The Case for Being Serious

Pushing Back against the Unseriousness of 21st century America

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

When I was still single, suffering the gory horrors of online dating—thank God I have passed that Sisyphean torture—many, many women said similar things on their profiles; one very common one was this pithy phrase: Don’t take yourself so seriously.

I always found this statement a bit strange. Weren’t contemporary women always whining about men being so unserious and immature and childish? Wouldn’t the antidote, therefore, be the opposite?

This idea flummoxed me for a while until one day I finally grasped it: I had to combine Wokeism/Identity Politics/Fringe-Leftism and Far-Right extremism with the concept in order for it to make proper sense to me. But then it did.

The realization is this: We are living in deeply absurd, incredibly unserious times. Young people grow up more slowly than ever before; online dating adventures introduced me to the 45-year-old woman who acts, dresses and talks like a 25-year-old Valley Girl. (I largely blame the internet, social media, iPhones, national wealth, New Age Helicopter Parenting, less reading, more obsession with devices, TV, etc.)

In the Intelligence Squared debate between Congressman Jamaal Bowman with Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza and writer Coleman Hughes with political scientist Ruy Teixeira on April 7, 2023 entitled Is the Democratic Party too Far Left?, Garza pushes back against Hughes’s and Teixeira’s provable, published data regarding race and how Black Americans feel about big political issues from places such as Pew and Gallup (see the stats here) by simply making up a non-existent poll that “they” (meaning BLM) did without citing any actual information, simply making claims such as that “most” Black Americans are progressive (not true). Bowman and Garcia both attack Hughes and Teixeira for their data statements by using a lazy gaslighting argument which basically goes thus: Polls aren’t perfect, and they’re done by white people and not enough Black people were included in the poll. Again, they offer no evidence of this.

Ditto if you ask any young lefty to explain exactly how or why things are so bad (in fact worse than ever) for Black people—supposedly—in America in 2023. If asked for data (for instance the Washington Post Police Database which clearly shows the low number of unarmed Black Americans killed by police every year [usually between 15-25] or a USA Today article showing 13 unarmed Black Americans shot by police in 2019) this is seen as “beside the point” and you are deemed “racist.” It’s easy and obvious to see why they use this tactic: They don’t have a real argument. Identity politics and name-calling is always at root an attempt to evade the uncomfortable realities. I’ve had incredibly dumb, frustrating arguments with my lefty friends about this hot-button topic and, even after I’ve presented the data and evidence and facts, they’ll be practically frothing at the mouth saying, Yeah but…but…RACISM IS BAD!!!! Yes. Racism is bad. Good thing America is much, much less racist than 20, 35, 50 years ago. It’s almost as if these people want—almost need—America to be more racist than it is so they can feel at peace.

Here are some easy, proven, boring facts: 68% of Black Americans believe sex is fixed and cannot be changed. The majority of Black Americans identify as either moderate or conservative (mostly but not entirely on the Democratic side); there’s a reason they, as a voting bloc, chose Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders in 2016. The majority of Black Americans were and are against Defund the Police. Etc etc etc. I could go on here forever.

My point with bringing all this up is this: These people—meaning, mostly, elite white Woke people, BLM founders, young people in general today—can mostly not be taken seriously. I see this largely as generational. Fifty years ago—even 30—people still read books. Now people read less, and more often than not what they do read tends to be either silly and solely for entertainment or else purely ideological. (Ibram X. Kendi’s writing, for example, or Robin DiAngelo.) People’s precious attention has become totally fragmented and sliced apart, given mostly to iPhones and social media and constant entertainment. It’s impossible to not see David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest rise to the surface here; the people who become obsessed with entertainment and literally die as a result, because they are fixed to their seats and cannot stop watching.

Arguments—facts—are a thing of the past, passe, so 2014. Now it’s all about sounding “good” according to your chosen tribe. What do facts, evidence, reality have compared to tribal self-righteousness and being on the “right side” of history? Five years ago all you had to do was read the read the title of your favored media article and maybe the first few paragraphs; now you don’t even have to do that. Is the piece by a white guy who is critical of leftism? Screw him. Or a Black guy with the “wrong” views (Coleman Hughes, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Glen Loury, Wilfred Riley, Chris Rock, etc etc etc)? He’s not ‘politically Black.’ (They said this about Obama. They say it now about Clarence Thomas.)

