The Wyrd

What matters here is not just the fact that we inhabit a world in crisis. It’s that we ‘live in a world where the language of crisis has become the most common way of representing a series of situations we face’, as the French anthropologist Didier Fassin has observed. The ubiquity of this language, he says, ‘tells us something about the actuality and the imaginary of contemporary societies’. The way we subjectively experience these feelings of uncertainty and crisis has a tangible effect on political animals of the 21st century. It places us in a state of ‘allostatic load’ – a constant state of accumulated high stress that comes from desperately trying to keep the body within its homeostatic safe zone. This exposure to chronic or repeated challenges, which the individual experiences as stressful, eventually wears out the body and brain. If one of the key functions of the brain is to serve the body by maintaining a healthy body budget, then chronic stress burns through cash. Without a healthy balance sheet, our options narrow as our organism can no longer rely on its increasingly depleted reserves. As a consequence, we lose our ability to flexibly regulate our bodies, and this loss contributes to poor health, emotional dysregulation and cognitive decline – a vicious cycle that exacerbates the conditions that promoted allostatic load in the first place. The strikingly increased prevalence of hypertension among African Americans compared with other Americans can’t be accounted for by genetic differences; instead, they reflect the sociopolitical tensions that such groups experience.

The fact that the human body and the body politic are intertwined means that systematically depleting our body budget has far-reaching consequences. For example, insufficient sleep isn’t just a private matter, but also affects political engagement such as citizens’ willingness to vote, to sign petitions and to donate to charities. Relatedly, a major study spanning 170 countries between 1980 and 2016 showed that the presence of democratic governance explains more than does GDP the variations in mortality for cardiovascular diseases, transport injuries, cancers, cirrhosis and other non-communicable diseases. Several empirical studies also show that population-level epidemiological profiles of infectious diseases can structure individual-level psychological preferences for authoritarianism as well as authoritarian governance.

On visceral politics.

These are not real stories. Taking Aunt Jemima off of a syrup bottle, rebranding Mr. Potato Head or changing the name of the Washington football team, doesn’t tell us anything foreboding about our culture other than the fact that, like all cultures, it evolves. America is becoming more racially diverse, and as a result, many Americans have a lower tolerance for racism. Traditional gender roles, long shifting, continue to shift. Companies that are trying to sell their products into this changing market respond.

But the American right has become the all-out party of gender and racial grievance, and they are hyper focused on two things: maintaining power, and not actually being held accountable for governing.

That’s why they obsess over culture war stories like Dr. Seuss: There’s no legislative solution (unless they want to nationalize the children’s book industry), so there’s no way for the Republican Party to have failed to deliver on a promise; there’s only finger-pointing at perceived enemies (liberals, wokes, Democrats), which rallies the troops. What are they being rallied for? They’re not quite sure — but they know who they’re against.

On distractions.