Race to the Bottom
On Tuesday, November 8th, 2016 I made a dramatic vow on my long-since-deleted Facebook page to use the written word as a tool to unseat the newly-elected president of the United States. It was understood that my voice would be a small, relatively insignificant one but I was certain to my core that Donald J. Trump posed an imminent, existential threat to the American way of life; to our institutions, to our accepted norms and to our democracy. I purchased a web domain with the intention of promoting a grass-roots movement against the president. My goals were as follows:
To publish whatever reasonable criticism I could create myself or commission from others.
To prove to the Americans that had jumped on Trump’s burning bandwagon the error of their ways.
To offer the occasional moment of levity to break up the space.
At the time a part of me believed I could make a small difference. Then I mostly sat around doing nothing until I met my future wife, got married, had a kid and realized there wasn’t enough time in the day to do anything.
Now, four years later and in the aftermath of the Trump cancer being painfully removed from the White House, I’m finally getting around to it. To continue with the oncological metaphor, it seems we’re now in the crucially important post-op phase and, while the tumor-in-chief has been excised, the work is far from over. We have to irradiate the body politic, eliminate the metastatic cells from within and begin the process of healing. Perhaps I can help with that? A little immunotherapy for the intellect...
Americans have always harbored a healthy suspicion toward our elected officials, more often than not with good reason. There is something a little off-putting about anyone that wants very badly to be in charge of their neighbors. Nonetheless, there is also much to be said in favor of expertise. Career politicians - whether you like them or not - are something of a necessary evil. If you think about it for a minute, we probably don’t really want to “drain the swamp,” as Trump sloganized on his campaign trail, an expression his supporters have used as justification to support a host of truly awful candidates with no relevant experience and plenty of bad ideas. There’s a whole, brutally-functioning ecosystem in “the swamp” that we’re better off leaving undisturbed. Let the leeches, gators and bottom-feeders do the dirty work they so desperately wanted when they solicited our votes and took our campaign contributions. We elect them - and pay them - so we don’t have to bother with the dreary procedural tasks most regular people are loth to do.
The American brand of self-government - loosely based on the ancient Greek model - is an imperfect, chimeric beast that, in its attempts to work for everyone, doesn’t really work for anyone. And that’s precisely what it’s designed to do. The built-in guarantee of dissatisfaction drives a lively, often contentious debate that keeps society moving peacefully forward - bumps and hairpin turns notwithstanding - toward a common goal. It’s not supposed to make you happy on its own merits. What it mostly does very well is keep the lights on and the water running so the majority of us can go about the business of life in relative comfort, dutifully lubricating the gears of progress with our blood and treasure. Ideally we do this voluntarily and in the service of the greater good and hopefully with the understanding that the security of the whole enterprise depends largely upon how we treat the least fortunate among us. At its best, democracy creates the most opportunity for the most people to flourish. But as with any system devised by humans, it is subject to decay and vulnerable to exploitation by monied interests. Some number of unlucky souls will inevitably fall through its cracks and feel, as we all might, that a redress of grievances must be made. Empowered as the people are to march with their feet and speak with their votes, the flood of money into our political culture has drenched our boots and drowned our voices. Something has to change, but what?
To be fair, the supposed swamp-drainers may have had a valid ideological point somewhere along the way, if not a workable solution to tether their point to reality. The free market economy Republicans are so dedicated to protecting can be a fickle partner. Many otherwise-innocent, hard-working Americans have fallen prey to its wiles through no fault of their own while less-productive people get rich off their backs, only to find that the safety net they have observed working for others does not work in the same way for them. It’s a devastating cycle to find oneself trapped within, and the instinct to hate the game is perfectly understandable. But whatever point the downtrodden, working-class Republicans had seems to have been lost or abandoned, as often happens when an objective is recognized to be too difficult or too wildly impractical to achieve.
