Ashli Babbitt, shot and killed during the Trump insurrection, pictured with her husband.
Stumped trying to understand how so many seemingly intelligent people — not utterly stupid anyway — could continue to believe, and act upon, such utterly obvious lies (surely this QAnon bullshit is just a cynical inside joke, right?), I’m now flashing back to the early 90s, when I spent a lot of time in the Pacific Northwest with EarthFirst! tree-sitters attempting to prevent the destruction of our old-growth forests, often standing valiantly (and peacefully) against the furious denizens of tiny logging communities like Dixie, Idaho, hoping not only to prevent or delay the clear-cutting of what we considered Nature’s cathedrals.
We felt righteous enough to leave behind homes, jobs, even families to fully commit ourselves to the cause. Awakened young bankers, artists, bureaucrats, etc, embraced an entirely new lifestyle, mentored by craftspeople, hikers, climbers, travelling musicians, hippies, and anarchists, learning to live, cook, and screw outdoors, bathing in streams — the most rudimentary existence off-the-grid — temporary to some, but adopted more or less permanently by many happy warriors who recharged at country fairs and festivals in between live-in protest camps.*
Our commitment was not based on lies — and I certainly carry no regrets from those years. But, honestly, most of us had very little interest in following the forestry debate in The New York Times or on NPR. We had already digested the gravity of the old-growth destruction, and we didn’t need to hear more. It was time to act. We used our intelligence to research BLM documents, even relying sometimes on helpful connections inside forestry offices to anticipate new movements in the industry that we could try to block or slow. Otherwise we were guided exclusively by an indestructible communal super-ego characterized by “love,” “seven generations,” “protecting the innocent,” etc. We had no gripe against The Facts — we just felt no need to keep investigating them because we already knew what was going on. We saw it with our own eyes. I myself took a flight with Project LightHawk, a nonprofit that allowed journalists and liberal philanthropists to witness the devastation beyond the thin veneer of trees that the industry kept alive alongside public roadways to conceal what looked like endless miles of carpet-bombed earth, convincing me it was time to act, not to debate.
Still, because our super-egos were comprised of Heart, we were entirely non-violent, and we viewed ourselves as deeply caring about the “adversaries” we encountered personally. We brainstormed with townsfolk, who despised us initially before quietly admitting they feared their way of life was coming to an end as the trees around them disappeared. We hugged them with empathy, hoping we could help them see who their real enemies were. We advised them, for example, to go back to the kind of small-scale millwork that had mostly been shut down after behemoths like Weyerhaeuser moved in.
Now with some age and reflection I realize that, at least theoretically, our super-egos were indeed vulnerable to hacking by malicious actors. For example (as a thought experiment), if we had received intelligence that certain bulldozers were going to start clearing a new section of forest the next morning, we would not have hesitated to chain ourselves to the machinery. It would have made perfect sense, and it would have seemed silly to wait to confirm the intelligence. It would never have occurred to us that maybe the bulldozer company’s disgruntled former manager was setting up the company for a business loss — or whatever — that we were being used by forces we did not understand. It isn’t a likely scenario, especially pre-Twitter, but it’s theoretically possible because we dwelled off the grid. And I’m now using “off the grid” to reference a state of mind, if not a state of literal existence, that has no interest in what The New York Times might say, a state of mind that considers “the grid” irrelevant to the task at hand, in that “the grid” represents a mealy-mouthed capitulation to endless debate and compromises — while the world burns.
The picture I’m trying to paint is of a mind that is not necessarily stupid, but, rather, dwelling in an altered state, much like religious devotion or spiritual euphoria. Freud’s main premise was that the three-legged stool of a healthy mind integrates the super-ego (such as our religious convictions and sense of morality) with the outside world — the real world that places checks on our aspirations and fantasies — enlisting the ego to do the messy bureaucratic work of resolving conflicts and inconsistencies between the other two legs. When the super-ego becomes over-sized, the ego eventually gives up its attempts to reconcile the outside world until, perhaps, balance is restored. After a spiritual awakening we may find ourselves at odds with the rest of the world (filled with countless people hopelessly caught in illusion). After some time our zealousness may fade, and we may “re-join” the grid with a more mature ego. Maybe we eventually don a priest’s collar to put our super-ego to work in a way that invites the outside world in, with the assistance of an unalienated ego.
