Live and Let Live

There is an xkcd cartoon that once got pretty popular:

I see wrong people on the internet all the time. And stupid people. People who are so stupid that even if you shook them by the shoulders and said, “STOP BEING STUPID!” they would still be stupid. I see wrong and stupid people in real life, too. In the grocery store, when someone blocks the entire aisle with their cart. On the roads, when someone is Sunday driving on a Tuesday. In the airport, when someone is Facetiming on their phone. There are so many wrong and stupid people in the world that they are uncountably infinite, and it’s enough so that you just want to retreat to your castle with your wife and your cats and say, fuck all y’all, I am going to insulate myself from the stupidity and never leave the house again. Ever try to argue with a stupid person on the internet? How did that work out? You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.

I have a philosophy of live and let live, where I let the stupid people be stupid and don’t undertake any responsibility of educating them. You fish on your side of the lake, I fish on my side, and nobody fishes in the middle. Life is a lot easier that way. This means that love and tolerance are our code. But there are a lot of intolerant people out there, are there not? There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t hear a story from someone about a relationship ending because someone voted for the wrong political party. There has been no shortage of intolerance in the last five years. Now, when most people hear the word “tolerance,” they think of underrepresented minorities. But there is a different kind of tolerance as well—tolerance of people with different viewpoints. The tolerant of minorities are frequently intolerant of viewpoints, and vice versa. Somebody being trans doesn’t affect me personally. Someone being a Republican doesn’t affect me personally. Practically nothing affects me personally. Live and let live, or as the great Humpty Hump once said, doowucthyalike.

Sometimes it hits a little closer to home. You have a friend or a family member who is making choices that are suboptimal, to say the least. Maybe self-destructive behavior of some kind. Maybe bad relationship choices. Is it your job to…intervene? To prevent the stupid person from doing something stupid? I assure you that if you intervene to prevent the stupidity, it will backfire and blossom into even more stupidity. The only way stupid people are going to learn is from the consequences of their own actions. They can’t be taught, they can’t be bought, they can’t be bullied, they can’t be reasoned with. You, as a spectator, are going to have to watch it unfold before your eyes. And it was all preventable. But not by you! Never deprive someone of the opportunity to learn from their own mistakes—even if the mistakes are horrifying. And you know what? Some people are so stupid that they will make the same mistakes over and over again, and you will be powerless to stop it. I mean, there is a certain laissez-faire in social Darwinism.

The one thing that all people in politics have in common is a desire to tell people how to live their lives—basically the opposite of live and let live. Think of the people you know who have gotten into politics. We all have ideas of what we’d do if we were king for a day. Personally, I’d replace the progressive income tax with a consumption tax, exempting food and other necessities. From a practical standpoint, this is impossible—you’d have to repeal the sixteenth amendment. So it is nice to talk about in the faculty lounge, but not really worth expending any capital on social media over. To succeed in politics, especially in the twenty-first century, you must be intolerant. There is no compromise. I have a small amount of influence as a writer, and I exercise it, but I am not going to get into an argument with Professor Monkeynuts on Facebook. On a side note, politics is a skill like anything else. Most people are very, very bad at it. You may think you are smart with your snappy neologisms like “Democraps” or “Repukelicans,” but really what you are is very, very bad at politics. Amateurish beyond belief. You should stay out of it. I like my politics like I like my porn: done by professionals.

How about letting people…live their lives? Which is essentially an argument for decentralization. Nobody knows better how to run a family than a family. Nobody knows better how to run a town than a town. Nobody knows better how to run a state than a state. The United States was built on the decentralization of power. People in California have different values than people in South Carolina. If you don’t like living in California, then move to South Carolina, and vice versa. Once every few generations, someone liberty-minded will get into office who believes that people actually know what’s best for themselves, which is another way of saying live and let live. Mike Bloomberg, man. The Big Gulps were a bridge too far. One more law and utopia will be achieved. And by the way: Bloomberg was great for New York! A clean, safe, gleaming metropolis. If the paternalism wasn’t so lampoon-able he might still be in office.

Implicit in the statement “live and let live” is the statement I know what’s best for you. No. I don’t know what’s best for anyone, and you don’t know what’s best for me. Once a week, someone tells me to get in the gym. They are well-intentioned. But crucially, they don’t know what’s best for me. I could counter, and say, why don’t you go read a fucking book, but that would not be live and let live. The reason I don’t know what’s best for anyone else, is because I don’t even know what’s best for me! My best thinking got me in the Coast Guard for nine years. My best thinking got me in a trade that almost took me down in 2017. I have made a lot of correct decisions, but I have not always made the correct decision. So I don’t make a habit of telling other people what to do, or what to think, or how to act, or how to dress, or what to eat, or anything else. It’s not my business. “I work out all the time and I’m happy, so if you worked out all the time, you would be happy, too” is about the most simplistic, autodidactic reasoning around. Again, it’s all well-intentioned, but you know what they say about the road to hell.

When someone’s behavior is inexplicable, the thing to understand is that it makes sense to them. Do you know someone who smokes? How many times do you think people tell them to quit smoking, and yet they keep smoking? Why do it—it’s certain death! I dunno, maybe it is a rational choice? Maybe the pleasure they derive from smoking is worth the tradeoff in decreased lifespan? My guess is that they will quit smoking when they are ready to quit smoking. And the smoking example is the best, especially in an age when there are so many other non-harmful nicotine delivery systems. You basically have to have a death wish. And people do—so what? They are not uneducated hicks. They know the risks. Their behavior seems irrational—to you. It seems rational to them. Again, you cannot take a stupid person and grab them by the shoulders and yell STOP BEING STUPID. They are still going to be stupid—there is nothing you can do about it.

But here is the biggest reason to live and let live—when you involve yourself in other people’s problems, you become codependent, and failure to solve their problems leads to anguish and distress for you. This is a very stoic thing to say, but we should not let other people’s behavior affect us in any way. Well, what kind of a society do we have when people smoke and do drugs and shoot each other and surf porn? Wouldn’t we be better off if we could get rid of these social ills? Can’t we Richard Thaler-like nudge these things out of existence?

The truth is that society is perfect in its imperfection. People are smart—they learn over generations. I mean, hey, hardly anyone smokes anymore! And people don’t drink as much, either! And there are half as many automobile deaths as there were 50 years ago. All of these was achieved without some czar sitting in a command post somewhere, dictating the activities of millions of people. It just got better…on its own. As Matt Johnson once sung in his song “Lonely Planet,” if you can’t change the wrold, change yourself.