According to Ian Bremmer, the author of the new book “Every Nation for Itself,” the rise of the “G-Zero” means the world has entered a transformative new phase — which will be more chaotic, uncooperative and dangerous. In his book, he charts how America assumed the burden of global leadership in the wake of World War II, and how institutions like the United Nations, NATO, the G-7 and the IMF helped it dictate the international agenda for much of the past century. He also explains how the breakdown of those (often problematic) institutions is now hurting our ability to marshal global leaders to deal with some of the greatest threats facing our planet. Bremmer, the head of a global political risk research firm who has written for the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and Foreign Affairs, believes that this new dynamic could lead us to a new, more egalitarian world — or to a new Cold War.

Salon spoke to Bremmer over the phone about America’s new isolationism, the cyber-attack threat and why China will never replace the USA.

You start off the book by talking about the Copenhagen climate summit. What does the outcome of that conference tell us about the changing dynamics in the world?

Frankly, the only success that was had at that summit was that Queen Margaret of Denmark managed to avoid sitting next to Mugabe from Zimbabwe. There had been so much buildup to this summit, that the climate is incredibly important and we’ve all finally gotten to the point where we agree that something needs to be done. It seemed like the classic area that you could get some form of global agreement on. Of course we came away with absolutely nothing.

Following the Copenhagen summit we haven’t pushed harder to get stuff done, we’ve actually just moderated our expectations. Every country is prioritizing its own very strong agenda and there’s an absence of acceptance of what the global road map should look like, what the global architecture should look like. This dynamic is increasingly true in so many aspects of the world, whether we talk about the election of a new president of the World Bank, or on how you fund the IMF (and what you do with the money once it’s there), global trade initiatives, security issues in places like Syria, sanctions on Iran, bailing out the Europeans.  I mean, really the principal dynamic in the world today is the fact that there just isn’t anyone driving the bus.  We don’t have a G-20. We have a G-Zero.

Why is the G-7 an anachronism?

The G-7 is an anachronism in the same way that the United Nations Security Council is an anachronism, in the same way that the old structure of the IMF and the World Bank is an anachronism. All of that stuff basically came out of World War II, when the United States was the dominant power in the world, and it created a world order using its own capital, using its allies, building up its allies, prioritizing its values and its interests. And that world order functioned very well for us for decades but of course over the last 30 years, the underlying balance of power shifted away from this G-1 environment toward China. It hasn’t shifted to China — it’s not as if China is now the new superpower — but toward China, and away from the developed world toward the developing world, and away from debtor states toward creditor states.  When the underlying balance of power no longer in any way reflects the global architecture that you have, then at some point, clearly, a shock will come along that will be big enough to crash that system.

The end of the Soviet Union was not big enough to make that happen, and 9/11 was not big enough to make that happen, but the 2008 financial crisis was big enough. And that effectively made the G-7 an anachronism. And it did so in part, of course, because it showed some of the vulnerabilities of the U.S.-led free market system; it certainly made it harder for the Americans to rally the emerging markets behind their values and preferences. But more important, the Europeans have been almost completely absent from the global stage over the past four years, and frankly so have the Japanese, with their 17 prime ministers in 22 years. And by the way, I strongly feel this is not a book about U.S. decline. I actually don’t believe the U.S. is in decline. It’s much more a book about the fact that the United States is not going to do this stuff anymore and its allies certainly are not coming along, but nobody else is either.

What happened after World War II to propel America to this position?

Well, it wasn’t just that they helped win the war, it was that the economies and infrastructures of the other countries — both victors and vanquished – were utterly destroyed, and the United States rebuilt them. Of course, that was the Marshall Plan. And that also was MacArthur in Japan. So the U.S. basically built up both its allies as well as the vanquished Japanese who surrendered, to create folks that would support a U.S.-led global system. And that worked very effectively indeed.

In polls, more and more Americans want a kind of inward focus and less involvement in the world stage — an issue that’s also played itself out in the Republican primary. Why do you think that is? 

The reason why I make the point that this book is not about whether or not the U.S. is in decline is because it’s very clear that America is the world’s largest economy, and more important, even if it weren’t, even when China becomes the largest, richest economy, China will still be a poor country. If the Americans wanted to remove Assad from power in Syria they surely could. If America wanted to bail the Europeans out they surely could; we have the money. It’s also true that if we wanted to balance our budget, we could, but we don’t. The political will doesn’t exist for that. And so much of that has to do with the political system, and it has to do also with the inward-lookingness of the U.S.

I happen to think that there has been this significant “coming apart” within the United States of the top 10 percent and the bottom 90 percent economically. But that coming apart within the U.S. is also being mirrored by a coming apart globally. And that there aren’t many Americans that are prepared to support the U.S. as the world’s policeman anymore. There aren’t many Americans that are prepared to say they benefit from U.S.-led globalization. With the levels of unemployment that exist in the U.S., with manufacturing jobs that have gone away and aren’t coming back, with Katrina and New Orleans not getting rebuilt, large numbers of Americans are saying, “We do not see the benefit from all of what the U.S. has been doing internationally.” And that will make it politically inconceivable for the U.S. to do the kind of things that it did when it was putting together the old world order. I mean, Geithner can get on a plane and go to Europe and give as much advice as he wants to. But there’s nowhere near the level of political support in the United States for the Americans to pull off another Marshall Plan in Europe, or anything remotely close to that.

