Independent thinkers and the lonely lives we lead

I don’t have a lot of friends, and that makes life lonely sometimes — especially during a year when I’ve felt even more disconnected than usual, thanks to COVID. But pandemic or not, I’ve come to accept the fact that I’ll never have a large group of true friends because of the kind of person I am.

It’s not that I’m rude. And it’s not that I don’t know how to interact socially: I’ve held jobs that required me to do so, and I’ve performed well, at least according to my evaluations. It’s more a case of not fitting in beneath the surface — and not particularly wanting to.

Two of the past three nights, I’ve watched horror movies with a similar theme: Anything for Jackson and 1BR. In each movie, members of a cult kidnap an unwitting victim.

The first movie was more of a classic horror offering, with satanic rituals, ghosts, and disgusting “undead” types trying to cross back over from the afterlife. Ho-hum. It seems like half the horror movies out there invoke Christian-based (usually Catholic) tropes like the antichrist, exorcisms, nuns, priests, holy water, and crucifixes. Sorry, but none of this seems very original, or scary, to me. Been there, done that.

1BR was more of a psychological thriller, which depicted a Jonestown-style brainwashing cult, minus the mass suicide. It felt like “Hotel California” transferred to an apartment complex: “You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.”

Spoiler alert: The last scene makes it plain that the cult in question is far more widespread than anyone imagined.

Cult culture

The world feels a lot like that to me these days. Trumpism has been aptly compared to a cult, but it’s more pervasive even than that. As we’ve become more polarized, we’ve been urged to “pick a side” — and to conform to that side, and to hate anyone who doesn’t. To dehumanize them. We’ve allowed ourselves to be ruled by litmus and loyalty tests that condition us to obey one form of dogma or another without questioning.

Without thinking.

And there’s the rub: I refuse to stop thinking for myself, and that’s always made it hard for me to fit in, whether it’s with a spiritual group or a political party or a social club. If something doesn’t make sense to me, I say so, and that can feel like a threat to those who’ve already made up their minds. I understand this. And because I don’t want to come off as threatening, I stay civil and, rather than challenging beliefs directly, invite others to ask questions about them.

“What if it’s not like this? What if it’s just a little different? Have you ever tried looking at this from a different perspective?”

What I’ve realized lately is that, much to my chagrin, the approach doesn’t matter much — especially in an us-versus-them world. It’s not incivility that’s a threat to people so much as the ideas themselves. It didn’t matter when Copernicus and Galileo asked whether the world had ever tried looking at things from the sun’s point of view, and it doesn’t matter today when you ask a Trumpist to put himself in an immigrant’s shoes or a coastal Democrat to imagine life in rural America.

It’s not that they can’t, it’s just that they don’t want to.

They’d rather blame “the other” than try to understand; to have any empathy for those who are hurting, and there’s plenty of hurt to go around.

The right blames socialists and immigrants and feminists (among others) for the decline of the America they think they remember. The left tends to heap most of the blame on white men and the privilege they enjoy.

No man’s land

This puts white men in a difficult position. We have to choose between defending others who do indefensible things, just because they look like us, or we can side with our consciences and support those who have been wronged by those seeking to preserve their white male privilege and impose it — sometimes cruelly — on those who don’t share it.

Sounds like an easy choice, and for me, following my conscience is the only one. But why do so many white men make the opposite choice? The easy answer is that it’s because they’re scared of losing power. But there’s more to it than that: White men feel like they’ll become second-class citizens in a diverse world, always distrusted because of their skin color and never truly belonging because they’ll never be more than “allies” who can’t really understand.

In a perfect world, diversity would apply equally to everyone, white men included. But we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a world where racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry have become so ingrained in our culture that we have to live with the consequences, even as we fight like hell to reverse the damage and do away with the system that caused it. That means white men, even allies, are targets of resentment, and that resentment is understandable.

Compassion: the option

But it doesn’t have to be inevitable. I see a road past this, but it’s not an easy road: What if we were to stop focusing on blame and focus instead on easing the hurt; solving the problem?

Instead of calling white men out for their privilege, shouldn’t we be focusing on the women and minorities who have been hurt? Haven’t we been focusing on white men long enough? Isn’t that the problem?

Our nation’s dysfunctional response to the COVID-19 pandemic shows, simultaneously, how difficult and how effective this can be. Difficult in the political realm, because all politicians and their followers want to do is blame the other side. Effective in the scientific realm because, when researchers focused solely on solving the problem, they produced vaccines in record time.

When we were exposed to the hurt caused by George Floyd’s senseless death, we as a nation were filled with compassion. But when we started blaming police in general for that hurt, many of us transferred our empathy to “good cops” who would never do such a thing. And to be sure, there are many such good cops. (Just as “not all men” are sexist assholes.)

When calls to “defund the police” started, I cringed, not because I disagree with the concepts of de-escalation and using non-police responders to defuse tense situations. A agree wholeheartedly with both ideas. But I knew the language used (“defund the police”) would be seen as an attack on law enforcement rather than a constructive solution.

I’m not alone in this assessment. No less a person than President Barack Obama shared this view, and with the same motivation: “The key is deciding, do you want to actually get something done, or do you want to feel good among the people you already agree with?”

Bullseye. Nailed it.

Put me in the category of getting something done, whether it be making progress on COVID or racism or any other challenge. I want to make progress, and if people want to slam me for saying so, so be it. They slammed Obama, and I consider him to be pretty damn good company.

Come together, right now

We might have begun to solve the problem of police brutality if we’d learned to speak the same language; if we’d learned to build on what we agree on — the senselessness and pure wrongness of George Floyd’s death — rather spending so much of our energy hurling accusations and casting blame.

The existence of systemic racism within law enforcement and the existence of good cops aren’t mutually exclusive concepts. They’re both true. So why didn’t we accept both of these realities and build on them, enlisting the good cops in the fight against systemic racism and praising them for standing up to be counted? Admittedly, it’s not as simple as that, and it never is when you’re dealing with deeply entrenched cultures such as law enforcement. But it would have been a start.

As it is, we’ve made little progress, not even a nationwide ban on chokeholds, which seems the very least we could do and the most obvious response.

Instead, we’ve engaged in scapegoating, which never solves anything. It’s a practice that dates back to ancient, barbaric practices like sacrificing animals — or humans — in an attempt to appease the gods and guarantee a good harvest. Unfortunately, a live was taken and nothing was resolved, because there was no causal relationship between the sacrifice and the harvest. It was all just superstition, an ancient form of conspiracy theory. (“The gods are against us!”)

It was a waste of life and effort that distracted people from actually solving the problem.

As time went on, we discovered and employed techniques that did solve the problem, such as irrigation.  But think of how much faster we would have gotten there if we hadn’t spent so much time blaming the scapegoat? If we’d worked together instead.

Our problem is that we’d still rather spin our wheels with scapegoating and conspiracy theories than work together. Because we don’t trust each other. We’ve forgotten how to look for that spark of commonality in one another’s human eyes, and we’ve chosen instead to focus on how we’re different, and why we’re (supposedly) a threat to one another. Recognizing that spark won’t solve every problem. It’s just a beginning, and there will be a lot of work involved. But beginning is better than never trying.

And the only group I want to belong to is a group of independent thinkers and problem-solvers, not a group of blamers and haters who define themselves by what they’re not. This leaves me on the outs in modern America. It’s lonely here, but that’s OK. I’d rather be lonely than conform to something I don’t believe just because my skin’s a certain color, I’m a man, or I’m afraid of being shamed and shunned.

I don’t have many friends, but chances are, if you’re one of them, you’re an independent thinker, too. And that means I think you’re awesome.