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.

Toxic Work Ethic in America, Part Two

This essay follows from Toxic Work Ethic in America, Part One.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk, currently likely to become America’s first trillionaire, has a conflicted history with his father, South African entrepreneur Errol Musk. Elon tries to deny Errol’s part-ownership of an emerald mine, for instance, but Errol calls that pure mythology. Even if Errol didn’t bankroll Elon’s earliest ventures, his wealth allowed Elon freedom to pursue an education, experiment with technology, and start several businesses in his early twenties.

If, as I said previously, people arrogant enough to become billionaires and presidents aren’t conditioned in childhood to be self-effacing, that doesn’t mean they’re unconditioned. And like me, their conditioning comes heavily from fathers. My father conditioned me, mainly by yelling, to maintain a self-destructive work ethic, pushing myself to the brink of collapse, then returning home too depleted to do housework. Elon’s father conditioned him to… well.

Like Elon, Errol was a serial entrepreneur, who also used his wealth to buy out enterprises that piqued his interest. Like Elon, Errol married a glamorous, accomplished wife, but seemingly paid her little attention, letting Maye Musk pursue her interests without support or awareness. Like Elon, Errol is sexually voracious: Elon has fourteen children by four women that we know about, while Errol had a child with his own stepdaughter.

Where my father taught me to deny myself and disappear entirely into my role as an employee, student, battalion member, or whatever, Errol Musk taught Elon to elevate himself, and his desires, over other people. Errol conditioned his son to be constantly self-seeking, always aware of ways he falls short or looks small. My father conditioned be to be self-abnegating, while Errol conditioned Elon to be self-centered.

I don’t know Elon’s full story, partly because Elon often contradicts himself regarding his biography. So I’ll draw an analogy. Joe Plumeri, former CEO of the Willis Group, opens his memoir by describing his father showing him the luxurious houses around his New Jersey hometown. Describing himself later as a “workaholic” who loves showing his father around his accomplishments, it becomes clear: Plumeri has spent his life appeasing his father.

Sigmund Freud

One could extend the comparison. Consider the American Presidents and presidential candidates who considered the Presidency their birthright: John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Harrison, George W. Bush. George H.W. Bush and Al Gore were both sons of senators. The Kennedy family exists. John McCain, whose father and grandfather were both four-star admirals, had his military career stall because of his POW status; he ran for President partly to outrank his ancestors.

Developmental psychologists describe human behavior as “highly conditioned.” In plain English, this means our past circumstances shape our present options. We cannot make a completely original decision, but rather see our opportunities defined by our life experiences. Many of the conditioning agents that shape our ability to see fall into two broad categories: standards we want to live up to, and mistakes we want to live down.

Again, for many of us, fathers (or father figures) shape our perceptions. My father taught me to see myself as part of a unit: whether a workplace, a classroom, or a military battalion, I needed to diminish. If I took an unscheduled break, yawned loudly, or even slowed down notably, my father volubly reminded me that I wasn’t just shirking my individual duties. I was letting the entire group down.

Meanwhile, billionaire fathers teach their sons to seek themselves. Sometimes this self-seeking is a doom spiral, as Cornelius Vanderbilt failed to teach his sons business acumen, and the Vanderbilt fortune eventually disappeared. Other times, this self-seeking accrues wealth and power. We can see this in how billionaires treat others: Elon’s multiple divorces and President Taco’s Epstein Island adventures show they see women as consumable resources, not people.

My military analogy recurs. Rank-and-file soldiers internalize an ethos of self-sacrifice, and learn to see heroic death as the ultimate virtue. And I do mean “learn”: cult expert Daniella Mestyanek Young writes that basic training doesn’t teach military skills, it teaches self-abnegation and the primacy of the unit. As a collective, the military survives by teaching its members that their individual lives aren’t worth saving.

Elon Musk claims to work 100 hours per week. This feels specious, since he also claims to be a world-class competitive videogame player, while recently tweeting nearly 100 times per day. But even if it’s true, Musk doesn’t work those soul-breaking hours because he’s disappeared into his job. Instead, he’s made his companies an instrument of his ego, something to inflate himself, though it will never leave him full.

Toxic Work Ethic in America, Part One

I sometimes literally hear my father’s voice when he isn’t there. Not in a jolly metaphorical way, either, but in a terrifying, often humiliating way. I first noticed this when I worked at a medical components factory during my hiatus between college and graduate school. If I slowed down, slacked off, or simply paused to chat with my co-workers, I heard my father shouting angrily, demanding to know why I wasn’t working until I bled.

Because of this terrifying voice which chased me throughout the workday, I moved faster, took shorter breaks, and got more done than people who had worked there far longer than me. Supervisors took notice, too. They often praised my work ethic, telling me that they wished they had an entire shift full of laborers as “dedicated” as me. Because they weren’t passengers in my head, as I was, they took my terror as committed professionalism.

Management often mistakes being “busy” with productivity. I noticed this often while working in construction: management would schedule marathon hours, especially in the final crunch. But management only deluded themselves. Fatigue, boredom, and resentment created new problems, while workers spent most of every morning ripping out the mistakes they made the previous evening, when they were tired. Team supervisors micromanaged workers’ every decision, because site superintendents micromanaged the supervisors. Everyone was tired all the time.

Literally every blue-collar job I’ve worked has faced some version of this. If food service workers find themselves caught up with tables, they’re given cleaning tasks to do, or refilling table caddies. I’ve worked in two car parts factories, where we were ordered to sweep and clean if the machines even briefly went down. Every moment is policed, every action judged, and companies demand constant maximum productivity; unscheduled pauses are justifications for reprimands, often stern.

Meanwhile, I’ve worked only two white-collar jobs, as a freshman composition teacher and a marketing copywriter. In both positions, I’ve been astounded by how much scheduled work time gets consumed by non-work activities. Chatting, dithering, side projects, day drinking, and even napping are anecdotally common. While hourly wage earners have their hours aggressively monitored for unsanctioned yawns, resulting in paranoid, often manic work, managers have so much discretion that they want for things to do.

My father spent most of his military career as a rank-and-file enlisted man. If you’ve ever spent time on a military installation, you know how aggressively the enlisted men’s time is regulated. Every barracks, parade ground, warship, and hangar is the epitome of cleanliness, with every plank sanded, hinge oiled, bolt painted, and floor scrubbed. Especially for unmarried recruits living on-post, twelve-hour workdays of constant, regulated motion are common, and labor outputs are closely quantified.

Simultaneously, a peer whose father was a career officer told me that officers cultivate the attitude of men of leisure. (We met in school off-post, because even officers’ and enlisted men’s children are discouraged from mingling.) Not that officers don’t work, because they too have pervasive regulations and readiness standards. Rather, they achieve their dictated goals at measured, deliberate speeds. Humans with autonomy, not checklists and rubrics, measure officers’ outputs. Rules are discretionary, not absolute.

This pattern applies broadly. Matt Taibbi wrote (before becoming a culture war spokesmodel) that every SNAP benefit applicant gets treated like incipient fraud, while almost nobody was held responsible for the 2008 financial collapse. Since then, we’ve seen how the only people indicted for the January 6^th, 2021, Capitol insurrection, were the foot soldiers at the door, and they got pardoned. Those who incited the crime not only got ignored, but they also got reelected.