And even in the case of Libya, which of course is the big intervention that happened after the 2008 financial crisis, look at what actually happened. The U.S. did not want to do it. Everyone hated Gadhafi — U.S. enemies, U.S. allies. The Brits and the French said, You’ve gotta remove this guy. And only then did the U.S. say they would, and still the U.S. did not have troops on the ground. In some ways, Libya is the exception that proves the rule, that whether we’re talking about trade or climate or security or the European crisis, all of these are issues where we’re just not going to see the kind of leadership anywhere that we have historically.

I think many people would see this as a positive decline in so-called American imperialism.

Well, first of all there’s no question that American intervention on the military side has been seen as problematic. But for every country that sees it as problematic, others have seen it as something essential. You can talk about Marshall Plan, the role that the U.S. has played in the World Bank and the IMF, the importance of the Peace Corps and all of this sort of stuff – these have been organizations that generally have been very welcomed in terms of the benefit for the common good.

A few years ago, I remember reading endless magazine articles about how China was going to become the new superpower, and we’ll all be learning Mandarin in grade school. You don’t think that’s going to be the case. 

I put that into strong question and there are a number of reasons for it. The first is that for the Chinese to continue to succeed they need to fundamentally restructure both their economy and their political system. They’re aware of this. It’s an enormous challenge, it’s never been attempted with a country remotely the size of China, and they’ll need to do it relatively quickly.  First of all, there are no guarantees that they will succeed and, even assuming that they succeed, or they even succeed sufficiently to stave off various crises, when China becomes the world’s largest economy, it will still be a poor country. And I don’t think we sufficiently appreciate how different that will be. They will be focused much more on ensuring that they can provide the minimum form of employment and growth and commodity inputs for their own people. The United States is a rich country. The U.S. can easily afford to spend a lot of time helping to provide public goods, acting as a global policeman across the world, and it’s done that for over a century, again for good and for bad. The Chinese will not be prepared to play that role.

Look at what China’s doing in the Middle East: They are interested in defending very narrow interests – economic and security interests. It’s easy for the United States to say, we want to do more on the global environment, because the average American is paying attention.  The average Chinese person has a very different view of the global environment. They want a car. They want their kids to be able to have an apartment. They want a proper education. Hundreds of millions of them want to get out of absolute poverty.

The last few decades have been sort of notable, because there’s been relatively little death and conflict around the globe, compared to other periods of time in global history — a point made by the recent book, “The War on War.” What do you think the G-Zero environment means for the security of the world?

Clearly we’re going to see much more conflict in this environment. And the question is what kind of conflict it will be. I tend to not see this as a world where we’re going to have military and the sort of conventional warfare between major powers. Compared to the pre-WWII environment, there’s so much more interlinkage between the economies of countries. But having said that, we’re definitely seeing a fragmentation of the world order, compared to a globalization and statelessness that had been driven by the United States at the order of the global markets over the past decade. What does that mean? Well, first of all it means we’ll see much more cyber-conflict. Much more industrial espionage. Much more direct and overt conflict between states and corporations. More protectionism.  More industrial policy. Those sorts of things, I think we will see more conflict overall. I think that can spill over into military conflict regionally that won’t necessarily involve the United States.

In a G-Zero environment the Middle East is much more problematic. Because absent strong US, European, Japanese, Chinese or Russian intervention, what you end up having is the Saudis, the Iranians, and the Turks playing much greater roles in terms of diplomacy and political influence, economic influence, military influence.  Those countries support completely different outcomes. Clearly that means more sectarian conflict.  We’re not going to see more integration in the Middle East, we’re going to see more disintegration, more fragmentation, more confrontation.

In the book you also suggest that we’ll be see the rise of privatized warfare, using contractors like the company formerly known as Blackwater. I find that a worrisome prediction.

You know, absent U.S. intervention, you are likely to see many more local arms races, like India vs. China, for example. But you’ll also see the privatization of warfare, where countries with cash will be buying mercenaries that are well-trained, whatever they can afford, and they’ll be doing the fighting for them. And that will also be true in terms of folks that can engage in cyber-warfare and folks that can protect you from cyber-warfare. In a G-Zero environment, fighting of all sorts gets fragmented.

How does this affect our ability to deal with global warming?

Well, this is one of the problems I have today with the political debate. You’ve got so many people out there who are saying, “Global warming is horrible and we have to do something.” But it’s fairly obvious that we’re not going to. And again, it’s not as if the world has never been capable of dealing with climate problems.  You remember, we had a hole in the ozone, and I believe it was in 1976 that there was this Montreal protocol that was going to stop putting the CFCs in the atmosphere.  And it was effective.

