We Are Not Who They Think We Are: How Human Nature Matters In This Emergency
Welcome to the emergency--or rather Meditations in an Emergency, this newsletter, not the national emergency, which is of course very unwelcome. What's striking to me about all the things our morally and imaginatively impoverished billionaires, notably Musk and Trump, right now is: they do not expect or imagine or understand consequences. Any of them– their theory of change seems to be that they are going to do stuff and then it will be done. Like they're moving furniture around, like you and I and the trans and immigrant communities and federal workers and Canada and Mexico are just so many sofas and chairs that are going to sit where they place us. Like we're inanimate objects. Maybe everything is dead in the sad lonely worldview inside their head. Which would also explain their recalcitrance about climate and nature: if you see it as a collection of inert objects rather than an intricate living system in which what you do to any one part may affect the whole, you grant yourself more license to meddle. But today I'm here to talk about the human--and human nature, and how they misunderstand that too.
They're miscalculating the reactions from foreign nationals, from politicians, from federal workers, from ordinary people; they're underestimating solidarity, courage, principle, and misunderstanding power itself. They do not understand people, and this may be their downfall. It's a bit staggering to see their incomprehension of the systems they're breaking, including the federal government and economy, as well as foreign relations, the consequences that come with their actions, and their ignorance of human nature itself. Take Trump's proposal that he can steal Greenland, now that he sort of grasps that this immense indigenous homeland is not up for sale like a golf course. He doesn't grasp that Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark and while Denmark is small it's part of both NATO and the European Union and not knuckling under, and neither are Greenlanders. As for this weekend's big tariffs on Canada and Mexico, they pushed back and won for now.
Clearly he thought he was going to punch Canada and Canada was going to stand there and be punched and maybe cry, but Canada punched back, hard with its own tariffs, including on Teslas. A few days ago Tim Pool, the right-wing video personality (who turned out last year to be paid by Putin), announced on Musk's ex-Twitter site, in what's pretty much a specimen of public masturbation or maybe power porn but also a useful illustration of this manosphere fantasy: "After we destroy the Canadian economy their will to resist will erode We will then march in unopposed and deliver Canada to its rightful place as a territory of the US with no political representation." The US of A is not going to destroy the Canadian economy, let alone annex a country larger than itself, and that whole business about the will to resist: Canadians are furious, not submissive, and there will be economic consequences for American products for years, whatever happens with the now-postponed tariffs. And while there's something to Canada's reputation for national niceness, my friend Bob in Montreal pointed out that the national sport is ice hockey, aka fast-moving athletes with knives strapped to their feet waving big sticks. These authoritarians confuse being nice with being weak which is why they also confuse being mean with being strong.
Underlying all this is an old assumption by many elites, especially the authoritarian and fascist variety, that ordinary people are weak, timid, fearful and pretty much collapse if you say boo to them. They also tend to think we are selfish and operate only out of self-interest because they think we're like them. They are very often wrong in very consequential ways. This misapprehension about human nature has, from at least the Second World War to G.W. Bush's Shock and Awe plans to subjugate Iraq, driven military attacks on civilians. Their idea is that you can break morale and make people surrender through sheer brutality. That somehow ordinary people will all collapse in terror or mental breakdown and be helpless and defeated, which will weaken or undermine the country as a whole.
I looked at this in my 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster: Mussolini himself wrote, "Once a raid has been experienced false alarms are incessant and a state of panic remains in which work comes to a standstill." Churchill worried that a helpless, hopeless public would overwhelm the army with the chaos of their neediness. In Britain, eighteen "eminent psychiatrists… privately warned in 1938 that in the coming war three psychiatric casualties could be expected for every one physical." By one estimate, this would have meant three to four million mental cases within months of the beginning of the Blitz. Certainly those directing the bombing raids on both Britain and Germany (and later, Japan) believed that the onslaughts would have profound psychological impact with important strategic consequences, and so the bombing campaigns were immense, taking a huge toll in human life—of both civilians and bomber crews--and city structures. ... A mother of two wrote that after surviving the raids, "I feel much more certainty and self-confidence…as a result of the discovery that I am not the coward I thought, and have more good in me…than I would have believed." Three weeks into the London blitz, Molly Panter-Downs wrote, "The courage, humor and kindliness of ordinary people continue to be astonishing under conditions which possess many of the features of a nightmare."
