Politics

Racism and Identity: The Lie of Labeling

February 2, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

This video examines how categorical labeling and the us-versus-them mentality it fosters are at the heart of division and, subsequently, intolerance and non-acceptance.

From birth, the world force-feeds us these labels, and eventually, we all swallow them. We digest and accept the labels, never ever doubting them, but there’s one problem. Labels are not you, and labels are not me. Labels are just labels. Who we truly are is skin deep. Who we truly are is found inside.

Labels forever blind us from seeing a person for whom they are, but instead force us to see them through the judgmental, prejudicial, artificial filters of who we think they are.

Labels Aren’t Just Idle Placeholders

Labels determine what we see. As essayist James Baldwin cautions in The Price of the Ticket (1985,) “As long as you think you are white, there is no hope for you. Because as long as you think you’re white, I’m forced to think I’m black.”

We’ve used the lie of labeling to define and separate people for millennia. We emotionally and intellectually enslave ourselves when we believe the lie of a label. Then we enslave others. Even forcing people to self-identify by labels reinforces separation, stereotyping, and divisiveness.

Rigid stereotypes of out-group norms follow. Such attitudes are harmful because they overlook the full humanity and uniqueness of all people. When our perceptions of different races are distorted and stereotypical, it’s demeaning, devaluing, limiting, and hurtful to others.

Idea for Impact: Let’s Stop Sidestepping the Human Behind the Labels

What we need now—more than ever—is an individual and collective shift from tolerance to acceptance (it’s possible to be tolerant without being accepting, but it isn’t possible to be accepting without first being tolerant.) In so doing, we can work to create a society in which everyone is valued, appreciated, and embraced.

When Anonymity Becomes Cowardice

September 8, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

A variety of psychological factors contribute to people being nasty online. Rider University psychologist John Suler famously argued that online environments unleash aspects of our personality that we usually keep under guard—a phenomenon he called the online disinhibition effect. With names concealed, there’s no pressure to maintain a public facade. Cyberspace becomes a separate dimension where the usual rules don’t apply. Actions no longer carry consequences. There’s no liability for rudeness and inappropriate behavior.

The disinhibition effect is also called ‘The Gyges Effect,’ after the Ring of Gyges, a mythical invisibility device in Plato’s Republic. The ring grants its owner the power to become invisible at will. Plato considers whether an intelligent person would be just if one did not have to fear any bad reputation for committing injustices.

Social media has a way of magnifying some of the worst facets of human nature. By allowing masked identities, as Professor Suler points out, abusers avoid accountability for their conduct and dissociate their online selves from their real-world selves. In real life, combative behavior triggers a victim’s immediate reaction–a change in tone of voice or a counterargument, even aggression. However, these deterrents are missing or delayed in the online world, and social inhibition is removed. Online abusers see their victims as faceless, abstract cutouts with no feelings and undeserving of fairness, compassion, and honesty.

Idea for Impact: Keep away from being nasty online. Awareness and activism are vital to civic duty, but you should seek out actual human beings who know how to converse intelligently on anything they disagree with.

Stop Stigmatizing All Cultural ‘Appropriation’

July 21, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

From The Telegraph over the weekend: a Leeds-based “woke dance school,” the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, “drops ballet from auditions as it is ‘white’ and ‘elitist'” as it “reviews ballet art form as part of a diversity drive.”

Many other performance arts are rooted in other cultural traditions, so should we expect that white folk refrains from performing those because that would be cultural appropriation? Shun yoga, not wear cornrow, and drop taco nights?

Should everyone else avoid trains, cars, computers, and much else because they’re white European originations?

Should people not be allowed to wear clothing, cultivate hobbies, or pursue careers that aren’t reflective of the culture they were raised in?

Look, works of art incorporating racist clichés and caricatural images (such as in The Nutcracker) should be reassessed with a different consciousness. Appropriation is elastic and ill-defined. Not all cultural appropriation is harmful or exploitative, certainly not innocuous cultural appreciation—where elements of other cultures could be used to pay reverence and highlight the historic oppressions of those cultures. Appropriation is but offensive when what’s being appropriated brings problems to the people to who the cultural artifact belongs.

On embargoing ballet, let’s stop denunciations of white pride where it doesn’t exist before. Let’s not fuel resentment with our shrill accusations and ill-thought overreactions and contribute to the rise of white supremacy.