America cultivates a socioeconomic narrative in which the poor, the laborer, the voter—the enlisted men of civilian society—hear their inadequacies repeated endlessly. Nor is this accidental. The wealthy and powerful—our officers—want us to suffer the constant loop of condemnation for even momentary weakness, like I heard, and sometimes still hear, my father. The psychological harm which this repetition causes individuals doesn’t matter, because to our “officers,” the outcome is “work ethic.”

But it also enables unbridgeable gaps in American social structure. This is why laborers seldom become management, classroom teachers rarely become administrators, and most citizens have little chance of getting elected to higher office. We numpties cannot lead because we’ve been conditioned to rehearse our inadequacies, real or imagined, constantly. Only those without that conditioning have the arrogance necessary to become presidents, billionaires, and other captains of society. “Work ethic” is the opposite of advancement.

This essay continues in Toxic Work Ethic in America, Part Two

In Search of Lost Adulthood

How do we define an adult? This question has surged in the last week, as Megyn Kelly defined fifteen-year-old girls as “barely legal” adults, mere days after online rumor-mongers redefined twenty-eight-year-old Rama Duwaji as a child. We saw this happen five years ago, when columnist Joseph Epstein called First Lady Dr. Jill Biden “kiddo,” just days after Donald Trump called his son Don Jr. “a good kid.” They were seventy and thirty-nine years old, respectively.

This problem recurs in America. Last month, J.D. Vance dismissed vile, racist comments from leading “Young Republicans,” ranging from their middle twenties to early forties, as “kids do stupid things.” But a decade ago, Connecticut schoolteacher David Olio lost his job for letting students read a sexually explicit poem in A.P. English, nominally a college-level course, because his students were “kids” and needed protection from adult sexual expression. Childhood excuses vast repressions in its defense.

Our society keeps moving the boundaries of adulthood further out. America has the world’s oldest legal drinking age, preventing youth from learning how to handle alcohol responsibly until they’re most of the way through college. An increasing number of upwardly mobile jobs require graduate degrees, keeping young adults from commencing their careers until they’re around thirty. The average first home purchase now happens around forty, keeping adults from building equity or developing rudimentary financial independence.

Every few years, Congress suggests adjusting the national retirement age. This probably makes sense to legislators, who are mostly lawyers and financiers, and can work as long as their brains remain active. But manual trades, like construction or manufacturing, erode your joints and tendons, so laborers get old faster than office workers. But for our purposes, keeping laborers working will prevent managers from retiring, keeping rank-and-file workers trapped in entry level positions for literal decades.

Perhaps worst of all, Western society overall no longer has clear adulthood rites. The rituals we Americans witness in travelogues like Roots are inspiring, and of course the mitzvah rituals of Judaism, and similar minority religions, still exist. But in the mainstream, ceremonies like baptism or marriage, or benchmarks like high school graduation, carry little weight anymore. With neither ritual nor financial independence, we no longer have any standards to objectively call someone an adult.

Because of these convergent forces, we see people performing the rituals of childhood well into physical maturity. Sometimes this influence is mainly turned inward. Incels and “masculinity influencers” like Andrew Tate perform peacocking displays of manhood that look like middle-grade boys flexing on the schoolyard. But we’re seeing more outward-facing, harmful displays, too: men like Bill Clinton and President Taco collecting sexual conquests like overgrown fraternity boys, leaving trails of scarred women in their wake.

Philosopher Alain Badiou writes that, in market-driven societies, men achieve adulthood by collecting the most toys. But as it now takes longer for youth to achieve financial independence, hoarding toys becomes prohibitively expensive. Therefore men adjust adulthood rituals to strength, dominion, and conquest. Who do they dominate and conquer? Women. Thus, as Badiou writes, men remain boys well into physical adulthood, while girls, to survive, become women at absurdly early ages. Just ask Megyn Kelly.

America’s shared definition of adulthood has become mushy and subjective because, in a society organized to protect capital, we turn humans into capital. Adulthood becomes contingent on economic productivity, freedom from parental support, and resources enough to have and raise children. Standards that many citizens don’t achieve until they’re approaching forty. To be enforceable, we need a standard age of majority: sixteen, or eighteen, or twenty-one. But for all practical purposes, these numbers mean nothing.

We’re witnessing a rare moment of bipartisan moral outrage over the continued lack of accountability for Jeffrey Epstein’s clients. And we should; very little encourages universal outrage as surely as child exploitation. But economic instability and job loss cause trauma as real as SA, if less visibly offensive. We’ve created a society where nearly everybody, in one way or another, is nursing the psychological scars of long-term trauma, and the people responsible suffer no consequences.

Within my lifetime, America has become a society comprised of traumatized children, trapped in cycles of learned helplessness, desperate for adult guidance. We only disagree about who, exactly, we consider a responsible adult. Does our society need a macho disciplinarian, a nurturing teacher, or some third option? Until we find a useful shared definition of adulthood, we’re all, in different ways, trapped at the level of dependent children, desperate for our lives to finally start.

Megyn Kelly, “Kidult” Culture, and Me

When I was fifteen years old, I fell deeply in love with my geometry teacher. Let’s call her “Ms. Shimizu.” In my recollection, she was tall, thirtyish, and resplendent with confidence and grace. I would’ve gladly let her teach me the rudiments of grown-up romance. Ms. Shimizu possessed wisdom enough to strategically ignore my fumbling teenage flirtation. But she spoke to me like an adult, teaching me the respect I should expect to give and receive as an adult.

I remembered Ms. Shimizu this week, when former Fox News ingenue Megyn Kelly delivered her cack-handed and obnoxious defense of grown men chasing teenage girls. Kelly’s claim of a categorical difference between prepubescent children, and adolescent teens, provides just enough rhetorical coverage to justify those who already believe that. But it does nothing to address the question of whether teenagers can provide informed consent to adult sex.

My teenage infatuation with Ms. Shimizu taught me two tentpole principles of my philosophy of consent. First, yes, adolescents are sexual beings, and censorious adult efforts to squelch teen sexuality have maladaptive consequences later in adulthood. But second, adolescents don’t have sex for the same reasons adults do. Teenagers have sex for the reason grade-schoolers run and jump and scream constantly: they’re learning to control their rapidly changing bodies.

This carries an important corollary: I can only imagine three reasons adults would pursue sexual relationships with teenagers. Either they’ve forgotten the different reasons adults and teens have sex; or they’re enacting their own arrested adolescent psychosexual development; or they’re simply bad people. Each of these reasons carries its own appropriate response: education, treatment, or punishment. But fabricating excuses, as Kelly did, only makes other adults complicit.

Mass media in the last twenty-five years exacerbates this tendency. (Maybe longer, but that’s when I noticed it.) Prime-time dramas like The O.C., Gossip Girl, or Pretty Little Liars feature sexually precocious “kidults” who often pursue relationships with surrounding adults, including teachers. I still cringe at Veronica Mars, whose teenage protagonist dated an adult cop. Though targeted at teenaged and twenty-something audiences, these shows have significant adult viewership.

These are mass media caricatures, sure, but as our economy allows adults fewer opportunities to make friends their own age, it’s easy to forget the distinction. Age-inappropriate relationships reflect a common adolescent desire: many of us thought ourselves unfairly circumscribed by social standards. And many of us wanted an adult mentor to teach us the ways of adulthood, skipping the fumbling experimentation we needed to understand ourselves.

