Is it worse to be cruel, or to be flippant?
I’ve been on a masochistic kick lately, replying to people online with bad intentions and no desire for understanding, on a range of topics from housing affordability amidst “digital nomadism,” to the supposedly recent popularity of “girl-fronted bands,” to the inhumane, enraging, and downright scary disappearing of students, parents, and lawful citizens by the United States government. Each time I read another update or comment I’m reminded the cruelty is the point.1 It makes being a reluctant optimist, a hope-is-the-only-thing-left-ist, quite difficult. And if it seems contradictory to proclaim these things while shutting out a whole section of the commentariat as beyond help, well.
To the person who claims they’ll become part of the “remote tech-worker to moving to Mexico pipeline,” first off, good luck in this economy, secondly ew, what the fuck, and thirdly, why—when I mention that Mexico City in particular has been dealing with a massive affordability crisis because of people doing just that—is the response “well, displacement is going to happen no matter what”?
To my guy doubling down on the idea that “girl-fronted bands seem to be the trend nowadays”—I should know better responding in earnest on the hardcore subreddit, and I should know that an imbecile willing to put his kindergarten-level misogyny on full display like that won’t care for indignant takedowns—women (notice I say WOMEN…not girls…as if we would ever call any band boy- or even man-fronted) have been telling everyone for years that their gender does not a music genre make, and also, you’re extra stupid because “girl-fronted” bands are the ones making the best and most interesting punk music these days and probably always. You can have your derivative-ass chugga chugga guitar and sweaty bald frontman telling everyone they’re bitches and they need to MOVE THE FUCK UP AND OPEN THE PIT. I will gladly listen to Initiate, Gouge Away, No Right, Primal Rite (I could go on!) in your stead.
And to the lady in the New York Times comment section (what a cesspool, again, I should know better) who responded to one of several stories in the collective held-breath week of discovering Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s wrongful deportation and incarceration in a terrorist prison in El Salvador with “If you knowingly broke the law, how can you be innocent?”: first off, applause to you for so knowingly missing the point, and second, I hope a thousand cuts find themselves suddenly on the webbing between your fingers, rendering you unable to hold a pen comfortably for a minimum of a week (I am available for hexings any day of the week—DM me).
You already know my obsession with the cost versus convenience equation, and how I believe technology encroaching on all aspects of our daily interactions with other people erodes communitarianism and collective ideas of care. We’re all susceptible to techno lifestyle creep: DoorDashing because we’re busy couch- or bed-rotting; Uber or Waymo-ing because the bus is gross and/or has miserable timetables; bypassing a shorter cashier-facilitated queue for a self-checkout lane to avoid small talk (this one’s unrelatable to me because I live near stores where everything including toothpaste and laundry detergent is locked up, and they closed down the self-checkout entirely. I’ll let you hazard a guess as to whether that’s completely unrelated to the neighborhood demographics or not! <3).
These are examples of seeming minor conveniences, things that ostensibly make our lives easier when we’re burnt out or sick, but they also eliminate the possibility of any complicated or non-routinized forms of interaction with anyone: they render other people mere facilitators of obtaining goods and/or services (more than regular degular capitalism already does). I’m socially anxious, I get it—but cringe, awkward, confusing, weird, mundane, surprisingly pleasant—the gamut of social happenings we have with other people, besties and strangers alike, are necessary. We can’t survive as hermits! I’m sorry! The frightening thing is that something so ubiquitous and arguably necessary (for employment, keeping in contact with people, seeking out knowledge) as a phone, an app, a web presence at all, can also completely annihilate our capacity for empathy.
It’s like the argument that’s been helium-buoying since the Fight for 15 movement started: you (this is like a hypothetical/all-encompassing you, not a callout to the progressive bastion that is my dutiful readership) don’t get to simultaneously demean minimum wage-earners as “burger flippers” and demand a drive-thru be open all night. That burger ain’t gonna flip itself, right? That you hate all people more impoverished than you because you falsely believe you’re closer to the billionaire class than them is a personal problem. The fear and/or loathing of all people different than us manifests itself in overt (the dehumanization of homeless people by reducing them to “zombies”) and subtle (accepting the less savory consequences of gentrification because you remain temporarily unimpacted) ways. It’s gross, and the increasing lack of interest in engaging with these uncomfortable truths is grosser.
