Overcoming Anger at the Ongoing Derangement of Our World

As I mentioned two weeks ago, I find it harder to write now that I’m immersed in a series of managerial tasks. Even now, with a “free spell” before my main day job and my local freelancing gig, I find it difficult not to want to get cracking on the next major projects. There are just so many great plans on the go! So many ways to build community in the days ahead! And so many people who have such a strong sense of their own creative practice, while I’m still churning in doubt about the use of it all.

But doubt can only be overcome through the work.

So, here I am—

Wondering what there even is to say anymore.

It’s not that I doubt many of my convictions. I haven’t lost my humanity, and I haven’t become a deranged statist, ever-eager to discard democratic values in service to tribalist convictions that the world can be bombed into peace. I didn’t suddenly wake up believing that the deaths of some people’s children matter more or less than others, or that it’s okay to treat war as a game where all that matters is bullying dissenters into silence so that true warriors can “get the job done” without further interruption.

Nor have I lost my acute awareness of the wastefulness of this violence on a broader level, when climate change is here, and when it does not care what sort of leaders we have in office as it increases our resource wars and related displacement pressures, or drives more humans into small-c conservative thinking out of sheer biological stress.

And I still routinely grieve our species’ stupidity, for buying into myths that allow us to spin intricate excuses for slaughtering one another, and oppressing one another.

Likewise, when I see folks continue to parrot Jingoist propaganda, as if they slept through similarly inane rhetoric during Iraq and Afghanistan, my despair is just as sharp as ever. We never seem to learn. Too many of us love authoritarianism too much.

And I get it. I do. Authoritarianism is easy. It allows you to do away with all the messy nuances of life if you just place your parasocial trust in strongmen, no matter what.

I also wonder how many people are actually capable of imagining different coherent subject-positions. To this day, there are some people in my circles who assume that I hold the views I do because I just haven’t read the right people on the subject. They can’t believe that I would be “intelligent” and come to different conclusions than they have—because surely all “intelligent” people would think the way they do?

They don’t understand that I do read the militant-minded, the Jingoists, the war-deranged—along with everyone else. I read missives from people who delight in the fresh rubble of others’ homes; who thrill over debating the technical details of war-craft; and who eagerly, routinely re-traumatize themselves on media depicting harm done to “their own” to keep their hearts hardened against ongoing trauma elsewhere.

And I feel for these people—I do. I feel for both the war-deranged and those who don’t understand why I’m not war-deranged, too. The latter category in particular includes people who are so afraid of a more complex world that they cannot imagine any path to tribal security save through the construction and violent defence of extremely hard borders. It seems entirely outside their ability (right now, at least) to imagine achieving greater safety for their own by any other, less drastic means.

So when they see me engage in democratic, diplomatic, and economic critique instead, their usual reaction is alarm—because don’t I realize that I’m aiding “the enemy”, either intentionally or because I’ve been hoodwinked by nefarious forces, whenever I fail to support purely statist rhetoric and militant propaganda instead?

Once one has given over to strongman, Kissinger-esque “realpolitik”, that’s all that remains: the all-or-nothing. The zero-sum. The brute show of force to knock everyone else down. And in this cruel arithmetic, the human vanishes. Democratic discourse vanishes. Individual variation, such as exists in every demographic, ceases to exist.

Which is a really awful way to live, isn’t it?

Because when you’re primed to see other humans in such absolute terms—with us or against us, full stop—there is never any end to the threats that bad-faith actors can use to terrify you into switching back to war mode. You will always be on the lookout for enemies who rise to the level of existential threat deserving of any form of retaliatory attack you can imagine; and as such, you will always find them.

The bigger derangement in our society

And that’s not just true of war-derangement. It might be better said, rather, that war derangement is a special case of a much deeper societal illness.

Just last night, I read a highly unsurprising Guardian article announcing that social media has overtaken TV as the dominant means by which people in the US get their news. And not just any social media! As the author reports,

One-fifth (22%) of those contacted in the US said they came across news or commentary from Rogan in the week after the presidential inauguration, including a disproportionate number of young men, a group traditional media struggles to reach.