The ensuing loss-of-mission eventually perfected itself in the protest nomination of an unapologetic criminal and huckster - with decades of demonstrably corrupt inside-dealing to his credit - to the highest office in the land. It hardly seemed to have the potential to achieve a desirable-for-anyone result, least of all as a remedy for the real and imagined grievances of his supporters. The prevailing wisdom among the cognoscenti before Trump actually won the presidency was that he was an obvious joke, didn’t take his candidacy seriously and had no chance of winning an election. It seemed impossible, laughable even. Alas! God, above all, punishes hubris. In our arrogance it had not yet occurred to most of us that Trump had somehow - almost certainly without knowing he’d done it - ascended to the leadership of a cult that would not suffer the intrusion of reason into its doctrine.
It may surprise some of you to learn that I grew up in a cult. It was called the “Worldwide Church of God” and it was founded and led by a megalomaniacal evangelist and self-styled “apostle” named Herbert W. Armstrong until his death - at the ripe-old age of 93 - in January of 1986. Armstrong was something of a pioneer in the field of religious broadcasting, blazing a trail for the innumerable evangelical media outlets that exist today. He had a career background in advertising that gave him some of the tools necessary to sell his product - a bizarre and thoroughly-debunked interpretation of biblical scripture called “British Israelism” - and a perfectly pliable audience of poor souls devastated by the Great Depression and desperate for meaning. Armstrong had an outward confidence and charismatic authority that drew seekers into his orbit, qualities that masked his admitted internal struggles with insecurity and self-loathing. He also, allegedly, sexually abused his daughter starting when she was just 13 years old and continued doing so for years, a gruesome detail outlined in a filing by his own legal team during bitter divorce proceedings from his second wife, a decades-younger former secretary he married after his first wife’s passing. As “Pastor General” of the Worldwide Church of God, Armstrong’s extravagant lifestyle stood in stark contrast to the economic condition of the mostly poor members of his global congregation, who were expected to tithe up to 20% of their income to support his ministry. He traveled the world in a private jet, was driven around in a limousine and resided in a luxe mansion in an exclusive neighborhood of Pasadena, CA. It was a prosperity gospel in all but name and Armstrong was the quintessential cult leader, demanding absolute loyalty and strict adherence to church policy while offering no earthly comfort to his followers and unapologetically ignoring his own rules.
Like most cult members, I had no idea I was in a cult. No one who is in a cult ever thinks they’re in a cult. To me, Mr. Armstrong (as we called him) was glorious and terrifying. He seemed so much better than the rest of us and we were all so afraid to disappoint him. My parents, having both been raised in the church from childhood, were relatively laissez-faire in their approach to the church’s policies. They had tasted some normalcy before being dragged by their parents into the cult’s orbit, and had toiled under the yoke of Armstrong’s authoritarianism for the better part of two decades by the time I came along. They had learned to cherry-pick as it suited them. Many of my peers were not as lucky. As terrified, awkward and other as I felt in my childhood, there were kids in our church who had it much worse by comparison. Corporal punishment was encouraged and sex education was discouraged, a dismal set of instructions for child-rearing if ever there was one. Some of those kids never stood a chance.
My family was thankfully possessed of a certain reservedness that shied away from extremes, coupled with an independence that forestalled absolute fealty to the church’s authority. That is not to absolve my parents - nor their parents - from a share of responsibility for participating even half-heartedly in my religious education. The indoctrination of children is a tricky subject and mature adults ought to know that their impressionable children, who are natural sponges for information, are not always preternaturally gifted with the ability to parse the few supposedly-important moral teachings from all the violent, superstitious nonsense. There is an expression in journalism that goes, “no one wants to read about all the buses that arrived on time.” Drama sells newspapers. The same principle applies to sermons. It’s far more effective for the sermonizer to solemnly describe the inevitable punishments visited upon the miserable sinner, often for offenses they’re not aware they committed (there is a foul on every play by dint of your very existence), unless they hew unerringly to a line they’re probably doomed to fall out of! Only short shrift is given to the idea of heavenly reward because you, the aforementioned sinner, probably don’t deserve it.
