People Who Understand Nuance, and People Who Don't

We need to get rid of the left/right paradigm and deepen our definitions.

A few weeks ago I had an encounter on Twitter with someone who I think I have interviewed on the radio. “I think,” because, on Twitter, he was hiding behind the name of his right-wing, “libertarian” organization, and not using his name. My name is out there for all to see.

Which tells you the difference between us right from the start.

So it’s entirely possible that the person I interviewed in 2017 and the person behind this account today are two different people. From the same organization.

The interview on my show was about a bill in the 2017 legislature to deregulate the energy industry. His organization was for it. Unions were against it. And, of course, since it was Nevada Public Radio, the producer had to book “both sides” of the “argument,” rather than simply getting the bill’s sponsor on to explain it and having me ask the questions that were coming up from those for and against, or talking to energy and economics experts about how this had panned out in other states.

At some point, the libertarian guy started talking about the cell phone industry, which he argued was highly competitive.

I answered something like, “The cell phone industry isn’t competitive. They’re a monopoly.”

He was aghast. He started listing off Verizon, and Sprint, and AT&T, and T-Mobile to argue that MONO means ONE and there were FOUR national phone companies competing with each other.

Of course, now there are only three, since T-Mobile bought Sprint, but I digress.

My answer was OK, it’s an oligopoly, which I didn’t say at first because… well, you try saying oligopoly on the air.

The point was, the cell phone industry wasn’t competitive then and isn’t competitive now. They all “magically” offer the same types of plans and plan discounts and charge you for the same services. They may not be colluding, but at the very least, they’re watching and mimicking each other.

But this guy couldn’t - or wouldn’t - see the larger argument. He could only see that I had used the word with the prefix for “one” instead of the word with the prefix for “the few.”

At some point later in the conversation, I responded to something he said by saying, “Oh! You see democracy and capitalism as the same thing.” He sputtered, and looked at me as if I had just said I was dating his mother.

The Twitter “conversation” went along the same lines, but this time it was about him defending racism in the south, by blaming “bad apple” cops for pulling over a Black family for a ticky-tacky law about tinted windows, then having the cops assume that the parents were on drugs, then forcibly drug testing them with no probable cause, then taking away the father, then stopping the mother from bailing the father out until she took a drug test in the car in front of her children, then having THE CHILDREN TAKEN AWAY as soon as she walked in the door to bail out her husband.

This was in rural Tennessee. The family was driving from their home in Atlanta to a funeral in Chicago. The state had their children - ages 7, 5, 3, 2 and 4 months - from February till April. Or a third of the baby’s life.

No drugs besides marijuana were found in the father’s system. And that, as we know, could have been from days or weeks before. No drugs at all were found in the mother’s system. But the state still took away their children. And gave the parents a different drug test that is so unreliable, it is inadmissible in court. 

It’s hard to fathom how anyone would not see this as blatantly racist. And an example of how systems collude to perpetuate racist stereotypes.

The cops may have been “bad apples,” but were the social workers? Or do the social workers have to act when a cop triggers an issue? Are the systems built to stop personal bias - or blatant racism - from going up the chain?

My interlocutor could not grasp this. In this case - because he kept changing the subject and not answering direct questions - I think he might have grasped it, but just wanted to “win” and “own a lib.”

But I’m not certain.

I wrote a couple of months ago about the Heinz Dilemma, and the number of people in this country who are stuck at level 1 of social understanding.

This guy, and his supporters on Twitter, demonstrated that. “It’s the law,” one of them said.

So, if someone is driving from one state that allows tinted windows through another that doesn’t, they have to get their windows untinted for the trip?

This is the kind of thinking manifested when someone like me uses the phrase “automatic weapon” and a bunch of people counter by saying, “Automatic weapons are not legal. Get educated!”

Which you know was an argument once used on them, by someone who saw nuance. But they don’t understand the nuance, so they just throw the argument back.

That’s why the news media and gun control folks have pivoted to the term “assault weapon.” So we can avoid these stupid fights over semantics.

This is also where the idea of “reverse racism” comes from - people who can’t grasp the larger idea of power dynamics and think of it only as disliking someone who doesn’t look like you.

I thought about this on May 15 when Missouri activist and former legislative candidate Jess Piper posted this on Twitter.

My first thought was, this Joshua guy is technically correct. And he phrased the question knowing that. 

The First Amendment simply says, 

It does not use the phrase “separation between church and state,” which was something Thomas Jefferson coined in a letter more than a decade after the Constitution was written.

But here’s the thing. We say “separation between church and state” and this guy says, “It doesn’t actually say that in the Constitution, so you’re wrong.”

And I’ve come to realize he and folks like him actually believe that. They can’t put the ideas together, see or understand the bigger picture, understand that paraphrasing doesn’t change the meaning of an original quote.

To them, lives are not about lived experience. They are semantic arguments to be won.

These are the people who would answer the Heinz Dilemma with a yes - Heinz should steal the drug, or no - it’s against the law. They are not the folks who would say, “Isn’t there another way to save Heinz’ wife’s life?”

It is black and white, yes or no, one or a few. And after years of exasperation that people who think like this were playing games, I’ve come to realize they might not be. That anything beyond “yes” or “no” is simply something they are not able to grasp. So they get mad at people for breaking the rules simply because those “rule breakers” grasp the larger issues that they can’t see.

This is, to me, the central tension in this country - between people who see the bigger picture and people who don’t. And I don’t mean the smart/dumb paradigm. We have an education system that rewards kids who learn how to navigate the system and get straight A’s, without learning about the importance of social/emotional intelligence. Sometimes those rule followers then head to Harvard and Yale, and take control of our political and governmental systems. Without an ounce of understanding of how humans are affected by those systems.

When I talk to people now, I look at the arguments they’re making through the lens of the Heinz Dilemma. Are you someone who can understand the complexities of the issues? Or are you someone who never learned how to navigate - or even recognize - complexity?

When my kids were in little, their elementary school taught them social/emotional skills. Their goal was to make kids better, more expansive people. Our education systems today ignore that whole-child approach. We focus on test scores, and grade markers. And we put people out there to contribute to a society that they are not very capable of understanding. 

So, people are brutally murdered at a shopping mall. People are brutally murdered in their schools. People are brutally murdered in a movie theatre, and the grocery store, and… and… and… we can do nothing. Because one of us dared to say the words “automatic weapon,” and so we’re “wrong.” And the people who can’t see the larger picture? Well, they own most of the guns.