On Contrarianism
A Field Guide for Talking to Me
When you tell someone you were socially awkward as a child, the natural assumption is that you were shy. I was definitely awkward, but I’ve never, ever been shy. Quite the opposite, in fact — being largely oblivious to what people around me were thinking meant that I never knew when to shut up.
I figured out how to approximate a normal person primarily through experimentation, by slowly learning the patterns that conversation tends to operate within. And once you see those patterns, you can also see the negative space surrounding them — all the things that people aren’t saying, that it would never occur to them to say. Coloring outside of those lines eventually became the backbone of my sense of humor; a way to get people I otherwise had trouble connecting with to at least think positively of me. Over time, the rest of my personality trended in that direction as well, which is to say that the more routine and transparent a statement is, the less interest I have in voicing it.
When I do choose to say something, I try very hard to make it distinct. Not just to be funny, but to gently usher an interaction outside of the pattern, to the uncharted territories where things are more interesting. There are times, I recognize, when pure volume is what’s called for, and being one voice in a resonant chorus counts for something. But for my money, it’s much more rewarding to find the unplayed notes.
The Tao Te Ching opens with these lines:
The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal name
What this says to me is that real truth is indescribable; that anything expressed by a human mind is definitionally not the full truth because a human mind was able to express it. The more effort you put into describing something, in fact, the further you get from its truth — hence, Taoism also emphasizes simplicity. (An ironic philosophy to espouse in a 2100-word essay, but one that’s served me very well on social media.)
The Tao Te Ching is so specific to its era that it has no one perfect translation; becoming truly acquainted with it entails reading several translations, ideally from a range of cultures and time periods, and triangulating a meaning as you see it. Similarly, if truth can’t be found in the utterings of any one human being, then I think perhaps it exists somewhere in the conglomeration of all of our points of view. The pathways of our minds are shaped, literally, by the language we use to express ourselves; we can only imagine, can only comprehend, that which we have words to describe — so voicing a unique observation means making that constellation of thought ever so slightly bigger, and increasing the odds that a person listening to you might draw out some truth of their own. That, to my mind, is the principal purpose of speech — going all the way back to “Look out! Tiger!” Everything else is vanity.
The Problem With Rote Speech
What do I mean by “everything else”? Small talk, for one thing, has no social or informational benefit whatsoever and exists solely for the enjoyment of one’s own voice and the evasion of silence. Platitudes, I will admit, have a degree of value to the right ears, within the right relationships — but they’re reflexive, and reflexive sentiments are built on foundations of sand. “I’m sorry for your loss” still reads as genuine to most people, but “I’m sorry you feel that way” is now popularly understood as a shirking of responsibility. And woe betide anyone foolish enough to mention “thoughts and prayers” to someone under forty!
Not only are these things not original, they’re not even real thoughts. They’re little social scripts that we periodically stumble into, only to conclude that finishing the scene is easier than extricating ourselves from it. Regardless of whether we would ever think to say these things organically. Regardless of whether we really mean them. If a friend comes to me with sad personal news, I’m not so heartless as to dismiss them — but I do try to come up with a response they haven’t heard ten times already.
I‘ve come to recognize that discourse flows downhill — in whichever direction offers the least resistance.
The Tao Te Ching also talks a lot about water. Water is soft and yields to impositional forces, yet “nothing is better at overcoming the hard and strong” (ibid.) because water is also patient, and thorough. It assumes the shape of its container without argument, yet it is quite rigorous in seeking out and exploiting any cracks in that container, any possible openings which will allow it to spread further. While Taoism typically associates water with notions of balance and stasis, I see this behavior as bearing certain similarities to an evolutionary process — one with no inherent moral character, but with a clear logic and an observable direction: downhill.
I‘ve come to recognize that discourse also flows downhill — in whichever direction offers the least resistance. The opinions, and arguments, and beliefs that propagate are not necessarily those that are the strongest in practice so much as they’re the ones that are the easiest to boil down into clichés, which can then be memorized and repeated.
For this reason, my least favorite form of rote speech is unanimity. There’s nothing more suspicious to me than a group of people habitually agreeing with one another. It suggests to me that nobody’s really thinking that deeply about what they’re saying, opting instead for the path of least resistance: a stock worldview they’ve purchased in bulk from Joe’s Worldview Emporium and are content to putter around with ad infinitum. A sense of belonging is a powerful thing, and I’ve seen even the smartest, most interesting people file off their own rough edges and counterintuitive impulses in its pursuit, becoming mere caricatures of who they really are.
Disagreement, on the other hand, is honest. Getting along with someone doesn’t mean, shouldn’t mean, seeing eye to eye on every little thing; in fact, my favorite people tend to be those with whom I have the most engaging disagreements. Disagreement is like exercise for your point of view, and like exercise (or so people tell me) I often find it invigorating — because it forces me to actually think about what the hell is coming out of my mouth. To take a belief I’ve recited a hundred times to the echo chamber of my own mind and consider it more deeply; to refine it or even, if it crumbles under scrutiny, discard it altogether.
