(YEP IT’S A MANDOS POST)
Hardly a week ever goes by when I am not alerted to the increasingly absurd cruelty of the social welfare services of the UK. I’ve lived in economically below-average, minority-populated parts of the US, off and on, and the US has a bad reputation for social welfare—mostly due to its absence—but in all that time, I never heard of the kind of sheer, deliberate twist-the-knife cruelty that is apparently daily life for some of the UK’s most vulnerable citizens. I’m starting to think that no welfare is better than evil welfare. Which I suppose was the entire point of the exercise.
The very same people who advocated for this cruelty and have had years to make it worse are the people now in charge of making Brexit happen in the UK. And everyone knows they’re making a mess of it—predictably, with the same twist-the-knife cruelty that is certainly no ward against incompetence. As I have written before, even if they were to run the Brexit show well, what they want from Brexit contains no redeeming value whatsoever. They’re still proud of their austerity and are only at best grudgingly willing to restrain it when it looks like they might lose a critical handful of voters here and there. Yes, even such a debased character as the British Tory voter can show rue where his drivers, on their own, cannot. The British Tory voter, however, will still let his leaders guide him into the sewage lagoon of the tax paradise which they are chomping at the bit to build.
A Brexit with less dislocation was possible, give or take an Irish peace accord or two. That Brexit requires a Britain that did not stake its economic foundation on being local banker to a currency union it didn’t join. This would require a Britain that, long before the Brexit referendum, had not gone down the neoliberal route in the first place, had not succumbed to the ideology of austerity, and had not perfected welfare cruelty.
But therein lies the paradox of Brexit. Brexit was only going to come after a referendum for it. But the conditions to reach the “Yes” vote are precisely these conditions of frustrated failure, if you are inclined, as many are, to see the phenomenon fundamentally through an economic-stress lens. In a non-austerian, non-neoliberal political alternate history—one that, I emphasize, has always mostly been within the UK’s power to execute, despite EU membership—a “Yes” vote would probably have been unachievable. That is why you could never really have a good Brexit, and why, when Brexit really takes place for good, a possible future Corbyn government is going to be left holding a nasty bag of failure that will likely preclude any major reforms in a left-wing direction.
From a progressive/left-wing/whatever perspective, from the perspective of a humane political economy, the flaw in anti-EU/pro-Brexit thinking is one of “dictionary-definition” conservatism. I was mostly opposed to the pro-globalization policies for goods and capital on the whole. But now that it has occurred, it’s a reactionary mistake to attempt to roll it back, rather than assess where the world is now and consider new ways of creating a humane economy in the future. That reactionary mistake plays into the hands of the Rees-Moggs and Boris Johnsons of the world, and worse.
Alright, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. The simple fact is that, compared to other developed countries, the US has a lot of gun violence.
One can wave ones hands and say “well, cars kill more people”, or point out that statistically you’re damn unlikely to die in a mass shooting (just like you aren’t going to die from terrorism), yet, relatively speaking, the US has more mass shootings and school shootings than any other developed nation.
It is important to understand the scale, however. This chart from the Intercept is useful:
Screen-Shot-2018-02-27-at-1.30.01-PM-1519756226 James Alan Fox and Emma E. Fridel, “The Three R’s of School Shootings: Risk, Readiness, and Response,” in H. Shapiro, ed., “The Wiley Handbook on Violence in Education: Forms, Factors, and Preventions,” New York: Wiley/Blackwell Publishers, June 2018.
Alright, so first off, it is INSANE to arm teachers. School shootings, while a problem, are relatively rare, but what we do know is that when people have guns they are more likely to use them. If we were to, say arm five teachers per school, at approximately 128,000 schools in America, we’d have 640,000 teachers with guns. This to stop an average of ten deaths a year from school shootings.
How many of those five teachers with guns would use them? Use them on themselves, their students, their families or other people? I guarantee, absolutely, that it will be more than ten people a year. Far, far more.
“Hardening” schools is deranged. Having cops and guns and so on in schools is a pathetic admission of social pathology that is off the scale and it’s bad for students. Schools should not be prisons: well, not any more than they already are by design, keeping young kids cooped up and sitting down when they’d rather be doing something else (and probably should be, but that’s another article).
