Before we start: hey there, Thought Readers. It’s been a while. How’s it hanging? World seems great right now. Rest assured, though, that I have not abandoned you. I did move to a new city and start a new job and have to get a new computer (RIP my dear 2009 MBPro, you were a champ) and for some reason those things had a bit of an impact on my creative process. No idea why that would be. Anyway.
I’m planning on being back this year, exposing my Thoughts to the oxidizing light of screens. I have plenty of them hanging out in various states in my drafts, but finishing and polishing them up has been just too much of a bother for my poor delicate constitution. (If you want some behind the scenes reasons why, I will sum up by simply saying GIANT INTERNET CONGLOMERATIONS BAD and you are free to conclude from that what you will. Related note: you might want to subscribe to the email version if you aren’t already to keep seeing these. If you want to keep seeing these.)
I have also realized that one of my big sticking point for posting my thoughts is that I struggle with conclusions. Not wrapping the post up, I mean my brain is telling me that I need to find a way to conclude, as in, idk, a solution?? So here is the first New Year’s Resolution that I have made in maybe my entire life: I resolve to not feel like I have to first find The Solution to the problems that I start mulling over in order to post about them. There usually aren’t solutions, and that is the whole point, you know? So if my post seem messier and more open-ended going forward, well, welcome to an even closer facsimile of my brain I guess. I’ll probably also leave in more of my tangents that I used to edit out, so buckle up. Now on to the main event.
Humans love stories. Story is how we have made sense of life, since the dawn of humanity. The random chaos of an indifferent universe is too much for us to deal with, so we create stories to explain, to give meaning to our lived experiences. Stories also help us make sense of our internal lives. Our emotions are a different chaos than that of an indifferent universe, but they can be similarly overwhelming.
So what are the elements of story? A-number-one is character. Plot comes in at a distant second place, and trailing somewhere in the foggy middle distance of third place is setting. (Story nerds might yell at this point that I’m missing some major elements. Unfortunately, story nerds would be wrong, because those missing elements go under those three categories, COME AT ME NERDS. Conflict is character. Resolution is plot. Theme is literally just [just] the story, what are we doing here? You might want to think about those conceptually to write a story but that’s not what we’re talking about now. Nerds.) But wait, I hear you (non-nerds) say, isn’t story all about plot? Isn’t story The Things That Are Happening? No. If that was the case, history classes would be hot-ticket seats instead of nap time.
But if humans use story to explain the chaos of the universe, then isn’t that almost necessarily plot-driven? Isn’t that explaining The Things That Are Happening? The sun rises because a god drives his chariot across the sky, or because an eagle opens its wings. The world was birthed by the earth mother, or created from primordial mud brought up to the surface by a giant turtle. Look at all those plots. No. Wait. Reread those examples. Those are about the characters. The important part is Helios, is Atabey, is Kisosen: the important part is the character. Story comes in as the how the characters react to circumstances; the circumstances are not the important part. Story is the because.
In story, generally, ideally, there is a narrative structure, which ends with the main character or characters having changed in some way, or having learned some critical lesson. The key here is that there is an ending, a conclusion, some decisive denouement. The characters have found the missing piece to their lives, the conflict has been resolved, everyone can ride happily into the sunset together, or maybe everyone died horribly. The End.
Of course, this is not how real life works (spoiler alert). Real life just keeps going, unfettered by narrative structure. Which is… exhausting, if you think about it. We set goals for ourselves to counteract this: graduate, get a job, get married, have kids, retire, raise llamas, die. Start a band, go viral, learn a language, write a novel, start your own business, remodel your house. What’s even easier is setting goals for ourselves that other people have come up with: the expected goals. That has the added advantage of not requiring us to put thought into what we want. Just let someone else take care of the thinking. Let society mete out expectations. If enough people have gone along with them for long enough, they have to be the best options, right? If enough stories and books have described an arc from beginning to decisive end, that has to be achievable, right? And that means there is a goal to achieve. An endpoint. (But an endpoint other than death, please, we don’t want to think about that.)
You know what also doesn’t follow a narrative structure? Democracy. And it really, really seems like it should. There are characters. There are battles. There are victories and losses, and there is progression. There are different settings and high stakes. There are all the elements you would expect to have in a story — and yet. Democracies are made up of people, real people, in the real world, which means that they are just as messy and just as arbitrary as real people in the real world.
Democracies demand continual care and attention. You can win a monumental victory, but that is never the end. You can never rest on your laurels. Just like your own individual life, it just keeps going, one battle to the next. Today it’s unexpected car trouble, tomorrow it’s fringe candidates trying to take over the local school board. The only constant is that it is constant. And, again, that is exhausting. More than that, it is messy. Everyone is different and has different opinions, but everyone gets a say, so there will always have to be compromises and debates. No one person gets to be the ultimate arbiter of all.
