We Are Surrounded By Monsters

Reflections on Human Nature

---

I have been struggling lately. I hate the concept of “empaths” with a violent passion so I would never call myself one, but I am highly sensitive to the things that happen in the world and often internalize them to an unhealthy degree. It’s something I desperately wish to be able to turn off and tune out. When you follow politics as closely as I do, the constant barrage of bad news flooding your feeds can be overwhelming. And right now it feels like the world is getting worse at an unstoppable pace. I am deeply affected by bearing witness to not only immense suffering, but the sheer sociopathy proudly exhibited by so many. If you’re reading this, I suspect you are too.

We are truly living in (as Antonio Gramsci didn’t actually say) a “time of monsters”. The worst of humanity is on constant display everywhere you turn. There seems to be no justice for the wicked at all, anywhere. Worse, this wickedness is frequently rewarded by the perverse incentives that drive this system. The evil can feel all-encompassing. It permeates every single facet of our lives and can easily drive a person to despair.

Not just the blatant indulgence of evil that characterizes the modern Republican party, but the banal evil of corrupt Democrat politicians who take loads of cash to work against you, of mercenary venture capitalists, of the atrocity laundering New York Times, of the cable news hosts who distort the truth to serve their billionaire bosses and their class interests. Insatiable greed is treated as a normal condition, support for mass slaughter is as quotidian as the sun rising, your local activists want to liquify the homeless for “infesting” their streets. Liberals and conservatives alike openly revel in the suffering of the people in states that didn’t vote like them. Recording strangers in their worst moments and posting it online is a social norm. Installing surveillance equipment on your front door and treating your neighbors like criminals is the default. “Call out culture” has replaced rehabilitation. Getting someone fired has replaced real justice. Our heroes are celebrities and billionaires instead of humanitarians and revolutionaries. The accumulation of wealth is the new religion, and getting yours is the prerogative.

The world feels like it’s getting meaner, crueler, uglier. It feels like the human race is devolving. The simmering rage bubbling just under the surface of the average American is palpable, and more often than not it is directed at each other. What we call our humanity is reserved for some and not for others. We let our worst impulses rule us at every turn.

What the hell happened to us?

When I was a child I was told that communism was “a nice idea that couldn’t work because it goes against human nature”. The assumption inherent in this is that humans are far too greedy, too individualistic, too selfish and self-interested, to build a collectivist society where we all shared the fruits of our labor. A society where no one was hungry and everyone had enough. If you look around right now, it seems like that is self-evidently true. Society is run by a million Gordon Gekkos who are actually doing quite well for themselves in this never-ending hellscape.

We are told fairytales of the concept of karmic retribution by people who want to make you feel like the world is more equitable than it actually is. The idea that there’s some cosmic justice waiting to be meted out to the worst people, eventually, someday, helps us cope with the fact that the world we actually live in is one where having no conscience or morals is often rewarded. Ruthlessness is the highest virtue. The people who are the most corrosive to the very idea of living in a society are sitting at the tippy-top of unfathomable piles of gold, implementing a societal order that crushes us under the weight of its injustice and inequality.

The true question is if “human nature” is even real. And if it is real, is it some fixed thing —immutable, like the laws of gravity, or is it something more malleable, more a product of its environment. Is what we think of as “human nature” really our nature at all or just the result of what we nurture? Are we destined to be cruel, self-serving narcissists who want an ever-growing piece of the pie regardless of the human cost? Are we truly incapable of community, collectivism, sharing, altruism? Or is all of that ugliness a result of the catastrophic conditions of our existence.

Something I think about often is road rage. The act of driving can make a decent, mild-mannered person into a raving lunatic at the drop of a hat. This is attributed to the fact that either consciously or subconsciously, you know that when you are driving, one wrong move could be the end of you. Deep down you understand that being on the road is a risk, and that whether by your own carelessness or the carelessness or stupidity of another, it takes very little to crash. Your senses are therefore heightened, and any real or imagined slights become amplified. I think capitalism works much in the same way, especially at this late stage. We are all living lives of unfathomable precarity. A sudden illness, a mass layoff, an accident, and it could be over for us. We are all a handful of paychecks or less from being homeless. We are one stroke of bad luck from being thrown into incalculable amounts of medical debt, or being evicted because the rent is too high and the wages are too low. Living under an ever-constricting capitalism is like being on a road full of patches of black ice: one wrong move and it’s lights out.

This Sword of Damocles is constantly swinging above us and threatening to destroy what little we’ve managed to carve out in this world. So we react. Poorly. We are on such a knife’s edge that it takes almost nothing to activate us, to turn us against one another, to be self-consumed, to perceive threats where they don’t exist. We become trained to see differences instead of similarities, ever in search of the danger that could befall us by the hand of another. We distract ourselves from this looming sense of existential dread with unhealthy preoccupations. We seek the justice we don’t find in our real lives in the ability to ruin a stranger’s life online. We ultimately inflict our sense of powerlessness on each other, over and over again. We do all of this while the people who create the culture, the toxicity, the true violence, walk away with the bag, completely unscathed.

There is good money in the art of misdirection. There’s billion dollar rage industries that exist entirely to turn our eyes towards each other and prevent them from looking upward. You can even build an entire successful media career on grievance against the most vulnerable people in our society. Ben Shapiro couldn’t exist otherwise. And of course all of it is a distraction created with the intention of shielding us from noticing we are being robbed — of our money, our time, our basic human dignity — by the people we follow to tell us who to hate. There’s a whole political party that exists as an outlet to rail against thy neighbor. Madison Square Garden gets completely sold out, full of people convinced that the rich assholes on stage are on their side and the immigrant farm worker next door is their enemy. These leaders know that the fury you feel is real, but it’s better if you don’t figure out the true reason why. They are masters at harnessing your righteous anger and throwing it at convenient scapegoats. That doesn’t mean you were wrong to be angry in the first place.

