Being Goldstein

How did so much of what we once thought of as the left become an anti-intellectual, identity-obsessed cult, and how did I become Emmanuel Goldstein?

Ever wake up one morning and realize that you are Emmanuel Goldstein, and there are lots of people out there in the world looking at your picture and having their daily Two Minutes of Hate in order to maintain their correct worldview and affirm your complete opposition to it?

Well, good morning to you, too, then.  As I was watching the veins bulge in the neck of the tall, masked trans woman who was shouting at me at the top of her lungs, I wondered about the overstuffed bag she had hanging around her neck, and whether that very heavy bulge in it was a handgun, or something else.  This is America, you never know who's carrying a gun, and it's best to assume the person shouting at you is.

As she was shouting at me -- "I DON'T WANT TO TALK TO YOU!  I WANT YOU TO LEAVE!  I WANT YOU OUT OF LEFT SPACES!  YOU INTERVIEWED A NAZI ON YOUR PODCAST!  YOU'RE A NAZI CONSORTIONIST!" -- I was reminded of little kids I've known, who had parents with an authoritarian orientation, and I was also reminded more than a little of other people I've known.

I have three wonderful children, the youngest of whom is now no longer a toddler.  Between my teenager and my two younger kids, none of them have ever shouted at me, or at anyone else, like that, or like the toddler equivalent.  You know how some kids throw tantrums and say outrageous things to their parents like "I hate you"?  I've never had that experience as a parent.

I don't want to suggest that my kids are all perfect because of my perfect parenting.  Even if my wife and I were perfect parents, there are so many other things that can deeply impact a child's reality, obviously.  We've been very lucky.  But loving, respectful, thoughtful, engaged parenting does have something to do with it.  (If you want to know more about this kind of parenting, I can recommend some books.)

I spent much of the night after the rally with the shouting, alpha-male trans woman lying awake in bed beside my sleeping family members, thinking about this person shouting at me -- and thinking of all the people who think just like her, who shout at me and so many others regularly in exactly the same way, but on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and now on Blue Sky and Substack as well (they get accounts on all the platforms, some work better for their virtual bomb-throwing than others).

It's recently been sinking in just how profound the impact on society has been -- not just of the terribly divisive political orientations available for us to internalize via those "influencers" presenting their perspective, plus the magic sauce of the algorithms that consistently drive the most divisive material to the top.  That has clearly been a great formula for fostering a society full of atomized social groups and multi-polarized politics.  But what else does it foster?

What does this intellectual environment, or really this extremely and unforgivingly anti-intellectual environment characterized by black-and-white thinking, where someone's perception of you having made a wrong step can get you permanently vilified, ostracized, and hounded by online mobs forever, what does this do to our minds, our emotional reality, and our ability to think clearly over time?

With social media corporations having successfully hijacked and taken over our communications now for almost two decades, among certain elements of society the damage seems to be getting pretty clear.  It is by no means a phenomenon limited to the youth, but for various reasons related to being young, it might be more visible with that generation.

One of the most difficult as well as one of the most fascinating periods of my life were the years during which I was lovers with a woman who had Borderline Personality Disorder.  I wouldn't wish this mental illness on anyone.  During the years we were together I did a lot of reading about BPD, hoping to figure out how to relate to her better, how not to trigger her as much and that sort of thing.  After all the reading and all my efforts, the chaos never subsided, and although there were so many wonderful moments and she and our relationship had so many really good things going on along with the rest, it didn't last in the end because I just couldn't handle the emotional rollercoaster involved.

According to my deep dive into BPD during those years, it is thought that the people who are prone to developing this mental state have often been raised in an environment that was characterized by unpredictability, like if your parents split up early on and one or both of them is really unpredictable in terms of how they relate to you, sometimes being very loving and engaged, and other times being very distant or hostile, where you never know if they're going to praise you or insult you or something else.

Of course, lots of people grow up with parents like that and don't develop BPD.  But from what I've read, it is thought to affect 1 in 100 people, which seems like an awful lot of people to me.

One of the main ways that people trying to explain BPD simply tend to do it is to say that adults with the condition have the emotional maturity of a toddler.  Those with BPD who manage to more or less pass as relatively normal adults often live very strictly according to an ethical code which they have intellectually concluded is the correct way to behave, even though if they were to behave according to their emotional impulses, their behavior would not remotely resemble what they think of as the right way to act.  Without explaining this reality any further, I hope it's pretty obvious what an incredibly debilitating thing BPD is to live with, for people who have it, whether they try to manage it by constructing an ethical framework for going through life with, or if they just give in to their emotional impulses, or some combination thereof.  Depending on which study you believe, 10-15% of people with BPD will die by suicide.

