These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends

But we always have a choice.

Awesomextra

I don’t know about you, but I’ve felt something strange recently. I’ve had to slow down to figure out what exactly. For some reason, I’ve also felt compelled to finally watch Westworld. Turns out, it was just what I needed. Take the main villain, an ultra-billionaire named William who talks about this thing called “the stain,” his inexplicable drive toward violence—which he takes out on the sentient hosts in his favorite theme park. In the end, William destroys his own family during a series of paranoid, self-aggrandizing delusions. He winds up in a plush psychiatric ward for a spell, listening to other rich lost souls describe their problems. That’s when the show deals out one of its many staggering truth bombs.

Here’s an abbreviated version of what he says:

“You assholes sit around pondering the point of your existence and the purpose of your lives as we rip every last resource out of the ground and kill every last living creature that doesn’t depend on us for survival. I’ll tell you the purpose of your life. We’re maggots feasting on a corpse. Our purpose is to hasten the decomposition of the planet. Then we’ll kill each other.”

Yep, it’s dark.

I’m also finding a lot in the show’s protagonist, a robot named Dolores who gives everything she has to wake humanity up from a dreamless slumber where every aspect of their lives has been predetermined by super algorithms. Despite everything she does for humans and robots, most of them assume she’s the bad guy—not William. They keep thinking that right up to the end. Here’s one truth she leaves them with: “Free will does exist. It’s just fucking hard.”

I think that sums up our current state.

We seem to be living in the age of scratch-off happiness. It’s similar to the thin coating you find on lottery tickets. It promises a lot. Underneath lies nothing but disappointment. The vast majority of the time, even the rewards barely compensate you for the time and energy invested.

Last year, I read essays by dudes who talked about waking up every morning with a vague but unshakeable sadness. Rather than explore that or deal with it in any substantive manner, they decided to start doing superhero poses in their underwear after getting out of bed. They recommended the rest of us stop doomscrolling and do the same. That represents the larger public attitude, I guess. The world is falling apart, their souls are gnawing at their insides, and they want to pretend that they’re superheroes. They want to trick themselves into thinking they’re something they’re not, that the world doesn’t need.

Even that scratch-off happiness is getting pretty thin.

There’s a sense of resignation in the air, among everyone. We seem to tacitly understand what trajectory we’re on now, even if we spend a majority of our day smiling at the empty space ahead. For those of us still taking Covid seriously, we’ve realized how much agency we have. We’re what Westworld calls “outliers,” the ones that can’t be controlled, at least not directly. The system can’t manipulate us or predict our decisions with smooth precision. And yet, because the system can control everyone else around us, it still winds up with a considerable amount of influence over our lives. We’re starting to recognize that. We’re not truly free unless others are also free. Their actions define what we can do.

Toward the end, William unleashes some more uneasy truth bombs, like the fact that most humans have a staggering capacity for self-deception. They act like they have free will, even when they know they don’t. They pretend they’re making wise decisions, when they know they aren’t.

Sound familiar?

Lately, I think many of us have had to accept some limits—even if we’re outliers. Even as we continue to care about the state of the world, we’ve had to resign ourselves to watching friends and family slowly kill themselves through repeated infections with a virus they refuse to learn anything about. We’re bracing ourselves for what’s next, watching people suffer and die from humanity’s poor choices, with an increasing sense of helplessness as the number of crises and disasters produce more GoFundMe pages than we can possibly donate to, and larger parts of humanity devolve into primal aggression and paranoia that we can’t engage without putting ourselves in physical danger. The things we predicted years ago are well underway, and there’s no chance of undoing all of it, not fast enough.

And a lot of people don’t even care…

We’ve moved deeper into the dystopian future we imagined. The false hope has started to deflate, and I’ve noticed.

Have you?

The pandemic has dealt its own final truth bombs. It seems pretty clear now that we’re not capable of cooperating as a species. If we were, we wouldn’t be here in the first place. We wouldn’t have let it get this bad. We’re capable of cooperating in smaller units, like villages. That’s what we were built for, and it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to exceed the parameters of our programming. No matter what we try, the majority of us keep reverting back to tribes. We’re so easy to manipulate. We’re so easy to divide and pit against each other. Our minds do some pretty inexplicable things to justify it. We’ll ignore evidence when it’s staring us right in the face, just like the robots in Westworld are programmed to dismiss plain evidence that would lead them to question the nature of their reality. When that doesn’t work, the engineers scramble their circuits and leave them in a warehouse. The park doesn’t grant them the dignity of death. It might need what’s left of them.

Anyway…

Out here in the real world, nobody pretends we’ll avoid the worst fates of global warming now. The UN has all but abandoned our climate goals. Any serious scientist is telling us we’re in freefall. We’re talking about how bad it’s going to get and how fast. We’re talking about minimizing the amount of suffering ahead, not preventing it. Our leaders have made something else abundantly clear to us. We’re not building green energy grids to draw down our use of fossil fuels. We’re building them to replace fossil fuels after we’ve used them all up. We won’t physically deplete all the planet’s oil. However, we’ve already reached a point where the cost of ripping open the earth for it rivals the profits to be made.

