"Well, you know, that's just like uh, your opinion man."
And for the most part, it doesn't matter very much.
From the time I became politically conscious to present day, my dad and I have had countless conversations about the state of affairs in the U.S. and around the world…TL;DL—we’ve solved basically every problem that anyone has ever experienced. If only we were in charge, everything would be much, much better!1
I love it. I love spending time with my dad, I like talking through the issues of the day, and it’s a good thought experiment for both of us to test our knowledge, ideas, information. Sometimes it just feels really good to state what you think. And occasionally we reveal blind spots in each other’s point of view, giving each other the opportunity to change our mind.
But truth is, unless either of us run for office, these conversations don’t really matter. Regardless how righteous our indignation, the simplicity, elegance, or pragmatism of our solutions, or whatever other ingenious ideas we hash out, neither of us has the power to affect government policy other than the small number of people we associate with and our ability to vote in elections. Even then, our effect is muted because many of the people we associate with will be unpersuaded by our opinions (alas!), and in most elections we have a choice between two candidates who will control only 1/x of whatever body politic they serve.
Funny enough, the first blog I started was about politics, and despite all my attempts to engage an audience and reframe the content or rebrand myself entirely, it never really took off. What I learned the hard way, writing hundreds of posts that were well argued and chock full of evidence, is that people can’t be bothered to care that much about stuff they can’t do anything about…
And they’re right not to care
Pick your political outrage d’jour: the Iraq War in the early 2000s, the Tea Party in 2010, Trump’s election, George Floyd, COVID, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at almost any point since the founding of Israel as a nation…it’s not that these events don’t matter—they do! But is the individual person, or even the collective effort of 100,000 protestors, going to move the needle?
No.
The college protests demanding a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas are a good example. Highly effective in terms of getting attention and disrupting daily life around campus, but ultimately pointless.2 Because the government of Israel and Bibi Netanyahu in particular, don’t care what a bunch of US college kids, whose brains have been pickled by Tik-Tok, think about their military strategy—nor really, does the US government, or anyone else who has skin in the game.
And they’re right not to care.3
The problem, however, in a world where everyone averages four and a half hours on their phone each day, and most of that on Tik-Tok, Facebook, Twitter, and/or IG, is that we’re led to believe our opinions are terribly important, and indeed, we’re often judged—or feel we’ll be judged—tribally, as if they do.
But they don’t. And what’s truly crazy is that employers, friends, family, and everyone on social media also place incredible importance on what we believe about shit we have no ability to change.
Like, the whole concept of cancelation is insane. Think about it: someone has an opinion people don’t like but doesn’t matter in terms of changing anything, and we’re going to use that to get them fired or banned from polite society…why? They never had any power in the first place.
The obvious rebuttal here is that of discrimination. If a person or group expresses views that imply they are likely to discriminate against others, that would be bad. Here’s the thing though: not only is it bad, it’s also illegal. You can’t discriminate against people when it comes to important stuff like getting a job, buying a house, or going to school, etc. So like, if some person or entity is actively discriminating against people in these ways, they’ll likely get sued and either fined or thrown in jail.4
The Case of Black Lives Matter
And the problem with trying to read the tea leaves is that there’s a tendency to be as uncharitable as possible in order to score points with our tribe, and to catastrophize small differences in opinion into truly toxic beliefs. Take the whole “Black Lives Matter” vs. “All Lives Matter” controversy. There was a time when saying the latter was taken by many to be a naked declaration of racism. But the reality is that people are complicated and often don’t consider other points of view.
The people saying “BLM” were trying to point out that throughout US history, Black people have been treated in a way that would suggest their lives don’t matter. The uncharitable read, however, is that they were implying non-Black people don’t matter. This wasn’t the point, but for people who thought it was, the reaction was to starting saying, “ALM”, because like, of course they do, right?
But these people weren’t racists.5 They just didn’t get it. And both groups adopted these slogans to signal their political tribalism: people on the left would say BLM, people on the right would say ALM. But at the time there were cases where some of the people saying ALM lost their jobs, and that seems pretty bad—like, that’s a pretty steep price to pay for not getting it, and it’s easy to see why many on the right would see this as abridging their freedom of speech.
The same is true on the topic of trans-rights today. Voice any opinion other than a full throated endorsement of the trans-activist communities most strident positions, and your a “trans-phobe” who wants trans-people to commit suicide.6
Censorship Magnifies Bad Opinions
The problem with this kind of social censorship, especially in an era where we have the internet and tools like social media and Substack, is that it doesn’t work. Popular ideas—good or bad—are going to be expressed. We can play whack-a-mole all we want, but this isn’t the middle ages where we can just kill or jail all the people who say stuff we don’t like; indeed, it’s counterproductive, because every cancelation gives fuel to those viewpoints. What’s worse: someone saying stuff you don’t like, or someone getting press coverage for saying that stuff because they were fired from their job?
And to return to the theme here: it probably doesn’t even matter what they think, because they likely have almost no power to put those viewpoints into action anyway.
There are two takeaways here:
We should spend a lot less time and energy policing and worrying about what people think on any given issue, because:
It probably doesn’t matter what they think,
That odious opinion they have is probably due to a lack of understanding, and
It’s also just OK to disagree with someone about stuff and move on. Unlike my dad, my ex did NOT like to talk politics—especially when we disagreed—so we just didn’t talk about that stuff…and like, it’s totally fine! There are lots of things to do and talk about instead of hot-button political issues.
But that’s just like, my opinion, man.
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Link is to this crazy optimist who thinks things are actually pretty good now.
To give credit where it’s due, this is a refrain I’m borrowing from Sam Harris in his amazing podcast following the George Floyd protests, titled Can We Pull Back From the Brink? Highly recommended listening!
Hell, some of them got kicked out of school, graduations were canceled, and there was some truly nasty anti-semitism, overall: A+ for Protesting 101.
Also, the extent to which it’s alleged that people are secretly racist or sexist seems vastly overblown. I’m sure it happens, but we’ve also starting teaching people to assume discrimination, like micro-aggressions, exist, when like, sometimes people are just mean or having a bad day or needed to cross the street—not because they’re racist, but because they just actually needed to cross the street to reach their destination. As a future post will note: if you go around looking for witches, you’re likely going to find some, whether they’re real or not.
Maybe some small portion of them were, but if there were really true white-supremacist racists, wouldn’t they have said “White Lives Matter”?
To make my position clear: trans people should have all the legal rights of any other person, and not be discriminated against. Furthermore, because there are true bigots who have hateful beliefs about them, we should protect trans people and advocate for them as allies in correcting these beliefs.
Where I diverge is that I don’t think trans women should compete in athletics against natal females—it’s just not fair, and most people agree with me: 79% according to the NYT. The other place where it’s appropriate to separate people based on biological sex, are places where people are fully naked with others, like locker rooms and some spas. I imagine it would be extremely distressing for a biological woman to see a penis in the locker room showers, especially considering the unfortunately high number of women who’ve experienced sexual assault at some point in their lives.