By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, February 28, 2024
Here’s
a different take on Aaron Bushnell. He didn’t kill himself for a righteous
cause. He killed himself because he was bored.
Let’s
put a pin in that for now.
Boredom
is one of the least boring topics in human history, but it doesn’t get nearly
the attention it deserves. One reason for this is: It’s sort of invisible.
Historians, journalists, social scientists, filmmakers, and other chroniclers
of the human experience look at the things that people do. But
people very often do things as a way to fight off boredom. Here’s a weird way
to think about it. Figuratively, we’re all minutes away from dying from a kind
of internal poisoning. But there’s an antidote that we have to consume every
few seconds or minutes or we’ll succumb to it. The antidote is called “air,”
specifically “oxygen.”
You
might say we’re all dying from boredom poisoning. Boredom is like a lethal
invisible background radiation that will be held back by action. We don’t talk
about this omnipresent threat for the same reason that fish don’t talk about
wetness. Instead, we talk about the things people do to keep the enemy at bay.
That’s good, in moderation. Being productive, engaging with life, is what life
is supposed to be about.
But
there’s a reason we say “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” Those most
allergic to boredom are often the drivers of history, yet—outside of
biographies—we rarely discuss the drivers of their exertions, we just talk
about their exertions. When we read about the Marquis De Sade, we focus on all
the perverted (or sadistic—from whence we get the word) things he did and wrote
about. But we often forget that his twisted schtick was fueled by a profoundly
unhealthy desire to fend off the demons of boredom. In the 19th and early 20th
century the “social question” dominated intellectual discourse because the new
liberal order didn’t provide the sense of the heroic the romantics craved.
“Shock the bourgeoisie!” was the rallying cry of artists thirsty for transgressive
relevance in an age of peace and prosperity.
There’s
a reason most revolutionaries come from fairly comfortable backgrounds. Few of
the Jacobins and Bolsheviks actually rose from the ranks of the impoverished
masses they claimed to speak for. The bourgeois Lenin was driven to
revolutionary zeal to ward off the nauseating anguish of boredom. The Port Huron
Statement begins, “We are people of this generation, bred in at least
modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world
we inherit.” “It wasn’t the children of auto workers who pulled up the paving
stones on the Left Bank in 1968,” writes Deirdre
McCloskey. “The most radical environmentalists and anti-globalists nowadays are
socialist children of capitalist parents.”
I
don’t think it’s an accident that philosophers have written a lot
about boredom. Historians look at the outward things people do to fend off
boredom, the adventures launched for the conquest of nature or nations. Boredom
drives philosophers to launch their adventures inward. “Philosophy,” Martin
Heidegger wrote, “is born in the nothingness of boredom.” In What
Is Metaphysics?” Heidegger talks about boredom as simultaneously
a kind of revelation of the fundamental nothingness of existence and an
illumination of one’s own being (or the state of be-ing). “Profound boredom,
like a silent fog insinuating itself in the depths of existence, pulls things,
others and oneself into it altogether with remarkable indifference. Such
boredom reveals be-ing as a whole.”
Indeed,
Heidegger wrote explicitly about boredom more
than any modern philosopher, though I think you could say that Nietzsche wrote
more about it implicitly. But both shared a view that boredom—the
sort of ennui that produces anomie—can spur us in a quest for authenticity and
self-understanding. And they had a point. The loss of boredom is a real problem
for kids today. How many of us born before the internet and iPhones forced
ourselves to acquire new passions, get past the first pages of a book that
ultimately changed our lives, simply because we had nothing better to do? “He
who fortifies himself completely against boredom fortifies himself against himself
too,” Nietzsche writes. “He will
never drink the most powerful elixir from his own innermost spring.”
But
again, everything is moderation. Some have suggested that Heidegger’s embrace
of Nazism was inspired by a deep desire to find a cure for his existential
boredom. Indeed, at the heart of Nazism was the romantic infatuation with the
idea of “struggle” as the true source of authenticity and meaning in life. The
struggle of the individual (Mein Kampf means “My Struggle”), the
struggle of the race and
nation.
Okay
enough about philosophy. Let’s talk about psychology. It turns out that the
allergy to boredom is not just a metaphor. Excessive boredom in kids is correlated with
all sorts of negative health outcomes. But it’s also correlated with bad
psychological outcomes. Boredom can be experienced as pain. And for some
people, pain is preferable to boredom. Some would literally prefer to be electroshocked than
bored. In one
study, “67% of men and 25% of women chose to inflict it on themselves
rather than just sit there quietly and think.”
Again,
boredom can spur us to productive pursuits. But it can also spur us to behavior
that merely feels productive.
“One
of the things that makes boredom distinct from other negative emotions,”
science writer Bahar
Gholipour notes, “is that it’s uniquely associated with a strong
desire to engage in more meaningful behavior.”
“Meaningful”
is the key word. We may have all sorts of ways to keep us occupied and
distracted these days, but doom-scrolling Twitter and playing Minecraft won’t
build up our sense of meaning. It’s like people are gorging themselves on food
that provides no sustenance, drinking from a fire hose that never quenches
their thirst for meaning and purpose.
We
have taught whole generations of Americans that politics is one of the last
legitimate places to pursue meaning—so long as it is the right politics.
Indeed, so totalizing is this concept of politics, it is colonizing art,
sports, education, religion, even family.
