The Year We All Became Terrible People

Here’s my one and only resolution for 2016. Maybe you’ll join me.

If you’d told little nerdy 6 year old me, staring up at you through Coke-bottle glasses, that his intellectual hero, the author of the book he was reading at that very moment, an acclaimed scientist, would, a few decades later, be viciously insulting little kids just like him online…for building overachieving science projects…he’d look at you like you were crazy.

But you would have been right.

2015 was the year we all became terrible people.

Here is a short paragraph about the ways in which the people that should be our leaders were terrible people. Richard Dawkins obsessively insulted a…14 year old kid…in public…for building a clock. Donald Trump threatened banning an entire religion…and rose in the polls. Much of Europe turned a blind eye to the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis in decades…after a decade of needless, prosperity destroying austerity.

Here is a short paragraph about the ways in which we became terrible people. The internet left became just as, if not even more, vicious, than the right. “Men’s Rights” became a cause. People started threatening one’s another’s lives over…video games. Women publicized the violence they received online…and the entire tech industry turned a blind eye. Soul-crushing abuse, not just from governments, politicians, corporations, and institutions, but now even from one’s neighbors and peers, became not the exception but the rule: regularized, normalized, internalized, accepted, expected.

So let me say it again. 2015 is the year we all became terrible people.

Right at this moment, the leftists among you will cry, outraged, offended: “but we have always been terrible people!”, not knowing that human fallibility is precisely the founding belief of…conservatism. Maybe people have always been terrible people. So what? Put the abstruse cultural theories aside. Dude. Those people are dead. We’re not. Not to be left out, the rightists among you will cry: “but I am not a terrible person — you’re generalizing!!111”, likewise not realizing that human exceptionalism is precisely the founding belief of…liberalism. Perhaps you are not. But the truth is that enough of us are for everyone’s lives to be marked by extremist politics, endless cultural wars, perpetual outrage online, and outbreaks of mass hysteria on a regular basis. Hence, we are indeed terrible people at the moment — no matter how exceptional you might be.

Why, then, did we become such especially terrible people this year? A perfect storm of cultural, economic, and social factors: an unfortunate confluence of three big factors which, collectively, have formed a Massive Swirling Black Hole of Terribleness that we’re all getting sucked into.

The first is economic stagnation. Stagnation doesn’t simply mean that the economy is stuck — it means your human potential is, too. You fail to become all that you are capable of — not because you haven’t, but because you can’t. Maybe you have the talent to be one of the finest doctors in the land — but who can afford med school…at 8% a year interest…if you’re born poor…and can barely afford college in the first place? Put yourself in such a person’s shoes, and imagine how such a little death of possibility might feel. It wouldn’t just hurt. It would burn, scar, and never truly heal. Every day that potential stagnates, its loss mocks us with failure, despair, inadequacy, taunts us with anxiety, dread, fear, despair. And so we have become frustrated, embittered, angry, enraged, worried…volcanic, ever primed to erupt. It is understandable — in the sense that I have just explained it, and you have understood it. But it does not benefit us to be both failed by the system, and then to fail ourselves.

The second is what I’ll call the culture of self. Pop-psychological narcissism. We are exhorted at every turn, on a billion instagrams a day, by every best-seller, in a trillion TED talks on Netflix, in a thousand encouraging blog posts per second, to be something like good little therapeutic patients — without actually having done the work. Here are just a few: “be your authentic self”, “love your life”, and my favorite, “live your truth”. “Live your truth!!”. But what if your truth is that…you’re a malicious pinhead who’s never read a book with the emotional range of a jackhammer? Living that truth isn’t going to help anyone in their quest for happiness…not even you. It will simply make the world a duller, darker place. Hence, therapeutic pop culture acts like a drug dealer in the quest for the self: it licenses our worst appetites, at the expense of our better ambitions. Having been taught, commanded, and then culturally licensed — told that it’s not just OK, but in fact necessary for happiness — to be our shallowest, narrowest, most grasping selves, we have become coddled, fragile narcissists…whose insatiably large appetites have replaced grand passions and ambitions with vanishingly small, trivial, inconsequential desires.

Narcissistic self-culture is making porcelain puppets of us: easily broken, impossibly to put back together, pretty on the outside…but empty on the inside. Hence, we fly into rages over hurt feelings, as if we were children — while half the world lives on less than two dollars a day — yet almost anything, no matter how slight, it seems, can hurt our feelings, which then gives rise to yet another turn in the cycle of narcissism, anger, and rage. Perpetually disappointed narcissists, ever unsatisfied with the perfection of their objects, the most important of which is the self…how can such people be anything but terrible people?

