An Inconvenient Truce
Rusty Guinn
January 3, 2022·72 comments·Politics
Political leaders and tribal missionaries have perfected a technique for maintaining anger between groups by constructing narratives designed not to resolve issues but to make the other side seem fundamentally inhuman. The mechanism is elegant: introduce an aggressive, attractive claim, then retreat to a reasonable defense when challenged, treating both as equivalent. The result is two separate realities where half the country believes things about the other half that almost nobody in that half actually believes.
- The Christmas Truce teaches an unexpected lesson: After 1914, military leaders actively prevented subsequent holiday truces not through brute force but by controlling which stories got told. Once leaders recognized that shared humanity was dangerous to their aims, they simply erased it from the narrative. The mechanism was psychological, not physical.
- The motte-and-bailey doctrine works because it conflates two completely different arguments: An aggressive premise (the bailey) gets swapped with a sensible one (the motte) whenever the aggressive version faces challenge. Both sides have become expert at this. What looks like a genuine policy debate is actually an argument structure designed to make compromise impossible.
- The gap between Narrative World and Reality World is now massive: Sixty-one percent of Red Tribe members believe Blue Tribe wants to abolish police. Only 28 percent of actual liberals believe that. Fifty-seven percent of Blue Tribe believes Red Tribe thinks police shootings are always justified. Only 31 percent of actual conservatives hold that view. We're not disagreeing about facts. We're disagreeing about characters in a story that mostly don't exist.
- Each side uses the other's aggressive claims as proof of the other's fundamental corruption: Blue Tribe can point to the dumbest Red Tribe narratives and declare it consensus. Red Tribe can caricature Blue Tribe's most extreme elements and treat them as representative. The missionaries benefit from this. The rest of us lose the ability to see anyone across the divide as anything but an enemy.
- The question becomes whether we can even recognize when we've been conscripted into someone else's war: If you can't tell the difference between battles that are yours and battles someone selected for you, how will you know when to stop fighting? And more importantly, what does it take to make people most uncomfortable? Peace.
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Comments
What I keep coming back to again and again - when did we reach the tipping point where “reality” was dramatized and fictionalized en masse? When did we get to the point where news and regular people’s lives became mere building blocks for narratives and entertainment on a scale large enough to cause social disunion based entirely on fictional constructs?
If we look back at totalitarianism (everyone’s favorite, convenient villain - the Nazis), we see a significant amount of powerful, and average, citizens believing in a man’s delusion - but that was a single powerful narrative aided by many different circumstances and the centralization of mass communication. Now, it seems as if there is an almost emergent property of democratized mass communication, whereby the demand for fictions, for stories, is insatiable, and it’s so ubiquitous that it is hard to separate what’s real from what is dramatized.
But besides the location and reasons for reaching this tipping point, how much is this even under the control of missionaries? How is it possible to account for the adaptability of the fictional constructs, with the audience and missionaries reacting to one another?
And, since you’re focused on the particular motte-and-baileys and mechanisms used the last two years and mapping those arguments - are there any additional generalizations you can make about this system? Is it simply a feature of modern life now that fictional constructs will live constantly side-by-side with reality?
Perhaps sometime around the year that (anti)social media (ie “Engagement by enragement”) got unleashed upon the world?
I honestly think we started on this path quite some time ago and I think you can definitely start to see some cultural precursors in the late 90’s especially, with 24-hour news coverage and certain social phenomena (motiveless school shootings). But I don’t know. It kind of seems that this is all part of a massive social upheaval precipitated by technology, and an upheaval which we are not able to fully grasp because it directly undermines our understanding of the world by flooding us with too much information…but I don’t know, that’s the way it seems to me.
Yes, although that has always been true. Democratized mass communication, as you put it, simply permits it to happen faster and at a larger scale. I don’t think that there was a tipping point in how much we are affected by stories or even how much our society became about stories.
When the story-making became a feature of emerging bifurcated tribal identity, the stories / fact-frames went from being an overlapping mess of beliefs to a distinct set of two realities. Instead of looking at someone who shared 60% of our narrative explanations for our world and could share what felt like a basic grasp on the same reality, that person might now share what, 10%? 15%?
We aren’t more story-wired, and the world isn’t more story rich. We are more story-sundered.
I think?
I’ve mentioned a few times my ‘narcissism-at-scale’ explanation of the world and this sort of fits neatly into that theory. Everyone needs to either be the narrator OR they need someone else to narrate to them the story that they believe is true. Social media and blogging culture amplify that to 11. From that starting point it isn’t hard to see how we got here.
What is so frustrating is the switch to the Motte, leaves people not knowing the proponent’s degree of belief in the Bailey, but suspecting they still hold that position - thus a complete breakdown of trust and an inability to continue the conversation, even when trying to come to an honest understanding of our differences.
This article reminded me of the Evolution of Trust "game: that made the rounds several years ago. It begins and ends with the same Christmas truce illustration Rusty uses here and shows how trust evolves / devolves through repeated competitive and cooperative games. Well worth your time if you haven’t “played” it before.
The Evolution of Trust (ncase.me)
I was today years old learning about franz gruber and his xmas song and the genius that is naming the bad guy in an xmas movie hans gruber. Great article.
I just want to say thanks Rusty for a terrific article.
Time and time again, reading ET forces me to think, to get out of a sort of “comfort zone”. And that’s a good thing, because I so easily seem to fall into the narrative traps.
Even at my relatively advanced age, I think I’ve “grown” quite a bit since I subscribed
Good stuff, please continue .
Thanks
One day a group of trained and resourced people will team up to concertedly breach
the walls of an infamous motte and bailey. The story of what happened will spread far and wide, with villains and heroes included. This will change the strategic viability of this type of engagement. Akin to field artillery , to extend the metaphor.
At some point we will have to deal with air superiority, if you expose any contentious beliefs in narrative controlled territory.
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