It’s very clear that this climate issue, as you mentioned, is a much, much bigger order of baggage. It’s going to cause a lot of death, a lot of displacement. There will be winners as well. There will be folks who are successful economically out of climate change, but overall, it’s a negative for the world economy, and it is inconceivable in a G-Zero environment that you’re going to move efficiently even toward the beginning of a global solution, and so what will happen is you will have local solutions.  Local solutions will not be coordinated, they will be less efficient, and they will focus on those issues that are most important to individual governments directly. In the case of the Maldives, they’ll buy land and they’ll move. In the case of China, they’ll focus on issues that are impacting their domestic population, without worrying about what they’re doing to the global public commons in terms of emitting pollutants into the air. As they need to industrialize but they’ll focus much more on water, for example, because they desperately need that water for themselves.

And the U.S. and others will start focusing on geo-engineering — looking at what can be done to potentially artificially lower temperatures and create cloud cover and, you know, all of these sort of things which 10 years ago were fanciful but now increasingly people are starting to look into seriously.  But the issue is that those solutions will not be taken globally.  And what will be seen as a solution by one country or a set of like-minded countries might actually be seen as very strongly against the interest of other countries and other actors.

What countries do you think are going to be helped by this new G-Zero arrangement?

There are a group of countries that I think will do particularly well in this environment and I call them pivot states. The reason I focus on these pivot states is in a G-Zero environment you need to not just focus on growth — because there’s so much more volatility in the world, you need to focus on growth and resilience together. It’s countries that are able to hedge and adapt between different models of growth and integration, that don’t get captured by any individual large country [that will thrive] and certain countries are particularly good at doing that.

Canada’s really good at doing that. If Obama doesn’t want to do the Keystone pipeline, there are a lot of Chinese that want to have access to Canadian energy. As climate change occurs, the Canadians will have this northern shipping route, which will help them to have access to folks all over the world and will help them have access to Arctic resources. They sell more timber in British Columbia to China now than they do the United States, and that’s very interesting. Singapore pivots very well. Kazakhstan increasingly pivots well where Mongolia, nearby, actually doesn’t because they’re much more in the pocket of the Chinese. I would argue that Indonesia pivots relatively well, Turkey pivots quite well. Mexico doesn’t. Ukraine doesn’t.

You claim there are a few possible outcome scenarios from the G-Zero world. What are they? 

The G-Zero is not the next world order. It is a global power vacuum that is not sustainable. Something will fill it, because crises will continue to grow and not be resolved and so that very process will lead to something new.  And the question is what that something new is. And I think to understand what’s coming next there are two questions you need to answer. The first is, what will be the relationship of the United States and China toward each other: Will they be relatively cooperative or relatively competitive? And the second is how much do other countries matter; do they matter a little or a lot? If you can answer those two questions you have a really good sense of where the world is going.

The only one of my scenarios that gets you to a G-20 that actually works is one where the U.S. and China have relatively harmonious relations and other countries matter a lot. So far we are not moving in that direction. So far we’ve been moving into an environment where the U.S. and China have more confrontational relations and we’re moving toward an environment where other countries are indeed likely to play a fairly significant role. So you’ll end up with a world of regions.  That’s a much more inefficient environment and it’s one where pivoting is absolutely critical.

The other two possibilities are one where the U.S. and China have good relations and other countries don’t matter: That’s the G-2 path. That’s an environment where pivoting doesn’t matter so much but where nothing gets resolved unless it happens to be a priority on the agendas of both the United States and China.  The U.S. does relatively well in that environment, actually, and so does the dollar. The other environment is the one where no one can pivot and that’s if the U.S. and China have bad relations and other countries don’t matter very much, and that is really a bipolar cold war. It’s by far the worst of all outcomes, though it’s not actually the one I expect.

But this is very much in process. Countries are in play right now, geopolitics are in play. We are in a process of creative destruction, globally, that hasn’t occurred since after WWII.

In the years since the events of the first book, Clegg has rebuilt his career as an agent and become one of the best-known faces of addiction recovery. (He is also the rumored muse for “Left-handed,” a recent book of poetry by Jonathan Galassi, and the supposed inspiration for one of the lead characters in “Keep the Lights On,” Ira Sachs’ well-reviewed new film about a troubled gay relationship).

Now Clegg has written a follow-up, “Ninety Days,” a tumultuous chronicle of his early sobriety. The book begins with Clegg’s release from rehab and follows him as he struggles to keep clean for 90 days, a milestone for those in recovery. Over the following weeks, he tries to rebuild his shattered life — befriending other recovering addicts, searching for a new apartment and shuttling from meeting to meeting — but before long, he is once again drinking, smoking crack and having anonymous drug-fueled sex. Thus begins a dramatic series of relapses.

The book, which is written in straightforward, readable prose, is an often-vivid testament to the difficulties of overcoming addiction and the value of companionship. Despite occasional moments of cattiness (Clegg can be ungenerous in his description of other meeting attendees), Clegg comes across as a deeply troubled but a perceptive and sympathetic man, learning lessons about addiction in some very difficult ways.

Salon spoke to Clegg over the phone from Manhattan about the fallout from his first book, the unique appeal of recovery memoirs and why he won’t be writing another book.

It’s been a long time since the events of this book happened, and now you’re doing interviews and publicity about them. Does it feel strange to be rehashing all this stuff?

