Between Empathy and Misanthropy

Anti-vaxxers as a case study of stretching the limits of empathy.

Yes.

I find myself stuck between empathy and misanthropy. It’s a contradiction, the matter and the antimatter, clanging off each other.

Some days, I’m overwhelmed with genuine contempt and combustible frustration with a grotesque society full of grotesque people. A tide of grim Malthusian utilitarianism washes over me when I see hordes of hothouse freaks croaking from ingesting horse paste, or pool cleaner, and even their own urine—inspired by their proclaimed skepticism of injecting an “unknown vaccine” into their bodies. There’s a solid correlation between these absently vengeful idiots and their likelihood to vote for reactionary ghouls who enact ludicrously shitty policies that make America a worse place to exist. Their dedication to congenital blowhard idiocy is endangering themselves, everyone around them, and broader society. In a social climate defined by the vague gripes and abstracted grievances of dimwitted “freethinkers,” these people are determined to sail off the edge of the earth specifically to spite everyone else asking them not to.

Social media contains thousands of documented chronologies of pot-committed, credulous chuds posting dog-brained and violently ignorant anti-vax memes that lead to their grave finality. On a visceral level, I question your humanity if you can’t take some twisted libidinal jolly in watching them gasp for their last breaths on a ventilator while begging for the vaccine, or if you don’t at least appreciate the morbid irony of guileless idiots measuring their unbowed, unbent, and unbroken free will against their willingness to risk needless suffering and death against all common sense. If these comedic implications are too horrifying to you, it’s worth considering the millions, if not billions, of people in this world who toil and perish in senseless misery with far less control over their fate. Although, this would all be a lot easier to laugh at if Trump had never won, if his presidency hadn’t ended the way it did, and if his legacy wasn’t being carried out the way that it has.

I don’t endorse the sadistic daydreams of mass death; I’m just reporting them as worrisome symptoms of the state of my own soul. These harrowing thoughts are the logical conclusion of this grievance-driven strain of metastatic individualism, one premised on the naturalistic myth of people being wholly responsible for their actions. If one doesn’t examine the philosophical assumptions of—in this case—human nature, anyone could easily be turned into enemies. The alternative is criticizing the self. As Stacey Alaimo says, learning includes loss, especially the discomforting sensation of realizing the world isn’t quite as simple as you previously thought.

Two years into a pandemic, and nothing has really changed. It has only been amplified and atomized and monetized through what is apparently the most robust and truly resilient channel that American culture has left: a continual overemphasis on individual consumer identity. It serves as a frame of reference for personal decisions. Most people don’t consider why they do what they do, or the values and valence that inform their actions. They mostly make haphazard aesthetic judgments.

Like all dull, one-dimensional humans, many anti-vaxxers operate on the axis of who they despise and what they oppose. They exist in a culture of pure resentment, rote and enforced, a sad simulacrum of macho psychopathy and multivalent stupidity. Seeing these people totally caught up in a spectacle of mindless cruelty and breathtaking entitlement is cause for despair, but it’s hard to completely judge them because every current of culture pushes them in that direction. There are hardly any meaningful positive liberties left in this rickety-ass collection of Ponzi schemes we call America, so refusing to get vaccinated is enough illusory proof that unrestrained freedom still exists.

This vapid and clanging and strange rationale syncopates in perfect tandem with the beating heart of liberal sanctimony. The vaccine effort isn’t exactly helped when its champions are neurotic freaks trying to scrub themselves of their social anxieties through morality policing and ritualistic masochism.

Last fall, I came across an article in The Atlantic titled, “Stop Death Shaming.” In a vacuum, the arguments are fundamentally sound. But anyone who has ever listened to a MAGA truther bellow like they’ve been shot with a harpoon would likely agree it’s patently ridiculous to assume an anti-vaxxer’s decisions hinge on whether random internet voyeurs mock them or not.

Good-faith persuasion is a matter of discipline and habit... It also happens to be a practice that maintains the premise that liberal democratic politics can change. Inasmuch as democracy is a shared vision—a collaborative dream about the kind of governance we’re capable of and the sort of future we could build—it’s crucial to keep its practices alive even when its functions have broken down.

