Obviously, conspiracy theories have been pushed in recent years to irresponsible and deadly extremes.

But I can’t help but wonder if some of the pushback comes from the way equivocation has been used in power. Particularly in recent years.

I was legally able to vote for the first time in 2008. For my generation, ending the Middle Eastern wars and the national security state were essential priorities. Obama ran on a promise to close Guantanamo Bay and I believed him. Others did to. We also believed him when he said he’d make Roe v Wade the law of the land.

Then he started hemming and hawing with “maybe we shouldn’t leave the Middle East until we set up a Western-style democracy.” And then he sicc’d the Feds on Snowden, Assange and Manning when they blew the whistle on American air strikes targeting civilians and emergency first responders in Iraq. Eight years later, Trump is elected and Guantanamo Bay is still open.

Trump won populist sympathy with claims of bringing jobs back to America and courted the religious right with a promise to overturn Roe v Wade. He did neither of those things. What he did do was host Saudi nobility at his DC hotel chain where they dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars. Jared Kushner received two billion dollars from the Saudi crown prince for a documentary that was never made. When an American journalist was murdered by the Saudi court, he ignored it. While outsourcing even more American labor needs overseas.

Most Americans fell for one of those celebrity politicians or the other. And those who voted for either Trump or Obama were not rewarded for their trust. Both Obama and Trump stopped short of their campaign promises while claiming that their hearts were always (and remain) in the right place.

Saying one thing and doing another is hypocrisy. Saying one thing, doing another and claiming that you were serving the same ends in both instances is equivocation. Many younger people came of age under Obama or Trump. Even before then, American voters were long familiar with their values being dangled just out of reach.

If “woke” activists appear to fly off the handle over mere words and ideological nit-picks, I think it is easy to see why. It follows that a history of equivocation would engender a suspicion of vague, interpretive language. For a people who are tired of the abuse of language and good will, conspiracy theories are a ripe target. Any body of ideas in which appearance is taken for confirmation will not be treated charitably. Especially when one side of the political spectrum is more willing to weaponize conspiracy theories.

On the subjects of broken faith, double standards and recent politics, there is something else we must necessarily mention.

In 2018, on Sam Harris’s Waking Up podcast, he interviewed a guest with a compelling theory on the origins of the MeToo movement and the 2016 election.

For the sake of clarification: I’m aware that #MeToo was started by Tarana Burke as a means for victims of sexual violence to legitimize their overlooked experiences. Burke has also said that outing individual predators is a quick fix compared to the work of systematic reform. Burke writes that healing the wounded must matter more than punishing the guilty.

With that out of the way, back to the Waking Up episode: Harris’a guest theorized that the election of Trump, who has been accused of sexual assault innumerable times, was a galvanizing event. Weinstein and R.Kelly were exposed, but how much could that actually mean if someone like Donald Trump could become President?

A common rebuttal at that time was that lasting change is incremental and must take time. For recent generations of American voters, who grew up hearing “incrementalism is the only way”, this smacks of equivocation. While dissidents are being told that change must be incremental, the powerful and the privileged are free from self-restraint.

The dynamic reminds me of the ancient Peerages of France and Britain. A Peer (like nobility in general) received fortune-sized salaries. For occupying their office. For simply being a Peer of the nobility. Peers were protected from certain laws. Victor Hugo had an affair with a married woman who was convicted and imprisoned for adultery. Hugo was a Peer, and therefore could not be charged. The attention paid to the marginalization of women in his work suggests that the incident stayed with him. To say nothing of his novel l’homme qui rit, which villainized the Peerage.

These legal and social protections were afforded, presumably, for the same reason as their salaries: simply existing as Peers.

Similar privileges were common among ancient nobility in general. But the Peerage represented a particular relationship with feudal power. A Peer was a social equal of the monarchy. It was a relative distinction.

