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By Root 2427 0

or anger the mass of people. Certainly an examination of history shows a greater willingness of the mass of people to participate in the atrocities of the culture than to oppose them. How is it that a sure-fire way for a president to increase his standing in the polls is to invade yet another defenseless country? Or, compare how many Germans were in the Wehrmacht in World War II—or how many were just good Germans—to how many were part of the resistance. One of the reasons members of the resistance knew they had to kill Hitler was because he was so magnificently popular among the majority of people: if Hitler were allowed to speak, they knew the people would listen.

WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE NINETEEN. Two words: Detroit Tigers. No, not because the Tigers are so terrible that they threaten life as we know it—although they are bad, historically bad, bad enough that if there were a hypothetical contest between the 2003 Tigers and the legendary 1899 Cleveland Spiders (20 wins, 134 losses: .130 winning percentage), the only reason the 2003 Tigers would win is because everyone who played for the Spiders is long-since dead332—but because more people care about Detroit Tigers than real ones.

I’ve commented elsewhere how deeply it saddens me that hundreds of thousands of Americans attend sporting events each night, and millions more watch on TV, yet if we try to get a rally together to do something—anything—to save salmon, we’re lucky to get fifteen people, and they’re the same ones who showed up last week to protest the circus, and the week before to hold signs decrying increases in the military budget.333 You could argue that the difference is advertising—if smooth-voiced announcers constantly exhorted us to blow up dams, and if newspapers daily devoted a dozen pages to the travails of endangered species, then more people would care.

Maybe.

I doubt it.

There’s a deeper point to be made here, which is that what people want can to some degree be told—more or less tautologically—by what they do. If more people go to see the Detroit Tigers every summer night than do anything to save real tigers from extinction, it’s probably because that’s what they want to do.334

Or maybe that’s what they think they want.

Or maybe that’s what they’ve been taught to want. Or maybe that’s what everything in the culture has led them to want. Or maybe that’s what everything in the culture has traumatized them into wanting. (And yes, it’s pretty traumatizing to watch the Tigers, but I’m talking about something deeper here.) Or maybe these wants are toxic mimics of real wants. Or maybe they’re what people have become addicted to.

My students at the prison who’d been addicted to crank often said they started taking drugs because the drugs felt so good (especially in contrast to the often-not-so-quiet desperation of their lives), yet soon found themselves taking the drugs no longer to feel good but to keep from feeling bad.

I have known women who were sexually abused as children who as adults loathed and feared sex, and who at the same time became extremely promiscuous. They were disallowed from saying no as children, and were trained well in the ways of subsuming themselves in order to please men. Now, these women went to the bars voluntarily, yes? Doesn’t that mean they wanted to? They picked up the men for sex. No one put a gun to their head, yes? Doesn’t that mean they wanted this?

But it didn’t make them feel good. They told me this later. Many hated it. Or did they? They thought they loved it. They thought it validated them. They thought it was what they wanted. But did they? What did they really want?

And the men. What did they want? If all they wanted was to get off, they could have grabbed some hand lotion and saved themselves the trouble of dressing up. If all they wanted was an ego boost, they could have got that through conversation. What did they really want?

Let’s go further. What did my father want when he beat or raped us? On one level he obviously wanted to do what he did, or he would not have done it. He