There Are Three Reactions

Another "Culture War" Observational

  Just the other day, I published an essay on my Substack in written form and on my Rumble and YouTube channels in audio presentation format that has garnered more feedback than I was honestly expecting. Don't mistake me, it still wasn't a ton; I'm a small-timer, folks, and I accept that position. But one of the folks who responded to it is someone who I respect a great deal, and that felt wonderful.

     At the end of that piece, I indicated that there was another topic, closely related to the whole ‘Arts and the Culture War’ theme, that I had considered tacking on. However, given the importance of the concept to myself and to society as a whole, I decided it deserved its own essay. Now, I am well aware that plenty of folks on Substack won't give a tin fig about the discussion, particularly given that the service seems to be rapidly devolving into just another attempt at a social media site. Blissfully, the small but attentive audience that has opted to reward me with their time and consideration is more likely than some to give the topic its due attention.

     No matter what people do in the course of their lives, the rest of humanity around them, once aware of those actions, has a trinity of choices in how they intellectually and/or emotionally respond outside of physical interaction. Those choices are as follows:

Forgiveness

Condemnation

Or,

Apathy/Disinterest

     This last option is where a definitional challenge will doubtlessly crop up for folks unaccustomed to seeing it in written form, or even spoken form, because disinterest is not defined as “being opposed to taking interest in”. The word means, in its classical usage, ‘to be neutral toward, likely lacking emotional investment in the person, location, object or event’. Enough folks have become painfully familiar with ‘Apathy’ over the last ten years, because in many areas of our day-to-day lives, we've had to adopt it as an approach to the overwhelming deluge of interests, pet peeves, and news updates about everything under the sun if we're going to maintain our sense of self and/or sanity.

     Before the era of instantaneous and world-wide communication to anyone and everyone with an internet connection, most of humanity was limited in the number of times they might feel pressed to even have one of these reactions, thanks to the limits of who one could get exposed to. If a celebrity said something foolish during an interview on Larry King, the average, everyday Joe or Jane had only their friends, family or coworkers to opine upon their jackassery to. The celebrity themself was unreachable, except perhaps through Letters to the Editor or fan mail, each of which deployed layers of editorial control over whether or not the response would even be delivered.

     That era has long been over, however. The truth of the matter is, we are infinitely more accessible to the mob of humanity than ever before, and truth be told, there are ways in which this is excellent, and ways in which it might be less awkward to just walk naked down the street while shitting yourself and sucking your thumb. Thanks to data online being so retrievable and accessible, as well as the human foible of forgetting passwords, forgetting we had accounts on services A, B and C, and the Machiavellian ruthlessness we are capable of as humans, a capacity amplified by anonymity and what I call the Digital Distancing Effect, any and every utterance or action we take that is captured and uploaded online can be recalled for public scrutiny and judgment at veritable moment's notice.

     While documentaries like Netflix's “The Social Dilemma” and books such as “Why Social Media Is Ruining Your Life” do their level best to highlight a handful of acutely powerful moments or events that negatively impact our modern human interactions, they focus almost exclusively on direct interaction with the well-known social media services, missing the more devastating and personal damages being dealt thanks to their effects on the culture more broadly.

     And this is where we have to look at ourselves as the end-users in the whole ugly process.

Forgiveness Is Divine; I'm Just Human

     The title of this section is pared down from a sentiment I've used a few times in dialogue with people over the years, a sentiment which I usually end up snarling through clenched teeth- “Forgiveness is divine, and unfortunately for you, I'm just a guy, so, fuck off.” When I've found myself uttering this unpleasantness, I've hit a breaking point with someone, and any further interaction is likely to just incense me yet more. But even if one were to strip away the ecclesiastical connotations of the observation, I still stand by the essence of its framework, which is to say, forgiveness is an often difficult state of mind to achieve, but striving to get there is a worthy endeavor. I’m no Jesus, but didn’t he ask us to not be him, but to try acting more like him?

     Since the inception of social media and its widespread adoption, we have in the Western cultures of the world come to rely upon it as an archival dumping ground for our every thought or whim, be it profound musings born out of deeply affected moments, or stray thoughts that fill our heads as we sit on the shitter with smartphone in hand.

