People demand simple answers. This is why Trump was elected. People need and therefore produce reductive slogans that they can rally around. "Send them back," "Australians are racist," "Make American great again," Israelis are Nazis." This kind of short, potent message gets thrown around to produce effects in the public sphere, and to further arguments. But reality is more complex than this and resists this kind of characterisation. Reality contains nuance and subtlety and cannot be easily embodied by slogans and labels. Do people care? No, they only want their side to win. Truth is not important to most people, but if you tell them this they will most likely insult or ignore you.
The slogan that sits in the title of this post was put up on Facebook by man – a middle-aged lawyer who lives and works in western Sydney – I have since unfriended on the site. We had got into a discussion about the US and its relations with Iran, and he had optimistically thrown out this old clunker in an effort to support his arguments. Other people who are Facebook friends of his applauded his stance and laughed at mine (with the laughing emoji that Facebook offers people to use to respond to comments) and I felt fed up and excluded, so I cut ties. He had been abrasive and idiotic on other occasions as well, using similarly tired arguments drawn from the standard arsenal of the social-justice warrior and I had always found him unwilling to compromise and, indeed, sometimes offensive with his comments. So, no loss.
But this man wasn’t the only person I unfriended on Facebook at that time. On Thursday the Adam Goodes documentary ‘The Final Season’ screened on Channel Ten and it garnered a lot of attention in the community. I made a comment on a post of a Facebook friend (who, like the other man, I had never met in real life), a middle-aged PR officer for an industry peak body. I said that I thought the show had actually only shown half the story and that there are many other things to say about what it talked about, things usually ignored by the community because the people who can speak about them are usually not Aboriginal. One of the man’s friends started being stupid and aggressive, completely dismissing my views, and when the man himself eventually commented in a way that made it perfectly clear that he supported his friend’s aggressive stance, I unfriended him.
I had had enough of the kind of narrow-minded sloganeering that often passes for debate on social media. Now, there are certain hot-button issues that lead, on social media, to this kind of blank, black-and-white exchange. Aboriginality and reconciliation are one but another is Israel. People usually leave their brains behind when they venture into discussions surrounding these issues, and they stick to the approved line without actually responding to the arguments that the person they are talking with puts forward. In this kind of environment, unfriending, blocking, and other kinds of deplatforming are often resorted to either because one party finds the tone of the discussion too hard to deal with, or else one party finds that, their arguments – which they think are entirely reasonable – going nowhere, no other solution is available in order to adequately express their frustration.
The thing about social media that marks it for special consideration is not just its popularity – although most people seem to have at least one account in operation – it is the way that using it rewards people for their views. The chemical response the brain registers when someone acknowledges a post or comment in a positive way, in a way that helps to create a feeling of community, actually works against meaningful discussion because even if you just disagree with something someone says they might take your comment as an attack. You have deprived them of a hit of dopamine and so they lash out and personally attack you in reply, causing the discussion to be aborted amid feelings of anger and frustration. So even reasonable remarks that are opposed to what a person has said can easily be construed by them as unreasonable. It is their brain talking without thinking rationally. They are on autopilot and are unaware of what they even feel.
Even if this has never happened to you on social media (which I think unlikely), you can see examples of this dynamic if you take the time to look. On 15 July the Toronto Sun newspaper published a story with the headline, “Polarizing free-speech activist Lindsay Shepherd banned from Twitter.” The story was about Lindsay Shepherd, a student and free-speech advocate, who had got into an argument on the social media site. The story says:
Here’s another example. On 19 July at 6.20am an account belonging to a US man who calls himself a lawyer and a Trump supporter, with 350 followers, tweeted:
It is precisely in relation to difficult subjects that, in actual fact, we need to be having the most detailed and comprehensive discussions we can. We are failing ourselves when we resort to sarcasm, to belittling comments, to ad-hominem attacks (attacks on the person you are talking to, rather than on the points they are making). Such rhetorical ploys erode trust in the public sphere generally and encourage the rise of demagogues such as Trump, Duterte, and Bolsonaro. For many people, giving support to this kind of politician is their only way to respond to what may have been decades of insults thrown out by people on the left in their efforts to steer the polity in a direction conducive to achieving the goals they personally identify with. Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” comment probably won the US election, which in 2016 was very close, for Trump. If you push people far enough, eventually they will push back.