The modern day concept of a ‘celebrity’ is also a relative distinction. A Peer was a peer of a royal family and a celebrity “celebrates” something. To celebrate is to bestow legitimacy with your witness. An officiant for a ceremony is a kind of celebrant. The term has made a comeback in modern paganism for clergy who perform marriages, cleansings and other rituals. Andy Warhol’s concept of the superstar was a personality who simply embodies something. The films Warhol made with his own cohort of self-proclaimed superstars consisted of the actors doing ordinary, day-to-day activities. The project was inspired by Warhol’s obsession with the early years of Hollywood where the face of an actor, alone, was an almost archetypical embodiment. Marilyn Monroe simply existed as feminine beauty and John Wayne simply existed as rugged masculinity.

This method of embodiment is where I see the connection between the ancient European Peerages and the modern celebrity. John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe, as celebrities, are celebrants of aesthetic ideals. A less specific function is apparent in modern pop culture, though: the famous are seen by others. They are celebrated by others, whose witness gives them power, while at the same time they represent the power of being seen. Modern celebrities are celebrants of visibility. The only trait required for visibility is to be visible. Beyond this, that which is visible need only exist.

Like the European Peerage, a modern celebrity’s existence is treated with reverence. If an outsider demanding change has to carry the burden of high-minded stoicism and restraint while the powerful can get away with anything, they will feel like they are being told to stay out of the way. This can explain why privilege has drawn so much anger in recent years. Just lately, this double standard is even harder to miss with the followers of Donald Trump making accusations of government overreach with their criminal investigations. Immediately after the 2020 election, Andrew Yang was asked in an interview whether or not Trump should face criminal prosecution for insurrection, assassination of Soleimani, emoluments or anything else. Yang said that to do so would be to join the ranks of third world dictatorships where heads roll between administrations. After the illegal, offensive wars of George Junior and Obama’s double taps and whistle-blower prosecutions, giving Trump a pass would send a clear message that an ex-President is free from prosecution simply for being an ex-President.

A gap between the restraint of outsiders and the freedom of insiders invites suspicion of vague language. When the vagueness is weaponized through conspiracy theories, it becomes even more suspect. Ironically, it becomes harder to think of that gap as anything but conspiratorial.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/10/07/new-book-highlights-how-campaign-money-influences-us-foreign-policy/

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/09/22/saudi-lobbyist-oversees-millions-in-dark-money-gop-campaign-donations/

https://amp.smh.com.au/national/outing-perpetrators-doesn-t-get-to-root-of-the-problem-metoo-founder-20191108-p538x0.html

https://isreview.org/issue/89/enduring-relevance-victor-hugo/

https://www.warhol.org/exhibition/andy-warhol-stars-of-the-silver-screen/

https://fashionmagazine.com/flare/celebrity/andy-warhol-superstars-guide/

Content warning

I’m pretty sure this is gonna annoy or piss off nearly everyone.

In both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections here in America, there were widespread expressions of shock. Many Americans began to see a near-majority of us as being demonstrably evil. Or, at the very least, the other half sees evil as a tolerable state of normalcy.

I chose to use the meme above because of how confrontational it is. To forgive mistakes and to see the good in those that are guilty of evil feels very different now. Nearly impossible.

Nor am I exempt from this. Lots of queer people like myself get used to people-pleasing because we are so deprived of acceptance that any price might seem acceptable. I won’t belabor this point but I’ll say that, in order to reverse this destructive psychological tendency, I swung hard in the other direction.

I essentially adopted a policy of zero expectations from others and license to do whatever I want, without explanation or justification. Pure fairness.

This belief is also embodied in a well-known adage from Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible: “If your happiness or success is offensive to someone, DESTROY THEM”

This continues to be one of my favorite quotes and I’ll probably embroider it on a homey lil doorway decoration that all cute, quaint little houses seem to have.

I believe in my lived truth: I cannot do otherwise. I know what it is like to learn the value of dignity the hard way. But even if the specific point of contact between lived truth and objective reality is difficult to perceive, it must be grappled with.

