The acceleration of disintegration
We know what we are fighting against. But do we know what we are fighting for?
Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. —Nietzsche
It seems at this point clear that, while there is unquestionably a select group of super baddies who are orchestrating a great deal of the ill-fated utopian hubris that has enveloped humanity since March of 2020, there are also forces at play that are larger than and unaccountable to any actor or group of actors. These forces go by a few names. Evil, or demonic, is a common one, and I have come to appreciate the parsimony of that. I’ve renamed my podcast “Perverse Incentives” to reflect my own view, which is that many, if not most, people and institutions—evil or no—believe themselves to be doing the Right Thing even as they encourage and create unintended consequences that will ultimately drag us all to hell (on earth, or otherwise.) Is that still evil? Is that perhaps the very essence of evil? I wonder.
Those entities that believe themselves to be doing the Right Thing, who are indeed on some kind of Right Thing or Else crusade, tend to have (not exclusively, but almost all of the time) a left-skewed moral compass that is guiding their efforts. I locate this reliably in the “we must” that inevitably precedes their claims about the world. “We must stop the pandemic (so you must mask up, you must distance, you must vaccinate, you must listen to the experts, etc.)” “We must stop climate change.” (Whatever that means.) “We must achieve lofty and vague and ultimately impossible goals of racial equity and social justice.” “You must do it this way, our way, there is no other way.”
This rigid certainty and rightness, animated by a relentless urgency and an insistence that individuals subvert their own interests to that of the collective—they must take action, they must do better—gives otherwise unconnected and disparate institutions and organizations a shared moral imperative. It enables a kind of collective coordination without direction. No one is pulling the strings, but all serve the same master. And it is inescapably obvious at this point that this is a neo-utopian leftist master.
The super-baddies—the cartoonish bad guys of Schwab and Gates and Soros and so on—are really just cogs in a machine of this grand utopian vision that is far vaster than they are and which generates its own momentum and the acquisition of power and territory through the loyalty test of “we must.” Anyone or anything who stands out side of “we must”—who dares say “well now, hold on a second, it’s a bit more complex than that,” or “this paper says something different from the CDC,” or “equal outcomes among different racial groups is actually a pretty dangerous way to go about things,” or “the explosion of transgender youth is fundamentally a social contagion and yet another cash cow for the pharmaceutical industrial complex”….you are a misinformation-peddling white supremacist transphobic irredeemable fascist of the first order, my dude.
Many of us who sit outside of “we must” have been churned into something of a tribal panic this past 2.5 years or so. How much breath have I wasted trying to reassure people that, “look, I’m not freaking unreasonable, I’m just introducing a few other considerations and parameters here.” “I’m not anti-vax, I’m just anti this vax.” “Of course there are legitimate trans people in the world and there always have been, but a lot of this is a runaway social process and I think we’re going to regret it.” “I would never vote for Trump, my goodness, but I also deeply regret my vote for Biden, don’t you?”
But once you’ve violated one shibboleth, you’ve violated them all. You’re marked for life. Your protests of good-person-ness fall on deaf ears; you’ve demonstrated a fatal flaw. It’s natural, I think, to resist this for a while. To wince when someone calls you a TERF, or racist, or accuses you of spreading misinformation. That first social media suspension cuts the deepest. One’s instinct is to insist earnestly on one’s good-person-ness. But eventually it becomes clear to us all—it certainly has to me—that this cannot be done. There is no nuance. You’re on the Good team and you must not question its fundamentals, or you are out. And what this does is it situates you as permanent opposition, and opposition therefore becomes your entire identity, your vocation, your raison d’être. You begin to play their game—your perspective becomes just as absolutist and intolerant. Kicked off the team, you decide you never liked those losers anyway.
An insidious and pervasive nihilism emerges. You wake up not seeking to engage in good faith solutions, but to burn it all down. If they can’t see the merit in your position, you see no merit in theirs. The process hardens your positions and erases your tolerance. You and the abyss eventually become one. We are all in the abyss together.
It seems to me that evil, if it is indeed calling the shots, would want this most of all. That paranoia and distrust dividing groups, families, friendships—that would be a thing of great delight and pleasure to evil. It is just destruction all the way down at that point. There is nothing generative—no creativity, no beauty, no humility, no awe. Not on the side of neo-utopian idealism (in that vision, there is only Compliance with all the youmustness) but also not here, on the side of what is, increasingly, just some version of “we must stop them.”
This frantic scramble between coercion, hedonism, and nihilism is what Nietzsche and Dostoevsky warned us about. It’s an exaggerated battle between chaos and order that seeks no balance and therefore finds no balance between the two. Resistance against creeping totalitarian control is all well and good (righteous, even) but not resistance for its own sake—that is simply a preference for chaos, and there is perhaps even less virtue in that.