Liberalism’s Reality Problem

Live Long And Prosper, If You Like

We liberals are ultimately optimists.

For many of us the perfect world would be something out the Star Trek universe, where geniuses have optimized all of life for maximum enjoyment, abundance, efficiency, and equity. In Trek world, there’s no need for money and there (mostly) aren’t wars over resources because the smart gals and guys have it all figured out. I want to live in that world, particularly in a Holodeck that would let me live out my fantasy of being Clark Kent.

But we don’t live in that world. It isn’t just because of Donald Trump, but in our Current Crisis he is the main actor in making the world suck, along with his propagandists at Fox News and his GOP enablers in Congress. We can’t have our utopian world because all of these various elements are flies in our ointment.

That doesn’t mean we cannot strive for Captain Kirk/Picard/Janeway/Sisko nirvana, but it does mean we have to deal with the world as it is.

In our perfect world, we would be able to persuade people away from making bad decisions and holding destructive positions merely by talking them out of it. There is a shared liberal delusion (in my POV) that the way to get this done is by simply talking to people. If we just sit down and rationally explain with these folks how they went wrong and how they can solve their individual issues, surely they will come around.

That’s how it works, right? Most of the time on Star Trek, the Captain can talk the villain of the week or some other entity the error of their ways and come to a satisfying conclusion. Sometimes on Star Trek you can even convince the Klingons to stand down instead of shooting first.

But the real world isn’t like this. If anything, trying rational persuasion leads to the other party digging in even deeper. The mere act of trying to get into their heads to understand the issue is caricatured as an insidious campaign to “get in their head” and even “brainwash” them.

The reality is most adults will need something very bad to happen to them or a loved one to change their minds. We cannot talk them off the ledge, they have to jump off and go splat on the pavement to understand it was a bad idea to dance on the edge of a building in the first place.

This feels illogical to us. We’re in the right. We’re doing a good thing. Can’t they understand we are trying to help them? If we feel in our hearts that we are doing What’s Best, surely they will feel that.

Unfortunately, no. Particularly when it comes to politics and all the associated ideas, people are pretty dug in. To be fair, if you’re a standard issue center-left person and someone came up to you and gave you a long speech about how we need to cut the safety net and accept racism, you wouldn’t budge either.

It isn’t two sides of the same coin but understand that they believe clearly crazy and wrong and destructive things with the same vehemence with which you understand that gravity is a thing that exists.

Ultimately, I believe the best course of action in many of these cases is to just give up. We have to accept the reality that many people are simply lost and not able to be recovered. This feels bad. We want to help our fellow man and woman and giving up on them feels like a failure.

But the problem lies with them, not us. We have our hearts in the right places but there’s just something within them that blocks coming to the right conclusion. Instead of beating our heads against the wall until it’s a bloody pulp, we should focus on the people who can realistically see the light.

I think it is a far more efficient use of time, which is finite, to focus on people who at a very minimum share reality with the rest of us. They may be politically apathetic or nihilistic, but unlike the most diehard they are not in a cult. In our world, which is very far from the domain of Spock, that’s putting us way ahead of the game.

In politics there are bandwagons. While you may not ever convert a diehard person, getting a persuasion-curious person to “yes we can” will sometimes lead to one stone loosening, then another, then another, and an eventual avalanche.

That can then – maybe – lead the most diehard to question their outlook. Because if 50-70 million people are swimming one way and they are swimming the other, perhaps they will at least ask: “Am I actually swimming the right way?”

This isn’t the most satisfying course of action. It feels like a loss to give up on people, especially if its someone you dearly love. But I think if we want any hope of getting to our Star Trek jetpack future with phasers, food replicators, and warp drives, this is the only viable path.

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— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on BlueSky @owillis.bsky.social

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The head is not going to scratch itself, hooman.