Comprehending those who are broken
Human nature doesn’t change. As a species, we haven’t gotten better over time. We still need what we have always needed: relief from the terror of being fragile and negligible in an endless enveloping universe full of strange and dangerous things that are indifferent to our sentience. When it comes down to it, we’re all scared of the long empty.
Maybe what we need is unnameable, but that hasn’t stopped us from coming up with a lot of names for it, and devising oddly specific prescriptive arguments about how to go about approaching it. Some of the rituals we come up with to appease our personal gods look like the result of one of B.F. Skinner’s crueler experiments in operant conditioning. Maybe someone’s cave-dwelling ancestor stepped on a sweetgum ball just as a storm abated, so now we all hop on one foot to summon the sun. (But careful, one man’s superstition is another’s cultural heritage, and the very least we should be is kind to one another.)
To cast it in secular terms, we all need love and meaning. Or at least one of the two. Maybe if you have one the other naturally follows.
One of the ways we break is not getting enough love or meaning. Some people get strangled in the cradle by a lack of love, some people stare so long into the abyss they find it impossible to care about anything or anyone. Some people have issues with brain chemistry, or they poison themselves. It is not a big leap from creating in your head a credible, useful model of reality based on the best evidence at your disposal and believing in dragons and a flat earth.
Madness is one of the risks we run out here on this frontier, adrift in space.
Madness in moderation isn’t all bad or uncommon. It can make you charismatic and funny—a touch of it is probably necessary to keep you sane in this absurd universe. Because if you do the work, you’ll have to confront some dark existential stuff. You might come to the conclusion the cosmos is cold and confusing. Certainty is precluded by countless variables ricocheting off each other. You might even doubt the existence of what you need to be whole and happy. “Love” and “meaning” might just be words.
Walker Percy had a way of looking at this dilemma; he thought we ought to choose to be what he called an “ex-suicide.” You have the option of being dead, you will be dead a long time. So why not experience the absurd while you have a chance? The question isn’t whether life is worth living, it’s how to live, hour to hour.
It takes an act of faith. You have to believe in love and meaning. Or believe in nothing.
Believing in nothing is easier. You can organize your life around expedient rationalizations, you can justify the Ayn Randish pursuit of your own self-interest, prioritize your creature comforts above the suffering of strangers. Because none of it really matters. It’s just a game, and the ones who die with the biggest houses and the most commas in their financial statements win.
In that kind of world, it’s OK to choose sides and let the Reds and Blues go at it with hammers and alternative facts. In that world, success justifies whatever it takes to achieve.
Most people probably don’t get all that thinky about it. Lots of people base their beliefs on things other than the best evidence. This has always been the case, because critical thinking isn’t as easy or as much fun as wishful imagining. A lot of us long for someone to tell us what to believe and cling to the most comforting scenario that’s presented. This is how gurus and demagogues build constituencies— they posit versions of reality that some people would very much like to be so. Human nature doesn’t change, but our technology gets better, and it warps us in serious ways. We develop new syndromes; we scorch our eyes on screens and suffer from repetitive motion disorders caused by digital time-wasting. It used to be that the screams of the broken were only noticed by those proximate to their suffering. Now we’ve given every broken, wounded soul access to a worldwide audience.
I don’t think any intellectually honest person could possibly believe Roseanne Barr is a healthy, happy person who has helpful things to say about the way we ought to live. Most people who consider her history of bizarre incidents and attention-seeking stunts would agree that she’s broken in a very sad way.
Maybe this brokenness has in some ways made her a better artist, maybe her drive for our attention illuminates some murky but undeniably human impulse. But I see her acting out and don’t think she’s brave or daring or iconoclastic; it seems that she’s lost the thread. I can’t imagine that she likes herself very much.
In sort of the same way, a person who behaves the way our president behaves can’t be a healthy, happy person who has helpful things to say about the way we ought to live either. I don’t believe French Hill or Tom Cotton or Asa Hutchinson think he’s a worthy person. I don’t think they respect him or think he’s good for the country.
I do think they fear him. And they fear the roughly 20 percent of this country’s population who have embraced Trumpism out of their own fear.
There are a lot of scared people out there. There always have been. Human nature doesn’t change. pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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