Andy HoffmanWe live the way we do in small part because it quiets the awful noise made by the collapse of the American experiment in democracy. Here in Brazil, we don’t hear so much about the country’s reckless path toward dictatorship. We look at the news now and again, and locals – upon learning that I’m American – let me know how deeply Donald Trump disgusts them. Brazilians don’t see dictatorship as a potential alternative form of government; it threatens the progress the country and its people have made over the past four decades. I like controlling the flood of terrible news from Washington DC by simply choosing silence. The news just floods over the walls when Deb and I occupy some place in the US.
But some new leaks through our personal networks. Last weekend, the beginning of Hanukkah brought terrible news close to home. First came the shooting at Brown University, where I earned my PhD and worked for five years, followed by the murder of an MIT professor in Brookline, MA, where Deb lived since her return to the United States 19 years ago, with me for a half dozen of those years. Our reaction to those episodes took on the color of the episode on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, where Jews celebrating the holiday faced antisemitic gun fire. I thought for sure that the Brown shooting grew out of the University’s refusal to bow to pressure from the Trump administration. Deb believed that the MIT professor’s opinions on Israel had motivated his murder.
We both guessed wrong. The deranged shooter in both episodes had targeted his own failures, dropping out of Brown’s Graduate School and then bested by his undergraduate competitor. His murderous spree plainly did nothing to salve his pain, since he turned his weapon on himself within days of his pointless executions of others. In time, we might learn something about the human psyche that will prevent future violence, but that seems unlikely. We have lived with pointless violence since emerging from the African savanna. This murderer – like almost all murderers – blamed others for the problems he caused himself. Dozens of people will pay for his unwillingness to accept responsibility for the waste he made of his promise.
All primates have a murderous impulse. Most of our cousins have come up with social solutions for minimizing the death toll within their species. Gorillas have a hierarchy. Chimpanzees use inclusion and exclusion. Bonobos reduce social stress through continuous sex. None of these solutions end violence entirely, but they do reduce it to the point where it doesn’t seem random any longer.
Seen from a broader perspective, we could say that human beings have used all the same tools to keep the violence at bay, with mixed success. The disappointed physicist who killed three people and shot nine more because he felt overmatched reveals the dark side of exclusion. And the murderers on Bondi Beach show the limits of hierarchy: we can guess that their hatred-fueled rampage stemmed from their belief that Jews occupied a rung on the ladder they believed to be rightfully theirs. In both cases, the trigger-men – and we should remember they are all men – refused to accept the wrongness of their worldview. And in both cases, the murderers felt entitled to social rewards the system had declared them unworthy of.
We all experience disappointment. We all rage privately at systems that undervalue, in our self-conception, the gifts we bring to the world. Earlier in my life, I believed that my writing talent would guarantee me comfort and modest fame. Time told me that I would have to accept less than I dreamed, and I trimmed my sails to respect those more powerful forces. Deb and I don’t preserve American democracy by ignoring the noise of its dismantling, but we do give people a little bit of hope by providing alternatives: choosing an alternative life, portraying the virtues of flourishing, and recognizing personal disappointment as mostly impersonal luck.
And putting love at the forefront of everything we do. I hope for a more peaceful 2026, for everyone.