So maybe all the current democratic backsliding into fascism and authoritarianism makes sense. Why keep fighting election after election when, instead, you can pick the team that can win once and then be set for good? Why not pick the team that sells such a beatiful narrative — not one of constant compromises and fights, but one of Right and Wrong and Victory? Why have to constantly concern yourself with the nitty gritty ins and outs of current events, which you never have the time or energy for, when you can instead appoint someone who will simply take care of it all for you? We are already electing representatives, why not simply take that a step further?
Now, just to be clear, I do think that democracy is a good thing. But I also think that story is essential to the human psyche, and I’m not sure how to square those two things. Can we find a different way to tell the story (so to say) of democracy? Is there a way that democracy is fundamentally at odds with how humans work, or is it more that currently our current system as a whole — society, politics, economy, everything — is what is at odds with humanity?
Last week I started in on the topic of Truth and Reconciliation by examining the truth. Now it’s time for more thoughts on reconciliation than you ever cared to read! In order to reach reconciliation, we must first have a common truth, a common history. After all, what is history but the story we tell to explain our present? The dead don’t care what we say.
But first, the matter at hand: what does it mean to reconcile? Can we?
Right now we have a common conception that there are two halves of society, inextricably interconnected, diametrically opposed. This is, of course, a gross oversimplification, because humans naturally struggle with complexity (more on this later). However, we do indeed have one part of our society that is determinedly sprinting towards an idealized past and hell bent on taking the rest of Us with Them.
Why Reconciliation?
There is a branch of religiosity — in the US it appears as right-wing Evangelicalism — that is profoundly authoritarian. This is the religion that takes the view that letting people think for themselves is dangerous, that the only way to keep people in the faith is to keep them afraid and unable to form their own interpretations of the religion or of the world. This by definition requires a rigid and narrow interpretation of the Bible (for example) provided by People Who Know More Than You — i.e., the authoritative authorities. The people involved in these branches of religion are then naturally more susceptible to authoritarianism when it crops up in other circumstances.
The Foundations
As I vaguely alluded to earlier, we have facing us an Us-Them paradigm. It is built on several factors. One of them is what I’ll call the Traditional American Psyche. This is partly derived from the Puritan roots of the country, which has contributed to the Evangelicalism as described above, but it is also based on ideals of Individualism and Freedom.
The story we like to tell ourselves of the founding of the United States is one of brave people fleeing persecution and founding a beautiful free society in which people could live as they chose. Setting aside for the moment the many, many flaws in that history, let’s first ask the obvious question: Why is it such a seductive idea to be solely reliant on yourself?
This ideal of individualism is deeply woven into the fabric of this country. It exists not only on the personal level, like that iconically described by Thoreau, but also at the societal level. Today we are a big strong superpower that don’t need no man sorry appreciates the generous assistance of our less powerful allies, but even before we leveled up, the country had a similar-outlook-but-different-effect execution of isolationism. Same self-reliance, fewer overthrown foreign governments.
Individualism
One angle from which to examine this individualism is from the parochial lens, as featured in Evangelicalism. In the fly parlance of the youths, we might also call this parochialism ~toxic masculinity~. It’s where you’re the big strong country who can and does take care of everyone else, because everyone else is too weak to do it for themselves. One might even say it’s the Manifest Destiny of caring. Obviously this is because relying on someone or something else is a sign that you can’t take care of yourself, that you’re weak (implication: like a woman), that you need some sort of parental figure (implication: like a child), that you’re just not manly enough.
And just in case you might be confused, this isn’t like a loving kind of caring, because that’s also emasculating. This is the condescending pat-on-the-head kind of caring. Because, of course, everyone loves to be condescended to, so it makes for an excellent way to conduct social interactions!
Is This My Blog If I Don’t Talk About Fear?
Another angle is, of course, fear. This isn’t wholly separate from the first angle. Really it’s more of a distillation of it: why do people struggle so hard to be tough and manly? Is it because that’s the most fun way to live, or is it a fear of the perceived alternatives? Do people want to run away from things because that’s the logical thing to do, or is it easier than facing the fears that come with them? If you only have to worry about yourself and yourself alone, then whatever happens is under your control, and you don’t have to worry about what might happen outside of your control.
However, this rugged individualism ignores the profoundly social structure of the human organism. Humans are at our best when we work together and delegate responsibilities — without condescension! — especially in such a complex society as we have today.
Freedom
As far as freedom goes, well. Ignoring the facts when the country was founded, women were considered property and there were, you know, actual slaves, even the white man had some limits to his freedom. Laws curtail some actions. Responsibilities also curtail individual freedoms in a way, in limits imposed by family, work, friends, neighbors. The friction here crops up often in the perceived difference between personal responsibilities and imposed responsibilities. In other words, people don’t like being told what to do; they prefer to be able to do it of their own volition.
