I once sat at a camp ground with a couple of friends, caught embers on the ends of twigs, and poked ants with them. A touch of the burning staff sent the ants jumping away. There was one bigger than the others which wasn’t deterred. He kept in my path. I kept touching him with burning embers. Eventually, he died. It rained that night. The ground was wet and cold beneath the tarp of the tent. None of us slept well. I haven’t gone camping since.
In college I took a solo performance class. The first brief solo show I wrote for it was about that night with the ants. What if the ants made little sounds? What if they thought I was a god, cruel and demanding? I became an ant boy, a scout who witnessed the horrors and reported them to the queen. Her guards captured me to offer me up as a sacrifice. Then I was the camper again. I didn’t care about the ants or what they did. We Cruel Gods, I titled it.
I don’t if this really happened or if this is some hallucination.
The last two times I got unbelievably high, I hallucinated I was trapped in the same eternal time loop. I had dreamed of these moments before. I knew the loop. My thoughts vanished into a nonsense word and the idea that “this is all that’s ever happened.” I almost had a complete psychotic break. In the hallucination, this was some cosmic punishment. A set of demons were torturing me for all eternity, and the life I thought I’d lived was an invention, a defense mechanism, unsecure and fragile. They wouldn’t tell me why I deserved this. Every now and then, I’ll experience a moment of deja vu. Before the time loop experiences, deja vu was this cool, silly thing. Now, my brain panics. I am back in the loop. All the horrible things and thoughts I’ve had return to me. Surely I deserve my punishment. God is real, and He hates me for good reason.
The Christians is a play by Lucas Hnath that follows the pastor of a mega church revealing that he no longer believes in Hell and that it shall no longer be the church’s position that hell is real. Controversy insues. A schism occurs. People are incredibly passionate about their belief in hell. Where hither goest Hitler if not to wither in the heat with her Majesty the Queen?
The play is well written. I don’t have any problems with it. But when we studied it in one of my theatre literature courses in college, I was taken by the amount of people who apparently find it brave and radical. Important. Far be it from me to say it isn’t, art is art is art, but it didn’t resonate as particularly controversial or brave. I found it tame.
Perhaps that’s because, even in my ongoing religious confusion, I reject the concept of hell wholeheartedly, and I find the belief in it to be anti-social, bloodthirsty nonsense. When someone tells me they believe in hell, when they hope someone burns in hell, I side-eye them a bit. Why would believe in a God that allows constant torture? And, more importantly, why would you want to believe in such a concept?
You hear all the time about how religion is critiqued by the left. You see certain flavors of communists calling it a false consciousness or whatever annoying terms Marxists throw on things.I know social media is a scourge upon humanity, but on my time there, I’ve found a different worrying pattern: a lot of people on the left have accepted religion, but only the worst parts of it.
In a video talking about a homophobic and transphobic Muslim couple on TikTok, I tried to figure out why some supposedly left-leaning people are willing to embrace the bigotry of those who wrap it in religion. In a video over Bourgeois Decadence, the trend of social conservatism amongst people who think being on the left is purely about economic issues because otherwise it becomes clear they’re social reactionaries, I talked about Qatar and the World Cup. That’s one issue the broad left has with religion. There’s an instinct to defend oppression if it’s based in “culture,” calling it “social imperialism” to be against religious-backed bigotry. It’s a bunch of nonsense.
Today, though, I want to talk about hell. Much like in The Christians, there are some people on the left who cling onto the idea of hell, of suffering, and they will defend that bloodlust until the end. Let’s talk about it.
One - Queen Elizabeth
Eilzabeth the II of England, Supreme Lordess of Corgis, reigned over England in a largely useless and ceremonial role whose domestic and international duties to soft power are indispensable to Great Britain. In that time, did she wield actual political power behind closed doors, potentially strong arming and threatening members of the cabinet? I don’t know. She served for 70 years. On the sixth of September, she appointed Liz Truss Prime Minister. Despite having no say in the matter, the Queen was so ashamed and embarrassed by this action that she immediately died two days later.
If you can trust the internet to do one thing, it’s to immediately meme and make fun of any event that ever occurs whether now, in the future, or hundreds of years ago. “With safety in numbers, comedy co-opted this moment of grief and captured every social media platform’s main feed,” Victoria A. Kishoiyian wrote for the Harvard Crimson in an article describing the various ways the internet reacted to the news of a dead queen.
