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Notes -
Political discourse as small talk
People approach political discourse the same way people approach small talk. They don't really put a lot of higher order thought into it. And that tends to frustrate both them and the people trying to have a higher level discussion with them. Most people engaging in water-cooler discourse do not have any intention to operate on any deep, thoughtfully-developed principles, but on vibes. That's just how human beings are.
Notably, vibes are not always directionally wrong, and analytical thought is not necessarily correct (else I'd agree with CRT and inequality of opportunity - common sense carveouts justified by added complexity). But the point is, most people don't really apply themselves in unraveling political discourse.
What got me to think about it was this excellent post downthread.
Summary: when our hypothetical character Lauren says, "Oh, I had so much traffic on the way here. I hate it. Man, what are all these idiot drivers doing out there?" There's a couple ways you can respond to that. The general way you would do it is to just go, "Yeah, I hear you. Traffic, man." There is not any kind of intellectual discourse that's being had here. However, when you answer that way, you're basically signaling a level of empathy for that person as an individual, a willingness to hear them, even if you're not that interested in what they have to say.
The second thing you can do is kind of signal disinterest. Maybe you just do not want to hear it, so you give a single-syllable response.
The third way is that you can be autistic about it, and you can say: "Um, actually, you know, nobody likes traffic. Why is that even worth saying? You're part of traffic too, right? You know, you're adding to the problem." Or, you know, you can be the Redditor autist: "If everyone took public transit..."
People don't go into small talk expecting you to start arguing about the intellectual valence of traffic-related frustration.When I was a little 12 year old autistic kid, if I heard another kid complain about rain, I'd be like: "If there was no rain, everyone would die." And that was a mistranslation of my father's attempt at making me a less cynical individual, where his response to my complaints over rain would be to say: "Oh, you should appreciate the good side of things, because rain gives us plants and stuff."
You might technically be right, but that's really just not the kind of conversation that's supposed to be happening here. When people open that kind of small talk line of discussion, they're not asking for a debate full of intellectual rigor. They're just expressing a basic observation, maybe in this case minor frustration. And they want that to be appreciated. They want other people to understand their current emotional state and what's driving them to it and offer sympathy. They're not really looking for any kind of discourse.
When you answer politely, you're signaling a baseline empathy for Lauren, even if you don't actually care about what's being discussed at all, and she probably won't even care if you really are. But what the Laurens of this world do care about is that you care about their feelings. And that's what you're demonstrating when you show interest in small talk. Your true investment is the individual. So the theory goes, that small talk fulfills a basic social function, kind of greasing the wheels, reducing friction between individuals. And that can actually start as a jumping off point for a deeper conversation. They might be less willing to just assume you're "one of those people," regardless of who has what beliefs. People are more willing to assume good faith if you have demonstrated that sort of general niceness, and you can both get a better sense of the vibe before things get too hot.
Back to the main thesis: Small talk is how a lot of people discuss political talking points. When a left-leaning person at work brings up Kyle Rittenhouse, they're not looking for philosophical debate on the merits of self defense. They're not looking for a proper legal assessment to uncover whether he was acting in accordance with the law. They're mad that those people got a murderer off the hook, and they want their fellow coworkers to appreciate how upset they are over such a ridiculous ruling. Obviously, this has the feature, not a bug, of acting as a soft social enforcement mechanism. Being impolite to Lauren would be weird. How about LeftyLauren? To her, hearing your rigorous undertaking in response would come off exactly the same way as me being a smartass to my fellow students about how rain is actually really good. She will not be impressed, maybe bewildered or angry.
Why is LeftyLauren like this? Well, from what I saw with Kyle Rittenhouse but also politics in general, most people who felt inclined to yap about it didn't really feel inclined to look into it. And when people raise any talking points to object to their pithy slogans, they just want to say, "I guess it's legal to murder progressives now." Someone with that mentality is not really looking at the actual facts of the case or anything like that. They're just vibing, and they're making small talk about a minor frustration. That's not to say they don't actually care—quite the contrary, they do. They are genuinely upset when they say these types of things.
