Bad Things

 As it has so often the past several years (when to start the clock on this—March 2020? November 2016?)—the morning news sent a bolt of white hot terror through me with the first headline. Musk's acquisition of Twitter. It's finished. The deed is finally done. 

Everything about this is demoralizing and terrifying. First of all, there's the simple fact of how disgracefully Musk behaved through the whole ordeal. He acted far below the standard of any responsible executive and will apparently face no consequences for it. We have here yet another vindication of what is becoming the dominant style in our social and political life: the mugging smirk of the little boy who misbehaved and got away with it. More evidence that the bad guys are winning. 

But then there are the even worse geopolitical implications. Musk has of course pledged to reinstate Trump on the platform he just formally acquired. There are also the rumors—denied by Musk but seemingly emanating from people in the know—that Musk has engaged in secret negotiations by phone with Vladimir Putin: a claim that would align with Musk's recent public comments on the Ukraine issue. 

Of course, I've said on this blog many times that I think Ukraine and the West should propose some sort of compromise with Putin for the sake of ending the war more quickly and saving lives. But to argue for swallowing some rank injustice in the interests of an imperfect ceasefire is very different (indeed, the opposite) from appearing to morally legitimize Putin's territorial ambitions (or even worse—as the claims allege—conducting foreign relations without the knowledge or consent of the U.S. government). 

It all adds up to a plausible hypothesis that this day—of all days—could be the tipping point. This one morning—seemingly more innocuous than so many others we have woken up to in the past several years—could set in motion a chain of events that sees Trump reinstalled in the White House (now with a taste for blood and a desire to neutralize everyone who blocked his attempt to seize power last time) and Vladimir Putin able to gobble up territory at his borders without the impediment of a unified Western opposition. 

There are voices within that tell me not to trust the bolt of white hot terror I am feeling at this prospect. A part of me says, "Josh, that's sheer alarmism. You're catastrophizing again." Years of cognitive behavioral therapy treatment for anxiety disorder taught me that the worst thing we are dreading usually doesn't actually come to pass. It taught me not to trust the voice of anxious forecasting as the infallible voice of truth. As a friend once said: "we get so worried about politics every cycle. But then—every time—nothing really changes."

But then, in response to this voice, there comes another. This one speaks in the words of Richard Ford, in a line from his novel The Sportswriter: "bad things can and do happen to you." If the voice of anxiety is not always correct, it is not always wrong either. As a different friend once said to me: "I used to believe that I was blessed. That I was exempt. Then COVID-19 happened. I realized I'm not specially favored by the universe. The universe is just... kind of chaotic."

The good guys don't always win, in short. Fate does not invariably favor the virtuous. People who live in Vladimir Putin's Russia had to figure this out years ago. Why shouldn't it be our turn to learn? And besides, haven't bad things actually happened to us after all, just as Ford's narrator predicts? Have we not had Trump, global pandemic, war, etc.? Which one of these was the exact one that defeated our native optimism and convinced us—as my friend said—of the reality of the chaos element in the world will vary. But the realization must come for us all at some point. 

Many of us go through life—and indeed perhaps it is necessary to retain such a belief in order to face the world at all without being stalled by anxiety—with a baseline conviction that bad things only happen to other people; never to us. 

The reason perhaps lies in the fact that we are, to each of us as ourselves, the center of the universe. Our own mind is the only consciousness with which we are directly acquainted—so how can we not believe that it must be special? As Thomas Hardy puts it in his early novel, Desperate Remedies: "There is in us an unquenchable expectation, which at the gloomiest time persists in inferring that because we are ourselves, there must be a special future in store for us, though our nature and antecedents to the remotest particular have been common to thousands."

And as truly as Hardy wrote about the subjective state of us all, Ford was right about the objective reality of the situation: "bad things can and do happen." And not just happen to someone else. They can happen here, now, in our timeline, in our reality, in our world. Today might not be precisely when it comes. But come it will.