There are two comments here on the Motte that have, for the past month or so, been sitting amidst the 71 tabs I've got opened in my browser.
The two comments are fairly different;
The first is a more personal meditation on the human desire to 'be a good person', and how that may or may not align with the equally-human desires to 'fit in', and 'pursue Truth'.
The second is a political argument over whether Democrats/progressives/libs are the real hypocrites, and whether or not they were the ones to 'defect first' in the game of American partisan politics; pretty standard stuff around here, really.
The thing they have in common is that I've been intending to respond to them.
And yet, I haven't.
Part of this is due to a dynamic that ought to be familiar to anyone with a maladaptive relationship with deadlines- if you're late turning something in, the longer you wait afterwards to get around to it, the harder it becomes to ever actually do it; it's easy to put it off for a day or two or three, and before you know it, a week's gone by, and length of the delay in your response might raise some eyebrows when you eventually do respond. Repeat this cycle a few times, and eventually a month or two has passed you by- at which point, you might as well just not bother to respond at all- assuming you're even still in the same headspace necessary to give a coherent response, and that events in the meantime haven't made your response irrelevant, the other person's really going to wondering about your penchant for necro-ing old threads.
A larger part, however, comes down to a much simpler -and much less easily overcome- barrier:
Why bother?
In my very first comment on this site, I noted that the 'two screens' effect is very real, and that the picture that the screen the self-identified 'Red Tribers' on this site are watching is showing a very different picture than the one the few self-identified 'Blue Tribers' still active on this site are watching.
This isn't particularly surprising. For decades, Americans have been slowly but steadily self-segregating along 'tribal' lines; fewer and fewer of us spend much time interacting with other Americans radically different from ourselves. We might live in the same neighborhoods, frequent the same shops and restaurants, and be theoretically 'close' to each other (or not; the same self-segregating dynamic increasingly applies to physical locations as well), but it's increasingly rare for us to ever actually interact with our Others to any real extent.
Combined with the general shifts in how people interact with and perceive what are 'their' communities (triply so in the online age!), the balkanization of 'common' hobbies & interests, the fracturing of the media landscape, and the overall decline in common cultural touchstones and trusted authorities, the end is result is that nowadays its easier than ever for all of us to live in our own Bespoke Realities™. It isn't just that political polarization & disagreements are tenser & higher-profile then they've been in decades (though they are!); now, we no longer even need to have similar conceptions of what it is we're even arguing over in the first place!
I can rage over how Republicans are trying to destroy the government and intentionally harm millions of the worst-off Americans with their new tariff, tax, & budget idiocies- and you can scoff and dispute my entire framing, say how I'm being absurdly hyperbolic and hysterical.
You can denounce the large-scale concerted push by progressives to trans the nations youth; to turn them into Marxist-indoctrinated eunuchs conscripted as soldiers in the frontlines of the culture wars. I can roll my eyes and say there is no such phenomenon, and it's all a conservative bogeyman.
Etc, etc.
So in light of this situation, where we not only argue endlessly about the most basic facts of any given political disagreement, without either side ever having to concede to either the opposition's arguments, or even their basic worldview and underlying framing of the situation...
Why bother?
Why bother continuing to argue (and especially why bother continuing to argue online- an exercise in futility if I ever heard one!) when doing so is unlikely to change the other person's mind?
Why bother continuing to argue when the people I'm disagreeing with seem to have beliefs & experiences so wildly opposite of my own that I have to wonder if we're even living in the same country?
Why bother continuing to argue when people I disagree with just seem like they fundamentally can't be reasoned with at all?
And especially why bother continuing to argue when doing so is only likely to be """rewarded""" with mass-downvotes and distributed dogpiles by commentators on a forum you don't even really like, and only stick around on out of some sort of... IDK, perverse masochism, I guess?
Seems kinda pointless to me, tbh.
Despite my faint hopes, the dysfunction in this country appears to be acclerating.
We seem to be waiting on the precipice, holding our breath to see if the next few days heralds the opening salvos of the beginning of true, active civil conflict.
So I ask again- why bother? Is the time for talking over?