However. Democracy is not the same as everyone deciding for themselves: that’s anarchy. Democracy is everyone having an equal say in what the decision is.
But wouldn’t it be great if none of those responsibilities existed and we could all run about naked in the woods owing nothing to each other??
Bad faith arguments say that once you start imposing limits on freedom, then there is no stopping point. Once you limit one thing, what’s to stop you from limiting everything? This is the “paradox” of tolerance: you can tolerate everything except intolerance. One quick litmus test though: are your actions harming someone else? If yes, then you are curtailing their freedom to live their lives. If your pursuit of boundless freedom leaves other people with less freedom, then that’s the limit point.
The Powers That Be
This brings us to the people in power. To help simplify life, we elect people to represent our interests in government (or we allow the formulation of organizations tasked with our care and protection). Crucially, these representatives are not outside of the normal structure; rather, they are profoundly a part of it. The representation of your interests does not become some oThEr once it is invested in a person — it’s still your interests, still part and parcel of your live in your society. This means that they — your representatives — are emphatically not outside of the law that governs your actions (and their actions in their non-representative form), and in fact by virtue of the powers invested in them, they are held to even a higher standard.
Think of a concentrate of the powers and limitations of each of the people that they represent coalescing in them. In a way they become an avatar for the people they represent. This is constraining, and rightfully so. They are become the focal point of people’s belief, which is a powerful force.
Most of us have at some time in our lives experienced the feeling of power that comes from having other people believe in us. This is to an extent a hardwired social cue: the more people agree that something is a good idea, the safer it probably is to pursue. Thus, many people believing in us imparts more power than a single person.
I Want To Believe
Additionally, we have wired social cues to believe in people who have gained power. If they have successfully attained power, there’s probably a reason for that, right? That means that we have to be able to hold the circular idea that power imparts belief imparts power, and the implications of that for leaders of society.
One of the implications that I want to highlight is the leaders’ beliefs about the beliefs of the people they represent. Naturally, leaders representing a multitude of people will have to reconcile a multitude of opinions and beliefs if they are to effectively represent everyone. However, our system is currently set up in such a way that if a leader fails to uphold that ideal of fair representation of their constituents, there is no quick or easy vote of no confidence; there is basically only the actual elections. Anything within a term limit is left to the trust in the norm that people will vote in their interests the next time. This however does rely on things like the people being actually able to vote.
This is a rest stop on our journey of reconciliation.
The Truths We Avoid
Let’s now circle back to the flaws that we set aside in our glowing portrait of the founding of this country. In the beautiful US of A, any deviation from “the norm” that you may have becomes your primary identity. And, excitingly, this is a really fun way that people outside of “the norm” have been targeted for persecution.
But wait! You may shout. Didn’t I say that the founders were “brave people fleeing persecution? Why yes, yes I did. Strange, that. Who could have guessed that the society of The Scarlet Letter could be intolerant?
One feature that we often take for granted is how predictive our identities — our degrees towards or away from “the norm” — are of our political views. Why should this be the case? If each person were truly free to decide for themselves what kind of society they wish to participate in, it would make sense that demographic distributions within ideologies would be fairly equitable. However, as we all know, this is manifestly not at all the case. Therefore we face the proposal that certain political ideologies must be an anathema to certain demographics and identities.
Personal Reconciliation
The majority of people would say that they’re good people. People don’t generally believe, or like to think, that they’re otherwise.
We also don’t like to be told that we’re wrong about things. We like even less actually being wrong. Then, internalizing that you’re wrong about something takes time and space to acknowledge and more to address it. All too often, we are not afforded this space of development.
Instead, people become so afraid of being wrong (and of not getting that space to reevaluate) that they retrench into their established misbeliefs. This feels to them safer than trying to change — because change is scary — and most likely, everyone around them also has the same misbelief. As social creatures, going against the grain is extremely difficult.
Language As An Out?
Another issue crops up here wherein our language doesn’t often differentiate between terms that are systemic versus those that are personal. Most notably here are the terms “sexist” and “racist”. A singe person can be racist, and the society in which they participate can also be racist. A singe person can not be personally sexist, while still participating in a sexist society.
A person who believes that they are a good person will not see themselves as sexist or racist — those (at least for most of us) don’t fit in with the ideal of a good person. Participating in a system that is sexist or racist also does not make one a good person, so acknowledging that is similarly painful and frankly better off avoided.
Additionally, big systemic problems are much harder to conceptualize than personal problems are. For one, they lie outside of the direct control of any one person. You can’t just go flip the racism switch and turn it off for the whole of society. Two, they typically span much more than we can hold in our minds at one time. They start to close in on the chaos beyond our comfort, beyond the order that we have imposed on our lives.