The third is technology, at least in it’s appitalist variant. You know the score. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. All these give us not just the ability to lash out — but the incentive to. For the truth is that if you called somebody an asshole on the street, they might punch your lights out. But should you do it on social media…your digital “friends” will probably cheer you on. Therefore, the social incentives in “social media” are backwards, upside down, utterly wrong, not just obstacles to happiness, meaning, purpose, but actual weapons of mass destruction against it: they encourage sociopathic behavior, not sociophilic behavior. Hence, they produce constant, endless streams of little violences, tiny forever wars, over the littlest, most trivial of meaningless differences, precisely between people who shouldn’t wasting their lives fighting in the first place.

What happens when all three of these influence collide, and become confluences? When technology not just empowers but incentivizes emotionally fragile narcissists to deploy their endless rage at a system which has disappointed and thwarted them from reaching not just their ever-dwindling human possibility…but their ever-expanding manufactured desires?

BANG!! That’s what. We become terrible people. Abusing one another endlessly. Online. At work. At play. Through politics. On TV. At home. But all those aren’t the places that count. Here’s the place that does. In our hearts, minds, and spirits. But the simple fact is that every moment of life we spend perpetually outraged, angry, disappointed, anxious, afraid, enraged, lashing out, defensive, offensive, is precisely the opposite of every moment of life seared, enlightened, illuminated, consumed by happiness, meaning, and purpose.

We have become something like human cannons with hair triggers. Perpetually disappointed narcissists, who’ve been told that we are entitled to happiness (“live your truth!”), yet frustrated and angered by the system’s failure to let us reach our potential…now armed with weapons of social mass destruction, which we turn on anyone and everyone unfortunate enough to stand in the firing line of the tantrums and outbursts we throw over our thwarted desires and broken dreams. That’s how we became terrible people in 2015.

And yet.

The great task of every life — its first and most fundamental — is to succeed at being a person. All else is secondary. That does not mean you do not need to struggle for your daily existence — but if that struggle costs you your better self, then it will scarcely have been worth it at all. You will have failed at being a person worthy of the boundless privilege of life you have been granted.

Some among you will ask the definitional question: “wait!! what does it mean to ‘succeed at being a person’ — and who made you the expert?” — as if it is an enigmatic mystery, or as if it is culturally relative, or as if it is a matter of a great unresolved dispute. It is not. Every great prophet, artist, and philosopher has told us, since the dawn of humankind. What does it mean to be successful at being a person? To dream, imagine, create, love, wonder, suffer, think, know, defy, rebel, fall — and so to grow into the fullness of life. To have lived in such a way that one’s own life is not the horizon of one’s existence. To place the possibility of the world before the surety of the self. To elevate life before one clings to one’s own narrow “isms”. All that is what this boundless privilege of life demands of us. For the difficult truth is this: we cannot find happiness, meaning, and purpose unless we succeed at being people. A life worth living is only earned by embracing the fullness of life— never by letting one’s anxious, insatiable ego make a prison of one’s freedom.

There are those of us, who have walked in the valley of the shadow of death, that know how vast and immeasurable that privilege is. And though we may try to explain it, the truth is that it cannot be put into words. Words are inadequate.

And so I will stop here. I cannot succeed, but only fail. Yet perhaps therein lies the lesson. To be a person is not merely to succeed or to fail at all. The task of being a person is not merely walking the impossibly thin line between human possibility and human fallibility. It is knowing that fallibility and possibility are not opposites. They are like the river and the sea. Each flows endlessly into the next. And so should we curse others for their fallibility, or curse ourselves for ours— or curse ourselves for our lost possibility, or curse others for it — that is when we are failing at being people.

For the objective of the great task is simply this: to teach us each to recognize that fallibility expands possibility, and possibility expands fallibility, in an endless dance of expansion that we may call, if we are lucky enough to accept its gift, a life fully lived. But to accept that gift requires letting go, and thus going beyond, anger, fear, rage, frustration, despair, outrage, greed, hate—all products of the shallow self-gratification that an age of narcissism tells us we are entitled to. Rage, anger, fear…of the weakest kind. Not at the dying of the light within us, but merely at not having the perfect selves we believe we should be able to buy and assemble like mass-made flat-pack furniture. Falling victim to all that is simply a sure sign that we are failing at the greatest task of being people.

To succeed at being a person means cultivating, instead, the timeless qualities of mercy, forgiveness, compassion, rebellion, perseverance, purpose, imagination, passion — especially in the face of human fallibility. The difficult, often thankless, and ever perilous struggle of it. That is the key to the the door called love, and through it, and it alone, we make our way to grace: a sense that our lives have been worth living. And that is all the great task is meant to teach us.

So I have just one resolution for 2016. To be a slightly less terrible person. Here’s hoping that you’ll join me.

Umair
Washington, DC
December 2015