Turn and Face the Monster

Are you ready to face the source of all your suffering? Well, guess what? No one cares.

Every season in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy took on a different mega adversary, known as the Big Bad. “What’s the Big Bad this year?” was always the question, in the early episodes, as you wait for it to really reveal itself. When I hinted that I was going to name my own Big Bad a few weeks ago, my friend Marisa texted me “Are you taking on…” and she named the person you’re thinking of.

Reading her text, I shrieked and threw my phone down, which startled Steve, and then I texted back GOOD LORD NO. I am not writing dystopia or horror here. I am determined to create hope, not despair. So how can I possibly write about that?

At the same time, how can you not? I was emailing with my mentor Bill Novelli last week, and he said in his circles around DC, everyone is asking the same question: what are we going to do? Bill didn’t specify “about what” because he didn’t need to. We all know what is happening.

Or… do we? Because that’s the trick, right? We all want to do something, but the big question is what are we going to do? And before we can figure out what we’re going to do, I think we have to agree on what we’re up against.

Who’s our true adversary, here? If I were Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who would be the Big Bad I’m taking on this season? Well, before I unveil it, let’s review the criteria that make up a worthy adversary. There are three.

1. Its Defeat Must Make More Of You

“The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.”

— Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers, Power of Myth

If we pour all of our energy into the destruction of our enemies, then we forget the most important point of the story: to transform ourselves into heroes. One of the deals with Buffy’s Big Bad was that ultimately, the Big Bad was always there to force Buffy to grow in some way. As Michael Pollan and Oprah have both said, the trick is to let the monster teach you. That is a core feature of a worthy adversary: its defeat makes more of you.

This is why Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have never been heroes. They are not seeking to make more of themselves, but to make more for themselves, and um, those are not the same thing.

I was re-reading The Power of Myth last week, checking my facts on adversaries, and Joseph Campbell reminded me: “One of the many distinctions between the celebrity and the hero…is that one lives only for self while the other acts to redeem society.”

A worthy adversary means that when you defeat it, the world gets better.

Not just for me. Not for some of us. But for all of us. Which brings us to the second quality of a truly worthy adversary.

2. It Is A Source Of Deep Suffering

On Saturday I read the new Facebook expose, Careless People, and it was terrifying. Stories about deliberate misinformation and trolling campaigns to tilt the 2016 election; when Zuckerberg realized how much power Facebook had to rig elections, he considered running for President himself. Desperate to get at the economic power of China, they agreed to partner with the Chinese government to spy on Chinese citizens. Their refusal to curb terrorist activity on the platform led to literal genocide in Myanmar.

In short, reading this book, you realize: Mark Zuckerberg knows that he is putting the entire world at risk with his actions, and he doesn’t remotely care.

And his contempt for humanity spread the same way Facebook did. There’s one scene where the author walks into an open floor plan office to find an employee thrashing on the ground, bleeding from the head, in the midst of a grand mal seizure… and no one has looked up from their desk. The author, horrified, is calling 911, and asking, What is her name, does she have epilepsy, what is going on? And someone answers, still typing, “She’s just a contractor.”

So, then, is Mark Zuckerberg the adversary I’m about to name? Or Sheryl Sandberg? Or maybe, all the billionaires? (Except Bill Gates, who’s lobbying for more international foreign aid, and also Michael Bloomberg, who is paying the US bill for the Paris Climate Accords.)

The vast majority of the power and the wealth in this world are concentrated in the hands of a very few people, and they have weaponized their resources to get stronger, at the expense of all of us. We can feel helpless in the face of what we’re up against. I understand why Marisa was alarmed, when she thought I was going to start naming names; why you all might be feeling nervous right now, wondering if I’m about to WAY overreach my abilities.

If we have established anything in this substack, we have established that I have almost no practical skills at all. I’m not running for office, so I can’t defeat any politician. I don’t own a media empire, or an empire of any kind, so there’s not much I can do about Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or any of those guys.

Which leads us directly to the third criteria of a worthy adversary, and it’s a doozy.