The Size Problem
That chaos is the big and scary realms of monsters and madness. The whole story of our lives is finding ways to impose order on that madness: we categorize, we organize, we create neat narratives to explain events and to explain what happens after we shrug off this mortal coil. As the world has gotten bigger and more connected, we have had to create additional ways and means to undergird our sanity.
The average person can keep track of a social circle of about 150 people. [Expand on this?] However, many people in online social media circles have exponentially more contacts than that. How can they possibly keep track of all those people? Do they have a superhuman ability?
Maybe. But probably definitely not. One explanation is that they take advantage of categorizing and grouping people. Instead of just your traditional family, coworkers, friends, neighbors, you also have your knitting circle, plant people, fitness gurus, cat ladies, and whoever else. More importantly, though, the quality of interaction takes a massive hit. They aren’t interacting deeply with all 2,000+ of their online friends.
Is the Us-Them Paradigm a Paradox?
People love connecting with other people. Introverts and extroverts might go about it differently, but both do indeed enjoy human contact. And not only with friends and family: research has shown that people are happier after connecting with total strangers.
The Us-Them paradigm places a big fat wedge in that. Something is apparently holding that wedge in place — or multiple somethings — because the natural gravity of humanity’s love for humanity would seem to imply that the natural state would be for no wedge.
$$$
One finger on the wedge scale is money. It has become profitable to sow discord: if you can make one group of people afraid of another, you can sell that fear. It has long been profitable to lie and to act selfishly.
Some people and media companies have found that you can make money by selling people an alternate truth. They find success and profit by keeping the world a divided place using these false truths. They abuse the trust that other people place in them, have imbued them with the power of their belief. Then people don’t want to admit that they were duped, that they were wrong. It’s easier to go on believing the lie that white people are inherently superior than to face the fact that your ancestors, that you yourself, have contributed to — and profited off of — the profound suffering of other people in the service of a lie.
Because the biggest finger on the wedge scale is demographic in-groups, is tribalism, is the fear of The Other, the Us-Them paradigm itself.
Reconciliation in Truth
So, this is the reconciliation that we face. We have to find a common truth that links us across the Us-Them paradigm, that can bring us together in it. If this sounds basically impossible to you, well, you’re not wrong.
Part of the difficulty will stem from the fact that it won’t be a fair and equitable shift of truth. If one side says the Earth is a sphere and the other side says the Earth is flat, the point of common truth isn’t to say that the Earth is a cylinder. Just because there are two sides to the paradigm doesn’t mean that both sides are equally far from the truth. It isn’t a compromise to chop the baby in half. This may not seem fair to those who have to move farther from their chosen haunts of misbelief, but their sense of fairness does not outweigh the needs of the people.
Because make no mistake, there are dire needs at play. These are the needs of everyone — no matter race, sex, gender, religion, whatever — to be able to access their human rights. These are the needs of everyone to be able to live on a planet that isn’t dying.
Hello everyone and welcome to the new era. How about those press conferences, eh? And wow talk about going right back to old-style controversies like the last four years never happened (very cool NYT)! So I’ve been hearing some talk — and I’m pretty sure that at least some of it has been happening outside of my own head — about a post-Trump, post-January 6, post-where-ever-we-draw-the-line Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and I thought hey, I have a lot of thoughts about that.
For background, so we’re all starting from the same page, probably the most famous T&R Commission was on the end of Apartheid in South Africa. Many other countries have had their own commissions as well. They all follow the same basic model of a realization that something wack went down that really needs to be addressed for the good of the country. The United States, for all its posturing as the beacon of light for the world, has always avoided acknowledging the truly wack things that have happened here. We have yet to do anything lasting or meaningful to address past things like slavery, pushing out indigenous peoples, or putting people in camps and cages.
If you’ve been here before, you know that I like musing on basic subjects: fear, isolation, motivation, fear again. (Check out the Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast for this but done better.) For my sanity, I’m going to break my thoughts on Truth and Reconciliation down in a similar way. The logical place to start then is with truth.
The Trust in Truth
To talk about truth, we have to talk about trust. There can be no agreement between parties without trust. If you don’t trust either the other party, or if you don’t trust yourself to be able to extricate yourself from the fallout of the failure of the agreement, then you won’t enter into it in the first place. This trust is best achieved through truth.
At its core, democracy is an agreement between people on how to govern themselves. This means that people have to be able to trust each other in order to come to an agreement — and not in the way of trusting themselves to be able to take care of themselves if the going gets bad; that is no longer a system of democracy, because the interaction is no longer interpersonal. Two of the most prevalent political ideologies battering at our democracy today are Libertarianism and Authoritarianism. These both in a way trace back to a dearth of trust: Libertarianism by losing it in others and directing it back inwards, and Authoritarianism by losing it in others and directing it instead towards a chosen authority (which is a roundabout way of directing it back inwards).