If the phrase “DNA evidence” took human form, it might look like these guys

Furthermore, these shows distort adult perceptions of what teenagers even are. Labor laws and the vicissitudes of puberty make real teenagers difficult to work with, so most mass media teenagers are played by actors in their twenties. Except for parents or working teachers, most adults have limited opportunities to even see teenagers regularly, and as we drift further from our own teens—when we considered ourselves very mature—we think TV teens are realistic.

Our society produces two equally deleterious responses to adolescent sexuality. Conservative parents advocate for “purity culture” and abstinence-only sex education. These movements keep teenagers swaddled in childhood innocence for years, then dump them on adulthood’s doorstep catastrophically unprepared. More progressive parents take a permissive hand, if not outright encouraging adolescent sexuality, at least providing insufficient adult guidance for making good choices.

Then there’s the third option. Jeffrey Epstein is perhaps an extreme example of adult exploitation, an attempt to commodify teenagers’ sexual inexperience. But almost every teenage girl, and no small fraction of teenage boys, has the experience of being propositioned by adults who see adolescents’ bodies as something to consume. When youths are mature enough to have sex, but not experienced enough to understand sex, they exist in a precarious balance.

Bill Clinton and President Taco may be extreme examples, insulated from consequences for years by power and money. But even before the Epstein revelations, both men were famed for their voracious sexual appetites, both seeing women not as fully developed humans, but as vessels for male gratification. Both men, born to absentee fathers, pursued wealth, power, and the attendant sexual attention, as shields to protect the festering wounds in their souls.

All this is to say, I understand Megyn Kelly’s intent; but she’s still wrong. It’s possible to acknowledge teenagers as sexual beings, and respect their arc of self-discovery, without throwing them to the ravening appetites of dangerous or damaged adults. If we don’t provide the guidance and defense they need, then we’ve failed an entire generation.

On a related topic: Are Age Gaps the New Scarlet Letter?

Rich Men and Their Misshapen Brains

Elon Musk

Watching the eagerness with which American billionaires have rushed to pay obeisance to President-Elect Donald Trump has been a real education. Not in the sense of realizing that America’s rich are venal—that’s hardly news. But the haste they show in showering Trump’s planned inauguration with money and other resources speaks volumes to what these men want. They’re pouring million-dollar investments into an inauguration that threatens to become a coronation.

I’ve often wondered what makes men (and it’s indeed mostly men) want that kind of money. Oligarchs like Zuckerberg, Musk, and Bezos have more money than they can possibly spend. And more than money: as Giblin and Doctorow write, half of Earth’s online advertising revenue flows through two companies, Alphabet (Google) and Meta (Facebook). Half of Earth’s online commercial transactions move, directly or indirectly, through Amazon or an affiliated company.

In other words, these monumentally rich oligarchs, some of whom command wealth exceeding the GDP of entire nations of the Global South, have not only money, but enough power to make medieval potentates blush. These financial superstars have become so powerful that, like real stars, their very presence bends time, space, and the value of a buck. Yet they pay homage to the political candidate who promises them ever more.

They cannot spend that kind of money. It cannot buy them any more comfort or security than they already have. Indeed, they need to employ cadres of guards, managers, and other functionaries to protect their wealth, making holding the money a financial burden on their bottom line. Paradoxically, having such money and power makes them poorer and more vulnerable. Therefore they must want something else, something non-monetary, from their investments.

Mark Zuckerberg

My mind returns to two prior authors I’ve reviewed. Hungarian-Canadian physician Gabor Maté writes that substance abuse patients choose their various addictions according to whatever traumas they suffered in childhood. Children who endured chronic physical abuse, become adults who abuse painkillers like alcohol. Maté writes that one heroin addict described the feeling of shooting up as receiving the warm hugs she never received as a child.

Business executive Joe Plumeri describes himself as a “workaholic,” whose social worth derives from his time spent working. In his memoir, Plumeri describes not only putting himself through punishing hours, but demanding his subordinates do likewise, sacrificing personal time, family, and sleep in favor of making money. Though a billionaire himself, Plumeri clocks less than one percent of Elon Musk’s wealth, too little to crack the Forbes 400 list.

The two most prominent relationships in Plumeri’s memoir are his father, and his son. In an early chapter, Plumeri describes his father showing him around the better-off neighborhoods of Trenton, New Jersey, showcasing the splendor available to those who achieve worldly success. By his own admission, Plumeri put everything else behind achieving the worldly success that, he learned early, would make his father proud.

That “everything” includes Plumeri’s relationship with his eldest son, whom Plumeri describes struggling with alcohol and drugs. Christian Plumeri destroyed himself on substances, seeking the validation and happiness that his distant, workaholic father couldn’t provide. Notably, he completely fails to notice the parallels between his own work addiction, and his son’s substance addiction. Both Plumeris wanted their father’s love, and couldn’t do enough to earn it.

Jeff Bezos

One wonders, reading these accounts, what comparable relationships men like Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos lack. Musk seeks extremes of wealth and political power, arguably to find the acceptance and love he increasingly doesn’t receive from his numerous children and ex-wives. Other billionaires hoard land, build spacecraft, and otherwise perform spectacles to receive adulation from shareholders and the public.

Because deep down, I propose, they’re lonely.

These men started off rich: Zuckerberg was a Harvard legacy admission. Bezos received seed capital from his parents. Musk has tried to bury the emerald mine story, but his own family confirms it. Given the crazed, excessive lengths they’ve travelled to become even richer, it seems likely that they, like Plumeri, inherited the myth of personal worth having a dollar value. They hoard resources because, basically, they need a hug.

Consider all they acclaim they’d receive by dedicating even a portion of their wealth to improving society. They have money enough to end famine, conquer homelessness, or halt global climate change. Instead, they’re donating millions to Donald Trump’s inaugural extravaganza. Because despite everything, their brains are already adapted to loneliness, rejection, and isolation. They’ll never make friends like ordinary humans.

And that’s why peons like me will never become rich.

What Forgiveness Is, What Forgiveness Is Not

Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

Forgiveness is one of the most necessary, and one of the most difficult, aspects of the Christian experience. When neighbors, enemies, and earthly powers affront us, the Gospel calls us to forgive generously; but our human impulse is to nurse grudges and seek vindication. Essayist Lysa TerKeurst found this in her personal life, when her husband’s infidelity nearly imploded her marriage. So she went in search of what the Bible actually says about granting forgiveness.

I find myself divided about TerKeurst’s findings. Her conclusions are biblically sound, extensively sourced, and balanced by personal experience. She found that, whenever she couldn’t bring herself to forgive, her resentments turned malignant, wounding her far beyond the original transgressions she suffered. When she opened herself to the experience of Christlike forgiveness, she didn’t need to excuse the harm done, or compromise her boundaries. She just stopped carrying her old resentments around in her pockets.

However, I quickly noticed several elements missing from TerKeurst’s exegesis. For starters, though she describes insights she gleaned from her therapist, she cites nothing from science, and little from any extra-biblical sources. She name-drops St. Augustine, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Spurgeon in the text, hardly rigorous scientific sources. Her insights come mostly from personal anecdotes, and her text reads more like a memoir than therapeutic guidance. She assumes you can learn from her personal journey.

