The Philosophy of Bitterness
Anti-humanism and its place in modernity
Much of our current political dialogue originates in displaced, repressed, and projected emotions rather than logical propositions. Sympathy for historically marginalized groups (along with the desire to feel and seem righteous) creates widespread feelings that failure and wrongdoing has nothing to do with personal decisions or cultural patterns, and therefore the only ‘fix’ for disparities is active and heavy-handed discrimination and set-asides. Unacknowledged fear of death leads to irrational hysteria regarding illness and environmental trends. Lack of empathy creates the feeling that criminals don’t respond to incentives, and ignores their victims (actual and potential) when it comes to creating policies around criminal justice and imprisonment… and so on.
Resentment and bitterness are perennial human emotions but our hyper-connected and hyper-alienated age seems to be stoking these feelings. Young men feel bitter at the women they perceive as too judgmental, too picky, too selfish, and hypocritical. In extremis this sentiment creates the phenomenon of the mass shooter. Young women feel bitter at the men (and society-the same thing, in their view) who they perceive as derisive, aggressive, threatening, and boorish. Liberals resent conservatives for their alleged bigotry and irrational fear. Conservatives resent liberals for their perceived hypocrisy and shallow self-regard… and so on.
The most refined and expansive form of bitterness detectable in our politics today is the anti-normative, anti-civilization, anti-human sentiment of many people. I see this mainly in people on the Left (mostly young) who I encounter online. They despise their history, their future, society’s norms and expectations, civilization, and development. I think the reasons for this complex are numerous and intricate but some of it probably comes from a feeling of inadequacy and inauthenticity. If you believe that you live on stolen indigenous land and that your culture is rapacious and immoral… yet you continue to live there and participate in it, how must that make you feel? If you feel that statistical disparities between black and white Americans are due to vast and invisible systems of unearned privilege… but you continue to enjoy your favored station, how can you conceptualize your life? If you believe that the economy is causing a fast-motion environmental apocalypse but you continue to buy and use and consume things how will you see yourself and your life? People often point to the empty and shallow and fake-virtuous nature of many modern progressive positions and this is fair, but beliefs must be believed (at least on some level) to be effective as virtue signals. If everyone knows the entire ideological structure is nonsense then it lack potency as a belief system and as an intended signal of intent and character. The sad fact is that many, many people in our country earnestly subscribe to a worldview that simultaneously tells them that their histories and identities and economic activities make them complicit in great immorality… while it completely de-emphasizes the possibility of self-improvement or individual action (apart from more empty signaling: twitter feuds and reputation destruction and impotent mass protests). This worldview is corrosive not just for our institutions and our culture but for our psyches.
describes an inane and counterproductive recent protest against a car factory in Germany:
The Grünheide factory employs 12,000 people and contributes millions of Euros every year in taxes, which is bad enough from the activists’ point of view. Still worse, production has caused some water pollution, and Tesla plans to expand the factory, which will entail cutting down some trees. A bunch of “water justice” advocates and forest saviours have therefore crawled out of their Berlin squats and made their way to Grünheide to defend humanity from the scourge of car production.
These people are motivated less by a love of the environment than they are by a hostility towards factories, jobs, cars, and civilization itself… even as they enjoy lives of almost unimaginable luxury and waste. The same masochistic nihilism is on display at the campus protests for Gaza, the BLM “largely peaceful” riots of 2020, and the puerile soup-throwing fits of young ecological campaigners, as well as many other places.
Visit any online space about a number of things: race, male/female relations, culture… even animals. You will witness a widespread tendency toward pessimism and collective self-loathing which would have been unknown, and frankly confusing, to most people, from the dawn of history to the 1960’s. This seems to be a primarily wealthy and Western phenomenon as well. In a sense, this reflexive negativity and cynicism is a luxury but it’s a poisonous one. If the world needs changing then do your part to change it. Your emotional reactions and your beliefs and your opinions alone ultimately mean nothing.
Cixin Liu’s ‘Remembrance of Earth’s Past’ trilogy is a decent sci-fi adventure which creates a compelling universe. Unlike William Gibson or Dan Simmons (whose works incorporate revolutionary concepts concerning AI, travel, alien megastructures, vampirism, futuristic organized crime, cyborgs, parasitism, etc.) Liu’s books really focus on a single issue. That is the concept of the universe as a ‘dark forest’ full of danger from aggressive super-opponents. The books chronicle our struggle with the Trisolarans (San-Ti Ren, to the Chinese), an insectoid race from an ecologically unstable but habitable planet 4.2 light years away, and the aftermath of that great struggle.
Before any of that happens, though, we are betrayed by one of our own. Ye Wenjie is a Chinese graduate student in physics whose feelings about her country and her species and her future is bitterly twisted. After many personal losses and deep betrayals, she ends up sequestered at a secret hilltop communications station in Western China. Her family has been ruined (her father beaten to death by Red Guards and her mother compelled to publicly disown him before his death).
