Maybe My Last Plea: A Call For Empathy.
I tried dumping my brain state onto a piece of paper last week. It helped me feel better, but wasn’t making my point to others. Medium’s editor kept breaking each time I tired to edit the post, so I couldn’t really fix it.
Then I realized I was trying to use my brain dump to make a point to a specific group of people: Those who think I have just cause to be scared, but maybe shouldn’t be scared as I am now. Or I’m being dramatic.
That’s a good, targeted group. Going to talk to those people. If you’re not in that group, maybe my older piece will make sense.
Okay. Let’s get started!
I have a huge issue.
All fears and emotions and reasons to be worried about the current climate withstanding:
I have spent so much time trying to read more “source material” to make more sense of what’s happening in my world. How long will that material stay in my head, moving with me every step I take?
The issue of course, is that the source material for the main reason why I personally feel anxious and under attack takes form of a multi paragraph broad Executive Order, which contains no implementation details.
The “source material” I’m trying to rely on contains some disgusting touch-of-the-tar-brush 9/11 centric racism, alongside “their” opinion on why what they’re saying is legally sound and within their right to say.
No opinions about if my grandmother, the green card holder with a flight already booked from the States to Iran and back, if she can go and come back home. No information about that in the source material. None.
The worst thing with brief overviews that directly affect you is their ambiguity. How much does the “30 days” clause in the Executive Order matter? What’s the chance that Iran will ever listen to this U.S. Gov’s sanction proposals? When you say “case by case”, who is being considered case by case?
So, with lacking source material, you start looking for other things to try to make you feel better. Anything.
Differing opinions of different trump surrogates on different TV channels.
Eight drafts of versions of the text of the executive order, which if you want I could explain to you per time-of-day they were leaked and to whom they were leaked to.
Even if all this stuff ends today, all the uncertainty goes away, all the talk of building a wall or banning people who look like me (are me) goes away:
How long will I have this extra information I jammed in my head? How long will that information be stored in my head? Is this baggage I carry for the rest of my life? I already have one Revolution’s worth, and “growing up as a refugee during 9/11”, do I need more baggage?
Will the anxieties and baggage that come with carrying that weight everywhere I go, will that last longer than all the actual effects of this presidency will last?
That scares me, shakes me to my core. It makes me rethink what the concept of being an informed citizen in this world is. Would it be better to hear 10 peoples stories, than 10 versions of guesses about 3 paragraphs of threats?
I think so. I would rather carry on the thoughts of those people and their stories in my head, forever, than my feelings around accidentally glancing at comments on the white supremacist websites I visited to find the PDF version of the ban against my people.
All this stuff is just uncertainty and anxiety from the last week alone. It might be resolved soon, super soon. Let’s step backwards a bit.
Why does it matter? How did we get to this point?
I don’t mean to be a warmonger and blame the Russians or whatever.
I think we got to where we got due to a huge internal empathy issue.
We got to where we are now because of a lot of people refusing to face reality: that their Dream America was my Dream America too, but it was closer to their Real America than mine ever has been.
That their loved ones inside their own families could have such different opinions and perspectives and viewpoints, but they’d rather act like they’re listening to my viewpoint than even consider talking to their uncle.
That said, and I’m not saying “THE RUSSIANS HACKED US!” — But, I read about one guy a few years ago that terrified me and I’ve been thinking of since.
Vladislav Surkov is one of the coolest people I’ve ever heard of. Quoting from the first paragraph of that piece:
he was wearing a white shirt and a leather jacket that was part Joy Division and part 1930s commissar.
Depending on your mood, the Atlantic article above might either make your day or ruin it. Surkov is so real. He’s a human. He’s a real life human being.
Surkov, in addition to being a badass leather jacket wearing Tupac fan, is one of Putin’s top advisors. This means he does things like:
Surkov would sit behind a desk with phones bearing the names of all the “independent” party leaders, calling and directing them at any moment, day or night.
With a flourish he sponsored lavish arts festivals for the most provocative modern artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox fundamentalists, dressed all in black and carrying crosses, who in turn attacked the modern-art exhibitions. The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside of its walls.
Surkov, in addition to being a badass leather jacket wearing Tupac fan Putin advisor, writes sci-fi short stories.
His most terrifying piece, Without Sky, was published under a fake name a few days before the Crimea invasion.
In Without Sky Surkov discusses the first “non-linear war”. A war where everyone is at war with everyone. And the sides switch almost on demand.
Some to test their weapons, some just because everyone else is at war too.
This was the first non-linear war. In the primitive wars of the nineteenth, twentieth, and other middle centuries, the fight was usually between two sides: two nations or two temporary alliances. But now, four coalitions collided, and it wasn’t two against two, or three against one. It was all against all.
The people hurt by this war aren’t the participants, the participants are fine, it’s the people stuck on the land watching all this happen in their home’s sky.
Surkov, beautifully summing up identity politics and in-fighting:
And what coalitions they were! Not like the earlier ones. It was a rare state that entered the coalition intact. What happened was some provinces took one side, some took the other, and some individual city, or generation, or sex, or professional society of the same state — took a third side. And then they could switch places, cross into any camp you like, sometimes during battle.
Cold war parallels ignored, real life war ignored, feeding insurgents across the globe ignored:
I believe we are all participating in non-linear warfare every day.