People on the extreme Right are just as ridiculous and dumb. Trump was/is a narcissistic broken child who eviscerated language just as much as the Wokies and cared not one iota for the United States but rather for himself. January 6^th was an abomination, as were the BLM riots throughout the land in the middle of the Covid pandemic (I know, the “real virus” was racism).

So what these women on Hinge and Bumble and Tinder were really saying was, Look, we’re not serious people. Life is a joke. Nothing should be taken seriously. No one is concerned with ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ (“omg,” they might say, ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ are so ‘white.’) They—aka The Culture at large—are therefore inviting you (to use the Newspeak of CBT therapists) to go ahead and flick the button internally that turns that pesky brain off and to “become one of them.” That annoying, pesky brain which thinks is, to them, anathema. It just gets in the way. Don’t think, whatever you do; that might lead to more thinking and, taken to its most extreme, to a grisly connection to Reality. You might know how things actually work!! And that simply cannot be allowed to occur. There is a good side (the Left) and a bad side (the Right) and you don’t want to get caught with your pants down, do you?

Again, the reactionary bullshit on the far-Right is also absurd. The Florida situation, trying to ban speech by Lefties, obviously doesn’t solve the problem. Just like how Affirmative Action can’t possibly be the solution—how can current discrimination alleviate the ills of past discrimination—banning speech cannot possibly help freedom of speech mor generally.

It’s fascinating to watch the two political extremes as they pull their side of the rope harder and harder, both sides pretending they have no part in the quagmire, that in both cases it’s “the other side” that is evil. This is what’s called a Negative Feedback Loop. It takes two to tango, my friend. Remember “Fake News”? That phrase originated on the Left and was abducted and captured by the Trump Right. If you go far enough to the Left you end up holding hands with the Right. Stalin, Castro, Chavez, Mao: These were all 20^th and 21^st century dictators of the Left. And yes, on the Right, equally nasty and grotesque: Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, etc. Both are bad.

This was all written about decades ago by many writers, but best of all by a man named George Orwell. You may have heard of him. Though he identified all his life as a “socialist,” and loathed totalitarianism, he also criticized his “own side.” Because he was a free and deep independent thinker.

Thinking as an art form itself has never had it so bad as it does in our country right now. Thankfully, between the cracks of extremism on both sides we’ve seen moderates and deep, independent thinkers fill the void. Writers and thinkers like Sam Harris, John McWhorter, the guys at The 5^th Column podcast (Michael Moynihan, Matt Welsh, Kmele Foster), Meghan Daum and many others have walked into that terrifying vacuum and brought commonsense back to the stage and the page. Most people on the Left won’t debate anymore, which is profoundly telling. The Left often uses the “I won’t debate conspiracy theorists” line as defense. And hey, look, I agree somewhat. How the hell do you debate say Alex Jones or RFK? You don’t, I think is the logical answer there. I do think there are some people worth “not platforming,” though I still strongly support their right to free speech. (Even if I think someone like Alex Jones is a total nutcase.)

If you really want to be a serious person you must follow The Truth—“truth” stems from the Old English “treowth,” meaning “fidelity” and one definition of the word in Mirriam-Webster is: “The property (as of a statement) of being in accord with fact or reality.” And truth takes us to some weird, sometimes awkward, often uncomfortable places. Government or “society” or “The System” aren’t always solely or even mostly to blame. Yes, there’s anecdotal “lived experience,” and this does matter somewhat, but this is exactly why data and statistics are so crucial: Far from perfect, they nevertheless show us what we cannot know ourselves alone: They give us the larger, broader view of how things actually are from up above at 30,000 feet.

