Recreational Outrage

I want to take a few minutes of your time to try to connect with you on a more caring level. It’s easy to forget in the hyperbole of today’s society, that we’re all still humans who have much more in common than we do different. We’ve all forgotten that despite political differences, we all want to get to the same place.

How we get to Utopia is what we argue about, but what it looks like is fundamentally the same for everyone: no war, no hunger, no poverty, no class division, all humans living symbiotically, striving for self-actualization. Am I right? Most all of us have the same goal. All that’s left is to figure out how to get there.

Utopia is a world of equality and abundance, and when we picture it, we understand instinctively that it is built on the peaceful exchange of ideas. That and the compromises made in order to create policies that all can agree upon. Politicians in our very-much-not-Utopian world, however, want to win elections – at any cost. Partisan politics has moved to separate people along ideological lines in order to secure elections, rather than putting in the time and effort to craft agreeable policy. Now that everything is available at the push of a button, it’s even easier to be a lazy and ineffectual politician; one doesn’t require the best ideas, only to cast doubt on the opposition. The stakes are incredibly high, and thus the propaganda is intense – on all sides.

Too much of today’s propaganda generates hate. Hate is corrosive, ultimately harming the hater more than anyone else. Righteous outrage, by contrast, delivers a delicious neurochemical cocktail of oxytocin, dopamine, adrenaline, serotonin and more. There’s a high associated with it, and a crash, and withdrawal. Kings used it to convince people to join the Crusades; partisan propagandists use it to dehumanize their opponents.

I don’t think anyone truly, in their most sober of hearts, believes that half of all people are evil based solely on who they voted for. I believe that the vast majority of everyday people believe wholeheartedly that they have the best of intentions. Socialism, for example, sounds very much like Utopia, but in practice, it is disastrous. Why? Because it ignores human nature, our animal instincts as well as our psycho-social and bio-chemical imperatives. Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

“Of the voluntary acts of every man, the object is some good to himself.”

— Leviathan (1651)

The way I see it, and I think I speak for a great many people on the Right and at Center, modern Western Liberalism is an echo chamber where there is only one group-approved opinion. We get that you strongly believe in this opinion, but where we take issue is when it is at the expense of all others. Any dissenting opinion is aggressively, sometimes violently, censored. We understand that you feel your beliefs are the “correct” ones to have, and maybe they are, but we wouldn’t know because we can’t talk to you about it.

Many people on the Left have cut people out of their lives based on politics. Any ideology that has you dismantle your own support system of people who love you, replacing it with “The Movement“, doesn’t sound like Utopia at all; we’re curious why you don’t see that. Uncle Joe doesn’t like DEI initiatives, and you do. He’s still the same man who taught you to drive, or told the funny fart jokes, or always got drunk at Thanksgiving. Uncle Joe still loves you, even if you do disagree on things. Your family misses you. They value you based solely on you as a person, a individual human being, with all your talents and flaws. Disowning them or severing relationships – with those who care about you or may one day do so – because an ideology that insists that The Movement is more important than love is neither inclusive, nor tolerant. Call your Dad.

We also find the self-loathing of white people confusing. It seems to us that you believe that white people, and white people alone, are an inherently evil race of people that bears a permanent moral debt for the wrongs of our ancestors, who lived in a world where those things were not wrong. Harvard even suggests we “Abolish the white race”. That’s the definition of genocide. And regardless if it self-directed, it is still racism and it is still hateful. We’re sorry that you feel guilty for things that happened long before you were born. We crafted for you the most progressive and inclusive society that the World has ever known; it didn’t take. We’d like to go back to judging a person by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.

We are not (save for a very small group of fringe lunatics) anti-immigration. I’ve lived abroad and have seen the very real, naked, unapologetic racism that exists in much of the globe outside the Western world – we’re not racist. We may be culturalist. Immigration built North America. It’s great! We love immigration… that we can control. Kind of like how you have a door that locks at the front of your house so you can control who comes in. And hey, maybe you live in a really safe neighborhood, and you know all the people on your block by name, but you lock your door every night just the same. That’s all we’re asking. We believe that illegal and fast-tracked immigration has become a problem, and we point to the crimes – particularly violent and sexual crimes – carried out by people who should never been allowed past the front door. I think this gets confused amongst ourselves with the belief that law and order has degenerated on the whole. Sometimes a felon who is American but has been let out of jail more times than a Monopoly piece gets packaged as an illegal immigrant. I apologize. It’s just we’re very upset to see these horrific crimes and we want something done about it. We want to know our neighbors by name too.

