Since 2016 I’ve been disturbed by the caustic state of public communication in America. By public, I mean peer to peer, and by disturbed, I mean that during quiet moments in my apartment where I’m lost in thought, my peace-of-mind is disturbed. Although there’s a spread of instances I think of, the most noteworthy was also one of the earliest.
I was a UConn student in November 2016 (what else happened Nov. 2016? You know where this is going). I was living on campus and running the UConn branch of Gary Johnson’s campaign. If you’ve never heard of him, or just need a memory jog, Johnson was the Libertarian Party candidate, a third party designated by the color gold, a hedgehog mascot, and a reluctance by either major party to court its membership. My running the UConn branch of his campaign sounds more consequential than it was; really it meant that I got a bunch of free swag (t-shirts, buttons, stickers, magnets) and posted them around campus or handed them out to anyone who would take them (last time I was on campus, April 2019, at least one sticker still remained). It wasn’t a lot of people and, sure enough, Johnson only garnered about 3% of the vote that year.
We all know who won, and my being on a college campus meant that most people I saw were upset. Very upset.
That week a few of my classes took a day of grievance. It sounds melodramatic, but it’s reasonable for me to describe it as if we endured an unprecedented national disaster where many people suddenly died. I listened to students in my 25 person classes explain how they felt endangered and victimized and afraid. I’m not saying they shouldn’t have felt that way. I’m not saying their feelings were unjustified. I don’t know because I don’t have their personal experiences and, for all intents and purposes, these were strangers to me. All I knew was that I felt alright because I voted for who I wanted to vote for. There was a palpable sense of cognitive dissonance, spread amongst the student body; it stopped being only a question of who you voted for. The proper reaction became self-evident—only, there was intense disagreement about what constituted “proper”.
I went back to my dorm for the night and, after settling in, took a left down the hall towards the men’s bathroom. It was a short walk; three doors lined each wall, and I noticed on one dorm hung a handwritten sign: “Way to waste your vote, Trump is your fault.”
Now, I’m not the sort of person to assume something is intended for me just because it bothers me—but given that this guy lived 3 doors down from me, that he passed my room every time he went to or from the elevators (again, these were seventh floor dorms, so elevator use was frequent), and my door was plastered in Gary Johnson campaign paraphernalia, it seemed likely that this hand written sign was intended for me.
For now, let’s get past the fact that my third-party vote was cast in Connecticut, which reliably goes blue every year. I mention this because the most common ridicule third-party-voters receive is “you’re wasting your vote”. The idea is this: if you don’t vote for a candidate who has an equitable chance of winning compared to other candidates, then you’re throwing your vote away. It would be the same as not voting at all. The presupposition, however, is that voting is an act where the consequence determines the act’s efficacy. This is tantamount to saying everyone in CT who didn’t vote for Clinton wasted their vote in 2016, because Clinton won the state. But, again, let’s look past that.
Let’s also look past the murky conversation that could be had around the ethics of voting for a third party (things to consider include the Electoral College, First Past the Post, Deontology and Consequentialism, moral origination, ranked choice voting), and ignore the fact that it definitely does not suffice to say that voting for someone who isn’t likely to win is inherently a bad thing to do. We’ll ignore these gross simplifications and instead focus on the physical act of my floor mate writing that note. I want to know exactly what his mental process was.
This guy, we’ll call him J, he had to have thought about Trump winning, been upset, and looked for someone to blame. I imagine he came up with a lot of people from a lot of places; I certainly was not the only person he targeted.
J doesn’t just stew on that feeling. He actually takes action, which is a step further than most. Most people rue. Most people slow-cook a mental stew of things they hate and then take it out in unrelated ways on unrelated people. J, at least, took action, albeit passive-aggressive action. He writes up a note directed at me, and hangs it on his door, hoping that I will see it (and maybe a little bit hoping that I won’t). I think this is a great example of contemporary discourse, not only on politics, but on anything where people disagree as a matter of course. It’s passive-aggressive, almost an act of performance art. There’s no opportunity for discussion, it’s just about making your voice heard (I realize the irony of writing this on a privately hosted blog).
The act of targeting me for the election of Trump was ill-conceived, but this guy did it anyways. Why?
