Announcing "Better Strangers"

I started blogging during my semester abroad in 2007. I had recently dropped out of my film school program, and, high on reading Hunter S. Thompson, decided I was going to become a journalist.

Journalism school was not, in retrospect, a good idea. My professors were teaching us how to work in a newsroom and mostly dismissed the internet as a fad, or as a place where "real journalism" didn't happen.

And then the next year, the entire industry collapsed, along with the economy. And just in time for me to graduate from college! What jobs remained were almost entirely online, and newsrooms were shuttered all around the world.

I spent the next decade trying to make it in writing. I worked for a sketchy SEO company that operated out of the offices above an abandoned arcade, I got a master's degree in human rights to supplement my knowledge base and make some connections, I worked for an immigration nonprofit in DC, and finally, in 2014, I scored a gig editing for a travel website, all while trying to figure out my "brand" and build up social media clout and pick up freelance gigs on the side.

I finally burnt out in 2018, when my daughter was born. The website I worked for was rocked by sexism complaints and was plagued by a generally toxic, Silicon Valley-style culture. I began to realize that the purpose of our writing was not to open the world up to people, but instead to write clickbait, which we could then sell to advertisers for local tourism boards (at one point, the state of Idaho's tourism board tried to get me fired for making a crack about potatoes). Travel itself, I also began to understand, was one of the primary industrial drivers of climate change and ecosystem destruction, and could not sustainably exist on the scale that it currently does. This was not an opinion one could have on a site where 100% of the revenue came from the tourism industry, and where "travel is fatal to bigotry, narrow-mindedness and blah blah blah" was a cultish mantra.

On a long drive back to my hometown with my infant daughter, my wife, who'd listened to me complain about my job for about half of the 10-hour drive, said to me, "You know, you could just… quit. Like, first thing tomorrow."

So I did. I got a job at the local library, where I buy comics and run programs and a digital literacy lab, and I've spent the past four years, in my rare moments of free time, working on a pair of books.

This has been good for me. The intervening time has made me more and more certain that the current layout of the internet, with its premiums on rapid production of "content," with its emphasis on short attention spans, and with its algorithms designed to maximize ad revenue rather than healthy debate or thought, is absolutely devastating for our collective soul.

I miss the old internet, which was so fucking weird. My friends used to send each other random shit we'd found on Stumbleupon and Tumblr, like A Story from North America, Rejected, or Wizard People, Dear Reader. Even if something felt too weird (looking at you, Salad Fingers), it was at least confirmation that I was not alone in conformist, boring Cincinnati, and that somewhere out there, there was a dope world full of dope shit.

I do not think that is the function of the internet any more. I think the rich and powerful have learned (as they generally do) how to manipulate it to their ends, which means bubbles are more likely to be solidified and fortified, while the weird quirky shit largely gets relegated to the corners.

Wondrous creatures

Around when I was leaving my writing job, I became obsessed with the work of comic writer Alan Moore, who argues that art and magic are fundamentally the same thing. Art, he says, is the only human activity that allows you to transport people to other places, other times, other worlds. It's the only way we can enter each other's minds and poke around, it's one of the very few ways we can induce feelings like awe or sadness or joy in our fellow humans.

As magic, of course, writing can also be used as a dark art – it can be used to make people hate, fear, or destroy one another. It can be used to divide and manipulate. Most of us who have chosen lives as writers think of our choices in terms of "career," and how we can "monetize" our talents. This usually means prostituting our skills for advertisers, who want to take this elemental force that we have at our disposal and exploit it to sell cars or beers or pharmaceuticals, or, even worse, as propaganda for cynical politicians or billionaires who want to amass power while destroying the world.

I'm aware that calling writing "magic" or an "elemental force" being cheapened by advertisers and billionaires makes me sound a little self-important, but I'm past the point of caring about that. So much about our culture tells us we're worthless little creatures that can't make a difference or do anything worthwhile, that we're better off leaving the tough work to the "heroes" who are smart enough or powerful enough to make the big boy decisions for us. I'm done with that – I don't think humans are useless. I don't think we're a disease the world needs to be cured of. Thanos wasn't right to destroy half of the life in the universe, and I think that it's crazy that so many people agree with him. 

"The landscapes that we exist in, we're going to internalize them, aren't we?" Moore said in an interview with podcaster Will Menaker, "So if you're living in a place that appears to you to be a kind of rat trap, then inevitably, you're going to come to the conclusion that you're probably some kind of rat."

"Whereas if you know anything about the place in which you're living, if you can invest all that brick and mortar with some history, some mythology, whatever, then you can transform the place that you're living in to somewhere out of the Arabian Nights, into a fantastic, magical wonderland, and if you're living in that kind of environment, you might eventually come to the conclusion that you could be a wondrous creature."

Or, as Yoda put it – "Luminous beings are we! Not this crude matter!"

The human mind understands the world through stories, and by grappling with our stories and the ones that surround us, we can start exerting control over the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. 

Better Strangers

On a practical level, this means I want to get back to writing what interests me, regardless of how well it fits a "brand" or how it performs in terms of clicks or likes. If it brings me alive, it's worth writing about. So I cast about for a while and finally settled for stealing something from Shakespeare, which has worked well for better artists than me (see: Infinite Jest, The Sound and the Fury, Something Wicked This Way Comes, literally hundreds more). The line comes from As You Like It:

JAQUES. God buy you: let's meet as little as we can. 

ORLANDO. I do desire we may be better strangers.

So: the new title is "Better Strangers." I can't claim to have thought too deeply about it, it just hit me as the correct name. And, to be totally transparent, I did not come across it while reading the actual play: I came across it on a coffee mug ("Shakespearean Insults") at Barnes & Noble. I like the sound of it because it could be an insult or an invitation to friendship, and because its initials are "B.S.", which my writing frequently is.

While it will primarily remain my blog, the act of naming it something other than MattHershberger.com means I can call it a "publication" and post the work of my friends, who tend to be creative, thoughtful people.

This site will be fundamentally anti-ad, so if we make any money, it will be either through affiliate links (never Amazon), through selling books or merch, or through Patreon subscriptions. Your support would be appreciated, but I have no plans to quit my day job.

This, in spite of its slick Squarespace layout (Squarespace is less labor intensive than my other options), will hopefully become a small corner of strange on the internet. If it's not for you, that's fine! If you like our version of strange, welcome! Let's become better strangers!

Best books of 2021

It's December again! Somehow! Which means it's time for my now-two-year-running “best books” roundup!

Unlike most of the “Best Of” lists you read, these are not books that came out this year. They are books that I read this year. I am actually totally unclear as to why anyone would make a list of books that only came out this year unless they were like, I dunno, financially beholden to the publishing industry and were little more than an advertising organ.

As per usual, the books below are affiliate linked, which means if you click on them then buy them, they kick me back a few bucks. Because I’m not a fucking monster, they aren’t linked to Amazon, they are linked to Bookshop.org, which allows you to make the purchase through a local bookshop, thus supporting hard-working local business owners and not a human penis who is spending his retirement trying to shoot himself into the sun while his former employees scramble to get better pay and working conditions.

Okay! So, starting with the best:

Favorite Book of the Year

The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt-Tsing

This book makes absolutely zero sense for me to pick as my "best of the year" -- it's written by an academic, so it's not exactly enthralling writing. It's also the only book I listened to this year, and the audiobook reading was not top-tier. But in a chaotic, bleak year, this bizarre book is the one that brought me the most comfort.

It's about a mushroom: specifically the matsutake mushroom, which is highly prized in Japan, but which is impossible to cultivate. For whatever reason, the matsutake mushroom only grows in places that have been ecologically destroyed. It is rumored to be the first thing to grow in Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped, and it now flourishes in the clearcut, logged forests of the Pacific Northwest. Because of its value in Japan, groups of refugees and immigrants have converged on these forests to find and pick the matsutake, and in studying both the fungus and the people that hunt it, Anna Lowenhaupt-Tsing finds hope for a world that is being systematically destroyed by capitalism.

The subtitle is On the possibility of life in the capitalist ruins, and Lowenhaupt-Tsing doesn't envision some sort of revolutionary utopia, but instead sees how people will figure out a way to survive amidst the destruction and chaos. The people who hunt the matsutake have already seen some shit: Hmong refugees (who escaped the Vietnam War), Latino immigrants, off-the-grid survivalists (often also Vietnam vets), and hippie mushroom enthusiasts. The message, if there's anything, is that: there's life after destruction! It's complicated and weird! But life finds a way, and people and nature adapt.

The book makes for dense reading, but it's packed with ideas, and it's bizarrely hopeful for a book about ecological collapse.

If that’s a bad pitch, I’d recommend a Netflix documentary on a similar theme: Fantastic Fungi.

Books that made me cry

Only two entries in this category this year! Honestly, this was a year of emotional growth for me, so it’s probably healthy that my cries in 2021 were connected to actual life events rather than fictional stories, but I kinda like this category, so I'll read sadder stuff next year, I promise.

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

12-year-old Conor's mother is extremely ill, and his grandmother, whom he can't stand, is more and more forcefully suggesting that Conor move into her house. While resisting the brutal reality bearing down on him, he looks out his window one night to find that the enormous yew tree in the yard has transformed into a giant monster, who demands that Conor listen to his stories and answer his questions.

This is a super quick read (it's technically marketed as Young Adult, but it's an all-ages book), and it is beautifully illustrated by Jim Kay. And man, it really knocks you off your feet. The tragic end that's coming is visible from the first page, but the book is not cloying about it. There is almost certainly a copy at your local library, go find it.

The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen

This is a quick one — you can read it in one sitting — about a second generation immigrant named Tien who relates to his refugee mother through fairy tales. Tien is not sure how he’s supposed to come out to his parents, and his mother is not sure how to process being separated from her homeland, her family, and culturally separated from her son.

This is a beautiful little book, with a real gut punch of an ending.

Best Mindfuck

The Magus by John Fowles

Our culture is, at this point, so saturated with "twist ending" movies and stories that we're hardly surprised by them anymore. But John Fowles 1965 novel The Magus is something different: I finished it back in January, and I still don't know what the fuck happened in it.

This should not suggest that this isn't an exciting read, and it's not to suggest that I finished it disappointed: it's great. The story follows the young Oxford graduate Nicholas Urfe, who takes a boring, fairly easy job teaching English at a school on the island of Phraxos in Greece. While there, he stumbles across a wealthy recluse named Maurice Conchis, who is despised by the locals for his collaboration with the Nazis in World War II. Nicholas, though, finds Conchis captivating, even though he can't quite put his finger on what his deal is -- is he putting on a performance? Are the people living with him servants, or actors? Why does Conchis always play such bizarre mind games with him?

The relationship between Conchis and Nicholas keeps changing, the stakes keep ratcheting up, to the point where you, by the end, will be questioning what was real and what was staged.

Fiction

The Fisherman by John Langan

My runner-up for book of the year is John Langan's absolutely brilliant horror story, The Fisherman. Two men, both grieving personal tragedies, form a bond by driving around New York's Catskill Mountains and fishing the various streams and rivers that flow into the Hudson. One day, one of them insists that they try a new stream, one that they can't seem to find on the map, and that the locals insist they stay far away from. But the bereaved fisherman insists: there may be something about this stream which could return what was lost.

Guys, I don't want to give any sort of spoilers, because this is a fucking great horror book. It is the best I've read in years (and the three regular readers of mine may recall, my "best book of the year" for 2020 was also a horror book, The Ballad of Black Tom). It is so spooky, it is so good. 

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

In fiction, there's a rule known as "Chekhov's gun." The rule was named after Anton Chekhov, who insisted that, in a play, if you introduce a gun in the first act, it must go off by the end of the third act. The point being that the most effective stories are ruthlessly efficient, and that no words are wasted on elements that don't serve the overall story.

While this rule tends to be slavishly followed in both the theater and in the writing of short stories, in practice, most novels don't follow the principle of Chekhov's gun. Writers have a hard time resisting tangents and side plots, and given the length of novel, most authors will throw in a thing or two that makes them feel clever, or that scratches an itch.

Revolutionary Road is one of the few novels I've ever read that follows Chekhov's gun perfectly (I think maybe John Le Carre's The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is the last one I read that fits the bill? And I read that five years ago). It is a clockwork novel, and it is spectacularly written. 

The story itself is simple: Frank and April Wheeler had high hopes for their lives. They thought they would take the world by storm. Then they got pregnant, and they found themselves slipping into a boring, conformist life of the 1950's Connecticut suburbs, and it is driving them insane. They decide to try and escape, and… well, no spoilers.

I can't call this my favorite book of the year, but I will call it a perfect book.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

Virtually everyone read Parable of the Sower this year, because it seems, ahh… a bit prophetic. Written in 1993, the book is set in 2024, and it imagines a future America torn apart by ecological collapse, a crumbling infrastructure, social inequality, and a violent, brutal drug epidemic. Also, the President is a far-right lunatic who runs on the slogan "Make America Great Again."

So there's that. For my money, the most interesting part of the book is the religion invented by its narrator, Lauren Olamina, a teenager whose community is under attack and must the increasingly dangerous city of Los Angeles. The religion, called Earthseed, speaks not in terms of solid, eternal truths, but in terms of the inevitability of change, and how one can both live with and "shape" change to be something more positive.

It's not an optimistic book by any means (and by all accounts, the sequel, The Parable of the Talents, which I have not gotten to yet, is bleaker), but it's a good book to read if you're struggling with the world's chaos.

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

I first became familiar with Russell Hoban when I was 2 years old, through his "Frances the Badger" series. But turns out, he also wrote visionary post-apocalyptic literature for adults!

Riddley Walker would be a strange story regardless, but the main appeal to it is its language. The story is narrated by Riddley, an 11-year-old boy who is living in ruins of a post-nuclear war Britain. The language has degraded in intervening years to something familiar but coarser. Here's a snippet:

“Its some kynd of thing it aint us but yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals. May be you dont take no noatis of it only some times. Say you get woak up suddn in the middl of the nite. 1 minim youre a sleap and the nex youre on your feet with a spear in your han. Wel it werent you put that spear in your han it wer that other thing whats looking out thru your eye hoals. It aint you nor it dont even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can.”

As I've gotten older, I've appreciated dialect books like this a lot more -- Trainspotting being the best other example I can think of -- because by forcing you to sound out the words in your head, it takes you that much further towards inhabiting the brain of the character. This book is astounding, if you're patient enough to work through it.

Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky

Sci-fi stories about alien invasions are usually about what the aliens want from us -- they want to destroy us, they want to harvest us for food, they want to form an intergalactic alliance, etc. But Soviet-era sci-fi writers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky had a more plausible idea: if they came, would they even notice us? Would we just be a waystation that they stopped at en route to something more interesting?

The world of Roadside Picnic has been fundamentally changed by one of these alien visits, where they stopped for a few hours and left. The sites of their roadside picnic are littered with their trash, which to humanity are unbelievably high-tech (and thus insanely dangerous) treasures. The sites have been cordoned off by governments, but are plundered by "stalkers" who sell the tech to criminal syndicates and scientific researchers alike.

Short Stories

Exhalation by Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang's short stories are insanely inventive. His earlier collection, Stories of Your Life and Others included the story that became the movie Arrival, but even that unbelievably good adaptation doesn't show the man's range. He's an idea guy, and his stories revolve around him playing with ideas and science in a way that literally no one else can. A good book for people that aren't always into books.

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez

Mariana Enriquez's other collection of short stories, Things We Lost in the Fire made my shortlist for the best books of last year, and this follow-up collection does not disappoint. The Argentinian writer has published four novels, of which none of have been translated into English. If we're lucky, this will be changing soon, but in the meantime, her unbelievably spooky and effective short stories will have to tide us over.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders

This is a one-of-a-kind book: George Saunders is widely regarded as the greatest living short-story writer, and for years, he has been teaching a course at Syracuse University on the great Russian short story writers. The course is obscenely exclusive — it’s a handful of students each year — but in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Saunders offers the course in written form.

The stories aren’t his — they are by Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Gogol — and after each story, Saunders explains what makes it great. In doing this, he also offers his techniques for how to write a good short story. It’s a great book for anyone engaged in the craft of writing, and a rare generous instance of a great writer offering his entire technical toolkit to the public.

Comics

A Secret History of Coffee, Coca & Cola by Ricardo Cortes

Ricardo Cortes is better known as the artist behind the hit children's book, Go the F**k to Sleep, but in this book, he looks at the history of three stimulants: coffee, coca, and cola. The pharmacological properties of the three plants are fairly similar, but one has become one of the world's most consumed plants, one has become a banned substance, and the other (when combined with the illegal one) has been turned into the world's best-selling soft drink.

This book is short and sweet, but it's an interesting look into how decisions made by the powerful can turn a plant into a crime or into a billion-dollar crop.

Baltimore by Mike Mignola

A World War I veteran travels across Europe to battle vampires, werewolves, and golems while being chased by a new Inquisition. If that doesn't sell you on it, I'll add that it's drawn by one of the most distinctive artists in comics, Mike Mignola. The look of the book alone is worth checking out, the excellent story is just gravy.

Asterios Polyp by Dave Mazzucchelli

I buy comics for our local library, and this was on a lot of best-of lists, so I got it, and then put off reading it for years because it looked kinda pretentious. The main character is an insufferable middle-aged white dude, a professor of architecture who likes to hear himself talk, especially if it's over the voice of a woman.

When I finally picked it up this year, I was pleasantly surprised at just how good it is, and how well it uses comics as a medium. Comics are often derided as just picture books for adults, to be used to dumb down actual literature or to provide future filmmakers with a storyboard. But there are some things you can only do in the comics medium, and this book is a great example of why comics should be appreciated in their own right.

Cinema Purgatorio by Alan Moore

Not many people on the internet liked this book! I am an Alan Moore fanboy, so I did, but I also think there's something to be said for it on its own: the story takes place in a movie theater, and features famous old movies, but told with a weird twist: in It's a Wonderful Life, Jimmy Stewart is stopped from jumping off the bridge by his stuntman, who explains how many stuntmen actually die in shooting the movies. The corpse who opens Sunset Boulevard is met in the morgue by all of the many, many, many other Hollywood corpses, fictional and real, who all shout over each other for attention. And the Marx Brothers become the Warner Brothers, stabbing each other in the back until the cynical Jack Warner comes out on top.

There is an overarching story to the comic, but the fun of it is watching Moore and artist Kevin O'Neill (whom he did The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with) play around in Hollywood's seedy underbelly.

The Department of Truth by James Tynion IV

Imagine: You're an FBI agent doing undercover research on QAnon and conspiracy theorists, so you attend a flat-earther event. The funders of the event pile you onto a plane, where they fly you out to the edge of the world.

When you return, realizing the conspiracy is true, you are picked up off the street by members of a shadowy government agency who tell you that what is "true" has less to do with objective fact, and more to do with belief. If enough people believe the world is flat, the world becomes flat. So he who controls truth controls the world. For this reason, you are being recruited into the ranks of the people who protect reality, the Department of Truth, led by their fearless leader, one Lee Harvey Oswald.

Non-fiction

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism by Peter Marshall

I spent six years of my life studying political science and taking comparative politics classes, and in not a single one of them did my professors ever say, "This is what anarchists believe." We engaged with all of the other ideologies -- socialism, fascism, capitalism, liberalism, communism -- but never once with anarchism, which, consensus seemed to be, was on its face stupid.

It has only been in recent years that I've realized many of the people I admire most -- Alan Moore, Leo Tolstoy, George Orwell, Mahatma Gandhi -- all had (or have) anarchist leanings, and in 2021, I finally went down the rabbit hole and started brushing up on anarchism as an idea.

I started with Peter Marshall's enormous Demanding the Impossible, which charts anarchism from its roots in belief systems like Taoism and the English Digger movement all the way through the 80's and early 90's. It's a monumental book, but if you're interested, I recapped it on my Instagram stories. They are still available here:

• Part 1

• Part 2

• Part 3

• Part 4

• Part 5

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution by Pyotr Kropotkin

When Darwin released On the Origin of the Species, all sorts of authoritarians seized on it as a natural justification for the domination of the weak by the strong. Capitalists saw in it a natural law that proved that competition was inherently good, and that inequality was necessary for the furthering of the species.

Russian biologist and anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin was Darwin's contemporary, and pointed out what most biologist already knew: cooperation was at least as common a driver of evolution as competition. His book, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution is both a biological and political argument that cooperation is at least as much our birthright as is competition and domination. 

I wrote more fully about this concept here.

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner

Most of us are at least dimly aware that, in spite of America's soaring rhetoric about democracy and freedom since WWII, the actual arms of the American Empire through bodies like the Central Intelligence Agency have been engaged in violence, torture, assassination, and in propping up dictators since their inception in the 1940s. 

Tim Weiner's exhaustive history of the first 60 years of the CIA's existence is staggering not just in revealing stuff we already knew about -- Abu Ghraib, MK Ultra, Iran-Contra -- but in showing just how bad the CIA has been at protecting and promoting American interests abroad. They've racked up an impressive body count for sure, but in terms of achieving actual American foreign policy objectives, they've been continually bested by superior intelligence services like MI6 and the KGB.

This was another one I recapped on Instagram, view those stories here:

• Part 1

• Part 2

Nature's Best Hope by Douglas Tallamy

When activists talk about what needs to be done to prevent the worst effects of climate change, they typically focus on changing the minds -- or at least placing significant pressure -- on the people who are powerful enough to actually do something.

This is disheartening to say the least, because the people in power have no interest in relinquishing their wealth and their power, both of which are byproducts of the system that is destroying the earth.

This is why books like Douglas Tallamy's Nature's Best Hope are so vital to maintaining any sort of optimism about the future of the planet. In it, he argues that the way to protect the earth is to turn our backyard into tiny nature preserves by cultivating native plants, promoting healthy homes for native birds, bugs, and other wildlife, and by turning our boring, lifeless lawns into oases.

It's a great example of grassroots activism: if you want to change the world, first you must literally tend your own garden.

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

In 1972, Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten, was "disappeared" from her flat in Belfast by masked men and women, never to be seen again. Hers was one of hundreds of deaths in "The Troubles," the struggle between the Irish Republicans and the pro-British Unionists in Northern Ireland, but it's implications have been enormous.

Patrick Radden Keefe tells the story of McConville's disappearance mostly through the eyes of the people who were responsible for it, the IRA operative and hunger striker Dolours Price, as well as Sinn Fein head and (allegedly) former IRA head Gerry Adams. Following Price's radicalization, her involvement in London bombings as well as murders and assassinations, and her hunger strike in prison, her force-feeding at British hands, and her later disillusionment with the IRA cause, the book shows just how history can be rewritten, not only by the victors, but by those who are trying to maintain peace. 

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

The common wisdom is that humans are bad, and they need to have their worst impulses checked by institutions of power. Bregman's Humankind: A Hopeful History argues the opposite: that actually humans are pretty good creatures on the whole, designed to care for each other and pretty good at organizing their own affairs when empowered to do so. 

In it, he dissects the major arguments made against human nature (the Holocaust, the Milgram experiments, the bystander effect, Lord of the Flies) and offers a hopeful alternative: maybe we aren't that bad after all?

To an anarchist like myself, this book is maddening because it makes all the arguments anarchists make while never actually acknowledging it in the text (the notes in the book are absolutely peppered with anarchist writers and arguments). But that is presumably to make the argument in favor of the inherent goodness of human nature more palatable without having to confront anarchism's not-always-savory reputation. Which isn't such a terrible thing.

I also did IG recaps on this one, which you can find here.

A House in the Mountains by Caroline Moorehead

When Americans talk about World War II, they're almost never talking about Italy. Italy was the first fascist country, but it fizzled out halfway through the war, with Mussolini holding on to power only through Hitler's wavering support. 

A House in the Mountains is the story of the northern resistance army (and more specifically, the women in it) which sprung up when Mussolini's government collapsed, and which fought the occupying Nazis to the death. They received only tepid support from the Allies, who were worried about a communist takeover of post-War Italy, and were beset on all sides by Nazis and fascists.

It's an important reminder that resistance was everywhere in Europe in WWII, even in fascist strongholds.

Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff

I read a lot and I parent a lot, but I tend to not read many parenting books, for the same reason I don't read diet books -- I don't really trust them or anyone who self-styles themselves a parenting expert. Like, talk to me in 30 years so I can ask your kids about how great your advice.

What's more, we're living in a strange limbo world in parent culture where it's somewhere between helicopter parenting (manage your kids entire life) and free range parenting (put your kid in charge). Michaeleen Doucleff's Hunt, Gather, Parent moves beyond these two paradigms by asking: how have most parents in history raised their kids? The title was obviously invented by a marketing department, as she is mostly looking at indigenous, non-western parenting methods rather than hunter-gatherer parenting methods, but everything between the covers is a goldmine for parents who want kids that aren't tiny tyrants but aren't willing to use fear or coercion to get them to be that way.

Doucleff is a science reporter for NPR who traveled to different indigenous communities (Mayan, Inuit, Hadzabe) for advice on how to deal with her tantrum-y daughter. The resulting book is full of concrete advice on how to raise children to be autonomous, compassionate, and responsible members of a family and community. 

Be more biased: There is no such thing as "unbiased" news

Back in journalism school, one golden rule was hammered into our heads: don't let bias seep into your reporting. Our opinions and preferences had no place in good journalism: we were to report "just the facts," and to allow our audience to develop their own interpretation of those facts. 

Given that we now live in the age of misinformation, I feel qualified, as a journalism grad, to offer this flowchart as to whether your preferred media source is biased or not.

It is still not, to my knowledge, taught in journalism school that "objectivity" is bullshit, and that there is no such thing as "unbiased" news. The mainstream media still holds these concepts in high regard, and as a result, much of the country believes that "unbiased" news is actually a thing, and gets furious when they detect bias in a work of journalism.

This has some disturbing implications for how our society operates, so it’s worth looking at the concept of bias a bit more closely.

What is bias?

Bias, in short, is prejudice. Prejudice does not need to be against a certain type of people, (though it often is) it can also be against things and ideas. Most of us have been taught that prejudice is a bad thing, and when it's against broad groups of people -- say a race, a religion, or an ethnicity -- it is! But you can also be prejudiced against, say, people who punch children in the face. That, many of us would argue, is a good type of prejudice. (But making that argument is in itself an act of bias — the kidpuncher lobby will be furious with you.)

Prejudice is inescapable because you're a human being. Human beings occupy a specific place in both space and time, and must see from where they stand. You cannot escape or transcend this fact -- all of your thoughts and opinions are influenced by a lifetime of experience: your body, your mind, your personal history, your family, your religious background, your culture, your gender, your ethnicity, your sexual orientation, your economic background, the time in which you live, and literally anything and everything else that has borne any sort of influence on you in your life.

There is no way to extricate yourself from that web -- you in a different time or place or body is a different you, and would not think or feel the same things. Any attempt to transcend your context and view things from some Godlike perch on high is a) inevitably going to be biased towards people like you, because you’re not fucking god, and b) is like, the textbook definition of hubris.

In spite of this, most of us like to still imagine that there is some greater objective moral truth. And maybe there is! Maybe someday we'll crack the code and figure out which religion is "right"! Or discover the formula for truth! But the current reality is that humans have never agreed completely on what is right and what is wrong. 

“With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.”

— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

Let's take an easy example: Killing is bad. You probably believe this. You also probably believe that there are times when it is right to kill people. You may be one of the millions of Americans who believe that the bombing of Hiroshima was justified. You may believe that "freedom fighters" in the land of your choice -- Ireland, Palestine, Syria, Revolutionary America, 1980's Afghanistan but definitely not 21st century Afghanistan -- are justified in killing if it means protecting their interests. You may believe that it's right to kill someone in self-defense. Or you may be a pacifist! Or you believe that all killing is good and that we should just Squid Game each other until only one dominant human remains! 

Regardless of what your exact opinion is, it is likely not shared by most people. Most people will have a qualm with at least one aspect of your opinion. And with no consensus on this fundamental moral question, there can be no "objective" correct take. Anyone claiming to have the correct take is claiming to either be a God, and just know, or is taking a side, and as such, is being biased.

I would argue that if someone claims to be God, you should cross to the other side of the street, but none of us blink when the entire journalistic establishment makes this claim. 

