Against Misanthropy

In a modern moment ruled by alienation, dreary, apathetic politics has taken hold. To overcome the next Trump presidency, we’ll need to override that instinct.

By Caleb Brennan | November 13, 2024 | 11:13am

Photo by https://www.flickr.com/people/126057486@N04, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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The 2006 film Children of Men is set in 2027 where a global fertility crisis has plunged the world into an orgy of sectarian violence, ecological disaster, and a global refugee crisis. Democracy has collapsed and only authoritarian governments are able to survive. As humanity slowly waltzes towards extinction, a once-promising horizon sours. The hopes of the 21st century—technological liberation, an end to disease, the peace of a unipolar planet—are transformed by mass surveillance, state-of-the-art weaponry, and feudal-esque wealthy inequality into a new dark age. The absence of new people has brought our worst instincts to bear. The only salvation for mankind is presented to the audience via immaculate conception: The first pregnant woman in a generation is revealed to our hero Theo, and he is tasked with shepherding her to safety in a Britain shackled to the chains of a xenophobic police state.

It is in this dystopian narrative where we may find glimpses into understanding what the next four years may look like — not quite literally, but in spirit. When we imagine the destruction of society, we often picture total annihilation. Nuclear war. An unrelenting plague. The rise of a malevolent AI. An asteroid the size of Texas. In reality, empires fall apart gradually. The process by which the Roman Imperium buckled under its own weight took centuries. The Spanish Monarchy once controlled an entire continent and a half before slowly dwindling into geopolitical obscurity. On March 21st, 2025, when the United Kingdom officially returns the Chagos Islands to the island state of Mauritius, the sun will at last set on the British Empire after 200 years.

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And much like our forebears, the twilight of Pax Americana will likely be an exhausting, sordid affair. The return of Donald Trump to the White House might not eclipse “democracy as we know it”—nor will it be able to end American hegemony overnight—but it will certainly be destabilizing as the chaotic contradictions of MAGA give way to the reality of its proposal. Think less apocalyptically and more of a continuity; the prolonged process of the hollowing out. Trump is a brain-rotted bull and our decaying institutions are fine China dinner sets held together with scotch tape and spit.

Where does this leave us? We can save the Monday morning quarterbacking for the more astute, wiser minds who have already embarked on that analysis. Instead, we should reckon with a more concrete element, one that allowed for Trump’s unprecedented influence. His domination over the past eight years can be seen in part as a byproduct of our broader shift towards misanthropy, one born out of a lack of meaningful human interaction. It seems that the very texture of our increasingly anti-social world gave us this innovative style of blood-and-soil revanchism.

Much like the characters of Children of Men, our day-to-day lives are defined by a deep, festering sense of isolation and loneliness. In one scene, Theo and his comrades take shelter in an abandoned school, a relic from a time when the harmonies of playing children were not a distant memory. The floors are caked with mud. The swing sets are corroded. The echoes of the emptied classrooms are haunting. And the message couldn’t be any clearer: When we lose purpose and connection, the kind that only publicly organized social institutions can give us, we lose the possibility of a future.

The quality of American social life has been steadily depreciating for decades. The cause of this is too complex to unpack in one essay, but the political scientist Robert Putnam relayed a prophetic analysis in his influential book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. As the union halls and church groups diminished as sites of socialization—and in concert with the dawn of the Internet—Putnam warned in 2000 that the demise of these spaces could be sociologically destructive, especially since they were only being replaced by the digital.

Since the 1970s, he explained, the foundational elements of post-war modernity—the way we interact, how our economy runs, and the technology that governs it—have depleted the social bonds that healthy societies need to thrive. Putnam also observed that this was not a novel circumstance.

According to Putnam, The United States experienced a similar upheaval at the turn of the 19th century when immigration and urbanization placed pressure on existing institutions. At first, American society was unable to cope with this development: “Crime waves, degradation in the cities, inadequate education, a widening gap between rich and poor…a ‘Saturnalia’ of political corruption,” he explained.

But it was in the first quarter of the 20th century, known in our country as the Progressive Era, that a sense of urgency mixed with a popular front of left-wing radicalism brought about reforms to the contemporary society we dwell in. “In fact, most of the major community institutions in American life today were invented or refurbished in that most fecund period of civic innovation in American history,” Putnam concluded.

