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Introduction

This piece ended up being longer than I originally thought it would be. As with most topics I cover, it’s complicated and multifaceted, and I can’t resist elucidating that complexity. The topic of this piece might also be frustrating, I’ll be pointing out what I believe is a problem without providing any kind of solution. Pointing out a problem is easy, doing the work to think of a solution is more difficult, but what’s even more frustrating is that I’m not sure this problem has a solution. What problem am I referring to? The way in which people, both individually and as a society respond to a man-made disaster. 

Some of my favorite episodes of the satirical cartoon South Park aired shortly after the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The plot of the episodes are too absurd to explain without going into detail, but in the episodes there is a superhero called Captain Hindsight. He has the power of perfect hindsight, and he arrives at the site of every disaster to tell first responders what should have been done to avoid the disaster. Then he leaves without doing anything to help clean up, or help any of the victims. The character of Captain Hindsight and the episodes he appears in are classic South Park, simultaneously mocking BP and the people who suddenly became offshore drilling experts overnight so they could self-righteously blame BP for their mistakes. I want to expand on the idea behind Captain Hindsight: people’s tendency to quickly and strongly assign blame after a disaster, and who or what they decide to blame. How often do people accurately diagnose the circumstances and causes that led to a disaster? I’d argue that in the short term, people’s view of a disaster is understandably but fatally narrow and superficial. By the time a wider and more objective assessment is finally done, it’s too late to be useful. 

We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Courthouse

A common pattern after a man-made disaster that one can observe, is that someone will lose their job or be put in prison, or in an especially brutal system executed as punishment for the negligence, incompetence, or callousness that allowed the disaster to happen. It’s also a well known phenomenon that a few individuals get scapegoated to keep the blame narrowly focused on them, so that some people can escape scrutiny, or so that wider institutional problems are ignored or overlooked. As I said above, as with most human behavior, this is understandable to a point. We don’t like to confront the uncomfortable truth that reality is chaotic and meaningless, and that at any point a legion of big and small mistakes or missteps could cascade into an avalanche of pain and suffering. What might be even more frightening to contemplate, is how often these disasters are narrowly avoided, and we never have any clue how close we came to untimely death or hideous injury. When something does happen to upend our lives, it’s easier, and it makes us feel better if we can lay all the blame and responsibility at the feet of a few people. It allows us to sleep easier when we don’t have to look deeper at the institutional or societal causes of calamities. I want to very briefly look at two events in particular to explain what I mean by institutional and societal causes, the 2018 and 2019 crashes of two Boeing 737 MAX aircraft that combined killed nearly 350 people. 

Obviously for the sake of brevity I will make my summary of these crashes cursory, but if you are interested authors have literally devoted entire books to the subject. Boeing wanted to release a larger version of the 737 airliner with bigger and more efficient turbofan engines to compete with Airbus’ A320 Neo. To get the new version of their decades old plane released to airline customers quickly, and to avoid the long and expensive process of getting the MAX certified as a brand new airliner, Boeing used a software system to correct the handling changes to the plane caused by the position and greater thrust of the new engines, in lieu of an engineering solution. Even more crucially, part of Boeing’s sales pitch for the MAX was that current 737 pilots would not need simulator training to transition to the MAX, a long and expensive process for airlines. So, the software system that corrected the nose up tendency of the MAX (abbreviated as MCAS) was specifically left out of the pilot’s manual for the new aircraft.

Effectively, the MCAS misbehaving is what destroyed two aircraft, and led to hundreds of deaths. In one crash a sensor was installed incorrectly on the ground by maintenance crews, that faulty sensor fed incorrect information to MCAS. That is obviously an important part of the crash, and analyzing the behavior and decisions of the pilots in both crashes is an important part of disaster reconstruction as well. None of that analysis, or other mistakes made before the loss of both MAX aircraft absolves Boeing, however. In the company’s haste to release a new airliner they cut corners, and they created a dangerous aircraft as a result. 

After the 2018 and 2019 accidents, many were quick to blame the pilots of the Indonesian and Ethiopian airlines that were flying the planes for the accidents, claiming that the training standards of the pilots were not up to those of American or Western standards. I don’t know if that’s strictly true, and even if it is I think that line of thinking gets uncomfortably close to racist assumptions of white and Western superiority, so extreme caution is needed when broaching that subject. 

This is the pattern with people and man-made disasters. There are usually always mistakes made on the day of a disaster by those present on scene, and are the final catalyst for the worst possible scenario. People tend to latch on to these mistakes, and viciously criticize those who made the mistakes as the only ones responsible. Only later does a greater examination of the deeper institutional flaws begin to shed more light on the deep context that leads to needless tragedy. Rarely however, do people look even deeper, at the society that created the institutions that cause disasters. 

Let’s return to the 737 MAX crashes again as an example. If we follow the chain of culpability and responsibility, at the end of that chain we find the pilots and maintenance crew of the particular aircraft that crashed. If we go back further on the chain we find Boeing, a company that built a dangerous aircraft where an accident was probably bound to happen, a company that spent more money on stock buybacks than they did on research and development. What if we follow the chain of responsibility even further back? What kind of society creates an airline company that cares more about enriching shareholders than it does about making a safe aircraft? What kind of values does a society have that creates people who value profit over human life? 

This is another reason why people are so quick to assign blame based on superficial calculations of causes and responsibilities. It’s a lot easier to throw the people in the immediate vicinity under the bus than it is to follow the chain of culpability upward. Those higher up that chain are also eager to deflect responsibility away from themselves. After the MAX crashes Boeing was forced to compensate the airlines and pay the families of the victims, but how is that justice? Who else can get away with killing hundreds of people and only be forced to pay a fine? Even as this piece is being written long after the two crashes, the US justice is still deciding whether or not they should hold Boeing criminally liable. If it’s that difficult to punish a company for criminal negligence, how do you hold a society to account? A society is such a big and amorphous concept it’s impossible to know where to begin. How do you change a society to make it less prone to creating the conditions for man-made catastrophes, what do you change, where do you make changes? The title of my book seems appropriate here, these all seem to be a lot of questions without any obvious answers. 