A demagogue is a kind of amplifier of popular discontent. They mobilise grievances in the broader community and weaponise them for use in debates with political opponents who, like the media, often have trouble responding to the kinds of things the demogogue says in a reasonable or effective manner. You can't argue with stupidity. If you do you just risk looking out of touch and at odds with the broader community. This is the demagogue's advantage. The only way to neuter the demoagogue is to play nice and to allow real discussions to flower on social media. Without this kind of meaningful exchange, it will just become easier for people with dishonest motives to take power. What else we allow them to take remains to be seen.
Many people compare the situation we find ourselves in today, when the number of populist demagogues is on the rise and when democracy itself seems to be under threat in so many places, with the situation in Germany in the 1930s. It’s purely a rhetorical device, though. The realities on the ground in Europe after WWI and the realities on the ground in the US after the Twin Towers are radically different. There is no communal humiliation to overcome, for a start, and there is now also no economic crisis (although there were a few sluggish years for the global economy after 2007).
And anyway I don't think Orwell is a good source of wisdom if people today are looking for historical analogues for popularists and demagogues. Orwell lived at a time when information transmission was, by today's standards, sluggish and meagre. The game has changed and the problems we face today are different in nature from those that Orwell's generation faced. There were no trolls in Orwell's day, there were no social-justice warriors. The number of people, in his day, who participated in the public sphere of any country was, compared to today, infinitesimally small. And how information is distributed now compared to then is, furthermore, so different that the information itself is different in nature from what existed in the 1930s or 1940s. We live at a time for which there is no roadmap, there are no reliable guides, there are no established rules for conduct. People are freewheeling down a long incline and I suspect that we haven't yet reached the bottom.
The slogan that sits in the title of this post was put up on Facebook by man – a middle-aged lawyer who lives and works in western Sydney – I have since unfriended on the site. We had got into a discussion about the US and its relations with Iran, and he had optimistically thrown out this old clunker in an effort to support his arguments. Other people who are Facebook friends of his applauded his stance and laughed at mine (with the laughing emoji that Facebook offers people to use to respond to comments) and I felt fed up and excluded, so I cut ties. He had been abrasive and idiotic on other occasions as well, using similarly tired arguments drawn from the standard arsenal of the social-justice warrior and I had always found him unwilling to compromise and, indeed, sometimes offensive with his comments. So, no loss.
But this man wasn’t the only person I unfriended on Facebook at that time. On Thursday the Adam Goodes documentary ‘The Final Season’ screened on Channel Ten and it garnered a lot of attention in the community. I made a comment on a post of a Facebook friend (who, like the other man, I had never met in real life), a middle-aged PR officer for an industry peak body. I said that I thought the show had actually only shown half the story and that there are many other things to say about what it talked about, things usually ignored by the community because the people who can speak about them are usually not Aboriginal. One of the man’s friends started being stupid and aggressive, completely dismissing my views, and when the man himself eventually commented in a way that made it perfectly clear that he supported his friend’s aggressive stance, I unfriended him.
I had had enough of the kind of narrow-minded sloganeering that often passes for debate on social media. Now, there are certain hot-button issues that lead, on social media, to this kind of blank, black-and-white exchange. Aboriginality and reconciliation are one but another is Israel. People usually leave their brains behind when they venture into discussions surrounding these issues, and they stick to the approved line without actually responding to the arguments that the person they are talking with puts forward. In this kind of environment, unfriending, blocking, and other kinds of deplatforming are often resorted to either because one party finds the tone of the discussion too hard to deal with, or else one party finds that, their arguments – which they think are entirely reasonable – going nowhere, no other solution is available in order to adequately express their frustration.
The thing about social media that marks it for special consideration is not just its popularity – although most people seem to have at least one account in operation – it is the way that using it rewards people for their views. The chemical response the brain registers when someone acknowledges a post or comment in a positive way, in a way that helps to create a feeling of community, actually works against meaningful discussion because even if you just disagree with something someone says they might take your comment as an attack. You have deprived them of a hit of dopamine and so they lash out and personally attack you in reply, causing the discussion to be aborted amid feelings of anger and frustration. So even reasonable remarks that are opposed to what a person has said can easily be construed by them as unreasonable. It is their brain talking without thinking rationally. They are on autopilot and are unaware of what they even feel.
