New on OnlySky: Democracies fall, but so do dictatorships

I have a new column today on OnlySky. The next four years in America promise ongoing outrages against decency, the rule of law, and competent governance. But even as the United States fails the democratic test, other countries seem to be doing better.

In South Korea, a would-be autocrat came close to seizing power and turning the country into a military dictatorship, but South Korean society stood up to the attempted coup and prevailed. Meanwhile, in Syria, after decades of brutal dictatorship and years of violent civil war, the Assad dynasty has dramatically fallen. While knitting the country back together will be an immense task and the rebels may still fail to establish a new government, the Syrian people have the chance to choose their own destiny for the first time in a long time.

The lesson to draw is that, while democracy can fail, autocracy doesn’t necessarily do better. Neither is inherently stable. Both kinds of states can fall, and both can rise, for reasons of their own.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

That democracy depends on the consent of the governed is both its weakness and its strength. When it works well, democracy is the best form of government. It creates stability, peace, freedom and opportunity. But every generation has to choose whether to renew the democratic compact, and there’s no guarantee that they’ll choose well.

People can come to take democracy for granted, ignoring threats out of complacency or normalcy bias, and support strongmen or fascists who have designs on seizing power. Alternatively, they can grow disillusioned and come to believe it’s incapable of solving their problems, electing candidates who promise to burn the system down. When these things happen, democracy can rot from within or turn on itself.

But autocracy can also fail. It happens all the time.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The UnitedHealthcare CEO killing: Broken promises create violent men

As you’ve doubtless heard, Brian Thompson, the CEO of insurance giant UnitedHealthcare, was assassinated this month. Thompson was gunned down in broad daylight outside a shareholders’ meeting in midtown Manhattan in a premeditated attack. The most Hollywood-esque twist is that the fatal bullets had words engraved on them: “delay”, “deny” and “depose”. After a massive manhunt, police claim to have caught the shooter in Pennsylvania.

Most gun violence in America is an occasion for grief, despair, and the rote offering of “thoughts and prayers”. But this shooting has given rise to celebration. If you’ve been on social media, you’ve probably seen people praising the shooter and hailing him as a folk hero. There was even a lookalike contest.

In case it needs to be said, I don’t endorse assassination as a means of change. I’m not an accelerationist. I don’t cheer for anyone’s murder or encourage others to do violence.

Even so, Thompson’s killing should be the least surprising thing imaginable. It’s an eruption of the rage that’s long been building against a cruel and broken system that’s thwarted every effort at reform.

Every American has experience with the infuriating illogic and inhumanity of our for-profit healthcare industry. Insurance companies throw up one hurdle after another: stalling, denying vital care, burying patients and doctors in a landslide of paperwork.

UnitedHealthcare in particular has been a rich vein of horror stories. Even in an industry that’s so widely despised, they stand out, and not in a good way.

They deny claims at more than twice the industry average. In 2021, they announced that they wouldn’t pay for emergency room visits if, in their opinion, the visit wasn’t a true emergency (as if people are supposed to diagnose themselves and figure out whether their complaint is serious enough to justify the ER). They scheme to deny care to people with expensive conditions. In 2023, they were sued for using an AI model to auto-reject claims, kicking elderly, sick and disabled people out of nursing homes. The plaintiffs claim the AI has a 90% error rate – but of course that’s not an error, it’s the intended result.

My family has personal experience with UnitedHealthcare. My wife Elizabeth has insurance through them. I’ve written about the time when, after a routine operation, they tried to charge us $32,000 for an “out-of-network” technician in the operating room. They only relented when she quoted New York’s surprise-billing law to them. Obviously, they knew what the law was; they were just playing dumb and hoping that we didn’t know our rights.

All this byzantine bureaucracy might be a worthwhile tradeoff if it guaranteed high-quality care at an acceptable price… but it doesn’t even do that. Americans pay twice as much for health care as other developed countries, and yet we have the worst outcomes.