Ye Wenjie forms a deep loathing for humanity after her society compels her mother to betray her father and he is beaten to death before an angry mob. This is a rare and realistic depiction of China’s Cultural Revolution and THERE ARE SUSPICIOUSLY FEW RESULTS FOR THIS SCENE ON YOUTUBE OR GOOGLE IMAGES…
Ye Wenjie is told that she will never be able to leave the facility, and she assents. The world has shown her only suffering and malignant human selfishness, Before her ostracism she is betrayed by a work camp colleague and even within the facility a supervisor tries to take credit for her ideas. One of her ideas is to use to sun to amplify out-going communications. It appears that the Chinese have a kind of CETI (communication with extraterrestrial intelligence) program. Upon beaming her message out to a patch of the sky she receives a warning not to transmit there any longer. She chooses to rebroadcast anyway… and so begins our decades-long enmeshment with the San-Ti Ren (“Three-Body People” in Chinese). Eventually this relationship will result in the destruction of our entire solar system.
She meets a young trust fund kid named Mike Evans, living in Western China to do conservation work in the forest to help preserve bird species. He becomes her collaborator in the betrayal of humanity, similarly faithless in our collective goodness and our ability to solve our own problems.
Ye Wenjie’s resentment toward our world and its people is perhaps understandable. Mike’s disgust for his species, on the other hand, is completely unforgivable, as is the widespread and lazy pessimism we see among the rich and the young in the West today.
The philosophical stance between Ye Wenjie’s betrayal and the daily bemoaning of development and technology and hierarchy and merit and progress could be referred to as ‘anti-humanism’. It is a profound pessimism about the project of civilization and it displays itself in two general directions:
Regressive policies - any dislike of nuclear power or economic growth or cheap housing or, indeed, any of the policies which benefit society and lead to aggregate increases in utility are anti-humanist. We see this sort of thing in the modern environmentalist movement a lot. The fact is that if some activists could press a button and eliminate all emissions today but ensure the continued growth of our economies (including those in the poorer parts of the world) and population they would not. Many environmentalists are motivated by a kind of religious disapproval of human flourishing and their real goals have more to do with an erasure of civilization than a conditional protection of ecologies from its externalities.
Emotional reaction/societal pessimisim - the attitude that civilization is gross, brutal, unworthy, and corrupt is extremely popular these days. The irony is, of course, that the people who believe such things are (materially) the most profound beneficiaries of civilization. Poor people, indigenous people, uneducated people do not believe these things. These are lessons which are luxuries of the bored and well-fed and, like all ‘luxury beliefs,’ are learned only by people with the money and time and comfort to absorb them. They act as signals to society (mainly now displayed through social media) and one’s group that one believes virtuous things and is therefore a good person (regardless of whether one does anything which reflects their beliefs). In fact, almost no one does anything with these beliefs. It is certainly possible to limit the purchase of new clothes and avoid emission-intensive travel (commercial aviation) and give up smart phones and laptops and other products which necessitate the mining of cobalt. Basically no one does these things, but they profess an ideology which should, if it were consistent and compelling, necessitate them. This sharp division between the advertised ideals and the personal behavior creates a deep feeling of inauthenticity and bitterness, which interacts with the worldview and deepens contempt toward dissenters (even and especially those on one’s own side). People are mistaking their loneliness and their ridiculous and impractical political ideas (and their negative emotional effects) and their sense of ennui and the aimlessness of their lives for a symptom of civilization. In fact, civilization can easily coexist with purpose and compassion and connection… but you must cultivate those things. No one will give them to you. That’s not to say that civilization does not create victims and suffering and oppression. Our globalized market is the most productive and complex machine ever assembled by humans and as it operates in a world full of scarcity and greed it will certainly hurt and kill many animals and people. The answers for those failings come from frank and logical examinations of the particulars of the system and trying to improve them. If you throw up your hands and say ‘everything is terrible and so are we!’ while you continue to buy things on Amazon and upgrade your smart phone and fly around the country then you are simultaneously taking a melodramatic and impotent stand while actually choosing to sustain all of the worst features of that system. Perhaps some of your unhappiness comes not from civilization as such but from your laziness and greed… and no amount of social media posts or fashionable opinions can wipe those vices away. That requires action.
Try this experiment: find an adorable animal video of a helpful or useful animal assisting a human or another animal. One I recently saw om Instagram (IG and TikTok have younger user bases and tend to be more pessimistic-Youtube is older and more male and is less so) was a touching clip of an elephant rushing to help a man who was being carried downstream by a river (although he was not in any danger). Read the comments. You will immediately see young people (mostly women) bemoaning the brutality and selfishness of humans and humanity.