News influencers on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok are also finding large audiences in India, Brazil, Indonesia and Thailand, which have younger populations that are heavy social media users.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s X has seen a major shift to the right among its users, according to the analysis. Musk’s takeover of the site has been followed by a 50% increase among right-leaning users, from 10% of the group in 2021 to 15% this year. There has been a corresponding fall in left-leaning users, from 17% to 14% over the same period, as liberals have abandoned the platform.

But despite the surging dominance of right-wing rhetoric in our most popular discourse spaces, the content of right-wing speakers runs relentlessly into persecution-complex territory: in part, because these loud forums can always find a minority scapegoat to elevate as an existential threat. And hey, if everyone’s talking about [X] minority demographic, it must be because there’s a real issue there, right? Otherwise, why would so many commentators go on about it?

So while war derangement certainly emerges from the recent spread of small-c conservative thinking, it might be more accurate to talk of “algorithm derangement”. After all, it isn’t easy to avoid becoming passive and credulous consumers of whatever shows up next in our feed. Whether or not the next video/post in queue is a natural fit for our interests, or just something the platform is being paid to shove in our faces, it often takes more effort than we care to spend to refuse the media object in front of us.

Then there’s our broader desire to fit in: to like the things our friends like; to support family members no matter what. And of course we want to be loved by our loved ones! Who wouldn’t be? Of course we’re afraid of being discarded by our in-groups over something as “small” as having a few doubts or questions about some of their views.

So we will do and say and believe awful things to stay secure in the righteousness that comes from being able to add, “Yes, well… at least I stood by my family and friends.”

Dealing with the futility of it all

What point is there, then, to any of this prose?

Why bother to write at all, if all around me there’s just so much war derangement, algorithm derangement, and tribalist peer pressure underpinning anti-democratic attitudes at a critical last-gasp of a time for our environmentally imperilled world?

Well…

This is going to sound hilariously arrogant—because it is; I’ll cop to that—but I think these days I write (when I can) in part to practise forgiveness for my fellow human beings; and in the process, to try to shed some layers of algorithm derangement that this awful media milieu keeps coating me in, too.

Because I find these days that I am so angry at people for being statists at cost to democratic values, and for ignoring our history of warmongering failures to justify to themselves that this time—this time!—we will at last be greeted as liberators. This time, if we just bomb away our problems, no new ones will arise in their wake!

I’m angry at people whose war derangement has brought them to gamify death figures and play propagandist games in lieu of cultivating meaningful discussion, and to accuse everyone who doesn’t think in equally stark, simplistic terms as clearly being the more ignorant, the more hoodwinked, the more propaganda-pilled between us.

I’m angry with people who credulously repeat what they hear online, and who make little to no effort to study the sources and/or rhetoric of their preferred pundit(s) before repeating statements that stand to dehumanize whole other segments of the population. Who see debate over dog-whistle politics and demographic scapegoating, whenever it’s advanced by their favourite online pundits, as merely a bit of sport.

I’m also angrier at the existence of our core three Abrahamic religions than I know I should be (sorry, Hinduism; I’ll be grouchy with you some other time)—because I know that if we didn’t have today’s myths in the West, with all the excuses they’ve given so many populations to go to war with one another, we’d just have others in their place—as we did for thousands of years before our current pantheon.

We’re a group species, after all, so for better and for worse the vast majority will always be inclined to follow something “larger” than ourselves, like starlings in flight or buffalo in a stampede. Humanity’s complex language skills just give us more opportunities to shroud our banal herd mentality in more elaborate social routines.

And so, what good is all this anger I have for my species—especially since I understand some of the behavioural biochemistry at its heart?

How does my anger over our collective mediocrity make me any less deranged than the people whose views and group-think reactions drive me at times to such despair?

Israel, Iran, Gaza, the US, and media literacy

News out of the Middle East remains bleak.

We know the slaughter of Gazan civilians continues in the dozens most days—even if global coverage is now focused on the “new shiny” of will-they-or-won’t-they Iranian war, and thus grants many politicians relief from their constituents pressing quite as hard for something to be done about the horrific and existential suffering.

