The Cult of Pain

Europe just experienced a heatwave. At places, temperatures soared into the forties. People suffered in their overheated homes. Some of them died. Yet, air conditioning remains a taboo. It’s an unmoral thing. Man-made climate change is going on. You are supposed to suffer. Suffering is good. It cleanses the soul. And no amount on pointing out that one can heat a little less during the winter to get a fully AC-ed summer at no additional carbon footprint seems to help.

Mention that tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are working on life prolongation, that we may live into our hundreds or even longer. Or, to get a bit more sci-fi, that one day we may even achieve immortality. Your companions will be horrified. What? Immortality? Over my dead body! Fuck Elon Musk and his friends.

Try proposing that we all should strive to get rich so that we can lead better, less painful lives. Maybe we should grow the economy, build some more nuclear power plants, get rid of unnecessary regulation or whatnot. But how dare you?!? Are you not aware of the global inequality? Do you know nothing about the climate change? What kind of monster are you?

There’s also a religious inversion of the theme. Humbly, we won’t criticize those who ask for a better life. Instead, we’ll passive-aggressively venerate the suffering. Here’s mother Theresa: "I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people."

You can get an esoteric equivalent of the same idea. Tell a spiritual person that embryo selection could help eliminate the most severe genetic disorders, and you’d be told that you are trying to interfere with God’s plan. God manifests Himself through people, all kinds of people, including those who suffer, and eliminating people of one kind would mean diminishing God.

Or you may be told some other bullshit, but the gist will be unmistakable: The pain is good. Do not dare to fight it!

This may seem strange. Pain is an unpleasant feeling. Why would anyone want more of it?

But actually, it’s not that hard to explain.

Until recently, humanity lived in Malthusian, zero-sum world. Everything good we’ve got in life came at someone else’s expense. In such a world, having more meant that someone else had less. Being fed meant someone else was starving. Being warm meant someone else was cold.

Unsurprisingly, a moral intuition evolved that being better off than your peers was bad. After all, your being better off inevitably meant that someone else was worse off.

And it’s just that. An intuition. A heuristic. An instinct. It’s not a conscious, rational argument that we could have adjusted when we entered the world dominated by positive-sum effects some 250 years ago. And as many an instinct, it can misfire when faced with environment that does not resemble the one in which it has evolved.

That instinct can sometimes even look rational. Arguing that rich countries should get poorer for poor countries to get richer is not immediately obvious to be false.

But even when it’s completely irrational, as in arguing that Elon Musk becoming immortal would somehow make everyone else more mortal, the instinct still kicks in. Having more means others must have less. Period. No discussion allowed.

So yes, that’s why Germans were silently suffering in their overheated apartments with no air conditioning last week. The fact that they suffered meant that they were fighting climate change, doing repentance for the carbon footprint of their holiday in Turkey the other year.

That’s why people believe in degrowth. Getting poorer means that others will get richer…

But wait, you cry, isn’t degrowth not about the well-being seesaw, where one gets rich only at the expense of the others, but rather about everyone deliberately getting poorer to limit our strain on the environment?

But no. Look closely enough, and you’ll see the Malthusian instinct is still present, alive and kicking as always. You may point out that poor countries like India and China are burning the most coal as much as you want, but degrowthers will still make statements like: “Again, calls for degrowth are not directed at poor countries, but rich countries.“ Or here, arguing that rich nations should degrow to free up the ecological space for the poor nations: “The transformation needed in industrialized countries–if they are to reduce their emissions and environmental impacts fast enough to leave space for the Global South to administer its wellbeing, and for the world to head towards ecological balance—will also lead to reducing the size of Global North economies.“

And of course, that’s why the Christians love suffering so much. They are do-gooders, for Christ’s sake. Let them self-flagellate a bit and that will surely make everybody else better off.

As a bottom line, if you want to push something like the abundance agenda, you will have to fight not only selfish vested interests, but also the selfless, if misguided, Malthusian zero-sum instincts, emotional as they are and not responding well to rational arguments.