All right, so much for that argument. let’s move back to our original question. Why is the US a pathologically fucked up mess? Most adult Swiss males have assault rifles, they do not go on killing sprees like Americans do (they do kill themselves a lot, though). Nor do the Swiss have nearly as high gun homicide rates.
Of course, those Swiss have those guns locked up and understand they are to be used for their military duties only.
A comparison of international rates finds that the US has about three times more gun deaths per capita than the next highest nation—Finland, with Austria close behind. But the Fins and Austrians are three times more likely to blow their own brains out, rather than someone else’s, while Americans kill with guns almost as much as they commit suicide with guns.
The summary of a WHO study is worth reading.
Even though it has half the population of the other 22 nations combined, the United States accounted for 82 percent of all gun deaths. The United States also accounted for 90 percent of all women killed by guns, the study found. Ninety-one percent of children under 14 who died by gun violence were in the United States. And 92 percent of young people between ages 15 and 24 killed by guns were in the United States, the study found.
Right…
So, there are two factors here. Social pathology and deadliness. China (not on the above list) has strict gun controls and a lot of violent people. It doesn’t have a lot of gun deaths, instead it has mass killing sprees with knives.
But when you look at those sprees what you find is that they’re less deadly, because while knives are dangerous (very hard to defend against), it’s also hard to kill a lot of people with them.
So the idea that having less guns available would make attacks less deadly passes the sniff test. Of course it would. Remember the Las Vegas shooting? One asshole in a hotel room shooting into a concert crowd?
I have little time for those who say that if deadly automatic weapons with large clips were hard to get there would be less gun deaths from shootings. It is also true that wounds from assault rifles are far worse than wounds from handguns, by the way.
One may wish to argue that there is social utility to people having guns that is worth the deaths. We think the convenience of getting around in cars is worth car deaths. But one has to make that argument. If the social utility is “can fight the government”, well, that’s an argument that isn’t clearly the case. (See this long article for the full “will guns let Americans defeat their government?” argument. ) But, perhaps most tellingly, Americans have been in a long slide to loss of their rights and having guns hasn’t stopped that slide.
One might also argue that owning military guns is an intrinsic good. Owning them and knowing how to use them has social utility in some fashion.
But, again, the more guns, and the more guns whose purpose is to kill large numbers of people quickly, the more gun deaths are possible. And whatever level of social pathology you have in a society which makes people want to be violent, guns will make that violence more deadly.
So let’s talk social pathology. First off, it isn’t intrinsically “multicultural society” because Canada is multicultural and has a lot less gun deaths and murders than the US. I live in Toronto, which is more multicultural than any major American city, and has a lot less gun deaths than many US cities.
It may be that Americans are just a bunch of violent assholes and always have been. The country was won with genocide, and founded in slavery (no, don’t even) and that’s just who Americans are, and they’ve never gotten over it.
I… suppose? Culture is a thing, violence does get handed down from father to son, and from perpetrator to victim, who then goes on to victimize. Beat your kid, and your kid is quite likely to be violent to other people. This is robust in the scientific literature.
But parenting has changed, and parents are less violent to their children than in the past. They’re controlling assholes who give their children no freedom these days, of course, but they generally don’t hit them.
The thing is, the evidence supports this:
Gun violence, in fact, is declining. It rose with the boomer cohort, both because young people commit more crime, and because American society went off the rails starting in the late 60s, but it’s declined since a peak in the early 90s, despite Millenials, a large generation, coming on line.
America is less violent. The 90s was, in fact, the peak, and this is true of school shootings as well.
So, no problem, right?
Wrong. Here’s the mass shooting data.
Well—that doesn’t look so good. Americans are killing less retail, and killing more wholesale. Of course, we’re talking a few people, very few, but the far end of the curve has been pushed into mass homicide territory, and it looks bad.
So, how about something simple.
Around the late 60s America’s economy starts to go to shit. Yes, I know this is my go-to argument for a lot of America’s problems, but that’s because, well, it’s true. ’68 is where working white class wages peak. The 70s see social struggle, especially around African American liberation, and a lot of violence (including bombings).
And in 1980, Reagan is elected and he and his movement does this—
BOOM!
Here’s a simple thing well known to criminologists. You put people in prison, they tend to come out nastier than they went in. You criminalize victimless crimes (like drugs) and a lot of people who would never be violent, become violent because they are forced to become criminals to engage in behaviour the state doesn’t want, but which isn’t innately harmful to anyone but themselves.