For-profit insurance companies are the reason. In the name of profit, they’ve murdered tens of thousands of people: coldly, slowly, a little bit at a time, shaving off a few years of their lives with each denial. An estimated 68,000 Americans die each year because they can’t afford medical care. Those deaths may not be as sensationalized as this one, but they’re no less real and no less meaningful.

Brian Thompson didn’t have sole responsibility for this inhumane system. But in any list of who benefits from the status quo, his name would be near the top. We don’t know what specific grievance his killer had, but it’s not even a little surprising that someone eventually snapped. The only surprising thing is that it hasn’t happened before now.

The expectation of fairness is the thread that knits society together. The only reason anyone would want a society is because it protects their rights and treats them fairly, as opposed to an anarchy where the powerful can abuse others as they please. If people perceive that society isn’t keeping that promise, they’ll grow angry and aggrieved, and they’ll be more willing to take the law into their own hands.

In opinion polls, supermajorities of Americans express a preference for universal public health care. But the American political system has frustrated that wish for decades, thanks to rivers of lobbyist money and an antiquated, anti-democratic structure that permits minority rule. Obamacare reined in some of the worst abuses, but people feel with justice that it didn’t go nearly far enough, and soon even those modest gains could be wiped away.

When pledges of justice and fair treatment ring hollow, when people feel they have no recourse and their voices go unheard… then their sense of frustration transmutes into rage. They rightfully conclude that if the law doesn’t protect them, then the law is a sham that doesn’t deserve their allegiance. They want to avenge wrongs done to them by any means necessary. Again, what right do we have to be even a little surprised?

Whether this is going to bring about any real or lasting reform… I doubt it. More likely, insurance executives will just use their vast wealth to surround themselves with bodyguards, and carry on as before. However, if this story sticks in their mind – if they start looking over their shoulders more often; if they feel nervous and frightened, even just a little, the next time they propose a new way to get between human beings and the medical care they need – it’s not inconceivable that it will have some positive effects.

There’s some evidence of this. Another insurer, Anthem, recently put forth a horrible proposal to not pay for anesthesia if an operation takes longer than an arbitrary time limit. Anthem was already under fire from doctors and politicians over this… and, right after the shooting, they backed down. It’s not a leap to imagine that someone at Anthem didn’t want the next target to be on their back. Even if Thompson’s killing was only a small grain of extra weight, it might have been the grain that tipped the scale.

Again, this isn’t a question of right or wrong, justified or unjustified. It’s a question of cause and effect. You can only push people so far, you can only take so much from them, before they rise up against you. That’s the lesson from every revolution in history. It’s a lesson that America’s ruling class seems determined not to learn, and there will be more bloodshed because of it.

America has chosen acceleration

To be clear, I’m not an accelerationist.

Accelerationism, as you may know, is the ideology which argues that our present political system is corrupt and broken beyond redemption. According to this theory, which has advocates on both the left and the right, small improvements are like band-aids on an infected wound – they cover up the problem without curing the underlying rot. Accelerationists oppose all half-measures and compromises because, to their minds, at best they do nothing, and at worst they allow rotten institutions to stagger on just a little longer, prolonging their evil.

Instead, accelerationists believe we should root for things to get worse. They want people’s lives to be unbearable, so that they hit their breaking point and rise up in revolution. That way, we hasten the time when the whole rotten system collapses so something better can rise from the wreckage. (That “something better” might be a socialist utopia or a fascist ethnostate, depending on who’s espousing this idea.)

Like I said, I’m not an accelerationist. I don’t want people to suffer. More often than not, misery doesn’t lead to glorious revolution; it only leads to more misery. Even when revolutions happen, they create more chaos, pain and death. They can collapse into perpetual war, or harden into a junta seizing power and turning into a dictatorship that’s worse than what came before. I believe that incremental progress, as slow as it is, is a greatly preferable way to create a better world. Democracy is always superior to violence, if we have the choice.

However, it’s not my personal views that are relevant. The question arises: What happens when people choose acceleration for themselves?

We don’t know for sure what’s coming in the next few years, but we can make some educated guesses.

