Why Do We Want to Blow It All Up?

That fuck-it-burn-it-down feeling? I get it. It's intoxicating. It's ancient. And it's easily manipulated. How do we fight it?

In 2016 I had a monthlong affair with wanting California to secede from the US.

I was in the middle of filming Hacking Your Mind, a PBS series whose thesis was that although we’ve made enormous strides since the days of plate mail and witch-burnings, we still make most of our decisions using ancient behavioral shortcuts. The show’s warning was that manipulative folks in business and, increasingly, in politics were learning to exploit those shortcuts, and that we needed to learn to protect our minds from them.

Then hey, wow, Trump got elected using exactly the playbook that dozens of experts had been warning me and our team about — playing on ancient fear and anger and tribalism, ignoring policy — and I fell into some pretty bitter pessimism. So much so that when I bumped into t-shirts that read “CalExit,” fuck it, I bought one.

Mine was green, but you get the idea. These things are still for sale!

The first time I wore mine, I hadn’t really thought about the practicalities of California seceding, or whether I actually wanted that to happen. I was just enjoying the dark satisfaction of the idea it implied. Screw you guys, I’m taking the fifth-largest economy in the world and going home. I was indulging in the powerful intoxication of just detonating it all.

Then I sobered up. I bumped into a paper about Russian propaganda efforts in Ukraine that detailed “information warfare techniques” like the principle of emotional agitation, described as “bringing the recipients of the message to a condition in which they will act without much thought, even irrationally.” (Huh. Kinda like a journalist between jobs angrily buying a t-shirt.) I started reading about Russia’s long history of bloody internal division, and how that seems to have inspired its modern tactic of trying to trick its enemies into falling out among themselves. Then the founder of the CalExit movement moved to Moscow, after it turned out he’d accepted money and office space from a Russian nationalist group. That afternoon the shirt was a pile of rags in my cleaning-supplies drawer.

I’m telling you this so you understand I’m not better than anyone who has fallen into this desire, as so many clearly have. (After I lost my job at NBC in March I transmuted my disappointment into a cultish surfing habit, which in retrospect is in the same emotional star system, and turns out to be pretty common among surfers.) What I’m doing here is setting the stage for one particular flavor of this impulse that I think is worth keeping in mind as the children of immigrants vote to deport immigrants, and as families struggling to buy the basics vote to pay enormous tariffs on imported goods. I’m coming to the idea that this destructive impulse may actually be hard-wired in us. It even has a name.

“Altruistic punishment” refers to our reaction to those who have violated social norms. It’s “altruistic” when it’s handed out although it costs the punisher something. So: me punishing you for behavior I think hurts us all, even though the act of punishing you hurts me as well. Think of us sitting together in a poker game. You observe me cheating. You’re offered the opportunity to punish me for cheating, but doing so will cost you everything, and you’ll be out of the game. It turns out a lot of people will pull that self-destructive lever. For decades, social scientists have found it to be a deeply planted impulse in their study subjects.

In a 2002 study, Swiss researchers Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter described it this way: "Altruistic punishment means that individuals punish, although the punishment is costly for them and yields no material gain.” They theorized that it might explain the unique amount of cooperation that takes place in human society — we cannot help but do anything to punish those we feel have hurt the group. "The altruistic punishment of defectors is a key motive for the explanation of cooperation."

In a 2004 study of the neural basis of altruistic punishment, Fehr and several co-authors found that altruistic punishment is even measurable in the brain. "Altruistic punishment is associated with the activation of brain areas related to reward processing,” they wrote. When they gave their test subjects the choice between a “symbolic” punishment that cost the punisher nothing, and an “effective” punishment that cost the punisher some money, only the “effective” punishment set off the reward system in the brain.

The authors concluded “individuals derive satisfaction from the punishment of norm violators...Altruistic punishment is probably a key element in explaining the unprecedented level of cooperation in human societies.” It blew my mind when I first read about this impulse, and now I see the fuel that feeds it everywhere.

