The New Sartre

Lorcan Finnegan (director), Vivarium

A young couple looking toward adulthood have decided they’re ready to purchase a home. Gemma (Imogen Poots) teaches kindergarten, and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) is a tree surgeon; they have no last names. Curiosity brings them to an estate agent, Martin (Jonathan Aris), who lacks social skills but is persuasively pushy. Martin shows them a manicured, hastily erected suburban tract home… and leaves them there.

Writer-director Lorcan Finnegan claims he found inspiration in his native Ireland, where land developers built ugly, soulless suburbs in the middle 2000’s, then abandoned them when the market cratered in 2007. Ireland’s urban margins are full of ghost towns which have never been occupied. The houses, like in this movie’s Yonder development, are virtually identical, built on flat quarter-acre lots. The streets are impossible to navigate without GPS.

Alone in the Yonder suburb, Gemma and Tom try to leave, but can’t. Every road returns to the same house. The house is already furnished, so they reluctantly spend the night. Come morning, they find a box stuffed with enough bland, flavorless food for one day. Also the next morning, and the next. Then, one morning, they find another box. This box contains a baby, and a promise: “Raise it and be released.”

Judging by several previous reviews, this movie must divide audiences starkly. Many people complain that it’s slow-moving, atmospheric, and circular. Yet other viewers, including me, believe that’s the point. Gemma and Tom find themselves thrust into a Sartre-esque human hellscape where past and future don’t exist, yet dominate their every moment. Apparently some audiences wanted monsters, but this movie offers the greatest horror: adulthood under Late Capitalism.

The house divides people into roles. Tom, a gardener who hopes to become an entrepreneur someday, digs a hole, looking for escape, because it’s the one thing he can control. Every day he leaves the house and resumes digging, while Gemma stays inside, raising The Boy. The community forces them into preassigned roles, segregated according to gender, granting only as much freedom as the house and land permit.

Therefore Tom keeps digging, deeper and deeper, because the work is the only thing that gives his life any shape. He sees himself constantly on the brink of breaking free from the imprisonment of his future: he lives entirely for what’s going to happen around the next bend. There’s nothing in his present, including Gemma, that gives his life meaning anymore; posterity has sucked all meaning from his life.

Imogen Poots (left) and Jesse Eisenberg failing to escape the suburbs, in Vivarium

This is a movie about futility. It’s about how everything Gemma and Tom do comes to nothing: the work of digging turns into digging your own grave, and the effort of maintaining a house becomes an effort at creating something worth abandoning. (The symbolism is hushed but overt.) Everything the characters do comes to nothing, because they’re doomed to uselessness. Because, let’s be honest, that’s the dream sold to us.

We spend a child’s first eighteen years telling them their dreams can take them anywhere, and the next fifty years relentlessly demanding they wake up and earn a living. We tell adults to keep their aspirations small: the house is basically a traditional London-style two-up, two-down; the wall art is images of the house. The aspirations are limited to what we already have and what we can’t take with us.

Partway through, Gemma screams: “I want to go home.” Meaning, she wants to reclaim the dreams she had before suburban mediocrity claimed them. But she can’t: she’s indebted to the future, which already owns everything she creates. Her dreams are subordinated to somebody else’s dreams, which will eventually be subordinated to somebody else’s. The future owns her, leaving her, paradoxically, trapped in the present.

If this isn’t a movie about capitalism, it’s certainly about not controlling your choices. Gemma and Tom don’t own their effort; everything they build belongs to someone else. Late Capitalism creates the illusion that we’re working for the next generation, but we’re just going through the motions. Gemma and Tom might escape if not for The Boy, but probably not: even before, they lived entirely on promises of the future.

We’ve been conditioned to accept diminished expectations, because it’s all we’ve been shown. But, Finnegan insists, it’s a fake life. The suburban promise is a reality we didn’t choose and didn’t create. Only when Tom and Gemma physically can’t escape the ’burbs, though, does this reality become visible. Their life becomes brooding, atmospheric, and granular; but, the denouement suggests, it already was. And so, implicitly, is ours.

There Is No Opioid Epidemic (Part 2)

Three years ago, I wrote an essay entitled “There Is No Opioid Epidemic.” It got several positive responses and, when shared by a popular Colorado yoga practitioner, became my first essay to go viral. So I assume it must’ve struck a chord with readers. Almost like, in a one-note media chorus of professional chin-waggers complaining about the opioid epidemic, readers were happy to hear somebody say their suffering wasn’t invalid.

When I re-shared it yesterday, on its three-year anniversary, a friend contacted me with her story. She suffers a chronic disability with symptoms which include immobilizing chronic pain. (This friend, and the stories she’s shared recently, have made me aware how pervasive disability-based prejudices are in American society.) She told me she’d been prescribed opioids, but had the prescription yanked, fearing she might, in the future, become addicted.

Not, please note, that she’s currently addicted; rather, that she might become addicted in some hypothetical future. Her doctor admitted that, under pressure from the DEA and other authorities, she’d been forced to restrict the number of opioid prescriptions she wrote. So my friend got handed a prescription for another drug that doesn’t work as well, leaving her in a constant state of pervasive, low-level pain—not debilitating, but restrictive.