Now, as someone who finds irreverent memes very funny, I don’t really care. You can joke about anything, and no, that doesn’t mean all jokes are created equal or jokes can’t be evil. That’s just to say, joking about this doesn’t matter to me.
Noted Does-This-Even-Count-As-Reacting-Reaction Streamer Hasan Piker streamed that day to provide context as to why people around the globe might be celebrating the Queen’s death, immediately going into details on the colonialism that happened while Elizabeth was the main figure of international PR. Hasan went onto say that he could understand how British citizens might be sad over her death, but brushed off any general “death is sad” sentiment by pointing out that everyone dies. That is true, but that’s not really… a statement against it. In plenty of cultures, death as a general topic is sad. I think it’s understandable to feel a tinge of sadness when anyone dies. He said, “But if you’re not from the UK, what’s it to you? You’re such a bitch. Like you’re simpling–you’re simpling. She don’t know you, little bro. She don’t know you. You’re simpling for her but she don’t know you. She’s also dead and burning in hell now, so there’s that part.”
So we don’t simply critique her and the Britith Empire, we claim she’s in hell. He goes on to say, “She’s not with Princess Diana because she’s not in Heaven. … Diana’s up there having a tea party with Ghandi. You know where she is? She’s down there. United with all of her friends. Nancy Reagan’s down there slorpgorpin… With Thatcher. And Reagan.”
Side note. I have now broken my long running winning streak of not watching streamers or podcasts and for this I’ve watched Hasan and listened to an episode of Chapo Trap House and The Deprogram and I have to say… Some art forms simply aren’t for you. And these aren’t for me.
In the Deprogram episode where they “RIP Bozo” Lizzy, one of the hosts uses that topic as a jumping off point to talk about Gorbachev. I suppose because they’re bitter about the fall of the USSR, he says, “I dare say the best death of the century is Gorbachev… he’s finally … rotting in hell with his buddies…” I’m pretty that speaker was Hakim? A totally well adjusted person who says of Gorby, “If I could disembowel him and feast on his entrails, I would.”
So what is hell? In the Christian context I grew up around, it’s the place where sinners go to be punished and tortured for all eternity. The eternal part is integral to the idea. As is the torture. It’s a lake of fire. You avoid hell because you should be scared of it. Because it’s torture. A lot of people don’t “obey” their God because they think it’s right or He deserves it, but because they are scared of Hell. The price for disobedience is not death but literal, actual torture, unending pain and agony.
Based on a clip from an interview with Hasan and a community post Hakim made about the plight of the Palestinian people, the former was raised Muslim and the latter is Muslim. Since I’m not terribly familiar, I looked up Islamic beliefs on hell. Gabriel Said Reynolds has an article at Yale University Press describes hell as where the “punished will be struck by angels, drink boiling water, and eat from tree of Zaqqum…” Physical punishment and torture. It tracks onto the ideas of Christian hell. Just like in Christianity, some believe this punishment is eternal and some believe it’s temporary or “correctional.”
That jives with Hakim’s podcast comments where he fantasizes about inflicting violence on Gorbachev. There’s an expressed idea here that people who have done or been the face of events you find evil, then they deserve to be punished. Not only do they deserve punishment, but they deserve it for all eternity.
The obvious question is… why? If we believe “bad people” deserve to go to hell, and if our vision of hell is torture, then why do we believe people deserve it? Especially for eternity? Well, unfortunately, the answer is simple: bloodthirst. If it was about punitive justice, then hell would have to have end point. There is no amount of finite suffering on earth that can equal to an eternity of suffering in the afterlife because time itself is finite. Eventually, it would have to end. But let’s also ask: what does torture do as a punishment? The vast majority of people, even those giddy about the idea of pain in hell, don’t advocate for torture as an earthly punishment. We don’t whip people. We don’t break their bones. When the US was revealed to be torturing people in Guantanamo, rightful condemnation was quick. The people who defended it did so on grounds that information was getting gathered. But there is no such pretend-defense for torture in an afterlife. It’s torture for torture’s sake.
So what is justice?
For some people, it isn’t about society. It isn’t about rehabilitation. It’s about making sure there is more suffering in existence. It’s bloodlust. When they wish for eternal torture, it’s because the idea of pain gets them off. It’s sadism. It’s a kink. A meme on TheDeprogram subreddit laughs and celebrates the idea of the queen going to hell. Comments in the LateStageCapitalism subreddit also call for her to “(g)et fucked in hell.” For them, justice means suffering. The cruelty is the point.