A Slight Tangent
Democracy is also not an agreement between the people and the government, because the government is not an entity separate from the people. Both Libertarianism and Authoritarianism could lead one to believe otherwise, however. Libertarianism, in saying that the government cannot be trusted, is both implying that (1) other people cannot be trusted and (2) the government is an Other entity that cannot be trusted. This is of course an ideological tension if you believe in a government of for and by the people, but it also allows entry for more people to have their own version of Libertarianism.
Authoritarianism, on the other hand, says that (1) other people cannot be trusted, (2) the government is an Other entity, and (3) only their chosen authoritative government can be trusted. In a way, it’s a more stable philosophy. If you cannot trust other people, it makes sense to put your trust in an authority that can dictate the actions of the other people.
This also highlights the easiest way to sabotage a society: to ruin its internal trust. If you are fed the idea that other people cannot be trusted, then it makes perfect sense for you to conclude that you cannot be in democratic congress with them.
Types of Truth
So let’s talk about truth. The two main forms of truth available to us are truth in words and truth in action. Human society got to this point because of our awesome skills of complex communication. Other organisms may have basic language, rudimentary systems of communication and learning, but none of them have invented telephones or satellites yet, and none of them have come even close to needing those yet.
Words — languages — are how we have managed this. Actions may be an element of communication, but they cannot convey complex concepts. Actions are furthermore subject to the individual interpretations that happen in the brains of each person who observes them. Words have the power to be precise in a way that actions can never be.
Communication in the Age of Technology
The internet has created the illusion that words are cheap in a way that they never have been before. Pre-written language, words were shaped into stories that could be told through the generations. Physical forms of writing each have their own costs associated with them, from chisel to ink. They also have an inherent audience limit. Now, any fool with a connection can put out words that can be accessed by anyone else. The audience limit is orders of magnitude larger. We have created platforms that serve the explicit purpose of reaching incomprehensibly massive numbers of people essentially for free.
Cheap words means it’s easier to use them without consequence. If you say something wrong, something false, you can easily add more words to try to make it better. There’s no reason to ever regulate your words.
If the perception of words is that they’re cheap, then actions gain increased importance. It’s not what you say, it’s what you actually do that matters. Actions become concrete evidence, an incontrovertible truth, by which we can all judge. (Cyclically this also erodes the power of words.)
However, this then follows that the actions of those in positions of power are correspondingly more important as well. That means that merely paying lip service to something is insufficient. One cannot both cheapen words and then expect to be able to live off of them. In that situation there is a complete absence of truth, and thus of trust. On another note, they also need to be able to take actions by which they can be judged.
So What Is Truth?
There is no absolute truth, because there is no absolute reality. Practically speaking, everything is based off our perception of reality, not off of reality itself (whatever that may be). That means that a shared truth is a shared trust that we’re all interpreting reality the same way. Societies are built on this shared truth.
If someone professes a belief in another reality, either by word or by action, that is not just empty words and actions; that is an invitation into another truth. If that professed belief is a lie, then that is an attack on a common truth and trust and thereby on society itself.
A belief in a lie can be committed without intention. Americans aren’t reinventing the lie of white supremacy every generation, and yet it has persisted for longer than the nation itself. It’s a lie that has been woven into the very fabric of this country; and yet, as with all lies, it is nonetheless tearing our society apart. The only way to fix it is to first acknowledge that it exists, that it is a lie, and that it must be addressed head on with a truth that is shared by all Americans.
In the interest of Being Festive, let’s talk about the space of fear! Because is there a better way to celebrate holidays than by writing essays? I think not. I wrote about fear last Halloween from the self-care angle. This year I’ll examine it from my Make Space angle. If you haven’t already, you can catch up here with Part 1: Clutter and Part 2: Listening!
I aim to approach this from two angles. First, by asking what the space of fear looks like; and second, by looking at what it pushes out. Disclaimer here (that I usually forget to add because apparently I just can’t be bothered to spend the time remembering) that I am not am expert, I just like to read all the things and then regurgitate unsolicited thoughts back out. Enjoy!
The Space of Fear
Fear can be roughly separated into two types: acute and chronic. Acute is short-lived, usually a response to a situation, lasting basically as long as your body can produce adrenaline. This can range from tripping on the sidewalk (brief burst of adrenaline, very short time being afraid) to being followed at night (more sustained adrenaline, longer period of fear). Chronic is fear that persists either longer than the danger, or danger that persists longer than your body can physically respond.
Technically speaking, what I’m describing as chronic fear is actually anxiety. There are some nuances, but basically anxiety is fear without a concrete source. As far as I’m concerned, for the purposes of this blog, “fear without a concrete source” is still fear.
