On an afternoon stroll the other day, I noticed across the street a quick-walking woman on a sidewalk headed toward a family of four coming the other direction. The woman ran into the family like a bowling ball hitting pins.
On the other side of the resulting mess, the woman who was the main cause of the conflict screamed back, “You could have gotten out of the way!”
Puzzling. Life is so full of challenges and disappointments. It strikes me as unfathomable that such a normal engagement—a problem once resolved with a smile and a bit of deference—would be so quickly turned into an occasion for outright meanness.
Surely there’s another way.
Another person saw what happened, and we looked at each other with a sense of bewilderment. I noted that this sort of thing seems to be going on more and more. What has happened to people?
He agreed and then added that nothing has really been the same since “all the virus stuff happened.”
Fascinating. I agree. The above story is a small one and no great harm resulted. But it’s emblematic of a much larger problem. The pandemic response took a chunk of flesh out of civilization itself. The masking, the vaccine mandates, the learned presumption that everyone is a disease vector, the fear of authority, the shattering of life routine, followed by the economic chaos and dislocation, not to mention learning loss, the loss of faith and trust, and the rise of petty and serious crime—it’s all taken a terrible toll.
It’s not just about declining U.S. lifespans, which is shocking enough. In just two years, life expectancy in the United States is down by 2 years and 7 months in total. Such vital statistics reveal terrible suffering and ill-health both physical and psychological.
We all know why. Yes, COVID-19 was bad, but the excess deaths are from different sources, including substance abuse, depression, and worse. The lockdowns utterly wrecked health and well-being. And few dare to consider the vaccine itself as a contributor.
All of this is awful, but there’s a deeper problem that afflicts the cultural and moral sense. Our leaders treated us in beastly ways—muscling, coercing, censoring, lying—and that lesson seems to have stuck and become a cultural habit that’s hard to break. After all, if the leaders of these institutions can get away with it and show no respect for traditional norms of humane engagement, why not the rest of us? Criminality is contagious.
The biggest loss is empathy, the willingness and capacity to identify with another person’s feelings, wishes, and desires, respecting them and adapting one’s behavior and mental outlook in the hope of bettering the lives of others.
Adam Smith explained empathy as a feature of the human personality.
“As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel,” he writes, “we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel like in the situation. ... By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments ... and become in some measure the same person with him.”
Empathy is what elevates the human personality above the beasts. It forms the basis of community and trust. It undergirds civil commercial and familial relationships. It’s a mark of civilization. When governments decided to treat us all like animals, muzzling us and forcing us all apart, they sent a message that it’s fine to treat each other in the same way. Not only that: They specifically encouraged division, exclusion, and hate.
There’s been a profound cost to this. We’ve lost key pillars of what makes for a good life, among which is the feeling of empathy as the basis of getting along with each other. We see the loss of this sense all around us: in our communities, workplaces, and even families.
Our political culture further drains it away daily. For two years, we had bureaucrats issuing strange and arbitrary rules that they made up and changed by the day, all enforced by intimidation and compulsion, and spending billions and trillions of other people’s dollars to realize their desires. They postured in this silly way as if their edicts had world affairs under control when they clearly did not.
Even worse, and what chilled me to the bone over this period and even now, is the strange absence of normal human emotion in public performances of government officials. With day-to-day normal communication in the presence of uncertainty, there’s some admission of the possibility of being wrong, of mistakes made, of the difficulty of knowing, of the limits of information to make informed decisions, of the pain wrought through such disruptive governance.
You don’t see any of this in these political and bureaucratic announcements. Despite all evidence, they act as if they have everything under control. They won’t admit error. They won’t admit ignorance. They stare straight at the cameras and issue pronouncements and edicts, without even an apology for all the lives they’ve ruined and continue to ruin.
They talk down to us. Condescension in every word.
We try not to speak this way to each other. Instead, we share stories of how our lives have been affected. We share pain with each other, and frustration at how destabilized we feel, how we’ve been separated from family, how we’ve been led to dark places, how caged we’ve felt. We worry about our finances, our loved ones, and our very future. We are astonished at how quickly and radically our freedoms were taken away. And in sharing these stories with each other, we come to understand more and feel a bit of healing perhaps.
In short, we have empathy, or at least try to. The politicians, on the other hand, show none. They have glassy eyes and come across as bloodless, like generals who order troops around knowing with certainty that many people will die. They rarely, if ever, talk about what they’re doing, in human terms. They talk about data, restrictions, studies, and plans, but not as if any of this involves real humans or trade-offs. They preen with certainty that isn’t really believable—no one more absurdly than the gibberish-spouting presidential spokesperson.
Political life today seeks to banish normal human feelings. It’s as if they’re playing a video game featuring all of us, but we’re mere figures on a screen programmed to do what they want. They have no obligation to understand us, much less worry about the pain they inflict, because, like figures on a gaming screen, we surely don’t feel pain at all. We sit helpless, watching all of this unfold day after day, astonished that our rulers could be so impervious to what has taken place before our eyes.
The emotional gap between the rulers—whether in government, media, or technology—and the ruled has never been wider in modern times. It seems completely unsustainable. It’s like they aren’t even trying to connect with people except through payoffs and obviously false pronouncements about how they’re the key to solving all the problems of our world.
Politicians are no great shakes in normal times, but they seem worse than ever now, throwing out law, tradition, morality, and even the appearance of caring about how their edicts and plans have destroyed so many lives. And rather than back down, they only push more, with even more preposterous rationales and pronouncements.
The question is why. Here’s my attempt at an answer. The lockdowns were based on an implausible claim that viruses can be controlled via coercion and forced medicine, in the same way as people. But they cannot. And it isn’t surprising that everything they did achieved nothing and left massive economic, cultural, and demographic destruction.
The ruling class started to intuit this. They suspect in their heart of hearts that they’ve done something horrendous, including throwing out core postulates of American law and tradition. They worry that this realization is going to spread. Then they will be held accountable, maybe not right away but eventually. And this is rather terrifying to them. Thus, do they spend their days trying to forestall this moment of truth in hopes that the mess they made will eventually go away and they escape blame.
Which is to say, they’re lying. Then they lie more to cover their previous lies. If you’re going to push such a lie in the face of mounting evidence showing it to be fraudulent, if you’re going to lie with impunity to keep the game going, you'll have to steel yourself against emotion and empathy. You become a sociopath. This might be enough to account for their bloodless posturing.
There’s another factor too: The more pain you inflict on people, the worse of a person you become. Power is dangerous even when not used, but deploying it brutally and pointlessly rots the soul. This is a good description of almost the entire ruling class around the world today. And they’ve managed to drag vast swaths of the world down to their level.
There’s surely a path to rebuilding, but it isn’t through more of the same. We need a dramatic turn if we’re going to rebuild civilized lives and communities after this crisis ends.
