“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’”
I’ll say it! David Foster Wallace's parable has stuck with me.
Imagining us humans as little fish, swimming in a vast body of water that our little fish brains probably couldn’t even fully conceptualize. Encountering such a basic question about your surroundings — how’s the water? And you, stumbling, realizing that you don’t even know that those surroundings are there. Or, that what’s around even is.
What the hell is water?
The way I engage with the world only really began to feel even somewhat clarified once I confronted this question. To look around and really examine our immediate surroundings — our status quo of contradictions, the silliest and most in-your-face vulgarities that have become so baked into everyday life that they’re as American as Apple Pie.
There’s the more day-to-day, conventional features. School children becoming miniature cookie dough salespeople every year, in order to raise money even for the most basic classroom supplies like pencils and notebooks. Our Healthcare-by-GoFundMe Complex, where well-connected community members very well might receive a good deal of sympathy and support, but in general, it’s hard to effectively crowd-fund your healthcare as an individual when over 250,000 other people are in the same boat at any given moment.
Then there’s more blatant emblems of societal failure. Cities spending more money building anti-homeless architecture rather than just building homes. Millions of people working multiple jobs while still managing to pay their share towards building our society; simultaneously a small echelon maneuvers the system to maintain their extreme comfort while contributing no fair share to nurturing our society and its people.
The list goes on.
Amid all these conditions, we’re absorbed by emotionally-draining rat races, and emotionally-muting monotony. Our “normal” conditions lead us to be always working, always moving, but with little regard as to what we are moving towards. Resultantly, we become absorbed into isolated bubbles of constant anxiety, fear, and stress as we respond to a social framework that leaves us all to figure things out by ourselves — to the point that we do not even get the chance to recognize what’s making these bubbles: the Water. Naturally then, it feels difficult to address common challenges because we barely have the capacity to acknowledge these challenges as common in the first place! So we not only fail to meaningfully empathize with our fellow human beings (our fellow fish), and their unique struggles — we also rationalize these broader bleak conditions as “just how things are.”
The task of better world is to confront the Water and all its conditions. By doing that, we can hopefully escape these lonely bubbles and orient our planes of understanding towards each other. As David Foster Wallace also points to, it’s straightforward enough to understand how two different people can perceive an experience in totally different ways, given their respective engrained ways of thinking. But to go beyond just “understanding” and actually initiate this sort of re-orientation, it’s helpful to actually dig into where these individual beliefs and ways of thinking come from. Otherwise, our default setting might simply be to view people as hard-wired or static, rather than complex and dynamic. And if we do the former, we will probably keep playing politics as it is now — where the goal is simply to continually convince just enough people to vote for your candidate every few years. On the other hand, if we can view people as amenable, you could imagine a reality where politics actually is about working to rally people together behind focused political visions, ambitions that go beyond just an election cycle.
better world is not premised on any superficial claims like “we just need to understand each other better.” It’s an active and critical project, but one that echoes what the late Michael Brooks urged, to “be ruthless with systems, be kind to people.” This project has to come from a basis of love, not vindication; not premised on simply forcing someone to think differently, but rather by articulating the world through a lens people perhaps have not yet been confronted with. As James Baldwin suggests, “If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”
The project is to formulate a lens, one we can constantly refine together. A lens that understands people as dynamic, not static; as complicated, not simple; as the combination of human choice and living history, not predetermined nor inevitable. A lens that argues our hopes and dreams should not trickle down from what politicians or pundits tell us is possible; rather our hopes and dreams themselves should be what creates and embodies our politics & leaders. A lens that urges us to recognize that the way things are now is not inherently how they ought to be.
To that end, this newsletter will present a combination of reporting, conversations, and essays — work that is critical of power, grounded in love & conviction, and built on the wholehearted belief that humans can actually be for each other, and not simply in spite of each other.
So please, subscribe to this newsletter (it’s free!) —>
…and invite friends, family members, and neighbors — those you find harmonies with, and those you suspect you do not — to subscribe as well. I reckon we all will be learning and growing together anyways. If you are in a position to do so, I invite you to support this newsletter with what amounts to a couple cups of coffee — $5 a month (or more if you’re feeling generous!). Your contribution allows me to take more time to interview and talk with people, conduct research, and ultimately, write with more liberty. If you are unable to contribute financially — your careful reading, thoughtful comments, shares with others, and free subscriptions to read more from better world are just as appreciated. Finally, you can reach me at prem.thakk@gmail.com, and on Twitter @prem_thakker.
You can expect my first report in the coming days. I spoke with Dave Morris — owner of D&R’s Daily Grind Cafe in Portage, Michigan — whose impromptu broadside about the government and COVID-related shutdowns went viral. I suspected there was more to Dave than the archetypes he was being ascribed to online and on TV. Without giving away too much — this hunch bore some very revealing fruit. I found Dave’s thoughts apropos to much of the issues we are focused on today: the false choice between economic livelihood and physical & emotional well-being; the interrogation of what an adequate & just government looks like; the tensions that arise when federal ineptitude leaves local obligations out to dry. Subscribe to better world to ensure you catch this captivating story — I’m eager to hear your thoughts.
Be well, take care, and Love. A better world is possible.
The sentiment of questioning the status quo that's binding most people into dealing with their anxieties as an island rather than being able to discuss and challenge their sources together with one's community is very similar to what I have read of yours in the Spectator. I'm excited for you to be on this new platform where you'll have more space to expand on your ideas.
I also took this opportunity to finally unsubscribe from the dozens of useless mailing lists I'm on that clog up my inbox, just so that your emails don't get buried under a mountain of advertisement and irrelevance. So thank you for that unexpected benefit of inviting me to read your essays.
Loved the fish intro, but you got me at "Healthcare at Go-Fund-Me-Complex". And Pleeeze! not "We just have to understand each other better." I had a client email me this:
"empathy
the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
Then "Peace and Joy".
Well meaning and nice person, but I reminded this person that "actions speak louder than words." She actually does help friends and family. She is always broke because she is constantly giving her money and time to them. But like many, if not most, liberals who got all resisty in the last 4 years, they throw phrases around like "empathy" as if some politician like Biden or Clinton who says "I feel your pain" will actually give two hoots about your inability to pay your rent or find a healthcare plan you can afford. Talk about bubbles!
So Prem, how do we unite the working class with the pie-in-the-sky kids of the professional managerial class to take down the system? To put our bodies into the machine as Mario Savio said in my day. (1960s). If you read the history of populism, of Thomas Paine's ideas, you realize that the powers that be are ruthless in putting this down. In the 19th century, they made sure that the white working class (mostly Irish, Serbs, Poles,) did not unite with the rural blacks and the rural white farmers/ranchers who were being screwed. It continues to this day.
Your article on David Morris is part of this continual fight to bring us together despite the elites wanting to pull us apart. But it is a battle.