amatyultare

This is a post from early 2017. While not explicitly political, I'm pretty sure I was thinking about the political climate when I wrote it.

Tonight I was thinking about two lessons I’ve learned about evil- or wrong-doing. Specifically, I learned them from Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men by Lundy Bancroft (it’s a great book, read it if you haven’t already.

Lesson #1: Wrong-doing doesn’t automatically hurt the person doing it.

We have this weird cultural myth that “evil sows the seeds of its own destruction” which, in the very long term has some truth in it I guess? If you keep hurting people, they will do their best to escape or stop you. But the idea that doing wrong in and of itself makes you sad, makes your life worse, etc. is just false.

(Bancroft touches on this when contrasting abuse and addiction. Addicts go into downward spirals; it’s one of the defining attributes of addiction, in fact. Abusers, on the other hand, can go for decades abusing their partners without damaging their careers, friendships, physical health, or psychological wellbeing.*)

Lesson #2: People generally do bad things because it gets them things they want.

Okay, this sounds really obvious? But one of the most mind-blowing sections of Why Does He Do That? is when Bancroft carefully explains that abusers abuse because they get a lot of benefits out of being abusive.

(In particular, abusers get the privilege of never, ever having to compromise about the issues they care about. Say one partner wants to live frugally while the other wants to go on expensive trips every year. Or one believes in corporeal punishment for their children and the other doesn’t. In an abusive relationship, the abuser will ALWAYS get their way.)

The Point Is…

It’s uncomfortable to consider that doing bad things does, in a limited sense, work. Evil is not, in the short term, actually doomed to fail.

In practical terms, I think this leads to a counter-productive, even dangerous cultural construct on how to handle being wronged. We want to find closure through consensus with the wrong-doer. We need the person who wronged us to agree that they did wrong and apologize. We want to see concrete proof that “evil doesn’t pay”.

But how likely is that, really? The wrong-doer got concrete benefits from what they did. While they hurt us, they likely didn’t do themselves any harm. They have no incentive to agree with us, and every reason to defend their behavior. The idea that we must pursue consensus&rapprochement leaves us trapped when the person who hurt us is not interested in playing their part.

Instead:

On a PERSONAL level, we need to find a way to say “What you did was wrong” and then…walk away. Our ethical judgement cannot be dependent on the agreement of those who have wronged us.

On a SOCIETAL level, we need to understand that “appealing to their better nature” is not a winning strategy. Reinforcing social and ethical norms is important, yes. But that must come in tandem with concrete penalties that impose negative consequences and eliminate the benefits of wrongdoing.

*here we’re talking about “natural” emotional/psychological/social consequences, leaving aside than the possibility of being punished by the judicial system.

A post from early 2016, in the lead-up to the awful 2016 US presidential election. I'm no prophet, but this short essay does feel a little prophetic.

(Subtitled: Electing A Fascist Because It Will Show People How Bad Fascists Are Is Not Quite The Foolproof Plan You Seem To Think It Is)

I have been seeing, with increasing frequency, a wish that Trump will win the election so that “we hit rock bottom and things can get better”. Sometimes this is being suggested jokingly; other times…not.

What I find interesting is how this idea of hitting “rock bottom” (and, more importantly, a presumed immediate upswing) is ultimately tied to a sense of American Exceptionalism and U.S. culture’s love of an underdog story.

Note, I say underdog STORY because us U.S.ians don’t tend to like actual underdogs. We only like once-upon-a-time underdogs who have been affirmed as victors (if only moral victors) by history. We love, love, LOVE to imagine someone suffering nobly - and briefly - for their cause before achieving success. And that arc, from low point to inevitable victory, is part of the mythos of our country from beginning to end.

I can’t help but think that modern media, particularly Hollywood’s three-act structure, is also partly to blame. The major turning point of a Hollywood movie is from “character is at their lowest point” at the end of Act Two to “character triumphs over obstacles and wins the day” by Act Three. This can be done well, certainly! But when we see one kind of story again and again, we start to think that it’s how our own lives will go.

Alternate arcs that are less sexy but at least as realistic as the downfall->triumph storyline:

Messy, inconsistent, two-steps-forward-one-step-back style progress where we see incremental improvement over time

A huge crash followed by a long period of things being really, really shitty

Does this ultimately fall under that ever-present error in thinking, the Just World fallacy? Yeah, probably. As a fairly privileged U.S.ian, I distinctly remember the moment in my childhood when I first discovered the existential terror of realizing that sometimes, things don’t work out well. Sometimes people suffer, and die in cruel and terrible circumstances, and there’s no last-minute rescue or happy ending. And that could happen to me, or someone I know! It’s an uncomfortable thought, but a necessary one, especially when we start wishing for the whole system to crash because ANYTHING would be an improvement.

I wish I knew a good way to say this to those folks who express a desire for U.S. politics to crash and burn. They’re imagining “hitting the lowest point” as working like a rubber ball hitting a concrete floor. But there’s at least an equal possibility that it will look more like a stone falling into a swamp. Sure, we’ll have stopped sinking - but we’ll be in a bad place, with no immediate prospects of getting someplace better.

(Note: Is it possible for a system to be so bad that it should be destroyed and remade? Of course! However, the people using crash-and-burn rhetoric today generally strike me as not having thought carefully about a) what qualifies as “so bad it’s better to burn it down and start from scratch” or b) whether the kind of “breaking” they propose/envision will facilitate the type of rebuilding they hope will result.)