Thinking about this, I’ve struggled to comprehend the reasoning. Clearly, the authorities responsible for regulating American drug behaviors believe chronic addiction is a worse affliction than chronic pain. We’ve certainly been conditioned to believe this through generations of “This Is Your Brain On Drugs” messages, coupled with police interventions and DARE programs. We’ve heard for years that becoming addicted is always, innately, a fate worse than pain.

British journalist Johann Hari writes, in Chasing the Scream, that Harry J. Anslinger, America’s former top narcotics officer, had a personal aversion to addicts. Owing to a complex and nuanced experience in childhood, he believed addicts weren’t just suffering, they were actively bad people. Because Anslinger had a hand in negotiating the end of World War I, President Wilson gave Anslinger a blank check for his post-war public service career.

Anslinger chose to dedicate his life to punishing addicts. He chaired the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (forerunner to the ONDCP) for thirty-two years, one of the longest public appointments in American history. Using this leverage, he pushed legislators to enact laws intended to punish addicts, enforce private morality, and force people to be, in Anslinger’s view, good. All because Anslinger had an inflexible moral attitude.

Harry J. Anslinger, near retirement in 1962

Even this explanation doesn’t really satisfy. Though the unprecedented power Anslinger enjoyed (if that’s the word) allowed him to enforce his moral prejudices, President Nixon declared the War on Drugs in 1971, nearly a decade after Anslinger retired, and years after abundant science demonstrated that many illegal drugs, particularly cannabis, aren’t that dangerous. Clearly the prejudice persists beyond one person’s preconceptions.

In 1994, John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s former deputy, admitted to a journalist that the administration turned hostile to drugs, in brief, because they needed camouflage. Busting drugs became a convenient legal condom that allowed Feds to harass Civil Rights leaders and anti-war demonstrators without contracting the taint of racism or war-hawk-ism. In other words, for Nixonites (and Reaganites after them), addicts were bad people because they were different.

This has been extensively documented. Legal scholar Michelle Alexander records that, though it’s illegal to stop somebody simply because they’re Black, race is nevertheless an acceptable qualifying condition. In other words, police can randomly stop somebody because they’re Black and something else. The law is so inclusive that “something else” can include basically anything that a reasonably healthy imagination could conjure. And it’s almost always something drug-related.

So basically, when drug enforcement officers force my friend’s doctor to take her off pain control medications that work, and put her on something marginally better than a placebo, they say they’re preventing her from becoming an addict. But really, they’re preventing her from becoming a nonconformist. Our drug regulations, which doctors must comply with to remain licensed, are based on moral fears of hippies and African Americans. We can’t let a White woman become… that.

It boggles my mind that, in 2020, these prejudices remain so persistent. Worse, the moral panic surrounding opioid “abuse” has been perpetrated by media forces marching in lock-step. The same newsrooms that want congratulations for holding Donald Trump to account, continue reinforcing Harry J. Anslinger’s class-based prejudices, and Nixon’s racism. Eighty years later, it’s time to show some moral independence, and let these old, outdated ideas finally, mercifully, die.

America’s First Racist President™

Joe Biden

Earlier this week, I awoke to read the strangest news: presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden had called Donald Trump America’s “first” racist president. Though the quote makes marginally more sense in context, it still left me scratching my head. Surely a seasoned politician like Biden doesn’t forget that America has produced presidents like Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson. Racism isn’t new in this country.

But then I thought about it. What if Biden’s right? Jackson and Wilson were products of their times, ages when slaveholding and segregation were seen as economic necessities, backed with government authority. They fell into racism ass-backward, and were richly rewarded for it. Trump, however, resists the larger cultural narrative. Official, outspoken, bigoted racism isn’t standard anymore; Trump must choose daily to be, and remain, racist.

In the 19th and early 20th Centuries, America’s Left and Right were unified in two bipartisan positions: environmentalism, and racism. Our political parties linked arms to defend clean water and White supremacy. But after Lyndon Johnson threw the Democratic Party’s weight behind the Voting Rights Act of 1965, our political climate changed. By 1968, Richard Nixon was already reduced to dog whistles, an art later perfected by Ronald Reagan.

Donald Trump’s undisguised racism is a conscious, deliberate throwback. He could choose another course, as indeed his predecessors have, straddling the aisle, but he doesn’t. More importantly, he doesn’t disguise his positions. He exists entirely as he is, insensible to changing values around him. He divides people into in-groups and out-groups, sustaining an older moral system, which he has to feed daily because it isn’t the cultural context anymore.

In other words, Trump is America’s first president to choose racism. He supports racism willfully, not because America expects it, but because it’s his motivating option. He isn’t a product of our time, and doesn’t belong to our collective guilt (except insofar as he does). Rather, he makes a willful stand against the larger world, especially against his immediate predecessor, because it’s the only thing that makes him special.

As an entrepreneur, Trump’s business model turned on making himself, and his name, exclusive and rare. He defined himself, and those who bought into his buildings and other ventures, as separate from the population, and therefore valuable. And, like prior business models organized around exclusivity, he divides customers into insiders—those wealthy enough for the buy-in—and ousiders—the hoi-polloi. His enterprise depends on creating systems of winners and losers.

