When their community becomes overpopulated and can no longer survive upon available food sources, lemmings do not, as in that symbolically rich myth, throw themselves in spellbound droves off of cliffs, or scurry into the sea, or raid the toxic-in-large-dose shelves at the pharmacy. Instead, as one would expect, they simply starve to death, far less dramatically, here and there, one by one. No ultrasonic signal is broadcast across the burrows announcing who can stay and who must go. This curiously stubborn tale of mass hypnosis is meant to illustrate blind obedience or simple idiocy. Which is unfair. The lemming is no blind follower, as field observers can attest. Nor, for the record, is the lemming dumb. Their burrows are elaborate. These put-down interpretations of the tale, in and of themselves, also seem askew. The more generous read of the myth is that the lemming, far from witless, is instead a rodent-martyr, willing to make the ultimate sacrifice in order to secure the common good.
Likewise, one might hypothesize that, being such socially hypersensitive creatures, the lemmings left behind after The Great Cull might well struggle with a crippling sense of survivor’s guilt. Research on this topic, however, remains slim. The lemmings refuse to talk about it, so great is their apparent shame.
Whales, in fact, appear to be a far more self-destructive species as some, ill-advisedly, occasionally decide to go sunbathing as a group, at the beach. Which is strange, because they have big brains and seem, otherwise, to be quite clever. They talk to each other, they mourn, and they play: all of which we regard as signs of good mental hygiene. But a big brain, sadly, is no guarantee of overall wellness. In fact, as we have learned, the bigger, the more complex the brain, the more ways there are for it to go haywire. One need look no further than the mirror to recognize this unpleasant fact of life. Sometimes our chemicals and voltages get scrambled, thus demanding a reboot with capsules or electroconvulsive tweaks. Sometimes we get into such bad trouble that suicide is, amazingly, the least awful of any number of other, possible grim ends that we have devised for ourselves. Sometimes our abnormally large head is, in other words, just more trouble that it is worth.
For awhile, there was a pseudo-scientific sounding urban legend swirling in the it-sounds-like-it-could-be-true-sphere that, rather like lemmings, suicide rates and population density among humans had a direct, casual relation. The more tightly you pack people together, so it was said, the sooner some will go nuts and die. But as in the case of Kitty Genovese, who, in 1964, was famously and supposedly murdered while dozens of allegedly indifferent New Yorkers looked on, pulled the shades, and ignored her screams, the density equals death argument-really seems more like just more provincial nonsense about how big cities equal a lot of dangerous Black people. Ergo, one might conclude that no one ever does anything weird in Wyoming. All of the brains out there are, instead, regularly and thoroughly scrubbed clean by a mixture of prairie wind and mountain air.
Look at Dick Cheney, for instance. Nothing wrong with him.
Thanks to this series of evolutionary quirks, providing us with an excess of up top capacity, we are the only creatures who kill themselves, and each other, for the sake of an abstract idea. This, as many have noted, is one of the biggest lessons from the 20th century, comparable in importance to the inventions of the silicon chip and of whole-globe-cooking. Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s U.S.S.R., and Mao’s China were cults of personality. Amassing as much power as possible in the hands of the fewest was job one, but much of these cults’ appeal, and appeal they did, had to do with the seductive principles that the respective charismatics personified. In that sense, in the end, the belief in racial superiority and the Marxist march of history, in their magnetism, in their populism,were not so different. Bismarck’s realpolitik and Joan Didion’s dreampolitik are weird twins, as it turns out, and they can hardly leave the house without one another.
At the height of and in the aftermath of several utopian slaughters, many set about trying to identify the components of the poisonous dream born of these bad apples, in the hope of explaining our strange, backward-seeming capacity to destroy ourselves in service to a concept, particularly when that concept is plainly contrary to one’s own rational self-interest. Or, to put it in lemming logic, when we decide upon a 47th floor high dive even when there was plenty to eat. Sigmund Freud warned that we were up to something other than pleasure, but the scale of self-inflicted pain in the 20th century was so unprecedented that it demanded yet more unpacking. This it received. From George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, and others. They explained the problem with so much skill and insight that it almost seemed as if they had broken the code once and for all, and that the most baffling, self-annihilating mechanics of propaganda had been dismantled. Here was how it works. Here is what it does. Now you need not ever get fooled again.
It’s not much of a stretch to think that at some point in the future, after all of the soundbite and pixel dust settles, it will not be the impeachment, or the separation of families at the nation’s Southwestern border, or the denial of vote counts, or even the astonishing spree of executions meted out during the administration’s final days for which the Trump presidency–at least in psycho-historical terms–will be most remembered. Our blip of a moment in history may instead be more frequently recalled for a worldwide pandemic, for the resulting number of dead, for the speed in which a vaccine was developed, and as a perfect, pithy example of the ever resurgent power of propaganda, as demonstrated this time by millions of people who, out of political partisanship, maintained that this proven, deadly virus, for which there was at the time no known cure, simply was not real. That the exposure of, and the refusal to bow to, this alleged hoax was worth risking one’s one life and the lives of others. That even though everyone could see the concrete wall, one could still delight in the green-lit good news that there was no wall there at all and so one could drive the family car right into it nightly without worry. Over. And over. And over.
For those of who lived through the moment, we will have many memories of the many gradations of this auto-destructive denial. There was the needlessly-walking-around-on-the-airport runway argument: if it happens, it happens, because you can’t just stay in your basement forever (as if there had been any suggestion that you would or should). There was, too, the argument that one’s body was a kind of nation-state and hence a suitable platform for expressions of nationalism and patriotism, in demonstration of the swell fact that one’s magnificent body from the West hemisphere will thwart this alien, intrusive “Chinese virus” (as if alveoli know how to check a passport). There was the it really isn’t that bad line of thought: the number of deaths was being rigged and hospitals were getting payoffs from the DNC (as if antifa and George Soros and the American Hospital Association had some beyond Deep Blue, organizational capacity to pull off the wholesale pilferage.) And, finally, perhaps the strangest, most grossly ideological version of all: I will not compromise my freedom in any way, regardless of the fact that, as a result, we could both end up in the shackles of the grave. At six feet under, solitary confinement must look a lot like recess.
But for those who did not live through the moment? What will they think when all of these arguments and rationalizations have crumbled into footnotes at the bottom of the page? The massive, shared, head-in-the-sand freakout of 2020 will probably be most handily and reductively cited as yet another example of the stubbornness, the dumbness, and the blindness of rodents headed for the cliff, for the sea, or for some kind of heaven. It will seem like an old-timey, cautionary fable of foolishness. One that even children will know not to repeat.