Agreement is lovely, and obviously an essential component of our personal relationships, to say nothing of functioning societies. But agreement is a conclusion, a warmly-lit sign proclaiming that nothing more needs to be said. Disagreement is an invitation. An opportunity to hold yourself side by side with someone not yourself, in order to see your own contours in greater relief. Only by understanding what you are not can you fully understand what you are.
The Art of Shutting Up
Disagreement doesn’t have to be substantive or high-minded, of course — it can be as innocuous as debating the merits of a movie you and a friend just saw, or contrasting your tastes in beer. And most importantly, it doesn’t have to be angry. In fact, I’d draw a crucial distinction between disagreement and argument. A difference of opinion that has transitioned into an argument has ceased to be about growth and understanding and, in all likelihood, has fallen back into those same well-trodden lanes where people are just repeating the script set forth by the last hundred people to have that argument.
Friendly disagreement requires mutual respect, and open-mindedness. You must be prepared to acknowledge and confront your own biases; to honestly appraise your own life experience and recognize why you like and dislike, why you believe, the things you do. When it comes to art, even matters of principle involve a degree of subjectivity — the message you take away from a book or a film (or this essay!) might be one that you disagree with vehemently, but someone else might experience the same work and receive another message entirely.
On the surface this feels like an obvious thing to point out, but in practice I think we considerably underestimate how much our biases affect the way we move through life; which experiences we seek out, which we avoid, and which we go along with but complain about later. A human mind, like the Tao, is a superposition of possible interpretations and reactions, forever being nudged this way and that by every outside influence it bumps up against. Even things that we see as our true north, our core values and morals, are generally either ideas we were raised with or reactions against the ideas we were raised with.
Friendly disagreement also requires the willingness to consider that you don’t know what you’re talking about. “Debate” doesn’t have the greatest reputation on social media these days, thanks to masses of half-wits using it as a cudgel against anyone whose opinions they don’t like — if you don’t have the time and energy to personally convince Rando McTwitterson of something, then clearly that makes you wrong! To these folks I would impart one lesson in particular: know when your voice isn’t needed.
I accept that in some situations I’m simply not capable of swaying the people I might want to sway, and I don’t think there’s anything particularly unjust about that.
As a straight, cis, neurotypical(ish), able-bodied white man, this is both a very easy thing to recognize and a challenge to maintain, because the truth is: there are a shit-ton of conversations going on that do not require, and cannot be improved by, my input. Arguably the principal objective of the global social media hivemind over the last generation or so has been the development of a taxonomy of human suffering — how it manifests, how to identify it, and how its various expressions can intersect. And being white (just for starters) will always situate me in the lowest echelon of any conversation about suffering, because no matter how hard my life might be, not being white would make those circumstances at least a liiittle bit worse.
This is difficult for a lot of white people to accept, but it’s no different from having the sense, as a layman, not to tell a surgeon how to remove a kidney or a pilot how to land a plane. But just the same: your opinion occupying a lower tier of relevance than someone else’s doesn’t mean you aren’t entitled to it, or even that you’re necessarily wrong. No marginalized group is a monolith, so being part of one isn’t a badge of infallibility. But I accept that in some situations — particularly in conversations those groups are having amongst themselves, regarding their own experiences — I’m simply not capable of swaying the people I might want to sway, and I don’t think there’s anything particularly unjust about that.
True confidence is quiet, and choosing not to disagree is not the same thing as conceding the point. Forcing your own input into a situation where it will do no good is an expression of nothing but ego. When people are anchored by mutual respect, and earnestly trying to understand each other’s points of view? I live for that shit. But finding those moments means knowing how to pick your battles, and maintaining a measure of humility at all times. It means accepting that even your most strongly-held beliefs stem from your subjective experience, and that they’re parts of a larger picture at best.
Respecting the Conversation
I have no shortage of opinions. They’re all correct, obviously, and the world would be a better place if everybody agreed with me. But since I don’t live in that world, I’ve come to appreciate the human conversation itself — the constellation of thought, the endless churn of ideas and beliefs as we trip over each other in the rough direction of whatever feels like truth in that moment.
Getting closer to that truth, I think, means learning to value differences of opinion. Learning to see them as opportunities to smack yourself in the face with the unknown and thereby know yourself better. It means being mindful of the inner nudges of the ego, and asking yourself whether you’re actually trying to convince anybody of anything or just assert your own magnificence.
Disagree without arguing. Think, actively, about what you’re saying, and look for the gaps, the things that aren’t being said — maybe there’s a new idea there just waiting to be voiced, and we’ll all be better for having it.
Next: Iambic pentameter. ‘Nuff said.