Donald Trump

This contradicts America’s changing standards. Within Trump’s lifetime, our collective worldview was divided into moral binaries: rich and poor, White and Black, male and female. Today, we increasingly recognize that class, race, and gender exist along spectra, and just as important, we acknowledge these spectra as artificial. Our shared definition of what makes someone human, and worthy, is becoming more inclusive. But Trump and his supporters consciously reject this change.

And the longer they reject this change, the more effort it requires. They not only must consciously choose hostility, bigotry, and binary thinking, they must also reinforce this thinking daily, because our cultural context won’t reinforce it for them. As society generally becomes more welcoming, those who perceive themselves as an exclusive elite must defend their standing with increasing force. As with all things governmental, “force” ultimately means “violence.”

Which leads to the Gestapo tactics our government is currently utilizing to crush dissent. Organized state violence is frequently the rear-guard defense of a dying structure, from the Whiskey Rebellion to Bull Connor. Trump knows he’ll lose if applying logic or appeals to common values, because America broadly welcomes African Americans, trans people, and immigrants, for one simple reason—he can’t appeal to common values that aren’t common anymore.

So yes, Trump and his supporters are racist in ways America hasn’t previously seen before: racism as willful, even countercultural, choice. Trump’s business model, and his supporters’ dwindling self-figuration, are dying. Scared, powerless, and lacking larger support, these regressives resort to violence, because otherwise they’ll lose the sunk cost of daily choices. This is racism as conscious deliberation, as massive cross-cultural reversal, as willful retreat from the present.

Admittedly, reading Biden’s words, this isn’t what he meant. Biden, like Trump, doesn’t think before he speaks, and therefore says unbelievably dumb things sometimes. But taking his words into our cultural context, I suspect Biden has accidentally landed on a larger truth we’d previously missed. Trump’s violent bigotry isn’t a show of strength, it’s an admission that he’s losing. That’s a truth we can carry boldly into the future.

Disability Chic and Toxic People

Don't be fooled, this badge is a lie

Check out this masterful piece of PR. According to circulating reports, two women are selling these lanyards around Gretna, Nebraska, a small town between Lincoln and Omaha. They purport that wearing this badge gives wearers liberty to enter public places without masks. Gretna mayoral candidate Angie Lauritsen reports that the makers actively sell their lanyards by claiming their magic powers derive from the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

I won’t waste time debunking this claim; smarter reporters than me have done it already, and extensively. Briefly put, it’s complete bullshit. More interesting to me is the attitude that these vendors, and the people who buy from them, have about disability. They apparently believe that, first, disability is something you can assert, like joining a church, or supporting a political party. And second, that claiming disability gives them some kind of super-rights under American law.

The underlying philosophy behind these lanyards, and other similar scams sold by online hucksters, is that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) permits blanket exemptions from private rules, public laws, and common decency. If you simply assert you have some disability—which, the vendors say, you needn’t justify with evidence—private businesses must play dead. Voilà, you’re instantly special; you have rights other people don’t.

Functionally, this attitude is identical to people who believe that African Americans, LGBTQIA+, and other designated groups have “special” rights simply because their rights are protected. When groups who have historically been marginalized start having their rights recognized and defended, those who’ve been protected by the status quo have a pathetic tendency to whine. They apparently can’t imagine others having rights, except at the expense of the majority.

I’m reminded of Mitt Romney, Senator and former Presidential candidate, who in 2012 appeared on a smuggled video recording claiming that, were he Hispanic, his election campaign might be easier. This statement was, admittedly, ambiguously phrased. He might’ve simply meant that more Hispanic voters, a growing and lucrative voting demographic, might support him. But he might’ve also meant life is easier for protected minorities, which Romney isn’t.

This insistence that protected people groups live on the gravy train achieves a particular level of silliness with disabilities. Unlike African Americans, Hispanic Americans, or women [sic], people with disabilities often look remarkably similar to the general population. Though our stereotype of disabilities remains stuck on paraplegia, a stereotype reinforced by the wheelchair-using parking spot, we’re increasingly aware that many disabilities don’t have obvious external markers.

Proof of the standing stereotype
of what constitutes a disability

Respiratory problems like pulmonary fibrosis or extreme asthma may diminish a person’s ability to perform routine mechanical tasks. Same with movement disorders like Huntington’s disease or dyskinesia. I’ve recently become aware of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, which erodes a person’s connective tissues, leaving them progressively fatigued from even minor exertion. All these conditions leave sufferers severely disabled, without the photogenic disfigurements of traditional disabilities.

Briefly put, we’re aware, in ways we weren’t just fifteen years ago, that not all disabled people look disabled. This means a gold rush for people who want some form of protected status. White, male, heterosexual Americans who feel aggrieved that their rights don’t need spelled out (because the deck isn’t stacked against them), now believe they can claim protected status, just by asserting they have some undefined “disability.”