This does not mean that journalists can't be fair. Fairness is much more simple: if you're writing a story about specific people, you give them a chance to speak for themselves. A good example of a "fair" piece of journalism is the OG true crime podcast, the first season of Serial.

In it, the interviewer Sarah Koenig gave everyone involved in the story a chance to give their side. Adnan Syed, the convicted murderer; his friend Jay, who implicated him; the investigators; friends and families. It was not, of course, perfect fairness: the murder victim Hae Min Lee was not able to give her side of the story, but Sarah Koenig allowed everyone she reasonably could a chance to speak (or to decline to speak).

But does that mean that Serial doesn't have a bias? Absolutely not. Koenig regularly gave her opinions throughout the course of the podcast, and in the end, had conclusions about the case. Her conclusions, and, it appears, her intentions in covering the story, had less to do with the "Whodunnit?" aspect of the murder case, and much more to do with the inner workings of the American justice system, which she viewed as shockingly flawed. She later went back to this topic with the (much less listened to but still pretty fucking great) third season of the show, in which she spent months in a single courthouse in Cleveland dissecting the day-to-day business of sending people to jail.

Just because Koenig was not for or against a specific perpetrator does not mean that she was not biased. It just means her viewpoint was focused on something else. And this is the lesson: all narrators, even when they are in the third person, are telling a story from a viewpoint. If there's no story, it's just data.

Data can be biased

This might make you ask: well, why don't reporters just give data? The simple answer is: we are not computers! We are humans! And human brains don’t work that way — they receive an enormous amount of data all the time, and language and stories are the mechanisms that the brain has developed for organizing that data in an understandable way.

Even if newspapers were to switch to just posting graphs and tables, it wouldn’t fix anything, because even data can be biased. An example:

I used to work for an immigration non-profit, and whenever the anti-immigrant groups wanted to convince people how bad immigrants were for America, they would release a set of numbers: this, they would say, is how much immigrants are costing America. And what would follow would be a list of things that immigrants did that cost taxpayers money. Schools, healthcare, criminal justice system: all tallied up neatly to a big ol' number that made it clear: immigrants are bad! If that data was accurate (it wasn’t) it would seem to be solid proof that we should try to reduce immigration to the US.

Of course, that wasn't the only data. Our organization would then release our own set of data, which would tabulate the amount of money immigrants paid in taxes and contributed to economic growth, arguing that the anti-immigrant groups were basically showing a bank account with only the withdrawals and none of the deposits. And guess what! The number was much higher than the amount they took out! Immigrants are good! We should open our doors!

This is not, of course, to say that this was the correct interpretation of data. It was certainly more correct, but at the bottom of the entire discussion was an assumption that everyone engaging in the debate implicitly agreed upon: a human’s presence in this country must be economically justified to be acceptable. That’s a moral opinion right there! And a fairly controversial one at that! One could argue that human life should not be reduced to its monetary value, and that it is ghoulish and weird to see other humans in terms of how many dollars you can wring out of them!

Data will not save you because there is a lot of it, too much to even comprehend sifting through, and by choosing which data is important, you are making a subjective choice.

When you choose to write about something, you are committing an act of bias

Even angling for “fairness” in reporting, journalists are committing an act of bias simply by choosing to report on something.

Say you're a reporter, working for the local newspaper. You have a couple of leads in front of you for your next story, but you can only pick one: The first is the story of a murder of a white woman by an immigrant. The second is the story of corporate bribery of government officials which resulted in the pollution of a nearby river.

Both of these stories are 100% true. They actually happened, and you'd be able to hunt down the Five W's (who, what, where, when, why), and report on them accurately.

Which one are you going to pick?

Your answer says something about your political preferences -- if you want stricter immigration laws, the murder story is the obvious choice, as it illustrates the consequences of what you see as weak immigration laws. If you care about the environment, or hate the influence that big money has over elected officials, the pollution story is the one for you.

But your choice also says something about your economic and professional incentives: The murder story has all the elements of a front-page headline. It will, as the Newsies would say, sell lots of papes. The masses love a good murder story, especially when there's a racial element to them, because it really gets their blood boiling.

The second story might be awful on a much larger scale, but it will likely not sell quite as much. People don't buy papes for ecological catastrophes and corruption like they do for murder (quoting the Newsies, once again, in regards to what makes a good headline: "How 'bout a crooked politician?" "Hey stupid, that ain't news no more!")

The pollution story will also probably be more labor intensive, because you'll be reporting unfavorably on powerful people who will have the incentive and the means to make life difficult for you. It will mean digging through piles of receipts, rather than interviewing sobbing relatives of the murdered beauty queen (yeah, I just made her a beauty queen, roll with it, this is my hypothetical). The pollution story may also lose your paper advertisers, political power brokers may cut off access to their offices in retaliation to your reporting, all of which will force your editor and publisher to make some hard decisions about whether the story you're writing is worth putting the entire paper in jeopardy. 

At this point, even if you don't like the race-baiting element of the murder story, you may well take it. It's obviously the better career move.

This sounds like a ridiculously skewed hypothetical example, but it's not far off the calculus that reporters and their editors use to determine what to report on. Journalistic labor is limited, and publishing is a business. So more in-depth, harder-to-research stories often fall by the wayside in exchange for the tawdry "beauty slain by immigrant" story.

What can we as media consumers do?

The single best explanation of how the American media works is Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent. Buy here. (Affiliate link)

There are some fairly disturbing implications for our democracy if there is no such thing as objectivity, but let's be honest: we all know what those implications are, because they have been part of our daily lives for years now. Large swaths of our country think that vaccines are putting microchips into their bloodstream, that the CIA used psychedelics to develop mind control techniques, and that the Democratic Party is actually an elaborate front for a ring of pedophiles.

The sheer amount of conspiracy theories and intentional disinformation out there makes it hard to know what's real anymore, because the world we live in is fucking insane, so all of that stuff sounds plausible. For one thing, the CIA did use psychedelics on unwitting Americans in an attempt to learn mind control — Google Project MK Ultra. And governments and corporations are tracking your every move, they’re just doing it through your phones and metadata, not through vaccine-administered microchips. And while all of us are out here laughing at QAnon for thinking that the Democratic Party is a pedophile ring, we all as a planet learned over the past 20 years that one of the most powerful and respected institutions in the world, the Roman Catholic Church, was basically an elaborate front for a ring of pedophiles.

Is that an exaggeration? Sure! If that helps you sleep at night! But the damage is done: the fact that all of these conspiracy theories seem to rhyme with the truth makes them easy for relatively sane people to swallow when they are twisted into something that’s Pizzagate levels of bonkers.

Which makes it that much more important for those of us that believe in democracy to be media literate. And we can’t do that if we keep viewing our preferred media sources as “objective” and everything else as “biased.”

What follows are a set of totally biased rules for better media consumption.

Rule #1: Stop looking for "unbiased" media and start looking for media that discloses its bias.

If a writer (or a news outlet) is honest, they will disclose their bias. Anyone claiming "objectivity" should be immediately suspect, because it means they are at best unaware of their own biases, and at worst actively misleading you.

If a writer or an outlet does not immediately disclose its bias, you can typically find out rather quickly by Googling them or, in a pinch, the owner of their publication. If the owner is a billionaire who dumps money into the election funds of liberals or conservatives, you'll have a good sense of what the publication is trying to promote. If the publication is run by a specific religious group or a political party, you'll know exactly what they are trying to do.

If you really want to go on a deep dive, look at their advertisers. Publications tend not to bite the hand that feeds them.

This does not mean individual reporters at a paper won't take a stand -- it just means they are taking a professional risk in doing so, and are putting their editors in an awkward position. After a while, you’ll start to identify reporters you trust, and you’ll seek their writing out when in doubt.

Rule #2: Identify your own bias, then get outside your comfort zone.

You should know what you believe in. You have moral preferences, and, like all human beings, are subject to cognitive biases.

Hands down one of the best rabbit holes to go down on the internet is Wikipedia's List of Cognitive Biases page. At the very least, you should know about confirmation bias, negativity bias, the framing effect, and the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

““Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.””

— Noam Chomsky

Cognitive biases aside, be aware that you have values, and these values influence what you believe. That's not an inherently bad thing! You can believe in curiosity, in kindness, in freedom, in equality, in beauty, and so on. All of these are admirable values, but your adherence to them will influence what types of information and stories you'll be attracted to.

One of the best ways to identify your own bias is to catch yourself when you’re reading something you totally agree with. If you're reading an article and are internally saying things like "Yes! Obviously! So true!" then it's probable that you're reading a bias that is in keeping with your own. If everything you read is something you totally agree with, guess what! You’re in a bubble! You should spend some time getting out of your comfort zone!

This does not mean you should start listening to InfoWars. If you know what your values are, guess what? You don’t have to read stuff that runs against them! I, for example, decided a while back (to be exact: when I was 12 and was watching Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time) that Nazis were bad. Now that I’ve made that decision: why would I read what a fascist has to say about anything? Why would I need “to get in their head”? If I’m looking for a viewpoint that’s different from my own to expand my worldview, I, a straight white man, could read a book by an indigenous person, by a trans woman, by a black man, by an immigrant, by a Dickensian street urchin, by literally anyone with a different experience than mine, to get a broader take on an issue.

When people say, “Oh, I watch Fox News to see what the other side is saying,” they don’t realize that a) there are way more than two sides, and that b) they are giving “the other side” a chance to work its propaganda on them. If all journalism is, at some level, propaganda, you need to be super judicious about which propaganda you expose yourself to. Why get into a Nazi’s head when you could get into the head of a Jew that fled them, an Italian communist who resisted them, or a Danish factory worker who sabotaged them? Your attention is a privilege — ask any toddler — and you should decide who is worthy of that privilege.

In my case, though I identify politically with the anti-authoritarian left, I will still read stuff written by more centrist liberals because I do believe we have basically the same values, even if I think they are entirely wrong in how they apply them. I’ll also go out of my way to read stuff by people who aren’t just straight white dudes like myself, people who have historically had less power. This can be extremely uncomfortable, given that most of the worlds oppressed people have been oppressed by, well, straight white dudes like myself. I’m still getting a diversity of views, I’m just not wasting any of my bandwidth on Ayn Rand or Tucker Carlson.

Rule #3: Be humble.

Once in a while, you are going to believe something that is wrong. Something that is demonstrably incorrect. Something that makes you look like a complete dumbass. When you find out: Don't panic! Think of the following things:

1. A lot of what you once learned as fact is now embarrassingly outdated. You are not stupid for still believing it, you've just been busy living life, falling in love, having kids, building a career, and occasionally experimenting with various funtime substances. You don't need to feel bad about living your life instead of constantly fact-checking the stuff you learned in high school.

2. Given our cognitive biases, the amount of misinformation out there, and the sheer limits of human perception and understanding, it is amazing that anyone is correct about anything ever. But through the simple act of seeking the truth, humans have split the atom, cured smallpox, and invented Dippin' Dots, the ice cream of the future. Truth is a journey, not a destination, and committing to the process rather than to a specific objective will make you feel a hell of a lot better about screwing up.

3. One bit of information that challenges your view of the world does not necessarily mean that your view of the world is entirely wrong. It just means you need to adopt a more nuanced worldview. And people who use words like "nuance" sound smart! 

4. Remember what F. Scott Fitzgerald once said: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." F. Scott Fitzgerald was super smart! He wrote The Great Gatsby! By not rejecting inconvenient information, you are basically a cool Jazz-age guy holding a cocktail.

It is also worth noting that their are worldviews you can hold that allow you to become less dogmatic and more open to new thoughts and ideas, but that is for another article. In the meantime: humility in our thinking is a sign of intelligence, not stupidity.

Be more biased

The most insidious thing about the desire to be “unbiased” is that it often induces a state of complete moral spinelessness. In our insistence on “seeing both sides,” we can get lost in a haze of rhetoric and propaganda and never take a step back and say, “Hmm… The one side is a man with a boot on his neck. The other side is the man wearing the boot.” Most of us would like to imagine that, confronted with this reality, we’d maybe stop having lengthy conversations about the two different perspectives and we’d give the man with the boot a great big shove so he doesn’t kill the other guy.

To do that, of course, would mean the man with the boot would shout at us for being “biased.” Heaven forfend! My stars! Could there be anything worse than to be “unfair”?

A beginner's guide to reading horror

(Post contains affiliate links because I’m not proud, but not to Amazon, because I’m fuckin’ prouder than that.)

The horror genre of writing is viewed by most "serious" critics as pulp or trash. This is bullshit. Serious critics are the worst, and they ruin everything that's fun -- horror is an awesome genre, and "pulp" is not an insult. If you're totally new to the genre, here are the basics -- how to understand it, and some suggestions for what to read.

Why read horror? 

I have an ongoing argument with my wife, who adores the crime genre. She could fall asleep watching Law & Order: SVU, whereas I do not particularly find stories of sexual assault conducive to sleep. It gives me nightmares.

For my wife, the nightmares come with horror -- I convinced her to watch Stranger Things and the first It movie with me, and while she enjoyed both, she didn't sleep for a week. For me, the fact that demagorgons and eldritch murderclowns aren't real makes horror easier to watch than, say, Zodiac, a movie about a real-life serial killer they never caught, which gave me some pretty bad nightmares. 

It probably comes down to temperament -- some fear the known (like me) and others fear the unknown (like my wife). Regardless of where you fall on that spectrum, horror is useful because it allows you to experience and process your darkest fears in a safe way. Fear is one of our most primal, fundamental emotions, and if we don't understand what we're scared of, it can drive us to do a lot of dumb things.

It should also be said that reading horror is a completely different experience to watching horror. I'm not a particularly big fan of horror movies because I don't care for gore and viscera. There is gore and viscera in horror writing, but it's harder to write splattering guts than it is to film it, and the techniques writers use to scare you on the written page are very different from the techniques filmmakers use to scare you on the screen. The best horror writers are sparing with their descriptions of the monster, because they understand that it's better to let the reader fill in the blanks with their imaginations -- you'll visualize something far scarier than they could ever describe, because you'll fill in the details with the thing you find the scariest. It's why every screen adaptation of It has failed to really make the true form of the monster-clown Pennywise as scary as it was when you read it under the covers when you were 15.

The best horror movies understand this principle as well, and they don't let their cameras linger too long on their monster. The Babadook mostly stays in the shadows, the monster in It Follows takes the form of literally anyone watching you, John Carpenter's The Thing looks like your friend or a cute dog, before it explodes into a gnawing, writhing, all-consuming beast. The greats in all mediums also understand the difference between horror and terror.

Horror vs. Terror

The Horror vs. Terror distinction refers to two different techniques writers will use to scare you. Horror is the easier one to pull off -- it's basically an attempt to shock or surprise you. Think jump scares, think blood and guts, think terrifying images.

Terror is more refined -- it's about setting a mood, and then slowly ratcheting up the unease and tension until the climax. 

The pulpier, less skilled writers basically just go for horror. A cockroach crawling out of an eye socket will give anyone a good shudder. The great writers, however, will take the time to build terror. It's a much harder thing to do because it takes a while to build, and one misstep can totally defuse the tension built earlier in the book. 

Some writers -- like Shirley Jackson, who is very possibly the GOAT -- rely exclusively on terror. But most are more mercenary, like Stephen King, who admitted in his nonfiction book Danse Macabre: 

"I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud."

It's worth understanding the distinction if you're going to dive into horror fiction as a genre, because it'll help you spot the masters. 

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Classics that are good

So… where to start? The obvious place is the classics, though as older books, these can sometimes be trickier entry points because of outdated language and slower pacing. But some of the classics age well, and others don't. If you're gonna start with the big ones, these are my picks.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley's classic, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus will probably never be topped as the most influential horror story of all time. Shelley wrote it when she was 18 years old, but her youth doesn't stop it from being one of the smartest horror stories of all time -- it's an almost prophetic story about the consequences of man's attempt to conquer nature. Two centuries later and it's more relevant than ever.

It's not like the movies you've seen. Any of them. Karloff's monster is iconic, but he groans and moans his way through the story -- Shelley's monster is eloquent and furious, which makes the story's climax even more horrifying. 

Victor LaValle's comic Destroyer is an interesting riff on Frankenstein, but you can't really improve on perfection.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

I submit, for your consideration, the spookiest opening paragraph to any book ever:

““No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.””

— The Haunting of Hill House

Shirley Jackson's books are gothic and creepy, though rarely horrifying (the end of her classic short story "The Lottery" being an exception). I personally prefer her book We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but it's hard to classify that one as horror. 

The Haunting of Hill House is a special haunted house book in that the ghosts don't jump out and shout "boo!" It is unclear if they are real spirits, or if the house is just built in an architectural style that drives people insane. Hill House has been adapted several times, and while the recent TV show is genuinely creepy, nothing really compares to the creeping unease of Jackson's masterpiece.

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

I Am Legend has now been adapted at least three times into movies (The Last Man on Earth, The Omega Man, and the Will Smith empty-New-York-dog-scene I Am Legend). All three have become popular in some circles, but all three miss the mark in translating this excellent book, which can be counted either as a great vampire book, or the very first zombie book (due to its direct influence on The Night of the Living Dead).

What makes this book great is its examination of what a human is, what a monster is, and what makes a legend, which is something that the Will Smith movie in particular totally fails to touch on, even while stealing the title.

Richard Matheson, along with Ray Bradbury, is among the most influential post-war horror writers, having been responsible not only for Hell House and The Shrinking Man, but also some of the most influential Twilight Zone episodes, including the famous Shatner episode, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet."

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Here's the bummer: If you know this story already, then you're missing out on what's actually one of the best surprise twists in fiction. I don't want to say much more if you're one of the like, three people who never watched a Bugs Bunny cartoon, but this book, one of the most successful penny dreadfuls ever written, holds up. 

Pro tip — read the copy linked next to it, and you can imagine Dr. Jekyll as Elijah Wood! If you’re feeling fancy, you’ll imagine Mr. Hyde as Gollum.

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Classics that suck

Some people may like these! I do not, and would not recommend them.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Whenever someone complains about the "sexy vampires" in Twilight, it's probably a sign that they aren't familiar with, uh, the entire history of vampires in literature. Vampires have always been sexy, and Bram Stoker's classic Dracula is basically a supernatural bodice-ripper. You can understand why it may have been a hit at the time, but if you don't live in the context of sexually repressed Victorian London, it reads as a kinda silly book where Count Dracula is a sexy, swarthy Eastern European with a personal harem of debauched she-vampires who then goes to terrorize the pure-of-heart Protestant ladies of London, who are totally helpless and must be saved by the men.

Dracula has survived mostly because Bela Lugosi was genuinely spooky, and because F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (a wholesale, unsanctioned rip-off that Stoker's heirs tried to suppress) was an absolutely terrifying silent movie.

If you like gothic romance, you'll like Dracula, and there's an absolute butt-ton of sexy vampire stories from Anne Rice's Lestat novels to Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse novels (which the show True Blood was based on) to, obviously, Twilight.

Read Instead: But if you like your vampires to be actually scary, you're better off reading Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot, which for my money, is his masterpiece and is a major contender for the scariest book ever written. A second actually-scary option is the astoundingly good Let the Right One In, by Swedish writer John Ajvide Lindqvist, which was also adapted into two movies. Both adaptations are great -- the Swedish version is the best, but the American version, titled Let Me In is also solid. Less scary but still brilliant is Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, where the take on vampires is that they are not parasitic towards humans, but actually live in symbiotic relationships with them.

The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty and The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson

The Exorcist movie scared the absolute poop out of me when I saw it at age 11, but the book did not work for me. This is, in part, because I read it when I was 33, and also because I hadn't believed in God or demons for a good 18 years. Neither The Exorcist nor The Amityville Horror (which is even worse, not in the least because it claims to be a true story) is easy to take seriously as an atheist, because the stated respective reasons that the demon gained access to the homes in these books are extreme pagan activities like -- I am not kidding -- yoga and transcendental meditation.

Given that I did yoga every day during the pandemic and not once did my daughter turn her head around 360 degrees (blasphemous swearing was also on the infrequent side), it's hard to read these without rolling your eyes. Which isn't to say that The Exorcist isn't a classic movie -- the mood and special effects make for a deeply creepy film -- but the book just fails to scare.

Read instead: If you are not a believer, haunted house and possession books can be tough to pull off, because what's doing the haunting has to be something other than demons or prosaic ghosts. There are a few of these books that succeed -- the previously mentioned Haunting of Hill House is the gold standard, but the scariest, for my money, is Stephen King's The Shining. It is not at all like the movie, which is a good thing, and it ranks next to 'Salem's Lot and It as one of his scariest books.

Another solid entry is Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves. The core story is about a family that moves into a house that they realize is slightly bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, and the difference becomes greater with time. It's a bizarre book, it's got David Foster Wallace-style footnotes, it contains at least two major side-stories, and sometimes the text rotates and you have to turn the book as you read. It is strange, but it all works.

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Cosmic Horror

In the interwar period in the early 20th century, a new type of horror fiction emerged. It branched off from what's called "weird fiction," in the style of Edgar Allan Poe or Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows," in that what haunted the stories were not conventional monsters and ghosts but something uncanny and possibly otherworldly. It was morphed into something totally new by the pulp fiction writers in publications like Weird Tales. The greatest among them was a reclusive, xenophobic New Englander named Howard Phillips Lovecraft. 

Lovecraft has since been rightly condemned for the racism pervasive in much of his work, but his influence remains enormous. The comics writer Alan Moore (who has written several Lovecraft-inspired comics) makes the case that Lovecraft was an incredibly sensitive barometer of the anxieties and fears of the average white American in the early 20th century (which, it should be mentioned, are pretty much the same now, 100 years on). Moore also believed Lovecraft actually understood Einstein's theory of relativity, and believed that the new advances in science showed that the universe was not only indifferent to humanity, but that it may in fact be beyond humanity's comprehension.

His most famous short story, "The Call of Cthulhu," begins with this famous paragraph:

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." 

This story was written in 1928, 17 years before the atomic bomb, but horror has been shifting in this direction ever since — humanity no longer fears ghosts and demons and the wrath of a vengeful god so much as it fears the threat of manmade disasters and the brutal, unforgiving laws of nature.

Lovecraft invented some of the great terrors of 20th century fiction, from his monstrous eldritch Gods like Cthulhu, to squirming, tendril-covered shoggoth terrors, to the evil book The Necronomicon, which has been ripped off by everything from The Evil Dead to Adventure Time.

The problem is that if you’re a barometer for the anxieties of white America, you’re gonna be racist as all hell. Lovecraft connected his very reasonable unease about scientific progress and the weirdness of the universe to an absurd fear of immigrants and racial minorities. This was -- and is, it should be said -- fairly typical of white middle class America. But as a result, his fiction is peppered with overt racism and allusions to "mongrel races" which can make his work unappetizing in the 21st century. Women are virtually absent from his stories. So you could understandably want to pass over the founder of this particular subgenre entirely. The good news is there’s plenty of good stuff still available if you decide to do that. But first, here are my Lovecraft starter recommendations:

"The Call of Cthulhu"

Lovecraft's most famous invention is the octopus-faced, dragon-winged behemoth Cthulhu, one of the "Great Old Ones." This is the original and primary Cthulhu story, though the monster is now virtually ubiquitous, with appearances on The Simpsons and the opening credits of Rick and Morty. And it's genuinely good! It's vintage Lovecraft, with spooky purple prose, a growing sense of terror, and an unwashed, suicidal cult attempting to awaken the monstrous manifestation of chaos that sleeps beneath the waves of the South Pacific.

"The Color Out of Space"

"The Color Out of Space" is another classic, completely bonkers Lovecraft tale -- in it, a small farming family wakes to find a meteorite has crashed into their family well, and it glows with a strange, unnameable color -- "it was only by analogy that they called it a color at all." The color, of course, is evil, and begins to infect the water and the plantlife, turning them into bizarre alien fruits that drive all who eat them mad. 

There's a bonus in that this was made into what is, to my mind, the best adaptation of Lovecraft's work, in the form of a completely batshit-insane B-movie starring Nic Cage and Tommy Chong.

"The Shadow Over Innsmouth"

Lovecraft only really wrote short stories and poems. There are no Lovecraft novels. But he did write a handful of novellas, the most acclaimed of which is "At The Mountains of Madness," which introduced his second most famous creation, the formless, betentacled shoggoth.

For my money, though, Lovecraft's best novella is his moody The Shadow Over Innsmouth, in which a man travels to a town to find that the townspeople look and act a bit fishy. I will not say any more. If you don't like this, you won't like Lovecraft.

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If you are not interested in reading the works of racists, then you have plenty of other options.

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor Lavalle

Antiracist deconstructions of Lovecraft have become more and more of a thing in the last decade ago, most prominently through the TV series Lovecraft Country, which was based on a pretty good book by Matt Ruff. 

The best entry into this subgenre though is easily Victor Lavalle's brilliant The Ballad of Black Tom. Lavalle takes one of Lovecraft's most repulsively racist short stories, "The Horror at Red Hook," and flips it on its head by telling the story from the perspective of one of its black characters. It could've just been a preachy gimmick, but it's not. It's great, and it pays homage to Lovecraft's brand of horror while absolutely eviscerating his views on race.

The Mist by Stephen King

The only director who knows how to adapt Stephen King is Frank Darabont, who turned two of his best novellas ("Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" and "The Mist") and turned them into the only two King movies that actually improved on the source material. With that said -- King's novella The Mist is creepy Lovecraftian horror at its best. In short, a mist descends over a small Maine town, and inside the fog are unseen horrors that annihilate everything they touch. When a small group holes up in a grocery story, things start to go bad fast.

The Fisherman by John Langan

One of my best reads of 2021 so far — Langan’s story starts as a folksy tale of a man who finds solace in fishing after losing his wife to cancer. When a coworker undergoes a similar tragedy, the two start fishing together. But his coworker has heard of a stream where you can catch something… different. A stream that the locals seem to really, really, really think you shouldn’t go fishing in.

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Modern Horror

The Changeling by Victor Lavalle

Victor Lavalle is probably the most exciting name in modern horror, and his best novel-length work is The Changeling. It's about Apollo Kagwa, a New York City book buyer who falls in love, has a baby, and then finds his wife is convinced that the baby has been… switched. I don't want to say anything else about what happens beyond that, because it is horrifying and weird and genuinely great, and it has the perfect monster for a book that came out in 2017.

The Terror by Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons' 2007 book The Terror is based on a true story -- in 1845, the explorer Sir John Franklin embarked on an Arctic sea voyage to discover the northwest passage. On the way, his two ships, the HMS Erebus, and the HMS Terror, got caught in the ice, and couldn't get loose for two years. That much we know is true -- what we don't know is what happened to the ships after that, as they disappeared off the face of the earth. Simmons retelling of this story introduces a supernatural element, and is one of the most effectively creepy books of the century so far. It was also made into a pretty decent TV series.

The Stephen King Trifecta

Stephen King is the undisputed master of modern horror for a reason -- he's objectively great at writing spooky, terrifying stories. Over the course of his career, he's dabbled in fantasy (The Dark Tower series and his collaboration with Peter Straub, The Talisman are both excellent) and crime (Mr. Mercedes), but his wheelhouse is horror, and his best work was done in the first decade or so of his long career. While different people have different favorites, I would make the fairly uncontroversial case that these three books are his scariest and also his best. They are:

1. Salem's Lot (1975)

2. The Shining (1977)

3. It (1986)

Salem's Lot, as I've already mentioned, is probably the best vampire book ever written, and is also the scariest book I've ever read (though to be clear, I first read it when I was 12). The Shining as a book is quite different from the Kubrick movie, which King himself low-key hated. It's also way scarier as a book, as the monster is not spooky girls and elevators of blood, but the slowly-unraveling Jack Torrance -- especially post-pandemic, you will recognize the man slowly losing it due to seclusion and deteriorating alcoholism.

And It has haunted the dreams of several generations of kids for a reason. King took FDR's "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," and turned fear itself into a befanged eldritch clown that preys on the innocent. While the recent movie versions did a respectable job of adapting the unadaptable, this, too, is best read in book form (though there's a scene at the end which could generously be called "problematic").

A couple other King books could jostle for position on this list (Carrie and The Stand being the best two contenders), but if you're going to start, start with these three. If you're hooked, you have plenty of options laid out in front of you.

