Politics has always been a contentious topic, adversarial in its nature. It is also something deeply personal, as ones political beliefs are often a reflection of their personal values. With these two points alone, its easy to understand how politics leads to interpersonal conflict. Whether stranger or family, just a brief mention of the topic or even worse, ones stance, can give way to argument and strife. This is the feared “Family Thanksgiving Dinner”. This divisiveness becomes disdain. The disdain becomes hatred. It then feels as if there’s two possible relationships one can hold towards politics. The first is to grow to resent those who hold views differing from your own, only engaging with those of like mind. The second is to disengage from the system entirely. You see this in people who say “I’m not really into politics” despite assuredly having opinions of their own.
I do not like either relationship, nor do I think either are healthy.
The person who avoids politics is repressing their viewpoint, avoiding the topic out of fear or certainty that engaging in it would lead to conflict that would mar their relationships with others. I cannot agree with this relationship as it is cognitively dissonant. Inaction is tacit acceptance of the values that run opposite to your own.
The person who engages with politics and resents the opposition has become closed minded, unwilling to even try understanding the other’s beliefs or what underlying situations led to those beliefs. Thus, the people they interact with become filtered, and eventually they’re in an ideological bubble whose own views can never be challenged, or corrected if wrong.
I want to offer a third relationship. A relationship that can loosely be described as “radical empathy”. I hold strong political views. There are commonly held political stances that I believe are unconscionable. However, that is where I draw the line. I do resent the stance, but instead of resenting the individuals that hold it, I try to understand what brought that person to holding that stance. I do not think there is any merit in attempting to convince someone of a stance other than the one they hold. That is a fruitless endeavor that only breeds further resentment. My wholehearted belief is that the actual path to enacting meaningful change, is to identify and combat the underlying circumstances that created that stance.
There is a behavioral therapy technique called exposure therapy. The way you’d most commonly recognize this is in treating phobias, or irrational fears. Someone who was attacked by a dog at a young age can easily develop a fear of dogs. This fear would be treated with exposure therapy by being presenting the person with dogs in increasing levels of exposure that start as small as possible. First the thought of a dog, then the picture of one, seeing one in person, and then eventually interacting directly with it. Continued exposure allows the individual to be able to overcome their irrationality. This is, in essence, what I hope to achieve with Pierce The Bubble.
Most people would agree that dogs aren’t something that should be feared. But you could tell someone who has a phobia of dogs that all you’d like. You will not change their mind. The more insistent you are of that point, the more likely you are to damage your relationship with that person. This is the same for politics. You will not change someone’s mind by insisting on what you believe to be true, similarly to how they will not change yours.
My goal with Pierce The Bubble, is to provide political exposure therapy. I will highlight contentious political topics, ones with multiple viewpoints that are in strong opposition. My focus is not to argue the merits of those viewpoints, that is akin to insisting of the truth of them. I will do my best to highlight what the viewpoints are, and then dissect what leads to those viewpoints, as well as flawed assumptions they’re built upon.
For me, this project has a clear successful outcome. Influencing readers to be able to see past a political stance. To see the person holding it and understand that, even if you believe that the stance is morally reprehensible or irrational, that they did not always hold that stance. Something caused that person to hold that stance. From this single point of understanding, the climate of resentment can soften. Effort can be put towards actionable solutions fixing the issue that made the stance necessary in the first place.
Even if you do not agree with my personal stances, or do not believe my rationale for this project, thank you for taking the time to read this and peering outside the bubble.
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