What do you suppose happens when you put your kids in front of a preacher, command them to be silent and attentive, and then sit idly by as they are told about how they will suffer and die - and then suffer again, eternally - unless they submit to the impossible rules and compulsory love of a being they can neither see, hear nor touch but that is omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent? Parents - whose children rely on them to take seriously their care and protection - have to be aware that without proper guidance or context, their kids will take religion very seriously. They are a captive audience, surrounded by people they are supposed to trust and respect, being fed an impossibly-rich load of hocus-pocus they cannot be expected to properly digest. Extremism is birthed in those moments, when children - in the presence of their caretakers - are commanded to eschew empiricism in favor of mysticism, to value faith above reason and to simultaneously, obligatorily, love and fear a man-made idea.
That early education becomes a bedrock foundation for future thought. Even if the child grows up and eventually abandons the religion of their youth - sometimes the anti-intellectual framework of extremism and unreason has already been totally nailed together, waiting to be clad in whatever extreme ideology serves their purpose. It is this group that represents an existential threat to human civilization. They are the Trump cultists, the Taliban, the Oath Keepers and the Three-Percenters, they are the extreme leftist thought-police and anarchic nihilists, et al. Each of these malignant groups, disparate as their individual modes of operation may be, are united in a common purpose: to arbitrate your behavior whether you like it or not (and especially if you don’t), in the service of their god, metaphorical or otherwise, and to destroy anyone that refuses to comply.
It is often the mistake of natural moderates and centrists - those disposed to free thought and classical liberalism - to vastly underestimate the belief of believers, even within their own faith communities, and often despite what the most extreme believers themselves actually say and do. For the majority of people, having one foot in a religious tradition in the interests of community, fellowship, routine and ritual, is more than enough to satisfy their basic needs. And for the most part the sheer number of those moderate believers - and the unlikelihood that they would countenance any significant upheaval to the routine - serves to temper the more extreme believers among them. Occasionally, however, the needle moves too far in one direction and the moderates get a bit queasy as they’re suddenly forced to deal with the sleeping giant their tepidness has long ignored. In contrast to the average, church-going American, “true believers,” as they will inevitably refer to themselves, have a much more complicated playbook they are certain has been revealed to them alone, the special subjects of their god’s attention and affection, and they will give their lives or take yours to protect it.
I’ll spare you a long-form report on the labyrinthine inner workings and doctrines of the Worldwide Church of God, the cult of my personal experience. It’s all available on the internet if you’re interested enough to give it a wider look. However, in the interests of illustrating how far some believers have to go to find satisfaction - and how serious many of them are in their pursuit - I’ll give you the short version of what we were told and taught to believe. And remember, this was and still is a version of Christianity and the future that actual people actually believe with all their heart:
Origin: We were the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, the “true” Israelites, as opposed to the people geographically located in Israel and/or with ethnic ties to the region. Not to be confused with Jews, with whom we shared many doctrinal similarities and traditions but who were, like people of all faiths but our own, following a false narrative.
Observance: We observed a strict sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday and had our meetings on Saturday mornings. We celebrated our own “holy days,” rooted in the Mosaic tradition, and rejected all other religious holidays like Christmas, Easter, etc. because of their supposedly pagan origins. Even birthday celebrations were considered to be inadvisable.
Theology: God and Jesus were sort of co-equal partners while the holy spirit was not an entity in and of itself but rather an essence, projected by God and Jesus, that suffused all of Creation. More like the “holy vibe” than the “holy ghost.” This was as against the standard, Christian idea of the Trinity, which was considered by us to be a grave heresy.
Lifestyle: We abided by the Levitical dietary laws prohibiting the consumption of myriad delicious foods. Pork, shellfish, et al were not allowed to pass the lips of the congregation. I didn’t taste pepperoni pizza or real bacon until I was 14 years old, in secret, and not without a measure of guilt. Women were discouraged from wearing makeup or jewelry. Men were considered the bosses of their wives and of women in general. Children were expected to be obedient without question.