This isn’t a matter of annoying comments online. It is a cast of mind that forms entire worldviews now. Western history is deplorable and our ancestors were the worst kinds of criminals (rather than just ordinary people struggling to survive and prosper, like all humans throughout time). Science and technology are dark and evil. Development is ruining the environment. Progress is a lie. Optimism is a bitter joke.
The converse of this orientation is a kind of ‘noble savage’ view, in which all brown and black and primitive and other (in almost any way) groups or cultures are revered and accorded a sanctified and childlike status. The noble savage has a long and persistent history in Western civilization, of course, from the officious and disordered babblings of Jean Jacques Rousseau to Dances with Wolves and the Avatar films.
The modern strains of anti-humanism and anti-development have several major negative implications. The first, and most basic, is a loss of faith in our civilization and its benefits and an ignorance of the gratitude which is objectively warranted and helpful to leading a happy and successful life. If you believe that your society is unhappy and twisted then it becomes true, at least for you. Anti-humanism is rarely seen in combination with some kind of constructive proposals (other than the apocalyptic and genocidal ambitions of the radical environmentalists, which would lead to the deaths of many millions of people). It cultivates a kind of pessimistic malaise, in which every feature of our society is so warped that OnlyFans and Amazon gifts and empty protests become almost admirable. They might not be doing anything to make the world a better place, the young tell themselves, but at least they’re unshackled from the silly traditions and hopes of the past. Selfishness and a shallow life become openly acceptable, even laudable, courses of action. This makes manipulations by those in power that much easier to execute, for a citizenry that doesn’t care about truth or ethics or the future is the least demanding kind there is.
Similarly, it erodes the norms we need to raise children, debate issues, and unify as a political body (which we all still are, despite the contempt of many). Many young people these days truly believe that ALL old ideas and venerations are false, even evil. Marriage, God, sacrifice, duty, honesty, fidelity, service, community… and many more have all been swamped in a rising and bilious tide of cynicism. As workable replacements we have equity, trans joy, anti-racism, dismantling, and de-colonization but these are simply not ideas which can anchor a civilization, even if they are the consensus (which they are not and never will be). These are negations, not constructive values in themselves. That is the spirit in which they were conceived and that is all they can ever be.
The anti-humanist program leads to inauthenticity as well. Like well-educated white students taught that their blessings are all malignant examples of privilege (and who therefore resent and disdain the blessings… while simultaneously trying to maneuver to exact maximum benefit and comfort from them) modern people taught that technology or development or capitalism are unethical in such a shallow and cynical way can’t really act according to these ideas. They are reliant upon development and technology and the market and they know they are. They could certainly buy less and wean themselves from apps and screens and pool resources or share with the poor but their cynicism prevents that. This leads to a strange situation in which record numbers of young people praise socialism, while lusting for money and fame within the capitalist system. Even without a deep understanding of political economy it is understood that this is the worst kind of phoniness. I’ve probably had a hundred exchanges in which I point out (to some radical extolling socialism or green energy or lambasting international trade or resource extraction) that their phone (and solar batteries, and laptops, and EV’s) require inputs of cobalt mined in brutal and murderous conditions in the DRC. If you oppose these things in theory, I point out, why go out of your way to support such an industries? The reason is obvious, and maddening to such people: it’s easy. Their ideals are simply a greasy sheen of fashionable cynicism. Convenience and status and comfort will always win out among this demographic and so they know that they are hypocrites and this knowledge-rather than causing them to interrogate the axioms they were taught-fuels yet more bitterness against the system which has given them so much.
The anti-humanist program also leads to a distorted (and ultimately) dangerous view of history and the rest of the word. We saw this emerge in sharp relief one hundred thousand-fold after Oct. 7th. If the West is evil, these people muse, than our enemies must be good. The Aztecs, Hamas, even Bin Laden, become redeemed. The danger implicit in having large numbers of neighbors and voters and citizens who believe such things scarcely needs explanation.
I would like to propose a different stance toward civilization in general and ours in particular: civilization is a series of cultural and technological solutions to problems of survival. It is highly imperfect but it has created more freedom and comfort and novelty than any indigenous culture (by a factor of 1,000) and we all benefit from that. Humans aren’t evil, they just have some dark psychological tendencies, foremost among them the groupthink and hostility towards other and intolerance of dissent on view across the entire modern Left. Our ancestors were not evil, they just struggled to make their lives safer and better and protect their children and homes. We would all do the same, and we do. If you want to improve upon their actions, opinions won’t suffice. You will have to gain a workably complete understanding of the world and its problems and then use intention and communication and personal sacrifice to improve it. This will be limited to your tiny corner of reality, but opinions about global systems are completely worthless. If you want to redeem civilization work to be a useful teacher and a good son or daughter and a loyal friend and a mindful consumer and a kind and responsible citizen. If everyone did these things this world could be a paradise-even with our civilization intact.
"Today, I think America has lost its way because its people have lost faith. Not simply in God, but also in its institutions."
- Joseph Hamrick