So, we have a criminalizing trend, an economy which is getting shittier, and a change in parenting from violent to non-violent.
And the kids raised by violent parents (yes, that is the GI generation, don’t say otherwise) are violent when under economic pressure or when stuff they think is their right, and which was legal when they were young, is made illegal.
But as the children become adults who were not raised violently, retail violence decreases despite social pathology.
This is probably aided by the widespread use of legal mood altering drugs, often from childhood, of anyone who shows any spirit or unwillingness to sit like a tranquilized animal in a classroom while a teacher drones on, or in an office, doing meaningless work for an asshole boss for a shitty wage.
Unhappy with your life because your life is, actually, shit? No, no, no. The best way to solve that isn’t to change your life, or society, it is to drug you.
So, kids who weren’t treated violently become adults, and they are, in large numbers, drugged to the gills.
Is this “the cause?” Who knows. But it’s a narrative that fits a lot of the facts and a narrative that doesn’t explain the mass shootings…
Homicide rate drops, mass shootings increase. And very much an American thing, though other nations dip their toe into the pool on occasion.
Why?
Well, perhaps part of it is that the US continues to get worse and worse off. You see this in the opiate epidemic, which I consider to be clearly caused by economic despair moving from blacks to working, lower and lower middle class whites. (The economy dropped off a cliff for blacks in the 80s.)
It isn’t, of course, that the poors always do the deed, it is that everyone is aware that their economic situation is precarious. Lose their job and get blackballed or wind up sick with more than their insurance will cover (easy even with good insurance) and that middle-class American lifestyle is gone. And for more and more people it has just slid away. A hundred thousand here, a million there, a financial crisis over there, and hey, you’re on the street.
Even if it hasn’t happened to you, the knowledge that it can is always there. Economic life in America is a game of musical chairs, with some chairs having spikes on them, and there are not enough chairs period. And if you don’t have a chair to sit in when the music stops, well, your life is endless misery—well, until your life ends.
And the guns are there. And people are angry. And the far-end of the bell curve moves over and over and over and it lands on just a few people. But they have access to military weapons and the knowledge is out there of how to train and prepare in order to do maximum damage. There is a “gun culture,” the internet, and easy access to everything they need.
And—BOOM, a few of them go off.
Solutions? Well, again, they come in two flavors. End the pathology and/or make it harder to be really lethal. So, less access to the most lethal weapons, or stop treating people like shit.
People who are happy, have people they love and are optimistic about their future, outside of war, do not go on mass killing sprees. Does not happen. Provide a society where people know that one slip up or bad bounce doesn’t mean social, economic, and possibly literal death; a society where people are happy, and optimistic, and don’t have to put up with bad bosses because they don’t need to keep a specific job, because they can always support themselves, and there’ll be a lot less mass shootings, suicides, and drug addicts.
Lot nicer society to live in, too. Might have to give up having as many billionaires, though. I’m sure there are a few people who will miss them, but really, having to kneel or bend over for billionaires to make a good living gets old fast and they aren’t needed for a good economy. The 50 and 60s had far fewer really rich people and were a lot better.
Final word. I had my first gun when I was 12. I grew up with hunters. I’m not “anti-gun.” But no one I knew ever felt the need to own an assault rifle. Most didn’t even own any handguns: hunting rifles and shotguns. Rural people need guns. They don’t need guns designed to kill people, unless the society is pathological. And if it is, perhaps you should make it less pathological?
It isn’t, actually, that complicated to do so. Your great-great grandparents and great-grandparents did it during the Great Depression and World War II. If they can, you (we) should be able to.
Perhaps get on that, rather than arguing about whether or not a teacher with a gun, barricaded in a classroom, can hold off a shooter. Because when it gets to that debate, your society is in the shitter.
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Given the gun control debate, it seems time to put this back up for newer readers. Originally posted Nov 4, 2013.
Let us talk, today, about violence, resistance, and revolution. It has been observed that armed populations often seem to be more free. Equally it has been observed that armed populations live in a state of misery and anarchy, as in most failed states, where virtually everyone is armed.
An armed population, alone, means little. For all of the talk about how important it is to have Americans armed so they can “resist tyranny,” the fact that America is awash in guns has done nothing significant to stop the erosion of civil liberties and the rise of plutocracy. Indeed, many of those screaming the loudest for policies which ensure their own poverty, the power of the rich, and thus the decline of effective democracy are the most heavily armed.