I also noticed the near-complete absence of one word from TerKeurst’s text: “repentance.” I don’t recall that word appearing until an appendix. Christians must frequently forgive someone who hasn’t repented or sought to amend their transgressions, because it’s more important to stop carrying that stone ourselves. But I’ve frequently observed that powerful people demand forgiveness before they’ve demonstrated a whit of repentance, placing the burden of transgression on the one wronged, and excusing the transgressor.

We’ve seen this recently in churches. Floods of accusations, not only against religious leaders who have socially or sexually abused their parishioners, but also against church institutions that papered over the abuse, have revealed decades of unhealed trauma. Insurrectionists bearing Christian insignia besieged the American government, then urged voters and legislators to “just move on.” Forgiveness has become an obligation the powerful impose on the masses, not a gift freely given to us by Christ.

Lysa TerKeurst

TerKeurst’s larger text contains important pointers and tools to enact forgiveness in our lives. Again, she roots these insights on her personal experience rather than larger psychological research, but pause on that. Her suggestion to, for instance, begin the forgiveness process by writing down the original transgression, and its long-term impact. After reading TerKeurst’s direction, I applied this exercise myself. I found that crystallizing the hurt into words makes it manageable, not vast and insuperable.

She also expounds about what forgiveness is not. Though TerKeurst accepted the struggle to reconcile with her husband, reconciliation isn’t an obligatory component of forgiveness. Sometimes Christians must unburden ourselves of others’ transgressions, but that doesn’t mean allowing those who hurt us back into our lives unconditionally. There’s a wide gulf between forgiveness, and being a doormat. TerKeurst dedicates an entire chapter to creating and enforcing boundaries to ensure the offender doesn’t hurt us again.

Perhaps the greatest shortcoming in TerKeurst’s reasoning reveals itself in one fact: after this book shipped, her husband returned to old habits, and she reluctantly admitted her marriage was over. I don’t say this to gloat. Rather, I want to emphasize the White Protestant fondness for forgiveness, separate from repentance, has consequences. God is loving and merciful, but God is also just, and Christians who elide the need for repentance miss part of the journey.

In the New Testament, the Greek word metanoia is variously translated as both “repentance” and “conversion.” In either case, metanoia signifies a transformation of mind, a complete reorientation of outlook in service of a renewed life. Metanoia doesn’t happen instantaneously, and it isn’t something someone professes verbally. Rather, repentance makes itself known in a life realigned to serve higher goals. Apologizing and accepting responsibility are good first steps, but repentance comes in a reorganized life.

Don’t misunderstand me. Though TerKeurst purposes to write a self-help book, she actually gives us a good memoir of spiritual struggle, one which yields valuable insights, even if—we now know—her struggle wasn’t complete. If we read it that way, we have plenty to learn from her experiences. But one of the necessary lessons is that forgiveness without repentance creates a downward spiritual spiral. Don’t carry burdens unnecessarily, but don’t rush to forgiveness either.

I Can’t Trust Americans Anymore

Vice President Kamala Harris approaches the podium for her concession speech, 11/6/2024

The Associated Press called the 2024 Presidential election for Donald Trump at 3:30 a.m. where I live, and I’m ashamed to say I was awake for it. And this time, he won without the asterisk that followed his name in 2016: he became the first President Elect to win with a simple majority since Barack Obama, and only the second Republican to win outright since George H.W. Bush in 1988. A majority of Americans who could be arsed to vote, voted for this friggin’ guy.

This means that 71 million Americans (as I write) watched him promise to make it harder to be Black, Brown, gay, disabled, a woman, or a dissident, and decided they wanted that. They heard him promise to use the military to purge citizens he considered disloyal, and considered it acceptable. They heard him threaten to shoot members of his own party in the face, and said “Okay.” They watched him fellate a microphone before a mixed-age crowd, and bought what he was selling.

Edit: in light of new evidence, it appears that Trump did not win an outright majority. Though he came first in the popular vote, continuing counts indicate that he fell short of the 50% threshold.

Even beyond the policies he’s promised to enact, policies which are already costing lives, his comportment in public should be disqualifying. His revolting language about women, minorities, and nonconformists basically means that he’s expressed hatred toward someone you know, possibly someone you love. And tens of millions of Americans considered that acceptable, handing him the nuclear codes. Nothing he’s done in public dissuaded American voters.

Laying aside the question of whether he will, or even could, do everything he’s promised to do, I’m left staring at my fellow Americans, wondering what possessed us to accept this. Because he received a simple majority, a relative rarity in Presidential politics, that means that over half of voters willingly put their names behind Trump’s actions. Shielded by the anonymity of the ballot box, they gave their endorsement to everything he’s done and said for nine years.

In light of this endorsement, I’m forced to ask myself: how can I trust anyone I meet again? When meeting an adult American now, I’ll forever remain conscious that there’s a better-than-even chance this person voted for Donald Trump. Forevermore, I’ll shake hands with potential employers, contractors, landlords, new friends, dates, and ask myself: did this person vote to force my gay friends into conversion therapy? To kick my disabled friends off the payroll?

To grant the police qualified immunity in shooting my Black friends?

Okay, in fairness, not everybody will have equal odds in this sweepstakes. We know, for instance, that men were more likely to support Trump than women. We know that White people, including White women, supported Trump by wide margins. This only increases my tendency, growing since my middle twenties, to reflexively distrust White men. And I say this as a White man, that I belong to perhaps the least trustworthy demographic in America today.

Exit polls have shown several demographic breakdowns, though readers should handle such results cautiously, considering how many voters openly distrust media and pollsters. Age, race, sex, peak educational achievement, population density, and economic class played into it. Broadly stated, the older, whiter, more rural, and less financially certain someone was, the more likely they’d support Trump, and his anger-based campaign pledges.

Again, I’m incriminating myself. Among the demographic divisions that increase one’s likelihood to support Trump, I belong to most. This means I’m arguing against my own interest here. I could easily lapse into tranquility, go with the flow like a dead fish, and do okay with the upcoming administration. People who look like me probably won’t face federal pushback, if I placidly participate. Only my willingness to oppose puts me at meaningful risk.

But from that privileged position, I regard my protected status as a responsibility, not a cocoon. Too many of my fellow pasty-faced honky dudes see their position as something which needs defended, a bastion against constant attack by barbarian hordes who want our creature comforts. Given the opportunity to use our gifts to improve the world for everyone, White men have chosen to retrench ourselves, and live in a state of constant paranoia. And it shows.

I’ve read Robert O. Paxton and Timothy Snyder. Within the sloppy, vague boundaries of small-F fascism, Donald Trump meets the definition. And, as a fascist, Trump has accomplished something neither Mussolini nor Hitler accomplished: he won a straight majority. We American voters, mostly White, mostly male, and disproportionately Christian, have thrown our support behind a fascist in ways completely unprecedented. No matter what happens, we won’t walk this back easily.

Large-Group Dynamics and the Lonely Child

Nobody actually likes the popular kids in high school. You wouldn’t know that from the deference they receive, from peers and teachers alike. Yet several years ago, reading Dr. Ellen Hendriksen, the author delved into several studies in how people make friends—and the outcomes were surprising, and frequently ugly. Our social structure relies on principles which we frequently can’t see or understand.

