What should I do when I am shocked by politics?

Embrace what increases political comprehension and reject what doesn’t.

It is easy to feel stressed and maybe even overwhelmed by politics. When we do, our stress is all about how shocking we find the behavior of our political adversaries. It leads to feelings of indignation, disbelief, grief, resentment, etc. And it is difficult to decide what to do with those feelings or how to respond to a given situation. At bottom, the question we are wrestling with is this: what should we make of the shocking thoughts, words, and deeds of our political adversaries? What should we think of this situation and what should we do about it? Today, what I would like to offer you is a way to recognize the difference between answers that help and answers that don’t.

The right answers to these questions allow you to see that “those who come to hold bad beliefs” (and therefore engage in bad behavior) “do so for roughly the same sorts of reasons as those who come to hold good beliefs. It isn’t because they’re irrational and we’re not.”¹. These answers increase political clarity; they have the potential of both decreasing our political stress and of allowing the remaining irreducible stress to be channeled into effective political action. Whereas, on the contrary, the wrong answers make you believe that there is something fundamentally different about the way political adversaries choose their behavior or acquire their beliefs. Those answers lead to political cluelessness, ineffectiveness, as well as to misery and misanthropy.

So to the question “what should I make of the shocking behavior of my political adversaries?”, the answer is: I should interpret their behavior in such a way that increases political comprehension. This means that I should come to understand their reasons for acting this way, and to see these reasons as analogous to the ones that dictate my own behavior. Not only do we tend to be bad at doing that, but we also tend to gravitate towards answers to political stress that explicitly tell us that we should be doing the opposite! Some of those views state that understanding the offender’s reasons would mean agreeing with them or forgiving them. That it would mean giving up on our own moral standards and political convictions. That isn’t true, though this concern can initiate an interesting and productive discussion about exactly what kind of “understanding” is necessary in the context of political comprehension. Other views state that to understand the behavior of political adversaries is to understand its causes, in a way that necessarily breaks the analogy between what motivates them and what motivates you. For example, a view might describe “critical thinking” as what your adversaries lacked, hence why they behaved that way, whereas the same “critical thinking” is taken to be what you are proving that you have when you perform this analysis. In those conditions, there can be no analogy between their reasons and yours, because only your reasons are proper reasons, and not just causes. This too should be rejected as lacking political comprehension.

Here is the situation we are facing: the experience of being shocked by political adversaries is so bewildering that we intensely crave answers, ways to understand what is going on and to make things right. Because of this, it is very easy to fall for the answers that do not help, and in fact make things worse. Over time, you can learn to spot the wrong answers and why they are both tempting & wrong. While perhaps counter-intuitive at first, the right answers can become more and more intuitive with study and practice. I make it my mission to share with you all the resources that I have found to help, through a series of articles. Therefore, the present post will be updated regularly to point to them. You will find the list of resources below (short at first, and then updated over time). In those resources, you will find the arguments that back the change of attitude I am advocating for, and I hope it will help you the same as it helped me.

Resources:

- The Trustful Approach: it is a mindfulness-based philosophical exercise that I have developed in order to deal with political shocks. It teaches you to be more confident about your political convictions and to refrain from misunderstanding the words of your adversaries through insecure and incredulous interpretations. It requires no perspective-taking or empathy, and it is deliberately agnostic as to the usefulness of anger. It focuses more on feelings of strangeness, disbelief and horror. It is good to avoid toxic political polarization and to avoid activism burnout. Click here to read: The Trustful Approach: An Introduction

- Bad Beliefs by Neil Levy. I would normally link to an article where I explain a philosophical idea, and not just to an entire book you can read. However this book is available for free, in open access, and so I thought I would share it. This brilliant book shows how bad political beliefs are not the product of a deficit of rationality on the part of our political opponents, but the product of rational processes. Click here to read the book.

- [More resources to come!]

Pierrick Simon

my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr

(do not hesitate to reach out)

Bluesky: @pierricksimon.bsky.social

Twitter: @PhiloTranquille

NOTES:

1Levy, Neil (2021). Bad Beliefs: Why They Happen to Good People. Oxford University Press. ; Preface: Rational Social Animals Go Wild xiii --- Note that when Neil Levy talks of “bad beliefs”, he uses it as a technical term which is not synonymous with “wrong beliefs”. He uses it to designate beliefs that go against expert consensus even though this expert consensus is readily accessible. But allow me to re-purpose that quote a little bit out of context given that it broadly points in the direction of the same puzzles we are worried about. 

Soji: Zen Housework without Hope

(The plan? To try one new philosophical exercise every month. This article is part of a series. In the previous episode, we explored Spinozist Mindfulness & Loving Kindness)

For the month of April, I practiced a zen ceremony called “Soji”. Here’s how it was explained to me:

“In many Zen temples, there’s an activity called soji, a period of about 20 minutes where the whole community participates in cleaning up the temple and its grounds. It usually happens right after a bowing and chanting service, marking the end of the morning meditation schedule.

The premise is simple. You are assigned a simple cleaning task (rake the path, dry the dishes, sweep the hallway), which you do silently and without ambition to finish. In other words, there’s no ownership of the task: Just pick up the broom and do the best job you possibly can sweeping the hall until it’s time to stop.

After about 20 minutes, the work leader walks around ringing a bell that signals the end of soji. When you hear the bell, you simply stop what you are doing. If the hallway is only half swept, if there are still dishes to be dried, if you only polished 12 of the 15 windowpanes—it doesn’t matter. Just put away your tools and move on to the next thing. (In the case with most temples, this would be breakfast!)”¹

It is difficult to perfectly recreate that ceremony at home. Some aspects of this I chose not to do because they were not practical: it was not practical to have someone pick the task for me, and it was not always practical to stop and drop everything before having finished (since it sometimes created clutter in the middle of the room that had to be dealt with). Nonetheless, I recreated the conditions of the practice as best as I could. There’s always ways to make it as close to the original ceremony as possible. Which is important, since those conditions are the things that impart interesting lessons.

