Erick Erickson has a lovely piece on current social dynamics:
We’re in an Age of Betrayal.
We know fewer people personally. We connect to people online. We become “friends” with the person on Instagram and obsess about their lives. All we know is what they show us on social media. When it turns out they have views diametrically opposed to ours, we hate them. They betray us. We’ve created our connection, to a degree, in our heads by extrapolating ancillary information to what is presented. When they provide the actual ancillary information and it does not match that which we conjured in our heads, we feel betrayed.
Celebrity culture, even in the church, can do that. In politics, we spend time in battles with people fighting alongside us. Then one day we find ourselves on opposite sides and feel betrayed. More often than not, we cannot agree to disagree. We must be aggrieved and launch subtweets.
And I’d take it further. The behavior of joining forces with those of apparently like-mindedness in politics is what has brought victories to the left and the right. The Senate these days is merely this lesson writ large: the actions of Murkowski, Collins, Manchin, and Sinema have been shocking because they are betrayals of their side – at least to the zealots of each side. Most of the time, the Senate and the House votes in political blocs, careful to remain loyal to the leader – rather than their judgment.
This isn’t how it’s always been. Sparing you the white cane and quavering voice[1], it was not unusual, forty or fifty years ago, to see Democrats and Republicans often voting for each other’s legislation. “Reach across the aisle” was neither unusual nor betrayal; it was simply how important things got done.
It was called politics, and it ended not too long after the Soviet Union collapse, thank you Professor Turchin[2].
These days, rather than discuss across the aisle, in order to avoid being called Traitor! you stick to the team charter and don’t deviate.
Erickson cites Dave Chappelle and Joe Rogan as two who’ve acted as betrayers, and while I’m not overly familiar with either of them, I’ve gotta say that if Rogan is busy boosting anti-vax people, that endangers people’s lives. While the omicron variant seems far less dangerous than delta, and I hope we can dispense with the masks soon enough, it’s becoming clear that 900,000 people dead, from all walks of life and age, isn’t enough to get some folks’ attention.
And that’s just fuckin’ dangerous.
But before I go too far astray, I’ll restrain myself. I think Erickson’s observations concerning social dynamics interacting with social media are accurate. Speaking for social media prior to its migration onto the Internet (i.e., BBSes), most social media was strictly local, and that meant there was a greater chance of meeting the people on the other side of the modem screech than there is today. That often humanized your opponents – I vividly remember a rather cantankerous, even bitter, online dude turned out to be a skinny guy with big ears, who was dragged out of a party by his girlfriend – she grabbed him by the ear and told him to settle down.
It’s hard to be mad at a guy after witnessing that.
So, remember, there’s a good chance that your “opponent” is a human being with the same foibles that you have, next time you’re thinking of digging into the Team Tactics Book. Maybe they deserve a gentler thrashing, eh?
1 There, that should be lodged in your brain for the rest of the day.
2 See his Secular Cycles.
