Dead Kids and the Walls that Make Them
When is it appropriate to give people your empathy and consideration?
First there’s this caricature of conservatives: criminals are criminals and they don’t deserve our thoughts. They deserve war. We shouldn’t spare any of our noble feelings for murderers and rapists or anyone else who might destroy our families and culture. Would you smile at an approaching tiger? We must never fail to remain robust to evil, and protect ourselves from enemies even if that makes us intolerant of the people who only might be enemies. Sorry, but it’s a price worth paying.
Then we have the woke leftist: Nobody is intrinsically evil. They’re just traumatized and confused. If we could show them their mistake, they would agree that our way is better. (Why can they not see their mistake?) Prison doesn’t help people. In fact it tends to make them worse, and even if it didn’t we’d still hate it for its cruelty. We need better systems of rehabilitation. No person, however evil, deserves to be totally cast aside. There must be some way to show them!
Both of these extremes are silly but also real, and we can gain some insight from them.
When something big and unpredictable (like a bad parent) messes with someone over and over, they learn to expect the worst case. They can’t know when the interference will show up, but they can protect themselves from being knocked over by clinging harder to what they already know, and making sure not to let any strange forces through the doors of their mind. It doesn’t matter if the enemy is “truly” an enemy, only that it is pushy and unpredictable, like a big government with opaque goals.
This method of protection doesn’t depend on the details of what’s being protected against. “Don’t let strange forces into your mind” is applied to all sorts of things the person only assumes are suspect. This includes useful information and skills they don’t know yet, like how vaccines actually work. Nothing gets in; the high-threat mode is already on. They know what they know, and they cling to it with all their might, and there is almost no way to get in and help them. Helpers might as well be the enemy, too.
This is the conservative extreme. It doesn’t care about the circumstances of strangers. It cares about walls. It builds up insensitivity to everything that isn’t already known.
The woke also succumb to this effect, they just do it in a more complicated way. Perhaps they have a nicer childhood and a fuller education before they are battered by “enemies” for the first time. More information gets in before the doors close, giving a taste of a better world before snatching it away. No, you cannot have that, an enemy has taken it from you. And just like the extreme conservatives, the woke end up doubling down on what they already know, and walling themselves off to new information, like what it’s like to drive a truck for 12+ hours a day for shitty wages, or what it’s like to be an average German citizen post-World War I. Enemies become unthinkable monsters rather than fellow humans failing to cope with trauma.
I think all of us agree that the world could be better. Children could be saved from illness and death and coercion. The best way to get there is through knowledge and cooperation. Think of the work of all the physicists that let us design MRI machines to save children from cancer. You can’t reach that kind of knowledge when you’re stuck behind a wall! You can benefit from the knowledge that already exists, but you have no right to hope for more. You build a wall, and your children die in pain.
The extreme conservative is worse for this. They wall themselves off earlier. They’re more defeated about an open-ended future that blooms with beauty and family and MRI machines. They recede into the known. But they’re also right about at least one thing: you cannot stop a hungry tiger with your empathy. Sometimes a wall is necessary.
One failure of the extreme woke is to reject that empathy is ever misplaced, or that walls are ever necessary, while putting up walls of their own to insulate those beliefs. There are other failures of the woke, but they are complicated and silly and deserve their own post.
I’m willing to give a little thought to every human, even the horrible criminal that killed a child and added a brick to the wall around our spirits. In a sense, killers are also dead children. How can we let that happen?
Evil exists because the world can’t stop hitting itself. To save your children from a painful death, learn to give up your paranoia and at least some of your walls. Accept that most of your perceived enemies aren’t the tigers you saw them for, just as they accept the same about you. The tigers evaporate, as you both accept this.
Some tigers will remain, but knowledge and cooperation can make short work of that.