Which returns us to the Gretna lanyards. I called them a “masterful piece of PR,” and I meant it. The rhyming slogan makes them memorable and lets them occupy a piece of your head rent-free, like “birds of a feather flock together,” or “if the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” Stating “please be kind” makes it look like they’re seeking mercy. The final tag, “disability rights are human rights,” ties the lanyards’ lie to a verifiable truth.

But that doesn’t make it any less odious. Healthy, able-bodied people attempting to circumvent science-based prevention measures, by pretending to acquire disabilities, disgusts me. Not only do they think they have some God-given right to inflict their infectious microbiome on everyone around them, they’re ultimately damaging the infrastructure of protections for people with actual disabilities. This will create long-term consequences for vulnerable people.

If you think asserting a “disability,” which you don’t have, makes you glamorous, or that there’s anything sexy about falsely claiming membership in a historically dispossessed people group, you’re worse than wrong. You’re a garbage person. Because any ill-informed or misguided wingnut can be wrong. But it takes a special self-infatuated asshat to go from merely not knowing the facts, to actively hurting others. That’s what this lanyard does.

COVID-19 and the Trust Economy

Who takes responsibility when somebody drops their COVID-positive child at daycare or school? I’ve heard two basic answers. Libertarian individualism holds that we, individually, take responsibility for our choices, and when faced with a situation like this, responsible parents will take one on the chin, socially and economically, by staying home with the invalided child. Yes, that’s two weeks or more, but we’re all responsible for our actions and circumstances.

The more communitarian response shifts blame off the individual. Parents, especially poor and working-class parents, need to make rent and buy groceries, and our economy, organized around strict regulation of ownership, won’t let them survive on trust. Parents need to work, and therefore schools and daycare centers absorb the economic uncertainty which children create. Maybe, if parents weren’t penalized financially, they wouldn’t offload responsibility onto others.

Months ago, I would’ve fallen into the second camp. (There are other positions, more subtle and nuanced, but these two dominate.) It seems obvious that, if parents are forced to choose between threatening other families with Coronavirus, or finding their own family homeless, they’ll choose protecting their family. After all, our economy functions by threatening swift, life-altering consequences on non-conformists. Even libertarians will admit this.

Watching the economic consequences of COVID-19 unfold, I’ve come to question many of my existing beliefs. Both libertarian individualism, and soft-Marxist collectivism, leave me dissatisfied now. Because I’ve come to believe both subsume an important point: all social and economic systems depend on people to trust one another, and we can only trust other people if their future actions are reasonably predictable. Put another way, individual freedom is an illusion.

American values extol individuals who exist entirely as they are. Our movies and TV shows praise men of action and women of spontaneity, from Jason Statham-style action heroes, to romantic women who beg to be portrayed by Jennifer Anniston. But notice how these characters consistently disrupt and inconvenience others. The movies never hang around to watch cleaning crews rectify the messes Statham and Anniston leave behind, because stability is boring.

That level of individuality absolutely requires other people willing to behave in consistent and reliable ways. Somebody has to stay behind, cooking meals and extinguishing fires. Even the free spirits we romanticize, necessarily assume everyone else will behave in reliable ways, that bankers won’t pocket our deposits, that cooks won’t spit in our rigatoni, that farmers will plant every spring and harvest every fall. We rely upon everyone else to be reliable.

And everyone else relies upon us likewise. We often chafe at impositions made upon us by work: to show up at regular intervals and do nitty-gritty tasks that seem beneath our dignity. Or is that just me? Yet we cannot accomplish anything larger than ourselves without the ability to collaborate productively: from Amish barn-raisings to multinational corporations, we need to divide labor so we can act cooperatively. That means we need reciprocal trust.

Old-fashioned liberalism tells people to simply unionize, that workers increase their dignity by joining forces to resist overweening management. And indeed, unions can provide protections. But as the Soviets discovered, if we overthrow one network of oppressive socioeconomic roles, we’ll have to adopt another one, because we still need to trust others, and they need to trust us. Living together makes us reliant, at least somewhat, on repetitive, robotic actions.

I realize it appears I’ve gotten off-topic. This isn’t about schools and COVID-19 anymore. But respectfully, it is. Because we’ve structurally abandoned the idea that one person’s income should support a household, we’ve necessitated outside childcare. Since we cannot return to pre-1972 economic conditions, somebody needs to take responsibility for our children, whether it’s private professional daycare, state-funded schools, or unpaid grandparents. Childcare becomes another trust-based role.

COVID-19 hasn’t revealed that childcare workers are superheroes, as our memes in April implied, or work-shy cowards, as our July memes say. Instead, it reveals our trusted social roles, in a massive technological society, have become so interconnected that our façade of civilization is brittle, shattering under the slightest pressure of predictability. We absolutely trust others to behave in reliable ways, which is impossible in unreliable times.

As Slavoj Žižek writes, COVID demonstrates our globalized society’s vulnerability to nature. I’d go further: it shows how vulnerable trust makes us. I rely upon my neighbors, colleagues, and strangers around the globe to behave in consistent, reliable ways, regardless of their individual circumstances; they rely upon me likewise. Now we have to re-learn our own, and everyone else’s, roles.