Which brings us to the main controversy that happened after Queen Elizabeth’s death. In response to Elizabeth going ill earlier on the day she died, Carnegie Mellon professor Uju Anya tweeted, “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genodical empire is finally dying. May her pain be exruciating.” According to a New York Post article, this led to a back and forth with egg model and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to whom she appears to also wish a painful death, at least that’s the implication I picked up on. Many others criticized the tweet, while others defended her.
An article in The Guardian explored the history of colonialism Elizabeth represented and how that history personally impacted Anya. In that way, Andrew Lawrence and Anya explain, her lack of reverence makes sense. Perhaps even to rejoice in her death. While I don’t personally agree with wishing or enjoying death, that would be understandable. According to the article, Anya suggests the reason she was targeted was her connection with union orgnanizer Chris Smalls. She’s a Black leftist. She’s a woman. It makes sense to go after her for…
Well. There’s something missing in this article and her defense. Professor Anya did not merely celebrate the Queen’s death or use it as an opportunity to teach about the evils Britain has inflicted on the world. Very specifically, she wished Elizabeth a painful death.
She told PublicSource, “Some may not approve of how a survivor of state violence expresses their opinion of those who harmed them, but all should know that ‘colonizer’ is not an abstract word to me.” But… she didn’t express an opinion about whether or not the queen dying was a good thing. She expressed a desire for suffering. In the PublicSource article, another professor, Danielle Wenner, is quoted as saying, “Professor Anya is doing the work that academics should be doing, in telling the truth, in speaking the truth in her way.” Again, it’s avoiding the actual content. “May her pain be excruciating” is not a statement of truth in any sort. It’s a wish of suffering. If Anya hadn’t wished for that, would the response have been the same? I don’t think so.
In an opinion piece for The Grio, Michael Harriot wrote about what he sees as the importance of Black Twitter dragging the Queen after her death. The memes and context, the celebrations, he argues, serve as a means to continue to force white people to deal with the harsh legacy of history and ongoing oppression. I think he has a point. It is good to discuss the actual impact, good and bad, a person has had. AND I think there’s a difference between that and what Professor Anya said. What comes up in article after article is a complete avoidance of her wish for suffering. People simply don’t engage with that part. I wonder if it’s similar to the characters in The Christians couldn’t accept the idea of a world without hell: we’re meant to accept suffering as part of the moral arc of the universe. It’s fine to wish that on someone.
But it isn’t. It’s antisocial. It’s bloodthirsty. It’s how you wind up justifying pain and destruction because you convince yourself that your violence is inflicted on the right people. But your violence is not special.
“Speaking truth to power” in this instance means longing for pain. Wishing for justice showcases a class of people who can only conceive of justice as pain. The wish for suffering showcases a sadism that feels entitled to satiation. You cannot critique the wish for harm or everything breaks down.
But here’s the thing: if you long for suffering for the evil, for the afterlife, how can we ever create a better world? Can you critique the criminal justice system, the harsh penalties and often horrid conditions while still believing that the evil should suffer? Can you condemn murder and torture while believing and longing for eternal torture? What bothers me about the deaths of people with a history of horrid deeds is that people drop their masks. They reveal that they don’t care about destroying the wheel. They don’t care about making sure no one tramples on anyone else. The complaint is that they are not the ones wearing the boots. They’re not the ones inflicting suffering.
I follow a member of the Democratic Socialists of America on twitter. When Henry Kissinger died, he said that, on days like that, he wished he still believed in hell. It would have made him feel better to believe someone would receive eternal, torturous punishment. It made me think less of him. It recontextualizes some of his thoughts to me. It’s a gross wish.
Two - Cat Janice
A lady on TikTok showed up on my For You page. She starts off by warning, “Your cognitive dissonance will deactivate your critical thinking.” She then goes on to argue against empathy. Specifically, she blames people with empathy for people with negative views for potential negative futures. She was right that her video made me angry. Well, something approximating anger. Anger isn’t necessarily an emotion I feel. Regardless. While using vague and coded language to call for a violent revolution, a thing that will not happen and will not to lead to good results in the USA because revolution is a violent, bloody mass that will immediately splinter out of the left’s control, especially with foreign interference, she does make sure to let us know that she will not be firebombing the walmart.
The video is about someone named Cat Janice. I had to look her up because my TikTok is mostly populated by the Groundhog Phil/Phyllis musical. According to an article on NBC’s TODAY, Cat Janice is a singer who got diagnosed with cancer. She is dying. She’s in hospice. She wrote a song, put it out there, and put the rights in her son’s name in order to make sure he gets the money for when she passes. The song went viral. People have a lot of empathy for a mom with cancer.
