Three of my best Facebook essays

A Rant, The Bus Story, and Most Humans Scare Me

I’ve got some new content that I probably won’t wrap up and publish until tomorrow (and free subscribers won’t see it for another week or two) so in the meantime I thought I’d begin the process of scraping my old ephemeral FB archive for some of the better content. These are three of my favorite hundred-or-so extemporaneous monologues from the past decade.

(BTW I have idle plans to collect those hundred or so and curate them into an ebook; you should feel free to chime in with encouragement or discouragement of this intention, as appropriate.)

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Art by Marco Bucci

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A Rant

October 21, 2019

You are born.

Almost immediately, a bag is placed over your left hand, pulled tight with a drawstring around your wrist.

That bag is there forever. When it gets dirty, you swap it out (in the privacy of a bathroom). You take it off to shower, but you have another bag that you wear while you sleep.

You never really see your left hand—just glimpses now and then. You definitely never see anyone else's—if, by some chance, a bag falls off during recess, the situation calls for nervous giggling, whispered teases, flushes of embarrassment. They hide their arm behind their back, tucking their hand inside their shirt until the teacher can bring a spare bag over.

One time, in kindergarten, you took your bag off on purpose, while playing on the playground. You wanted to see what it felt like to throw the ball with your left hand, instead of your right. Everybody shrieked and laughed, thrilled by the sense of rebellion. They didn't know how serious it was. You were all six.

Eventually, you got in trouble. You had to sit in Time Out. Your parents were called. You were grounded, and you had to meet with the school counselor—a stranger. She had lots of scary questions. You cried a little.

Oh, and they threw the ball away. You watched your teacher pick it up, gingerly, with two fingers—watched her drop it in the trash and go wash her own right hand.

People still mention the incident, years later. You're sort of hair-trigger about it, now. You wish they would let it go. It seems like it's a bigger part of their picture-of-you than it ought to be.

Once, on a camping trip, you and four friends held a secret competition out in the woods, each of you writing your name in the sand with your left hand while the others looked away. It was fun, but you couldn't tell your parents about it.

Nobody ever really talks about what's in the bags. You don't notice how weird that is, until you turn eleven and your health teacher says you're going to spend a week studying left hands. You blush and shift nervously in your seat. You mostly know what you're going to see? But you've never really looked closely. It seemed like something they didn't want you to do.

And then boom—there it is, on the screen, three feet tall, with little arrows and weird labels like "phalanges." It's not that different from your right hand, but you still feel squeamish, giddy, at the way everything is backwards. You feel weird for a week or two after, and even though you and your friends joke about it—loudly—you're not quiiite looking each other in the eye.

Fast forward to eighth grade. There's this person that you like, and you take long walks in the park, and you talk about things you've never talked about with anyone. After a while, you both work up the courage. You reach out—with your right hand—and you hold their left, through the bag.

Years later. You get the sense that most people have "touched bag" by now. One of your friends says that they've held hands directly, skin to skin. They admit it reluctantly, at a party, during a game of truth or dare. They blush dark red when they say it, and next week there are nasty rumors about who the other person might have been.

You're in college, now, and you still don't get it. You're not supposed to talk about your left hand. You're really not supposed to talk about anyone else's left hand. It's like everyone wants to pretend they don't exist, except in weirdly formal settings like the doctor's office, where everyone is super over-the-top relaxed about it, and you feel like they have to be pretending.

Oh, and it's fine to talk about it if you're, like, a boorish douchebag. It's just not fine for normal, regular, everyday people who are trying to have normal, regular, everyday conversation.

You're not even really supposed to think about your left hand. If you do—if people find out—they judge you for it, weirdly, even though it's not clear exactly what's wrong with thinking about it. They don't act that way if you tell them you spent an hour fiddling with your hair, or ate a whole thing of Oreos.

You're not supposed to use it, except you are, except you're supposed to hide it, except everybody makes fun of you if you hide it, you're supposed to do some weird dance where you hide it just enough and wink-wink just enough, you never can tell where the line is, and there's awkwardness all around.

