Last time I suggested this era of social media following, as it has, a century of entertainment culture might be what makes it harder for Putin to recruit soldiers or Americans to stay devoted to work. Complacent and selfish, we’ve been taught not to care or are allowed to care only about what we want to care about.
Obviously, the reverse is also true, as Max pointed out to me. That is, at the same time so many bail on the opportunity to fight in Ukraine or punch the clock in America, we also make a football team or whether or not to wear a mask, for instance, matters worth killing each other over. No one cares about anything, you might say, except what makes them angry, and as there is so much to be angry about and so many people out there to stir up anger (for fun and profit), overdeveloped care is just as prevalent as caring about nothing.
(Maybe Putin’s problem, then, is just too much competition. While no doubt he could do with a better message than, “Be a lamb to slaughter” a more TikTok savvy delivery of whatever his message is would help too.)
Anyway, surely “caring”—how we care, what we care about—is a form of work we do quite differently than did our grandparents or great-grandparents. An age of distraction is also an age of not knowing what matters.
Do you remember the phrase compassion fatigue? Coined a few decades back to explain why people would not contribute to charities or good causes? After hearing about this famine or that natural disaster twenty-four hours a day, people’s empathy batteries were worn out. Or so the supposition went.
An obvious response to our inability to care or feel compassion is to increase the volume of everything, up the voltage. Fried wires need more juice, except that this extra voltage burns out the wires all more, requiring more juice next time.
Needless to say, Mr. Trump was voltage of a kind personified.
In this vein, I just learned, Dahmer is now the most watched series on Netflix. I have no doubt that it is well-made and horrific and creepy. But I'll skip it. I don't want to care about Jeff, even or especially, if that care is registered by revulsion.
Maybe I am just answering the question no Netflix producer asked: “Is it too soon to put a spotlight on America’s best-known cannibal?”
For me? Yes. It is too soon. I mean, I remember reading about this guy in the newspaper. History (my own, the world’s) and entertainment (well-wrought and sensational) all collapse in on each other—again.
To turn away from the bulk of what we are offered, not let the inane stoke tribalism, and maintain a little private decency is the challenge we face as individuals.
To construct (or reconstruct) a common cultural discourse that takes us off the grid of “how much voltage does this have” to wherever it is actual care and concern can be weighed, debated, and improved (towards our improving the nature of our care) is something we must do together.
But what trumpet will call us to this cause? Where is the compass that might guide us there?