What Makes Us Cruel or Kind?

A question I have wrestled with for thirty years and completely failed to answer.

1.

Here’s something I learned in junior high school: often, the dumb people are in charge, and no matter how transparently dumb they are, they have the power to make everything worse.

Does this sound familiar?

I wonder how much of my loathing of this authoritarian period in American history is based on those old, teenage memories. It would be bad enough if our leaders were merely malicious. But they are also so dumb. The ridiculous hair, the repulsive Oval Office decor, the transparently idiotic yes-men calling the Dear Leader “brilliant” all the time. The military parade. Trump Steaks, the Trump memecoin, now apparently even the Trump cellphone plan.

Much has been written about Trump’s dictator aesthetic — here’s one excellent piece in the New York Times on his “Gilded Rococo Nightmare” of an Oval Office. To me, the overarching feature is its stupidity. Obviously, bragging about being strong is a sign that one is weak. Gilding everything in cheap gold makes one look cheap, not wealthy. Ridiculous plastic surgery makes women look fake, not beautiful. And yet — a lot of people don’t get it. As Fran Lebowitz said in 2016, Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person. Anyone with taste knows that he’s pathetic. But most people don’t have taste. They see gold, they think rich.

None of these details matter in comparison with snatching innocent people off the street and mocking the rule of law. But to me, maybe because of my memories from the bad old days, it heightens the insult. Like the Scots in Trainspotting complaining that they’d been conquered by a bunch of wankers, I feel put upon that my country’s cruel dictator is also so freaking dumb.

The worst people have all the power.

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2.

The last two newsletters were about my recent injury and my recovery from it. As I thought about transitioning to the usual obsessions of Both/And — in particular, the spirituality of American politics — the connection became clear. More than once, I remember thinking, laying in my hospital bed, about so many people suffering similar pain but without all the good fortune I have. What happens if you break your pelvis in Gaza? Probably you die, or become permanently disabled, or at the very least suffer agonizing pain since there are no working hospitals to go to anymore. Or what about someone injured by a missile fired from Iran to Israel, or from Israel to Iran? Or the hundreds of thousands of people in Africa now going without medical care because Elon Musk believed some conspiracy theory about USAID.

I’m not a pacifist or an anarchist. I think wars can sometimes be just. And I don’t mean to sound cloying or self-righteous here. But surely we want as little misery as possible, right? Surely experiencing any pain should sensitize us more to the pain of others, right?

Well, sometimes. It’s also possible to have the opposite response.

Fred Trump, the president’s late father, was a cruel, racist man who taught his sons that there were two kinds of people in the world: winners (“killers”) or losers. At 13, Donald was sent to military school, where beatings and other violence was common. Donald was also haunted by the failure of his brother, Freddy, to live up to his father’s expectations; a longtime alcoholic, Freddy died in 1981 of a heart attack related to his addiction.

One path open to the young Trump would have been to reject his father’s ways and use his boyish experiences of suffering as the soil for his own compassion. Having known what it is like to be victimized unfairly, he might have empathized with all who are oppressed, marginalized, or victimized. (He might even, eventually, have learned to forgive his father, who doubtless had childhood traumas of his own.)

That, obviously, is not the path he took. Instead, Trump has spent his life trying to live up to his father’s expectations, learning from his mentor Roy Cohn how to be ruthless. Trump hates weakness of any kind. Compromise — even paying one’s bills — is for losers. And those on the short end of the societal stick — Muslims in term one, “illegals” and liberals in term two — deserve to be there. Donald treats immigrants the way his father treated him.

I was quite fortunate by comparison. While there was shouting and occasional shoving in the home I grew up in, there was also a lot of love, nurturing, and garden-variety American Jewish liberalism. My mother was a feminist and loathed what she called “the good ol’ boys club” — her term for the white, male, conservative, racist, and probably antisemitic Floridians who held power in Tampa in the 1980s. And while I rejected a lot of my parents’ world — a GenX kid, I was nauseated by the the patriotism, hypocrisy, prejudice, superficiality and materialism of the 1980s — my sense of outrage at cruelty only grew as time went on.

And I was on the wrong side of my high school’s social hierarchy — the stupid kids were in charge. I was awkward, nerdy, pre-gay, Jewish, and smart; even had I wanted to, I don’t think I could have fit in. Then again, Stephen Miller was a lot like that too, and look what happened to him.

Increasingly, Midjourney seems to be reflecting the weirdness of the zeitgeist.

Could I have gone the other way? Could I have have chosen toughness? I have no idea. Certainly I’m no paragon of compassion. I have friends who are full-time activists, vegans, and just really kind people who take care of people. But I make compromises. Could something have happened to have made me conservative instead of progressive? Maybe, like Winston Churchill never actually said, getting mugged? Seeing how life is cruel and strength is the only way to survive?

It seems like a mystery, and yet it’s such an important mystery; it determines our history. What makes someone more liberal or more conservative? What combination of nature and nurture, experience and reflection, leads one toward compassion or cruelty? What causes us to harden our hearts to those unlike ourselves, or to soften them and recognize our shared humanity?

I have absolutely no idea.

3.

There are, of course, many smart conservatives, fascists, theocrats, libertarians, post-liberals, and whatever Peter Thiel is. Obviously, liberal policies are not the only ones that are based in compassion. There are also times when causing suffering is justified in order to prevent more suffering. Again, I’m not a pacifist.

But surely there is something uniquely evil about the way the present regime, and its propaganda networks, take so much pleasure in the suffering of those they deem (carelessly and without due process) to be enemies of the people, whether those Others are migrants or federal workers or scientists or reporters or anyone else. I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, to empathize with their fears, to seek common ground, but I just can’t do it. It’s one thing to solemnly, seriously take actions that cause death or despair. It’s quite another to enjoy it.

Maybe there’s a connection between fascists’ cruelty and their inability to comprehend depth, complexity, irony, or self-reflection. While Lao Tze and Obi-Wan say that true strength lies within, fascists think strength lies with strength. More gold, rich. Bigger guns, strong. Bad or foreign people, bad. Again, I don’t think conservatives think this way. But fascists do — at least, fascist leaders and followers. The bureaucrats, the Stephen Millers of history, know what they are doing.

Ultimately, my recovery from this injury has, I’m afraid, mostly confirmed my priors: suffering is bad, empathy is good, gratitude and meditation are also good. But even this brief encounter with the fragility of the human condition has made me wonder anew how so many people can become inured to it. I don’t have any foundation for this view. Maybe pop-culture Nietzsche, Andrew Tate, and Curtis Yarvin are right. Maybe the heart is better when it’s closed off, so you can make strong decisions for the common good and break as many eggs necessary to make the omelet. I just cannot imagine living that way.

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Thanks to everyone for your well-wishes over these past few weeks. It has been a journey, but I’m now walking without a cane and the pain is very manageable. Once again, I feel very lucky.

There’s obviously a lot going on right now in the news: Iran, the NYC mayoral election (which I wrote about here), and much else. Let’s not forget the daily trespasses against democracy and human dignity being meted out by ICE, the shredding of environmental regulations and protections for our planet, the inhumanity of DOGE (which still exists), and the classically authoritarian war on higher education, the free press (the actual one, not the Substack propped up by dark money which the publisher refuses to disclose), and the legal profession.

If I could pop out one story that deserves more attention, it is the nomination of the extremist Emil Bove to be a federal judge.

Chris Geidner

has been all over this story — here’s his latest and here’s a comprehensive take on why he is totally unfit to be a judge. If I were to choose one under-discussed story to pay attention to, this would be it.