In short, why I stopped caring about the election
When I began writing this post, the first presidential debate of 2020 was just a few hours away. I wasn’t planning to watch it, and I made good on that un-plan. Having never watched a single presidential debate in my life, it seemed there was even less reason to do so now than ever before.
If there’s anything that the events of this year have demonstrated to me — and that the aftermath of the debate has reinforced — it’s that I’m not the only one out here feeling lost at sea. Everyone else is too, all the way up to the principalities, powers and kingmakers. But not everyone is willing to admit it, and like a shipwreck victim thrashing against the current, that only makes things worse. Cue Tuesday night’s, ah… display.
An unseen microbial menace popped out of the woodwork almost seven months ago, and the sudden panic in the face of our mortality was apparently too much to handle. It left me and millions of others without work, income or physical community, making for a kind of lurching half-life that’s even more digitally entombed than it was before. And we, ever proactive, used the resultant downtime and disembodiment to find even more artificial reasons to hate each other than we already had.
Then enter George Floyd and Derek Chauvin, with great fanfare, as if on cue. As our collective boredom, confusion and resentment steeped in the pressure-cooker of global lockdown, an incident of violence at the right place and right time triggered something like an ongoing chemical fire. Now a small handful of tech monoliths are juicing us for the noxious byproducts and getting fatter all the time. They convert our bad juju into ad revenue, market research and automated infrastructure, all of which they then use to sell themselves to us again, sucking us deeper into their tepid protoplasm and stretching the membrane out toward those they haven’t absorbed yet.
Really, the fallout from CoVID-19 is just the climax of a process that’s been going on for the past several decades. Whatever good intentions may have been behind them, the lockdown measures have blown away many of the remaining barriers to the Empire of Silicon Valley. The doors are now wide open for it to usher us into a new age of brains-in-vats singularity that may someday free us from such bothersome things as disease and sweat and traffic. But it will also render us a collective puddle of unrealized desires and abstract rage, helpless and hermetically sealed behind plastic and glass. Look in awe, ladies and gentlemen, on the Great American Circle-Jerk that serves no other purpose than to be a battery for itself.
The democracy we so pride ourselves on has, at least on the national level, become a tool of our enslavement rather than our freedom. The issues at stake are now so big, complex and abstract that discourse about them a) is easily (like, so easily) manipulated to attract passionate engagement from millions, regardless of their differing priorities and opinions; b) cannot result in concrete solutions that will benefit the majority, let alone everyone; and c) stokes the resentment and infighting of said millions when improvements inevitably fail to happen.
This resentment isn’t productive for the nation at large, but it is very profitable for a few — namely, the tech platforms that host the discourse, and the media platforms that inflame it. And so we keep fighting, and fretting, and voting, and sniping, and sharing, and commenting, and reading and watching and fuming until we’ve all ground a good five years off our lifespans and basically fixed nothing apart from FANG’s valuation.
All of which is to say, I don’t give a particular shit about the presidential election. I don’t think there’s anything it can do for us at the moment.
But now that I’ve indulged in this nihilistic screed (and shaken my fist uselessly against the very infrastructure that allows me to do so — lololol), I’d like to turn your attention to the quote that appears at the top of this post. It doesn’t offer a way out of the mess, but it might offer a way through it.
I’ve found that some of the most difficult people to deal with are the ones who assume that others’ experiences match theirs, and who consequently judge others harshly for making choices different than theirs. They can’t comprehend a decision different from their own, or a value system different from their own, because they can’t comprehend an experience different from their own. Or they won’t try, at any rate.
To some extent or other we all fall victim to this. It’s a kind of necessary evil: we have to develop rules and concepts by which to understand the world around us, and we do so by interpreting our own highly personal experiences. But we must always remember how limited those conclusions are. Hence Gregory of Nyssa’s wonderful aphorism: concepts create idols, but only wonder grasps anything.
The information age we live in has absolutely inundated us with data, and with endless interpretations of that data. Social media drowns us in each others’ experiences to such a fantastic extent that both ours and theirs start to feel fake. There are so many hashtags and isms and rallying cries that any one of them starts to seem meaningless when held up against the whole jabbering panoply.
So the ironic — but perfectly natural — reflex we have in response to this deluge is to filter it. To curate, block, amplify, and double-down on our biases until we’re able to build something that seems more or less cohesive. And then we place our hope and identity in that collection of concepts, that worldview. We make an idol for ourselves.
Slogans and platforms are abstractions; they are general categories that blunt and flatten an unbearably complex world so that we can have a prayer of understanding it. But we very, very easily get hooked on the existential comfort that they offer, and like any addict we start to discard everything in life that doesn’t bring us that rush of conviction, of feeling right, justified, superior, in control.
One of the biggest threats to that rush is other people — those people, usually. You know: the deplorables, the illegal immigrants, the misogynistic old MAGA guys, the Evangelicals, the gays, the BLM socialists, the libtards and bros and basic bitches and Karens and Reddit trolls and Lavender Mafia and crotch-grabbing bling-swinging swaggering thugs and Hollywood pedo cabal and Coastal Elites and (lest we forget for one mothereffing second) the wHiTe SuPRemAc1sTs.
“Those people” — or rather, the individuals that exist underneath the shit we project upon them — are a complex reality that frightens us, that we can’t understand, that we try to drown out by shouting our slogans and “moral principles” ever louder. But all that shouting does is sap our energy, brew rancor in our listeners, and enslave us all even deeper to our robot overlords (I’m kinda kidding when I use that term, but only kinda).
So stop shouting. For the love of God, stop shouting. It is not. making. things. better.
The 21st-century world is stuffed to the gills with concepts, but has precious little wonder left in it. It’s practically choking on knowledge, but is starved for wisdom. It gives us limitless tools to construct our own personalized visions of the world, and blinds us to the mystery of reality. It’s crowded with idols and deaf to God. That’s what I think of this sorry election in this even sorrier socio-political landscape, and that’s why I don’t exactly care about its outcome.
The good news is that a dear friend of mine is getting married later today. And throughout this year, others of my loved ones have had babies, started new jobs, taken up gardening, fallen in love, lost weight and gained hope, despite all the dark clouds floating through the conceptual ether. And that makes 2020 a good year, honestly.
Here’s the thing: the overarching narrative of this year may be trash, but ultimately, the overarching narrative isn’t even all that real. It’s just another idea that the Internet wants me to blow time and brain cells on so I can make ad revenue for them, generating it like electricity as I chug away on my anxiety bicycle. But the people in my life, and the love they generate, is much more real.
Concepts create idols, but only wonder grasps anything. So if you’ll excuse me, I have a wedding to attend…
