[1173] Workin' On The Railroad

I think I recognize a point of major confusion when someone is attempting to explain the “reason” they did something. We tend to think that a choice is discreet, or that one thing naturally follows to another. I choose to hit the cue ball into the 8 ball. Incidentally, we have an idea of the physics that will cause the ball to fall into the pocket, but it’s not predetermined. There’s an underlying chaos and probability matrix seemingly calculating indefinitely in real time.

I read once that to accuse someone of being a hypocrite was one of the weakest forms of both criticism and argument. The reason being, no one ever, ever, feels like a hypocrite. The moment a personally gratifying or sense-making opportunity is presented, a deeply personal choice gets made and the seeming contradiction is resolved by the new embodied person. You can see this during interviews with killers, or Daily Show maga man-on-the-street interviews. This is what every “modern religious” person does. It’s how I can “resolve” being a hyper-focused go-go-go-type person who maintains the capacity to sit around all day watching TV. We’re complex things.

This, I suspect, is where the wisdom of “hate the sin, not the sinner” came from. When we choose to be, we can be as discerning as we wish in painting a picture of the many things that influence behavior. You can love people in your family, it’s said, while you hate everything they do during the heights of their addiction, perhaps. I’ll refrain from speculating and dismissing the messy or haphazard definitions of “love” one might adopt there, but the superficial contradiction and hypocrisy are no less highlighted.

We have evolutionary systems that, one way or another, need the world to “make sense.” That is, you would not be here if your nervous system confused the sensations of pain and bleeding out with the taste of honey. So much of your being is attempting to resolve that sensibility with the abstract nature of language and ever-confusing nature of your experience.

I think I got considerably better as a thinking individual when I adopted an “all at once” and “yes, and” mentality about my power, motivations, intentions, and potential. It started with learning how to shit talk. You can’t become a good shit talker if you’re not observing the things about you that you would use on someone else to cut them down. If I didn’t know I had a receding hairline, big ass, or serial-killer beard when I don’t shape things up, it’d be really hard for me to make fun of you if the second you responded with one of those things I broke down.

No one or ten things you can pick out about yourself or someone else’s looks make the whole person, and the seasoned genuinely comfortable shit-talker knows this. They know it’s attractive to be funny and laid back. They know it’s cool to project power and intelligence or wit. They know that any deficiency they may have will pale in comparison to how someone next to them feels about themselves and what’s wrong with them.

Comics understand that trading barbs is a show of love. In a different context, with someone who doesn’t understand the culture and language, you might make someone cry. To them, you’re being mean, even if in your world you’re not even in a mean ballpark and are genuinely trying to connect. If you try to defend yourself and say, “No no no, I like you, that’s why I said your tits were saggy so be careful they don't get caught in the door jam!” Who says that to someone they like? You’re going to look like a hypocrite who claims to like someone, but says mean things to them. It’s entirely a product of a superficial understanding of where either person is coming from.

To me this feels like an area that’s both extremely personally familiar, but one that many people still misunderstand with regularity. I think the problem has only compounded with characters like Trump in our minds.

The comic who makes fun of you isn’t lying about where they come from. Someone like Trump is lying about everything all the time until it’s a transaction that personally helps him. And then, he’s still lying about whatever feeling he may express about you. He’s not gratified to know you, he’s gratified he got something out of you.

But what’s a frequent defense you hear from Trump’s apologists? “He’s just joking.” You have someone like Jordan Peterson trying to liken him to actual comics and claim they’re making the same kind of jokes. Absolutely not. One class of people are making jokes, professionally. When they step off stage they are normal-enough people with standards of conduct and a shared reality. It’s part of what allows them to reach the heights they do. Bill Burr hasn’t cut down and destroyed everyone in the comedy world like Trump cuts down and destroys everyone who doesn’t service him.

When you don’t want to accept the basic reality, you shift the conversation. You let the words mean something else. You move the goal posts until new norms of behavior and connotative baggage can be shaken or adopted.

There’s several thousand posts trying to explain why Trump got elected. The ones I caught, none avoided the trap of equivocation and nice, neat, or indignant summaries of familiar talking points. One person, Tressie McMillan Cottom actually and accurately spoke to the feelings that drive people on The Daily Show. The equation looks something like this:

Clock vibes –> Create excuse –> Call it “reasons” –> Passionately double-down –> Clock self-fulfilled prophecy vibes –> continue cycle indefinitely.

