Stay Out of "The Library"

A healthy political culture requires personal responsibility and maturity from citizens and leaders alike.

One of the more interesting books anticipating our current politics is a cult novel written in 1977 by an Italian author, Giorgio De Maria. The Twenty Days of Turin tells the fantastical story of a young investigator trying to understand what happened in the city a decade earlier when a series of grisly deaths occurred after an unexplained episode of collective psychosis.

In the book, the young sleuth discovers the probable source of the insanity in a place called the Library, a pre-technology Internet-like arrangement set up in a church sanitarium where people could deposit their most private thoughts and desires—mostly sad and petty or angst-ridden and degraded—and others could read them.

Everything could be deposited into the Library…There were manuscripts whose first hundred pages didn’t reveal any oddity, which then crumbled little by little into the depths of bottomless madness; or works that seemed normal at the beginning and end, but were pitted with fearful abysses further inward. Others, meanwhile, were conceived in a spirit of pure malice: pages and pages just to indicate, to a poor elderly woman without children or a husband, that her skin was the color of a lemon and her spine was warping—things she already knew well enough. The range was infinite: it had the variety and at the same time the wretchedness of things that can’t find harmony with Creation, but still exist, and need someone to observe them, if only to recognize that it was another like himself who’d created them.

The Library became the home for the city’s loneliest and most isolated people seeking to make some connections without any genuine human contact or real empathy. And not unlike the social media-induced frenzy of our current politics (most evident over the past few weeks), a collective mental breakdown soon emerges from this arrangement, with people wandering the streets at night in a catatonic state and strange terror descending on the city, breaking people in inexplicable ways.

Although De Maria’s allegory was written as a response to a range of terrorist acts in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, it rests on keen, if alarming, insights about human nature and what can happen to societies when people get whipped into hysteria by the warped reality of places like the Library.

Unfortunately, these ideas apply all too well to our current situation in the United States. The widespread dissemination of conspiracies, false information, inflammatory rhetoric, and unhinged anger has been building for years and now openly threatens our ability to govern ourselves. Lacking interpersonal trust and believing too much of the nonsense deposited in our own Library on social media, Americans themselves—fueled by unprincipled politicians and tech companies making billions from the distribution of bad information and emotional excesses—risk irreparably breaking their own country into competing factions of militant and extra-constitutional mobs tearing at each other based on distorted or biased realities.

As we take steps to protect the institutions that secure our equal rights as Americans, we must also take steps as citizens to inform ourselves better, separate fact from fiction, and take a deep breath before making monumentally stupid or criminal errors based on lies, hyperbole, or extreme beliefs about others.

American political culture desperately needs more personal responsibility and maturity—from citizens, business leaders, and politicians alike. Nobody has all the correct answers about politics. Sometimes you end up on the losing side of an election or a debate. It’s not “existential” or the end of the world. And it’s certainly not any rationale for political violence or state repression of those with different viewpoints. That’s democracy. People and parties that you disagree with in terms of issues or values aren’t your enemies. America is a pluralistic nation, and people have all sorts of opinions—some good, some bad, but all equally protected under the U.S. Constitution. We have the First Amendment for a reason. The government can’t single out people and organizations for harassment based on what they say or believe, or what they don’t say or believe. The same lesson should apply to individuals in their own capacity as citizens—treat other people with respect and not as targets for political rage and personal vendettas.

Ultimately, Americans and their leaders need to control their instincts better and take more responsibility for their words, deeds, and actions—for their own sake and for the good of the entire country.

The Library is a dark place.

Americans—and especially political leaders in both parties—should stay out of the social media madhouse and try responding to different perspectives with more emotional restraint, demand nonviolence and reasonable disagreement from everyone on their own side, and uphold core national values like liberty, equality, and freedom of speech for all people.

Editor’s note: this is an updated version of one of TLP’s earliest posts.