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Short story collections

I would contend that the short story is the best format in which to read horror -- the best horror writers are all excellent in the short story format, from King to Lovecraft to Poe to Jackson. Here are some of the best collections.

American Supernatural Tales edited by S.T. Joshi

This is my number one recommendation if you are new to horror and want to dip your toes in. S.T. Joshi is one of the few literary critics to take the horror genre seriously, and his collection here about as good a cross-section of American horror as you can find. It includes "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Fall of the House of Usher," but also titles from lesser known authors like T.E.D. Klein's "The Events at Poroth Farm," which for my money is one of the best horror shorts ever.

Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez

Mariana Enriquez has had two of her short story collections, and both of them -- Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed are delightfully creepy. Enriquez is an Argentine writer, and that country's recent violent history is the backdrop for her dread-inducing short stories -- "Under the Black Water" is the best entry, for my money, into the Cthulhu Mythos this century.

The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers

The King in Yellow is one of the most important horror short story collections of all time, which is surprising, given that only the first four stories are horror stories. The rest are kind of boring purple romance tales that do not at all fit the tone of the rest of the book. But goddamn, are those first four killer -- the title of the collection is in reference to a play which drives the viewer or the reader mad, which would be cribbed later on by Lovecraft with his Necronomicon. Vague references to the malign character The King in Yellow and his Yellow Sign in Lost Carcosa are repeated in the first four stories, which not only influenced Lovecraft but also the first season of True Detective.

Night Shift by Stephen King

Stephen King is best known for his thousand page horror epics like It and The Stand, but the man can write short horror extremely well. You could pick up any of his collections (Different Seasons is particularly impressive: it includes "The Body," which became the classic movie Stand by Me, and "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," which became, well, you know). 

For my money, his best work is his early work, and Night Shift is his first short story collection and his spookiest. It includes now-classic stories like "The Children of the Corn," "The Lawnmower Man," "Trucks" (which became Maximum Overdrive), and “Night Surf,” which would take place in the same universe as his future epic, The Stand.

Horror comics

If you like horror movies, you are undoubtedly aware that the genre works really well as a visual medium, but horror comics have a stylized element that horror movies simply can't replicate. What follows are not only some of the best horror comics I've read, but some of the best comics period. 

Hellboy by Mike Mignola

The best artist and writer in the horror comic genre is, without a question, Mike Mignola. Hellboy has been made into several movies of varying quality (the Guillermo del Toro ones did a surprisingly good job visually), but his comics are breathtaking. 

The premise of Hellboy is simple: Rasputin, resurrected and working with the Nazis, attempts to bring about the apocalypse by summoning a demon child. He succeeds in summoning the child, but the child is taken into custody by American scientists, and is dubbed Hellboy. He is still fated to bring about the end of the universe, but instead of fighting for evil, he fights off the monsters that threaten his human friends.

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Mignola's comic is funny, spooky, and just unbelievably beautiful. He pulls on old myths for his short stories, and he has a drawing style that Alan Moore astutely described as "German expressionism meets Jack Kirby."

This is, for my money, the most beautiful comic book period, and never, ever misses a beat. All of it is great. 

Dracula, Motherf**er! by Alex de Campi

The Dracula story, as I've mentioned, bores the shit out of me -- but the ultra-stylized Dracula, Motherf**er! is actually pretty great. It's a retelling of the story in 1970's Los Angeles, with the premise of a burned out actress resurrecting the legendary vampire so she can suck some more youth out of life. It's short and uncomplicated, but the art is colorful and awesome.

Through the Woods by Emily Carroll

Em Carroll is the first great horror comic artist of the webcomic era -- her excellent story "His Face All Red" went viral in 2010, and it was compiled in the collection Through the Woods in 2014. You can find that original comic here. She's since published a few more spooky books, including the sexy When I Arrived at the Castle, but Through the Woods remains her best.

Saga of the Swamp Thing by Alan Moore

Alan Moore is widely considered the best comics writer of all time for a reason -- in the 80's, he was hired to revive the Swamp Thing character, which had been a pulpy poorly-selling horror comic until then. He turned it into a trippy exploration of environmentalism, America's demons, and the nature of good and evil. And it's still a lot of fun -- some of Moore's run kept the monster-of-the-week approach, but he also dabbled in plant-on-human love and on psychedelic drugs. It's maybe the best thing Moore's ever written, and that's saying something.

Baltimore by Mike Mignola

We have to start and end with Mike Mignola -- his Hellboy universe spun off into several side series, including the BPRD and the Lobster Johnson storylines, but for my money, his best non-Hellboy work is Baltimore. It follows Lord Henry Baltimore, a WWI soldier who suddenly finds himself battling vampires in the trenches. When a plague of blood-suckers and monsters, empowered by the hate and violence of the war, effectively ends the fighting, Baltimore decides to fight a new war against the rising tide of evil. 

Human nature, Mutual Aid, and Darwin’s blind spot

Of all of the things that the left and right fight about, perhaps the most illuminating is the great apes. The fight is simple: Human's closest living biological relatives are the two species of the pan genus, the chimpanzee and the bonobo. Of the two, the chimpanzee, pan troglodytes, is the favorite of the right. Chimpanzees live in hierarchical communities, with clear leaders and subordinates. They engage in violent warfare with other communities, and they do not share their food with strangers. They are the "might makes right" ape.

Bonobos, pan paniscus, are the favorite of the left. Bonobos are not warlike -- disputes are solved by fucking. Like, seriously, the life of a bonobo is just a long orgiastic fuckfest. They fuck to say hello, they fuck to strengthen social bonds, they fuck to end fights, and they fuck for fun. They fuck bonobos of the same sex, as well. Female bonobos unite with each other against male sexual aggression, preferring male bonobos who are respectful towards them. They are the "make love, not war," feminist, communist ape.

This is, of course, a simplification: aggression has been seen in bonobos, they do have social hierarchies, and prosocial and promiscuous sexual behavior has been seen in chimps. The fight illuminates less about bonobos and chimps, and more about what the right and left believe about human nature. The left argues that we are more like bonobos, the right argues we are more like chimps. In reality they are both cousins, equally distant from us on the evolutionary family tree. 

But in the past, the right has been more successful than the left in promoting the biological justification of their political views. It's still the version of biology that is taught to us in school: survival of the fittest. The thing that drives evolution in this interpretation is competition. The better competitors survive, while the weaker competitors die. It's brutal, but it makes for stronger, more resilient species, and as such, should be accepted as a good thing. Attempts to lift up the weak at the expense of the strong, in this version of reality, is actually weakening the species as a whole, and is morally reprehensible. Let the strong survive. Let the weak die.

This Social Darwinist way of thinking was the basis of the eugenics movement and also of Nazism. It's attempts to provide a scientific justification for racism were wildly influential in the early 20th century, and have hardly been rooted out after the defeat of fascism in the 40s. It's maybe stated a bit less explicitly, but still, at the root of right-wing thought is the idea that competition is good, and to artificially make the weak stronger is to hamper the course of nature.

Cooperation vs. Competition

In the latter half of the twentieth century, the left managed to beat back the advance of eugenics, thanks to the defeat of Nazism, the rise of the civil rights movement, and the scientific debunking of racist ideas, but it failed to adequately counter the "survival of the fittest" narrative in biological science, which effectively left the door open for the fascists, once they got their shit back together. "They can force their PC agenda on us all they want," a right-winger could argue, "it doesn't change the laws of nature."

There are a few reasons that the "survival of the fittest" narrative didn't die with the Nazis: first, a lot of the people who defeated the Nazis were capitalists, not leftists. Competition is the entire basis of capitalism, so liberals and moderate conservatives basically agree with the far right on this scientific point: the cream should rise to the top. The failure of the weak isn't an entirely bad thing. Inequality is good because it stimulates competition.

The other people who defeated the Nazis were creatures of the left, but they were usually authoritarian communists. They did not want to acknowledge that the best argument against right wing Darwinism came from another corner of the left -- came, in fact, from one of their greatest foes: the anarchists.

The specific anarchist in question was Pyotr Kropotkin. Kropotkin, in the earlier part of his life, was better known as a biologist than he was as an advocate of anarcho-communism, though his greatest contribution to both fields was likely the same book: Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution.

Kropotkin's argument is widely acknowledged by biologists and anthropologists today, and that is that cooperation holds at least as much of a claim on being the core driver of evolution as competition. Animals regularly cooperate with members of their own species to survive as a group rather than as individuals: ants will lay down their lives to protect their colonies, migrating geese take turns at the head of the flying V so other geese can draft and save energy, elephant herds will protect the young and old as a unit. The individualist ideal of the "lone wolf" is in fact, quite illustrative. A lone wolf is actually a distressed creature, as wolves live in packs and are incredibly cooperative within that context -- a lone wolf's main goal would generally be to no longer be alone.

For humans, cooperation has been at least as much of a part of who we are as competition has since the beginning of time. We've always been social animals, and while we often fight with one another, the majority of our time is spent not in battle, but among our tribe, working for a common good. Every time you send someone who's having a hard day flowers or a plate of cookies, every time you lend someone your pencil or give a stranger a seat on the bus, you're sacrificing your well-being for someone else's. I would argue you probably help people more often than you destroy people, that being kind and decent is so reflexive than you do it instinctively, whereas competition and destruction requires planning, and thus, takes up more of your attention than just being decent.

Cooperation within species (called "altruism" by biologists) is extremely common, but so is mutualism, which is cooperation across species. The most obvious example of this is probably in pollination, where a pollinator like a bee or a butterfly feeds off of the nectar of a plant, and then pollinates another plant, allowing the pollinator to survive and the plant to pass on its genes. But humans do it too -- you have a mutualist relationship with your gut bacteria, which allows you to digest food and gives the bacteria a place to live. More obviously, you have a mutualist relationship with your dog, which protects and supports you in exchange for your food and love (a cat's relationship with a human might be better described as parasitic, to be honest. You know, depending on the cat).

Kropotkin didn't deny the existence of competition, which obviously played a huge role in evolution. This is why he called mutual aid a factor of evolution rather than the factor. His point was that cooperation was underemphasized, and that there was as much of a scientific basis for working together as there was for defeating the competition.

Mutual aid is widely recognized by naturalists and anthropologists as being a fact of life, but it has not been adopted as widely as a political ideal because, as we mentioned, capitalists don't like to admit that cooperation is important. The left has also been slower to glom onto the idea than it should, and this is mostly because in the 20th century, it was the Marxists, not the anarchists, who won the major battles.

Marxists generally believe in cooperation between the workers being the highest ideal, but they believe that this cooperation will be brought about through a revolution that overthrows the capitalist state. The revolution, of course, will be led by them, the Marxist vanguard, and they will guide the common people on how to reach a state of cooperative communism.

It's harder to argue for the necessity of a vanguard (or even a revolution) when cooperation is an inherent trait of being human. If cooperation is a muscle we all have, then all it needs is a little bit of flexing to get back into practice. If enough people started working together and not against each other, then you'd have a cooperative society. This is what Gandhi, who sometimes declared himself an anarchist, meant by "be the change you wish to see in the world." The revolution is not out there, it is inside you.

Grassroots Morality

Frans de Waal is a naturalist who has spent most of his life studying bonobos and chimpanzees, and in his 2013 book The Bonobo and the Atheist, he argued against the prevailing atheist thought, which was that morality, though not passed down from God or some divine being, was nonetheless something that came from the top-down. We are moral creatures, the New Atheists argue, because we can think and reason, and our reason leads us to making moral choices.

de Waal's argument was that simply looking at primate behaviors proved that this was not the case -- empathy and cooperation were reflexive traits in our closest relatives, and that behavior we would consider "moral" could be spotted throughout the animal world. What's more, when we behave in this way, it does not light up the "reasoning" part of our brain in a CAT scan. 

If you, like me, have long heard from believers that by not believing in god, there's "nothing stopping you from committing murder," you know that the top-down approach to morality is nonsense. It shouldn't be a surprise, then, to learn that higher thought is also not the reason we make moral choices. Religious people and smart people often behave like absolute dogshit.

Trying to make broad deductions about what human nature is ultimately pointless -- humans appear to have both competition and cooperation bred into their genes, and moral behavior as well as immoral behavior is present throughout the animal kingdom. If either one is an option, if either one is your birthright, then it's a choice, isn't it? 

Which one do you value more: power, strength, and competition?

Or compassion, empathy, and cooperation? 

How you choose is how you will behave, how you behave will shape your society.

Against Forgiveness

“But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.’”

-“As I Walked Out One Evening,” W.H. Auden

In Carlo Rovelli's 2018 book The Order of Time, he points to an arresting fact: in all of physics, there is only a single equation that accounts for the existence of time. The equation is:

ΔS ≥ 0

This is the equation explaining the second law of thermodynamics, the law that establishes the concept of entropy. In its simplest form, this law means that heat passes from hot bodies to cold, never the reverse. This sounds, to an unscientific mind like my own, like an uninteresting fact on its face, but, Rovelli points out, entropy is the reason we only experience time in one direction. It is the reason that the sun’s rays damage our skin cells and our warm skin doesn’t feed the cold sun, it is the reason we grow old, not young, the reason that what's lost stays lost. You can't reverse what has already happened. There's no other physical law that accounts for time. Physicists call it “time's arrow.”

Think of it this way: Every moment in time is a card in a deck. You have one card that shows a smooth, unblemished planet. One card that shows a meteor hitting that planet. And another that shows the planet with a massive crater where the meteor hit.

Because of entropy, the only way you could order these cards coherently is in that exact order:

1. Cool planet.

2. Hot meteor hitting cool planet.

3. Damage hot meteor has done to a now-less-cool planet.

Each moment has an impact on the next, it leaves its mark. So it goes with all time: You, with your wrinkles and your sore joints and your memories, are an accumulation of all of the marks time has left on your body and on your brain. Those marks will never leave you. They may be covered by other marks, they may turn into something else entirely, but once the crater is formed, it's there. The unblemished planet is forever gone.

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When I was 15, I was on the freshman lacrosse team, and one day, the coach wanted to get my attention. I didn't hear him when he called my name, so, in a fit of cool-guy bravado, he cradled a ball and lobbed it at me. He aimed poorly and it hit my left ankle, tearing the ligament attaching it to my fibula and leaving me with a sprain. 

I didn't see this -- I just felt the pop, my leg gave out, and I hit the ground. The coach told me I must've stepped into a hole in the field and rolled my ankle. My buddy told me later what had really happened, that after I hit the dirt he shushed my teammates, not wanting a lawsuit.

I didn't particularly mind: it meant that I didn't have to pretend to care about lacrosse. It meant sitting on the sideline without the uncomfortable pads or the worry of disappointing my peers by playing badly. So I shrugged it off and forgave him. 

But the ankle never healed right. Occasionally while I'm walking or running, that outer bone, the fibula, pops loose in an uncomfortable but not-painful way, and I shift my weight to keep it from happening again. I’ve done this every day for 19 years.

I am 34 now, and during COVID, I started doing yoga to stay sane during the long days with two young kids. I started paying attention to my body for the first time in years. And I realized that my left leg has all sorts of issues. For years, I've had a neuroma on my left ring toe, a swollen nerve that sends painful little jolts up my leg when pressure is placed on it. I realized one day that it hurt most when I walked in the way that took weight off of my left ankle so that the fibula wouldn't pop. After long walks, I felt that the left leg was always more tired than the right. During pigeon pose in yoga, I noticed my left inner hip was always tight, while my right hip was very flexible. 

Suddenly, it hit me that my Coach had done more damage than I'd originally thought: that 19 years of walking weird on my left foot had spread my injury far beyond a poppy, weak ankle. 19 years later, for the first time, I was pissed at my coach.

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Our culture puts a high premium on forgiveness. We want women to forgive men their creepy transgressions. We want Black America to forgive and move past the damage white America has done to their bodies and their communities. We want to move past partisan politics to some mythical time of unity and peace, when there was no red America or blue America, only a United States of America. The past is in the past, our favorite Disney princess says: let it go.

Of course this forgiveness doesn’t work. Women still get hurt by men, Black people are still marginalized by policymakers and murdered by cops. By insisting on unity, by demanding that we all get along, we are just erasing the violence and the damage. We’re rendering the harm null before it even reveals its full extent. We want equilibrium and peace, we want everyone to get along, to move past the unpleasantness, so we can go back to how we were before. But that's not how time works. Entropy moves in one direction. You can't uncrater the planet. 

And why would we insist the planet forgive the meteor? The planet doesn't yet know the contours of the crater. It doesn’t know how the crater will impact the rest of its existence: if it opened up a tectonic fissure, or if water will begin to pool at its bottom, forming a new sea. What seemed in the early days to be a manageable obstacle, an inconvenience to be worked through, later reveals itself to be a permanent feature of the planet. Why must we insist that the planet behave as if it is unblemished? Wouldn't it be better if it accepted the crater? Then it could appreciate the ocean that formed in it, the life that spawned in the ocean’s depths.

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When Albert Einstein developed the theory of relativity, it had an alarming implication: time seems to exist much in the way space does. We are not capable of perceiving it as such, but in a physical sense, the past still exists. The moment before the meteor hit is just as “real” as the crater, the moment when you were a kid and were snuggling with your grandma is as real as the moment your grandkid is snuggling with you.

Authors have wrestled with the concept ever since. Alan Moore equates it to reading a book: the page you just turned hasn’t disappeared, it’s just not the page you’re experiencing right now. Some physicists think the future already exists, too, you just haven’t moved through it yet. Others think only the past and present exist, that the future is TBD. Whether you think the book is finished or just a work in progress says a lot about what you think of free will. 

Moore thinks that the book is finished, that when we’re done, we go back to the start and read it again, and that all moments are eternal. So heaven, in a sense, is your best moments, hell, in a sense, is your worst. 

In his epic novel Jerusalem, Moore imagines the block universe shaped like a football, the big bang at one tip, the end of time at the other. If you could examine the details, viewing a small chunk of human time in the same way you view space, you'd see "motionless and twisted trunks of intricately textured gemstone that [are] wound around each other… it might look a bit like a coral garden." A human, each moment stacked against the next in time, would not look like the bipedal apes we know and love, but like a constantly changing flowing tube.

Vonnegut explained his view of time in slightly less surreal terms. In his book Slaughterhouse-Five, the main character, Billy Pilgrim, does the impossible and becomes unstuck in time. He zips around to random moments in his life: his death one day, his childhood the next. He comes to understand time differently thanks to the aliens who abduct him and put him into an extraterrestrial zoo. They tell him that they see time “as you might see a range of the Rocky Mountains.” To them, a man is a creature not with two legs, but with millions, like a centipede, every moment of life stacked next to each other. They see the man as a baby, as a young man, as an adult, as an old man, finally as a corpse; a full human's life, stretched out in a line.

What they don’t tell Billy, or perhaps what Vonnegut simply didn’t imagine, is that the centipede would of course not stop with the baby, the baby would slide back up into his mother. And she into hers. 

In one of his online lectures, Yale Biologist Stephen C. Stearns offers a vision:

“Think of your mother. Now think of her mother. Now think of your mother’s mother’s mother. Now I want you to go through a process like you’ve done in math where you do an inductive proof, where you just go back. Just let that process go. Back you go in time. 

“Speed it up now.

“You’re back at 10 million. Now you’re at 100 million. Now you’re at a billion years. Now we’re at 3.9 billion years.

“Every step of the way there has been a parent. 3.9 billion years ago something extremely interesting happens. You pass through the origin of life and there’s no parent anymore. At that point, you are connected to abiotic matter. 

“This means that not only does the tree of life connect you to all of the living things on the planet, but the origin of life connects you to the entire universe.”

To look at you over the whole range of time, you would not be physically separate from anything. You’d be one tendril, connected through your mother, to the enormous roiling totality of existence. If you followed that massive, crystalline coral garden back to the beginning of time, it would become less complex, as heat passed from cold bodies to hot bodies, as meteors sucked their impacts off of planets, as supernovae reabsorbed themselves, until it all collapsed into a single, boring ball of sameness, into the singularity that came before the big bang.

Perhaps this is just a matter of personal preference, but the cosmic oneness of the singularity sounds less interesting to me than the fractal complexity of the coral gardens and centipedes. I enjoy seeing the craters on the moon from earth — a smooth ball would attract less of my attention. 

It seems to me, if forgiveness is insisting upon a return to the time before the craters, we should reject it. Time's arrow moves ever forward, and it's hard enough to understand this ever-increasing complexity without trying to cram it back into a simpler past. 

If you have regrets, this rejection of forgiveness may sound, well, unforgiving. But you have a choice to stop making craters. You could choose to see forgiveness as accepting the damage and moving forward, a bit more damaged, but a bit more knowledgeable. And you can take comfort in the idea that those older, purer, more innocent moments still exist, just as real as the present, somewhere back there in the coral garden.

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The books in this articles have affiliate links to Bookshop.org, a website that supports local bookstores. I get a small kickback if you buy them, but the editorial content of this article is mine, and mine alone.

Where to start with Vonnegut

No one “got” the late 20th century like Kurt Vonnegut, the science fiction writer and humorist best known for his 1969 World War II book, Slaughterhouse-Five. He saw the dangers of late capitalism, of religious fanaticism, of climate change, and of technological change with such clear eyes that it would be too difficult to read him if it weren’t for the fact that he was also very humane and very funny.

All told, he published 14 novels, 98 short stories, a children’s book, and god knows how many essays over the course of his 84 years. That can be a little daunting if you’re trying to pick a place to start (and didn’t, as so many of us did, have to read his work in high school English class).

So what follows is a breakdown of what to start with if you’re interested in Vonnegut. It’s a subjective list, obviously, but I claim three tiny bits of authority on the topic:

1. I’ve read all of his novels, as well as most of his short stories and essays.

2. My original blog was named “A Man Without a Country,” which was ripped off from one of his books. This was a terrible career move, as Vonnegut was always gonna beat me on SEO.

3. My wife and I popped his saying, “If this isn’t nice, what is?” into our wedding vows.

So without further ado:

The Best Novels to Start With

Vonnegut did something no other author did, to my knowledge, which is that he published a self-graded list of the books he had published so far in 1982. This means some of his later books are left off of the list, but it’s actually a pretty good ranking, with a couple of tweaks. So if you want the opinion of the author himself, here they are:

• Player Piano — B

• The Sirens of Titan — A

• Mother Night — A

• Cat's Cradle — A+

• God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater — A

• Slaughterhouse-Five — A+

• Welcome to the Monkey House — B-

• Happy Birthday, Wanda June — D

• Breakfast of Champions — C

• Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons — C

• Slapstick — D

• Jailbird — A

• Palm Sunday — C

At least two of these he’s far too harsh on (Breakfast of Champions is one of his best, and Slapstick is much better than a D), and maybe one he’s a bit too kind to (Cat’s Cradle is more of a B, to be honest), but it’s otherwise pretty accurate.

Here’s a breakdown of where to start:

Best Overall: Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Slaughterhouse-Five is quintessential Vonnegut. Everything that came before doesn’t quite feel like Vonnegut, and everything that comes after echoes it. It has the black humor, the repeated phrases, the sudden appearances by the author, and the sci-fi weirdness that he did best.

The story is based on Vonnegut’s own experiences as a prisoner-of-war in World War II, when he survived the firebombing of Dresden. The main character in the book is a man named Billy Pilgrim who, depending on how you read it, either has a mental breakdown during the war, or he becomes “unstuck in time,” which means that he zips around to different moments in his life with no apparent control of where he’s going next. The book zips with him to those moments, including the moment on his wedding night where he is abducted by aliens called Trafalmadorians and is placed in an alien zoo with a pornstar as his “mate.”

While living with the aliens, he learns that they see time “as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains.” In other words, when they look at you, they see you now, they see you at the moment of your birth, and at the moment of your death, which makes every human look like a centipede. This gives them a fatalistic attitude towards death — they (and the book) say “So it goes” whenever someone dies. “So it goes” appears 106 times in the book.

It sounds, reading most synopses, like a very cynical book, but the magic of Vonnegut is just how humane it is. He’s upset about the loss of life he saw in the war, he can’t comprehend the suffering we put each other through, and the only way he manages to cope with it is through jokes. But the humor doesn’t harden you, it softens you. You can’t call it an easy read, but you can call it a beautiful read.

With all of that said, Vonnegut can be jarring to read (I’ve heard more than one person say he made them sick to their stomach), so if you’re looking for something that feels a bit more like a traditional novel, go with one of his earlier books.

Best for people who don’t “Get” Vonnegut: The Sirens of Titan (1959)

Before he was famous, Vonnegut was a bit of a hack — in a good way. He wrote short stories and his first couple of novels as a way of feeding his family, and he occasionally had to work other jobs — PR for a major corporation, running a Saab dealership — in order to make ends meet.

The Sirens of Titan was his second book, and it is the most classically pulpy sci-fi of any of Vonnegut’s books. It’s about a space-traveler and his dog who, by accident, gains the ability to materialize on other planets, and also to see the past in future. Using this ability and knowledge, he founds a church (“Of God the Utterly Indifferent”), and squabbles with an alien robot trapped on Titan, a moon of Saturn.

For people who don’t like Vonnegut, this is probably as close as you can get to the good parts of his work before he really developed his style, which is an acquired taste. It’s also one of his best books period, and thus possibly the best Vonnegut book for beginners.

Best for people who don’t “Get” Vonnegut or Science Fiction: Mother Night (1962)

If sci-fi is not your bag, your best choice is probably Mother Night. The book is about Howard Campbell, Jr., an American who was recruited by the OSS (precursor of the CIA) to spy on the Nazis from within the party. In his role, Campbell becomes an English-speaking propaganda broadcaster for the Nazis, sending out messages to the Allied troops telling them to give up and surrender (kind of a German Tokyo Rose). He does his job so well that after the war, he ends up on trial in Israel for crimes against humanity, all while scrambling to prove that he was actually a spy.

Vonnegut gives a moral to the story: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful what we pretend to be.” It’s one of his more straightforward books, and its one of his more affecting — many people do terrible things during the war, for all sorts of “justified” reasons. Vonnegut, for his part, wants to weigh the justification against the deed.

He never did a spy novel again, though he did one more set in jail (1979’s Jailbird, about a Watergate conspirator). It remains one of his most moving. And it’s not too Vonnegut for people who aren’t into him just yet.

Next Steps

If you liked one of those books and are looking for something that does have the Vonnegut style, the best of his remaining novels are:

Breakfast of Champions (1973)

Breakfast of Champions is the first book Vonnegut wrote after he became mega-successful with Slaughterhouse-Five, so he just kind of lets all of his weird impulses off the chain. The resulting book is probably his funniest, and also probably the Vonneguttiest book he ever wrote. It is also not for people who aren’t into Vonnegut. It’s about a syphilitic Pontiac dealer who is slowly losing his mind and a failing sci-fi writer, but honestly, who cares about the plot? This book is bonkers and hilarious.

Cat’s Cradle (1963)

Vonnegut’s A+ for this may be overstated, but it’s probably his highest regarded book after Slaughterhouse-Five. It involves an inventor who develops something called “Ice-Nine,” a new type of ice that freezes at a higher temperature, and thus has the ability to freeze all of the oceans on earth. It has all the classic Vonnegut features: a made-up religion that’s mostly just goofy quips, horrifying sci-fi catastrophes, and short verbal tics that are repeated throughout the book.

Slapstick (1976)

Slapstick deserves far better than the D he gave it, but it’s possible that Vonnegut’s judgment was clouded by how the critics had panned this book (something which had never happened to him before). In reality, it’s delightful. Inspired by his relationship with his sister (she died of cancer two days after her husband was killed in a trainwreck, and Vonnegut adopted two of her kids), it’s the story of a brother and sister who ascend to the Presidency in a post-apocalyptic America by campaigning on the promise of ending loneliness.

Among his other novels, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is probably the least bizarre — it’s the story of a rich do-gooder son and the plot against his inheritance — and also maybe the best regarded. Broadly speaking, his best novels were the ones written between 1959 and 1976. His first book — Player Piano — is good, but is the work of a green novelist, while the later ones — Jailbird, Deadeye Dick, Galapagos, Bluebeard, and Hocus Pocus don’t do much that his earlier novels didn’t do. His final “novel,” Timequake, is one of the most interesting, as he basically gave up on writing it and made it half of a novel and half an autobiographical work.