The Last African Outpost in the Solar System

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 107
Mike Resnick, Kirinyaga: a Fable of Utopia

Koriba is the mundumugu, the great priest-healer, of his tribe, the Kikuyu. Sure, he has a Westernized education and speaks English fluently; but he rejected his European learning to become his people’s spiritual guide. Sadly for him, his Kenyan homeland is overrun with technology and silicon; his Africa has no place for African ways. So he has led his tribe to a new settlement: a terraformed planetoid called Kirinyaga, out amid the solar system.

Mike Resnick’s science fiction was often heavily influenced by myth and fable, and his stories, including the eight interconnecting narratives which comprise this novel, often functioned as modern parables. He first began visiting Kenya as a trophy hunter; he later became fascinated by the indigenous cultures. He especially respected the ways African societies adapt to colonial influences, while retaining their unique characters. But this respect was tempered by trepidation.

In this setting, the Kikuyu people have named their adopted homeland Kirinyaga, their native name for the mountain Europeans call Kilimanjaro. Koriba, our first-person narrator, repeats this fact frequently, emphasizing the almost-Zionist nature of his culture. His people have struggled to recreate the experience of living in pre-colonial Africa, hunting game and farming dryland crops. Koriba himself has spearheaded the effort to reconstruct traditional Kikuyu religion.

The experience is deeply imperfect, however. The Kikuyu language is dead, so Koriba’s people speak Swahili, something Koriba, a trained classicist, finds distasteful. Lions and elephants are extinct, so the Kikuyu have populated their homeworld with as much African wildlife as possible; but without predators to stabilize populations, bottom-feeders quickly strain the ecosystem. Koriba must frequently use European technology to restore the balance.

Most important, Kirinyaga receives its license to operate from Maintenance, a bureaucratic institution that oversees terraformed planetoids. Maintenance means well, and seeks to ensure rights and autonomy for various populations. However, its primarily White membership has a frustrating tendency to enforce its own ideals upon license-holders, like the Kikuyu. Koriba balks at what he perceives, with some justification, as an extension of European colonialism.

Resnick was deeply conscious about the moral compromise inherent in himself, a White American, writing a story of African characters, using a Black African narrator. In interviews, he expressed his trepidations, yet admitted this was essentially a story of outsidership. His themes are not innately Africa, nor Black; beneath the surface, his story deals with themes about the balance between tradition and innovation, and how maintaining that balance can be deadly.

Mike Resnick

Koriba has a powerful ally in Koinnage, chief of the settlement. Between them, they represent the two authorities which govern traditional life: while Koriba tends to his people’s spiritual hungers, Koinnage handles the politics, and traffics with Maintenance. Both, however, face problems common to utopian thinkers throughout history. They have romantic ideals, often at odds with daily life. Both are European-educated, but trying to reconstruct African society.

And both are getting old.

This novel’s third principal character is Ndemi, Koriba’s student, whom Koriba hopes will eventually inherit his responsibilities. (Koriba failed to adopt a girl student, a tragedy which haunts him.) Ndemi was born on Kirinyaga, raised on Koriba’s African parables and Koinnage’s political ideals. As he approaches adulthood under Koriba’s tutelage, however, Ndemi discovers how compromise with European bureaucracy has tainted his people’s culture.

Because Koriba reflects the twin impulses of utopianism, themes which have colored utopian (and dystopian) literature throughout the last century. He has strong beliefs, and clings to them desperately. Koriba’s desire to preserve his people’s identity comes at great human cost, including, on occasion, innocent lives. His belief in capital-T Truth justifies him lying to his people and keeping Ndemi, his future heir, in the dark.

But strong beliefs don’t feed the utopian family. Little hardships make rank-and-file villagers, including Ndemi, question Koriba’s convictions. Couldn’t we make one little change, they ask, or adopt one European technology, to make village life less onerous? Koriba always refuses, believing that any change will make his people no longer Kikuyu. Tradition and morality have become, for him, their own ends. The people’s hunger is secondary at best.

Nearly a quarter-century after publication, it’s tempting to look backward and assume Mike Resnick considered himself a White Savior, writing about Africans’ concerns. But using that paradigm, I quickly realized: Koriba is Black, but he’s a White Savior himself. His traditionalist African beliefs are so ascendant, he’s incapable of understanding the harm he does by doing good. That, perhaps, was Resnick’s message. But he conveys that message so artfully, he never descends to preaching.

Playground Politics

A recurring character has started appearing in my blog essays recently, an anonymous phantom known only as “my co-worker.” This nameless entity keeps cropping up in discussions of recent events, a monster that, like No-Face in Spirited Away, gets its taint on everything it touches. I realized I’ve used the words “my co-worker” with liturgical consistency, but no context. Perhaps it’s time I acknowledge, to myself if nobody else, that this is only one guy.

One man, let’s call him Jack, keeps repeating racist stereotypes, Fox News talking points, and any stock justification for protecting the status quo. And I keep treating him like a hapless but misguided Everyman, whom I could potentially sway with facts and reason. But listening to him repeat shopworn stereotypes about Black people this week, I realized Jack was controlling the discussion, and everyone else was squelching their objections to avoid drawing his petulant ire.