If Trump keeps his promises – which is never a sure bet – of slapping high tariffs on imports and engaging in mass deportations, the consequence will be sudden, dramatic inflation. There will be supply shocks, shortages and skyrocketing prices, especially food (because American agribusiness absolutely depends on undocumented workers to harvest crops and process meat, no matter how politicians try to ignore this reality). Consumer goods we take for granted will become scarce or impossible to find. The empty shelves of COVID days may make a return.

American businesses that depend on exports will go bankrupt as other countries impose retaliatory tariffs. Immigrant and minority communities who voted for Trump, believing they would be spared because they’re the good ones, are going to be unpleasantly surprised when they’re swept up in racist dragnets.

With control of Congress, Republicans will be free to pass their agenda of tax cuts, union-busting and deregulation, which will result in a massive upward transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich. Corporate profits will soar and the rich will get much richer, while people who work for a living are exploited more, treated worse, and paid less.

If they repeal or weaken Obamacare, it’s their own voters who will suffer the worst, as doctors flee red states and underfunded rural hospitals shrivel up and die. If they take a chainsaw to the safety net, older voters and rust-belt communities (both of whom depend on these programs for most of their income) will regress to Dickensian poverty and squalor.

If they pass national restrictions on abortion, women everywhere will find their access to health care drastically curtailed. Their freedom of movement may be restricted. They may lose the ability to get a divorce and to escape abusive spouses. Even if those laws don’t get passed, it’s certain that violent, misogynist men will feel free to be their worst, most hateful and nastiest selves.

Whatever Republican voters thought they were voting for, this is what they’re going to get. And, in a black irony, the best hope for America’s future may be that all these things happen as soon as possible.

All the policies I’ve described are deeply unpopular, for good reason. Our best chance is that, given unfettered power, conservatives so immediately and thoroughly wreck the country that the public rises up in revolt. That doesn’t have to mean violence – it could equally well be a massive popular movement to throw the bums out in the next election.

There’s precedent for this. California used to be a swing state, until the hardline anti-immigrant Proposition 187 sparked an uprising from immigrant communities and turned the state solid blue. I could imagine a scenario where America follows a similar path.

Granted, this would be a form of political shock therapy. There will be violence, chaos and pain. Millions of innocent people are sure to suffer, no matter how it turns out. It’s not the path to change that anyone should rationally prefer. But this is what America has chosen, whatever I might think about it, and Americans will have to live with the consequences of that choice.

New on OnlySky: The United Cities of America

I have a new column today on OnlySky. It’s a modest proposal for a novel solution to our intractably divided politics. Just think of it as a two-state solution for America.

It’s based on the observation that big cities are reliably liberal, while rural areas are reliably conservative. This holds true in both the “red” and the “blue” states. Trying to jam these two polarized regions together into one nation, with both battling to pull the nation onto drastically divergent courses, is the cause of our national bitterness and malaise. What would happen if, instead of engaging in this warfare every election cycle, we let the urban and rural parts of America both go their own way and see who does best?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

The last time America was this balkanized was in the lead-up to the Civil War. In that case, the separation was more or less geographical, between the free industrialized states of the North and the slaveholding agricultural states of the South.

Some have suggested a similar split today, but instead of North and South, it’s blue states seceding from red states (or vice versa), creating two nations, each with their own politics. But this won’t work because, unlike the Civil War era, our national enmity can’t be divided along such neat lines.

The line of demarcation isn’t between states, but between urban and rural areas within each state. Every large state has liberal cities and a conservative countryside. This is true in deep-blue states like New York and California and blood-red states like Texas. The only thing that differentiates the states is which region dominates its overall politics.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

Abuse in the Anglican church: An all-too-familiar pattern

It feels almost quaint, in this era where politicians openly break the law and boast about getting away with it, for a religious figure to do wrong and suffer consequences for it. Nevertheless, that’s what today’s story is about.

We know well that religion often functions as a cloak for sexual predators to abuse the vulnerable. Whether it’s the Amish, Mormons, the Southern Baptists, evangelical Christians, or, of course, the Roman Catholic church… the details always sound familiar.