This would be true anyway, but the COVID-19 pandemic has made it unavoidable. The new, resilient and even more contagious strain that originated in the United Kingdom is now in America, and even before that we’ve fucked up our response so badly that we got travel-banned by the EU. Our negligence, as private individuals, is now pushing the limit of our healthcare, administrative and scientific infrastructure. Those who did not take the first lockdown seriously are now saying that we should have followed the order better the first time around. Reality has become so negotiable that we see it as our due when we make exceptions to break quarantine. Across America, hospitals are being filled to capacity and dead bodies are quickly and efficiently removed because of the need for more hospital beds. Our belief in our right to ignore the needs, humanity and mortality of others has enabled this pandemic to become what it is here.

There is, though, a less obvious but equally pressing need for greater unity. A society that values democracy as an aspiration will not change without minds being changed. Minds do not change without conversation. The portrayal of civility above as a naïve attempt to marry an unstoppable force with an immovable object is a lived reality in many respects. I have no desire to sit down with people who do not think I am as human as they are, or that the historical trauma of my ancestors was an acceptable price to pay for the proliferation of Western culture. But there is no other way forward.

In an adversarial duopoly such as the one America is subject to, there are convenient and practical reasons not to believe this. We are shown that the side opposite our own will stop at nothing to defeat us, including sabotage, deception and potentially even violence. We often feel that to play by the rules under those circumstances is a mistake. A friend of mine once said “When you try to be reasonable with unreasonable people, you get played.”

If you were not alive for it, then consider what racial integration in public schools must have looked like when Lyndon Johnson decided to enforce it with the military. At that time, it must have seemed like a question with a diversity of opinions on both sides and to claim that you are right and so many others are wrong would have sounded like sweeping arrogance. Yet we now take racial integration in society for granted. Democratic change happens through exposure to other ideas and sometimes that exposure must come through confrontation. A first blow needs to be struck sooner or later. When the abolitionist John Brown was publicly hung, a young solider named John Wilkes Booth was in attendance who would go on to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. Meanwhile, other contemporaries of Brown equated his willingness to die for the greater good with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The early skirmishes preceding change are always seen in the most polarizing and combative lights. If these necessary challenges to popular wisdom are to last, though, conflict cannot be the end even when it must be the beginning.

If not sooner, conversation must happen later. And the prospect makes my blood boil, at times. I grew up practicing a marginalized religion and my Christian neighbors spent both my childhood and their own trying to convert me and convince me that Western conquest could not have been that bad if Natives got Christianity out of it. The various rounds of bathroom panic create an expectation that myself and those who share my gender identity are sexual predators and that we are obligated to explain how we are not. Transphobia and stealth racism have become fashionable brands and a method for washed up political figures and celebrities to renew their cultural relevance. I have dated people who saw me as racially inferior and my gender identity as false and I simply took the time to civilly engage them in conversation about it when I could. And it has never gone well. I detest the prospect of nobly taking one on the chin for the moral edification of others for the rest of my life.

On the other hand, I could not have made it this far in my life and achieved this much success and happiness if I thought everyone who demonized me and people like me were demons themselves. This admission, though, must co-exist with the point of contact between lived truth and objective reality. What would such reconciliation actually look like?

I once had a traumatic encounter with someone who was released from prison mere weeks beforehand, having been jailed for victimizing others the way he did me. Might I, potentially, be required to shake that person’s hand, or the hands of those like him? During the few occasions where he approached me in public afterward, I could not even bring myself to make eye-contact with him. When he was seen around my mother’s workplace a few years later, I ended up binge drinking for days.

Perhaps there is a border to the territory of forgiveness. If so, I don’t know definitively where it is and I doubt anyone else does. I would also like to clarify that I am not equating violent people with those who give voice to bigotry. We are all familiar with the conversational slope of “what about”-ism, though. I am only relating that memory as my only experience that could furnish a worst-case scenario of forgiveness. Yes, someone who enables or condones evil might not be an evil person- but what about those who have committed predatory acts and have an established pattern of it? If conversation is necessary in the long run, then the scope of necessary engagement will probably include some painful conversations. If all movements for positive change start as a marginalized effort, though, then the fear of a bad outcome cannot stop us from trying.

