Guest post: When you’re an exile
Originally a comment by Artymorty at Miscellany Room.
A strange side effect of SPLC calling legitimate organizations hate groups is that it has the potential to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. People or groups who have been wrongly smeared as agents of “hate” are liable to turn sour on any suggestion that anyone is hateful, and they might start drifting towards hardline, far-right positions, as a social effect of being ostracized by liberals and embraced by fellow-exiles, many of whom are, in fact, far-right, hateful extremists who were exiled from liberal society’s good standing for entirely legitimate reasons.
No one who’s been cast into the “hate” pile believes they deserve to be there. Everyone who’s been labelled hateful vehemently denies the charge. Everyone. Even the genuine bigots and quacks. And they all resent liberal society for discrediting them.
In the case of critics of gender ideology who’ve been “wrongly” labelled “hateful”, rather than objecting to having been mistakenly put in the hate pile, they sometimes decide to throw the whole category away, to cast distrust upon the whole edifice of disrepute accrued by legitimate hate groups. When you’re an exile, there’s a good chance you’ll end up rubbing shoulders with fellow exiles, many of whom are genuinely hateful wackadoos. And there’s a good chance your values will start to bleed into each other. Because we’re social animals and that’s just naturally what happens.
I’m watching this exact dynamic play out in real time: people and orgs in the “gender critical” camp are interacting more and more with far-right extremists, and their values are shifting as a result. As a gay rights advocate, it deeply concerns me. Support for the full gamut of gay rights (workplace and housing protections; freedom to partner with whom we choose without penalty; freedom to start families of our own without facing discrimination; freedom from abusive pseudoscience like “conversion therapy”) is eroding before my eyes in GC circles.
That’s why it’s so dangerous for the supposed arbiters of hate, groups like SPLC who peddle their little lists, to become corrupted, and why they’re such easy targets for corrupting influences with special-interest agendas.
The truth is, we’re social animals, and there’s a real need to socially reinforce that some groups are disreputable and should be ostracized from decent society. (I find myself tempted to cite SPLC sometimes when I’m trying to point out that some groups are hate groups, and I have to stop myself from doing so, and find other means to easily and quickly convey that a group trying to get back into society’s good graces is terrible and shouldn’t be given a pass.)
But all kinds of special interest groups want the ability to put their personal enemies on the hate list, to advance their own agendas. With the unwitting help of the SPLC, Muslim extremists did it to moderate, liberal Muslim advocates. And now gender extremists are doing it to us.
And the side effect of that is that the separation between reputable sources and disreputable ones — between truth and fiction, ultimately — starts to collapse.
This is something I have previously touched on. The ”any enemy of my enemy is my friend” mindset is almost impossible to resist for a lot of people, and if you manage to get someone sufficiently pissed off, they might just decide that ”I don’t care who wins, or what else is included in the deal, or who else gets hurt as a result, as long as these assholes lose!”.
But even if you just make an entirely pragmatic choice to make common cause with elements on the Right to stop the TRA capture of everything, once again you have a stake in defending your choice. You also have a stake in keeping the alliance together and not antagonizing your new bedfellows. You may even come to genuinely like some of them. So you decide to cut them some slack and defend them from criticism to a certain degree. And before you know it, you’re in a justification spiral pushing you ever further to the right. As they say, how do people become radicalized? One step at a time.
Jane Claire Jones has written an interesting post about this issue. I’ll post this part here:
https://x.com/janeclarejones/status/1745760345954689255?s=46&t=NGJBRqkXgp1UazF5I8yjXA
But the question then is how do you prevent yourself from getting caught in a justification spiral. Yes it is worrying that gender critical people get caught in a justification spiral towards the far right. But it is/was equally worrying to see many people who were concerned about “trans” people getting caught in their own justification spiral, where wanting to do good for trans people transformed into totally neglecting the possible conflicts with women rights.
So if we people are so vulnerable for this kind of thing so that even well intentioned people can get up in a position they would orginally strongly apposed against, how do you protect yourself against it?
axxyan, I ask myself that a lot. I have been at least somewhat fortunate in being able to agree with someone on one issue without agreeing with them on anything else, without seeing my values shift, but it is work, and work is what most people don’t want to do.
This is a big problem for me as well. Sone of the Substacks careen between excellent analysis and right libertarian tropes at a dizzying rate. LGB United comes to mind. I still read it, but sometimes I just shake my head
axxyaan #3
Damn if I know. If there is a solution (and I’m not saying there is), I’m pretty sure it’s not something as simple as more education, though. It’s tempting to think that familiarity with concepts like rationalization, motivated reasoning, the My Side Bias etc. will make people less inclined to engage in these errors themselves, but I can’t honestly say I see much evidence for that.
The more I think about it, the more I’m inclined to think that critical thinking is mainly about values rather than “skills”, let alone intelligence! If you don’t value the truth for its own sake, then learning the skills of critical thinking only gives you more tools for rationalizing whatever you want to believe and explaining away anything that challenges your sacred cows.