You can talk with your friends about your shoulder, your freckles, your belly. You can ask for advice on how to do a handstand, or rehabilitate a sprained ankle, or hit a high C in choir. You can get your mom to look at that spot between your shoulders, to tell you if it's something you should worry about.

But even the people you can talk with, about your left hand—there's this lingering awkwardness, this wild swing between hesitation and bluster. You've spent your whole life pretending—it's hard to throw off the habit. When you try to be nonchalant, that just seems to make it more obvious that you can't.

You're a little bitter about that. They did that to you.

You had to learn how to use it all by yourself—

Oh, right, we forgot to mention, being good with your left hand—being able to use it in a skillful and dextrous manner—it's actually really important. Like, you can get along without much skill if you have to, but people say things like "no marriage will ever last without partners who are able and willing to help each other out with left-handed tasks."

Not that you can really get anyone to teach you how. Can you even imagine asking that? No. No, no, no. No WAY.

You just fumble around in the dark instead, with partners who are just as inexperienced, or who are way older than you, or who somehow (you discover) had their hands outside of a bag practically the whole time they were in high school?

Sometimes, you watch left-handed videos online. You delete your browser history afterward. Wouldn't want an awkward auto-complete to ruin Thanksgiving.

It's still in a bag. It's been in a bag so long that it's a completely different color from the rest of your body—a pale and fragile translucence, compared to the dark tan of your arms or the light browning of your back and shoulders.

You've almost never taken the bag off, in the sunlight. It's such a rare occurrence that when you do, the day automatically becomes about that. Like, it can't not be a thing, even around friends.

It's weird.

It isn't fair.

This is your body. You're supposed to be in charge of it—you're supposed to have the rights to it, as long as you're not hurting other people or being disruptive or dangerous in public. As long as you're not, y'know, spitting in people's food or tracking in dirt or talking during a movie.

But nope. Somehow, in a decision that happened before you were born, a decision you had no input on, that no one will explain, that they won't even let you challenge even though most people agree with you when you bring it up quietly, when they aren't on the record—

Somehow, this one part of your body has been taken away from you. Is not yours to control, is not yours to acknowledge, is not yours to use. Somehow, this part of your body is everyone else's concern, even as the main expression of that concern is to force you to hide it and pretend it doesn't exist. To gasp and glare if you even say the word in the presence of a child.

As if they don't have left hands themselves. As if we don't all have left hands, barring rare medical circumstances—little kids and old retirees and fat people and thin people and rich and poor. We ALL HAVE HANDS. We all KNOW we all have hands. We all know that we all know it.

And yet, the bags stay on. Every other part of your body can be mundane, but not this one.

And when you finally snap one day, and rant about it in public, they all look at you like you're the one with the problem.

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The Bus Story

October 12, 2020

This is a story about one of the moments that crystallized my life and character and worldview. In contexts like therapy and circling, people will often talk about what's "up" for them—what's at the forefront of their attention, what's coloring their experience, what's informing their interpretations and their responses—and this, the bus story, is approximately always "up" for me.

I attended Western Alamance Middle School from 1997 to 2000, and Western Alamance High School from 2000 to 2002. The schools were only about a mile apart, so they shared a single bus system.

That meant that, on their very first day past elementary school, ten-year-old sixth graders were rubbing shoulders with eighteen-year-old high school seniors. And not just any eighteen-year-old high school seniors, but specifically those high school seniors who were irresponsible enough and antisocial enough that they neither had their own cars, nor any friends willing to drive them to school.

The buses weren't, like, rough rough—I don't recall anyone actually being stabbed, for instance. But they were rough. I definitely saw knives. There was definitely bullying. People got their lunch money stolen. Stuff got thrown out of windows, and there was an all-out fight at least once a year, to say nothing of covert abuse of smaller or quieter kids. Conversation was not PG-13, and there was racism and sexism and the kind of rowdiness that's fun if you're in the ingroup and very, very scary if you're in the outgroup.