This question of societal culpability is so complex it can leave one spinning in circles. A moment ago I said that the US justice department spent years deciding whether or not Boeing getting 350 people killed is a crime worth prosecuting. That in of itself is one reason why the MAX crashes happened. The US was not unique in this attitude, but it was a country that always treated crimes committed by rich people with kid gloves. As long as you did terrible things in a fancy boardroom while wearing an expensive suit, odds are you would be treated lightly by the legal system in the United States. Let’s imagine that a group of gunmen carried out two separate, devastating shootings that combined killed just under 350 people in the United States. Would the US legal system hesitate to punish the gunmen? Now let’s imagine an airplane manufacturer designs a fatally flawed airliner that gets just under 350 people killed in two plane crashes. Should the US legal system hesitate to punish the manufacturer? If the answer to that question is yes, why? Is it because the manufacturer didn’t set out with the express intention of killing hundreds of people? Does the goal of wanting to make as much money while spending as little as possible absolve you from the deaths you’re responsible for? Does killing hundreds of people accidentally make any difference to the dead? It’s my understanding that you’re just as dead irrespective of whether or not your death is an accidental or intentional. Because Boeing killed through negligence that makes it okay? Because they killed with meetings and memos rather than with guns it makes it not a crime? Because the blame is spread through more people in the company than a few gunmen that makes it less criminal? These are the kinds of societal values that can lead to disaster. 

The issue of who to punish, how, and why in relation to Boeing and the MAX crashes is a complicated question. There’s more to the story that I haven’t even mentioned either, like Boeing’s relationship with the FAA, which in part makes regulators and lawmakers culpable as well. Just because an issue is complicated, however, doesn’t mean nothing should be done. That would mean crime is legal, as long as you can make your crimes complicated enough that the justice system won’t touch it with a ten foot pole. 

Conclusion

Every man-made disaster is a series of misjudgments, mistakes, miscalculations, and negligent behavior. In assigning blame for a catastrophe, most people are satisfied with fixing all their ire on a few people, or a few immediate factors. Why? Because it’s easy. Blaming and punishing a few people doesn’t require a lot of thought, and it doesn’t require any changes. Altering the attitudes and assumptions of an institution or an entire society takes work, and honest introspection. That kind of introspection and change are difficult enough without interference, and those in power and authority definitely interfere. Anyone who has a vested interest in the status quo remaining unchanged are loath to see their power threatened, even if that means getting people killed in the process. How do we overcome that resistance, and how do we make human societies better at spotting their flaws and correcting them before they lead to unnecessary tragedy? Frankly, I have no clue. Human societies have been around for a long time, and a lot of ideas have been tried, and to my knowledge none of them have been very good at self-correction. My only advice for the United States is to stop glorifying greed and start treating white collar crime the same as any other crime, you know, like the rule of law says we should. That would be a good place to start.  

Postscript: I was inspired to write this piece after reading two books by the author Adam Higginbotham. The first is called Midnight in Chernobyl, about the world’s worst nuclear disaster (so far at least). The second is called Challenger, and it’s about the space shuttle explosion in 1986. Both books are highly entertaining and readable while also looking decades back from both disasters to seek out greater context and insight into why both events happened the way they did. If you want to read a book on the Boeing 737 MAX crashes, then I recommend Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing, by Peter Robison. I’ll provide a link to all three books below. 

Midnight in Chernobyl: https://bookshop.org/p/books/midnight-in-chernobyl-the-untold-story-of-the-world-s-greatest-nuclear-disaster-adam-higginbotham/15129431?ean=9781501134630

Challenger: https://bookshop.org/p/books/challenger-an-american-tragedy-adam-higginbotham/20712668?ean=9781982176617

Flying Blind: https://bookshop.org/p/books/flying-blind-the-737-max-tragedy-and-the-fall-of-boeing-peter-robison/17204663?ean=9780593082515

P.S.S. Just before publishing this piece I read a news article about how the US Justice Department was likely seeking a plea deal from Boeing rather than a criminal trial to prosecute Boeing for the MAX crashes. The future will tell if that came to pass, but I’m not optimistic about Boeing actually going to trial. I’m not a lawyer so I don’t understand a lot of the intricacies of the law, nor do I want to. The more I learn of the legal system, the more convinced I am that arcane bureaucracy and injustice are synonyms.

Aside from my personal feelings about the injustice of the law, this lack of accountability on Boeing’s part is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been talking about in this piece, and There’s more than One Way to Skin a Democracy. Under what delusion is the US government, and the public at large operating under? Do they simply expect that massive corporations, whose only modus operandi is to make money will protect people and the environment out of the goodness of their hearts? Of course they won’t, corporations need to be forced to behave ethically, and that’s done with scrutiny and enforcement. If you refuse to punish companies like Boeing for killing hundreds of people, they will learn they can get away with it, and that in turn creates a society of negligence and callousness, which in turn creates a vicious cycle that feeds on itself. You can’t give corporations a blank check to do whatever they want, and be surprised when they abuse that blank check. We either need to revoke that blank check, or stop being surprised when they abuse it.

Foreword: This piece is about US presidents, the crimes they commit, and the apparent impunity they have when committing crimes. As the reader is just about to find out, this essay was written while Trump’s first criminal trial was ongoing. Just before this piece was published he was found guilty of all charges in that first criminal trial. As of this foreword being written Trump has yet to be sentenced, and if that sentence is anything less than being hurled into an active volcano by the Statue of Liberty herself I consider everything you’re about to read to still be completely valid and relevant. 

Introduction

One thing the United States likes to claim is that we are a society that values the rule of law. A concept that posits that everyone is equally accountable to the law, regardless of their religion, means, status, or any other factor. It sounds good in theory, a society striving for justice in a chaotic universe by holding all to the same standards and laws. Hopefully I don’t have to tell the reader that the United States has never come close to realizing the dream of equality before the law for all. I know the US is supposed to be a nation striving to create a more perfect union, but we’ve also been a nation of hypocrites for our entire history too. All the bloviating about the US being a nation of freedom rings hollow when one remembers that this is the same nation that began with a system of race based chattel slavery. If the United States can live with a fundamental hypocrisy like slavery for decades, it’s not surprising that the rule of law sounds more like a joke than a goal that’s being strived for. 

