You wake up and choose not to hurt someone. Most days this choice isn’t conscious—you don’t feel yourself deciding not to hurt yourself, the person you sleep beside, your kids, your pets—but you do choose. And this choice, this refusal, is the first meaningful bit of information you have about yourself each day. You are one who chooses not to hurt another; you are one who refuses violence.
This meaningful refusal can define us. We can live and build our lives around it, like homes built around a central hearth. But because of the technology we use daily and the structure of the organizations which limit our choices (our governments and corporations) we forget this refusal. Sometimes within minutes of waking up we believe instead that we are stupid, cruel, and numb. Why do we so habitually replace one belief with another? I want to explain the best I can. I want to explain so that you and I, you the person reading and I the person writing, can understand why it’s so painful to live today.
The facts are apparent and easy to find. We will destroy all that supports human life on Earth within 50 years. We’ll do no such thing: climate change is a natural cycle and we ignore the data that tell us so. Capitalism is to blame. Socialism is to blame. We can’t make real progress without law and order. Law is abuse. Human nature is real and it’s violent, or it’s peaceful. Human nature is an illusion; we do what our circumstances make us do. Pain is good because it causes struggle and struggle causes innovation. Pain is an error we can fix if we work together. One group of people is bad; another group, your group, is good. Or if your group isn’t good it’s certainly better.
These are the facts. They are easy to find. They are exhausting, and misnamed. They are not facts: they are phrases. Phrases which point to no distinct situation, but instead to other phrases which are just as vague. One of the pains of living today is that we live and make decisions without a clear picture of reality to reference or feel a part of. We feel pain not from this lack, but from knowing deeply and intuitively that we are mostly full of shit. And from feeling trapped in a petty game in which you can only proceed by gathering more and more of the right kind of phrases into your head then saying those phrases at the right time to the right people. (Job interviews and talking with customer service representatives are events that scream this truth: the game is not fun because the game was not made for you.)
And the pictures of reality we trust most—photographs and videos—work on us either like punches or narcotics. There is either a dead boy face down in the sand or a beautiful traveler on the balcony of some expensive hotel. There is either a group of two hundred people crammed in a cage, brown skin under fluorescent light, or a dog doing a fucking handstand. When one of George Orwell’s characters described our future as a boot stomping on a human face forever, he left out important details: the boot is beautiful and shipping is free.
For those who don’t attend any place of worship, the other way to get a picture of reality is to watch TV. We try for reality this way at an angle: by watching and listening to stories. In the series we watch we look for comfort (to not feel pain), stimulation (to feel anything at all), and meaning (to feel even briefly that the world makes sense). TV series have gotten better because TV writers are aware of their new role in society. Yet we describe watching hours of TV at a time as bingeing because we recognize we’re starving.
I’ll say again our situation: we think in phrases that either stun us or which we resent; we want reality and our lives to make sense and feel purposeful but we have bad sources of information; we forget every day the immediate proof of our goodness and ability to choose. It’s as if we are dying of thirst yet stumble again and again to a well full of poisoned water. And when this water touches our lips we wonder: Is there any other way?
Those are the pains that must be admitted. The obvious pains are here with us too, so obvious yet so severe that we feel ashamed to think of them. Here are some: a wheelchair-bound veteran in Wisconsin whose friends are spread across the country, who is alone and staring at his pistol; a thirty-year old woman who sends half her pay to relatives in Honduras, struggling to stomach groceries she could barely afford while she watches videos of people who look like her and her son leaning against a metal fence, avoiding their captors’ eyes; the man who needs to beg for forty dollars before nightfall so he can afford a motel to avoid the wind and snow; the young woman who wakes to fantasies of killing herself, these fantasies metastasizing into plans; the person who hates themselves for asking the government to buy their food; the person whose parents and friends ignore then mock them for wanting to have a name and one word of their choosing, their family campaigning daily to prove this person’s wrongness.