As you'd expect, though, there was a gradient. The back of the bus was the full-on hot zone. The seats right behind the driver were quiet and lawful.

If you were willing to put up with being, y'know, lame, you could sit up front, near the driver, and experience (relative) calm and safety. That's not to say there weren't still issues with intimidation and so forth, but things in the front third of the bus were at least kept to the level of plausible deniability.

My own first experience on the bus was in the afternoon of my first day of sixth grade, riding home, since my mom had indulged my request that she drop me off that morning. I got on, chose a seat about two fifths of the way back, and was startled to be quickly accosted by a fellow sixth-grader, playing toady to an eighth-grade bully-wannabe. The sixth-grader had apparently been "initiated" that morning, which consisted of letting the eighth-grader punch him really hard in the chest, and was now loudly insisting that the eighth-grader "initiate" the other kids who had not already had this marvelous experience.

(Hi, Josh Torrence. Hi, Josh Kelly.)

I refused, and the situation wasn’t quite to the point that the eighth-grader was willing to go through with it entirely against my will, but it wasn’t the sort of conversation that I had expected to take up twenty or twenty-five minutes of the forty minute ride home.

(As a side note, my parents had a rule: my brother and I were not allowed to start fights, but they would back us with the administration if we finished one. So it’s possible that the eighth-grader could kind of see in my eyes that I felt like I had options available if they actually hit me. I would later try many times to get various bullies to throw the first punch, precisely so as to get those options on the table, always to no avail. I guess they could smell it on me, or something.)

But anyway. Takeaways were:

1. The bus was rough.

2. I didn’t like it, and

3. Even as a sixth grader, I had some small degree of power (that I didn’t understand and didn’t really have any control over) that allowed me to ward off the bullshit. A little sphere of trust-me-it’s-not-worth-it that was big enough to shield me and (at first) whoever was in the seat beside me. (Hi, Carl.)

I don’t think that my little reality distortion field would have stood up to the proto-violence going on at the back of the bus, but even when I was late getting on and found myself forced to sit as far as 60% of the way back, it was enough that nobody really messed with me, even as they definitely messed with some of the people around me.

It was just less of a hassle at the front, though—there were fewer instances of needing to rely on the shield in the first place—so that year I mostly sat somewhere in the front four rows of seats. Me, my buddy Carl, a friend of ours in the next grade up named Matt. We were nerds. We liked to read Star Wars books, and bring LEGO spaceships and little magnetic gizmos on the bus with us. We liked to talk about math, and science, and music, and fiction, and what’s a little too low-key to call philosophy or politics but what was, like, the sixth-grade version of philosophy or politics.

It was nice. The bus ride was actually fun, something to look forward to both in the morning and in the afternoon. I think the fancy term for it is “holding court”?

I liked holding court, on the bus.

And other kids drifted in and out of our bubble, depending on the seating arrangements of the day, and the topic at hand. Sometimes we’d get a conversation going across like six or eight seats.

And then in seventh grade, Carl’s younger brother Jacob started riding the bus, too, and a kid named Adam Beane who lived near me, and Ryan’s younger brother Jeremy. Our circle expanded a little. There were routinely six or eight seats in the court, instead of just sometimes—not, like, six or eight seats of people actively participating, but six or eight seats of people sort of halfway following the conversation and occasionally chiming in, when they weren’t busy doing their own stuff.

And interestingly, the bully zone just sort of...receded. Slowly. Without anybody really doing anything on purpose. On most of the other buses (I rode them from time to time, when our bus broke down or when I was going to or from a friend’s house or whatever), the safe zone was just the front four rows of seats.

On good ol’ bus 134, it was the front six seats. Then the front seven, then the front eight. By the time Carl and I were in high school, we were sitting five or six seats back on the regular, and everything in front of us was asshole-free, and always a seat or two behind us as well. We could still hear the same old bullshit going on back there, but it largely left us alone.