When this piece is being written Donald Trump was in his first of many criminal trials. The future will reveal how this trial and the others turned out, and what if any effect they had on the 2024 election. Personally, I was furious as I watched this first criminal trial and watched the legal system shuffle with agonizing doltishness towards prosecuting Trump for the endless list of crimes he committed while in office and before he ever ran for president. I asked myself with increasing incredulity how Trump could commit crime after crime and the legal system all but refused to punish him. Any other American with less power and means would face far worse consequences for far less. Even when Trump committed treason by inciting an insurrection it seemed only the people who stormed the Capitol were targeted for punishment, while the people who planned and incited it were largely ignored. Once again, without meaning to Trump highlighted a glaring flaw in the American political system that was ripe for exploitation. The American legal system was either unwilling or unequipped to deal with a man like Trump. Watching the legal system fail to uphold the rule of law was as disappointing as it was shocking. 

Impunity is the Rule, not the Exception

However, I should not have been as shocked as I was. As I just said above, the rule of law is a concept the United States has paid lip service to, but never seriously pursued. People of power and means have always been treated with a light hand in the US. I wondered how Trump could violate the law so flagrantly, but the truth is that he is far from the first US president to do so. It seems that the bigger the crime or the more crimes a president commits, the less willing we are to punish them for it. That will be the focus of this piece, US presidents and why they are tacitly, if not explicitly, immune from punishment. I want to highlight one particular crime committed by Richard Nixon and his campaign as he was running for the 1968 elections. Why focus on this one particular story? Well for one, if I tried to list every crime committed by US presidents alone that could quickly balloon into a multi-volume book. Secondly, I think this story encapsulates what the core of the problem is. 

I’ll try and explain the events with as much brevity as possible. During the 1968 election campaign, President Johnson’s administration was negotiating with the North and South Vietnamese governments for peace terms, to facilitate an end to the war, or at least the US’ withdrawal. The Nixon campaign had back channel communications with the South Vietnamese government, and they had Henry Kissinger leaking classified information from the Johnson administration (it’s a long story but Kissinger had classified access to the negotiations). Nixon and his campaign didn’t want the Johnson administration to successfully negotiate an end to the war before he left office, that would be seen as a victory for the democrats. Nixon cared more about his own political success than he did about stopping a war. So, the Nixon campaign told the South Vietnamese to sabotage the negotiations, thereby denying the democrats a political victory in time for the November elections. Nixon assured the South Vietnamese government that they could get a better peace deal if he was president (North Vietnam conquered and unified all of Vietnam in 1975 if you’re wondering how much that promise was worth). Nixon got what he wanted, the South Vietnamese torpedoed the negotiations, and US involvement in the war lasted another 5 years. Just in case this isn’t obvious, Nixon committed treason. He was a private citizen clandestinely interfering in US foreign affairs. Everyone remembers Nixon for the Watergate scandal, but on the scale of the human suffering Nixon’s treason caused the Watergate scandal can’t even begin to compare. The reader might at this point be wondering why they haven’t heard about this, and why this story isn’t a massive piece of popular history in the United States. 

To answer that, I’m going to quote the fantastic book Kissinger’s Shadow, by Greg Grandin. This quote begins by referring to new information about the negotiations the Nixon campaign received. 

“Nixon’s people acted fast…they urged the South Vietnamese to derail the talks, promising better conditions were Nixon to be elected. President Johnson was informed of the meddling. Through wiretaps and intercepts, he learned that Nixon’s campaign was telling the South Vietnamese that Nixon was going to win and “to hold on a while longer.” If the White House had gone public with the information, the outrage might have also swung the elections to Humphrey. But Johnson hesitated. He feared that “Nixon’s conniving” was just too explosive. “This is treason,” he said. “It would rock the world.”

“Johnson stayed silent, Nixon won, and the war went on.”

 I’m not certain if the wiretaps and intercepts Johnson used to obtain this information were legal (knowing the FBI under J Edgar Hoover I’m inclined to think not), but even if they were legal they were certainly unethical. Perhaps that is another important reason why Johnson wanted to keep Nixon’s crimes a secret, revealing them would have revealed his own crimes (these wiretaps were far from the only ones Johnson authorized during his presidency.) Even with this caveat in place, I find Johnson’s rationale positively insane.

As I just pointed out, Johnson was by no means innocent himself, but he knew that Nixon committed treason, and yet he thought it was a better idea to let a man who had committed treason become president than to point out his treason? WHY???? 

Did Johnson fear revealing what Nixon had done would appear to be a political smear campaign, a chance to attack someone in the opposite party before an election? Was he afraid that a reckoning with presidential power and secret keeping would dig up skeletons in his closet, and maybe limit the power of future presidents? Is the ruling class willfully blind to the damage this lack of accountability causes? How could Johnson possibly think that a man willing to commit treason to obtain political office wouldn’t abuse that office once he got it? Do politicians at this level of power adopt a code of silence? “I’ll let you get away with your crimes if you let me get away with mine.” That’s the only logical reason I can think of, because Johnson’s excuse that Nixon’s meddling in the negotiations would “rock the world,” if it came to light is trash. You know what else will rock the world, keeping a superpower locked in a war in Southeast Asia for another five years to advance one man’s political career. 

