An Inconvenient Truce Revisited
Rusty Guinn
January 3, 2022·72 comments·Politics
Political leaders have stopped trying to persuade opposing tribes. Instead, they've engineered narratives designed to keep both sides enraged by systematically preventing citizens from recognizing the humanity in those they're told to oppose. The machinery doing this isn't new, but its effectiveness at driving real-world conflict has never been sharper.
- Two completely different realities now exist side by side. In narrative world, 61% of one tribe believes the other wants to abolish police. In reality, only 28% actually support that. The gap between what tribes think their opponents believe and what opponents actually believe is the foundation of modern political conflict.
- Political missionaries profit from exaggeration, not resolution. They construct arguments with an aggressive, attractive premise that's easy to criticize, then retreat to a sensible defensive position when challenged. By treating both positions as identical, they make ordinary disagreement feel like betrayal.
- Nearly every major issue has been transformed using this exact tactic. Whether it's critical race theory, election security, or pandemic policy, the pattern is identical: frame the most extreme version of your opponent's position as their actual position, then conflate it with something reasonable nobody could disagree with.
- This creates a trap where recognizing shared ground becomes politically impossible. For one tribe to acknowledge that most of the other tribe holds reasonable views would undermine the entire narrative structure built to motivate their own base. Agreement is the enemy of engagement.
- The question is no longer whether you'll fight, but whether the fight you're in is actually yours. Most people don't realize that tribal leaders benefit far more from conflict than from winning any particular policy debate. The truce itself becomes the dangerous act.
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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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