accounting for fear
red button, blue button, bad faith, contrapoints
There was a poll on the Netherworld formerly known as Twitter that asked: Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press? The answer segregated users across ideological lines; with red pushers convinced their button was the more intellectual choice and blue pushers convinced their button was the more moral choice. Red buttoners called the blue button the “suicide button”. Blue buttoners called the red button “the murder button”. At the risk of sounding like a spineless centrist—both strike me as melodramatic but more importantly, generally untrue until the outcome of the poll is decided. We can hypothetically litigate which button leads to the destruction of whom and how after we see who wins the poll. History is decided by the victors, after all. I picked blue in a split second decision. I can unspool my reasoning: 50% of the world’s population pressing blue is likely, plausible and preferable, especially when thinking about the framing of the question from a purely linguistic point of view. The average person will naturally gravitate towards the option where “everyone survives”, as the “everyone” will include themselves / if “everyone in the world” gets a vote that means a large wave of children with undercooked brains are going to press blue so I should press blue to make sure they survive1 / the world has more women2 than men and I think women are way more likely to pick blue than men so I shall pick with them / if I were to expect any bloc of countries to skew red, it’d be western countries (especially America, the hyper-individualist capital of the world) but countries in the Global South would probably skew blue—China is the most populated country on Earth3 and they have a culture of collectivism where the majority is likely to pick blue—when the world was assimilated into the hive mind in the first episode of Pluribus there were global casualties in the millions of people so if between 1% to 49% of the world population died overnight it would severely affect the trajectory and function of our entire civilisation—I am less afraid of dying than I am of living in a hypothetical scenario among people who see the red button as objectively logical, believing themselves to be the intellectual Viltrumites, but do not have the wherewithal to consider the third or fourth order ramifications4 of the most altruistic people in the global population being culled. Blue won the poll with 57.9%.
After learning Reform, the far-right anti-immigrant British political party, made gains5 in the UK’s local elections, I drove to work while listening to Briahna Joy Gray’s podcast episode with Natalie Wynn a.k.a Contrapoints. It is two hours and forty eight minutes of two people occupying the same audio track but unable to edit one another—or themselves—to resonate at a sonic frequency that both of them can hear. There is a moment where Briahna asks Natalie who she’d vote for in the next presidential election. I’m willing to tolerate anyone, I’m not in a position to make demands. I am the hostage. It is a deeply sad admission, not only because it makes you hyper-aware of how much Natalie’s voice has been sitting at this dreary, woeful register but also because it shines a halogen light on how unproductive the conversation was always destined to be. Briahna cries out You’re the client! But Natalie’s inability to imagine herself outside of the political hostage situation is evidence that fear dictates her political world-view in a way that does not manifest as measured clarity but, instead, tinges all of her beliefs with an intellectual haze. In contrast to Briahna’s assured and insightful commentary, Natalie’s side of the podcast conversation is a groundhog day of the same inquiries that coil around the fact her stance is ultimately one of resignation. Many will experience the discussion and determine that Natalie “loses”. I’d argue that Briahna loses, too—in a manner that I often see leftists losing. Briahna rigidly treated the conversation like a debate: partially a traditional, academic debate; one that must require a clear winner and loser and partially a modern internet debate; optimised for clip-mining to bolster one’s own social capital. This is a mistake—if only because the second order effect means that, once the mics and cameras are off and the clips hit the feed, Natalie will use any clips in which Briahna seems to be dominating to appeal to her own base as soon as the opportunity present itself.6 It is obvious that Natalie is in some sort of altered state, her tone is dreary and slurred, she keeps emphasising her confusion but she’s displaying some sort of willingness to talk through her confusion. This coalescence of elements requires a different approach to the trenchancy Briahna is so skilled at deploying.
This is why Zohran Mamdani is such a lightening-in-a-bottle politician. He knows how and when to change his colours but he retains his shape. I pointed this out to a friend the other day: but Zohran has this fake smile that is extremely transparent but something happens in your brain when you see it, where you acknowledge the smile isn’t real but you accept whatever effort has gone into mastering it means the smile might as well be true. It lowers your guard. Zohran is a singular figure in politics because he is a modern phenom of self-editing. In the same way Barack is considered a generational orator—Zohran is a generational communicator. You can almost see how he switches gears—when he speaks emphatically, when he attacks politically, when tackles a subject more emotive, or injects humour—all of it is a pitch-perfect performance. He has successfully woven himself into a canvas in service of his goals and, while there is argument about his policy positions or concessions, there is not enough emphasis on the fact that he is utterly untouchable when it comes to being personable. Natalie incorrectly identifies this as a “radiant energy of hope”. “Hope” is just the byproduct. What Zohran offers is social intelligence that needs to be germinated more or invested in more. Zohran has become a global success because he has read the room and adjusted to command it.