I wouldn’t say it’s strange, because one of the ways I’ve stayed sober is to stay very close to the things that happened, both when I was using and also in early recovery. I can’t talk enough about those early days of getting sober, because it’s the things I did and the lessons I learned — and the things suggested to me in those early days — that keep me sober today. The more comfortable I get and the more I forget it, the more vulnerable I am to relapse. And it’s pretty simple. Those experiences in those first 90 days are ones I never want to get away from and never want to forget.

Your first book was about your descent into drug addiction and alcoholism. This book is about your recovery. Why did you write it?

It came from a sense of not being finished when I completed the writing of “Portrait of an Addict.” During the three years it took to write that, I felt tethered to this live thing that needed my care and attention. I had this expectation that when I was done I would feel severed from that and I didn’t. So I just kind of didn’t stop writing. But I don’t feel connected to it, or any writing, at this point. I feel completely done.

In what sense?

Finishing this book, the process definitely stopped. I was reading the audio book a couple weeks ago and I hadn’t seen the text in a while. Reading from beginning to end, I almost couldn’t identify with the person who wrote the book. I identified with the person who lived the experiences, but I couldn’t really identify with somebody who would sit for six hours at a time and see that [book] to completion. I just don’t have it in me right now; it’s beyond my imagination that I’d be able to write anything longer than an email. Which is a relief, let me tell you. These books just sort of bullied their way into existence. I have a pretty busy day job as an agent, so I’m kind of amazed that they exist, these things.

What do you think is the overall message of this book?

I thought that once I got out of rehab that if I just stayed away from drugs and alcohol and followed a few simple suggestions there would be a clean narrative of getting sober, that there’d be a before and after that would be clearly defined. And that process for me was a lot messier than that. So if there’s a message in there, it’s that the only way that, in my experience, I’ve gotten sober and seen other people get sober is by asking for help and getting involved deeply in a community of addicts and alcoholics in recovery.

The first book was such a huge success. How did you deal with the sudden fame that came with it? The book included some pretty shocking scenes.

I guess I dealt with that in the same way I dealt with every difficult or wonderful thing, which is one day at a time. If I step back and regard any aspect of my life, whether that be my relationship with my family, or my job, or that publication, or this one, I will probably get overwhelmed and driven to my knees in exhaustion and despair. I was busy at that time doing my job so I just did everything that I always do but maybe with a little bit more desperation. I didn’t stop and look around and try and make meaning of any of it. I just kind of showed up to what I needed to show up to — whether it was an interview or working on the copy-edited manuscripts or whatever — and then moved on to the things that crowd my life.

Do you think your disclosures from “Portrait of an Addict” have changed the way people interact with you?

Because my collapse and the revelations of my alcoholism and drug addiction were so known to people in the book publishing world, it sort of mediated or affected every interaction I had professionally when I came back to work, whether that was with prospective new clients or colleagues. I think because that history was informing so many of my interactions and relationships, I got used to it as a kind of third person in the room. In terms of people outside the sphere of book publishing, it was challenging. I’m a self-conscious person by nature, and there were certainly uncomfortable moments.

Is there one big moment is “Ninety Days” that stands out to you as being particularly meaningful?

When I look back and try and locate some moment where a great shift occurred, it was the feeling [at one point during the recovery period covered in the book] when I was walking toward a place where I did drugs all the time. I was walking towards the door and thought of Polly (this woman I got sober with who is still very close to me) who was not sober at the time. She was, at that point in her recovery, pretty dire — like life or death. I felt like if I went in and got high and went down that rabbit hole, she might show up to a meeting and find out that I had relapsed and that that would keep her out of there.

My involvement in her recovery and connection to her was the thing that stopped me from walking through that door. Somehow the pull of my feeling of usefulness and responsibility to Polly was greater than my desire to use. That was the first time anything stood between me and a drink or a drug. And I turned around and walked away. Very soon after that, the obsession to use and to drink lifted, which was something that hadn’t happened in all of the time that I had tried to get sober.

To me that reminds me how important it is to stay connected to other people in recovery. To me recovery is sort of moving from the first-person singular to the first-person plural. For me as an addict, I can get very consumed with my own anxieties and worries and struggles and ambitions. And if I get too wrapped up in those thing and lift away from my usefulness to other addicts, I’m most vulnerable to relapsing.

In the book, you enter a lot of spaces in which people are meant to be anonymous. There must have been tension between describing the people and wanting to preserve their privacy.

I felt very comfortable talking about my experience getting sober without naming the program of recovery that I’m involved in. And in the instances where there are people in the program that I got sober with and who are still in my life, I spoke to them about the fact that I was going to describe our experience and went to lengths to protect their anonymity and their privacy and followed their lead in terms of what they were comfortable with and what they weren’t. The main point is to transcribe my struggle to get a toehold in sobriety and maintain it. I didn’t feel that the focus of the book is on anyone else’s recovery necessarily, outside a handful of relationships that I had and still have.

One person in the book about whom this question arises is the character of Asa, whom you describe extensively as he helps you during your early sobriety. I’m assuming you weren’t able to get his permission to write about him.