The people of Vietnam were not convinced or subjugated by the massive military superiority of the US military--at least we're supposed to call it superior, but it didn't crush their resolve or win their war even though it killed more than a million Vietnamese. US bombs didn't conquer Iraqis, make them afraid to resist, and they certainly didn't welcome Americans as liberators, like the Bush Administration promised. As for the Putin regime's invasion of Ukraine, Business Insider reported that at the outset: "Russian soldiers advancing on Kyiv brought parade uniforms with them, seeming to expect a victory in less than two days." It will be three years on the 22nd, and Kiev is still in Ukrainian hands. In Syria, Assad's long civil war against his own people, for all its atrocities and slaughter, did not end resistance in that country– that resistance recently led to his defeat and exile.
That book of mine was about how ordinary people react in disaster, and the truth is that most of us are brave, generous, altruistic, creative as we rise to meet the demands of a sudden disaster by rescuing and taking care of each other and re-building the terms of survival as community kitchens, volunteer clean-up teams, and more. We saw this with the L.A. fires--and here I want to take a small detour. Lots of people noted that some aspects of the fires that swept through Altadena and Pacific Palisades resembled Octavia Butler's novel Parable of the Sower and concluded that yes, we were in her dystopia. But in fact, the bookstore named in this visionary Black novelist's honor, Octavia's Bookshelf just outside Altadena in Pasadena, turned itself into a community hub and mutual aid supply depot, to which volunteers swarmed. I would argue that Butler wasn't wrong about the dystopian aspects, but what she actually catalyzed was a utopian space and network. Both can be true. And Los Angeles has filled with mutual-aid efforts of many kinds, drawing on the resources and commitments of many communities, many of which are ongoing--a true paradise built in hell.
Or rather the book was about the magnificent ways ordinary people often respond in disaster and the vision of human nature and human desire it gives us--because people don't just do good but they are often deeply moved and even joyful in these times. I read their accounts from the 1906 earthquake, the 1917 Halifax explosion, and the London Blitz; I heard them in person about 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the 1985 Mexico City earthquake. I found in disaster a window into our deepest desires for connection, community, purpose, immediacy, meaningful work. Disasters sometimes bring moments when the triviality, the distraction, the fretting about the past and future, disconnect us from the present and our deepest commitments, moments when Martin Luther King's beloved community comes into being. But this book was also about elite panic--the way elites, including government officials and wealthy and powerful individuals assume the worst about human nature and act on their assumptions, convinced they're suppressing a rampaging mob or controlling a bunch of hapless panicky people. What they're really frightened of is the fact that in these moments they're not in control, and the old order they sat atop is destabilized and maybe open to change. They also often act--or in the case of the media, report--with the assumption that material goods matter so much that protecting property relations takes precedence over saving and caring for fellow human beings (with the L.A. fires, stories about looting hit the news when the police had arrested exactly one thief while billions of property was lost to fire). We saw that in horrific ways in Hurricane Katrina, whose twentieth anniversary is coming this August. And that could bring us back to where we started: the elite worldview.
The US is caught up in an unprecedented nightmare. Nothing remotely like this has happened to us before. Not this sabotage by unelected unofficials, not an ignorant and idiotic would-be dictator in the president's seat, not these full-fledged fascist tactics, not the surrounding circumstances of a new oligarchy and an ugly decline of old news media, not the ways Silicon Valley distorts our realities and alienates us from each other. But I do not believe the people of this country will submit to the destruction and the attempts at dictatorship. We are not submitting now.
We have already seen many federal civil servants resist the takeover of their offices, the pressure to resign, and the corruption of their missions. Jen Bendery of the Huffington Post noted on BlueSky, "Another EPA employee said Trump's effort to force civil servants to quit by making them all return to in-person work is backfiring at least somewhat at this agency. Being together has made them feel stronger and more connected, and ready to hunker down together." She also reports that across eight agencies she's seeing employees, "are scared – and also pissed and digging in for a fight." The Wall Street Journal reports today, "Multiple EEOC attorneys and other staff have warned acting Chair Andrea Lucas that they can't comply with the executive order without breaking federal law, according to current employees and an internal email viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Some agency employees are openly revolting. 'The tactics you are employing and the actions you have taken in lockstep with this new administration are illegal and unconstitutional,' an EEOC administrative judge emailed Lucas on Monday, copying in most EEOC staff."