Education: Being biblical literalists, we were strict creationists and were told, in fact, that Armstrong himself had pursued a rigorous study of Darwin’s theory and found it to be chock-full of holes. No further argument was necessary. Science in general was viewed with deep distrust. Medicine was frowned upon unless it pertained to repair or maintenance; a broken bone or a stitchable laceration could be treated but cancer could be healed only by prayer. The church had its own private schools and accredited, for-profit colleges. Needless to say, the church was not producing a whole lot of doctors and lawyers.
Eschatology: We believed that, at any moment and probably very soon, Jesus would descend from the heavens accompanied by a divine army to lay waste to a world deceived by Satan and his false prophets. Wars and plagues would ravage the Earth for exactly three-and-a-half years, during which the best the unchosen could hope for was a quick death. We, on the other hand, along with the resurrected corpses of the faithful dead, and in what would certainly have been a logistical nightmare, will have already been whisked away to an indeterminate “Place of Safety” where we were to be invisible and secure while the world around us suffered and died. After those three and half years had elapsed, there would be another resurrection, this time of everyone who had ever lived and died in the history of the world. Imagine that! We, the chosen few, then had 1000 years of peace and prosperity - the “Millennium” during which Satan is chained and powerless in the “Bottomless Pit” - to reveal God’s truth to the billions who had yet to receive it, offering them a chance to submit and accept eternal life in the “World Tomorrow,” an unspoiled paradise depicted mostly as an hallucinatory petting zoo, where we would all become “spirit beings” in God’s glorious kingdom.
Now, once those 1000 years had passed, there would be another resurrection and God - in a final act of remarkable caprice - would unlock Satan and release him from the Bottomless Pit, allowing him to work his temptations once more in an effort to weed out all the incorrigibles before the Final Judgement. For some reason it was assumed there would be a number of recalcitrant heathens who would choose annihilation over the World Tomorrow. Those unapologetic sinners would be summarily dispatched to the Lake of Fire, where they would be erased from the Book of Life and forgotten for the rest of eternity. That was at least a final mercy. The intransigent salvation-deniers would simply return to dust and, if they happened to be someone you loved, you wouldn’t even remember they’d ever existed.
Those were the main things. For obvious reasons the organization discouraged relationships outside its confines. We had our own sports teams and social events. Anything to prevent too much mixing with the ideas and traditions of the world outside. It was all very insular and weird and impossible to explain without embarrassment to curious schoolmates and teachers. I might as well have told them I was a fucking alien with psychic powers who came to Earth with an instruction manual about human civilization that was missing a bunch of important pages. It would have made just as much sense to them. Despite having my own doubts about all of this nonsense for a number of years, I held to it as tightly as I could manage until I was in my late teens. It was/is a lucky thing to have found my way out and to have a family that didn’t disown me as a result of my journey away from it.
One variable that was painful in real time but that may have inoculated me against too deep an attachment to the church was that we moved around a lot. Like, a lot. I averaged two schools a year until seventh grade so I didn’t feel inextricably connected to any group of people outside my own little tribe (mom, dad and three brothers). In other words, I didn’t have any close friends and if anyone decided to forsake my friendship because I’d lost my religion, I wasn’t losing anyone I cared very much about. Quitting one’s faith at any stage in life can have much harsher and wider-ranging consequences for some.
In any case it is easy to see how vulnerable, curious people can be convinced of almost anything by a confident, motivated leader with a vision - no matter how absurd or convoluted. The full, blunt impact of such indoctrination is absorbed most devastatingly by children, who may be crippled for life by the massive injury to their developing minds.
I often laid awake at night in my youth, worried that I would be one of those lost to the Lake of Fire, tricked into doing or saying something unpardonable, then incinerated and forgotten by my loved ones as they frolicked in a phantasmagorical paradise without me. I dreaded bedtime and was plagued by abominably violent, recurring nightmares that usually, quite literally, caused me to piss myself. I slept in diapers and with plastic sheets until I was 10 years old, at which point I mostly stopped remembering my dreams altogether. Whether this was the brain’s way of naturally solving the puzzle of terror or whether there were other environmental factors at work, I’m unlikely to ever know for sure.