As evident from Trump’s re-election, we have so far failed to meet the moment with similar vigor. The statistics bear this out. Loneliness has now become defined as a kind of public health crisis. More than one in ten Americans have no single close friend. More and more people report having less or no sex as compared to previous decades. Despite relatively low crime, adults are increasingly worried about walking around in their own neighborhoods. Participation in religious institutions has only continued to decline, though it doesn’t appear that a meaningful, community-based alternative has taken hold.

However, rather than tackling this problem head-on, both the right-wing and the liberal center have leaned into the politics of misanthropy, wherein the average person is treated with deep suspicion and revulsion. For the Trumpist faction, this means presuming that everyone is out to get you: migrants, criminals, and government bureaucrats lurk around every corner. The center-left is no better, imagining that vast swaths of the population are craven, unfeeling racists who revel in mass deportations and abortion restrictions.

Neither is, of course, grounded in reality. These attitudes make solidarity—the most urgent sentiment we’ll need to win back power—completely impossible.

Rather, such narratives have been propagated because we no longer have real communities or even mundane, daily interactions. With the decline of public transportation, we all now take our own individual Ubers to a location. More and more parents are opting into home-schooling their children. We now can swipe an app that will pay someone a paltry wage to go to the grocery store for us. Churches and other communal spaces are bought up and transformed into luxury condos. Our political parties do not permit actual membership to the hoi polloi. Municipal governance often does not lend itself to participation.

And this absence of social cohesion has brought about a kind of toxic, nonpartisan individualism to germinate, growing like bacteria in the laboratory of late capitalism. As the anti-human tendencies of the digital revolution have taken hold, we have used this new anxiety to justify our own isolation. The atomizing ideology of misanthropy stresses your comfort above all else; views every social interaction as a game of zero-sums; and embraces a sort of post-modern disposition towards humanity that views our species as inherently sadistic.

Taken holistically, we begin to see the means by which Trumpism, with all its soothing conspiracies and essentialist Manichaeisms, would be a compelling alternative to the sclerotic, tepid status quo. In the mythology of MAGA, complexity collapses, and the intricacies of how to manage changes in a multi-racial democratic fall by the wayside. Yet part of why the Democrats failed to retain the presidency and the Senate is in part due to their inability to present a meaningful alternative that wasn’t imbued with the stench of neoliberal pragmatism—the very system that birthed the misanthropic paradigm.

Our response must be two-fold. Americans must be prepared to reconstitute themselves against the present systems by which our crises have emerged and the social malformations that laid the groundwork for our rightward tilt. The anti-capitalist Left has often pressed the material circumstances of class relations above all else to organize its worldview, but simply calling for militant trade unionism to combat the rise of fascism won’t suffice.

Thus, we must embark on a broad movement to undo the culture of misanthropy that leaks into every crevice of our lives. Even the most mundane acts can repel the anti-social urge: starting a band, bringing your neighbors together for a potluck, befriending the people who work in your community, permanently logging off from social media, or volunteering at the soup kitchen near your home are simply means by which we can reject misanthropy.

Doing this in tangent with the actual politics necessary to defeat Trumpism will make such tasks not only easier but more viable. Building up unions, organizing your fellow tenants, drafting ballot measures, and preparing to resist mass deportations can only be realized by individuals who are not afraid of those around them. We cannot, as a Senator from Vermont once said, “fight for someone you don’t know” under the conditions of misanthropy.

The millions of ordinary people who have resisted violent orders in the past understood this. When they threw themselves onto a burning pyre of bone saws and razor wire to end slavery or topple colonial regimes, they were firmly standing against the psychology of misanthropy that abhors sacrifice.

At the end of Children of Men, Theo delivers Kee to a buoy where a boat captained by the elusive Human Project is supposed to intercept them. The promise is that this will be the first step in ending the infertility catastrophe. None of the members of this “almost mythical” contingent are seen in the movie. Theo and Kee aren’t even entirely sure if they exist or if they’re trustworthy. As the vessel cuts through the fog, Theo dies from wounds sustained in the film’s climax. The camera cuts to black. To me, it suggests people are all we have, and that we have no other option but to believe in them.