I can trace a similar lineage of trauma and violence between myself and the likes of Dolours Price or Jean McConville. My experience is much more mundane: there are no freedom struggles in my near ancestral past. My, in fact, family largely cut themselves off from their ancestral past, instead opting to believe in their adopted country’s beautiful lie, the American Dream. Irish ancestry bubbled out once a year, on St. Patrick’s Day, when sad or silly Irish songs were sung, when melancholic feelings bubbled up over a few drinks.

After reading Say Nothing, I suspected that had I been a young man in Belfast at the time of the Troubles, I would’ve joined the IRA. The underdog identity, the socialist politics, the camaraderie — it all would’ve been too seductive for me.

I am glad that’s not how it panned out. Retired terrorists do not have an easy time of it: In her later life, Dolours Price struggled with her eating disorder, with alcoholism, and with prescription drug abuse. She died of an overdose at 62.

My family’s legacy, the Ireland they fled, is lost to me. My ancestors forgot well. But the symptoms of the Ireland they left linger on — the trauma, the mental health problems, the abuse, the alcoholism. It’s nice, getting to have that same inheritance without having to have done any of the terrorism.

Or maybe I’m just a masochistic white guy, so devoid of identity that he needs to fabricate it out of a perceived ancestral oppression. Maybe it’s pointless trying to ascribe political meaning to your trauma. Maybe you just have to feel it so your kids, at an even further remove than you, can feel it a little less.

Éirinn go Brách! Póg mo thóin! Watch kids, as your dad gets sad! This is your heritage!

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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

Your dog knows way more about your intimate business than you’d be comfortable with. Today’s episode is about the scientific concept of the umwelt, which is the perspective that different animals have on the world, and how this is influenced by different sensory abilities. I think imagining animals realities is a fun and humbling way of understanding just how limited our perception of reality really is.

The books referenced in today’s episode are:

And:

As usual, these books are affiliate linked to Bookshop.org, so if you buy through these links I get a small kickback, which would be cool of you. I never link to Amazon.

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

Consider this possibility for a second: Watching the news every day is making you less informed about the world.

This is not to say you don’t understand what’s going on in Ukraine. It’s not to say you aren’t up to date with which basic democratic right the Worst Supreme Court in History™ is dismantling at this very moment. It’s not to say you don’t know the names of most of the major world leaders. It’s not to say you don’t fully understand what’s going on with Silicon Valley Bank and its fallout.

It’s just to say that very little of this knowledge actually helps you in navigating your way through the world.

I’ll explain.

A few years back, I got into a debate with a close friend of mine about immigration. He’s a liberal guy, but he still believed that immigrants should “get in line” and that illegal immigration was bad.

This is a bad topic to get into an argument with me on: I wrote my master’s dissertation on immigration and worked at a pro-immigrant non-profit for several years. We got into it.

At some point during the debate, I realized my friend wasn’t misinformed — he had perfectly reasonable arguments, he wasn’t saying much that was objectively false, but I kept having to stop to explain contextual reasons for my positions to him. He did not, for example, know that much of modern border policy was predicated on a 1924 political deal which threw a bone to powerful white supremacist groups. He did not know about the US and CIA’s role in creating the devastating economic and political conditions in Central America and Mexico. He did not know very much about NAFTA, about the Drug War, about the economics of immigration, or about the basic structure of the modern immigration system for the undocumented.

At some point we gave up. It was a futile argument and it was only creating friction between us. I left disillusioned: my friend, I knew, was relatively well-informed. He read the news, he paid attention to global events. Why was that not enough for us to come to an understanding?

The news cycle is broken

Let’s set aside a few small things, like the corporatization of the news media, right-wing ownership of local news channels (see the John Oliver video above), and the rise of fake news on the internet. There is a problem with the basic structure of news, and it is in the name.

News media is structured around breaking information, and different outlets are aware that they need to get access to or knowledge of that information first if they want to stay relevant and successfully compete within the field. Given the 24-hour news cycle — which is now competing with literally millions of amateurs on the internet — this means that the dump of information has to be rapid-fire and constant.