And that's a big part of what frustrates people in political debates, because some people will approach these discussions with the mentality of getting to the bottom of it, of digging into the facts, of assessing the truth, acting on moral principles. And other people who have possibly never really given their baseline principles as they relate to such an issue any consideration will be caught unblinking. They will see that person being the weirdo autist, like the redditor ranting about slavery after you said Happy 4th. "Bro, you're hashing the vibe!" These people are generally going to be on completely different wavelengths.
I remember when the Kyle Rittenhouse thing was going down, I was getting in arguments with people about it, and a lot of them sure seemed to have strong opinions on it while also refusing to even watch the video. And I was just completely dumbfounded. I asked: "How can you have an opinion on something like this if you're not even going to do your due diligence as a professional opinion-haver and look at the freaking video and see what actually happened with your own eyeballs?" But, while I definitely think I was right in a technical sense — and this, in no way, excuses their lack of rigor — I had absolutely no awareness that these people were venting and looking for validation. They were being Laurens about it, just hoping for somebody to say, "Man, yeah, it's crazy what you can get away with in America, bro!" And hearing me respond with emphatic, sincere disagreement came off as hostile. They had no interest in an actual discussion.
I, by no means, mean to imply that you are either in Camp Rigor or Camp Vibe at all times. It depends on the individual interest in the topic, I suppose. One person may be the most technically-rigorous autist in a discussion about gun control but an entirely vibes-driven normie on foreign policy. Perhaps vibes vs rigor pretexts is an explanation for Gell-Mann amnesia; consider if you had an astrophysicist rain on your parade by interjecting about how your super cool sci fi concept you brought up in an idle office conversation was just totally off-base. He would then go home and write a post about how dumb office talk is, and you'd write about how much of a dick he was to just not even try to have fun. You get the picture. You're vibing, he's not.
And I'm not going to just bash progressives here. I think I was probably in the vibe camp after the death of Charlie Kirk. I do not know if rigor was on my side - I like to think it was, overall, but it wasn't my primary operating principle. I vented my frustration privately to many progressive friends, was met with abject dismissal, and felt absolutely aghast about it. Then I came here and got "Facts don't care about your feelings" and other such expressions thrown in my face. Do you know how alarming that feels? It's very, very disconcerting to have your vibes spat upon that way, especially when they feel so normal, so unobjectionable. And that is probably not too different from how those poor normies felt about my confrontations over Rittenhouse.
But I do think this vibing is a valuable tool. Whining about traffic is as low-stakes as it gets. But this method of communication, this basic human tendency — I think its exploitation can be one of the ideal end states of propagandistic efforts. Uncritical small talk is, for reasons I discussed at length, kind of unassailable! You look like a lunatic for contesting it. This makes it the perfect tool for spreading an agenda, provided that it's normal enough that invoking doesn't make you weird. This is the perfect weapon for LeftyLauren to enforce norms, and to be honest, I have some doubt that it's intentional in all cases. I think this is a weapon that is often issued to clueless footsoldiers who probably don't even realize they're fighting a war.
I suspect this very detail was the reason "the personal is political" caught on, but I may be giving this too much credit. Either way, if someone says something flagrantly political, about, say, how awful it is that 10,000 unarmed Black men a year are killed by cops... I might be inclined to dispute that fact. But what am I gonna do about it, hash the vibe? All I'd accomplish is to rock the boat and look like a weirdo, at best, ignoring any disciplinary potential.
"What? You think getting rained on is fun?" and "You think it's okay to just shoot protestors?" come from the same fountain of normie autism-repellent. Neither of those are really accurate assessments of the contrary point of view, but you're never going to get an honest autist discussion from these two starting points. And from a propaganda spreading angle, that's actually really beneficial! It's not just about how you look to onlookers, either. You are as likely to convince Lauren to reconsider her vocal disapproval of some political happening, as you are to convince Lauren that her complaints about TRAFFIC are farcical, and that she should know better. It's completely orthogonal. At best, you're missing the point of her discussion.
