Why improve when we can just appeal to futility?

The world is an imperfect place indeed. Actually, if you really think about it, it’s quite a violent place (as recent events have proven, again), and if we look at the big picture, well, it’s always been this way. Nature is a cruel place. Not only do animals kill other animals on a regular basis, so do insects, sometimes in the worst ways.

Have you ever seen a war between two ant colonies? Violence, rape, murder, slavery, all these atrocities are going on in the dirt, in the trees, everywhere, all the time, and they’ve been going on since biological life first evolved on this planet.

And here we are, silly humans, trying to make the world a better place by going against the laws of nature and history and, well, just the natural order of things by making such atrocities illegal. Shouldn’t we just forget about this modern-day concept of morality and do what makes us feel good, considering how the world is far from perfect and always will be?

This nihilistic worldview is known as the appeal to futility fallacy, and it’s been used throughout history to justify just about every atrocity imaginable, and beyond.

The great Philosopher of Ancient Greece, Aristotle, argued in defense of slavery by claiming it to be part of the “natural order of things”. As an elite thinker whose views transcended generations, his rationale was passionately incorporated by American slaveholders in the 19th century.

Let’s fast-forward to modern times and talk about guns, particularly guns in the United States of America, a country so infatuated with the “right to bear arms” that nearly one out of every two American households owns at least one firearm.

The American infatuation with the right to own an apparatus specifically designed to conveniently kill others while at a safe distance began well over 200 years ago, at a time when American settlers felt the need to defend themselves from the British, the natives, and maybe bears.

Today, it is a statistically proven fact that societies with strict and well-enforced gun laws are generally much safer than those where these weapons are more easily accessible.

And yet, every time another mass shooting occurs, either in a mall or a school or a movie theater, instead of addressing the problem of the American free-flowing firearms trade, gun-loving citizens and politicians alike will make arguments like “people kill people with knives too, are we going to ban knives?”.

In the summer of 2019, the US was grilled by three mass shootings across the nation, immediately ending the lives of innocent victims of all ages in a span of 48 hours, from California to Texas to Ohio.

Not long after, the well-known pop-scientist Niel Degrasse Tyson sent out a Tweet stating the following: “In the past 48hrs, the USA horrifically lost 34 people to mass shootings. On average, across any 48hrs, we also lose… 500 to medical errors, 300 to the Flu, 250 to Suicide, 200 to Car Accidents, 40 to Homicide via Handgun.”

Although Tyson is anything but a gun-tooting right-wing zealot (and he later apologized for the Tweet), his message can still be interpreted as an appeal to futility, whatever his reasoning for the message.

The underlying message in these types of arguments is that we shouldn’t bother taking action to make anything better because there will always be problems over which we have no control. They are often used by individuals, groups of people, or entire societies to justify customs and traditions they are passionate about holding on to.

Slaveholders held on to any argument to defend that which was dear to them, the idea of owning another human being, just as gun-lovers will do the same because their weapons are a part of their identity, regardless of how much of a threat they pose to those around them and society as a whole.

The same goes for drugs and other unhealthy and dangerous habits. “Sure, cigarettes cause cancer, but so does sunlight and just about everything else in the world,” or “Sure, I sometimes drive drunk, but sober drivers crash too.”

Ah yes, and then there’s meat. Widely perceived as an integral part of who we are as human beings, meat has been deeply rooted in many of our diets and cultures since our good old hunter-gatherer days.

Many of us cherish our meat (and eggs, and dairy) so deeply that it’s no surprise we embrace the futility argument with passion when anyone dares to question the foods we adore.

For some context, most meat today comes from factory farms, where the majority of the 70 billion land animals raised and killed to be eaten (yearly) spend their short and miserable lives.

In the beef industry, cows on factory farms often have barely enough space to move, and in order to make veal, calves are prevented from moving at all, the only way of making their meat tender and ensuring a high value before their throats are slit.

In the egg industry, egg-laying hens are genetically modified to lay up to 30 times as many eggs as their wild ancestors. This frequently causes their bones to break, since the calcium in their bodies is diverted for the formation of eggshells.

Today’s livestock systems occupy approximately 45% of the Earth’s ice-free habitable land and are the leading drivers of species extinction, while also contributing between 14.5% to 18% of all human-induced global greenhouse emissions, more than the entire global transportation industry.

The meat industry consumes 33% of the Earth’s freshwater reserves. In fact, the average meat burger requires 460 gallons of freshwater. That’s simply because all those crops to feed all those animals need to be irrigated on a regular basis.

But whenever someone merely brings up the idea of avoiding animal products, the most creatively absurd futility arguments are immediately brought into the conversation.

“But lions eat other animals… but bacteria… but ants… but the world isn’t perfect… but animals will always suffer…”

Ok. Let’s start with the big cats. Lions do kill other animals for food. They don’t have a choice. But they also kill other lions, have been known to eat their own young, and sometimes lick their own anuses. Is this an appeal to futility or a suggestion for us to emulate everything lions do?

Let’s skip the bacteria and the ants for the same reasons we’re not taking the lions argument very seriously. Regarding the last two, the world is indeed an extremely imperfect place, and yes, animals will always suffer in the wild.

But can’t the same argument go for human rights? Come to think of it, our beloved Vladimir Putin probably has those same nihilistic thoughts running through his head as he orders the bombing of Ukraine while I write this article. Sure, people will suffer from each bomb that falls, but the world isn’t perfect, and people will always suffer from something, somewhere.

So fuck it.

Imagine a world where this is the most prevalent mind frame when it comes to ethics.

Indeed, the world will never be perfect, but we can always make it better if we at least try, otherwise we may one day find ourselves emulating the same lions we drag into conversations when appealing to futility.

If you like what you just read, you might enjoy my fiction novel The Shadow in the Mirror, where you can find out what’s actually going on with Harold Hopkins, and what he is actually seeing in the mirror.

Harold’s only wish is to lead a normal life. Yet, for reasons he can’t comprehend, he is shunned by all living things. No matter how hard he tries, he is unable to garner attention from the woman he loves, nor can he foster genuine friendships or find a decent job. Meanwhile, since childhood, he has been haunted by his own reflection in the mirror, which frequently acts as a window to another world. The person on the other side is everything Harold wishes he could be, like a clone of himself leading the fruitful life he was destined to lead. He finally sets off in search of answers, where he learns about the unearthly events that took place when he was born, and discovers the tantalizing truth about his own existence…

Now available on Amazon both in paperback and Kindle here.