Peter Watts Is An Angry Sentient Tumor: Revenge Fantasies and Essays

by Peter Watts

When the people charged with upholding the law lie to the citizenry about what that law even is; when they give “lawful commands” to disperse and then prevent anyone from dispersing; when they detain, search, arrest, and attack jes’-plain-folks for no better reason than that the Cylons look like us now—maybe we’ve passed the point at which we should be letting these thugs and bullies stomp all over us. Maybe we should start stomping back.

There are simply too many of us. Over seven billion already, and we still can’t keep it in our pants.

They keep getting killed. And we keep rending our garments and sending them our fucking thoughts and prayers, and the moment they block a road or stop a parade or express a fraction of the rage that is their due we back away and tell them that they won’t get anywhere with that kind of attitude. We trot out the same insipid MLK Jr. quotes about the virtues of nonviolence, about peace being the only way to achieve “dialog” or “brotherhood”—as if the people who have them in the crosshairs give a flying fuck about any of that. We tell them to have patience, to let the system work because we’ve got the evidence now, everyone saw it on YouTube, no way those fucking cops will walk away from it this time—and yet they do. Time and time again. The cops walk away from it.

It’s not much of an overstatement to say that your gut bacteria are a large part of what makes you you, psychologically. Transfer gut biota from one animal to another, and you transfer personality traits as well. Think about that. You can literally transplant personality traits via feces. To that extent, we all have shitty personalities.

The rational truth of the matter—that we have squeezed out one more large mammal in a population of seven billion, which will in all likelihood accomplish nothing more than play video games, watch American Idol, and live beyond its means until the ceiling crashes in—is something that simply doesn’t compute.

A measly 20% dead might be something we could handle without too much trouble (and it would certainly be a relief for the nonhuman inhabitants of the planet). Sixty percent sick, though, not so much. Imagine half the people responsible for delivering your food, maintaining your water supply, and keeping your ATMs online call in sick for a few weeks; imagine that half their backups call in sick as well. Historically, once the infrastructure collapses even in a single city, it takes mere hours for people to start killing each other over food; check out what happened in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina if you don’t believe me. Now, scale that up to every city on the planet.

Here’s the trick: it was all exactly the same data. All Kahan et al did was switch the labels. What they discovered was that your ability to correctly interpret these data comes down to how statistically smart you are, regardless of political leanings—but only when you think you’re dealing with rashes and skin creams. If you think you’re looking at gun control data, suddenly politics matter. If you’re a numerically-smart conservative, you’ll have no trouble parsing the data so long as they show that gun control results in increased crime; but if they show that gun control reduces crime, suddenly your ability to read those numbers drops to the level of a complete innumerate. You’ll only be able to interpret the data correctly if they conform to your pre-existing biases. Smart liberals are just as stupid as smart conservatives, but in the opposite direction. Show a numerically-savvy left-winger that gun control reduces crime, they’ll be all over it; show them the opposite and, once again, their performance drops to the point where they might as well not have any statistical smarts at all. Note that this is not a case of people rejecting a pattern they don’t agree with. This is more subtle, and more pernicious: this is people literally not being able to perceive the pattern to begin with, if it’s too threatening to their beliefs. Ideology compromises your ability to do basic math.

The truly moral are those with lesions in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex; not, so far as I’ve heard, a “universal” aspect of the Human condition.

We are not wired for restraint; let us off the leash, and we will devour whatever is available.