Idea for Impact: Raise cultural hackles only for a good cause, i.e., when there’s real offense intended. Don’t stigmatize valuable cultural interchange. Delimiting features of cultures is contradictory to our goal of creating a diverse, melting-pot society. E pluribus unum.

Cancel Culture has a Condescension Problem

February 28, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Cancel culture and wokism have allowed for overly politicized worldviews where people both on the left and on the right are quick to take offence. There is, at present, a strong instinct to censure, anathematize, ostracize, and insist upon punishment for people or perspectives that are deemed unacceptable. Acceptable expression is being forced into ever-smaller confines.

It’s not enough for each faction to point to the hypocrisy of the other. It’s also crucial for each to defend theirs—and the others’—right to say disagreeable and objectionable statements and subject them to empirical and logical assessment.

While we shouldn’t organize our worlds around the sensibilities of those who’re easily distressed, every person should have the right to decide his beliefs for himself, speak freely, and defend his views during civilized discourse. Intellectual inquiry can’t thrive if people can’t express themselves in good faith.

Idea for Impact: Cancel culture is to be kept within bounds if we are to preserve a free society. If we fail to stand up for the right to speech that we dislike, why retain the right for the speech we do like?

No, Reason Doesn’t Guide Your Politics

February 14, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor,” observes the American political scientist Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012,) a captivating voyage of discovery of the social psychology of politics and ethics. Haidt makes a compelling case for why reason and logic aren’t what people use to contend with problems and steer through to the right answers.

Most people’s politics tend to be ill-informed. People don’t engage in deep causal thinking about the consequences of their favored political positions. Information and analyses tend to provoke—not calm—their preconceived judgments.

Reason is Motivationally Inert

As the Scottish philosopher David Hume noted in his masterful Treatise on Human Nature (1739,) “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

Reason becomes subordinate to the passions that have come to life in people’s tribal allegiances and their confirmation bias. People are prone to making decisions derived from instinctive, emotional, and fast thinking of psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s “System 1,” not the slow, logical deliberations of “System 2.”

Most people feel good about sticking to their guns, even if they are wrong. They tend to read newspapers, periodicals, blogs, and social media feeds to settle ever more comfortably into their preexisting beliefs. They use their tribes’ “notice boards” not to reassess their established opinions but to have them validated, comforted, legitimized, and intensified.

On the rare occasion that they do converse with someone or read something they may disagree with, they don’t revaluate their judgments, let alone change their minds. They merely use reason as a weapon to discredit contrasting evidence, spot others’ flaws, and convince them that they are wrong. Consequently, reason doesn’t bind but drives differing people apart.

Idea for Impact: The Opinions You are Blind to Could Be Your Own

Be conscious of the internal conflicts brought on by your passions. Seek and assess the counterevidence. Incorporate these counterarguments and strengthen your positions.

Can’t Ban Political Talk at Work

September 2, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

When politics and social issues are increasingly divisive, workplaces find it challenging to forbid political conversation entirely from the workplace. In April, project management software company Basecamp faced uproar when trying to ban politics at work. Co-founder Jason Fried announced that Basecamp would no longer tolerate discussions around political or social issues “where the work happens,”

Today’s social and political waters are especially choppy. Sensitivities are at 11, and every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy, or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant. You shouldn’t have to wonder if staying out of it means you’re complicit, or wading into it means you’re a target. These are difficult enough waters to navigate in life, but significantly more so at work. It’s become too much. It’s a major distraction. It saps our energy and redirects our dialog towards dark places.

Basecamp’s ban was meant to prevent distraction and souring of work relationships, but the mandate swiftly backfired. Twenty out of some 60 employees threatened to quit.

Banning Political Discussions Isn’t That Simple

Can't Ban Political Talk at Work I think banning political talk is a lazy way for leadership to not deal with issues like racism, misogyny, stereotyping, and contempt that may be festering among employees.

Often, when people say they want more political discussion in the workplace, they actually mean that they want more political discussion about viewpoints they want others to conform to. Workplaces with lots of political discussions are ones where most of the staff has identical socio-political leanings. Employees with divergent political leanings tend to be reticent and stay out of such talks.

It’s neither productive nor possible to not talk about politics and society at work. Companies can’t tell employees to not bring their real selves to work. People are opinionated about politics, and everyone has views and tries to defend them. Besides, politics isn’t a neatly self-contained issue that doesn’t overlap with anything else. When an employee’s attitudes aren’t in line with the company’s—or even the majority’s—attitudes, “put up or shut up” policies end up more damaging than the bickering or backlash they are intended to avoid.

