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.

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”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?

Toughguy Tautologies:

A Unifying Theory of MAGA

Shortly after Joe Biden was elected, I received a Facebook message from a friend I hadn’t heard from since high school. Without so much as a howdy-do, he jumped right in, accusing me of calling half of all Americans morons in one of my less-guarded Trump-bashing posts.

While he never struck me as politically astute, my friend got me thinking. Passing judgment on 20 percent—or even a third—of my fellow Americans is one thing. But when I start condemning half the country, it’s time to double-check my premises.

Even more so now that Trump has been re-elected, and I’m being attacked on all sides by Trump-loving Facebook friends from every social stratum. On one end, there’s my high school buddy, who was never one for holding back.

“Growing up on a farm, I was forced to work with migrants from age eight,” he said in one of his less-guarded messages. “They thought nothing of a knife fight. Death meant nothing to them. They’d eat shit that’d make a billy goat puke and bathe whenever. All of them were from the Deep South, whose grandparents were slaves. Every chance they got, I got a taste of slavery.”

It’s easy to see how such a person might come to favor Trump, who clearly has little use for poor people of any color. So, what does my farmer friend have in common with a former newspaper colleague turned county prosecutor—or an economics PhD who writes impenetrable articles on obscure subjects?

They love Trump. And they love arguing with me about my political posts bashing the guy. More important—and perhaps a little disturbing—I can relate to all of them on one level or another.

How does a prosecutor eagerly endorse a president who thinks he is above the law? Mea culpa. Growing up on Long Island’s bountiful East End, I enthusiastically supported ever-stricter local laws on fishing and clamming—even as I ignored them. Those laws were for people who didn’t know the waters like I did.

As for the professor, he’s the personification of my Ayn Rand-reading days in college, when I was studying evolution’s role in human behavior. To my way of thinking back then, competition and natural selection were the only ways to advance humanity. Government only got in the way.

Around that time, two things happened that sent my perspective in a whole new direction. The first was talking politics with my father, a Depression-era FDR liberal who dedicated his life to raising five boys while working as a newspaper reporter.

One day, while I charged on with the standard Ayn Rand spiel about government defying Darwin, he said simply: “Just because government doesn’t always work doesn’t mean government always doesn’t work. We may be animals, but it’s only by working together we become more. That’s government.”

At the time, my Ayn Rand brain saw his remark as ignorant—but it stuck with me. He could say so much with so few words. His point was driven home that same year when I took a job working as a weekend counselor at a Long Island orphanage.

These kids, almost all black and Latino, came from the most broken homes in New York City’s most broken neighborhoods. Adolescence was spent in a miasma of foster care—being molested, given drugs, beaten, and otherwise completely neglected.

One might argue this was only possible through the very sort of failed government programs Ayn Rand and most Trump lovers loathe. All I came to realize was: these kids stood no chance in the world they were about to enter. And there are millions of them out there.

I tried only to show them the most basic tenets of decency: Don’t bite the hand that feeds you. Don’t beat up smaller people. Respect your elders. I failed miserably.

The only counselors they showed any respect for were also the toughest. They didn’t try to rationalize with these kids—they issued and followed through on threats. And they got results.

“Spare the rod and spoil the child” might work for kids, but when that standard is applied to adults, people get really angry. Yet it’s becoming the nation’s MO if not motto and my three Facebook friends firmly believe it’s what’s needed to correct the mess they perceive people like me have made of this country.

For decades that prosecutor enforced laws on a revolving door of defendants who keep places like the orphanage—and many large government agencies—in high demand. How do you not lose patience with a system that fixes blame but not the problem?

My professor pal fiercely defends free-market economics as the purest and surest means of meeting people’s needs, citing as proof the failures of more empathetic approaches—i.e., socialism and all those helpful government agencies. History has certainly given him plenty to work with.

Which brings me back to those orphans—and the father they were unable to share with me. Sure, he believed in tough love, speaking softly, only the strong, and a dozen more aphorisms that comprise so much of this country’s culture. But he also understood they were only a means to an end. A last resort used to push humanity when needed, but not a strategy to lead it.

Which is why I can sympathize with my Trump-loving Facebook friends but never join them. Might might work as a reproductive strategy, but it comes at the expense of what I see as humanity’s greatest asset: our endlessly creative minds and our ability to join them in common cause.

We may be animals, but we’ve tripled our lifespan since we climbed down from the trees. Our big brains made it possible; our increasing cooperation made it happen. Which brings me back to my high school buddy and a Trump-lover philosophy I can at least respect, even as I passionately disagree.

“You can only live off the land by taking what the land naturally provides,” he said. “If you take whatever you want, Mother Nature will take it back, with interest. Within the next century or so, Mother Earth will shed humans like dead skin. She has the patience and time. Man has neither. We’re our own worst enemy.”

Not when we’re working together. I can’t fault Republicans losing patience with inept Democratic efforts to reign in the national debt and government waste. But blowing up 80 years of cooperative effort that made America great with no plan in place sounds more like giving up on what made humans great.