It’s not me or you, it’s us
When I first started writing on Medium, I said I was driven by a desire to understand myself and put it out there as a legacy for my son. It turns out I was (mostly) wrong. I write because of a desire to communicate, and the difficulty I was having with that was — again — for reasons other than the ones I initially thought.
Despite starting with a fluff piece as my first Medium post, the idea that was really burning a hole in my psyche was the China one. I held off on publishing it first because I was afraid of how it’d look to my friends. In the piece, I alluded to the multitude of arguments I’d compiled refuting all of the anti-China rhetoric that was (and still is) prevalent throughout mainstream media, saying:
I’d actually written many, many paragraphs on these topics already but decided to edit them out, in a vain attempt to show with this little gesture of restraint that I haven’t completely veered off the deep end. But I’ll gleefully discuss the merits of any or all of these accusations at great length. Try me.
Hidden within those sentences is the truth about the reason I write. I desperately wanted to talk about those things. To share what I believed was the truth. To discuss what I’d learned with people I know and trust. But in the end I chickened out and packed it all neatly away into the sentences above and muddled towards an alternative conclusion that pointed the finger at racism.
Some people share their thoughts on Social Media in the belief that their curated social graph creates a walled garden that affords them the luxury of speaking freely. I blog because my blog (and this extension of it) is my safe space, a little corner of the internet over which I have complete control, and where only people who value my thoughts and opinions would visit. But posting there no longer gave me any satisfaction. I’d whittled my social graph down to a tiny echo-chamber consisting only of amazing people who love me and make me feel safe, and even then, I didn’t feel safe to speak.
What is that fear?
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One notion I firmly stand behind in my previous post, was calling out an epidemic of tribalism. In our fast-paced, post-truth world, we rely on intellectual shortcuts to help us manage the firehose of information pointed at us (even as I write this I’m mindful of the post getting longer and whether I’ll be able to keep holding your attention, or whether you think I’m becoming ranty in my old age). Platforms intentionally reduced information down to bite-sized chunks: examples being the 140 character limit of Tweets (albeit no longer with X, under the new management), 3 minute TikTok videos, and of course the good old static image comedy mainstay: memes. The resulting lack of detail and nuance in these brief communications though, leads to low-quality decisions in cataloguing the world around us, which, in my opinion, is one of the key contributing factors in the formation of tribes.
Tribes are how we tell us from them. Good or bad. Friend or foe. Our evolutionary history endowed us with instincts that lead us to nominate in-groups and out-groups to help identify those who might want to do us harm.
Therefore, in answer to my own question above of why I fear sharing with my friends and peers, is that in expressing an unpopular opinion I’ll self-identify as being part of an out-group. That in a socio-political environment and media saturated by anti-China rhetoric, my pro-China views will make me a pariah to the already-few people with whom I still have relationships (pro-tip: this is another hint referring to a long-overdue article I’ve been intending to write about men — in particular, loneliness and isolation in the latter stages of life).
It’s a topic I’ve visited before, and 6 years later, still find myself traipsing over the same grounds. At that time, I demanded that everyone just shut the fuck up, and yet in the ensuing Facebook discussion I was humiliated when I instantly displayed the hypocrisy of my position by failing to comply with my own exhortation and getting into an internet argument. Therefore this time I’ve arrived at a different conclusion.
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We watched the recent 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup as a family. News carried an undernote of surprise at seeing Australians rally around the Matildas, but in a way it was completely unsurprising. Culturally, we love an underdog, and despite the Matildas comprising elite-level players that achieved individual success on the global stage, the team enjoyed underdog status coming into the tournament.
But despite what team (or country) you ultimately barracked for, fans were united by the sport itself. The separation of players into teams and factions was understood to be a completely artificial construct, given players represent different teams (and countries) in different leagues. When Sam Kerr isn’t Captaining the Matildas, she’s playing for Chelsea F.C. Women in the Women’s Super League in the UK.
It struck me that sport is a fantastic representation of how we can deal with the Us and Them problem in a healthy way. Given that other normal, non-nerdy types usually participate in sport as a regular social activity, this is probably not news to most other people. But for me, it was a revelation.
Not that sport is entirely immune, such as when Eilleen Gu decided to represent China in the Olympics, Americans criticised her decision to be one of “them” and in doing so, implicitly endorsing every wrongdoing (real or perceived) of the government of a country representing 17.2% of the world’s total population and politicising something that has nothing at all to do with politics. Hopefully you can see how this is part of an intellectual disease of American politics, and that we must inoculate ourselves against it.
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The path out of the quagmire is to understand that there is no them. No matter the situation, there’ll always be more to a person or an opinion than what we can perceive, and ultimately there will always be common ground.
My new personal philosophy is to embrace the person, and understand that there’s always more to their opinion than what they express, because of the restrictions we all share on our time, ability, knowledge or other factors. To find joy in discovering that which connects and grows, rather than that which divides.
Also sprach Caesar.
