What if you could say whatever you want?
Free speech, individual respect, and how we see the world.
People have always had opinions. It is what defines us as individuals. With every single human on earth, that ever lived, is living, and will ever live, there is a set of encounters from birth to death that are completely unique to each of us. Added to this individuality is the fact that even with similar base line equipment, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin, we all have a unique perception with no guarantee that what we experience in a given moment is exactly what the person right next to us experiences. Green for me may not in fact be green to you. Sour? Sweet? All these perceptions are relative to the individual.
So we come up with language to help unite our experiences. Different languages of course offer a severely different unique set of descriptions and levels of nuance when it comes to experience. Here in lies the beauty and challenge of interacting with humans.
But something accelerated the way we think about these interactions over the last few decades that greatly affects public life. The idea of “canceling” lies at the center of this. Politics used to be a thing people did not talk about. You supported who you support, went about your day, and for the most part just tried to get along with people regardless of their political ideology. But something tragic began to shift with the advent of cable “news” in the late 90’s. News shows began to become more oriented to opinion and commentary rather than the stories of what was going on around the world. And a new form of tribalism was birthed in America, or was at least taken to the next level.
Fox News comes to mind first, but the shift quickly took hold at the major networks too. People began to discuss people of different opinions in a more “us vs. them” way. Very quickly it escalated to a mocking, and even more dangerous tone of war and fighting. Fast forward 20 years and by the mid-20 teens the conversation was full out talk of enemies when referring to people that had different political views. And it doesn’t take much thought to realize the fabric of our country was torn. Division had taken hold. In the meantime the internet had been born, and tribalism was given steroids and bulked up like the Incredible Hulk, ripping hits cloths as it grew so fast.
The internet brought one more dangerous aspect to the whole game… the ability to attack at scale. Suddenly a disagreement over opinions between two individuals could be re-packaged and made as a public statement of disapproval, at scale, resulting in one of the two disagreeing parties spreading their opinion at large and resulting in the “cancellation” of the other. Businesses and relationships be damned. That was the point. Attack. Kill. Destroy.
Of course it is media and with media several intrepid and frightening components exist in this “battle.” First and foremost is, media rarely gets the whole story correct. Even when news was “news,” and not commentary, facts were missing, perspective was missing. But now add to it the passion and lack of clear vision that comes in the heat of moments, and often what is a discussion becomes a fight in a matter of seconds, without clarity of thought, without reason balancing emotion. Online fights escalate quickly. People want to be heard. Expect to be heard. Expect their opinion to not only be taken seriously, but to be right. Or be damned.
And of course this is problematic. We are all certainly fallible at best, and often change our minds as various inputs are collected. We think we are seeing the color green until the window is fully opened and we realize in fact it was more a shade of blue. My bad. The window wasn’t open. I thought it was. The light was funny.
But fights online in which people draw their position in the sand seem to be harder concede. And often, once the attack damage of “cancellation” is done, the damage is irreversible. Rarely do people apologize online (or even in person for that matter.) It is a wild time to be alive and trying to interact with people online. And it’s become such an immense part of peoples day that many across society seem to forget that the basics of human interaction when they step away from their screen. Interactions seem to be growing increasingly awkward.
So what can we do about it? I think about this sort of thing for myself a lot. I was certainly sucked into the early years of tribalism and witnessed it as it directly affected my relationships with my parents, with whom I had for years very differing political perspectives. But what I realized over the years was that we were letting strangers dictate what we thought about our very own family. We were letting strangers, who have absolutely no connection to our day to day lives tell us how to think about people based solely on a few key word points. It’s absolutely crazy. And luckily I recognized it before it actually did harm to the relationship. But I’ve seen and heard tales of countless relationships destroyed just the same.
The biggest point I think we need to know is that the media, no matter how good you think it is, always has an agenda. It is always selling something. I don’t care how altruistic they claim to be (often the more altruistic they claim, the more wary we should be) there is always something being sold. And none of these people actually knows you. They do not know your individual history. They do not know your perspective, or the series of experiences and inputs that have made you who you are. Nor do they know it about anyone else.
That is life. We only know ourselves. And we have to move forward with that knowledge that when we are interacting with others we are interacting with people that have a completely different set of experiences. Thus the need for compromise. First and foremost, compromise of thought. It is ok to agree to disagree. It is ok to get along with people with whom we disagree. In fact, it is not only ok, it is absolutely necessary for a functioning and civil society to act as such.
Yes, there are assholes in every society. There are people we absolutely do not want to interact with, with whom we adamantly disagree and who’s actions we disapprove of, but the media would lead us to believe that the dichotomy comes in around 50/50 which is insane. We have far more in common with most people that not. And even when we don’t like them, we can, outside the influence of media and social media, often get along with the majority of people out there, even if we are not best friends.
Society right now has made us all afraid to say what we really think because discussion is a lost art. We seem to have forgotten how to discuss a difference of opinions without immediately seeing red. And we know people on the other side are one breath away from taking their disagreement of opinions to the highest level of amplification possible so as a result, we tiptoe around our own opinions.
It should not be this way. And the more readily we accept others as they voice their opinions, listening without immediate judgement, the more we can ourselves express our own opinions. Conversation is a two way street. We need to not only be willing to listen, but be willing to concede we may be wrong in our own opinions, and allow our own mind to evolve. And even when a disagreement has been firmly reached, in all but the most serious matters we need to be willing to live with people we disagree with. That is one of the most basic tenants of a free society.
As someone that spends time online I want to see a more cordial society. As someone that loves to put down my phone and interact with the real world, I want to see a society that knows how to get along. We think the anonymity of online life might make all this meaningless, but we’ve all see the decay in the real world that has resulted from the incessant bickering and escalating conflict that has erupted across social media in the last decade. Without becoming conscious of this inflated animosity we can’t hope to reverse it. We need to approach it differently ourselves. But that is not to say we should not express our true opinions. In fact, we need to do more of it, but without anger and judgement. We need to converse and realize we may or may not have the full scope of the picture we are discussing. We need to let others disagree without immediately shutting them out of our lives.
The tribalism that has occurred has reached the level where simple political disagreements lead others to consider their opposition no better than “vermin.” People are told to view others with dissenting opinions as stupid, wretched, and not worthy of respect. The major networks from MSNBC to FOX both promote such thinking. It’s ridiculous. And it’s dangerous for our society. No two people will ever agree on everything. So think an entire society will is a game in the absurd. Compromise is absolutely necessary for this to get any better.