It’s Never Been More Important to Love Those You Disagree With
Step out of your echo chamber, and into the light
“Because it’s not love to be static like the desert, nor is it love to roam the world like the wind. And it’s not love to see everything from a distance, like you do. Love is the force that transforms and improves the soul of the world… It is we who nourish the soul of the world, and the world we live in will become better or worse, depending on if we become better or worse.”
— Paolo Coehlo, The Alchemist
I think about echo chambers a lot. In today’s world, very few things frighten me more. During the propaganda-fueled crap-tornado of an election that we endured last November, echo chambers were out in all their annoying and ego-boosting glory.
Well-intentioned progressive friends of mine flung political memes back and forth at each other in a flurry of activity. As I read more and more of these, I realized that I (and presumably they too) were only seeing one side of everything. Our side. The side that we already agreed with. The only people in my life who were reading any of this content were people who already agreed with each other.
Because of social media algorithms, bipartisanship, and the idea that we should “cancel” the people we disagree with neatly out of our lives, many of us (myself included) have filled our feeds with yes-men. This creates a flurry of agreement, and it is certainly ego-boosting, but it is very, very dangerous.
“Canceling” people out of your life does not allow them to reflect on what they’ve said and change their crappy, harmful opinions. Love does that. All canceling people can do is create martyrs, and martyrs are not reflective. They have a persecution complex.
Only taking in the opinions of people who already agree with you is lazy. It’s like you’re in a mind-gym with minds identical to yours, flexing your mind-muscles back and forth at each other, going “Don’t we look awesome? Yes, we certainly do.”
“If you only read the books everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
— Haruki Murakami
Echo chambers create the illusion that how you live is, of course, the one true path. People who disagree with what is true and right are obviously only doing so to antagonize you, and are thus standing in the way of progress!
Sadly, it is not (and has never been) that simple.
I wasn’t sure when putting this together if I was going to write about what follows, but I want it to hit home, so I’ll share my experience.
After I was evacuated from the Peace Corps last year, I took a teaching job in a rural, conservative town in Colorado. As a young progressive fresh off of graduation and living in another country, I’d fallen into the trap of believing that people who wear MAGA hats and act in ways I find distasteful are waking up every day, choosing to be antagonists.
After arriving, I was forced to confront the fact that this is not the case (though it’d make things much easier if it was).
Newton’s third law states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
The progressive population is sequestering ourselves in reaction to what we see as a threat from those we disagree with.
This is what is happening on the other side as well. The conservative population is skewing farther right in reaction to us, who they believe to be a threat to their way of life. Because we’re obsessed with “canceling” and “shouting down”, we are creating the illusion of persecution.
Because of our ability to hide behind a screen and our inability to be civil, we’ve become toddlers in a stalemate pouting at each other across a room.
Who’s going to reach across and show the other side that we’re not a threat? Certainly not us! We don’t have the time! It’s their responsibility to educate themselves! We’re too busy endlessly sharing memes with people we already agree with and creating martyrs by canceling those we disagree with.
The only thing that can save us, the only thing that can save anyone, is love.
Though I’m not religious, there is one quote from my boy Jesus of Nazareth that I believe applies beautifully here:
“Let he who is without sin throw the first stone.”
With the rise of digital media, social media, review culture, and cancel culture, we are a bunch of people throwing stones at things we barely understand. In the post-truth world, we are an army of digital hypocrites.
If there’s anything I’ve realized from living where I have these last few months (especially during the election) it’s that we are all products of our environments, for better or for worse.
It’s all well and good to say “It’s the responsibility of the ignorant to educate themselves about social justice.” It’s also well and good to say “there shouldn’t be war.” Or “huge corporations shouldn’t pollute the earth and manipulate the people.”
While all of these are objectively true statements, this isn’t, at this point, how the world works.
Here’s an example of the reality of the situation:
Person A (let’s call him Fred) grows up with a certain set of values, that his community really believes in. Truth. Justice. Etc. Then, those values are systematically exploited and turned into fear and hate. This brand of fear and hatred is created by powerful people who have a vested interest in turning people into bigots for votes or profit. Fred grows up to espouse these bigoted ideas in an echo chamber with people who only think the same way. Fred is very likely not going to pick up Judith Butler and change his own hateful ways of his own accord.
“Canceling” Fred when he’s motivated by fear and hate will only create a martyr
The only way Fred is changing at all is if someone who embodies everything he disagrees with shows him love. Love is all that has ever worked!
Tupac famously said, “The Hate U Give Little Infants F**ks Everybody.” Though he was talking about racism and oppression in our society, the advice applies to everything.
Hate. F**ks. Everybody. That’s all hate has ever done. It never accomplishes anything. It never makes people change their minds. It only creates more hate.
“Hate never beats hate.”
— Jim Jeffries.
People who espouse hateful ideas do it for only one reason. That reason is fear. Powerful people cause less powerful people to feel fear because it makes the powerful more powerful and because it is profitable.
The only thing that will stop this cycle is love and a genuine attempt to seek mutual understanding (though I’d love to see a few fear-spreading pundits exiled, I don’t see that happening anytime soon).
I want to share an example with you of love conquering hate in my own life.
Growing up as an Evangelical Christian, I believed in homophobic ideas until I was almost 20. I won’t write down any of the things I believed because they were icky, I’m ashamed of them, and they’re not worth a second of our limited times on this planet.
I didn’t grow and change of my own accord. It wasn’t spontaneous self-education that changed my perspective. It was encountering beautiful, loving LGBTQ+ people who became my friends, and were patient with me.
The love they showed me (when I undoubtedly didn’t deserve it) is why I was able to change my perspective. As much as I wish that the bigots and fearful, angry people of this world would educate the hate out of themselves, that is not (currently) the way the world works.
As good as it feels to “cancel” people out of your life, it helps no one but you. Everyone deserves a gentle explanation and a chance to change before they get shouted down.
(Speaking on cancel culture) “That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.”
— Barack Obama
There has never been a better opportunity to practice spreading love in a vacuum than there is right now. There has never been a better time to try to understand each other instead of seeing each other as the enemy.
Reach out to a person in your life who you disagree with, and have a genuine conversation. Find out how they got the way they are. I guarantee the answer isn’t “I wake up every day and choose to be a villain.”
As much fun as it is to sit in echo chambers and high-five each other for being progressive, that method clearly isn’t working. Three months ago, 70 million people voted to keep the status quo. That cannot be ignored, canceled, or shouted down. It can only be helped through love.
Love is not the easy path, but it’s just about the only method we haven’t tried. Isn’t it time?
Thanks for the encouragement Matthew!
Couldn’t have said it better myself.