Hey, I’m just askin'...
Are nazis the high-fructose corn syrup of substack?
Questions cut like swords, they can be used to dice problems into pieces, or shatter homes and hearts.
“She looks tired” is an opinion. “Don’t you think she looks tired?” is a CRISIS. There’s no winner in the wake of those words.
Consider this headline, “Do gummy vitamins actually do anything — or are they just candy?”
If you click on the link, you don’t even have to read the article, asked and answered:
This is from The Atlantic — an organization that does significant reporting, which is very expensive, so they pay for it by asking “does Substack have a nazi problem?” with a link to an article headlined “Substack Has a Nazi Problem.”
Does The Atlantic actually do journalism, or is it just clickbait?
Please, forgive me for putting them in the subject place of their own game: I subscribe to The Atlantic, I mean them no harm. It is clear that they, like all the other surviving journalism-turned-newsy-info-tainment enterprises, contain multitudes — like Substack does, or a gummy vitamin. Perhaps they must have many faces to survive. Perhaps we all must.
No one taking gummy vitamins is particularly interested in interrogating whether sugar content undermines health value or squishiness compromises shelf life — this is classic “thing you think is good might actually be bad!” madlibs brainstorming where the solution is “people like gummy vitamins” (beat) “but what if they’re just candy?”
What if your favorite chicken sandwich is made by homophobes? What if the way the chickens are killed is cruel? And the chicken processing workers are being exploited? And the way the chickens are raised poisons the earth?
So you can’t eat Chick fil-a anymore, and you can’t eat Nutella, and how dare you buy… actually, the more specific I get here the more I’m going to lose my readers because all of the claims against all of these companies are true, just as the claim that gummy vitamins are candy is true, and you, dear reader, are perfectly in the right to refuse to participate economically with any company for any product because your values do not align with the product or the owners or their effects on the wider world. Buying that (reportedly amazing) yarn from Hobby Lobby does mean some people who are actively undermining women’s reproductive health will get money. All I would ask is that you write me an article about a politically-safe source for making baby-soft woolens.
Ah, but an article about the best vitamins — with the lowest sugar content and the longest shelf life — will not drive clicks and shares. The algorithms have spoken and they only speak one language: the language is called Grievance. In Grievance, the standard mode of speaking takes the form of a question:
Are gummy vitamins really just candy? Will your house be out of style in 30 years? Does everyone’s spouse have such bad breath? Are kids supposed to be this dumb? Is marriage really just prostitution? Democracy: yeah, but is it worth the hassle? Time: does it heal all wounds or just let them get infected? Love: real or a hormonal imbalance — experts can’t agree. Planet Earth: wondrous blue oasis of life, or flea-bitten sweaty armpit of the stars?
The Manchurian Candidate (1962) remains one of the greatest films ever made. In it, James Gregory plays a Joseph McCarthy-like anti-communist crusader who is being managed by his wife, a role performed with legendary resonance by Angela Lansbury, who is also colluding with the communists… there’s so much more, really, if you haven’t seen this film just stop everything and go find it and watch it. Anyway, Gregory’s character, Senator Johnny Iselin, is a little embarrassed because his wife keeps telling him to change the number, in his public declarations, of communists in the Department of Defense, and the boys in the cloakroom are ribbing him about it.
Sen Iselin: There's just one thing, babe. I'd be a lot happier if we could just settle on the number of Communists I know there are in the Defense Department.
Her answer is not to be underestimated:
Who are they writing about all over this country and what are they saying? "Are there any Communists in the Defense Department?" Of course not. They're saying "How many Communists are there?"
Of course in this story the person raising the question is working with the communists to destroy her own country — but notice the rhetorical craftiness of skipping to “how many” rather than “is there any”: it allows a CRISIS to escalate, rather than be quickly defused by open and reasonable discussion. That’s a bit of human-hacking right there, exploiting a vulnerability in the human network.
I don’t think headline writers are trying to “hurt society” when they aim for virality; nor do I think their practices will change. But they are hacking at us, and we don’t need the stress. For those of us who read this stuff, whose eyes process the information and whose hearts feel the tiny little stabs of CRISIS, I’m here to insist on being human in this post-human world, because humanity implies imperfection. That means we don’t have to get worked up about our vitamins being sub-optimal or the existence of Wrong People on the internet.
Baby, I am so imperfect. The car I drive, the food I eat, the country I live in — all so flawed. But we love our planet and our children and our world not in spite of their flawed humanity but because of it. This chaotic tapestry is the magic of us. The beauty emerges from the conflict in us, and in how we navigate it, the solutions we find, however imperfect, which is the truth of us.
The only thing that is certain is death, because being predictable is, by definition, being dead. If you are alive you are probably annoying someone. That’s what being alive means.
So please, every day do some little thing to make the world a better place within the sphere of your own influence, pet a cat, water a weed, help a kid get across the street, or choose to smile and change the subject when someone you love is Wrong in Person.
And while you are doing that some little thing, deny the voice of Grievance proclaiming that everything you think is good is really bad. Because you know, of course everything’s bad. Duh. But also everything’s good too. This is human life we’re talking about. And a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. And stuff. :D
❤️ (one wasn’t enough)
I petted the golden retriever at my chiropractor's office for 10 minutes before my appointment today. The rest of my day was shit, but that 10 minutes was something truly awesome. For me and Daphne.
P.S. I'm gonna watch that movie. I read Mrs. Calliban recently, at your recommendation. Loved it.