Guns alone mean little.
America’s founding fathers wanted Americans to have guns and be in well-regulated militias. In this, as in many things, they were wise. A militia, properly oriented towards the community it serves, is an organized body of citizens who have military training and are used to fighting as a group. They have ties to the community, and as there is not more than one militia per community, they also have ties to whatever local government exists. If enough of these militias decide, as groups, to resist the government, they can do so.
Individual violence is not a threat to the state. The threat of assassination can act as a brake on the activities of politicians (though I, of course, would never suggest it). It is notable that the concrete barricades and ludicrous overprotection of DC politicians, especially the President, picks up exactly as plutocracy gets underway. Say what you will about Nixon: he went to meet protesters, at night, with a single aide and no bodyguards. He was not afraid of his own citizens, even those who disagreed with his policies. It is unimaginable that Clinton, Bush, or Obama would do such a thing.
To some extent the right-wing gets some of what they want because they are armed, and every once in a while their crazies “go off.” Rhetoric justifying violence is regularly issued by the right-wing, and it works: When a political attack occurs, it’s almost always against someone perceived as a left-winger. The days when there was any chance of being beaten up by a “union thug” as a pol are long gone, let alone having a genuine anarchist blow up your building, but you can still be shot in the head by a right-winger.
Moreover, people have simply not understood the lessons of Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Mexico. The modern toolkit of violence is amazing at area denial. If the US government starts losing control of chunks of the US, what it will look like is Mexico or Iraq: Places where they can’t go without police cars or tanks blowing up, sporadic attacks by people who fade away, and terror against the police and their families. It will not be some great glorious slugging match between armies, because anyone stupid enough to fight the US that way will lose.
The problem with modern insurgency technologies, however, is that you can’t protect anything. So you can deny the writ of the state, you can create places where they can only go in force, you can make it so they control the ground their boots are on and nothing more, but you can’t create a sub-state, because they will find it and destroy it: Any facilities you build or staff they’ll bomb, any public leadership they’ll assassinate, and they’ll kill as much of the secret leadership as they can.
Modern states, and especially the US state, after Iraq and Afghanistan, are very aware of this. This is one of the main reasons for the rabid scramble to surveil everything–not just online, but offline. Put cameras, drones, satellites, listening devices (many cameras now eavesdrop) everywhere they can, add in recognition software and behaviour algos, and scoop everything up. The first sweep is algos, looking for behaviour that seems consistent with being a threat or even that is just unusual (i.e., “Fred’s not doing what he usually does, let’s flag that.”).
With this surveillance, the hope is to be able to stay on top of the new technology of violence and area denial: We know where you go physically, online, what you buy, and who your friends and family are. We know you, we can predict you, and if you get out of hand we know where to find you so we can grab you or kill you.
Historically, the more the state needs its citizens to fight, the more power they have. You get universal male suffrage, generally, when you have the draft, you get selective male suffrage when part of the population fights and is required to fight (is not replaceable. You can replace US soldiers, but Greek hoplites came from a class which could not be replaced with someone else.)
Even so, human soldiers are a clear point of failure. They may not shoot their fellow citizens, and the more of them you have, the more likely it is they won’t shoot. Thus automated warfare: not just aerial drones, but ground robots, which are no more than a couple decades out. It’s a lot easier to kill someone from remote, when you don’t smell what humans smell like when their guts are ripped open, when you can turn the sound off the screams.
If there is violence against the state, it will look like Iraq or Afghanistan, not like the American Revolution. Add in other new techs like 3D printing, and you have an insurgency where virtually anyone with a minimum of tech skills and a few parts can make weapons. Some household chemicals which can’t be banned, and you have bombs. Drones will not, ultimately, be weapons of the strong, either, but weapons of the weak: They are not hard to make and if technically savvy people get motivated, they will be more than able to make their own air and ground drones.
The… issue, here, is the inability hold ground and protect infrastructure. What happens in this type of war is that it is difficult to land a knockout punch. So the country becomes a place where you have low (or high) grade terror, places where no one can go, and constant atrocities on both sides as they try and destroy the will of the other side to resist, punish their enemies, and cow the local population into obedience.
