Why We Waste

The Death of Decency Part 1: No More Mr. Nice Guy

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: Are Humans too Dumb to be Decent.

”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 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 despise 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 brain structure 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 on the amygdala heavily during the first few 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 fifty times our size and cultivating fields that produced far more food than any individual could eat.

A few hundred millennia later, we're writing literature, creating art, and engineering technologies that have tripled our lifespan, making clear 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 is Donald Trump’s 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, amid escalating worldwide anger and anxiety, did the US electorate say "no more Mr. Nice Guy" when it selected Trump on November 5, 2024? And why are so many still buying his hyper-competitive course despite the death and chaos it's causing worldwide, all without any immediate, discernible benefit to those voters?

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, 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. It's why capitalist love Darwin, he's great for business.

But when it comes to advancing civilization, competition is far too often a zero-sum game. The more losers there are, the more the winners win. That works tolerably in extremely wealthy countries where there is plenty to go around. Sort of like the US since its founding. But what happens when times get tight and losers start to vastly outnumber winners, sort of like where the US is headed today?

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, 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 cooperation and life expectancy?

We will all have less of the latter as the world spends dramatically more on military and immigration enforcement forcing a worldwide divestment in education, science, healthcare and social services currently being led by the US.

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 competitive ethos. I'm angry a clear majority of my like-minded Americans are losing the battle to stop the damage these might-makes-right folks are inflicting on this country and the world, all in the name of winning.

These folks and the ideas they embrace are fast falling out of favor, but they hold the reins of power with little sign they plan on letting go. But then, how does one fight behaviors that, until very recently in our evolution, we depended on for survival?