SOCIETAL DROPOUT
The Smartest Way to Play the Culture War Game Is Not to Play At All
Sometimes, not playing is the same thing as winning.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve racked yourself endlessly over the question of how to go about navigating a social media scene that seems as if it’s lost its marbles.
You know deep down that judging people to be Hitler-like villains or Theresa-like saints on the basis of how well they’ve managed to self-censor themselves — or say the “right,” performative things — is insane.
Let me say that again.
It’s insane.
Likewise, you might be feeling as if it’s equally insane to completely define yourself as the opposition to insane people, which necessitates that you take on, defend, and hold views that are just as vapid and intellectually hollow.
Both sides of this equation are playing a stupid game, and it’s a game that will destroy you unless you learn how to drop out of it.
Some part of your human nature understands that people are rarely all good or all bad. We each have negative qualities and positive qualities and — for the most part — we try to limit the negative influences we put out to make space for the positives.
Even if we don’t always get it right, it seems that most human beings have done their best since our ancestors first started walking upright.
I mean, how could we even have gotten this far as a society if we were mostly evil? If we were mostly evil, we would have destroyed ourselves long ago, because no species that works entirely against itself survives for long.
But take a look around, and you’ll quickly discover a toxic atmosphere that’s become completely overrun with cynicism and pessimism regarding the human condition.
Everyone, everywhere it seems, is evil.
More than being evil, they don’t even know they are evil, and they need the good people to instruct — aka brainwash — them as to how to be good.
So the game people are playing right now is one of endless, digital shouting.
Perhaps even more toxic, it’s one of endless moral competition, where the only way to feel like you’re going to be able to “fit in” is to play a constant, zero-sum game of moral one-upmanship to show to your fellows that you are, indeed, on the “right side” of history.
But rather than going out and proving to society that we are good people through our acts and deeds, we feel that it is only necessary to constantly claim to be so on social media, and to denounce those who refuse to parrot the views we believe place us on the “good” side.
In this environment, emotional and psychological bullying have become acceptable tactics in the pursuit of a “fairer, juster” world, and centuries of legal and intellectual progress is dismissed in favor of rallying digital mobs that unashamedly harass and intimidate people into saying the right things, all on the irrational, religious-like belief that they are evil and deserve to be scapegoated.
Is it ridiculous to suggest that there are tens of thousands (and hopefully only that many) of people suffering from some form of mental illness, and who cope by constantly finding new strangers to throw digital stones at?
Yelling at strangers that you will never meet is a mental disorder.
— Naval Ravikant
No healthy, happy individual (and indeed even a person who has made it their mission to positively change the world) goes around constantly attacking other people or trying to sow hatred and division among the populace.
They don’t go around telling people to abandon age-old friendships and to actively hate their family members because that’s how you dismantle the particular “ism” of the day.
The people making real change in the world don’t waste all their time and energy deliberately finding and attacking digital phantoms that disappear almost as soon as they’ve been “clapped” at.
They’re too busy working on themselves and trying to help others to play that kind of game, which only ever creates more drama and resentment between people, never peace, understanding, and reconciliation.
And I say all this as a person who played this toxic game, for a time.
I went around constantly arguing with people on the internet and attempting to scapegoat them for what I saw as being all the world’s ills.
What did it get me?
Nothing more than feeling even worse about myself than I did before.
All I had been doing was attempting to make up for my own insecurities by putting other people down to lift myself up, but all the real reasons I felt insecure in the first place were still going unaddressed.
Believe me when I say I’ve felt the temptation to say the right things for fear of protecting my future, safeguarding my reputation, and preserving my friendships.
I’ve engaged in performative speech because, at one point in time, I thought that this is what I really had to do to be a good “ally.” My desire to act compassionately prompted me to believe that I had to self-flagellate to advance social equality. It made me believe that others had to see my self-flagellation in progress for it to “count.”
The truth, however, is that I never felt worse than when I forced myself to say things I didn’t really believe because I thought that’s what would make other people happy.
Thank my lucky stars that phase of my life didn’t last long, because if it did, I shudder to think about how much more negative my mindset toward the world would have had to become before I woke the fuck up and got out.
And “getting out” is a great phrase for describing what needs to be done.
“Dropping out” works just as well.
Because when you see crowds of people playing a game that doesn’t lead anywhere but to more negativity and division, the rational thing to do isn’t to try and jump in and start throwing blows along with them.
In fact, that is the irrational thing to do.
It’s to drop out entirely and figure out how to make the world a better place in a way that doesn’t require you to coax people into constantly giving in to their dark side while thinking that it’s their light.
But once again, if you’re anything like me, you’ve constantly felt like you need to “fight back” against bad ideas — from all sides of the aisle.
Don’t.
Let me repeat: don’t.
In this shit-circus of an environment, when you fight bad ideas, you are automatically defined as the opposition to whichever crusader of the day are you are engaging with.
Crusaders aren’t interested in nuanced. Unless you express the same zeal as a crusader, you are a heathen, and heathens exist to be destroyed.
It is literally impossible to try and have a nuanced take with some people, and the more language you serve out trying to counter bad ideas or explain yourself, the more these people see it as evidence that you are, indeed, as corrupt as they paint you to be.
You’re far better off protecting your time, energy, and sanity by ignoring the vast majority of what you see on the internet while going about setting the best example you possibly can in your actual life and shining a spotlight on the people and ideas that you think are doing genuine good in the world.
Doing that will inspire far more positive change in others than any amount of digital boxing ever will.
The only time — repeat: only — we should consider fighting bad ideas is if we actually end up a person of influence and the bad ideas come after us, wanting to destroy everything we’ve worked to build.
In that case, we have a right to defend ourselves and our principles.
But that’s not something that most of us — thankfully — have to worry about.
At least not yet.
Most of us are just regular Joe Shmoes on the internet trying to get by without feeling constantly under attack.
The best way to do that is, once again, to drop out.
To ignore everyone and everything that’s toxic, because they don’t deserve your attention.
You do.
The people and things you love deserve your focus.
So leave the game entirely.
Not playing, in this particular instance, is the same thing as winning.
The goal of their game is to suck you into a vortex of toxicity that will erode the very fabric of your sanity.
And at the end of the day, there are so many other things to talk about than whatever the particular, culture war bullshit of the day is.
I’m quite fond of Rose’s line in Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, as I think it gets at a much better way of changing oneself and the world.
That’s how we’re gonna win. Not fighting what we hate. Saving what we love.
— Rose Tico
Right now, platforms like Twitter are overrun with people fighting what they hate instead of saving what they love, and the worst part is, they’ve duped themselves into thinking that this is, in fact, how they save the things worth saving.
It’s a tragedy that they can’t see how they are only hurting themselves and others. But you can’t try to “wake” anybody up. Because neither you nor I are “woken” up yet.
It’s believing that we are “awake” to the point where we feel justified to go shake others out of their slumber that’s the problem, and that’s the game that we need to stop playing.
If you can stand apart from that long enough to see what is going on, then it becomes quite easy to know what to do.
To paraphrase the British philosopher Alan Watts, to become aware of a problem — to truly understand it — is the same thing as knowing what to do about it.
When it comes to this particular problem, then, it pays for each of us to ask a critical question.
Jump in, fight, and lose with nothing to show for it?
Or drop out, recuperate our energies, and figure out how to save what we love, in our own way?