And I realized where I’ve seen this behavior before: on elementary school playgrounds. Jack is, in the classic sense, a schoolyard bully. We all knew this kid: he says inflammatory things without justification, picks fights, and out-and-out lies, as tools to establish dominance. Because he knows nobody will take the initiative to stand up against him. Instead, we all acquiesce, because it’s easier to go along to get along. We simply prefer peace to honesty.

Unfortunately, if your childhood was anything like mine, you were well into adulthood before you realized the truth: nobody really liked this kid. Many people pretended to be this guy’s friend, because they thought they could avoid his wrath. Others, like me, tended to join counter-conformist cliques which had little in common, except opposition to the bully. These cliques, however, tended to dissipate quickly, when the bully tempted our leaders and most prominent members away.

Bullies, from grade-school playgrounds to capitalist offices, set the tone around them by being noisy, gregarious, and threatening. Those who earn bullies’ trust, however fleeting, get the feeling of insidership while the leader attacks anyone outside his circle. Everyone else lives in constant fear. Nobody particularly agrees with this kid; we just find ways to live with him. If everyone else found ways to ally with friends and colleagues, the bully would have nobody left.

We adults recognize the bully dynamic when watching children. Perhaps because kids lack subtlety, or because we have the older outsider’s perspective, the schoolyard bully tactic is easy to recognize. But we often miss that dynamic when it reproduces itself in adult groups, like workplaces, because the bully no longer threatens to punch weaker kids. He just mocks, shames, and humiliates people who disagree. He often does this through proxies, like dumping on poor minorities.

Realizing this about Jack, I also realized how influential the bullying mentality becomes in adult politics. Donald Trump is a classic bully: he molly-coddles those who stoke his ego, then when these allies show the slightest modicum of independent thought, turns on them violently. Consider how Omarosa, James Mattis, or John Bolton went from being trusted advisors to being called stupid, crazy, or untrustworthy, often within mere days. Exactly like the jerk on the swingset.

Most important, bullies successfully get people to act against their own self-preservation. Just like I watched bullies’ grade-school allies punch weaker kids to avoid getting punched themselves, or everyone nod about Jack’s anti-welfare rants to avoid his active and malicious scorn, allies acquiesce to Trump’s sudden, capricious shifts. Consider how quickly many American conservatives went, last week, from hating to embracing masks when Trump was photographed wearing one. It’s exactly the same schoolyard bully dynamic.

I’m not the first to notice that American politics has become captured by one personality, like one bully captures the playground. The Republican Party has effectively become the Donald Trump party, beholden to his whims, even when he contravenes longstanding conservative values. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, has become the big-tent party, expected to coast to a poorly contested victory on the back of anti-Trump sentiment. The opposition is unified by vague hatred of the bully.

Nor is this unique. Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsanaro, and Vladimir Putin, all threaten shame, humiliation, or in Putin’s case, death, upon those who disagree. Wealthy and powerful people, or in Jack’s case those who aspire to become wealthy and powerful, appease the bullies’ whims to remain among the inside circle. And it works, for a while. My workplace has become a microcosm of effective bullying tactics. But this only reflects our outside world today.

Capitalism, Communism, and the COVID-19 crisis

Slavoj Žižek, Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World

The pre-COVID condition is supremely unprepared to handle crises on the level of global pandemics. This statement seems entirely uncontroversial: everyone from rational capitalists to undergraduate revolutionaries agrees we need to change something to address the massive scale, unbound by national borders and economic theory. Exactly what change must occur, though, remains subject to high debate. And the virus continues spreading, while humans keep talking.

Anglo-Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek avoids the common trap of getting prescriptive, demanding innovations that look good on graph paper. Instead, he looks at what political leaders and economic drivers are doing right now to improve, or fail to improve, the situation. (In this case, “right now” means late April and early May of 2020.) Žižek finds plenty of reason to hope, but he acknowledges the accomplishments of this controversial season are still ours to lose.

Two threads alternate in Žižek’s accounting of the COVID-19 crisis. First, his fellow philosophers discuss the crisis in solemn tones, failing to agree on premises, much less meaningful solutions. Giorgio Agamben, for instance, thinks the crisis mentality creates a counter-revolutionary mentality that allows government power grabs by creating permanent emergencies. Benjamin Bratton thinks we mainly need a vocabulary shift, not a truly new paradigm.

Second, Žižek describes actions which powerful people and organizations have already undertaken, or talked about undertaking. These actions often correspond, he notes, with the Five Stages of Grief: including Denial, where national leaders dismiss the threat altogether; Anger, like the famous video of wrathful Italian mayors; and Depression, where communities and economic actors simply surrender to existential dread and paralysis. We haven’t, Žižek says, reached Acceptance yet.

Much of our problem, Žižek believes, stems from the radically individualistic responses we’ve seen to the issue. Demands that people wash their hands and wear masks, demands easily circumvented by petulant people, shift the burden for dealing with the crisis onto individuals while leaving dysfunctional systems intact. This toxin permeated our nations, Žižek says, because our institutions were unprepared. Unless our institutions evolve appropriately, nothing will ultimately get better.