     Not a happy mental image, is it? Now you're wondering how much of this I typed up whilst on the old Porcelain Throne. No worries, friend; I only type so extensively either at my home office desk or my kitchen table. No, you don't need to know my bathroom habits, thanks, and I’m not personally inclined to share them with you unless there’s a really good joke to be had. Back to the point.

     With the connections we make online largely revolving around the concept of gathering together in cyberspace around shared interests and concerns, we have digitized a human impulse that has eternally confounded us, one that individualists like myself cock our heads to the side at like confused dogs, as it seems to run counter to our tightly-held preferences for the individual over the collective- the impulse to tribalization. Evolutionary biologists and psychiatrists can explain this to us, and have tried to, and though I am neither of these sorts of experts, I’ve listened to them and read them enough to take a loose stab at summarizing in lay terms what they’re getting at:

     As a species, we evolved to be a social/pack organism, as such patterns of behavior enhance our survivability. Add in our abilities to reason, extrapolate, and use tools to better manipulate the world in which we live, and you have factors that don’t just add to our improvement of survival odds, but rather, which amplify those odds by an exponential factor. I know, I know, I’m adding a mathematics metaphor in here and complicating the whole thing more than I need to, but I’m not using highfalutin concepts here, and the audience of folks who I seem to attract to these pieces are largely more intelligent than I am, so I’m not fearful of having lost any of you along the way.

     I’d leave breadcrumbs just in case, but how’d that work out for Hansel and Gretel? Fucking birds…

     Anyhow, this tendency to tribal mechanics includes exposing ourselves to the long-held psychiatric preconditions that regulate our participation in society. One of those preconditions demands that we try to play nice with the other members of our tribe, so that we aren’t viewed as a potential threat within the confines of it, and summarily launched from the group’s protection and benefits exchange like so much horse excrement gathered up and set in a trebuchet cup to be flung outside of the village’s walls. If we lose the benefits and protections of the tribe, our odds of survival plummet rather sharply. Thankfully for most of us, there’s the hope of forgiveness.

     Despite the way in which I framed it earlier, forgiveness is not automatically an indicator of agreement with what someone has said or done in totality. What it effectively is, most times, is an individual person’s conclusion that what you have said or done is in some way explicable, and can be recovered from with the appropriate counteraction or at least restraint from saying or doing the objectionable thing a second time. In terms of human forgiveness, it’s the message of, “I find what you did was wrong, but it was an error that isn’t terminal, and the results of it can be corrected moving forward.” Unconditional forgiveness is exceedingly rare among human beings, you see, and forgiveness tends to have an unseen countdown clock attached to it, like a doom spell in an rpg where each turn that passes brings the afflicted character ever closer to automatic death. In the case of forgiveness, once that countdown clock runs out, we tend societally not to hold the prior disfavor against the offender as an amplifying factor, should they screw up again.

     The problem introduced to us largely by social media and online communications and archival is that the countdown clock never reaches zero, it would seem. Did you say something brash and without thinking ten, twelve, or fifteen years ago? Well, too bad, so sad, it doesn’t matter if you’ve come to adjust your thinking since then and grown as a person, because people are going to hold that example of a gaffe up for all and sundry to see, and hold it against you now. We see this conversational tactic most frequently wielded like a mace by the socio-political Left against anyone who doesn’t toe the current line with them, and it’s rather amusing, in a dry wit kind of way; you see, this is the same group of folks who gleefully denounce the notion of religion, by and large, or the concept of God in any way, shape or form. They denigrate the faithful by saying it’s silly to think there’s some sort of ‘Invisible Sky Daddy’ (their phrase, not mine) who can offer spiritual absolution from one’s errors. Yet, they put forth their own set of behavioral guidelines, and roundly reject and condemn any and all who breach them, demanding penance and alterations of perspective and behavior if they’re to consider letting the guilty party back into their fold.

     They have dubbed themselves God. Ironic.

