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Who is the enemy?

Pluralism, Tribalism, The Cult of Personality, and the long term consequences.

Alex Pilkington

Aug 8, 2022

Oh, the misery
Everybody wants to be my enemy
-Song by Imagine Dragons for the Netflix series Arcane
1

Introduction

The idea of being friends with someone with a competing worldview is becoming increasingly taboo. This might be why the stories about Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia’s friendship seems so foreign a concept.

Despite their clashing jurisprudence taking spotlight on many cases that pitted conservative and progressive activists against each other

, they had a tremendous amount of respect for each other. In Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s eulogy at Antonin Scalia’s funeral, she recounts a story about how Justice Scalia offered her his draft of a dissent for a case to allow her as much time as possible to review and answer it. Another moment she shared in the eulogy was of how in the aftermath of the release of the Bush v. Gore decision in 2000, Scalia called her. The call was not to gloat about the victory or to tell her to just get over it, but to tell her to “Go home and take a hot bath.” The call was from a friend, offering a reminder that you have to take care of yourself.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia’s friendship was one rooted in an undergirding tenet of liberalism - that of pluralism. But pluralism

has its own well documented challenges, one of the most noteworthy critiques is that of Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance.

It’s something I’ve been struggling to grapple with as I think about how we can ensure longterm cooperation and species survivability. Can we be tolerant of ideologies that (at least seemingly) represent existential threats to our own?

For the most part, ideologies represent a large part of our identities. We form groups based on shared identities

and through coalition building, these groups form the “teams” we lean on and identify with through kinship, conflict, and political action.

The Surging Tribalist Moment

As social creatures, humans crave connection and community. These connections and communities offer us a network to pull from and a social safety net to fall back on when things might not go our way

. Also, as social creatures, status is an important aspect, our network is only as powerful as the individuals who comprise it, it requires a lot of cooperation to add status to the network.

What lengths would you go to ensure your team gains that status?

Last week, the DCCC squeaked out a victory in the MI-03 congressional primary race. Their candidate, Hillary Scholten won an uncontested race… but their real victory came when ‘post-liberal’ former Trump appointee, John Gibbs, squeaked out a 3 point win over Peter Meijer who was one of 10 GOP members who voted to impeach Trump after the January 6th insurrection.

As someone who follows politics closely, and understands the tribalistic nature of it, I understand the desire to face off against the more radical opponent in a general election, especially in a competitive district.

But the sick twist to this story comes from the underlying fact that the DCCC was funding Rep. Meijer’s opponent to the tune of $435,000 with ads that benefitted Gibbs in the final days leading up to the primary. That ad buy was more than the Gibbs campaign had raised in total throughout the entire campaign

This move by the DCCC has been replicated in a number of GOP primaries and represents the antithesis of pluralism - tribalism. When you would rather prop up the worst (granted this is a subjective judgement) of your political opponents to benefit your team, you’ve abandoned the values of pluralism.

There is no respect at that point. There is only the concern for the status of our own network, consequences be damned. The adoption of an enemy is useful for political action

The Manufactured Enemies

“Hate is a stronger motivator than love” is one of Roger Stone’s most infamous of rules for politics. Unfortunately, this observation does hold weight, especially when viewed from the lens of social media use.

Although there are a lot of happy moments shared on social media platforms, angry feelings are more influential than joyous ones. This isn’t lost on the political pundits who look to grow their audiences.

Twitch Politics has been called the Gen Z of political talk radio

and these pundits are more than just your typical network political talk show host. They function as community leaders, often having discord servers with thousands of members, and chat sections that scroll almost too fast to read at times.

Because of these communities, and the parasocial relationships that can form, many of these Twitch pundits have developed a cult of personality. This devoted admiration from the viewers can result in conflicts between streamers as they amplify disagreements and engage in antagonism of other communities

There’s also an issue of smaller streamers targeting larger streamers with embellished accusations and uncharitable interpretations in order to gain views from the people who follow that streamer

, this tactic is known as clout sharking and can be seen even on platforms outside of Twitch (example would be the ‘ratio’ing’ of a tweet on Twitter).

