Escaping the Politics of Self-Deception
How and why I broke out of the perfect rhetorical fortress.
We... are not serious people.
What am I doing here?!
Four years ago, in the thick of pandemic x election year hysteria, I found myself kneeling on my bathroom floor somewhere between exasperated tears and deep belly laughter at the absurdity that had enveloped my life.
Prior to this moment, I was a TDS-positive leftist and full-on Covidian zealot who had spent the spring and summer of 2020 trying to catalyze what I believed was the only commensurate response to what I'd been convinced was a convergence of multiple existential crises for America: a general strike.
Yes, I fully recognize now how crazy that sounds. But consider my fear-addled logic at the time: If indefinite lockdowns were the only way to keep everybody alive during the pandemic, and we needed to convince a trifling Congress to 1) pay people to stay home and 2) protect the rapidly approaching Most Important Election Of Our Lifetime™ from the prospect of a white nationalist Trumpian takeover of our democratic system, a general strike (or targeted, rolling strikes in key industries) seemed like the best way to simultaneously keep people home while leveraging our people-power to move a reluctant federal government.
At that time, major progressive and Democratic Party-aligned organizations collectively held tens (if not hundreds) of millions of dollars designated for activities like canvassing, house parties, and rallies that — according to The Science™ — had suddenly become irresponsible in light of the public health crisis. If we truly meant all we'd said about our public officials' meager response to our supposedly dire situation, why wouldn't we put our own money where our mouths were, paying striking workers' expenses while forcing our government to step up and do their part?
(Stop laughing! Yes, I truly, earnestly believed the situation was that dire, and that we might put our own money where our mouths were, instead of cajoling donors and taxpayers into sacrificing more of theirs.) Of course, that’s not what happened. Despite our increasingly alarmist rhetoric, the professional left stuck to its regularly scheduled programming of e-petitions, posting on social media, and permitted protests.
We honestly think this man might try to stage a coup, and our response to that civil war-baiting crisis would be… an email petition?! I laughed until I cried until I laughed some more, on repeat.
The vast disconnect between our apocalyptic messaging versus our feeble calls to action was rapidly thinning my patience and sanity. I couldn’t shake the scammy feeling that I was part of a “movement” raking in millions of dollars from terrified political hobbyists, while spending most of our time picking fights on the internet instead of seriously challenging the racism and fascism we claimed lurked everywhere. For the first time in years, I gave myself permission to seriously question the political narratives I’d bought into, and why. And the more I questioned, the faster I felt myself reaching the end of my rope not just with any one organization, but with this whole industry.
My discontent literally hit a fever pitch in late October of 2020, when a COVID scare that I (unjustifiably) believed might kill me forced me to recognize that this was not how I wanted to spend my life. By then, I had built my whole identity, career, and social life around "progressive" activism. I’d spent years going from place to place, repeatedly working myself to the point of burnout for causes I believed in, only to be driven halfway crazy by some combination of harassment, drama, and fatigue. And though there were certainly parts of my work that I was proud of -- organizing communities to improve their schools, championing workers’ rights, supporting survivors of harassment and assault, promoting the Census and registering voters -- there was also much that I was starting to question once I finally let myself see the glaring gap between our rhetoric and reality.
If COVID is such a threat that we can't connect with our families for Thanksgiving, why are we joining massive street protests?
If we truly care about the essential workers risking their health in this crisis, why aren't we making any tangible effort to force our government to address the inequality that is putting them at risk?
If we’re the ones who know how to “make the economy work for working people," why are cities and states run by Democratic supermajorities some of America’s most expensive and unequal places to live in the first place?
In past moments like these, when inconvenient questions about my politics or professional circumstances would start to well up in my consciousness, I'd reflexively redirect my thinking. I’d tell myself that the next organization or campaign would be different, might have less drama, might be more committed to "living their values" or "liberation" or whatever. But by late 2020, I physically had no more energy to keep BS-ing myself. I wanted OUT. I wiped my face, stopped laughing and started praying, and made a plan to quit my job. If I couldn't seem to "fit" in any particular organization, maybe I could figure out other ways to directly serve earnest people and organizations.
After gifting myself a one-month mental health sabbatical for my birthday, I launched my own business by experimenting with services based on the expertise I'd amassed from applying my background in psychology and education to political organizing and comms strategy. I soon found that my most popular offerings involved training and consulting around narrative interventions against disinformation, a niche I’d fallen into over years of waging hotly-contested communications campaigns on digital platforms. Especially given my emerging skepticism about various "progressive" ideas and causes, I was excited and relieved to find some way to do something useful with my professional expertise while giving myself some space from partisan or ideologically-bound work.