“Meaningful” art must speak truth to power—not beauty. The heroes of Hollywood
and athletics, we are constantly told, are those who use their fame to advocate
for change—in political terms. Professors are lionized when they are political
proselytizers. Children from kindergarten to graduate school are taught that
organizing and protesting, often in cos-play of 1960s civil rights activists,
is the highest and best use of their time. Millions still look to religion as
an outlet for meaning, but that idea is continuously mocked by much of the
culture.
Indeed,
the political antipathy to religion has resulted in religion becoming
increasingly politicized for many people. When self-described very religious
people say that Donald Trump is a person of faith, secular opponents of
religion should rejoice. They’ve turned religion into precisely the creature
they always claimed it to be. The Christian nationalists are simply becoming
the right-wing version of the politicized left-wing churches of social justice. The politics of meaning has
metastasized into politics as meaning.
I
have written a great deal about the “politics of meaning”—a phrase popularized
by Hillary Clinton and coined by Michael Lerner—and none of it was positive. I
loathe the term. Not because I don’t think politics is a realm where “meaning”
is a relevant term nor because I think a rightly ordered political system isn’t
essential to the quest for meaning. No, I despise the “politics of meaning”—as
elucidated by Clinton and her guru Lerner—because it places the state and
“politics” at the center of our lives. The pursuit of meaning, like the pursuit
of happiness, is an individual struggle. It’s achieved with others—family,
friends, work, community—but definitions of a rewarding life vary from person
to person and group to group, and the state’s role isn’t to deliver a
one-size-fits-all conception of meaning, purpose, “the good life,” etc. We can
debate how much the state should make the good life possible, but
it has a very minor role in telling us what the good life is. The
role of the government (a more republican, democratic, and pluralistic term
than “the state”) is to protect liberty and fair rules for people—and
peoples—to discover meaning on their own.
Civil
society is the place outside of government where this happens. But according to
Clinton’s “politics of meaning” it means the opposite. “Civil society,” Clinton
writes in It Takes a Village, is just a “term social scientists use
to describe the way we work together for common purposes.” Or as countless
progressives liked to say during the Obama years, “government is just a word
for the things we do together.” We don’t need to wade back into nationalism,
but it’s worth noting that this is almost a definitional understanding of the
state according to nationalists. It turns out that meaning for some people only
has oomph if it lets you impose meaning on others.
The
point of this detour is that the politics of meaning is the kind of thing very
bored people come up with to find purpose and meaning in their own lives.
Liberal democratic capitalism is great for improving the lives and expanding
the liberties—material and political—of humanity, but it is constantly
threatened by boredom. Francis Fukuyama recognized this in his sorely
misunderstood book The End of History. Liberal democracy is the
best system we’re going to get, he argued correctly. But what happens when the
dog of humanity catches the car?
But supposing that the world has become
“filled up,” so to speak, with liberal democracies, such that there exist no
tyranny and oppression worthy of the name against which to struggle? Experience
suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that
just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle
against the just cause. [Emphasis mine] They will struggle for the
sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom:
for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater
part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and
prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and
prosperity, and against democracy.
It
shouldn’t surprise us that studies find that boredom encourages more
extreme political views. In a society where the role and function of
politics is settled and nobody thinks the opposition is an existential threat
to society, politics is kind of boring for people who, like monkeys in a lab,
want it to provide evermore cocaine pellets.
“One
of the things boredom does is that it essentially wakes up people to the
realization that what they are doing at the moment is utterly purposeless,”
Wijnand van Tilburg, a researcher from King’s College London told Bahar
Gholipour. “And expressing political ideas or being connected to a particular
political group is one way in which people gain a sense of purpose.” That’s
fine when the ends of the political struggle are just and warranted. But when
politics simply becomes the means to indulge in struggle as an end in itself,
politics becomes deforming, even self-immolating.
Which
brings me to Aaron Bushnell. He deliberately set himself on fire in solidarity
with terrorists who set Jewish families on fire. He believed lies about
genocide because the lies offered an opportunity to cast himself as a
hero-victim in a great cause. How mentally disturbed he was is debated,
but unknown. But as Thoreau said of the trout in the milk, some circumstantial
evidence can be quite strong. What seems obvious to me is that Bushnell wanted
his name to ring out, to be a martyr, to find meaning in performative death
because he found so little in his actual life. He wanted
to be a kind of Hamas-stan Horst Wessel who
died in a struggle against oppression. That so many celebrated his “sacrifice”
is a symptom of societal sickness, of politics-poisoning, particularly given
how much we know about the mimetic power of such acts in the age of social
media. The epitaph “Rest in Power” clangs off my ear like a parody of all that
plagues the post-Christian mind.
But
he’s just an extreme symptom in a society wracked with less extreme
symptoms. The right-wing keyboard warriors wish-casting about civil war
and secession and winking about “what time it is,” the more literal warriors
who found it necessary to beat up cops with flagpoles in service to a lie, the
privileged idjit kids who throw paint on works of art, the federal workers who
stage meaningless one-day hunger strikes (skipping lunch for justice!), the
postliberal scriveners of the left and right thumping their dog-eared Marcuse
or Schmitt into a drumbeat of war against the rule of law and the liberal
order, the Instagram tradwives who find happiness not in matrimony but in
likes, the testicle-tanning roid
ragers, the trustafarian maroons who compensate for their inadequacy in the
face of luxury by purchasing political activism wholesale, the Putin apologists
drunk on his nonsense, the “white supremacy” obsessives, and the conspiracy
theorists and fantasists of oppression of all stripes: They all want to live in
a world where they are heroes struggling in a just cause. Lacking one, they
struggle against the just and call it oppression all the same. Anything to keep
the silent fog at bay.