Group settings are better when divergent opinions are known. An inclusive workforce must be able to embrace a diverse range of views. Conversations will come up anyway, and instead of banning these conversations and encouraging employees to take them outside of work, employers must institute protocols for airing and understanding opposing opinions and dealing with offensive behavior.

Idea for Impact: Canceling conversations about the significant issues of the day simply silences those with unpopular attitudes instead of encouraging a culture of growth.

The Problem of Living Inside Echo Chambers

June 14, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Psychologists use the term realistic ignorance to explain the human tendency to believe that we’re normal—that the way we see and do things is entirely representative of everybody else.

Realistic ignorance is intensified by our natural desire to associate with people similar to ourselves.

Social media algorithms make this worse—they reinforce our attitudes but not change them. They steer us to the type of stuff we already know and like. They make it easy for us to form our own echo chambers, packed with people who share the same views. This causes confirmation bias. Tribal allegiances form flawed ideas and viewpoints about what is typical for organizations and communities.

Idea for Impact: Seek out and engage thoughtful folks who don’t think like you. Discuss, debate, and improve your reasoned understanding of one another and of the crucial issues. Your goal should be to enhance your own awareness of the counterarguments in contentious matters, not win over anyone.

Tribalism Needs to Self-Destruct

January 20, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Big Tech’s recent rush to repress provocative content has expanded the debate on free speech and the social-media algorithms’ raw power to preside over how people see the world.

Democracy and free markets aren’t supposed to function this way. Overall, capitalism works because it typically rewards players for being right and penalizes players for being wrong. If you’re an investor and you’re wide of the mark about something, the market will penalize you.

That used to be valid with journalism too. Traditionally, if a mainstream news outlet got something wrong, it’d face disapproval, retractions, and embarrassment. If the outlet was wrong often enough, its circulation would shrink, and advertisers would drop.

Sadly, this feedback loop has gone. Our media consumption has become so segmented and tribal. For instance, Fox News could assert whatever it wants its audience to believe, and the market won’t punish it. Indeed, Fox News could even be rewarded with more significant viewership.

Tribal media consumption is especially manifest with social media because the platforms’ business model is driven by tribe-segmentation, engagement, and clicks. Social media reward fanaticism, emotionalism, and hyperbole. There’s no natural self-regulating market apparatus any longer.

All told, tribalism and hyperpolarized filter bubbles have taken their toll. They’re contributing to society’s intellectual decay.

Idea for Impact: This isn’t as much a freedom-of-speech issue as it is a distribution issue. Yes, everyone should be free to express themselves without the interference of editors or other filters. But what does—and doesn’t—surface for consumption needs to be moderated. Gate-keeping must be done in a way that doesn’t devalue truth and ignore the counterevidence. Technology needs to pivot to help society break through the mental barriers of tribes.

Moderate Politics is the Most Sensible Way Forward

September 17, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

A sharp observation on political extremism in this 1987 TV ad by comedian John Cleese for the Social Democratic Party-Liberal Party Alliance (1981–88) in the United Kingdom:

Extremism creates a nastier harsher atmosphere everywhere, more abuse and bother boy behavior, less friendliness and tolerance and respect for opponents. What we never hear about extremism is its advantages … the biggest advantage of extremism is that it makes you feel good because it provides you with enemies. The great thing about having enemies is that you can pretend that all the badness in the whole world is in your enemies, and all the goodness in the whole world is in you. If you have a lot of anger and resentment in you anyway, and you, therefore, enjoy abusing people, then you can pretend that you’re only doing it because these enemies of yours are such very bad persons and that if it wasn’t for them, you’d actually be good-natured and courteous and rational all the time.

As relevant now as it was then.

I don’t belong to a political party, and I don’t think I’ll ever join one. Partisan talking points irritate me no end. I’ll watch the upcoming debates, though, because I’ll find all the onstage mudslinging and the impulsive provocations very entertaining.

In politics, everyone tries to push emotional buttons. Few seem to talk about an evidence-based attitude for making decisions and allocating society’s resources where they’ll make the most impact.

Besides, the media today have made the exchange of ideas particularly charged and increasingly polarized. The only way to be heeded to in a screaming vortex is to scream louder and resort to premeditated ad hominum.

