how american mainstream media eats away at our empathy

When anything done in good faith and boring competence always get a negative spin, why bother trying to help or inform anyone?

Americans tend to be a weirdly optimistic and nihilistic bunch at the same time. We’re convinced that things will eventually be better. But also that nothing will really change, and every politician is absolutely useless and doesn’t care about us. In times of need, our government will move mountains to save us. But it’s also a huge, useless waste of our money filled with incompetent goobers only interested in self-enrichment. We are one country, one people, and anyone can become an American. But it’s every person for themselves and no one owes you anything.

In other words, modern day American political ideology is a mishmash of oxymorons spoken with absolute conviction. And few institutions do more to reinforce this while doing tremendous damage to our social framework than our mainstream media. Its addiction to negative spin to get clicks and eyeballs, absolute, total moral apathy and insistence on finding two sides to any story, even if one of the sides is fundamentally wrong or actively malicious, encourages us to see the absolute worst in each other at all times, and feel as if nothing is certain.

As a result, we’re constantly stressed out, see the world around us as collapsing, all efforts to fix it as hopeless, struggling to find objective reality as our information tools now lie to us for profit, so as we hear more and more unhinged tales, terrible opinions, and see corruption and sociopathic excess laughed off by millionaire pundits, it starts to sap our empathy. And once that happens, societies are at risk of splintering as its members either can’t cooperate, or refuse to.

If helping others is for losers and suckers, if everything you try is “bad, actually” or is not good enough, if when you talk about giving people opportunities or making things more fair there’s an instant backlash, if the very people you want to help after they ask for your help only spit in your face, yell slurs at you, make death threats, and wish for horrible things to happen to you while rallying around hate-mongering sociopaths… What’s the point in caring anymore? Why even bother to help? Why not just sit back with a stiff drink and watch the world crumble?

Of course, that’s a bit of an oversimplification. A few experts will argue that splintering into groups that have polarized, radical views can be thought of as a form of empathy as we defend those close to us, right or wrong, following our tribal instincts. Some say that instead of being empathetic, we should be compassionate. In other essays, social scientists say that too much empathy can leave us too paralyzed to make difficult but necessary decisions.

Researchers who specialize in group psychology, disinformation, and propaganda are ringing the alarm bells as every possible sign of deep societal trouble is now going off at the same time. A country that couldn’t unite over a common enemy like COVID, an apolitical, faceless virus which is impossible to debate about the economy, or tax cuts, or its thoughts on education and history, has a dire problem. The last pandemic was a force of nature, an equal opportunity killer and maimer. That more often than not we fought each other instead of the virus, is beyond disconcerting.

Now, we can debate whether it’s the place of scientists or popular science writers to wade into politics. But social science is inherently political. It’s quite literally the study of how we work in groups and organize to survive, create culture, and carry ourselves forward. To not comment on something as basic as “our country refuses to work with itself during a crisis, or solve real problems” requires either extreme privilege, blissful ignorance, or craven cowardice, or some unholy mix of all three.

And one thing that is not in dispute is that functional societies believe that “everyone for themselves” is a terrible idea and any civilization worth its salt helps those down on their luck or who haven’t been born with money, access, and connections so they can also have the means and desire to contribute to the greater good. When those in power refer to helping the unfortunate improve their lot in life as “giving handouts to lazy bums” and attack all public works and acts of goodwill as a waste, you know the society in question is in trouble. And things get even worse when public discourse in said society fails to push back on this parasitic and sociopathic rhetoric.

how to perpetually poison the well

There are two rules of American legacy media. The first is that thanks to 40 years of relentlessly working the refs, any political development must be framed around GOP approved talking points. This is why Trump’s nonsensical rants are edited and cut to make him sound somewhat coherent, and interviews with Biden and Harris tended to circle around hard hitting questions like “Donald Trump said you’re stupid and wear ugly shoes. What’s your reaction to that?”

Republicans are good at the border, the economy, and the military, Democrats are bad at everything, and if you thought that they did something good, just wait, you silly little libtard, the NYT politics desk will explain to you why lowering inflation and soaring job numbers are actually terrible news. No matter what Democrats actually say during an appearance on the campaign trail, they’re running on trans woke DEI CRT LGBT-BBQ, while no matter what comes out of a Republican’s mouth, their campaign is all about freedom, America, mom, baseball, and apple pie.

That is The Official Narrative™ and it is not to be questioned by the unwashed rabble who don’t understand how difficult it is to be a journalist. If you disagree with any of that, then you must be a sweaty conspiracy theorist in their underwear from mom’s basement. At least according to NYT’s editors on social media. To do otherwise is to risk rabid shrieks of “bias,” although said shrieks will come anyway. And yes, trust me, all of this is relevant and we will circle back to it shortly.

But first, let’s talk about the other important rule. Every American voter is the second coming of both Einstein and Newton, and when they cast a vote, they sit down at their kitchen tables with a custom quantum supercomputer which uses algorithms that can summon Laplace’s Demon to calculate every possible outcome of every mark on their ballot. Whatever their decision is cannot be questioned. If you don’t understand why they voted the way they did, you cannot criticize their choice. The only explanation is that you simply can’t comprehend their infinite wisdom.

