Fifteen years ago I wrote a story about all of humanity trapped in the bubble of an underground silo where all their news of the outside world was delivered through a single screen, and that screen showed them death, destruction, and all the things to fear.
With this single view to go by, the inhabitants of the silo go a little mad. People aren’t supposed to live like this. Revolution brews. Folks begin to doubt what they are seeing. There are some with hope so deep in their bones that they wonder if the world can be saved, and these people want to go out to see for themselves.
I won’t spoil the rest.
I will spoil the mystery of why Trump won and Kamala lost, and it has everything to do with my dad. My father was an amazing guy. One of the first to help anyone in need. Incredibly generous. Sharp as a tack. Big heart and big brain. Both of which turned to mush on a steady diet of conspiracy theories passed off as news.
My dad listened to Rush Limbaugh every day, religiously. Fox News played in the house 24/7. Bill O’Reilly, Hannity, all the rest. Whatever these men said was his reality. Muslims were going to take over the world. Gangs from Mexico were invading. Hillary and Obama were corrupt and evil and probably doing bad things to kids. Every phone call with him strayed to these topics and there was no way to penetrate his defenses with even a semblance of reality. My father disappeared and a hate-filled husk took his place. It was so bad that we couldn’t go to the best Mexican restaurant in town anymore, not because it was Mexican (he ate at the other place), but because Obama ate there once on his way through town. Not kidding.
My wife has been hearing from friends and family who voted for Trump, and the things they say and believe remind me of my dad. Trump will help with crime, which is out of control. He’ll deport all the illegals who contribute nothing to our country and do all the aforementioned criming. Kamala would’ve been as bad for the economy as Biden has been, which is the worst in the world. All our cities are burning and being abandoned, except by the homeless.
Nevermind that crime is down, every sane economist sounded alarm bells over Trump’s tariffs, that immigrants (yes, even illegal ones) contribute far more in taxes and GDP than they consume (and commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans). That our economy has recovered faster than any other developed economy in the world. Or that our cities are amazing and where the vast majority of us live. None of that matters. Reality doesn’t matter. It’s what’s on the screen.
Michael Tomasky at the New Republic gets it. His article here is a must-read. The thing to understand is how little understanding there is going around. And I don’t think it’s as nefarious as many try to swing it. Liberals are just as susceptible to conspiracy theory. What’s really at play here are evolutionary forces, which include: xenophobia, seeing patterns where there are none, the allure of forbidden knowledge, in-grouping and out-grouping, and the myriad biases that reward fear and delusion over sound thinking. (Our paranoid, skittish ancestors out-survived and out-produced the ones who stopped to ponder whether their fears were rational).
We had a meeting recently with some cast and crew and producers for the SILO TV show, and one of the things that came up was how germane and prescient the story seems, in light of what we’re living through now. But I wasn’t writing about the future. I was writing about my past. I was at ground zero when 9/11 happened. I watched and felt the planes enter those buildings and saw them topple right in front of me. And then I watched the conspiracies flourish in the aftermath. Disappearing planes. Helicopters setting off remote, controlled explosions. The Jews did it. The hatred of anything Muslim (or even resembling it; Sikhs and Hindus were now targets).
The fear of world-ending WMDs. The need to go to war in Iraq. This was around the time my dad began emailing me stories about how Muslims were having more children than Americans and eventually we would all be Muslim. Very much like the great replacement theory trending now. Fox News became the most-watched TV channel across America. Daytime radio beamed conservative voices in all directions. Anything not espousing these views was liberal media, which had its own echo chambers, bubbles, and silos. The two worlds didn’t see, understand, or hear one another (go read THE CITY AND THE CITY for a neat metaphor of this).
There’s a second theme in my novel WOOL that doesn’t get as much attention, but plays an even bigger role in the plot, and it’s the idea that revolutions occur roughly every twenty years or so. It’s a pattern you can see in our own history, and I used the series of novels to wrestle with why this was and whether that chain could be broken. My own theory about this pattern is that each generation hits their teens and twenties and thinks their ideas are brand new and that no one has ever been this outraged/enlightened/special/downtrodden, etc. They weren’t around for the last revolution and so they repeat the same mistakes. Hormones (especially testosterone) and undeveloped frontal lobes likely have more influence here than we care to admit. There are people voting now who weren’t alive when 9/11 happened. Heck, there are voters who were too young for their parents to play Trump’s Access Hollywood tapes and so didn’t know that was a thing!
Don’t get me wrong, racism and misogyny are very real and are playing a big part of our election cycles. But they are being stoked by a media that profits from our fear and paranoia. It’s a flywheel and a ratchet, both. Spinning out of control and only in one direction.
If there’s any hope, it comes from my father as well. A few years before he passed away, I took him with me to Africa and we sailed across the Atlantic together. We were at sea for 45 days or so, without any news, just a deck of cards, some books to read, lots of time talking and staring at the horizon. My father gradually came back. Later, as he was dying of cancer (the literal kind), he told me that our sailing trip was one of the highlights of his life. He specifically said how great it had been not to think about politics, to clear his mind. Sadly, he had just as quickly returned to his news bubble when he got home and that metaphorical cancer took hold.
I learned so much from my father, many really wonderful things. But also some sad things. The saddest is how fear and bad news pervert the mind. I lost my father to Fox News and rightwing media, and we lost this election to it as well. Rush has morphed into Joe Rogan. Rightwing radio has turned into Twitter. Russia gets this better than we do and happily pours gasoline onto the fire. Liberals, meanwhile, go into unaware bubbles of MSNBC and Threads and think everyone sees the same world they do. But we don’t. Here’s your spoiler: there’s more than one silo.
For anyone interested in understanding the world we live in, there’s no better book on the topic than THE RIGHTEOUS MIND by Jonathan Haidt. I can’t recommend a book more highly. Please give it a read.
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