It does not leave much space for context. While there are some internet-based outlets like Vox Media and the Intercept which focus on context-heavy “explainer journalism,” most news outlets do not dedicate much airtime or many sentences to diving deep into the historical context of current events. And this, it turns out, is vital for understanding an event.

For example: What do you know about Putin’s Russia? Do you know why he invaded Ukraine? Is it because he’s a “madman”? If that’s the case, how does he explain his justifications to the nation of people he leads that broadly support the war?

I’ve been obsessed with the Cold War for years now, and if you get into Cold War history, you eventually will come across Masha Gessen’s excellent The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. This book follows the trajectory of the country through the lives of 6 people, from 1984 through the collapse of the Soviet Union, the regime of Boris Yeltsin, to the rise of hitherto unknown Vladimir Putin, to his modern-day crackdowns on homosexuality and political dissent.

This book did more for me to frame Russia’s role in the 2016 election, the invasion of Ukraine, and even the western resurgence of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric than any thinkpiece or Op-Ed has. And it’s because, in over 500 pages, Gessen has the space to actually tell a nuanced story. She can connect the dots between the Communists and the KGB to the modern day Russian kleptocracy. She can portray the trauma of being a Russian in the chaotic years after the collapse, and the intense nostalgia for a time when it felt like someone was in control.

In skipping the news about battles in Ukraine, about statements made by Zelenskyy or Biden or Putin, I was able to read this book, and in doing so, I feel that I can wrap my head around the war a lot more than I ever could with the information dump I get from the news media establishment.

There are 18 copies of this book available in my local library system. None of them are checked out.

The Anti-Doomscrolling cleanse

Beyond the fact that longer form writing gives you more context and nuance, it also makes you far less depressed about the state of things. This is because the news relies heavily on a negativity bias to grab your attention: you are, by evolutionary necessity, built to pay more attention to negative information than positive information.

This in itself isn’t a bad thing: it makes sense to pay more attention to the tiger lurking in the bushes than the beautiful butterfly flitting by.

But media seizes on this preference as a way of holding and keeping your attention, and it means that, when all of your news is short-form and delivered via algorithm, you’re going to get a lot of super negative shit.

Longer form writing may be depressing, but it needs to employ more tools than just negativity to keep your attention over hundreds of pages. It needs to keep your curiosity piqued, and this is impossible to do if you’re feeling beaten down and depressed. This is why even when you read books that are about dark topics — say Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction — you still come away feeling like there are solutions, like there’s hope.

Now: if you believe you don’t have time for books, I have good news! You probably do! It’s all the time you spend reading, watching, or listening to the news!

Local library systems now have access to massive catalogs of non-fiction audiobooks, thanks to the existence of platforms like Libby and Hoopla, and these can be played off of your phone just like podcasts during your commute or while you are making your breakfast. These same apps also offer eBooks, which, I have good news, are just as easy to open as your email or the Twitter app.

Unlike social media, longer-form journalism and non-fiction are not specifically designed to be addictive, which means that this is all a bit easier said than done. The satisfaction that comes from long-form reading is a slower burn, but it is ultimately a greater one than the short dopamine hits you get from most online content. And if we really want to reach a point where we’re informed about the world, where we choose solutions-based thinking and political empowerment over the overwhelming onslaught of context-free informational chaos that comes from the news cycle, then we have to choose to resist the addiction and go for deeper knowledge.

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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

Hey guys! This week’s podcast is a fairly personal one about restarting a writing career while dealing with lingering mental health issues. My main note is this: if you’re going through something, please seek help! It does not have to be professional help, although that is a very good option. I first got help years ago after a friend opened up to me about his mental health struggles, so I’m very pro-sharing.

The more we talk about this stuff, the less stigmatized it gets, and the less alone we feel. Even if that means talking about Prozac shits.

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

A version of this appeared on my website for the 100th anniversary. I’ve developed different conclusions since then!

106 years ago today was the start of the February Revolution in Russia. It was, quite possibly, the most important single event of the 20th century. Without the October Revolution, there is no Stalin. With no Stalin, it's possible that many western powers would not have seen Hitler as the lesser of two evils (the French right wing, as Hitler marched on Paris, shouted "Better Hitler than Blum!" in reference to the Democratic Socialist — and Jewish — President of France).