Slavoj Žižek

A longstanding Marxist himself, Žižek claims we’ll only successfully address this crisis by adopting “a form of Communism.” He repeatedly stresses, however, that he doesn’t mean Twentieth Century capital-C Communism. State control in China handled the original Wuhan outbreak poorly, censoring the first whistleblower doctor and condemning him to die of his own disease. The Maoist desire to restore pre-crisis economics then pushed bureaucrats to falsify reports of supposed recovery.

Rather, Žižek believes we’ll need a small-C communist revolution, an outbreak of communitarian feeling and dedication to shared values of interdependence and confraternity. We must relinquish our principles of individualism (though not individuality) in favor of cooperation and collaboration, placing the common good above our personal acquisitiveness. We must stop believing we’ll personally get rich, and instead dedicate ourselves to lifting everybody up together. This is an excessively brief paraphrase.

For what it’s worth, Žižek’s precepts sound nice, but remain reliant on a centralized decision-making authority, which makes me squeamish. The massive technical complexity of post-human capitalism is totally dependent on so many moving parts that a very tiny interruption can destroy the whole mechanism. Žižek himself acknowledges this by comparing COVID to the Icelandic volcano that grounded the entire European airplane fleet: late capitalism makes us more vulnerable to nature, not less.

Writing about a world-shifting historical event, while that event is still occurring, creates possibilities for rift. Žižek describes the heights of COVID-19 as Italy being functionally shuttered, an event which seems impossibly distant now. He also cites evolutions in conservative capitalism, highlighted by President Trump moving to push the Defense Production Act to produce medical necessities like ventilators. Trump talked about doing this, but never actually did it.

We cannot help changing when faced with global scale catastrophe. As Žižek acknowledges, we can either amend our actions, with an increased reliance on cooperation, or stay the course, a choice which dooms part of society to death. Do we believe, he asks, that our choices can improve human circumstances? Or do we preserve economic continuity, at the cost of the defenseless among us? “But we not only have a choice,” he writes, “we are already making choices.”

Žižek sees the present as an opportunity. We can shed our illusions, embrace change, and thrive— though he admits he doesn’t know what that will look like. Or we can continue denying and bargaining, at vast human cost. Žižek remains guardedly optimistic. He just wants us to consider our options carefully.

The Happiness Thieves

As I write, it’s been nearly three weeks since I’ve seen anybody at work wearing a mask to prevent COVID spread. It’s been nearly two weeks since I’ve seen anybody even pretending to wear one: no chin warmers, no neck guards, no forehead shields. I was the first in my company to voluntarily start wearing a mask, before it was made mandatory. Last week, I became the last to quit wearing one, stuffing it into my pocket in resignation.

COVID has come amid an avalanche of news items, every one of which could’ve been prevented if important people treated others as equals. Protests against excessive police power continue, even if national media have stopped covering it. The remains of missing soldier and misconduct whistleblower Vanessa Guillen have been positively identified. China, whose extreme population density is perfect for breeding disease, is seeing outbreaks of swine flu and bubonic plague.

I say this happens because important people hold others in low regard, but they don’t do it alone. The extremes of authority, coupled with basic disdain for our common humanity, which we see demonstrated in leaders like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, are only possible because citizens keep supporting them. This relationship between people and power is cyclical; as each becomes more demonstratively bigoted and violent, it encourages the other.

Watching my fellow workers refuse to take the most basic precautions to prevent spread of a virulent disease, while also mouthing old racist slogans and Fox News one-liners about the inherent goodness of police, and continuing to wear hand-painted Trump 2020 banners on their hard hats, I can’t help wondering what’s going on. Is my industry really dominated by this kind of hatred toward others? And are they really representative of society as a whole?

A century ago, construction workers, alongside meatpackers and miners, were the backbone of the progressive movement. Workers like my colleagues banded together to fight injustice and defend a baseline standard of human dignity. This attitude persists in the belief I hear, from my co-workers, that if you want paid, you need to do a decent day’s work. Because contribution should be rewarded, though it often isn’t.

But, as economist Gar Alperovitz writes, Americans are notorious for kicking down the ladder we just ascended. My mostly White co-workers are deathly terrified that Black or Hispanic workers will receive the same protections they do, and they’d rather dismantle all safeguards than see others receive them, too. In America (and, somewhat, Britain), the workers most likely to require collective protection, are most likely to oppose state intervention in economics.

It’s like they’re afraid happiness is a finite resource. They seemingly believe that, if others do well and wax prosperous, it must come at the expense of their happiness. This attitude is certainly encouraged by right-wing media, including the talk radio that many subcontractors listen to all day. The fear of immigrants, of urban Black men, of lawlessness, all shares the same theme: they’re coming to steal your happiness.

Barraged by this message for years, my co-workers have internalized it. They see immigrants and asylum-seekers, not as dreamers coming to partake in the abundance of liberty we’ve created, but as chislers, coming to steal their jobs. They see government poverty protections, not as safeguards of basic dignity in history’s wealthiest nation, but as somebody wanting paid for doing nothing. Somebody is constantly trying to steal from you.