There was one memorable time when the boundary was tested. This pseudo-dickish half-bully named Jon-Jon—who wasn’t really a bad guy so much as just someone who never bothered being nicer or better than his context demanded of him—he ended up in, like, row five one day, instead of his customary row nine or whatever, and as we were trying to have a conversation on the finer points of interspecies communication, he kept interrupting to say that what we were talking about was boring and stupid, or to shame us for being nerds, or to mock the rough-draft ideas of the younger kids.

Eventually, I’d had enough. I wasn’t very sophisticated in my conflict-resolution skills at the time, so what I came up with was “Jon-Jon, you’re not allowed to talk anymore.”

“What?”

“If you’re going to be a dick all the time, then you can’t talk. Either stop being an asshole, or shut up.”

Jon-Jon started to bluster something or other, so I basically scanned the crowd for the smallest kid I could find, this pale little sixth grader with huge glasses, clutching a saxophone case that was bigger than him.

“Sam. Every time Jon-Jon speaks, I want you to hit him as hard as you can.”

(Yeah, yeah, this is bullying, too. But then again, a peace treaty is not a suicide pact—if one side refuses to put down a weapon, it’s often unwise to unilaterally disarm.)

I’ve never seen a kid’s face light up so bright. Sam was stoked.

And then Jon-Jon started to say some sentence that began with “You can’t fucking—” and little Sam just frickin’ launched himself out of his seat, like a whole-body Superman punch, and nailed Jon-Jon right in the center of his chest.

It didn’t hurt Jon-Jon, really, since he was an eighth grader and Sam weighed about fifty pounds soaking wet. But you could see the utter shock and confusion at the inversion of the pecking order. Jon-Jon started to puff up, like he was going to throw hands, and suddenly all twelve-or-so kids who had been involved in the conversation up to that point closed ranks. A dozen of us, all with arms crossed, all shooting Jon-Jon the warning look:

There would be no reprisals against Sam.

It worked—kind of surprisingly in retrospect. Jon-Jon shut up, and he never came back up into the bubble again, and he didn’t mess with Sam, and we went back to our little debate circle.

And things were just…good.

And then—

In 2002 I got accepted to a boarding school, in a city thirty miles away. And so that summer I said goodbye to everyone, and I packed up all my stuff, and my parents dropped me off in Durham, and I turned my attention to this whole new universe.

And I wasn’t even thinking about everybody back at Western, let alone the bus specifically, until I got a call from my mom one evening.

“Hey, Duncan, some boys came around looking for you today.”

“Who?”

“[name I didn’t know], and [name I didn’t know], and [name I didn’t know], and [name I didn’t know]. They were wondering where you were. I told them you’d gone off to boarding school.”

And it turned out—

(Sorry, my eyes are watering here, as they always do at this moment in the story, and yes, I’m telling you this on purpose, because that’s kind of the whole point.)

It turned out, my mom explained, that these four boys were looking for me, and wondering when I was going to come back, because they said that things weren’t safe, and they had told their parents that if I didn’t come back, they weren’t going to ride the bus anymore. They were going on strike. One of them had gotten roughed up. Another had had his lunch money stolen. Whatever magic bubble Carl and I had been sustaining, Carl wasn’t able to keep it going all by himself.

And there, on the phone with my mom, two weeks into my junior year of high school, already depressed and homesick and lonely and overwhelmed, I just—

I just—

I didn’t anything, really.

It was too big. Too much for me to process. I bluescreened. I hung up and just sat there, not able to put anything into words.

I’m a Hufflepuff, see. Hufflepuffs care about people. We care about right and wrong.

And these kids—these four boys—

I didn’t even recognize their names.

They weren’t on my radar, as distinct individuals. They weren’t my friends. They weren’t people I was tracking. They weren’t people I was trying to help. They weren’t people I had a relationship with at all—or so I would have said, right up until that phone call.

It was simultaneously the proudest I’d ever felt, and also the most—

Culpable?

I felt guilt, shame, responsibility.

Because I’d left them, you see? They’d come to depend on me—had built up expectations about the world around them, about what they could rely on—and I had let them down. Abandoned them.

