Reading and Thinking in a Paranoid Age

Johann Hari

Yesterday, as I write, I finished reading a book. Once upon a time, this wouldn’t have merited an announcement; I did it as regularly as breathing. But this has become more rare and remarkable, and as a book blogger, I have concrete evidence that this is the first time I closed a book and proclaimed “Finished!” in nearly three months. Not that I haven’t read, but I haven’t followed one book through to the end.

Nor am I alone. Anecdotally, my friends report a massive increase in doomscrolling, perhaps the most passive activity which modernity permits. One sits with a small, pocket-sized computer, flipping listlessly through two or three orphan apps, hoping something jumps out urgently enough to fill the spiritual void we all apparently share. Nothing arrives, of course. But the hope of finding something provides a greater sense of reward than getting up and doing something constructive can.

Johann Hari synopsizes the multi-pronged science behind this decline. Some of it comes innately from just getting older, as it becomes harder to create new synaptic connections. Activities which come easily to youth and young adults, like reading, studying, or handicrafts, just grow harder for adults, and we need to develop discipline enough to overcome this. So yes, if reading and art seem more difficult than when you were small, that isn’t just rosy-eyed nostalgia.

But the problem isn’t wholly internal. Technology critics note that our smartphones, tablets, and other screen technology have addictive qualities. App developers maximize the hypnotic quality of their interfaces, utilizing design principles that make us want to stare. Streaming content on platforms like Netflix and Disney+ have more camera cuts and other jolt moments than the broadcast television I grew up watching, which triggers the reptile brain to keep watching, scanning for further life-saving inputs.

I cringe, though, at the word “addictive.” The concept of addiction gets misused in government PR and middle-school “Just Say No” curricula. Often, to describe something as “addictive” implies almost magical properties, like a cursed object that weakens and destroys its owner. This isn’t so. Not everyone who tries cannabis or cocaine becomes addicted, just as not everyone who fiddles on social media on their phones becomes addicted. Something deeper and more primal happens first.

Dr. Gabor Maté

As addiction specialist Gabor Maté writes, addictions develop under specific circumstances. Some people become addicted after life-shaping traumas: childhood abuse and neglect mold children’s brains in ways that protect them as kids, but are maladaptive in adults. Addicts consume their product to numb their trauma scars. Other addicts have more fleeting issues. The second-leading cause of addiction is loneliness, which addicts can overcome through sociability. For AA participants, spirituality arguably matters less than the meetings.

What, then turns screens addictive? Returning to Hari, he writes that certain life experiences create trauma-like effects on the brain. This includes certain forms of uncertainty, including poverty, homelessness, and war. Many American soldiers notoriously became heroin addicts in Vietnam, then cleared up when they returned to civilian life. I grew up believing that people became homeless because they were addicts, but that’s backward; they become addicts because they’re homeless. Substances take the fear away.

America’s economy has created unprecedented prosperity, but hasn’t distributed it equitably. Elon Musk is currently angling to become our first trillionaire, while uncountable underemployed Americans rely on multiple part-time jobs and gig work to stay afloat. I’ve bounced among short-term jobs for three years, often panicking to keep rent paid and lights on. When I pause between hustles, that allows time for thoughts to emerge, reminding me of every bill about to go into arrears.

Hari and Maté agree that such uncertainty warps the brain. In conditions of constant fear, the limbic system, and especially the amygdala, gets bigger, while the prefrontal cortex withers. A larger amygdala makes us highly reactive, even downright paranoid. An atrophied cortex means less self-discipline, and just as importantly, less ability to empathize with strangers. Both of these make us too impatient for the detail work and contemplative pace of reading or of creating art.

Uncertainty and paranoia have become our standard of life. Not just economic uncertainty, but street violence and wars of choice permeate our daily lives. This results in a population more primed for fear, snap reactions, and restlessness. Into that circumstance, streaming TV media increasingly gives us very loud, aggressive, juddery content that sates our need for stimulation. Something as sedate as reading or listening to classical music seems quaint. So no, it’s not just me.

T. Kingfisher and the Kingdom of Free Women

T. Kingfisher, Nettle & Bone

Princess Marra of the Harbor Kingdom is a spare daughter, never to inherit, whose only hope for advancement is to wed a prince, someday. Until then, she’s foisted onto a provincial convent while her older sister gets the prestigious marriage. But she discovers the truth: her sister is a political pawn, abused and terrified, reduced to a walking shadow. Naturally, Marra decides to organize a campaign to assassinate the patriarchy.

