How Did We Get Here?

And how do we get out of here?

There’s been a fair amount of analysis trying to figure out why we are where we are. Why did the Democrats lose the election? Why do people support fascists and policies that are obviously in opposition to their best interests? We find ourselves in the middle of a fascist coup on our government by white supremacist billionaires and their minions. It’s too late to prevent it. Does it really matter why it’s happening? Isn’t the most important thing to stop it? Well, even though the question of “why” hasn’t been a high priority for me personally, it really does matter. The reasons behind the catastrophe might give us insights into how to counter the fascism in our midst and prevent it from happening again.

Photo by Viktor Hesse on Unsplash

Unfortunately, I think the answers are deeper and more complex than we might want to believe. The temptation to fascism is largely the natural result of unfettered capitalism: billionaires consolidating power and removing the roadblocks to the accumulation of even more wealth at any cost. It’s fairly easy to see that greed and narcissism are Trump’s personal motivations. But why are the masses willing to follow him when he constantly lies and is clearly interested in no one’s welfare but his own?

A friend and colleague forwarded me an article titled “The Psychology of Collapse: A Deep Dive in Human Misbehavior” by Jessica Wildfire in which she proposes that humanity has a kind of evolutionary apathy where we would really rather live in denial than prepare for future disasters. We just want to fit in, avoid change, and pretend everything is all right. The author sees this as the reason we’ve gotten ourselves into such a deep mess and attempts to take solace in the idea that since it seems to be evolutionary we shouldn’t feel bad when we fail to solve our problems. It’s not our fault. It’s evolution. That doesn’t feel all that optimistic to me. It feels like making excuses. The article does make some important points, however. The question is, can these insights show us a path forward?

While evolutionary apathy might help explain why some people have been so susceptible to Trump’s gaslighting, I don’t think it really explains what is happening today. This is no longer about preparing for a disaster. We’re in the middle of a disaster. Evolutionary apathy might better serve as a warning why large numbers of people might choose to give into fascism rather than fight it in the days, months, and years ahead. The temptation to live in denial will be most dangerous for those who see no hope that our nation’s course can be changed. I believe optimism can be found in the fact that although humans have repeatedly fallen to evil impulses in the past, they have also heroically resisted evil as well. What we need to provide is the hope that gives people a reason to resist.

What has brought us to this point in history is a wide coalition of self-interest. Those who support Trump and his cronies see themselves as actively getting something out of the fascist state. For some, it’s about white supremacy and for others it’s about greed and power. Some see Trump’s meanness as permission for them to be nasty while others find a sense of belonging in nationalism. I think still others are like someone in an abusive relationship. The hell they know is better than the unknown. I believe all of these things are factors, making it complex and difficult to know how best to respond.

One commonality I see between the idea of evolutionary apathy and the causal factors I’ve named is that people will go to great measures to cling to their current worldview, whether it’s white supremacy, the American Dream, or something else. We need a foundation for our lives that gives us meaning and we’ll cling to whatever we’ve got, regardless of whether it is actually in our best interests or not. Which means we’re not only responding to a crisis of capitalism run amuck, but to a crisis of meaning and values – a spiritual crisis.

The church has been in decline for decades and that has certainly been a factor in the rise of fascism. Much of the church is directly a part of the problem, embracing Christian Nationalism and abandoning core values and teachings to sell its soul for power. Some parts of the church preach love but hypocritically take great delight in demonizing anyone not like themselves. Other parts of the church have lost their prophetic voice, watering down their values in the name of unity. Certainly there are also still parts of the church that strive to follow Jesus and love their neighbor. The end result, however, is that I’m left wondering if Christianity can really be an impactful source of the meaning and positive spiritual change that we need.

I’m certainly not proposing that we need to all change and go back to the “glory days” of the church when attending services was an expectation of our culture. What needs to change is the church itself. The church needs to make itself relevant to people’s actual lives. We need to provide people with an alternative source of meaning to the so-called American Dream, a lone-cowboy ideology that claims we can all become one of the ultra-rich if we just work hard enough. We need to embrace community. We need to embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion. Meaning and purpose are not found in money. They are found in love, in relationships where we support and help each other. The world isn’t going to collapse if we change, abandoning white supremacy, greed and selfishness. That kind of change might actually save us.