I hate the word “deserve” because lord save us all from what we “deserve”, but lately I find it hard to remember that one good person is worth saving, or that most people are just weak, not evil. The world will burn, in war, and famine, and revolution, and climate change and it will burn because we are so contemptible we refuse to do anything to stop it from burning. And maybe that we now includes me, but I’m so very tired of dealing with stupid, cruel, selfish people. Heck, forget selfish, people who won’t even look out after their own self-interest, or even understand what it is.
I fear I’ve come full circle. As a teenager, subject to constant cruelty, I hated humanity. Contemptible. The human love of cruelty was clear to me, the way we encourage it, the way we nurture it, the way we inculate it. The way group dynamics require scapegraces and outsiders, the way most people, to feel good about themselves, like to watch others squirm, how they enjoy tormenting the weak, how they secure their own position in whatever little pack they belong to by showing that someone is below them. They make those people into something less than human, or worse, the truly evil know they’re human and derive pleasure from the ability to inflict and relieve suffering as they choose.
As I grew older, I learned how to defend myself, learned how to make those who would hurt me, hurt instead, so they would find their prey elsewhere, would prove their place in the hierarchy by humiliating someone else. And I learned that some people are good, that some people will do the right thing even when there’s nothing in it for them. I learned, also, that most people are of weak character. In their weakness they will do what they think the group approves of. A few good leaders I saw made of those around them good people, by expecting nothing less. Oh, the pettiness never goes away, but the deeper cruelty was not tolerated, and it was not tolerated by even the lower ranking members of the packs, for so they had been trained, so it was expected, and they knew that disapproval would come from the pack, and the Alpha, for cruelty, not kindness.
But we have selected, to rule our societies, sociopaths at best and psychopaths at worse. They have contempt for those they rule, do not see them as even truly human, and enjoy hurting them. They feel tough when they make the hard decisions, which are somehow always hard for others, but never for themselves. They encourage cruelty in society, from the ground up, and routinely subject the population to humiliating surveillance, force them to abase themselves to the least appearance of authority, whether legitimately used or not, and condone murder and torture and routine humiliation. They don’t do these things to themselves, of course, the rich, for example, don’t get groped in airports, but they routinely do it to those below them.
And in so doing they teach those below them, to do it to those below them, and below them, and below them, and so on. The sickness comes from the top, a rotten poison which has altered the character of nations. But it came from the bottom, first. It came from a population who became lazy and complacent and thought they had rights they didn’t have to guard like a dog with a bone; who thought they could just live their lives and leave politics to other people except for pulling a lever or marking a ballot every four years. It came from people who felt “I’ve got mine, who cares what happens to anyone I don’t know?” Unable to see themselves in others for longer than the gossamer blink of an eye, they were also unable to understand that what was done to others would also be done to them.
We have become contemptible. Our leaders, perhaps, are most contemptible of all, but we continue to consent. Oh perhaps polls might say we’re not happy, but who cares what polls say? We do nothing, we let our leaders do as they will, and we take on their mores, becoming cruel and debased and uncaring of what happens to our fellows, not even the care of enlightened self interest, the clear understanding that what is done unfairly, cruely, to someone else, could, probably will, one day be done to us. We pretend to care most about our children, making such a fetish of it that allowing children to roam unattended is virtually treated as a crime, yet we are creating a world in which they will suffer, unimaginably, a world in which hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of our grandchildren will die.
Lord save us from what we deserve, because what we deserve is what’s going to happen: war and revolution, famine and drought, climate change on a scale we truly don’t understand.