A System of Nature

After a long, draining day in the office last week, I stood in the rain looking at the 90-minute journey home from my friend's house and despaired at the combination of tiredness, anxiety, a stupid little summer dress, wind, no jacket, rain and three tube changes on lines that were all broken in some way. Unsurprisingly, I got an Uber and it's safe to say that the tube journey would have been preferable...

Now, it's important you understand that I generally enjoy talking to uber drivers about how their days have been, what their kids do, what they did before driving or what they think about the world, but this guy didn't want a conversation, he wanted to lecture me, "educate me" and "fix me" by brute forcing his opinions on me. Think mansplaining on steroids, but in a moving vehicle you cannot exit. As a business model for ensuring a captive audience, it was, I have to admit, quite effective.

Before we had even cleared the first left turning he had made a comment on housing prices in the area, stating my friend must be a "baller" to be living there. They absolutely are ballers, but it was a strange first comment and said with a hint of cyncism that whispered: "you're young, you shoulnd't be affording this, oh and you're in an uber, you lazy prick". Maybe all true, but certainly not what you want or need at 10:00pm on a Monday. As he almost-swerved into another honda, he began his tirade against "the money system" by which I gathered he meant capitalism, though he seemed to feel the word capitalism would have undersold it. The money system, he explained, was mad, just mad and I agreed (because he's right), that it is pretty mad and pretty fucking sad. That was my first mistake because what followed was not so much a conversation as a syllabus.

He moved swiftly onto my work (pointless), bosses (leeches), his opinion on women (apparently, we think and feel too much) and then to top it all off, the commute (the greatest injustice of modern civilisation). Hours of our lives, unpaid, uncounted, stolen in plain sight. “Do you get me?” he said at the end of every outpour, yes, sadly, I've got you for the next 40 minutes of this journey and I'd rather be under the car than in it right now.

He then told me he had done many studies of the people he drove around and I asked him how he managed to study anyone without asking them a single question. I don't think that went down very well, but he moved past that to explain the conclusions of his studies to me. With the confidence of someone unveiling a breakthrough theory, he explained that people are different at work than they are at home.

At work, he said, we perform, we are fake, we say things we don’t mean and at home, we are real. “Do you get me?” I did get him. I got him so much that I had to actively resist telling him that Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and several centuries of social theory had, in fact, beaten him to this particular revelation but there is something deeply unproductive about trying to out-theorise a man who has you physically trapped in the back seat of his car, so I nodded, respectfully.

Then came social media. “Social media is changing things,” he said, lowering his voice slightly, as if we were arriving at the most sensitive material. People are fake there too, maybe more fake, everyone performing, no one real. “Do you get me?” At this point, I began to feel that I did not just get him, I had perhaps been inducted into a belief system I could not leave.

Light joking aside, there is a seriousness to this story because none of what he was saying was actually wrong, it was just delivered with such force, such certainty, such absolute lack of nuance and doubt that it left no room for discussion. And I think that's why I got out of the car feeling so disproportionately upset, angry and deflated. Essentially I'd not just been spoken "to" but spoken "over" by a worldview I didn't fully agree with, but one I couldn't entirely dismiss either - which is unfortunately much worse.

A few days later, I watched the second series of Beef,which, frankly, deserves its own blog, but there’s a monologue in it that absolutely blew my little socks off :

“My second husband always said love is putting the other person over yourself but as soon as you are born you cry for mommy’s milk, you do not care about her, you only care about yourself. Maybe you put others over yourself a few times but only when it is easy. The universe is not designed for this, thank God. We survived billions of years from tiny cell to bacteria to monkey because we only care about self. That is why capitalism works, it is a system of nature, a system of the self. Love lives in this system, all relationships exist in this system. They are all the same, another way to serve the self. That is all I was to Dr Kim and that is all he was to me, that is why I am not crying right now, and that is why I am not worried about any of you.”

Now, here is the thing about an argument delivered without grace: you can dismiss the messenger, you can roll your eyes at the "do you get mes," at the unsolicited theory, at the man who has drawn conclusions about hundreds of people without asking a single one of them a question. You can get out of the car and feel righteously angry about it, but when the same argument arrives dressed in precision and stillness, with no need to convince you and no aggression, you don't get to do that anymore. You just have to sit with it. So I sat with it.

The argument being made in Beef is, at its core, a Darwinian one, and Darwin, irritatingly, is quite hard to argue with. We are here because our ancestors survived, and they survived because they prioritised themselves, not occasionally, not when it was convenient, but as a fundamental operating system. The evolutionary answer to altruism - that uncomfortable exception, the person who donates a kidney to a stranger, the soldier who falls on a grenade - is in fact kin selection. We protect not individuals but genes. So, the parent who sacrifices themselves for a child is, in cold mathematical terms, preserving fifty percent of their own genetic material and the love we feel, the pull towards certain people, the fierce protectiveness that can make us capable of extraordinary things are not evidence against the system but the system itself, running so deep and so quietly that we experience it as devotion, selflessness and love.

Of course, evolution didn't need us to understand our own selfishness, it just needed it to work and so it gave us feelings - beautiful, consuming, apparently transcendent feelings - that turn out, on close inspection, to be extraordinarily effective delivery mechanisms for genetic self-interest. Put starkly, the feeling is the mechanism and the love is the bait.

If I'm honest, I find this absolutely devastating.

It sends me into a doom-spiral where I consider all the selfish things I have done, then all the things I've done that have felt selfless and I wonder how many of those selfless acts were in fact selfish somehow.

I think about the achieving, the performing, the endless hitting of targets set by other people, and I wonder how much of that was love or duty or ambition and how much of it was simply the management of how I am perceived, because my sense of safety has always depended, more than I'd like to admit, on other people's approval. The chairwoman in Beef would say that is the self, through and through, the self, protecting itself, in the only way it knows how.

She's be probably right to an extent and I mourn that.

But I do think we need to push back against these ideas if we are to maintain any sense of sanity. What's interesting about the chairwoman's argument is that it's elegant precisely because it is closed. It accounts for everything and has no outside, no remainder, no excess that doesn't eventually reduce to self-interest. Closed system-thinking, however clumsily or beautifully expressed, should always make us slightly suspicious, not because the ideas are necessarily wrong, but because reality has a habit of being messier than the theories we build to contain it.

What the system cannot fully account for is this: the mourning of the system itself. The fact that we can hear that monologue and feel grief is important. The fact that we can also understand, intellectually, that love might be self-serving and still experience its loss as the most devastating thing that can happen to a person, is also important. I think it's actually very hopeful that we understand we are animals running ancient code, and still lie awake reaching for something that feels like it transcends it. Surely that's what makes us human?

The Uber driver wasn't wrong and the chairwoman in Beef isn't wrong but neither of them account for the woman sitting in the back seat of that uber in a wet summer dress, feeling disproportionately upset, not just because the world is cruel, but because some part of her keeps insisting, against all available evidence, that it doesn't have to be. Maybe that insistence is just another form of self-preservation and maybe hope is the most sophisticated trick the self plays on itself.

Or maybe (and I recognise this might be wishful thinking) the capacity to grieve the system is evidence of something that exists outside it. Not proof of transcendence, but a slither of light through a stone wall, which provides just enough hope to make the question worth asking.