Without the Soviet boogeyman, there's no justification for Vietnam, for the CIA-backed coups in Chile, Guatemala, and Iran, for the American training of neofascist Central American death squads. Without those, there's no Ayatollah Khomeini, no General Pinochet, no Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.

There's no need to arm the mujahideen to fight the godless commie invaders in Afghanistan, there's no backing fundamentalist Islam as an anti-communist alternative. Without this divine cause to fight for, the founders of al-Qaeda never meet, and the towers never go down.

Without Stalin, there's no need for a show of massive force in Japan. There's no need for an atomic bomb. There is certainly no need for an arms race and a space race, no need to get to the moon by the end of the decade. Without this fear, the fear of bombs and lasers shot from satellites, there is likely no serious funding for NASA, no real space exploration.

There's no Red Scare, no McCarthy or his acolyte, Richard Nixon, there's no Truman Doctrine, no napalmed villages and cluster bombs and Khmer Rouge. 

It is, of course, reductive to trace history back to a single day — events both before and after might have gone differently, and none of this was inevitable. You could make a very good argument that the actual fire started with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, but there would be an event before that and an event before that. It was, as the poet William Joel says, always burning since the world's been turning.

But in St. Petersburg, on October 25th of 1917 (November 7th by our calendar), something impossibly immense happened. And immense things are impossible to grapple with, but until a few years ago, I realized I had no clue how the Russian Revolution went down. So I read a few books, and now it seems only proper to TL;DR them for you.

Who knows? You may be planning a revolution of your own and want pointers.

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

The Revolution and the Left

The history of the Russian Revolution is not taught in American schools, and when it is, it's usually misrepresented. There is a documentary on Netflix (simply called The Russian Revolution) that suggests the whole thing came down to a personal grudge that Lenin had towards the Tsar, which is just fundamentally stupid — the revolution was a mass movement resulting from centuries of oppression and hardship. Individuals were able to influence its outcomes, but no one man dictated its course. The communists, after all, do not believe in the “Great Man” theory of history.

If you're a leftist and you're interested in the history, I'd suggest picking up China Mieville's October. Mieville is a left-wing activist who also happens to be a very good fiction author, and for the 100th anniversary of the revolution, he published October as a mostly sympathetic account to the events of 1917. He does not go into the aftermath of the Revolution, whether it’s the Russian Civil War, or the purges of the 20s and 30s — Stalin is only mentioned twice in the book — but it’s a good starter for how the Soviet Union we’re all familiar with was built out of the chaos and idealism of that year.

But if you aren’t ready to commit to a book, here are some of the basics:

The revolution happened spontaneously — after decades of activism and organizing.

In 1917, there were two revolutions: the February Revolution and the October Revolution. The first deposed the tsar, whose family had ruled Russia for over 300 years. The tsar’s reign was a brutal one — massive swathes of the population lived as serfs (only a slight step up from slaves) until the 1860s, and any political unrest was met with ruthless repression.

Because of this repression, peasants and serfs grew to hate the tsar, making Russia a popular recruiting ground for left-wing radicals. Anarchists like Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin and Leo Tolstoy became popular figures, and interest in books on socialism and Russian nihilism made authors like Nikolay Chernyshevsky and Ivan Turgenev superstars.

The most important event before 1917 was the 1905 uprising. In January 1905, a mass of workers, while trying to deliver a petition to the tsar, were fired upon by tsarist troops. Up to 1000 people died, the day became known as “Bloody Sunday,” and massive social unrest followed. 

The socialists were led by a rabble of charismatic men who had given names and political names — there was the fiery orator Vladimir Ulyanov (better known as Lenin), there was the bookish, charming Julius Martov, Lenin's friend and, in many ways, his opposite, and there was the eloquent, brilliant Jewish writer and theorist Lev Bronstein (better known as Leon Trotsky). The socialists formed a democratic workers councils called a soviet, of which Trotsky was perhaps the most prominent member, and began organizing mass strikes across the capital of St. Petersburg. But after a couple of years of unrest, the uprising had been effectively suppressed by the tsar, with 15,000 dead. 

