Let's use more moderate language in politics

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
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I think it’s important to use less inflammatory and insulting language when we talk to people with different political ideas. I am certainly guilty of this myself, but I am going to try to improve that.

Why does it matter the words we use in political discussions/spaces? Two important truths recently coalesced in my understanding:

  1. Ratcheting up the negative and insulting words is increasing the overall tension, stress and anger in society, leading to more chaos and less thoughtfulness. IQ is going down as a result, on both sides.

  2. Society functions politically through a dialectical process, it requires opposing sides. But it also requires that these opposing sides not be SO opposing they cannot meaningfully function or even interact together. The animosity needs to be there for productive competition and emergence of syntheses to appear, but too much animosity and the optimization breaks down.

I don’t think any of us wants a civil war. It may seem silly or impossible to consider that another civil war could occur, but it really isn’t that far fetched. If the anger, opposition, stress, frustration becomes too much either side can initiate it. Depending who is in charge of the federal government, that party would have the upper hand initiating the separation. It could simply begin as a financial or legal separation, perhaps the federal government and/or a group of states would declare certain other state governments invalid, illegal, traitorous, terroristic, etc. The language can always be adjusted to fit the psyops and mass mood of the moment.

Maybe separation is inevitable, two Americas, but we should think hard about what that would mean. War gives unlimited power to governments to do whatever they want. Populist governments in a state of war have rarely been a good thing for the people living under it. The line between left and right blurs into totalitarianism for all, on both sides, and the party that wins will merely indicate which particular form of tyranny the people will now endure.

So let’s try to be better than that. See the best in each other. For example, I tend to rip on liberals a lot here, but I also rip on conservatives when I feel it’s called for. But in fact I see the good and truth-seeking, truth-responding nature in people on both sides. I really do. But like everyone else I too get caught up in the back and forth game of cheering a side or enjoying exposing some idiocy. I may want to expose errors and insult what I think are dangerous levels of ignorance and bad thinking, in part just to put it in its place but also as a means of hoping to goad that lower level toward a higher level. Still though. I can be better, I think we all can try to be better.

That doesn’t mean giving respect that isn’t there or compromising our beliefs. We should have a war of ideas. That is the nature of a free society, it is also the nature of philosophy. But to have a successful war of ideas means we all need to have thicker skin, so to speak. And stop trying to make things personal about a person, who they are; stick to attacking the ideas, not the person who espouses them.

Less emotionalism, more maturity. Less escalation of language, more precise conceptualizations. Less rubbing mistakes in their face, more humility and empathy. Less short term gain, more long term intentions. Less fun “owning the noobs” (sure we can still do some of that) and more trying to find the areas of compromise and overlap in our positions, to the mutual exploration and productive development of truths in the world.

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Given the Malthusian investigations of Meadows et. al. (Limits to Growth, 1972), which have been more recently cast into much more “socio-historic” terms by Jack Goldstone (developer of the Structural-Demographics Theory) and by Peter Turchin (founder of the mathematically sophisticated strand of research called Cliodynamics), we should perhaps start assuming the outbreak of American Civil War and start planning appropriately.

Arguments to the tune of “Can’t we all just get along?” have in recent decades seemed to be fruitful because there was always some economic tidal upsurge that could, as it were, lift all boats, and offer at least a scintilla of hope. Back of envelope calculations, however, are starting to show that “the world as we Americans have always known it” – in the form of an effectively infinite endowment of natural wealth – does indeed have limits.

If the existence of these limits cannot be openly admitted by the political establishment, and there cannot then be public discourse – followed by appropriate planning – as a way to proactively mitigate their negative consequences, then it is quite hard to envision how mere verbal pleading can accomplish very much in terms of bridging the rifts that divide the American body politic. An argument could easily be made that we had our chance to do such things, but we sqaundered it: that chance was called the Carter administration. And so in the voting booths in November 1980, it was a landslide: Deregulation over Moral-Equivalents-to-War! Give us news of exciting quarterly profits and not news of our spiritual malaise!!

Perhaps the most outspoken public figure on the deep reality behind these issues is Nate Hagens, who currently hosts a podcast/channel called The Great Simplification. The main argument there centers around the principle that economies, fundamentally, are functions of their energy inputs, and thus as the energy industry becomes less efficient due to various geological factors, then what inevitably follows the peak of effective energy productivity can only be described as “the end of the world as we know it” – if only our collective future could be as happy as an R.E.M. pop-anthem!