“How you talk does not merely express your internal state, it shapes it.”
Amy Olberding is President’s Associates Presidential Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of The Wrong of Rudeness and Moral Exemplars in the Analects: The Good Person is That, among other works, which you can learn about here and here.
Olberding says she is “meant to be writing a book on death and grief, on bereavement. As it turns out, it is more a book I am meant to be writing than a book I am, in fact, writing. When I try to write it—or write at it—I lay words to page only to then lay waste to those pages.”
But she has been writing a series of essays, each one a marvel of writing in a singular voice, with sentences to take your time savoring and ideas to feel rolling around in your head and down to your heart. They’re collected at Shadow Book, and you can sign up there to be notified when a new one is published.
Olberding is rare among philosophers in the United States. She is an expert in, among other things, ancient Chinese philosophy. And she also knows how to fix her tractor. From that unusual vantage, in the following guest post, she talks about professors and the people and their mutual perceptions of each other in our current political context.
This is the fourth essay in the 2025 Summer Guest Post Series. (It will stay pinned to the top of the home page for a few days.)
Out in FAFO Country
by Amy Olberding
I spent some of spring getting ripped up by barbed wire. Storms that lately passed through our area brought our creek as high as I have ever seen it. The waters were so intense and swift that they ripped up barbed wire fencing that had stood sound for several decades. The waters flung creek debris, wire, t-posts, and even stout corner posts across acres of pasture, and I had to clean all that up. I used the USDA fence cost calculator and estimated our damage at around $5000—a pretty bad tally when you consider that our farm profits last year were $39, just shy of the money I’d need to replace the bibs that got shredded picking up all that wire. But unlike many of our neighbors around here, we’ll be fine. For some it won’t be so. The storms were accompanied by tornadoes, and the destruction these have left extends across the landscape—tin from barns flung into trees, trees torn from the earth and lain across homes, and places that once were homesteads looking now like bundles of trash and broken lumber.
All of this is bad for an area such as ours. The median income in the town nearest us is $27,891, with almost half its population living below the poverty rate. About a quarter of our county’s population is on Medicaid, about 30% of the children here receive food stamps. You don’t need all these figures to know the area is poor, though. You can just look at the people when they smile. Dental care is a luxury many do not enjoy. Such is to say that there just isn’t any give in local economics for clean up and repair. What some have lost looks to stay lost. This is in part because aid to the area has been slow arriving. The federal agencies that would once have jumped to the task have not, and it’s not clear when, if at all, they might be coming.
Why am I writing all of this to a bunch of philosophers? Because some philosophers in my Facebook feed have reveled in news of denied and delayed aid to the Ozarks and, much more broadly, in any news at all that describes how people in “red states” are now suffering from the decisions made by our red federal government. Facebook is the only social media I use, but I assume the same and worse is true across whatever other platforms academics nowadays are using. According to several philosophers in my Facebook feed, the people of the Ozarks “fucked around and found out” (FAFO). We are suffering leopards eating our faces because we voted for the leopards-eating-faces party. More formally, we justly endure the consequences of our own choices—though putting it this way misses the celebratory glee most of what I have seen displays. As one succinctly put it: “Hahahahahaha!”
There are almost surely ways to spin into something good, or at least defensible, the impulse to celebrate the misfortunes of others one perceives to have “earned” their suffering. I expect someone will inevitably chime in below with some of that. But I guess I want here just to lodge a protest, however naïve, and say that I wish philosophy conferred some better capacity for sympathy, compassion, or even curiosity upon its practitioners. I’d even settle for better political strategy, I suppose.
I trust that most can recognize that no area is politically uniform, and that tornadoes and flooding don’t specially pick out Trump voters for destruction. But I wonder why that gets lost in all the Schadenfreude? Perhaps the thought is that those who vote blue but live in red have also failed in acting as they ought? You deserve your fate if you don’t up sticks and move? Or maybe the celebration of suffering counts some collateral damage acceptable—it’s ok if some blue eggs get broken so long as you get the red-mess-omelet justice requires? Whatever the case, pointing out that people on your “side” are also suffering isn’t really the point. For me at least, I’d like it better if people were a little less pleased even when the only ones hurt are the red voters.