Just this morning, too, there was a gut-wrenching piece about an IDF tank firing into a throng of civilians gathering for aid. This is of course playing out right alongside IDF propaganda about how Iran is singularly outrageous for striking areas with civilians. Even though the Israeli government is plainly killing civilians in Gaza and Iran as well, it doesn’t matter; what matters is that your wartime PR remains stronger and steadier than everyone else’s—so keep blasting such simple lines at your allies; and keep reminding people that if they want to prove loyalty to you, they’ll repeat it.

Let me be clear about my point here:

Gamified death counts are disgusting.

It is shameful behaviour to play with human loss like this—whoever does it.

I also recently watched footage of a Jewish-Israeli family cheering as retaliatory Iranian munitions fell on Tamra, killing civilians in a Palestinian section of northern Israel that is severely under-protected from attack. A CNN article corroborated the video with the following comments about the deeper derangement at work here:

In a neighboring town called Mitzpe Aviv, social media video verified by CNN showed Jewish Israelis rejoicing over the rockets raining down on Tamra this weekend, shouting “may your village burn!”

Knesset member Dr. Ahmad Tibi told CNN scenes like that were the “result of the culture of racism that has spread in Israeli society and the escalating fascism.”

Another Knesset member, Naama Lazimi, condemned the video on X, writing; “shame and disgust.” On the lack of shelters, Lazimi added that “this is an even greater shame because this is a state with racist and abandoning policies.”

Tamra resident Nejmi Hijazi also lamented the video, telling CNN “in your own country, you are treated as a stranger, even as an enemy, even in your blood and in your death.”

The chant of “may your villages burn” is one I’ve discussed here before, as part of the sick facet of wartime derangement parroted by Israeli school children under the current media economy—and also, by extremists like the thousands who marched last month chanting “Death to Arabs” in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

But it was an article from The Jerusalem Post that most broke my heart in recent days, and which crystallizes why writing about so much of this feels pointless.

I’ve tried my best to help fellow internationals understand the political range of local Israeli media—from the left-leaning and loathed-by-Likud Haaretz, to the right-of-centre Times of Israel, to the more nuanced reporting of Ynet, which offers blunt, pragmatic conservative analysis (the best of it in Hebrew), to the historically pro-Netanyahu shill of paper Israel Hayom (though it did call for his resignation once!), to the Fox-News-esque derangement of religious-extremist propaganda-prop Channel 20 (now Now 14/Channel 14).

The Jerusalem Post is a right-wing paper, and it often gives space to pro-Likud, pro-religious-extremist, pro-ethnic-cleansing, and otherwise dehumanizing state commentary. It was also notorious in the early months of Israel’s post-10/7 campaign in Gaza for trading on short news blurbs that would play well for propaganda purposes—sensational brief pieces that served to launch international media cycles filled with fear and doubt at critical times for shutting down dissent and fortifying allies.

But JPost has never been impressed with Netanyahu’s corruption, either; and so, well before 10/7, its writers were also calling attention to his looming trials and related threats to the financial integrity of the nation. In other words—for all its right-wing leanings, and strong notion of wartime patriotism to the state and its propaganda needs—The Jerusalem Post is not really beholden to just one leader, like many other right-wing sources. It is a paper for conservative Jewish-Israeli thought in general.

Which is why it was no surprise to see a story like this in its pages yesterday, too:

As The Jerusalem Post reported, showing wonderful attention to the fullness of Jewish diaspora in a way that so many ignorant North Americans seem to forget exists:

Iran’s two principal Jewish institutions have issued unusually strident statements condemning last weekend’s Israeli air-raids on Tehran, Natanz and other sites, describing the operation as “savage Zionist aggression” and demanding that the Islamic Republic reply with overwhelming force. The comments appeared only in state-aligned Persian media.

“The Zionists’ brutality, which is far from any human morality and has caused the martyrdom of a number of our beloved compatriots, including innocent children, has hurt all of our hearts,” the Jewish Association and Community of Isfahan wrote in a statement provided to the official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) on Sunday evening.

