T.B.L. is the most emblematic of blogs where I've echoed this.
Certainly, we need a sense of decorum or rules. We need to know that by and large we're going to be met with a helpful or polite tone when we engage one another. Your server shouldn't be cussing you out anymore than your insurance agent because of a normalized social contract. There's a baseline for “moving things along” and getting things done. None of what I'm going to try and argue is ignorant of this necessity. None of what I say will be a referendum on how you feel about your willingness or ability to be polite or under what circumstances. I will not be arguing it shouldn't exist or is “wrong” in an explicit manner.
I will try to argue that how “we,” at least in U.S., understand this politeness is warped and does more harm than good. I will argue that I think there's a fundamental lie that goes routinely ignored at the bottom of our conceptions of “politeness” or “civility.” I think the heart of that lie is personal to each individual, more than some faux objective analysis parsing opinions on tactful engagement.
I've referenced the phrase, “Bless your heart” in the past as emblematic of the lie I'm speaking to. You're neither seeking to bless someone's heart in saying so, nor making an attempt to empathize. It's shorthand. It's common, easy, and considered a “polite,” perhaps Southern, way of implying there's nothing left to say, there's something wrong with you, and conversation or players currently involved are not going to be able to handle it. Bless your heart, and good day.
We know when we need to “escape” a conversation and sentiments like this are employed. As someone prone to “ranting,” I see the reservation and stress start to set in as the words are searched for from someone not used to me. I can appreciate when they signal the flow needs to end, and don't consider it “lying to me” because they are feeling overwhelmed, bad, or incapable of helping. I, too, encounter people who have many many words I don't know how to deal with on top of my already complicated head space.
I think one of the varied and complicated reasons I don't get “help” or “conversation” when it gets too “deep” or “convoluted” is because the mechanisms for doing so effectively have been eroded. I think “critical” thinking has reduced to “reactive scrutiny” for a generation or more. Ideas simply aren't shared or understood. They are default “fights.” They are stressful. They are personal. They threaten our sense of being. And the larger the threat they became, the more refined in our dance moves to avoid them. We implore people to not hurt our feelings, don't name names, and don't dare scar an interaction by what's actually happening. In fact, nothing can ever be happening! So there!
It's old news that people criticize form over substance, burn straw-men indefinitely, and never feel more proud or smug than when they can tout their dodging and bullying as righteous defending. That doesn't make it okay. It's “normal,” at least in our culture. It's so routine as to become something for which we're perfectly blind. We take for granted rules for engaging information and each other like we do shopping or our health. It just is what it is, and by god, here's where the person taking them for granted pivots to my opening “this isn't what I'm arguing against” points like I didn't bother to get out in front of them.
I worry that people don't pay close enough, let alone any, attention to what these habits of politeness or decorum are doing. If you're unable or unwilling to see a difference between practically functioning with these habits and “how to engage with the world,” I think they supplement your responsibility for respecting deeper truths. I think you begin to think being polite or following rules is the be-all end-all. I think when you're pressed to engage that, very broad, “deeper truth,” you react viscerally. That reaction is because you're not willing to build it into the balance of your concept for politeness. Your feistier will, perspective, or impulse is subsumed verses incorporated.
I'm pretty regularly accused of aggressively asserting my impulse. I'm oriented towards the “fight,” to be sure, but I've tempered how I go about doing so over the years. It's perhaps easier for me to recognize the rolled-over conciliatory moves, which I happen to often find gross and disingenuous, even when I often agree about their efficacy and appropriateness. The issue is when I try to drill down on any one specific situation and shift the introspective burden onto you. That's when the politeness goes out the window and the accusations flow. That's when the fight (you knew I was aiming for all along!) begins. It's unfortunate and familiar.
I think a lot of us are dramatically and chaotically more angry than we let on. I think every single person I've ever deigned to share a blog with could write as much or more than me. I think every single friend who has shared with me the depths of their depression and anxiety knows what I'm getting at in my fever-dream or drunk blogs. I think on top of the things we might intimately be able to share of our experience, there are a dozen “normal” things related to family or insecurities or shitty living and work environments plaguing you more than me as well. I say again, for the several thousandth time, I hear NONE of your opinions about your existence unless they are in the form of mischaracterizing something I said, or immediately sharing and hovering over the “unfriend” button when you can't be bothered to unpack why you're doing so.
You're not “handling” me by avoiding anymore than you're handling yourself by pretending things don't drive you fucking crazy like they do me. Also, you can't accuse me of mindlessly bitching and never going anywhere, mostly, because I try to work and create things that combat “my” issues big and small. When you put up an unflinching resistance to examining your habits, it signals to me that you're not just “disagreeing” or being “different” in how you're engaging the world, you're denying it. You're shitting on the very idea that we could get somewhere better and build better habits. I demonstrate, through writing if nothing else, my desire and thought process. I try to get more specific. I try to account for the panic.
You don't have to write pages on pages and feel like complete shit. You don't have to remotely agree with my elevated levels and “word twisting” to find out where you're coming from. You do have to signal, at some point, that what I'm speaking to is remotely relatable, reasonable, and, if only eventually, understandable, so that we're not just two crazy people talking past each other. You have grant me the license and understanding to positions you've raised that I already agree with, and then move onto what I've put forward. You can't do that when modern cultural “polite” metrics are the means by which you're going to engage.
In league with this is the endless open-interpretive sea of “favors” and “good will” that comes along with interpersonal relationships I have no patience for. My neighbor offered to tow my truck. He won't say out lout how much money he wants to do so. This will be the last time I allow him to do me any favors. He has a “polite” way of expressing his desires which I don't find polite. It doesn't express his wants and leaves me wishing I'd just paid the premium to hire a tow company. He's not explicitly “wrong” in his 52-year exercise in communication, but it's not truthful, it's truth-ish, and I don't find it helpful, fair, or productive. I'm not wrong for my disposition, but I'd be wrong in matter-of-factly expecting him to conform to my disposition. So would he. He's not likely to self-obligate himself to that understanding, nor is anyone subject to the rules of “politeness” currently employed.
It's a problem big and small. Who's on board with neoliberals negotiating with the fascists and domestic terrorists? Yes, we employed Nazis and there's a practical necessity for obligating the hopeless and angry to new work and rebuilding. How quickly did we “politely” just try to forget they were Nazis? Did that do us any real favors? Did that instantiate a healthy and rounded perspective to pretend “it can't happen here?” We know Germany is a living memorial with reminders everywhere of how badly they fucked up. We can't stand to face our shitty facebook comments! We habituate making “me” the enemy for pointing out when your words don't seem to match your otherwise forlorn or angry body language, tone, or word choices.
It's important for me to differentiate a sickness from a symptom. I need to recognize something as a tool verses a hasty fix. You should feel skeptical when something feels familiar. You might be rehearsing a pathological response, or you might be employing a failing strategy in your understanding of how things are playing out. I explore my hiccups in argumentation and conversation for that reason. I practice trying to keep it impersonal. I think our culture is deeply sick and we're all poisoned by it in different ways. I don't think we're getting better if we're content to remain on different planets in how we talk about it.
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