Accidental Monsters

A proposed means by which we can view

those who believe/vote/act in ways we find

horrifically evil, to be, actually, just people.  

Like us.

I’m walking down the street and come upon a tussle.  Two dudes are fighting.
To my left, a bystander points and says “Blonde guy started beating on Brunette guy for no reason!
Help him!”  Being a person who wants justice and peace, I act immediately, jumping into the fray.
Naturally, being an excellent puncher, I knock Blondie out.

Another bystander runs up to me.  “What the hell is wrong with you?! Blondie was defending
himself from getting mugged!  You just aided a crime! You absolute garbage person!”

You might be surprised to learn that this didn't actually happen to me.

It was an allegory.  

Here is my point. What did I do wrong in this scenario?  You might say,
“You just listened to the first person who told you what was happening.”  
I would say: “It was an emergency, there wasn’t time to take a poll!”
You might say: “You jumped to violence to solve the situation.”  
I would say that in that kind of situation it’s difficult to know how to proportion the reaction,
and when it comes to saving someone, over-reaction is probably a better policy than under-reaction.  
Maybe there was a better way to handle it, but in the heat of the moment most humans don’t
make the best choices. I tried my best.”

But regardless, from a bird’s eye view, I attacked an innocent person and helped a criminal.  
I made society worse. I was played for a fool. I’d like to think that when these facts are
called to light, I’d admit my fault and do whatever I could to make amends.  
But what if the scene turns out to be more complex than that?
What if it turns out that Blondie was only mostly innocent? What if he had been mocking Brunette?
What if they had a history, and Blondie owed Brunette 20 bucks that he refused to pay back?  
Or… What if Brunette knew that Blondie planned to take the money in his wallet and use to do
something self destructive, and was actually trying to protect him from himself?

If any of these scenarios turn out to be the case, my human nature would probably cling to them
and inflate them to the point that I felt like I did the right thing. When things are complicated it's
really easy to subconsciously compose a narrative the exaggerates some parts and minimizes
others in ways that make our actions or preconceived beliefs and biases justified.

I bring up all these convolutions to illustrate a fundamental reality that is getting lost in the
current cultural/political divide.  Everything is way more complicated than everyone wants to admit.
We humans are HIGHLY motivated to oversimplify complex issues for several reasons.  
The biggest one that’s getting monetized right now is that outrage is an addictive emotion.
It bonds you to your tribe, and makes you feel like a superior person compared to the other evil tribe.  
That other tribe can only be truly evil if they see the same ‘simple’ reality you do, but choose for
evil reasons to do the selfish, evil things anyway.

My conservative friends see my liberal friends as an incoherently angry, mean, bullying mob who
are shoving progressive, historically-unprecedented changes down their throats, using the full might
of the educational & entertainment industry, and as much of the political and press apparatus as
they can.  

My liberal friends see my conservative friends as openly racist, selfish bullies, who actually want
minorities to suffer, or are at least so selfish that they want a culture and policy that rewards what is
already privileged (them) and punishes what is not (minorities/women/etc).

My contention is that is that we are all that pretend person in in the allegory I so artfully constructed at
the beginning of this incredibly well-written blog.
We make mistakes due to universal human biases, but still generally want justice to prevail.
(There are exceptions; psychopaths who want to hurt others, but I think those are waaaaay smaller
numbers than we want to admit when we're lumping all our political opponents together.)  
We perceive ourselves as being in a life or death emergency. We all want to protect the innocent
from the bully. But we have all been brainwashed by our upbringing and our social group to
perceive the situation differently.

It’s true that only a monstrous human would zealously beat up an innocent victim.  
But if that person was misled by inaccurate information, are they still a monster?
I think this is the case with the vast majority of people who are believing/voting/acting in
ways that are damaging others.  They want to do what’s right. And yeah, this even includes most
of the pundits who are preaching to their respective choirs.

There are four powerful smokescreens that I think are clouding our perception of the other side.  
The first is Pragmatism vs. Idealism. It’s easy to assume that a vote for a particular candidate is
an endorsement of everything their opponents say they stand for.  Again, that’s overly simplistic.
Politics always requires compromise. Some people are more flexible than others when it comes
to that. It’s easy for those who stay far to the Idealism end of the spectrum to assume the worst
about those those who are willing to travel towards the Pragmatism end.  When we do it on our
side it’s painful. When we see those on the other side do it, we presume they are all only cynical
power hungry monsters who will stop at nothing. This is pretty much the Fundamental Attribution
Error: our tendency to explain someone's behavior based on internal factors (such as personality
or disposition) and to underestimate the influence that external factors (such as situational
influences) have on another person’s behavior.   In this context, we think the other side votes for
people and policy that have bad attributes because those people are evil, rather than -like we
would probably do- thinking that accepting some terrible attributes of a policy or politician are
regrettable, but worth the public good that they will ultimately provide.

The second smokescreen that makes it all but impossible to see the other side as non-monsters
is schadenfreude.  Being the semi-evolved monkeys that we are, we actually take pleasure in the
pain of the other tribe. That schadenfreude is really easy to interpret by the other side as evil.  
It’s certainly closer to evil than it is to good, but it’s also a large building block in our psychological
need for justice. So it’s important to recognize that the way our crowing over victory looks is
reinforcing the other side thinking our motives are monstrous.

