I think I am among many people who feel like we are emerging from a fog, having gotten lost with arguing on social media for years, before finally realizing how this whole phenomenon is so much worse than pointless.
It's just so easy to yell at people you can't see, and to caricature them in your mind. Just like how many of us often behave when operating a vehicle of some kind.
Which is not to say that I have become a saint -- I haven't. But it's good to have aspirations, and whatever I was aiming for before, that led me to communicate by essentially shouting at people online, particularly in the earlier stages of corporate social media platforms, was not heading anywhere positive.
As we close in on another election, and the western media seems to have almost nothing else to talk about (never mind the genocide, the famines, or the various wars that aren't happening in Ukraine), it's easy to see online that efforts to communicate by shouting at one another in social media comments, or shouting into the void with shrill social media posts that seek to portray anyone who doesn't see the "obvious" truth as a moron, are still ubiquitous.
I'll talk a little about what people are arguing about in a minute. First I want to talk about how people are arguing, and what this does to each other.
I'm a father of three children, one of whom is now an adult. I have personally yet to experience the phenomenon I see happen in other parent-child relationships, that we commonly call a "tantrum."
I don't want to beleaguer the point with lots of tangential ruminations on parenting philosophy, but to cut to the chase, if you really listen to your children and you're aware of how they're feeling, the relationship never gets to the point where a child feels the need to shout at you, flail around, cry inconsolably, etc. (I realize we're also just lucky.)
As I listened to and empathized with my children and noted things like their lack of desire or need to throw tantrums or ever really be disagreeable, I also noted what a tremendous and negative and lasting impact it could have on them on occasions where I showed signs of annoyance, impatience, or disapproval.
It's very easy to see how dramatically different our relationships would be if I or their other parents were frequently acting towards them or saying things to them that communicated those kinds of messages.
It's more amplified and intense with children, but adults have all the same range of emotions as the kids do. We also are fully capable of shutting down or throwing tantrums or becoming very defensive, etc., when faced with negative behavior coming from others.
Certainly from my experience as a parent, and my experience as a musician communicating with audiences, is you're not communicating with anyone if you're shouting, or being overbearing, or trying to tell people what they should be thinking or feeling. Rather, you often communicate best by telling good stories and letting people come to their own conclusions.
Studies in how people learn in educational environments that I've read about, naturally enough, reinforce the efficacy of this approach, and the failure of the more "listen to me, teacher knows best," punitive-oriented approaches at running a classroom.
You don't have to spend much time on Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok, etc., to see evidence of a whole lot of people -- and most definitely a whole lot of bots and who knows what else -- who seem to believe that shouting into the void their "obvious truths" and condemning those who disagree are still very popular pastimes.
And what are these "obvious truths" that everybody shouting online thinks are so clear? These "obvious truths" that may make those who reject them simultaneously anti-Jewish, anti-Palestinian, Putin-lovers and selfish, among other things?
The dominant one lately relates to the impending election. On one side are those for whom it is abundantly evident that a vote for either ruling party is a vote for genocide, since both parties clearly support the genocide of the Palestinians currently underway. On the other are people who are against the genocide, but say it's abundantly obvious that if you care about Palestinians you should vote for Kamala, because Trump will be worse.
Everyone knows that under either ruling party, the leadership of the US is going to continue to facilitate Israel's atrocities. But according to one camp, a vote for Kamala is a vote for genocide. According to the other, a vote for Kamala is a vote for the lesser evil, who will be a less genocidal president than Trump, and voting for a third party candidate is an expression of utopianism, selfishness, a lack of empathy for Palestinians, a lack of understanding of reality, or all of the above, since that candidate stands no chance of winning.
For the sake of argument, let's accept the logic that US society and the world at large are at least somewhat better off when the US is run by Democrats rather than Republicans. I would guess that 90% of the people reading this probably believe this to be true, whatever your political affiliations or wherever in the world you live. Given the choice, you liked Obama better than you liked either of the Bushes.
Even if we take that as a given, and even if that may perhaps be more true with this election than it has ever been before, what happens in countries where there is no opposition to the left of the main left-of-center party? It tends to take the left vote for granted, and in terms of policy, it moves to the right.
And more pressingly, perhaps, where is the world going under US Democratic Party leadership? The fairly clear answer, from Hiroshima to Hanoi to Jabaliya, with the country still leading the way in carbon emissions worldwide, with the debt growing more out of control with every passing year, with military spending mushrooming year after year after year, is to hell.
No self-respecting leftist thinks the Democratic Party is leading us anywhere else. The argument that I'm hearing, and in some form participating in, is between those who think that although the Democrats are leading us to hell, we really need to vote for them because the Republicans will lead us there faster. Others are convinced that because the two-party system is barely more democratic than a dictatorship and it's leading us to global suicide, every election is another opportunity to make that point by rejecting it and supporting a good third party candidate.
Some of us have been doing this for decades -- it didn't just start with the Russian funding coming in.
Of course, being a fan of reality, and history, I know that, contrary to popular mythology, political change in this country tends to be motivated more by bipartisan responses to mass movements and bipartisan responses to largescale external events. Change doesn't happen so much because it was voted in, in an election where one party had a radically different political agenda than the other.
Nonetheless, for what it's worth, we have this argument every four years, especially, about the electoral system and who to vote for -- and who's a selfish, genocidal moron for not thinking so. Every four years, most of my friends line up on one side of the argument or the other, though increasing numbers of them seem to be sitting it out, which I tend to think might be a good sign, though it's hard to tell.
I have personally been in the camp that has consistently been calling for supporting a third party movement, ever since I was old enough to vote.
I spend a lot of time in reasonably functional democracies, and they are all countries where there are multiple parties.
Growing up in the USA, by contrast, it has long been evident that our country functions more as a one-party state, run by whoever pays the most money to the politicians. In so many obvious ways, it is a failed state, but over time it only gets worse, like throughout my lifetime, and I'm almost a senior citizen.
In conclusion: regardless of your position on these vitally important questions, I would encourage you to realize that by acting like you know the "obvious truth," and by behaving that way in arguments on- or off-line, and by denigrating those who hold differing viewpoints, even on such vital issues, you are most likely doing more harm than good.
Even if you convince someone of the rightness of your position by acting like you know everything, in the longer term, you are creating a more toxic environment, and a less conducive one for the kind of inclusive, empathetic, musical, loving social movement we so desperately need.
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