We are ashamed to think of these pains because we know alleviating them would be simple work. Stupidly simple. But doing this simple work would make it intolerable to believe what we believe now: that society is mostly not formed by choices. If we did this simple work, we’d have to believe that most suffering is arbitrary. That we’ve brought most of our problems upon ourselves. Many of us would rather believe the lie that claims we have no power because we think powerlessness is less painful than responsibility. To make the stupidity of this lie clear, ask yourself: would you rather be a child who is beaten by their father, or the mother who has just learned this?
Now I want you to imagine a machine which can show us proofs of these pains, hundreds of thousands more proofs than we see stars in the night sky. A hundred proofs for every day of every year. Now imagine that this machine works everywhere. That we keep it within our reach every moment of our lives. That this machine is the first thing we use when we wake up and the last thing we use before we fall asleep.
No wonder we feel besieged. No wonder we feel naked to agony and disbelief. No wonder we accept the invitation to refuse to feel.
I’ll avoid euphemism: our cellphones and the products we consume with them are poisoning us. When we use our phones we invite into ourselves pains and contradictions which then seem to define life on Earth. Cellphones are the most powerful tool for self-sabotage yet invented. The fact that so many of us have decided over and over again to buy and use phones is proof for the claim that we don’t understand what we really need. This means—and I believe in my bones what you’re about to read—that if we understand our needs, we will understand our natures. And that if we understand our natures, we will less often hurt each other and more often heed what we know when we wake up: that we are good.
Plenty of charts and theories have been made about what we need, as individuals and as animals. Luckily we need none of them. Food, water, and reliable shelter, and often medicine and care. We could say that all people need regular company, that we all need to love and be loved, but the experience of ascetics and those who enjoy solitude shows us the truth: our needs are simple. Minimal. This fact, the simplicity of our needs, is the best protection against the lies of those who decide the structure of our lives. Politicians and the powerful need to lie in order to convince us that our needs are too complicated (technically, morally) to be met by our own efforts. In other words, we don’t need politicians, philanthropists, financiers, and marketers to create a good life on Earth. I’ll say this as clearly as I can: democracy—people having conversations and making together the decisions that affect them—is the task of the present.
(If you’re worried that democracy is too difficult to realistically organize and form our lives, I’ll tell you a story. Once, in a room full of fifty people over the age of 45, I asked who had been democratic. Meaning who had talked and worked with others to make and abide by decisions that affected them. Six people raised their hands; six had examples from their lives. Three out of six hesitated to even mention them. We are simply out of practice.)
The scale at which democracy works well—three to twenty people, ideally in the same room or sitting outside with a view of a shared horizon—tells us our natures. Though we are born and live as unique events that will never occur again, we share a quality. This quality is our incredible ability to understand and appreciate our immediate surroundings. For nearly all our history as a species, we have lived because we have been where we are. By intimately understanding our environments, we have learned to thrive as a contributing part of them. We are local. This fact too is conveniently obliterated by cellphones and their makers. Knowing that we are best at surviving where we live—as opposed to living somewhere that doesn’t exist, like in some bullshit national narrative or in a battle between good and evil—knowing we are best when we are local helps us practice democracy. And the obviousness of the needs of your friends and neighbors reminds you of the ease of being where you’re at. Reality, and a language that makes sense of it, returns.
Before saying plainly the truth—that the work of a good future is simple—I need to write to you about fascism. A few years ago I wanted to understand what the word meant, so I read books. Some books documented facts about political systems, other books described the working of those systems on people (even when that work was murder). Every definition of the word fascism I read was historical and impersonal; every definition implied that fascism was or is a kind of event. Instead, I define fascism as a kind of work. Fascism is a kind of maintenance. It is the work we do when we hurt others in order to maintain our belief that we are better than them. A fascist believes that another group is weaker and worse than theirs, then weakens and harms that group so that their original belief feels incontestably true. Fascism is cowardly work. We are fascists all the time. Knowing this, it is our personal and collective responsibility to change our thinking and behavior. Otherwise the logical end of fascism is not killing and torturing this or that specific group: it is destroying everyone and everything that is not you.
We’re used to replacing the knowledge that we are good with the sense that we are cruel. It’s time to abandon the instruments of this replacement. The choice to refuse violence is the promise of civilization: we are good together.
