Flaw Salad

Watching the world change makes me feel insane. I guess racism is Supreme Court-sanctioned again. (Explicitly this time.) Over the weekend our government murdered 11 people in international waters. No due process. No nonlethal interference. Just an extrajudicial explosion of a speedboat. At a party I attended Sunday (at the house of a good friend whom I love but whose parties I may soon avoid because the crowds are starting to feel hostile) three people (at least one of whom was a lesbian) told me that this massacre was good actually. “I want our borders protected from fentanyl.” We are living in different realities.

To me, it is obvious that the US government feeling free to kill anyone it wants as long as they believe the person to have drugs is a bad thing. Evil even. I would go so far as to say it is a moral blemish on all of us. How, then, are people seeing this through such a fundamentally different lens? I know there are a few simple answers and a few more complex ones, but the end result is that we cannot have a conversation. There is no moral cohesion. 

Once you decide that some people deserve instant death without due process for whatever pet issue you most care about, you have decided that human lives have no intrinsic value. Once you decide that human lives have no intrinsic value, it’s a lot easier to play fast and loose with them. That’s why these same people will happily converse with me at a party and then turn around and say trans people need to shut up and rally behind Gavin Newsom, despite his continued efforts to strip trans people of rights and humanity.

As soon as you devalue human beings in this way, it’s a lot easier to decide that a government’s job is to control populations rather than to serve them. Socialism and communism are built on the idea of government as service; authoritarianism and fascism are built on the idea of government as control. In the latter framework, killing a few people is a fine thing for a government to do because the government is the controlling power and the controlling power should make civic decisions, including and especially those involving justice. (Never mind the violation of international law.) In a service framework, the people are the controlling power and should make those civic decisions. That’s sort of the whole concept of our judicial system as it stands (or is meant to, though this Supreme Court throws that into complete shambles). A government that serves the people would need to work the many bureaucratic processes we already have in place to protect our population from threats, including nonlethal interference with that boat. 

I would never have thought these things to be controversial, but here we are. Some people — many of them — really, genuinely want a government that controls.

When I say I am living in a different reality from these people, I mean that in a total sense. I am drifting farther and farther from the center of American social life. I no longer fit in, and that fact screams from my hair and my clothes and my speech. From my hard ethical lines. Years ago I read that surviving a cultural descent into fascism requires developing a few lines you absolutely will not cross. I have a few. I won’t associate with anyone who works with Homeland Security, for example. I have lost friends over this. I won’t use AI either (as much as I can help avoiding it). I am risking my job by not complying with my employer’s many requests (demands?) to get on board. I may get fired, and when I tell people this, their eyes get wide. What will I do if I lose my job? I wonder that they can recognize that terror but not the many systems enforcing it: those that make employment a requirement of living in this country and poverty a crime. What’s the famous line? Have you not the eyes to see?

Somewhere along the line I tricked myself into believing people were waking up. I guess it was before the pandemic, which did do both physical and psychological damage to people’s mental capacity at large. But even without that massive hit to our collective psyche, history tells us that fascism would have continued apace. Perhaps it would not have metastasized quite so quickly under different circumstances, but it would have found its way. These are just the circumstances at hand.

And as an aside, from a technological/historical/anthropological perspective, globalization has enabled a truly frightening worldwide spread of fascism. I’m not yet willing to say there is no escape, but at the very least, there is no escape from its effects. Consider that there is no longer any location on earth where rainwater is safe to drink. Did the people of Tuvalu, for instance, deserve that? Tuvalu, if you don’t know, is working to relocate its entire population due to the effects of climate change. The rising sea is swallowing it whole. I can’t imagine a global system of governance that truly serves the will of the people would have let this happen. But we don’t have that. What we have is a handful of corporations controlling money and thus political interests on a global scale. What we have is an entire planet serving a few very rich men. Entire species and ecosystems and nations dying to cater to their whims. To a shockingly counterintuitive extent, we have the internet to thank for this. Rather than elevating our consciousness, global connectedness has propagated humanity’s cruelest impulses. But I digress.

I read a popular book called The Let Them Theory. I liked it, even though it was basically Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Dummies. It was a valuable reminder to let go of your desire to control other people. This strikes a strong chord for me as someone who was raised in an authoritarian household. It turns out, this trains your brain to think in authoritarian ways and makes your instincts controlling. This happened to me acutely based on my immediate family dynamics, but I think it has happened to most of the United States broadly based on cultural messaging. I mean, how many movies are about cops or soldiers? Is this normal for any society, or is it specific to ours? I believe the authoritarian thread through U.S. culture has broken us to such a degree that a book that tells you “stop trying to control other people and let them be who they are” feels revelatory. There’s a reason this book is popular, and there’s a reason it resonates now.

In leftist circles, we often say, “Kill the cop in your head.” I agree with this in many ways and am thinking of an addendum: Kill the cop in your head and replace it with a teacher. The reason I say this is because “kill the cop” doesn’t tell me what to do when someone is behaving in harmful ways. Let’s say someone just lit up a cigarette around some children. Cop would tell them to put the cigarette out, but if you kill the cop, what do you do? How do you reduce the harm to the children? Best I can think to do is try approaching from a teaching perspective. That is, do they know they’re causing harm? Try just letting them know there are children nearby. Most people would likely move, and those who won’t? You can’t reach them anyway. You can’t teach people to care.

I’m not sure if this makes sense. I smoke too much weed these days, and this is certainly oversimplified. I guess I’m trying to figure out how to bridge a gap between patience with those around me and unwillingness to tolerate the barbarism of a rapidly degrading society. How do you kill the cop inside your head and still try to help elevate the behavior in your own communities?

Anyway, I keep writing about morals and ethics and the world because I think we need to talk about it now more than ever. Things that were once a given are being re-litigated. Today the president said a little domestic violence is okay. Racial profiling is, too, according to SCOTUS. Bribery and corruption happen out in the open, and every element of daily life feels increasingly like a scam. In journalism school they taught us that journalism was the watchdog of the government, and now we’re maybe three months from, “Is slavery bad? The New York Times investigates.” 

I always thought the hard part of convincing people to change behavior was showing them the problem. It’s not. It’s convincing them that the problem is bigger than the effort to change. I don’t know what it will take to convince people around me that the problems inherent in this system are worse, more barbaric, more egregious than the effort it would take to change them — or to change one’s own mind or behavior in relation to them — but I hope that writing and talking about it constantly will be a small contribution to the cause. And if not, it will at least help me feel a little less insane.