We Learn Nothing: Essays and Cartoons (A Smart and Funny Essay Collection)

by Tim Kreider

Most people are just too self-absorbed, well-meaning, and lazy to bother orchestrating Machiavellian plans to slight or insult us. It’s more often a boring, complicated story of wrong assumptions, miscommunication, bad administration, and cover-ups—people trying, and mostly failing, to do the right thing, hurting each other not because that’s their intention but because it’s impossible to avoid.

suppose you might call it a prejudice—that liberals are the ones who went to college, moved to the nearest city where no one would call them a fag, and now only go back for holidays; conservatives are the ones who married their high school girlfriends, bought houses in their hometowns, and kept going to church and giving a shit who won the homecoming game. It’s the divide between the Got Out and the Stayed Put. This theory also accounts for the different reactions of these two camps when the opposition party takes power, raising the specter of either fascist or socialist tyranny: the Got Outs always fantasize about fleeing the country for someplace more civilized—Canada, France, New Zealand; the Stayed Put just dig further in, hunkering down in compounds, buying up canned goods and ammo. But,

karmic tremors in the corridors of power.

sound effect under his breath like mmwOWm, which Harold understood was meant to indicate that Felix was opening the door with his mind. My laughter at this story

As Michael Herr once wrote of Stanley Kubrick, “his elevator goes all the way to the roof.”

It was hard to tell whether he was genuinely interested in people or if he was simply voracious for information, and regarded everyone he met as a new resource.

(People are most vociferously opposed to those forces they have to resist most fiercely within themselves.)

Which is why our seminars so often trailed off into lectures, and why we found ourselves working for, rather than with, him on projects we’d initially refused to do.

production—the agricultural equipment, the fertilizers, preservation, and, of course, distribution of food—is completely dependent on petroleum. It’s no puzzle to biologists what happens to any population when its food supply is radically reduced. When it happens to animals it’s called a die-off. But the implications of this equation in human terms are so unimaginably ghastly that most people would prefer to believe it’s impossible rather than think about it at all. I keep remembering something the novelist Cormac McCarthy said in an interview: “If you were to take thoughtful people on, say, January first, 1900, and tell them what the twentieth century was going to look like, they’d say, ‘Are you shitting me?’”2

Hagens writes, “I am becoming convinced that confronting [people] with ‘facts,’ although necessary to better understand our predicament, will be almost completely ineffectual when it comes to altering our course . . . facts will become secondary and accessing raw emotions will be required for change.”4

It’s funny—we all grow up on a diet of stories about the lone voice of reason trying to warn everyone about some imminent calamity, from Noah to Jor-El, and instinctively side with this hero and despise the ignorant ovine masses who jeer him or try to silence him. And yet whenever such a person appears in real life, our reflex is to join in with the mobs of scoffers and call them alarmists, hysterics, conspiracy freaks, and doomsayers. Nietzsche wrote, “One often contradicts an opinion when it is really only the tone in which it has been presented that is unsympathetic.”8 Or, as The Dude put it: “You’re not wrong, Walter—you’re just an asshole.”9 Less quotable, and often overlooked, is Walter’s response: “Okay, then.” The Walters of the world don’t mind being assholes; what matters to them is being right.

“You’re not wrong, Walter—you’re just an asshole.”“Okay, then.”

Peak oil is an awkward topic. In trying to explain it to acquaintances, I always feel like I’m bringing up pedophilia or clitoridectomies. It’s a buzzkill to say things like “mass starvation” or “die-off in the billions” when people are trying to enjoy their beers.

people aren’t interested in lectures; they want to hear stories. Which is why the right holds the demagogic advantage over the left in America; they tell a simpler, more satisfying story. And it’s

The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ different choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt.

The Referendum can subtly poison formerly close and uncomplicated relationships, creating tensions between the married and the single, the childless and parents, careerists and the stay-at-home. It’s only exacerbated by the far greater range of options available to us now than even a few decades ago, when everyone had to follow the same drill: a job or housework, marriage, kids. So we’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated—that we are, in some sense, winning.

(The constant external demands of frantic busyness provide a kind of existential reassurance.)

Parenthood opens up an even deeper divide. Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. It’s as if these people have joined a cult: they claim to be happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to a pampered sociopathic master whose every whim is law. (Note to friends with children: I am referring only to other people’s children, not yours.) They’re frantic and haggard and constantly exhausted, getting through the days on a sleep deficit of three years, complaining about how busy and circumscribed their lives are, as though they hadn’t freely chosen it all.

have never even idly thought for a single passing second that it might make my life nicer to have a small rude incontinent person follow me around screaming and making me buy them stuff for the rest of my life. (I already have several large rude incontinent friends, one of whom is bugging me to buy him a first edition of Ray Bradbury’s Dark Carnival and another who thinks I owe him a Cadillac.) But one reason my friends with children sometimes envy my life, and I never envy theirs, is that they know what they’re missing, and I don’t.

"one reason my friends with children sometimes envy my life, and I never envy theirs, is that they know what they’re missing, and I don’t."

The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is an unrepeatable experiment with no control. In his novel about marriage, Light Years, James Salter writes: “For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the pardox.”

there were such a diagnosis as unipolar mania I’d almost wonder whether he’d had it. “Some who knew him found him slightly unsettling,” a columnist friend of his wrote after he died, “for he was constantly on the go and threw off ideas the way a burning pine log throws sparks.”

Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that any deliberate campaign to achieve it is so misguided, is that it isn’t an obtainable goal in itself but only an aftereffect. It’s the consequence of having lived in the way that we’re supposed to—by which I don’t mean ethically correctly but fully, consciously engaged in the business of living. In this respect it resembles averted vision, a phenomenon familiar to backyard astronomers whereby, in order to pick out a very faint star, you have to let your gaze drift casually to the space just next to it; if you look directly at it, it vanishes. And it’s also true, come to think of it, that the only stars we ever see are not the real stars, those blinding cataclysms in the present, but always only the light of the untouchable past.

"the only stars we ever see are not the real stars, those blinding cataclysms in the present, but always only the light of the untouchable past."