Related to the second; the third way our perception of the other tribe is distorted is the fact that
our current cultural/political climate is so charged that most people are on the defensive. And when
a person is on the defensive they usually become a caricature or parody of themselves. When
presented with evidence to the contrary of our beliefs (which, remember, are deeply tied to our tribal
affiliations) people will get really wacky with their justifications. Not because there's no SMART way
to justify their positions. (There may or may not be) But because when you're feeling attacked it
arouses all the primitive parts the brain that cloud over the higher reasoning functions. So we see the
other side stuttering, stammering and sputtering angry stupid retorts. The natural conclusion is: "These people have no real argument for their beliefs!" and THAT leads to equally stupid slogans like
"Fact don't care about your feelings." Anyway, this distortion we have is greatly magnified by...

The final smokescreen which is the most profound and powerful one as far as I can tell.  
Those who make money from clicks 'n' views are forced by market pressure to focus on the
most outrageous version of any given idea.  They aggregate images, video and quotes from
the least stable, least articulate, and most ridiculous looking people. Then package those up, and
the end product is an EXTREMELY satisfying experience of confirmation bias for the side
that disagrees with the strawman that has been cobbled together.  

So this is why I cringe when I see my friends talk about the other side as garbage people,
monsters, evil, etc.  To make such an assertion accurately, one would need to know two things
that I believe are impossible to know. First, you’d have to know the psychological framework
that they inherited, and that is reinforced by their tribe (subculture) on a daily basis.  (Because
OF COURSE if YOU voted they way they did you WOULD be a monster because of the
convictions that you have based on YOUR experiences.)
Second, you would have to know that the policies you support are simply good and right,
(clearly evident to all) and that competing policy is simply bad and evil.  As though anyone can
forecast every ramification of a policy on every human.  As if historical norms are completely
understood so that we can change them in purely positive ways without blowback, introducing
perverse incentives, or inadvertently eroding values that you hold dear.  Sorry.
You aren’t that smart.
No one CAN be.

So here's an embarrassing admission. I’m a political agnostic.  Sadly, that keeps me politically
neutered to a large degree, at least when it comes to governmental/law side of political action.
(If you know my social media feed profile, you know I’m not shy about my Social Justice Warriorness)  
I would never wish my crippled political condition on anyone else. I'm not trying to play that 'cool'
moderate card of "Listen, BOTH sides are just CRAAAZY! So the correct smart thing is IN THE
MIDDLE YA RUBES!"
No. My condition is NOT smart or great. It's not above-it-all. It's just a giant epistemic sucking void.
I do NOT want you to get infected with it.

But I’d LOVE to at least tinge your certainty with just a hint of epistemological uncertainty.  
Just enough to remove the perception that the ONLY reason the people on the other side oppose
you is because they are evil bully garbage monsters.  
They aren’t.
They are acting on the ‘information’ they have been given, and like you, they are
very certain that it’s the best information. To question that would be to endanger their place in
their social network.  (Which is one of the biggest no-nos evolutionarily speaking) You cannot
attach moral opprobrium to a person for not being superhuman in regards to risking everything
to question their worldview so they might agree with you.    

From my perspective, if I’m going to accidentally bully someone, I want to make sure it’s not
marginalized people who have fewer privileges.  That’s why I’ve moved more left socially and
politically. But the concepts of systemic injustice and power dynamics are VERY difficult to
articulate in short, politically powerful slogans.  Especially when those who don’t find the
concepts convincing would have to risk all their social relationships to change their minds.
So while I advocate and attempt to educate about these concepts, I don’t assume that those
who don’t see them the way I do are bullies who love beating on marginalized people.

Again, if a person does something that they believe will harm an innocent, then they are bad people.
If YOU voted for a person that you thought would harm an innocent, you're being bad.
THEY don't think that's what they are doing. They think that's what YOU are doing. MY opinion
(which is probably wrong) is that because reality is way more complicated than we want to believe,
you are probably both helping and hurting in different ways. It would also be unrealistically
over-simplistic to say that everyone is helping and harming equally. Which is why I'm not asking
people to hold hands and sing Kumbaya. No. 'Being Nice' is not some universally moral maxim. But creating unhealthy narratives about a
reality where half the world is composed of truly evil people... that will fuck you up.
That will destroy mental health, rip families apart and disintegrate relationships
that are important for emotional and financial safety nets. This view of the world as half-evil
has real consequences that our culture hasn't come to grips with yet because we are so addicted to
our outrage and self righteousness. And to me, the sad irony is that all the stuff I've heard and seen
about how people actually form their opinions and change their minds has to do with being in
relationship with those who hold different beliefs. Laws largely work to modify behavior, which has
some small effect on people's hearts. But RELATIONSHIPS change hearts and minds. And changed
hearts and minds vote differently. We are tearing our relationships apart because of our media-infused
righteous indignation, which ends up making our goals harder to achieve! The more we silo ourselves,
the less the other side sees reasonable, loving people who fundamentally disagree with their
prescriptions for the political good. (Which usually causes them to at least internally question
their positions.) The other side is now only left with a vacuum YOU left behind that
is filled with the strawmen that our clicks 'n' views media rushes in to provide and profit from.

But again... you should fight for what you believe in. You should follow your conscious concerning
where you draw the line in your idealism/pragmatism. I’m NOT trying to tell you that you should
support or advocate your political policies less.  

What I’m advocating is that you don’t utilize hate speech to impune those who disagree with you.  
I’m advocating that you attempt rational compassion for your ‘enemy’.
That’s not the same as compromise.  If you think their policy actively bullies and harms,
than fight that policy. But don’t assume they are intentional bullies.  

They are simply accidental monsters.

And you are theirs.