Why I've lost faith in the world

I used to think highly of people and the world. And especially public service.

When I was in high school and college, the world seemed like a bright, decent place to live. I looked for peoples' better natures, and generally saw good in peoples' efforts. And public service seemed like one of the more important ways that you could contribute to others and the public good.

I've not convinced anymore that it matters.

The reason is because I'm fairly convinced, at this point, that people are, as a rule more than as an exception, fairly shitty toward one another. It's perhaps the most important rule of human affairs. And public service is just as full of people who are shitty and is surrounded by people who are as shitty (Christopher Hitchens and David Horowitz come to mind, here) as anywhere else in the world. It involves very little money unless you get a lot of celebrity exposure or powerful connections that you can exploit elsewhere. People are always complaining about it, no matter how well it is done. No leader or civil servant is ever doing enough. Ever. Except by people constantly patting themselves and others in their group or ideology on the back and desparaging the efforts and contributions of other groups and ideologies.

It's full of low-minded, petty people with low-minded, petty priorities as much as any other field, no matter how important the big priorities in respective fields might be.

Noone is ever wrong, ever. In public service or anywhere else in life, really. Which is amazing because there's so much that goes wrong. And yet noone can ever be big enough to acknowledge that it might be their ideas or their way of handling things that are wrong. Wrong is how you describe other people and other groups. People in your group always have it right. Or I do, at least.

And it's everywhere. It's in academia and journalism and writing and teaching and more thinking-oriented careers as much if not more than other fields. Noone can ever admit that they might be wrong, for fear of losing face or looking weak or stupid (which is ironic, because the people in life who have the hardest time with admitting they are wrong are, in fact, people who are the dumbest, the least intelligent; by definition, really, since that's what makes them so dumb).

But the one thing you can count on in public service is that they never think they're wrong, they always want the power to make sure that others don't think they're wrong, either, or at least they do what the fuck their told whether they think they're wrong or not, and that public servants are not, typically, to be bothered with seriously and rigorously questioning their own thinking. Even many academics, sadly, where rigor is most expected and generally maintained. And that definitely includes many of the Ph.D.'s who take up more formal public service like politics, as much as Ph.D's in less formal public service like teaching, writing, and researching.

I don't really trust anyone to make any choices for me, anymore, is the truth, no matter how noble their intentions. And public service is a lot of people making choices for a lot of other people. I appreciate people who make important decisions that have to be made. And I appreciate people making decisions working with me on various projects. And I appreciate that someone has to make the decisions that come with power and public service. But I just don't trust others to make decisions for me, anymore, is the truth. Not just because they do such a bad job of bumbling it, as this war seriously demonstrates. But because noone can ever just take responsibility for their mistakes, including the mistake of treating people so shitty, and acknowledge it because we treat them like such complete and total shit when they do so that most people are afraid to take responsibility, is the truth.

We are a shitty, nasty, mean-spirited, self-centered lot, much of the time, is the truth. Humanity has so much potential that just falls flat, perpetually, because we just can't find it in ourselves to stretch beyond our petty, nasty worldviews and cynicism. And so we perpetually make the world shitty for others, not satisfied in feeling shitty, ourselves. And then, after we get done making it so goddamned shitty, we look at the mess we've created and we say, "See what a fuckin' mess the world is?"

And the whole world just has to shake it's head, "Yes," because it's obvious what a mess we've made of it, even though almost none of us take serious responsibility for the really big messes that we've created.

And we don't take responsibility because we're afraid of being treated like shit for it and we treat people like shit because they don't take responsibility and we don't take responsibility because we don't want to be treated like shit for it and we treat people like shit because they won't take responsibility and on and on and on and on it goes into perpetuity because we can't even imagine that maybe the reason that people don't take more responsibility is because we treat them like such shit.

I hate it. But I don't know what to do about it other than what I do now, which is write and talk and teach about it. And I'm not convinced after having done both for several years, now, that people really want to change all this. Because the solutions just seem so ready-made as long as you avoid this central problem of how shitty we treat one another. A central problem that I have no solution for except the obvious: we need to come to terms with our shittiness towards one another and take responsibility and cut it out and treat people as least shitty as possible when we face difficult problems with one another.

I used to think highly of public service. Politics, teaching, journalism, writing, scholarship, the whole lot.

But lately, all these fields have been giving cover to a notion that people learning to stop thinking for themselves, so much, and just learn to do what the fuck they're told, a notion that I just can't get behind, no matter how much I try. I understand why people want this. I work with kids every day, who never want to listen to a goddamn thing you say, no matter how important, valid, or dead on. I just don't understand why people think it will work or that it somehow promotes more intelligent engagement or solutions or why people seem to think that all the controversy around various solutions will somehow get resolved if you can somehow get your way and just prove to the world what a better place it can be if people would just do what the fuck they were told.

I've lost a lot of faith in the world in the last 5 years, is the truth. And the world, truth be told, has earned every bit of the lost faith.

Love,
Ben