This excuse that is often trotted out; that holding presidents accountable for their crimes, or even revealing them in the first place would be too destabilizing, it might even threaten the entire American political system. I can’t fathom how anyone can say this with a straight face. Isn’t not punishing American presidents for the crimes they commit equally a threat to the entire American political system? What precedent are you setting, and what behavior are you allowing when you REFUSE to punish wrongdoing? You’re not saving the system, you’re just destroying it by other means. If the reader is wondering why Donald Trump could plan and incite an insurrection on January 6th and get away with it, it’s because the US does not hold presidents accountable. Johnson didn’t tell the nation that Nixon committed treason, Ford pardoned Nixon for Watergate, Reagan didn’t get thrown in prison for the Iran-Contra scheme, George W. Bush’s administration lied to the American public about Iraq possessing WMDs to justify invading. There’s so much else I’m probably not even aware of, but all of it goes to show that the more we let presidents get away with, the more bold they will become. What else might a US president do when they realize they won’t be punished for it? What’s a bigger threat to American democracy, obeying the rule of law and punishing high office holders, or naively hoping that a president has enough shame not to do anything wrong?

I’ve said before that politics is an ugly business, and geopolitics is ruthless enough that even principled leaders might feel forced to make terrible decisions if they feel like it could prevent an even worse outcome, but this isn’t the issue being discussed. I thought the point of elected representatives was that they were supposed to be accountable to the people that elected them. Can the United States even call itself a republic if the highest office holder is immune to the law? At what point can we dispense with the pretense and just start calling the US president an absolute monarch? 

At the very least, can we stop pretending America is a society that cares about the rule of law? We clearly don’t, and we clearly haven’t cared, otherwise we’d have put a stop to this impunity long ago. Alternatively, if we won’t do anything about presidential impunity can we at least have the dignity to be ashamed of it?

Postscript: If you want to read more about politicians and others in power escaping any punishment for the horrible things they’ve done, I highly recommend Kissinger’s Shadow. Grandin manages to pack a huge amount of information into a short and highly readable book, and through Kissinger’s career the reader will also get a look into the events that shatter the illusion that the US were the “good guys” in the Cold War. 

https:/bookshop.org/p/books/kissinger-s-shadow-the-long-reach-of-america-s-most-controversial-statesman-greg-grandin/8479378?ean=9781250097170

Book Discussion: The Plague, by Albert Camus. Translated by Laura Marris

Introduction

Have you ever found a situation, piece of information, or something else in your life to be equally comforting and depressing? It’s an odd feeling, comfort and depression sound like they should be mutually exclusive emotions. However, the more I’ve learned about history and the past has shown me that these two emotions can coexist quite happily together. Reading The Plague by Albert Camus produced the same feeling of comfort and depression in me. The Plague tells a fictional story set in the real city of Oran in Algeria, set sometime in the 1940s. The book was originally released in 1947, and it is a fascinating exploration of how the people of Oran react to a citywide quarantine as the bubonic plague methodically sweeps the city. 

The Plague could have been written in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. It could be written in the wake of all the pandemics that have yet to happen. Camus’ work has lost none of its relevance since it was published in 1947. On the one hand, there is some comfort to be found in knowing that people of the past have had to deal with similar trials, and suffered many of the same tragedies. The entire history of our species is inextricably linked with disease. Sometimes those diseases are ever present, but low level killers. Other times a pathogen fells half a population in a year or two. Yet despite this specter constantly haunting our collective existence, humanity has persisted. Even in the wake of unimaginable tragedy people find a way to pick up the pieces and persist. There is something to admire in that tenacity against futility. On the other hand, it’s unsettling to recognize that people have always had the same irrational, unhelpful, or even harmful coping mechanisms to deal with wide scale disease outbreaks. Intellectually and philosophically speaking, humanity appears to be stuck running on a treadmill. We’re running really fast, but not moving forward. The Plague is a work of fiction, and Camus also wrote it to be a metaphor for France under occupation in the Second World War. Despite that, anyone who has lived through an epidemic or pandemic can read this book and wonder if Camus was reaching into the future to describe events they lived through, or reaching into their minds to extract their thoughts and feelings.

Camus didn’t have to reach into the future though. He simply had to reach into the past. From the past Camus had plenty of examples to inform him how people might react to a citywide plague. In The Plague Camus describes a city of people hounded by a gnawing sense of separation. For some, this separation is figurative, they are separated from the normalcy and opportunities that the plague and the quarantine deny them. For others, their separation is much more literal, they are trapped in the city while their loved ones outside wait without knowing exactly what’s going on. Camus is chillingly accurate when he tells the story of the desperate measures the city takes to deal with the increasing number of dead. As more and more bodies literally pile up, all the ceremonies and rituals people create to give death meaning are crushed under the weight of logistical demands. First the city buries several people to each grave, then in mass graves, then when that becomes insufficient, they start incinerating the bodies. It all mirrors real life to a disturbing extent. 
There is so much more to The Plague. Like I have with other book discussions in the past, I’d like to share some of my favorite quotes from the book. I have already given away some of the details the reader will find in The Plague, and the quotes below will reveal more. This does not mean, however, that I am giving away everything in Camus’ work. There are plenty of details I am leaving out on purpose, to encourage the reader to experience The Plague for themselves.

Book Quotations

-This first quote from the book is short, but it speaks for itself. 

”How could they have imagined that a plague would cancel the future, their travel and conversations?”

-This second quote is between two characters, one of them a doctor. They are discussing issues relating to plague and faith, and what a doctor’s mission should be in times of plague. 

“Yes,” agreed Tarrou, “I can understand. But your victories will always be temporary, that’s all.” Rieux seemed to darken. “Always, I know it. That’s not a reason to stop fighting.”

-The next excerpt is describing people’s growing indifference to the deaths from the plague. Unlike many other disasters, when a disease ravages a population month after month, they grow exhausted, and are unable to feel the same terror or sorrow that they did in the beginning.

“But nothing is less spectacular than a scourge, and, by their very duration, great misfortunes are monotonous. In the memories of those who lived through them, the terrible days of plague didn’t appear as tall flames, sumptuous and cruel, but rather as an endless stagnation that crushed everything in its path.”

-The text below is near the end of the book. One character just asked Tarrou what he thought would change with the plague winding down in the city.

“Tarrou thought that the plague would both change and not change the city, that, of course, our fellow citizens’ strongest desire was and would be to act as if nothing had changed, and so in that sense, nothing would be changed, but that in another sense, you can’t forget everything, even with necessary force of will, and the plague would leave traces, at least in their hearts.”