Quoting a 1998 study by Dr. Jennifer Parkhurst et al., Hendriksen writes that Parkhurst studied high school social dynamics, a popular field in social psychology. They concluded that popular kids are well-liked, amiable, and natural leaders. But Parkhurst took the unusual step of reading her outcomes to the students she’d studied. To her astonishment, one of her subjects stood up and said (I’m paraphrasing): “Nuh-uh!”

One of Parkhurst’s student subjects, supported by others, reported that peers often widely dislike, even despise, the “popular” kids. They achieve popularity by dominating others, waving their weight and social connections around, and behaving in an entitled manner. Parkhurst, astounded by the outcomes (and probably suffering her own flashbacks to adolescence), reevaluated the data. Turns out, people obey popular kids mostly out of fear and fatigue.

Growing up in a military household, my family moved frequently. Many military brats say likewise, but my father served in the Coast Guard, which mostly operates domestically, and therefore can afford to move personnel more frequently than other branches. Only once did we stay anywhere longer than two years. This proved particularly frustrating because, I now realize, most schools have an unofficial hazing process usually lasting a year.

Without the long-term longitudinal experience that comes from staying in one place for long, I truly never learned to read group dynamics in large populations. If Hendriksen hadn’t reprinted Parkhurst’s findings, translated into vernacular English, I might’ve persisted in believing that I received that hazing alone, unaware that everyone else experienced it too. I certainly would’ve remained mired in the delusion that the popular kids spoke for everyone.

(I know others, like migrant farmworkers’ kids, undoubtedly have it worse. I’m not comparing scars here.)

Put another way, I legitimately believed, not only throughout childhood but well into adulthood, that the loudest, most attention-hungry person in the room spoke for everyone. Presumably we all experience that phase, including that person. You presumably watched Mean Girls too. The persons demanding others’ attention and obedience legitimately believe they’re shepherding the crowd where it wants to go, simply keeping stragglers in line.

Something which former gymnast turned lawyer Rachael Denhollander said recently stuck with me. Speaking in the documentary For Our Daughters, Denhollander said: “It costs you something to side with the weak and the vulnerable and the oppressed. It costs you nothing to side with the one who’s in power.” Denhollander meant this about women and girls sexually abused in church, but it applies, mutatis mutandis, to all relationships with power.

For most children, public schools are our first interaction with organized power. Teachers have nigh-absolute power over their students, and I believe most wield that power with benevolent intentions. But as with most powerful people, there’s a gulf between intention and act. Whether they bend to a malicious minority, or go along with administrative dictates to get along, the outcome is largely similar for students, inexperienced at resisting injustice.

Popular kids and “mean girls” basically reproduce the regimes they witness, filtered through children’s eyes. They misunderstand the larger purposes behind adult authority; they only witness the demand for obedience and conformity, and repeat it. Meanwhile, adults don’t think like children, and attribute adult reasoning to childlike behavior. Both the popular kids and the subject-blind adults side with the powerful, which costs them nothing.

Kids could, hypothetically, organize against the popular kids and the adults who enable them. Indeed, something Malcolm Gladwell wrote recently stands out, that subgroups like Goths resist by making themselves look unapproachable, thus exempting themselves from popularity dynamics. But the outcasts shepherded by the cool kids, almost by definition, lack the leadership and organizational skills to unionize and form more healthy social dynamics. They’re doomed to struggle.

My father timed his retirement to coincide with my high school graduation, whereupon the family relocated one last time, to their hometown. This dumped me into adult responsibilities with no existing social network to streamline the transition. I hope other “nerds” and outcasts at least preserved their nominal support systems, because to this day, I struggle to read rooms. No wonder so many adults still have nightmares about high school.

I Don’t Like How Pessimistic I’ve Become

Scarcely had the dust settled following last week’s shooting at Apalachee High School, in Barrow County, Georgia, before the speculations started—most of it predictable. It’s the ubiquity of guns in America! It’s the lack of access to mental health care! Is the shooter trans, queer, or otherwise marginalized? Batten the hatches, kids, a massive political shitstorm is a-brewin’!

Little information is forthcoming about the shooter’s motivations. We know he’s fourteen years old,* that his parents purchased the firearm he used, and that, in an unusual maneuver, authorities have charged his parents as equally culpable for the catastrophe. The swirling accusations about overwhelming cultural trends might speak to whatever motivated the shooter, but for now, verifiable facts remain scarce.

This violence comes amid perhaps the most acrimonious election season America has seen, outdoing the previous most acrimonious election cycle, which was the last one… and the one before that. Apocalyptic rhetoric on both sides has become de rigeur in Presidential campaigns. America’s economy is supposedly thriving, but doesn’t feel productive for most Americans, since only the rich reap rewards.

As usual amid such apocalyptic circumstances, ordinary people try to reclaim the supposed lost grandeur of the past, while ignoring planning for the future. One Presidential candidate promises to “make America great again,” while the other yearns for the New Deal unitary order. Exactly when this greatness occurred remains vague, since the New Deal was as organizationally racist as the lily-white simplicity of Leave It To Beaver.

Meanwhile, hucksters remind every demographic that they can reclaim lost meaning… for cash on the barrelhead. “Men used to go to war,” laments the recurrent meme, “and now they [insert ordinary thing people do for fun].” Alpha male influencers like Andrew Tate and Alex Jones offer classes, nutritional supplements, and private guidance to become a dominant he-man. Dave Ramsey promises that Jeus wants to make you rich.

Since Andrew Tate is currently awaiting trial for sexual assault and human trafficking, we know what, in his mind, constitutes male strength. Anybody who’s worked the Sunday lunch rush at most restaurants knows that outspoken Christians can’t be trusted with money. Then, while men teach other men to abuse women, and Christians teach other Christians to hate workers, the rich think they can outspend the Grim Reaper.

Karl Marx believed that industrial capitalism would empower the working poor to develop class consciousness and overthrow their economic overlords. That maybe seemed reasonable amid the Dark Satanic Mills of pre-Victorian England, when labor actions frequently ascended into armed confrontations with literal liveried royal soldiers. To Marx, it probably seemed inevitable that what he called “alienation” would soon be universal.

It is, yes, but not as he envisioned. As the agrarian ideal recedes in memory, and factories, coal mines, and shopping malls seem inevitable, labor actions have stopped resisting the employer; workers instead defend their way of life, the system that keeps them permanently impoverished, and the bosses and billionaires who loot the masses for money. Because industrialism seems inevitable, the poor stan shamelessly for the rich.

This maybe explains trends we’ve all witnessed. It seems straightforward to me, that billionaires and resource hoarders keep the White working class impoverished, but White workers turn their rage on Black and Brown people and immigrants. Women certainly aren’t sending men to war or to the salt mines—most hyper-rich are men too—yet men pummel women, literally or figuratively, to reclaim their masculinity.

Barrow County, Georgia, is mostly White and relatively middle class. Like many similar regions, however, it’s seen its racial demographics become more diverse, and its average income stagnate, for the last quarter century. As usually happens, the economic powers use this changing population to chisel huge concessions, which means all economic gains, insofar as there are any, will trickle up.

