Everything Is F*cked(45)

Politics is a transactional and selfish game, and democracy is the best system of government thus far for the sole reason that it’s the only system that openly admits that. It acknowledges that power attracts corrupt and childish people. Power, by its very nature, forces leaders to be transactional. Therefore, the only way to manage that is by enshrining adult virtues into the design of the system itself.

Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, guarantees of privacy and of the right to a fair trial—these are all implementations of the Formula of Humanity in social institutions, and they are implemented in such a way that they are incredibly difficult to threaten or change.

There’s really only one way to threaten a democratic system: when one group decides that its values are more important than the system itself and it subverts the religion of democracy with some other, likely less virtuous, religion . . . and political extremism grows.

Political extremists, because they are intractable and impossible to bargain with, are, by definition, childish. They’re a bunch of fucking babies. Extremists want the world to be a certain way, and they refuse to acknowledge any interests or values outside their own. They refuse to negotiate. They refuse to appeal to a higher virtue or principle above their own selfish desires. And they cannot be trusted to follow through on the expectations of others. They are also unabashedly authoritarian because, as children, they are desperate for an all-powerful parent to come and make everything “all right.”40

The most dangerous extremists know how to dress up their childish values in the language of transaction or universal principle. A right-wing extremist will claim she desires “freedom” above all else and that she’s willing to make sacrifices for that freedom. But what she really means is that she wants freedom from having to deal with any values that do not map onto her own. She wants freedom from having to deal with change or the marginalization of other people. Therefore, she’s willing to limit and destroy the freedom of others in the name of her own freedom.41

Extremists on the left play the same game, the only thing that changes is the language. A leftie extremist will say that he wants “equality” for all, but what he really means is that he never wants anyone to feel pain, to feel harmed, or to feel inferior. He doesn’t want anyone to have to face moral gaps, ever. And he’s willing to cause pain and adversity to others in the name of eliminating those moral gaps.

Extremism, on both the right and the left, has become more politically prominent across the world in the past few decades.42 Many smart people have suggested many complicated and overlapping explanations for this. And there likely are many complicated and overlapping reasons.43

But allow me to throw out another one: that the maturity of our culture is deteriorating.

Throughout the rich and developed world, we are not living through a crisis of wealth or material, but a crisis of character, a crisis of virtue, a crisis of means and ends. The fundamental political schism in the twenty-first century is no longer right versus left, but the impulsive childish values of the right and left versus the compromising adolescent/adult values of both the right and left. It’s no longer a debate of communism versus capitalism or freedom versus equality but, rather, of maturity versus immaturity, of means versus ends.





Chapter 7


Pain Is the Universal Constant


One by one, the researchers shuttled the subjects down a hall and into a small room. Inside was a single beige computer console with a blank screen and two buttons, and nothing else.1

The instructions were simple: sit, stare at the screen, and if a blue dot flashes on it, press the button that reads, “Blue.” If a purple dot flashes on the screen, press the button that reads, “Not Blue.”

Sounds easy, right?

Well, each subject had to look at a thousand dots. Yes, a thousand. And when a subject finished, the researchers brought in another subject and repeated the process: beige console, blank screen, a thousand dots. Next! This went on with hundreds of subjects at multiple universities.

Were these psychologists researching a new form of psychological torture? Was this an experiment into the limitations of human boredom? No. Actually, the scope of the study was matched only by its inanity. It was a study with seismic implications, because more than any other academic study in recent memory, it explains much of what we see happening in the world today.

The psychologists were researching something they would call “prevalence-induced concept change.” But because that’s an absolutely awful name, for our purposes, I will refer to their discovery as the “Blue Dot Effect.”2

Here’s the deal with the dots: Most of them were blue. Some of them were purple. Some of them were some shade in between blue and purple.

The researchers discovered that when they showed mostly blue dots, everyone was pretty accurate in determining which dots were blue and which ones were not. But as soon as the researchers started limiting the number of blue dots, and showing more shades of purple, the subjects began to mistake purple dots for blue. It seemed that their eyes distorted the colors and continued to seek a certain number of blue dots, no matter how many were actually shown.

Okay, big deal, right? People mis-see stuff all the time. And besides, when you’re staring at dots for hours on end, you might start to go cross-eyed and see all sorts of weird shit.

But the blue dots weren’t the point; they were merely a way to measure how humans warp their perceptions to fit their expectations. Once the researchers had enough data on blue dots to put their lab assistants into a coma, they moved on to more important perceptions.