Comparison: The Plague & A lot of Questions…

Before concluding I also wanted to compare a section of The Plague with one from my own book. To be clear, I’m not trying to compare myself with Albert Camus, judging by his success he was clearly a better writer than I am. However, I wrote my own book years before I ever heard of The Plague. I was astonished and humbled to find out that Camus had anticipated what I would write in response to the Covid-19 pandemic in the late 1940s. No doubt other people before Camus made similar observations. Which, as I said in the introduction, is both comforting and depressing. None of the tragedies that befall us, or any of the uncertainties we have about the future are unprecedented. Calamity is a constant in human history. It’s comforting to know we aren’t alone in our suffering, but it’s discouraging to see the same patterns repeating. I wonder if people living through future pandemics will write something they think is clever and insightful, only to find out Albert Camus was way ahead of them. 

But I’m digressing, I’ll start with a section from The Plague, and then quote my own book. I’ll leave the quotation marks off of my own writing since I can hardly plagiarize myself. Also, the quotation from my book will begin in the middle of a section where I am discussing an imaginary modern pandemic that is killing thousands of people everyday all over the United States.

“But what were a hundred million dead? When you’re at war, you barely have any idea of what a dead man is. And since a dead man carries no weight unless you’ve seen him dead, a hundred million corpses strewn across history are nothing but smoke in the imagination. The doctor remembered the plague of Constantinople, which according to Procopius killed ten thousand victims in a day. Ten thousand dead equaled five times the audience of a large movie theater. That’s what they should do. Gather up the people at the exits of five cinemas, take them to a city square, and make them die in piles to see it a little more clearly. At least then they could put faces they knew to that anonymous pile.”

Can the human brain process the idea of, “I can’t see them, but thousands of people died today from a pandemic, that’s terrible?” Does that idea really sink in for the animal that is concerned about locality, what it can see, and affects that animal specifically? What would it take for that abstract idea to sink in for everyone?

How about this, at an appointed moment every single day, all of those who died as a result of the ongoing pandemic (we will say two thousand five hundred daily) get magically transported out of the hospitals they died in all over the country. Their bodies are then all magically transported to one location, Times Square in New York City…All the bodies in one place allows everyone who looks upon them to physically see, not just imagine, the price of the pandemic that created the bodies they now look upon.

Conclusion

I’ll close out this discussion with one more quote from The Plague. It’s the final paragraph of the book, a warning about how the bubonic plague could one day return to the city of Oran. It doesn’t take much imagination to broaden this warning to the entire planet, and there are more diseases to be worried about than just the plague. All it takes is a simple genetic mutation to start the next pandemic. 

“Indeed, as he heard the cries of delight rising from the city, Rieux remembered that this delight was always threatened. For he knew what this joyous crowd did not, and what you can read in books–that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears, that it can lie dormant for decades in furniture and linens, that it waits patiently in rooms, in basements, in trunks, among handkerchiefs and paperwork, and that perhaps the day would come when, for the sorrow and education of men, the plague would revive its rats and dispatch them to die in a happy city.”

Postscript– I’ll include a link to The Plague below. I also recommend Plagues Upon the Earth, written by Kyle Harper. I’ve reviewed another one of his books in the past, and Plagues Upon the Earth is a fascinating and accessible work. Also, I highly recommend the 2011 film Contagion. It was released 9 years before the Covid-19 pandemic began, and yet it predicted what a 21st century pandemic would look like to an uncanny degree.

The Plague: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-plague-a-new-translation-by-laura-marris-albert-camus/19781908?ean=9780593082096

Plagues Upon the Earth: https://bookshop.org/p/books/plagues-upon-the-earth-disease-and-the-course-of-human-history-kyle-harper/16402399?ean=9780691230597

Contagion: movies unlimited link for contagion

Introduction

As longtime readers might be aware, I tend to think a lot, to ask questions about people and societies they build. Some people might even accuse me of overthinking. Well, I’m certainly not about to prove those people wrong, because I was thinking about the lottery system in the United States. When this piece was published, the lottery industry was massive in the US. Checking any mainstream news feed one was likely to find a story about how big the largest jackpot had grown to after no winning numbers. There were national, state, and local lotteries, with different odds and different payouts. Lottery scratch tickets could be bought in almost any town or city large enough to have a filling station or a grocery store. If you asked anyone buying lottery tickets what they planned to do with their winnings once they finally won chances are they already had their entire life planned out. All they needed to start their new life of happiness and prosperity was to be lucky just one time. 

I object to the entire lottery industry, and the mindset it creates in people who buy into the promises of the lottery. I’ll explain my objections in two broad points in the paragraphs below. Before that, however, I want to make something clear. I’ll be talking below about systemic inequality and people being trapped in inescapable poverty. Global inequality is a massive crisis, and that inequality is due in large part to the machinations and lobbying of those in power to keep it that way. However, I do not believe in some massive conspiracy that world events are being controlled by some reclusive committee of elite. Belief in conspiracy theories appears to me to be an alternative religion for those who do not ascribe to traditional organized religion. Believing in evil masterminds who control world events might sound like a strange thing to put one’s faith in. On the other hand, it’s comforting to think that somebody is in control, no matter how dark their agenda may be. It’s a lot more difficult to accept how meaningless and chaotic reality often is. Systemic inequality doesn’t even require a global conspiracy, basic human greed and self-interest is more than adequate to accomplish the task. 

First Objection

My first major objection to the concept of the lottery, and a lot of gambling in general, is that it thrives and depends on exploiting the desperation and hopes of impoverished people. There would always be people who would gamble and bet their earnings on long odds to add some excitement to their otherwise mundane lives. Gambling is one of those vices humanity seems unable to rid itself of, but the promise of winning instant riches at astronomical odds only appeals to people desperate enough to not hope for much more. Is rent eating half your income or more? Do you have car payments to make, or student loans, or credit card debt, or medical debt? Maybe all of the above? Do you have any savings at all, or has the cost of living reduced your margin to destitution to a razor’s edge? Has living and struggling in late stage surveillance capitalist America left you feeling spent and jaded down to your slowly wilting spirit?

