Young guy in a vest, holding a clipboard, came to the door.
His timing wasn’t good – we were busy. “Thanks, sorry, can’t today,” I said through the crack in the door.
“One minute, max,” he said.
“Sorry, man, no.”
It wasn’t clear what he was canvassing for, and I didn’t have time to find out.
But he wasn’t leaving. My No hadn’t registered. He’d actually stepped forward. He was half inside the house. Only his hind end stuck out into the cold.
“Listen, man. No! Look at me: No!”
He looked me in the face. Blinking like a carp.
I felt my fist wanting to go somewhere I’d regret. I redirected it into my pocket and found a ten—here, bugger off.
The guy didn’t take it.
When I first heard about "illiberal democracy," and what Victor Orban was doing in Hungary, I didn't give it much thought. Then when Marine Le Pen became a rising star in France, and a Nazi-tinged party started winning big in Germany, I just shook my head and hoped this far right trend would pass.
But instead, the dissolution of the liberal world order quickened: Narendra Modi transformed India into a Hindu dictatorship... Jair Bolsonaro pulled off a coup in Brazil... Javier Milei feverishly waved a chain saw around Argentina... and then, fuck it, unbelievable, Putin's tanks rolled into Ukraine... Bibi Netanyahu ripped apart the bodies of 20,000 children... and finally, the coup de grâce: Trump's landslide victory last November.
America in the 2020s is looking more and more like Germany in the 1930s. What are you going to do about it?
Scientists used to think there were only six human emotions — anger, surprise, disgust, enjoyment, fear and sadness. We now know there is a seventh: awe.
Awe is the feeling, registering more in our body than our mind, that we’re in the presence of something so vast and deep and powerful that it swamps our present understanding of the world. A skyful of stars in the middle of nowhere. A soaring piece of art. An act of wild kindness, fugitively glimpsed.
Or an existential threat.
Awe is unlike anything else we humans experience. When it shoots through us, we enter a kind of altered state. We become superhuman, sleeper agents suddenly activated for a purpose we never prepared for, and barely understand.
Awe interrupts the trance, silences the static and replaces it with the clarity of mind to understand what our job is now.
The craving to be part of a bigger project, this is the “collective effervescence” Emile Durkheim spoke of: an energy and harmony that only happens when we huddle up on strong groups for a shared purpose.
People suddenly understand where they fit in the story of the world, now and going forward.