Many silly ideas are born of frustration, desperation, wishful thinking or some combination of the three. One of the most enduring of these is the widespread belief that there is some authority “out there,” poised to right wrongs.

The grandest — and silliest — version of this is found in the world’s religious traditions, according to which a giant, invisible guy is perched in the proverbial sky, guaranteeing that justice will prevail. Of course, even the dullest Bronze or Iron Age person could see that this was untrue given that daily life was filled with war, famine, sickness, enslavement and premature death (the average lifespan being 20-30 years), and books like Job were written precisely to point this out. But like water, foolishness always finds a way in, and this unfortunate defect in the god hypothesis was corrected by pushing justice off into some afterlife or other. This was Christianity’s solution to “the Jewish problem” — well, its most benign solution — but as far as anyone can tell, injustice is alive and well, and if people are being dispatched to the promised heavenly paradise after having endured a life of wretchedness and misery at the hands of history’s voluminous tyrants and villains, we have no evidence of it.  

Antiquity provides a useful lesson, because it represents a time in which whatever real authority there may have been — political, legal, religious, familial, etc. — was invariably debased and corrupted, with genuine, substantive equality, individual prerogative, and self-determination lying well in the future, albeit in adulterated forms. “Good” authority has been a fitful thing in the modern era, fraught and fragile and inconsistently applied, but we have seen it, so we believe it is practicable. Unsurprisingly, there has been a commensurate decline in religiosity in modern societies, as grand visions of a cosmic justice-bringer are only apt when justice is not only denied but effectively unimaginable. Utopian thinking, while silly, is at least comprehensible in certain contexts, but if one is looking for a more reasonable mindset when faced with seemingly hopeless circumstances, stoicism is the gold standard. The only genuine inevitability in history, after all, is that things will change, so endurance and fortitude are one’s best bet during dark times, while utopianism is little more than fantasizing with a philosophical name pasted onto it. 

I say that antiquity provides a useful lesson, because those of us who reside in the US find ourselves living under authorities whose corruption and debasement rival those of their Bronze and Iron Age counterparts. Whimsicality; narcissism; caprice; vulgarity; greed; sociopathy; sadism; they’re all there in spades and on a scale that would have made a Nebuchadnezzar or Tiberius blush. Yet, there hasn’t been a religious revival in the US, because justice remains within the realm of practical possibility, and because American religious authorities have been so tarnished by their own myriad depravities that they no longer offer a credible counterweight. America’s churches have placed themselves firmly on the side of the grifters, the conmen and the tyrants, and the days of Liberation Theologies and Social Gospels are nothing but a faint memory, with what few liberal and progressive religious institutions remain barely registering as a desultory blip on the nation’s spiritual radar.

Given the lack of appetite for utopian religiosity, one might have expected times like these to have unleashed a wave of stoical sentiment, but this hasn’t happened. Indeed, of all the troubled periods we’ve gone through — civil war; economic depression and collapse; world war; the social-political turmoil and violence of the 1960’s — our current one has met with the least stoical response imaginable. If you doubt this, just spend five minutes on social media, with its tens of millions of American users, and you’ll see an awful lot of people engaged in the discursive equivalent of gnashing one’s teeth and rending one’s garments rather than girding one’s loins. At least for now, the stoical option is off the menu.

With divine authority having lost its cachet, many have turned to the more meager variety found in elementary school in what can only be described as a fit of collective atavism. Political protestation today has all the hallmarks of schoolyard vows to “tell the teacher” and “get people in trouble,” and refrains of “so-and-so isn’t allowed to ____” and “they can’t _____” are ubiquitous, with the only thing missing from the standard eight-year-old’s repertoire being “I’m telling,” although this is what grown-ups “calling people out” essentially boils down to. In our hunger for justice, God has been replaced with an abstract version of everyone’s childhood assistant principal.

This sort of thing may have had a moment a decade or so ago, when there was sufficient social consensus and institutional muscle to provide a kind of ersatz schoolteacher or administrator who could “cancel” someone (the adult version of “getting in trouble”), but in the current environment it’s the weakest kind of appeal. As I observed in “Mesmeric Forces,” saying that someone “can’t” do something even as they’re doing it right in front of your face has an impotent air to it, and it’s useless pointing to rules and laws and principles, when one is confronted with someone who has no hesitation in violating them and where there is no prospect of their being enforced. Alas, this is the situation we find ourselves in now, in a country run by a 21st Century version of a Babylonian or Roman emperor and his corrupted court, and neither God, judges, nor assistant principals are going to get us out of it.

Fortunately, unlike Ancient Babylonia or Imperial Rome, the US is a democracy in which authority is highly decentralized and spread across the country’s almost innumerable states, counties, and localities ending, ultimately, with the voters who can replace any or all of their leaders in a single election. It is also a very large country, with a diverse population counting in the hundreds of millions, which cannot be controlled by a single strongman and his klatch and especially not one as clumsy and lacking in self-control as the current lot. In 1939, the British government coined the phrase, “Keep Calm and Carry On,” the purpose of which was to bolster morale in the face of devastating German bombardments, and we would do well to take this advice in our far less perilous times. Rather than looking to a God who doesn’t exist or some resurrected memory of a grade school teacher who isn’t coming back to save us, why not keep cool, make your way to the polls in November, and vote the whole rotten gang out of office?