Are you tough, or are you gentle?
Understanding the conflict that truly divides us
Remember when we had heroes? People who created amazing things, found remarkable success?
It seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it?
In just one example, James Gunn spent many years in the trenches of the film industry as a writer and director, making low-budget films before being catapulted to the top rungs of Hollywood royalty thanks to the smash success of his Guardians of the Galaxy movies. However, even as pre-production of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was already underway, some of his enemies on Twitter unearthed incredibly offensive comments he had made a decade earlier on the social media platform. Almost immediately he was fired by Disney, effectively killing his career.
This incident, just another in a near-hourly churn of social media drama, sparked a certain amount of debate. His defenders insisted he was a good person who had apologized for those old tweets (which will not be posted here). His detractors said it was only fair to hold him to the same standard of other celebrities who had been ruined by their online comments, such as Rosanne Barr.
The deeper issue, however, is what this controversy, and many others like it, say about our age. The truth is, these incidents will become more and more common. Why? Put simply, times have changed.
Welcome to the age of radical honesty
History is full of revered people who were, objectively, monsters. US President John F. Kennedy was, as we now know, a potential sex addict who took incredible risks to satisfy his cravings. Richard Nixon, behind closed doors, was a foul-mouthed racist. Henry Ford, genius that he was, was an anti-Semitic extremist. Roman Polanski, another successful director, was expelled from the Academy for having fled jail time for drugging and raping a minor. Even the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature had to be cancelled after serious allegations of sexual assault and subsequent coverup.
Ideology is dead. Faith is forgotten. Idealism is passé. Into the vacuum we now have a simple assessment of human beings that relies on a pass-or-fail assessment of the words and actions of our fellow human beings.
In 2018 and beyond, as it became normal to worry about the basic decency of icons and heroes, the question became “who’s next?”
In truth, as previously noted, it is in no way unusual for notable individuals to have squalid, even monstrous private lives — that part is not new. Two things, however, have transformed public life completely: social media and the #MeToo movement.
Thanks to these two phenomena, the separation between public and private life has crumbled, and looks set to vanish entirely. At the same time, just as we have stopped shutting out the unpleasantness, we now assign celebrities, and one another, a spot on a brand new spectrum: at one end is gentleness, and at the other is toughness.
New conflicts, new divides
Some take great offence at being called “racist” when they don’t believe they are; others are outraged that “jokes” are being taken too seriously. The truth is, though, arguments of this type are largely irrelevant now. This isn’t a right-versus-left conflict, it’s decency-versus-harshness, gentleness versus toughness; it’s a conflict where the real crime is hypocrisy.
Human society in many ways rewards toughness. It’s a quality we expect in leaders, be they corporate executives, military officers or political candidates. We want people who will get things done whatever the cost. We want people who won’t wring their hands and worry about other people’s feelings; we want people who will roll up their sleeves and get to work. It’s an old appeal that traces back to the dawn of time.
The mirror image is also true: there has always been a place for kind people. These are the folks we admire; they are the ones we aspire to emulate. They are the symbols of hope and idealism. They are the saints, the romantics, the heroes.
In the absence of faith and ideology, these two archetypes form the basis of many of today’s conflicts, especially on social media. We fall into one category or the other, and the metrics used to place us in either category are based largely on the words and images we broadcast on social media. Whichever side of this divide one falls on, we can be certain we will be hated by those who prefer the other side. It means we will all have supporters and enemies. We are all public figures now.
Hypocrisy itself has a new meaning. Once, in practical usage, it signified behavior that was inconsistent with allegiance to a fixed moral standard. Nowadays, though, it increasingly means behavior that is inconsistent with the spot one claims on the tough/gentle scale. If you claim to belong to one side, you’d better act like it. If you say you’re conservative, you will be attacked by your supporters if you turn out to be all talk. If you’re a man who celebrates #MeToo, you’d better walk the walk as well as talk the talk — or else.
This explains why Donald Trump can be, well, Donald Trump and still retain strong support from certain sectors because he consistently sticks to his side of the tough/gentle divide in actions as well as in words. James Gunn was destroyed because he violated his adherence to his side of the divide by posting those tweets, even if it was years ago.
There are countless examples of this conflict. The extremists who subscribe to the QAnon conspiracy theory movement view themselves as activists, even crusaders for justice, opposing “globalist” “one world” leftists; similarly, many American progressives view President Trump and his supporters as fascists, even Nazis. Both sides consider themselves to be virtuous. Neither side relies on hard facts. Indeed they have much in common, though they don’t realize it. Their chief difference is their placement on opposite sides of the gentle/tough spectrum.
Young people understand this new dynamic, having been raised in it. Older folk may be shocked by their level of personal sharing about their sexuality, their mental health, their home lives. They instinctively plant their flag on their part of the spectrum, and increasingly, older people will follow suit. Without a doubt it will take some getting used to, but get used to it we shall. We have no choice.
This new “scale” has already split our politics and public life, and its influence seems certain to grow. We will all have to pick a side. The split even extends to perception and objective reality itself, with both sides inventing or reshaping information to match their existing viewpoints. Going forward, it is very difficult to imagine the two sides finding common ground.
Only one question remains: which side are you on?