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Notes -
Why not bother?
By the sounds of it, you've become disillusioned by a sense of your impotence at changing others to your preferred views. Congratulations! You are recognizing a truth that already existed.
Be at ease. You have not become less persuasive over time, nor have humans become more unreasonable. Political tribalism did not begin in the last decades. The internet just brought the filters that already existed into clearer focus, by putting people who were previously behind regional media filters in contact with each other. The nature of connecting people is that you can now disagree with people who you previously never would have known strenuously disagreed with you.
But again, this was already the case. What has changed isn't the circumstances, but your cognition. If you only bothered to talk rather than fight because of a flawed and faulty cognition let you convince yourself that you were cleverer and more persuasive than you actually were, then perhaps you should not bother. (With either, obviously- if you can't trust your judgement on how well you can talk, you certainly shouldn't trust your judgement on whether and when to fight.)
But bothering doesn't require that sort of self-importance. And thanks to that, even if you can't force others to change, you can change your own thinking, and thus your reason to bother.
Why do you believe changing the other person's mind is the point of a public argument, as opposed to shaping the audience's opinion?
An internet forum is called a forum precisely because it involves more than two people. There are the debaters, and there is the audience, and the prize of any public debate has always been the opinion of the people not directly speaking. This is why the public fora have long been the political centers, and why part of rhetoric has been how to manage the appeals to the audience's sensibility.
The audience is almost never the opponent in the exchange. The audience is, by its nature, curious enough to pay attention, but ambivalent enough to not be taking part in the first place. The stage of a forum is for those who show up to speak, but the audience is many times larger. The prize is when successful arguments get echoed by people other than your opponent at the time, and/or when someone else re-iterates your previous rebuttal if the opponent tries that same line of argument again. Or, in a specific argument, when someone else enters with an unexpected concurrence, because you've written in a way that gives them something to build off of rather than focus on a solely personal bickering.
However, it is very hard to sway the audience if you do not bother to show up and try.
Because you live in the same country regardless of what you wonder, and your audience knows it.
If you are posting on this forum, you are part of a continental-scale civilization. There is no 'everyone has the same experience' commonality when some people face burning summers and others freezing winters, let alone more nuanced local institutional effects. Local political machines, dominant themes and trends in schools, different religiosity (let alone which religion), and so on. If you are only able to bother disagreeing with people who you have very similar beliefs and experiences, that is a limitation on your ability to persuade.
This limitation on persuading the audience is best addressed by.... interacting more with people whose beliefs and experiences contrast with your own.
Because the validity of fundamental reasonableness is a judgement for the audience, not the arguer.
To paraphrase a certain book, if a man accuses his fellow of being fundamentally unreasonable, one of them is. If there are specific people you want to write off as being in bad faith, then by all means do so. The ignore feature is there for a reason. But when speaking with categories of people, part of intellectual humility is recognizing that we can stand accused of the same things. You can make any accusation you want, but the merit / weight it has comes from the people needing to be convinced. Namely, you have to convince the audience that you are not the unreasonable one.
Fortunately, the best way to win a challenge of reasonableness, and thus disqualify the other person's influence on the audience, is to publicly and persuasively be a more reasonable person.
Because there is an audience here that will recognize good effort, and good rhetoric.
The Motte is a place of contrarians, not conservatives. It is not hard to be north-of-neutral on even contentious topics if you phrase well. Distributed dogpiles, on the other hand, are consistent indicators of often substantial issues. This could be a lazy pejorative, blatant bias, or letting your personal contempt for others show through.
This is valuable insight to learn about one's self. If one actually wants to become persuasive, then they need to learn to recognize, and mitigate, their bad habits.
Why not?
Are you the sort of person who only bothers to engage people you disagree with when you expect to win?
If the time for talking wasn't over during much larger and more violent political violence years ago, why would it be over now?
I will caution that going there tends to legitimise dishonest debating, flaming, and suchlike. It's a mode I've seen advocated by social justice warriors a decade ago (admittedly, they mostly then moved on to "why even allow the debate?"), and is related to why callout culture became a thing.
This is a fair failure mode to keep in mind!
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