We may disagree on how to prioritize law and order and not have it require we hate one another like mortal enemies. We managed to do it for hundreds of years up until very recently. Some people agree with the US projecting American power and dominance globally because they fear the alternative. Others want to push for globalism. We believe the education system – above all other systems – needs to be unbiased, objective, and to foster that same peaceful exchange of ideas we use to found Utopia. We’re not entirely sure what you believe there. We hear you when you say men can become women. We believe that even though a man may really, really, really want to be a woman, and even though he might wear women’s clothing, have cosmetic surgery, and believe himself to be an actual woman, he is not, in actual fact, a woman. We find it confusing why anti-vaxxers are (insert vicious adjective here) for ignoring basic science, but believing someone with a Y-chromosome hard-coded into every cell his body has, had, or ever will have is scientifically sound. We hear you say gender is a social construct, we just disagree. We think a trans man is a trans man. We’re not phobic. We don’t fear trans people; we just believe that gender is a hard scientific fact, and we’re not going to suddenly say that it isn’t just to conform.

Classic studies on conformity and obedience show that 2 out of every 3 people will conform or obey – over the objections of what they know to be right – with little to no coercion. Post WW2, many were trying to figure out how average German and Japanese people were able to commit such atrocities during the wars. Two thirds of people require no coercion to toss aside morals and logic in order to obey or conform; imagine what the propaganda machines of the Nazis and Imperial Japan accomplished. And the Nazis didn’t have TV. There weren’t screens in every home. When Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1947-48, immediately post-war, he wrote of a world with a never-ending stream of propaganda from everywhere, all the time. We live in that world now.

In the book, the central character breaks from Big Brother’s (the ruling totalitarian regime) ideology. He is discovered, and tortured until he believes what they want him to believe, that 2+2=5. In the end, he is happy, because “He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.” We see today’s Western Leftist leaders as a nearly complete analog of Big Brother. We believe that any party that mandates speech, aggressively censors any dissent, fights against election security, asks followers to value the party over all else, and encourages violence are not “the good guys“. We understand you think they are. We think the ideology you follow discourages – aggressively – rational debate. We believe that is because many parts of it are indefensible. We would very much like to sit down and have a rational conversation with you about it without getting shot in the neck.

We don’t hate you. We definitely do not want to see you get shot. We would like to be able to start with commonalities like wanting the streets to be safe, wanting our kids to have an education that serves them, or for people to have access to healthcare. We’re trying to listen to what you want, but our ears are ringing from all the screaming. It is difficult to exchange ideas with someone who thinks you’re subhuman. When we comment on socialism, it’s generally from a place of knowledge about what socialism is and how it has manifested itself over the years. When you use the word “fascist”, we think that you haven’t put any independent research into the word, having taken the entire viewpoint from brief online interactions heavy with confirmation bias. The knowledge of the Left seems to come from this “take me at my word” approach to very significant and complex problems.

Where we are at is believing we’re still trying to convince you with facts and logic, to prove to you that our take has merit. We’re not arguing with you just to be contrary; we’re trying to exchange ideas with you peacefully. We’re trying to persuade you. To us, that is not what you are trying to do. To us, it sounds very much like “agree or else”. And that’s not how Utopia gets built.

We live in a world full of screens and noise, where corrupt people try to tell us what to think, what to say, and even who to be. Big Brother isn’t a single face; sometimes it’s a movement, a party, a feed, a tweet. It is full of absolutism, it shouts down, it demands obedience.

But unlike Winston, we don’t have to surrender. The victory we want isn’t over ourselves to love the Movement more than anything else, it’s over the fear of the arduous and often frustrating work to understand one another. To truly build Utopia, we must fight that fear. We must speak, listen, and compromise – not out of weakness, but out of courage. We must not exist in an echo chamber – it’s intellectual incest.