There is a concept that has degraded from misuse by bad faith pundits in the last decade. This is the free market of ideas. Without those harrowing conversations, we cannot say that we have given the range and applicability of public discourse it’s due. The free market of ideas cannot be dismissed as a dishonest ploy from hipster commentators if there are ideas that have not entered the market for fear of bad company.

The true, ethical imperative of civility and dialogue can lead to frightening responsibilities and confrontations. It frightens me. But what alternative exists? If we see those who disagree with us as monsters in human form, what would the application of this belief look like? If we cannot deign to associate with them at all, then we cannot claim to be the victims of unfairness when they accuse us of being tribal and unreasonable. As potentially terrifying and mysterious as such negotiations may be, a pandemic in which our healthcare system is bursting at the seams is not the time to experiment with disposing of civility.

At the same time, though, we need to be able to recognize other common-sense needs. We need our Lyndon Johnsons and our John Browns and those who are willing to use their power unapologetically for the greater good. I absolutely support the push for Progressives in Congress to force a vote for Medicare for all and a greater stimulus effort because the health care system and our profit-driven society simply have not left us prepared to face things like a long quarantine during which we can’t work in person (or at all). Civility must be weighed in balance with external demands, but the degree to which other people create external demands means civility will keep coming up.

Other contemporary events, such as civilian violence, may also be attributable to others who feel driven by necessity. This has the appearance of an impossible and escalating gridlock. I acknowledge that it is possible, but I do not think it is necessary. Not only does civil discourse need to be weighed in balance with circumstantially necessary action. It must remain possible at roughly the same time (whether intermittently or perpetually).

This will not be easy. Yet when we are driven to act unilaterally, we can at least be honest about why. Those reasons being laid bare enables others to speak to us on the level at which we need to be heard.

In my last post I wrote about the legal precedents being set in states like Tennessee and New York that punish non-lethal civil disobedience as severely as violent crime, entailing in some cases a felony conviction. This is particularly amoral since civil disobedience is one of the few tools that American political minorities have historically had at their disposal. Punishing civil means of resistance and discourse can radicalize people for lack of any other option and could contribute to civil war.

Remember, this was done ostensibly out of a fear of violent uprising. If vandalizing public property, blocking access to public places and other non-lethal crimes are punished with felonies, then political minorities are shunted squarely in front of militarism out of necessity.

This is clearly a double-bluff: with fear of rioting being the stated reason for these crack downs, Republican legislators have framed the notion of civil unrest in a way that takes attention away from the natural outcome of the policies they plan to enact. That outcome, civil unrest, will confirm what they’ve positioned as a worst case scenario (rioting). This reflects a calculated awareness of the purpose of civil disobedience and a wish to use the result for political gain.

To address some common sense concerns, yes it makes sense to punish minor crimes and the law is meant to be followed. However, that attitude must coexist with other social realities. Ever since the labor organizers of the early 20th century and the nineteen sixties civil rights movement, civil disobedience has been established as a means of civil discourse.

What is the thing that stops it from being insurrection? Non-violence. If no one is harmed, then no one is alienated against the inevitable implication: that this specific law can be broken or that a prospective or related law can be given social censure. More often than not, the implication is that the specific law should be broken or that a legal or political act should be censured. The subtle depth to what has happened in Tennessee and New York is that, when non-violent crime is punished identically to violent crime (a felony charge) it discourages non-violent activism and emboldens those who claim that civil discourse is fruitless. If civil activism is not seen as an effective choice then non-civil activism begins to look practical. If that course is followed, then those decrying BLM as violent will claim to have been right all along.

Such well-informed social engineering enacted from above makes me wonder about everyone else. Especially since the ability to define an idea by being the first voice in a conversation to articulate it is used so carefully (“BLM are violent” *does things that drive out non-violent protestors and leave the violent ones* “See?”). Social calculations and dynamics are mixed up in how we think about social issues.

