4.4 Togetherness gone crazy
Because humans are a social species, and profoundly so…
Our fate depends on our togetherness.
Specifically, whether it’s working for us or against us.
Our traditional tribal kind of togetherness, which sustained us for millennia, is now, more than anything else, because of its compulsive divisiveness, putting us in danger.
But in the past hundred years, we’ve developed a new way of being together, and it’s…
The most dangerous kind of togetherness we’ve ever created.
Traditional, hunter–gatherer tribes were about…
Survival.
First, last, and always.
Now, though, we’re seeing a tsunami of delusional politics which is gathering people into a new kind of tribe…
A Death Tribe.
And I call it that because this new kind of togetherness is…
A surrender to death.
It’s…
Anti-survival.
But how can this be? It seems so wrong, so contrary, when throughout human history our ancestors have fought so hard to stay alive. In fact, it seems…
Stone-cold bonkers.
And the people who are joining the Death Tribe seem to have lost their minds. They’re giving themselves over to big lies and half–baked conspiracy theories and fatal fantasies.
At first this might seem mystifying, that so many people are behaving this way—against what would seem to be their own best interests. Instead of acting out of self–love, they seem to be lost, first in their hatred of others. But second, and perhaps surprisingly, self–hate.
But this death version of togetherness does make sense in its own way. If you look behind the scenes you can see why it’s happening.
I think it begins with the…
Death of hope.
On a global level hope is failing. We are on the very edge of extinction. As the crises we face multiply and intensify, it becomes harder and harder to hold onto hope.
So people are scared. Really, really scared…
Scared out of their minds.
Tens of millions of people are exactly that scared. So what do they do?
They surrender to despair.
They don’t fight it, they let it take them over. They give up on themselves, on their friends and family, and…
They give up on humans in general.
But they don’t admit this is what they’re doing. That kind of honesty would be too painful. Instead they cover their despair with fantasies, aggressive fantasies.
How does this happen?
There’s a principle of human behavior at play here…
When despair goes deep enough, it erupts into rage.
And when you start raging, you feel relief, you feel like you’re taking action and that’s somehow going to do you some kind of good. But all you’re doing is acting out your despair not solving it. Which means it owns you.
So you sink deeper into the despair you’re trying to escape, which scares you even more, which makes you feel even more helpless, which makes you madder and meaner, and traps you in a desperately repeating cycle until…
You’re drowning in your drowning.
If, instead, we were talking about a little child having an angry tantrum, no problem. You’d gather him into your arms and hold him tight and speak to him calmly, comforting him…
“You’re upset but you’re going to be okay because I’ve got you now, I’ve got you.”
Afterward you’d help him find a better way to handle his distress. You’d help him learn step by step how to take responsibility for his feelings and actions and how that’s a lot more satisfying than raging out of control.
But what can we do when our whole nation, or the whole world, is having a tantrum of destructive rage and there’s nobody big enough to pick us up and hold us and talk us through our fears and get us on the path to taking care of ourselves?
There are two things about this despair–driven rage that are especially dangerous.
First…
This kind of rage is tribal.
Because we are a tribal species. So you turn you rage against other groups of people…
You blame them for your despair.
So in America this new kind of togetherness is characterized, for example, by traditional racism, with white people, scared of losing their traditional privileges, attacking people of color as if they were the embodiment of all the troubles in the world.
And no wonder it gets crazy. You’re scared of losing privilege, you’re scared of losing your way of life, you’re scared of people voting who have different interests than yours, you’re scared about the decline of your country as a world power, and maybe you’re scared of the impeding extinction of our species, and therefore of your children or grandchildren or great grandchildren.
But instead of solving the real problems of our species with real solutions you attack people with less power…
You victimize people who are already hurting too much.
And you glorify those attacks and speak of them as if they were some kind of salvation and you were warriors for cosmic good against cosmic evil.
But you’re just sinking further into tribal muck.
Second…
This despair-driven rage is open-ended.
It has no end point. It’s not working toward a solution such that when it gets to that solution there will be no further need for the rage.
So we have to call this kind of rage…
Nihilistic.
Which means that it’s only about destruction, no–exit destruction.
And the people trapped in it are best described as…
Nihilists.