We see the problems related to the cult of personality time and time again on social media platforms. Whether they’re comedians, podcasters, think tank presidents, or our local representative - sometimes our admirations blind us to their faults and fallibilities as humans. (My friend Dominick Mellusi wrote a brilliant blog on how to avoid the cult of personality that I encourage you to check out.)

Pluralism requires us to go beyond the cult of personality, to recognize the individualized humanity in everyone and to not place any one person or team on a pedestal. There aren’t many ‘enemies’ so to speak when we’re pluralists… There are only people with competing world views.

That nuanced distinction doesn’t translate well in online discussions where our alignments feel like identities and criticisms feel like attacks.

Conclusion

Part of the difficulty in pluralism is that humans are evolutionarily predisposed to find threats from the outgroup. Having an enemy is shown to have a positive impact on social cohesion (at least within the in-group).

Perhaps Dunbar’s number plays a factor here. Our finite capacity for meaningful relationships probably makes us finding our RBG/Scalia friendship within our developed networks fairly difficult. Unless we are constantly exposed to people with competing worldviews

, we’ll retreat into our camps, not intentionally but because as social creatures we need to signal belonging.

Part of that signaling also includes being dismissive and discourteous to the cults of personalities that lead up the competing communities

, and this dismissive/discourteous attitude towards them are often interpreted as being dismissive and uncharitable to the identities of the individual members of the community. But the incentives to gain attention on social media necessarily lead to this.

Unfortunately, because of the interconnectedness that social media offers, the opportunities for miscommunications are vast. And due to the public forum nature of many of the platforms (at the very least the interpretation that there is an audience), we’re even less likely to be charitable to our opponents to avoid being seen as weak or stupid.

It reinforces our soldier mindset.

But, for the most part, those who disagree with us (regardless of how large the disagreement) are not our enemies but a fellow human being who is also capable of making mistakes and wishes to signal belonging to their primary groups.

This isn’t anything new, but with this community building aspect of social media, we are seeing a lot of fracturing and many people invoking “The Paradox of Tolerance” to describe their political opponents as intolerant. Which if we go solely based on the impersonal (signaling) discourse on social media, it can often feel that way.

To ensure our longterm future, we have to understand and remember who our real enemy is… miscommunication and tribalism.

This blog is part of a biweekly column I write exploring communication. Thank you so much for taking the time to read, please like and leave a comment if you enjoyed it. My email is always open for critiques, compliments, and questions. Direct inquiries to alex@leveller.tv and follow @alex_pilkington on Twitter.

If you haven’t seen the Netflix series Arcane, you should really check it out. It’s set in the steampunk sister-cities of Zaun and Piltover in League of Legend’s fictional world of Runeterra. It follows the origins stories of two sister’s from League of Legend’s and how their lives were torn apart from the conflicts of a budding war. I hope to talk about the series in a near future blog post and its message about communication and pluralism.

Cases that immediately come to mind are Citizens United and Obergefell v. Hodges.

As does every ideology. I am fairly confident in saying that every ideology has a fair share of valid criticisms and that is why we need to exhibit as much epistemic humility as we can when advocating for our own worldviews.

These groups are fickle, sometimes these shared identities do not supersede the differences that come from the individualized experience of people sharing them.

I don’t mean a social safety net in the sense of public welfare, but in the sense of the welfare you receive from friends when you hit a rough patch.

Gibbs campaign raised $340,000 in total.

Relating this to the recent takeover of the Libertarian Party by the far-right and reactionary movement known as the Mises Caucus who used the former chairman and the largest vote sharing Presidential Ticket in LP history (Gary Johnson and Bill Weld) as figure heads to hate in order to mobilize their takeover.

There should be a note about how there’s been some movement to YouTube because of ambiguity in Twitch Terms of Service enforcement.

Many streamers have strict rules against their community members engaging in these types of harassment campaigns (sometimes referred to as brigading) but for the larger streamers, it is implausible for them to have 100% enforcement.

Often large streamers do this to other large streamers too… It’s not exclusive to small streamers.

I miss college campuses for this reason, despite the self censorship many of my peers claimed to have engaged in.

Sometimes this is necessary, some of these “leaders” (very loosely applied) are very deserving of scorn and ridicule.