In the last year, I’ve become a massive fan of T. Kingfisher’s novellas. She channels classic literature and folklore, refashioning the background noise of our dreams into insightful dark fantasy. This is Kingfisher’s first full-length novel I’ve read, and instead of remaking a specific story, she uses images cherry-picked extensively from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The product turns childhood mythology into a grown-up fable of power, resistance, and self-reliance.

Marra’s story begins when she’s already past thirty. She chastises herself for being an adult and still believing the legendry of “happy ever after.” Her sister’s marriage to a handsome prince, solemnized by a literal fairy godmother, has proven disastrous. Perhaps Marra’s awakening comes late, but it nevertheless comes. So she leaves the religious cloister and begins walking, seeking the magical assistance that will help her liberate her family.

Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim wrote that, in the realm of fairytale, the bond between siblings matters more than that between spouses. That certainly applies here. Marra and Kamia had a contentious relationship a children, but as adults, their mutual trust and self-reliance gives them strength when faced with duplicitous adulthood. Kingfisher’s narrative maps so perfectly onto Bettelheim’s Jungian prototype that it’s tempting to psychoanalyze her story.

However, this is a false temptation. Kingfisher creates a dreamlike atmosphere, appropriately devoid of proper nouns. Many characters are identified only by their roles: the king, Sister Apothecary, the dust-wife. When characters merit names, it’s only first names, usually Anglo-Saxon: Marra, Agnes, Fenris, Miss Margaret. Even countries have names like the Harbor Kingdom and the Northern Kingdom. (One country has a name, but it’s distant and half-mythic, like Avalon.)

T. Kingfisher (a known and public
pseudonym for Ursula Vernon)

Characters and places lack names, here, because they belong only to a stage in Marra’s life. Bettelheim’s map of fairytale describes children transitioning into adulthood, with accompanying adult roles, like marriage and family. But Kingfisher describes a subsequent transition, where adults finally shed the conditioning of childhood storytelling. Princess Marra was first conditioned by the royal court, then by the convent. Now she must at last become herself.

Prince Vorling of the Northern Kingdom, Marra’s brother-in-law, is indeed handsome and charming. He’s also violent, domineering, and jealous. He maintains power, over both his kingdom and his family, through exaggerated displays of male swagger, and he sacrifices all relationships to maintaining the illusion of control. He truly desires to be a fairy-tale prince, and he’ll brook no intrusion on that story from annoying human foibles.

Therefore, Marra literally walks away from her society’s twin institutions of power: the royal court and religion. She spent over thirty years appeasing the dual threats of state violence and eternal judgement. Now she must obey the only instrument more true than either the kingdom or the gods, her own conscience. If that means striking a dagger to the power structures of two kingdoms, well, so be it.

Along the way, she assembles her company: the dust-wife (a vaguely defined sorceress), her mousey fairy godmother, and a massive, gentle-hearted warrior. Oh, and Bonedog, the company mascot, whose name says it all. He’s a dog resurrected from reassembled bones. If this sounds like somebody’s Dungeons & Dragons campaign, I won’t disagree, and the story has the semi-improvisational feel of a dungeon master trying to wrangle the players back on track.

Kingfisher’s product invites comparison to Tolkein, Michael Moorcock, and Andrzej Sapkowski, writers who mix dreamlike whimsy with painful grown-up realizations. Kingfisher’s characters march against the arrayed ceremony of kingdom and state religion, knowing death is likely, simply because it’s right. Princess Marra doubts herself and, without her companions’ support, would probably back out. But together, they form their own morally succinct counterculture, linked by morality and trust.

Please don’t misunderstand. I’ve deployed terminology from psychology and lit-crit, but one could read Kingfisher’s narrative as a rollicking adventure. Like the best literature, though, the story exists on multiple levels. Kingfisher uses playful genre boilerplates to make her message acceptable. But she also reminds us, in this post-MeToo culture, that “happily ever after” relies on the honor system. If Prince Charming lacks honor, then sisters must stand together.

Other reviews of T. Kingfisher books:
Man You Should’ve Seen Them Kicking Edgar Allan Poe
Secrets Buried in the World’s Darkest Corners
The Sleeper and the Beauty of Dreams

Will We Ever Get Tired of Re-Fighting Old Battles?

