Disrupting Radicalization
“But there is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation. Behind every fact presented to the world–by a teacher, a writer, anyone–is a judgment. The judgment that has been made is that this fact is important, and that other facts are not important and so they are omitted from the presentation.”
Unfortunately, a majority of Americans have become radicalized.
Radicalization: “the process by which an individual or group comes to adopt increasingly radical views in opposition to a political, social, or religious status quo.” [Wikipedia]
Radicals can be informative (the radical professor), catalysts for change (the peaceful protester), save us from mobs (the lone dissenter), and can even be entertaining (the armchair philosopher).
Radicalization ceases to be useful, works against humanity, and ruins lives when it leads to violence, violent extremism, and politically motivated assholism.
While a microdose of radicalization may be okay, any more than that is detrimental to your future.
You should be able to identify, question, and denormalize radicalizing ideas and practices. As such, here are some thoughts to consider:
Mathematics aside, all facts and truths are observer-dependent, multidimensional opinions (MDOs). Ergo, partial truths and incomplete facts are single dimension opinions (SDOs).
The road to radicalization is paved with single dimension opinions (SDOs).
Fact finding and truth seeking are hard; they require you to seek, consume, and understand competing points of view; until you have done so, the only thing you possess is an SDO.
Everyone has SDOs. Social media is an SDO machine.
Unfortunately, both commercial and public news organizations are increasingly politicized SDO machines.
You can spot a low value SDO source when they don’t welcome, don’t enable, or if they censor alternative points of view.
SDO partisans are easily triggered by alternative points of view.
SDO partisans use pronouns like “them” and “they” to demonize groups of people (e.g., “they hate you” or “they’re motivated by greed”).
SDO partisans use labels like “republicans” and “democrats” to demonize groups of people (e.g., “republicans are racists” or “democrats are socialists”).
SDO partisans use corporate names like Facebook, Google, and Twitter to demonize all employees of that corporation.
When you see or hear grouping words like “them”, “they”, “republicans”, “democrats”, or corporate names, ask for actual names (the humans); most SDO partisans can’t give more than three.
Science is never settled; therefore it’s impossible to construct an SDO using a ‘settled science’ argument.
Beware of SDOs that have been reinforced with credentials and/or anonymous sources (e.g., the Harvard graduate says…”).
Beware of SDOs that have been reinforced with cherry-picked statistics. See “How To Lie With Statistics” (1954).
News articles and social media posts become MDOs when they are accompanied by comments and responses. It’s essential to read both.
There’s really no such thing as an SDO, you’re just missing the other dimension.
Every time you convert an SDO into an MDO, you have made the world a better place.
Presenting information as an MDO (revealing all sides), makes the world a better place.
Investing in (forming and presenting) MDOs requires 2X or 3X more commitment than simply consuming and repeating SDOs.
After you have read this post and (most importantly) any responses to it (via Twitter), I hope you can use this MDO to disrupt radicalization.