I Know How This Ends
The Pain of Coming to Terms With Everything
I have seen the heart of the world. I cannot un-see it. I look at it daily, and think about it all the time. I’m driving myself mad. I’m not managing myself well. I try like hell to fight it, to just worry about my own life, to just tidy up my corner of the world. I am losing that fight. What I am about to tell you needs to be said, and you need to hear it, even if you already know. I need you to know that I know. Because this isn’t about me at all. I know why everything’s breaking. I know why everyone’s aching. We have three baked-in cognitive deficits as humans, and they’re being used against us.
People don’t handle grasp issues or choices or events well, by and large. Why? Because we treat these things as binaries. This side or that, red or blue, this thing happened or it didn’t. And so we are predisposed to disagree on things, even though we all generally want the same stuff: freedom, equality, fairness, health, enough wealth, life and happiness.
People also don’t have a great grasp on systems, by and large. We make decisions in vacuums, don’t ask enough questions, don’t get enough context, and we are imprisoned by the limits of our experiences and circumstances. We don’t zoom the lens out wide enough to see how everything is connected, how whole systems intertwine or work over time, or how things manifest, often unseen over the years and centuries.
Lastly, we don’t process exponential change well. We tend to assume change is linear or logarithmic. Those are easier ideas to wrap our heads around. These are important for reasons highly relevant to the world right now.
At the Nexus of these three deficits of processing — of ambiguity, whole systems, exponential shifts — lies our political discourse. Perhaps you’ve noticed it’s a bunch of people telling at each other, not examining things on a continuum, not looking at big enough problems, not handling acceleration of change well enough. Perhaps what you’ve not noticed is all the while, we’re being played by the few people who are aware of our baked-in blind-spots and profit from it.
You’re probably thinking to yourself, “Trump.” And you wouldn’t be wrong. Yet the problem isn’t Trump, it’s much deeper than that. It’s a global systemic failure of social contracts. It’s happening everywhere: The US, UK, Poland, Ukraine, Turkey, etc, the list of countries is exhaustive. We are all suffering (and many more soon will) from a total societal meltdown orchestrated on some level by people who stand to either gain from the chaos (technocrats, autocrats, kleptocrats), and they’ve weaponized those who benefit from the status quo, stand to lose the most from true equality, and are wondering why they’re not reaping the rewards they used to (the much ballyhooed “left-behind straight white man”).
We’ve — they’ve, but also everyone’s — been brainwashed, through our predisposition for binary, vacuum, linear thinking, to view each other as enemies. The simpletons who benefit from the status quo, who can’t question and examine this properly, have resorted to lashing out at the wrong people, and holding up the people who will “Make [INSERT FAILED STATE HERE] Great Again.”
The truth is, the world was never great, not for all, not all at the same time. Liberty and equality have never existed in the same breath. Marginalized groups intrinsically know this — and they’ve been telling us for centuries. Concessions were made to them in fits and spurts when they demanded it and when it was deemed economically perilous for the ruling class not to. Even so, the social order here, and most other places, protects a rigid hierarchy, hardened over time by things like imperialism, systemic oppression, mass incarceration, the Atlantic slave trade, aristocracy, feudalism, etc. They’re all symptomatic of the same problem, namely, no one’s put the true onus upon themselves to create a world order that’s globally Egalitarian, working for all races and genders and people and so on. It’s never been in the best interest of those who’ve established that order.
What’s happening is, now, with our technological exponential growth, we have an ability, if we choose to, to finally see whole systems and study them, place them on a continuum, and understand them across time: The French Revolution, Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, the Inquisition, Brexit. If you read even a cursory amount about everything, you can see the patterns plain as day. It’s all part of that system — the one that continuously produces record-setting income inequality, perilous periods of war, racist and sexist and socioeconomic imbalances in equality. And so then governments implode over and over, each time with swifter, harsher ends, followed by new orders taking their place, often slightly different flavors of the same damn thing.
So when I say things like “we are sliding into authoritarian dystopia,” and have been saying it repeatedly since 2011, and I say things like “enjoy the gulags,” I’m not just being provocative. There are systems and context and historical lenses and patterns that we can pick up on, if we are willing to immerse ourselves in them, while simultaneously looking at them with a critical eye.
So when we say things like “Trump was only talking about MS-13”, let’s take it out of the vacuum. He talks about shithole countries, he hated on the Central Park 5, he redlined his buildings in Manhattan, he called Mexicans rapists. Trump’s problem isn’t with a Mexican immigrant gang. His problem is with black and brown people. He thinks they’re animals.
So when we talk about MS-13, critically ask what causes gangs. The answer? Broken social contracts. Inequitable access to opportunity. A need to feel secure and like you belong. A desire for a better life. The same reason some of us have families or good paying jobs or brunch dates or whatever. We desire a working social contract. We all do. Our motives are the same. Our methods are different.
The escalation and normalization of hate, violence and rhetoric? It’ll increase exponentially. Look at it critically: More gangs. More militias. More war. It’s coming. Soon. Sooner than you think.
It is not entirely our fault we can’t see these things. Particularly those of us (like me!) who benefit from the current working world order. We’re blinded to it. We get fed imperfect information from our schools, our governments, our media, our peers, our families, our friends. But we can put an end to it. We can seek truth, should we choose to. We can ask ourselves the hard questions that require complex answers, and we can understand where we want to side and what the means to those ends are.
Liberty. Equality. Justice. Fairness. Health. Wealth. Happiness. They’re in basically every constitution-ish document for democratic republics (and other, decidedly less democratic republics) in modern history. We still haven’t ascertained those things for all. You need to ask yourself why. You need to ask yourself how. You need to ask yourself what we can do about it.
Because those in power know how to tilt the tables ever so gently in their favor when they make and remake the rules. They know, that because we look at things linearly, in vacuums and binaries, that if they do it with enough subtlety, that we won’t notice, and when it breaks, we won’t understand why. We’ll just become, again, a bunch of people telling at each other, not examining things on a continuum, not looking at big enough problems, not handling acceleration of change well enough. Everything will break all over again. Darkness will fall.
I have seen the heart of the world. I cannot un-see it. I look at it daily, and think about it all the time. My heart breaks for it. Every day, each day a little more than the last. Who can find happiness when you’re only beginning to understand how decidedly miserable our existence on this planet is? How cruel we are to each other and the environment and whole groups of “others?” I have seen the heart of the world. Everything’s already breaking and the darkness is already here. We’re arguing over nothing, while the ones lording over us, laughing, are making off with everything. I know how this ends. Enjoy the gulags.