By the way, any important conversation or decision always happens at a kitchen table according to politicians. Dining room? Doesn’t count. You live in a studio? Ha! Get out of here. It’s impossible for you to have a serious discussion. Are you debating current events and their impact on your wallet in your living room? Get your ass in that kitchen immediately. These are kitchen table issues so use the appropriate forum, dammit!

In the meanwhile, actual voters think that Obamacare and the ACA are two completely different things and they can’t wait to get rid of that stupid Obamacare bullshit to just get their ACA. They believe that foreign aid is a quarter of the federal budget when it’s around 1% or so. They think NASA commands another quarter of the budget, when in fact, it hovers around half a percent. And every year at tax season, they demand a full breakdown of how their tax money is being spent only to diligently ignore a few million charts showing where every dollar goes.

For all the rending of clothes and gnashing of teeth about President Musk and his Itty Bitty Gooner Squad dismantling the government, the number of Americans who think that Washington DC steals $6.8 trillion a year, pays out two million freeloaders in their pajamas $200,000 for nothing, then sets the rest on fire is far from trivial. They really do believe that Republicans are “finally fixing this stupid mess” through the power of bald eagle screeching and… I don’t know, mom’s apple pie served on an AR-15?

And yes, I’m trying to make all this at least somewhat amusing to lighten the mood a bit, but this is an untenable situation. A democracy — and yes, a republic is a type of democracy, like Honey Nut Cheerios is a type of cereal — relies on informed, caring, empathetic voters to make decisions for the good of an entire society over the long term. As the Greek proverb goes, civilization grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they’ll never sit.

Our old men? They’re selling the seeds for golf clubs and pickleball lessons. When a public is treated as both simpletons with the attention span of a goldfish with ADHD and fed red-baiting anachronisms and rage bait instead of actual news, but also as transcendent, infallible oracles whose words we may not understand but must follow, bad things were guaranteed to happen. Things that require empathetic adults in the room to fix.

But these adults have now hit levels of caretaker fatigue that were once thought to be utterly impossible, and are so out of fucks, the ones they gave over the past year were borrowed as they’ve ran out of their own long ago…

the new red scare, same as the old red scare

What’s happening today in American government has a precedent. Not only that, but we’re technically doing the same thing Republicans did in 1953. After painting pretty much the entire bureaucracy as communists trying to destroy the nation with FDR’s New Deal — because as we all know, first, you start caring for your fellow Americans, next you’re in a collective farm after the government takes everything you own — the party’s loudest and most regressive demagogues unleashed an ideological purge of the rank and file that affected the nation for decades.

That’s right folks, McCarthyism is back, and it’s not even remotely veiled. It’s just that instead of “are you a communist spy?” the question that the next House Un-American Activities Committee will ask is “do you support DEI initiatives?” before declaring that the very notion that someone other than a late-middle aged white man can be in any position of expertise or authority is “Cultural Marxism.”

Meanwhile, rational adults will look at retrograde reprobates who never got over the end of Jim Crow and segregation re-litigating the 1960s and asking how this helps us deal with modern problems. As in the ones from this century. Like more intense and frequent storms from climate change, antibiotic resistance, losing pace with science and technology worldwide, or woefully outdated infrastructure and urban planning.

They will listen to the very people who elected said retrograde reprobates being left without a pot to piss in while the billionaires they claim to hate and want to see paying their fair share get more tax cuts, and how they’re losing the family farm, how their life is getting more and more expensive with no relief, and how it feels as if the world has left these people behind and ignores them.

The adults will then offer to help. To enact far reaching programs break up our current oligopolies, forcing businesses to compete and lower prices. To build more housing to lower the insane, and yet still rising costs of putting a roof over one’s head. To expand the current public healthcare system to everyone, with private health insurance being an extra add-on or benefit, like in virtually every other wealthy, industrialized nation. To build more public transit to improve mobility. To invest more in education, science, and technology other than predatory middleman apps. To clean up air and water, and launch lucrative, job-creating green energy projects.

And the pundits in the media will sneer at these adults with a dyspeptic grimace and accuse them of being utopian dreamers untethered from reality at best, claim they’re trying to destroy the country at worst, or just laugh in their faces. Meanwhile, the very people they’re trying to help turn to them and say “fuck you commie scum, I hope you die and we can use your grave for target practice.”

Repeat this for about a quarter century as things continue to get worse and worse for the people actively making the choice to hurt themselves and the rest of the country in what increasingly seems like a murder-suicide pact, and you can probably see why as of late, the adults in the room are no longer wiping the spittle off their faces to still roll up their sleeves and help where they can anyway. Instead, their response — to the shock of millions — is “okay, cool, fuck you too, don’t call me when you’re finding out after fucking around.”

That is the sound of their empathy dying. Because while we tend of think of people as either being kind and empathetic or not, empathy is a finite resource. All of us have a different degree of empathy and compassion we can offer, but can only give so much until we’re burnt down to a cinder and simply cannot bring ourself to care anymore. If we’re being abused while we do it, there’s even less empathy we can muster.

At some point, we are no longer trying to help our fellow citizens, we are enabling our own abusers who believe that their rightful place in the universe is with their boot on the necks of anyone not exactly like them or actively groveling before them. We have realized as a society that we have been at this point for a very long time now. And we no longer want to be enablers.

[ main and secondary graphic: Red Scare by Liam Francis Walsh ]