Why Yell At People

Social media talks about this all the time, but lot of people these days think that we should completely write off people who politically disagree because the stakes are just too high and people who can deal with people who disagree with each other just don't have enough skin in the game to realize how important the issues are.

Believe me, one way or another, I'm tempted to do just that literally every day of my life. But the problem is this: once you write them off, you can't supervise them anymore. If they have no examples of liberals/progressives/socialists in their lives, there is absolutely no filter on their imagination of how evil we are and how much punishment we deserve. Keep your friends close but your enemies closer, and if you isolate them, they will fight to defend themselves a lot harder than they already have.

There's no question in my mind that the wrong political opinions say something unflattering about other people's moral character, and considering that my opinions are different than many people's, that becomes more complex. Living between hipster and Jewish Baltimore means living between two worlds that really and genuinely hate an enormous amount of what the other believes, and realizing that neither of them will ever accept you as a full member because you don't really buy what either of them is selling.

But what happened to the idea of simply yelling at friends: "You're fucking evil!" "You're a collaborator and a piece of filth!" "Don't walk away, if you believe this shit take your fucking medicine!"? Real friends tell us what we need to hear, not what we want to hear (braces himself for blowback...), and the reason people are so angry now is not that they've been yelled at too much, but that fake friends have told us all that it's possible to isolate ourselves from the ugliest conceivable disagreements, and then when we can't, it drives us all insane. It's one thing when a person is genuinely a danger to you, or if a deadbeat abandons you multiple times unprompted (no personal experience there...), then isolation is probably extremely wise, but when the isolation comes from abstract disagreement, that is a perfect way to turn the abstract concrete.

If you need distance from people who disagree with you, take a break. But when you don't return, they inevitably return, maybe with friendship or maybe with extreme enmity. That is how wars happen. The world of enemies is always replenished with new ex-friends. It is much better to scream and yell and bully your friends to exasperation than it is to completely write them off and then sustain the possibility that they come back into your lives as enemies, and if that's true in personal life, it's even more true in public life. If you live as close to violent conservatives as we do, then if you want them out of your life, the only way you get them out of your life is if you end their lives or if they end yours. So I will always be on the side that it's much better to yell my disagreements with people than it is to isolate them, because so long as the yelling keeps happening, I know what the other side is thinking, but if the yelling stops, there's literally no limit to what they can imagine about us all, and what they could do to defend themselves against the people they increasingly think we are.