While they talk up their fantasies of salvation and glory, they’re so deep in despair, and have so little faith in their fellow humans, that the true spirit of their movement, though they keep it unconscious, is…
Burn it all down!
The most disturbing thing about nihilism is that it demands…
Moral abdication.
Hannah Arendt, in her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, says that this new nihilistic kind of togetherness is…
The mass merging of soulless nobodies.
Arendt makes a distinction between fascism and totalitarianism.
Under fascism, you can still have your own thoughts. You have to obey the Leader, you have to behave the way he wants you to, but you can still have your own inner life as long as you never tell anyone about it.
Totalitarianism, by contrast, demands such total merging that you no longer have an inner life. In fact…
You surrender your moral soul.
And once you do that, anything goes. You will faithfully carry out whatever duties the Totality asks of you—torture, mass murder, even the willing and willful sacrifice of your own family, or your own self, if the Totality demands that.
If you’re a nihilist, you fool yourself into thinking you’ve achieved the height of sociality. But this absolute merging is absolutely anti–social.
In the Death Tribe, there is no place for souls anymore. And this includes the Leader, too.
He has to make himself into a nobody because otherwise he couldn’t merge into the totality. He mythologizes himself. He makes himself larger than life. He becomes more a symbolic figure than a real person. He erases his past. He appears in public only in the midst of the showy spectacle of flaming torches, waving banners, martial music, and ecstatic followers. He struts around like a super–somebody when in truth he’s become a super–nobody.
When you merge into the Totality, you have to surrender your soul. Actually worse than that, you have to immolate it. And this is…
A profound act against yourself.
So it’s no wonder rage erupts—unblinking, uncontrollable rage. And it becomes self–reinforcing. The more you rage, the more hopeless and helpless you feel. But you won’t let yourself be conscious of that reality. Instead…
You declare that your rage is your salvation.
You then get so locked into nihilism that you become an implacable patriot of death.
And you become rabidly evangelical. Because surrendering to death is such a terrible thing to do to yourself you have to keep the truth about what you are doing unconscious. That’s much harder to do if there are people passionately fighting for nurturance and taking moral responsibility for themselves and their community, and working hard to make things better.
If you’re a nihilist, then people living by nurturance give the lie to the delusions upon which you depend. So those people feel like a threat. And they are in fact a threat, not really to you, but to your nihilism.
So you demand that they join you, because you can’t tolerate their independence and their moral way of life.
And anyone who refuses, well…
You get to hate them and hurt them.
And feel perfectly righteous.
If this Death Tribe is so very terrible, why are so many people flocking to it?
It’s because of what I call…
The Big Suck.
Mass merging is, produces in us tribal humans…
The supreme endorphin high of belonging.
And belonging has always been our primary need.
Which is why merging is compelling on such a deep, primal, ancient level.
So here we are in a time when masses of people are scared to death. And scared into death.
And the tribal rule of thumb is this…
When scared, when in danger regress deeper into your tribal nature.
This is what has worked best for us in the past. There’s a paradox operating here…
Belonging to our tribe has always been more important to us than survival.
Because for most of our history, tribal belonging has been the first requirement for survival.
But now, in our present circumstances…
What feels best to us is what’s worst for us.
And there’s a contradiction here. Mass nihilism, is a regression into the feeling of tribalism, but it’s also a radical departure from traditional tribalism.
First, there’s no way we can go back to life in small bands and relatively small tribes. There are just too many of us now.
Second, the traditional tribe was at least good for the members of the tribe. It was good for survival. Within the tribe there was nurturance.
But the Death Tribe is…
Empty of nurturance.
And…
It has no interest in survival.
It couldn’t be deeper in despair.
Nihilism means…
You absolutely do not feel for yourself.
And…
You absolutely do not fight for yourself.
So mass nihilism is the exact opposite of the mission to upgrade love.
And the nihilists are not even playing defense. They’ve surrendered to despair.
By contrast, those of us engaged in the upgrade mission are playing the fiercest offense there is.
While the nihilists have turned themselves into moral nobodies, we’ve turned ourselves into…
Remarkable moral somebodies.
Vigorous and passionate.
In the final chapter of the human story, instead of creating a new kind of tribe that serves death, we’re creating the kind of love that serves life like never before.