An armed population gives the ruling class pause when it is not fully under their control and is organized by local elites not fully under the control of the central elites. But if those local elites go too wrong, you get armed militias imposing local shakedowns at best, tyranny at worst (see: Klu Klux Clan). It gives them more pause when they need that armed population to fight external foes who are actually an existential threat (Islam, again, is not an existential threat to the US.) It gives them further pause when they fear assassination and need to maintain close contact with the population and not hide behind guards and walls all the time.
One must also recognize that, despite its apparent overwhelming power, the US military is absolutely horrible at anti-insurgency. Take a map of Afghanistan or Iraq and plunk it down on a map of the continental US.
The US is…big, very, very big. If the US military could not crush insurgencies in Iraq or Afghanistan, if one ever gets seriously underway, why do you think it could do in the US? Hmmm?
Thus, again, blanket surveillance and remote or (ultimately) automated killing machines.
If anyone wants to defeat a first world State, on its own ground, they will either need the mass active (not passive) support of the population, before the killing machines become active, or they will need to rethink, or more likely, adaptively learn, how to defeat the surveillance state. The model for this, of course, is Hezbollah, who runs a secret army and in certain respects, almost a secret state. You must have your own ways of communicating which cannot be tapped. You must know how to avoid the surveillance of the enemy, or take it out. You must know how to move without triggering the algorithims, and you must figure out some way to protect the organs of your nascent state, whatever they are, from destruction.
It may come to this, but we should hope it doesn’t, because civilization will be laid waste by it. The other route is the failure of ideology. The USSR did not fall in battle, it fell when the decision was made not to use the troops, by men who no longer believed enough in the USSR to kill or die for it. A vast ennui had swept the USSR, they simply no longer believed in their form of communism. Done.
One problem with that is that it happens when it happens, and it may not happen for a long time: Plutocrats don’t need any grand belief in anything more than money and passing it on to their heirs, and the people who fight for them don’t need to believe in much more than money either. Absent a belief system that unifies them against the ruling class, they’ll kill for their lords and masters.
The second problem was also displayed in Russia: If you don’t have an ideology to replace the old one that’s better than the old one, your society can go downhill fast. Russians were vastly worse off after communism than during communism. By some metrics they still are. If the US fails and accepts, say, Chinese state capitalism, that might not be a good thing.
The best way of overthrowing a state is to undermine belief in it and replace that belief with belief in something new and something better. Do those things, and while some violence may be necessary, you will find, when push comes to shove, that the state is rotten and can hardly fight, because those running it do not believe in it and those fighting against it are fighting for something not just against something.
Absent powerful external enemies, belief is what makes states, and it is what destroys them. Even in cases where there are external enemies, great nations tend to rot from within before falling to outside foes–if they do not renew themselves first.
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By Eric A. Anderson
After almost every mass shooting since Wayne LaPierre became leader of the National Rifle Association (NRA), he and his minions have said that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. In Wayne’s world, the bad guys will cower in fear of a ubiquitously armed citizenry always on the ready to draw their weapons in self-defense. The image is attractive and probably resonates because it’s the story in so many movies and television shows, and harkens back to our myths of the Wild West.
Per economic theory, what we should do is arm children in schools, but I trust it’s obvious why that would be a bad idea.
Since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold executed twelve children at Columbine High School in 1999, school shootings have become commonplace. Between Columbine, and the most recent mass school executions at Marjory Stoneman Mason High School, at least sixty-five of our nation’s children under the age of eighteen have been killed by bad guys with guns. In not one instance has a good guy with a gun shown up to save the day, despite the fact that, in several of the mass executions, “good guys with guns” in the form of school resource officers had been present but failed to protect the children. Why? What explains the disconnect between the NRA’s vision of peace through fire-power and reality?
Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, may shed some light.
Although the origin of the term homo economicus remains disputed, it is unlikely the term would exist today without Adam Smith’s seminal work The Wealth of Nations. There, Smith states his dictum, now reduced to dogma by neo-classical economists, that “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.” From there, it is no great stretch to arrive at a modern definition, as provided by Chris Doucouliagos in his 2016 paper titled, “A Note on the Evolution of Homo Economicus”:
The neoclassical economists’ Homo Economicus has several characteristics, the most important of which are: (1) maximizing (optimizing) behavior; (2) the cognitive ability to exercise rational choice, and; (3) individualistic behavior and independent tastes and preferences.