In a TikTok explaining the controversy, another TikToker, Jaz Karati, states that of course people are going to sympathize with her. She’s a white woman with a tragic story. Karati points to Janice apparently following Israel and the IDF on Instagram as the source of the controversy. She goes on to talk about how she’s glad Janice’s son is going to get support, but she wishes people would put that empathy on oppressed people around the world who don’t get that support because of their skin color.
Karati balances a line, showing that she might not feel for Janice and she may be annoyed people are empathizing with her, but she understands it. There’s a child involved, and she wants that child to be okay. I don’t necessarily agree with the implication that having bad views means you’re no longer deserving of empathy, but whatever.
Now, in contrast, what did the revolutionary larpist say? “I have no empathy extended. I feel no sadness for her. I think the Fates took it easy on her. If you asked me, I would have called upstairs and see if they could weave her something a little bit stronger.” Cancer is not enough. She wishes this woman would receive a harsher divine punishment. And of course, the implication is that this is a punishment for her views. Bad people deserve illness and they deserve to suffer. Is this dangerously close to saying healthy people are moral people? Yes, but don’t look that closely into it. If you look too closely, you’ll find people who think karma exists and bad things happen to bad people and bad people are ugly and a whole bunch of other regressive nonsense that doesn’t approximate anything close to progressivism. The point is that she believes this woman should suffer. She thinks Cat Janice doesn’t only deserve cancer, she deserves Divine Punishment.
A comment the creator liked said “The quote ‘don’t let your kindness interfere with someone else’s karma” and that’s what this feels like.” Don’t have empathy. It’s bad to have empathy. Because the bad people deserve bad things happening to them. It’s the rule of the universe. Now, is that nonsensical mambo jumbo? Of course it is. Is it cruelty masquerading as social justice language? Very much so. Is the entire point to celebrate suffering while pretending what you’re doing is some moral high ground? Yes. That’s the entire point. I talked about it with Noah Schnapp. I talked about it in my discussion about The Menu. People long to be cruel but cannot stand to have their cruelty pointed out to them so they bend language as much as possible to pretend suffering is this moral category. To wish suffering upon the evil is to be doing the work of saints. If that’s the will of God, God is not good.
One popular video talking about Janice’s views came from a woman trying to get around censors, I’m guessing, by calling Israel “the blue star nation.” That didn’t sit right with me so I checked her page and, of course, she’s defending the Houthis, a group who pretends to be randomly attacking civilians in the name of Palestine.
Of course, a joke that the Houthis are only cared about because oh no, think of the Amazon packages doesn’t actually cover up the fact that they’re a group who have been targeting civilians in the Red Sea. The Houthis, a moral group, sentence people to death for being gay. The Houthis are surely going to support the Palestinians out of moral necessity while being half of the force behind a famine in Yemen. Despite all of that, people are able to manage empathy for the Houthis and their actions in the Red Sea by uncritically accepting their justifications for their actions. But. Having empathy for people who do bad is supposed to be a horrible thing. How do you square that hole? You don’t. Because the point isn’t having any sort of moral consistency. It’s about wishing suffering on those you want to suffer and then trying to force people who don’t agree with that to feel like assholes while, at the same time, employing empathy to people who also do and/or support horrible things because you vaguely agree with them on something or because they vaguely oppose the US and for certain supposed leftists, that is a defense against any and all transgressions, cough cough, Chinese social conservatism and war mongering.
Speaking of people who go to bat for the Houthis for some reason, in his Queen Elizabeth reaction, HasanAbi also implies leftists of any sort having even a brief moment of empathy for the Queen is stupid. Emotion has to be restricted. Empathy for bad people becomes bad.
In a negative reaction to the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once, a twitter user said, “Yeah, I’ve for some time now been anti-the ‘empathy is revolutionary’ thing.”
In an article arguing that communists need to showcase compassion, argue for a better world and not just the dismantling of a bad one, things I agree with, Laura Duggan says, “It is a bizarre manufactured empathic response that has some Irish people genuinely concerned for the health and well-ebing of a monarch in another country but wouldn’t know their neighbour to say hello to. In a capitalist society that promotes individualisation–leaving aside the obvious detrimental role that systeminc racism, sexism, classism etc. has to play–people are taught to relate on a one-to-one level, meaning that they only learn to empathise with other individuals on an individual basis.”