I didn’t think so. He was, he made it clear at a certain point that he didn’t want to have any contact with me because he was no longer sober. But I’m very happy to report that he’s come back into recovery and is sober. He knows that he is in the book, and that he is well masked. I went to great lengths to protect his privacy.

You’ve been the rumored “muse” of a few projects that have gotten coverage in the media in the last few months. How does it feel to be the subject of that kind of attention?

I don’t really have anything to say about that.

One of those projects, the film “Keep the Lights On,” recently got a distribution deal. Did you have any participation in that?

I guess I can’t really speak to any books or films that any other people wrote that I may or may not be connected to by speculation in magazines and elsewhere. It’s not my place.

Fair enough. Going back to your book, the most famous recovery memoir in recent years is the controversial “A Million Little Pieces,” by James Frey, which you allude to in the book. Did other recovery memoirs affect your way of thinking about this book?

You know I haven’t read, probably very consciously, other books of addicts and recovery — but particularly in the last seven years, when I’ve been involved in working on these two books. People I got sober with would use this phrase, “compare and despair.” I probably internalized that while getting sober and set out not to read other books about addiction and recovery when I was writing these. I would probably think they were better writers than me, or be affected by it so I just felt like in the writing of these books, I just had to follow my own instincts.

What do you think is the appeal of the addiction and recovery memoir for readers?

I think there are a lot of alcoholics and addicts in this world. And they touch a lot of people. It’s a disease that cuts through all class and age and race, and affects many, many people. I certainly myself felt very lost when I was first trying to get sober, and other people in my life felt incredibly lost. Both experiences are very isolating, so when reading an account of somebody getting sober — or in the case of David Sheff’s book “Beautiful Boy,” reading an account of a parent whose kid is an addict — I think identification is a powerful thing. It makes the struggle feel less singular, and it shows at least one particular path which one may choose to take or not take in any of those circumstances, whether you’re an addict yourself, or the father of an addict, or the daughter or son. I think people look to books to find answers, separate from addiction and alcoholism, they look to stories to illuminate their lives more clearly, to more clearly find their way.

I think there’s also the appeal of witnessing someone’s downfall and redemption.

Perhaps. People tend to make mistakes, and the reading of how someone may prevail against those mistakes may be encouraging to some people. If it is, that’s one use of those books.

According to Jessie Klein, the author of the new book “The Bully Society,” it’s a problem that’s only getting worse. In her excellent examination of the school bullying epidemic, Klein, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at Adelphi University, takes a broad approach to the subject. She first lays out the scope of the problem, before explaining how kids’ changing attitudes towards masculinity, the birth of child-targeted consumerism and the erosion of our compassionate society have all helped to create a culture in which children are increasingly feeling overwhelmed and helpless, and, in some cases, prone to violence. Most provocatively, she ties the rise of bullying behavior to America’s economic move to the right.

Salon spoke to Klein over the phone from New York about the Ohio shooting, Facebook and why the current election cycle is bad for bullying.

What is your immediate reaction to the Ohio shooting?

I think the whole controversy about whether [the alleged shooter] was bullied or not is very interesting. It’s clear he posted these rather miserable poems on Facebook that conveyed that he was unhappy and angry, and a number of kids say he was an outcast, he was isolated, he was picked on — and then others said he wasn’t. People are always arguing about what it means to be bullied. It seems clear this kid was not treated particularly well, he didn’t have a lot of friends, he was isolated, and he was unhappy. A good community would see a person who’s having a hard time and figure out ways to reach out to them and care about them. It seems less important to his experience as being bullied or not being bullied, than figuring out that he wasn’t in the middle of a social environment that was caring and compassionate.

You argue that the bullying problem in the United States has been getting worse in the last few decades.

Yeah. Between 1979 and 1988 there were 27 school shootings. From 1989 to 1998 there were 55 and then they continued to increase from 1999 to 2008 to 66, so there were 148 shootings in the three decades from 1979 to 2008. What’s most disturbing is that in the three years since 2008 there have been 43 shootings, and that’s almost two-thirds of the number of shootings that occurred in the preceding decade.

What do school shootings have to do with bullying?

I started studying the school shootings when I first heard about a school shooting in 1997. I was really struck by why he said he committed the shooting. He talked about how he had been picked on, and called gay, and harassed for being fat. And I thought that’s really not that different from what many kids experience. For the book, I interviewed kids across the country and asked them about their experiences, and I realized school shooters are really complaining about the same things that almost every American child could talk about.

We have an increasingly high depression rate, anxiety has increased among children. There are so many different ways that the children are acting out their despair — suicides, self cutting, substance abuse — and so much of it relates to school bullying. So, what I try to show in the book is that school shootings are the most horrific response to school bullying but they’re not the only response at all, and mostly they magnify what’s happening at schools. You know, most of the kids who committed shootings really wanted to tell the world that they were so miserable and they were treated so badly and this is what they felt forced to do.

What differentiates America’s attitude toward evil from that of other countries? And how does this relate to school shootings? In “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” for example, the new Lynne Ramsay film about a school shooting, the perpetrator is seen as intrinsically, almost cartoonishly evil.

