Word-Eater 1/x

Maintaining objectivity in discourse.

A recent post by @meno, that I sadly missed during the 7-day window, was concerned with the effectiveness of verbal (or textual) jousting; and how passionate argumentation was not always the most effective means of getting your point across. He was damned right about this.

One thing that I've noticed many, many times in my 20+ years on the internet (gods, how old I am...) is that many people, quite by accident it seems, interpret any disagreement with their position on a subject to be a personal attack against themselves, even if it is nothing of the sort. Some folks, who are completely rational and quite level-headed under normal circumstances, are disproportionately thin-skinned, even dogmatic, about certain subjects.

Photo by Tom Pumford on Unsplash

A good example that comes to mind is what happened back during the Iraq War... I was riding a train to work at the time, and would walk to a nearby bar in the afternoon to wait for her to come pick me up. I had been a semi-regular for a while, and made some friends. It is worth mentioning that I was in a decidedly conservative state at the height of the George W. Bush regime.

So we're sitting there having a beer, and ofcourse the TV in the bar is tuned to Fox News, because it's very popular around here. Avoiding the topic of the war was almost impossible in those days, and it was becoming evident that it had been a hasty decision based on outright propaganda, and that it wasn't working out so well. When asked about it, I simply stated that I never thought it was a good idea in the first place. And from my peripheral vision, I saw the man next to me, who I considered to be a pretty cool individual, grimace so fiercely that his face turned bright red. He looked as if he was about to explode into a torrent of cursing and screaming.

He didn't though. After that, he became a bit maudlin, and seemed to be sad all of a sudden. I think what happened is that he narrowly avoided the aforementioned freak-out through a colossal act of will, and realized that his near-explosion was irrational, and that he had nearly assaulted a friend as a reflexive action. And that this reflex was a result of the continual indoctrination that he had received from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and gods know who else.

This was during the early days of the Outrage Industry, when (seemingly) only Fox News and the right wing were openly engaging in agitation-based propaganda in order to exploit the natural vulnerability of those for whom identity politics forms the bedrock of their positions. In other words, they knew damned well that getting people emotionally engaged in an argument, especially by telling them they are being attacked, was immensely more productive than rational discourse. Herman Goering certainly wasn't wrong on that matter.

The reason that I'm bring this up in relation to the post by @meno, is because maintaining a certain objectivity towards your own position is crucial to proper discourse. To identify your postion too-closely with your own being is a mistake that a savvy sparring partner can easily exploit.

I certainly learned that on the Eve-Online forums, wherein people would regularly bait their opponent into a frenzy. Worse yet, sometimes a third-party would drop in just to create havoc. To "go-to-war" against someone who disagrees with your position is a deadly mistake.

I think I'm definitely going to have to post more on this subject, as effective argumentation is central to any sort of engagement, whether on the interwebs or in daily life.

Bliss to the Blissful,

Silas Danois