This is going to sound bad: My wife works in politics, and occasionally, I tag along with her to fancy events where local politicians are gladhanding with donors and constituents. I sometimes go to activist events where fairly powerful people show up to speak and listen to what we have to say. And there’s one thing that always crosses my mind:

I got in here and NO ONE patted me down… It’s crazy there aren’t more political assassinations in America.

I know! I know! I know this puts me immediately on a Secret Service list! I am fully prepared to answer their questions!

BUT. But! Security in most democratic forums is virtually nonexistent, even though those forums frequently get heated. The only people who really get a lot of security are high-level executives like the Governor or people with specific threats against them. And I know that a lot of the security that does happen is happening in the background, possibly with truly horrific invasive technologies.

BUT. But! Most public officials in America are fully out in the open, subject to their public. And given this fact, violence against them is shockingly infrequent — you can remember horrific instances like Gabby Giffords (2011), the Congressional baseball shootings (2017), and of course, the January 6th riots (2021), and there’s no minimizing just how bad those moments are.

BUT. But! There are so many tense political situations, meetings, and forums across the country on a daily basis that the fact that you can remember specific instances of violence is actually astounding. Because what it means is that humans — worse still, Americans — are shockingly civil and restrained, even when it comes to the stuff that fires them up the most.

This is so counter to the narrative about America and about humanity as a whole that we all hear on a daily basis that our minds almost have no choice but to reject it. Because to accept it, we’d have to consider the possibility: humans are actually generally pretty cool.

When misanthropy is cool

(Misanthropy, if you are confused, is not the condition in which one turns into a wolf come the full moon. You are thinking of lycanthropy. Do not worry about it, literally all of us have made that mistake. Lycanthropy is cool, and I do not wish to say otherwise.)

Misanthropy is the hatred of humans, and it is one of the most accepted, pervasive attitudes in modern society. This is because the alternative, believing that humans are basically good, is widely seen as being incredibly naive and “cringe.”

The attitude is pervasive enough that when the Marvel movie Avengers: Infinity War came out, literally hundreds of thousands of people joined a group on Reddit titled “Thanos Did Nothing Wrong.”

Thanos, if you haven’t seen the series, is the genocidal villain who murders literally half of all life in the universe because he’s worried about overpopulation.

Social media is rife with this attitude, that humanity is a disease, though the inevitable outgrowth of that attitude — that we should cure the disease, and all join the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement — is less frequently spoken.

It is understandable that we would fall prey to this type of thinking — we’ve all experienced people being awful, probably in our very recent past. But there is a logical jump that needs to be made between someone behaved like a dick and someone is a dick, and it’s a jump that usually requires us to abandon any sort of complexity and understanding in our thinking. The bigger jump that many of us then make, that all people are dicks, is an insane jump, one that requires that we completely ignore all of the stuff that never goes wrong in our daily lives.

I’ve discussed the negativity bias on this newsletter before: it’s our cognitive tendency to pay more attention to negative events than positive events. If you spend any time posting on social media, you likely have extremely vivid memories of negative comments you’ve gotten, but forget all the times people told you that you were great. But if you ran the data — all the likes, hearts, “you’re so great” comments you’d received vs. the bad ones, I can pretty much guarantee the positive would outweigh the negative.

Our problem is that the negative stuff stands out in our minds as being the most significant, and so we extrapolate small data points (“that waiter was a dick to me,”) into enormous, inflexible worldviews (“all people suck”).

And when we have a worldview that’s that negative, it triggers another cognitive bias: the confirmation bias. This is when we give more weight to data that supports our worldview than we do to data that refutes it.

All of that colludes to make us congenitally miserable, anxious people who can only see a world that’s decaying, and never see the better world that might be growing out of that decay.

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People are actually usually good

Break down all of your daily interactions. With your family, with the service industry people you deal with, with your customers, your coworkers, your boss, your neighbors, and your friends. How many of them are altogether negative?

My hunch is that most of them are pleasant, or at the very least are neutral. The reason for this hunch is that, on the whole, I spend very little of my day in a triggered fight-or-flight state. I would remember if I did. But in reality, in spite of all of the terrible things happening in our world right now, teachers are still showing up to their jobs en masse and teaching our kids, in spite of dogshit working conditions and bad pay. Trash is still being picked up by trash collectors. Potholes are still getting filled in. Food is still ending up on our shelves. Poop is still leaving your toilet and entering the sewer.

And when these things don’t happen, it’s often because of something outside the realm of the question “do humans suck?”

If your teachers don’t show up, perhaps they are striking for a raise and benefits they fully deserve. If your potholes aren’t getting filled, maybe it’s not because people don’t want to take care of their community, but they live in a system that discourages any sort of community. That’s not people sucking. That’s capitalism sucking.

And if you are getting shouted at, maybe it’s not because that person sucks! Maybe that person shouting at you is in the midst of a mental health crisis that came as a result of extended societal neglect! Maybe they’ve lost a home, maybe they’re going bankrupt, maybe they’re being abused, maybe they can’t afford health insurance, and you bumping into them was the only outlet for frustration available amid a day of constant systemic frustrations with no easy person to yell at on the other end!

None of this is pleasant, and it doesn’t say great things about the people who run our society. But that doesn’t have to be extended to people overall. People keep life moving, keep it livable, keep it fun and interesting, on a constant basis. If they didn’t, life would actually look like those dystopian movies we love so much, where everyone is stabbing each other in the back.

A world like that, a world where people suck, is easy. It’s simple. A world where people are trying hard but are struggling, where they are good but regularly have to deal with frustration, trauma, and structural oppression, is a world with more complexity and nuance. But embracing that complexity, we can start believing in each other, and we can start building something better.

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