Say, for the sake of argument, it’s the start of another week at the office, and you and your coworkers are milling around the break room, putting off getting to work, because, until you sit down at your desk, the week hasn’t actually started. Mostly you’re chatting about what you all got up to over the weekend and how you can’t wait for the next season of Killing Eve, but then The New Guy, who doesn’t know any better, starts talking about the healthcare system and what he thinks is wrong with it. The rest of you all know what this means: if talk turns political, you have to hear the opinions of… the guy from payroll. Guy from Payroll takes issue with The New Guy’s comments about how patients in many other countries pay less for better outcomes. Guy from Payroll thinks overhauling the healthcare system would be a long and difficult process to create a system where he would pay higher taxes and have fewer options, and all for what? He doubts socialized medicine –if it even worked– would be worth the tradeoffs, and even lets slip the phrase… do democrats think they can live forever? [Long, awkward beat] To cut the tension, someone starts talking about their kids, who’ve just started at a new school. But talking about school leads to talking about safety drills, and talking about safety drills leads to talking about school shootings, and now The New Guy’s on gun reform. And he speaks passionately about how easily monsters can get their hands on assault rifles, but Payroll counters that, even if you get rid of every gun in the country, criminals will just import them. A bad person can always find a way to do bad things, and why should he, as a responsible gun owner, be punished for the crimes of a monster? [Long, awkward beat] There is, again, an uncomfortable silence. Guy from Payroll fiddles with his tie; he doesn’t like this any more than you, he just can’t help himself. Someone tries to change the subject, but, by now, New Guy is looking to win an argument, so he steers you straight to Roe v. Wade. And Payroll is off and running, talking about how beautiful childhood is, and how wonderful it is to be a parent, and how it’s tragic for any life to be cut short before it begins, and how evil it is to have state-sanctioned– But new guy just can’t keep his mouth shut. He says, “If you wanted fewer abortions you would promote comprehensive sex education and easy access to contraceptives, because that’s all that has ever reliably lowered abortion rates in any country. All making it a crime does is determine whether the abortion happens in a doctor’s office or a motel room.” [Longest, awkwardest beat yet] It is deathly silent. People shuffle in place. Finally, without making eye contact, The Guy from Payroll just says, “Ugh.” "I hate Mondays." Everybody shuffles off to their cubicles, scowling more at the New Guy than at the Guy from Payroll, and another week officially begins. Much as it pains me to admit, Guy from Payroll has made one genuinely good point this morning: Mondays suck. It is a truth universally acknowledged that the work week will end talking about how great Fridays are and begin, three days later, lamenting the scourge of Mondays. But what are you gonna do? We could start work on Tuesdays and end on Saturdays but that’s just kicking the can down the week. The cold reality is: week’s gotta start somewhere, and even your most unlikable coworker has a right to complain about it and get sympathy. But why am I talking about it? I’m a YouTuber. Mondays only suck for people with real jobs. Well, because what I want you to understand today is that the conservative thinks about people dying of preventable illnesses, school shootings, and back alley abortions the way you think about Mondays. The conservative mindset tends to sort things into binaries with no room for scale. Mass shootings either happen or they don’t. You can talk about how much safer countries with robust gun control are, and they’ll just say, “Here’s a shooting that happened in England. Here’s a shooting that happened in Australia. Gun control didn’t stop them. You can't regulate evil. This is the kind of sentence that can drive you up the wall, because it is, on its face, obviously true. But it’s only applicable in this context thanks to the word that’s implied but not stated: “You can’t regulate all evil.” Yes, since they’ve had gun control, there have been shootings in England and Australia. Does it matter that these shootings are far less deadly and happen far less often? Does it matter that making guns harder to get has saved tens of thousands of lives? Like, do we really need to explain why stores put junk food you know you shouldn’t buy right next to the checkout counter? Because… The easier it is to do a thing, the more it happens. The mentality here is that, if you can’t stop every shooting, you shouldn’t bother stopping any; if you can’t save every life, there’s no point improving healthcare. Nothing short of literally defeating death will be good enough. It is a wholesale rejection of thinking in terms of systems. Notice how Payroll phrases his argument: "A bad person can always find a way to do bad things." Person. Singular. If a criminal can still get a gun, they extrapolate that every criminal can get a gun, in the same way that if a poor person can get a job, every poor person can get a job. Which… No! If there are fewer jobs than people who need them, there’s going to be unemployment, and if there are fewer guns than people who want to shoot them, there’s going to be less gun crime. If they talked about populations of people they’d have to acknowledge that some percentage succeeds at doing bad things and a percentage fails, and since percentages are different across cultures, we must have some influence over them. But a binaristic model of “things either happen or they don’t” leaves no room for percentages. Was there a shooting? Then there is still evil in the world. A conservative will generally agree with you about what the ills of society are: bigotry, violence, disease, oppression, poverty... But they don’t view them as… Problems to be solved. They are facts of life. Of course racism is terrible... but it's a Monday. Trying to fight racism is like trying to fight the first law of motion. The only reason to even talk about it is to commiserate. Besides, if we didn't have bad white people, how would we know we're the good ones? Morality, to them, is not about fighting evil, it is a set of shared opinions on what evil is. When bad things happen, we sit around agreeing that they are bad, and anyone who says otherwise we excommunicate. That’s what talking about tragedy is for. I think it’s why they get so mad at