I think it has to do with where his ideas came from, where they originated. I don’t think he was intentionally ignoring faulty logic; I think it was all subconscious. His presuppositions, those ideas that are foundational to conscious cognition, those were faulty. He had no idea that he was shouting from the rooftop of a straw house. This is so often the case, and I want to talk about why.
I already wrote about this in a previous post, about where ideas come from. I don’t want to rehash old rhetoric, but damn if I’m not weary of seeing the same dumb conversations between acquaintances on Facebook. Many other people have written about how to listen to your interlocutor. It’s been done to death. Listening has a prerequisite assumption that you might be wrong. If you’re not considering that possibility then you’re not listening—you’re waiting until it’s your turn to talk. That “not-listening”, it practically equates to muting the other person unless they say something that you can lunge on. Instead of taking the strongest part of your interlocutors argument, you take the flimsiest, and then still misrepresent it with a straw man. It does nothing for your own growth; in fact, it stagnates your growth, because your opinions are never challenged. They become like muscles that are never flexed.
And yet, we still haven't breached the problem.
The problem happens before we speak. The problem happens before the conversation begins. The problem is with the way we form our ideas. There exist paradigms of consideration that are foundational to our ideas. Before even getting into a conversation, you can delineate the discrete concepts that people have and are willing to share (or maybe not so willing). What I mean is that there exists a nearly limitless number of concepts that are foundational to our understanding of the world. The way we understand and interpret ourselves, our surroundings, other people, and circumstances, these things are all built on bedrock foundations. These foundations are made up of learned behaviors and assumptions that become so second nature that we forget they exist. This is an important process, because otherwise we would likely go insane.
Imagine waking up one day with no presuppositions. No expectations of what was to come; everything would surprise you! You’d wake up and be shocked by the room you were in, by the dust suspended in the window sun beams, by the material and softness of your sheets. If you share your bed with a partner, their very existence and likeness to you would be staggering, perhaps enough-so that you would be paralyzed into inaction. You can see: unconscious expectations and assumptions are essential to our lives; they allow us to focus on higher-order faculties. We can make art, maintain careers and family lives, follow television programs, play sports, all because our brains are running an astonishing number of unconscious calculations. The effects of these unconscious calculations, however, don’t strictly stay beneath the waves, so to speak. They have profound effects on our thoughts and our actions.
What I’m about to write sounds self evident, so much so that it hardly warrants mentioning, but sometimes the most obvious concepts are the most important to revisit: as we move through life and grow older, we accrue experiences, and, through those experiences, we gain ideas. These ideas are about the world, about ourselves, other people, and frequently about non-tangibles. So while you can try a new food, like raw oysters, and discover that they’re tastier than they look (or maybe have your initial repulsion warranted), you can also develop a preference towards or against “trying new things.” Now you have an idea about the idea of “trying new things,” which is a concept, or an act. You can’t hold it and you can’t point to it, but you can add your new idea to your unconscious filing cabinet of concepts; a filing cabinet you’ve been building your entire life.
These ideas, these concepts, make up so much of what we construct to be our ideas of self, our egos. These concepts, however, don’t arise out of nothing; they are built on a bedrock of presuppositions, ideas that are accessible but are largely unconscious or rarely considered. Take, for example, a man that was raised with a faith in Jesus Christ. As a conscious person he has always had this faith, and has never strongly considered other possibilities. This man will build much of his self identity on his presuppositions about Christ. Similarly, he will build his concepts about himself, about life, and about how to navigate the world on his presuppositions about Christ (not only about Christ, of course, but that is the example we are using; it is a common example I think). He might occasionally reconsider his conscious ideas about what following Christ means (ex: can you support LGBT rights and be a good Christian?). But he will never reconsider the bedrock idea: that Christ is true. That bedrock idea represents all of our unconscious notions, the things we believe that we don’t realize we believe.
The next point is that these presuppositions don’t exist independently of one-another. Presuppositions have relationships with other presuppositions, and will form an unconscious paradigm. These paradigms are deeply powerful for conceptual maturation as one becomes an adult. These paradigms operate on a continuum, and they form various continuums. People use continuums to gauge just about everything. For example, there is a continuum that people use to discuss politics: the left to right spectrum. You may or may not know, but this particular spectrum is nonsense. It’s nonsense for 2 reasons:
1. The presentation of the left to right spectrum of political and social discussion in the United States is carefully curated in order to limit conceptual possibilities.