There’s the way to define evil as taking pleasure in other people’s pain and feeling pain in people’s pleasure. And that characterizes a lot of what goes on in schools — kids are encouraged to be envious of other kids and if other kids get a high grade or a boyfriend or girlfriend or win a game or whatever else, they end up feeling envious and angry and hateful towards those people rather than supportive and excited and part of a community where good things are happening. When school shootings occur people like to say, “Oh that person was a psychopath.” And it’s a way of personalizing the issue and not taking responsibility as a society. As Durkheim, a classic sociologist, said in his seminal work called “Suicide,” when you see the same thing happening over and over and over again, you can’t keep blaming the individual. You have to look at the social environment and say, why is this happening over and over again? There must be something in our social environment that’s having this effect.

Most of us who grew up in North America have experienced first-hand how important social status is in high school. Many of the shooters talk about how their killings were a way of upending that hierarchy.

One of [the shooters] said he thought the shooting would make him more popular and, in prison, he said, “I feel more respected now.” These kids really were willing to do anything to increase their respect in the school. They’d been so harassed and so degraded. It was such a miserable experience that they thought if they picked up guns they would finally feel powerful and gain some respect. And I think that is a very sad statement in our society that kids get that message: To get respect they need to be dominate and aggressive and violent.

You argue that the pressure to be hypermasculine has increased in the last few decades. Why?

I think our whole society is more masculine. Capitalism as an economic system has become much more so. Our social services have been cut significantly. The media is much less regulated. They used to not be able to advertise to children, and now they advertise plastic surgery to them. There’s just so much in our society that’s concerned with how to perfect yourself, how to look, how to become as powerful as you can be, regardless of how it affects others. I don’t think that message was quite as prominent in previous decades, and all those values are related in some ways to masculinity. So what I show in the book is that masculine values of aggression, violence, dominance are not specific to men. Girls and women are increasingly pressured to demonstrate those values as well.

What’s most fascinating to me about your book is what you describe as the “bully economy” — the idea that economic conservatism is fostering this epidemic of bullying.

George Ritzer wrote a fascinating article about how the economy affects our social relationships. Now, when you go into a store there’s a scripted relationship. Somebody is going to say, “Is there anything that you want?” And you say, “No thank you.” “Do you have everything you need?” “Yes I do.” And that kind of conversation is organized so you won’t have a long personal conversation that will prevent you from buying things. Telemarketing is the same way. So that even when people come together and could have a human experience, they’re prevented from having that experience by these kinds of scripted conversations. Sales people actually get docked in pay or punished if they deviate from these scripts. And I think those kinds of new dynamics have had an effect on our social relationships. And what’s fascinating is that social isolation has increased. It’s tripled since the ’80s, and depression and anxiety statistics are extremely high. These are, I think, indicators of what’s going on in our society more generally.

In the book, you argue that much of this can be traced back to Reagan and the Reagan era. Why?

He came to power talking about deregulating capitalism. There are many people who do believe that the more you help people, the less they will work, the more lazy they will become. There became an entire culture against people on welfare. Even Clinton after Reagan developed this program called Welfare to Work, where even if you were disabled or had six children you were forced to find some way to work 20 hours per week. And I think since then society has gotten more and more harsh in that way and I think people feel strongly in our country that that’s the way to get ahead. We’re the only country in the industrial world that doesn’t have a paid leave for women who have children, whereas other countries in Europe go out of their way to make sure there’s a long paternity leave. There are countries that help families to stay home for 3 years and they’ll pay 80 percent of the salary. For the most part, people here believe that if you make money you’ll get support but if you don’t make money, you’re pretty much on your own. And I think that’s what kids in schools feel. A lot of the school shooters said, “The principal wasn’t doing anything, the guidance counselors weren’t doing anything, so I had to take things into my own hands.” And that’s pretty much the message that people get, whether you’re an adult or a kid.

You also take a very pessimistic view of Facebook and the Internet.

With Facebook, with a lot of social media, there’s a lot of harassment. The whole cyber-bullying phenomenon is just awful because people don’t even necessarily know who’s harassing them. A lot of the people I’ve interviewed say as the technology developed the harassment has gotten worse. And there are so many ways we use technology to disconnect from one another and to have relationships that are only in cyber space.

But isn’t the Internet also a tool for kids to escape isolation — gay kids, for example, can connect with each other over the Web in ways they never could before.

Technology isn’t necessarily evil — it can be used towards very constructive ends by people who are very isolated. There are ways technology can be used to help connect people and hopefully you have face-to-face connections following that. But I think because so much of our social relationships have become commodified, about getting ahead and having status and having popularity. Many relationships are almost entirely implemented on the Internet and people have few face-to-face relationships. Studies have shown that kids today don’t even necessarily know how to have face-to-face relationships anymore. People see people in cafes and they’re sitting right with each other, texting with other people. Friendship has decreased. In the ’80s, the average person had three confidantes. It’s down to two. At the same time we’re finding out that for mammals it’s actually organic to develop friendships and to care about other living beings. Our social and economic environment is undermining us.

In the book, you looked at bullying in both upper-middle class and working class schools. How do those environments compare?