If you feel rightly disgusted by that proposition, you are offered what’s behind door number 2. A kinder, gentler alternative to the Party of Hate. This is the same ruling class in a different outfit. They love to prattle on and on about their supposed values; about decency, about democracy, about equality and other high-minded ideals. But if you look a little closer, they are bought and paid for by many of the same people as their theoretical enemies. They are more committed to the almighty dollar, to Israel, to silencing dissent, to their stock portfolios, to fighting their left flank, to “bipartisanship”, than to any of those highfalutin beliefs they claim to hold dear. For what is decent about letting millions die from lack of healthcare, from hunger, from poverty? What is decent about arming a genocidal apartheid state to the teeth? What is democratic about accepting legal bribes from corporations and billionaires to pass only the laws that benefit them? What is democratic about rigging primaries so a politician who wants to work for the people can’t win? This is merely good branding over paper thin ideals. These people are where they are for the most part because they aren’t good, but they play the shell game of this sham democracy really, really well. A system as rotten as ours is not capable of producing anything but. In reality, you’re being sold a softer spoken barbarism that takes you to the same circle of hell, albeit at a slower pace.

We are surrounded by monsters. There’s not even a glimmer of hope that the system that created them will hold them accountable. They win and win and win again off our backs, off of the sweat of our brow, off of the bounty we provide. When they lose, the losses get socialized, everything else is kept just for them. We continue to live our “poor butchered half-lives” while they fail upwards forever. For those of us who believe in true democracy, in true equality, in the hope for a better world, it can feel too much to bear. The only thing that has ever really “trickled down” is this hideous culture that is making monsters of us all. Blatant sociopathy running amok through people who get rewarded with unimaginable money and success, while the good and decent people get poorer, and harder, and angrier, and more isolated, and more atomized.

One tries to imagine a world where the opposite of all these vices were what we collectively valued, and how “human nature” would work in this fictional future. What would it look like if this world incentivized sharing, collaboration, tolerance, selflessness and elevated the people who live up to those values? What if being a hoarder, a bigot, a narcissist, a brute, was sure to get you cast out? What if being selfish and self-centered had a social cost? What if all of us had more than enough of what we need to feel secure — never worrying about where the next meal would come from or if the cancer would bankrupt us? Would “human nature” work the same as it does now or would we change as our incentives do?

We valorize greed and then decry people for being materialistic. We exalt individualism and then deride people for not working together. We mock you for being lonely and then tell you the solution to your alienation is to fill your house with stuff. The society that makes the knives also sells you the band-aids. The society makes you sick just to sell you the cure. What we call our values are passed down to us from the top, and we react to those inputs. Our will is not quite as free as we want to believe.

Most people, most people, want to feel safe, want to feel loved, want to belong, want to feel valued. And yet the society we live in is designed to make fulfilling those needs as difficult as possible. To opine on the nature of humanity under a system that is designed to strip us of it is impossibly cynical. We don’t know what people would be like in the world I just described, but I don’t think they’d be like they are now. We lived for thousands of years in primitive communism, societies built on sharing and being a part of a whole, working together for the survival of the tribe. We’ve lost touch with the part of us that sees ourselves as belonging to something bigger, and that is by design. If we saw ourselves as one big collective family, we wouldn’t let a tiny minority of monsters lord over us. We wouldn’t let them trick us and divide us and distract us with rage bait. We would see them as outliers who threaten the tribe, and we’d likely have the good sense to deal with them with a very large rock.

We are surrounded by a poisonous culture that elevates profoundly misanthropic people who are setting the world on fire for short-term personal gains. It’s important to remember that we don’t have to become monsters too. If I was cynical about humanity I wouldn’t be a communist. I would instead give in to nihilism and despair. However, I believe deeply that there is a goodness in the indefatigable human spirit that may need some coaxing to come out, but exists nonetheless. I know that we aren’t spinning around on this rock for no reason, doomed to oppress each other forever. We are suffering the consequences right now of a very sick system, but sometimes you have to run a fever to get the virus out.

my friend @afrocosmist with some profound inspiration

While it is soul crushing to witness the degradation of whatever social contract we thought we had, to feel like there’s no justice for the wicked anywhere to be found, we have to guard ourselves to not become cynics about the nature of humanity itself. You can let the bastards get you down or instead tune your ears to the beating heart of those who let their love for this world guide them. As Antonio Gramsci actually did say, we need a pessimism of the intellect but an optimism of the will. It’s not over, because we are still here, and we refuse to be broken by the cruelty that surrounds us. It’s not the end, it’s yet another chance to start again.

"You must realize that I am far from feeling beaten…it seems to me that… a man out to be deeply convinced that the source of his own moral force is in himself — his very energy and will, the iron coherence of ends and means — that he never falls into those vulgar, banal moods, pessimism and optimism. My own state of mind synthesizes these two feelings and transcends them: my mind is pessimistic, but my will is optimistic. Whatever the situation, I imagine the worst that could happen in order to summon up all my reserves and will power to overcome every obstacle." - Antonio Gramsci

Thanks for reading! I am a 100% crowd-funded writer. If you enjoyed this piece, please consider upgrading to a paying membership here. An audio version of this newsletter is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and PodBean. Make sure to subscribe so you can get the latest right in your inbox. If you aren’t able to financially support this project, sharing it with a friend goes a long way. It is your support that makes this project possible. - Scarlet