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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The Joy of Hating

David Brooks and the exhilarating pleasure of spite

62627099If you read New York Times columnists online, a small selection of reader comments appears on the screen next to the column. I’m a regular reader of Douthat and Brooks, and am constantly shocked by how hateful so many NYT readers are. Either one of those guys could write a tribute to butterflies and fluffy bunnies, and some of those miserable wretches who read their stuff would complain.

Brooks today wrote a perfectly mild piece about what readers have written in answer to his question about how they found purpose in life. He writes:

I expected most contributors would follow the commencement-speech clichés of our high-achieving culture: dream big; set ambitious goals; try to change the world. In fact, a surprising number of people found their purpose by going the other way, by pursuing the small, happy life.

You ought to see some of the comments this column drew. For example:

Michael Indiana 19 minutes ago

When I read this insipid, pious, nonsense I understand Jefferson’s affection for the French revolution. Chou Enlai, apparently suspected that it would be back. Justice will be be very haphazard if it arrives.

More:

Socrates Verona, N.J. 17 minutes ago

My purpose in life is to redistribute wealth, income and well-being upward from the struggling and working classes to the richest people in the land.

After all, it’s billionaires who make the world go round; without them, no food would be grown, cow raised, meal prepared, dishes washed and succulent dessert prepared.

What gives me joy is taking the productivity and income produced by my workers and claiming it as my own and taxing that significant and swindled income at a lower rate than the tax rate of workers who helped produce that income; this gives me joy because stealing is fun, I can get away with it and I write the rules.

Sure, many of my workers don’t have living wages and many need the government’s assistance to afford food, but they have cellphones and widescreen TVs, so they must be living very comfortably.

I spend millions of my enormous personal fortune every year on worthy political causes supporting suppression of the minimum wage, suppression of public healthcare and retirement programs, suppression of clean air and clean water rules and voter suppression because all of these noble ideas help maintain the right-wing economic strip-mining of the American worker that has popularized the cultured, psychopathic and exceptional greed that makes the United States special.

In no other civilized country could my reckless narcissism be validated on a continuous basis as it is by America and its right-wing, Randian cult of unfettered greed.

I am truly blessed.

Another one:

John Q N.Y., N.Y. 24 minutes ago

America’s foremost sociocraptologist provides advice for those of us concerned that the GOP has replaced our democracy with a vicious plutocracy: Suck it up!

I agree with this commenter:

Frank S 23 minutes ago

To me, the comments on this article are an interesting study in human nature.

They can almost be neatly cleaved into two parts. One part contains comments calmly and peacefully conveying the hard-won wisdom of our elders, while the other seems filled with the collective despair of folks clinging hard to their immature and idealistic adolescence.

Several of the comments that I read contrasted Brooks’s column today with Paul Krugman’s, in which Krugman talks about the radical economic insecurity in the lives of ordinary Americans. From Krugman:

But all too many affluent Americans — and, in particular, members of our political elite — seem to have no sense of how the other half lives. Which is why a new study on the financial well-being of U.S. households, conducted by the Federal Reserve, should be required reading inside the Beltway.

Before I get to that study, a few words about the callous obliviousness so prevalent in our political life.

I am not, or not only, talking about right-wing contempt for the poor, although the dominance of compassionless conservatism is a sight to behold. According to the Pew Research Center, more than three-quarters of conservatives believe that the poor “have it easy” thanks to government benefits; only 1 in 7 believe that the poor “have hard lives.” And this attitude translates into policy. What we learn from the refusal of Republican-controlled states to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government would foot the bill, is that punishing the poor has become a goal in itself, one worth pursuing even if it hurts rather than helps state budgets.

But leave self-declared conservatives and their contempt for the poor on one side. What’s really striking is the disconnect between centrist conventional wisdom and the reality of life — and death — for much of the nation.

The thing that does not seem to occur to these berserker Brooks haters is that Brooks’s column does not contradict Krugman’s. They can both be true. Krugman is an economist who is focused on economic matters; Brooks is a moralist who cares a lot about sociology. If Krugman’s economic dreams came true, and America became a place where many more people had greater material security, the question of how to find purpose in life would remain. I wrote a book about how my younger sister, a public schoolteacher in a tiny Southern town, was one of the happiest people I’ve ever known, not because she was rich or free to fulfill all her desires, but because she loved her work and her family and her community, and was grateful for what she had. There are people with vastly more economic security than she had who possess not a fraction of her happiness and sense of meaning and fulfillment.

This is absolutely not to say that we should not do more to help the economically vulnerable, but it’s simply to say that the good life, the happy life, the fulfilling life, is not the same thing as the materially comfortable life. Which is all that Brooks seems to be saying.

And yet, some Times readers unloaded on him.

I wonder what makes people do that? Seriously, I have always been puzzled by the people who read this blog, and who seem to hate everything I believe in or say, yet who keep coming back to tell me what an SOB I am. I end up banning most of these people, but I can’t figure out why they come in the first place.

There is a certain kind of person who finds joy in hate. I know this couple, right-wing nuts who hate everything, and who are despised in turn by their neighbors. People who have had dealings with this pair have stories of how provocative and bizarre they are, and how they seem to thrive off of hating and being hated. I don’t think this is a right-wing or a left-wing thing; it’s just how some people are. They know who they are by who and what they hate.

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