If we long for a better world of mutual understanding and peace, says Jeffrey Tucker in this guest post, one way to help achieve it is to live as if it already exists. Never let politics take that away from you.
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Has the American election season always been this rough on friendships?
So many people I know are getting into Facebook fights, Twitter wars, Instagram arguments, and Snapchat squabbles. What begins as an ideological dispute ends in bitterness. People are provoking others, demanding those who do or don’t support their candidate leave their networks, cutting ties with friends and family – and all because of political differences.
[And most folk doing this in New Zealand don’t even vote! - Ed.]
It’s a pity to cause permanent rifts, and so unnecessary. The people who rearrange their personal relationships for the election imagine that they are taking control of their lives. They don’t seem to realise that they are actually letting strangers control their lives – strangers who care nothing for them in a system that actually seeks to divide people so it can conquer them. To permit politics to fundamentally alter something so important as friendship is to give politicians more importance than they deserve.
Trolling and Banning
Now, of course there is a proviso here. If there is someone in your network who is deliberately trolling you, harassing you, and goading you to respond, the best possible response is to block them. Not talk back. Not engage in a tit for tat. Just quietly block, without drama or announcement, much less denunciation.
Apart from these cases, it strikes me as pointless to hurl someone out of your life because of political differences.
First, by denying yourself access to different points of view, you risk isolating yourself from a critic who might teach you something you need to know, maybe about anything in life, but maybe even about politics.
Second, talking to people with different opinions keeps you making sense and speaking in a civil way, addressing others in a way that could persuade them.
Third, and most critically, to isolate yourself, hate others for their views, and regard people with different points of view as less deserving of dignified treatment, plays into exactly what the political system wants for you to do.
But Aren’t They Aggressors?
A counter to my point was offered by a friend of mine last year. Speaking as a libertarian, he said, he regards anyone who supports some government action – even just casually and without much thought – as wittingly or unwittingly contributing to an opinion culture that supports rising political violence. The only friends he believes deserve the time of day from him must hold steadfastly to his voluntarist perspective, else he regards them as a direct threat to his life and liberty.
For example, if a person favours higher spending on public education, they believe that they are pushing for policies that are good for others, not calling for violence against taxpayers to support unworkable programs. How can you possibly persuade them otherwise if you cut off all ties?
And it’s not just libertarians who can be this way. A good friend of mine was a casual lefty and, like most from his tribe, he was dead serious about the issue of climate change. I had no idea until the subject came up over coffee. I expressed some doubt that the science was truly settled concerning all causes and effects, solutions, costs and benefits, and so on. I was actually very measured in my comments, but somehow they caused him to blow up, call me a science-denying, tin-foil-hat-wearing capitalist apologist, and then actually leave the conversation. And that was it.
I was stunned. I was merely disagreeing with him, however cautiously. But somehow, he had come to believe that anyone who disagreed with him bears some responsibility for the rising sea levels, the melting of the polar ice caps, and the gradual disintegration of the planet, even though I’ve written very little on the topic at all.
He was letting politics control his life and even determine his friendships. Both of us are spiritually poorer as a result of this friendship loss.
What Is the Point of Friendship?
What the libertarian and the lefty I mentioned above do not realise is that they are guilty of the same error of allowing politics to invade the conduct of their lives and determine the conditions of their personal happiness. Once this kind of thing starts, there is truly no end to it.
Must everyone agree with you on every jot and tittle of your ideology to be your friend? Must there be zero tolerance for even the slightest difference in outlook, priority, application, and goal of your particular political outlook? In other words, must all your friends believe exactly as you believe?
I like to think of friendship much the way we think of economic exchange. In economics, goods and services do not exchange in the presence of perfect sameness. They exchange because each party to the exchange believes himself or herself will be better off than he or she was before the exchange. It is only in the presence of unequal expectations that exchange becomes mutually rewarding.
It is the same with friendship. We need to hear different points of view. We need the insights of others. Even if we don’t accept them in total, we can still hope to understand people and the world better by considering what others have to say – with sincerity, warmth, and honesty. In other words, friendships like this help us have an open mind and keep us all humble and teachable.