Or so I thought.
With apologies for stating the should-be-obvious: Reality transcends partisanship. No political party or "side" of an artificial political spectrum has a monopoly on truth, nor a deceit-free track record. Yet it was almost exclusively left-leaning coalitions and parties interested in this kind of work. Eventually I had to ask myself: If we're truly trying to promote truth and not a certain ideology, why aren’t these coalitions more ideologically diverse? Even before I had officially let go of certain “progressive” stances, but already increasingly skeptical of exclusively left-leaning spaces, I couldn't shake the nagging question: Doesn't it feel a liiiiiiiiitle too convenient that the 'truth' always seems to line up with our political preferences?
Especially if we believe there is no objective truth or morality?
Wait— what, exactly, are we policing here if all truth is subjective, anyway?
And how is “subjective truth” any different from “alternative facts?”
At this point, I started digging down to the foundations of what I believed not only politically, but about the nature of reality itself. And while I’ll save the details of those explorations for other posts, I think it’s important to pause and consider just how arrogant and dangerous it is for an ideological movement that denies the existence of absolute truth, and claims that objective morality is ‘oppressive’, to simultaneously position itself as society’s arbiter of truth and morality.
As I’ve said before, if all truth is subjective, then there is no basis to label anything as mis- or disinformation, exposing “progressives’” efforts to slow the spread of certain information as thinly-disguised attempts to impose their own views on everyone else. If there is no one right way to think or live, why should everyone else be forced to adopt their way of thinking and governing societies or spaces like social media? Beyond the hypocrisy and intellectual inconsistency lurks a more fundamental danger of surrendering our information environment — and governing power — to the ever-changing whims of self-deceived, often maladjusted people.
Anyway, as I continued mulling these contradictions personally, I also started posing similar questions to colleagues in the counter-disinformation industry. At best, I’d get intrigued nods and affirming acknowledgements of the depth of the question, but few attempts at answers. That unsettled me. These seemingly well-intentioned people were making serious money to do what should have been serious work, that had serious implications for freedom of expression in multiple societies— to say nothing of people’s reputations and livelihoods, and the free flow of information that is essential to productive public policy conversations.
Yet they’d never even bothered to examine their own beliefs about how we know what is or isn’t true. Nor were any of them bothering to actually verify what was true before participating in multi-continental efforts to change public policy and pressure Big Tech to police certain kinds of content. These people were confidently working with governments, media outlets, and digital platforms to obscure certain information (and individuals) based on little more than the say-so of ideologically-aligned public officials and “experts”— all of whom have significant political and/or financial interests in censoring certain viewpoints and dominating public conversations. By refusing to question themselves or their allies before embarking on efforts that distort our information environment, they abdicated their responsibility to stop and consider whether they might be doing more harm than good.
As I continued to question the evidence and logic (or lack thereof) underpinning what passed for "counter-disinfo" work, I also reflected on the industry’s troubling trend toward issue creep, as the work sprawled from clearly defined processes like census-taking and elections into all kinds of social issues that are not nearly so clear-cut. People started tacking highly subjective, poorly defined terms like "malicious narratives" and "hate speech/online toxicity" onto this field, conveniently broadening the pretext for their funder-friendly meddling. It was impossible not to notice that those terms were almost never applied to progressives engaging in malicious or abusive behavior, but regularly applied to conservatives or anyone else sharing disfavored views on issues as varied as immigration policy or pandemic response, whether reasonably or disrespectfully.
Or, I should say, it became impossible not to notice, once I stopped letting party and ideological loyalty define— or confine— how I viewed things. First slowly, then all at once, I started noticing not only double standards like those, but the absurd mental and social habits I and my peers adopted over the years. For instance, way back when I was first media trained years ago, everyone I worked with could competently role play opposing viewpoints for debate practice. But more recently, I started encountering "progressive" peers and trainees who were nearly incapable of steel-manning different positions on an issue, and sometimes even offended by the suggestion that they try.
I also started recognizing how many issue campaigners and organizations were needlessly struggling to articulate their ideas or get meaningful policy work done. Because they had become so internally captured by lefty groupthink, they'd lost the ability to reason or communicate with people outside of their ideological bubble. (As someone who cares deeply about public policy, it is physically painful to watch issues like public health or environmental protection, which should attract broad-based support, either struggle to get a fair hearing because they have been discredited by association with intolerant “progressives,” or get bogged down by unworkable or impractical policy goals because hard-leftists presume their preferred policy solutions are the only ones worth pursuing.)
