Monsters Unleashed – Fanpopfanpop.com
Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom. George Orwell
My biggest fear is of some kind of dystopian future where we’re advanced in every way except in our humanity. Bryce Dallas Howard
The tortures mankind devises for its amusement will surely render the devil redundant. Reed King
You always get your kicks pointing out defects?” retorted The Drippy Man. Jeff Phillips
We may be monsters, but we are each other’s monsters. L. Grey
Their lies are shrouded in beauty, attractive and believable to the average person. Jessica Scurlock
She was lucky enough to know little enough to fear nothing more than wasps, the dark, and the darker figments of her imagination. Angela Panayotopulos
No one wants to die, said Becka. But some people don’t want to live in any of the ways that are allowed. Margaret Atwood
For some time now, I’ve been intrigued, at times perplexed, at other times even disgusted at the degree to which dystopian thinking and imagery has influenced – surely infected as well – our social and political life.
What moved me to start writing on this topic and stop procrastinating over it was an image on my twitter feed this past Sunday morning, one of many posts in the post-Musk era full of monstrous venom directed at others, of violence in all its diverse manifestations, of lies and manipulations which represent, among other things, a down-payment on a world of fear and unaddressed longing, of political impotence and resource scarcity, that seem set to bring us down to levels that those who study the human condition have long recognized (and feared) our capacity to descend.
The image I refer to was of a classroom-style space in which sat a group of Russian children wearing masks and listening to a middle-aged woman speak on the topic of war. These children were perhaps of middle school age, still not so far from those days of being fearful of the dark, of imagining all sorts of monsters under their sleeping places. Not so far from needing the reassurance and stability of older persons that there really aren’t monsters under the bed, that it is OK to sleep secure in the knowledge that we erstwhile adults are doing all that we can to ensure a brighter, less fearful future for their still young lives.
Such reassurance was not exactly what was communicated through this particular post. What was “shared” was the view that “War is victory. War is love. War is friend. War is the future of the world”.
Well, if war is the future of the world, then these young lives are doomed to intersect with violence and deprivation which make the monsters under their beds seem like Sesame Street characters in comparison. If war is not the future of the world, and there are still plenty of us determined to make this so, then this “sharing” takes its place among the most monstrous lies that could be perpetuated on young minds, minds which are able to imagine the carnage to come but can do little or nothing at this point in their lives to divert its impacts.
Lest we insert my post into some dynamic of now-rampant superpower confrontation wherein the evildoers are conspiring to “educate” their own next generation, we don’t have to look far within our own contexts for those monsters we choose over and over to feed instead of tame. In my own country, the media is saturated with trailers for films and other accessible video that feature more shootings and explosions in a sixty-second commercial than any child needs to see in a lifetime. We have proven ourselves ready to believe anything about the world (or each other) that we feel could strengthen our hand while we enthusiastically project into the universe the evil that we refuse to acknowledge within ourselves. We set up schools to reinforce white privilege and glorify figures such as Adolf Hitler, run by people who are otherwise categorically opposed to the “indoctrination” of schools. We use the machinery of politics to divide and deny, and we use the language of religion to win assent from people who don’t seem to recognize (or perhaps care) that their economic and spiritual pockets have yet again been picked.
The characteristics of societies given over to dystopian worldviews are more common than we might otherwise think, people who have come to expect so little of others or themselves, people who have accommodated themselves to levels of violence and inequity which undermine prospects for caring and reconciled communities, people who believe fervently in the presence of monsters lurking in their sleeping spaces but who have also largely scorned the rhetorical reassurances of those in authority who themselves have too-often failed the more important test of reassuring actions.
It is commonplace in social commentary to reflect on our “advances” as a civilization, clever as we surely are, but less to acknowledge the degree to which many of these advances create new obstacles to access by most of the world’s peoples, obstacles which take many forms and which are more often protected than challenged, sometimes at the tip of a firearm. In my own country, but not my country alone, we continue to innovate in ways that both solve problems and create new ones without careful scrutiny of the gaps which our innovations are more likely to widen, the gaps which serve the interests of some but stoke the grievances of many, the genies which we so willingly let out of their bottles with not a clue in the world as to how to get them back in should that be required.
It is difficult for me at times to grasp what precisely we are up to as a species, why we find so much comfort in what are demonstrably our more troubling human impulses, why we insist on turning difference into occasions for hatred, why we take umbrage at the things others do and the ideas they hold without investing a single moment trying to understand the common complexities of people, their fears and loathings, their opinions and failings, their aspirations and dreams. I don’t know that I have ever lived through a time when people presumed to know more about their political, cultural or religious adversaries based on assumptions, caricatures, stereotypes – none of which could stand at face value the test of evidence generated from direct, human interaction. We have literally become adept at creating monsters with little or no corroboration regarding what exactly people have done (or thought, or believed) to warrant this unseemly designation.
Last week, I indulged a “538” podcast with Robert Waldinger, a Harvard professor who has been chronicling – and lamenting – the gradual but consistent demise of human connection which has had – and is having — grave impacts on our politics, our religious faith, even our personal health. Waldinger describes a society of increasingly isolated and lonely individuals, people who report having few friends of any quality, fewer and fewer trusting bonds, fewer too of the complex human connections that can contextualize our overly muscular, abstracted and increasingly digitally-enabled condemnations of others we do not know, have little interest in knowing, and to whom we seem content to posit as existential threats rather than as life and health-saving ties that bind.
Clearly we have decided in too many instances, as the great Wendell Berry once noted, that we would prefer to own a neighbor’s farm than have a neighbor. Consumption, acquisition, doubling down on the “beautiful” words that obfuscate more than illuminate and that we simply “need to believe,” getting our “kicks” by condemning all that we fail to understand, projecting evil into the world that we haven’t yet had the courage to confront within ourselves. These lines are hardly inevitable, but they are trending in directions that may well at some point make monsters of us all.
As one strategy for getting beyond my deep procrastination regarding this piece, I listened to a rendering of “Monster Mash,” a fun tune from long ago that got many in its day off the couch, away from the television, and on to the dance floor. It was a “graveyard smash,” we were told, so much so that even corpses were ostensibly inspired to leave the cemetery for an evening and join the fun. I fear that the next version of Monster Mash will be less about playful music and more about words which foment hatred and mistrust, words which signify our generalized intent, if that Russian woman prophesies correctly, to put “others” in their graves rather than invite them out for some genuine human interaction on a dance floor, real or metaphorical.
More and more, some quite powerful thinkers are coming around to the view that our nations are only as healthy as the bonds which connect us to one another. This is important work that has the potential to contextualize our policy, improve our personal and social health, and overcome the abstractions that serve only to increase populations of monsters, real and imagined.
For the sake of ourselves and the sake of our world, let’s reconnect.
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