2. Political opinion isn’t representational on a linear spectrum; you need at least a 2 dimensional grid to capture most people’s viewpoints.
I’m going to investigate both of these points in more depth.
Point One
The presentation of the left to right political spectrum in the US is curated. I don’t know who it is curated by, and I don’t know the reason it’s curated. Many conspiracy organizations will try to persuade you that it’s curated in order to create two classes: the rulers and the ruled, or, more aptly, the rulers and the “sheeple”. That term is somewhat out of date, but the point remains the same: the idea would be that you are being duped in one way or another. This is an unlikely possibility; I don’t support theories that require an unusually large number of people to form a sort of organized cabal that can then rule from the shadows. People aren’t that competent; secrets leak too frequently.
Instead, it’s much more likely that we’ve been presented with how our contemporary media portrays the political spectrum because of a complex web of socio-political-historical reasons. This is a boring answer, I am aware. It’s much sexier to believe we’ve arrived at our present state because of an organization, but that’s rarely true. For the purposes of this blog post, however, the reasons are not relevant. We are where we are, and that’s not going to change anytime soon.
So, with that understanding, what does it mean? For starters, it means that out of all possibilities, we are being presented with a small sample size, and, importantly, that sample size is being presented as if it was all-encompassing.
If you went to buy a used car, and the salesman on the lot started reading off a bunch of statistics to you about how one of his cars had nation leading gas milage, and another one had industry leading torque, but you looked around and everything was twenty years out of date, you would be confused. That’s because claims about universalities, like “Nation leading gas milage” and “Industry leading torque” have to be compared to all cars in the set. Instead, this bozo is only taking a sample size of what is on his lot. So when he says car A has nation leading gas milage, he is referring to all cars in the nation that are currently on his parking lot. That is, clearly, a ridiculous claim. Anyone would recognize the salesman’s absurdity, and yet, when we talk about politics and the political spectrum, we are limited to a similar parking lot, when the potential spectrum is much, much broader.
It’s tough to discuss this topic because common analysis is so clearly fraudulent, and almost everyone writing about it in newspapers, talk shows, news stations, they all know that a foundational tenent of their conversation is fraudulent. Anyone with even a little formal education about political philosophy understands it. But any conversation about this is kept out of the spotlight. Maybe it’s bad for the bottom line of newspapers, because it’s very easy to be upset with people on the other side of the political isle when the divide is so stark and you know for sure that your side is the good side. Rage sells, perhaps even more than sex. And a with broad political grid that displays differences that are both minute and important, it’s a lot more difficult to pinpoint an enemy.
Again, I’m not saying this as a broader conspiracy, but it makes sense as a side effect of day-to-day business interests. We know this is how Facebook works at least (shout out to the Social Dilemma on Netflix). Incendiary posts online get more traction, more clicks, than “good news” posts or “feel good” posts. More clicks means more ad revenue. The rest is basic arithmetic.
I’m not going much deeper into this point. I’m not here to attempt a unilateral investigation for the reasons we are being presented with a fraudulent paradigm for political theory. We are, and it’s probably a result of general business interest. That’s enough for me to begin wrapping my head around it.
Point Two
This is tightly interwoven with Point One, but it’s a slightly different, and maybe larger, problem. Where point one explains that even on a lateral axis, we are being presented with a left to right divide that doesn’t accurately capture the imagination of political theory, point two explains that even were we to have a broader axis, we would actually need a 2-dimensional plane to more accurately capture political theory. This sounds complex, but it really isn’t.
To begin, I’ll pose a question: If the typical American political discussion exists on a left-to-right line, where the left promotes high spending, big social programs, and a lot of leniency towards personal choices, and the right argues for less spending (still a lot), but the spending is focused more on war and business, less on social programs, and personal choices are more tightly controlled and regulated, where does that leave a person like me?