We are seeing reactions from ordinary people from coast to coast, from a fifty-person protest at the US Treasury in Washington D.C. late Sunday night to a big march around immigration rights in Los Angeles and so many smaller protests and marches inbetween, in small towns and cities, and at hospitals to protest those caving to the Trump Administration's attack on gender-affirming care. Monday morning we saw members of Congress, including Jamie Raskin and Ilhan Omar, stand up in a fiery press conference in front of the USAID building. Another Treasury building protest is scheduled for 5pm today, and a whole lot more is going on. Lawsuits are being filed, support groups organized especially around protecting immigrant rights, and people are looking around them to figure out what they can do and who they'll do it with. One thing that moved me right after the election was how people immediately understood we need each other in an emergency and reached out to strengthen ties weakened by the pandemic and the ways that tech has rearranged our lives. To resist the attempt at a dictatorship we need each other; when we come together as civil society we have the power to resist. And it's going to be up to us.
Like most of you, I'm disappointed in what the Democrats in Congress have done or rather haven't done, but that may be picking up (and I am big on the benefit of the doubt and the likelihood we're not seeing everything). Indivisible encouraged people to organize groups to go straight to their senators' in-state offices and demand action: how to go about that is unpacked at this link. https://www.mobilize.us/indivisible/c/funding-crisis-response/event/create/ Word has it that a week of huge outcry from the public in the form of calls, emails, letters, and in-person visits to elected officials' offices has had an impact. Keep it up. The pressure matters.
Some resistance is going to look familiar: protests, marches, demonstrations, blockades. New tactics may emerge, and there is reason to fear that the lawless people who've seized our federal government--or rather parts of it--will be ruthless in new ways against civil disobedience. But that's far from all that's happening. Just seeing lots of individuals and organization out to save the data on federal websites being scrubbed is a reminder that resistance takes many forms (I've heard that a lot of that data is preserved at the Wayback Machine and the Internet Archive, but also individuals like the reproductive-rights journalist Jessica Valenti are mounting their own efforts to save data.) The California Department of Education announced "While the Trump Education Department announced that they will no longer protect all students from discrimination, California law is unaffected by recent changes to federal policy and continues to provide safeguards against discrimination and harassment based on gender, gender expression, gender identity, and sexual orientation. While federal guidance devolves, our commitment to safeguarding the rights of all students persists." Do not forget the way that states, especially powerful ones like California, can affirm the law and decline to cooperate with violating it and human rights. Governor Pritzker of Illinois has been especially outspoken in this moment.
Some resistance is not going to look like anything at all because we will not see what goes on inside some of those government offices or how a medical worker doesn't comply with an unjust or inhumane mandate or how local police rebuff ICE (though it's been great to local police say publicly "here's how we do not with ICE"), will not see a neighbor quietly reaching out to a targeted individual. All this matters. (What I have not seen or heard anything about is efforts to convince members of the military to refuse illegal orders, but I hope it's happening.) I'm here in praise of human nature--as the moral and imaginative basis from which we act: we need to act. I'm seeing action. We're going to need a lot of it and we're going to need that determination the great climate activist and poet Julian Assange invoked when he said: "Part of our work as people who dare to believe we can save the world is to prepare our wills to withstand some losing so that we may lose and set out again, anyhow." Because if we do our utmost we will win some of this. But not all of it.
This resistance– what I called the pushback in yesterday's news summary--reassures me. My greatest fear was not of what they would do. It's that we would let them. After the election, I was alarmed by all the ways people were saying "I'm done; I'm checking out," and I understand the burnout as we enter year nine of the scourge that is Trump. But I had faith in what we always see in emergencies and crises--the ability of people to improvise together to meet the moment and the care for and commitment to things beyond narrow self-interest. And I had confidence in the beautiful intransigence of the American people. I'm seeing that, lots of that. People– not everyone, but a whole lot of us who aren't on board with MAGA--care about the rule of law that limits the powerful and protects the less powerful.
We care about the medical services at home and abroad that sustain life. We care about human rights and justice and the actual people behind those abstract terms. We care about truth. We care about the natural world and the policies and programs that protect it. All of us can in ordinary times get distracted by private life and the bombardment with messages to consume and amuse ourselves and enhance our status and all that, but in a crisis we generally go back to what we care about most--and sometimes we're surprised to find out who we are and how much we care and how brave that care makes us. That's our human nature, and it's beautiful and powerful and makes us dangerous to dictators. Remember who we are. Remember that underneath what we're furious about is what we care about, that our deepest feeling in this moment isn't necessarily anger, but protectiveness for what we love that may feel like fury. And that love is very, very powerful.
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