You know why the whole country moved towards Trump? We’ve been gagging on those fumes for almost a decade. No kid who grows up under that is going to fear fascism. Fascism is the new norm. No media that never learned how to cover or convey information in the first place is going to be a protective 4th estate. Our “norms” have only recently evolved to try and get used to surviving past our 30s. We can devolve into a considerably more ambivalent and blood-thirsty version of ourselves almost over-night. That’s the vast majority of our internal infrastructure.

I don’t want to drift too abstractly. You can stop the cycle at any point by just adopting better questions. You have to ask them of yourself and whomever you’re desiring to connect with.

Do you feel some kind of way when you’re discussing whatever the topic is?
 If you can’t recognize or own the feeling, it’s saying everything for you.

Can you recognize and accept whatever the last point I made was?
 If you are unable or unwilling to quote someone and recite back what they  said, you’re not talking to each other. You’re not sharing language or some  version of reality.

I suggest ceasing any conversation that can’t establish these two conditions if you’re genuine goal is to get somewhere useful and actionable.

One of the digressions I read from someone trying to front that they’re a “reasonable” split-ticket person criticized the border bill because of one out-of-context line about how many people it would allow into the country a day. To this person’s mind, they’ve got a reasonable criticism and wouldn’t vote for a bill that has that in it. The huge but, all bills are going to have things in them that one side doesn’t like. The fact that one came together at all, and was ready to be passed, and was deliberately tanked by the person you voted for says an incredible amount about how “reason” fails.

For that criticism to make sense, I would need that person to answer yes or no to a series of questions about the nature of my reality and perception of what a monumental accomplishment the bill was altogether. I’d also want to know their awareness of the history and context of our immigration issues against what the rest of the world is experiencing. What I’d discover within 2 questions is that this person has no idea how immigration works, what details needed to be negotiated, what future bills others were aiming for once there was a floor, etc. I’d also discover that they were not interested in those details fundamentally, because they’re engaged in backwards apologetics trying to justify a bad decision, not look to build reasons into one they think is good.

This kind of “reasoning” and behavior is something you see in social work constantly. I remind my clients often that there’s a huge difference between living in fear and avoidance, and living in an affirmative and accountable way. When they tell me, “I just don’t ever want to think about using again!” I tell them that’s building failure into their expectations. They’re going to think about using again. They’re not, yet, necessarily going to grasp the nature of their power not to do so. They’re not going to have an understanding and awareness of how their environment and self-talk and daily practices inform or impede their ability to reach years-later goals.

So it goes with everything we do. We live in avoidance of the psychological pain of superficial contradictions and difficult conversations with the forces that, having become too abstracted, we don’t respect as killing us. Fentanyl will drop you dead the first time you get the wrong dose. Rage? You’re not even angry…you claim. Fear? You like scary movies! You assert while I’m trying to talk about the consequences of you escaping an abusive dynamic. Faith? With god, all things are possible. Conveniently, “all things” in my head are something positive and not a global flood.

I’ve thought about taking as many posts as I can and sorting them into the categories of excuses, linguistic gymnastic rhetorical bins, and fallacies. It’s what I used to do back when I was “debating” religious ideologues. It’s the exact same mechanisms regardless of the topic of conversation. That’s what kinda kills and yet excites me, because it feels understandable and teachable. Michael Shermer has his books, but I don’t see enough people wrestling with the conversations in real time. I don’t see us as competent to both recognize and know how to redirect or call out in a way that keeps an exchange on the rails. Like, we don’t have a concept of the rails broadly.

I think for my purposes I need to continue speaking mostly to myself and my fleetingly small audience of people who aren’t reduced to reactionary pedantry when they pretend to understand what I’m talking about. If I can refrain from unironically engaging in the errant pissing matches as I’m searching for a compelling way to convert errant pissing matches into something useful, that will serve me best. We need more people demonstrating the value of methodically and purposefully approaching conversations while maintaining expectations for the nature of the exchange. This is incredibly hard to do, not least because I’m unsure how even most of the smartest and well-intentioned have the ability to recognize the problem.