I find Duggan’s article pretty interesting because it seems like the two of us agree on a lot of fronts, and yet the issue of individual empathy seems to be a divergent point. My understanding of Duggan’s argument is that this individualised empathy is understandable, but stands in the way of the revolution. People mourn the queen because of a capitalist empathy. If it were a communist empathy, maybe they would celebrate the death for what it means systemically, even though it doesn’t mean anything systemically, unfortunately. Duggan points out that there’s a social component to empathy, taught and expressed to out of social obligation, even if that obligation isn’t consciously acknowledged. I think Duggan takes a step too far in this idea in calling it odd to empathise with anyone’s death even while being a relatively shy or asocial person. “A person has suffered” is a statement that should draw empathy. Because we are humans. Arguing against that is arguing for a lessening of empathy.
I think you see a lot of this “anti-empathy” sentiment online. The internet is a cesspool, afterall. When Will Stancil was fighting with leftists who were insisting that the economy was bad when the typical economic measures had improved, members of the so-called “dirtbag left,” fans of Chapo, for instance, called him all sorts of names. Plenty of them wished for him to die. When he expressed disdain at the comments urging his death, advocating for his suffering, those same users called him a pussy.
Now, obviously, wishing death on someone is anti-social, especially when their crime is pointing out that media narratives shape perception, sometimes against material reality. But because their heroes are pro-hell, pro-torture, anti-empathy, they have to be as well. The performative cruelty becomes the point. When people say that’s messed up, they’re condescendingly asked if this is their first time on the internet. The implication is that because the culture is toxic, the culture is fine, and you simply have to grow up and take it. If people online tell you to kill yourself, it’s your fault for being such an easy target.
The point here, as with Queen Elizabeth, has nothing to do with justice. It’s religious sadism. I’m not the first to point out how some people view the Revolution as the Rapture. So they don’t do anything but antagonize people because their utopia is destined to come no matter what, and because their ideology is good, their faith is good, because their enemies will suffer and suffer and suffer, they can be as cruel and nasty as they want and not have to worry about a thing.
Three - Disease
In her video on Envy, YouTuber ContraPoints talks about her second favorite day on twitter: when former President Trump was diagnosed with COVID-19. The internet, she explains, went wild over this. She shows off a couple of tweets enjoying this development. When she tweeted her own thoughts, she was called a killjoy. In her video, Natalie says, “But why was I being a killjoy? The tweet was about how much I was enjoying it! Well, for most people–I guess not me, but for normal people, for other girls–cruelty is only pleasurable as long as they’re able to convince themselves it’s something other than cruelty. ‘Justice served.’”
When Trump got COVID, it was seen as some karmic justice. Of course the leader of the GOP, the party who politicized and downplayed a pandemic, got sick with the very disease. People were praying he would die because it would be funny. I was actually at my then-boyfriend’s house when the news broke, and we both had a little chuckle about it, though I felt bad the next day.
King Charles III of England was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year. Twitter immediately went into meme mode. Several people supposedly on the left celebrated and started talking about how they hope he suffers and that he “deserves” it.
Angels in America is a firmly left-leaning play duology about the AIDs epidemic. One of the characters in it is real life lawyer and scumbag Roy Cohn. Cohn was a staunchly anti-gay gay conservative who helped lead the Red and Lavender scares. In the play, as in real life, he dies of AIDs. Tony Kushner depicts this moment as a sort of divine retribution. The other character with AIDs, Louis, confronts the Divine Council about the disease and their attempt to stop humans from progressing. With Louis, the message is: if this is divine punishment, then it isn’t working. We will survive and push forward regardless. Love will win. Humanity will progress. Disease is not deserved. With Roy Cohn, the message is: evil gets what’s coming to it.
In an opinion piece for NBC News, F. Diane Barth talks about the HermanCainAward subreddit. Herman Cain was a Republican politician who was against government action on the pandemic who then died of COVID. The subreddit is dedicated to reveling in the deaths of people like Cain, anti-vaxxers or anti-maskers who succumb to COVID. It’s poetic justice. It’s funny. It’s divine. It’s what they deserve.
Like the Cat Janice debacle has proved, some people view disease as a moral punishment. Cancer is something evil people deserve. COVID is something stupid people deserve. Besides celebrating death and misfortune, again, one of my main concerns is how close it comes to eugenics. It’s edging it. At a certain point, they’ll reach a climax where illness is always a sign of karma, something evil people get. Coming from people who regularly throw around the r-word, the near-ableism isn’t surprising, but it is concerning.