Many of the leaders of the revolution had to flee the country, and were demoralized by their failure to depose the tsar. In Russia, the right-wing nationalist groups that had been used to fight the socialists began attacking their favorite scapegoats, the Jews, and killed up to 4,000 people. Lenin, now in exile, said in a speech, “We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution.”

But Russia's peasantry had been radicalized, and the repression of the 1905 uprising was not popular. Over the next decade, Russia would enter the horrific, destructive World War I, and the tsar would become increasingly isolated from his people.

In January 1917, workers in St. Petersburg went on strike in honor of the 12th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. More strikes followed, in spite of the threats of a police crackdown, and the factory bosses made a huge mistake — they locked the workers out of the factories, forcing them — all riled up! — out into the streets.

On February 23, 1917 (in the Julian Calendar — in the western Gregorian calendar, March 8th), rallies were held in honor of International Women's Day. No one planned it — but the rallies spontaneously turned into an uprising. And the soldiers who were ordered to put down the revolution, tired of war, tired of the tsar, refused, and sided with the workers. By early March, the tsar was forced to abdicate.

The February Revolution was a mass, organic uprising that took down a 300 year dynasty. But it would not have happened without literally decades of planning, failure, and death. Many who did the work of the revolution did not, as Lenin said, live to see it.

The second revolution

From February 1917 to October 1917, Russia was ruled by a provisional government. The government was thrown together hastily, and was run by popular socialist Alexander Kerensky. Kerensky was not a revolutionary in the way Lenin or Trotsky were, but he was popular, and he was willing to work with the ruling class to transition towards a political system where power was shifted from the less Democratic former government given to the soviets, which at the time, were totally open and democratic.

Side note: I’ll cop to my bias here and say that, as far as I can see, the original Soviets were basically perfect democratic organs. Literally anyone could organize a group and join them, and all arguments and opinions were given a chance. Early members of the soviets suggested that they’d even welcome the royalists and the bourgeoisie if they’d shown up, but this would never have happened, because to do this would’ve been for those groups to recognize the councils as legitimate and, in effect, to cede their already-immense power.

But Kerensky had an impossible job. The workers and radical socialists were calling for “All power to the Soviets!” while the military was threatening a coup. Lenin, whose Bolshevik faction was among the most powerful among the Revolutionaries, was also calling for an immediate end to the war, which was obviously a non-starter for the ruling class and the military brass. It was only through the power of his charisma that Kerensky was able to keep things together for so long — and eventually, the radicals grew to hate him as a man willing to compromise with the tsarists and repress dissent from his left flank, while the military started to suspect it didn't need him at all.

Eventually, a General named Kornilov attempted to overthrow the provisional government. The coup was stopped, but Kerensky lost a huge amount of support as a result: he'd been trying to compromise with the military, and the military had stabbed him in the back. During the coup attempt, Kerensky also had to arm every socialist to stop the advancing troops — which meant that the Bolsheviks were now popular and armed. Kerensky no longer had the people at his back, and he no longer had the military. His coalition had collapsed, and there was a power vacuum.

In October of 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power in an almost bloodless coup. The provisional government was dissolved, and Lenin declared the world's first ever socialist republic. What would follow was a bloody, 5 year civil war. At the end of that war, Lenin would be near death.

Worse, during the pre-revolutionary years, the Bolsheviks had been forced to fund themselves through crime, such as robberies and kidnapping. One of the men Lenin leaned on was a Georgian named Ioseb Jughashvili. Jughashvili went by the political name of Joseph Stalin, and while not particularly adept at revolutionary doctrine, was an expert at political maneuvering. In spite of Lenin’s (and nearly everyone else’s) misgivings, he emerged at Lenin's death as the most powerful man in the country. His main rival, Trotsky, had ignored him for too long, believing him to be no more than a dumb brute, and not worthy of Trotsky's time. 