When you’re in that space of fear, it doesn’t feel great. You feel like you’re being closed in. Every decision you face is more fraught. If it’s chronic, you feel more tired, because your body is working overtime to keep you alive. Fear takes up a lot of room and it doesn’t like to share. It invades and tinges everything else with its color: its murk of tension, exhaustion, apprehension, and apathy.
Spoons
When the space available to you is taken up with fear, there’s less space left for other things. You have less bandwidth to deal with additional problems, even the minor ones. And you have less space to devote to anything outside yourself: fear is forcing you to spend your energy on yourself, on keeping yourself alive.
A popular metaphor in the disability community is that of spoons. When you’re living with a chronic illness, you often have less energy or are more quickly depleted than someone who isn’t. Spoons represent your units of energy, of which you have a set number that only recharges with rest and sleep. Living with chronic fear is, in effect, living with a chronic illness.
What We Fear
Before we go any further, let’s build some context. As I write this, we’re in the seventh month of dealing with a historic pandemic that has so far killed over a million people worldwide, almost a quarter of those in the United States alone. This has severely strained our already threadbare social safety net. While the official unemployment rate is relatively low, this fails to count people who have dropped out of the workplace to take care of children who now aren’t in school full time, people whose industries have disappeared, or all of the people who are underemployed.
This is all in addition to all the “usual” causes of fear that were around before the pandemic, and will remain after it. These range from existential threats such as climate change to personal fears for our own success and well-being.
What Impacts Our Fears
Of course our fears don’t live in isolation. They are rooted in the condition of the world we inhabit. A world that leaves individuals to fend for themselves is inherently more fearful than one that establishes a community to delegate burdens of care. A world with lots of inequality is more fearful on both ends. On the bottom end of the spectrum, there is more fear for basic necessities. On the top end, there’s the fear that comes from the prospect of losing privilege should the inequality fail to persist. Naturally, this creates additional tension between those who would like to live more comfortably and those who benefit from others having less.
The Space That’s Left
So what is outside the space of fear? What gets pushed out? When we’re in a space of fear, our attention is focused inwards, on getting ourselves through the fear. That means there is less room for other people — less room for caring about them. A parent who is overwhelmed with trying to pay bills and put food on the table is going to have a harder time being present for their children. Someone working multiple jobs to stay afloat is going to have much less space to think about things like politics. A student who doesn’t know where her next meal will come from is going to have a harder time focusing in class. A black man who is afraid of being summarily executed by police or an immigrant afraid of deportation is going to have a harder time moving around freely in society.
It’s also easier to fall back onto more base instincts when faced with fear. With your reduced space, it’s harder to devote any of your remaining bandwidth to complex or nuanced thoughts. Again, it’s a game of survival. The condition of your fellow people need only apply as they directly and visibly relate back to you. You can get so used being attacked that you see potential attacks in every action around you — and react accordingly.
A Society in the Space of Fear
Fear is a potent emotion. It’s pretty good at keeping us alive by grabbing our attention when a threat presents itself. That same mechanism is ripe for exploitation, by its very nature. One of the easiest ways of getting people’s attention is through fear. Be it real or manufactured, fear has a natural leg up on other emotions when it comes to selling ideas.
Fear is also a powerful controlling mechanism: if you do x, then scary y thing will happen. If you cheat on your test, then you’ll get detention. If you break the law, then you’ll go to jail. Or maybe if you just break some norm, you’ll face vigilante “justice”.
Society doesn’t have to operate based on fear, though. Just because it is a sticky emotion, that doesn’t make it the most effective. Machiavelli might have preferred to be feared to maintain power, but a society operating in a space of fear has the same problems as an individual in a space of fear. There’s less space for growth, for creativity, for anything other than bare survival. We have other tools at our disposal. We can lessen the fears that people face.
Mitigating the Space of Fear
Fear is mitigated with action. Being able to do something about whatever is worrying you can dramatically cut down on how fearful you feel. We often face problems that are bigger than what we can deal with at once, on our own; or we have anxieties about things over which we have no control at all. In these cases, it’s good to try and do what we can, what we have the space and the spoons for, and then learn to set the rest aside — not forever, but until we have the space to pick it back up.
I wrote in my last blog about making space for those who need it, if you have the space to spare. There are groups in our world who chronically face more fear than others, which chronically cuts down on the space available to them. For most of the history of the United States, various laws encoded a system in which black people were at the bottom of society, and held there by fear. While those overt laws have been replaced, the ingrained attitudes take much longer to erase. Other minorities face similar obstacles. Women have had to fear violence from men for as long as humanity has existed. Members of the LGBT communities have long been given reasons to fear living openly. The list goes on.