Without even noticing.

And so while one part of me was elated, celebrating that just by being myself I had made the world a safer, kinder, more tolerant place—

(For everyone who was themselves willing to be kind and tolerant; sorry-not-sorry, Jon-Jon.)

—that I’d somehow managed to make this one little corner of the world better without even trying—

—at the same time, I felt this desperate, heart-stopping, frantic urge to go back, fix it, fix it. To somehow not have left these people in the lurch, somehow not have set them up for a sudden and disorienting experience of finding out that no, they weren’t safe, actually, everything was not okay.

It was within my power to do something about it. Technically. I could’ve gone home.

It’s one thing to have a pool with no lifeguard on duty. It’s another thing entirely to make someone think that there’s a lifeguard watching out for them, only to pull the rug out from under them.

And to this day, I still haven’t “processed” this. I don’t have any conclusions. I haven’t resolved any of the big questions—like whether I actually did anything wrong, or whether in my own ideal world I bear any responsibility.

(You’re welcome to chime in with thoughts, but before you do, please take seriously the fact that I’ve thought about this for hours on end across multiple decades.)

And I just wanted people to know that when you see me and talk to me—

When you look at how I move through the world, and the choices I make—

When you wonder about my strength of feeling, and the way that certain reactions seem to come out of nowhere—

I wanted you to know that there’s a part of me that’s stuck back there. There’s a part of me that’s still on that bus, that will always be on that bus, and there’s a part of me that will always be in that hallway on the phone with my mother, discovering my greatest pride and my greatest shame all within the same breath, and that part of me cries out never again, even as the rest of me has absolutely no idea how.

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Most Humans Scare Me

August 17, 2022

I've been trying to figure out how to say this one for months and haven't been able to put it into words properly so now I'm just going to blurt words and blame the lack of artistry and sophistication on insomniac COVID delirium I guess.

Most people scare me.

Most people scare me.

The vast majority of people—well over half—seem truly crazy and dangerous to me. Like being-trapped-on-a-bus-with-a-gorilla kind of crazy and dangerous—it's probably going to be fine, especially if I stay very quiet and don't make any sudden moves, but my continued existence is basically at the whim of this insensible incomprehensible alien entity that cannot actually be predicted or reasoned with and is capable of dismembering me.

I think a lot of people on the left started to get this feeling over the past five or six years, as they saw the indifference of people on the right to what Trump was doing. I saw people saying stuff like "I never realized how crazy my neighbors were" or "I never realized how many awful people there are in our society" or whatever.

But the people on the left aren't, like, an order of magnitude better or anything like that. They just go crazy at other times, for *other* reasons.

(I'm not trying to fallacy-of-the-gray, here. There is indeed "better" and "worse" on this axis, and that does matter. But it matters in the way that, I dunno, the difference between a lethal dose of poison and a 5x lethal dose of poison matters?)

And yeah, it's actually fine 99.9% of the time, the thing I'm saying here isn't, like, "it's impossible to coordinate or cooperate with humans." I drive on roads. I shop at grocery stores. I engage in chitchat with Uber drivers and people at the airport.

It's more like ... I'm never not-aware of how close-to-the-surface the crazy is, or something? I've had too many experiences of people just ... making shit up, and then not caring (or even noticing/remembering!) that they literally just made it up. Or acting out of some intense emotion and then just ... retroactively forgiving themselves entirely/justifying it by virtue of the strength of their feeling. Or doing whatever got them local and fleeting satisfaction, consequences be damned, damage to the social fabric be damned, appeals to reason or religion or reputation all falling on deaf ears because eh, why wouldn't they just ... take it?

(Or letting others off the hook for doing any of the above.)

It is just really really terrifyingly obvious to me, as I move through life, how very very very few people there are who would even quietly abstain from joining a literal lynch mob, let alone actually do anything to stop one. How very few people there are with any kind of principles that can't be set aside as easily as a coat.