You might be asking, if there are people who seem to be pro-torture, pro-suffering, and pro-deadly-illness as karma, are these same leftists supporters… of the death penalty?
Four - The Death Penalty
In the Philosophy Tube episode on Capital Punishment, Abigail Thorn mentions the idea of retributive justice. She says it’s easy to dismiss it as bloodthirsty as cruel, but she then digs into the idea anyway, completely brushing past those criticisms. If you have done bad, this school of justice argues, you deserve bad. She answers a hypothetical question about Nazis and whether they deserve to die by saying part of her thinks so, but she doesn’t want to use the word deserves. In her list of potential responses, she includes, “I want them to suffer.” That brings the personal into it and removes the idea of objective “deserving.”
At the end of the video, Thorn says, “(T)here is a part of me that does want to see some criminals suffer, and would love to latch onto a philosophical theory that not only makes that look justified, but also means I don’t have to talk about myself and my own feelings, but once I realised that those feelings were coming from me, I realized I had a choice about whether or not to indulge them…”
When you combine those two segments, it seems like an admission that, well, yes. Retributivism is just plainly bloodlust. It does nothing to heal the world, it does nothing to fix the past, it does nothing to prevent crime or rehabilitate criminals. It’s a sport. The point is wanting people to suffer. Finding enjoyment in another person’s suffering is called sadism. Sadism outside of a consensual bedroom is not moral. As Thorn points out, people don’t like that idea though. They want to find some sort of theory that makes their cruelty not seem like a personal desire for suffering and instead… turns it into a moral necessity. Suddenly you have people saying that holding empathy for people who have done wrong is wrong itself. The people who aren’t as bloodthirsty to you are naive, moral lessers.
What I appreciate about the Philosphy Tube video is Thorn admitting that the choice of whether or not to engage in our sadistic bloodlust is what counts. We can all have horrid thoughts and horrid wants. The point, the sticker, the reason why we must critique ourselves, our allies, and all movements is to make sure we are aware of the choices we have to indulge our desires or not. You do not need for anyone to suffer. You want them to. And you can choose not to indulge that want.
In my video on The Menu, I briefly talked about a certain segment of the left who, instead of supporting Palestinian liberation, went out of their way to support the idea of death and destruction. The killing of innocents is fine if you convince yourself that they are sinful for existing where they do. Parachute and red triangle emojis. You know, like the paragliders Hamas members used to attack the music festival and the red triangle Hamas videos use to mark target before they explode them. People would comment triangles on people they didn’t like. You know, saying they deserved death, a very not-bloodthirsty thing to do. It’s frustrating being on the left because so often this type of absolute moron, the dirtbag assholes latch onto movements and try to trick the rest of us into supporting their desire to be cruel, all the while trying to close off progressive spaces to those who are opposed to cruelty.
I’ve talked before about the frothing at the mouth over the Romanovs. I was researching them for a play I wrote debating justice and the death penalty during revolution. I found plenty of people defending and celebrating their murder. But that wasn’t enough. They again have to attack anyone who isn’t comfortable with that. Each time people pull out that stupid Mark Twian quote about the supposed two Reigns of Terror. He does have a point: untold horror was committed by the French royals before the revolution. They did harm. But that doesn’t suddenly excuse the barbarism of the reign of terror. To deploy that quote as if it’s an airtight defense for killing the Romanovs is just saying, “This was karma. It was divine retribution.” But people keep pulling it out because some people on the left treat literally any text that somewhat agrees with them as holy scripture that ends all arguments.
Mao Zedong is a murderous piece of shit. On the Communism101 subreddit, someone once asked for opinions on the killings of landlords under Mao’s regime. The comments, of course, are pro-murdering landlords. Not only there, they revel in the idea.
Abigail Thorn’s video on the death penalty gave her a deeper understanding of prison abolition as a movement even as she rejects the death penalty. There was a popular tweet from an abolitionist who came to a different position: part of the deal with getting rid of prisons is that more people need to be murdered for their crimes. There is not enough death in the world, the tweeter argues. Many of the comments agree with them. A few months later, another popular tweet said victims of sexual violence should be allowed to kill their assaulters. Plenty of people pointed out how stupid this is, but others claimed Islam is great, for instance, because this is something Islam allows for. There’s an idea of communal justice, that communities will come together to lynch people… Oh wait, lynching. Well, that’s probably not good. But then how will these people fulfill their bloodlust?
Anytime you see these proviolence moments and dig any deeper, you find there’s little below the surface. All that is there is a desire for pain and suffering. There’s a belief in harsh karma and even harsher justice.