Put simply, Smith’s self-interested, individual rationally exercises independent tastes and preferences to produce optimal self-interested behavior. Which begs the question: What rational human being’s tastes and preferences would lead them to believe it is in their optimal interest to rush into a hail of AR-15 rifle fire? The only answer possible is an individual motivated purely by altruism.
Many with only a passing familiarity with Adam Smith do not know that he had much to say on the subject of altruism. Three theories of altruism had already been outlined by the middle of the eighteenth century that mirror modern theories: (1) the egoistic perspective, can be seen as a variant of reciprocal cooperation, maintaining that one may share his income with another to induce a reciprocal transfer in the future; (2) the egocentric view, maintains that a donor would donate a resource if the pleasure of watching the happiness of others exceeds at the margin the donor’s satisfaction from consuming some resource himself; and (3) the altercentric framework views the benefactor’s action as stemming from a moral sense as binding as rules of honesty. However, Smith took issue with all of these approaches, preferring instead an alternative based of the idea of sympathy.
In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith conceived of sympathy as the foundation of beneficence, or in modern terms, altruism. Elias Khalil writing for the American Institute for Economic Research states in a paper titled Adam Smith and Three Theories of Altruism states:
For Smith, the motive to satisfy self-interest and other-interest stems from the same general tendency of humans to sympathize- in one case with the self and in the other with the beneficiary. That is, Smith did not view self-interest as radically different from other-interest: both are simply different instances of sympathy. We witness that man acts more often in sympathy with the self (i.e., out of self-interest) because man is obviously more familiar with the circumstance of his own self than with the circumstance of others. That is, for Smith, there is no fundamental distinction, but only a difference in degree, between one’s own feelings as opposed to the feeling of others towards one’s interest.
Smith’s own summation of the “difference in degree” between one’s own interest, and the interest of another, reveals the problem inherent in relying on a random good guy with a gun to protect our children, stating:
After himself, the members of his own family, those who usually live in the same house with him, his parents, his children, his brothers and sisters, are naturally the objects of his warmest affections. They are naturally and usually the persons upon whose happiness or misery his conduct must have the greatest influence. He is more habituated to sympathize with them. He knows better how every thing is likely to affect them, and his sympathy with them is more precise and determinate, than it can be with the greater part of other people. It approaches nearer, in short, to what he feels for himself.
Getting yourself killed for fifteen-dollars an hour for people you don’t care about as much as you care about yourself isn’t rational behaviour. Investing more money in guards or teachers whose sympathy for themselves is greater than their sympathy for school students is irrational.
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I recently wrote an article on how to be happy in bad times, and advised, in effect, that in most cases one should avoid feeling other people’s suffering.
One should, to be happy, not constantly be empathizing with people who are suffering.
Empathy happens when you feel what other people feel. You put themselves in their shoes, as it were, and feel what they feel.
Empathy is a deeply problematic emotion. It works best when we identify with someone else. It is for this reason that, for example, when New York or London suffers a terrorist attack, we (Westerners) get very worked up, but when Iraq suffers (yet another) attack, we hardly even notice and if we do, most Westerners care little, if at all.
Empathy requires us to put ourselves in another person’s shoes, to imagine ourselves as them. It is near automatic with people who are like us, with whom we identify, and virtually non-existent for people with whom people we don’t identify.
When empathy works, we feel a version of what the other person feels; if they are suffering, we suffer. If they are happy, we are happy, and so on.
Sympathy is different: We care about someone else, and we want them to be better. We do not have to feel what they feel, instead we feel caring. And when we feel caring, we tend to act. Sympathy is a positive emotion, it feels good to care. It is beneficial to us to feel sympathy, and it is beneficial to others if we act.
These are two distinct emotions, and they show up on brain scans as activating different areas of the brain.
Empathy is important in personal interactions with people with whom we identify or are close to. It shows that we are like them. It is a marker of being one of the tribe or the family. If my best friend or spouse is horribly upset and I’m smiling, we’re going to have problems.
But it is unhealthy in a networked world, where I identify with people thousands of miles away. Someone is always hurting, and if I read the news and feel empathy for every bad story, I’m going to be hurting a lot in empathy with them.
This wasn’t a problem in a hunter-gatherer band. I knew only a few people, and if something was hurting them, given our close ties, it was something I should really care about.
