Reading And Writing in An Emotionally Broken Age

The power of books when fiction and nonfiction blur

Photo by Mike Hindle on Unsplash

I have been writing online for more than two years now. If audience or read-counts are useful metrics, I have done pretty well. Notwithstanding my meandering across various topics—supposedly a bane to growth—my Substack and Medium pages have reached more than 1,000 combined followers and subscribers from at least 23 countries and 37 US states.

But lately, it feels a bit pointless. I am a writer who focuses on issues in the real world — science, technology, politics, and law. The problem is that the division between fiction and nonfiction has seemingly become a gray area or, worse, no longer extant. It is particularly noticeable in politics, but it has leeched into virtually everything.

Evidence, for some, is whatever they say it is (or isn’t) and logic is all but anachronistic. If an argument pushes against emotional appeal it is frequently dismissed altogether, without thought or coherent counterargument. Many tend to do so through ad hominem attacks—the cheapest form of rebuttal.

For example, if you say one political party has done something stupid, adherents to that party will claim you ‘worship’ another rather than contend with the issue. If you point out the lack of evidence or logical fallacies related to a belief in something (say, aliens or religion), people will claim you are ‘bias’ or ‘close-minded.’ It is tiresome, immature, and lazy.

No one should be optimistic for the future in such an intellectually devoid society. One in which, as political scientist Brian Klaas noted, The most powerful people in the world are both stupid and incompetent. Sadly, those people are in power in large part because far too many constituents worldwide applaud stupidity and incompetence. There are innumerable reasons for this, a few understandable, most not. But that’s an issue for another essay.

In this environment, nonfiction has become an almost indie genre.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with writing for a small, select audience. What matters is whatever one is trying to accomplish; crowd size does not need to rank high among the priorities — even if some are embarrassingly obsessed with it.

I only once, quite briefly, focused on the audience in my choice of content—which is why I mentioned several times now my surprise that I have a decent-sized one. If I was deciding my topics that way, I would long ago have chosen a niche and stuck to it. (I tried for awhile, but found it tedious). Had I done so, my audience—and income—might be even bigger by now.

Instead, I am driven by the interesting, good, and bad things happening about which people maybe have not heard or know much, or for which I have a view I wish to share. And sometimes, I just like to discuss the odd ideas that come into my head—like measuring snow removal in my driveway. Whatever the case, it was always driven by the motivation to think about how to do things better, either individually or as a community.

Make no mistake, I still enjoy doing all of that, and will continue to do so. I maintain the same motivation, despite the struggle to sustain any optimism. But the cure is becoming more elusive by the day for the growing despair that many are feeling—as the evidence clearly shows. Indeed, maybe there is no cure.

A woke virus

When I came back to the US last year after a long residence in Nepal, it felt like visiting a chronically ill patient. She was sick when I left, but declined so much during my absence that she now seems terminal. Unfortunately, she is also contagious. Every agonal breath spreads the malady like Mary Mallon. Standard treatments are no longer effective because the disease’s mode of transmission keeps evolving.

But it is not a novel illness. In fact, it is an ancient scourge, one that has patiently awaited its next opportunity. It is a virus of the mind, woke from its slumber by malcontents hardly different from their predecessors. There is no goal beyond deprivation; no endpoint where enough is enough.

They shall cover the surface of the land, so that no one will be able to see the land. They will also eat the rest of what has escaped—what is left to you from the hail—and they will eat every tree which sprouts for you out of the field.

Our ancestors contained this sickness by destroying the blockade on information. Gutenberg’s movable-type printing press broke the monopoly and paved the way for the Renaissance movement, which promoted the “genius of man... the unique and extraordinary ability of the human mind.”

Perhaps advocates of that movement overestimated their descendants.

The varmint in control of the largest portals of information today have turned accessibility on its head. They seek to capitalize on dissemination itself, not validity. Thus, washing over a trickle of useful data is a torrent of the useless. All in the name of destructive profit.

These unwholesome hoarders have learned that what is “unique and extraordinary” about 21st century humans is their propensity to acquiesce to their most primeval sensations, and such capitulation pays huge dividends. If emotionally stirred enough, people today will spite their friends and family, even themselves, to propagate any level of foolishness at whatever cost.

Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him. —Epictetus

Today’s villains chase an ages-old objective. Enslave the masses through humiliating self-destruction to live in a manner that they deny to everyone else. But while the motive is the same, the world is not.

What these modern monarchs face that their predecessors did not is a world that is far more fragile, far more dangerous. Billions of oppressed, often armed, subjects are a powder keg more volatile than ever seen in history. The natural environment and social systems degraded by unchecked avarice and corruption are the lit fuse. Global catastrophe is swiftly becoming a matter of when, not if.

Rather than put this latest coup down for good, the public is speeding the takeover through its ignorant infighting. There are no real ‘sides’ beyond oppressor and oppressed, but the oppressed do not see it that way. Like good little ideologues, they divide themselves into groups, with few that see the true threat, and fewer still who propose viable plans to conquer it. This despite more than a century of warnings by greater minds.