After the revolutions

Lenin, Trotsky, and most socialists believed that the revolution had to be global for it to work. Capitalism had to collapse. During the October Revolution, American journalist John Reed (writer of the famous October account Ten Days That Shook the World, and subject of the Warren Beatty epic Reds) reported Trotsky saying the following:

“In any case, if Europe continues to be ruled by the imperialist bourgeoisie, revolutionary Russia will inevitably be lost. There are only two alternatives; either the Russian Revolution will create a revolutionary movement in Europe, or the European powers will destroy the Russian Revolution.”

The latter is what panned out — Germany, which was the next likely domino in the global revolution, cracked down hard on its socialist movement, and government-backed paramilitaries executed many of its leaders, like the famed Rosa Luxemburg. Similar crackdowns occurred in the UK and the United States.

Worse, when the Bolsheviks had total power, they began suppressing voices on the Soviets that did not toe the Bolshevik line. So what had originally been a big tent revolution became increasingly authoritarian. There were a number of uprisings within the ranks of the revolution against the Bolsheviks, most famously the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion, in which decorated revolutionary sailors hijacked a famed warship and demanded that anarchists and moderate socialists be allowed back into the Soviets. The Red Army, led by Trotsky, crushed the rebellion. The famed Russian anarchist, Pyotr Kropotkin, had died a few weeks before the rebellion, and given what followed, the enormous crowds of anarchists and members of the anti-authoritarian left at his funerals would be the last hurrah of open dissent in the Soviet regime.

Suffice it to say: The global revolution never happened.

And unfortunately for the revolutionaries, the world’s only communist country was now led by a man who was hardly an ideological communist. Stalin was far more interested in consolidating power than he was in loftier communist aims. So instead of fomenting global revolution — which prior to the mid-20’s, had been an unquestioned goal of Marxist dogma — he instituted a policy called "Socialism in One Country." The leftists who still hoped the revolution would turn global were horrified, but Stalin’s move cracked open the door to negotiations with other governments, now that he wasn’t calling for their immediate liquidation. Had he not done this, he would not have been able to ally himself briefly with Hitler, which gave the Soviets some breathing room in their mobilization for war.

In the 1920’s and 30’s, he dedicated much of his time to turning what had once been a democratic revolution into the most thoroughly totalitarian government that had ever existed to that point. He executed hundreds of thousands of dissenters or “enemies,” and his assassins scoured the globe until they put an icepick in his rival Trotsky’s head.

Stalin also understood that the power of the early Soviet Union was weak, and that it would not withstand a major assault from external enemies, which at the time, constituted nearly every other nation on the planet. So he began a rapid industrialization program which effectively turned Russia from a mostly rural country to an industrial one in about a decade (which is insanely fast, and also resulted in the deaths of millions of people). Had he not done this, they wouldn’t have had a chance at defeating the Nazis. And it is worth noting: the USSR deserves the majority of the credit for defeating Germany. Far more Russians died in that war than in the other Allied Armies, and it was the Russians who finally marched into Berlin when Hitler shot himself in the bunker.

Soviet nostalgia

For people like myself, who identify more with anarchism than Marxism, the Russian Revolution in something to look upon in horrified wonder. Capitalism is obviously going to destroy the planet, and we need an alternative, but, well… that one ain’t it. One suspects, in retrospect, that it didn’t need to go the way it did, but its consequences were so massive that you have to take any “the Revolution was a wonderful moment” talk with a good dose of caution.

And there are people who want to go back to that! Here at the end of history, nostalgia for the Soviet era in post-Soviet states (and even in modern tankie communist circles) is very real. If you want a book on this, Anna Funder’s Stasiland is fantastic, and if you just wanna listen to commie synth music (like I’m doing right now!) try looking up “Sovietwave.”

But I personally do not know any people on the left who genuinely want to return to that era. We face a different set of problems, and while some argue that the information age means it’s time for “Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism” others see that the danger of capitalism is no longer just racism, exploitation of labor, and the slow erosion of human dignity: it’s the wholesale destruction of the planet.