Briahna won the debate. But she “lost” the conversation because she was unable to usher Natalie out of the fear-based confusion that she seemed paralysed by.This is something the right is famously great at alchemising—in no small part because they control all the levers and pulleys to all the media machines but also because the ideology of the right-wing allows for a convenient externalisation of fear (offsetting it onto black and brown people, immigrants, women, queer people, the poor) and all the mouthpieces the right has to do this are graduates (or autodidactic studiers) of the Fox News faux-journalistic blueprint that has taught them how to activate people beyond the need for factual reporting.
Natalie famously said: they don’t want victory, they don’t want power, they only want to endlessly “critique” power and Twitter assigned this adage to The Left despite the fact she was actually talking about a non-descript group who practice “resentment politics.” Her point is bipartisan—the right-wing Conservatives who have ruled Britain for over two-thirds of its electoral existence have essentially collapsed to the point where they’ve installed a vastly unpopular Nigerian immigrant woman to head the party in what can only be described as a self-hating humiliation ritual. Look beyond the short-wall of coonerific spectacle and our bigger concern should be why the most historically powerful institution in British politics doesn’t seem to really care about having political power anymore? In discussions of politics as a semi-spectator/semi-participatory sport; there is a fixation on trying to win people over by identifying who has a good heart but is misguided and who has a rotten heart and an unwavering commitment to get high off their own fetid fumes. We believe the former can be welcomed and the latter is unconvertible. We edit our appeals towards whether we think someone is inherently good or inherently bad and we offer grace or caveats depending. This is the essence of good faith. What if this instinct is wrong? What if appeals to morality that drive the blue button pushers or the way well-articulated leftist thought is argued by Briahna is wrong? Wrong, in a strategic sense—for there is almost a paternalism to the political assumption that there is good in everyone that simply needs to be tapped into. Commentators of the left believe their job is to convince people to act on the kernel of goodness that exists inside of everyone. “Win the hearts and minds.” But evil people do evil deeds believing they are good all the time. Goodness, especially how it is binarised in western society, is warpable in the most fantastical of ways. We are more driven by our opportunities and material conditions than our morality. Some of our most lasting actions are more defined by fear than the goodness in our hearts.
You can understand someone with a scary amount of intimacy when you understand how they are afraid. How do they metabolise fear? Do they confront it? Do they weaponise it? Do they desalinate it and use it as a clean-burning fuel? Do they let it drive them as a pollutant? Do they listen to it, do they ignore it? Are they consumed by it? Does it focus them? Does it cloud their judgement? Is it teflon between the synapses in their brain that would otherwise fire successfully? Perhaps understanding politics as a management of fear would do better than the underlying belief that politics is a matter of morality. Because even good people become cowards in the most unpredictable of situations and bravery can often inhabit the most malicious, most thoughtless, most uncaring. Society’s fetish for binaries would have us believe that “hope” is the spectral opposite of “fear”. But as always, it is never as simple a binary as the culture wants it to be. If anything, fear is merely a question which requires an answer. The easiest answer to fear is fear itself. Lovely as hope is, it is the fragilest answer; once dashed it leaves a chasm for fear to flood without prejudice. Faith is our civilisation’s most persistent answer—it has quelled (and manipulated) fear of the unknown since the age where early men worshipped the Sun. The most boring, reliable answer to fear is simply competence. What answer we pick, maybe, is secondary to the awareness of how fear might be puppetting our actions—or the actions of others—in ways we’re unwilling or unable to control or confront. It might compel us to believe we are hostages. It might drive us to press a hypothetical button. The moralising; the intellectualising—those are the decorative mask that conceals the ugly reality that we are afraid. And our current world rewards us for keeping the masks on. What can happen if we honestly engage with that fear? Does the blue button look like a murder or a suicide button, then? What can happen if we honestly engage with someone who seems utterly terrified? Does winning the debate seem so important then? What can happen if we account for the fear, as ugly and destructive and embarrassing and paralysing and weaponising and mobilising as it is, and treat it with curiosity? What if we stopped pretending to ignore the thing we all know is there?