Making space for others doesn’t mean speaking for them. It means giving them the space for their own expression. It means using what excess power you might have to allow someone else a break from their burden of fear. Overall, it means living in a less fearful world.
Prescript: I’m sorry, I hate to talk about and give space to Trump. However, I need (even if just for myself) to articulate the current problems we face as a country, as a result of our government.
Hi everyone. Long time, still no see. It’s been a bit of a wild ride recently, as you might have noticed. Personally, it’s taken a while for my brain to be able to stop screaming into the void and be able to string together coherent sentences on a page. I wanted to be able to post some comforting-type essay on, I don’t know, the resilience of humanity, but I’ll have to leave that to other people for now. Because right now, I’m angry, I’m frustrated, and I need to rant.
Don’t get me wrong. Humanity is indeed resilient, and I am so awed to see all the doctors and nurses who continue to work on the front lines, the teachers who have had to completely rework their curriculums, the people who have stepped up to make fabric masks as a stop-gap for desperate hospitals, the mayors and governors who have had to make hard decisions to keep their people safe, the companies who have volunteered to help produce necessary supplies…
I am not awed by the federal government’s response.
The key point here is that this is a global issue in an increasingly globalized world. While some people may long for the good old days of isolationism, that ship sailed before women even gained the right to vote, and it’s not coming back as long as the internet is a thing. For better or worse, the US has been a global power for almost a century now. We have been able to shape global policy just by virtue of being the biggest gorilla in the zoo. And as long as you agree with the United States’ vision of How Things Should Be, that’s pretty cool. Even apart from our giant muscly military, we provide monetary aid to over 200 countries. This is a part of the “soft power” that is incredibly important to diplomacy.
A global crisis like this should be addressed from the top down. Response needs to be coordinated between countries, because viruses don’t care about borders. Individual cities and states simply do not have the resources—not only the physical resources but also the intelligence resources—to put together an effective response.
The Specifics
Now let’s take a stroll through the specific failings of Trump and his administration to address this pandemic, up to this point. (For me it’s March 25, 2020, you time travelers out there.)
Failure to Respond in a Timely Manner
Trump’s daily intelligence briefings started including the potential threat from Covid-19 back in January. His first “serious” public address on the crisis wasn’t until March 11. (I put serious in quotes because it was so full of inaccuracies that were immediately debunked, one has to wonder what is going on in the speech writers’ room.) Until that point, Trump had continued to downplay the severity and encourage the narrative that it was all a hoax. Keep in mind, the first reported case of coronavirus in the United States was on January 21, and the first death was on February 29.
Chinese scientists sequenced the virus’ genome and shared it online on January 11. Not only does this help track the origins and mutations of the virus, it provides knowledge needed to test for the disease. By January 17, the WHO had published a working test protocol. On the same day, the US announced their own test that they had independently developed. Unfortunately, while having multiple test versions is a good thing, US labs found that that test did not work. This irreparably set back US testing while they remanufactured the problem parts.
Additionally, tests in the US have to first be approved by the FDA. While this is good in theory—I’m not one to advocate for looser regulations—the particular process for emergency-use authorization took weeks to clear. In pandemic terms, that’s too long. They relaxed requirements on February 29, following a plea from specialists the day before. On the other hand, the FDA approved a “rare disease” designation for a company’s experimental coronavirus treatment, which would give them a seven-year exclusive right to produce that drug without competition. Thankfully, the company requested that the agency rescind that designation. America, where we rely on companies to voluntarily do the right thing.
Failure to Respond Globally
Traditionally, US interventionism means that we’re on the front lines when problems arise. We like to be seen as the ones dispensing aid, fitting with our magnanimous image of ourselves. As the oldest continuous democracy in the world, we (traditionally) want to stand as a symbol of what democracy can achieve. We want to be the shining beacon to which other countries should aspire. (Or improve upon?)
Right now, we are abdicating our global leadership role. This, of course, did not start with Covid-19. It’s just a feature of Trumpism. You cannot be a global leader if you denigrate and insult your allies, if you do not participate in discussions with them, if you abandon them. You cannot be an independent leader if you believe the words of foreign officials over your own officials. (And if you’re not independent, are you a leader?)
We have not helped other countries in this crisis. We’ve even done the opposite. While Iran currently struggles with the 6th most reported cases in the world, the Trump administration has announced additional sanctions. Because everyone knows that the best way to garner good will is to kick people while they’re already down. Speaking of good will, the Trump administration has squandered more by reportedly attempting to secure exclusive vaccine rights. As for being global leaders, it certainly doesn’t look good for us that Chinese companies have been stepping up to assist other countries. If we don’t want other countries using Huawei’s 5G tech, it’s not a good look having them demonstratively donate masks to the Netherlands.