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. —Oscar Wilde

Information on its own cannot combat this emotional regression because it is sullied with endless bullshit. In this sea of confusion, people cannot discern who is honest, what is real, or even what is right or wrong. Essentially, the stresses of their environment “[outweigh] their ability to cope with those demands.” This leads to:

emotion-focused coping strategies such as denial, venting of emotion, and behavioral disengagement.

This fraudulent world full of lies and liars, bolstered by pernicious tech that promulgates every absurdity, is fostering all the elements that cause severe psychological disorders. And disorders are on the rise. A meteoric rise. Everywhere across the globe. The virus is very wide awake.

Photo by Matt C on Unsplash

Fighting fire with fiction

How does one inspire rational thinking and action when all information is suspect? Where people are devolving into perpetual states of mental anguish or disrepair? Where sides are decided by the visceral rather than the sensible? Where aversion is held over compassion?

This is where fiction comes in.

During times of duress, the human proclivity to defer to emotional over intellectual reaction is instinctive and, for many, irresistible. Fighting it is, in a sense, a battle between showing and telling. A good novel prioritizes the former because readers better associate with and retain what they felt, rather than what the author explained.

In an age of severe partisan and ideological division, social commentary must capitalize on emotion to resonate with a broader audience, especially if it hopes to reach those entrenched in echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. It must provoke feelings to convey a message that will be received and contemplated. Commentor Tim Underwood explained the concept on the Effective Altruism Forum (edited slightly for clarity):

A classic example is Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel about a slave unjustly suffering, written in the 1850s, that was credited with helping to spark the Civil War. Uncle Tom’s Cabin did not introduce anyone to the idea that slavery was bad, or convince anyone who thought that slavery was a fine peculiar Southern institution that it was actually evil. However, it seems to have radicalized Northern attitudes towards slavery, and it was part of the moment when enough one-issue voters on slavery existed that the party system broke down and allowed the new abolitionist Republican party to win congress and the presidency in 1860.

What is most instructive from a writer’s perspective is that one can engage in an abundance of telling by showing how things actually are. Consider this example by one of the true masters of the craft, Charles Dickens:

Some houses which had become insecure from age and decay, were prevented from falling into the street, by huge beams of wood reared against the walls, and firmly planted in the road; but even these crazy dens seemed to have been selected as the nightly haunts of some houseless wretches, for many of the rough boards which supplied the place of door and window, were wrenched from their position, to afford an aperture wide enough for the passage of a human body. The kennel was stagnant and filthy. The very rats, which here and there lay putrefying in its rottenness, were hideous with famine. (Oliver Twist; Ch. 5)

Dickens did not explicitly say how bad the housing in Victorian England was, he showed it. His illustration provided direct commentary on the lousy conditions faced by the poor without seeming to. In an analysis of Dickens as social commentator, Alok Mishra noted:

Literature can… shed light on issues that need exposure in public. It can also serve as a way to promote empathy and understanding among people by allowing readers to see the world through the eyes of characters with different backgrounds and experiences.

The place for answers. Photo by Will van Wingerden on Unsplash

Get a book (or write one)

Intelligent social commentary is sorely needed today, but scholarly articles and informational pieces are simply not enough, no matter how intelligently crafted.

We are mired in a new kind of Dark Age, one in which everything is painted black and set against an equally black backdrop. Fictive works may well be our last hope. They may be the only source of light left to illuminate the greatest hoax ever to take hold of the world—that everything is whatever we (or our ideological masters) feel like saying it is.

Movies picked up the mantle for a while, but avarice has eroded that industry, too. Few flicks lately portray social ills in a useful or smart way. Fewer still garner attention even if they do. Moviemaking is a business of chasing the biggest return with the least amount of risk, like nearly every other one. It is why cinemas are littered with endless sequels, trashy remakes, and CGI-infested garbage.

Contrary to what someone like Jeff Bezos might want people to believe, physical book sales remain strong and have even enjoyed growth in recent years, despite the advent of e-books and audio books. Print book sales exceed those other types by a large margin. In other words, aspiring or current authors still have significant potential to influence society.

I have found that our dreary and vacuous present-day existence can be reenergized by writing. It is how I ended up here (and on other platforms), and why I cannot confine myself to specific topics, even if doing so might lead to greater revenue. But, I have wanted for some time now to explore ideas with even less constraint.

To that end, I started writing my first novel about six months ago. It remains in a state of development, but I hope to complete a full draft by summer.

You can inoculate yourself against the poisonous influence of social and legacy media or the banality of movies and television by acquiring some books. Not political tripe or AI-generated nonsense posing as prose, but real books by real authors.

Or better yet, write one. In either case, you will both learn and be entertained, and support people who put considerable thought and effort into producing good work. But, most importantly, you will be contributing to putting this era of idiocy and ignorance behind us.

You just might give the next generation something to look forward to once again.

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