There’s one predator, or a small number of them, who preys on women, children, or any other disempowered group that they believe won’t speak out or won’t be listened to. There’s a larger circle of people who know about the abuse but do nothing. Often, they take active steps to cover it up, reasoning that the harm suffered by the victims matters less than the harm to the church’s reputation of godliness if the news got out. This emboldens the predator to keep assaulting people for years or decades, until the accumulated weight of their evil becomes too great to ignore. When the predator is finally exposed, the scandal is much bigger and more damaging than it would otherwise have been if the church had just done the right thing from the start.

Today’s story fits that pattern in all particulars. Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the ceremonial head of the Church of England, is resigning, after proof emerged that he knew about a prolific child abuser and did nothing:

An independent investigation last week released its long-awaited report into the late John Smyth, who sexually, psychologically and physically abused more than 100 boys and young men at Christian summer camps in the United Kingdom, Zimbabwe and South Africa over five decades.

The 251-page report concluded that Welby failed to report Smyth to authorities when he was informed of the abuse in August 2013, soon after he became Archbishop of Canterbury. Had he done so, Smyth could have been stopped sooner and many of his victims wouldn’t have been abused, the report found.

… “It is very clear that I must take personal and institutional responsibility for the long and retraumatizing period between 2013 and 2024,” Welby said, announcing his resignation.

John Smyth, the abuser in question, was a volunteer leader at the Iwerne camps from the 1960s to the 1980s. These were Christian summer camps aimed at privileged children from private schools, with the goal of preparing them to become future leaders of the church. However, like many religious retreats, they also served as a hunting ground for predators lurking in the religious power structure.

According to an independent report commissioned by the church, Smyth abused over a hundred boys and young men. He brutally beat them with a cane for minor or invented infractions, displaying a streak of violent sexual sadism:

Smyth used a cane to punish campers for “sins” that included “pride,” making sexual remarks, masturbation or, in one case, looking at a girl too long, according to the report. The victims and Smyth were at least partly, if not fully, naked during the savage beatings.

…Eight of the victims received about 14,000 strokes of the cane and two reported 8,000 lashes over three years. Eight men said they often bled from the whippings and others reported bruising and scarring.

As is always the case, Smyth’s behavior was an open secret. Many people knew about it and covered it up to protect the church from scandal:

A secret report of the abuse was compiled by a minister in 1982 and other church officers were aware of it, but police were never contacted.

“I thought it would do the work of God immense damage if this were public,” the now-deceased Rev. David Fletcher told people who worked on the new report.

Eventually, Smyth’s abuse became too well-known to keep hushing it up. Just like the Catholic predators who were quietly transferred to new parishes, he was encouraged – and financially assisted by church officials – to leave the UK. In 1984, he moved to Zimbabwe, where he continued to run children’s summer camps. He ultimately escaped justice, dying of natural causes in 2018.

Although Welby worked at the Iwerne camps in the 1970s, the same time that Smyth was preying on children, he claims he was unaware of it. This may or may not be true, but it’s not in dispute that he was informed about it by 2013. However, he didn’t report it to the police or take any other steps to see that it was investigated.

Finally, in 2017, the UK’s Channel 4 News blew the lid off Smyth’s past with an expose. This spurred an independent investigation, the Makin Review, which was published this month and sparked the outcry that led to Welby’s resignation.

What remains to be seen is whether this means real reform in the Church of England, or whether it’s just one leader throwing himself on his sword without making any institutional changes. If experience has taught us anything, it’s that where there’s one predator, there are almost always others. When the next one comes to light, that will be the real test. Will the church act promptly to bring an offender to justice as soon as their misdeeds are known? Or will they persist in hushing it up until an outraged third party does the right thing?

New on OnlySky: The end of the road for AI

I have a new column today on OnlySky. It’s a followup to my last column, about a massive, unappreciated obstacle that looms ahead for AI technology and what, if anything, can be done about it.

AI has been wildly successful, in both good and the bad senses. Chatbots and artbots are flooding the internet with synthetically generated text and images, often drowning out the contributions of human beings. While their output is frequently flawed, the creators of these bots insist that they’re going to keep improving, becoming more creative and less error-prone, and it’s only a matter of time before they leave human beings in the dust.