I’m not saying, we’re falling into the trap the Russians want us to fall into. I’m not saying we are doing what someone else told us to do. Honestly, it feels great to be at a constant non-linear war.
You and I know how to do that. We know how to live a life of “wait for the notification to pop in, click, view their message, respond explaining to them why they’re wrong.” We click on an article, read the interesting parts, scroll down to the comments, start shaking, and just keep going.
Every time you spend an hour arguing on Twitter instead of protesting on the street.
Every time you spend your morning going back and forth with someone saying “I agree with you, but not with the fact that you said ‘white men’ need to help”.
Every time you spend your time doing anything that’s conflict-resolution with someone you don’t know.
It’s all participating in someone else’s non-linear war.
Maybe it’s the Russians, maybe it’s just someone angry and scared in Coal Country looking for a liberal to argue with so they can further cement that they’re right the liberals are all idiots and wrong.
It feels great to be so hooked into the act of in-fighting, on the internet, over the phone, in our own heads, fighting so that we don’t act. That we don’t do anything else. Because I think if I just win this fight, I win.
Guess what: The other keyboard warrior you’re shouting at, they aren’t even reading your messages.
I’m not saying I am guilt-free here, I get wrapped in non-linear warfare so easily. Even on my own platform, even on my company’s product:
So, not saying the Russians necessarily hacked us and are trying to put us at war against each other. But god, the constant slew of WikiLeaks e-mails coming out, convincing very smart logical people that there was a large conspiracy going on?
If they get to talk about that and step into pizza shops with guns, as if it’s real, I get to think about the concepts around this. Once you know the name of the condition currently helping you back, you can start thinking clearly.
Besides, even if all this stuff I’m extrapolating from it is so wrong, Without Sky is a beautiful short story.
I think Surkov has great taste in leather jackets, and is a great writer, which are two of the highest pieces of praise I can give someone.
I’m not saying “The Russians are trying to infiltrate us with their short stories”. The lessons the story imparts are very similar to the lessons my mom learned being an unwilling participant of the Iranian Revolution.
But, in this context, I read something last night that really scared me.
Their theory is basically that a data analytics company has helped set all this up. Based not on first-party-user-identified features but an OCEAN score: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism.
I don’t mean they set up the election, or rigged anything, or anything of that sort. I mean they set us up to fight among each other, spread hate, idle, instead of act or love.
The theory is that a company used this kind of scoring to provide specific possible actions, sample pools who might respond as they expect to planned actions, who to reach and what to say to them, all to the Bannon team.
OCEAN scores estimate, based on metrics, matrices and eigenvectors, how likely you are to agree with others. Or how quick you are to get angry and fight.
The Vice article discusses one main company, who also helped provide specific stats for Brexit. Specific stats, up to the point of:
These “dark posts” — sponsored news-feed-style ads in Facebook timelines that can only be seen by users with specific profiles — included videos aimed at African-Americans in which Hillary Clinton refers to black men as predators, for example.
Think about that. Someone was able to make that targeted of an attack plan. Not one to try to get votes for their team, but to get people to become upset and not vote for the other team. Horrific.
Did they target the ads towards people with high Neuroticism metrics, people who might reshare it and start spreading real hate, by choice, to the rest of their friend groups?
Worst part is the data science parts sounds identical to what we do at Stack Overflow, it’s easy stuff, if you have a PhD around.
I’m not saying this is definitely true, but I’m saying if the theory is that we have an empathy problem:
AND there are people who have written down stories about how constant in-fighting from all sources and labels can destroy innocents
AND there are people being paid to help Bannon & team decide if someone is a “follower” or someone is a person they can get to anger quickly…
All I’m trying to get you to hear: Listen to people. Listen to people. Listen to people that look like you, listen to people that don’t look like you.
Each time someone comments on something you said, or something your friend said, really think about:
- Is this person being paid by someone to explicitly rile me up, get me to not act on what I want to act on, because they have seen my OCEAN score and know I’m both extroverted and caring and quick to anger?
- Is this person arguing semantics with me, because they themselves haven’t faced reality yet? Are they arguing with me as an outlet to prove to themselves they’re right I’m wrong? Are they listening?
- Is this person actively trying to help? Are they sharing something personal? Are they trying to give me a perspective?
I only respond to messages from one of those categories.
I think the way to survive these next 4–8 years of constant in-fighting and attacks is to get better at deciding when to ignore people who may or may not fall in the first two.
So, what can you do? All I think we can do is listen to each other and love. Not shout, not hate, not argue. If you don’t look like me, but you read this, and now you relate to me: Do you relate to your own family? All of them?
When someone says something, and you hear what might be either a really disgusting worst-case, put yourself in that person’s shoes and really think about what they meant to say.
Don’t let people drag you down into pointless arguments on Facebook, Twitter, any social medium. If you want to argue, go outside, see their faces. It’s a lot easier to tell if they’re listening that way.
I truly believe that it’s possible to live, internally, not at a constant war, while the world around you is in war and melting down into flames. This lesson, if you take anything from this take this lesson. It’s how I survived life as a refugee in America immediately after 9/11. It’s the only reason I’m here able to talk to you today.
If you are like me, a logical analytical person trying to understand feelings:
I strongly recommend reading my piece attempting to get you to sympathize with everyone, even those complicit Germans in ’39.
It contains no hatred towards Germans of that time or ever, it’s actually all about learning how to love them and think about them, as an easy to do example of how to be empathetic with anyone.
