THEM: The best time to pay attention was twenty-five years ago; second-best is now

THEM: Adventures with Extremists
JON RONSON
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link
$18.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the bestselling author of The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry and So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.

Them began as a book about different kinds of extremists, but after Jon had got to know some of them—Islamic fundamentalists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen—he found that they had one oddly similar belief: that a tiny, shadowy elite rule the world from a secret room.

In Them, Jon sets out, with the help of the extremists, to locate that room. The journey is as creepy as it is comic and, along the way, Jon is chased by men in dark glasses, unmasked as a Jew in the middle of a Jihad training camp, and witnesses international CEOs and politicians participate in a bizarre pagan ritual in the forests of northern California.

Them is a fascinating and entertaining exploration of extremism, in which Jon learns some alarming things about the looking-glass world of "them" and "us". Are the extremists on to something? Or has Jon become one of THEM?

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM THE PRIME LENDING SERVICE. USE THEM OFTEN, THEY PAY AUTHORS FOR OUR USE.

My Review: Twenty-plus years on, this book isn't obsolete.

I've never typed a sadder, more fraught sentence in the entirety of my life. Details are outdated, but that in no way invalidates Author Ronson's analysis (though it chops a half-star off...time for a new edition!)

Alex Jones was utterly exposed as the lunatic bigot he really is in this book long before Sandy Hook blew that closet door off its hinges, and yet this complete careful takedown had no effect on his ability to convince people to invest in his idiocy.

In his experience, detailed in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (q.v.), people have taken old-fashioned social organization with them into the digital age. The conspiracy theorists of today have a long lineage of hatred for the Jews, a long-standing mistrust of Authority (except of course for themselves; after all, they know The Truth℠, everyone else is a sad little dupe of Them), and no longer have to have a public owning of their nutjobbery.

Emotional dysregulation is far easier to run out of control in parasocial interactions with authority, or authoritative, figures. These are ever-more common events in our social lives as more and more time is spent in internet-mediated contact...post-pandemic there is a huge increase in time spent in and effect of parasocial relationships, which is only exacerbating the ongoing radicalization of younger men in Western society.

Author Ronson, trained as a journalist, is very much a careful observer of the people he speaks to; he does not come right out and say "that was a lie" but he very carefully notes what tells an observant listener and/or reader what marks something out as, in fact, a lie. Staying alert to subtext is, after all, a big part of a journalist's brief...another reason why "They" want fewer trained journalists in the world. It's part of a truly unnerving perversion of the truism that all of us together are smarter than any one of us alone...phrased best by Mark Twain: "When you set aside mere names & come down to realities, you find that we are ruled by a King just as other absolute monarchies are. His name is The Majority. He is mighty in bulk & strength ... He rules by the right of possessing less money & less brains & more ignorance than the other competitor for the throne, The Minority. Ours is an Absolute Monarchy." (Mark Twain at Large, Arthur L. Scott, p. 96-97.)

The jaws of the trap "They" have spent fifty years building, slowly and carefully, are springing shut. I do not know if there is still time to wedge a stick of sturdy truthtelling in them.

I'm sure gonna give it a whirl.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THEM: Why We Hate Each Other—and How to Heal
BEN SASSE
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing American Adult, an intimate and urgent assessment of the existential crisis facing our nation.

Something is wrong. We all know it.

American life expectancy is declining for a third straight year. Birth rates are dropping. Nearly half of us think the other political party isn’t just wrong; they’re evil. We’re the richest country in history, but we’ve never been more pessimistic. What’s causing the despair?

In Them, bestselling author and U.S. Senator Ben Sasse argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, our crisis isn’t really about politics. It’s that we’re so lonely we can’t see straight—and it bubbles out as anger.

Local communities are collapsing. Across the nation, little leagues are disappearing, Rotary clubs are dwindling, and in all likelihood, we don’t know the neighbor two doors down. Work isn’t what we’d hoped: less certainty, few lifelong coworkers, shallow purpose. Stable families and enduring friendships—life’s fundamental pillars—are in statistical freefall.

As traditional tribes of place evaporate, we rally against common enemies so we can feel part of on a team. No institutions command widespread public trust, enabling foreign intelligence agencies to use technology to pick the scabs on our toxic divisions. We’re in danger of half of us believing different facts than the other half, and the digital revolution throws gas on the fire.

There’s a path forward—but reversing our decline requires something radical: a rediscovery of real places and real human-to-human relationships. Even as technology nudges us to become rootless, Sasse shows how only a recovery of rootedness can heal our lonely souls.

America wants you to be happy, but more urgently, America needs you to love your neighbor. Fixing what’s wrong with the country depends on you rebuilding right where you’re planted.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM THE PRIME LENDING SERVICE. USE THEM OFTEN, THEY PAY AUTHORS FOR OUR USE.

My Review: I'm allergic to old-fashioned neighborliness, community-building exercises, the idea that living in the same zip code says something fundamental about my connection to people.

In days of yore, that would've marked me out as weird. Now that makes me...for the first time in my adult life...mainstream. And what did Mark Twain say about about agreeing with the majority? "Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect)."

I doubt I can change much, but others? There's hope for them and by extension all of us.

That Author Sasse is a Republican should tell anyone who knows me everything I need to convey by reporting positive agreement with his prescription for what ails the US body politic. (Also, per Wikipedia, Senator Sasse: "{o}n February 13, 2021, ...was one of seven Republican senators to vote to convict Donald Trump of incitement of insurrection in his second impeachment trial."} Go former Senator Sasse!)

The anomie and isolation of seemingly the majority of young people is absolutely terrifying. What Author Sasse posits as solutions earn all my four stars. His framing of the problems we face is resolutely inside the educated elite PoV one would expect from a lifelong academic and former Senator. Only in the funhouse mirror of US politics is this man in any way a centrist. He is also not wrong.

Many of the rights and norms Author Sasse identified as under threat in this 2018 book, eg the inalienable rights of all individuals including habeas corpus, and the freedom of conscience and the right to exercise it in private life (the Dobbs decision rises before my appalled eyes),have been explicitly targeted by the current administration. It's been a long, slow process to dumb down and distract people away from the assault on our institutions of trust and collective action. Look at Project 2025's digital ghosts.

A big part of that process has been the demonization and politicization of Others. When someone is Other, they're not protected like you should be, or protected from you like they should be. A long and successful campaign to convince people "They" are a threat to decency and rightness has been waged by the real "Them" the actual political operators of the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and so on.

Destroying the people's willingness to see each other as real, decent people who might disagree on things but who nonetheless have a lot in common, or divide and conquer, has been the colonizer's, the fascist's, the authoritarian's cornerstone strategy for millennia. It hasn't stopped working yet.

You, as an individual, have to stop falling for it in order to defeat it.

Read some of Sasse's ideas and try them out.