However, this may not be true. AI may be about to hit a hard stop, and its very proliferation may be the cause of its downfall.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

Of course, these bots aren’t flawless. For all their talents, they sometimes generate garbled text, or false factual claims, or weirdly melted and deformed images. Their creators dismissed these as inevitable early bugs in a technology that’s still maturing and improving. They promised that with more training data, AI would keep getting better, until it could not only match human performance but surpass it.

But there’s a problem: the internet is no longer pristine. It’s been polluted by immense quantities of texts and images generated by these AIs. There’s no reliable way to screen this out, which means that later generations of AIs will be trained on data created by earlier generations of AIs. Because of this, AIs are no longer learning how to be more human; they’re learning how to be more like AI.

You can think of this as the AI version of inbreeding—and it’s a problem for the same reason that inbreeding is harmful in nature.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

If you can keep it

Popular fiction romanticizes the medieval era as a time of noble knights, wise kings and chivalry. The unromantic truth is that it was a bloody and brutal age, marked by perpetual war and conflict. Monarchy bears the blame for that.

It’s not just that individual kings were cruel, arrogant and power-hungry, although they were. Rather, it’s that monarchy has a built-in incentive for violence.

Monarchy is a might-makes-right system with no rules, no laws, no checks or balances. Whoever could seize the throne by force became the next absolute ruler. This means that, whenever a king died, there was a succession crisis. Unless there was an heir ready to take over (and sometimes even then), a violent free-for-all ensued. Every powerful person who coveted the throne battled it out to decide who’d be the next king. For centuries, these wars of succession were an almost constant feature of life.

Democracy has a better solution to the problem of succession. When the previous leader’s term is over, the country holds an election to choose the next one, and – in theory – everyone respects the outcome.

However, democracy has an inherent weakness. It depends on the consent of the people, so it can only survive if each generation values it and makes a choice to renew it. If the people no longer care about democracy, it can degenerate into autocracy, and once it’s gone, it’s very hard to get back.

That’s the situation we’re in.

In 2024, Americans had a choice between two candidates for president. One was an ordinary, decent, well-qualified politician who would have continued the mostly progressive policies of the Biden administration. The other was the Platonic ideal of an unfit candidate: a convicted felon, a sexual predator, a tax cheat, a lover of dictators, a friend to conspiracy theorists, openly racist and misogynist, intentionally cruel, wildly ignorant and profoundly incompetent. Worst of all, when he lost the last election, he tried to steal it and then, when that failed, triggered a violent insurrection against the rightful government. It was a disgraceful first in American history, a true example of an enemy within.

We know who the voters chose.

And it was the voters’ choice, loath as I am to admit it. If he had lost the popular vote but won the electoral college (again) – or, worse, if he’d lost the election but had it stolen for him by red-state legislators or his judicial toadies – that would be one thing. That scenario would have been another illustration of the dysfunctional, broken-as-designed American system, which allows candidates to win with only a minority of the total votes cast. It would be an occasion for rage and despair, to be sure, but it wouldn’t say anything about the actual views of the public.

But, like I said, that’s not what happened. The fact that he won the popular vote is a different scenario altogether. This time, unlike in 2016, it can’t be blamed on the founding fathers’ mistakes. The American people saw him for who he is and freely handed power back to him.

What should we do when voters democratically elect an enemy of democracy?

Your response to this question should depend on your theory about why this happened. Was it out of ignorance – votes cast by people who somehow didn’t know or didn’t understand the threat he poses, or were unaware of what his policies actually were? Or was it out of malice – votes cast by people who know perfectly well that he stands for fascism and autocracy, and supported him because that’s what they want?

(As an important footnote, you can say that Trump didn’t win the election so much as Harris lost it. He got slightly more votes than in 2020, while she got dramatically less than Biden. Republicans voted like they usually do, while Democrats stayed home. But if you confine yourself to asking about the preferences of Democratic voters and why they didn’t show up, it’s the same core issue. Was it out of apathy and ignorance, or were they genuinely torn about which candidate was better?)