While there is something in the human mind that craves symmetry and order, there is also a more chaotic element that takes a perverse amusement in watching proudly vacuous idiots engage in absolute demented behavior. These seething donuts may be as small of spirit and vacant of principle and jealously selfish as they appear to be, but they are acting out of reflexive hair-trigger opposition, maybe even a subconscious death urge. If some crank named Bert O’Malley posts 15 consecutive variations of “masks are for pussies” before spending his final days in a hospital coughing his asshole out of his mouth, apparently, this is a more meaningful way to go out than suffering a heart attack in front of a bunch of backwoods bog-fuckers.

Republican philosophy, even at its highest intellectual pursuit, was always just rationalized selfishness and willful ignorance with a gloss of professional smarm. But what has replaced all their tricksy and smug debate-club rhetoric is the uncanny patois of deranged hornball grifters and serial antagonizers. They mostly vomit a staccato burst of trolling and recrimination and bile to an audience whose minds have been conditioned to receive them as devastating truths. There is no reasoning to it, or with it.

It is liberating, in a way, to realize you cannot affect their behavior. They live in a different algorithm, in a veal crate of studiously cultivated ignorance and arrogance. One of the defining aspects of highly caffeinated conservative infotainment sludge is that it is hard to understand. It is intended to induce a state of heated clammy umbrage in the slack and softening minds of its consumers, and it does this reliably more through tone and frequency than by means of nuance and analysis. The point is to keep everyone watching both very outraged and kind of curious about what exactly they’re outraged at. Someone who spends enough hours thirstily chugging from this firehose will, at some point, become wholly conversant in the curdled grouchy sounds that make up its language. But they will never quite know what the fuck they’re talking about.

One way these people understand politics only leads to a more profound non-understanding of the vaccine or basic epidemiology or even the concept of actions having consequences. They interpret issues through conversations they feel like they cannot have, all the things they think they cannot say. There are swarms of pundits who blather for a living only about this; the only conversations they have are endless circular conversations about all the necessary conversations that cannot be had.

Some of this wild and overbearing anti-vax nonsense is probably just the laziness and moral cowardice that it looks like—it’s much easier to complain about the inability to have a forbidden conversation than it is to face the blowback that would follow from actually having these conversations. These people believe they are open-minded enough to question everything but they aren’t open-minded enough to accept the answers to those questions. So they center themselves as the greatest and most afflicted victims of all this pandemic tumult, even as hundreds of thousands of people literally die of that same pandemic, gasping and scared, in overextended hospitals.

Anyone who holds any sort of progressive values is almost ideologically obligated to believe people are mostly byproducts of their environment and their context and their circumstances. People have the free will and agency to act in their own perceived self-interest, but this doesn’t refer to an objective interest or a supernatural idealistic form of what this person should do in every situation. The universe isn’t completely mechanical, but a person’s perception of what’s good for them is wrapped in all the cultural values they have absorbed—given where they emerged, what community they lived among, and what norms have governed them. As the famed psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan says, individuals are an articulation of society and not the reverse. And America is a pathologically sadistic society.

In the absence of anything more cohesive or ennobling, this vaccine has been filtered through a versatile resentment that has become the signal core emotional fact of American politics. As a way of life, it’s frictionless and airless and dull. You either choose to be a whimpering cuck who gets the jab, or you’re the rugged freethinker who disregards libtard propaganda and demands to be served a Big Beef and Cheddar at Arby’s after refusing to wear a mask.

This choice to remain unvaccinated is an utterly glamorous and toweringly vacant inconsequentiality in the context of a broad, unspoken consensus. It is now a de facto bipartisan agreement that holds that allowing about a million citizens to die is the practical choice if the alternative involves doing things that would alter the status quo or make people reconsider how they fit within the broader reality of our national life. The result has been a desperate and deluded belief that a critical mass of sufficiently responsible individual decisions could compensate for the absence of anything like a concerted collective interest.

The shame of it, the horror of it, is that no such response was ever really mounted in earnest at all. The moment in which we all find ourselves now, and not quite together, is a jangle of discordant signifiers. Bloodless technocrats in every nest of the social order have mustered a pandemic counteroffensive by pandering to the expectations of the people they’re trying to fleece. The conveyor belt of consent is broken, our institutions are completely decayed, there is no appeal to “objective” considerations. All that’s left are YouTube charlatans aping the cultural affinities of those who feel radically alienated from the glittering New York-D.C. axis. It drips poison, a little bit at a time, into the confused and lonesome individuals who have convinced themselves this is actually nourishing. Taking the vaccine morphed into a defiant political act, filtered through a certain partisan mania.

