Mormon Books, Palestinian Party Hats, And Weaponised Offence
Everyone has the right to be offended, but it’s still just a choice (like what colour pants you choose to wear).
Humans are weird. That was my thought as two separate but cognitively linked things happened on the same day in my life. In the morning, over a nice cup of coffee, the Significant Other Penguin told me that a large UK retailer had got some backlash after its Christmas advert featured paper hats in the colours of the Palestinian hats burning in a fireplace.
Later that same day the Significant Other Penguin and I grabbed last-minute tickets to ‘The Book of Mormon’ — a show that was so offensive in both word and deed that even I was a little shocked. Nothing was off-limits and if you’ve seen it, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
I sat behind a sweet old lady and her middle-aged daughter and listened to them both cackle loudly throughout the show. A show which features jokes about cancer, religion, repressed homosexuality, female genital mutilation and AIDS.
I want to tell you two things.
Firstly, to my knoweldge, not a single person walked out of that show and at the end there was a standing ovation. Secondly, because I’ve been in one, I can tell you that Christmas adverts are filmed in the height of summer. It might look festive and cosy but the actors therein are often sweating buckets and doing their best not to die of heatstroke between takes.
Three days ago the same retailer was then forced to omit a scene from a different advert because the eye-shadow choices of their actor was too close to the Israeli flag.
Make-up chosen, in all likelihood, to suit the complexion of the actress rather than a covert signal of political support planted a good three months ahead of the start of shit-show in the Middle East in a British Christmas advert to sell biscuits.
The Book of Mormon has been playing since February 24th 2011 on Broadway and moved to London in March 2013. Even after a decade in the West End, it continues to be a sell-out show with tickets starting at around £80. The SOP and I nabbed last minute ones for £25 each (an absolute bargain).
So here’s my question. And I’ll try and put it as succinctly as possible. What the fuck is all this about?!
Weaponising offence to win political points
You have the right to be offended by anything, you’re human. You’re allowed to feel things. Emotional responses are an integral part of a functional life and a functional brain.
Without being able to experience the full gamut of emotional responses via your limbic system, life would appear meaningless. If being upset is the cost I have to pay for the sheer joy of laughing until milk comes out of my nose — it is a price I willingly pay.
But being upset is an emotional response.
That’s not the same thing as being offended.
Being offended is a decision made after the fact. It’s an entirely different part of your brain altogether. To be offended, you have to leverage your cortex into the past, retrieve a memory, make a judgement call, then project yourself into the future and consider how to behave next.
This is not the same thing at all.
Consider the last time a small child said something rude to you.
Those bug-eyed sticky little crotchfruit are forever misgendering people, commenting on weight, age or appearance. They are, in their unique way, some of the most interesting and hilarious humans to be around.
They haven’t learned to filter yet. So we post-hoc filter for them.
Sure… sometimes we have to do this whilst we’re crying at the gym, but we still do it. Even if we are upset by their comments we don’t ‘take offence’ at what they have said because we know they are too young to hold a decent theory of mind.
Words have the power to hurt you. You’re allowed to be hurt. You do not need to be offended by those words.
‘I’m sorry you feel offended’ is what I used to say. So hedgy it could be placed outside a manor house and turned into a maze. ‘I’m sorry you feel offended’ is an unsubtle linguistic sleight of hand — neither an apology nor a withdrawal.
Standing your ground but pissing on your own shoes
These days when someone pops up to say ‘I find what you’ve written offensive’ — my go-to reply is “I find your comment about taking offence to be offensive”. That’s how quickly you can render the offence argument reductive and meaningless.
Now we’re both ‘offended’, back to square one and seeing as you started it, you owe both of us an apology.
Likewise, if you’re ever confronted with the phrase ‘some people might find that offensive’ then simply nod and agree. That’s true. It doesn’t matter what you do, there will be someone somewhere who finds it offensive.
Someone found eye-shadow offensive.
You can go around being innocuous and non-offensive to everyone if you like, but it seems like the quickest way to beige yourself into anxiety. Accept that someone somewhere is likely to be offended by what you say or do and then do or say it anyway.
Not simply to be gratuitous — it’s just that after half a decade of blogging I have a kill-count of zero. Nobody has ever died from taking offence.
That’s what I liked most about The Book of Mormon there was a collective decision that the rules of decency didn’t count in that time and place. The cast just did it anyway and the audience accepted in good faith.
What’s more bizarre is that the same people who are offended by the colour of Christmas hats and Israeli eye-shadow are also the same people who have likely seen Book of Mormon and found it hilarious.
They make a choice about when they are offended. That choice is context-specific and politically motivated. If you are emotionally traumatised by paper hats burning, then what you need is a rest and some therapy, you do not need to be given credence in an online forum.
What Marks and Spencer should have done is exactly what Book of Mormon did, ignored everyone. Because we’re now in a batshit world where I have to hear about cancelled Christmas adverts in the morning and then listen to songs about FGM in the afternoon — and pretend this makes sense
The problem with running a social contract on the basis that ‘some people’ might be offended is that you have to make a subjective judgment on whether those ‘some people’ matter or not.
If you conclude that it’s okay to offend ‘some people’ because you disagree with their political stance then why can’t they do the same to you? Why can’t all of us do the same to you? Who made you the arbiter of justice in the modern age anyway?
Either everyone’s opinion matters or nobody’s opinion matters.
