It's time to make an exception

Society will suffer if we can't find a way to get along

Atlas Shrugged gets all the attention but I think that Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead is the stronger of her two mega-novels. Fountainhead is realistic and leaves the reader with an endearing call to action: life may be exceedingly difficult but if you have passion and indefatigable determination you can stand on top of the world. In addition to a useful message about perseverance, The Fountainhead also provides us with an unusual but strangely compelling definition of love.

Love is exception-making.

At first glance this definition may appear lacking in the sentimentality one typically associates with amore. However, let me tell you that in the decade and change since I read Fountainhead, this curt explanation of the loftiest emotion has proven to be surprisingly enduring.

As a child I was denied unlimited access to high fructose corn syrup. My father famously said that sugar water makes you “fat, ugly and stupid” and so on movie nights my sister and I had to split a 12oz can of coke. We savored our small allocation. I was also denied the delights of cable television, was expected to exercise and nobody in my family smoked. In short, my family inculcated the belief that,

• Smoking is dumb

• Junk food will make you ugly

• Being fat is bad

• Watching a lot of television is for losers

• You should exercise to stay healthy

Also, love is exception-making. I just spent a week with a dear friend who is obese, has not exercised in twenty years, smokes by the carton and watches ~14 hours of unfathomably trashy television every day. But she’s great, I love her even though I abhor her life choices. My family loves me even though they’re frustrated by my perceived “emotional distance” and how on more than one occasion I’ve had a many too many to drink on the 4th and made an ass of myself.

The direction I’d like to take us is toward an understanding that if we’re to survive this decade we’re going to need more love and understanding, and less animosity.

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One of the unique features of my life is that I’ve had the privilege of getting shotgun blasted by culture. My best friend in college was Muslim, the love of my life was Dutch, today I have two good friends one of whom is a left-leaning biotech worker in San Francisco the other a right-leaning Australian electrician, my last girlfriend was ethnically Chinese and I’ve spent the prior decade living in foreign countries.

Hiking in Thailand

The humanistic truth I’ve come to see is that once you strip off the superficial paint of food preference, language and weird hairstyles, there is an astonishing amount of commonality between the peoples of this planet. Nearly everyone I’ve met wants a good future for their children, to eat well and enjoy dinner with family and friends, to feel secure in their employment, to have a day off to relax, to date someone attractive, to own nice things and so forth. The overlap of humanity across the globe, America included, looks something like this.

Here’s the problem. The implements of mass media that predominate in our modern world attempt to convince us that humanity looks more like this.

Here’s a personal example of how deeply entrenched these delusions of dissimilarity have become. Last year I was with family and we were talking about wildlife. The word “cull” entered the conversation and Family Member A mentioned that they were not familiar with the phrase. I explained that it was a polite way of saying “kill,” especially as it relates to reducing excessive populations. Family Member A said, “Oh, I wish we could cull all the Republicans.”

Uhhhhhhhhh, what an unbelievably foolish thing to say! My predominate emotion was disappointment, a wave of sadness that someone close to me could make such an abhorrent statement. You’d like to to murder half the country aye, that’s the first thing that comes to mind is it? Yikes.

My family member has not come across well in this instance, but just to make a good story let’s call upon a hypothetical. I imagine that at some point a Republican with a few beers under their belt has said “we should cull those damn Democrats, they deserve it.” And if we combine the “logic” of these two statements the solution to America’s problems is to kill all the Americans. Why, it’s brilliant! The USA would be a great place to live if all those pesky Yanks were gone, right?

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In earlier epochs technology united our society. The telegraph and radio welded together a fledgling country as people in Chicago, Boston and San Francisco learned of events in real time. Families nationwide listened to the same programming, and in the early days of television they watched the same shows.

Although there was a distortion of objective truth in these broadcasts, the falsifications were largely irrelevant. The honey that sticks a society is widespread acceptance of a given narrative. The narrative may be true or false but what matters is that everyone believes it.

One of the great conundrums of the modern age is that our technology divides rather than unites. Social media’s profitability is directly influenced by how much time they can get people to spend on the platform, and grooming division is the simplest way to foster that cherished “engagement.” A puff headline about the latest wretchedness from <insert opposite political party/> catches eyeballs so that’s what gets shown.

Polarizing content may be OK in small doses, but when consumed en masse it’s enough to convince us that we’re all radically different people even when that’s an outright lie. A popular acceptance of unsolvable difference is troublesome because a lack of uniting narrative is, as we’ve seen in the last few years, spectacular fuel for discord. Years of media propaganda can lead people to believe that outrageous propositions (culling) are somehow a solution, as if the the other side is irredeemably lost.

This raises an interesting question: would you rather live when,

1. A handful of large media companies control the entire narrative. What gets beamed into the living room is more or less untrue but everyone believes it because there is no alternative. Societal cohesion is high

2. You have access to the internet, alternative media and it’s never been easier to figure out how the official narrative is false, but we each have our own reality and societal cohesion is low

That’s an intriguing quandary. It’s a simplification of course to say that we had unity in one age and disunity in another due to media content, but broadly speaking I think this idea holds some truth. Ideally we could have our cake and eat it too. Live in the internet age yet also have social cohesion. Is such a utopia possible? Unfortunately I think it may take many years before we find a way to have a healthy relationship with social media and a toxic mainstream press that feeds on division, hate and blaming the other side.

There’s so much money in pushing everyone to loathe each other that I find it difficult to believe the ruling class will do much about it until the problem is so obviously outrageous that it can no longer be ignored. And to my knowledge we have not yet seen a large grassroots campaign from an angry populace demanding limits on social media, although I am hopeful that more people will move in this direction.

In the interim I believe the best solution may be the following. We can recognize that yes, all those people out there are hopelessly deluded and I (you, the reader) alone possess the ultimate truth, but I’m willing to make an exception and still love those misinformed rapscallions anyways. We all have so much in common that it’s possible to overlook political differences and recognize the humanness in every citizen. The fate of the universe may just be at stake.