Even if this has never happened to you on social media (which I think unlikely), you can see examples of this dynamic if you take the time to look. On 15 July the Toronto Sun newspaper published a story with the headline, “Polarizing free-speech activist Lindsay Shepherd banned from Twitter.” The story was about Lindsay Shepherd, a student and free-speech advocate, who had got into an argument on the social media site. The story says:
Monday’s banning of the Wilfrid Laurier University grad student came after a heated exchange where Shepherd says Jessica Yaniv — a transgender woman with whom she’d had previous arguments with — began hurling insults towards her and her infant son, and making remarks about Shepherd’s genitalia.You can see less extreme examples of this kind of argument on social media all the time, and in fact the two conversations described above that happened to me conform to this mould, just in a less extreme form. In conversations on difficult and important subjects hackles get raised by the way opposition is construed by one party or the other, or by both parties, and that’s when things can be said that should not be said.
Here’s another example. On 19 July at 6.20am an account belonging to a US man who calls himself a lawyer and a Trump supporter, with 350 followers, tweeted:
Donald Trump has been a public figure for as long as I can remember, he had a bestselling book, was a frequent guest on virtually every talkshow on the air, and was given a prime-time show on NBC for years. No one called him a racist until he announced his campaign for president.This was in reply to one from a Republican senator named Lindsay Graham who had complained that Republicans running for office always get labelled racists. In reply to the lawyer, a Baltimore resident who describes himself in his Twitter profile as a TV writer and author and journalist, and who had 231,454 followers when I looked at his profile, tweeted:
Have you ever been to New York City? Really? Did you roll into the Lincoln Tunnel on a turnip cart and roll out again without your turnips? Because New Yorkers have been calling that asshole a racist, grifting shit since the name Trump first showed up on apartment leases.Racism is a terrible thing and it should be condemned wherever it appears but is sarcasm really the best way to respond to it when it does? Is insult a good way to proceed? Do you really want to hurt someone’s feelings just for saying something you take exception to? Are these the types of conversations we want to be having in 2019?
It is precisely in relation to difficult subjects that, in actual fact, we need to be having the most detailed and comprehensive discussions we can. We are failing ourselves when we resort to sarcasm, to belittling comments, to ad-hominem attacks (attacks on the person you are talking to, rather than on the points they are making). Such rhetorical ploys erode trust in the public sphere generally and encourage the rise of demagogues such as Trump, Duterte, and Bolsonaro. For many people, giving support to this kind of politician is their only way to respond to what may have been decades of insults thrown out by people on the left in their efforts to steer the polity in a direction conducive to achieving the goals they personally identify with. Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” comment probably won the US election, which in 2016 was very close, for Trump. If you push people far enough, eventually they will push back.
A demagogue is a kind of amplifier of popular discontent. They mobilise grievances in the broader community and weaponise them for use in debates with political opponents who, like the media, often have trouble responding to the kinds of things the demogogue says in a reasonable or effective manner. You can't argue with stupidity. If you do you just risk looking out of touch and at odds with the broader community. This is the demagogue's advantage. The only way to neuter the demoagogue is to play nice and to allow real discussions to flower on social media. Without this kind of meaningful exchange, it will just become easier for people with dishonest motives to take power. What else we allow them to take remains to be seen.
Many people compare the situation we find ourselves in today, when the number of populist demagogues is on the rise and when democracy itself seems to be under threat in so many places, with the situation in Germany in the 1930s. It’s purely a rhetorical device, though. The realities on the ground in Europe after WWI and the realities on the ground in the US after the Twin Towers are radically different. There is no communal humiliation to overcome, for a start, and there is now also no economic crisis (although there were a few sluggish years for the global economy after 2007).
And anyway I don't think Orwell is a good source of wisdom if people today are looking for historical analogues for popularists and demagogues. Orwell lived at a time when information transmission was, by today's standards, sluggish and meagre. The game has changed and the problems we face today are different in nature from those that Orwell's generation faced. There were no trolls in Orwell's day, there were no social-justice warriors. The number of people, in his day, who participated in the public sphere of any country was, compared to today, infinitesimally small. And how information is distributed now compared to then is, furthermore, so different that the information itself is different in nature from what existed in the 1930s or 1940s. We live at a time for which there is no roadmap, there are no reliable guides, there are no established rules for conduct. People are freewheeling down a long incline and I suspect that we haven't yet reached the bottom.
2 comments:
Well said!
Keep up the good work.
Thanks.
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