Julie asked me a hard question today.
More on that in a second. First, for anyone who hasn’t gleaned it from reading my posts here, I am a person who walks looking into the light in spite of the darkness that might exist around me. It’s clear to me right now that we’re in trouble. Justice is strange, if it exists. Our President is more obsessed with his feud with a morning news show than he is with doing his job. No one has any real idea how to keep us safe, keep us well, keep us fed, etc. It’s all falling apart while Agent Orange: Nero Edition (the 45th revision) fiddles with his Twitter feed and Rome smolders. But I choose, every day, to look for the good in people, the good in the world, because I know how hard hitting the ground is going to hurt if I take the step off the ledge into the abyss. I think the best of people.
My mantra, which I teach, which I mentor with, which I give as advice to friends and to family, is “do your best. If you do the best you can, you can feel good about things when you lay your head down at night and can be free from the demons in your own head.” I believe this, fully. You don’t answer to the people who don’t think you’re cool, or who think they’re better than you, or who question your motives or your skills or your loyalty when you lay down to sleep. You close your eyes and you’re alone in there with yourself. You need to be able to feel comfortable with that voice.
But today Julie asked me the other side of that question. She asked me “do you think people are doing the best they can?”
I paused.
I SHOULD. That should be part of my mantra. I should expect the best of people, and since I think people doing the best they can is their natural state of best living, I should think that most people are doing their best. But the answer… the answer is no.
And I think it comes from the top. Forgive me if I start sounding Marxist here, as I’m not really a big fan of other Marxists, but this whole capitalism thing has messed up human socialization and interaction. The old “social contract” theory, though it was already flawed by the dreams of what capitalism would become, was built on a pretty solid foundation. People need other people. My ancestors knew that. We were tribal for a reason. We had a different sense of ownership for a reason. We didn’t think anyone could literally own the land because we saw the world a different way.
This can all be sort of rooted out from one of the earliest teachings in the Bible, even before capitalism rose. There were those two brothers, Cain and Abel (or in my world, the Undertaker and Kane, because I’m a nerd of a different color). For those who might not know their Bible well, Cain and Abel were brothers, sons of Adam and Eve (not Adam and Steve, I was told, all through my youth). They both worked as farmers, and both made offerings to God from their work. God like Abel’s offering better. The Bible doesn’t explain why. That always sort of troubled me as a scholar, but so does the book of Job in its entirety, so maybe me and the Old Testament have beef. At any rate, Cain killed Abel. This was generally believed to be the origin of envy and greed. For this, Cain became immortal, cursed to walk the earth.
I don’t want this to feel like a searing attack on religion, because it isn’t, but I’m about to attack this story. It might be accurate; I really don’t know, I wasn’t around. And my cultural belief in the beginning of life is that a spider swam across the dark water to get a flame, so I don’t get to pass judgment. But God showing favoritism is a great metaphor for how capitalism works. You see in a tribal living situation, in a truly communal living situation (I know, I know, communism is EVIL), people do what they can and receive what they need. The idea there being that if you do what you’re good at, you will have all that you need. But if someone is given more for the same, or more for less, there comes an incentive to be deceptive and to be ruthless, to cut corners and to think of self before others.
Our President illustrates to us how well this works. People don’t try to be their best selves because their best selves won’t always make them the most money, won’t curry them the most favor, won’t result in the most power.
And as Machiavelli taught us– the actual guy, not 2Pac– it is better to be feared than to be loved. Statecraft, and hence social interaction in a capitalist society, isn’t based on morality. It’s based on navigating the corruption. Be the loudest. Steal the most credit. Blame the most others for your shortcomings.
So now, I don’t think everyone does their best. I think many people succumb to the bad part of being an American and do the most selfish thing they can. People steal. People cheat. People kill. People spread lies. People waste their time going after innocent people for presumed moral outrages (homosexuality, for example, which is not a moral outrage at all) because it lets them create an us/them binary.
I want everyone to be their best self. But I know that most people won’t be. I know people will lob attacks and will say and do horrible things so that they can get to where they perceive they are ahead.
It reminds me of the simplest metaphor for American life, one I am sure you’ve all seen at least once in your lives. When you’re driving, and you’re going the speed limit, there’s sometimes that angry person who runs up on you, then honks, or starts weaving into the other lane, desperate to get around you. Sometimes they flip you off. Sometimes they yell.
At the next stop light, they are always either right next to you or just a single car ahead.
All their sound and fury, all their anger and selfish desire to get around you amounts to no real gain.
That’s America sometimes.
But that is clearly not our “best.”