There was no one I could talk to about any of it. It was, however, around this time that I became a voracious and advanced reader, which could have served to open new and better pathways down which my imagination could travel. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say. Perhaps ironically, it was my parents and grandparents who inspired and encouraged me to read and who, for some blessed reason, never bothered to deny me whatever book I endeavored to check out from the public library. This led to the occasional awkward moment, as in one morning while reading at the breakfast table I paused at an unfamiliar word and innocently queried my father, “Dad, what does “flaccid” mean?”
Returning to the point, it is crucial to acknowledge that millions of people of various faith traditions take their religious teachings very literally and, as a result, don’t ever faithfully pursue other educational opportunities. Those people will consider it a great responsibility to pass their beliefs on to their children. The stakes are very high for them because they actually believe what they’ve been taught about the consequences of infidelity to their religion. It is a huge mistake of religious moderates and other centrists to ignore this. If it all seems absurd to you, try your hardest to imagine the lengths you’d go to protect yourself and your loved ones from an eternity of suffering and death. We have to stop ridiculing people’s beliefs and start to build better arguments against bad ideas that don’t make indoctrinated people feel attacked or inferior. No one wants to feel like they’ve been tricked into a con, or that you’re trying to trick them into damnation. If you’re going to try to convince someone that what they believe is a lie, you might need to think about what’s going to rush in to fill the vacuum left behind.
Trump’s appeal is tied directly to his skill in identifying the fears of his audience, and it primes him to replace God in the minds of his most ardent followers. He is famous, he is wealthy, he speaks in simple, repetitive language and he craves attention without seeming too desperate to consume it. It is a short intellectual walk from Trump’s absorption of his audience’s energies to his/their collaboration in the cruelly false narrative that he is their only path to salvation. The cultist has merely to rearrange the hierarchy of needs, which is remarkably easy when you don’t really “need” anything. In this case, Trump is God’s instrument and representative on Earth and it is an incredible relief for the cultist - who has just been instructed that they are in imminent danger of losing whatever is important to them - to have a tangible, actionable set of instructions delivered in plain language by a person they believe has their best interests in mind. In doing Trump service they are doing God service, in the hope of some future reward and/or to simply feel connected to a larger purpose.
It hardly matters if what Trump says contravenes everything they thought they knew up to now, or even whether it accurately reflects their actual condition. Trump, as the word of God, has delivered a new revelation that supersedes all previous revelations. And that, in a nutshell, is what cult leaders are good at: convincing their followers that there is something terribly wrong with the world, that they are losing a battle with dark forces, that the leader has their best interests in mind despite all evidence to the contrary, and that following his instructions is the only way to survive. Trust in evidence must be dispensed with entirely - forget what you thought you knew. The cult leader alone commands the truth and everything else is a deception. It is almost always either an active con or an insane delusion, and even when it’s not it rarely reaps the cultist all but the most dubious reward. Reward, in this case, is all in the eye of the beholder.
The motivational factors that lead to a person falling into a cult are both obvious and mysterious. People who have experienced some personal or professional loss might quest for a sense of meaning in the aftermath. People who feel disconnected or socially outcast might see in a cult’s membership an opportunity to commune with like-minded folk dedicated to a common purpose. Those are the obvious factors and from those sources it is possible to sustain a multi-generational flow of indoctrination that grows and feeds the cult’s membership and legitimacy. What’s mysterious is why intelligent, capable people would subject themselves to the leaps of cognitive dissonance and willful ignorance necessary to hold onto otherwise easily-dismissable lies about the nature of reality. No one can make you believe a lie. You have to choose it for yourself. The truly insidious consequence of that choice is that, upon deciding to adhere to an untruth, one incurs an enormous personal cost when/if they decide to dissolve it or, even more devastating, when it is dissolved by the originator of the lie. The cult leader might die before any of their prophecies come to fruition or they might be exposed as a charlatan or confess to being a fraud. The emotional investment necessary to sustain a practiced avoidance of truth is more often than not ruinous to a person’s psychological health.
