Seeing the Best in Others
Generally, it means not interacting with them on Twitter
Above: Big Media forces us all to read about Donald Trump’s latest escapades
My son recently watched the movie A Clockwork Orange for the first time. Afterwards, I told my son my theory about the movie, which I think is perfectly obvious—so obvious that I’m sure I’m not the first person to make this particular point. (Spoiler alerts: if you haven’t seen the movie, stop reading and go watch it right now. Come back when you’re done. I’ll still be here!)
My theory, which is mine, is this: Stanley Kubrick does the same thing to the viewer that the Ministry of the Interior does to Alex. In short, Kubrick performs his own “Ludovico Technique” on everyone watching the film. And you realize this the second the end credits roll.
Let’s review. For most people, possibly the most memorable scene in the movie is also its most disturbing: the invasion of a writer’s house while Alex (played by Malcolm McDowell) rapes the writer’s wife while cheerfully crooning “Singin’ in the Rain.” If you don’t recall it, you can watch it here—but first, you’ll have to prove to Google/YouTube that you’re an adult:
The second most memorable scene is the one featured in the opening image to this missive: the “Ludovico technique” being used on poor Alex. The Ludovico technique is a sort of aversion therapy through musical association. Alex, whose one redeeming quality is that he likes Beethoven (he often refers to “a bit of the old Ludwig Van”), will be forced to watch ugly and awful images while Beethoven’s Ninth plays. In the future, whenever he hears the Ninth, he will associate the piece with those horrible images, and he will be cured of his violence forever . . . or so the theory goes. (Spoiler alert again: that ain’t how it works out.)
When the movie ends and the credits roll, we are treated to the version of “Singin’ in the Rain” that we were familiar with before the movie: the cheerful rendition by Gene Kelly.
And it is at that point that you realize: this lovely song, which I have liked all my life, is now a song I associate with horrific images of violence.
Stanley Kubrick has performed the Ludovico technique on you.
I think there is an analogy of sorts here between the Clockwork Orange theory of association and the way our partisan media constantly pushes on us stories of the worst, craziest people on the other side. We see images of the nuttiest possible people on the other side of the political spectrum, and descriptions of the insane things they believe—and we come to associate those images and descriptions with all of our political rivals.
The Bubble
In part, this happens because many of us don’t get a ground-level view of actual real people with different political opinions than ours. A lot of people in this country live in a political bubble. David French has written about this, citing a New York Times tool that allows you to see whether your neighbors are likely to share your political leanings:
French lives in a bubble in Tennessee where most people are conservatives. Many big-city dwellers live in a lefty bubble. (As it happens, I live in a very politically balanced community. But that’s rare.) As a result, many people form their opinions about “the other side” from social media and TV.
Seeing the Best in Others
I recently finished the book Broken News by Chris Stirewalt of The Dispatch. It’s a fun book with a lot of quotable lines. A few weeks ago, Stirewalt had a piece at The Dispatch that talked about our country’s need for love. About our need to see the best in one another. About our need to rise above cynicism and give each other the benefit of the doubt. While the thought is simple and as old as time, most profound things are. Stirewalt began the piece talking about how, after his mom passed, his dad used to go smell a perfume bottle that had belonged to her, to remind him of their love. Stirewalt’s reflections on this are stirring, and I hope he does not mind if I quote them at length:
I’m thinking very much of my dad and that perfume bottle these days as I observe life in an America that seems to be forgetting how to love—our country, and certainly each other. The left and right can seem to agree only that the United States is a disaster, with one side certain that we never should have been created in the first place, and the other angry at the loss of a way of life that never really existed. The disdain and casual denigrations I hear about my country break my heart. In the endless quest to obtain and keep power, progressives and nationalists exaggerate our flaws and preach despair about our future. If they can convince people that we are some kind of failed state, perhaps then the masses will give their side the authority they crave.
These anti-American voices are self-affirming. The contempt that many progressives show for the American project and our proud and flawed history is proof for the apocalyptical right that the nation is being pulled down from within. The deadly rage of the nationalist right, on the other hand, gives progressives the proof they want that they are already in a civil war. The declining patriotism at both ends of the continuum has created an atmosphere in which decency and restraint are viewed as vices.
