Why We Waste

The Death of Decency Part I:

No More Mr. Nice Guy

”We live in a world … that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Steven Miller, Deputy Policy Advisor to the President and architect of ICE immigration crackdown.

Morbid curiosity and a hunger for karmic justice compelled me to search out the full video of Charlie Kirk's assassination.

The footage I found opened with Kirk's professionally honed, rapid-fire conservative talking points punching down at college students nowhere near as polished or prepared. With my contempt for the man confirmed, a shot rang out. Kirk went silent, then collapsed softly to his left. In that instant, this leading voice of a corrupt Christian Nationalist movement I deeply distrust became a source of sadness for me.

Not sadness for Kirk's fate—the chaos sown by people like him has left me sometimes harboring dark fantasies of pulling that trigger myself. But in that moment, all I saw was an obviously sharp mind being extinguished in a spasm of mindless hate.

How is it I can entertain such violence only to have it evaporate when confronted with the fragility of the life it targets? What sort of psychological short circuit leaves me suddenly ashamed of sentiments that moments earlier were fueling my passions?

The short answer lies in a tiny, ancient structure buried deep in our brains called the amygdala. Found throughout the animal kingdom, it tells us when to fight and when to flee, with little thought in between.

Humans relied heavily on the amygdala during the first 2.8 million years of our evolution. But as we went from living in caves with our kin to building cities among strangers, our brains expanded outward and away from the amygdala, as did human behavior.

Fight or flight yielded to cooperation and collaboration as increasingly complex social groups demanded ever more brainpower to navigate. It worked. In an evolutionary blink of an eye, we landed atop the food chain, teaming up to hunt mastodons many times our size and cultivating fields that produced far more food in a season than any one individual could eat in a year.

Because Americans have a unique relationship with competition. We believe in it. It's our North Star. It's the means by which a nation comprising six percent of the world's population accumulated thirty percent of its wealth in just 250 years. Proof positive for the true believers that competition is the only way to run a country.

The problem with competition is that it requires losers. This very dynamic, say competition's champions, ensures survival of the fittest and advances society by culling the weak. We’ll leave aside the ethics involved here and focus on the economics.

Say what you will about America's love affair with competition—over the years, it has left countless losers in its wake, both domestically and abroad, and that number is climbing sharply. The US is now imposing cutthroat competition on allies and adversaries alike, all driven by one percent of the world's population who decided on November 5, 2024, that this is how we win.

So, is it human nature to compete? Or cooperate? The bulk of human literature and a half dozen artificial intelligence engines say it's both. But then what of the clear correlation of increased societal cooperation and increase human life expectancy?

We will all have less of the latter as the US forces a world-wide shift, with governments spending much more money on military and immigration enforcement and dramatically less on education, science, healthcare and social services.

Which brings me back to Charlie Kirk and the violent fantasies I've indulged as he helped plunge the US into a might-makes-right mentality integral to this country’s current competitive ethos.

I'm angry a clear majority of my like-minded Americans are losing the battle to stop the damage the might-makes-right minority are inflicting on this country and the world, all in the name of "winning". I get even angrier as the options for dealing with the minority get winnowed down to one: fighting.

I don't like getting angry and I don't like fighting. I like cooperating and compromising, that's what made humans great.

But then, how does one counter behaviors that, until very recently in our evolution, we depended on for survival? Even decent people hate losing.

Which raises a crucial question: Are the decent destined to lose? Do nice guys always finish last? In The Death of Decency Part II: When the mob is the minority, what's a poor billionaire to do?

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A few hundred millennia later the technologies we created allowed us to triple our life span, giving us time to write literature, create art, and ride jet skies. Clearly, the most significant phase of human evolution occurred during increasing social cooperation and community building.

Yet despite cooperation's central role in making us human, the world is reverting to a more competitive, aggressive posture toward our fellow humans.

Leading this regression to aggression is the United States which, after establishing the global standard for international cooperation following World War II, has adopted "look out for number one" as its default domestic and foreign policy directive.

So why did the US electorate say "no more Mr. Nice Guy" on November 5, 2024, when it elected a man known for his disdain for cooperation and collaboration? And why are so many still buying into the hyper-competitive course he has set for the country, despite the death and chaos it's causing worldwide, all without any immediate, discernible benefit to those voters?