And LeftyLauren can and will tune that exact same human mentality towards complaining about capitalism uncritically, which I bet is more likely to be a genuine expression of frustration than a deliberate attempt at manipulation. The intent doesn't matter though, either way, this has a profound normalizing effect, drawing people to a cause, making an idea more openly expressable, and forcing anybody who disagrees to adopt a socially weak standing. The Lauren making a flagrantly political argument in the first place will thus make an autist out of her weird political interloper.
You will be about as successful as my 12 year old autistic stuff harping about how rain is good, actually.
This sounds a lot like what Scott described as 'phatic' speech.
I mentioned recently that I work in a caring profession and spend most of my time talking to people. One of my lessons from that work is that while occasionally you meet someone who wants to have an in-depth, substantive conversation of a particular issue, by far the majority of all social encounters are phatic. The goal of the conversation is not to arrive at insight, but rather to make a person feel heard, appreciated, and validated. Even if I am going to forget everything we talked about by lunchtime - and I confess that I usually am - my purpose in the space is not to learn or assimilate facts, or engage in some kind of analysis, but rather to convey to the person I am caring for, "You are important, and I care about you".
This goes especially for when people want to talk about politics. Smile, nod, show sympathy, but don't get into an argument or even an analysis. Sometimes people will say things I disagree with strongly and I'll just file away that disagreement and ask an open question. If someone rants about this or that politician, there are a lot of ways to politely engage in and redirect that conversation without either lying or making it a contest. Gaza is one that comes up sometimes, and I have gotten pretty good at noncommittal ways to move that one along.
People are usually not trying to share facts, and if you treat every conversation as an exercise in collaborative truth-seeking, you are the creepy weirdo, not them. Sometimes the correct response is to just nod, smile, say "yeah, I know where you're coming from", and then say something else. If someone says to me, "ugh, my job was awful today, I hate capitalism", I don't jump in with facts and arguments about how 'capitalism' however defined is not the reason why work is tedious and boring. I say, "oh gosh, sounds like you had a hard day, can I get you a cup of tea?", and then we move on.
Now you are correct that this kind of conversation is politically productive, and the kinds of complaints you can make are reflective of overall shifts. To use the above example, I pretty much never hear "ugh, I hate capitalism" from older people, but younger generations are much more likely to use that phrase as a generic statement of unhappiness. That does reflect a shift in values and political priorities. This goes for politicians as well - whether, in a particular local context, someone uses "ugh, Trump sucks" or "thanks Obama" or "let's go Brandon" as a casual complaint is genuinely reflective of something, and your phatic response to that serves to normalise that complaint. The same goes for praise as well; I have noncommittally nodded along to a lot of praise of Jacinda Ardern. But I tend to think these conversational changes are downstream of larger changes, and that the direction of the stream cannot be reversed by arguing or quibbling on this casual level. From an activist perspective, the way you should respond to or change the view of the "I hate capitalism" girl is not to argue with her on the spot, but to change the affect she associates with the word or concept of capitalism. You can't change the direction of the ocean currents by pushing the froth on the surface in the opposite direction; and we're mostly talking about conversational froth here.
I think this is remarkably wrong. A big part of the reason these yutes complaining about capitalism, or sexism/racism, or the ‚destruction of the planet‘ are unhappy, is because those are deeply incorrect, anxiety-and-depression inducing beliefs! You could actually solve most of their long-term problems by convincing them they are false (which isn‘t easy, I grant), instead of patronizing them every day by making them feel good for 5 minutes. They could have talked about the weather if they wanted to wallow in their misery, but no, they‘re practically begging you to save them, and you say „no thanks you‘re just being phatic kiddo“, tap them on the head and go on your way.
I think I'd be more sympathetic to that if, well, I hadn't tried that. It usually goes badly.
Yes, there is probably a useful conversation to be had around capitalism and climate and hope for the future somewhere down the line, and I've had those as well, but it is almost never helpful to respond to a person expressing irritation or exhaustion with, "actually, you're wrong, here's why".
I think it's worth it. If an expert debater and religious authority with a knack for youth online culture like yourself isn't going to dispel their harmful illusions, who is?
Clearly you rate me higher than I myself do.
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