Right Story, Wrong Story: How to Have Fearless Conversations in Hell

by Tyson Yunkaporta

systems that emerged from the period. He brings up the emu story I shared with him, which I framed as a cautionary tale about narcissism. He wryly reflects on representative democracy as a selection operator for ensuring that the worst people are always in power. ‘Wasn’t it clever of us in the eighteenth century to set up a political system based on finding the narcissists and promoting them to the top?’ I suggest that this was a result of flawed reasoning in the Rights of Man workshop that happened after the French revolution. According to the story I heard, they got stuck on the ‘Jewish Question’ and argued about whether that community could have rights or not. Eventually they decided that Jewish individuals could have rights, but their community could not. This little exclusionary bug was later extended to every marginal community and was possibly the reason individualism and collectivism ended up at either end of a political continuum rather than continuing to be two sides of the same coin. Bigotry is a bastard. It’s not my political identity or victim status that causes me to dislike it, though—I hate anything that’s based on logical fallacy and makes systems dysfunctional.