Sometimes people ask me why I don’t cite sources in many of my arguments, and I think that is a fair question to ask. The thing is, there was a time when I did that to absurd detail. I would post many links to peer reviewed articles, and some news media sites that broke down what was being said, taking time to be as accurate as possible, sometimes spending hours doing so, and you know what the end result of that was?
They’d ignore it entirely or find some niggling detail that wasn’t at all relevant to the primary argument being made. All of that effort for nothing.
Now, you might think it wasn’t for nothing, because someone else might have seen those links, read them, and changed their minds. I’d like to believe that because I am always open to new information, but the time of people actively stepping into a debate with a willingness to listen has long passed. We’ve entered an age of social bubbles, especially online, where even if you disagree with someone, you don’t want to be seen as making waves in the group.
I say “we’ve entered an age” but we’ve always had this in some form of human behavior, it’s just being online has made it more prevalent. I remember back in the early 2000s, when I was still learning more about myself (a lot of change was happening for me at this time), and I would talk to people who were on a different ideological wavelength than I was, and we’d actually share between each other, trying to get to understand each other.
I don’t see that so much these days. It’s more hard headed stubbornness than anything. It’s less about being correct and more about feeling “right,” in the sense that no amount of information will change the position of someone who takes pleasure in being “right.”
I have told people before, and it has always been true for me: I will gladly take a cold truth over a warm lie any day. Maybe it’s a result of my earlier years when I was a Christian fundamentalist. The Bible said that the truth would set you free, and I believed it.
I still believe the basic principle that knowing the truth of a situation empowers you. The problem these days is getting other people to see that truth, because we honestly live in a post-fact world, and it’s frustrating, almost like you’ve become Cassandra, cursed to tell people what will happen and being mocked for it as they continue down a path of destruction.
Is all of this subjective? To a point. Truth, lie, right, wrong, these are often see as malleable, and they are, because humans are malleable. We can be goaded, coerced, into taking positions against our own interests in an effort to get us to go along with the power structure of the day.
For me, I push back against that malleability dependent upon how it affects human beings, or the environment. When someone tells me something they believe is factual, it goes right into my own heuristic analysis, taking into account context, history, and its effects on others.
It’s why I am who I am today, because I weighed the data I was given up against my own biases, checked those biases up against history, context, and how it affected other people, and built a determination from that.
None of this is foolproof. Part of my error checking relies on understanding history and, like all things when it comes to humans, that can be “massaged” into telling a different story than what happened, and so I am always vigilant about falling too heavily into my biases and my knowledge.
This means it requires effort to effectively parse out factual data from hyperbole and misdirection (lying). It is not 100%, but then nothing experienced within the framework of human perception is, and no one is always going to be correct, so I also try to give the benefit of the doubt when someone says something I know is wrong.
All of this is just a way to say that I no longer post so many sources anymore because so many people simply do not care for it. They especially don’t like if, on the rare occasion when they post them, I read their sources and charts (which I do) and find that what they claimed the article read and what the article actually says are two different things.
See, I verify my data. I don’t glance at a headline and say “good enough,” I read the contents. I check alternate sources. Charts can be intimidating because there’s often massive amounts of data on it and checking it all is time consuming, which is an old tactic called “burying them in paperwork.” The idea being that because the data seems so voluminous, it must be true, but we all know that bullshit generally comes in piles, and so you can’t just assume that data is accurate.
So it becomes almost moot to post data, because so many people have watered down the method that anyone can post anything and since so few will actually check it before agreeing or disagreeing, it is wasted time.
Now, that’s not always the case, but when it comes to online arguments, it might as well be, because like in actual debates, it’s less about substance and more about style. As long as you appear to be on the right side of things, that is enough for most people.
I want to be clear that there ARE objective facts, that there can be a right or wrong in a particular situation, but internet debate doesn’t care about facts, and the right or wrong it focuses upon is aesthetic, and doesn’t dig down into the substance of the argument.
Plus, more cynically, it’s far easier to drown people in bullshit on the internet because there requires no effort to say something wildly inaccurate and get people nodding their heads. Our education system, and I can only speak for America on this, is grossly inadequate. As a result, people don’t think critically, they just listen to the loudest voice.
Yes, this is how Donald Trump became president, but that’s a discussion for another day.
.Red