(More than once, I've tried to get some kind of resonance or empathy from other people specifically by pointing at their apparently-deeply-held principles, only to find that this (disturbingly) REDUCED their confidence in me, because actually they were all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ about those principles, and assumed I must be, too. Like, in what I thought of as extremely civilized company I tried to say something along the lines of "y'know, like, how you're not at all tempted to rape anyone?" and got back some very scary information about the median human.)

I think a lot of people are saying things about how the right has lost its soul to Donald Trump. I think that's a confusion. I don't think there was a soul to be lost, in the first place. I think this is just ... business as usual, with slightly less pretense than usual, and I think that there are far fewer people with souls on the left than the left currently wants to think.

(Like, let's say it's some noble 5-10% of people on the right who are actively resisting, and who proved to in fact have some kind of principled decency within them. Maybe in some bizzarro alternate reality where it was a leftist blue tribe Trump, we'd find that there were as many as 10-20% of people on the left who'd similarly resist. But I don't think it'd be any more than that, and I wouldn't be surprised if it weren't even that high.)

There's just ... not a lot of Humanity out there, in the human population. Not a lot of Sapience in the Sapiens. As near as I can tell, this has basically zero to do with race or gender or ethnicity or age; I haven't been able to find a Reliably Sane Demographic Whose Members Do Not Terrify Me.

It's just exactly the world I would expect to see, if all the people I went to middle school with realized that they could band together and physically overwhelm the teachers, except in this world there aren't any parents or police or whatever to make that seem like a bad idea so they're just ... going for it.

(I mean, there ARE parents and police, but in this case they're things like The Laws of Physics and we're not going to be able to bargain with them by the time the hammer comes down.)

Sooner or later everyone else started playing Quidditch, or not putting protective shells on their time machines, or thinking that Death was their friend. It didn't matter how good their intentions were. Sooner or later, and usually sooner, they demonstrated that something deep inside their brain was confused.

I'm not even doing particularly well on this axis! I bet that there is some narrow slice of the population that looks at me and is like, eh, this monkey is still 89% as dangerous and unpredictable as the median monkey, which is not enough to qualify as Safe.

But I still feel like ...

Like ...

There's this meme, a screenshot of a video game, and the guy is typing

And yeah, people laugh and roll their eyes affectionately, but like ... because they relate?? Because they do that themselves. Because they're like, ah, yes, how relatable, it do be like that.

!

!!!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

whatifwhatifwhatifwhatifNOT that

What if never that? What if actually try to not-that? What if instead of aw-shucks laughter there was APPROPRIATE FEAR or something? Or like, not "shame" exactly, shame does not seem to be useful in quite the way I'm looking for here, but some kind of tagging-of-that-thing-with-negative-valence, such that it becomes a tool we reach for less and less.

Not okay.

Not okay for a very small child stuck on the bus with this crowd of gorillas. Not safe very not safe 1984 levels of reality rewriting scary.

I worked at a place called the Center for Applied Rationality, it was a group of people who told themselves that they very much cared about truth and reason and reality, it was literally what they hoped to work on day in and day out, and I nevertheless once spent multiple hours fighting an uphill battle to get the group to admit that maybe the factual question of whether a written agreement had, in fact, been made and had, in fact, been broken was relevant to the conflict resolution dispute we were all currently engaged in.

And I was alone in this fight! There were bystanders who weren't actively pulling against Team What Actually Happened; there were some people on the sidelines who were mostly just watching and absorbing.

But it took over an hour before even one other person was like "hmmm, wait, maybe that IS a thing that matters..."

What I take away from this is NOT that the people at CFAR were unusually terrible, by the way, or not-trying. It would be comforting if they were.

What's scary is that the people at CFAR at that time were, as far as I can tell, genuinely substantially above average, and sincerely doing their best, and that's what their best looked like, and holy fuck, humans are SCARY.

One time my beloved aunt posted a meme to FB saying "if you are a teacher and your students know your political beliefs, you are a terrible person and shouldn't be near children."

