Radicracy - A Twitter Adventure.
Navigating an election in a bubbling cauldron of distrust and fear.
Here in Melbourne, it’s two days until the 2022 Victorian State Election. If we’re lucky, Daniel Andrews, the world’s worst dictator since Georgia’s finest Josef Stalin, will be unseated from power.
For those of you who don’t know, Daniel Andrews is the most corrupt politician in Australian history. Anyone who votes for him is by definition a seditious bootlicker and enemy of freedom and liberty. At least that’s what I read again and again and again on Twitter.
Do you remember the election in 2018, when nobody said any of those things? It’s weird, because I feel like if someone were an autocratic monster, it probably should have been evident at least a little bit. Nice poker face, Dan!
Let’s entertain this idea, and compare like with like. Not being an expert on Russian history, it’s altogether possible I’ve just forgetten that calm, early part of Stalin’s rule where he ruled from the centre before he lurched to the left and murdered Trotsky completely out of nowhere!!
And yet the debate goes on on Twitter. People become horribly haughty about things.
Then if you act like you care at all, tell you social media isn’t real life so none of this matters, like people don’t get their ideas online and it’s just some sandbox to stretch your contrarian muscle. It’s wilful blindness of the most pathological kind.
And so it goes. The ‘debate’ rages on, like it’s a debate about reality and they’re not just emotionally scarred from the war. The war is what I’m calling COVID now.
Why not? There were 6.62 million deaths at last count, freedoms were curtailed, citizens were called upon to sacrifice, and did. No one liked doing it, but neither did the Diggers at Gallipoli. That’s what happens. It’s war.
War leaves scars. Scars in those who have lost loved ones. Those who have lost themselves. And I see a lot of those people online. People used to suffer in silence. Now people suffer loudly online, keening.
Watching the polarisation of political debate taking place worldwide over the past 5-10 years, I’m reminded of the frog in the pot, slowly getting boiled.
Do you remember thinking quite so many of your fellow citizens were insane in 2005? That question goes to both sides of the debate. If you’re not a cooker, you’re part of the woke agenda. Again, like poker-face Dan Andrews, these are not realities or again, we all would have noticed it ages ago. People are not crazy, this is what it looks like when people don’t trust each other. This is just a bad relationship.
Do you remember people having such strong opinions about trans-rights, vaccines, liberty and all the other touchstones of division back in the day? I don’t.
The 2005 versions of most of the people conducting these debates couldn’t tell me what Hobbes’ Leviathan is, or articulate their opinions on the distinction and balance between freedom from and freedom to. Noone gave two shits about what the definition of a woman was.
And why should they? We got along perfectly well without that knowledge. It’s clearly not important for a functioning society for everyone to know everything about everything. What’s important is that we all feel like we’re in it together and broadly agree on a few fundamental principles.
And yet, now everyone waxes lyrical about every issue under the sun.
All assuredly based in some fact that they’ve encountered and you haven’t. You’d think with so many facts around, we’d enter some sort of golden age of knowledge. Alas, it seems like there are two versions of knowledge. Correct facts, which you and your side possess. And ‘that thing those idiots think.’
So who’s right? Well, I’m sad to say that no one is, this should be fairly clear from the nature of the debate. When, in your life has it ever been the case that you’ve been 100% right, and the other person 100% wrong? And if that has happened, it isn’t the case most of the time.
I keep pointing this out online, and of course no-one wants to hear it. Which is more evidence that this debate isn’t factual, it’s emotional. It’s a collective hysteria that could be summed up by a common relationship trope, “I don’t want you to solve my problem, I just want to feel heard.”
Facts, real and alternative exist in abundance, and people generally aren’t good at expressing pain and suffering, so instead of hearing “I’m scared and COVID scarred me” as “Dan Andrews is up there with Pol Pot.”
Also unfortunately, true facts don’t exist. Even the side I advocate for, science, doesn’t promise that. It promises the best possible approximation of the facts. And those are just the physical facts. How physical facts affect each person psychologically and subjectively is different, and so different issues adhere differntly to different people. This is a complex phenomenon, but it’s there every time you have a discussion online, removed from everything about the person but the 280 characters.
A woman’s right to choose is an abstract discussion for a childless man, but for a newly pregnant woman, it may define the rest of her life. These are not the same thing, and sometimes it feels like people playing with ideas on Twitter ignore that and think of these debates as either a fun mental exercise or a place to let off steam. We’ve all met people who do this in real life. I’ve been that person at points. I once tweeted “Who’s better, men or women. Go!” because I thought it was funny. It was, if you’re thirteen. I wasn’t thirteen. I was an emotionally backed-up douchebag. Don’t be that cripple.
Your opinions used to be limited to what you saw, heard, read or watched. This used to be a couple of newspapers, five channels and the people you knew. Now it’s a Pick ‘n Mix of the world’s philosophical spectrum: christian fundamentalists, radical feminists, trans-rights activists, famous authors pushed too far, billionaires on the spectrum and Jeff Kennett’s tipsy tweets after dark.
Whatever your feelings (and experience) suggest, I guarantee you can find the facts online to go along with it. If life taught you that authority=oppression, there’s people tweeting that vibe. They’re similarly damaged. You’ll agree with them. Viscerally. Find enough people like that courtesy of a helpful algorithm and you’ll be convinced that that is reality. If life taught you that vulnerable people need protection, you’ll find that too.
The depths of denial some people online are in suggest that they’re in great pain to me. They’ll be so for a variety of reasons. Some have no doubt been victims of abuse, and deeply psychologically resistant to being forced to do anything. So COVID and the decisions that it brought would have traumatised them deeply. Some are deeply distrustful of all authority, again probably because they’ve suffered abuses at the hands of power in the past. It doesn’t mean they’re right in their interpretation of their feelings, but their feelings are clearly beyond question. Love the player, hate the game.
If people are having emotional debates cloaked in truthiness, the sooner we recognise that, the sooner we can go some way to actually finding some common ground. You cannot solve a problem that you misidentify.
The internet has democratised thought and yet people walk through this broad church of opinion and kid themselves that there is a way out. That their side can win. They cannot. If there was truth to be found, it would have been found by now.
And so, I hope that when they count the votes on Sunday, that this insane state of affairs hasn’t radicalised too many people. Hopefully just enough to prove to me that it wasn’t many people at all, it just felt that way on Twitter. Because that’s what I think it is. But I’m scared that it’s not. Time will tell.
Yianni Agisilaou
24 November, 2022.