Bjarte #6
It seems to me that the ‘skill’ of ‘critical thinking’, as well as the training that is supposed to instill it, is greatly over-rated. The Heritage Foundation, the think-tanks set up by the Koch brothers, the Tufton Street think-tanks that gave us LizTruss’s disastrous budget, and political parties are filled with people who are highly educated and skilled in ‘critical thinking’ (Ted Cruz, de Santis, Truss & Sunak) — but to what end? Anne Applebaum writes about erstwhile highly-educated friends and acquaintances who simply and cravenly acquiesced in the right-wing takeover of the Polish government. And there are plenty of not highly-educated people about (I think of certain trade unionists in Britain — particularly Mick Lynch) who stand up for truth and who are certainly very good at thinking critically as they do so. There is the idea that a good education is a panacea that will inevitably lead to everybody thinking in a nice, Platonically rational way and coming to the same conclusions. It is demonstrably false, and always has been.
Bjarte #6
I liked your ‘let alone intelligence’!, since fools and ideologues attach so much importance to it. I am fed up also with the idea that this abstract concept of ‘intelligence’ necessarily leads to correct and ethical conclusions. It doesn’t. Carl Schmitt was a highly intelligent man, but that didn’t make his ideas any better.
Ditto with comunication. What technological breakthrough in communications technology has not been heralded as the dawn of somesort of new era of peace and understanding?
Indeed. As I like to say, the same technologies that have made it easier than ever to spread true information and good ideas have also made it easier than ever to spread false information and bad ideas. The critical thinking skills required to separate the former from the latter – not to mention the motivation to use them that way – don’t come automatically with more information, but often require us to override our deep-seated biases and intuitions and sometimes even common sense.
Having the truth on your side is not the decisive advantage it’s often cracked up to be in the battle for public opinion. Playing by the rules of science, logic, critical thinking, and intellectual honesty is nothing if not limiting whereas activist agenda-pushers are free to say whatever it takes to impress or intimidate people. In the absence of the neccessary pre-knowledge, skills, and motivations, all your average person can be expected to get out of the kind of “rational debate ” the techno-optimists like to imagine is that one side comes across as far more confident, assertive, and aggressive, while the other side is forced to use conservative language (“seems to indicate”), talk about statistical probability, confidence intervals and error bars, acknowledge doubt and uncertainty, and intoduce caveats, conditions, and qualifiers at every turn. No need to specify which side is the scientific one, and no need to specify which side your average layperson is going to find most convincing.
Indeed. And on some level we all must know this. Electioneering is all about emotional appeals, even when we pretend it’s about the issues. Anyone who’s ever seen a courtroom drama (i.e., everyone) knows that the same applies to the law: an accused’s guilt or innocence rests on whether the defence or the prosecution puts on the better performance for the jury. The material facts — the evidence, the witness testimonies — are the props dealt to each side which they must use to put on the best show they can. Obviously the performance aspect is exaggerated in fiction, but there’s more than a kernel of truth to the fact that many real-world trials play out like dog and pony shows, and it’s led to countless miscarriages of justice in both directions: wrongful convictions and wrongful acquittals.
Debates are no different, which is why I’ve always chafed at the pretence that the debate format is high and noble, and something close to intellectually conclusive. Far from it. The techniques deployed to win a debate are nothing like the techniques deployed to get to the truth of a matter.
The libertarian “free marketplace of ideas” is an idealistic fiction. Humans are not purely logical thinkers by nature. It’s in our nature to prioritize our social needs over abstract principles like right or wrong, and true or untrue. Hardly anyone is willing to stick with what’s right or what’s true if the social cost is too high. History keeps teaching us this over and over and over and over again, but the lesson never seems to hold.
In order for what’s right and what’s true to prevail, we have to acknowledge the social dynamics that are hardwired in humans, and we have to make use of these tools to advance the good and the true: we have to impose social costs on bad and wrong ideas, and we have to amass and hoard social credit for those who reject them. It’s true that activists on both political extremes rely too much on social appeal to push their agendas — both the far left and the far right make heavy use of social punishment to keep their flocks in line — but the correct response to this is knowing how to deploy these necessary tools in moderation, rather than adopting airs of intellectual superiority over the social dynamics of the human race altogether.
It’s messy business, but that’s people for you. We’re only human.
Bjarte Foshaug #1
29. The enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy. No more. No less
From
https://schlockmercenary.fandom.com/wiki/The_Seventy_Maxims_of_Maximally_Effective_Mercenaries
Artymorty @11
I forget who it was I read/heard say that debates are not for getting at the truth, they’re for winning people to your side.
I hate it that the sacred DeBates have become so deeply entrenched and so mystificationized. Combat sport. They’re worthless at best and a disaster at worst. We seem to be mostly getting at worst.
I remember going to a meeting of the debating society at school. It was the only one I ever attended. It consisted in exhibitions of ‘cleverness’ and the scoring of points. To the devil with that, I thought. Britain has now introduced debates between leaders of parties before elections, following the American example, and they, too, are unwatchable and worthless. Artymorty is spot on.