This aunt is not a teacher. I am. I was like, hey, this is bad, for [reason, reason, reason]. It turned into a fight. Other family members got involved. And the overwhelming message from those other family members was "Duncan, you are in the wrong, here, because obviously the meme is polemic exaggeration and nobody really holds that policy position and also when people read the meme they don't actually think of that policy position."

That was the literal argument (plus some stuff about generic respect and deference to your elder family members). "It's just a joke, bro." The fact that my aunt and I had just clarified that no, actually, the intended message was exactly what it said, on the tin, she really actually meant the plain straightforward interpretation of the words … that fact didn't even register.

These people all voted for Trump, because ... why wouldn't they?

"Voldemort," said the old wizard. "I understand him now at last. Because to believe that the world is truly like that, you must believe there is no justice in it, that it is woven of darkness at its core. I asked you why he became a monster, and you could give no reason. And if I could ask him, I suppose, his answer would be: Why not?"

To what-seems-to-me-to-be-more-than-half-of-humans, things like literal objective verifiable truth do not seem to exist. They're colorblind to them, indifferent to them, take them or leave them as convenient, treat them like any other tool in the manipulate-other-monkeys toolkit.

Even scarier: of the remaining humans, a terrifyingly high fraction seem to me to care about stuff like truth most of the time, but to switch it off at convenient moments, and also to not notice, not record, and not remember that they did so (or to preemptively forgive themselves for doing so).

I am reminded of a (not particularly spoilery) scene early in the book Dune, in which Jessica uses The Voice on Thufir Hawat, causing him to collapse into his seat in a reflexive, obedient twitch.

Thufir's immediate thought, upon discovering for the first time that he can be externally controlled for a length of time perhaps as long as half a second, is: this woman is invincible. She could kill anyone. Her half-second power is a lever of incredible strength.

I feel the same way about people's half-second ability to abandon truth and reason and rationality. I feel the same awe and terror. It only takes the correct half-second, for an otherwise upright and pious-seeming so-called Sapient Human to suddenly wreak havoc, and then go right back to their self-satisfaction after a small performative gesture of embarrassment.

And the rest of the monkeys let it slide, no doubt at least in part because they want room for their own inevitable use of exactly that action-space. If we go after people for using this kind of weapon too much, we won't be able to use it ourselves, after all.

(Or you could just be hypocritical about it. Mostly the other monkeys don't seem to mind that, either.)

And the thing is, when I notice somebody Being This Kind Of Person Around Me On Facebook, I tend to block them. I've culled my audience a bunch, so that this sort of thing happens WAY less in my bubble than in genpop—

(even, like, self-identified-rationalist genpop)

... and so what that means is that instead of knowing for a fact that, at any moment, your eyes could glaze over and your body could twitch and you could be replaced, Matrix Agent style, by an unreasoning gorilla ...

... what this means is that I mostly am just like, okay, none of these people have done this yet, at least not where I could see.

It doesn't feel safe, in other words, even here. But at least here people don't ... openly revel in shifting into gorilla mode? It's at least nominally frowned upon, even if (in my experience) very few people will actually do anything more substantial than raise an eyebrow if somebody slides into gorilla mode and starts threatening to dismember me.

Like, I'll take it. I'll take a culture that professes to not like rape even while letting people rape with impunity, because that seems like a stepping stone toward a culture where people actually don't rape.

(Like the sort of culture where maybe some kids will grow up not realizing that the "rules" were wink-wink-nudge-nudge, and when they come into power they will actually make the rules into reality, the way that a lot of kids broke away from Trump because of the very same values that their Trump-supporting parents taught them.)

Maybe. It's a rather thin hope.

But it seems like the most I can realistically hope for. Humans are scary.

Maybe I can fall asleep now.

LATE EDIT: I still love humans, by the way. There's, like, counting up from zero and counting down from perfect, and the above is very focused on counting down from perfect and noticing just how bad things are.

But like. Ants have zero of this thing, that humans have at least a glimmer of. "Any hope whatsoever" is still an infinite improvement over "literally no hope."