His Other Work

On a personal level, I’ve always loved Vonnegut’s nonfiction writing, in particular his speeches. His novels can often be jarring and depressing, but his essays always manage to balance funny and furious in a way few others can. Because of his popularity, books of his nonfiction have continued to be published posthumously for the past 14 years. I will say as a parent that his children’s book Sun Moon Star is not all that great, judged by the metric that it has never managed to capture my kid’s attention. It is an extremely simple telling of the Nativity from the perspective of the baby Jesus and what he saw — the illustrations are all very simple shapes, so perhaps some younger babies would be engaged with it, but it fails to interest my toddler.

Fates Worse Than Death (1991)

Vonnegut’s books Palm Sunday (1981) and Fates Worse Than Death are must-reads if you want a look into Vonnegut’s brain particularly in regards to his writing and his personal history. In these books, he discusses his early life, his mental health, his experiences during the war, and the writers who inspired him. These are good books for people who have been intrigued by the novels and want to get a better sense of the man.

A Man Without A Country (2005)

Vonnegut considered himself a humanist for all of his life (and politically, usually aligned himself with socialism). Towards the end of his time on earth, these alliances made him feel less and less comfortable with the country of his birth, which he saw as increasingly corrupt and violent. A Man Without a Country is, for my money, Vonnegut’s best non-fiction book, and is required reading for anyone who looks back on the Bush years with a sense of deluded nostalgia.

If This Isn’t Nice, What Is? (2013)

After Slaughterhouse-Five was released, Vonnegut became an in-demand commencement address speaker. This book collects nine of those speeches. It includes the advice his uncle passed down to him: during the good moments in life, take a moment to acknowledge it by saying, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

Vonnegut’s bread and butter in the early part of his career were short stories. Some of them are great, and some of them are forgettable. There were three books of his short stories released in his lifetime, more seem to keep leaking out after his 2007 death. Your best bet is the Complete Short Stories, a compendium that was released in 2017. Three to check out to start:

“EPICAC”

“EPICAC” is about a computer technician who falls in love with a mathematician. The mathematician tells him that she could never love a man who isn’t “poetic,” so the technician asks his computer, EPICAC, to write her a love poem. As he asks EPICAC for more help, he realizes that the computer has fallen in love with the mathematician. It’s actually a fairly heartbreaking story, and it’s one of his best.

“Harrison Bergeron”

This is the one you may have read in high school English — it’s about a world in which all people are forced to be equal. If you have really great eyesight, you have to wear thick glasses. If you’re athletic, you have to wear weights around your neck. One man, the most exceptional of all, Harrison Bergeron, decides to stage a revolution. No more should be said, read it, it’s beautiful.

“2 B R 0 2 B”

“2 B R 0 2 B” imagines a world in which aging has been cured, but the world can’t sustainably hold onto an eternally increasing population. So a rule is set up: You can have kids, as long as one person agrees die for each person that’s born. If you can’t find someone, you child is killed at birth. The story focuses on a man in a hospital waiting room while his wife is giving birth to triplets. He does not have three deaths lined up. For a story that was written in 1962, it is bananas how ahead of its time this one is.

Similar Authors

During his life, Vonnegut was mostly neglected by academics and critics, but he was enormously influential on other authors. His style is his own, and it can’t be replicated, but if you like Vonnegut, you may like the following authors. The first, Celine, was a direct inspiration for Vonnegut, the second, Heller, was a friend and contemporary who wrote perhaps the only WWII book better than Slaughterhouse-Five, and the latter two, Palahniuk and Kobek, are satirists with as sharp an eye and as distinct a voice as Vonnegut.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Vonnegut acknowledged that his writing owed a lot to the French writer: he read Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night while writing Slaughterhouse-Five, and the influence shows. That book’s influence on 20th century writing is huge, you can pick up traces of it in Vonnegut and in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. It is, in short, about a man who finds himself in the horrors of World War I, then as a colonist in Africa, then as a galley slave, then as a doctor in Detroit. It is, without a doubt, one of the bleakest, most cynical books you will ever read. Fortunately, Vonnegut never became that cynic: he always had humanity left in him. Not so for Celine — after his experiences in the first World War and his success as a nihilistic writer, he became an enthusiastic antisemite and Nazi collaborator.

Joseph Heller

The only literary equal to Slaughterhouse-Five is Catch-22. They are totally different styles, but they are both chaotic, hilarious books about the stupidities of World War II. Heller’s protagonist, Yossarian, is a bombardier in the Mediterranean during the siege of Italy, who increasingly starts to wonder, “Is any of this worth me dying?” When he answers no, he realizes he has to work incredibly hard to hold to his convictions to be a coward and stay alive. Heller is amazing — when an interviewer told him he never wrote a book as good as Catch-22 afterwards, he said, “To be fair, neither has anyone else.”

Chuck Palahniuk

There are two writers who can make me sick to the stomach: Vonnegut and Palahniuk. Chuck Palahniuk is best known for his excellent book Fight Club, which remains one of the most misunderstood books of all time (it has been adopted by Men’s Rights Activists and alt-right types who do not realize that the book is mocking them), but he’s written a handful of other amazing satires as well, like Invisible Monsters, Lullaby, and Choke.

JaretT Kobek

Jarett Kobek hates being compared to Vonnegut. He prefers to be compared to Celine (which is weird, because Kobek is left-wing, not a Nazi). Regardless, there are similarities: Kobek relies on repeated phrases, short paragraphs, constant black humor, and he repeatedly writes himself into his stories. If you like Vonnegut but want his material updated for the 21st century, you could do worse than Kobek’s I Hate the Internet or Only Americans Burn in Hell.

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The links in this post are affiliate links with Bookshop.org, which supports local bookstores. I get a small kickback if you buy something through one of the links, but all of the book choices are mine and mine alone.

After America

In 1838, a 28-year-old Abraham Lincoln stood on the stage of the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, and spoke out against slavery. Lincoln -- till then mostly unknown -- believed that slavery would corrupt the federal government, and that the mob violence committed against abolitionist movements in the United States represented a threat to the country as a whole. In his most famous line, he declared that the destruction of the US could only come from within.

"At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide."

The speech helped cement Lincoln's reputation as a speaker, and his stance as an abolitionist. But — it needs to be said — his timeline is a bit immodest.

“Live through all time”? Even the Nazis limited their Reich to a thousand years.

Regardless, America, at the moment, seems to have chosen Lincoln’s latter option. America — with a departing Nazi President and an ascendant Nazi movement, with an impotent liberal establishment and an immensely powerful billionaire kleptocracy, with a tanking pandemic-stricken economy, with $1.6 trillion in student loan debt, with the looming chaos of catastrophic climate change — feels tenuous in a way that it did not a mere 30 years ago, when I was a kid and our establishment was proclaiming that the end of the Cold War meant “the end of history.”

America, at least as we know it, may not be long for this earth.

No civilization lasts forever

via Wikimedia Commons

Pick a place on earth and watch the course of its human population over time. Let's pick China. There has been some sort of Empire in China for probably 42 centuries. But if you look at a timelapse of those dynasties you'll see an empire whose land is constantly expanding and contracting, breaking into pieces and then reuniting. With a deep Imperial inhale, the borders slip over into Tibet, out into Mongolia, and then with the exhale they shrink back to well within the current borders.

Within those breaths, too, are entire revolutions, massive transformations of the social order, when entire cities, ethnic groups, and local histories were burnt to the ground. We think of China as this ancient civilization, but in reality, the current nation of China has existed since the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949. All of my grandparents are older than China.

Even our borders in the US are not the solid block we imagine. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were only 45 states. The last two, Alaska and Hawaii, weren't annexed until 1959. The US, as it currently exists geographically, is only 61 years old, and even that's only if you don't count the quasi-conquered lands that we added and lost in the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan Wars; that's only if you leave out the proxy governments installed in the Middle East and Central America, our little capitalist Vichy outposts. If you looked at a timelapse of the expansion of the US globally over the past couple centuries, there would have been massive additions early on, but now, it would have slowed, and you may start to think that this was the crest of the breath, that the exhale was now inevitable.

Yes, you may say, but the government as it currently exists has been around for 244 years. That's something, isn’t it? 

Is it? Universal women's suffrage has just hit its hundredth birthday in the United States. And universal male suffrage, while nominally the law since the end of the Civil War, was not true in effect for Black Americans in the South until the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. 56 years ago. If you're a Millennial, your parents are probably older than American democracy.

We don't allow ourselves to think these thoughts because the United States feels like the ground underneath us. We wave its flags, we sing its songs, we even fight and die in its wars. To question the permanence of the United States is, for many of us, to question our very identities. 

The United States has existed for about 12 generations. Do you really think it will still be here, in this current form, in another 12?

How civilizations fall apart

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In 2005, the American anthropologist Jared Diamond published the book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In it, he compared several major human civilizations that have collapsed over time, and found that there were five possible factors that could lead to collapse.

1. Climate change

2. Hostile neighbors

3. Collapse of essential trade

4. Environmental problems (soil depletion, introduction of non-native species, overpopulation, etc.)

5. The society's response to one or all of these four pressures.

Diamond, an optimist, believed that a smart, adaptable society could survive these pressures if it took decisive action, but if a society blundered or dithered in response, it would eventually collapse.

Collapse, for Diamond, was defined as "a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time." It's an interesting definition, because the word "collapse" as we think of it in the popular consciousness takes place over the course of a day or two. We are literally thinking of the first scene of a zombie movie, where someone wakes up from a coma or after a night out and suddenly there are shambling hordes of brain-eaters charging at them down the street.

But that’s not what collapse looks like. It is not a global, sudden catastrophe. It is a progression of smaller catastrophes. Which means it happens over the course of not days, but decades and centuries. In other words, it is slow in relation to a single human life.

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Ecologist and writer John Michael Greer makes this point in his book The Long Descent. Our culture, Greer says, holds two opposing myths about our future. The first is the myth of eternal progress, that we will keep innovating our way out of things and will end up living among the stars. I will admit that I personally rather like this myth, and have always felt nice warm feelings reading the works of the myth's chief proponent, Carl Sagan. But, as Greer points out, there's literally nothing that has happened historically, and certainly little happening now, to suggest that we will be the first ever civilization to not enter into decline.

The second myth about our future is the apocalypticism adopted by pessimists, religious fundamentalists and doomsday preppers. This myth, like the progress myth, is not rooted in historical reality. It is violent and dramatic, almost righteous in its totality. It is a complete collapse of the world order, a return to the Dark Ages, but more desperate and violent.

The only way this second myth would really happen, though, would be if there was a global nuclear war. But even that wouldn’t be immediate — the places not directly hit would have to wait a bit for total crop failure and the ensuing famine, for radiation sickness, for the slower growing cancers to take hold. It would be a quicker collapse than most, but it would not be immediate.

Historically, Greer says, collapses are slow. They are not global, and they are not complete. Instead, they take place as a series of crises happening in different areas over a longer period of time. These crises take many different forms. On the smallest level, they are personal. Someone who has been under enormous pressure finally has a mental health breakdown, which could take the form of addiction, acts of violence, mental illness, or even suicide. A family finally can’t pay the rent and is evicted from their home. A town can no longer afford its library, it’s after-school daycare, it’s extra-curriculars and arts programs.

As these small crises start to increase, they snowball into larger societal problems: a decline in the quality and an increase in cost of healthcare leads to higher death rates and more bankruptcies, which lead to a smaller tax base, which leads to crumbling roads, the selling off of parks and public lands, and an inability to remove old lead pipes, which in turn causes more widespread health problems. This weakening of the civilization’s core means that it is more vulnerable to the less predictable (but still inevitable) catastrophes, like earthquakes and hurricanes and floods and pandemics and terrorist attacks and economic contractions. Over time, the small catastrophes start to aggregate into very big ones.

"On average," Greer writes, "civilizations take between five hundred and one thousand years to rise out of the ruins of some past civilization, then decline and fall in their turn over a period of one to three centuries."

From a historian’s bird’s eye view, this may be “collapse,” but from an individual’s viewpoint, this would feel less like collapse and more like “descent.” In Greer’s “Long Descent” scenario, the changes would be felt on a generational level rather than instantaneously — each generation would notice that their parents had it a little better off than they did. Their education would be a little more expensive, their healthcare a little worse, their quality of life a little bit lower, and so on.

You could be forgiven for thinking that this all sounds familiar.

Imagining a time after America

Americans, at the moment, seem to imagine that they’ve dodged a bullet with the election of Joe Biden. The rhetoric of his campaign was based around restoring honor and dignity to the White House, around restoring civility to the political discourse, and around bringing us back to the golden, honorable, Obama years.

The slogan, god help us, could well have been “Make America Great Again.”

This is not meant to equate Joe Biden with Donald Trump: another four years of Donald Trump and our democracy may well have been totally over. But even though Biden will obviously be infinitely better than Trump, we aren’t going to be returning to the America of the past few decades. The damage Trump did to the system in his four years is permanent, and while some things he destroyed will be patched up and fixed, many will linger with us, much like the unoccupied “X-ed” houses that still dot New Orleans 15 years after Katrina. The far-right Supreme Court will be with us a long time. Some, but not all, of the public lands he sold off will be clawed back. And the climate? Well, we’ll never get those four years back, and they were four years we needed.

Those losses aside, the fabric that makes this country into a coherent, unified nation is fraying. Some of this is intangible: we’ve never really had a shared history or culture, because our divisions have always been endless — North vs. South, Right vs. Left, Coasts vs. Heartland, Men vs. Women, Black vs. White, Immigrant vs. Native, Colonist vs. Indigenous, Urban vs. Rural, Rich vs. Poor, etc. — but now we don’t even seem to have the core idea that made America worth it to most people, “the American Dream.” The idea that anyone can become anything here has less traction than it did a generation ago, as the Millennial Generation enters its late 30s and early 40s still saddled with debt and still without homes or secure jobs. The American Dream was always mostly bullshit — disproportionately available to straight white men, extra available to people with family money and decent connections — but enough people made good a generation ago that you could believe that work would set you free.

But mythology is only part of it. What really makes a country whole is it’s infrastructure and its institutions. It’s the fact that you can pay a few cents and have your mail delivered anywhere in the country for that one standard price. It’s that you can hop on a train or get in your car and go anywhere in the country with no barriers put in your way. It’s that you can count on clean water, on untainted food, and on basic legal protections wherever you go.

Can we really say we have that? Our Postal Service is being actively dismantled — do the men doing this know that Washington and Madison saw a Post Office as vital in pulling together the United States in its fractious early days? Our roads and bridges are crumbling, and our train system is an embarrassment. How do you feel connected to places you can’t get to? In many cities, the water is basically poison. Our agricultural system is a nightmare. And only certain people can count on the protection of the law, as the massive difference between the police responses to Black Lives Matter protests and to the white nationalist storming of the Capitol shows.

These aren’t straws we’re putting on the camel’s back, they’re anvils. It’s not sustainable. It’s too much pressure for a system to bear. It’s hard to face, but it may be that the pressures currently bearing down on the United States are not pressures it is capable of withstanding.

This sounds like pessimism, but it doesn’t have to be. Consider:

1. All civilizations eventually collapse.

2. When civilizations collapse, it typically does not involve everyone in that civilization dying with it. Like, Pompeii aside.

3. When the United States of America no longer exists in its current form, there will probably still be people living in the United States of America, and they could build all sorts of new, different ways of living on that land.

Now, the moment where the USA is no longer around may still be generations down the line, but it does not hurt for you to start thinking about what that future looks like. And don’t give in to pessimism — imagine something nice.

Our culture has an allergy to utopia. In an interview with The Ransom Note, cultural historian John Higgs pointed out that we've abandoned the idea of a bright future almost entirely:

"It seems to me that the last ditch attempt to say something positive about the future was in 1989 in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, when they say ‘The future will be great – it’s a bit like now, but with really great waterslides’. That was the best they could do. Ever since then the future has been shown as environmental apocalypse, zombie films, all of these things."

For Higgs, this is worrying, because if you wish to create something -- a piece of art, a chair, a machine, a scientific theory -- you have to be able to imagine it first. All of humanity's wondrous creations have existed in the nebulous foggy realms of the human mind before they've ever existed materially in the real world, so the death of an entire culture's imagination on any one subject means that much that could've been created won't. 

Our current media diet is so focused on the decay and collapse part of what’s currently going on that most of us can’t fathom solutions outside of building a bunker and surfing prepper sites. But there are realistic visions of a future utopia that are already out there, there are futures we could start working towards that aren’t just Hunger Games and 28 Days Later. I have, for those interested, a few books to check out if you are ready to think beyond the more, ah, “practical” Democratic vision of passing voter reform, the Green New Deal, Medicare For All, Immigration Reform, Marijuana Legalization, Abolishing ICE, getting a Billionaire’s Tax, and also stuffing the court in the two years between now and when the Republicans inevitably take one of the houses of Congress back.

Books about the future that won’t fill you with despair

A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit

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A Paradise Built in Hell is a history of “disaster utopias,” which are what Solnit calls the communities that arise after a disaster occurs. She profiles five major disasters over the course of the last century and a half (from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to Katrina), and examines how the public responds to these events. If you believe our mass culture, we turn into greedy, “every man for himself” looters who need to be put back in line by the restoration of public order.

In reality, this is a myth that is pushed by the powerful. Many studies have shown that acts of looting are almost always wildly exaggerated, and that during a disaster, most communities actually come together and take care of things before “the authorities” even arrive. After 9/11, Solnit points out, the nation rightly applauded the New York City firefighter who stormed into the building and saved lives. But very little credit goes to the people who were already in the building, who actually saved more lives than the firefighters. Nor do we hear about the 9/11 boatlift, a spontaneous evacuation in which boat owners from New Jersey and Staten Island evacuated 500,000 people (more than Dunkirk) from the toxic clouds of debris that were covering lower Manhattan that day. In almost all disasters, it is the people who are already on-site who do most of the saving, because they don’t require things like a “response time.” These rescues are self-organized, decentralized, and lacking any major authority.

If you’ve lived through a disaster, if you’ve been somewhere after a hurricane or a tornado swept through, you’ve likely experienced this. A community’s barriers and social structures break down in a disaster, and people show up to pitch in without being asked. Churches fill up with donations, mutual aid groups scramble boats to pick up people who are stranded and deliver water and phone charging stations to the thirsty and disconnected.

The violence and chaos, Solnit finds, is usually caused by the powerful who are trying to restore order, or by the people who expect looting, and get trigger happy when a neighbor shows up to offer help.

The lesson, in short: we do just fine even without our governments. People are smarter and better than we give them credit for. We can trust each other more than we imagine.

The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

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The Parable of the Sower got a lot of press in 2016 for its prescience: it was written in 1993, and is about a 2020’s America that is plagued by economic collapse, severe climate change, drug epidemics, and a right-wing President who insists he is going to return America to it’s richer, more prosperous days.

It’s a particularly bleak dog-eat-dog dystopia, (one that A Paradise Built in Hell might suggest will not come to pass) but what’s most interesting is the religion that the young protagonist events. It is best summed up by the novels first few lines:

All that you touch you Change.

All that you Change Changes you.

God is Change.

The religion has since been made into a real-life thought system called Emergent Strategy, outlined in a book by activist and organizer adrienne maree brown. The core idea is that you don’t fight change — you move with it, and in doing so, try to shape change in a way that creates a better, more just future. If you’re looking for a belief system that can see you through a time of chaos, this is a great place to start.

Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher & America Beyond Capitalism by Gar Alperovitz

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As the federal government becomes less and less responsive to its constituents (who broadly want better access to healthcare and a Green New Deal and gun control), the easy thing to do is to fall into despair, to imagine that nothing will never change. This is unnecessary — people have the power to start building a better world with or without the consent powerful, and these two books outline strategies for doing so. Schumacher is famous in ecological circles for putting forward an economic theory that acts “as if people mattered,” rather than capital or economic growth. It’s a radically different vision of society, and one that we’re honestly pretty far from, but he gives some ideas for how it could work.

Alperovitz is more focused on the changes already happening in the United States, particularly with people who are experimenting with alternative ways of doing business. To use one example: a reason a lot of companies are so terrible is that they are legally required, in their corporate charters, to act in a way that maximizes profit for their shareholders. So if a CEO were to, say, decide to stop dumping chemical waste in a local river even though dumping it elsewhere would be more expensive, the shareholders could sue him for losing them money, so long as there wasn’t a regulation in place requiring that they not pollute the water.

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Some companies (called “B Corporations”) came up with a workaround — they developed a different type of corporate charter which allows for the company to make decisions that are not only good for their profits, but are also good for the community they live in. It’s a subtle difference, but it’s an important one, because it means that companies don’t have to be regulated by the government to make ethical choices. On top of B Corps, Alperovitz gives dozens of other things people are doing to create a better, more just grassroots economy (from worker-owned co-ops to building local wealth to encouraging more democratic forms of banking). Both books are worth a read if you think that the ideas coming from the left are unrealistic.

The Future Starts Here by John Higgs

The Future Starts Here is a spiritual sequel to Higgs’ excellent Stranger Than We Can Imagine, which was an attempt at explaining the totally baffling 20th century. In FSH, Higgs is attempting to predict what will happen in the 21st century by looking at issues like space exploration, climate change, artificial intelligence, and social media.

The book is effectively an experiment: In a hyper-networked world where misinformation is rife and authority can’t be trusted, Higgs realizes the only thing you can trust is, well, the people you already know and trust. So his research into these topics goes almost entirely through his friends and collaborators. This experiment fails to get him any easy answers as to what the future looks like, but it’s an incredibly interesting model for how we can place ourselves in the world in this completely overwhelming century. Our networks are what will save us.

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Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit

Solnit’s Hope in the Dark was published after the despair she saw among her friends during George W. Bush’s re-election, and it seems to go back into print every time something terrible happens, whether it’s the global financial crisis or the election of Donald Trump. In this absolutely must-read book, she looks back at the people who have changed history in the past, from Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr., to Vaclav Havel, and she discovers important lessons on how to hold onto hope in situations that appear to be hopeless.

Swamp Thing by Alan Moore

Gotta throw a comic in here: Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing is about a giant humanoid plant that stalks the Louisiana bayous and occasionally fights monsters. So it’s a bit more fun than everything else on the list. But it also has a storyline that fundamentally altered my perspective on the nature of good and evil, best encapsulated in this panel, in which the hero, Swamp Thing, is talking to the elder trees of the forest:

It’s a trippy fucking comic, but sometimes what you need to get through hard times is a broader cosmic perspective. Swamp Thing (as well as Alan Moore’s magnum opus Jerusalem) have realistic perspectives on the universe that will energize you rather than deflate you.

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The books mentioned in this post are affiliate linked, which means if you click the link and then buy it, it kicks back some money to me. I pick the books myself, no one’s telling me which ones to promote. The affiliate sites I use are IndieBound and Bookshop.org, both of which support local bookstores.

Matt's 2020 Book Rex

Note: If you’re gonna buy any of these books, get them on IndieBound, Bookshop, Thriftbooks, or Better World Books. The first two support local bookstores, the others are usually secondhand and pretty affordable. Jeff Bezos made $90 billion off of the pandemic, fuck that guy, don’t give him another dime.

I mostly abandoned social media in 2020. My wife and I both work, and trying to work from home during the pandemic while raising two kids under the age of three and with extremely limited support was stressful to say the least, and did not leave me a lot of mental space for flamewars with conservatives and centrists. At some point during the sustained mental health crisis that was this year, I made the decision to set my bar a bit lower than Marie Kondo, and jettison from my life anything that sparked seething fury and outrage. Facebook and Twitter made the list, and Instagram was set to private.

The only salvation for my year on the social internet was Instagram Stories, which automatically deletes your posts after a day, and allowed me to sporadically type up my thoughts or dumb jokes in between caring for my kids. In particular, I really enjoyed writing little mini-articles about the latest books I’d been reading, and my thoughts on them. I did one of those Instagram “30 day challenge” posts for books I’d read, and the small group of friends who follow me on Instagram seemed to like them (one rave review: “They were usually good!”), so I decided that once I got more time, I’d convert some of my book writing into blog posts.

Given that everyone does “Best of 2020” lists in December, I figured I’d do the same. I even drew a little graphic for it.

Note: These are books I read this year. Like, maybe three of them came out this year. This might make this list virtually useless to most, but I get most of my book recommendations not from “definitive best of” lists, but either from friends or from writers whom I enjoy. If I don’t fit into either of those categories, then I can’t be held responsible for your choice to read further.

My Favorite Book of the Year

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle

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The great nonfiction writer John Higgs claims that one of the main reasons the 20th century was such an incredibly confusing time was because that, over the course of a hundred years, everything that western civilization thought it knew about the universe, from science to economics to culture to art to climate to math, was upended and undermined. We thought we were near a complete understanding of all things, only to discover that, in all probability, we lacked the capacity to understand just about anything in a comprehensive way.

One of the earliest authors to understand this horrifying new state of things was a pulp horror writer named H.P. Lovecraft, whose monsters were not malevolent demons bent on human destruction, but were immense creatures who could care less about human affairs, and might crush us in the way a toddler would step on an anthill.

In the first paragraph of his most famous story, The Call of Cthulhu, he wrote:

“The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

It is a remarkably prophetic sentence, one that’ll take you a long way in understanding our current political moment here on the edge of climate change and civilizational decline.

The problem with Lovecraft is that he mourned the loss of our collective ignorance, and with it, the hierarchy of nature that put him and white men like him at the pinnacle of God’s creations. So along with his truly excellent bestiary of cosmic terrors like the cephaloid giant Cthulhu, his stories also found horror in things like, gasp, race-mixing.

Horror writers have grappled with this for decades, because, racist asshole that he was, Lovecraft was a crazy good horror writer, and left a profound mark on our modern culture. No Lovecraft and there’s no Stephen King, no Guillermo del Toro, no Stranger Things or Twin Peaks or Alien or Ghostbusters.

The most prominent recent story to grapple with Lovecraft’s legacy is Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country, which has been adapted into a TV show by Misha Green and Jordan Peele. That story asks, “what if RACISM is the real monster?” And look, it works. It’s good. The answer is obviously yes, but that’s worth saying.

But it pales in comparison to Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom. LaValle’s premise is simpler in that it accepts Lovecraft’s premise, that the racial minorities are in fact doing something sinister and evil and world-ending. The question LaValle asks is darker: why might some people in this civilization want and actively work towards its collapse?

It’s great horror, it’s a great book, and it’s my number one pick for 2020.

Best Satire for the Nightmare That Is the Trump Era

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Only Americans Burn in Hell by Jarett Kobek

A few years back, an unknown Turkish-American writer named Jarett Kobek wrote and self-published the surprise hit I Hate the Internet, which makes the case that, uh, maybe dunking on Nazis on social media platforms that directly profit off of promoting Nazi content isn’t the subversive act people think it is.

I Hate the Internet was a great book, but it was also one of the most misanthropic books ever written, so it did not take off in the era of Hope and Change America. It found audiences in the UK and also Serbia, where pessimism was more the order of the day.

But boy, is Kobek the voice for the Trump era. Only Americans Burn in Hell was not published in the United States, possibly because Kobek spends a good chunk of the book ripping into how all of the major modern publishing houses have profited off of war criminals and right-wing hate-mongering. It’s also possible no one thought a book with that title would sell here. Also, it does this thing where it starts telling a fantasy story but gives up after a bit because what’s the fucking point of telling stories when Donald Trump is president. A snippet, from the climax of the novel:

And if this were a book written by someone who still had the ability to build suspense or cared about meaningful plot resolution, there’d be about three-to-four-thousand words about how Celia went in the building and found Fern and discovered what Fern was doing in Los Angeles.

And it would be so dramatic.

Your heart would be in my hands.

But this book isn’t being written by that kind of someone.

I’m burnt out.

Donald J. Trump was elected to the Presidency of the United States.

So there’s really no point.

Stop hoping books will save you.

Stop pretending.

Everyone else has.

It’s the best satire to come out in years, and that’s probably why it hasn’t caught on in the United States. Good satires are always despised in their time.

