Well we couldn't wait for 2020 to be over and ring in the new year, but as I've written before be careful what you wish for. Not even a fortnight into 2021 and terrorist protestors tried to topple the Capitol Building in Washington D.C at the behest of their cult ring-leader narcissist Donald Trump inciting insurrection. An attempted coup nonetheless. The world looked on in horror, shocked and stunned in disbelief. The same day the U.S had the highest daily death count from COVID-19. 4,112 souls dead, with a mind boggling 300,000+ cases. With a fascist in the White House leading a fascist coup Trump is the only President to be impeached twice and rightly so. Meanwhile the U.S and many parts of the world are facing a race against time with COVID-19's new strain exponentially driving cases, deaths and hospitalizations to the brink that is becoming unsustainable.And if that wasn't bad enough yet another 737 deadly plane crash. We might already be wishing for 2022?
When I look back and think of 2020, I think of two moments. The first was near the beginning of the pandemic. People cheered for doctors and sang from balconies. A spirit of sudden fierce determination prevailed. “We’re in this together,” people said. The second moment I think of was the end of the year 360,000 Americans were dead. Britain and South Africa had bred a deadly new strain of the virus. The West was in tatters. And just a handful of countries had actually pulled together to fight the virus, all in the East. And so I’ll always think of 2020 as the year we weren't all in it together.2020 was a depressing, miserable, grim year and revealed the truth about us. Of our societies. It was a profoundly ugly truth.
We know something about us that we didn’t quite know before. If we suspected it, as many of us did, now there is stark and vivid proof. Nobody can deny the pandemic’s grim revelation. Our societies are made up of terrible terrible people. They are not good people. The person in our society doesn't care about anything. Anything good or beautiful or true. Nothing matters to them. Only stupid and shallow and false things. The average person appears to have no sense of guilt, shame, no conscience, no morals, no ethics, no values, no decency, no civilization. We live in societies made of profound, pervasive, relentless, ugliness, which nothing, it seems, can move an inch.
Our societies look at mass death and shrug and, after they clapped for the doctors for all of five minutes, didn't change one bit. The irresponsibility and negligence and amorality of the average remorseless fool went on to cause an even greater wave of mass death. And what did they feel? Remorse? Grief? Sorrow? The pandemic scrubbed away the polite fictions that we have accepted for far too long; our societies are flawed. It showed us, without a shadow of a doubt, that our societies are made of sociopaths.
Take America for example. The world has long suspected that Americans are idiots. Backwards, brutal, violent, greedy, selfish. More inclined to shoot a gun than read a book. Americans don't care. As a society, as a country. About mass death. About turning a potential pandemic into a lethal, historic tidal wave of death. They flatly have refused to change their behavior one iota. Sure, maybe you did, but America as a society was completely incapable of change — right down to even wearing a mask or staying home for a month.
The pandemic revealed that Americans are exactly who the world thought they were. Violent, selfish, ignorant, deceitful, stupid — and then some. It’s one terrible thing to bomb half the world. But to kill hundreds of thousands of people in your own country…because you don’t believe a pandemic exists, or it isn’t that serious? And yet that is what Americans, as a society did. They killed each other. They proceeded to create a nightmarish Lord of the Flies in real life, a social Darwinian engine of death. The most vulnerable in society — the elderly, the poor, the frail, the sick — were picked off one by one. And nobody much cared. Sure, some brave doctors and nurses did. But they are the exception who proves the rule. Most of America, society, culture, economy, people, shrugged.
The pandemic revealed that our societies are largely made of sociopaths. Idiots seems to me to be, on reflection, far too kind a word. Sociopaths, I think, fits better. They are people who feel nothing for suffering, or worse, revel in it. People who have a kind of supremacy complex. People who are only ever calculating how to win some kind of game, defeat someone else, acquire and possess more. People to whom others are a means to an ends, not ends in themselves. People who value things over lives. People who, because they are incapable of having genuine emotions, are incapable of having any kinds of genuine relationships, either. What happens when you put enough people like that in a society? What happens when a society crosses the threshold into being made of a majority of sociopaths?
Sociopaths can’t have real relationships: our societies are just like that, places of distrust, hostility, suspicions, if not outright enmity. Sociopaths don’t consider anyone else a real person, treat them with dignity, respect, care, concern, which is exactly how we treat one another, investing next to nothing. Sociopaths are like childish narcissists taken to the outermost extreme — what else would you call societies to whom the economy matters more than mass death? What good is “an economy” anyways if one its main byproducts is to kill people? There’s no shortage of evidence — in fact, the idea that you “need evidence” for any old obvious observation is itself kind of sociopathic. It says that you can’t simply feel what’s so achingly and painfully simple and true, that you don’t trust anyone else, and so forth.
All those wise old classical European sociology professors who taught me would have smiled darkly, and said: “capitalism.” They would have pointed out that people are just expressing capitalist values. Capitalism, meaning, by the way, Walmart, Google, Amazon — not your little local shop. Capitalism tells us that money, sex, power, and fame are all that matter in life, that acquiring and possessing more of them is the point of life, and the way to get there is to dominate and exploit others. Capitalism is what makes us so selfish, stupid, brutal, violent, that we won’t stay home for a month so that hundreds of thousands can live.
It seems to me that the process of civilization in our societies is failing. By process of civilization. I mean "what it takes to produce a civilized person." Civilizing a person is very, very hard. It takes multiple institutions from childhood well past adolescence to do it. Schools, universities, clubs, athletics, arts, sciences, media, books, and so forth. The point of these institutions is to inculcate the basic virtues of civilization: from empathy to reason, from kindness to grace, from selflessness to courage. Our process of civilization does not seem to be more working anymore. Those institutions and systems are not working anymore. Our societies are not producing civilized people anymore. They are producing sociopaths. Again, that’s not “my opinion.” It’s what 2020 revealed. The average person doesn’t care about anything anymore. They are not good people, which is what the whole point of the process of civilization is: to produce people who are at least good enough that they don’t make a society melt down by way of indifference, stupidity, violence, brutality, and ignorance. And yet all that is just what 2020 revealed ours are all too capable of, and in fact did.
The average person in our societies appears now to be someone who is perfectly happy with mass death. emotionally indifferent to it, angry that they don't get their own infantile way, resentful that any imposition on them was made at all, and therefore, unwilling to change their behavior in any way whatsoever, of their own volition.
All that is the antithesis of what it means to be civilized. It is the diametrical opposite of things like “having a conscience,” “being able to reason for the common good,” “being able to self-govern for the public good,” “being able to be a decent and thoughtful human being.”
If you are a sane, thoughtful, decent person - well, how do you live in such a place? A dehumanized, violent, brutal, idiotic one? How do you live in a society of sociopaths? Isn’t it an oxymoron to begin with? Where do you go from there? How do you coexist with the kind of remorseless idiots who don’t care about causing death on the scale of a World War? How do you not shudder in contempt and disgrace every time you see them — which is all the time? But where does that leave you?
That, my friends, is the question for 2021. The pandemic revealed that our societies have a total lack of empathy, goodness, decency, and a stunning capacity for indifference, malice, carelessness, ignorance, selfishness, violence, stupidity.
How do you live in a society like that?
Vincent Lyn
CEO/Founder at We Can Save Children
Director of Creative Development at African Views Organization
Economic & Social Council at United Nations