The Apalachee High School shooter, like millions in his generation, watched the future he and his family were promised shrivel to almost nothing. Like millions of others, he looked directly at the entrenched powers making his old world look inevitable, and who now stand bathd in the economic carnage they wreaked upon the community. And like always, he blamed the poor for his plight.

Until Americans demonstrate enough imagination to realize that another world is possible, this violence will repeat itself in America’s schools, centers of commerce, and public spaces. These are the places where the world inside our minds has become small, circumscribed by our economic conditions. Mass gun removals, besides being impractical, won’t change the underlying mindset.

*Per my standard practice, I will not say the shooter's name, lest I contribute to his unearned notoriety.

Introduction to the Psychology of Doing

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 119
Victor E. Frankl, Man's Search For Meaning

Austrian psychologist Victor Emil Frankl spent three years in German concentration camps, mostly Dachau. His survival sometimes depended, by his own admission, on blind luck and circumstance. But he also witnessed something perplexing: some people survived, while others surrendered, dying long before the Gestapo executed them. What made some people persevere, and others die before they died?

Frankl divides this volume into three sections. The first is his memoir of the labor camps, a single exhaustive narrative undivided into chapters or other smaller, more digestible segments. Like Frankl, we must consume the experience without guidance, an exercise in existential absurdity. Frankl quotes generously from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, emphasizing that survival comes from meaning, and meaning comes from one’s interior mental landscape, not from outside.

The second section provides a plain-language introduction to “logotherapy,” Frankl’s version of psychotherapy. Opposed to fellow Viennese psychologist Sigmund Freud, who believed healing came from resolving past conflicts, Frankl finds healing in the future, in giving patients something to live for, something to work toward. Frankl believes meaning doesn’t exist objectively, within either the world or the self, but is something people make, sometimes at great cost.

His third, and shortest, section is a lecture revising and updating his therapeutic approach with new discoveries made in the 1970s and early 1980s.

According to Frankl, humans find meaning, and therefore something to live for, when they see something to strive after in the world. For him, this means either work or relationships. (I say “relationships” where Frankl says “love,” but a century of pop songs has tainted that word.) Meaning comes not from some list of principles, but from the work we do and the people we care about. This, for Frankl, is highly existentialist, in the Kierkegaardian sense.

Thus Frankl’s philosophy harbors a contradiction. We create meaning internally, but we create it outside ourselves, in our actions and relationships. Viewed another way, meaning is necessary, but it doesn’t objectively exist; it dwells in the realm of Platonic ideals. Though Frankl isn’t hostile to religion (and was, by reports, an observant but private Jew), his philosophy doesn’t require subsuming oneself into an external God. Meaning is, and isn’t, in the material world..

Victor E. Frankl

Calling this “philosophy” isn’t accidental. Frankl utilizes the scope of Western philosophy, but through a medical scientist’s eyes. Though his autobiographical section describes how he tested and defined his philosophy in the violent laboratory of Dachau, his therapeutic section contains practical applications, mostly questions for patients to ponder. Frankl doesn’t demand a closed loop, but neither does he require every student to reinvent philosophy, as Plato does.

Perhaps most importantly, his philosophy steers us away from abstractions and buzzwords. We don’t find happiness by seeking happiness, Frankl writes, nor do we find healing by seeking healing. Rather, we find both by seeking something that gives our lives definition; happiness and healing are ancillary benefits of meaning. And again, meaning comes either from doing productive work, or pursuing nurturing relationships.

The points Frankl makes in technical terms in his second section, he demonstrates in practice in his first section. He survived the labor camps because he had a wife waiting and research to complete. (His wife died in another camp, but he didn’t know that for years.) Others survived because they had art to create, children to raise, or houses to build. Those who survived believed they had something waiting outside, and strove to remain connected with it.

Admittedly, Frankl’s narrative has garnered criticism. Historians dispute his labor camp memoir as somewhat fictionalized, as though no autobiographer ever streamlined events for clarity and readability. More fair are criticisms directed at specific details. Frankl repeatedly describes Auschwitz as though he faced extended internment there, though it was merely a layover; he mostly stayed at Dachau. This is slovenly and misleading, but doesn’t undo his message.

More important is the contrast between internal psychological meaning, and external nihilism. From King Solomon to Jean-Paul Sartre, thinkers have agreed that this world is chaotic, violent, and antithetical to human wellbeing. Yet like those thinkers, Frankl agrees we have control over only our own responses. We must at accordingly.

Victor Frankl wrote multiple volumes on the process of finding and making meaning. But this brief, plain-language book contains probably the most accessible and most widely read introduction for non-psychologists. He proffers a useful guide for finding meaning in a world suffused with despair. Only in seeking meaning through work or relationship, he contends, do we find happiness and healing within ourselves.

Netflix Presents: the New, Improved Jimmy Carr!

Jimmy Carr in his newest special, Natural Born Killer (Netflix photo)

Content warning: this essay will directly address the vulgar, transgressive, and sexually violent themes common to Jimmy Carr's stand-up comedy.

Jimmy Carr’s latest Netflix special, Natural Born Killer, features an extended riff on the fatuousness of the phrase “date rape.” He suggests that the qualifying prefix is a nicey-poo addition that makes the crime less horrific, mainly for the perpetrator. This sounds particularly weird coming from Carr, whose content has often featured sexually transgressive themes. Carr’s stock character is a shitty, libidinous satyr. This is just the first time he’s felt compelled to justify himself.

I have a particular fondness for one-liner comics. Milton Jones, Jack Handey, Gary Delaney, Steven Wright. Jokers who don’t require lengthy contexts to understand their punchlines, they just zap us with abrupt reversals or insightful wordplay. Short, incisive jokes often reveal deeper truths. With Jimmy Carr in particular, whose routine involves teasing audiences’ bottom limit, his transgressive themes often reveal that his audience, no matter how jaded they think themselves, still has a bottom limit.

Carr loves jokes he knows defensive interests will hate. In past one-hour specials, he’s lobbed out what he calls “career-ending jokes”; this time, he boasts of his intent to get “cancelled.” Not for nothing, either, as his routine has involved jabs at the disabled, the Holocaust, religion, and women. He’s previously told rape jokes, and jokes which imply he’s a drug-addicted pedophile. The above-mentioned “date rape” diatribe comes only after delivering a trademarked rape one-liner.

To his credit, Carr’s transgressive jokes make himself the bad person, never the victim. Unlike, say, Louis CK, Carr doesn’t use his aggressive tone to garner audience sympathy or wallow in self-pity/; you’re supposed to hate his stage persona. But Carr has always played that persona with winking acknowledgment that, like us, he’s in on the joke. His character knows what an awful human being he is, and invites us to participate in the pile-on.

This time, Carr doesn’t do that. He delivers a lewd joke, then counters with an explicit explanation of why we shouldn’t find such content funny. Not just once, either: he breaks character multiple times, sometimes for several straight minutes, and culminates the performance riffing extensively on the importance of consent. As he lectures viewers why we shouldn’t have laughed at the joke he just delivered, we wonder: who is this guy wearing Jimmy Carr’s face?

