Comment by clairity
3 years ago
or even simpler, stop being on a side, then you don't have to do mental tricks like "reversing the polarity". you can just see things for the way they are, without personal identity invested in the situation. this is exactly what being independent is.
This isn't just partisan "sides." It's also sides of specific legal questions.
I don't think "just stop picking a side regarding abortion, gun ownership, or gay marriage" is a reasonable solution. These are political wedge issues, but they are also legal questions with answers that can affect your daily life. Of course you want it to go a certain way!
no, stop thinking of sides at all, and especially don't start with a side first. start with reasoned first principles (the constitution is a good start) and continue to reason your way to a position on any given issue that is consistent with those first principles, sides be damned. the only reason you pay attention to sides is identifying with and wanting to defend a side in the first place. don't worry about defending and entrenching. have earnest conversations. if your position is constantly getting barraged with hard-to-argue counterpoints, then consider changing your position. it's not that hard.
Forgive me for my ignorance: why would the constitution be a good start for reasoned first principles? The constitution was written centuries ago by wealthy men who considered women and other men property and its updating process is so onerous that it still has nothing in it that considers women equal to men, despite women's right to vote, pay taxes, own businesses, etc. being established decades ago.
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> the only reason you pay attention to sides is identify with and wanting to defend a side in the first place
True! For example, I inherently have a bias towards wanting LGBTQ people to have the right to participate in society through marriage, anti-discrimination laws, etc because I'm LGBTQ. I suspect a lot of black people have a bias towards wanting anti-discrimination legislation so they don't get discriminated against, too.
Does that strike you as unreasonable?
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Okay, the constitution is as far from “first principles” as you can possibly get. Totally arbitrary. If that’s what you value, that’s fine, but it is not more logical than someone else’s view.
If you really do start from first principles (I think “utilitarianism” might be a better example of something that would be a first principle), and you find out that one side of an issue is good and the other is evil, or even if you find out that one political party is a good bit morally better than the other, you’re now back to picking sides. Because picking the right side of a morally important issue is a moral imperative to most people.
here's another point i forgot to bring up earlier that i'm just gonna hang off of here...
getting caught up in a side means you can't pick and choose from the whole menu of ideas out in the world. it means that if you're against abortion, you must be for guns (or vice versa), lest you suffer cognitive dissonance and social anxiety. that's exactly how political parties, pundits, the media, and partisans of all stripes get twisted up into contradictory positions, but can never extricate themselves, because they'd have to acknowledge a modicum of reasonableness coming from "the other side". it's pretty silly to get so tied up in a tribal affiliation that you shut down your own thinking that way.
this is actually the topic of the linked paper (i.e., culturally motivated reasoning), which was hardly discussed at all in these comments.
I like actually thinking about things, but does that address the problem where you’re more likely to see people who disagree with your (well-reasoned) opinion as violent?
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>start with reasoned first principles (the constitution is a good start) and continue to reason your way to a position on any given issue that is consistent with those first principles, sides be damned.
How do you come up with first principles? Consequentialism vs deontology has been around for centuries and it's obvious which one is the the correct one.
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Don’t pick sides.
Read old document written in specific political tradition.
^ That’s where you jumped the shark.
Less biased philosophy might be Camus, or Freire. Camus if you’re feeling cheeky, Freire if you’re feeling academic.
Freire describes forced import of culture and solutions to problems by financiers on people far away. It is far more objective look at freedom than the Constitutions goal of agency capture people far away.
Camus snarks about the absurdity in the belief we can ever truly understand one another given lack of direct access to each other’s bodily states and memory.
Both push back against the idea of allowing external influence to guide us in different ways. The Constitution is an aristocratic doctrine of acceptable forms and limits of state coercion which are routinely ignored. It’s scripture to hold up as an appeal to imagined authority Freire and Camus don’t believe exists.
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If you've got an opinion on some issue, especially a strong one, then you're on a side, and there is an 'other'. Be careful not to conflate a sense of your own independence with a sense of your own lack of biases or immunity to human irrationality.
no, you don't have to think in sides. you can have a position and discuss your position with others. you don't have to think of them as your enemy, but rather your conversation partner, someone who can help you expand your perspective and perhaps even change your mind.
At the end of the day, all those discussions still result in actual decisions. In some cases, those decisions affect people in a very negative way. Given that, why shouldn't one see someone advocating for decisions that will negatively affect them as an enemy?
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But practically, this is simply not true and the more important debate the less it is true.
Simple historical example: slaveholder says Frederic Dougles should be slave. Douglas does not want to be whipped nor slave again. They are enemies, full stop. Not partners. Same examples exist with any other country history.
Simple current example: Take the model abortion legislative currently proposed. It literally says that raped 10 years old must give birth regardless of threat to her health.
These people are not partners. They are in fact threats and if they win, actual raped kids will he harmed.
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> this is exactly what being independent is.
"I think that, a) you have an act, and that, b) not having an act is your act."
-- Linda Powell, Singles [1992]
No it's not. Being independent just means your personal identity isn't "My political party is X." There's still your mental image of yourself and it shapes your opinions ("What would do I think the kind of person I want to be would think about an issue like this?"). This is pretty much inescapable.
we're saying the same thing. you're distinguishing biases formed of life experience that can't be avoided (but can be consciously corrected to some extent), which is implicitly acknowledged. the point was not to pile partisan identification on top to further distort things needlessly, this latter part being a conscious choice we can deliberately avoid.
Not having a side is a nice idea until your opponent forces you into a side. Then they complain when you defend yourself or you must give into their side.
Like when someone is arguing that people with your attributes should be killed or should have less rights than other people you don't have a choice in the matter. If you have a coworker yelling about how gay people are inferior to their openly gay coworker, there's no getting out of choosing a side.
that's a strawman. we're talking about how to have dialogue with people who hold cognitively dissonant viewpoints (to you), and sometimes that means the dialogue is context- and time- dependent. if one person is literally attacking another person verbally or physically, well, then you should possibly step in or call for help. but that's not "taking sides" so much as intervening against violence.
I think of the abortion issue as like a necker cube. You can view the optical illusion as extending inward or outward. But it is difficult to see it both ways. You could easily see it as flat, but then you aren't really seeing it at all.
Partisans may object "but in the abortion case it is objectively extending inward and the other perspective is the optical illusion". But that objectivity is a moral illusion.
remember that the abortion issue, as a matter of law, is about the state's interests in the body. it does not litigate religious or social mores, but most of the "debate" is of this latter type.
i personally agree with the recent supreme court ruling that abortion rights shouldn't rest on privacy protections, but rather on a robust reading of the constitution that bodily autonomy is a fundamental right above and beyond states' interests (nation state or US state). i'd extend this to the issues of euthanasia and suicide as well. the state should have a very narrow and rigorously limited set of concerns (foreign relations and interstate disputes, in the case of the US federal govt).
>remember that the abortion issue, as a matter of law, is about the state's interests in the body. it does not litigate religious or social mores, but most of the "debate" is of this latter type.
It seems specious to claim this when the states' interests in the body in this regard (as well as gay marriage and any other rights formerly predicated on the right to privacy asserted in Roe) are based on conservative Christian beliefs and mores.
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Adopting the reactionary, revanchist rhetoric which the southern plantation owners used to justify their continued subjugation of others, contrary to the will of the majority, is the opposite of being "independent".