I am turning 28 this year and have only just started to feel at home in my body and not eternally at odds with myself and knowing how and where I fit in the world. Sometimes it hurts to think it’s taken this long, how many years feel “wasted” in trying to puzzle piece together what makes me tick. Then (here’s the modicum of woo-woo I allow myself) I remember that every day is another opportunity to learn more about how to exist and another piece to add to the puzzle. Also, that I’m a tiny speck in the grand cosmic scheme and this much navel-gazing is quite unbecoming.
Despite my prolonged-into-mid-twenties teenage angst, not to brag, I’ve always understood that you should care about other people without needing an incentive. Even if they’re weird, mean, ugly, addicted to drugs, or a furry. The one caveat is if they’re Smaug-level ghouls who actively trade on amassing more profit than one can logistically run through in a lifetime, while dropping the equivalent of a penny in a Christmas charity bucket, are smug enough to gleefully destroy the Earth, do insane dark magickx to try to live forever, and act as though any of this is aspirational behavior. Being a fervent believer in the false god of Capital is embarrassing and shameful, and antithetical to possessing and utilizing empathy on a societal level.
We exist in a timeline where the self-installed Despot of Gross Excess and wannabe king of tech-assisted breederism calls empathy a weakness. It’s because he’s the biggest wealth-hoarder in the universe and his essence is SO rancid that still no one wants to hang without getting paid. This man, who comes from apartheid profiteering of comically villainous blood-diamonds proportions, was never loved even as a baby because his personality is the worst, and now he’s making it all of our problem. Even Jeffy B, who has now dropped down in the rankings to maybe the third most evil guy in the world, has a female gremlin Eldritch horror who seems to enjoy his company. Katy Perry, proving the flop era is eternal, along with a “crew” of all-women-girlboss-extraordinaires do a bajillion dollar ten-minute space tourism jaunt in order to vaguely understand that (at present) we have one hospitable planet and we should maybe respect it and all of its inhabitants.
bell hooks writes in All About Love:
Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience. In our society we make much of love and say little about fear. Yet we are all terribly afraid most of the time. As a culture we are obsessed with the notion of safety. Yet we do not question why we live in states of extreme anxiety and dread. Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear—against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other.2
I think we (speaking as a leftist, but I also hope for and consider the possibility that this is something that surpasses mere political affiliation, at least abstractly) desperately want to capture and embody a “love ethic” that hooks speaks of—a type of empathy and attention to the needs of others that surpasses simple neighborliness and becomes a genuine culture of caring—along the lines of a sustained mutual aid network amongst our friends and communities rather than a scraggly list of panic-published GoFundMe links.
It feels even more urgent of a project to commit to realizing this ethic in our lifetimes, our immediate futures, because there is no other option. The cruelty is the point and the only antidote is maybe a disgustingly saccharine but crucially real sense of love and care for ourselves, the planet, and the people, plants, and creatures that share it. The thing about resistance and the fight for good being a marathon and not a sprint is deeply annoying but it’s also true.
Approaching people from a place of understanding and care can be terribly difficult, but it continues to be necessary. I don’t like that people appeal to a desire to be on “the right side of history,” if there ever is just one, because that makes empathy a vanity project. History and historiography cannot be reduced to a simple duality of victor and loser, nor can activism be situated as exactly correct one way or another. Praxis can take as many shapes as schools of thought, and what matters is that there is a common goal (how that goal is reached is invariably subject to endless discourse), and that the effort towards those goals are sustainable, inclusive, creative, and fueled as much by rage and indignance as they are by love and joy.
The light of love is always in us, no matter how cold the flame.3
That this was originally written in 2018 and only grows more relevant by the day makes me wanna collapse into a puddle of ennui Nevertheless I Am Persisting.
bell hooks, All About Love (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 93.
Ibid., 68.