So, who deserves to die?
The answer is simple: no one. As with the Philosophy Tube video, anytime you say that, people come out of the wood work to ask about all the worst people you can imagine. How about the Nazis? Well, no, I don’t advocate for anyone to go around murdering them. What about this mass murderer? Sorry, I’m consistently against the death penalty. What about in instance of r-a-p-e? Can’t you empathize with…?
Five - Justice
Trigger warning. Skip section. Three. It’s not a high number, but it’s still too many. My senior year of college, over the course of three months, three different men did things to me. Once a month. The pandemic hit. I turned into an alcoholic. Two of them, I don’t know. One of them I knew very well. One was straight forward rape. One I don’t know how to qualify. One was drunken coercion from someone who knew I wouldn’t get with them when sober. None of them were particularly violent. One angers me. Two hurt. Three times.
I didn’t have intercourse for another six months. When I did, I had a panic attack.
I think about those incidents a lot, and they confuse me. Comparatively, they’re nothing. You hear stories, you know people, and you know things could be a thousand times worse. What I went through was no great trauma, and yet I blocked it out until that panic. Then I couldn’t stop thinking about it for months. I still do. It messes with my mind. Sexual assault changes you. I beat myself up a lot about them. Minimize my experiences. I like to pretend I made them up. I’m just crazy.
The man who had while I was drunk, I still keep tabs on. When I see his moments of success, it makes me angry. It isn’t simply jealousy. It’s that good things happen to him. But. I can’t bring myself to wish him harm or suffering. I don’t wish that for any of them.
I understand what it’s like to be victimized by people, to have part of you trampled on and feel like you’ve had something stolen. When people throw out their gotchas on the death penalty, I don’t know any Nazis. I’ve never been a victim of a mass murderer. But I have experienced sexual violence. What is justice in this case? Would it be for them to experience the same, an eye for an eye? Well, I don’t wish that on anyone. Who would? It’s easier in our current culture to easily say “so and so deserves to die,” but can you say, “so and so deserves to be raped?” Only if you’re morally bankrupt. Is it for them to suffer? Their suffering would change what happened. It wouldn’t give me anything back. And, to be honest, I know myself enough to know that a belief in karmic justice would make me see their suffering as my fault.
The person I know who treated me in such a way, a few of the people I’m close to know who he is and what happened. But I’ve decided to keep his name to myself unless one day he proves to be a serial offender. Perhaps coercion was a mistake of youth. At the moment, I will only put him on blast in order to support someone else coming forward. I hope I never name him.
In a post about the Capital Punishment video by Abigail Thorn, posted on the PhilosophyTube subreddit, a user praised Thorn’s acknowledgement of the retributive belief and that she didn’t bat it away as dumb bloodthirst, which it is, because the poster believes in retribution. And has since they were a child. Almost like retributive justice is a child’s idea of justice. But because this user personally wants to bring forth harm on someone… well, it must be sacrosanct.
I remember in the wake of the OceanGate Titan incident a response very similar to what happened with ContraPoints and her pointing out revelry of cruelty re: Trump and Covid. While I also found the memes funny, there were people who didn’t agree. People who found it crass and wrong, who were sad at the deaths. Some of the worst tweets I’ve ever seen emerged: people who were upset that their cruelty was being pointed out. They called the sad killjoys, just as they did with Contra for naming the cruelty cruel. More than that, though, they claimed they would be on the wrong side of the revolution. Again and again and again, empathy is demonized. Justice is cold blooded. It is dangerous. It is deadly. It is laughter at suffering. To disagree is to be the enemy.
So. Is it justice to harm people who harm people?
If the answer is yes, then justice is an evil concept that we as a society need to grow past.
When I was younger, I believed in cold justice. As a middle and high schooler, I believed heavily in the idea of harsh, violent retribution against the people I thought deserved it. I wrote a deranged couple of vampire books about exacting revenge and calling it justice. I thought harming people was fine if there was a utilitarian positive. Or if they were “evil” and “deserved it.”
I’ve since grown up.
Six - Populism
2016 was the first time I was able to vote in an election. By the time the primaries came to Kentucky, the race was over between Hilarie Clinton and Bernie Sanders. So my choice was between Trump and Clinton. I voted Clinton. Donald Trump managed to gather the frothing support of a lot of people in part due to his anger. He insulted people. He promised to destroy his enemies. He gave people permission to actively hate as loud as they want. The swamp was going to be drained. The filthy journalists would be reigned in.