On another occasion, while registering for an event held by a prominent scientific organization, I stopped myself upon realizing that I had just scrolled past fairy pronouns in order to select “she/her/hers” in the mandatory pronoun field on the form. This is an org that claims to promote and defend scientific principles… yet they’re entertaining the idea that people can not only somehow magically ‘identify’ out of their sex, but out of their species altogether and declare themselves mythical creatures?! (Realizing that I couldn’t hit ‘submit’ without engaging in that farce, I ditched the form and the event altogether, and have refused to participate in reality-denying pronoun rituals ever since.)
Relatedly, I almost choked on my lunch last year when I saw a clip of my former boss, an Ivy-educated leader of one of the country’s leading women’s organizations, testifying before Congress that because she is “not a scientist,” she couldn’t define what a woman was. (I later found out that this was the second time she was unable to answer this basic question on the Hill.) This used to be a question kindergarteners could confidently answer, but now men and women of letters are either unsure of -- or afraid to state -- the obvious?
What had happened to us?!
And then I remembered what happened. I remembered all the “internal organizing,” and tense DEI trainings, and “mediations” and “processing conversations” and love-bombing and sloganeering and jeering and cancellations. I remembered running what Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott aptly call the conformity gauntlet, and how many minor and major moments of emotional manipulation a person experiences on the journey from elite indoctrination educational institutions into professional spaces like these. I remembered how intermittently rewarding the socio-emotional rush of self-righteously condemning “problematic” transgressors could be. And I remembered the chilling anxiety of knowing your every word, phrase, ‘like’, share, reaction, or silence would be relentlessly scrutinized by your so-called ‘friends,’ colleagues, and even family.
She couldn’t state the obvious for the same reason I’d stopped doing so until a few months prior: because she’d learned over the years that if she dared to use common sense and acknowledge biological reality, she’d have an angry crew of staffers (like my own former self) making her life miserable for the next few days or weeks— if not running her out of her job entirely— for the high crime of being “transphobic.”
If you are someone who feels like you just woke up one day in the late 20-teens or 2020 to find that society had devolved into Clown World overnight, you might understandably wonder how anyone gets caught up in thinking or acting like this. And while I can look back now and see all sorts of logical fallacies and misdirections within "progressive" ideology, I can also see why it took so long for me to detect them. As a high-achieving '90s kid growing up in a largely Democrat community, I readily absorbed the dominant culture of "political correctness" that served as a hospitable environment for the more virulent strain of leftism I'd eventually catch from my professors, peers, and pop culture during college.
A few years later, the rise of social media would simultaneously enable digital campaigning, algorithmic segregation, peer-to-peer social surveillance, and cancel culture. That, in turn, enabled symbolic capitalists -- particularly professional lefties like my (former) self -- to seal ourselves within a perfect rhetorical fortress where fair representations of opposing viewpoints were rarely presented, or easily mocked or dismissed by presumed association with low-status “right-wingers” or “MAGAts” when they were. Once confined in that echo chamber, it was all too easy for the most extreme voices to claim that their hard-left positions were the only legitimate path to “social justice.” Far more militant and rhetorically persuasive than their more modestly “politically correct” counterparts, they would eventually silence, convert or displace many of these more moderate partisans from positions of power in academia, many advocacy nonprofits, legacy media outlets, government bureaucracies, and the Democratic Party.
Because too few divergent voices remained within our echo chamber to actually question the fundamental soundness of certain ideas and policy goals, emotional manipulation frequently replaced evidence-based exploration and argumentation. (The latter is allegedly a “masculinist, white supremacist mode of inquiry,” as I — a black woman! — was once scolded by a white academic. She didn’t appreciate me laying out a logical argument or asking her to prove an assertion she made during a heated email exchange. All humans are capable of rationalizing away their own self-interested foolishness, but highly-educated people have a much bigger rhetorical wardrobe in which to dress up their nonsense.)
Ever wondered why, when you try to ask left-leaning partisans a simple question or raise a logical objection to certain “progressive” ideas or political figures, you’re frequently met with a barrage of emotional appeals or accusations? This is a key reason. Their own thinking was likely shaped by someone else’s emotional appeals and accusations, and it is incredibly difficult to reason a person out of a position they were never reasoned into.
