Our societies are made of terrible, terrible people. They are not good people. The average person in our society doesn’t care about anything. Anything good or beautiful or true. Nothing matters to them. Only stupid and shallow and false things. The average person appears to have no sense of guilt, shame, no conscience, no morals, no ethics, no values, no decency, no civilization. We live in societies made of profound, pervasive, relentless ugliness, which nothing, it seems, can move an inch.

 

2020 Revealed The Truth Of Our Societies — And It Was Ugly

 

The Year We Weren’t All in It Together

Hooray!! The worst year in modern history is finally over. We survived. Or did we?

Let me explain why I ask that strange question. When I think of 2020, I think of two moments. The first was near the beginning of the pandemic. People cheered for doctors and sang from balconies. A spirit of sudden fierce determination prevailed. “We’re in this together!” people said. The second moment I think of was seven months later. 300,000 Americans were dead. Britain had bred a deadly new strain of the virus. The West was in tatters. And just a handful of countries had actually pulled together to fight the virus, all in the East. And so I’ll always think of 2020 as the year we weren’t all in it together.

2020 was a depressing, miserable, grim year. But not just because of the pandemic. Rather, because the pandemic was a kind of eraser. It rubbed away all the artifice and gloss and politesse we play games with. And revealed the truth of us. Of our societies. It was a profoundly ugly truth.

And now here we are. We know something about us that we didn’t quite know before. If we suspected it, as many of us did, now there is stark and vivid proof. Nobody can deny the pandemic’s grim revelation.

 Our societies are made of terrible, terrible people. They are not good people. The average person in our society doesn’t care about anything. Anything good or beautiful or true. Nothing matters to them. Only stupid and shallow and false things. The average person appears to have no sense of guilt, shame, no conscience, no morals, no ethics, no values, no decency, no civilization. We live in societies made of profound, pervasive, relentless ugliness, which nothing, it seems, can move an inch.

Not even mass death. Our societies looked at mass death, shrugged, and, after they clapped for the doctors for all of five minutes, didn’t change one bit. The irresponsibility and negligence and amorality of the average remorseless fool went on to cause an even greater wave of mass death. And what did they feel? Remorse? Grief? Sorrow? Not a thing. They didn’t feel anything.

The pandemic scrubbed away the polite fictions that we have accepted for far too long; our societies are “flawed,” every society is “imperfect,” we are “doing the best we can,” and so on. It showed us, without a shadow of a doubt, that our societies are made of sociopaths.

Take America, as an example. The world has long suspected that American are, well, idiots. Backwards, brutal, violent, greedy, selfish. More inclined to shoot a gun than read a book. Only interested in money, sex, fame, and power. Now, the world would say that, and once in a while, someone like me would object, and say, “No, Americans are just misunderstood. They’ve been abused by their society, you see.” Maybe that’s true, but…does it matter? Just because you’ve been abused doesn’t give absolve you from being an abuser yourself.

Americans didn’t care. As a society, as a country. About mass death. About turning a potential pandemic into a lethal, historic tidal wave of death. They flatly refused to change their behaviour one iota. Sure, maybe you did, but America as a society was completely incapable of change — right down to even wearing a mask or staying home for a month.

The pandemic revealed that Americans are exactly who the world thought they were. Violent, selfish, ignorant, deceitful, stupid — and then some. It’s one terrible thing to bomb half the world. But to kill hundreds of thousands of people in your own country…because you don’t believe a pandemic exists, or it isn’t that serious? And yet that is what Americans, as a society did. They killed each other. They proceeded to create a nightmarish Lord of the Flies in real life, a social Darwinian engine of death. The most vulnerable in society — the elderly, the poor, the frail, the sick — were picked off one by one. And nobody much cared. Sure, some brave doctors and nursed did. But they are the exception who proves the rule. Most of America, society, culture, economy, people, shrugged.

The pandemic revealed that our societies are largely made of sociopaths. Idiots seems to me to be, on reflection, far too kind a word. Sociopaths, I think, fits better. They are people who feel nothing for suffering, or worse, revel in it. People who have a kind of supremacy complex. People who are only ever calculating how to win some kind of game, defeat someone else, acquire and possess more. People to whom others are means to ends, not ends in themselves. People who value things over lives. People who, because they are incapable of having genuine emotions, are incapable of having any kinds of genuine relationships, either.

What happens when you put enough people like that in a society? What happens when a society crosses the threshold into being made of a majority of sociopaths? 2020 does. The pandemic never needed to be remotely so bad. If America had acted like South Korea, just 4000 people would have died. If the UK had acted like South Korea, just 850 people would have died.

But those simple statistics still aren’t part of the general awareness. Why not? What does that say? The sociopaths have warped the rest of us too. They have made it seem normal — if not outright desirable — to have their values: indifference, selfishness, materialism, domination, cruelty, violence, emotionlessness, except to fly into rage when all that is questioned. We are considered the strange ones for being repelled and disgusted by what is a now openly sociopathic attitude and stance towards life, society, politics, economics.