A healthy republic, like a family, is built on love. . . . Our common cause is a republic of liberty and justice. Our common land is one of beauty and bounty. If we love those things, then we ought to love America. And if we love America, then we ought to love Americans.
Amen. That piece had a deep and weighty impact on how I see the world these days. While I still admit to feeling contempt for a certain nasty sort of extreme political partisan—whether it be a proudly vicious Trumper or a high-on-outrage acolyte of the new cult of “antiracism” that John McWhorter aptly titles “The Elect”—I try, when I remember to, to keep in mind that we are all fellow human beings, and that people generally do not try to do things they think are wrong. (I said generally.) Even someone like Trump, who is arguably one of the least moral people on the planet, is more to be pitied than despised. At least, this is what I think in my better moments, or what I judge to be my better moments.
Being the Hero of Your Own Story
To be sure, a lot of people do actually believe in crazy things. All the charitable impulses in the world can’t blind us to the huge numbers of people who believe Donald Trump won the election in 2020. QAnon seems to be gaining even more traction, judging by Trump’s increasing open pandering to those people at his rallies. How to deal with people with actual insane beliefs?
I don’t have the answer to that; if I did, I’d probably be making millions telling the world about it rather than writing this newsletter for you. But using Stirewalt’s call for charity as my model, I can discuss why people believe crazy things, and try to do so from as charitable a point of view as I can manage.
A book I just purchased but have not started reading yet is Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, by Roy F. Baumeister. I learned about the book from an excellent Sam Harris podcast featuring Russ Roberts (another of my favorite podcasters, whose recent book Wild Problems I just finished and highly recommend). Roberts pointed out that, according to Baumeister, evil people don’t go around doing evil things and thinking to themselves: “man, am I evil!” On the contrary, evil people tend to think very highly of themselves, and believe what they are doing is right. The question is usually: why do these people believe such crazy things? Why did the January 6 insurrectionists believe they were fighting another American Revolution? Why (to cite an evil of a far grander scale) did Hitler believe the Jews were such a menace?
Why people believe crazy things is a topic that has fascinated me very deeply as of late. It’s well understood at this point that, not only do highly educated people often believe completely insane things, but the more intelligent of them are also fantastic at spinning out complex rationalizations for their bizarre beliefs. Sam Harris had a fellow named Will Storr on his podcast not too long ago, and at the beginning of the conversation they discussed a book of his called The Unpersuadables. Storr talked about a once-renowned historian named David Irving who had at one point done the most revelatory work out there about the firebombing of Dresden. But at some point, Irving decided that Hitler was a “friend of the Jews” who had nothing to do with the Holocaust.
Harris asked Storr what he believes is behind such insanity. His answer was essentially that we are all storytellers, and when we tell ourselves the story of our lives, we all want to be heroes. So our brain’s incredible capacity to engage in motivated reasoning is often tasked with the job of minimizing facts that interfere with our conception of ourselves as heroes. Irving, the Holocaust denier, didn’t decide to be evil. He thought he had stumbled on an untold story and sacrificed his reputation and even his freedom to tell it. (Australia locked him up for his beliefs, which is something we don’t do here.) Even though in reality he was a deluded fool, in his mind, he was a hero.
That seems to fit a lot of the insane “New Right” orthodoxy these days, doesn’t it? There is a thread that runs through many of the beliefs of the Trumpy New Right: a belief in promoting “freedom”—a noble and praiseworthy goal in the abstract — that becomes twisted and perverted into the sort of wild beliefs that motivate people to gather at the U.S. Capitol to “take back their country” by force if necessary. The people at the Capitol who believed with their whole heart that they were taking action to remedy a stolen election were the heroes of their own story. They were the New Revolutionaries: ready, willing, and able to spill the blood of a few cops in order to water the tree of Donald Trump’s liberty, and stop the lawful counting of votes for the other guy.
In such an environment, facts don’t matter. You could take any one of these people and ask them to justify their belief that the election was stolen, and then counter each and every one of their arguments with as much data as you like. You could summon video, audio, and other forms of evidence from sources as unimpeachable as you can imagine. None of it matters. Because these people want to be heroes, and your facts threaten to interfere with their conception of themselves as lionhearted warriors, fighting for the cause of liberty.
