A Better Project 2025: Let’s Make Narratives Better, Together

An Open Letter to Everyone on Social Media (Which Is, Like, Everyone)

[Photo is from Leo Lionni’s book Frederick]

Thanks to vlogbrothers and particularly Hank Green for inspiring this New Year’s Resolution. Recent reading of The Politics of Pain by Fintan O’Toole and The Politics of Resentment by Kathy Cramer also informed my opinions here.

The other day, I was reading this book about the housing crisis in America, and I realized I had reached a crossroads. I closed the book and put it back on the shelf. Not because it wasn’t a good book—I was quite interested in what it had to say and I appreciated it linking the crisis to the 2008 Ponzi Sche-I mean Financial Crisis and corporate greed more generally. No, what I realized was that I couldn’t keep outraging myself. I couldn’t keep hurting myself by holding onto the desire to hurt others. Now, I fully believe many of our economic elites (e.g., people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, all the CEOs of Tyson Foods, a good chunk of the MBAs who cheated on their ethics exams) are deserving of some harm—maybe they could lose all their wealth and never hold positions of power ever again; maybe they should be dragged to the stand to answer for things like fraud, whistleblower suppression, and rent-seeking. But what I know is that acting from a place of fear, hatred, contempt, and outrage is a recipe for disaster.

In America right now, it seems like there’s 3 big options: do nothing, side with the Establishment against the rising tide of populism, or feed into and magnify the onslaught of outrage and simmering resentment which has cannibalized the right-wing. And I don’t like any of those options. The thing that the resentful right-wing is doing right which is winning them so many votes is that they’re recognizing a reality that the Establishment refuses to recognize and perhaps is incapable of recognizing: something is deeply wrong and unjust right now for the ordinary American, and something needs to change. While I agree with that sentiment, I partially disagree with what they think is wrong, and I almost entirely disagree with what they think needs to change. And I do not trust them to make the changes we need for the people who need them.

While I don’t know with any precision the proportion of movements of mass resentment which have ended badly, I claim that enough such movements have gone badly—even by the lights of many of the supporters of such movements—that we should generally be cautious of them. The examples stick out like sore thumbs: the German Nazi movement led to the Holocaust, the Russian Revolution led to Stalinism, and the Chinese Communist Revolution led to the horrors of CCP past and the continued oppression of CCP present. But even more worryingly, there’s precedent for the exploitation of grievances by bad actors within mass movements. Relatively recently, the Iranian Revolution to establish a theocratic state had significant support from many liberals, left-wing supporters, and women’s rights activists (before they were—you guessed it—purged). I fear that our own resentment has fertilized the seeds for a similar fate for the US. As I see it, one major problem is that, when a movement has been about resentment, self-righteousness, and destruction, it is precisely the most resentful, self-righteous, and destructive individuals who are poised to take power. And then bad things happen.

Well, that’s a bit bleak, but this is all to say that I believe that resentment doesn’t work, at least not in today’s day and age. The day I reached my breaking point, I asked myself a question: if I could choose, would I rather sic vengeance of all kinds upon the evil elites, or would I rather alleviate the sufferings of the poor souls who suffered from their actions? And of course I would rather alleviate the sufferings of the poor souls. I knew my holding onto resentment was, in a sense, selfish; in my heart of hearts, I did not want to be resentful.

Something Hank Green pointed out in “Populism, Media Revolutions, and Our Terrible Moment” was that revolutions in media, such as the printing press, the radio, and today’s social media platforms, appear to be closely followed by (and instrumental in fomenting) spikes in horribly consequential populism (the Protestant Reformation, the rise of Nazi Germany, and populist movements in the US and Europe, respectively). This is because the pieces that sell the best are short and simple, have high shock value (delivering new or contradictory information), tap into resentment, and make one feel self-righteous. Unfortunately, all of these things are often in conflict with factuality and moderation, hence the popularity of extreme and bullshit takes in the absence of constraints and norms on a form of media. 

We are in the middle (or at the beginning) of a media revolution right now, so we are caught in a devastating positive feedback loop: some content creators create populist content; consumers demand more of this content; social media platforms, seeing the success of this content, further share and feature it, encouraging more populist content creation, and so it goes. In my mind, this begets 2 solutions, both of which should be implemented. Most obviously, the platforms need to figure out how to regulate content while sufficiently respecting freedom of speech the way radio and print have done. But content creators and content consumers are also responsible for the content which is created, consumed, and promoted, and this is where I think We the People can make the biggest difference.

This brings me to my resolution; a better Project 2025. I want to move away from feeding into the discourses on outrage. That doesn’t mean that I’ll stop talking about or listening to problems (I’m doing that right now), but only that I’ll be more careful to avoid outrage farming, both as a creator and as a consumer.

As a creator, I want to create content about specific solutions and movements. So many people are talking about the catastrophic consequences of things like political polarization and corporate capture, and that’s great and necessary, but there’s tons of discussion on that; someone’s already pulled those fire alarms, so pulling them again isn’t going to do much. Pulling the fire alarm is easy. Even respected academics seem to have a strong attraction to writing about the problem; the canonical academic’s book is 19 chapters carefully detailing the problem followed by 1 chapter gesturing vaguely at solutions. I’ve realized how much I’ve focused on the problems in my own writing, and how that’s constrained my creativity and uniqueness as a writer. It’s old hat to write about how many billions of animals are killed by factory farms each year, but maybe very few voices have talked about some particular solution or intervention which decreases suffering on factory farms. I don’t know how many people know about Cory Booker’s introduction of the Farm System Reform Act, the successful resistance to the EATS Act, or rural communities’ movements of resistance to the imposition of factory farms in their communities. Those things are harder to write about, but I want to write about them because I think they are more worth writing about. Creators like vlogbrothers, Kurzgesagt, and Go Meta are inspirations in using their platforms to build constructive communities focused on making the world better, and I want to become more like that.

And as a consumer, I want to stop consuming content which pushes narratives of resentment and victimhood. You might be thinking here that I’m calling out some people on the left, and I am, but to be clear, the greatest narratives of resentment, victimhood, and self-pity right now are coming from the right. I also don’t want to consume content which blames the individuals for their own suffering—I’ve never been into that nasty brand of narratives (also prevalent on the right). What I want to see more of is narratives of survivorship. Not just what’s happening to the people, what’s being done to the people; but what are the people doing, and how are they surviving? Stories of resilience and hope and just plain everyday goodness are the things which give me the most hope in humanity, and they are probably much more common than we think they are.

But as I said at the beginning, I’m also doing this for me. I’m changing my own algorithm because it was making me miserable and because it didn’t reflect my values. I’m not retweeting a political rant or doomscrolling a Reddit post about how horrid the job market is or clicking on that video about how terrible Project 2025 is going to be. That’s felt about as good as scratching at an open wound: gratifying for an instant, and then just a dull, burning pain. It’s not just unhelpful to others, but it’s hurtful to myself. I just don’t want to be doing that anymore, and I think there’s a better way forward. So I hope you’ll join me in this Resolution, this Project 2025 to weave and share better narratives for the world, for our communities, and for ourselves.

If you liked this post, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing; consider it your little bump to shift the algorithms ;) Thanks!