The vast majority of human beings possess an innate desire to be useful and valuable to their loved ones and fellow citizens, and actively seek ways to fulfill that desire through word and deed. It is for this reason that every culture has traditions around sharing, hospitality, verbal and physical expressions of caring, admiration and any number of customs that don’t strictly abide rugged individualism. The instinct we have for altruism makes it exquisitely difficult for any person to consciously acknowledge - never mind apologize for - the abdication of reason, kindness, mercy and truth in favor of slavish devotion to dogmatism and the cult of personality. It would seem to go against the pre-installed software of humanity but it is obviously vulnerable to being hacked. It is especially complicated in the cult of Trump and other, largely Christian cult movements, because the principal figure behind all relevant machinations is, ostensibly, Jesus. And the example of Jesus is supposed to have been one of pure altruism, of placing a value on others that is equal or higher than the value you place on yourself.
It would be difficult to engage in the intellectual contortions necessary to connect Trump to Jesus if Christians hadn’t already been tying themselves into pretzels over the obvious double-standards of their leadership, for as long as anyone can remember. One need look no further than the Catholic Church or any of the various contemporary, scandal-plagued evangelists we know of for a perfectly salient example. And it would be surprising to learn that the majority of practicing Christians didn’t have a much closer-to-home example of ecclesiastical malfeasance than the ones everyone reads about in the news. Neither moral courage nor intellectual honesty are necessary preconditions - nor desirable qualities whatsoever - for membership in any cult, regardless of its allegiance to a mainstream faith tradition. It is, therefore, all-too-easy to draw a straight line from cultish religious belief to racism, sexual misconduct, political extremism, violence and other dangerously uncivilized behavior. These policy positions and reactionary stances are not, within the context of the cult, defects. They are doctrinal.
A cult is a top-down operation and Trump has the dual advantage of being a natural bully with an unnaturally powerful bully pulpit. The combination of an entitled, malignant narcissist in the office of the U.S. presidency with easy, unfettered access to social media has manifested a weapon of mass delusion the likes of which we have never seen. We should be thankful that his selfishness and lack of creative intelligence merely lands him in the category of cult leader, rather than a more competent ideologue with a clearly-articulated imperative who may have succeeded in overthrowing American democracy. It is, however, entirely possible - perhaps even probable - that Trump has merely laid a foundation for future autocrats to build upon. By indoctrinating a throng of captive minds eager for a purpose, he has given an evil inheritance to America’s democratic institutions, regardless of the political leanings of its operatives; a shriveled monkey’s paw that will visit macabre consequences on anyone that attempts to wield it. Whether through intention or carelessness hardly matters. There are men and women on both sides of our ever-expanding aisle (we might as well call it a chasm) who are much more ambitious, intelligent and motivated than Trump, and who will no doubt try where he has failed.
What makes it all the more dangerous is that Trump’s cult is now a roiling, directionless mob waiting for instructions, like a poisonous gas in stagnant air waiting for a breeze. What puff of hot breath from a Mike Pompeo or a Josh Hawley - intellectually grounded politicians with deep commitments to dangerous ideologies and no attachments to ethics - might blow that miasma into action? We might find out sooner than we’d like to imagine. The cult of Trump may no longer require inspiration or animus from its original leader. The mob has seen what it can accomplish without any clear plan to execute. It will now lie in wait for a more organized plan to manifest itself and I’d wager it doesn’t matter who delivers it to them. Once a person has accepted that God “works in mysterious ways,” they can be convinced of nearly anything if it reinforces what they already believe. We have to do everything we can to correct course so that such a plan no longer seems reasonable, beneficial or possible to fulfill.