The next question that pops into our minds is: is this problem worse in current times — and if so, why?
Well, Duh: Social Media Helps People Reinforce Each Others’ Insane Ideas
This one seems so obvious, it doesn’t seem worth spending much time or energy discussing. Can there really be any doubt that social media helps people espousing crazy beliefs find one another and reinforce one another’s beliefs?
In this newsletter, I try to bring you new ideas. Maybe it’s something you haven’t thought about before, or something you haven’t thought about in quite that way. (Or, failing that, maybe I can point you toward an interesting book or podcast.) This one ain’t that new. I think we all feel this one in our bones—so much so that it’s boring to talk about it.
To me, a more interesting subject is this: is it possible that the very nature of social media is causing us to misinterpret one another? Is it possible that most of us are not as crazy or partisan or unreasonable as we may seem to be on social media?
Twitter Really Does Bring Out the Worst in People — And Allow Us to See the Worst in People
I think the answer is yes. Another event happened recently that caused me to feel in my bones a truth that you probably already take for granted: that Twitter brings out the worst in people, and allows us to see the worst in them.
I’ll start by explaining that I used to listen to and enjoy a podcast on NPR called “Planet Money.” I am interested in economics, and Planet Money had a way of taking economic issues and making them interesting and fun to learn about.
I find NPR tiresome on many issues, especially legal affairs. Another digression: as an example of NPR lefty bias, take Nina Totenberg (please!). She is a hack in the mold of Linda Greenhouse—an agenda-driven partisan who does not even try to present issues in anything approaching an evenhanded manner. No sentient observer is surprised by the latest revelations of the extent of Totenberg’s friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but even lefties might be surprised and a little dismayed at the extent to which Totenberg covered up her all-but-certain knowledge about the extent of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s cancer:
It was 2020, an election was looming, and RBG was dying. During lockdown, we learn in the book, Totenberg’s home was the one place Ginsburg went other than her own apartment. Their weekly Saturday suppers made Totenberg one of the few Americans to lay eyes on the justice during the months of isolation. By July, Ginsburg could not climb the six steps into the house without a bodyguard holding her around the waist. At her apartment, she fell asleep midmeal, a fork still in her hand. She wore clothes meant to disguise how much weight she’d lost. Her gloves — which had become a fashion statement — were actually there to cover the IV wounds on her hands.
Had “reporter” Totenberg actually, you know . . . reported on this, maybe there would have been more public pressure on Justice Ginsburg to retire. And maybe Roe would still be (partially) good law. So: being buddy-buddy with a Justice has consequences. (I should note that it’s tough to imagine Totenberg reporting on this, given their friendship . . . which means the real ethical problem was allowing the friendship happen to begin with. Nothing corrupts a pundit or reporter like making friends with their subjects.)
But I digress. As I often do.
What I was saying was, I liked Planet Money. It occasionally doffed its hat to lefty pieties, but I was surprised by the extent to which the show actually took market economics seriously. The guy running the whole enterprise was this guy named Adam Davidson, and while I recognized that he had lefty leanings, I liked him. He seemed like an OK guy. On Planet Money, I learned about things like how silly the Dow Jones Industrial Average is, and the proliferation of Social Security disability fraud, and the true facts behind Cyprus raiding its banks. It’s the first place I ever learned about the bane of Scott Lincicome’s existence: the infamous Jones Act.
The show did a great series on rent-seeking in general, which not only included another piece on the Jones Act, but also pieces about the Tesla ban in New Jersey, the government-created raisin cartel, and government-mandated minimum prices on sugar. Through stories like this and many others, I formed a positive opinion about Adam Davidson.
Then Davidson left Planet Money, and I mostly encountered his stuff at the New Yorker. He wrote a lot about how bad Donald Trump was, and I couldn’t disagree with that, but man, he seemed pretty partisan. But when you went to his Twitter feed, it started to become apparent that the guy is kind of rude.
And then Davidson got into a fight with two guys I like a lot: Kmele Foster and Thomas Chatterton Williams.
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