Best Horror

If I had to pick one genre, it would be horror. I did a long Instagram Story for people who had never gotten into horror writing, which I will eventually adapt into a blog post, but on the heels of that, I realized how many of my recommendations were by white men. So I checked out a bunch of horror that was written by women or people of color.

Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez

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Horror works best in short story form. This seems to be universally true — Stephen King, the master, is known for writing thousand page epics like It or The Stand, but a lot of his best work is only a few pages long (The Mist, Shawshank Redemption, and The Body, which became the movie Stand by Me are all short stories/novellas).

The best collection of horror short stories I’ve read in a while is Mariana Enriquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire, which is sometimes outright horror, and at other times is just spooky fiction. It has characters who see and hear things, characters who disappear, who stumble into horrible slums and find things worse than poverty there. Enriquez is Argentine, and given her country’s recent history — violent dictatorships, economic crashes, capitalist exploitation — there’s a lot of horror to pull from. In particular, her story “Under the Black Water” is the best entry into Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos I’d read in a long while, before I stumbled on Black Tom a few months later.

The Changeling by Victor LaValle

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I discovered LaValle this year and now I plan on reading everything he’s written. The Changeling is a novel where Black Tom is a novella, and it exists not in Lovecraft’s world, but in our own. It is the story of a bookseller named Apollo Kagwa, who meets a woman, falls in love, gets married, has a kid, and then has something truly terrible happen when his wife becomes convinced their child has been swapped out for a fake.

I really don’t want to give away too much, but a lot of books have tried to turn dark corners of the Internet into good horror, and most have failed (“What if ‘unfriending’ meant YOU DIE?”). LaValle’s internet horror is the first in my mind to actually succeed. An internet troll is a terrible thing.

Books That Made Me Cry

This happened twice this year. It usually happens, like, maybe once every five years. This is in part because we were all just quivering raw nerves in 2020, but also I was trying to be a bit more emotionally open because I had a son this year and don’t want him to be another generation of male that can’t healthily process emotion. Anyway, these books are beautiful:

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy

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Arundhati Roy got famous back in the 90’s for her brilliant debut book The God of Small Things and then, to the majority of the literary press, “disappeared” for 20 years. She actually didn’t disappear at all: she was doing incredibly important political work as an activist and writer fighting both the capitalist poisoning of India and also the rise of Hindu fascist nationalism in the form of current President Narendra Modi. Also, she wrote one of the best pieces of early journalism on the pandemic. But this was not newsworthy to the mainstream press, which has also totally missed the astoundingly huge general strike that occurred this year in India (250 million strong! That’s like if 80% of the US population participated in a strike! What the actual fuck! Why is Trump’s palace intrigue more interesting than this?).

Roy has been doing good work for decades, and in the 20 years since her first book, she also managed to write another beautiful novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. It is good, it made me cry, but I love Arundhati Roy more for the other stuff. This is what a writer should look like.

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

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In 2013, Kate Atkinson wrote a book titled Life After Life, which follows a single British woman, Ursula Todd, over the course of the 20th century. The core idea — which would have been a gimmick in the hands of a worse writer — was that each chapter ends with Ursula dying. Each chapter represents a different path her life could’ve taken. In many chapters, she dies in the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, in many more, she dies in the Blitz. It’s a great book.

Its sequel, A God in Ruins, follows her brother Teddy’s life. Teddy flew for the RAF in World War II. When he gets out of the RAF, he realizes that he did not, in fact, die in a ball of fire as he thought he would, and is now expected to live a normal life for perhaps decades and decades, which is not as clearcut as dodging flak and German fighters and dropping bombs. It does not share the same gimmick as Life After Life, but it has an astoundingly good ending that caught me off guard and had me an emotional puddle for the rest of the week.

Best Comics

I buy comics for our local library, so I read a butt-ton of them to try and be able to advise local comic lovers on what to read. Turns out, I’m not great at that, because I just don’t like superheroes that much and also am not a teenager, so you guys will be the only people to benefit from my efforts. Yay!

Little Bird by Darcy Van Poelgeest

I am a little burnt-out on dystopias, and I don’t love gore. If I am being honest, I cannot remember much of the plot of Little Bird, but Ian Bertram’s art in it is astoundingly cool. And guys, I literally never recommend comics for their art, I am a story guy. But just look at some of this shit:

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For the record, the plot is good, I just have been thinking about the art since I read this in March.

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Your Black Friend by Ben Passmore

I first came to Passmore through the excellent political cartoon site The Nib. He’s an anarchist, and he is an uncomfortable read for most Americans — some of his comics discuss assaulting police — but he’s an incisive and interesting comic artist. His takes, especially on political and racial issues, are an interesting glimpse into the antifa brain, which, frankly, most people have made zero effort to understand. You guys all rushed out to read fucking Hillbilly Elegy to understand Trump voters, why don’t you give the guys saying “Fascism is bad” the same attention?

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Here by Richard Mcguire

I am ten years late on this one — Here is a very simple idea executed brilliantly. It is the same corner of the same room, drawn over the entire course of history. It has some recurring characters, but it is rare that the story and the setting are one and the same, and it will make you think about the nondescript corners of the homes you’ve inhabited. What has been done in those corners over the course of history? What dinosaurs stalked prey in your living room? Were lives conceived on that couch? Did fights, breakups, holiday dinners occur here before you arrived?

It’s a quick read, find it at your library and check it out.

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Best Nonfiction

If I’m being honest, a few books have been left off this list solely because I waited until December 31st to write the bulk of this article that makes no sense if published in 2021 (kids are a lot of work, okay?), but I figured books like Between the World and Me by Ta-Nahisi Coates, In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson, and How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell got enough of a boost by ending up on recent best-of lists to not need my help. Those books were good, okay? These ones felt more essential in 2020.

Operation Chaos by Matthew Sweet

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Imagine: You’ve been drafted and are in Vietnam. You suddenly decide this isn’t for you — for moral reasons, political reasons, or possibly just your basic cowardice — and you decide to desert.

This happened to a group of GIs during Vietnam, and if they made their way to the right channels, they were spirited out of the country by Soviet agents and leftist activists, who settled them in Sweden. There, they began the revolution. Or they tried to, rather — instead, they collapsed into a truly bizarre world of paranoia, drug use, cults, and intrigue. Some of it may have been encouraged by the CIA or the KGB, but in the end, many of these exiled deserters, who faced arrest if they returned to the US, ended up in the clutches of a charismatic madman named Lyndon LaRouche.

This story is, to put it lightly, fucking bonkers, but what was most interesting about it was what it ended up saying about the early days of what would become the alt-right. If you’ve never understood conspiracy theorists or how people manage to get into these impenetrable political echo chambers, Operation Chaos is required reading.

Bullshit Jobs by David GraebeR

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If you don’t know David Graeber, you’ve heard his most famous slogan: he coined the phrase “We are the 99%” during the Occupy Wall Street movement. By night, he was an anarchist activist, but by day, he was a world-renowned anthropologist whose Debt: The First 5000 Years entirely dismantled the notion of debt being something shameful that the debt-holder should peaceably bear and just pay off. His most recent book is the excellent Bullshit Jobs, which is required reading for the COVID era.

You may have noticed, back in March, when the whole country shut down, that “essential workers” were not the people who worked in the advertising industry, or who made big bucks off of corporate law and lobbying, but in fact were some of the least appreciated people in society, from garbage collectors to grocery store workers to janitors, teachers, and nurses.

Graeber’s book, based off of his 2013 viral blog post, asks the question: if a free market capitalist society is supposed to be so efficient, why do so many people work jobs that are utterly useless? Given that so much meaningful work needs to be done (particularly when it comes to climate change), it feels like an enormous societal misfire that so many of us are spending our lives doing things that we consider pointless.

This was, sadly, Graeber’s last book — he died suddenly in September of internal bleeding, the day I finished Bullshit Jobs.

Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher

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If Graeber’s book asks the question, “Why is our economy this terrible?” my next book answers with what a better economy could look like.

Over the next couple of decades, the world is going to come to terms with a simple fact: it is eternal economic growth, not just carbon emissions, that is driving the ecological crisis. When people do start realizing this, they’re going to start looking for alternative economic theories to our current “growth is good” orthodoxy, and they would do a lot worse than Ernst F. Schumacher’s 1973 essay collection Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.

Schumacher’s economic approach is inspired by the work of Gandhi, and could conceivably be called anarchist economics, in that it focuses on human need rather than abstract concepts like efficiency and profit, and endeavors to keep human economic activity to a small, sustainable scale. If we adopted this type of economic system, it would mean drastically changing the world we live in, but… well, that’s gonna happen anyway, isn’t it?

The book is a bit wonky, so the whole thing might not be required reading for people who aren’t interested in economics — if you’re interested but not down for the wonkishness, check out the essay “Buddhist Economics” for a sense of what he’s saying.

Have you considered anarchy?

Let’s do a quick word association, okay? I’ll say a word and you just notice the first thing that comes to your mind.

Anarchy.

What was it you saw in your mind’s eye? Was it a Molotov cocktail smashing through a police station window? Perhaps a nihilistic teenage punk with a mohawk? Maybe it was a mustachioed madman murdering a President whose name you can’t remember? A faceless hacker in a Guy Fawkes mask? Or maybe you just saw images of broad disorder: civilization undone, smoking skylines and empty, crumbling streets.

You could be forgiven for seeing these images. Fuck it, you are forgiven. Anarchy, in respectable circles, is viewed with dismissive contempt, and this attitude has seeped pretty pervasively into pop culture. Depictions of anarchy are split into a few broad camps: you’ve got your Jokers, amoral agents of chaos; you’ve got your Tylers Durden and Misters Robot, split-personality disaffected weirdos; and you’ve got your Johnnies Rotten, adolescent thrashers who are rebelling against… whatever.

The rare semi-positive cultural depiction of an anarchist — say V in Alan Moore’s comic V for Vendetta — will be ideologically stripped when it’s made into a movie, and will be turned into a clumsy metaphor for anti-Bush liberalism.

So yeah: it’s okay that you’ve never seriously considered anarchism as a viable political system. Everything in your world has told you it’s ridiculous from day one.

But hey, you wanna consider anarchy for a minute?

Why the fuck should I?

Hostilely put, but fair. Let’s go full 21st century and start with our influencers, shall we? A lot of the people you most admire and respect from pages of history were anarchists. 

George Orwell, co-opted by the right as an anti-communist and the left as an anti-fascist, read by everyone as an ominous oracle of what’s to come every time a new president is elected, was closer to an anarchist than anything else. When he went to go fight the fascists in Spain, the battalion he joined was an anarchist battalion, and his most glowing praise is reserved for the days that Barcelona was effectively an anarchist commune. While fighting, he was shot in the neck by a fascist, and while still recovering from his wounds, he was chased out of Catalonia by Stalinists who were purging the Republic of anarchists and their allies.

[Part 1] V for Vendetta, Victory... reVolution... #guyfawkes #gunpowderplot #alanmoore Source: 9gag.com

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Henry David Thoreau was an anarchist, and famously wrote the essay “Civil Disobedience,” which argues that people of conscience should refuse to cooperate with an immoral government. This essay was influential to Christian anarchist Leo Tolstoy, who wrote the book The Kingdom of God is Within You, which makes a pretty good case for the idea that Jesus Christ himself was an anarchist. The two of these together were major influences to Mohandas Gandhi (who is said to have privately identified as an anarchist) and Martin Luther King, Jr. Regardless of whether either of these men were literal anarchists, their movements heavily borrowed anarchist ideas like direct action and civil disobedience.

The art world is chock-full of anarchists: the punk rock movement is basically synonymous with anarchism, but it's worth pointing out that its philosophical roots came from a group of anti-totalitarian Marxists called the Situationists. It was this same group that gave us the modern graffiti and street art movement. Anarchism continued to be influential among punk's many offshoots, particularly in grunge, the Riot Grrl movement, and the nu metal of groups like Rage Against the Machine. Chumbawamba and Bjork? Anarchists.

Among writers, the list of anarchists is bananas: aside from Orwell, you've got Albert Camus, Ursula K. LeGuin, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Thomas Pynchon, Edward Abbey, Henry Miller, J.R.R. Tolkein, Robert Anton Wilson, Noam Chomsky, and Howard Zinn. Comics has also been a bastion of anarchism, with Alan Moore, Alan Grant, and Grant Morrison as the most prominent examples (if you're looking for a cool newer anarchist comic book writer, check out Ben Passmore).

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"The cool kids are anarchists" is, of course, a terrible reason to become an anarchist. But a list that includes Gandhi, Jesus, and Chumbawamba is one that deserves your attention.

What even is anarchism?

The word "anarchy" literally means "without rulers." If that sounds broad and vague… yeah, it is. Like every political school of thought, there are about ten billion schisms of anarchism, so it really gets hard to define it beyond that. One of the more popular anarchist slogans is "No Gods, No Masters," but even that is tricky, because there are both Christian and Jewish forms of anarchism, and both of those groups, you know, believe in gods. In an interview with Mehdi Hasan, Noam Chomsky gave an uncharacteristically brief explanation of what anarchism means to him:

"What does anarchism mean? ...It fundamentally means opposition to structures of authority and domination unless they can justify themselves. Illegitimate structures of domination and hierarchy ranging from paternalistic family to business which is a tyranny in which people rent themselves as slaves, to international affairs. Anywhere across this domain if you find illegitimate authority, it should be eliminated. I suspect most people believe that."

What's often confusing about anarchy is that its best ideas are frequently co-opted by other groups or movements. The word "libertarian" has been associated with anarchism far longer than it's been associated with the weird cryptofascist corporate movement championed by people like Ayn Rand and Paul Ryan in America. "People who are called libertarians in the United States," Chomsky pointed out in the same interview with Hasan, "...are fundamentally calling for rule by unaccountable private tyrannies. I don’t see anything libertarian about that.”

Likewise, well-known terms like "conscientious objection," "squatting" and "free love" all have roots in anarchism even though many of their practitioners aren't anarchists. The rewilding movement, the vegan movement, and modern hacking have strong anarchist ties, but aren't necessarily anarchist movements.

The term itself is also often conflated with things it is not. You will sometimes hear people say stuff like, "God, I went to Walmart on Black Friday, it was fucking anarchy." They don't mean anarchy, they mean chaos. Most ideal visions of an anarchic world would, in fact, imply the nonexistence of Walmart. Anarchy is also conflated with violence (even though an enormous proportion of the violence committed in this world is committed by governments), and with nihilism (which is fair some, but not all, of the time).

I've reuploaded this clip because the person who originally uploaded it spliced it from this location: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX7ehbE1vc0&feature=cha...

Part of the reason anarchism isn't widely regarded or understood is because no one who wields an enormous amount of power -- your Hitlers, your Stalins, your Bezoses -- profits from promoting good faith depictions of an ideology that would require that they relinquish all of their power. No other political system views power itself as evil — the rest are concerned with which types of power suck.

Another part of the reason it's so confusing is that if you say to someone, "hey, let's remove each other's chains. What life should we now live, now that we are free?" literally every single person will come up with a different answer and a different vision. The tolerance for an endless amount of diversity is anarchism's great strength, but it also makes it super hard for any one person to say, "this is what anarchism is." Because they don't have the fucking authority to say that. Nobody does. We got rid of authority, remember?

But is anarchism even relevant anymore?

Writing for a friend's newsletter, I recently pointed out that at the core of the liberal belief system is a thought experiment called the "social contract." The social contract is based on the belief that we all choose to live in society that puts limits on our freedom because the anarchic “state of nature” we lived in was “nasty, brutish, and short.”

I also pointed out that this thought experiment was flatly wrong, that it was dreamed up a couple hundred years before we even knew what evolution was. What we know now is that early humans lived in small tribal communities that took all different shapes and forms. You could call these communities anarchies, because they lacked any formal government structure. We also know that they were hardly miserable meat-grinders of barbarism, and that while, like today, some lived short lives of misery and toil, many others lived rich, fulfilling lives.

A lot of stuff we take for granted as necessary for a civilization to function — say, prisons, permanent police forces, or standing armies — ignore the fact that these inventions came about only in the last few centuries (in the case of the first two), or have only been used by some civilizations (in the latter case) during certain eras.

If you can accept that everything we currently have developed out of anarchy, it’s not a huge leap to seeing that everything is, in a sense, still anarchy. A common argument against it is: “Anarchy would just result in the strongest taking what they want and leaving nothing for the rest.” The only reasonable response you could give to this is “how the fuck is that any different from now?”

If this is anarchy, it’s badly developed anarchy. Because humanity is so flexible and adaptable, we could choose to build a different one, a better one. 

Anarchist economics

One thing that’s confronting us in the 21st century, climate change, is caused by the current anarchy’s economic system, which is based on eternal growth. “Growth for the sake of growth,” the writer Edward Abbey pointed out, “is the ideology of a cancer cell.”

Anarchist economist E.F Schumacher proposed a different type of economy in his book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. He suggested that an economy based on valuing human life would be one where all work was meaningful, consumption was kept to a minimum, and where most if not all of the materials we used came from local, renewable resources.

This would, of course, mean giving up a lot of capitalism’s creature comforts. But it would almost certainly make us happier, with the fringe benefit of saving the planet. 

Many anarchists also believe that the ideal economy is one in which the only work you do is work you choose to do voluntarily, and which you can reap the rewards of as an equal partner. Anarcho-syndicalists, for example, are big promoters of worker co-ops. If you were a bartender in an anarcho-syndicalist co-op bar, for example, instead of earning $2 plus tips from drunk bros who "don't believe in tipping," you'd have an equal share in the bar, and would earn the same profits from it that the bar manager and the line cook would. This, arguably, would make you a bit more invested and passionate about your work, because you'd no longer be making shit wages for assface owners. You, the worker, would have ownership of the means of production.

You may notice that this sounds an awful lot like socialism. That's because it kind of is! Anarchists and socialists have long been leery allies who often agree on the ends they want but disagree on the means of getting there. Marx's anarchist rival in the First International (a famous international coalition of leftists) was a man named Mikhail Bakunin. Bakunin and Marx agreed on some things, but Bakunin believed that Marx’s suggestion that the communists create a "dictatorship of the proletariat" when they take power would just turn into another dictatorship.

“Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice," Bakunin said, "socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.”

Hard to argue with him there. History speaks for itself.

Mutual aid

Another idea anarchists dream up that is wildly useful is “mutual aid.” Mutual aid is when people in a community choose to take care of one another through a voluntary exchange of goods or services. Say you have a job but your neighbor doesn’t. Mutual aid between you two could conceivably look like you feeding and housing your neighbor while they take care of your kids or tend your herb garden. The point is that it’s reciprocal — it’s solidarity, not charity.

In times of disaster, mutual aid turns out to be a wildly effective method of distributing resources. After Katrina, government agencies like FEMA and the Red Cross often totally failed to reach certain neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods were kept afloat by mutual aid networks that coordinated and distributed food and healthcare and other basic human needs. Disaster researchers have consistently found that far more lives end up being saved in a catastrophe by civilians present on the scene than first responders, and that cities where the government has suddenly failed to provide the necessities often manage to self-organize and find a way to distribute those necessities on their own.

As Rebecca Solnit points out in her excellent book, A Paradise Built in Hell, this sudden popular autonomy is dangerous to those in power, because if it goes on for too long, people may start to wonder if they need their leaders at all. The go-to response by the elites in a disaster is to suggest that looting is rampant, which then justifies a violent crackdown by law enforcement. Looting is almost always overreported, and what looting is reported is often just the requisitioning of essential goods, like food, that would spoil instead of feeding someone who desperately needs food were it not “looted.” The elite response always tends to emphasize the importance of protecting property (which is replaceable and often insured) even at the expense of human lives (which are, you know, not expendable).

Mutual aid networks like Food Not Bombs have been feeding people hot vegan meals during COVID at a time when the government has been failing to give people the resources they need to survive. Perhaps people will come away from this crisis with less confidence that our federal government is the essential order-keeping apparatus it claims to be, and that the real future lies in solidarity with other members of their community.

Direct action

Another anarchist idea worth taking seriously is direct action. You may, like many people, have become disillusioned with the electoral process. Good! The electoral process is hot trash, a shadow of democracy run by corrupt shitheads.

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The alternative is direct action, which basically means exercising your political and economic power in the real world rather than through elected proxies. It’s basically everything the civil rights and labor movements have done to affect change: sit-ins, strikes, boycotts, marches, protests, occupations, and whatnot. There are also violent forms of direct action —street battles, uprisings, assassinations, revolutions — and in between stuff like sabotage, property destruction, and looting, which are considered violence by people who value things over people.

Direct action, when done well, is the reason for virtually all substantive change. For a real glimpse into how this is the case, read Howard Zinn’s seminal A People’s History of the United States. It was, for example, the strikes and organizing of the socialists — as well as the always-lingering threat of a Russian-style revolution, it’s own type of direct action — that got us the New Deal, for example. It was the activism of Martin Luther King Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as well as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Students for a Democratic Society, and more militant groups like Malcolm X’s Nation of Islam that pushed American political leaders to finally implement the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The idea behind direct action is that you have power, and you can choose to exercise it in ways outside the voting booth.

Baby, I’m an anarchist

There are a dozen other anarchist ideas that are worth engaging with, and if you want a thoughtful walk through some of them, you can check out James C. Scott’s excellent book Two Cheers for Anarchism. He takes a positive but somewhat skeptical view of the belief system -- it's hard to come up with an anarchist solution to things like nuclear weapons, of course. Some autonomous self-organized societies may reasonably choose, through democratic means, to sacrifice freedom for security and order, and who are you to tell them what they really want? Others may simply not want to deal with the day-to-day bullshit of governing their own lives. It's a big responsibility, liberating yourself. 

On the other hand, Scott suggests, we unconsciously subjugate ourselves to other people all the time -- how many of the people who are reading this have worked for an absolute tyrant of a boss who they've refused to stand up to out of fear for losing their jobs? How many times have you followed a rule that you've found stupid and senseless, just because breaking it would be a whole big thing? This may sound like nothing, but how, Scott asks, could we expect to one day stand up to an authoritarian regime, if we'd spent the entire rest of our lives practicing obedience rather than rebellion? Anarchism offers a practice in rebellion that some of us desperately need.

But you don’t have to become a full-blown anarchist in order to engage with anarchist ideas. Opposition to illegitimate power and commitment to personal autonomy is more of an orientation toward the world than it is a rigid ideology. You can and should find your own creative ways to become a freer, more liberated person, and to help others become free as well.

Call yourself what you want — but if you ever want some pointers on liberation, might I suggest the anarchists?

Further Reading

• V for Vendetta by Alan Moore

• Two Cheers for Anarchism by James C. Scott

• A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit

• Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E. F. Schumacher

• Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

• Your Black Friend and Other Strangers by Ben Passmore

• The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin

• A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

• The Kingdom of God is Within You by Leo Tolstoy

• Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus

• Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

• The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord

• Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey

Thoughts on a pandemic: Welcome to the disaster utopia

In a perfect world, I am using this pandemic as an excuse to work on my two books, and also to write daily blog posts and build out my email list. But alas, a month before this whole shitstorm kicked off, my wife and I had our second child, and the little bit of relief we had — daycare and sleepovers with grandparents for my toddler — disappeared. 

What follows would have been lovely as several blogs, but I had to write them one-handed with a colicky infant laying on my chest. So please: forgive the scattershot nature of what follows. But as someone who is writing a book about coping with the "apocalypse," I feel I have a few things to share that might be worthwhile.

I’m counting this as my first entry in a column I’m calling “Book Rex.” I even drew a mascot for this column. Meet Noam Chompsky, the Bookasaurus Rex.

We're going to be fine

One of the most persistent and demonstrably wrong narratives around disasters like the one we're living through is that they reveal just how tenuous civilization really is. We all like to think that, if you take away the parental authority of the government, we all descend into a Lord of the Flies scenario where we consume each other until all that remains is a putrid skull on a stick.

We get this, I think, from the hideous 20th century. It was a traumatic hundred years for a society to live through -- two world wars, the invention of world-ending bombs, the creation of economic systems that could consume the entire biosphere, depressions, totalitarianisms, the crumbling of colonial empires and the dozens of ensuing wars for independence, genocides, holocausts, mind-shattering drugs, mind-shattering science, and the collapse of every conceivable order into mind-boggling chaos.

We could be forgiven for taking a dim view of humanity in such times, but we've now made it the only view of humanity that can be held by thoughtful people in the 21st century. And it's just not correct.

The essential reading in any cataclysm is Rebecca Solnit's 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. In it, Solnit makes the case -- supported by most disaster research -- that disasters actually reveal the opposite of our “every man for himself” imaginings. Civilization is, in fact, quite resilient, because what makes civilization strong is not massive institutions, it's not strong leaders who are ready to commit acts of breathtaking violence, it's not rough men in uniforms forming a thin blue line between order and chaos. 

It's just people. Not heroes, not superhumans, not Great Men of History, but everyday people who notice that something needs doing and then do it. Solnit points to the civilian flotilla of boats from Staten Island and New Jersey that crossed the bay on September 11th and evacuated half a million people from the cloud of ash, debris, and human remains choking Lower Manhattan. This totally decentralized effort did this work in less than nine hours. Fewer people were evacuated from Dunkirk.

Or take the fact that our first responders -- who we rightly admire -- actually save fewer lives in major disasters than bystanders. An article on the topic in Scientific American made it clear why:

““In fact, during disasters, the survivors themselves are the first responders, because they were already there when the disaster happened. The decisions survivors make can and do save their own lives and the lives of the people around them. It can take a while for help from the outside to arrive, but people don’t just sit around waiting. They begin to organize themselves into groups, identify the resources they have, and use those resources to help others. In fact, this spontaneous response is so reliable that research from around the world has found that people are often more likely to be rescued by these emergent, informal groups than they are by official search and rescue teams.””

If you look around during this pandemic, I suspect you will see something similar unfolding: despite all of the governmental failings at the federal level, people are banding together, sharing information, distributing resources, and are working together to come up with positive solutions. They are arranging impromptu relief funds, they are using 3-D printers to make PPE equipment, they are reaching out to isolated friends for digital happy hours.

The idiots who are playing two-hand-touch football games in the park are, in fact, a small minority. Most people are trying to help. And a good chunk of those people are doing active good in this nightmare. That doctors and nurses are doing good is perhaps not surprising, it is literally their jobs to save lives, but will you ever look at a grocery store clerk the same way ever again? Or a mailman? Or a janitor? These people are literally saving us, and all they’re doing is stocking shelves, dropping off packages, and mopping floors. It is not glamorous deeds of derring-do that keep a society functioning.

The cool attitude to adopt, of course, is that people suck. That they are stupid, that they ruin everything, that they can't be trusted. Your doors are to be locked at night, your neighbors to be viewed with suspicion. Faith is to be placed in a benevolent dictator, or perhaps in a more educated elite.

What is not acknowledged is that this educated elite is precisely the group that created a system where a psychopath could be elected to the Presidency with a minority of the votes. It is elites that start the wars, it is elites that tank the economy, it is elites that dismantle our public health infrastructure so they don't have to pay higher taxes, it is elites that block healthcare for all, it is elites that pick apart the natural world and sell its scraps for change.

It is the elites that have adopted a totally nihilistic worldview, where nothing matters and all is for sale.

How is it cool or realistic or edgy, then, to simply agree with them when they tell you people suck? The most subversive thing you could possibly do in disaster scenarios is to believe in your neighbor. It's not even that risky: anyone who's lived through a catastrophe (9/11, Katrina, Sandy, Trump) knows that when we need each other, we show up.

The powerful created a lot of the problems that caused COVID. Some of those in power will do good things, will be good leaders. But the people who do the real life-saving work will be the ordinary people who take the fate of their community into their own hands.

The value of a hard day of no work

One of the recurring themes on political social media during this shutdown has been "HEY, THIS IS WHY EMPLOYER-BASED HEALTHCARE IS STUPID." Because obviously: yes. This whole system falls apart when 6 million people lose their jobs and health insurance in a matter of weeks because of a public health related emergency. This flaw was always in the system, but it was only happening to one person at a time, rather than everyone at once. And it's a good point: fuck any future system that doesn't give literally everyone healthcare.

But there's a story here that I think many will miss: A lot of us do work that society doesn't even remotely need. 