The burden of truth now falls on us. The timing almost couldn’t be worse. American liberals are trapped in their own, self-defeating feedback loop. The left, in an all-too-predictable reaction to the single-issue polarization and cultification of the right, has tragically elevated identity politics to a position of absolute primacy. In effect, a growing ideological movement on the left is becoming a cult of its own, replete with dogmatic rules of membership and an abandonment of empirical considerations in favor of what seems like must be true. Just as we’ve seen on the right, many on the left somehow decided to stop thinking precisely when the most critical thinking was required. At the point when the common experience of all people had reached an historical nexus, it suddenly, unceremoniously collapsed into a free-for-all of commitment only to personal experience and intersectionality. It is no longer enough to diligently work towards a set of socio-political goals, driven by real data and in partnership with a diverse collective of people, to achieve a greater good. The unelected arbiters of social justice have commanded us to instead attenuate the entire project of progress by stopping to acknowledge the complaints of every solitary constituent, immediately and with equal urgency. The left has become a reactionary mob in its own right, feeding on emotion and ignoring inconvenient facts. The moral high ground has been surrendered.
If you’ve ever been on public transportation, you’ll understand that the bus does not stop and wait for you to run your errands. The show must go on without you. If you have personal business you get a transfer, get off the bus, do your thing, and then catch another bus to take you where you need to go next. If that seems unfair to you, then it’s you who needs to rearrange your priorities, not the public transit schedule. You can’t hold the whole system hostage to get what you want, and shout pejoratives at your fellow travelers while they’re forced to wait for you to pick up your dry cleaning. Too many on the left have volunteered to be lied to, trapped in a solipsistic fog, afraid to pay the cost of dissent from ideas they almost certainly know are spurious, even as they jeer at the cult of Trump for doing the same thing. It is truly a race to the bottom, seemingly with the objective of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Without refreshing our commitment to free speech and the honest, civilized exchange of ideas in the interest of exposing and disposing with the bad ones and advancing the good ones, our democracy will not survive much longer. And we cannot wait for the opposition to match whatever integrity can be summoned from the wreckage of liberal philosophy. We have to start now, assume the risks and keep a way forward open to anyone who wants to catch up. Until we learn how to navigate the disinformation and echo chambers of social media we have little chance of reestablishing a forthright, dialectical tradition to achieve that end. We should treat social media platforms as they relate to interpersonal communication the same as we might treat sitcoms in relation to David Attenborough-narrated documentaries: each has its value but they are not created equal. False equivalencies are a slippery slope that ends in a deep crevasse. One cannot seriously denounce the propaganda of the opposition while simply subscribing to a different set of exaggerations and outright falsehoods. To excuse your team’s lies as a defense against the other team’s lies is to confess your abandonment of logic. We have to recognize it’s called an echo chamber for a reason: no one outside of it can hear you.
We need to swing wide the doors of our echo chambers and stop shouting at ourselves. A big part of any intellectual renaissance in America will require us to shut up and listen, without judgment and without betraying horror, to the voices of people who need us to hear what they have to say so we can all, together, begin to understand where things might’ve gone wrong. It’s time to stop making people feel bad for having questions, whether you think those questions have obvious answers or not. It’s time to start making people feel secure and empowered to speak sincerely and seek the answers they need. There isn’t a single one of us that doesn’t have something to learn and not everything we learn is going to be easy or comfortable - and lots of it isn’t going to fit neatly into the locked compartments we’ve built in our minds to guard against intrusion. The fact is, we’re going to have to accommodate some messiness in order to serve a higher purpose. Intellectual sterility bears no fruit.
We must be extremely cautious in the attribution of evil to people who are simply different from us. We run the risk of systematizing our own biases, a sin for which we are ever eager to accuse the opposition, and creating a Frankenstein’s monster that will inevitably return to haunt our doorstep. It is not easy to leave a cult. The journey out is fraught with challenges that expose a person to risks that are often too difficult to bear alone. Let’s not escalate those risks for people who may be trying very hard to escape but don’t know how. Leave open a safe path home for the wayward mind, and by doing so you may discover you’ve just been tricked into being locked on the other side of the same door. Freedom isn’t free.
