Maintaining sanity during the quadrennial extravaganza

Almost everything people have to say about politics on the internet just makes people more polarized. Very little of it serves the function of actually convincing anyone to change their beliefs. If you consume a lot of political content, when was the last time you saw a video or tweet that fundamentally made you say: “okay, maybe the other side is actually onto something and I’m wrong”? This is a byproduct of a vicious cycle of polarization: one side levies increasingly malicious attacks on the other, which spurs the other side to get increasingly defensive and malicious themselves.

If you’re going to make political commentary in the midst of all this, it helps to ask: what effect will my comments actually have? Am I actually going to convince a single person to change their minds, or am I just doing this to experience the pleasure of furious self-righteousness? You can ask the same questions when you’re consuming political content: when you seek out news or commentary, are you genuinely seeking information to help correct your beliefs, or are you looking for the emotional satisfaction of knowing that you’re on the side of Good and the other side is Evil? ¹

One problem with the combative discourse is that it’s a rabbithole that, once you’ve gotten into, is extremely difficult to get out of. Once you step foot in the ring, and identify yourself as a member of one group or the other, you start feeling like you are constantly attacked by people who disagree with you. And the constant attack distorts your sense of reality: the whole world starts to seem increasingly radical, which then makes you more radical too. This is what I’ve observed with a number of public figures on twitter who—despite having seemed like reasonable people at one point—increasingly seem to have lost their minds by virtue of consuming and producing a lot of political content.

So it’s wise to think carefully before getting entrenched in the morass of political bickering online. But there’s a deeper reason to exercise restraint when engaging in these discussions. It’s that “good” and “evil” are elusive things that are hard to get a proper handle on.

I’m someone who believes in good and evil as real things: forces that you can align yourself with or against depending on the choices you make. In other words, I’m not a nihilist or a cynic. There are many kinds of evil in the world and we need to fight them so that good can prevail.

And yet. All the most evil things in history were done by people who claimed they were doing it for good. Religious wars, terrorism, violent dictatorships, witch hunts, and even ethnic cleansings: they were all justified by their perpetrators as necessary for some greater good, like spreading a “true faith” or establishing a “perfect society.” As Erik Hoel writes, “no one willingly wears a sign on their chest saying I’m evil”:

People love to gawk over the fact that Hitler loved dogs and was a vegetarian, indeed, he would pester his dinner companions with pictures of animal slaughter to dissuade them from eating meat, arguing that it was needless suffering. To this day, the animal cruelty laws in Germany are the same laws the Nazis originally passed. This is not some contradictory aspect of Hitler and the Nazis. It’s the other way around—Hitler’s strong sense of morality was the cause of the evil he sowed, and his beliefs about killing the “bad guys” and not eating meat were, from his perspective, never in contradiction. In fact, they stemmed from the exact same aspect of his psychology. All the Nazi higher-ups were evil racists, but I think most were evil racists not because they were sadists, but because they were moralists looking for someone to blame, and, having settled upon a group of people they thought were the baddies, did unimaginably horrible things to them.

When someone does something evil in the name of doing good, there are two possibilities: either they genuinely believed they were doing good and just had the wrong idea about how to do it, or, even worse, they knew they were in the wrong but did it anyway for their own personal gain. They were either sincere and didn’t know better, or insincere and cynical.

It’s easy to tell if you’re in the latter group: you know when you’re being sincere and when you’re not. I happen to think that a small group of cynical, dishonest people are a major cause of many of America’s problems, but I think the vast majority of ordinary people are sincerely trying to do good.

And the problem is that, if you’re sincere, it’s not possible to tell—with absolute certainty—whether you are one of the good guys or not. This is why engaging with all of these topics requires a basic level of restraint, of self-skepticism. I feel so strongly that specific groups of people are so wrong, and are so utterly evil. And yet, there are other people who are totally convinced that I’m in the wrong, that my beliefs are evil. And you always, always have to maintain some shred of doubt, some willingness to say: okay, maybe I’ve made a mistake somewhere along the line.

So how do you turn this into practical advice? What you do is you say: let me treat everyone with compassion. Let me start by looking at things calmly and carefully, rather than constantly yelling and projecting my anger onto the internet. Let me focus on the art of persuasion – genuine persuasion, which involves asking questions like “how might I be wrong?” and asking my adversary to do the same – rather than merely trying to entrench my own beliefs. Let me engage in quiet, earnest discussions rather than the loud, public, fake-persuasion attempts that only make everyone more angry. Let me remain engaged, let me continue to fight for what I believe, but let me do it in a spirit of love rather than contempt. Let me love the people whose ideas and actions I despise rather than hating them. For in the end I will never know for certain whether I am any different than they are.