Offering condolences for seven senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders and nuclear scientists it claims were killed in the strikes, the association added: “We are confident that proud and honourable Iran will give a crushing and regret-inducing response that will make the Zionist regime repent its shameful deeds.”

…

Dr. Younes Hamami Lalezar, spokesman for the Beth Din (religious court) of the Tehran Jewish Committee, used still sharper language, calling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision “unjust and criminal” and writing that the “murder of civilians, women and children by the criminal Zionist regime and the evil Netanyahu must be met with decisive force.”

Hamami stressed that Iranian Jews “have always been part of this great nation and will never fail to defend our homeland.”

…

Jews have lived on Iranian soil for more than 2,500 years—one of the world’s oldest continuous Diaspora communities. The Hebrew Bible places Queen Esther and Mordechai in the Achaemenid capital of Susa, and Cyrus the Great’s 539 BCE edict freeing the Judeans from Babylonian captivity is still revered as a landmark of religious tolerance. Jewish colonies later spread across Hamadan, Shiraz and Isfahan, surviving successive Parthian, Sassanian and Islamic dynasties, and by the mid-20th century the community peaked at an estimated 140,000–150,000 under the Pahlavi shahs. The 1979 Islamic Revolution triggered a mass exodus—mainly to Israel and the United States—leaving today’s Jewish population inside Iran somewhere between the Iranian census figure of roughly 3,000 and scholars’ estimate of 8,000-10,000, with the largest concentrations in Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz.

No, it wasn’t the story itself that broke my heart. I’m certainly not new to the diversity of Jewish experience, as I’ve discussed before. The Jewish friends in my childhood cohort grew up to scatter to the political wind—some becoming Jewish Republicans and settler-enamoured zealots; others becoming firmly anti-Zionist or differently Zionist in their Judaism; and all the Jewish folks in my immediate life today are staunch humanists who come to their faith-practice from a place of liberal and leftist love for the power of Judaism to speak to care for the stranger everywhere.

So, no, the story itself wasn’t shocking—because I’ve never had cause to treat people who share a cultural and religious touchstone in Judaism as a hivemind; and because I’ve been trying for a very long time to push back on any and all extremists (Christian, Jewish, Muslim) who would tell you that anyone who doesn’t agree with their version of a given faith/culture is “self-hating”, a “traitor”, or otherwise “false”.

That sort of thinking is reductive nonsense, and it has no place in pluralist society.

No, what broke my heart was the reminder, when reading this story in The Jerusalem Post, of how impoverished Western discourse around the Middle East continues to be.

Because you really have to wonder at the depth of war derangement in North America, when even something a right-wing Israeli paper comfortably reports is likely to be treated as pure terrorist-abetting propaganda in many Western spheres.

And yet, that’s how it’s been for years now: with even centrist and fully conservative papers in Israel routinely sharing nuanced details that are all but taboo to repeat in the West—at least, without being seen as a traitor, terrorist-sympathizer, or “useful idiot” by people with some of the loudest megaphones in our media ecosystems.

It doesn’t seem to matter how much one tries to encourage people to read widely and locally, and to listen to how much complexity every demographic contains.

Instead, the sweeping normalization of far-right rhetoric and politicians in the West has tricked a great many of us into believing that even local nuance is a ruse: a trap laid by our worst enemies to try to bring down the sanctity of the State, or to sow doubt in the self-evident righteousness of our every military campaign on foreign soil.

So where do we go from here?

How do pro-democracy advocates push back on statist propaganda?

How do we even begin to hope that we can ever have meaningful sociopolitical and media conversations about the extent of our world’s complex humanity again?

I’m not sure of the answers myself, which is why I’m working on that matter of forgiveness instead—as arrogant as that sounds and probably is—because so long as I’m simply angry at how much fear-mongering, hate-mongering, and ignorance has won out among us, I can’t be of much use in its undoing.

And I want to be. I really, really do.

But for now, by and large, while I’m grieving all this latest, brutal waste of human life on a personal level, I’m also spending most of my days cheering on others who have somehow retained more confidence in their ability to turn the tide with their words and their actions—for love, for community, for peace, and for democracy.

And I’m thankful for their courage.

I’m thankful, as always, for yours.

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Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.

ML