One of the many tactics of progressive-Lefties today is to point deliberately and incessantly to anecdote as “evidence.” George Floyd was killed, they say, due to racism and this is a uniquely Black phenomenon. But what about Tony Timpa, the white man who was killed egregiously by cops with a knee on the neck for 13 minutes in 2016? It’s all on film and the cops had no repercussions. Mainstream media barely even reported it. What about the fact that Black Americans as a whole commit more crime than white Americans despite being only 13% of the U.S. population: Could this, perhaps, account for higher than normal incarceration rates and higher than normal interactions with police? What about the context involved in police shootings? Are alcohol and/or drugs ever involved? Does a perp rush a cop or reach for a weapon? Is there ever a gap between what the media reports and what the actual shootings caught on video often show?

When did the noxious, Utopian, Communistic notion of “equity”—aka the insane belief that all populations should or can be exactly equal in every way possible—become normalized, and why? Populations are made up of individuals and individuals—of all races—vary widely from one another. There is no “Black” group or “white” group; there are only unique, complex individuals. There is no “Black experience” or “White Experience” or “Asian Experience.” Groups aren’t unified in thought or action and the people within groups do not all think alike. That’s racist to even consider. And yet the progressive Left does it with vigor.

The old, tired, lazy refrain “you’re racist” or “you’re ___phobic” has gone from being a legitimate argument and callout a couple decades ago to being indistinguishable from dumb tribalism. Knee-jerk, pre-packaged opinions that are not formed but given to you by your Tribal Guides. You feel safe in doing this because the rest of your tribe is doing the same thing. A whole mass of people—a couple generations—of idiotic sheep who have lost the ability to think for themselves and who want only one thing: Gladiatorial murder against “Them.”

I do not defend the Right. Or the Left. (That’s obvious.) My argument isn’t solely about politics, either; it includes reading, literature, attention, group-think, intelligence, contemporary ideas, the destruction of language.

That’s a big one: Language. Yes, language has always evolved and is always changing and is still evolving now. But this is new, a concerted political effort by a powerful media-running minority (elite white Wokies) who are attempting to crack open language, hollow it out, and insert their political ideology. Think of words like “racism” or “prejudice” for example. What the hell do they mean anymore? Define racism, I dare you. You ask 12 people to define “racism” and you’ll get 14 different answers. Because these words have become subjective, hollow, in short: Meaningless. And that’s exactly what these young angry Lefties want: The murder of language, the destruction of commonsense, the rewriting of history and reality (read: 1619 Project), the end of order and capitalism. They want that pure Marxist Utopia we’ve been hearing about ad nauseum since the explosive 1960s.

I fear for our nation because you know—we all know—there’s going to be a backlash. I’m not talking about what happened during Trump’s first reign. Tyranny by one side creates Tyranny in another. Both sides have already been tyrannical and stupid. But wait until 2024. My God: If Trump runs and wins? Or someone similar to Trump? I can only imagine. And of course the Left will take zero responsibility for this. Root causes mean nothing to them except as a lie about “Systemic Racism.” Counties and states who voted for Obama twice and then switched for Trump in 2016 were “White Supremacists.” There could be no other rational reason. And all white people—especially the White Working Class—are racist subhuman animals who hate Black people. (Remember: Obama wasn’t “really Black.”)

George Floyd clearly, obviously shouldn’t have been murdered. Chauvin, in my view, got his just deserts. I am fine with him rotting in prison. But what about Tony Timpa? What about the police killing data? What about reality?

Until we find the safe, common ground of Reality once again we are doomed to keep going around in this gross, sick O.C.D.-like political doom loop. It reminds one of two toddlers covered in mud and screaming at one another, But he started it!!!

Either way you slice the pie, one thing is certain: Americans need to become serious again—about facts, science, evidence, their responsibility in the chaos—before we can move anywhere or do anything different. And the Left cannot afford to wait until the “other side” changes. Be the change you want to see in the world. You can’t change others; you can change yourself. It’s up to you whether you want to live in smoky media perceptions or the realism of Truth. You can’t have it both ways. People forget they live in their own little bubbles. And most Americans lay somewhere in the political middle.

Up to you, people. I’ve always been serious.