Everything Is F*cked(80)

4. See chapter 4, note 26.

5. Examples include Johannes Gutenberg, Alan Turing, and Nikola Tesla, et al.

6. A. T. Jebb et al., “Happiness, Income Satiation and Turning Points Around the World,” Nature Human Behaviour 2, no. 1 (2018): 33.

7. M. McMillen, “Richer Countries Have Higher Depression Rates,” WebMD, July 26, 2011, https://www.webmd.com/depression/news/20110726/richer-countries-have-higher-depression-rates.

8. Here’s a fun theory about war and peace I came up with: the common assumption about war is that it starts because a group of people are in such a painful situation that they have no option but to fight for their survival. Let’s call it the “Nothing to Lose” theory of war. The Nothing to Lose theory of war is often framed in religious terms: the little guy fighting the corrupt powers for his fair share, or the mighty free world uniting to vanquish the tyranny of communism. These narratives make for great action movies. That’s because they’re easily digestible, value-laden stories that help unite the Feeling Brains of the masses. But, of course, reality isn’t that simple.

People don’t just start revolutions because they are subjugated and oppressed. Every tyrant knows this. People who are kept in perpetual pain come to accept the pain and see it as natural. Like an abused dog, they become placid and detached. It’s why North Korea has continued as long as it has. It’s why the slaves in the United States rarely rose up in violent revolt.

Instead, allow me to suggest that people start revolutions because of pleasure. When life becomes comfortable, people’s tolerance of discomfort and inconvenience lessens to the point where they see even the slightest of slights as unforgivable travesties, and as a result, they lose their shit.

Political revolution is a privilege. When you’re starving and destitute, you’re focused on surviving. You don’t have the energy or will to worry about the government. You’re just trying to make it to next week.

And if that sounds bananas, rest assured that I didn’t just make that part up. Political theorists call these “revolutions of rising expectations.” In fact, it was the famed historian Alexis de Tocqueville who pointed out that most of the people who instigated the French Revolution were not the poor masses “storming the Bastille,” but rather, people from wealthy counties and neighborhoods. Similarly, the American Revolution was not instigated by downtrodden colonists, but the wealthy landowning elites who believed it a violation of their liberty and dignity to see their taxes go up. (Some things never change.)

World War I, a war that involved thirty-two countries and killed seventeen million people, started because a rich Austrian dude got shot in Serbia. At the time, the world was more globalized and economically prosperous than at any other time in history. World leaders believed a massive global conflict to be impossible. No one would risk such a crazy venture when there was so much to be lost.

But that’s exactly why they risked it.

Throughout the twentieth century, revolutionary wars sprung up across the world, from East Asia to the Middle East and Africa to Latin America, not because people were oppressed or starving, but because their economies were growing. And with their introduction to economic growth, people found that their desires outpaced the ability of the institutions to supply those desires.

Here’s another way to look at it: when there’s way too much pain in a society (people are starving and dying and getting diseases and stuff), people get desperate, have nothing to lose, say “Fuck it,” and start lobbing Molotov cocktails at old men in suits. But when there’s not enough pain in a society, people start getting more and more upset by tinier and tinier infractions, to the point where they’re willing to become violent over something as stupid as a quasi-offensive Halloween costume.

Just as an individual needs a Goldilocks amount of pain (not too much, but not too little, either) to grow and mature and become an adult with a strong character, societies also need a Goldilocks amount of pain (too much, and you become Somalia; too little, and you become that asshole who loaded up a bunch of trucks with automatic weapons and occupied a national park because . . . freedom).

Let’s not forget the whole reason that deadly conflict exists in the first place: it gives us hope. Having a sworn mortal enemy out there trying to kill you is the quickest way to find purpose and be present in your life. It drives us together into communities like nothing else. It gives our religions a cosmic sense of meaning that cannot be acquired any other way.

It’s prosperity that causes crises in hope. It’s having six hundred channels and nothing to watch. It’s having fifteen matches on Tinder but no one good to date. It’s having two thousand restaurants to choose from but feeling sick of all the same old food. Prosperity makes meaning more difficult. It makes pain more acute. And ultimately, we need meaning way more than we need prosperity, lest we come face-to-face with that wily Uncomfortable Truth again.

Financial markets spend most of their time expanding as more economic value is produced. But eventually, when investments and valuations outrun actual output, when enough money gets caught up in pyramid schemes of diversion rather than innovation, the financial market contracts, washing out all the “weak money,” knocking out the many businesses that were overvalued and not actually adding value to society. Once the washout is complete, economic innovation and growth, now course-corrected, can continue.

In the “Feelings Economy,” a similar expansion-contraction pattern happens. The long-term trend is toward pain reduction through innovation. But in times of prosperity, people indulge more and more in diversions, demand fake freedoms, and become more fragile. Eventually, they begin to become feverishly upset over things that merely a generation or two before would have seemed frivolous. Pickets and protests erupt. People start sewing badges on their sleeves and wearing funny hats and adopting the ideological religion du jour to justify their rage. Hope becomes more difficult to find amid the twinkling array of diversions. And eventually, things escalate to the point where someone does something stupid and extreme, like shoot an archduke or ram a 747 into a building, and war erupts, killing thousands, if not millions.