Candidates Will Betray You
Neither is it a good idea to give up a friendship based on loyalty to a particular candidate. The top two contenders for the presidency have held many different and conflicting views on a huge range of political issues, from taxation to immigration to war. And so it is with every election. These people are wired to be adaptable based on the polls. To follow one or the other all the way to the point that it affects your associations is to risk compromising your own intellectual integrity.
One of the great tragedies of politics is that it can take people who in real life would be peaceful and loyal and loving friends and turn them into bitter enemies. I’m always struck by this when I see a political rally, with face offs between backers and protesters. What exactly is gained by this? If you put these same people in a shopping mall or movie theater or restaurant, they would have every reason to get along and no reason to be screaming obscenities at each other.
We should hold on to that realisation. Each of us is a human being with feelings, hopes, dreams, and a vision of a life well-lived – every single person, regardless of race, religion, gender identity, or ideology. Politics should change nothing about that.
If we long for a better world of mutual understanding and peace, one way to help achieve it is to live as if it already exists. Above all, that means never letting politics get in the way of rewarding human relationships.
This post first appeared at FEE.
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4 comments:
" Might as well stay home and reflect on your own infallibility." Amen. Nor does it help to note that politics is a game played by selfish individuals for ends they do not publicize. The most ridiculous case in my experience came up over policies fought over for the first 40 years after Canada's Confederation ( 1867 ) regarding tariff protections.
A deceased friend was an international photojournalist who had me read the biography of once CIA head Nelson A. Rockefeller. If it had been a thriller it could have been little less riveting. And one little entry said that in 1945 elimination of the tariff wall to Canada was an agenda on his desk. ( Background : Canada's population is laid out in a band along the US border for thousands of kilometers. Freight costs east to west within the country vastly exceed the costs of north-south cartage...i.e. from the US. The most natural consequence of free trade is to become dependent on US sources. )
Fast forward to 1993, when Brian Mulroney had laid down the leadership of the governing Progressive Conservatives ( not just marketing : the result of an old merging of parties ) and a pretty young lawyer ( Kim Campbell ) was PM going into the election. But public resentment was high against a party which had changed federal tax from a hidden tax to a tax publicly charged on every retail sale ( partly a complication of Free Trade. You don't want to tax domestic production but not imports. ) The Goods and Services Tax was therefore the death knell for the PC's ( God Save the Tories. Nobody Else Will ) , who won 2 seats nationally ( one of which was Campbell's ) Anyway, getting to it. The Liberal Party ( should that not be spelled Lie-beral ? ) ran on a red book of election promises. People desperate to get rid of the Cons practiced targeted voting and elected them. And the little red book was never heard from again. It any promise was kept I cannot recall it. Instead government ran with the platform that had eliminated the 'competition.'
For me, that was the best lesson about politics that I ever could have had.
There has to be a line, though. I think everyone who frequents this blog would be perfectly fine cutting someone out of their life if they became a skinhead or joined the KKK, even if they joined it for the social aspects and never burned a cross.
Of course, in a rational society this wouldn't be an issue. Pressure-group warfare necessitates this sort of behavior: he who screams the loudest gets the most loot. You end up with various sides screaming their fool heads off in order to get that sweet government financing (note that protests are never about government intervention, but only who the government helps). The more conspiracy-theorist side of me wants to say that this is encouraged by the powerful, but the reality is that this is the inevitable consequence of government handouts. There has to be some criteria by which governments choose who to distribute resources to, and our society has chosen "The loudest get the most".
yeah, well sometimes I forgive them, but if he's an urban planner?
I get away with a fair bit on this site, and possibly because of the libertarian outlook.
I am allowed on over at KiwiPolitico, but places like the Pundit, Standard and Daily Bog and so on upgrade their expanding ban list of IP addresses regularly.
There is plenty of intolerance over at Kiwipropaganda also. The ludicrous system of ticks and down crosses helped turn that show from good to bad .
Dinwar [3.15] above, Our next meeting of the Fascists and Rednecks Society is in Christchurch next month if you want to come. We have two immigrant members, Hungarian chaps, and they say that compared to the European alt-right we are pansies.
My father and his friends did not openly or easily talk about politics at all. Talking about politics was something for those from the other side of the railway tracks to be engaged with. Unions were bad, I knew that much.
In a similar the same way but for different reasons some of us now very rarely talk about our income, or assets.
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