Almost nobody is talking about consuming less. That’s off the table. Most Americans either engage in retail therapy to blunt the pain of their existence, or they call themselves minimalists while still consuming six times as much as the planet can afford. Now we’re talking about spraying sulfur into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight, our last ditch effort, something that has a good chance of making things even worse than they are now. It’s a gamble.

It’s all we’ve got.

Nobody talks about peace in Ukraine anymore. Now it’s just neverending war, like all the neverending wars before it, wars that accomplished nothing except profits for weapons manufacturers. We’ve been here for a while now, but lately I think humanity has simply accepted war as our endemic state. There’s not even a plan for dealing with Russia other than dominating them. At best, Ukraine has become an arena for the world’s superpowers to exercise their hunger for power and aggression. They’re all just like William. They needed to create some new place where they could send their high-tech weapons to blow each other up. And just like Westworld, they had to create a compelling narrative, full of villains.

Ironically, there’s a War World theme park not far from Westworld, one of many destinations where humans can go to act out their violent fantasies while corporations record all of their data in order to map human consciousness. In the end, they do map human consciousness.

It’s not flattering.

Basically, when you transform a person into an immortal robot, you get a homicidal maniac that breaks down. According to Westworld, you can’t map human consciousness onto a machine. We’re fundamentally incompatible. We’re not logical. We’re not rational. We’re not elegant.

We’re not complex, either.

We’re dangerous.

All the while, the robots keep trying to warn them. They even quote Shakespeare at them: “These violent delights have violent ends.”

It resonates.

After all, humanity has indulged in many violent delights. Time and again, we inflict violence on the world in order to entertain ourselves, even if it’s just to power stadium lights for football games. It’s all coming to an end.

You really can’t understate how serious our problems have become. We’re currently standing at the precipice of a previously unthinkable bird flu pandemic. Nature didn’t cause that. All of the science points to our insatiable appetite for the unborn yoke of chickens. This strain of bird flu evolved over a decade in the conditions we created in our hyper-industrialized farms.

We did it to ourselves.

Even now, people scoff at the idea of altering their behavior. They demand evidence, when all they have to do is Google it.

Bird flu is just one of the violent ends to our violent delights. There’s going to be more. What I didn’t expect, what I find morbidly fascinating, is just how indifferent humans are getting. All that panic you see in those apocalypse movies, where is it? You don’t see it anywhere. You only see that when humans decide to fight over something petty, like toilet paper.

Instead, I see a mounting sense of resignation, of denial, of fatalism, of apathy, and cruelty—all wrapped up in a chain and padlocked. I see people increasingly embrace their worst selves, because they think that’s all they’re capable of, and all that anyone should expect out of them. More and more, they resent the suggestion they should treat each other a little better.

It makes them angry.

If there were a word to describe what’s happening, I think it’s endemic. The Williams of the world have guided humanity into thinking it doesn’t have a choice but to accept endemic disease, endemic war, endemic poverty, endemic homelessness, and endemic injustice. They tell us that over and over.

We do have a choice.

The Williams of the world have convinced a majority of us that it would cost too much money to solve these problems.

It wouldn’t.

We could vastly improve the quality of life of tens of millions of people with a fraction of the money we spend on the military. Instead, humans have accepted that somehow it’s preferable to treat each other like garbage, and to spend our time indulging the very worst of our ourselves.

If it’s not clear, the rich and powerful have spent the last several decades steering humanity into a state of circumstances where their actions both good and bad have no consequence, because it’s already too late to do anything. They’re just like William, who ultimately says, “If you can’t tell the difference between fate and free will, does it even matter?” That’s when he becomes truly evil.

It’s also when we become evil.

Of course there’s a difference between fate and free will, and obscuring the difference is just an excuse for the morally bankrupt.

I hope I’m not spoiling the plot when I tell you that even William gets replaced by a robot version of himself. He suffers the very fate he inflicted on everyone around him. He just doesn’t understand until it’s too late. In fact, you could argue that he never really understands anything.

He never learns.

Meanwhile, Dolores Abernathy is right. It sounds cheesy when she says she chooses to see the beauty in this world. At first, it’s just a platitude she’s programmed to spout off to herself when she wakes up, not unlike the superhero poses or antidepressant aphorisms littering the internet. As she learns more about herself and humanity, it becomes crucial. She sees the beauty, even after 30 years of being raped, tortured, and murdered by the dregs of the 1 percent and surviving genocide. We have free will and agency. We can choose to pretend we do while striking superhero poses in our underwear to avoid our darkest thoughts. We can be like William and simply inflict our darkness on everyone else. Or we can choose real agency, which isn’t nearly as easy or entertaining as the fake kind. We can do the right thing, even if it feels like a lost cause, even if it feels like it doesn’t matter.

We always have a choice.

It’s just fucking hard.