Louis CK

Perhaps there’s an autobiographical reason for Carr’s reversal. He became a father for the first time in 2019, aged forty-seven. At approximately the halfway point of this performance, he includes a nearly three-minute narrative of how he feared his child’s premature birth might’ve blunted his edge. The story ends with him realizing he still had it, apparently deaf to the irony that a one-liner comedian just took nearly three minutes to establish one punch line!

I’m reminded of Jimmy Kimmel, another Jimmy famous for working blue who attempted to reinvent himself. Kimmel, previously co-host of the basic cable raunch-fest The Man Show, turned into an advocate for radical empathy when he transferred to broadcast TV, frequently turning weepy-eyed at expressions of injustice. His former co-host Adam Carolla, meanwhile, has become a Fox News and right-wing podcast staple, doubling down on his basic cable persona. Again, audiences seek the authentic Jimmy.

Please don’t misunderstand, I believe both Jimmys could have their secular “come-to-Jesus moment.” As a former basic White conservative myself, I know irreligious conversions happen. Yet Carr attempts to do double duty, delivering the transgressive joke before lecturing us on why our laughter makes us bad people. His fatherhood narrative ends with a coat-hanger abortion joke. His consent riff is him lecturing a young audience member on when it’s okay to “get your dick out.”

Because there’s definitely a place for such content. We laugh at Carr’s blue material because we recognize something of ourselves. No matter how enlightened or empathetic we’ve become, we possess the same vulgar, libidinous id; becoming an adult doesn’t mean we’ve defeated those tendencies, only that we’ve learned to conceal them in public. Carr is funny because when he delivers his raunchy content, he helps us compartmentalize that side, and leave it in the theater.

This time, I’m left confused. When I laugh at Carr’s blue material, then he lectures me directly on why his own content wasn’t actually funny, I wonder: have I changed? Or has he? Previously, Carr encouraged us to leave the unrestrained id with him, onstage. Now, he lectures us, and I feel compelled to conceal my laughter. I can’t relinquish my id, because I can’t admit I have one. So it comes home with me.

Twilight of the Global Bullies

In my childhood, I had a deeply conflicted relationship with bullying, as children do. Whenever confronted by bullies, the adults around me—parents, teachers, concerned outsiders—encouraged me to cultivate internal strength and resilience to remain unperturbed. But if my internal strength manifested as pushing back against bullies and asserting my own dominance, those same adults punished me. I was supposed to be strong, but not strong like that.

As an adult, I understand the difference. Child bullies appear strong in the moment, and children, lacking perspective, think the current moment will exist forever. Children haven’t seen swaggering, overstuffed bullies cross that invisible line and get smacked down. Adults realize bullying bluster always contains the seeds of its own destruction (though we frequently forget in contentious moments). Children only know that big Jimmy punched me and adults did nothing.

Children are fairly singular, notwithstanding their unique and diverse personalities. They perceive reality as eternally present, assuming that past and future essentially resemble now, with different set dressing. Not until early adolescence do children develop the ability to perceive change in the historical context, to understand that the domineering forces in their lives right now, including both adults and bullies, cannot possibly hold sway forever.

Such development isn’t inevitable, however. We all know adults who continue behaving like childhood bullies, and seemingly get rewarded for it. Workplace jerks whose infantile bluster ensures nobody likes them, but they get promoted anyway, because management knows who they are. Financiers who gambled with the stored value of customers’ homes, and imploded the economy in 2008. The IDF, currently bombing hospitals and neighborhoods in Gaza.

We now know, as children cannot possibly know, that empathy for other people’s suffering has a neural basis. As a bullied kid, I thought some people just learned empathy later in life, but no: empathy is a stage of brain development. People who see others emotions, good or bad, and remain unmoved, aren’t just unskilled or unlearned; they’re suffering a form of brain damage in their mirror neuron system.

Perhaps we see this most evidently in wealthy people. Readers of a certain age will recall the stories surrounding the Enron collapse, when we discovered that corporate executives literally celebrated their customers’ suffering. More recently, Elon Musk has aggressively acquired corporations, then demolished them, to settle personal grudges. Then there’s the watchword of modern far-right politics: “the cruelty is the point.”

These people, either wealthy themselves or desperate to ally themselves with wealthy idols, demonstrate incapacity to feel others’ pain. Like schoolyard bullies, they take pleasure at seeing poor people or smaller kids crying. This forces a necessary question: did they never learn to see other people, and their feelings, as equally real to their own? Or did they maim and scar their own brains to make such knowledge go away?

I’m guessing a little of both.

Few people achieve positions of power without some demonstrated will to ignore others’ feelings. No matter which party holds the White House, Number Ten, or other halls of power, the winners probably stepped on others’ necks to get there. George Dubya’s Global War on Terror, or Barack Obama’s targeted drone killing campaigns, are only the most globally visible manifestations. Winning power always necessarily entails lack of empathy.

However, the present offers a rare opportunity to change this dynamic. Only the most ridiculous political sophists can deny that the Netanyahu government’s campaign of terror in Gaza, or Vladimir Putin’s interminable war in Ukraine, demonstrate a failure of baseline empathy for others’ suffering. But the ripple effects of both conflicts have demonstrated the weakness of countervailing forces, like NATO, which pick and choose whom to defend from atrocities.

As governments immolate, as police forces prove themselves deaf to justice, and as capitalism flips like a pancake, I believe we’re witnessing an important moment. Not the collapse of the economy or the social structure, but the collapse of the man-children who have profited from the structure’s weaknesses. Centuries of domination by people demonstrating what we now know is brain damage, may perhaps end within our own lifetimes.

What if, rather than choosing our leaders by their ability to dominate debates, we chose them by their demonstrated ability to care? Seems far-fetched, admittedly, in a society that favors glib charisma and photogenic glamor. Yet if we organize ourselves, if we take time to determine what standards of empathy and accomplishment we consider worthy of reward, then why not? Our current self-seeking leaders have international egg on their faces.

But What If the Bible Doesn’t Say That?

Adam Hamilton, Half Truths: God Helps Those Who Help Themselves and Other Things the Bible Doesn't Say

We mainline Christians certainly love our platitudes. No matter what curveballs life throws, we inevitably have a ready-made cliché available. The problem is, we frequently think our preferred platitudes come from the Bible, which they most certainly don’t. Adam Hamilton, a United Methodist pastor from suburban Kansas City, collects five beloved platitudes which he believes impede Christians’ most direct experience of God, and God’s love.

Reverend Hamilton identifies the following five shopworn cliches, including several variations on their themes:

• “Everything Happens for a Reason”
• “God Helps Those Who Help Themselves”
• “God Won’t Give You More Than You Can Handle”
• “God Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It”
• “Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin”

These common expressions provide handy, nugget-sized servings of Christian layperson theology, which believers can deploy in nearly all circumstances. Each one, Reverend Hamilton admits, contains some amount of truth. As canned responses to life’s ever-changing happenstance, they’re broadly unsatisfying. Sometimes, things happen because they happen; or God’s word exists in context and doesn’t apply here; or we get so busy hating sins that we forget to love our neighbors.

Worse still, in Hamilton’s estimation: entirely too many Christians believe these bromides come from the Bible. He cites a Barna Group survey suggesting that as many as eight in ten Christians believe “God Helps Those Who Help Themselves” is biblical, which it isn’t. (I have a love-hate relationship with Barna research, but let’s accept it provisionally.) These clichés first substitute Man’s wisdom for God’s guidance, then elide the wisdom, leaving only cold comfort.