If you needed evidence that the sociopaths have won, by the way — what, 350,000 people needlessly dead wasn’t enough? — it’s there in abundance. Sociopaths can’t have real relationships: our societies are just like that, places of distrust, hostility, suspicions, if not outright enmity. Sociopaths don’t consider anyone else a real person, treat them with dignity, respect, care, concern, which is exactly how we treat one another, investing next to nothing. Sociopaths are like childish narcissists taken to the outermost extreme — what else would you call societies to whom “the economy” matters more than mass death? What good is “an economy” anyways if one its main byproducts is to kill people? There’s no shortage of evidence — in fact, the idea that you “need evidence” for any old obvious observation is itself kind of sociopathic. It says that you can’t simply feel what’s so achingly and painfully simple and true, that you don’t trust anyone else, and so forth.

How did our societies become sociopathic? All those wise old classical European sociology professors who taught me would have smiled darkly, and said: “capitalism.” They would have pointed out that people are just expressing capitalist values. Capitalism, meaning, by the way, Walmart, Google, Amazon — not your little local shop. Capitalism tells us that money, sex, power, and fame are all that matter in life, that acquiring and possessing more of them is the point of life, and the way to get there is to dominate and exploit others.

Capitalism turns us into idiots, slavering for another dollar, hookup, fan, like, follower, even as we dance to the lunatic tune of our own self-destruction. Capitalism is what makes us so selfish, stupid, brutal, violent, that we won’t stay home for a month so that hundreds of thousands can live — because we’ve been conditioned our whole lives long to be good, obedient, stupid little “consumers” and “producers,” but not human beings and citizens and decent, thoughtful, sane, kind people.

You can judge for yourself if Professors Hall and Le Page were right. What I do see, at work in the real world, is this. There is indeed a relationship between how capitalist a society is, and how badly it did in 2020. America is the world’s most capitalist society of all — and it is a total wreck. Britain is the second — and it’s closely behind America, making all its mistakes and then some. Europe is probably third on that list — and it seems to have erred just the same ways America and Britain did.

Still, I think there’s more to the story than just capitalism.

It seems to me that the process of civilisation in our societies is failing. By process of civilization, I mean “what it takes to produce a civilised person.” Civilising a person is very, very hard. It takes multiple institutions from childhood well past adolescence to do it. Schools, universities, clubs, athletics, arts, sciences, media, books, and so forth. The point of these institutions is to inculcate the basic virtues of civilization: from empathy to reason, from kindness to grace, from selflessness to courage.

Our process of civilisation does not seem to be working anymore. Those institutions and systems are not working anymore. Our societies are not producing civilised people anymore. They are producing sociopaths. Again, that’s not “my opinion.” It’s what 2020 revealed. The average person doesn’t care about anything anymore. They are not good people, which is what the whole point of the process of civilisation is: to produce people who are at least good enough that they don’t make a society melt down by way of indifference, stupidity, violence, brutality, and ignorance. And yet all that is just what 2020 revealed ours are all too capable of, and in fact did.

The average person in our societies appears now to be someone who is a) perfectly happy with mass death, b) emotionally indifferent to it, c) angry that they don’t get their own infantile way, d) resentful that any imposition on them was made at all, and therefore, e) unwilling to change their behaviour in any way whatsoever, of their own volition. All that is the antithesis of what it means to be civilized. It is the diametrical opposite of things like “having a conscience,” “being able to reason for the common good,” “being able to self-govern for the public good,” “being able to be a decent and thoughtful human being.”

The average person in our society seems to have experienced a kind of profound moral, emotional, and intellectual corrosion. Social: they don’t care about anyone but themselves. Moral: they don’t seem to be able to even see themselves as anything but what they’ve been conditioned to be, a good little “producer” and “consumer,” not a member of a collective, a family, a social group, a larger organic body with a higher set of meanings. Emotional: they don’t seem able to care about anything real anymore at all, to the point that even mass death doesn’t move them. And intellectual: they lack the ability to think critically about what all those deficits might say about them, add up to as a society, why the whole of human civilisation has been a story of trying to grow beyond such a weakened, corroded, empty self.

Where did that corrosion come from? Was it capitalism, like my Professors would have said? Or is there something deeper at work? Is it empire’s revenge? Is it the karma of slavery and subjugation? Are we just stupid people who don’t read enough, and spend too much on things we don’t need, and always have been?

You will have to tell me. I imagine we will both be spending a great deal of thinking about it this year.

Because the year 2020 was so depressing, grim, and relentless wasn’t just the natural calamity. It was that calamity revealed the truth about us. And that truth was ugly. We are stupid, violent, brutal, indifferent, careless. Enough of us, anyways, to make our societies that way, period. We added catastrophe to calamity. After we clapped, we soon enough stopped caring at all. “Hey! I need to go to the bar! My kid has to go to school! I need to go shopping!!” Good little consumers and producers, to the bitter, shocking end. But where did the human beings in us go, then?

And if you are a sane, thoughtful, decent person — well, how do you live in such a place? A dehumanized, violent, brutal, idiotic one? How do you live in a society of sociopaths? Isn’t it an oxymoron to begin with? Where do you go from there? How do you coexist with the kind of remorseless idiots who don’t care about causing death on the scale of a World War? How do you not shudder in contempt and disgrace every time you see them — which is all the time? But where does that leave you?

That, my friends, is the question for 2021.

The pandemic revealed that our societies have a total lack of empathy, goodness, decency, and a stunning capacity for indifference, malice, carelessness, ignorance, selfishness, violence, stupidity.

How do you live in a society like that?

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