Which of these two explanations you believe will dictate your conclusion about what we should do now. If people were ignorant or deceived, that means our situation is fixable. It’s discouraging, to be sure, but it means the American republic isn’t beyond saving. With better education, with a stronger ecosystem of progressive media, and with more of an effort to get the word out, there’s still a chance of turning the ship around.

On the other hand, if people have given up on democracy and want a strongman to rule them and punish their enemies… that would be a more dire scenario. That’s not a mistaken impression of facts, but a deep dissonance of values. If that’s what happened, then the American experiment may truly have run its course and is now drawing to an end.

When he was asked what the Constitutional Convention had created, Benjamin Franklin famously said, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Those words have never been so bleakly relevant. If we ultimately can’t keep it, it won’t be because we were conquered or overthrown by an external enemy. It will be because we did it to ourselves.

New on OnlySky: AI will be the death of the internet

I have a new column today on OnlySky. It’s about a problem we’re only beginning to glimpse that could spell the death of the internet as we know it.

From social media to e-commerce to journalism, the internet is built on the basis of the attention economy. More users equates to more views, more ad clicks, more sales, and more profit. Entire industries are founded on this model.

But AI chatbots have become scarily good at imitating people, and unscrupulous actors are already using them for everything from phony reviews to coordinated propaganda campaigns. Genuine humans are at risk of being drowned out by endless zombie hordes of bots. How will this affect the assumptions that the internet is built on? What happens when there are no humans left to advertise to?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter. I’m told that now everyone can post comments:

By some estimates, bots already comprise as much as 50% of total internet traffic. And these are still the early days of AI. This problem is only going to get worse. It may not be long before encountering another human being on the net is a rare exception.

The future of the internet is a lifeless wasteland. It’s a zombie funhouse of bots chattering inanely at each other, heedless of whether anyone is listening. It’s an infinite conveyor belt of meaningless words spilling into the void, with no humans in the loop at all.

But it won’t last. It can’t. The same incentives that created this digital Babel will be its downfall.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

Things I still believe

The years ahead are going to be a time of trials for us. We’re all going to face pressure to compromise our values: to keep our heads down, to avert our gazes, to play along, to profess loyalty, to collaborate.

For when that temptation is strongest, I’m writing this now, to remind myself (and you, if it benefits you) of the moral principles we should hold on to, whether the world encourages it or not. When the future looks clouded and uncertain, these values are like a lighthouse on a rocky headland. They’ll see us safely through the darkness of the night and the lash of the storm, and they’ll light the way to better days when the clouds finally clear.

First of all, I believe in kindness. In a world where cruelty is the motivation and the rule, kindness is the essential virtue. It’s a reassertion of the inherent worth and dignity of all human beings. Despite the superficial differences cited to divide us, we’re all alike in the ways that count. Everyone’s life matters. Everyone’s well-being should be protected. Everyone deserves to be safe, happy and free. When life falls short of this goal, we should do what we can to make up for it, helping people in the ways they need.

In a world where laws and institutions are slanted toward the rich and powerful, kindness is a leveling impulse. It reminds us to keep our gazes on the vulnerable, the oppressed, and those who’ve been kept in the shadows. The advocates of hierarchy say it’s right that some people should be on top and others on the bottom; the defenders of bigotry say that some people, by virtue of who they are, are outside the circle of moral concern. Both of them are wrong. Kindness is radical because it refuses these limitations.

Most of all – because I’m sure we’re going to hear this a lot – we should reject the argument that kindness is weak. Nothing could be more wrong. Cruelty is a trait of the fearful and the insecure. It’s the mindset of people who want to keep others down because they believe it’s the only way they can stay on top. Those who help, who are willing to reach down without fear of lowering themselves, prove that they’re the strongest.

At the same time, I believe in justice. Justice means that we should treat people as their actions deserve. It’s the abstract form of the Golden Rule, that enduring moral principle that every society and culture has discovered. Those who do right should be rewarded; those who do wrong should be punished, to give them an incentive to make a better choice next time.