Well worry not, there is a way out! Maybe. All it takes is just a little bit of whatever money you have left over every month or week. If you buy some tickets and pay into a collective pot that lots of other desperate people are buying into, you have a chance of winning that huge pot, minus a massive tax deduction of course. It might not happen this week, or this month, or year, or the decade after that. It might not happen at all, but just imagine the possibilities if it did. You could get that surgery the doctor says you desperately need that you can’t afford, because according to your insurance company, you have a preexisting condition called “being alive.” Maybe you can finally afford to own a home of your own, one that you could afford to maintain and renovate as needed. Maybe you could retire early and take the time to travel to all the places you dreamed of seeing. Isn’t a few dollars here and there worth it for even a remote chance to realize all those hopes?  

Behind all the pomp and hype around winning instant wealth is a predatory instinct to further exploit people who are already being exploited. When someone pins all their hopes on a random accident of chance to liberate them from the injustice of modern American society, they are giving up on finding another solution. To be clear, I don’t fault people for wanting to escape poverty, and for those struggling to live, money is the answer to many of their problems. But there is a diminishing return on the happiness that money can provide, and we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be locked into a mode of thinking that believes that money=endless  happiness and fulfillment. The promise of winning the lottery is a carrot dangling on a stick in front of our faces, and just enough people get that carrot for us to believe it could happen to us someday. Maybe we should stop chasing after that carrot and instead demand it. 

Second Objection

The lottery system in the US not only takes advantage of people, it also shines a light on American culture’s selfish individualism. Hoping you win the lottery isn’t a protest against the unjust system that creates inequality to begin with, your only objection is to you being in poverty. If you became rich you would cease to be a victim of the unequal system and instead perpetuate it. The hope of quick riches so many Americans cling to not only allows us to be led around by the nose chasing after chimeras, it leaves us thinking only of ourselves. We shouldn’t limit ourselves to imagining the end to our own poverty, we should imagine the end of poverty, period. Dreaming of winning the lottery shifts people’s thinking and energy away from changing society for the better and instead keeps them locked into it. It reminds me of the lyrics of Pink Floyd’s song Welcome to the Machine; “What did you dream?  It’s alright we told you what to dream.” We are limiting ourselves when we can only imagine a better future for ourselves and for humanity within the confines of the existing status quo.

Some might be thinking at this point: “Really? Are you that much of a killjoy that you have a problem with something that’s fun and relatively innocuous like betting on the lottery? Besides, do you think getting rid of the lottery would make any difference? What do you expect people to do? Is there really any chance of changing systemic inequality when the forces marshaled against that goal are so numerous and powerful?”

Do I think getting rid of predatory practices like the lottery would lead to any great sea change in American society? No. When problems like inequality are rooted as deeply and spread as far in a society as they are in the US, any small change is window dressing, a sop to public opinion. A deeply rooted system can’t be changed without first uprooting the system. I’m mixing metaphors but I hope you get the point. Is it likely to expect systemic inequality to change? If the history of most sedentary societies is instructive, then no. Humanity has a knack for creating hierarchies and institutions of coercive force to legitimize and enforce those hierarchies. On the other hand, how much more unlikely is it to expect deep systemic change if we give up and never try? Or worse yet, what if we literally and figuratively buy into the unequal system in the hope that someday we will be the ones on top benefiting from the inequality we were seeking to escape in the first place? 

Conclusion

Perhaps I am overthinking this issue, and the lottery is something that’s not that controversial, and I should just let people have their fun. Even if that’s true, there is a broader point to be made. We shouldn’t take any part of our society for granted. Human cultures are constantly changing and evolving, nothing remains the way it has always been forever. Just because some cultural practice has been around a long time doesn’t by definition make it good. We shouldn’t take anything for granted. We should always be looking at ourselves and the societies we build, and wondering if what we have built is just, fair, or even makes sense.

Introduction:

One of the points I’ve made many times in my writing, and one I find myself returning to again and again, is the importance of examining historical individuals with a critical eye. Too often people of historical import are reduced to heroes and villains, easily understood and one dimensional caricatures representing what used to be a real person at one point. Obviously, a person could both be a hero, or a villain, depending who you ask. Either way, however, creating a caricature of someone involves removing whatever parts of their life conflicts with the caricature being created. This makes history, and the people in it, a lot simpler, but simple does not mean factual. In fact, if you ask me, the more one simplifies historical actors, the more one distorts them.

For the purpose of this discussion, I want to instead create four broad categories that most people of historical significance could likely belong in. Before anyone points this out, yes I am fully aware of the irony of this. I don’t like people being labeled as heroes or villains, but I will force them into four arbitrary categories that I made up. How is that better? I don’t intend for these categories to be bulletproof, and they are far from a complete list. In addition, I will use some examples below, but which person belongs in what category is also open to argument and interpretation. However, even with those caveats in place, I still think the list below is more robust and retains more nuance than a binary of hero or villain.

Category 1: The Inarguable Bad: These are the sort of people who committed such heinous and inexcusable acts that no one respectable would ever defend them. An example that immediately springs to mind for me is Joseph Mengele, the infamous “Angel of Death.” I hope everyone reading would readily agree that a “doctor” that was an active participant in the genocide carried out at the Auschwitz concentration camp is indefensible. 

Category 2: The Argued Over: The people in this category also are responsible for mass death and suffering, but the issue of whether or not they were “good” or “bad” is debated though not necessarily debatable. Often these are the sort of people who became the authoritarian rulers of states, and the cult of personality they created around themselves can linger and affect public or academic discourse for generations to come. I would put Stalin in this category, specifically because there are still people who make excuses or justifications for the tens of millions of deaths he is responsible for. Time and distance might change who gets put into this category. As the world gets further away from the suffering someone caused, it becomes easier to ignore it or downplay it as an unavoidable consequence of great people changing history.