Empathy does not imply, either, what sympathy does: a desire for the other person to be better off. A torturer can feel empathy with a victim, and get off on it. Sympathy includes “want them to stop suffering,” empathy doesn’t always. I take care to feel empathy for my enemies, so I know what they feel and how they think, so I can defeat them, after all.
For most purposes, in our world, sympathy is the better emotion. Have sympathy for others, act if you can, and get on with your life. Don’t feel the pain of strangers in trouble all the time, because there are too many of them. Your empathy does nothing for them, and it is harmful to you to feel bad so much.
I’m a strong proponent of being able to feel empathy for almost anyone. But much of the time, using empathy should be a conscious choice, because doing so with someone who is suffering, hurts.
(Of course, learning to feel empathy for happy people is one of the best skills one can have. In fact, it is one of the “four Buddhist treasures.” Someone’s always happy, if that makes you feel happy, well, you can be happy almost all the time.)
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Last year, the New York Times had a profile of two people marrying: one 98, the other 94. They met in gym, they’re both active and happy despite their age.
What is their “secret?”
“People always ask what it is that keeps us young,” Mr. Mann said. “Of course, one part of it is medical science, but the bigger part is that we live worry-free lives; we do not let anything we cannot control bother us in the least.”
All times are bad times. Bad stuff is happening to a lot of people, somewhere in the world, and in your country. Oh, some times are worse times: the An-Lushan rebellion, say. WWII. The Great Depression. The Sea-People invasions that destroyed almost all civilization in the Europe and the Middle East, and so on. The Congo today.
And it may be that, as a species, we have a big one coming down the line. I’ve seen reasonable scenarios where climate change and ecological collapse get bad in less than a decade. I’ve seen scenarios where it takes a hundred years. My current over/under is about 40 years from now and has been for a long time. The science is creeping towards shorter and shorter numbers. (40 years is about where I expect us to start losing continental coastal cities.)
There are a variety of other problems, economic, technological, social, and political, and they are going to be aggravated by our environmental issues, though environmental issues may also make some of the worst stuff unlikely, or destroy bad civilizational choices like panopticon societies. (China is definitely going to have one. In certain cities, it almost does alread–held back only by the technical problem of way too much information. Other societies will too, the UK isn’t far behind in London.)
So it is entirely rational, in one sense, to despair for the future. Lots of bad shit coming down the pike, and anyone who takes their blinders off and looks can see it.
But it is not rational to despair and become depressed because of stuff you do not control.
And you do not control the environment, the economy, or politics.
You are one of seven billion people, and unless you are part of an elite of maybe 1,000 people, you have no real power. Maybe you’re part of the million or so people who have power locally. If so, use it well to help your locale. But even then, you aren’t stopping the big forces coming down the line; all you can do is prepare somewhat better and for more people.
Your responsibility can never be more or less than your power. Look at how much power you have over anything, including yourself, and that is the extent of your responsibility. Even when it comes to yourself, your power is not infinite. You don’t, for example, have direct control over your thoughts and feelings, though through various methods you have some indirect control and ability to slowly change the preponderance.
A clear recognition of what you can control and what you cannot control; of the exact extent of your power, allows you to relax. You don’t control it, don’t sweat it.
Of course this is easier said than done. It is unlikely that you can change to be that way overnight. But you can change to be that way over time, in part by simply remembering that worrying about things you don’t control is pointless.
Relax.
And remember, death and suffering are not optional. They happen to everyone. The schedule has some flex–when you die and suffer, but only some. You may have some influence over the amount of both, but other suffering will happen completely out of the blue, taking you by surprise.
Relax.
That which you cannot control, you should not care about. That doesn’t mean pain won’t happen, it means you won’t add to it with worry and self-blame. You didn’t cause climate change. You may be the proximate cause of your suffering or death, but you did not invent either suffering or death. So—
Relax.
Everything ends. Everything. Nothing is eternal.
This is, however, as true of everything bad as everything good.
And remember also that the good is always around too. Food that tastes good and satisfies. Love. Beauty. The satisfaction of a soft bed (hopefully). The good times pass and return, just as the bad times do.
And everyone dies, and everything ends, and in that is freedom.