For instance, when telling hurting people that “God Won’t Give You More Than You Can Handle,” we attribute everything that happens to God’s will. That’s pretty horrific, if you consider what catastrophes ordinary people face daily. Reverend Hamilton directly disparages Calvinist predestination, with its presumption that God planned everything you face before Creation. Scripture promises God will provide us tools to withstand life’s calamities, but not that God either gives or limits those calamities.

With each platitude, Hamilton similarly unpacks their theological meaning, and the harm they perpetuate. He admits each one has some element of truth, but that isn’t enough. When we limit our truths to easily memorized bromides, we miss God’s mission, and Christ’s love. The listeners for whom we deploy these platitudes need something deeper, so in relying on simplistic sayings, we not only short-change God, we miss our audience’s needs.

Reverend Adam Hamilton

Hamilton writes for a Christian audience, one which already believes Christ’s message of comfort and salvation in an unjust world. He writes to offer Christians necessary tools to convey that comfort to those suffering—which may, often enough, be ourselves. Too often, we Christians become so comfortable in our salvation that we reduce others’ spiritual struggles to Sunday School simplicity. Reverend Hamilton encourages us to unpack life’s difficult, subtle aspects.

If Reverend Hamilton has one overriding theme, it’s “nuance.” He expresses frustration with these platitudes because they’re unsubtle, and prevent Christians from thinking deeply about life’s most important topics. The questions which most deserve our scrutiny, get papered over with sayings we probably learned from our grandparents. Hamilton invites us to recognize that while these sayings aren’t necessarily wrong, they also seldom meet our own or anybody else’s spiritual needs.

This book began as a sermon series at Hamilton’s suburban congregation, and it retains the simple, breezy tone common in Protestant homiletics. (The publisher offers supplementary materials for adult Bible studies.) Large type and wide line spacing conceal the fact that, though over 160 pages, this book is short, barely more than a pamphlet. Hamilton offers discussion starters, not deep dives into major theological questions. That’s all some people need.

Therefore, this book whets my appetite without satisfying it. People who read voluntarily, generally want something more detailed and contemplative. Adults participating in Bible study might or might not read Hamilton’s short chapters; in-class videos, and the resulting conversation, will be the study’s heart. Hamilton briefly introduces how poets, saints, and ministers have addressed these difficult questions, then walks away, providing neither in-depth analysis nor sources for further independent study.

Don’t misunderstand me; as an introductory survey, I enjoy Hamilton’s points, and hope more Christians take his advice to heart. This book is a great beginning. But Christian bookstores are stuffed with great beginnings on important questions. Reverent Hamilton raises important points and debunks Christian myths that prevent us showing God’s love wholeheartedly. I just hope Hamilton has a follow-up pending to go deeper into the themes he raises herein.

On a similar but not completely identical theme:
How To Give Real Advice, In Ten Easy Steps

The Business of Finding Enemies

Accused subway vigilante Daniel Penny
being escorted by police after his
arraignment last week in New York

Nearly three weeks after Marine Corps veteran Daniel Penny fatally choked homeless man Jordan Neely, nobody doubts who did the killing, or when. Bystanders captured the killing on cellphone video, and Penny admitted delivering the fatal chokehold to police. The only meaningful question is how to interpret what happened. Penny’s arraignment, and expected trial, turn on questions of when it’s acceptable for civilians to use terminal force.

Nobody disagrees that Jordan Neely behaved in a belligerent, intrusive way on that Manhattan subway platform on May 1st. After all, we have bystander video. Analysts disagree heartily, however, whether Daniel Penny responded proportionately. These same questions emerged last month after the wounding of Ralph Yarl, shot for ringing the wrong doorbell: does one civilian’s subjective feeling of threat justify fatal, or near-fatal, responses? Is fear a sufficient justification?

These questions matter. Following routine disasters, first responders face questions of exactly how to interpret ordinary civilians. As Rebecca Solnit writes, following Hurricane Katrina, police and National Guard reinforcement had to hastily interpret people’s intentions. Did fleeing New Orleanians constitute peaceful refugees, or an incipiently violent mob? Were individuals recovering survival supplies, or looting? Answers to these questions often determined who got shot.

Much American political rhetoric today involves how we interpret enemies, real or potential. Are transgender citizens simply ordinary people striving to live their truth, as their advocates claim, or incipient sexual predators, as opponents like Ron DeSantis claim? What about undocumented immigrants seeking asylum status: are they criminals needing punishment, 6or refugees needing help? Chances are, your answers to these questions coincides with your political party affiliation.

My personal response flashes back to elementary school. I remember hearing from authority figures early that my mere perception that somebody else intended to hit me, wasn’t sufficient justification for me to hit them first. Even after experiences with repeat bullies, I couldn’t claim self-defense until something violent actually happened. No, the principal admonished, not even if this bully hit me previously. Past outcomes weren’t predictors of future behavior.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in his
favorite pose: angrily lecturing the crowd

Admittedly, this resulted in awkward encounters, where literal bullies with demonstrated track records received essentially free rein to shout, threaten, and harass me. I remember the feeling of powerlessness this rendered. On multiple occasions, bullies loomed over me, threatened and shouted at me, even encircled and shoved me— and every time, adults repeated, I was responsible to de-escalate the situation, even at the cost of my own dignity.

So yes, I can imagine how powerless subway riders might’ve felt when Jordan Neely acted belligerently.

The obverse of this situation, though, is paradoxical: the few times I ignored adult advice and resisted my bullies, I didn’t feel more empowered. Answering force with force didn’t break the cycle. Instead, it reinforced a violent, helpless worldview, where vigilance often shaded into paranoia. Once I began identifying and preparing against enemies, I inevitably started seeing enemies everywhere. Like after Hurricane Katrina, my enemies were often racially coded.

Cyclical paranoia and preemptive violence might make sense to children, whose limited experience means they usually can’t see the longer view. Unfortunately, in today’s America, this shallow depth of field has become mandatory among many adults. Ron DeSantis has identified enemies among schoolteachers, drag performers, Black teens in hoodies, and the kitchen sink. Florida may be a cartoonish exaggeration, but it’s a microcosm of America today.

Conventional American politics has devolved into an exercise in identifying enemies. Republicans display this pronounced tendency more visibly, certainly. Enemy-baiting has become their brand. But Democrats occasionally bump into that paranoid tendency; remember the outcry about hip-hop in the 1990s, or sex in video games in the 2000s. Like me in elementary school, Democrats try to appease the opposition by acting tough, but descend into paranoia.

Because I, too, descended into vigilant paranoia, I have great sympathy with politicians like DeSantis, who identify enemies around every corner. It isn’t mere political posturing; once you start preparing for enemies, it becomes an all-encompassing worldview. Fortunately, adults and other authority figures around me saw it happening, and broke the cycle. Because that paranoia was really starting to take a psychological toll.

Tragically, today’s political sphere has no authority figures prepared to break the cycle; today’s authority figures are the cycle. Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, and Donald Trump desperately need a grown-up to intervene, but voters have granted them grown-up authority. Thus the paranoid feedback loop continues until citizens stop it. Voters need to step up and stop this paranoia, because if they don’t, the next stage is revolution.