As I was being shouted at the other day, as with other times I've been similarly shouted at by this woman via her Twitter account and those of her handful of friends, I remembered my lover with BPD, and how she would shout at me for things like asking whether she had eaten breakfast yet.  Whatever would set her off, once she started yelling at me about whatever it was, there was no possibility for any kind of discussion, naturally, just as the idea of trying to "reason" with an enraged, crying toddler is a pointless notion.  

With my background as an accidental armchair expert in BPD, perhaps it was the slightly dissociated state I was in as I was being screamed at that made me draw this connection at first, but then thinking about it, it makes more and more sense.  Which is to say, what would you be like if you were raised by a Subreddit characterized by black-and-white thinkers engaging in character assassinations and coming up with condescending memes about anyone over the age of 25?  What if your parents sucked, or maybe even didn't suck, and for whatever reason you went and started spending most of your waking hours in a toxic environment like that?

My theory, whether this has been studied by psychologists yet or not (I haven't looked), is that we are probably now experiencing a rise in Borderline Personality Disorder in this society.  We are certainly experiencing a rise in suicide.  I don't see how this wouldn't be the case, given the extremely toxic environment provided for us to exist in online for the past twenty years or so -- and online is where so many of us mostly live, especially the younger set.

Once you have in place the meta environment of Meta and the other dominant social media platforms doing their algorithmic thing, once you have an environment that systematically highlights and thus encourages black-and-white thinking, social atomization, and conflict of all kinds, it doesn't matter what the discourse is about, it's going to become both toxic and polarized.

Add to that pre-toxified, pre-polarized environment actual content related to, say, how we understand and relate to political trends or perspectives on them, and you can start to understand how we eventually have managed to arrive at this point, with the kinds of apparently nonsensical and even farcically extreme accusations that are made about people on the most tenuous of grounds.

The accusations themselves wouldn't merit response except that they are so widespread.  It is accepted on the face of it as truth these days in many circles when people say, for example, that Glenn Greenwald or, for that matter, David Rovics, have somehow become rightwingers.  For anyone who listens to either of our podcasts or reads anything either of us write who has the slightest idea about what it means historically to be politically on the right or the left, the idea is completely, obviously ridiculous.  Yet it is very persistent, and seems to be spreading.  

And why wouldn't it?  A culture of believing what someone says about someone else without investigation beyond a few out-of-context misquotes has been firmly established, it's widespread, and it has been facilitated, if not entirely created out of whole cloth, by social media and its algorithms, along with the other factors that predate social media, of course, such as the brainwashing we all grow up with from corporate media, school textbooks, etc.  

Once this culture has been established, and people are just going to believe what someone says about someone else without really looking into it -- which is, again, now the norm that has been firmly established in broad circles -- then it becomes possible for black to become white and white to become black, or for Glenn Greenwald or Medea Benjamin or Freddie DeBoer or David Rovics (to take a few not-quite-random examples) to have joined the ranks of the right.

Once it's been established that someone has joined the right and is therefore a villain, the kind of behavior deeply familiar to anyone who has become intimate with Borderline Personality Disorder will be exhibited on a widespread basis, with people posting the kinds of things -- or shouting the kinds of things in person in the center of town -- which will be the sorts of things we've heard before in a different, less political or less public setting.

What most fundamentally characterizes the emotional reality of a toddler in tantrum mode, or someone afflicted with BPD who is having an episode, is what they call splitting, or black-and-white, all-or-nothing kind of thinking.  Thus, the parent once cherished is now hated, or the intellectual or artist once considered a hero is now a villain.

Add to the mix manipulative characters who are working to turn these algorithmic and other tendencies to their advantage in order to form a sort of cult mindset among their followers, and it all gets especially disturbing.  When it comes to these characters (who I won't bother naming because it doesn't matter who they are and they don't need me to give them any more oxygen), they can create a twisted sort of narrative that can pass as analysis if you don't read it too carefully, that serves to give some kind of serious intellectual justification to the crazy talk about me or Medea becoming rightwingers.

I only wish I had filmed this masked person with a huge, garish, angular, militaristic-looking "never again" tattoo screaming at me, because she seemed to embody the very essence of the Two Minutes of Hate sessions that all of the loyal followers of Big Brother are expected to engage in every day, as they think about Emmanuel Goldstein, the reviled leader of the Brotherhood, and his very dangerous book, which is so dangerous that none of his critics have ever read it.

What also made me want to write more about what seems to be a rapidly developing social phenomenon is that because of the success the platforms have had in atomizing society (rather than bringing us together, as was once speculated they would do), many of the other longstanding activists in this city are having exactly the same experiences, with exactly the same people, but we tend not to know this about each other.  

To all my comrades who haven't joined this all-or-nothing Nexus, who still believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt, who believe in kindness, solidarity, and real discourse:  you're not alone, even though I'm sure you often feel that way.