Just Keep Watching
Do we live in a cult, or a thoroughly entertained society?
I keep waiting for something to crack—for the state of our country to get so obviously bad that there’s no choice but to believe its badness. But that keeps not happening. No matter how many countries the Trump Administration illegally bombs, no matter how many innocent people they kill or detain, no matter how many lives are worsened in ways that, to me, seem so obviously a consequence of our government and their disdain for human life, so many people seem willing to keep on going.
Perhaps the most depressing story I read in the last few weeks was a New York Times temperature check of Trump voters after his unilateral and illegal bombing of Iran had begun. The article can be summed up as: sure, my life sucks and I can’t afford groceries, but I believe he’s doing the right thing, in Iran and everywhere else! One supporter described himself as a “long-term patriot,” a phrase that seems to mean, “it doesn’t matter if things are going badly now because I have blind faith things will eventually get better as long as I believe thoroughly enough in some abstract concept.” A recent CNN poll found that 82 percent of Republicans still approve of Trump’s presidency.
You can say this is denial, or a consequence of constant propaganda. And, of course, it is both. But also: perhaps this is what people want. Not because it makes them happy. But because it makes the people making their lives miserable happy. And that is what they care about, whether they know it or not.
Our current political situation can, in part, be explained by steadfast and increasing belief in a system of trickle-down emotions—the idea that if the people you admire appear satisfied or strong or free that you will eventually too, as long as you continue to let them do their thing. It is a system of sunk costs and delayed gratification. And it is a system that is thus self-reinforcing—the more those in power can make your life miserable, the more appealing the idea becomes that supporting them will eventually make your life better.
Trump supporters aren’t the only people who participate in this system. You can see it everywhere these days: in the Elon Musk fanboys who explain every stupid thing he does as the moves of a 1,000-dimensional chess master; in the hustle culture bros who defend billionaires and insist that the reason they run the world is because they are just smarter than everyone else (presumably including the bros who adore them). And it’s not just a right-wing thing. Think of the Ruth Bader Ginsberg shirts and Obama posters everywhere in the 2010s—sure, their supporters liked some of their political positions, but they also found them inspiring. Americans wanted to know the details of the Obamas date-nights and travels as much as they wanted to know about what laws Barack was supporting. One could argue the main point of the position of any First Lady is as a kind of wellspring of emotional health to be disseminated to the American public—if you lived like her, if you acted with such poise, you too could be…well…not First Lady…but at least not the sad, poor, American you that you are.
Much of the world operates within this framework of unquestioning support for the powerful (whether politically or economically or culturally so) for theoretical future emotional gain. To see just how much fealty the public pledges to people who will do very little in return for their loyalty, go online and post a light criticism of a K Pop star (though, at least they return fans’ devotion with momentary auditory pleasure, unlike politicians, who return to their fans only more debt and destruction and death).
Whether K Pop stan or Trump fan, religion is the blueprint for all of this. What is Christianity but a system of emotional debt (and often economic debt too, in the form of tithing) and fealty to a powerful figure in exchange for supposed future gain—gain in the afterlife in most traditional forms of Christianity, gain in this life for those who believe in prosperity gospel?
Things will get better, if only you believe hard enough.
As many philosophers like Walter Benjamin have pointed out over the decades, capitalism itself can be thought of as a religion in this way—a system of totalizing belief in which people are manipulated to give more and more of themselves for the (usually false) promise of future reward. As Giorgio Agamben put it succinctly in a 2012 interview: “God didn’t die, he was transformed into money.”
So, this unyielding fealty to bad actors in the hopes that that fealty will result in some kind of bounty is not new. Indeed it can be said to be a constant feature of Western industrialized civilization. But it seems as if we’re at a particularly high point of the phenomenon’s presence in our society, and the question is why.