In defense of nuanced understanding of the enemy in a networked age (feat Zizek vs Peterson)

One can construct a bingo sheet to group together anybody. A bingo sheet constructed to group together people who don’t act or think similarly will not reliably predict those people’s thoughts or actions. I think the Peterson/Zizek debate will be instructive because so many people have adopted a filter that highlights the similarities & elides the differences between them, & the differences are very important.

Folks with very different values & bodies of theory can accidentally agree on some aspects of praxis, but such agreement is very fragile in situations where praxis actually derives from theory. It’s a little more than a bingo sheet but less than an alliance of convenience.

Compounding this bingo-sheet problem is a tendency to conceive of outgroups as a block. But, terrible people are terrible in diverse ways. The outgroup is always just as schismatic as the ingroup. Understanding those schisms is tactically advantageous.

Thinking of the outgroup as a block made sense when geography coincided very strongly with group boundaries. Communications tech has increasingly disconnected culture and ideology from geography. As a result, the world we live in is one where people can and do change their minds all the time. (They don’t do so in a rational way: value in the marketplace of ideas isn’t any better predictor of quality than value in any other market, & so good ideas do not win out — loud ones do.) If…