It is a malady confined to man, and not seen in any other creature, to hate and despise himself. — Michel de Montaigne
My household “reading room,” a locale that lends itself to the consumption of short bits of written material, has amongst its selection a couple books of aphorisms by the American social philosopher Eric Hoffer. In my latest perusal, two nuggets caught my attention. The first offered the Montaigne quote in the context of Man’s uniqueness as a religious animal. The second, offered nearly 50 pages later, read:
To have a grievance is to have a purpose in life. A grievance can almost serve as a substitute for hope; and it not infrequently happens that those who hunger for hope give their allegiance to him who offers them a grievance.
Hoffer did not connect these two aphorisms in his book, and it was by random chance that I read them more or less consecutively. It struck me that, contained in these separate observations, lies the core of today’s social justice movement, and beneath it the foundation of the persistent desire (against all evidence of its failure) for socialism.
Life today, in our first-world society, is, compared to the entirety of human history, incredibly easy and incredibly luxurious. Modern medicine offers the poorest in society better treatment and better options that that available to the wealthiest of a mere half century ago. Fears of hunger and famine have been supplanted by concerns about obesity and sloth. In most of our pockets are technological marvels that the richest man in the world could not have commanded only a couple decades ago. Agricultural technology has become so good that farmland is being retired. Energy keeps getting cheaper and more plentiful. And, every year, countless millions around the world rise up out of subsistence living and join the ranks of the upwardly mobile.
Despite this reality, however, we are beset on many sides by people who tell us how terrible things are, how wrong those who disagree with them are, and how government needs to force others to behave a certain way so that the world could not suck so much.
In a time when things are so good, why is that so many act is if they’re so bad?
First, consider Montaigne’s notion of self-hatred. If we consider it in the aggregate, as in humanity hating itself, it explains a lot. It explains why people feel others need to be controlled, it explains the perpetual bleatings about how humans are destroying the Earth, it explains the tribalism that makes us fear and loathe “other.” It explains why we can’t seem to live and let live. It explains why we assume that others will engage in the worst sorts of behaviors – behaviors we personally would avow never to conduct. We presume that others will mirror our worst selves, the things our deep, dark selves would do if we didn’t exercise the self-restraint and morality that we presume is exercised solely by us and ours. We have a natural tendency to hating humanity, and since it’s tough on the ego to admit self-hatred, we focus that hatred on “other” i.e that fraction of humanity that is not us or like-us.
Second, consider another old aphorism, this one from Proverbs:
Idle hands are the devil’s workshop; idle lips are his mouthpiece.
The incredible ease of our lives means we have a lot of free time and few existential concerns. Since nature abhors a vacuum (yes, another aphorism/cliche/pithy saying), we find things to fill our time. And, as Hoffer observed, grievances fit the bill quite nicely. Here’s the wrinkle: Since it’s pretty easy to point out the illogic of someone who’s living an incredibly cosseted life complaining about stuff, people avoid that rebuttal by airing grievances on behalf of others. The second half of Hoffer’s aphorism comes into play here – those who are seeking something in which to put their hopes are drawn in by those who tell them they have stuff to complain about. Thus, a social justice movement gestates, and thus, a grievance hierarchy emerges.
Why the latter? Because not everyone has the same grievances. Because, with a finite amount of time and energy, there will be competition to be heard, and that competition encourages loudness, excess, and hyperbole. Because some grievances conflict with others. And, because, at their cores, people are tribal and dislike/distrust “other,” even when some “other” includes other “oppressed” (as opposed to “oppressor”) identity groups.
Ironically, the biggest champions of grievances and social justice are, in some ways, the biggest peddlers of hatred for one’s fellow humans. Even as they rail against those who judge others by superficial markers (rage, gender, ethnicity, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, etc), they declare that those not of certain markers are de facto guilty of something and/or not permitted to offer dissenting opinions on certain social justice issues (take note of that last bit. The assertion isn’t only that dissenting opinions are wrong, but that, because of superficial markers, they mustn’t even be spoken).
As things get objectively better, as the very real social injustices that founded the civil rights and feminism movements become smaller and smaller, as the original grievances continue to be addressed and resolved, the smaller issues become a bigger deal, and the divisiveness they spawn will become a bigger problem. This is what Freud called the narcissism of small differences, a century old phrase inspired by even older analysis. The better things get objectively, the more we’ll be told that things are awful, and the more we’ll sort ourselves into like-minded groups rather than interact with those who have (slightly, in the grand scheme) differing view points. This is, unfortunately, human nature, and it may very well be that our success in making our lives better will be the source of our society’s undoing. And, it may very well be that we undo this success by embracing a political philosophy that has produced immeasurable death, destruction, harm and diminishment of living standards.
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These thoughts have have swirling through my mind but I have been unable to articulate them. Thank you for doing the work that I was unable to accomplish. Even though this post is several years old, it’s more applicable than ever.