There was a suggestion immediately following the election of Donald Trump that many of the people who voted for him were driven by economic anxiety. In fact, it’s sometimes argued that economic hardship is what drives populism in general (guardian). Or, as Ben Casselman argues, not hardship but anxiety: the idea that hardship is coming, that your position is precarious.
Following the 2008 financial crash and global recession, people of my generation have kept a heavy eye on the idea of the economy. Or, not the economy. As Will Stancil has pointed out, there have been plenty of leftists who have argued the economy is bad despite good indicators. It’s the idea of capitalism itself, that exploitation is on the rise. People are struggling. We sees stories of hardship on social media or witness it in our own lives. Doom is more popular on the internet than positivity.
In Torsten Bell’s Guardian article about populism, he cites German researches who studied puplists of 120 years. Who are populists? Those politicians “whose central argument is one of the ‘true people’ v ‘dishonest’ elites.” If you live in America or, I suppose, any liberal democracy, you’ll be familiar with that rhetoric. It’s us versus them. The real people versus the evil snobs. We would be great if those people disappeared.
Framing it that way might start some sirens in your head.
And you might pause and think, wasn’t Bernie Sanders a populist? So then, can’t there be a good populism? That’s what Larry Diamond explores in an article for Stanford University. He discusses the ways in which populism can be a force for good, how it can lead to good reforms and nice outcomes… but it erodes democracy. The breaks become hard to hit. He always places “good” and “bad” in scare quotes. Despite distinguishing between the two, it becomes clear that the distinction… isn’t super clear. He says, “...the answer to the question, ‘When does populism become a threat to democracy?’ is: When other powerful democracies stand by and let it happen.”
Where does populism appear on the left? Why, the dirtbag left. In a fascinating article for The New Yorker, Andrew Marantz said of the dirtbag left, “[It] derived its sensibility from niche Twitter, heightening the attributes that make social media both alluring (the specificity, the absurdity) and the toxic (the nihilism, the narcissism, the casual sexism.” He specifically refers to Chapo, one of those very annoying podcasts I listened to as research for this. Of Chapo and the internet, he says, “(P)eople who objected to ‘Chapo’ on aesthetic ground were sometimes suspected of being insufficiently committed to the cause…. (I)nsults are to the left of arguments.”
The lesson the dirtbag left took from the assencion of Trump was that you can, indeed, insult your way to the presidency. But, in the words of Jeet Heer, “Beyond violating leftist ideals, dominance politics seems like a tactic doomed to fail.” And indeed, he’s right. Revenge based politics, anger, is purely reactive. It leads to and is built on reactionary politics.
So then, if this tactic doesn’t work, why keep at it?
Well, the answer is that it isn’t meant to work. The purpose is not politics. The purpose is the insult. We are hurtling towards either doom or the glorious revolution. Until then, what matter is expressing your righteous anger. It’s a religious devotion to the self, which is odd for advocates of socialism and communism to hold. Anger must be beyond critique. Rage. To harm and insult others. Because the point is the idea of suffering. For the crime of disagreeing, the enemies of the dirtbag left deserve what’s coming to them. It’s karma. It’s holy. As ContraPoints might point out, it’s a “resentful moan… They don’t want victory, they don’t want power, they want to endlessly ;critique’ power. Because for them, ‘critique’ is an important psychological defense against feeling impotent.”
So we believe in hell because we want suffering. We believe in punishing our enemies because we desire suffering. But because we cannot call ourselves cruel, because to acknowledge we are seeking suffering would be to call ourselves cruel, we have to label it moral. There is some god out there who will inflict eternal punishment. Karma will eventually give people cancer. If you hold empathy for the enemy, you are immoral. You become the enemy. If you do not join our glorious crusade, well, it’s time to nail you to the cross.
Seven - What Do?
Well then, what are we supposed to do with all this anger, with this bloodlust, with this righteous fury? Surely, since we feel it, since anger is a holy emotion, it must be expressed…
But no. It doesn’t. What you have to do is grow up. We have the ability to critique ourselves, understand our instincts, and decide whether or not to engage them. If you believe in hell, ask yourself why. If you want people to suffer, ask yourself why. To want suffering is to be sadistic. It’s cruelty for cruelty’s sake. For entertainment. For bloodlust.
The answer to this evangelical attachment to suffering is to reject it entirely. Become the pastor in The Christians. Leftism must be built off of compassion. If it isn’t, it’s worthless. It isn’t, well, welcome to hell.
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