Everything Is F*cked

Plato’s Prediction
English  philosopher  and  mathematician  Alfred  North  Whitehead  famously
said  that  all  of  Western  philosophy  was  merely  a  “series  of  footnotes  to
Plato.”
23
 Any  topic  you  can  think  of,  from  the  nature  of  romantic  love,  to
whether  there’s  such  a  thing  as  “truth,”  to  the  meaning  of  virtue,  Plato  was
likely the first great thinker to expound upon it. Plato was the first to suggest
that  there  was  an  inherent  separation  between  the  Thinking  Brain  and  the
Feeling  Brain.
24
 He  was  the  first  to  argue  that  one  must  build  character
through  various  forms  of  self-denial,  rather  than  through  self-indulgence.
25
Plato was such a badass, the word idea itself comes from him—so, you could
say he invented the idea of an idea.
26
Interestingly,  despite  being  the  godfather  of  Western  civilization,  Plato
famously  claimed  that  democracy  was  not  the  most  desirable  form  of
government.
27
He believed that democracy was inherently unstable and that it
inevitably  unleashed  the  worst  aspects  of  our  nature,  driving  society  toward
tyranny.  He  wrote,  “Extreme  freedom  can’t  be  expected  to  lead  to  anything
but a change to extreme slavery.”
28
Democracies are designed to reflect the will of the people. We’ve learned
that people, when left to their own devices, instinctively run away from pain
and  toward  happiness.  The  problem  then  emerges  when  people  achieve
happiness:  It’s  never  enough.  Due  to  the  Blue  Dot  Effect,  they  never  feel
entirely  safe  or  satisfied.  Their  desires  grow  in  lockstep  with  the  quality  of
their circumstances.
Eventually, the institutions won’t be able to keep up with the desires of the
people.  And  when  the  institutions  fail  to  keep  up  with  people’s  happiness,
guess what happens.
People start blaming the institutions themselves.

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Plato said that democracies inevitably lead to moral decay because as they
indulge  more  in  fake  freedom,  people’s  values  deteriorate  and  become  more
childish and self-centered, resulting in the citizenry turning on the democratic
system  itself.  Once  childish  values  take  over,  people  no  longer  want  to
negotiate  for  power,  they  don’t  want  to  bargain  with  other  groups  and  other
religions,  they  don’t  want  to  endure  pain  for  the  sake  of  greater  freedom  or
prosperity. What they want instead is a strong leader to come make everything
right at a moment’s notice. They want a tyrant.
29
There’s a common saying in the United States that “freedom is not free.”
The  saying  is  usually  used  in  reference  to  the  military  and  wars  fought  and
won to protect the values of the country. It’s a way of reminding people that,
hey,  this  shit  didn’t  just  magically  happen—thousands  of  people  were  killed
and/or died for us to sit here and sip overpriced mocha Frappuccinos and say
whatever  the  fuck  we  want.  It’s  a  reminder  that  the  basic  human  rights  we
enjoy  (free  speech,  freedom  of  religion,  freedom  of  the  press)  were  earned
through a sacrifice against some external force.
But  people  forget  that  these  rights  are  also  earned  through  sacrifice
against some internal force. Democracy can exist only when you are willing
to tolerate views that oppose your own, when you’re willing to give up some
things  you  might  want  for  the  sake  of  a  safe  and  healthy  community,  when
you’re willing to compromise and accept that sometimes things don’t go your
way.
Put  another  way:  democracy  requires  a  citizenry  of  strong  maturity  and
character.
Over the last couple of decades, people seem to have confused their basic
human rights with not experiencing any discomfort. People want freedom to
express themselves, but they don’t want to have to deal with views that may
upset or offend them in some way. They want freedom of enterprise, but they
don’t  want  to  pay  taxes  to  support  the  legal  machinery  that  makes  that
freedom  possible.  They  want  equality,  but  they  don’t  want  to  accept  that
equality requires that everybody experience the same pain, not that everybody
experience the same pleasure.
Freedom  itself  demands  discomfort.  It  demands  dissatisfaction.  Because
the  freer  a  society  becomes,  the  more  each  person  will  be  forced  to  reckon
and  compromise  with  views  and  lifestyles  and  ideas  that  conflict  with  their
own. The lower our tolerance for pain, the more we indulge in fake freedoms,
the  less  we  will  be  able  to  uphold  the  virtues  necessary  to  allow  a  free,
democratic society to function.
And  that’s  scary.  Because  without  democracy,  we’re  really  fucked.  No,

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really—empirically,  life  just  gets  so  much  worse  without  democratic
representation,  in  almost  every  way.
30
 And  it’s  not  because  democracy  is  so
great.  It’s  more  that  a  functioning  democracy  fucks  things  up  less  often  and
less  severely  than  any  other  form  of  government.  Or,  as  Churchill  famously
once  said,  “Democracy  is  the  worst  form  of  government,  except  all  the
others.”
The  whole  reason  the  world  became  civilized  and  everyone  stopped
slaughtering one another because of their funny hats is because modern social
institutions effectively mitigated the destructive forces of hope. Democracy is
one  of  the  few  religions  that  manages  to  allow  other  religions  to  live
harmoniously alongside it and within it. But when those social institutions are
corrupted by the constant need to please people’s Feeling Brains, when people
become  distrustful  and  lose  faith  in  the  democratic  system’s  ability  to  self-
correct,  then  it’s  back  to  the  shit  show  of  religious  warfare.
31
 And  with  the
ever-advancing  march  of  technological  innovations,  each  cycle  of  religious
war potentially wreaks more destruction and devastates more human life.
32
Plato  believed  societies  were  cyclical,  bouncing  back  and  forth  between
freedom  and  tyranny,  relative  equality  and  great  inequality.  It’s  pretty  clear
after the past twenty-five hundred years that this isn’t exactly true. But there
are patterns of political conflict throughout history, and you do see the same
religious  themes  pop  up  again  and  again—the  radical  hierarchy  of  master
morality  versus  the  radical  equality  of  slave  morality,  the  emergence  of
tyrannical  leaders  versus  the  diffuse  power  of  democratic  institutions,  the
struggle  of  adult  virtues  against  childish  extremism.  While  the  “isms”  have
changed throughout the centuries, the same hope-driven human impulses have
been behind each movement. And while each subsequent religion believes it
is the ultimate, capital T “Truth” to unite humanity under a single, harmonious
banner, so far, each of them has only proven to be partial and incomplete.

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Chapter 9