What I’ve found is that it’s pretty bad everywhere. There are different products that people are pressured to buy. In suburban areas it’s Louis Vuitton, in urban areas it’s Nikes or Michael Jordan sneakers. People often feel that unless they purchase them they’ll get bullied. And parents are in this terrible position where even if they don’t believe in branding or buying these commodities, they worry rightfully that their kids might get bullied if they’re not wearing the right clothes or sneakers or have the right cell phone. And of course there are companies that actually go into high schools to try to get kids to wear their clothes or items so that other students will want to buy them.

If you’re tying bullying to deregulation, how does America compare to other countries where the economy is far less deregulated?

It’s an interesting question. We have more school shootings and violence than anywhere in the world. Certainly there are much less school shootings [in industrialized European countries]. They do have a big bullying problem, and I think in some ways America has become globalized — there is a McDonald’s in every country. But most of what they try to do in response to school shootings is not the zero tolerance policy that we have of suspensions, expulsions. It’s much more about, how do we build relationships among people? How do we create communities?

The cultural dialogue around school shootings seems to have shifted in the last decade and a half. When Columbine happened, video games and violent movies were really being blamed. This doesn’t really seem to be the case anymore. It’s more about bullying.

In 1997 I wrote an article about how people were blaming single parents [for shootings], and I think that was really interesting because at that time in almost every school shooting at that point the perpetrators came from families with two parents, often a stay at home parent. They blamed the violence in the media — and there’s a lot of data that shows it increases aggression but not that it necessarily causes violence. And of course the gun control issues were big. Right now people are looking at the bullying issue instead of looking at external symptoms, but I don’t think that we can discount them. Media violence is part of the deregulated society we have today. There used to be many more limits on what kind of things you can show in movies, what kind of advertisements you can have. Everything is much more sexual, more violent, more callous.

I think many parents these days are being faced with a lot of conflicting messages. On one hand, they shouldn’t be helicopter parenting. On the other hand, they should be very concerned about whether or not their kids are being bullied at school, and monitoring them for signs of distress.

Those are very interesting, important issues. People want to blame somebody. Teachers are getting blamed. Parents are getting blamed because they’re not raising their children correctly. Certain students are getting blamed because they have the profile of a bully. These are all distractions because it’s not about individuals doing a certain thing it’s about a socioeconomic environment where people are pressured to act in particular ways. Parent get so little support for navigating a very cruel and scary world — if kids are going to school and getting shot, why wouldn’t a parent want to coddle their child and make sure that they don’t meet such a horrible end? We have to look at a much broader level to think about how do we change a society that’s become so cruel and callous and dangerous.

Well, even under Obama, the American economy is still extraordinarily deregulated, and will continue to be so. We’re going through this election cycle in which, once again, welfare recipients are being demonized, and the GOP primary has become a race to out right-wing Mitt Romney. Given what’s happening in America right now, do you see any hope?

I do actually feel hope. I feel like people are really concerned about these issues. I think schools could become leaders in a movement to make change in our society. At a minimum, they could create a reprieve from the harsher environment that kids have to deal with outside of schools, and if schools are successful, different kinds of people will come out of them. Right now kids are trained to be heartless and pursue success at any cost. If schools really worked to create community and to help children value themselves and one another, different kinds of people would come out of those schools, and I think different leaders would end up leading the country.

I think people can create change on a very interpersonal level by refusing to be objectified, by refusing to be defined by their brands, by their shoes, cars, clothes, bags, by refusing to identify other people in terms of what they’ve bought, and to be present with other human beings, emotionally and intellectually.

“Who is that guy?” I asked my friend.

“No idea,” he said. “He must be new to the neighborhood.”

After I downed my fifth beer, I mustered up the courage to talk to him. But it was no good. By the time I left, he was making out with someone else in the corner.

And so he joined the dozens of men I’d seen in bars during my 20s, about whom I’d obsess for weeks afterward, thinking: If only I’d had the courage to talk to him, or had the biceps to make him notice me. But unlike those guys, Brian (which is not his real name) became a fixture in my life over the next few months — or, rather, a fixture on my Grindr app.

Grindr, in case you don’t know it, is a wildly popular smartphone tool that allows gay men to find guys nearby looking to chat or hook up for sex or whatever else two men would want to do together. Its simple interface consists of a grid of 100 photos, ranked in order of increasing distance from your current location. Click on a photo and you can chat and exchange images. Since Grindr was introduced in 2009, it’s garnered over 2 million users, and in the process, has transformed the way gay men think about their surroundings.

When I downloaded it back in 2010, it turned my straight-ish Italian neighborhood into a matrix of muscular torsos and smiling faces. I was a little scandalized. I recognized many of the guys from my bodega or my coffee shop; some were 400 feet away, others even less. It was like getting a map to my neighbors’ secret desires: “Mostly a bottom,” “Discreet, you be too,” “Looking to meet right now.” The app scared me a little — now these people would recognize me too — but I was fascinated by its potential. People would send me messages: sometimes crude and accompanied by dirty pictures, sometimes charming, which would lead to hour-long correspondences. And then one day, as I was killing time in my apartment on Grindr, Brian, the man from the loft, appeared 1,500 feet away.