I expect that what informs an impulse to celebrate another’s misfortune is just the sense that the misfortune is deserved—in this case, that the misfortune is righteous comeuppance for how one votes. (I am assuming it must be the votes because from what I see around me, no one out here has much spare income or time to give over to political donations or activity. I guess they might be promoting political views on social media, but just like academics do, they’re doing that almost exclusively within their own agreeing bubbles.) I guess the reasoning is that if you vote as you ought not, the rest of us are entitled to dance on the grave of your home, now buried under rubble. Because you wanted this. Or, you should have known this could happen. But surely there is some important moral difference between recognizing that someone has voted against their own interests and the judgment that they deserve whatever follows from that choice. Surely there is some important moral difference between recognizing another’s error and actively celebrating the way he now suffers for and from it. These distinctions seem to matter.
Even if there is some general case to be made that celebrating another’s misfortune has some salutary purpose or good end, I am skeptical that such expressions are helpful in our current political climate. Where I live, I sometimes hesitate to tell people I’m a professor lest they assume I am one of those “elites” they perceive to harbor contempt and scorn for them. But I also sometimes like confessing my profession—say, when I have proven my mettle by repairing my tractor or engineering a solution to the flooded creek crossing, those occasions when my bona fides as a person capable of manual labor are not in doubt. Then, alerting others to my profession, I hope, works as a corrective, a way to say that see, professors really aren’t “the enemy,” we’re just regular people too. So I guess now I’m trying that same strategy in the other direction.
I’m telling you I live in the Ozarks and got cut to bits on barbed wire just so that you-who-celebrate might see that, hey, maybe those people you’re happy to see hung out to dry are not really that different from yourselves. Some of them are people a bit like you. And, as I try to reference above, some of them are a hell of a lot worse off than you. Some of them belong to categories—poor, underserved, socially and economically at risk—that in the abstract you often profess to care about. Nobody here needs your tears, but maybe spare us your mocking laughter? It would also be helpful to the general cause of academia if we who are in it could avoid confirming the worst stereotypes about us.
I am not a political analyst of any kind (which is surely already evident). My most recent work has been in civility and yeah, no one wants to hear about that now. But I can’t help seeing here something of a peril that the Confucians were quite alert to. How you talk does not merely express your internal state, it shapes it. Polite restraint, they understood, was useful as a form of self-cultivation, for it held you back from doing and saying things that would steer your psychology toward a worse version of its possible forms. Say too much that is contemptuous of human suffering and your moral-emotional capacities start to constrict, feelings of contempt become more easy and frequent. Not saying hateful things about other people is a strategy for feeling less hateful ways about them.
For those who enjoy celebrating misfortunes visited on the wrong-thinking, I expect the coming months and years will offer much that you can cheer. Here’s a teaser of coming attractions in my area: our already shoddy and desperate local hospital, the only one for miles around, is unlikely to survive Medicaid cuts and lost USDA contracts will destroy many of the remaining small family farms. So there will be more laughs ahead, but what is all that cheering going to do to you?
Some of my lament surely derives from being out of step with the new conversational norms encouraged by social media. From my vantage, social media looks like a Pavlovian lab for training bad rhetorical impulses, and hence bad moral-emotive impulses, into its population. I don’t much like what it seems most to reward. The tone is forever breezy, witty, knowing, at least when it isn’t scolding, mocking, and deriding. The best combine all of these, dispatching foes with sharp verbal darts while making it look both witty and fun. Hence all the leopards and acronyms, all the once-clever-now-cliched ways of mocking others that feature so often. I sometimes want to wail: I miss grown-ups! That is, I miss the world (perhaps fictive) where adults could not so easily confess publicly their cruelly juvenile tendencies, would not openly deploy hip-with-the-kids rhetoric to sneer at others’ suffering. I wonder if I am alone in this? I expect it’s hard to tell since people like me are just the ones mostly likely to pass by the celebrations in silence.
On seeing so many philosophers posting their Schadenfreude about my region’s late troubles, I did consider inserting a “Hey, you know you have peers out here in the destruction, right?” But I never did. That isn’t really the point. The relevant “peer group” I’d like to see acknowledged is just other human beings, not that far more limited set.
Read more by Amy Olberding at Shadow Book.
