For more than half my life, I lived in a happy fantasy world of optimism. I thought that most of us wanted peace on earth and goodwill toward mankind. Now I’m a cynic, a hopeless pessimist. Only the powerless and disenfranchised seem to want equality.
As a child, a teen, and a young adult, I was misled by innocent people and well-intended influences to believe that as a species mankind was evolving toward an eventual utopia. Now I’m an advocate for atrophy. Hieronymus Bosch nailed it 500 years ago with his triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” Look at it.
I grew up in a small town that was virtually crime free. In my first 17 years there were only two violent murders. A guy shot his wife for cheating on him, and another guy shot his wife’s lover. The rest of the crimes consisted of soaping windows and stealing beer off of back porches.
In college, I studied classic philosophy and literature – Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Descartes, Dante, Melville, Steinbeck. It seemed like it was only a matter of time before war and famine became a thing of the past.
During the Vietnam War, the peace and love movement created a generation of compassionate activists who protested hard to end that war, and succeeded. I thought wars were lessons on how not to solve problems. Naively I used to say that Vietnam was probably our last war, that we’d finally learned that love is the answer.
The future was bright and full of innovations and inventions to bring us closer to a cleaner, healthier, safer world. We would have clean energy, clean water, and nutritious food. In college we studied the nature of goodness, morality, and ethics. We analyzed evil, but only as an aberration. I graduated with stars in my eyes.
So, what shattered my magical kingdom? I’m trying now to put my finger on it. I recall the year the first dark cloud appeared in my sunny skies. It was the attack on the World Trade Center.
Though there was an opposing explanation for every detail in the official story, I still accepted the consensus. Then by happenstance, I came upon a film that insisted jet fuel couldn’t melt steel, and the way the buildings fell straight down was mysterious. That did seem odd to me. It stirred my curiosity, and I spent the next year researching all the theories surrounding that tragic event. I even met Charlie Sheen and Alex Jones in person.
That same year, the movie “A Beautiful Mind” was released, the story of the mathematician John Nash. I read his Game Theory that says if players in the game of life chose the best decisions and know that the other players will also chose the best decisions, and everyone knows each other’s decisions, they will achieve Nash Equilibrium — harmony, agreement, and cooperation. That was the world I grew up in.
Then read the follow up about the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and it started to turn my world upside down.
To summarize an example, if two arrested prisoners are interrogated separately, and they agree beforehand to keep quiet, each will only serve one year. However, if one snitches on the other, the snitch will go free and the other fellow will serve two years.
If they are loyal and trusting – aka honor among thieves — that won’t happen. However, if one is selfish or distrustful, he will snitch, for fear that the other guy may snitch on him. Thus, it’s better to betray first. This isn’t opinion; it’s math.
All this mumbo jumbo led me to learn about BitTorrent, an internet protocol that lets people download massive files like documentary films.
As a journalist and a scholar, I began downloading for-free documentaries from around the world not available in the mainstream. I wasn’t bootlegging Harry Potter films. I’m not a thief. I was interested in exposes, revelations of crime and corruption. There were terabytes of them.
I was overwhelmed by the magnitude of bad behavior going on, arms deals, human trafficking, mass murder, propaganda extraordinaire. I began reading books like John Perkins’ “Confessions of an Economic Hitman” about how the World Bank and the IMF robbed third-world countries. The information I uncovered was dark, foreboding, and ubiquitous. War won’t end because we wised up. It’s about the money. There are two kinds of engineers – those who make weapons and those who make targets.
Once exposed to that dark world of treachery and deceit, there was no forgetting it. I’d been tainted, disillusioned. I learned so much nasty news that I couldn’t take it anymore. I stopped investigating, but it was too late. My sunshine and lollipops world view dissipated. I was a changed man, and my dull, rumpled Rockports couldn’t get me back to Kansas.
This experience is one reason why my columns are not often topical. I prefer the far side.
When I read that a climate-change denier and environment-protection hater may run the EPA, and a public-education hater may run the Department of Education, and our leaders plan to abolish health care and senior support, I am neither shocked nor surprised.
Lies and insults have become commonplace, everyday occurrences. It’s in our nature. Bosch lives.

Steve Gibbs is a retired Benicia High School teacher who has written a column for The Herald since 1985.

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