The Magic Wand of Toxic Positivity

Staring into Hell, True Moral Quandary, Productive Pessimism, Our Fallen World

Someone breaks into your house and kills a few of your children then retreats with promises to return. You leave your remaining children at home to pursue the killer but when you finally catch up they’ve hidden themselves behind one of their own innocent children. They’re firing at you, still, hollering that they will go and kill the rest of your kids as soon as you’re out of the way.

What do you do?

Well, per the internet, the most popular choice is that you should just pretend that this isn’t happening. Nope. Not happening. The situation is totally different.

If you’re really liberal, then the gunmen never killed your children, or actually, your children were bad. Totally valid targets, to those who have sold their souls to the Devil. What the gunmen did to you is justified by ancestral grievance. If you’re hyper-conservative, it turns out that your enemy’s children are actually bad because he was raising them up to be just like him and therefore you’re totally morally clear to just remove his entire bloodline from the face of the Earth. Stained by nurture. In either case, the objective is the same. Eliminate from the situation all of the true moral quandary, the ugly reality that no matter what you choose to do, it is bad. And not only bad from a certain point of view, but globally bad. There is no scenario where you leave without blood on your hands.

It’s your children or his children. That’s the choice you’ve been presented with. Who dies? There’s no secret riddle you can solve to choose a different scenario. You’re not Captain Kirk and this isn’t a test of your brilliant wits. It is bad to let the gunman kill you and then move on to kill your children. And he will. He has repeatedly shown he is willing and able to do this. You do nothing and your children are as good as dead. And if you kill his children in order to kill him, then you’re a child-killer.

Expand this out to the population level and you get all the moral sewer of the Israel-Palestine conflict. When you go to war innocents will die. People make mistakes. Intelligence isn’t perfect. Some of your own soldiers are secretly psychopaths looking for their chance to settle a personal grudge and you don’t know who all of them are but they will commit war crimes. They will. It’s a numbers game. You can reduce it but it can’t be eliminated. And it’s hard to see through all the damn lies because if there’s ever a time to lie it’s to save your own life or the lives of the people you care about.

If you do nothing? Then you’ve taught your enemy that they should continue to do what they have done before. You’ve rewarded them for a certain set of tactics. More of your people will die.

It makes me quite angry when people pretend away all the ugliness in the world. Not because I want people to be darkly depressed, but because the thing that causes us to move into better worlds is a full acknowledgement of the reality we inhabit. Sometimes the reality we inhabit is vomit-inducing. So people play a substitution game and replace the characteristics of a situation in just the right way in order to make the moral landscape something they are happier to hypothetically navigate.

Take homelessness and addiction. Some people do drugs and have induced psychosis. They won’t ever get better on their own and eventually they lose their families, their homes, and begin to live on the street. Some of them won’t get better even if multiple people make it their full time job to help them for years.

Wave the magic wand of Toxic Positivity and voila! The answer is simple. Homeless people just need homes. Then they’ll be home-full people. If you put five-thousand dollars cash on the chest of a guy sleeping in a cardboard box with a needle sticking out of his arm then he won’t be schizophrenic anymore. Give him a cellphone and some food then just let him die right there in the middle of the street and give yourself a pat on the back. He’s not actually sick and nothing is wrong with him. He’s the best person to make decisions for himself and you have preserved his personal freedom, which was the most important thing.

Take the recent open crime policies in San Francisco. People breaking into shops and stealing things so that it is impossible to profitably run a business. Wave the Wand of Toxic Positivity and merely transform all the shoppers into honest, starving family people who are only trying to survive. Or on the reverse side, when you return to law and order, simply imagine that no matter what a police officer does to stop a crime that they are always in the right no matter what.

The thing that causes progress to happen isn’t putting on rose-colored glasses and imaging a different present. It’s putting on quite clear glasses, seeing the world as it is, and then putting the rose colored glasses over your imagination and trying to project all the possible future worlds that are better than the current one. Then really ask yourself, honestly, what is the connective tissue that takes you from the ugly present into that much better future? Once you find that, you are honor-bound to execute on it.