     I have myself been guilty of thinking in such a manner, as I mentioned before. I have told people “No, I don’t forgive you, that ability to forgive lies alone with God, and I’m just some guy”. But this isn’t true, not if we are to look at the way we’ve functioned on a societal level throughout the history of Western cultures. If you need proof of this, then I would point you toward the area of jurisprudence. Yes, we have screwed it up all up and down the board over the long course of human history, and there have been massive, glaring flaws in the ways that justice is administered upon the heads of the guilty. But at least it is a system of trying to correct wrongful behaviors without simply throwing everyone’s neck into the pinch blocks of the guillotine, or up onto the platform for hanging.

    I’ve written before about the idea of bringing back a form of social probation, wherein we rub individuals’ and corporations’ faces in the mess they’ve made like fractious puppies and scold them for their poor choices. I still believe we should enact such a set of precepts, because it offers both eventual forgiveness, and it keeps us safe against the impulse for the guilty parties to once more return to the behaviors which caused us damage in the first place. It isn’t easy to forgive someone, especially in a day and age where we can be quickly and repeatedly reminded, thanks to social media, of how they hurt us in the first place.

     But I would argue that this is yet another instance, like so many others, where doing the right thing is not going to be doing the easy thing. Forgiveness is challenging. That doesn’t mean we should give up on trying for it.None of us have been perfect actors in the digital age, and doubtlessly, some message board sleuths out there could make any of our lives an absolute living hell if they were so inclined. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were the hope of being forgiven our earlier mistakes in the current day and age?

     Conservatives and folks on the Right in Western cultures are already well familiar with the concept, and they have long embraced it through religious instruction. They have, perhaps, been too forgiving, too ready to open their arms and once more embrace the very same people who have tried to destroy them through quiet, subtle means for the last fifty years or so. This willingness to forgive has resulted in some of these folks being betrayed and destroyed due to their naivete by less-than-ethical or decent people on the Left, people who were finally caught out at their underhanded behavior and called to account. “I’m sorry,” these Lefties whinged, preying upon the Right’s tendency to attempt forgiveness.

     It’s like the line in Frank Herbert’s “Dune”: “When you are in power, I plead mercy, because it is according to your principles. When I am in power, I deny you mercy, because it is according to my principles.” The Youtuber Whatifalthist has pointed out on numerous occasions that this is one of the fundamental flaws in conservative circles, their tendency to extend grace to their ideological enemies, even in the worst of circumstances. But we have to allow this flaw to exist, ladies and gentlemen, we have to forgive this flaw, because without doing so, we will lose the ability to forgive altogether….

     And who genuinely wants to live that way?

The Condemned Who Survive Can Become Our Worst Enemies

     In terms of Culture War injuries and casualties, there are few people who have been jumped up and down on quite as viciously as the eternally entertaining Alex Jones. The guy has lost revenue, lost personal property, been labeled a kook, a maniac, and a threat, been physically threatened, labeled as deserving of imprisonment and/or banishment entirely from society, lost his ability to engage in standard banking practices, and recently, has had the last vestiges of his media empire ripped out of his hands and set to be sold off in chunks and pieces to whoever will bid on the remains.

     Prior to the advent of the Internet, which has served as the basis for Jones’s ability to become as culturally relevant as he has, guys like him were pretty much relegated to the absolute outer fringes of popular culture, niche operators who might garner a fanbase of a few hundred, maybe even a few thousand, but whose reach was ultimately severely hampered by the network of gatekeepers in media who would keep such folks from ever attaining broad-ranging reach and influence. Thanks to a combination of tenacity, access to information, and the willingness to make and proclaim certain connections behind the scenes in the world, Jones made his Info Wars a force to be reckoned with. He benefited from a section of the populace’s distrust of credentialed experts, a distrust which, if we would but listen to those folks without assuming they’re all hayseeds or morons or mentally deranged in an actual, bio-chemical way, we might at least accept as understandable.

     It’s odd, isn’t it? How the Left/Liberals will often discount the ‘lived experiences’ of people if their responses/conclusions to their personal experiences renders them in ideological opposition to the Left? “MY TRUTH”, they shriek, never once stopping to consider that this whole Grahmsian angle of attack is self-defeating….Anyway….

     Jones became this era’s flaming example of what happens when collective condemnation is leveled against a singular individual, with no means of achieving grace and forgiveness in sight. The fact that someone hasn’t outright killed him is something of a miracle, really, one that I hope continues to hold true. Yet, even as dense as the mud must now be that he's perpetually caked in, he perseveres. How? Well, he has friends in wealthy places, friends who, even when they loudly disagree with him, they don't condemn him to the shadows of the world.