This is not to say that members of the professional left don’t reason or look for evidence, but rather that, like other highly educated partisans, they’re very willing to abandon both when those processes start turning up results that threaten their political preferences, their professional interests, their social status, or their ability to think of themselves as good people. Again, this kind of self-deception and rationalization is common to all humans, regardless of ideology. But the specific danger here is in their ability to cloak such behavior behind a veneer of “expertise” and have their false perceptions affirmed throughout the rest of academia, echoed across legacy media outlets, and enforced by government bureaucracies, HR departments, and activist pressure campaigns.
Not only are these people deceiving themselves and each other, they are enmeshed within industries that simultaneously reinforce, pay for, and profit from their misapprehensions. As hard as it is to change your mind when you've been a vocal supporter of a particular party or cause, it is exponentially more so when your entire livelihood is wrapped up in it. But people who are lying to themselves cannot be trusted to tell you the truth, much less police it.
I had a choice to make: Did I want to keep lying to myself? Or was it time to walk away, risking most of my relationships and my business in the process?
Hard as it was and continues to be, my conscience wouldn’t let me keep ignoring the obvious. I let the questions keep coming, and continued seeking answers rooted in solid evidence instead of a consensus manufactured by people in denial of their own fallibility or self-interest. I started reading and listening to a broader range of voices, including thinkers with well-substantiated ideas who’d been stigmatized in my old bubble. I started relearning how to assess sources and evidence, and re-examining logical fallacies and cognitive biases in order to reclaim my reasoning from the damage done by years of lefty groupthink. I left the Democratic Party, and ended business relationships with clients whose policy goals or cultural norms infringe upon people's fundamental rights to life, liberty, and property. And I started -- and plan to continue -- speaking up about what I’ve learned from things I regret promoting in the past.
As I worked to rebuild my discernment, I recognized how the ideological capture of academia and media in particular had made it easy to mistakenly feel informed while actually only being emotionally validated for believing whatever members of my class are incentivized to affirm. It required a lot less work to stay in the bubble and passively consume legacy media output. But especially as I watch the people still inside battle unnecessary anxiety and confusion post-election, I'm reminded that the effort to think for yourself is well worth it.
Now that we’re at another turning point, I hope others who find themselves in the same position I was in four years ago find the courage to start questioning their own and their allies’ unserious behavior. If that's you, here are a few you might start with:
If President Trump is like, LiTeRaLlY HitLer, why are your political avatars promising a peaceful transition of power? If his behavior was so distinctly bad as to merit prosecution, why are they backing down instead of doing whatever it takes to save America from a criminal would-be dictator?
If President Biden is such a good guy, why is he breaking months of promises by issuing Hunter Biden a blanket pardon for crimes that could implicate the last ten plus years of his own career? (And what is this business about preemptive pardons?! If they’re truly that scared of Trump, why are they maneuvering to save their own hides instead of protecting ours? Are you not yet tired of these scammers playing in our faces, while exploiting your fear of the Scary Orange Man in the Red Hat to get away with it?)
If your favorite organizations and public officials truly support democracy, why are some of them vowing in advance to oppose the will of the voters? And how are people who widely support censorship going to protect your freedom?
How are the same media outlets that have repeatedly (and often unapologetically) publicized 'culture war' hoaxes, assisted in coverups of major scandals involving their political allies, and recently run pieces denigrating the Constitution trustworthy to cover (real or imagined) attacks on democracy and the rule of law?
I've said it before and I'll say it again: it is dangerous to let political identity become a mental shortcut for filtering new information. Bad actors exploit that in-group bias to stop us from questioning “our side’s” policies and practices, even when they undermine the people and issues we care about. Being "well-educated" and listening to "experts" does not make you immune to cognitive biases or misinformation. Indeed, it can actually make you more susceptible to motivated reasoning and vulnerable to disinformation from authorities you identify with.
Ask me how I know...
If we truly care about making a positive difference in the world, we cannot afford to lie to ourselves about ourselves, or the people and causes we feel aligned with. To say to you what I wish someone would have said to me years sooner: Let yourself ask and investigate politically inconvenient questions. Leave the rhetorical fortress and actually consider the perspectives of people whose viewpoints differ from yours. Don’t let ideology or partisanship undermine your reasoning or your relationships.
Prideful rationalization and self-segregation paves the path into self-deception; humbly listening to others, asking yourself hard questions, and doing the work to find answers illuminates the path out. Move towards the light — you will be happier, healthier, and wiser for it.