A few years ago, on the platform formerly known as Twitter, I saw a video that stuck with me. I’ve searched for it since then, but haven’t been able to find it.
The video is being taken from the passenger’s side of a car window by a man whose girlfriend is driving, or more accurately, sitting still in traffic on a freeway. Several lanes are backed up with cars. There is some treacherous winter weather and the streets are extremely icy. The man is recording one car after another losing control, sliding on the ice along the lane directly to the couple’s right, and crashing into a multi-car pileup ahead.
The woman is pleading. “Get out and do something!” she’s saying. “There’s nothing we can do,” the man says. Getting out of the car would be dangerous, he says, and it wouldn’t accomplish anything. So the two are left to watch one soul after another sliding to his destruction, seconds passing between each catastrophe.
The video reminded me of the ever-increasing rate at which the West is funneling healthy, gender nonconforming children into harmful hormone treatments and surgeries. It feels like an even more apt metaphor now that we (in the United States, at least) are doing it against the advice of the Cass Report and several European reviews of the medical literature.
At one juncture amid a series of eerie dreams last night, I cradled in my arms a one-year-old baby girl who I’d been watching but temporarily lost sight of. In the interim, she had become a Fisher Price toy person—nothing but a head on a peg-shaped wooden body, stripped of character, stripped of limbs. But she was alive, speaking in a voice beyond her years, talking of past lives and reincarnation, unsmiling, ghostly. Left behind by her family, by anyone else who might care for her, and even by me for that neglectful moment, she’d met a very strange fate indeed—become broken and vulnerable.
The transitioned child was embedded in her, of course, but she was much more. She was the young woman in my orbit who took her own life a few weeks ago, and the friend I recently spent enough time with to learn that she starves herself, and the teenagers experiencing more despair and fragility than previous generations, and the rest of us, mesmerized by the meager dopamine hits conferred by glowing icons on five inch screens, forgetting what wet grass feels like.
Postmodern nihilism, social media, porn, and now AI are separating us from our bodies, twisting our minds, and destroying our empathy for others.
We are in a mass car pileup.
Except we can get out and do something.
But don't we live in a time when we are told that what we are is more important than what we do? Jordan Peterson tells young men they can’t effect social change until they’ve made their own beds, cleaned their rooms, and eaten their vegetables. Robin DiAngelo insists that we cannot make the world a more just place until we flog the secret racism from our hearts. These new gurus fall on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but each of them preaches that we must look inward for salvation. They tell us that if there are few points of contact between what we find inside and what we see in the world, well, to hell with the world. It’s what we *think* that counts.
I happen to believe the opposite. You don't become a good person by holding the "right" opinions; you become a good person *by doing good things.* Nobody cares about your motives.
Quite a dream. Reminds me of a sci-fi short story that I'd read many moons ago -- possibly 50 in Playboy (when one could read it for the philosophy ...). It described some dystopian future -- an isolated community of some sort, the Nostromo perchance? -- in which some rescuers had found that the inhabitants had died while hooked up to their virtual reality machines and had died of starvation because they had forgotten to eat -- and how to live.
Reminds me too of some scientist commenting about evolution, about how adapting to the environment can be a trap -- when it changes we may no longer be able to change with it.