Which remains a problem for the Old School communists, because modern communist systems like those in China still subscribe to the growth-based economies that are destroying the biosphere. It doesn’t matter if we’re capitalists or communists if we destroyed the planet in our attempt to get to Mars.

New futures have to be imagined, and those futures will likely be local. It will have to be people banding together to solve massive problems as a diverse group, rather than as a united monolith. The Global Socialist Revolution, dreamt of since Marx and Engels first started stirring up shit in Vienna and London, is just not coming, because we don’t all have the same needs and interests. We are products of local ecosystems, and some systems that work for say, Polynesian Islanders, won’t work for American Midwesterners.

The good news is that there are already models for what building grassroots revolutionary movements look like: You can look to the Zapatista movement in Mexico, which has been running strong for nearly 30 years, you can look to Rojava in Kurdistan, which has made it 10 years as a ecofeminist commune while fighting off the armies of ISIS, Syria, and Turkey, and you can look to the indigenous movements that are leading the fight in protecting natural resources.

None of this means that global solidarity isn’t possible — we’re in a period of resurgent mass movements. Organized labor is winning fights all across America, Black Lives Matter has breathed new life into the under-siege anti-racism movement, environmentalist groups like Extinction Rebellion are engaging in mass disruption to end the stranglehold of fossil fuels on global politics, and in the wake of the repeal of Roe v. Wade, massive networks aiding and abetting abortion have sprung up to help people in need. We can all support these causes and actively participate with them when they intersect with ours. We can exchange ideas and tactics and build stronger coalitions.

The lessons of the Russian Revolution aren’t exclusively bad: it shows us that decades of organizing can suddenly explode into moments of progress and change. It also shows us that the revolution lasts only if we never cede our power to those who say they’d be better off in charge. To quote the immortal Ursula K. Le Guin:

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”

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In the latter half of the 20th century, a group of people called the Discordians discovered something magical: the Number 23. They came to call this esoteric bit of wizardry the “23 Enigma,” and pointed out that, once you start looking for it, there are all of these strange recurrences of the number 23 in the world. A small sampler:

LeBron James and Michael Jordan, the two greatest basketball players of all time, both wear the number 23 on their jersey. David Beckham, Don Mattingly, and hockey legend Bob Nystrom also wore 23.

Julius Caesar was stabbed 23 times, each parent contributes 23 chromosomes to their child, William Shakespeare was born and died on April 23, Princess Leia was held in cell AA23 in the first Star Wars, Kurt Cobain was born in 1967 (1+9+6+7=23) and died in 1994 (1+9+9+4=23), Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species was published in 1859 (1+8+5+9=23), September 11th adds up to 23 (9+11+2+0+0+1=23), and so on.

It is at this point that I should point out that the Discordians are worshippers of chaos, that the 23 Enigma is utter bullshit, and that this is why the Discordians love it. Simply put, when you decide something is special, you start looking out for instances of its specialness, and inevitably, you find them. The universe is immense, complex, and chaotic, and our attention can only focus on so many things at a time, so if you start looking for a pattern, you will be able to find it. 

You could apply the concept to anything: there are masses of people (not all necessarily gullible or stupid) who believe in a concept called synchronicity, which is when a series of seemingly connected coincidences occur in what feels like a meaningful way. The concept is used by many as a proof of God: “Well, if the universe has no meaning, explain this unbelievable coincidence.”

This is why fundamentalist Christians see “666” everywhere, why theists find infinite instances of God’s benevolence and mercy, why atheists find infinite signs of a supposed God's cruelty and wrath. We all tend to find what we’re looking for. In reality, we are beings with an extremely finite capacity (about 120 bits per second, according to some fairly reliable research) for absorbing the nearly infinite amount of information the universe throws at us. Our minds have necessarily evolved mechanisms for selecting which bits of information are important.

The ability to separate the important information from the irrelevant information would have been very useful for literally every form of life — creatures that spend all of their time reveling in awe at the oneness of the universe make for excellent and easy snacks — which means that this ability is not only innately human, but innate in organic life itself. It is, in no small part, responsible for our very existence. 