Importantly, that theft isn’t monetary. They’re okay with the upward drift of wealth, embodied by Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, and they repeatedly vote for candidates who promise to cut taxes on the obscenely rich. They believe, in keeping with standard Libertarian politics, that money isn’t a fixed quantity; if someone’s slice of the pie is oversized, that means the pie is getting bigger. So we needn’t protect baseline wages or stop the rich from hoarding.

No, they aren’t worried about anybody stealing their money; they worry that somebody’s stealing their happiness. That’s why they favor punitive policing and harsh sentences… on others. I’ve watched co-workers complain about getting stung for DUI, even while admitting the bust was legitimate, then swing, without irony, into insisting we need to bust crack dealers without trial, in the best Rodrigo Duterte style.

I see so many contributing factors that I have no simple solutions. Racism, economic insecurity, fear of change, even simple boredom. And the toxic sewer of COVID America gives it opportunities to boil; wearing masks becomes a visible symbol of happiness theft. I fear to say, things aren’t going to get better soon. Unless something stops the perceived happiness theft, conditions are likely to get worse.

You Know What They Say About the Road to Hell

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 106
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

We could probably have a broad bipartisan agreement that society today is plagued with systemic problems. Though we’d disagree what those problems are, we’d agree that they represent, not failures among individuals, but structural flaws with society itself. Why, then, do we have such difficulty actually fixing the situation? Why do grassroots attempts to repair these problems almost inevitably create more crises than they solve?

Yale educator James C. Scott didn’t intend to become a broad-ranging political scientist. He simply wanted to research why post-colonial governments in southeast Asia had such difficulty getting traditional nomadic peoples to settle in permanent, geographically rooted communities. But in conducting that research, he began discovering important resonances throughout history. He uncovered important structural patterns more or less by accident.

Political science maintains the illusion of “science” by quoting statistics and measuring improvements for general populations. But Scott finds that this science conceals a sweeping network of unquestioned prior assumptions, which even the scientists often cannot see. Which statistics, Scott asks, actually merit consideration? How can we separate meaningful measurements from background noise? Put another way, Scott admits, the scientific veneer of politics conceals a morass of unexamined value judgements.

Ancient European city centers, Scott writes, have subtle internal logic which reflects the people who first paved the streets. But that logic is based on what Scott calls “local knowledge,” and therefore is often impenetrable to governments and tax collectors. That’s why powerful autocrats like Napoleon III flattened and rebuilt their capitals along straight lines which are easily mapped, and centrally designed American cities, like Chicago, follow strict grid layouts.

Central governments disdain “local knowledge,” not because they consider it dangerous or unhelpful, but because it excludes the values they consider most important for ruling. Therefore they replace, say, measurement systems created by local gentry, with a Metric System which means something reliable everywhere in the realm. This makes levying taxes quick and easy. It also concentrates power in the hands of kings, or their successors, the bureaucracy.

Because Scott’s research background deals heavily with agriculture and agrarian societies, many of his lengthy, exhaustively researched examples draw from farming. Soviet attempts to collectivize agriculture, Scott shows, actually derive from “scientific” models devised in America, and the model Soviet farm was actually designed in a Chicago hotel room. The Soviet Union then exported their agricultural model, even as it became clear it was failing at home.

James C. Scott

Tanzanian ujamaa villages, an attempt to modernize farming and join East Africa to the booming global export market, looked perfect on paper. They also reflected both post-colonial capitalism, and Julius Nyerere’s Catholic values. Why, then, did traditional peoples leave the farms and resume their less-efficient ancestral practices so eagerly? The answer, Scott reveals, lies in “local knowledge”: the people understood the soil, plants, and water better than the government could.

Early on, Scott’s conclusions seemingly support Libertarian economics and a distrust of central government. He pointedly avoids implicating America directly for nearly 200 pages. (In the introduction, he admits excising an entire chapter about the TVA, claiming the book was overlong.) This possibly reflects the political milieu in which Scott writes, directly in the aftermath of the Cold War. Decentralized capitalism, with its distrust of state bureaucracy, appeared ascendent everywhere.

Late in the book, however, Scott’s focus takes a remarkable shift. He begins investigating how disastrous corporations have been for local communities, taking decision-making authority from local producers and concentrating it according to the disposition of money. Here, he still mainly, but not exclusively, focuses on agriculture. This results in denuded forests, strip-mined mountains, land sapped of nutrients and reduced to silt—and no one available to accept the blame.

Scott isn’t entirely averse to central planning and cooperative authority. He acknowledges that trade has made wealth and opportunities available to populations previously limited by geography. Planning has its perquisites. But it also eliminates incentives to respect the land and preserve communities, robbing future productivity for near-term balance sheet rewards. What central planners consider worth measuring reflects their values, and excludes factors which often prove priceless further down the line.

The situation is, of course, considerably more complex than that. Scott spills copious ink demonstrating the important trends of how powerful people, often motivated by benevolent goals, strip control from families, communities, and other sources of “local knowledge.” Importantly, Scott acknowledges, the result is not inevitable. Some central planners have done great good. But the seeds of abuse are always present, he shows, and somebody always seems to find them.