Researchers studying this stuff often use gambling games to test their hypotheses, because the prospect of making or losing money can bring out our unvarnished instincts, God help us. (Prediction markets are based on the idea that it also creates valuable wisdom, although that’s not as clear.) But some of the grifts built around this stuff are so perfectly triggering it’s as if they were designed for the lab.

At the height of a campaign that saw Trump and JD Vance making outrageous, false claims about legal immigrants to the US, Fox News and the New York Post were in the habit of running stories about Leonel Moreno, an undocumented immigrant from Venezuela who decided it was worth casting himself as a hateable freeloader for a bit of Internet fame. He’s since been arrested and faces deportation, and his TikTok has been shut down. (Trading a bit of money in the attention economy by finding one’s niche as a cartoon bad-guy is a category of Internet awfulness I need a name for. Repcashing? Badhanding? Villain work? What does Hollywood call this?) People deeply dissatisfied by their own economic prospects — and in a country where 63% of workers can’t afford a $500 emergency, that’s a lot of people — are understandably triggered by anyone they think is somehow cheating their way into a free ride.

In other areas I’m still thinking about the connection. For instance, the Americans who are most unhappy with the state of the economy are more likely to blame China. Now small-business owners who voted for Trump are about to get crushed by tariffs, which Trump has promised to impose on China, Mexico, and Canada. (They’ll also get crushed by a tightened labor market, assuming deportations do take place.) But is this altruistic punishment? What do we call it when we don’t fully understand the cost to ourselves? I get it that misinformation is so often invoked that it’s beginning to ring false, but what else do we call this? This feels like me, a trained journalist, buying the CalExit t-shirt without reading up on the movement and its backers.

Anyway, let’s assume that altruistic punishment is a thing. (And for 20 years study after study has strengthened the case that it is.) How do we put the pin we pulled back in the grenade? I don’t know that we can. But maybe we can learn to spot different types of explosives.

Even the earliest findings on altruist punishment showed that it can have a social benefit: punishments (which the researchers call “sanctions”) help protect our uniquely human culture of cooperation among strangers. (No other species does this.) But when sanctions are imposed for economic or political benefit, they don’t create a culture of cooperation. In fact, they wipe cooperation out. As Fehr et al wrote in 2003, “altruistically motivated sanctions for the benefit of the group enhance cooperative behaviour,” but “sanctions that are imposed to enforce an unfair distribution of resources have the opposite effect.” A truly moral instinct around this stuff can make society more cooperative. But working one another through this instinct is likely to make us much harsher with one another. (In fact, one study found that when put in terms of social and economic benefit to the US, the prospect of annihilating another country’s citizens through a nuclear strike was more palatable than it was when put in terms of moral conscience. This is dangerous stuff.)

I’m often in the position of bumping into these huge revelations about human instinct that are well-known and well-substantiated within a small scientific community, but that no one seems to know anything about in the larger world. My book about the mania surrounding AI, The Loop, is entirely motivated by this dynamic. I write The Rip Current to document big, invisible forces that have us in their grasp, and this is a strong one, one that really can carry us to sea if we lose track of where we are. But does writing about this do any good? I’m honestly torn. My most cynical friends and readers just throw their hands up. But I do think that prolonged news coverage can make a difference, even in the modern era.

For years the mainstream media banged on and on about the 2007-2008 mortgage crisis, covering it in every conceivable way. At the end of the day, I think the aggregate effect was pretty simple: the average prospective home-buyer understood that signing a variable-rate mortgage was a terrible idea, and that fixed-rate mortgages are what you want. Variable bad. Fixed good. I’ve always wanted the basic curriculum of any school to not only include an early lesson in compound interest, but also one in the difference between causation and correlation, which would go a long way here too.

I recognize that in the maelstrom of the attention economy it’s not going to be possible to hammer home a similarly binary takeaway here. I can tell you from personal experience that no one’s going to do a nightly prime-time segment about advanced psychology. (God bless you, Hidden Brain.) But here’s the binary I’d hope for: that we’d know true altruism from politically advantageous messages of revenge or economic benefit, the milk from the poison, even though both taste just as good going down.

P.S. Good teachers are a gift to humanity. If I’ve bummed you out here, watch this guy teach kids how to skateboard. Let’s get him teaching psych classes.