The talking cactus at the RA
I’ve written you an emotional support checklist. Because Boris. Don’t shoot.
Okay, this’ll be quick and then I’ll shut up for good. But Boris Johnson is prime minister and we’re having a Brexshit. I have mild sunburn, my boyfriend’s cat just died and as I care about my friends and have been reminded recently of all of our mortalities, I’ve written you an emotional support checklist.
Oh god, you may think, but bear with me.
This checklist is to help you diagnose all your arguments with friends, family and colleagues between now and the next general election.
Which you will. The arguments I mean.
Even if you really don’t mean to.
It will just happen, like when you catch the toe of your shoe between paving stones, stumble a bit then look behind you, hoping nobody saw.
I am here for you.
I have A List.
Nothing on it will be a surprise to you or an original point, this is merely a handy summary or checklist to use going forward, should you find yourself in the middle of an *heated debate*.
An simple tool with which you can ‘diagnose’ the argument you are currently having from 1 through to 7.
1. Black and white thinking.
Deliberately misunderstanding another person’s view point, replacing it with a different and far more extreme view. And then arguing with their imaginary viewpoint instead.
Which is a bit easier, let’s face it.
Really tempting.
2. Whataboutism.
There is always going to be some far worse issue or person one should be attending to than the mistakes or wrongdoing of the person or issue currently on the table. If somebody is doing something even worse somewhere else then you’re meeting the diagnostic criteria for argument style 2.
3. ‘Media lies’.
Any evidence presented which does not support one’s hypothesis will be designated “media lies”. Only if it fits our/their/your/my wild theories will it be deemed unvarnished manly truth or a ‘special’ insight.
4. Getting personal
The personal insult. And on Twitter, and even on FB, the PI might come right out of the gate.
But I think it’s a useful trope, in some ways so Do slyly insinuate hidden personal agendas on the part of your opponents.This is a thing called naked psychological projection, so you putting your insults out there in the public domain will definitely save your personal therapist time and direct everybody else in how best to support you going forward. I advise this one.
5. Inside info.
While arguing, always suggest that you have inside information, unique personal insights, by way of irrefutable anecdotes (because only you were there) or else that you are in some way in touch with hidden truths, vis ‘the voice of the common man’. (Boris does this a lot. Although I honestly don’t know how many common men Boris can possibly meet on his carefully managed trips out and about. A few public schoolboys and the odd old lady dazed with sunburn, possibly.)
6. The Badness
‘Anyone who doesn’t agree with all my ideas about who we are, where we need to go or how we need to get there is a bad person. And *probably* supports [insert extremist event or idea].’
Oh, we see you baby.
We do.
Just stop it.
7. What ‘the people’ want.
I don’t know exactly who ‘the people’ are, I mean I’m fairly certain I’m people but how to really tell? But argument style seven is when you align yourself with a bunch of imaginary others as you speak. So that it’s not just you spouting off in a corner, you are in fact multitudinous. An interpreter, if you like, for ‘the people’, much in the same way that the pope is for God, and with a similar level of evidence required for your assertions. Because who needs evidence when there is an imaginary crowd behind you nodding vigorously at everything you say. And you are then perfectly positioned because anyone who presents evidence to the contrary is defying the will of … ‘the people’. That would make you an elitist. A silencer. And no-one wants to be that guy, except that … think about it, Five year olds argue like this. ‘My friends said … Everyone thinks it’s my ball.’
And so do mildly dementing old men in tweed jackets, ‘Well everyone at my club thinks it’s perfectly dreadful …’
The non evidence based ‘the people’ trope is just another version of this.
Anyway, persons beating hard users of argument style seven down with evidence will henceforth be committing the crime of cleverness and therefore will be designated ‘arrogant liberal elitists’ against whom ‘the people’ will somehow riot or cry out in some hazy future rioting scenario. But in the meantime they’ll express their dissatisfaction at ‘liberal elitism’ by putting children in cages. Stuff like that.
Except that they won’t.
Except that they didn’t.
Because these ‘the people’ simply don’t exist.
The ‘the people’ who wanted concentration camps and infants ripped out of their mothers arms in a bid to see their guy ‘get tough on immigration’ are entirely cooked up in the imagination of one man.
These ‘the people’ don’t exist. He has supporters, sure. And did his supporters enable him? Yes. Are they complicit in his abuses? Of course. But I doubt that more than approximately nobody among them actively wanted him to do what he then went and did. So the imaginary ‘the people’ on whose behalf he is acting all over are cover. That’s all. An convenient trope for an already privileged man to get even more of what he wants in order to serve his own group. If racism polls well then the argument style seven guy, in this instance Trump, will use it, but he doesn’t care either way. It’s just a rhetorical device. And argument style seven guy really doesn’t have any idea either about the disenfranchised group of poor whites whose voices he’s claiming as his own, and nor does he care anything about them. That’s clear.
The ‘the people’ trope is the most dangerous argument style in current use and it’s being used not only to make a claim on an already disenfranchised group’s voice for all sorts of activities which there is no real evidence that they have sanctioned. And in order to mock an evidence based approach which would help the same group. It’s also providing an awful lot of self righteous cover for a bunch of seriously sketchy shit to go on and all whilst claiming some sort of moral high ground against Liberals.
It’s an extremely successful stratagem, it’s profoundly dangerous and it is absolutely working. Argument style seven is basically gaslighting on a grand scale.
I don’t know what we do about it but we definitely should no longer be cowed or wrongfooted by the ‘the people’ trope. Nobody should any longer get to stroll around doing whatever takes their fancy under cover of the claim they speak for ‘the people’ without strong evidence that they in fact do so.
Argument style seven needs to die in a cage.
