The Importance of Discourse
Many chalk civil discourse up to the value of debate with respect for human dignity involved. While this is a great goal for discourse, it is not the historical definition. The word “civil” relates to “civic”, the discussion of public life. The end goals of this “civic discourse” is to do two things ultimately: inform and find places of agreement and understanding. Most importantly, the informing happens before the opinions are displayed. We can’t find places of agreement without knowing what we’re talking about. Then, the process of understanding and agreement can blossom, not by assimilation but by empathy.
Recently, Michael Ventura wrote an Op-Ed for the Times headlined “The Dark Side of Empathy.” He starts with a quote from entrepreneur-turned-comic-book villain Elon Musk, “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” Said on Joe Rogan, the statement might not be worth all that much, but is still a sign of a growing movement. Musk later claims that empathy has been weaponized by the woke, but he still believes in it. This skepticism of empathy is essentially a skepticism of human connection, exacerbated by the Internet and social media. Why ever be vulnerable if you can control the entirety of your presence online? Any blunder, mistake can be deleted. Any great deed can be embellished.
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There’s many explanations for this phenomenon. Many left-leaning individuals have characterized this movement as a part of a whole Trump-led attack on education. They cite people like Charlie Kirk, and point fingers at the anti-education rhetoric of Trump. I think that’s probably an overgeneralization. While Trump certainly plays a role, this has been a growing issue throughout the 2010s and 2020s.
Some could also chalk it up to the online world of masculinity promoting a toxic view of connection and over-prioritizing individualism. This concept, known as the “manosphere”, is populated by overtly macho influencers like the Tate brothers. Sued in March on human trafficking charges, these two are at the forefront of this burgeoning movement. Boasting repeatedly about pressuring women into the sex trade, Andrew Tate online claims repeatedly that he has many women within his compound, all of whom are not allowed to go outside without him. This version of masculinity is one of material dominance, turning one’s life into a Michael Bay movie.
Andrew Tate actively champions Trump to his audience, saying “You have to support Trump if you are a man.” Now Trump has never addressed Tate directly, despite his son being “good friends” with both brothers, but this is still a bit alarming. Tate is just one of many male influencers endorsing (in a very ingenuine, opportunistic sense) Trump, along with Dana White, Joe Rogan, Adin Ross, Logan Paul, Theo Von, and others. I only speak to this movement because of its role online. Platforms like X or Threads have turned into a breeding ground for this “manosphere”, fueled by podcast clips or the work of generative AI. The sound of reality on these platforms is drowned out by the work of structural stupidity, a term coined by Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation.
On an interview with 60 minutes, he described the phenomenon like this. “You have very smart people, highly educated, highly intelligent, but you put them in a situation in which dissent is punished severely. And what happens? They go silent. And when—when the moderates, or when anyone is afraid to question the dominant view, the organization, the institution, gets stupid.”
This means that the extremes on either end of the political spectrum, Haidt calls them 7-8% of the population, are heard the loudest. This drowns out any centrist opinion, and moreover, any sense of empathy at all. Empathy is hard to find online at all, but it seems to decrease as you venture towards the political poles. There, politics turns into a sports game, an “Us v. Them” scenario where no one wins but someone has to lose. This tribalist mentality is the greatest threat to democracy today, and is the thing we’re fighting most in this newsletter! It takes many more forms than the “manosphere” or social media, but those are some ways that discourse is threatened.
The Internet and social media as a whole essentially acts as an open forum for discourse, so much of this column will focus on Internet-related phenomena and the discourse surrounding it. Believe it or not, we can learn a lot from online topics, as stupid as they might look on the outside. And from the onset, I want to stress that this is not a partisan issue we’re tackling, and is certainly not a partisan newsletter. Discourse is threatened on both sides, and I’m ultimately trying to propose solutions rather than just point fingers at one side or the other.
Because the loudest voices on the Internet don’t even really fit into parties, they’re hardly even democratic. We should not assume righteousness with normalcy; because it is standard does not mean it is democratic. And if we lose our democracy, it’s not even worth trying to discourse civilly. We’ve got bigger fish to fry then.