If you can be Productively Pessimistic, the optimists will win out. Productive Pessimism is the force that causes optimism to be true. A Productive Pessimist can sit with moral quandary and instead of wishing it away to let the problem snowball and worsen on its return, they instead ask “What is the absolute minimum bad that can happen in this situation? What is the least bad path to the best possible future?”

I wish I could save all the innocent lives in Gaza. Especially the kids, who I have watched die in numbers that seem like they should exhaust my tears but haven’t. I think about those children when I am with my own son, and while some part of me says I have a duty to be alive and happy here and now because I am lucky, I imagine Dutch’s lifeless body being retrieved from rubble. I ask myself, wouldn’t I want a stranger to at least for a moment to sit with the emotion of that? The answer is yes. I would want a stranger with no power to help to at least feel a moment of sorrow for my lost child. So I do because I don’t have any other levers to pull.

Yet if I’m an Israeli and I’m preparing to send in a ground invasion how many of my own people do I risk by lightening the bombardment? Every Hamas terrorist I leave alive is one who will attack my people when I send in rescue teams to secure the hostages.

There’s much about the situation I would change. I’m not a fan of Netanyahu. If I could snap my fingers and make him gone, I would. I know a lot of the complicated history of how Israel came to be and those early Zionists often resorted to tactics quite a lot like Terrorism. I wish that history were otherwise. I wish the Palestinians and the Israelis lived in one coherent state and there was no such thing as antisemitism.

But I will not wave the Wand of Toxic Positivity. I’ll ask questions like what is that these actors have to do in order to survive and protect their people? And if they go beyond that, what does it say? What future are they working towards?

If Hamas had gone into Israel and killed military targets or even adult men, I would have said “desperate people doing what they must to survive. “ That’s not what they did. They killed women and children, they kidnapped, and worst of all they celebrated the horror of it. Yes, there are other accusations where the intent was more dubious, but I know they paraded a dead girl’s body through the streets and spat on her corpse, and kidnapped children, because I watched them do it from their own videos. They enjoyed widespread support from the Palestinian diaspora and although there have not been elections in sometime, Hamas was also elected by the people of Gaza. That is the ugly reality we inhabit.

Israel has been bombing Gaza and everywhere I look the Wand of Toxic Positivity is wielding its powerful magic. Tap the wand and there are no rockets shot at Israel from civilian kitchens. No military targets mixed in with common people whatsoever. Hamas isn’t telling people to stay in their homes so that their dead bodies can make good PR. And on the other side, all the child deaths are faked, everyone being killed is a full terrorist, and Israel is within its rights to turn all of Gaza into a sheet of glass. I believe Israel is doing what it must to survive, and I hate it, but other than for violating the sovereignty of Qatar to carry out assassinations on Hamas leaders I don’t know what I would do differently.

I don’t like any answer I can think up. Without a wand, the best answer I’ve arrived at is Occupation with International oversight. Someone has to break the cycle of Palestinian antisemitism. Otherwise you’re just leaving this to continue and the “mow the grass” strategy seems even more repugnant. If you could resettle Palestinians that might be better, if a more polite sort of ethnic cleansing, but nobody wants them. Someone has to get an actual control structure and governance system in that society that won’t just be immediately destroyed by Hamas. However this has come to be, you can’t have a society where children are watching cartoons about how great it is to kill Jews that just continuously produces that every generation. Yes, I’ve seen similar happen in Israeli schools but by all accounts it is not a cultural mainstay. I’d see such things denounced if not outright banned.

Little by little, over what I honestly can’t imagine being less than a hundred years, I would try to foster better relations. Find ways for them to trade that can spread. Find ways for them to interact that are safe. Hell, mandate X-Box matches for the entire youth of the country. Get someone Israel respects to settle disputes in an impartial manner. That’s all ugly, but it’s the least ugly thing I can imagine.

Whenever you see horror in your life, even if you can’t speak its name, try to at least know it for what it is on the inside. Be honest with yourself. We owe it to the world. Since the Garden, real or metaphorical, we have been on our own out here. We can imagine other futures for ourselves and we should try to move into better ones. But the mere fact that problems like this one can exist, that there are situations where you have no choice to make but a bad choice, should never be forgotten.