Shallow men and deep joy
I’m listening to Gilded Rage while painting countless tiny green leaves and red roses inside the Gypsy van. It’s good to be doing something peaceful and constructive amidst Jacob Silverman’s meticulous record of all this nihilistic illegality in contemporary US.
My life is so rich – with things that money can’t buy. I can’t imagine the mental and emotional impoverishment of a life like Donald Trump’s, whose powerful position enables the unlimited scope these Silicon Valley tech fascists (I’d rather call them that than the tech bros, which makes this back-stabbing bunch of sociopaths sound all cosy and fraternal) who are spending billions of tax payers’ dollars on their Dystopian projects, especially AI, which has a voracious appetite for water, power and rare minerals.
And inside the heads of the tech billionaires and Trump – the bleak meaninglessness of their interior vision (I don’t think we can elevate base instincts to the label of ‘philosophy’. An interior vision of bottomless greed and a pleasure in cruelty. We don’t see many pictures or videos of Trump and his ilk smiling happily – we see a lot of smirking.
Our dopamine rises mostly in anticipation and the working towards goals. We’re wired to become quickly habituated to a higher level of satisfaction. Almost as soon as we attain what we wanted, we feel less happy with it. Hence the thrill of the chase and men like that will always have that. (Until they’re in jail.) But at what cost (to other people, to their country, to the very planet!) and behaviour governed by greed is usually unsustainable.
Sometimes I wonder at Trump’s total lack of intellectual curiosity. How does that even happen? He’s not learning anything; he’s just on repeat of past behaviour (the past behaviour that resulted in multiple bankruptcies, counts of felony, rape etc). It must be so boring. To be him and to be around him.
The older I get the deeper my joy at discovering new things. The search for how things work and who did what when and in cahoots with whom never palls.
Chilling gloom versus fascinating insights
I alternate between listening to Gilded Cage and to Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ podcast Wiser than Me, which leavens the chilling gloom of the former by lending some perspective. After all, a sense of humour is a sense of proportion. Louis-Dreyfus was interviewing comedian, Catherine O’Hara, when they began talking about Jane Fonda. Catherine O’Hara related something that happened during the making of Hal Ashby’s 1978 film, Coming Home.
Early on is a love scene between the Fonda character and her uptight, conservative husband played by Bruce Dern. He has no idea about satisfying her and it’s over quickly. The director and team were discussing the script, saying that there won’t be a love scene between the Fonda character and the Vietnam veteran (Jon Voigt) because he is a paraplegic and can’t feel anything below the waist.
Jane Fonda said, ‘But I can.’
And so, a love scene between the Fonda and Voigt characters was then included. – And it’s the only thing most people remember about the film. Just kidding! But I do remember it very clearly – in cinema that had never been done before. And since it was the 1970s and various codes about nudity restrictions etc were relaxed, they could.
Would you rather wisdom or disinformation?
I love listening to those wonderful older women on Wiser than Me. Our contemporary western society must be one of the few in human history since it began that has devalued and ignored the accumulated wisdom of experienced, older people. Instead they pay attention to disinformation on social media. They’re getting fed a distorted viewpoint, to put it mildly.
Only six companies own all the algorithms. They decide what we get to see and not see. It pays to manipulate us to get angry and hate each other. An article by Jay Van Bavel in The Guardian Weekly (18 July 2025) claims that 10 per cent of users create 97 per cent of political tweets. 0.1 per cent of users share 80 per cent of fake news. Elon Musk posted on his X 1,494 times in the first 15 days of implementing government cuts for the so-called department of government efficiency (DoGE), spreading misinformation to his 221 million followers.
We humans make mental models about what other people think or do. It’s how we figure out social norms and navigate groups. But on social media this shortcut backfires. Only a tiny percentage of users engage in toxic behaviour, but they are responsible for a disproportionate share of hostile or misleading content. ‘The super-users are so active that they dominate our impression of the internet. That means the resulting problems don’t remain confined to this small cohort, which distorts how the rest of us make sense of the world.’ (p. 57)
Online platforms amplify the loudest and most extreme voices and we can see the detrimental effect this is having on our social discourse. The author reckons we can take back control by curating feeds, resisting the outrage bait and refusing to amplify the nonsense.
The good news
Van Bavel and some colleagues paid some people a few dollars to unfollow the most divisive political accounts on X. After one month they all reported feeling 23 per cent less animosity towards other political groups. Their experience was so positive that nearly half the people declined to refollow the hostile accounts once the study was over. And those who maintain their healthier newsfeed reported less animosity even eleven months after the study.
So be careful about what you spend your valuable time listening to and watching. It all goes into your conscious and subconscious, influencing your behaviour and mood, your worldview and sense of reality. Happily we have more control than we tend to think.
A native American story begins with a grandfather sharing a lesson with his grandson. He tells the boy that within every person, there exists a battle between two wolves. One wolf embodies all that is good and virtuous, symbolising love, compassion and peace, while the other represents negativity, anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, and fear.
‘But grandfather,’ says the boy, ‘which wolf will win?’
His grandfather responds, Why, the one you feed, of course.”
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