He was just as handsome as I remembered, with a charming description and a smiling photo. Here was my second chance! I hesitated: What if he rejects me again? Will I just seem pathetic? Then again: What did I have to lose?

So I sent him a tentative message: “Hey, how are you doing?” The reply came back immediately. “Great! How are you?”

This began a months-long correspondence. I never let on that I had seen him before, and over the weeks that followed, we talked about where we were from, and where we went to school. He worked for a nonprofit. He loved the neighborhood. He seemed to like my jokes, tapped out on a tiny keyboard, and I liked his. In short: We were hitting it off. He sent me more photos of himself — of his vacation, his naked torso, and, at one point, his dick. I could scarcely believe that somebody who looked like that could be interested in me, even just as a sexual object.

I began to imagine that, maybe — just maybe — there was more to this than a possible hookup. I only knew him as a digital presence, a sporadic vibration on my phone, but I was already imagining our future together. We would wake up in the morning, and read the paper, or bike down the street while holding hands and whistling. Then he would cradle me in his big, muscular arms.

But, as I learned, the world of Grindr can be jarring when it collides with real life. I would be reading a book at my coffee shop when someone who had sent me a picture of his penis would walk in and we would have to avert eye contact. My morning subway commute filled with men I recognized from my Grindrscape — men who were looking for threesomes with their boyfriends, or someone to come over and have sex with them right now. One time I was at a bar near my apartment when one guy walked up to me: “Don’t I know you from Grindr? You live 700 feet from here.”

I had never seen the man before in my life.

But the most unsettling experiences occurred when I saw Brian. I panicked when I passed him on my bike. I would pedal faster so he didn’t recognize me. Once, I saw him standing on my subway platform at the bottom of the stairs, but instead of introducing myself, I turned around and waited for the next train. I’m not sure what I was afraid of — awkwardness, I guess. I mean, what do you say to someone whom you’ve never met, but whom you’ve seen naked? But mostly, I was afraid that if I met him, he wouldn’t live up to my elaborate fantasies, and I’d have to end it all.

As the summer dragged on, Brian began to brag more and more about his sexual exploits. He had had sex with somebody we both knew at a party. He told me about how he had picked up two guys in the neighborhood, and he had taken them home for a threesome. He described doing sex acts that I didn’t realize existed outside of a Czech porn movie. The next night, he told me that he had met up with another guy from Grindr who “wanted it really bad.” The following night the same thing happened.

Increasingly, I started to realize that Brian wasn’t just incredibly sexy — he was a sex addict. I’d never encountered anybody who had sex with a different person, let alone multiple people, every night of the week. Perhaps he wasn’t the guy I had drawn up in my mind.

And then, finally, it happened: After months of correspondence, he wanted to meet up. But he didn’t just want to meet up, he wanted to have a threesome. I had mentioned at one point that I’d never had one before, and so he had decided to scout out other men on Grindr, and send me photos of what they looked like, in case I wanted to join. “I don’t think I can do this,” I told him, after he sent me a bunch of photos of a stranger’s penis. “This might not be my scene.” I stared at my phone, and realized that my attraction to Brian had faded. As beautiful as he was, his behavior was raising too many alarm bells for me.

“Well then let’s just meet up the two of us,” he wrote. “But first, there’s something I need to tell you. I’m HIV positive.”

And that’s when I realized I had gotten in way over my head.

The thing about digital apps like Grindr isn’t just that you invent fantasy scenarios about your fellow Grindr users. It’s that Grindr also makes you forget that on the other end of the phone is a real person, made of flesh and blood. Brian was real, with real problems and feelings — and managing a serious health problem at a horrifyingly young age. It was heartbreaking. We talked about how long he’d been seropositive. He said he was healthy, and that it wasn’t a huge issue for him. He said he would completely understand if it was a dealbreaker for me, that it had happened before and would happen again.

And now I didn’t know what to do. I’d already decided I didn’t want to sleep with him before his disclosure. But if I backed out of a meeting, it would seem like I was stigmatizing him for his HIV. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. My mind raced: Should I hook up with him anyway, just to absolve myself of guilt? Would that make me a better person? Or just weak willed?

“Let’s chat later,” I told him when I logged off. Except we never did. I would still see Brian around the neighborhood, and I would turn away, struck by embarrassment at my clumsy handling of the situation. As far as I can tell, he never saw me.

Eventually, I decided I wasn’t built for Grindr. It fed into my most obsessive impulses and preyed upon my ability to conjure imagined lives about strangers. I decided to focus my energies on real life, and I began to enjoy my newly penis-picture free coffeeshops and sidewalks. But every once in a while I would log into my neighborhood’s Grindrscape, just to see what was going on. Dozens of handsome faces would stare back at me with their smiles, from 500, 1,200, 1,800 feet away. They were so close, so enticing. But deep down, I knew they were very far away.

Where does it come from? As it turns out, it wasn’t even created by a gay person. A straight couple, Stephen and Vanessa, sent the image to the gay blog Unicorn Booty out of the goodness of their heart. Kevin Farrell, an editor at the site, tells Salon that the couple has “been getting a real kick out of the image garnering so much attention.”

Click below to see the image at full size: