[Off-Topic] The Pity Evolution of Modern Society

The world is perishing in an orgy of self-righteousness.

People from Wisecrack always manage to put a smile on my face. They give me hope that there are still people of reason in this world. This essay is inspired by that video and the gathering of complementary thoughts.

As an engineer, I stay amazed at what we’re able to create. No one would have guessed that one of humankind’s most fabulous inventions, the internet, along with its biggest hits, could turn into a weapon of mass destruction. I mean ubiquitous mobile access and social networks that gather absurd numbers of people at the same time.

This case is far from the only one, but it works as an example. A few days ago, I was caught off guard by a seemingly small piece of news. James Gunn, the beloved director of two of the MCU’s biggest hits with his Guardians of the Galaxy, was fired over tweets he wrote ten years earlier.

I am not here to judge the merits of the tweets or if his apologies are good enough.

Actually, by just stating neutrality, I am automatically judged as being in favor. This is the problem here.

These days, we’ve seen right-wing pages and accounts deleted from Facebook. It’s part of the platform’s ongoing effort to fight “fake news,” which really is a problem of modern times. News outlets have turned into click-bait factories, exactly as Wisecrack’s video describes.

Who decides what “fake news” is? It “offends” a demographic that is loud and generates clicks. Therefore, we must ban the other side.

It reminds me of a cliche phrase from The Lord of the Rings that always resonated with me. When the fellowship is trying to go through Moria, Frodo laments to Gandalf:

‘What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!’

To which Gandalf replies:

‘Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity.’

And then concludes:

‘Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.

For even the very wise cannot see all ends. I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it. And he is bound up with the fate of the Ring. My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many — yours not least.’

Back to Gunn, what surprised me was not that those tweets were republished or the public outcry (and of course, no sane person supports the specific contents literally). What really surprised me was the incredible velocity with which a mega-corporation the size of Disney responded with a swift beheading, literally terminating a great career in less than a few hours.

It reminds me of equally quick public sentences without trials or due process. Again, I’m not advocating for these people, but James Damore vs. Google, Brendan Eich vs. Mozilla, and James Watson vs. Nobel.

And most of you or your friends would say, “of course they were ousted, they are bad people, we must police ourselves to remove these villains from our midst.”

Should we?

Can you give back their future if you were wrong? What makes you entitled to be a jury and judge?

Careful. When antagonized, an average, reasonable person should dialogue in private, as any civilized society learned to do. But social networks motivate people to do the worst: call out in public.

This is Mob Formation. This is plain old bullying. I suffered bullying my whole life, being a Japanese minority in a Western country, and I know exactly how much it hurts. That’s why I never bully back.

If you call out someone in public, you’re not practicing “justice.” You are a mere bully. No matter the subject at hand.

Have you ever read the image header of my Facebook and Twitter profiles? It reads:

“I Disapprove of What You Say, But I Will Defend to the Death Your Right to Say It.” - Evelyn Beatrice Hall.

And I believe that.

I shall never shame someone in public. Only cowards do that. Shaming someone in the open has the sole purpose of mobbing people, transforming the herd into a maneuvering mass to swiftly perform a public execution, and thus, make your point without having to defend it.

“But I have the right not to be offended.”

No, you don’t.

Another movie I talked about years ago, and cropped a segment to upload on my blog, is Miloš Forman’s masterpiece The People vs. Larry Flynt, produced by Oliver Stone.

It tells the story of the founder of the pornography magazine Hustler. By all means, a despicable person.

But this is precisely the point. Larry did things most of you would condemn. Not just publishing porn, but making satire out of public figures with bad-taste jokes. Jokes nonetheless. The part that really hit me was the idea that people have no right not to be offended. It’s a subjective matter, with no place in court, because we can’t legally define taste.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you have heard a lot today, and I’m not gonna go back over it, but you have to go into that room and make some decisions. But before you do, there’s something you need to know. I am not trying to suggest that you should like what Larry Flynt does. I don’t like what Larry Flynt does, but I do like that I live in a country where you and I can make that decision for ourselves. I like that I live in a country where I can pick up Hustler magazine and read it, or throw it in the garbage can if that’s where I think it belongs.”

Anyone has the right to do and say whatever he or she wants as long as it doesn’t harm the other person. This is a delicate matter because my rights should end where your rights start.

“If the First Amendment will protect a scumbag like me, it will protect all of you.” - Larry Flynt.

But because it can’t be decided in court, radical people take matters with their own hands, using the most powerful weapon ever devised: social networks. They can quickly gather a large jury and determine the public execution. It’s like handing a loaded gun to a toddler.

This is Inquisition territory. Galileo was judged and sentenced because he offended Catholic society by stating that the Earth and the planets revolve around the Sun, and not the other way around. It seems stupidly trivial today, but it was a monumental scandal back then. People would rather die than accept that offensive statement. It would be trending on the Twitter of the 1600s, and public execution would be demanded within minutes.

This “I’m offended” justification is what ultimately led to assassinations such as Luther King, JFK, Lennon, the arrest of Gandhi, and the genocide of the Jews. Intolerance.

If not being offended is the ultimate goal, intolerance is the only path, and the murder of Freedom is the worst consequence.

Every atrocity in humankind starts with mob behavior around the “I shouldn’t feel offended.”

That’s the story behind Fahrenheit 451, which Wisecrack explains well. At some point, people just started building echo chambers. Every Twitter feed and every Facebook timeline is, by definition, an echo chamber. You only get content meticulously curated by machine learning, configured to spit out posts that won’t offend you and won’t ever challenge your points of view.

You create and live in a bubble, and you immediately get outraged when your reality is challenged by any thought-provoking idea. You limit yourself to your personalized and narrow status quo.

It’s a lie when you say “I’m open-minded” but keep calling people out and whining about how offended you are. You are not open-minded. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. At least admit the truth: you’re narrow-minded and intolerant.

Contrary to what many of us believe, the internet was supposed to set us free from governments, authoritarian institutions, and big media channels that supposedly controlled the masses’ points of view.

We were supposed to have access to a broader range of knowledge, without borders, without prejudice, and that would help us advance faster into the future, into more innovation.

Innovation, by definition, is a challenge against the status quo. You can’t innovate and please everybody at the same time. That’s impossible. Otherwise, it’s just more of the same.

The invention of fire challenged nature, the invention of heliocentrism questioned God, and the design of natural selection challenged humankind’s soul.

Social networks took a free, decentralized internet and put it on a very tight leash, controlled by “Influencers.” People of pure charisma, with no righteousness and much less wisdom. Charisma is what pulls in huge numbers of followers. The network effect is vicious.

We were supposed to be all together collaborating for the betterment of humankind, regardless of race, geography, and political inclinations.

Be warned, you are all falling for the Eight stages of Genocide. Behold:

1. Classification: People are divided into “them and us”.
2. Symbolization: “When combined with hatred, symbols may be forced upon unwilling members of pariah groups…”
3. Dehumanization: “One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects, or diseases.”
4. Organization: “Genocide is always organized… Special army units or militias are often trained and armed…”
5. Polarization: “Hate groups broadcast polarizing propaganda…”
6. Preparation: “Victims are identified and separated out because of their ethnic or religious identity…”
7. Extermination: “It is ’extermination’ to the killers because they do not believe their victims to be fully human”.
8. Denial: “The perpetrators… deny that they committed any crimes…”

This is the original Nazi modus operandi, and you are perpetuating those steps. I’m not a Jew, but I deeply admire and respect their history and resilience. I’ve been to the official Holocaust Institute at Yad Vashem, in Israel, and to the one in Washington D.C., because I respect the lessons they left behind. It was supposed to be our duty not to let history repeat itself.

But, such is the power of blind ideology and the leadership of charismatic celebrities.

We had charismatic leaders doing good things and bad things, charismatic nonetheless. For every Lincoln or Churchill, we had a Stalin or a Castro.

What’s more difficult is that we can only really know that something went horrendously bad in hindsight, from History. There is no such thing as a black-and-white “good” vs. “evil.” You always think that you are doing an excellent job by following charismatic people who seem to be only promoting the well-being of a minority group.

Ask yourself: are you following a selfless person, one who can treat another with more humanity than they got? Or does it sound more like selfish revenge and payback? Hate is always the stuff of evil. A righteous person does not mimic what they claim to fight against. Anyone advocating “let’s do to them what they did to us” is most probably Evil. You cite people like Gandhi. Did you learn nothing from what he taught all his life?

Every Fidel, every Mussolini, every Hitler, they all really believed that they were fighting for the well-being of their people. Every Nazi acted thinking they were doing the right thing for the future of their sons and daughters, that the sacrifices would pay off. That they were being Noble for killing people.

There has never been a better platform to mob people into irrational herds than now. There are YouTubers out there that have millions of more followers than any Hitler ever had.

And to add injury to misery, we’ve formed the online consensus that people have a magical, inherent right to “never be offended.” They shall not be offended by 200-character tweets. That’s a capital sin, and the perpetrator must die. Apologies are not enough. The thought police have reached the point where one out-of-context tweet is enough to judge and execute a person’s life, without recourse, without parole.

It’s fascinating to see how a series of technologies and innovations supposed to broaden the freedom of everybody would turn to become the most potent weapon of mass destruction ever devised. And it didn’t need a newborn Hitler.

The end of the world doesn’t have to be a catastrophic physical event like a nuclear blast. I think the destruction of the fabric of society itself is even worse. It’s not a big evil dictator that will kill Freedom, it’s the people who don’t deserve it. It’s far more nefarious and can be even more damning.

That’s the lesson: no Omar Bashir, Bashar Al-Assad, or Nicolás Maduro will, alone, be responsible for destroying society.

Every evildoer in history did what they did “in the name of the people.”

And it all starts with “I shouldn’t be offended.”