But it also means that the mechanisms that developed this selectiveness came before higher level rational thinking. So our supposedly rational minds still select the focal points of their attention using arcane, reptilian, even amoeban tools. Our pretensions at rationality are, at best, only partly true, and at worst, are totally delusional. It’s helpful to identify patterns in an environment: you could use those patterns to deduce a new way to get food, learning a sexy fellow creature’s patterns might help you to seduce them, and knowing the patterns in how certain predators or rivals attack could help you defend against them. We got really good at finding meaningful patterns, but our success rate never hit 100%: some of the patterns really were meaningless.

Tinker Bell Beliefs

This is where the 23 Enigma takes a weird twist, though: Even though the Discordians were just trying to prove a point about the randomness of consciousness and attention, they ended up making 23 special to a lot of people. You can find hundreds of little spots on the internet where people talk about the importance of 23, not realizing that the entire concept was made up by chaos worshippers trying to prove a point about selection bias. There are even two movies about people who are obsessed with the number 23, including a very bad one starring Jim Carrey. 

But all the attention the Discordians brought to 23 actually made 23 kind of special special. Enough kids grew up worshipping Michael Jordan or LeBron James or Princess Leia that 23 has retained a childlike mysticism as they age — indeed, when I was working as a listicle (or, less generously, clickbait) writer, we had data showing that 23 was the most effective number of items in a list if we wanted to garner clicks. There were lots of theories as to why, but mine, that is was an instance of the esoteric “23 enigma” manifested by chaos worshippers, was the least marketable to potential advertisers.

You do not need to believe in numerology for this to work on you. If this article leaves enough of an impression on you, the next time you see the number 23, you’ll notice it. If I hadn’t drawn your attention to the trick, you might even begin to see some meaning in it, and decide it is a lucky number.

This exposes a strange quirk in how human belief works: sometimes, when you believe in something that is factually false, the way you act can actually turn the belief into something real.

The comedian Patton Oswalt does a bit about this regarding religion (listen to the full thing below) where he talks about how, if he believed that there was a giant invisible anus hovering over him that would suck him up to be devoured by shit pirahnas if he did anything bad, then it would probably make him behave really well in the real world.

Does that mean there’s an actual invisible anus? NO. But would the belief in the invisible anus influence his actions? Yes!

Beliefs, like Tinker Bell, get stronger and more real the more people believe in them. This does not mean beliefs are stupid. To Oswalt’s point — if you have to believe in the invisible anus to be kind to people… I guess go ahead and believe in the invisible anus?

The issue lies in the fact that many people don’t realize that their core beliefs, the things that guide their moral actions, are really just 23 enigmas and invisible anuses. This leads to fundamentalism and zealotry and, rather than simply guiding the individual toward moral action, their beliefs become something they use to control and destroy others. This is true of everyone who takes their beliefs too seriously, even atheists.

Catmas vs. Dogmas

The problem is, because humans have become so heavily reliant on our meaningful patterns, suggesting that our patterns aren’t inherently meaningful makes us fall into indecision, stagnation, and depression.

The good news is that the chaos worshippers also had a solution for this.

The Discordians talk about adopting “catmas” rather than “dogmas.” A catma, they say, is a rigidly held belief that is to be abandoned the moment it stops being convenient.

The reason they promote catmas instead of dogmas is because they recognize that a human’s capacity to understand the universe is finite, and the belief systems we construct are by their nature incomplete. They also acknowledge that we need these belief systems to survive, so we can hardly abandon them.

The point then, is to never take our beliefs too seriously, to never confuse what we find special or interesting (whether that’s your lucky numbers, your astrological sign, or the hanging of bones over your door to ward off evil) with actual reality.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

-Philip K. Dick

But the fact that our beliefs aren’t 100% reflective of reality doesn’t mean we can’t have some fun with them. Christianity, bless its black little heart, still has some fantastic art and music, and paganism, with its emphasis on nature and flame, is a fun excuse to go outside and roast marshmallows over ghost stories.

The universe is nearly infinite, and our capacity to understand it is extremely finite. Our options, then, are:

* Deny that fact and claim that, if we don’t yet understand everything, someone does, and submit our will to them.

* Fall into despair.