I don’t view kindness and justice as values in opposition to each other, but as two sides of the same coin. Kindness would be meaningless and absurd if it was given in equal portion to oppressor and oppressed. As I’ve written before, I don’t believe in tolerating intolerance. Those who treat others with cruelty, malice, or disregard deserve the same treatment in return, and we shouldn’t feel empathy for them when they’re reaping what they sowed.

This principle applies with particular force to the Americans who supported fascism in this election. Millions of those people, in the coming months and years, are going to be unpleasantly surprised. In fact, the red-state footsoldiers of fascism are likely going to suffer some of the worst repercussions. That too is justice, even if only in a roundabout and approximate sense. We shouldn’t extend sympathy to them when they get what they voted for.

As an essential complement to these moral values, I believe in knowable objective reality. The world exists independently of us, and it’s not inherently shaped or governed by our desires. There are physical laws and material facts that are beyond our power to change. (Among other things: Climate change is real. Vaccines prevent disease. More guns means more violence. Cutting taxes on the rich doesn’t trickle down to the poor.) If we try to ignore them, we’ll wreck disastrously on the rocks of reality.

At the same time, we can learn what those laws are and use them to our benefit. The more we know about how the world works, the greater our power to alter it in accordance with our desires. Truth is a map and a tool for forging the future we want.

Those in power dislike the idea that reality isn’t malleable to their will, so they fight against it. Dictators, strongmen and propagandists all want to bewilder you with a blizzard of bullshit. They want to flood the public square with lies until the truth is drowned out. They want you to believe that objective truth is nonexistent, so you might as well believe what you’re told without asking questions.

But a lie is still a lie and a truth is still a truth, even if all the powers of the world are pushing you to believe otherwise. Holding to this principle is a vital defense against unjust power.

These three values – kindness, justice, empiricism – are the stable three-legged stool of my secular humanist philosophy. All are equally necessary.

Kindness without justice is undeserved charity to the oppressor; without knowledge, it’s as likely to make things worse as it is to make them better. Justice without kindness is mere cruelty, and without knowledge of who’s in the right, it becomes injustice. Knowledge alone, without kindness or justice to channel it to the right ends, can make the world worse instead of better. But when these three are combined, they create a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts.

Last but not least, I believe in joy. This isn’t a moral value as such, but the savor that makes life worth living. However maddening and cruel the world becomes, we have the power to choose how we react. And our reactions, more than anything else, are what determine whether we’re happy.

If you have the misfortune of knowing a fascist, then you know that their worldview is bleak and bitter. Their every thought is shaped by fear, rage, and revulsion. Their lives are full of pain and suffering, which they accept as inevitable rather than seeking to change. It’s this worldview that they want to export to the rest of us. They only win a final victory if they can make us as miserable as they are. That’s a victory we shouldn’t grant them.

Millions and millions of people who lived in, objectively, more unequal and more brutal times than the present didn’t lose their capacity for joy. They found ways to bring pleasure and meaning and happiness into their lives. We’re far more privileged than them, so why can’t we?

Living with joy, refusing to let go of happiness even in dark times, is a victory all its own. We may not find that in politics for now, but there’s still love, friendship, community, art, music, literature, creativity, and helping one another – all the other ingredients that make life worthwhile. Those values aren’t at risk. We just have to remember that we still have them.

New on OnlySky: Heading into the dark

I have a new column today on OnlySky. You can guess what it’s about.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter. I’m told that now everyone can post comments:

What now, for those of us who care? What should we do in response?

Should we plan on moving to another country? (But what country can truthfully say it’s free of bigotry, conspiracy theorists, cruel and selfish people, or would-be authoritarians? These aren’t American flaws, they’re human flaws.)

Should we go Galt—or whatever the liberal equivalent is called—and withdraw from society to build our own enclave of tolerance, decency and human rights? (But there’s an inconvenient shortage of handy mountain refuges with limitless free energy.)

Should we conclude that if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em? (I get nauseous just contemplating it.)

None of these responses are suitable. As hard as it is, there’s only one thing to do—only one course of action that’s thinkable.

Continue reading on OnlySky…