The importance of the herd-instinct and our mammalian, prosocial hard-wiring cannot be overstated. Language is how most problems are solved between individuals and language (whether it’s speech, writing, typing or any other medium) is how we are taught to express ourselves. After the example of self-expression, it is no surprise that the language we use most frequently probably looks a lot how we think our private thoughts.

It follows that some of our private thoughts may resemble external social dynamics. If one believes that those in power will never negotiate with those without, then an actual refusal to negotiate will create the appearance that you are right. If this “you” is a BLM protester, others will remember claims about how violent your movement is and will think they are right while you are receiving the message that nothing short of violence will be heard.

This is nothing new: most of us have heard about stereotype threat (aka labeling theory) and confirmation bias. If you have not: both of those things refer to ways that social stereotyping can effect both behavior and private thoughts.

Recent events have made me wonder what the current state of things looks like, though, through the eyes of social engineers. In a recent speech, Trump mentioned that he was afraid of running against Bernie Sanders since Sanders had a movement following, like himself. With Joe Biden, he is less afraid, since the majority of those voting for Biden are doing so because he is not Trump.

Donald Trump realizes that the Democratic Party scattered their base when the DNC gave the nomination to Biden. He is now attempting to hit us where it hurts: by saying he was intimidated by Bernie’s movement, he is trying to touch a sore spot of progressives to stop the left from uniting.

The senators in Tennessee and New York are preparing to punish civil disobedience harshly enough to escalate violence. And Trump just attempted to use the emotional momentum of the scattered Democratic base against itself. One reflects a calculated effort to get people to think and act a certain way and the other reflects an informed knowledge of how people feel to begin with and how to exploit it.

This kind of manipulation only works with people who believe that their value system furnishes everything they need to know. If one believes they have an airtight grasp on an issue, it becomes easy to be disinterested in other consequences. What most people know more about, than anything else, are their personal experiences. The kind of political issues that can most directly effect our experiences are often social issues.

Speaking of recent political events, Kamala Harris used an interesting rhetorical device in her speech to the DNC: she began talking about an impersonal and voracious virus which turned out to be a metaphor for racism.

If you start talking about a virus right now, people are going to think of COVID-19. Did she say COVID-19? Nope. But I think it’s importance in general (to say nothing of it’s importance in American politics) is hard to ignore. I don’t know of anything else such a metaphor could be referring to. It strikes me as likely that she did intend to use COVID-19 as a metaphor for racism.

This rhetorical technique is familiar: start your talk with something everyone knows about in order to frame your point as comparable to it. Is a viral pandemic the same kind of problem as racism?

I’m not saying it’s not possible for overlap. Racism effects the function of government infrastructure, so systemic racism can impact how a response to a pandemic unfolds. And I have no doubt that it has. But when you equate a social issue like racism with a non-social issue like a pandemic, it’s clear which directions the emotional support is coming from and going toward within that analogy. With the intended metaphor and the metaphor’s meaning, the emotional momentum of anti-racism is related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of those two things we all probably know at least something about, and the other is a mystery that our best doctors and scientists are still laboring over. For most people, to relate those two things will allow one to borrow emotional “weight” from the other. It makes the mystery less scary.

But if the effect that racism has on the pandemic is the actual point, the comparison cannot be literal. It relies on the emotions that the viewers bring with them. To start with emotional momentum is not necessarily proof of bad faith but it makes it easy to suspect: either the emotional momentum is supposed to make the truth evident or the emotional momentum is the point itself.

In either case, the psychological button being pressed is more visible than what the person pressing it wants. Not knowing what someone wants could make one feel like they’re not being honest. If their end game is not stated, then they either feel no need to or think you already know. Neither inspires confidence.

Obviously not every statement that invokes ideas with strong social resonance with a vaguely defined or undefined goal is social engineering. Context, as usual, must complete the picture. What makes the legislation in Tennessee and New York so unique is that it reflects both a knowledge of the function served by civil disobedience and how to exploit it. Every day, though, I wonder when the psychological momentum summoned by those in power will clash against forces it cannot move.