us when we “politicize tragedies,” as in: when yet another shooting happens, we talk about what could be done to prevent them. It’s not just that they refuse to do anything about the problem –though it is definitely that– it’s that we’re not participating in the ritual of “thoughts and prayers.” Solemnity is how we perform our morals after a crisis. How do they know where we stand if we don’t participate? And, on its face, this seems completely contradictory to all the other things they claim to believe. Sometimes you wanna scream at Payroll… But here’s the real kicker: He doesn’t think illegalizing abortions will make them happen less. What he wants is to throw people in jail for getting them. It’s right there in how he talks about gun rights: To him, the law isn’t about shaping society, it’s about who gets punished. In this view, human nature is immutable. People are going to… be gay and do crime, and get abortions, and take drugs. And the law is not there to guide, it is there to judge. It is there it sanctify one particular walk of life as The Right Way. The reason they’re opposed to contraceptives and sex ed is not because they don’t work, but because they shouldn’t work. It doesn’t even matter that kids who get abstinence-only education have just as much sex as the ones who learn about condoms; And if it doesn’t work, it’s because you’re just not trying hard enough! It’s nothing to do with the way the world is, but the way they want it to present. As the philosopher Taylor Schweizzel once said, But if shade crams all the queer people back into the closet, that’s how it will look to straight folks. The goal is to communicate which types of people have to fear law enforcement and which get to admire them. And, once you see the conservative view of laws and customs as mapping a path we are meant to walk and punishing deviation, you start to see why we have a Religious Right and not so much a Religious Left. It describes a world drenched in sin that cannot be cleansed from the inside, but walk the path, you might save yourself. Punish those who stray, you might save them as well. You can see how talking in terms of systemic problems and harm reduction just bounces off of that. It’s like saying it’s better to die with one, unconfessed mortal sin on your soul than seven. You’re still going to Hell! And what good is it to talk about populations? When your soul is judged at the gates of Heaven you will stand alone. And if God still hasn’t rewarded your faithfulness, you must not have been pious enough. This is not to say that reactionary conservatives in the US are just a pack of Catholics. In fact, they’re quite the trail mix; we got Protestants, pagans, a surprising number of atheists. But maybe you’re familiar with the term… I don’t mean the school of philosophy that’s about following the teachings of Christ but not believing in His divinity, but, colloquially, the philosophy of… It’s a person who, despite not being a Christian, has a set of ethics clearly informed by a Christian upbringing or by living in a not-officially-but-in-practice Christian nation. Regardless of creed… And it spans the whole political spectrum. Take, for example, the (often liberal) sentiment, There is no consequentialist argument for this. Perhaps if you and an organized bloc of citizens threatened to withhold your votes in order to influence policy, but, as a purely individual act, the consequentialist would argue… And that, if there are two evils, and one or the other is going to be in a position of power, voting for the lesser is more ethical than staying home. The consequentialist would argue… When both options are terrible, all you can do is… But that’s not generally the way it feels. It feels like refusing to participate, or choosing someone you want to win but whom you know isn’t going to, is the more ethical option. That voting for the lesser is a moral compromise. This feeling is independent of results. It doesn’t mitigate damage, it doesn’t reduce harm, but it does… That feeling is very powerful; many politicians have staked their careers on it. Our society has always told us that voting for any flavor of evil will leave a stain on our souls. It continues to feel this way even among people who no longer believe in souls. The greatest difference between Left and Right is simply in how common and how intense this feeling is. This is why fascism can be so enticing to the religious and irreligious alike, why they have such an easy time making inroads with conservatives: because fascism is politics as faith. There’s a reason the Nazis talked about the übermensch. They didn’t reject the framework that evil is ancient and the world is polluted and nothing short of divine intervention can save it. They said the world could be saved, and only by them, because, to the other races… And which would you rather believe? In the Left’s framework… But, to hear the fascists tell it… So conservatives can brush off moderate change as impossible yet embrace people who promise to turn the whole world inside out. Because nothing short of that is worth trying. I would caution against assuming this mentality is a natural outgrowth of Christianity, or paganism, or atheism. It spreads because people in power spread it, and people listen when they want their egos flattered and their sins absolved and to be folded into an authority structure that privileges them. They’ll what it takes to conform whatever beliefs they came in with to it. The necessary counternarrative is to stress that that, in fact… and, even if it were… The way nature deals with a pandemic is to let everyone without a genetic resistance to the illness die, and, if what’s left is not a stable breeding population, you go extinct. Humanity as we know it only exists in defiance of nature. Every form of bigotry, every means of oppression, is a thing we created; The idea that the worst things on Earth have no great significance, that most evil is a chaotic mess borne of human fallibility, can be very depressing to consider… It can be reconciled with spirituality, but not with reactionary fundamentalism, which is the point. And it can be kind of baffling to assert that, when bad things happen, maybe we should do something about it? But you just can’t take for granted that, when someone agrees a thing is bad, they’re agreeing it’s a problem. But, if you cross that hurdle –again, not with the people spewing bullshit but the people they’re trying to convince— you may find incrementalism still doesn’t do anything for them. They may still long for something more dramatic. And, frankly, a lot of us feel the same. So maybe that’s a gateway to talking about deeper change. Because…