Your worry hurts you and helps no one else. By all means do things. If you can make a difference, and want to, go ahead. But once that all is done—
Don’t worry and be happy.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
Recently I changed this blog’s comments to be reviewed and approved before posting, because too many comments were, well, bad comments.
In particular, many of the comments were attacking other commenters, not other commenters’ arguments. Others still were simply racist, sexist, or otherwise offensive.
I had been reluctant to place comments under moderation both because I didn’t want the extra work and because I believe that sometimes calling evil, evil is required; that swearing is not always bad, and; that it is helpful for people to see the trogdolytes.
I still believe these things (and am still lazy) but the problem was moderation: There was simply too much insulting and too much racism and so on.
So, since I’ve put on comment moderation, almost all comments have been clean and approved. The few exceptions were marginal. Granted, there are no new threads yet on topics people get excited about, so we’ll see. But I’m guessing most people understand how to be polite.
That said, let’s run through how to comment productively.
First: no ad-hominem attacks. That means addressing the commenter’s, or poster’s argument, not their character. “I believe that red is not the best color,” rather than “Any fool knows blue is the best color,” or “Only a depraved ^!#%#$# would say red is the best color.”
I understand this can be difficult at times, because a commenter may say something truly vile or stupid like, “the Holocaust didn’t happen,” or compare a race to animals, or whatever. However that won’t be happening now because such comments will not be approved.
Of course a poster may say something you think is evil, or may themselves engage in some ad-homs (I have not been shy about calling various people evil in posts). This may seem unfair and probably is. You will simply have to suck it up and deal with the argument. So, instead of “Ian is scum for calling the Iraq war/Iraq/Putin/Obama/Bush/Trump/Clinton/My Cat (or whatever) evil,” try “Ian is wrong about Iraq being evil because by gosh, it has made the Middle East objectively a better place as measured by (damned if I know).” If doing it this way is unbearable, well, there are other blogs. You are not required to read this one.
Second: No racism, sexism, etc… I’ve put up with some of this, maybe too much of it, because I believed that it was useful for readers to see people make the arguments. But now that I am pre-approving comments, I will be very reluctant to allow it. Commenters might be able to get it in by using racist or other objectionable comments as launching points for rebuttals and so on.
There is a gray area here, when it comes to actual differences between the genders and ethnic groups. Obviously there are some. Let me suggest it should not be suggested that any race or gender is innately bad. Blacks are not arrested more than whites in America because they are innately criminal, and so on.
There are going to be some marginal cases here, and I’ll just have to judge them. There will be no appeal, because I do not have time to get into finely-parsed arguments with commenters. I may well make the wrong choice in either direction, especially if I decide an argument I think dubious needs some air time so that it can be seen, and hopefully rebutted. How much of that I allow will depend as much on how other commenters deal with it as anything else.
I don’t want this blog’s comments to turn into a place where it is impossible to note, say, that there are biological differences between men or women. I also don’t want it to be a cesspit or sexism and racism.
Third: Swearing.
Yeah, I’ve been known to swear myself in blog posts. The old progressive blog argument was that civility was bullshit, people were suffering and dying and angry people, who should be angry, were being censored out of the conversation because they spoke and wrote like angry people, when anger was entirely appropriate.
So. Limited, for effect, and not directed at other commenters. There will, again, have to be judgment calls here. I will make them, they will not be up for appeal, for time reasons. If you use invective, you will be risking your comment. Up to you if you want to take that chance.
Concluding Remarks
I am saddened it has come to this, but it has. Let’s make it work, though. It really shouldn’t be hard. The basic rule is: “Would I say this to the face of a guy I know could whup my ass in real life.” If the answer is no, don’t say it.
I have many, very good commenters. I value your comments. Let’s make the comment threads something people want to read, not something they flee.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
Moderation is now on. All comments will go through me before being posted. This will last for at least a couple weeks.
Do not email me if comment approval takes a while, I’ll try to check at least once a day, but it may be somewhat longer depending on the events of my life.
No comments with ad-homs will be approved. In some cases, I may edit them, to show how to make an argument without using ad-homs, in other cases I may just delete them. I will also not approve comments which, in my opinion add nothing to the discussion, or which include lies. This will not be up for debate, it is at my discretion.
I have tried to avoid this, but it is as it is. Play nice for a couple weeks and I’ll take the moderation off, as it’s extra work and I’m not interested in doing it.
