Why a Zero Sum View – of Politics or of Life – Dooms Us to Misery

In 2015, God thought “Instagram and social media and reality tv is really distorting the people’s views of what does and doesn’t matter in life. I should send them a reminder.” 

Enter Donald Trump into the presidential election. Trump, God reasons, is the ultimate manifestation of a society utterly consumed with wealth, status, luxury and power at the expense of anything that actually matters. He embodies gold plating, carrara marble, supple leather – the steadfast belief that the appearance of money and prestige are both the means and the ends to a good life. But to God’s surprise, the people instead respond well to Trump. So God ups the ante with all the Putin posturing, pussygate, and lambasting Gold Star families. Doesn’t matter. The people pick Trump anyway.

God pushes more chips into the middle, starting with alternative facts and unprecedented abuses of power and going through four years of utter chaos. The message still isn’t getting through, so God thinks, “How about a global pandemic that he mismanages completely? That’ll surely resonate.” It does, sort of. Biden wins, but only by a handful of votes.

To make sure the people get the point, God decides to send one final message on Trump’s way out. The nail in the coffin. January 6. That’ll do it. Trump finally leaves office, but still manages to dominate public opinion for years to come. So God decides to make the message yet even clearer and Trump ends up indicted on 88 counts and convicted on 34 different felony counts in New York alone. Nada. 

The people somehow still don’t see what God’s trying to tell them and they elect Trump yet again. Now even God is confused. What could it possibly take to make the people understand that a worldview where the only point of life is to have more than the other guy is a guaranteed path to individual and collective ruin and misery? Enter the reality show cabinet in Trump II. And here we are. 

While the description above is satirical, the reality of our situation is not. We now exist in almost two realms simultaneously – real life and metaphysical life. The metaphysical life – social media, reality tv, drugs – tends to be one that indulges our fantasies, good and bad, whether it’s pretending to have what we don’t really have on Instagram or being mean on Twitter in a way you never would in person or creating insane conspiracy theories on QAnon. It can mean reality tv where we see people pretending to be versions of themselves but in ways that are far more dramatic and confrontational than they’d otherwise ever be. It can mean Tik Tok bombarding kids with messaging and ideas that are objectively terrible for them. It means engaging in – and producing – a far lesser version of ourselves. 

In fact, our values and priorities have regressed to the point where we now see the worst version of ourselves being played out on the world’s most consequential possible stage – and yet we still don’t seem to get the message. It’s not a question of left or right or Republican or Democrat or trad or woke. It’s zero sum vs abundance. It’s a worldview that if you accumulate more money and status and power and luxury and prestige than everyone else, you win. If you don’t — or if someone else has more than you — you lose. 

It’s a worldview guaranteed to produce misery, because the politics of Trump are a politics of grievance (just like the politics of the left are a politics of grievance). A life filled with grievance is, by definition, an unhappy life. It’s a worldview that, despite strong evangelical support for Trump, does not reflect my understanding of Jesus, the Torah, the Buddha or any other major religious doctrine. And to be clear, the cognitive dissonance between what we think makes us happy and what actually makes us happy exists broadly across society, not just among Trump voters. Trump is just the most visible example of a zero sum approach to life. 

Happiness does not come from more and more stuff. The hedonic treadmill guarantees failure. You only feel truly happy – you only feel truly good about yourself and content on a sustained basis — if you actively work on expanding your capacity for love and generosity, if you feel purpose, fulfillment, meaning, unconditional love and support. And yet this new meta version of reality drives the exact opposite message, which is why in the latest World Happiness Report, Americans under 30 ranked 68th globally. We’re the richest, most abundant society in the history of the world and our young people are 68th. Think about that.

Whether you believe in God or not, whether you believe in biblical allegories, prophets or imminent doom, it’s hard to look at who we are as a people today and feel good about it. We know Trump’s voters don’t – that’s how he wins them over in the first place. We know the far left’s voters don’t – everything they do is motivated by punishing others for their moral inferiority. But they keep doubling down on what makes them miserable. 

We need a change in the way we relate to each other, the way we view ourselves. We have it backwards in every way. And the worse it gets, the more we acclimate to it, sending us into a downward spiral. 

We need a fundamental change in our political system. We need a fundamental change in our view of societal responsibility. We need a fundamental change of the way we conceive of success, happiness — of life itself. We need things to be very, very different if we want them to start getting better. 

It should be obvious by now. We can’t keep going this way.