But as long as the super-ego insists that the outside world — the grid — is an inferior component of the triangle, it is vulnerable to a hack, particularly when the individual is determined to act upon the outside world in accordance with the super-ego.
With this realization, a moral axiom comes to mind:
While there is nothing inherently or ethically illegitimate about living “off the grid,” whether as a lifestyle or a mindset, we are obliged to investigate and seek understanding of the grid — on its own factual terms — whenever we attempt to act upon that grid. The greater our efforts to change or manipulate the grid, the greater our obligation to seek deeper understanding of the grid with eyes open to the perspectives of all the other parties sharing it.
I.e., since the modern, western grid is an amalgam of reason, science, facts, debate, economics, etc, we should not physically attack the grid armed only with an off-the-grid super-ego. We can certainly believe that abortion is murder, but we cannot ethically target abortion doctors based on such a religious conviction, as that would be targeting an outside world that we refuse to engage with on its own terms. Freud was not glorifying the outside world when he argued that we needed to negotiate with it; he was simply recognizing that it is genuine part of ourselves that needs attending to if we are to live in balance, with minimal self-delusion and self-harm.
I’m a bit ashamed to admit that in the mid-90s, after fathering a son, I became an anti-vaxxer. I say “a bit” ashamed because we had less knowledge than than we do now — and the evidence of possibly harmful vaccines was still being sorted through. That said, my partner and I encountered plenty of righteous friends and acquaintances who were appalled by our choice, and were not shy about telling us what they thought. But I had a read a few alarming books, and I had this beautiful baby I was dedicated to protecting from any malevolent force. While my beliefs remained personal, not political (I never went around arguing against vaccines to others), I was impacting the grid in an obvious, if relatively minimal, manner. With selective information, my super-ego (protecting my child) had outgrown any interest in what the outside world had to say. (My partner and I mellowed within a few years, after a bout of chicken pox, and faced with the inability to register our son in the Montessori school of our choice. Our egos, eventually, were compelled to find a peace with the outside world.)
So what comprises the super-egos of today’s QAnon folks? Some qualities are familiar to me, such as “saving the world,” but instead of “love” they are most fueled by grievances. They are the put-upon peoples who have risen up to fight back against the insanity of a world led by bad actors and elites with such pointy heads they wouldn’t even know how to load a gun or a skin a deer or, more than anything, to fight. Clearly, such a super-ego is much more at risk to hacking attempts by the likes of Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley than one comprised primarily of “compassion.” But the principle remains: the more one seeks to alter the world, the more one is duty-bound to engage that world on its own terms. Rousseau’s “social contract” is not so much about a specific agreement, but more an acknowledgement that we share the outside world, and, together, we share the consequences of ignoring the challenge of integrating egos and super-egos.
This is as far as my “research” has taken me. The big question, especially considering today’s culture of social media, and rightwing media, is how to circumvent the continued hacking of vulnerable super-egos by malevolent parties like Sean Hannity. We should, of course, remain vigilant ourselves, since we are not immune from the dangers of living “off the grid,” but I do not know how best to short-circuit the ongoing current hack of The Deplorables.
I don’t have an appetite for “understanding their grievances,” but, other than systemic mitigations (such as suspending Twitter accounts) I suspect some of the answers will be found in conversations “off the grid.”
Which leaves me lamenting, Where have all the hippies gone?
*Not to overplay my own bodily commitment to the cause: much of the time I spent in these communities was with a tape recorder and notebook as a freelance journalist.
** I use Freudian terms not necessarily as a literal adoption of the Freudian model, but as generalized metaphors to help explain contradictions in the human mind.