Considering ‘everyone’ also includes the subsection ‘idiots scoring political points’ it’s important to realise as quickly as you can that nobody’s opinion matters.
Try it. It’s very creatively freeing.
The policing of language cuts both ways — what can be done by the left can be done by the right. I find both sides equally pernicious and will always argue against whichever group tries the hardest to hijack language for their own political ends.
If you’re offended more by LGBTQ+ books about trans-kids being on the shelves of schools than you are by The Family International and their credible history of child molestation then I’ve got a three-word-phrase you’ll love.
Likewise, if you’re offended because some Christmas hats and eyeshadow allowed you to sound off on Twitter to win kudos in an echo chamber of neophytic political fucktards then it might be time to get over yourself.
It’s a toss-up between the left and right who go into the best histrionics at the first sign of dissent. I have very little time for the extremes of either.
Why I don’t like weaponised offence
When someone plays the ‘offence’ card, what they’re really doing is appealing to your very human desire not to hurt other people. It’s an appeal to our better natures and it’s an appeal couched in dishonesty.
Most of us don’t want to be the sort of person who hurts others.
I certainly don’t. Sadly, my better nature has withered of late.
When someone tells me that I’m being offensive, or they’ve been offended by something I’ve written, I’m faced with a judgment call. I have to weigh up any emotional damage they may have accrued against their desire to control and deflect attention away from whatever is being discussed.
What isn’t immediately obvious is whether a given person is genuinely hurt by my words or whether they’re just carrying me off into a subjunctive fiction where everything I’ve written is reputed to have earth-shattering emotional consequences.
In most cases, it’s the latter. That makes it their problem. It is their choice to ruminate on my words.
Once again nobody ever died of being offended. Maybe Miss Havisham, but she had to wait 60 years, corrupt a young girl’s soul to unspeakable cruelty and die in a fire.
When you tell me that ‘you’re offended’ what you’re doing is asking me to change my view based on your subjective experience. So what? I already wrote an article asking you to change yours based on mine.
When being offended replaces ‘a genuine threat to life’ in the eyes of a pluralistic society, we no longer have a social contract — we have a complex ideological bun fight without any rules.
The technology to do so is now available and most of us put our thoughts online in some capacity. Most don’t. Moderates should. And urgently.
If words are treated as weapons rather than transient communicative moments and the policing of language begins in earnest. If we’re going to police what people say and how people think based on offence, we need to give some serious thought to the implications.
This is becoming problematic. The bar for offence is continually lowered whilst the cost of causing offence is raised at an alarming rate.
A safe digital space isn’t safe
If you’re the sort of person who is easily offended then you likely won’t enjoy my work. That’s a you problem. You can deal with lengthening the gap between your feelings and your thoughts on your own.
Here’s why I don’t get offended and why you shouldn’t either. If someone sets out to offend me — and plenty of people do every week, then taking offence is the quickest way to reward that behaviour.
Why would I do that?
I’ll give as good as I get in the comments section here and elsewhere with a smile on my face. I can’t control how other people feel, I can simply control how I feel — and I feel fine.
The social experiment we’re attempting with The Panopticon is to create an anti-safe space. The digital world is inexorably sliding towards a ideological mess where everyone poses extreme theoretical danger to everyone else at all times.
We are getting to the worrying stage where the tools for the perpetuation of our own stupidity are readily available. Weaponised offence is part of that — invoking echo chamber thinking and using the block button to avert perceived danger
Not actual danger. Emotional danger. Offence.
Society cannot afford ‘safe spaces’, they aren’t safe in the long run. They create philosophical myopia and ego-infantilisation — they lead to radical children, ideologically driven but without the ability to question.
Those people are dangerous, whatever quarter of society they emerge from. Universities, churches, online forums, it doesn’t matter. The key to a healthy society is the exchange of goodwill and ideas.
Society is now at a place where it has altered the nature of ‘facts’ to suit the individual . This is worrying. In a recent discussion, someone told me society has a problem because we can no longer look out of a window and agree on simple things like ‘is it is raining or not?’
He had a point. But I think he’s missing a single vital nuance.
Society is now looking through multiple windows at multiple weather systems because of technology. Weaponising your offence, blocking people and joining an echo chamber is a surefire way to keep your window clean enough to make your best-informed judgement about the weather.
But that’s just your best-informed judgment. Why wouldn’t it be? It’s your window. You have no idea what the hell you’re missing.
So instead of leaning into the echo chamber, The Panopticon is going to create a gladiatorial pit. A place where wordsmiths and thinkers can come and not be ideologically safe at all. Where they can throw ideological fireballs at each other safe in the knowledge that everyone who signs up to write here is fireproof.
We all take our ideological windows, point them at the same circular arena and then watch as a Penguin (who doesn’t get offended) goes to town on a bunch of other folk (who also don’t get offended) and we kick seven-shades-of-shit out of each other until we agree that perhaps the weather is changeable.
Or drizzle. I fucking love a bit of drizzle. Now, go forth and be a little more Book of Mormon and a little less Christmas Advert histrionics in your life.
THE PANOPTICON NEEDS YOU!
If you’d like to write a rebuttal or furnish the world with a different take on my most recent piece (that offended everyone and nobody at the same time) then please feel free.
You can even call me names if you like, I won’t be offended for all the reasons outlined in the article above. Fireproof.
There’s already plenty of interesting back and forth to read in the comments section — and only a few people have called me nasty names thus far.
Show us what you can see through your window. Every perspective matters.
