The collapse of conversation

When I was growing up, we used to laugh at a moralising certainty that was the purview of stuffy conservatives on the Right.

But as Matt Taibi wrote in 2020, “We laughed at the Republican busybody who couldn’t joke, declared war on dirty paintings, and peered through your bedroom window. Now that person has switched sides, and nobody’s laughing.”

Taibi’s point was that much of that moralising has migrated to the Left. I see it a lot, and as someone who generally leans left, it’s frustrating to see people shooting themselves in the foot.

If you constantly announce your opinions as pre-given truths that any sane person would believe, you’re making it much less likely others will come to understand your view. Here’s what happens: they hear your view, but it doesn’t resonate. You seem very certain, and they don’t get it, so they stay put, perhaps even more convinced of their original position. In other words, the binary nature of your beliefs fuels theirs.

This kind of opinion declaration is now commonplace—a huffing impatience. It might come from a good place, wherein someone thinks the issue is important enough that they should take a hard stance on it. But in the end, it backfires.

The conversation that needs to happen collapses and instead, we have performative rehashing of the same slogans and soundbites. This is bad for everyone.

One retort is that things are bad, that people can’t see what’s in front of their eyes—we need to be firm. I was going to criticise this as a turn to cynicism, but it seems that cynicism is now actively embraced. If the Left becomes cynical about people, the whole political climate stagnates.

Regardless of political orientation, this declaration of opinions just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You end up shutting yourself off from new perspectives, you see all detractors as obstacles, and you end up feeling increasingly resentful.

I say all this, of course, as someone who’s done their fair share of huffing. Certainty feels good—right up until you realise that feeling “in the right” doesn’t correlate with actual change. If shouting our truth at each other actually worked, we’d probably all agree by now.