3. Victory Has Got To Be Possible

Daniel Pink said that human beings thrive most in hard times, as long as we believe we are engaged in a worthy cause, we are part of a community, and we believe victory is possible. I recognize that a lot of us are struggling with the third one. Look at all of this! How is victory even remotely possible?

Bad Billionaires make for a really good Big Bad. And if someone else wants to take on that adversary, sign me up, I will join the cause. But this story is for me and people like me, people with no superpowers or super resources. Just ordinary people wanting to bend the world towards the light.

And that is absolutely fine, you know why? I don’t have to take on any individual because historically, the most effective campaigns don’t identify a person as an adversary. The truth is, no matter how egregious they might be, individuals are almost never the root cause of suffering. They are almost always a symptom of it.

Ronald Reagan didn’t run against Jimmy Carter; he ran against America’s feeling of malaise, and he promised morning again. Barack Obama didn’t run against John McCain, he ran against despair, and he promised hope and change. The most transformational brands didn’t rise up against their opposition; they rose up against a cultural problem. For instance, Uber took on the challenge of not being able to get a ride when you needed it. That was a root issue that affected us every day.

And this is what is at the core of all of this, for me. If you want to find a worthy adversary, say to yourself, what do all of us share in our suffering?

Because a great adversary is one where, when we defeat it, all the people in the world will benefit. Not half of us, not even most of us, but all of us. Not just Democrats or Republicans, not just Black people or white dudes in red caps, but also children in Gaza and Jews in Israel, and hey, also, trees and oceans, too.

Do you know any adversaries like that?

An adversary whose defeat will make more of us, whose defeat will alleviate suffering around the world?

An adversary we can possibly take on, just as normal people, with no powers at all?

Spoiler alert: I think I do.

“Everyone knows the opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference." — Elie Wiesel, writer, professor, and Holocaust survivor

“Whatever you say, I really don’t care.” — Sam Malone, Cheers

Every client who has ever hired me has hired me for the same reason: no one cares. No one cares about their cause that is so important; no one cares about the suffering that is causing harm; no one cares about the impossible metrics they are being asked to hit in order to achieve success. Clients hire me because they need more people to care.

Are you a woman of Jewish faith, barely two generations away from the Holocaust, who is terrified by the rise in anti-Semitism, but no one cares?

Are you a young white man spiraling in a world that seems to have less space for you than ever, in a population where deaths of despair are soaring, addiction is rampant, job opportunities are dwindling, and it’s like your life doesn’t even matter? Like you’re toxic, or maybe even deplorable?

Are you a person of color, or an immigrant, or do you identify as gay or queer or trans, have you been fighting your entire life against a caste system designed to hold you down, and now people are celebrating your literal erasure?

Are you working in an environment where people have seizures on the floor in front of you and no one looks up from their laptop?

Is your job at risk, are you a veteran who is going to lose your health care, your benefits, because Elon Musk wants more money for another rocket ship?

And do you feel like no one cares at all?

Do you feel like there’s no point in even trying?

Well. Let’s turn and face the monster.

No one cares.

What do you think we can do about that?

Remember, victory doesn’t have to be guaranteed: just possible.

And it doesn’t have to be easy, which is fine: we like things that are hard. We like it when life makes more of us.

This adversary that I’m going to name, which I already have named, not only is it a root cause of all the problems I mentioned above, there’s one more thing about this adversary.

I have exactly the one superpower I need to defeat it, and so do you.

It’s the superpower that made homo sapiens the dominant species on the planet. It’s the reason that human beings were able to thrive in the first place, in circumstances far more difficult than the ones we’re facing now. It’s possibly the only thing we can do that artificial intelligence never can.

This superpower that you and I possess, it is the ultimate endlessly renewable resource. It is the source of energy that, the more of it you spend, the more you create.

There’s a few bad billionaires in the world. But there are billions of us, and this is the one thing we have that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk never will.

I am not an omniscient narrator, but I read history, and Joseph Campbell, and psychology, and biology. And I think it’s possible that, if we harness this one superpower, we could save ourselves, we could save each other, we could save the planet. I truly believe it’s possible.

Don’t believe me? We’ve done it before.

How do you think we got here in the first place?