* Just have some fucking fun in all the chaos.

It does not seem like a hard choice to me.

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Given that the entire planet is conspiring to destroy our ability to pay attention, it’s not a surprise that sometimes we can’t commit to or focus on a novel. If this is you, I have a suggestion: don’t even try! Instead, get back into the reading habit by reading short fiction.

This was not a medium I held in particularly high regard until the pandemic, when I realized I needed a short palette cleanser before bed each night, and couldn’t easily jump back into a 300-page novel without getting distracted by the ongoing apocalypse outside my walls.

So I’d like to share my five favorite short story collections!

As usual, all books are affiliate linked to Bookshop.org, which means I get a small kickback if you buy using the link. Also — a portion of your money goes directly to your local bookstore! Which is neat!

Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez

Mariana Enriquez is (I am so, so sorry Stephen King, you know I love you) the best living horror writer, hands down. Things We Lost in the Fire was the first of her short story collections to be translated from the original Spanish — the second, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is equally good, and I have her first translated novel Our Share of Night sitting on my bedstand to read next.

Enriquez uses old school cosmic horror as a method through which to present the nightmares of the past 60 years of Argentinian history, with its Dirty Wars, its military dictatorships, and its economic turmoil. It is breathtakingly good, and is almost always exceptionally spooky.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders

None of these short stories are by George Saunders, which would be a bit sad, as he is widely regarded as one of the best living short story writers. It’s not sad, though, because it’s actually a master class in which Saunders presents six stories written by four of the greatest Russian short story writers (which, incidentally, makes them among the best short story writers in history, as pre-Soviet Russia did short fiction extremely well), and then analyzes what makes them great.

The result is basically a much-cheaper, easier-to-access version of Saunders extremely exclusive Syracuse short story course, which something like 6 people a year get to attend. It’s a beautiful introduction to the art of the short story, and to the art of storytelling in general. And you get to read stories by Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Turgenev!

Exhalation by Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang is best known for his story “Story of Your Life,” which was adapted into the excellent sci-fi movie Arrival. His short stories all have take ingenious premises mostly pulled from science and then build a world around them. One of them asks, “What if creationism was scientifically true?” and then pictures a world in which old trees stop having rings if you go 8000 years back, as that was the year God created them.

Others imagine a world in which you can see whether people go to heaven or hell when they die, others present allegories for the heat death of the universe, others have small devices that disprove the existence of free will: it’s all mind-bending stuff, and is genuinely exciting to read.

Exhalation is his more recent collection, but Story of Your Life and Others is also excellent.

Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges

Borges short stories have the feel of an MC Escher painting. They feature infinite libraries where every possible book ever written is shelved, they feature men who wish to dream a person into existence, or men driven mad by the realization that Judas, not Jesus, was the true Messiah that died for our sins, as Judas is the one that suffers to this day in Hell.

Borges is dense, but his writing is entrancing. This is his best short story collection.

In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash by Jean Shepherd

Hey, remember the movie A Christmas Story? This is A Christmas Story, divided up into short stories, with a few more added on outside the Christmas season. The movie was narrated by the author Jean Shepherd himself (Shepherd also appears as the guy waiting for Santa Claus who says, “Hey kid! The line ENDS here. It starts back there!”), so it is impossible not to read this book in Shepherd’s perfect baritone.

It is also, like that classic movie, utterly hilarious, and adds a whole lot of extra flavor and color that didn’t make it into the movie. Shepherd was one of our funniest writers of the 20th century.

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Hey everyone! I am dragging a bit! Pandemic mental health stuff caught up to me, so instead of original content today, I am providing an audio version of my favorite ever column, which was originally titled “Against Forgiveness” and was then changed to “Forgiveness and Time” on Better Strangers.

Then, at the end of the recording, is Dylan Thomas’s reading of W.H. Auden’s “As I walked out one evening,” which is the poem I cite in the beginning.

If you want to read the original text here it is — the article also includes the bit about the poem in from Before Sunrise, as well as links to the books mentioned in the article, which as usual, are Bookshop affiliate links:

Text of Auden’s poem here.

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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