Category 3: The Inarguable Good: In my opinion almost no one of great historical significance belongs in this category, it is an extremely small club. Crucially I said people of historical significance, I am certain there were plenty of people throughout history who were unusually kind and generous, but never made it into history because humanity’s obsessions revolve around drama and violence. People who belong in this category will also change over time. As cultural norms and values change, people who were once moral paragons might become despicable. 

Category 4: Messy or Uncertain: This classification is vague enough that it can fit most historical figures under its umbrella. These are the sort of people whose qualities and actions both recommend them and damn them. This category also reflects what people are most often like in lived reality, complicated, with a laundry list of overlapping or conflicting motivations and beliefs.

For this piece, I wanted to pick an example of someone I believe belongs in category 4, John Brown (for anyone who is unfamiliar with him I’ll provide a brief biography below). However, depending on who you ask he could belong in any of the other 3 categories. I was inspired to write about John Brown because there are a lot of qualities I admire about him, but almost as many that give me pause. Some of his actions I cannot praise highly enough, and others on basic principle I have to object to. He was a radical for his time, both in his beliefs and his deeds. His radical beliefs were more authentically American than most of his contemporaries, but his radical deeds left many dead in his shadow. In all honesty, John Brown is a man I want to like, but I am unsure if I should. 

A Brief Biography

For those totally unaware of who John Brown was and the time period he lived in I’ll try to provide a succinct biography of the man and the world he lived in. For those of us interested in history we are lucky that John Brown was a grown man when the first cameras were coming into use in the 19th century. Even without knowing anything about him the photograph above reveals a man possessing a unique energy. He had one of the most generic names in the English language, and yet he remains “the” John Brown, not “a” John Brown.

John Brown lived from 1800 to 1859. He was a man of intense religious devotion. Just as important as his religious faith, was his abolitionist views. A fact that many people today misunderstand about the first half of 19th century America is that abolitionists were considered radicals among those of “respectable opinion.” John Brown was a radical among radicals, and he believed in violence to achieve his goals. The two events he is most famous for is a massacre he led in Kansas in 1856, and a raid on a federal armory in what is today West Virginia in 1859.

I’ll try to be brief, but the Pottawatomie Massacre in the Kansas territory stemmed from tension that was present in so many aspects of US politics before the Civil War, the struggle between slave states and free states. The question was always posed when new territories wanted to join the Union: should they allow slavery in their borders when they were incorporated into the Union? There were different attempts at compromises and solutions that conveniently dodged the question of whether slavery should exist at all. The period in Kansas in which John Brown carried out his massacre is known to history as “Bleeding Kansas.” Over a period of years there was basically a miniature civil war in Kansas between people who wanted Kansas to be a free state, and those who wanted it to be a slave state. John Brown and the other perpetrators of the Pottawatomie Massacre targeted pro-slavery supporters in retaliation to an attack against abolitionist newspapers in Lawrence, Kansas shortly before.

After Kansas, Brown eventually made his way to Virginia to lead what turned out to be a foolhardy attempt to secure a federal armory in 1859. Brown intended to use the captured weapons to arm enslaved Black Americans and spread a liberating revolution south. Brown only had a few followers with him, and only a handful of enslaved people actually joined him at the armory. With John Brown and his followers holed up in the armory with some hostages, a standoff and eventual gun fight ultimately lead to the death or capture of Brown’s entire retinue. Brown himself was eventually tried for treason and hanged. The raid was probably never going to work as intended, and at least from some of the books I have read of the Civil War there was speculation that Brown might have been deliberately trying to make a martyr of himself for the cause of abolition.

The raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859 obviously helped increase tensions before the Civil War. While many abolitionists John Brown spoke before the raid cautioned him against it or refused to participate, after the raid and his execution John Brown did become a hero to abolitionists. His heroism to abolitionists was matched by fear and disgust among enslavers. Whatever people’s opinions about the man, John Brown became a household name, not only for the raid itself, but for his stoic and unshakable belief in his cause during his imprisonment before his execution. 

How to Judge John Brown?

There are two important points to remember about the analysis below. 1. This is my own analysis, and in keeping with my theme of the messiness and complexity of history, different people would have different interpretations, and 2. I am basing this discussion off of a brief study of John Brown and his life, if I did a deeper dive into his life story I might come away with different conclusions. I don’t think either of these points detracts from my thesis for this piece. In your own study of history, you will frequently encounter people who do not fit into simple definitions of “good” or “bad.” John Brown’s legacy is both good and bad.

I’ll start with what I consider to be problematic. There’s no getting around that he led a massacre of five people in Kansas. The victims were pro-slavery, but as far as I know, none of them were enslaving anyone at the time of their deaths. Did they deserve to die because of their beliefs, even if those beliefs were abhorrent? Dragging people out of their homes at night and killing them is morally upsetting, no matter how noble the goals and intentions may have been. Anyone who wants to label John Brown a hero has to grapple with this troubling chapter of his life. 

An aspect of John Brown’s character I take issue with is his intense religious devotion. I wrote a whole essay in my book about how people need to take the time to seriously and rigorously question their beliefs, to see if they can withstand scrutiny. As a rule, I am cautious towards people of fanatic religious faith. John Brown might be an exception to that rule, however. If you’re going to be a religious fanatic about any cause, ending slavery is probably the best cause to be devoted to. In spite of the deaths he is responsible for, I would also argue that John Brown was more authentically Christian than so-called “Christians” in the south and border states. In the antebellum south it was common for preachers to use the pulpit to justify the institution of slavery, narrowly interpreting whatever Bible verses or doctrines they needed to to make slavery seem “Christian.” John Brown is certainly not without his blemishes, but a man willing to take up the cause of liberation is a lot closer to the values Christianity is supposed to represent than those who would use their religion to justify owning people. 