Failure to Respond Humanely
If you can say anything good-ish about Trump’s response to the Coronacrisis™, it’s that it has been consistent. He has consistently responded with both eyes on the stock market. And look, the reigning feature of modern “conservatism” has been a focus on the health of corporations over the health of, well, everything and everyone else. Full disclosure here, I’m of the opinion that a government of, by, and for the people should serve all its people. That’s right, not just the ones who can afford to buy politicians: all people.
And even with Trump’s response fully focused on Calming The Markets, he failed to effect that. They have been on an erratic but steep downward trajectory, only showing improvement with news of the Senate coming close to passing a recovery package. (I apologize on NPR’s behalf for that article’s lead photo.) However, the Trump administration has still failed to address how to maintain a functioning economy when over half of its citizens are under shelter-in-place orders, and experts have called for nationwide orders. We are likely facing record unemployment. Many states’ unemployment websites have crashed from high traffic. As mortgage and rent payments have not been suspended, millions of people are wondering how to make everything work – and no one has been at the helm to reassure them.
Failure to Respond
Additionally, Trump has not yet invoked the Defense Production Act. This would allow him to order companies to produce the supplies that hospitals desperately need, from ventilators to masks. His claim is that some companies are doing so on their own. Therefore, there’s no need for a mandate. While some companies have stepped up to do so on their own, there needs to be a coordinated national response. We still aren’t meeting the needs of hospitals. Some companies—with an eye on their shareholders—cannot afford to make those changes on their own. This uncoordinated response also adds to the confusion and uncertainty.
Leaving the response up to states also means that they are competing against each other for those necessary supplies. This drives up prices and, again, increases confusion and uncertainty. At a citizen level, the uneven response from states also increases the chance that some people won’t take the threat from this virus seriously enough.
If the federal government doesn’t feel the need to respond to a crisis like this, what on earth do they think they exist for?
Trump and the trumpiest Trumpism
Sadly, nothing that the Trump administration has done in response to this pandemic should be surprising. It is perfectly in line with everything else they have done. Trump has led the charge on redefining the presidency as an office dedicated to the glory of its holder. (This is in contrast to the idea of the president as the chief public servant, nominally espoused by many previous presidents.) His staff and advisors exist to stroke his ego, not to actually tell him what’s going on. And if they’re not doing that, they’re essentially babysitting him.
The government of the United States, as set forth in the Constitution, is theoretically structured in a way to mitigate some of the repercussions should the American people elect a demagogue. Mainly, there are the checks and balances between the three branches of government. Unfortunately, those don’t help when multiple branches are complicit. Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Turtle himself, has arguably done as much damage to the United States as Trump has. He has been happy to go along with the Trumpist form of government, as it gives him the opportunity to work towards his own ends.
What does that mean? It means that we no longer have a functioning system of checks and balances. Instead, we have party divides acting in their stead. The problem with that, of course, is that political parties are private entities and not legally beholden in any way to the American people. Also, there are really only two of them. It’s hard to have a stool with two legs.
Media in a Trumpian Age
The Right-Wing Media has mostly consolidated around Trump, with hell to pay for any Republican who steps out of line. And Trump, for all his lack of political acumen, knows how to play the media. For their part, Right-Wing Media seems content to play the part of his propaganda arm.
Centrist, balanced media, while not, er, singing Trump’s praises, is also not not contributing to the misinformation. By the mere fact that he occupies the office of the president, there is a certain duty they feel to report on his activities. This is where Trump’s ability to play the media comes in. Take, for instance, his March 11 live address to the nation. All four of his main points were false or misleading, but because it was The President speaking, all major news outlets reported on it. Even when they include the factual debunking in the article, they know that the headlines that sell (click?) are the flashy (even if false) ones. On average, Trump lies 32 times per day. It’s enough that fact checkers have given up on trying to keep up with every lie.
My Disclaimer
There’s always an irony to writing about media coverage of Trump, as that is itself media coverage. Giving him air time or column inches is often playing into his game. It’s a sort of prisoner’s dilemma, in which not reporting leaves you behind, even when you know better. So what on earth do we do? (I say this like I’m a media person too. Which, I guess, thanks to the internet and Social Media, we can all be part of the media! We are all media on this blessed day!) My solution today is See Something, Say Something. This administration has failed us, and I want everyone who cares to read what I write to know that. It means not just slavishly reporting what is said, but critically and thoughtfully responding.
I don’t like to get into political discussions, not because I don’t have strong opinions, but because I kinda suck at articulating them. If you’re still with me here, two thousand words in, I hope I’ve at least put some new thoughts into your head. (I’m all about thinking here.)
As a reward for your perseverance, here’s a fuzzy picture of Butters very sweetly snuggling with me when I was sick at the end of February with a low grade fever, dry cough, major fatigue, and muscle aches!