Anti-vaxxers seem characteristically affronted by the fact that so many judge them for fetishizing a narrow and narcissistic idea of “freedom,” one completely divorced from every other grudging compromise we make to get along and to keep society functioning. They seem to think is very small and petty, if not tyrannical, of these people. This would preclude anti-vaxxers from having to consider why those people—who likely just want this pandemic to end, and who have realized the vaccine is very effective at preventing serious illness and death from this particular disease—might despise them and people like them for the ways in which they refuse to understand the link between individual freedom and collective responsibility.

Although, it’s not as if the pro-vaccine establishment engaged in any sort of meaningful persuasion. They applied standards cynically and arbitrarily to no discernable effect, which left a sense of abandonment and alienation all up and down the culture. There was the wholesale absence of anything like a broader shared purpose or even an agreed-upon common interest, which left overmatched individuals to fight something much bigger than themselves, leaving the doomed and dreary hero’s journey riff-raff as a day-to-day structure. There was only “believe in science” and the coercion of personal behavior, led by an old scarecrow with dementia. For someone who never bought into the epistemic tunnel of the Democratic, the scientific, and the media establishment, taking the vaccine is interpreted as a command to submit to a domineering liberal regime. Their entire politics are predicated on resisting this; their vector of power is lib-triggering contrarian bullshit.

Regardless of any real critique they could have of America’s vulturous healthcare system, it’s a secondary codicil to a temper tantrum of giant babies who demand the right to own the libs by choking to death. An entire movement is oriented around this singular decision, which is needlessly congesting already overcrowded ICUs. This choice has nothing to do with empirical health outcomes, but it’s consumed by an overwhelming identity prism that distends the standard of evidence and scrutiny applied to the vaccine’s efficacy and contents in a way that isn’t directed toward, say, scarfing down hot dogs. These people exist in the tailwind of this meteorite of narcissism that explodes out of a political identity invested with ritualistic significance. They are existentially defeated by the vaccine in a way they aren’t by everything else they do every goddamn day in accordance with basic human decency.

Everyone is going through their own personally calibrated Kubler-Ross cycle in response to a new normal that may closer resemble a schizophrenic fantasia than it does grounded reality. A concerted national attempt to minimize or even manage the pandemic has mostly flopped, not just because it appeared difficult, but because there was never the institutional will or capacity to enforce any of the not-especially-onerous stuff that such an effort necessitated. The result is a wilderness of weird rules dictated by a sclerotic and inconsistent elite who are more concerned with shielding themselves from legal and political liability than they are about protecting public health. Beneath the thin veil of jingoistic Americana flag-humping is a writhing mess of individuals making their own choices, for their own reasons, on their own behalf.

This is a long-winded way of saying I have no definitive answer on where to draw the red line between free will and determinism in a way that doesn’t let anti-vaxxers completely off the hook while remaining cognizant of the socio-political trends that plunged America into this howling void.

This pandemic is a Chinese finger trap, with one finger pulling toward empathy and the other toward misanthropy. Yale law professor Daniel Markovits says we should distinguish between two kinds of sympathy, political and existential; the former inspires reasons for people to make sacrifices for others, and the latter is a recognition that everybody’s life is the only life they have, despite being the proper object of political scorn. Also, transferring beyond a state of control to a state of acceptance may be the healthiest way to acknowledge the powerlessness within yourself to change the world and influence others. This is likely cope, at this point, but it has taken me toward a place of lucid tranquility where I’m no longer psychically charged by an outcome, nor do I feel a responsibility to “enlighten” others.

So suspend judgment as best as you can and cultivate a heart of compassion, first for yourself, then for everyone else. We are, all of us, shaped in ways we had little control over. Instead of looking at people like individuals, with their flaws and corruptions, look at people like trees in a vast forest. Admire how one twists in one direction or another, the gnarls of their bark or the brightness of their leaves. Eventually, we will all pass and be forgotten, and all of our problems will disintegrate and vanish with us. Disliking anti-vaxxers won’t change a thing in their lives, but it will take a toll on yours. Enjoy the ride. Enjoy the idiots.

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