The designation of "essential" and "nonessential" work is obviously a little bit heightened at the moment, but the truth is, most of us will stay at home and not do all that much work and our society and the planet as a whole will actually be the better for it. Not only are we slowing the spread of disease, but we're also giving the earth a chance to breathe.

The Atlantic did a breakdown of some of the ways nature is responding to our little civilizational pause, and it is pretty staggering: air pollution, for example, kills millions of people a year. Air pollution has plummeted during the quarantine (it's also made the skies a lot clearer: a Facebook friend of mine is posting pictures every few days of how clearly she can see Long Island from her home on the Jersey Shore: it is not usually visible underneath the New York City smog). Boat noise in the oceans has been linked to higher stress levels in marine life, and thus lower levels of reproduction. Those oceans are now quiet. 

Anthropologist David Graeber has made the point that the only significant drop we've seen in carbon emissions in the past few decades was during the global recession in the late 2000s. The reason for this -- when we've been doing so much to try and innovate climate change away with our technological advances -- is that climate change is a direct result of economic growth. We will probably see a similar, or perhaps an even greater drop in our emissions for this year. Our economic pain is the world's ecologic gain.

The question becomes unavoidable: if most of our jobs aren't essential, and it's our economy that's killing the earth… shouldn't we fundamentally change our economy? If our jobs are useless at best, and actively detrimental to the planet at worst, shouldn't we reconsider our relationship to work?

At the moment, it's an impossible question to answer, because the only way we can feed our families is through jobs. But plans like Universal Basic Income could give people the opportunity to skip working at a pointless job, and Universal Basic Income is suddenly, in this Year of Our Lord 2020, being temporarily advocated by no less a radical than Willard "Mitt" Romney.

Graeber himself famously diagnosed our country's reliance on what he calls "Bullshit Jobs" in a 2013 article for Strike! Magazine, but we as a country need to do something trickier than just realize that our jobs suck and are also not remotely essential to the functioning of mankind: We need to come to terms with the fact that one of our deepest held beliefs, that there is dignity in work no matter what the work may be, is wrong.

There may, in fact, be more dignity in doing no work at all.

The death of the individual

Social media loves a good intergenerational war, and COVID-19 has been a doozie. There was, at first, the glib Twitter jokes about COVID being a "Boomer Remover," then the recriminations of Millennials who refused to skip their Spring Break by amateur social media pundits, then the inevitable backlash when Millennials pointed out they weren't in school any more, they weren't on Spring Break, the real villains were the younger Zoomer generation, those were the fools killing our grandparents.

Which… is anyone shocked? Everyone sucks when they are a teenager. If you say you didn’t, then you definitely sucked. You probably still do.

On the other side of the intergenerational war — which, let’s be honest, is mostly just an attempt to abstract our concrete personal issues with our parents — has to be some sort of realization that it’s not one group of people but the culture as a whole that’s causing these problems.

““It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.””

— John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

Steinbeck wrote this in 1945, and it’s gotten truer by the year — look at the President. When humans build societies, they start with their values and work their way up. There’s basically no ceiling to what a group of people can do if they can collectively imagine it. Our society can put a man on a moon but it can’t imagine giving a janitor healthcare. Who is surprised at that? The Platonic ideal of an American is a murderous loner like the cowboy, or ubermenschen fascists like a superhero, or ruthless self-made Masters of the Universe like Gordon Gekko.

Why wouldn’t a teenager raised in this society go on spring break? We've taught them since day one that they should buck the conventional wisdom, break free from the crowd, follow their bliss. Self sacrifice is for suckers and saviors. The real heroes are the lone wolfs.

Of course, if we’d asked an anthropologist while constructing our society, they could’ve told us that humans evolved not as rugged individuals, but as small communities, and that’s how we function best. If we’d asked a biologist, they would’ve told us that even wolves aren’t loners — a lone wolf is an unhealthy, desperate, distressed creature that has lost or been rejected by its pack. If we'd taken this into consideration, we'd perhaps have a better understanding of that Most American of All Creatures, the Lone Wolf Shooter.

Separateness, a pandemic might conceivably teach us, is an illusion. We trade cells and atoms with other humans and other creatures constantly all day long. Selfishness does not exist in a vacuum. Nothing we do exists in a vacuum. We’re part of an ecosystem, our actions — even actions as inconsequential as handshakes — have repercussions. If a handshake can eventually kill thousands, what do we expect to happen, for example, when we dump an entire continent of plastic into our life-giving oceans will do?

The implications of this new reality are massive, and if we want to survive in our brave new world, we’re going to have to adjust to it. We just won't be able to unsee what we've seen: that there is no such thing as an individual.

No man is an island entire of itself; every man 
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; 
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe 
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as 
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine 
own were; any man's death diminishes me, 
because I am involved in mankind. 
And therefore never send to know for whom 
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

-John Donne

To build a better society, we should first decide what it is we value most. I propose, in this time of social isolation, that hell is not other people, that we are at our best when we are with our families, our friends, and our communities. It is from there that we can start to build something better.

Ideas aren’t enough, of course, but you can't build something if you can’t imagine it first. All that we can collectively imagine right now is apocalypse and collapse. If we can’t fathom anything better, that’s all we’re going to get.

An excessively academic reading of “Okay, Boomer”

I am not a member of Generation Z (or a "Zoomer," as they are delightfully called), so the retort "Okay, Boomer" does not belong to me. But the first time I saw it, it filled me with the type of unbridled joy that I rarely feel on the internet anymore, because it spoke to a seething resentment I've been feeling for over a decade, and with particular intensity since the election of Donald Trump. 

I immediately told my wife about it, and she was less into it because she's a better person than me. "Isn't it kind of ageist?" she asked. 

I tried to jump to its defense (mostly by attacking the Joe Bidens of the world who just. don't. fucking. get it.), but I think I failed, because she is still lukewarm about it, and the two times I have had to explain it to anyone who is older than a Millennial, I have gotten the sense that they have walked away slightly miffed.

I am a Millennial, so obviously I have an unnecessary Master's degree that I earned in the early 2010's while "waiting for the economy to improve." The degree was in Human Rights, and for my dissertation, I used an academic technique called Critical Discourse Analysis to look into the right-wing American media's rhetoric around the children of undocumented immigrants. The technique is designed to analyze how language either reinforces or pushes back against power structures within a society. I focused on the terms "anchor baby" and "DREAMer." It was one of the more fulfilling parts of earning my degree.

Naturally, I haven't used the technique since. No Millennial ever uses anything they learned in their Master's program. Master's programs are what the overseers use to rope you into indebted serfdom in the dark Satanic content mills that dot the 21st century landscape.

It seems fitting, then, that here, on this blog that exists solely so I can shout into the void, "I'M NOT A CONTENT CREATOR, I'M A HUMAN BEING!" I should be afforded the opportunity to again apply Critical Discourse Analysis in the service of explaining "Okay, Boomer" to people who don't get "Okay, Boomer."

The Psychosocial and Economic Implications of "Okay, Boomer": An Abstract

1. "Okay, Boomer" is directed not at a particular generation, but at a class structure and the people who defend it, who are often members of the Baby Boomer generation. 

2. The Boomer mindset is one that offers unsolicited or bad advice to younger people that is based on an economic context that has not been in place for over four decades. The new economic context, in which "work hard and pay off your loans" or "just find a job with healthcare" are absurd things to say, is the outcome of the core political project of the Baby Boomer generation. 

3. This advice is often offered as a condescending or dismissive parry to the personal grievances of Millennials or Zoomers that have arisen from the current economic context.

4. For a long time, the only rebuttal a Millennial or Zoomer could offer was a long explanation as to why "that's not how it works anymore." This response, usually heartfelt and born of frustration, almost always fell on deaf ears, because: 

   1. the Millennial/Zoomer economic struggles are a direct result of popular Boomer policies, and the only policy programs that could serve as a corrective to these policies would be the center-left wealth redistribution programs that are popular in the modern Democratic Socialist movement, 

   2. Boomers grew up in a Cold War context which made the vague menace of "socialism" the existential, atom-bomb-is-coming enemy for most of their lives. This childhood fear has been effectively weaponized by the right, who declares any social program to be indistinguishable from Stalinist purges,

   3. Boomers, as opposed to Millennials or Zoomers, are far more likely to be in the "from" rather than "towards" category of wealth redistribution, and 

   4. The arguing parties are, usually, children and their parents (or older family members), meaning that the arguments will almost always be tinged with parent/child power dynamics, which means they get easily derailed because the child doesn't feel seen by the parent and the parent doesn't feel appreciated by the child. 
      
      "Okay, Boomer," is the first retaliatory response to the bad advice given by Boomers that is effectively the same in both content and form. It is reductive, dismissive, condescending, and designed to end conversation rather than start it. Boomers -- particularly the leftists who have actually been fighting the current economic context since the 60's and 70's -- could recognize in "Okay, Boomer," the spirit of their own youth zeitgeist:
      
      For 60's Boomers, it was articulated by Bob Dylan:
      
      "Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
      And don’t criticize what you can’t understand
      Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
      Your old road is rapidly aging
      Please get outta' the new one if you can’t lend your hand
      For the times they are a-changin'."
      
      And for 70's Boomers, it was David Bowie:
      
      "And these children that you spit on
      As they try to change their worlds
      Are immune to your consultations
      They're quite aware of what they're goin' through."
      
      In conclusion, "Okay, Boomer" is a (slightly more concise than usual) iteration of the type of dialectical weapon that always appears in intergenerational warfare.

I'm angry at my Mom and Dad: A case study

There was a wonderful little moment on Twitter last week that illustrated the "Okay, Boomer" fight perfectly. The Tweet is by Aren Le Brun, a leftist and Democratic political consultant:

I understand the catharsis of bashing boomers but writing off an entire generation like that is class-blind and wrong. Many have been in the fight way longer than we have. Many in fact taught us about the fight when we were kids and knew nothing.

— pete buttigieg is a republican (@proustmalone) October 31, 2019

He followed it nearly an hour later with this:

Looks like people’s response to this tweet is is in direct relation to whether or not they had radical parents

— pete buttigieg is a republican (@proustmalone) October 31, 2019

The central, inescapable stupidity of every book, every article, every single glib statement about Boomers or Gen-X or Millennials or Zoomers is that it treats an enormous number of people who were born within an arbitrarily marked span of time as a monolithic mass of people, when in reality, they are as diverse and different as any huge population. The Boomer Generation contains both Angela Davis and Mike Fucking Pence (his real middle name, look it up). Any category that contains both of those names is so broad as to be completely meaningless.

Which means that the amorphous generational demonym "Boomer" is going to be given shape in our minds by one or two real life examples, and those examples are probably going to be our parents or grandparents. 

This is, in short, all just "fuck you, Mom/Dad!" framed as a culture war.

I say this as a person who is working through some parental anger issues himself. Don't get me wrong: my parents are great. Neither of them voted for Donald Trump, thank god. But I'm a new father, the future looks dark, and I'd always been told during political fights with my parents that I would understand when I became a parent. I'd become more conservative in my old age.

Now, at age 33, I am a parent, and this rightward drift has not transpired.

My parents were both Reagan supporters and conservatives until they both started shifting leftward in the George W. Bush era, in large part because all three of their kids abandoned conservative politics pretty much the instant they came of political age, and instigated fights almost constantly. When I've confronted them about their earlier support of conservative causes, their response has often been, "We didn't know,” (about death squads in Central America, about racist dog-whistle politics, about environmental destruction) or “It was a different time."

To which my response is often, "Yeah, well, some people knew, and they were doing something about it, where the fuck were you?"

I have to imagine it is not pleasant hearing this, because I know full well where they were: they were in suburban Cincinnati, driving my bratty difficult ass to soccer practice. Dad was running a travel agency in the era of September 11th, the Internet, and the recession, figuring out how to pay his three kid's way through college, as well as playing catch, taking us out boating, hiking, and traveling with us whenever he could. And Mom was running all of the household errands, cooking all of our meals, starting her own small business, working with the PTA, and whistleblowing to the press that our creepy Catholic priest was embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from our local parish.

They were never greedy; they were, in fact, excellent parents. What’s more, the personal ideologies that they lived by held my family together. Because of them, my family was a stable, loving, only occasionally dysfunctional place. It was this ideology that allowed them, as upper-middle-class white people, to build an idyllic world for their kids. The tax cuts they were voting for were, in their minds, “fiscally responsible.” They were not “dismantling the social safety net and destroying the environment at the expense of minorities and future generations for their own personal short-term gain.”

Now, 30 years on, all of the things they believed in — Patriotism, Catholicism, Conservatism, Capitalism — have become things that I (and to differing degrees, my sisters) have violently rejected in adulthood.

To them, this could conceivably be felt as a wholesale rejection of their lives and identities, which were largely constructed in the service of us, their kids. That, I imagine, might really hurt. I am now a father myself and I love my daughter so much that the idea of her judging me this harshly is brutal. 

At the same time, I see how the conservative America I grew up in has led to the mess that my daughter is inheriting. Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, said, when asked about preserving nature for future generations, "I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns."

The economic boom times of the Reagan years — which young me benefitted from — were checks cashed from my daughter's bank account. The deregulation mania, the cutting of social services, and the gutting of civil society that Republicans started and Democrats tacitly went along with from the 80's till now is going to make my daughter's and my unborn son's life very difficult.

The people in power, of course, were not my parents. I suspect that if they had been in power, they would've done things differently. For most people, the massive political and economic systems that we live in do not feel like structures that are built and reinforced by humans, but unstoppable forces of nature that the average person can do little about. For Boomers especially, these forces could conceivably have felt inevitable. They had, after all, staged a massive political and cultural uprising in the '60's and early '70's, and the bastards had still won out in the end. 

It was said best, as it so often is, by Kurt Vonnegut:

“During the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”

To someone caught in this current, to someone too busy with the work of everyday life to pay attention to the inhumanly immense forces of history, it would be tempting to assume that the direction we were headed was inevitable. The best mindset to adopt — the easiest to live with — was that this was a good thing, God would provide, all would work out. Temporary material advantages -- lower gas prices, lower taxes, economic booms -- would seem to confirm that this New World Order was, indeed, a blessing.

The tragedy of our time is that the blessing the Boomers thought they were giving to their kids was in fact a curse, and the Millennials and Zoomers, particularly the ones whose parents weren't the radicals who never believed in any of this, now have to figure out if they can cast that curse aside without breaking their parents' hearts. 

I have written this article no less than five times since Donald Trump was elected, since it became clear things were going to get much worse before they got better. If they get better. And I’ve never published it out of nervousness that my parents will read it. Because I love them, and I don’t want to hurt them. “Okay, Boomer” gives me a bit of cover to hide those feelings in. I hid the first iteration of this article in a Facebook comment. Because it’s the internet, it got copied, pasted, and shared a lot, and I’m getting emails from strangers now, so I feel the need to elaborate. I hide it again here under a boring title. It’s easier to passive-aggressively blame an entire generation than it is to tell my parents that I feel betrayed by their earlier political selves, that the world they built for me to flourish in has, instead, deeply hurt me.

Taking the power back

My daughter has shifted things, just not in the way my parents expected it to. I can no longer protect my elder’s feelings at the expense of my daughter’s very existence. I can no longer be a depressed, resigned little drop in the current. I have to at least try to change things for the better. And this means taking power away from the people who are making things worse.

"Okay, Boomer," is shitty, but it's necessarily shitty. Arguments made from a context that no longer exists should not be taken seriously and should be derided. It's not a perfect weapon, and it will have collateral damage. The hand-wringing and #NotAllBoomers thinkpieces that will inevitably appear on the New York Times Op-Ed pages will, at least to some extent, come from a place of genuine hurt.

But the youngest Boomers are now 55. If the worst case scenario with climate change comes to pass, most of them will be dead about a decade before our civilization collapses. It is not their world any more, and yet, thanks to their age, their socioeconomic status, and the demographic bulge that gave them their name, they still hold an immense amount of political and economic power. If we let them, they will keep cashing checks on our future. They will keep up the neoliberal project, keep hoping, increasingly crazed and red-eyed, that things will work out and the blessing will still be a blessing. Their political stances will continue to service their retirement portfolios, and this short-term material gain will once again confirm the blessing.

The mindset that would do this has to be harshly rejected, and the power held by those who buy into this mindset must be wrested away from them. It is unfair to say that all of them are Boomers, it is unfair to say all Boomers are them, and it is unfair to say that this war is a war between the generations and not a war between the classes.

But hey: Life's unfair. It's time to grow up.

Imagine a Green New Deal

If you, like me, are in your mid-thirties or younger, there is a decent chance you have worked in what anthropologist David Graeber calls a "bullshit job." In his 2013 essay, On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, Graeber wrote that in the mid-twentieth century, economists believed technology would have rendered work unnecessary for most people in society. 

But, he said:

"Technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul."

In an interview with the Guardian Books podcast, Graeber added, “One of the few things that actually helped the world in terms of slowing down climate change was the financial crisis. A lot of people were out of work, and the amount of carbon emissions went down. If we all worked half as much, we’d probably do a lot for the world’s ecosystems.”

People tend to see work of all sorts as an inherent good — but in reality, some sorts of work are at best pointless, and at worst, actively harmful.

Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs. [Affiliate link]

I have, as far as I can tell, worked two bullshit jobs, both writing jobs where I was sold a "vision" by canny con artists who, in reality, were just using my work to make themselves money while underpaying me. In both cases, it was a degrading and demoralizing experience, and quitting, rather than feeling bittersweet, felt like liberation.

We -- especially those of us in the Millennial generation -- spend an enormous amount of time working in unstable, underpaid, high competition, low-benefit jobs that do not feel like they are moving us in any direction of value. Even when we work in the vocation we choose, even when we have good benefits, the work is often channeled and redirected by investors, bosses, and managers towards the service of a fairly cynical bottom line, rather than in pursuit of anything loftier and useful for society as a whole.

Sure, as a writer, I could choose the more stable path of working in advertising or marketing, but what I love about writing is the opportunity to be honest with myself, to work through human problems and emotions in a public way, and hopefully, in learning, help my readers learn something themselves.

This is not what advertising does. Advertising is the act of fibbing in order to separate another struggling human from their income. It sells best to the fearful and insecure, and it sows both of these things in order to sell more.

I am 33, and my professional life so far has been a strange mix of choosing career paths that sound meaningful to me -- teacher, professor, journalist, librarian, non-profit worker -- and either being talked out of them because of bad pay and poor prospects, or being ground down by the harsh realities of holding them.

I know I am not alone. This malaise, this feeling of being dead in the water, is pervasive among my peers. It is not, as Dr. Seuss suggested in our graduation gift, Oh! The Places You'll Go!, a mere waystation we'd be stuck in for a short time, but a perpetual state of being. It is a feature of the economy we had no choice but to enter into. We tried to avoid entering the economy, having been assured that it was only temporary: many of us who graduated during the recession to a world of bullshit jobs or just shit jobs went back into the safe bubble of academia to get another degree while we waited the storm out. But in the end, the bullshit jobs were still there when we got out, and now we had much, much more student loan debt.

Now, we tread water in this dreadful economy running through the motions: we take on the financial risks of buying houses, we get married and have kids, and are told by our elders that something will come along if we work hard enough.

Others, though, scientists, people we’ve been taught (till now) to trust, tell us that we're destroying the world and the biosphere in the service of this ocean of meaningless drudgery. They tell us that much must be done if we are to still have a planet worth living on by the end of the century. They tell us we have to start changing, fast. They tell us there's work to be done. But the work that must be done -- the equivalent of a full time job for 8 billion people -- doesn't pay, and we have bills to pay and mouths to feed. So instead, we rot in jobs we hate and watch our world slip away.

Imagine if it was different.

Imagine a Green New Deal

Imagine that there are jobs to be had, good paying jobs with benefits and healthcare. Imagine that you are no longer working for a trust-fund shithead who has power over you because his father made a fortune selling tobacco products to toddlers, and who was gifted $10 million in lieu of being raised into an actual decent human being. Imagine who you are working for is your community, your kids. Everything you do benefits them, and not just in the abstract -- you see the fruits of your efforts every day, because they are accumulating right here, right in your town.

Imagine what those jobs would be. You are no longer answering phones for a corporate attorney who makes weird comments about your body. You are out in your neighborhood every day planting trees, sprinkling milkweed seed around the fringes of your public park so you can not only bring back the pollinators and save the food supply from catastrophe, but so that in the summertime, the park briefly fills with hundreds, thousands of beautiful monarch butterflies.

Imagine you go back to college -- free this time, your old debt forgiven -- and you learn ecology and environmental science. Your classes take you on kayak trips out to the local rivers and marshlands, where you learn the name of every animal, every plant, and how each is vital to the system. You work to save the species you can, and one day, years later, you see a thriving ecosystem where once there was a toxic waste dump. Local kids swing from a rope attached to a tree and drop into the water, laughing, screaming, and you don't call out, "This water's not safe!" because you're the one who tested it, and, for the first time, found that all of the poison had been removed.

Imagine you join a rewilding program, and you set the first wolves loose in the deep woods of your state. They will control the deer population, which will allow more plants and trees, no longer grazed to death as saplings, to grow, and more carbon is sequestered. The atmosphere inches back down towards a sane level.

Imagine you take that engineering degree, and instead of building a more ergonomic Mountain Dew bottle, you apply that knowledge towards building a national high speed rail network. The trains crisscross the nation, publicly subsidized and cheap, with quiet maglev propulsion. You finish a railroad and hop on one of your trains to go visit friends 500 miles away. You're there in two hours -- your kids don't squirm in their seats, they instead play cards in the dining car and watch forests and canyons zip by from the glass-covered viewing car.

Imagine every morning you get up at 4 and get onto a boat. Fishing had to be pulled back on -- you eat it still on special occasions, really savoring the taste, since you only get to have it every few months or so -- but the fishing boats were repurposed, and you are now paid for the plastic you pull out of the ocean. You take it back to a processing plant, where the plastic is eaten by a special type of bacteria. One day, you start bringing in less and less plastic, but you start noticing shoals of fish so massive that no one in living memory can think of a precedent. You watch as dolphins and sea lions playfully dive through the swarms. You shoot video for your kids back home to get them excited for the upcoming snorkeling trip.

Imagine that teaching, a revered and well-paid profession, entails taking kids out into nature and teaching them that they are a part of this, they are neither separate from nor above it all. They camp under the night sky, which is getting clearer lately, and point up at shooting stars and satellites. Back at home, they go on foraging walks to learn the local edible plant life, and they take a gardening class where they learn how to grow plants with minimal fertilizer and no pesticides. They plant many crops at once, all complementary to each other, and they cook delicious meals with what they pick. No one has any memory of the bland, flavorless tomatoes of the 20th century.

Imagine being a milkman, a family profession until it disappeared in your grandfather's time. You know all of your neighbors by name, catch up with them while collecting the old glass bottles they used to deliver them back to a nearby farm. An older neighbor doesn't answer the door one day during a heat wave, and you, concerned, call her daughter, who brings over the key and gets her to the hospital. She lives thanks to you.

Imagine being a doctor, and realizing that your patients seem happier than they used to. You spend more time with them, you don't need to check charts, and you don't have to worry as much about malpractice suits, as no one needs to sue to cover their medical bills any more. Lung disease seems to be going down, as does obesity and depression -- a lot more people are outside these days, the air much cleaner. Because you're not feeling a pinch in your pocketbook, you don't feel pressured to push certain medicines, to churn through far more patients than you can handle. 

Imagine coming home, after a day's work, and sitting outside. A lot still needs to be done, your kid's generation isn't out of the woods, but you're working towards something, dammit. If the feedback loops that the scientists are warning about destabilize it all again, you know that you'll all work together and try your best to figure it out.

The news isn't always good, but it's hopeful: there's an international coalition of scientists and environmental workers that is constantly experimenting on the best ways to lower emissions to under 350 parts per million, there are teams of economists figuring out how to make our economies work without eternal growth while still developing the most impoverished countries, there are policymakers working on ways to keep population stable without telling people they can or can't have kids (providing education to women consistently lowers birth rates, for example), there are security professionals protecting wildlife sanctuaries from poachers, and there are spiritual leaders teaching the anxious and the fearful how to be resilient, how to be hopeful, even in times of crisis.

You snap off the news and play with your kids out in the back. There are blackberries growing on the back fence, there's a six-pack of local microbrew in the fridge, and there are a lot of crickets in the woods behind your house these days, a lot of fireflies in the night sky. Not all problems have been solved, but it's not for a lack of trying. You go to sleep fulfilled with your work, excited to get up tomorrow and do it again.

Perhaps

This, perhaps, all sounds impossibly idyllic, perhaps a little bit too utopian. We have all gotten used to being cynical about our future. But you cannot work towards a better future if you cannot imagine a better future, and there's no reason for us to bargain our imaginations down from a best case scenario. 

The arguments against such a world are almost always an act of bargaining down our imaginations. "How will we afford it?" people ask. The same way, of course, that we could afford to give tax cuts to the richest people in the world, the same way we could afford to blow trillions of dollars on wars and weapons, the same way we gave enormous sums of money to banks after they blew up our economy. We have the will, we have the resources, we have the labor. Past those three realities, all financial constraints are fictions created by "reasonable" men who just so happen to profit immensely from things never changing. If we can afford for you to spend your days sitting in a cubicle and posting funny marketing Tweets for laxative companies, we can afford for you to save our planet. End of story. It is only a matter of will. And in the words of the great Walter Sobchak, “If you will it, dude, it is no dream.”

The other option is to die not even trying. It's to leave nothing for our kids out of loyalty to jobs we hate, to an economic system which has never treated us as humans, but as cogs in an immense machine. We are not, as Charlie Chaplin put it, machine men with machine minds and machine hearts. We are humans. We can reject a world that we hate, that hates us, and build a world we love. We can save our planet and our children and feel joy in doing it.

All we have to do is to imagine it.

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Further Reading:

• Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber

• Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibben

• Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea, and Human Life by George Monbiot

• The Future Starts Here: Adventures in the 21st Century by John Higgs

• The Limits to Growth: 30 Year Update by the Club of Rome

• Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E.F. Schumacher

Just a note: these are all affiliate links, so I make some money if you buy from them. I haven’t been paid otherwise to promote anything specifically, I picked all these because I liked them.

An anti-despair reading list

The world, it seems reasonable to assume, is fucked. Between climate change, the revocation of nuclear arms deals left and right, and the fact that an increasing number of the world’s most powerful governments are being run by greedy cryptofascist dullards, it seems like we’re moving in a dark direction as a species. It would be easy to fall into despair, to grow helpless.

This, as I’ve argued elsewhere, is unnecessary. But perky web articles and cute, “Hang in there buddy!” memes aren’t really going to keep you going. To stay clear-eyed and full-hearted over the next few decades of your life, you’re going to need to build a coherent worldview, and you can’t cobble that sort of thing together with short-form pick-me-ups. To do that, you need books, and you need art.

I do not claim to be an expert, but I have managed to pull myself out of a depression over the past couple of years, and I have started viewing the world a bit differently as a result of it. This, in large part, has been because of key books I’ve read. So here is one man’s reading list for fighting despair in dark times.

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Nonfiction

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The Reality Bubble by Ziya Tong

The amount of reality we see is only a tiny sliver of what’s possible. There are humans, for example, who can see more wavelengths on the spectrum than we can. They literally have extra colors in their eyes. There are animals that can see in slow motion, or with a telephoto zoom, or taste things with other limbs. With so much in this universe to see — and with our ability to see so little of it — one might start to wonder: could we possibly begin to construct our reality a bit differently?

In The Reality Bubble, journalist Ziya Tong documents all of our blind spots in the world, from these strange sensory blind spots, to our inability to comprehend the scale of the universe, to our blind spots about where our food comes from and where our waste goes. The book hits the perfect tone for our dark times, one of both curiosity and urgency, and will make you think that change isn’t just possible, it’s inevitable.

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A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit

For people feeling gloomy about the state of the world, there is no one better to read than Rebecca Solnit. Solnit doesn’t ever pull a Stephen Pinker-style “you’re wrong, everything’s actually fine,” but she manages to find ways to be optimistic without ever compromising her clear-eyed view of the world.

