Coup de Disgrace: The Deadly Consequences of a Culture That Equates Humility with Weakness

Note: This is a lightly edited version of a message I sent to my students in the wake of the January 6, 2021 siege on the U.S. Capitol building.

Wednesday’s attack on the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., perpetrated by an assortment of extremist groups ranging from the Proud Boys to QAnon supporters to neo-Nazi organizations, was an alarming, horrifying event in our nation’s history. It was also utterly predictable, an outcome of numerous cultural pathologies that have been allowed to flourish in our country for decades or even centuries: antisemitism, white supremacy, our glorification of violence, our superheated rhetoric, and our eagerness to participate in the dehumanization of others, to name just a few. However, it would be unproductive and dishonest to wring our hands over these societal illnesses without acknowledging the pivotal role of that most insidious of human failings, one that transcends political parties, religious affiliations, and indeed any kind of group allegiance: our addiction to the narrative of our own infallibility.

Put bluntly, there are too many people today who are so convinced of their own innate superiority, so wedded to their outsize sense of entitlement, that they are willing to go to any lengths—bribing their way into college or public office, falsifying documents, latching onto a conspiracy theory, scapegoating an entire group of people, smearing a whistleblower’s reputation, blaming a sexual assault victim for what happened to them, gaslighting, witness tampering, even inciting violence—to avoid acknowledging mistakes, failure, defeat, wrongdoing, or fault. It is this kind of arrogance, coupled with human beings’ highly developed talent for self-deception, that leads people to participate in an armed insurrection against the nation’s lawmakers rather than accept the results of an election that didn’t tip in favor of their preferred candidate. It is also why Americans of all political stripes cheered for and/or participated in the public humiliation of women like Monica Lewinsky, Anita Hill, and Christine Blasey Ford when they accused Bill Clinton, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh respectively of sexual harassment and assault. It is also why people continue to engage in Holocaust denial and historical whitewashing of slavery. For that matter, it is also why a combination of oppositional defiance, misinformation, disdain for science and health experts, and slipshod adherence to health guidelines have caused the COVID pandemic to spiral out of control in our country.

Our only hope for doing better as a nation, and as a species, is for every one of us to recognize our own fallibility. Every one of us has the capacity to convince ourselves a nonsensical conspiracy theory is true if it conforms to our preferred narrative. Every one of us is vulnerable to the allure of simplistic explanations for our own real or perceived suffering, the sound-bite-friendly reductionist views that quickly curdle into racial, religious, or gender-based hatred. Every one of us is prone to taking at face value the innuendoes, insinuations, distortions, and outright falsehoods promulgated by people like Michael Moore, Bill Maher, Rush Limbaugh, and Alex Jones. Every one of us is guilty of making unfair assumptions about other people’s motivations.

There is, unfortunately, no fool-proof inoculation against these temptations, but there are two important steps we can all take in the right direction. First, we can make a commitment to better media literacy. We can read or listen to multiple news sources and pay attention to how well their interpretations of events overlap. We can ignore pundits who smirk, shout, and sneer their way through their programs and try to pass off vitriol as journalism. We can investigate sources of information and see if they have been misquoted or misrepresented.

Second, we must abandon the notion that it is somehow “weak” to admit our own shortcomings, or to apologize to someone we have wronged, or to be gracious in accepting disappointment. We also need to resist the urge to make excuses for other people’s bad behavior, even if they’re people we like. It’s a dangerously small step from that impulse to a much worse one: victim-blaming, or else casting the wrongdoer as a victim. This is neither hypothetical nor a problem of the past. It was only four years ago that a judge worried more about what a prison sentence would do to Brock Turner’s swimming career than about what Turner’s rape of Chanel Miller would do to her life. To this day, students in schools around the country—including ours—continue to draw swastikas on desks “ironically,” loudly tell rape jokes in front of their classmates, and throw around racial epithets like confetti at a parade, only to complain that they are the victims of political correctness run amok when they’re called out for it. On a smaller scale, I have on more than one occasion witnessed students and teachers alike expressing disdain for someone who blows the whistle on a cheating ring, even as they look for ways to rationalize the cheating itself.

I cannot stress this enough: we all know these behaviors are wrong, or we should. This is an issue that extends far beyond politics, though as we have seen, it is often channeled most visibly into a venting of political grievances. But regardless of what form it takes, if we don’t push back against this toxic ethos of “winning” at all costs and never admitting fault, we are bound to see more of what we witnessed on Wednesday, and likely with even more catastrophic results.

We can be proud of who we are and still practice humility and self-reflection. We can stay true to our core values and still make a habit of periodically asking ourselves: “Do I believe this because it is true, or because I want it to be true?” And we can demand better from ourselves, our peers, and our leaders instead of settling for the scorched-earth, hateful, reckless discourse that has taken hold of our country—the kind of discourse that tends to get lots of social media likes and boosts TV ratings, but at an unacceptable cost.

Simply put, people are dying needlessly because of the epidemic of hubris, denial, and sadism in our country. Our survival as a society depends crucially on our collective, intentional rejection of our worst impulses. And none of us is exempt.