Idea for Impact: Wisdom doesn’t reside solely on one side of the center. I am partial to those moderates whose political stance often varies with the issue. Contrary to popular perception, they aren’t tuned-out or ill-informed. Instead, they’re disposed to see both sides of the complex problems, disregard the left and the right’s excessively ideological positions, and seek the middle ground.

How to Have a Decent Discussion with Those You Love but Disagree With

March 9, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

If you feel like you’ve been overdosing on news and conversations related to politics and Trump, much to the exclusion of other meaningful subjects, try the “No Trump Rule” evoked by essayist Joseph Epstein in the Wall Street Journal:

Every Friday I meet for lunch with three or four friends from high school days. I instituted at these lunches what I called the No Trump Rule: ‘No’ not in the sense of being against Trump’s politics but against talking about him at all, for doing so seems to get everyone worked up unduly. The rule, I have to report, has been broken more than the Ten Commandments. No one, apparently, can stop talking about our president. The Trump talk quickly uses up most of the oxygen in any room where it arises, and can bring an argument to the shouting stage more quickly than a divorce settlement.

Look, I understand that everybody has been amped up to eleven since Trump emerged as the Republican Party’s nominee in May 2016, but some of us don’t want to talk about him—or politics.

I, for one, don’t think it’s a good idea for so much of our news, talk shows, and social media feeds to be devoted to a single subject for this long. Yes, Trump is a polarizing figure, and our country is so divided. But we don’t need to let him, and the anger he provokes, besiege every moment of our lives.

Awareness and activism are vital to civic duty, but hatred isn’t meaningful activism

I’m happy to listen to everybody’s opinions, but I’m fatigued by the extent to which politics dominates present-day exchanges. Ordinary conversations about routine topics tend to degenerate quickly with any evocation of the current state of affairs. Even banter about the weather (“the last refuge of the unimaginative” per Oscar Wilde) can quickly spiral into climate change, the environment, fossil fuels, oil, Russia, Putin, and so on.

More than anything else, I can’t bear the way most people currently think about politics—in particular, how ill-informed they tend to be. I am dismayed at people’s shallow understanding of the significant issues of the day—immigration, trade, nationalism, economic inequality, healthcare, etc. The stakes are high, and, given the depth of people’s political convictions, their anger is understandable. Nevertheless, the propensity to lash out against those with different views and dehumanize them is deplorable.

I will talk about politics with people who aren’t as much interested in winning an argument and convincing opposing people of the wrongness of their positions as they are about understanding more fully why others hold a particular conviction.

Our values, not politicians, should mold the policies and positions we support

Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers’ commendable I Think You’re Wrong (But I’m Listening): A Guide to Grace-Filled Political Conversations (2019) proposes a framework for having productive political discussions with those you love and yet disagree with.

Somewhere along the way we stopped disagreeing with each other and started hating each other. We are enemies, and our side is engaged in an existential battle for the very soul of the country. We are no longer working toward common goals. We are no longer building something together. Our sole objective is tearing the other side down. Nothing short of total victory is acceptable.

…

The reality is that we never stopped talking politics altogether—we stopped talking politics with people who disagree with us. We changed “you shouldn’t talk about politics” to “you should talk only to people who reinforce your worldview.” Instead of giving ourselves the opportunity to be molded and informed and tested by others’ opinions, we allowed our opinions and our hearts to harden.

The authors, hosts of a popular discussion-podcast, invite readers “to hear each other’s thoughts, to test our own beliefs against each other’s philosophies, and to better appreciate our own core beliefs by having to articulate and challenge those beliefs.” They emphasize an earnest curiosity for the counterargument and the open-mindedness to leave room for nuance:

Engaging with other people is never easy, but it always will be worth it. Engaging with other people about politics is no different. Let yourself take that chance. Let yourself rise to the challenge. Your ability to stretch and grow will surprise you, and so will the people around you. Once people see you as a person willing to have thoughtful, curious, calm discussions, you will have all kinds of interesting conversations that seemed impossible a year ago.

Postscript: Things are far more awkward in the workplace. Politics has always been a sensitive topic—but in today’s contentious climate, such conversations can rapidly escalate into arguments.

Politics

Labels Aren’t Just Idle Placeholders

Idea for Impact: Let’s Stop Sidestepping the Human Behind the Labels

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Reason is Motivationally Inert

Idea for Impact: The Opinions You are Blind to Could Be Your Own

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Banning Political Discussions Isn’t That Simple

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Awareness and activism are vital to civic duty, but hatred isn’t meaningful activism

Our values, not politicians, should mold the policies and positions we support

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