A Paradise Built in Hell debunks a myth about disasters and apocalypses: that humans turn on each other in a violent orgy of every man for himself. History (and for many of us, personal experience) shows the opposite: when shit hits the fan, humans help each other. They pull together, they self-organize, they make sure people get fed and medically treated, they rescue those at risk, and they save the day.

In this book, Solnit debunks the myth of rampant looting after a disaster (a myth spread by the powerful to reinforce the idea that we need them), and confronts the violence in post-Katrina New Orleans, which came not from looters and gangs of rapists, but from white supremacists who realized they could get away with murdering black men.

If ever you needed reassurance that the world on the other side of disaster is not a violent Mad Max nightmare, but a world of cooperative struggle, then this is it.

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Stranger Than We Can Imagine by John Higgs

British writer John Higgs’ 2015 masterpiece is billed as “an alternative history of the 20th century.” Britain, at the beginning of the 20th century, could reasonably have been considered the center of the world. To a Brit in 1901, the world made sense.

Then relativity and quantum mechanics changed everything we thought we knew about science. Modernism, surrealism, and dada pulled the rug out from under art. Totalitarianism rose, wars became potentially world-ending, we started launching men into space, our economy grew so fast it threatened to consume the earth, and we became so interconnected that we could see what was happening on other continents in real time. In the midst of all of this, Britain stopped being the center of the world. Its Empire was gone a mere half century after its peak.

This unmooring of everything in the 20th century that had been real and certain before 1901 was (and is) baffling and traumatic for many people. But Higgs offers a new way of thinking about it, a way that may help us start to understand where we now are. America, the most powerful nation in the world in 2001, and now a mere 18 years later indisputably in decline, could learn a thing or two from Higgs and the Brits.

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Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Kurlansky

This is a beautifully written book detailing 25 lessons we can learn from the history of nonviolence. It explains how “turn the other cheek” was actually a statement of civil disobedience in biblical times, it explains how Gandhi believed that, if you must choose between violence and doing nothing to change things, you must choose violence, it goes into Martin Luther King’s perceived radicalism in the United States in the 60’s (and why people claiming MLK would have “done things differently” from activists now is complete and utter garbage), and it goes into how the Cold War was ended not by Ronald Reagan shaking his fist at the Berlin Wall, but by thousands of dissidents working tirelessly over the course of decades.

Politics can seem impenetrable to common people a lot of the time, but Kurlansky’s book shows that creative nonviolent efforts undertaken by ordinary people have changed things for the better again and again over the course of history. Violence may be inescapable in this world, but we can choose to reject it.

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Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan

This is the best possible follow-up reading to Kurlansky’s Nonviolence. In it, Chenoweth and Stephan detail why it is nonviolence is so effective. They went through every major resistance campaign of the 20th century, and found that nonviolent campaigns were twice as effective as violent campaigns.

There are a few reasons for this: First, if you run a nonviolent campaign, you are likely to get more people to join than a violent campaign. Second, it is easier for a regime to oppose a violent campaign than it is a nonviolent one: armed rebels can be fought and executed, peacefully protesting civilians are much harder to shoot on (not impossible to shoot on, as history sadly shows us, but the blowback from murdering innocent people is pretty steep). And finally, when nonviolent campaigns win, they tend to transition to more peaceful and less authoritarian forms of government.

This book is packed with practical lessons for dissidents, and with justifications for changing things peacefully. As it turns out, you don’t need guns to change things. You just need to make it so things staying the same is more expensive for the rich and powerful than it is for them to change.

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Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit’s 2004 book was written in response to the invasion of Iraq and the reelection of George W. Bush, a pretty bleak time in American politics. Now, 15 years later, it is essential reading. Solnit, like Kurlansky, is excellent at providing an alternative view of history and offers a glimpse of the path forward. In it, she quotes Czech poet and dissident Vaclav Havel, who, when he wrote this in 1985, was in prison.

“The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not a prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”

Four years after writing this, Havel was no longer in jail. He was, in fact, the President of Czechoslovakia. Things change.

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The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli

Science books are essential for staying curious in dark times, because they remind us how fucking weird the universe is. Rovelli’s 2017 book The Order of Time explains what quantum physicists now know to be the case about time: basically, everything we think about it is wrong. It is not the linear, machine-like thing we imagine it to be as we watch the hands of the clock tick through the day. In fact, only a single equation in physics references its existence. The way we see it moving has more to do with our perception than it has to do with the nature of time itself.

Rovelli is a brilliant science writer, on the same level as Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson, and this book is essential for fighting despair because it’s hard to feel hopeless at the state of the world when you realize you don’t understand a fucking thing about it. Nothing beats fear like curiosity, and nothing pulls you out of despair quicker than wonder.

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Fiction

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Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut is the all-time master of compassionate humanism. Slaughterhouse-Five is an extremely dark book (it’s about World War II and the firebombing of Dresden, which Vonnegut was present for as a Prisoner of War), but it manages to also be an incredibly humane story that will, if nothing else, make you feel a little bit gentler towards other humans.

Like The Order of Time and Jerusalem (also on this list), it will have you thinking about how time works, and if we maybe don’t really understand any of this at all.

If that’s the case, then we’re all mucking about down here. None of us really know what we’re doing, the universe is a mystery, and death comes to us all. So it goes.

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Jerusalem by Alan Moore

This remains the most rewarding thing I’ve ever read, but I don’t recommend it to many people, because it is nearly 1200 pages long. Alan Moore is best known for his comics V for Vendetta, Watchmen, and From Hell, but this 2016 book is his magnum opus.

It takes place in Northampton, England, Moore’s hometown, and it jumps around in history, from the 19th century to the end of the universe. Chapters are written from the perspective of Moore’s family members, the daughter of James Joyce, Charlie Chaplin, and the Archangel Michael, among others. Some chapters are written as poems, others as plays, others as pulp fiction. About 400 pages of the book take place over the 10 minutes it takes for a 2-year-old boy to choke on a cough drop (and they are a staggeringly good 400 pages).

The book makes this list in particular because of its sprawling, original vision of life and the afterlife. If you, like me, have abandoned the idea of a heaven and hell, if you do not see any paradise beyond your death or human extinction, then Moore offers a wild, surreal alternative that will make you rethink the world and your place in it. It is a spectacular piece of writing, and incredibly fun to read, if you don’t mind taking a couple of months to get through it.

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Daytripper by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba

Daytripper is one of the most beautiful books I’ve read, and you can finish it in an afternoon. It is a comic book written by twin brothers Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba, and it covers the life of Bras de Oliva Domingos, a Brazilian obituary writer. Each day covered in the book is an important day in his life, and at the end of each of these days, he dies. 

It is a beautiful meditation on life and death. It is one of those books where you finish it and just sit quietly with it for a few minutes.

We tend to organize our lives around these big moments, but it is the small ones that end up defining us. The more we forget that, the more anxiety, depression, and despair can take hold.

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A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter Miller

The Cold War inevitably gave rise to a lot of excellent post-apocalyptic literature, but A Canticle for Liebowitz stands out as one of the most striking and one of the most hopeful for a society on the brink of a different type of cataclysm. The plot is simple: After a nuclear war between Russia and the US, the survivors go around burning all books and murdering intellectuals and academics, claiming (perhaps not unreasonably) that it was knowledge that brought us to this point. 

A Jewish Engineer named Liebowitz working at an army base begins smuggling books containing the entirety of man’s scientific knowledge out to a nearby Catholic abbey in the desert. They are entrusted with keeping this information quietly, to return it back into mankind’s hands when we’ve finally learned our lessons. The book follows the abbey over the course of the next 1700 years.

The book is a thrilling one for us to read now because it imagines life beyond a disaster, and it depicts morality as something that must always be grappled with, regardless of the technology at our disposal.

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East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Steinbeck’s magnum opus isn’t The Grapes of Wrath — it’s East of Eden. It is in one sense a retelling of the book of Genesis, but set in Steinbeck’s home, the Salinas Valley. The question at the core of the book is an eternal one: are we fated to be good or evil? Or do we have a choice?

It’s a staggeringly good book, with one of the greatest villains in literature, and with central characters who were actual family members of Steinbeck’s.

The conversation at the core of the book came from Steinbeck’s mistranslation of a Hebrew Bible, but it won’t matter, you’ll want to tattoo “Timshel” onto your wrist at the end anyway.

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Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling

Set aside the 12 years that have passed since the seventh book came out. Set aside J.K. Rowling’s need to constantly modify her books to make them more “woke” after the fact, set aside that she can be kinda shitty on Twitter, set aside that every new movie feels increasingly like a cynical cash grab, and just take the first seven books on their face.

They are amazing guidebooks for people (especially young people) going through tough times. I re-read all seven after Trump’s election, and they worked incredibly well as a pick-me-up.

Separating the art from the artist is probably a fool’s errand, but a flawed person can certainly write some brilliant stories.

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Poetry

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Pessimism is for lightweights by Salena godden

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This is a living document — if you have suggestions, let me know!

What's wrong with "we probably live in a simulation"

In 2003, 30-year-old Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom published a paper in Philosophical Quarterly titled “Are you living in a computer simulation?” The paper came out the same year as The Matrix sequels, and it caused a stir. 

In 2018, the idea is primarily known through its most prominent proponent, eccentric billionaire Elon Musk. When Musk talks about it, he bases his point on the improvement of video games over time — we had Pong in the 70s, we have incredibly realistic 3-D games now. What if we keep improving in that direction? "If you assume any rate of improvement at all,” he said in an interview with Joe Rogan, "then games will be indistinguishable from reality, or civilization will end. One of those two things will occur. Therefore, we are most likely in a simulation, because we exist.”

Elsewhere, he has been quoted as saying, "There's a billion to one chance we're living in base reality."

Americans in particular eat this shit up. We love eccentric billionaires. You must be an outside-the-box thinker to get rich, we assume, and Musk is a billionaire, so this weird shit must by why. On top of this, Elon Musk, much like Donald Trump or Beyonce, is an internet click-getter, so clickbait articles have repeated this over and over again, and if you spend enough time starting fires on the internet, you’ll bump into a Musk bro who’ll shout at you about how we’re living in The Matrix.

The problem, of course, is that the picture Musk paints is a pretty massive misreading of the simulation hypothesis, and a total misinterpretation of Bostrom’s argument. What Bostrom really said is far more interesting (and far more troubling) than what the clickbait headlines have suggested.

What if we’re all, like, pawns, in some giant alien’s game?

Nick Bostrom. Photo courtesy of the Future of Humanity Institute. Creative Commons license.

First, Bostrom's paper did not say that we almost certainly live in a simulation. He said that there are three possibilities, and that at least one of them is very likely true. They are:

1. The human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage (which is to say a stage where we could run high-fidelity simulations);

2. Any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof);

3. We are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

Bostrom has suggested elsewhere that he thinks each is probably equally likely, but that’s not something he fixates on in the paper, as it’s not something you can really prove.

The third possibility gets the most play, and it goes like this: If it’s possible to run simulations that are indistinguishable from reality, then a human within the simulation wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. It’s even possible humans within those simulated realities are also running simulations, and humans in those are running simulations, and so on. 

Given how many simulations might be running within simulations (it could get to a near-infinite number), then most sentient humans would actually be simulations, and not living breathing organic beings.

There’s a sort of dizzying but coherent logic to this thought. It’s an idea that has an almost religious feel to it: there’s especially comfort in the idea that we are currently living in an alternate history where Donald Trump was elected president because some jackass future human thought, “Let’s see what happens if we make this bullshit happen." In a world where a supernatural interventionist god is becoming less and less believable to a lot of people, a computer simulation feels like a rational, understandable alternative to a sentient Creator who’s crashing stars together and lighting bushes on fire.

The thing is, you have to get over one very controversial hurdle to even get to the first two points, and then you have to get through possibilities one and two, which is no small task. In fact, to my thinking, point one and point two are far more interesting than the third. So let’s go through it.

A big assumption: Do our brains not matter at all?

At the very beginning of his paper, Bostrom makes an admission: he’s assuming what philosophers call “substrate independence.” This is why everyone hates philosophy. It’s an overly academic way of saying that consciousness can be simulated without actual, physical brains; that our software doesn’t require our hardware. 

This is not a given. No one has really figured out what consciousness is yet. It’s one of the core mysteries of philosophy: what the hell are we? What is our experience of the world? And can it be replicated? If we build an artificial intelligence that can do all of the mental processes that we can do, it may behave as if it’s conscious, but is it?

This is what Descartes meant when he was saying, “I think, therefore I am.” When it comes down to it, the only thing you can know for certain is that you exist. You can trust other humans when they say that they have thoughts, feelings, and deep internal lives, but when it comes down to it, you can never know. You can only trust. Would you be able to trust the same coming from an intelligent computer?

Say you’re running a simulation of a human life, and you have that simulation walk out into the rain. Does the simulation feel that raindrops hitting its face? Does it feel its clothes getting wet? Or does the program running it just say, “I feel the rain on my face”?

If you believe in a soul or some sort of ghost in the machine, this is an impossible hurdle to overcome. But even if you don’t, it’s still not a done deal. There may be some hitherto undiscovered feature of the brain that gives rise to what we experience as consciousness. It may be a feature that a computer program could not replicate. For you to be a simulation, you who are experiencing actual human consciousness as you read this article, software must be able to replicate consciousness without the actual presence of a human brain. 

It’s not crazy to think that this is possible. But the issue is not settled, and, if we’re being totally honest and are taking a fairly rational skeptical viewpoint, it never will be, just as you can’t be totally sure right now that anyone else besides yourself experiences consciousness. And they have the same bodies and brains as you. It’s much less of a leap, but even then, it’s not a puddle you’re jumping over, it’s a chasm.

You need to make this assumption, this leap of faith, before you even start looking at the rest of the thought experiment. So let’s just make it and move on. We already got this far, so Jehovah starts with an “I,” middle finger to the gods, let’s ride eternal shiny and chrome. We’re doing this.

Point One: Humans might never have the ability to simulate the universe in this much detail

1. The human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage.

The first part of Bostrom’s trilemma has a few parts to it: first, it might just not be possible to simulate the universe to the degree of detail in which we currently see it. There is an absolutely immense amount of information in our universe, and simulating it would require an unfathomably large amount of computational power.

Our technological advancement over the past few centuries has been impressive, but a study out of Oxford found that, even using quantum computing, you'd basically need a computer bigger than the universe to simulate the universe. And that's just the size, it says nothing about the amount of energy you'd need to power that computer. Even if you tossed away most of the universe and just looked at what we've observed as individuals, the computer required to simulate our experiences would be infeasibly enormous. 

There could be some future innovation or workaround that would solve this problem, but there's no guarantee that there will be. It may just be impossible. Bostrom himself admits that we’re not currently there technologically, and proposes a few workarounds, but they’re all a bit… distant. He suggests we could totally redefine physics with a theory of everything, or that a few thousand years of technological discovery "will make it possible to convert planets and other astronomical resources into enormously powerful computers.”

Those fatal errors are rough, man.

That is a big ask. I am as turned on by the idea of a star computer as the rest of you, but that is not coming soon. Which raises the point — can we survive for that long? Even setting aside possible manmade calamities like climate change, nuclear war, superviruses, robot takeovers, nanobot “gray goo” scenarios, or particle accelerators accidentally creating a black hole, we still face the external threats of meteor strikes, the Yellowstone caldera exploding, or, you know, aliens.

We might just not make it to star computers.

The Fermi Paradox

Possibility #1 is, I think, the most likely option in the trilemma. The reason I think this is something called the Fermi Paradox.

Enrico Fermi was an Italian-American physicist, and he noticed that, if you look at the sheer size of the Milky Way Galaxy, it is extremely likely that there is not only a lot of life out there, but that there are a lot of human-level civilizations out there, and potentially a lot of human-level civilizations that have developed the ability to travel in interstellar space (this high probability is based on something called the Drake equation, which I don't have time to get into here, but which you should Google, because it is fascinating.).

Even given the enormous distances from one end of the galaxy to another and the relatively slow pace of interstellar travel, Fermi reasoned, enough time has passed that we should have been contacted by extraterrestrials by this point. He found no convincing evidence that we had, so, he said, "Where is everyone?"

From xkcd.

One possible explanation is that intelligent life tends to destroy itself shortly after it acquires the ability to travel outside its own solar system. Technological innovation occurs in conjunction with all other human events, and it may be that the type of society that can master the ability to split atoms and launch itself into space must also be an inherently unstable one.

It may be that the technology those civilizations need, like nuclear power, can be weaponized and that this tends to destroy those civilizations before it can fling them out safely and sustainably into space. Or it may be that these civilizations rely, as we do, on an economy based on exponential growth, which inevitably pushes the civilization up against its environmental limits, causing it to collapse.

It would seem that the universe’s silence is speaking volumes.

Bostrom himself is most concerned with superintelligence and how it might destroy us to preserve itself. He literally wrote the book on it. Naturally, as soon as the book came out, Elon Musk started talking about how superintelligence is potentially more dangerous than nuclear war, which is like saying the hungry tiger five feet in front of you is less dangerous than the aliens from Independence Day which, while technically true, is contextually stupid. Whatever. We don’t have time for it. Moving on.

Putting "should" before "can."

2. Any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof).

This possibility is, to me, the most interesting -- why, we might wonder, would a civilization not choose to use this power? I know for sure that if I had this power, I would play with it in all sorts of ways — I’d want to see what would happen if you made Africa the continent with guns, germs and steel, I’d want to see what would happen if you had Hitler hit by a horse and buggy when he was five, I’d want to see what would happen if Donald Trump had showed up at the third presidential debate with pinkeye. 

And that’s just me — history nerds everywhere would lose their shit by moving a bullet a few inches to the left at the Battle of Trafalgar, saving Admiral Nelson, or by keeping Salieri away from Mozart, or by making the smoke and mirrors a bit more conspicuous during Jesus’s miracles. Fantasy nerds would introduce dragons, horror nerds would introduce zombies. Thirsty housewives would create a world of only Colin Firths, bros would fill the world with pornstars, and 5-year-olds would push the meteor onto a different orbit and keep the dinos alive.

We, as a species, absolutely lack the restraint to not do this. So what future version of us wouldn’t? 

The first possibility is that it would take a lot of energy, and we wouldn’t want to spend it on dicking around with alternate timelines. We’d need it for our important jobs of crashing big stars into bigger stars, or for developing a test that determines who is a human and who is a Cylon. In Bostrom’s argument, the computers he’s proposing are the size of planets. Maybe if we can pull shit like that off, we’re not that interested in alternative histories anymore.

But the second possibility is the one I like the most: my suspicion is that, for a civilization to advance to such a point of having that power, it would need to learn to draw a thick line between "can" and "should."

Scientists over the past few centuries have made enormous strides, and many of these strides have noticeably improved our lives. But at the same time, a lot of these new technologies have put the human race at serious risk. We’ve already gone through most of these so far, so no need to rehash — but might a civilization that survives be a civilization that learns a bit more discretion? Might a sustainable, long-lasting civilization be one that learns how to do without certain luxuries, and to just take certain parts of life as they come?

Our civilization has very obviously not learned this lesson yet, and it seems increasingly unlikely that we are simply going to science our way out of our problems.

Thought experiments and reality

A final note to make here — throughout time, certainly long before the invention of computers, humans have played around with some form of this thought experiment. In a more superstitious era it took the form of, “Is all we see just a demon playing tricks on us?” In a more Frankensteinian era, it was “Are we just a brain dreaming in a mad scientists jar?”

No matter which version you choose, the results are always somewhat similar, but they are invariably fun to play around with. That is the point of thought experiments. They push you into corners and make you think your way out. But there is always a problem with mistaking a thought experiment for reality: thought experiments were usually conjured up by smartass philosophers to make some sort of broader point about the nature of reality and of being human. 

And that’s the issue: reality does not exist to prove your point. It is far more complex and weird than we are capable of grasping. To take a thought experiment that is basically saying, “Things may not be as they seem,” and to say, “Well, the thought experiment is how it really is, then,” is to miss the point entirely.

Billionaires will always have the need to make themselves sound edgy and cool, especially if their billions are contingent on getting Venture Capital and government money thrown at them constantly, but if something sounds implausibly weird (and, you know, a bit like something you’d talk about while stoned), it’s worth examining a bit more closely.

Yes. We could be living in a simulation. We could also be on the brink of extinction. We could be on the cusp of learning something important about responsibility and restraint. All three are possible futures laid out in front of us. The point of the trilemma is to ask: which do we want? And how do we get there?

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If this topic is interesting to you, the science podcast The Infinite Monkey Cage did an excellent panel on it featuring Bostrom, neuroscientist Anil Seth, physicist Brian Cox, and the comedians Robin Ince and Phil Jupitus. You can find it here.

Featured photo by Steve Jurvetson.

How to deal with the oncoming apocalypse when you're a new parent

For a year now, I’ve been a dad. Being a dad is great. My daughter is a chubby, smiley little cutie pie who giggles when she sees me, who likes to dance, and who thinks it’s hilarious to put her pacifier into my mouth. It is hard being a parent, yes, but it’s the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done.

My wife and I have always wanted kids, but there was a night in November 2016 where we briefly decided against it. You can probably guess the night. It was a bad night. It was a bad month. The two years that have followed have been no fun at all.

The kicker though, what made us decide to go ahead and have the kid, was that we didn’t want Donald Trump to be involved in our family planning decisions any more than he already would be. We didn’t want the man to hold any psychological power over us, on top of the political and economic power he already wielded.

But the past two years, we’ve both been grappling with the fact that the future our daughter is going to grow up in has darkened substantially in comparison to the one we envisioned we first got married and started thinking about her (then totally hypothetical) life.

For real though, the apocalypse is coming

I am not constitutionally capable of having a rosy view of the future. This may be a side-effect of having grown up consuming almost exclusively dystopian culture. I have long been an aficionado of zombie apocali, of days the earth stood still, of furious roads. I know these are fiction, and that they perhaps distort my perspective on the world, but even setting aside my congenital alarmism, it does appear that we’re coming up on a breaking point. 

The most alarming thing I’ve read recently is The Limits to Growth, a 1972 book put out by the Club of Rome that pointed out that exponential growth (both economic and population) on a planet with finite resources is, to put it simply, not sustainable. The study of LtG was one of the first to use computer simulations to try and predict the trajectory of global political, economic, and ecological systems.

While they ran their simulations, they kept noticing that, on their current trajectory, these systems all collapsed within 100 years or so, and by the year 2100 at the latest. They concluded:

“If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”

Without a serious global attempt at slowing both population and economic growth, they argued, collapse was almost certainly inevitable, and within a lifetime or two.

The world — briefly — took this seriously. Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House roof, people started wearing sweaters instead of using their heating. But it was seen as too burdensome, too oppressive, for many Americans, and when Ronald Reagan was elected, the solar panels were binned and the era of unrestrained growth began anew. Now, in 2019, if you hear about slow economic growth, or a dropping of the birth rates, it is inevitably mentioned as a bad thing, and not as the only thing that can prevent us from catastrophe.

The LtG team ran a 30-year update in 2004 (with exponentially better technology this time) in which they found that all of their initial predictions were still pretty spot on, and that we still hadn’t corrected ourselves from the “collapse” scenario. We are now 47 years into their 100 year timeline.

And this, for the record, is just environmental catastrophe. This does not even take nuclear weapons, AIs, nanotechnology, particle accelerators accidentally creating a black hole, or bioterrorism into account as potential world-enders (If you want a full list of the things that might kill us all — along with the ways we may survive — read Sir Martin Rees’ great book, Our Final Hour).

Dealing with the apocalypse as a parent

Thinking about this in the context of my daughter’s future makes me want to swan dive off the Empire State Building. The thought of a total environmental and economic collapse in her life time — with the most likely result being that she starves to death along with billions of others — is almost unbearable. I have stayed up nights (not a smart thing to do in your first year as a parent) fuming at the Trump supporters and climate deniers in my life, apoplectic at their callous disregard for reality, at their willingness to take a measly, short-term tax cut at the expense of my daughter’s future. Sometimes, I continue thinking about it into my sleep, dreaming about shouting at them, about burning all the bridges, about reducing them to quivering, weeping heaps.

I know that other friends, other parents especially, feel this way. The panic we feel is not represented in the media, which, unlike us, is focused on the latest Tweets and bits of palace intrigue. If the media mentions climate change, its attitude is, “Oh look, another doomsday report. Oh well! Nothing we can do!” 

To which we all shout back, WE ABSOLUTELY CAN DO THINGS! The reports all say, “if we take no action, climate change will be out of control.” TAKING NO ACTION IS NOT AN INEVITABILITY!

We don’t have our eyes fixated on our retirement portfolios, like our parents’ generation does. We have our eyes fixated on our children’s ability to even get to retirement age. What we see is haunting, and the inability of the rest of the cultural landscape to grasp this is infuriating and crazy-making. 

Earlier this week, I got home from work and my daughter was standing in front of the door waiting for me, and she raised both arms and screamed “YAAAAASSSSS” while charging at me for a hug. I mean, come on. How the fuck am I supposed to reconcile that delightful shit with the world I'm leaving her? How do I bring that into line with this bleak-ass future with clouds of ash, scorched earth, and hills covered in fire? How did I go from hugs, kisses, and gawp-gawps to The Road?

(”Gawp-gawps,” by the way, are an onomatopoetic term that refer to the sound you make when you’re just EATING THAT CHUBBY LITTLE FACE RIGHT UP.)

The darkest thought, the one that the mind pushes away the hardest, is the thought that it was pure selfishness to have her, that our desire to play house has brought into the world a wonderful little creature who will now undergo untold suffering. Indeed, this is even built into the discussion about growth — we can’t go forward having kids at the same rate¹. To do so is to doom them.

“You who grew up tall and proud, in the shadow of the mushroom cloud”

Every generation expects to be the last, and most of this is narcissism — it’s impossible and sometimes unpleasant to imagine a world beyond ourselves. But since 1945, being the last generation has been an actual possibility, and this has made us behave in weird ways. 

If you’re a Republican, it means raping the earth so you can take everything you can get before you go. They have openly admitted this on occasion: James Watt, Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, responded to a question about leaving resources for our descendants with, "I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.”

That’s some evil-ass shit right there. But it’s an understandable (if not forgivable) response to your impending annihilation. It’s hedonism cloaked in religious fundamentalism.

My grandparents’ generation spent literally all of their time thinking about “legacy,” which is why our world is covered in fucking plaques. At my alma mater, Penn State, the football coach was so intent on building a messianic legacy for himself that he handed the children in his care over to a sexual predator. When he found out, he didn’t tell the police. To let this out was to tarnish his legacy. So children continued to be raped. This is how badly some people want to be remembered fondly.

But what if you don’t get the comfort of being remembered? What if you are the end? What might you do? Might you take what you can and fuck those who came later?

I’ve become obsessed in recent months with Queen’s “Hammer to Fall,” a joyful little 20th Century danse macabre about resigning yourself to the inevitably of death and decay.

Here we stand, here we fall 
History won't care at all .
Make the bed, light the light 
Lady Mercy won't be home tonight.

It strikes me as odd that we’re so often encouraged to cope with the inevitability of our own personal deaths, but are never asked to confront the possibility of humanity’s death. Only the bleakest nuclear wasteland stories end in the extinction of the human race, but that extinction is just as inevitable in reality as our own deaths. We may evolve to something greater, we may build rockets that take us to terraformed Mars (although that sounds really unappealing if we have to live next door to Elon Musk), or we may escape the bonds of this solar system and live for millennia. But entropy is ceaseless; the heat death of the universe is coming.

At some point, there will be no one to remember us. What if this fact instilled us not with a rapacious consumptive greed, but with humility? What if we chose to instead live our ephemeral little lives as if they mattered, but not so much that they should blot out other little lives?

Wishing I’d been born

When I told my therapist about how much I worried about my daughter’s future, he asked, “Are you sad you were born?”

“No,” I answered. I have not, in fact, ever regretted being born, not even in my adolescent, “I WISH I’D NEVER BEEN BORN!” stage. Not even in the darkest days of my depression. I mostly like being alive, and I told him so.

“Well,” he said, “You were born during the Cold War. Your parents could have reasonably expected the nuclear apocalypse in the near future when they had you.”

