Everyone's a Little Bit Sadist Sometimes: An Argument for Moderation (Most of the Time)

Last night I was chatting with a neighbor about politics, as one does, and we were lamenting the radical polarization of politics, also as one does. "What does it say about us,"  I asked, "that we keep electing these politicians who are so incapable of compromising with the other side?" And it's not just compromise; our politicians are incapable of having rational conversations with their opposites. If you look at political discourse on social media, it's not terribly surprising that these are the people we elect. We as a human race seem to take pleasure in ridiculing those we disagree with. Like, if I can just get one more jab in, you'll finally see how superior my point of view is--and therefore how superior I am. We all know how fruitless this effort is, but we engage anyway.

And yes, I mean we. I know I do it. If you can sincerely say that you don't take pleasure in mocking or arguing with people who are wrong, then my sincere kudos to you. You are more mature than I am. I like to think of myself as a moderate liberal, capable of engaging in productive conversations with people I disagree with, and sometimes I pull that off--the conversation with my right-of-center neighbor last night was quite friendly and I learned about his point of view--but a lot of times I don't. I tend to swing far left and become combative in certain trigger situations. These triggers include my hot-button topics, which for the most part are cases where I perceive people being hurt; especially when those people are part of the LGBTQ community, women, or people of color, all of whom I broadly think of as "my people," even though I can only claim membership in one of those groups (why I don't think of straight white men as my people despite being a white man and having several straight white male friends is a topic for me to explore another day). Other triggers that make me dig into my ideologies and become obstinate are when I'm engaging with an obstinate person from the other end of the spectrum, when I'm engaging with a stranger on social media so I have nothing to lose, when I feel attacked or threatened, when I'm grumpy for unrelated reasons, or when I just have a really good joke that happens to be at the expense of people I disagree with.

My perceived correlation between the political spectrum and niceness. An admittedly oversimplified view.

Generally speaking, I see a correlation between political moderation and niceness, and between political extremism and meanness. This is absolutely true of me: When I'm more moderate, I'm more willing to listen to other people, to speak respectfully and be nice. When my more extreme political views take over, that's when I get belligerent, sadistic, just plain mean. I'm making it sound like I believe the solution to all the world's problems is for everyone to be more moderate, and to a certain extent I believe that, but unfortunately it's not so simple. There are situations where it's not appropriate to be nice. When people are actually being hurt, sometimes the only way to make it stop is to dig your heels in and forcefully say NO. If someone's pointing a gun at my children, I'm not going to worry about hurting his feelings--or his body--as I do whatever it takes to stop him and protect my children. The difficult thing is identifying the threshold for those gray situations between "you're pointing a gun at my children" and "I disagree with your personal beliefs" at which point it becomes appropriate to set aside niceness.

The key, I suppose, is being honest with ourselves about our motivations. If I'm being a jerk just because my ego is threatened, because I'm hangry, or because I'm reverting back to that basic human tendency to take sadistic pleasure in being mean to others, then I'm part of the problem. If I'm being a jerk because it's legitimately the most effective way to stop someone from being hurt, then I will be that jerk. And maybe some problems take both the moderate approach and the more extreme approach. Both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X were fighting the same injustices, but the two fought in very different ways. I believe both were necessary. I'm going to work on being Martin whenever I can, and being Malcolm when I need to.