My political beliefs are not the subject of this post, but they are useful to delineate briefly because I happen to be the sort of person who doesn’t land anywhere on the typical linear spectrum. I advocate for radically little spending, far less than either Democrats or Republicans, and I generally don’t support fiscal programs that either party sponsors; I rarely want money spent on federal social programs or on the military industrial complex. If the right is the side of little spending, then I’m far, far right. But socially, I don’t fit in there at all. I advocate for total legalization of drugs and I’m pro-immigration. So with these views combined, does that put me in the center? Certainly not, because many of these ideas are radical.
The point is this: unless your viewpoints on all variety of subject toe your party line, you don’t fit anywhere on the typical political line. We need another axis.
You remember from your primary math classes that a graph exists with an X axis and a Y axis. The X axis moves left to right, and the Y moves up and down. Political theory needs a Y axis, and both axes will extend in both directions. So instead of a graph where data points are plotted above and to the right of the axes, we will deal with four grids, where data points can be plotted above, below, to the left, and to the right of the axes. You can see how this graph looks here.
Okay, so now we have a better understanding of the normative political spectrum, and why it isn’t a proper representation of actual political theory. Still, like I said before, the spectrum (as opposed to the compass) is massively important to our cultural identities. Just take a look at Trump: his base of voters weren’t just party Republicans. He won the vote of people who are practically apolitical, meaning that they don’t care much about politics at all. These are the sort of people who drive around with MAGA flags on their trucks. These people are tribal, and Trump’s representation of their contempt for sophisticated rhetoric is their chief political stance. There is no replacement for Trump in this sense.
Further, Trump won the vote of so many disaffected progressives who were sick of neoliberalism in the Democratic Party. These are people who, at their heart, are very progressive, perhaps even radically so. These are people who would have voted Bernie Sanders given the opportunity. For this voter, the difference between Clinton and Trump is that one is right of them, and the other is giving speeches that suggest he wants to blow up the political paradigm. Neither represents you, but might as well shake things up a bit.
All three of these types of voters (as well as the many, many other varieties) are all categorized under the “right” vote. Regardless of where they stand on myriad complicated issues, they are boiled down to their vote and labeled right, or alt-right, or, increasingly over the last four years, bigots and racists.
Here’s where this ties in to the rest of this post: The predicate of an assumption that all Trump voters are racist is that all Trump voters look or act or think alike. The presupposition of that predication is that there exists a substantive and paradigmatic spectrum on which to categorize these voters. I know that was jargony, so let me give you the upshot: implicitly believing in a flawed political spectrum has allowed the media to lump fully half of American voters together on the right.
I’ve already demonstrated that this is false; that spectrum is deeply flawed, but so much is built on its existence. People argue online, family member to member, friend to friend. Divisions are sewn between people. How many folks have you seen post something like, “If you voted for Trump then unfriend me, I don’t want you in my life any more.” My friend list is about 200 on Facebook and out of that I saw at least three posts like it over the last two years. Everyone is caught up in their convictions such that they don’t stop to recognize they’re working off of faulty presuppositions. And the scary thing is, it’s not just about the political spectrum. So much is wrong about the way we assume reality to be.
If you made it all the way to the end of this post, then I’d like to ask you to do a short exercise. You owe it to yourself; you spent probably fifteen minutes reading this, might as well go whole-hog with it. So go get a pen and paper, and write down some of your strongest convictions. They could be religious, political, fiscal, social, regarding sexuality, ethics, sports, whatever. It doesn’t matter, just write them down. Then see if you can go one layer deeper: What are you basing that conviction on? Was it an experience you had many years ago, something like trying oysters for the first time, which made you dislike trying new things? If you can locate an experience, then see if you can deduce what presuppositions that experience established for you. Is it a simple linear spectrum that you use to classify the world? And if it is, then does that spectrum accurately reflect reality? I’m not here to tell anyone they’re right or wrong, but I am hoping to bring a little more self-reflection into people lives. It’s good to change, and it’s good to grow; we all should recognize that our ideals are not the end-all-be-all of reality.
So investigate that mental filing cabinet of concepts you’ve been arguing for all your life. One thing I can guarantee you is this: if that filing cabinet is dusty, then it’s certain to be chocked full of ill-advised ideas. I won’t go so far as to say you should be emptying it as often as you’re filling it, but it would do everyone good if we all revisited our presuppositions more often than we do.