As I said above, John Brown was both a radical of beliefs and radical in deeds. While his abolitionist beliefs do not seem so radical today (Brown is partly responsible for that shift in attitude), leading a massacre and raiding an armory are still considered radical deeds in the 21st century. People can certainly quibble over whether Brown’s actions helped or hurt the cause of abolitionism, but I for one cannot disagree with how Brown envisioned slavery ending. John Brown did not want a gradual end to slavery, where states slowly outlawed it and children of the enslaved were freed when they reached a certain age. John Brown wanted slavery to end immediately, full stop, and he was willing to help arm the enslaved so they could secure their own liberation. There was another proposal on how to end the institution of slavery, President Lincoln suggested it many times, and it was actually used to end slavery in the British Empire, compensation to “owners.” The idea is a simple one: enslavers would free their captives and in exchange, the government would compensate them for their “lost property.” The more I consider this solution, the more I am disgusted, and I want to take an interlude to explain why.

Interlude

If there is such a thing as evil, and slavery is an evil institution, in fundamental opposition to inalienable rights that everyone possesses, how does one put a stop to this evil? I know, how about we pay enslavers a ton of money, and let the people they enslaved fend for themselves with little or no aid. Does that sound like an even remotely just way of ending an evil institution? I sure as hell don’t think so. 

Let me address some potential critiques before continuing. Historians of the US Civil War and the period leading up to it can correctly point out that I am simplifying a lot of very complex history. As I said earlier, abolitionists were often considered radicals, in the 19th century there was a whole spectrum of opinion in the US on slavery. On one extreme of the spectrum some justified slavery as a positive good, some didn’t like slavery but didn’t see a way to end it, some wanted slavery to end but were extremely cautious in how it should end, some wanted to end slavery quickly while still avoiding war, and at the other extreme you had people like John Brown who said damn all caution, end slavery immediately, even if force is required. As with any issue that affects an entire society, and that an entire society is complicit in, there were a million different ideas of how to end slavery, why it should end, and what needed to happen when or if slavery did end. I am having to simplify a lot of history to condense it down into this short essay, but I hope my arguments will still have merit despite that.

The second critique that I anticipate is anyone who has or currently holds a position of power and is somehow reading this will accuse me of being naive and unrealistic. They might say that I don’t understand how the levers of power are deployed, and that I don’t appreciate the difficult compromises that have to be made to do the most good while avoiding as much suffering as possible. This hypothetical person might ask me to imagine an alternate reality where the US was able to avoid the Civil War by paying “owners” to release their captives. They might ask me: “Would paying for the enslaved to be freed be worse than all the death and suffering that was caused by the Civil War?” I don’t think any of us are equipped to answer the question, but it is worth considering. However, I don’t believe I am being naive when I say that the idea of compensating “owners” is catastrophically flawed. 

In cases such as the end of slavery, monetary compensation has practical as well as symbolic value. What is being said when an “owner” is paid for their “lost property.” It is being stated clearly that their “property” was indeed property, that the “owners” had a right to own people, and being paid for the “loss” benefits them both financially and symbolically. Ending slavery by paying enslavers is a blatant justification for slavery. Enslavers deserved nothing because they had no right to own anyone in the first place. If enslavers became financially destitute because of the loss of “their” enslaved captives, that’s a good thing. No prosperity should be built on the back of human suffering (that applies just as well to the present as the past). One might point out that ending slavery abruptly would have destabilized the entire US economy, not just in the South. That’s true, but at what point do we become complicit in criminal institutions when we care more about the economy than we do about injustice? How many times have more cautious (read, liberal) people made an excuse such as this: “Yes (fill in the blank) is obviously terrible, but we can’t just stop doing it all at once, that would be too disruptive.” As a result of this overcautious attitude, injustice is allowed to continue unabated. 

If anyone deserved financial compensation, and land as well, it was the people being freed from enslavement. They’re the ones who suffered at the hands of their captors, and getting money and land would have gone some way to apologize for their captivity. Additionally, paying “owners” would only entrench wealth and class disparities further. What good is it to end slavery if you force the people freed into circumstances so difficult and so unequal as to be functionally similar to enslavement? 

Conclusion

John Brown did not want enslavers paid to end their criminal enterprises. John Brown was willing to fight and die for the cause of freedom. Unlike the founding fathers, who betrayed the basic principle of liberty and enshrined slavery in the constitution to preserve the union, Brown recognized this blatant contradiction and was appalled by it. I want to admire John Brown, being driven to anger about hypocrisy and injustice is a character trait more Americans should have.

On the other hand, admiration and respect should not be blind, as I have said many times before. We can like people in the past while also realizing we might not know much about them, or that they held attitudes and beliefs that would be scandalous in the modern world. Life is messy and uncertain, that is just as true in the past as it is today. What is equally true is that people have always contained multitudes. People’s lives and values can be contradictory and hypocritical. This doesn’t mean we can’t admire people in the past, it just means we need to examine those we admire with a more critical eye. 

Postscript: As I was writing this piece I was also reading Malcolm X’s autobiography. In it I read a quote that related to American Christianity that I have to relay here. Above I said that despite John Brown’s violence, I ultimately think that he was a better christian than the enslavers who used their religion to justify slavery. In his autobiography, Malcolm X describes how christian values of nonviolence were twisted to encourage the enslaved to be more docile.

In the quote below, the word “Negro” is capitalized and in quotes in the original text. The word negro in this quotation is being used to refer mixed race people that are being brainwashed to embrace the values of white society and demonize their African heritage. 

“This religion taught the “Negro” that black was a curse. It taught him to hate everything black, including himself. It taught him that everything white was good, to be admired, respected, and loved. It brainwashed this “Negro” to think that he was superior if his complexion showed more white pollution of the slave-master. This white man’s Christian religion further deceived and brainwashed this “Negro” to always turn the other cheek, and grin, and scrape, and bow, and be humble, and to sing, and to pray, and to take whatever was dished out by the devilish white man; and to look for his pie in the sky, and for his heaven in the hereafter, while right here on earth the slave-master white man enjoyed his heaven.”

PSS: If you want to find similar critiques of American Christianity that mirror those from Malcolm X’s autobiography I recommend scrolling down this blog feed to the August 2023 discussion of the book From the Deep Woods to Civilization.