Promo still from the last time someone dragged The X-Files out of the deep freeze

This weekend’s illegal American bombing of Iran arrives hand-in-glove with another cultural announcement: Hulu is relaunching The X-Files. Preliminary announcements call it a “reboot,” but deeper reportage suggests it’s more a soft reboot, a continuation with new leads. Simultaneously, reports suggest there might be a long-awaited season five for Veronica Mars. (This is more ambiguous, maybe misreading the series being acquired by Netflix; wording is fuzzy.)

I’ve complained before about the cultural currents behind constant reboots. Pop culture is always behind the times anyway, and the flood of streaming media has made the biggest entertainment conglomerates more timid, not less. But this feels different. The resurrection of two popular franchises, thirty-three and twenty-four years old respectively, amid a “Make America Great Again” culture feels more than timid. It feels like a hasty retreat from reality.

Throughout the Current President’s 2016 campaign, he decried urban violence and burning cities, despite such violence being at near-historic lows. But his rhetoric makes sense in his life context, as the Bronx famously caught fire in the late 1970s, the same time he moved into Manhattan real estate with his purchase of the former Commodore Hotel. The poor future President was simply trapped in the sociopolitical milieu of his thirties, unable to grow.

Similarly, this weekend’s bombing of Iranian civilian targets mirrors the President’s unhealed past. Consider his inability to stop heaving accusations against the Central Park Five, nearly a quarter century after they were exonerated. This President retains grudges and political interpretations molded by a privileged youth and segregated social set. In context, he likely bombed Iran, not really for its nuclear program, but as payback for the 1979 Hostage Crisis.

This has become the default for much American politics. We aren’t facing the past, we’re relitigating the past. In the 1980s, both political discourse and mass media desperately wanted to re-fight the Vietnam War, but correctly this time. Franchises like Iron Eagle, Rambo, and Top Gun promised to purge America’s Vietnam disgrace. More recently, Call of Duty and James Bond try to tweak our memory of the Cold War.

Caught in the interregnum between the Cold War and the Global War on Terror, the Clinton decade offered enforced cheerfulness, a frothy meringue of Empire Records and Ben Stiller’s early career. The X-Files directly countered that, maintaining post-Reagan cynicism toward America’s surface culture. Scully and (especially) Mulder walked through neon-soaked midnight landscapes, uniquely able to see the venality that made that era’s party ethos possible.

Kristen Bell in the original network run of Veronica Mars

Veronica Mars pushed this contrast to the extreme. Read superficially, the series presented a stereotyped Southern California panorama, all hypersaturated colors and loud, jangly indie pop soundscapes. Only Veronica and her father—and, eventually, those trapped in their decaying orbit—understood the vulgar horse-trading and human commodities that subsidized Neptune, California’s skin-deep glamour. Veronica, like Mulder, was ready to expose the lie, damn the consequences.

Both franchises took dim opinions of power structures. Veronica Mars fought plush-bottomed police as often as criminals, while Mulder and sometimes Scully brought official corruption to light despite, not because of, the law. But both presented a morally distinct, binary universe. Neptune’s Sheriff Lamb and the Smoking Man were clearly evil, and needed exposed to a public which their shows depicted as passive and sheep-like, desperate for an underdog hero.

Unfortunately, the political tenor has changed. From the impotent government depicted in the 1970s, to the malignant one of the 1990s, the problem has been presented as siloed at the top. The disclosure of the Epstein documents, like the Panama Papers before them, has revealed a network of politicians, capitalists, entertainers, academics, and scientists colluding to support an otherwise decrepit system. The “secret” isn’t secret anymore.

While politicians and media captains want to refight the battles of their, or our, childhood, rapidly unfolding news reveals their vision of the problem as charmingly naïve. Nary a top-tier capitalist or government insider didn’t share information with Epstein. Public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Richard Dawkins had their hands in his pockets. The rot isn’t an isolated, partisan tumor. Everyone, everywhere in the system, has been proved complicit.

Veronica Mars and The X-Files helped define a generation’s idea of acceptable villains. They showed our lawkeepers were complicit with lawbreakers in the anarchy most people felt in their ordinary lives. But reality has overtaken the scope these shows made possible. Bringing back the monsters of my twenties is worse than quaint. It offers audiences my age an excuse to avoid the monsters that have revealed themselves in reality.