     Gamers are in the midst of their own wave of condemnation, one they have aimed squarely at triple-A developers and publishers of video games. They have been browbeaten and messaged at so overtly by the Leftie activists in the industry that they've finally started to push back, heaping their own form of punishment upon the game makers- ceasing to pay for products. In online discourse, the Left has for about 25 years marked anyone who isn't a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist or at least socialist sympathizer as various flavors of sub-human, condemning them first from message boards and social media sites, then their places of employment or residence, and more recently, from financial institutions, hoping to starve them to death it would seem. They have taken condemnation to a whole new sick level on the societal interaction front.

     And now that conservatives and right-leaning folks have finally started firing back with the SAME TACTICS, only now does the Left take a step back to shriek about how unfair that is. “How dare you condemn us this way! That's OUR toolset!”

     The folks of faith on the Right have used condemnation for centuries, though of a moral compass sort. The biggest cultural example the Left points to is apostasy exile, a practice applied far more gently by Western cultures than Eastern or Middle Eastern ones, just by the way. If you are offended by that observation, I recommend you read some comparative history, and shutting your fucking mouths. The Left has leaned far more in that direction than the Right for the last 50 years. Don't believe me? All right, quick question, then: which side has tried to or succeeded in having political leaders jailed and/or assassinated in numbers greater than 1 in that span of history in the West? Which side of the aisle has attempted to abuse and twist the criminal justice system in new and unfounded ways to go after their ideological opponents? It's all pretty one-directional, because condemnation is all the Left has anymore.

     And that's why condemnation, by itself, cannot continue unabated. If it goes that way, nobody survives, or lives a life of anything other than fear.

     It's also why the folks who survive such waves of condemnation strike terror into the hearts of their opponents. You see, most of us are capable of enough self-awareness that we will admit that the kind of opposition faced by Jones, by Trump, by conservatives who very publicly are set ablaze in effigy, is something we could not ourselves face off against. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has had his accreditation as a clinical psychologist and legal ability to practice that field of work put on the chopping block, all because he won't bend the knee to the Left. Jones, well, I already covered his scenario. And Trump?

     The Left mutated the justice system to try and get rid of him, and has tried to literally, physically kill him. Most of us would be hiding deeper than the Darkspawn in the Deep Roads of Thedas if that happened to us.

     Condemnation of an individual can only go so far before that person is broken, and the limits each of us can reach before we surrender differs. Not every “bad take” is deserving of condemnation, however, and it seems that we are hardwired to respond with it as a reaction when someone speaks to or acts within fields of deeply personal attachment to us. I'm not sure right this second what that might imply in a broader view.

Apathy is Death

     So sayeth Kreia, one of my favorite characters in all of Star Wars legendarium, and above that, one of my favorites in all of fiction. The rest of the quote is even more brutal; “worse even than death, for at least a corpse feeds the beasts and insects.” But for the purposes of this little piece, I'm not as severe about the reaction of apathy as that crone. In point of fact, there are times where I would recommend it.

     In the conversations and events surrounding the Culture Wars in the West right now, most folks respond with one of the other two reactions, being forgiveness or condemnation. Usually, if they agree with the statements or actions of others, these responses don't even actually come into play; they tend to only come up in instances of disagreement. For example, while reasonable Lefties might dislike religious pro-lifers holding up protest signs outside of Planned Parenthood clinics on public sidewalks, they largely forgive the practice, so long as said pro-lifers don't attempt to block access. Now, I know, the caveat of ‘reasonable’ with Lefties has become vanishingly rare to see in real life or online, but they do exist; Jimmy Dore is not a unicorn. Likewise, reasonable Righties might not appreciate Rainbow Brigade activists arranging Pride events down Main Street, but they'll forgive it happening for a day or two before letting local life go back to its normal operations afterwards and the Brigade keeps their damned clothes on around the minors in town.