I let it slide that my parents didn’t expect the apocalypse, they were Reagan supporters, which — I can’t even with right now. But the point was a good one. Even if they had been worried, I hadn’t been vaporized into a cloud of radioactive smoke.

“When I went to the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam,” he continued, “I remember this moment where I was in the room they lived in, and I saw a little collage that Anne had made with cutouts from magazines. It was the type of thing you see in teenage bedrooms all of the time. And I realized, in spite of how she died, in spite of how young she was, that this was a life well lived.”

This had been sinking in recently with me anyway. All through my depression, I kept thinking about how horrific the world was, how it was dark and full of terrors, how it was bleak and pointless, but I never stopped to recognize that, at least for me, life had been largely pleasant. Even in the face of dreams deferred, loneliness, and the cold emotional deadness of depression, I had mostly enjoyed life. I could die tomorrow, aged 32, and feel that I had lived well. I would want more time, sure, but I would have enjoyed what I got, regardless of whether what cut me down was a heart attack, a bus, or a nuclear explosion. 

My daughter may not get a full-length life. This is true whether the world ends or not. But she can still have a fully-lived life, if I can teach her to live in the moment and enjoy this experience. Even if her life contains immense amounts of suffering, it can still contain immense amounts of joy.  A life cut short by global catastrophe is only necessarily a bad life if you give more weight to the mode of death than you do to the life itself.

That possibility, obviously, is still absolutely un-fucking-acceptable, given that the only reason she should die young is so red-faced, small-hearted, fearful little chodes like Donald Trump can die with a few extra billion in their bank accounts. But. But. To live a short, happy life is perhaps not so bad.

Is optimism possible?

Our inability to imagine a brighter future may, in part, be a byproduct of our culture. Writer John Higgs makes an interesting point. He says in an interview with the Ransom Note:

"It seems to me that the last ditch attempt to say something positive about the future was in 1989 in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, when they say ‘The future will be great – it’s a bit like now, but with really great waterslides’. That was the best they could do. Ever since then the future has been shown as environmental apocalypse, zombie films, all of these things. And to create the future, first you have to imagine it, so this is a very worrying thing.”

Fear tends to inhibit imagination, and given that we’ve all been reduced to piles of quivering flesh over the past few years over the existential threats facing us, whether real (climate change, nuclear war) or imagined (immigrants, communists, Muslims), it’s perhaps unsurprising that our imaginations have failed.

When alternative futures are imagined, they tend to be put forward by 21st century flimflam men, billionaires who believe that AI or automation or Mars will save us, and who will coincidentally make billions more if we choose to heavily invest in those things. And while there could be cool futures with any of those, none of them address the underlying problem, which is the very structure of the society in which we live. If The Limits to Growth is right, then technology alone can’t solve the problem, because technology doesn’t decrease consumption (it usually increases it).

There are people who are imagining different societies, but at the moment, they are relegated to the margins. They are people like Bill McKibben, who in his book Eaarth, imagined a future where our economy is built on sustainability and endurance, where power is decentralized, and where community matters once more. They are people like Gar Alperovitz, who, in his book What Then Must We Do? looks at how a different type of society could be built for the many and not for the few. For Alperovitz, many of the necessary steps are already being taken, under the radar and across partisan lines (I wrote about some of these in an article for USA Today on microbreweries and the political revolution).

What we’re realizing is that the revolution that’s coming is not like the ones that happened in Russia, China, or Cuba, but instead is like the agricultural and industrial revolutions. What comes will be a massive shift in the way we live.

Or, you know, civilization will collapse. It doesn’t have to, though, if we can ditch the laziness of despair and start thinking creatively.

Silver linings

In Rebecca Solnit’s excellent book Hope in the Dark (which you should read if you’ve been in a state of constant despair for the past two years), she points out a curious side effect of the invention of Viagra: when the drug became publicly available, fewer endangered species were being killed for use as aphrodisiacs. Rhino horn, caribou antler, green turtle shell — all of these are traditional folk remedies for impotence, and all of them were rendered obsolete by a medicine that could actually give you a boner. Solnit’s point in this book is that history doesn’t move forward so much as sideways, and that things that were unimaginable 10 years ago are often the reality now. You can’t predict what will change or how.

When I was born in 1986, the end of the Cold War was inconceivable, as was a world shaped by the internet, as was President Donald Trump. It’s not all positive, sure, but I have no fucking clue what my daughter’s life is going to look like at 32, and I don’t know what strange things will take place between now and then. But the seeds of a brighter future are already there.

Take the freshman class of the House of Representatives. They aren’t bogging themselves down in the palace intrigue, they aren’t fixating on the Tweets of a deranged white supremacist, they aren’t “playing the game.” They’re instead out there presenting serious ideas for change, ideas that our current visionless leaders dismiss as impossible, just as the wrinkled old men leading the Soviet Union would’ve dismissed reform and collapse as impossible before Gorbachev took power in 1985.

As for me, my daughter has sharpened my focus. I’ve joined a local team of environmentalists and I’m organizing a set of lectures at the town library I work at. I’ve decided to stop writing horseshit clickbait for travel sites, and to start writing stuff that can change things. And I’ve started meditating, so I can better enjoy these moments with her, lest they be my last.

When I watch the news, it often feels like I’m on a train that’s barreling over the edge of a cliff. But that was true the moment I was conceived. This only ever ended with me kersplatting on a metaphorical (and, for all I know, literal) canyon floor. The same is true of my daughter. She, too, will die. But I can do what I can to make the fall a fun one, and I can work to keep her falling for a very long time.

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[1] The best thing you can do for the environment, by the way, is to have fewer kids. This is far more effective than giving up cars, never flying, giving up meat, or changing your lightbulbs.

So: if you don't really want kids, don't have any! If you do want kids, limiting yourself to 2 will keep you below the population replacement rate of 2.2 children per woman. If you DO have kids, limiting yourself to 2 will mean you're not contributing to population growth. If you want more, that's cool, just talk someone else out of having one, or consider adoption.

What dick pics can teach us about human morality and climate change denial

When I was 25, I moved to London to study human rights. It was a very millennial decision. There was a recession going on, I was living on and off with my parents, and I couldn’t find a job in journalism because nearly every paper in the country was cutting staff or shutting down, so the only alternative to continuing to live with my parents was to go to grad school.

Human rights seemed like the most decent thing I could dedicate my life to fighting for (if not the most profitable) so I went into debt and moved to a different country.

The only honest approach to any academic field of study is to first take what you think you know and tear it down. This is one thing when you’re studying economics or chemistry. Most topics of study are abstracted enough from our daily lives that if a professor were to kick open the door to the classroom on the first day and say, “SIT BACK, MOTHERFUCKERS, AND FORGET EVERYTHING YOU THOUGHT YOU KNEW ABOUT ROBOTICS!” most of us would be like, “Okay, sure, done.” It would not ruin our day.

It’s an entirely different thing when what you’re studying is your very moral bedrock, the thing that has influenced all of your decisions in life, including the very expensive one that brought you into this classroom in the first place. 

The problem with human rights is this: they are intended to be universal laws that protect human dignity. But in any real metaphysical sense, there are no such laws. They exist only as a social construct. You might not agree with me. If you, for example, believe that there’s a God who told us what is right and wrong centuries ago, or if you believe that morality can be determined through the use of logic, then you could reasonably reject what I just said.

But you can’t reject this: even if there are universal moral laws, we can’t agree on what they are. They may be “self-evident” to you, but to many other selves they are not evident. When confronted with what, to you, is the clearest, most common sense moral dictum, many people just say, “naaaaahhhh.”

The Golden Rule

Let’s take the least controversial moral law out there. The one that is subscribed to by Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Taoists, and atheists alike. 

Norman Rockwell’s famous 1961 painting, “The Golden Rule.”

Isn’t that beautiful? Doesn’t that sound perfect and simple? This is a rule that has arisen independently in many cultures and many religions, both theistic and atheistic, and it is an excellent rule to live by. But it is not universal. 

There is a 21st century phenomenon that derails the logic of the Golden Rule. This phenomenon is the sending of unsolicited penis photos to women in dating apps, or, as they are colloquially known, dick pics. 

Dick pics, nearly everyone agrees, are repellent, but they follow the logic of the golden rule.

The dick pic sender is basically saying, “Hello, kind stranger, I would like to see naked pictures of you. Here, as a sign of good faith, is such a picture of me.”

via GIPHY

Should you protest at the sudden “OH GOD, THAT’S A COCK” of it all, the dick pic sender could reasonably respond that they were simply treating you the way they’d like to be treated.

The loophole in the golden rule is a pretty glaring one, and it’s obvious enough when you take a second to look at it: not everyone wants to be treated in the same way. So while the Golden Rule is an excellent method for encouraging empathy and the ethical treatment of others, it is not a rule that can be applied in every situation. In certain situations (especially those of the sudden penis variety), the ethical thing to do with the Golden Rule is to abandon it.

Nothing is universal

You can find exceptions to pretty much all of our moral laws, and the task of studying human rights is essentially a job of demarcating the boundaries between good moral laws (i.e. free speech that allows marginalized people to find a voice without government interference) and bad ones (i.e. free speech that allows troglodytes to make anonymous online rape threats against feminists).

Human experience is so varied, so wildly diverse, that to expect one rule to be applicable to everyone in every situation is absurd. Such a law would have to be so vague as to be meaningless. Even something seemingly harmless, like “Honor thy father and mother,” breaks down, for instance, when you’re Eric Trump.

Most people, likewise, can find instances where murder is excusable — because you’re protecting your family, because you’re preventing someone else from getting killed, because you’re hungry and he’s not pulling his weight on the life raft, etc.

This view is usually called “moral relativism” by its detractors, but the opposing philosophy, moral absolutism, has done more damage by far. The absolutists count among their numbers Hitler and Stalin and Dick Cheney. To them, the world is divided into right and wrong and they always happen to be on the right side. This provides a pretty clean excuse for dropping bombs on and torturing your opponents. How many Americans blink twice at the knowledge that the bombs we’ve dropped in the “War on Terror” have regularly, even routinely, killed innocent children? Bring up the Atomic Bomb and Hiroshima, and see how many Americans reflexively say, “Well, it saved millions of American lives." They never just say lives. They say American lives.

A moral relativist is going to have a harder time being quite so sure that the mushroom cloud is justified, and might think twice about doing it. God, can you imagine if we dropped a single bomb that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people and our justifications weren’t sound?

This approach also allows what you consider to be moral to change over time and according to context. Circa 1791, it made sense to enshrine the right to bear arms in your country’s founding document because you just won a revolution and are afraid of backsliding into tyranny. 228 years later, when guns can fire bullets ten times faster, when those bullets are frequently piercing the bodies of children, the morality of this stance makes less sense. To everything there is a season.

This idea, that there is no such thing as top-down morality, is terrifying to a lot of people. But there is a better way of thinking about it.

A different type of morality

The primatologist and humanist Frans de Waal argues, in his excellent book, The Bonobo and the Atheist, that if we look to our genetic cousins the chimps and bonobos, we will see that moral behavior exists in the natural world without reference to reason or rationality or towards any religious belief.

Which is not to say primates are not capable of reason and rationality, because they very much are. It’s just to say that their moral behavior comes from elsewhere. So any attempt to base human morality on “reason” is misguided.

de Waal writes:

“The confusion seems to stem from the illusion that all we need for a good society is more knowledge. Once we have figured out the central algorithm of morality, so the thinking goes, we can safely hand things over to science. Science will guarantee the best choices. This is a bit like thinking that a celebrated art critic must be a great painter or a food critic a great chef…

The view of morality as a set of immutable principles, or laws, that are ours to discover ultimately comes from religion. It doesn’t really matter whether it is God, human reason, or science that formulates these laws. All of these approaches share a top-down orientation, their chief premise being that humans don’t know how to behave and someone must tell them. But what if morality is created in day-to-day social interaction, not at some abstract mental level? What if it is grounded in the emotions, which most of the time escape the neat categorizations that science is fond of?…

My views are in line with the way we know the human mind works, with visceral reactions arriving before rationalizations, and also with the way evolution produces behavior. A good place to start is with an acknowledgment of our background as social animals, and how this background predisposes us to treat each other.”

If we accept this — and I think that we obviously should — we have to accept that we can’t just piece together morality sitting alone in our rooms and thinking about it, or analyzing a book that The Lord sent us, but that we have to get out into the streets and talk to other people about what we want to be as a community, as a people. 

This requires of us both the openness to be able to hear each other’s stories in good faith, and the vulnerability to be able to tell our own. It requires that we be honest with each other about who we are, and be brave enough to stand up against what we think is wrong. None of that is easy, but no one ever said it was. And when you start talking to people, when you get to their experiences and away from their political talking points or inherited ideology, you’ll usually find that they are less stupid, less stubborn, and less ignorant than you think.

When we talk to each other, we learn: Our morality is not up there in the ether. It is down here, in the spaces between us.

Moral curiosity in the face of a cold, unfeeling universe

When I finished my course in human rights, I felt winded. There seemed to be no moral footing for me anymore, nothing to keep me from sliding towards a terrified state of nihilism and despair. Over the next few years, I sunk into a pretty deep depression that I didn’t begin to escape until I was in my 30’s. The world was just so fucking complicated. How, I wondered, can one live when nothing is certain?

The answer ended up being that you do not need certainty to live, and that the alternative to certainty is not nihilism, it's curiosity. Curiosity is the only worthwhile way of confronting the universe, because seriously, in the words of comedian Pete Holmes, life doesn’t make any fucking sense. So we might as well have some fun with it. We might as well explore.

This is the solution, by the way, to all of your totally unproductive political arguments. You think you can beat ignorance with knowledge? Hell no. Ignorance doesn’t give a fuck about knowledge. Because ignorance isn’t an absence of knowledge, it’s a protective shell constructed against scary knowledge.

Think, for a moment, what your conservative elderly parents or grandparents would have to do to accept a) that climate change was coming, b) it could very well lead to the collapse of civilization in their children’s lifetimes, possibly resulting in their starvation or murder by Mad Max-style War Boys, and c) that everything they ever did or believed in contributed to this oncoming catastrophe.

What do you think their response to, “Well, if you look at the climate science and the weather patterns in recent years…” is going to be? Might it be “FAKE NEWS!”? Might it be “LIBERAL CONSPIRACY!”? Do you think it might be, “I’m just going to deny this until I die, because to accept it would actually kill me."

I am telling you right now, I have a 1-year-old, and when I stop and think about what climate change could do to her sweet little face, I want to put rocks in my pockets and walk into the sea. Your parents denial of your liberal or left-wing political views is not just ignorance, it is a deathly fear that if you are right, they have destroyed your life. You! The thing they love most in this world!

You’re not going to beat that with facts. You couldn’t beat that with A Clockwork Orange, Ludovico-technique-style brainwashing. 

You might beat it with curiosity. People can get to base-level curiosity pretty quickly, and from there, it’s possible to change minds. Curiosity is a backdoor to open-mindedness.

You’re going to die, you might as well accept that. Life, if you choose to look at it that way, is a goddamn meat-grinder. So while we’re here, we may as well be kind to one another, we may as well be curious. And that means asking questions, listening to other people, and believing each other. On that basis alone, life isn’t so bad, even if it doesn’t make any fucking sense.

Being a better humanist in the 21st century

My lecture at the Red Bank Humanists December forum. In it, I talked about the problems with being an Enlightenment thinker in the 21st century, where human right have succeeded, where they fail, and where we as humanists could maybe think about things more creatively.

Further reading!

• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

• The Bonobo and the Atheist by Frans de Waal

• Stranger Than We Can Imagine by John Higgs

• The Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome

• Humanist Manifesto III

Your helplessness is a delusion

I was recently invited to a local community college to discuss what we, in the modest little corner of New Jersey that we live in, can do about issues as huge and seemingly untouchable as global human rights. It is a terrible topic for a speech. Human rights, for most of us, is just something to be depressed about, and that is because activists and advocates like myself are notoriously bad at making people feel hope about the state of the world. 

The problem, of course, is that we advocates have pet issues we want to fix, and in order to fix them, we first have to tell you about them. 

If I want you to donate money to my cause to save the Rohingya in Burma, I first have to tell you about the Rohingya in Burma, and that is going to make you feel sad. Then, my compatriot over at the charity next door will come in and tell you about the plight of the Syrian refugee, and this, too, will make you feel sad. This, too, will make you open your wallet, or maybe pick up the phone to call your congressperson.

We have no shortages of causes we’re fighting for, so this cycle will continue with a parade of us detailing the modern world’s atrocities and catastrophes, and eventually, you will not only get tired of donating money, you’ll start to feel numb to the virtually endless suffering of other people around the world.

Activists have a name for this. We call it “compassion fatigue.” You yourself have experienced compassion fatigue if you, like me, mute the TV every time that Sarah McLachlan ASPCA commercial comes on. 

Closing our eyes to the pain of another living being may make us feel cold and callous, but really, the problem is simply that our individual capacity for compassion is finite, and the world’s suffering is infinite.

The choice, it appears to us, is to either numb yourself or to die of empathy.

Helplessness blues

So when we read the news about the Syrian civil war and the refugee crisis growing out of it, many of us feel helpless, like there’s not much that can be done. And to an extent, this is true. Assad has all but won the war, so the dictator who gasses his own people will likely remain in power, now firmly backed with the military might of Russia and Iran. Even if we intervened now, that core fact would not likely change, nor would the fact that the “other side” fighting Assad has a lot of radical Islamist elements in it that most of us would prefer not to be allied with.

When it comes to refugees, we’re also past the point of being able to do very much: If they were here, we could welcome them to our neighborhoods and help them rebuild their lives, but the current administration is not going to let them in, and that position is not likely to change, no matter how much we protest. 

We can give money to organizations that support refugees, we can vote for candidates who are pro-refugee, we can get involved with activist groups, and we can educate ourselves on the conflict, it’s context, and it’s history, but short of actually leaving our homes and going to Europe or the Middle East, our ability to directly help is limited.

The reality of the situation right now is that most of what needs to be done for Syria and Syrians needs to be done at very high levels of government, and most of what really needed to be done to stem the violence should’ve been done years ago. 

The details differ, but the same is basically true of the case of the Rohingya in Burma, or the gang violence in Central America, or the ongoing collapse of Venezuela, or the war in Yemen — the decisions that caused these events were made high up, and they were made in the past. By the time they hit our newspapers, we’ve already failed in the ways that really matter. 

That, I admit, is a pretty depressing thought. It’s thoughts like this that make us feel helpless about the state of the world.

I’d like to argue that any sense of helplessness you feel when confronted with these humanitarian catastrophes, though, is misplaced, and that it stems from thinking about it in the wrong way. So before we can figure out what we can do to fight for human rights, we first need to change our thinking about it. And to do that, we need to address the elephant in the room.

Nazis ruin everything

There’s a rule on the internet known as “Godwin’s Law.” Godwin’s Law states:

“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”

There’s a corollary to this, which is that whoever is the first to bring up Hitler loses the argument. 

There’s a good reason for this: Nazis poison everything. It’s impossible to talk about the world and politics in a world where the Nazis existed, and, sadly, continue to exist. More importantly, it’s impossible to even think about humanitarian catastrophes without discussing the Nazis. They are the black hole of humanitarian work and political activism. You can’t escape them, and your thoughts and actions bend around them. 

Most modern human rights work was built in direct response to the atrocities the Nazis and their allies committed during World War II, and much of what drives modern human rights workers is the specter of the Holocaust. So instead of trying to avoid the Nazis, we should take a moment to confront them: There’s a major problem with how the Nazis influence the way we talk and think about the world. They make us lazy thinkers, and worse still, this lazy thinking disempowers us.

I’ll explain.

Inevitably, whenever people discuss how to stop human rights abuses before they occur, they bring up the failure of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy when he went to Munich to negotiate with Hitler. The idea being that, if Chamberlain had been more forceful at Munich, World War II would have been averted. 

Chamberlain and Hitler at the Munich Conference.

Here’s the thing: This is not the moment in which we could’ve stopped World War II. It’s chosen more or less arbitrarily, and usually by people who are trying to justify the use of pre-emptive force. Chamberlain went to Munich in 1938. This is one year before the start of the war. It is five years after the Reichstag fire, five years after Hitler banned all other parties in Germany, five years after Germany had begun to rearm. It would be very easy to argue that 1938 was already far, far too late. 

If you chose to, you could make the argument that the right time to stop the Nazis was 5 years earlier, when they started violating the peace agreement from World War I.

But why stop there? If we wanted to really stop World War II, the Holocaust, and the Nuclear Era, we could just as easily go back to the mid-20’s and build a less speculative American banking system, averting the crash of ‘29, the Great Depression, and the global rise of authoritarianism that came with it. 

Or we could go back to the Treaty of Versailles at the end of WWI, which put such onerous terms on the Germans that their interim democracy was pretty much doomed from the start. We could go back and prevent the absurd and utterly pointless violence of WWI, we could undo all of those antiquated alliances and pointless squabbling, all the constant jostling for colonial supremacy. 

At this point, if you’re keeping track, we’re reaching back into the 19th and even 18th century.

I could keep going back and never stop, but I’ll spare you, as doing so would miss the point. The point is that there is no one moment in history where we could’ve prevented World War II. There were millions of moments. The point is that when we discuss the big moments where the course of history could’ve been changed, we almost exclusively focus on moments where old powerful men were making important decisions in closed rooms. Most of us weren’t alive when these decisions were made, and if we had been, we would not have been in the rooms where they were being made. 

Looking at history in this manner, where the only people ever making a difference are powerful old men, and where there’s only one moment in which the right decision can be made, is fundamentally disempowering to the rest of us.

Gentler alternative histories

I would like to offer a few alternative moments to when the horrors of Hitler could have been prevented: like the moment in 1905 or so, when, at a dinner table in Austria or Germany, someone could have spoken out against an anti-Semitic, war-mongering, or hypernationalist comment made by a friend or relative, and didn’t.

We do not know anything about this moment specifically, but we’re all more familiar with what it would have felt like than we are with what sitting in the room at Munich or Versailles would have felt like. This is because we have all been having these types conversations lately. These conversations are often terrible. They are tense and awkward and sometimes they lead to fights we would rather not have. 

But they are as important now as they were in 1905 Germany, for a single reason: there are often children present at dinner tables, and children listen. Children that hear about how war is glorious, that hear their country is destined to rule all, and that hear that Jews or gays or immigrants are untrustworthy and subhuman, are going to have a very hard time shaking those ideas off in adulthood, no matter how well-meaning and decent they grow up to be.

It would be tempting to imagine that if Hitler had heard an adult he respected speak up for the humanity of the Jews at a young and impressionable age, that he would never have been more than a failed painter, of the harmless type that still lives in your Uncle’s basement. But I think most of us have trouble imagining Hitler as a child, without the mustache and swastika, without the seething, furious charisma. It is hard to imagine the most evil, warped human being most of us can think of as ever being anything but evil and warped, even if we ourselves have never met a truly evil 5-year-old.

Instead of trying to imagine a better Hitler, let’s think about all of the other dinner tables in Germany, the ones filled with the 5-year-olds that would one day join the stormtroopers, attend the rallies, work in the factories, and turn a blind eye as their neighbors were beaten in the streets and dragged into cattle cars.

Imagine if they had learned, at a young age, that a person is a person, regardless of race or religion, that their country was beautiful but that others were, too, that their destiny was not one of conquest and domination, but of peace and cooperation. Imagine if a country full of those kids would have been quite so willing to follow an embittered, failed painter into the violent oblivion of the Second World War.

Now: None of the parents of 1905 could have possibly seen the future that was bearing down on them and their children. None of them could have possibly fathomed the decades that lay in front of them. You can’t really fault them for not being able to see the future. But if you can judge a parent by the children they raise, they were among the worst parents in history.

It is because these kitchen table moments are not recorded in our history books that we don’t remember them, but there were far more of these moments than there were treaties, sanctions, or proclamations, and even in those important, historic instances, all of the men who were in those big important rooms had once sat as children at humble kitchen tables.

The argument is not that the acts of the powerful do not matter, but that the tone of them is set by the accumulation of millions of tiny little acts of kindness or cruelty in a thousand little communities over the preceding centuries. 

What is true of genocides is true of hurricanes: the real life saving work is done long before the crisis point hits.

The darker timelines we never lived

Most importantly, you do not hear about the genocides that didn’t happen. You don’t hear about lives that were saved, about children that were unharmed, about women that weren’t raped, about family heirlooms that weren’t stolen, because if we’re successful in our work, those people don’t exist. If we’re successful in our work, no one will ever thank us, because no one will know there’s a reason to give thanks. 

It’s impossible for us to compare ourselves to darker, more violent timelines that may have resulted had people been crueler in the past, or brighter, more peaceful timelines had we chosen to be kinder and wiser. But there is reason to think that we’ve been getting better as a species over time.

There’s a school of thought out there right now, most notably put forward by the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, that says that rather than focusing on short-term, horrifying anecdotes, we should be looking at the broader trends of history. And the broader trends of history are much more positive than you might imagine: violence has steadily declined over the course of history, as have the number of wars, massacres, and genocides. Fewer people are dying of preventable disease, life expectancies have lengthened, and respect for human rights has risen around the world.

There are, of course, major weaknesses in this theory: past performance is not an indicator of future success, and “fewer genocides” is not the ideal, “no genocides” is. A decrease in violence and hardship also doesn’t really matter all that much if we destroy the world with nuclear weapons or climate change in the next few decades, which seems increasingly possible by the day. 

But this outlook does give us a dose of much-needed hope for the future. It does show that human beings can change, and that they seem to gradually, glacially, on an almost generational scale, change for the better. 

A more realistic system of thinking is offered by Rebecca Solnit in her physically slim but emotionally massive 2004 book, Hope in the Dark. Solnit, unlike Pinker, sees the flaws of humanity with clear eyes, but she suggests that hopelessness is still an irrational response to the world. The sheer amount that has changed in our small lifespans alone should lead us to reject the idea that we can see the future and that it’s bleak. 

When I was a kid, virtually no one used the internet, which, for good or for ill, now shapes the world in massive, unpredictable ways. When I was 3, the Berlin Wall fell. A few years before, a world without the USSR was unthinkable. Until I was 16, gay sex was still illegal in 14 states. After Bush’s devastating reelection in 2004, virtually no one would have told you a black man could ever be President, let alone in the next Presidential term. 4 years ago, before Obergefell v. Hodges, there were 15 states where gay marriage was either banned or was not totally legal.

The work that led to these changes started small. It was not Reagan who knocked down the wall, but ordinary Germans, Czechs, Poles, and Russians, dissidents who for decades had been writing poetry and fiction and essays in jail cells and gulags and in the secret corners of their homes. It was not the Supreme Court that legalized gay sex and, eventually, gay marriage, but groups of activists who insisted on their dignity for decades, and were willing to sacrifice their time, money, and personal lives to demand that dignity in court. It was not Obama who brought us a black President, it was thousands of activists who, for centuries, demanded equal rights for blacks, even if it meant being beaten, imprisoned, and sometimes murdered by the very state that was supposed to protect them. 

The "great men" are just surfers. We are the waves.

A butterfly flaps its wings

Most people are terrified of the apparent chaos of the world, but there’s something beautiful about it. Chaos, for one thing, makes the future impossible to predict. This is because small, even microscopically insignificant actions now, can snowball into something massive. This, for those of us who feel insignificant or small, should inspire hope rather than dread.

Most of us are familiar with the Butterfly Effect, the idea that a butterfly can flap its wings in China and that this can cause a hurricane in the Atlantic months later. While no one has ever caught this asshole butterfly in the act, the idea itself is now widely accepted among meteorologists and climate scientists. 

In historical terms, the idea is similarly expressed by the old proverb.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.

For want of a shoe the horse was lost.

For want of a horse the rider was lost.

For want of a rider the message was lost.

For want of a message the battle was lost.

For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.

You cannot predict what will change our future. You cannot predict what it will look like. We do not see the horrible futures that collapse every time we choose to act with kindness rather than cruelty, or the bright, beautiful utopias that evaporate when we lash out at those around us, but those futures are as real for us now as they were for the parents of 1905.

Push it in the right direction. Start seeding more good into this chaos.

Go ahead, little bug: flap.