     In the commerce arena affected by the Culture Wars, however, we've seen the first signs of what happens when apathy is the response among increasingly large swathes of the potential customer base. Usually, it begins with volatile condemnation, where angry customers let it be loudly and pointedly known that Company X has severely fucked up, because they produce a product or service that the base has been quietly, loyally supporting for a long time, and Company X has effectively shat on that base's front porch. “We're done buying your shit,” the base snarls, and most companies, such as Budweiser, Tractor Supply, Ubisoft, and who knows how many others, respond with a smug little grin, implying that they don't need those customers anyway, since they already have so much money, thanks.

     This point, here, is where the fate of some of these outfits lies. They have reached the Rubicon. The only question that remains is, will they cross beyond the point of no return?

     If Company X makes some at least minimal move toward an apology or reversing course, they will usually get some more snarls and eventually, they may be offered a measure of tepid, cautious, conditional forgiveness. They'll get condemnation hangover from about half of that prior base, too, but it won't cut too deep.

     But if Company X doubles down, or tries to pretend that base doesn't matter, they will invite the escalation through fiercer forms of condemnation, until they reach the breaking point of apathy. Once a potential customer becomes apathetic to your company, though, you have almost no hope of getting them back onside. At that point, they don't care if your organization flourishes or fails; they effectively cease to acknowledge you even exist.

     At first blush, and on an economic scale, this isn't so bad, one might think. But before you brush apathy aside (how ironic), think on this; if people don't care about what happens to your company one way or the other, what do you suppose will happen if it comes under some kind of threat, like a property being damaged? Target knows what that's like; when they came out in support of the BLM George Floyd riots, some customers were livid. Then, when Target stores started getting looted, and Target cried out for help, those customers they'd pissed off to the point of apathy just shrugged their shoulders and went to Wal-Mart. “Not my problem,” they said.

     In market terms, this leads to lost market share, lost revenue, and economic damage to a company or brand. That might not seem too worrisome to most folks, but consider the fact that that economic damage has a very human cost, in the forms of reduced wages, hiring freezes, and layoffs. If some spokeperson comes out raging about how the boycotting/non-compliant would-be customers are all ‘istophobes’, well, the sliver of hope that the apathy won't become permanent vanishes entirely. Ask the cast of “The Acolyte”.

     Now, extrapolate this response to the human-to-human environment. Have you seen how many YouTube videos are titled things like “Why Don't Men Step Up to Help Women Anymore?”, or “Are People Giving Up on Work?” They almost universally point out a commonly shared catalyst- a segment of Western populaces have recognized that they are being ignored, demonized, and cut off from cultural considerations. Their compliance with modern, Left-leaning expectations and worldviews has become taken as par for the course, that they have no option but to obey, consume, and fall in line. But more and more as time goes on, both companies and individuals in certain ideological groupings are recognizing that this segment of humanity in the West is coming around to saying, “No, no more. Do your worst; I no longer care.”

     In economic terms, I already covered what this can result in. But in day-to-day life? This means that if I, personally, witness a blue-haired 20-or-30-something with a septum ring and a score of tattoos being accosted and physically beaten, or mugged, or even just harassed, then guess what? I'm just taking a few steps out of the way to avoid involvement, and they deal with whatever they have to deal with, because I no longer care. My apathy is informed by the expectation that that victim of a crime hates me and most of what I believe in.

     I COULD BE WRONG! And THAT'S the danger of allowing apathy to become a standard response to our fellow human beings in the West. Apathy robs us of even our own sense of nobility, honor, virtue, or duty. It renders us heartless to the suffering of others, because we become so dejected from constantly expecting that we are seen as little more than peons to be used to promote someone else's pet cause, or product, or service, to fund their lifestyles even when we personally object to them, that we throw our hands up and say, “Go fuck yourselves.” The most dangerous society-level extrapolation of this phenomenon is already creeping up on us, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom: military enlistment is dropping off so noticeably that entire battalions, divisions, and job roles are being phased out on an indefinite basis, because there simply aren’t enough young men who feel it’s worth the risks and losses to themselves to sign up to maintain them. How can a nation or culture survive an enemy of any size or type, when its potentially viable fighting force collectively sighs and says, “You don’t deserve my effort,”?

     Apathy is death. Fiction can teach you more in a few lines of dialogue than a fleet of public school teachers.