Even by recreating that practice imperfectly, it’s not hard to get a hold of some of its lessons. The point is very clearly this: “there’s no ownership of the task”. It’s about relaxing a lot of the emotional baggage that comes with a task like this and that has to do with your ego and its aims.

I was drawn to this practice because of the idea of doing a chore “without ambition to finish”. I was very excited when I heard of this principle. I immediately translated it in my mind as “without hope to finish”. It is only today as I write this blog post and find the exact quote again that I realize that I immediately interpreted the phrase and added the notion of hope. This is because Spinoza was fresh on my mind from the month before. Spinoza talks about a kind of anxious hope, which we must get rid of. Hope is an inconstant joy. The fact that it is inconstant matters more than the fact that it is a joy, and makes it something we should be wary of. Hope and despair are fundamentally two sides of the same coin: to accept one is to be bound to the other. As an anxious person, this is something that I feel very deeply. Hope is torture to me, and I stress out about the chores a lot. The idea that I could do the chores without hope promised a lot of relief.

I’m glad to say that it delivered on that promise! The exercise worked as intended. Finally, I could focus on the task at hand without being irritated by that nagging hope: hope of finally being done with the task, hope of doing the task as fast as possible, hope of being on top of my To-Do List, hope of being a good person, the kind of person that does good things and should be proud of doing good things. All of that emotional baggage: despair, despair, despair. Despair about the task ahead, about being late, about not being able, about being clumsy, about things not working out.

The exercise allowed me to be very attentive to the difference between two ways my body can move through space:

ON THE ONE HAND

my attitude when I’m hoping “to just be done with something”, to “get it over with already” = the abrupt and expeditious gestures. The way my present circumstance, drained of joy, voided by contempt, becomes nothing but a stepping stone towards an allegedly more interesting future.

ON THE OTHER HAND

my attitude when I perform a long task “without hope” = settling into it, admiring the view ; wandering through it, as if the series of things to be interacted with is the terrain on which I have a pleasant walk, not rushing to a predetermined destination, but instead, with an eye on the open horizon, experiencing the freedom of exploring that space in any which order I choose. A relaxed demeanor, not of mechanical gestures, but of exploratory gestures.

I really need to be attentive to that difference. I need to feel it in my flesh and bones. It is a matter of life or death. Every morning I wake up faced with a similar challenge, which is a microcosm of my life: I either surrender to the anxiety elicited by the work that needs to be done on my computer, and experience the entire space that separates me lying on the bed and me being on the computer (meaning: going to the bathroom, having breakfast, walking to the computer, waiting for it to be turned on… etc) as a lifeless chasm, void of meaning and joy, a bothersome chore that I “just want do be done with” OR I refuse to let my computer drain all the colours from the world around and hoard them for itself, and I move through the space as if to explore it. Without hope or ambition to “just be done with it”, and instead with a complete surrender to every step. I then feel the pull towards the window to look at the cool birds outside. If you try to “just be done” with life, as if it were a chore, pretty soon you will get your wish fulfilled, and that is very sad.

All of this gave me some insight as to how I should tackle the tension between wanting to be productive & get stuff stone VERSUS wanting to not rush things & smell the flowers. The insight is this: you should give yourself as much leeway as possible when it comes to exploring the place you’re in. Exploration should feel chaotic, as it does not follow very orderly plans. It loathes very neat plans. So you can pause, you can go backwards, you can do detours, you can repeat steps, you can take the scenic route. Whatever! Whatever you feel like doing is what you should be doing. However, you should carefully pick the space you decide to explore, and not leave that space for a while. This is similar to a writing technique Neil Gaiman talks about where he will go to his desk, and allow himself to not write at all, but not allow himself to do anything but writing. You can sit there and daydream, write or not write, explore that space all you want, but you can’t pick another space. With Soji, you can pick the pace (pace, not space) that is most natural to you, you can feel like a living being again, not a cleaning robot, but you have to commit to not leaving that situation for a while.

For all of these lessons, I found that dust was the best of teachers. While practicing Soji, I loved cleaning the dust, befriending the dust. Removing dust was the one task that encapsulated the spirit of the exercise the most. I could not possibly hope to be done with it, since it always came back, and it is always everywhere. I can make progress, but I cannot beat it. I can deal with it however I wish, as long as I make progress. It’s not rocket science, it’s just dust.

One thing the dust made very salient is the difference between the “present instant” and the “present moment”. One way to describe Soji is to describe it as an exercise where you focus on the present (the process) and stop thinking about the future so much (the end result). But the complex phenomenology of time can sometimes get oversimplified. Here, with this exercise, I found it interesting that I was not focused on the present instant. The present instant is that infinitesimally small slice of time that you are currently living. It is the thing that makes Marcus Aurelius say that you can tolerate any pain, since you always have to endure that pain only for a fraction of a second; that’s it. It is also the thing that makes Alan Watts say that, if you think about it, you always have to wash only one plate when you do the dishes. There is always just the one plate in front of you. Focus on the present instant is a good short-term coping mechanism to endure something very unpleasant. But in the long term, if you treat a task as torture to be endured it will really feel like torture to be endured. I do not recommend it for chores. You need to allow yourself to see that there is never just one plate. A single plate has the weight of all the ones that tired your arms before, and it has the meaning of all the ones that are to come. It isn’t so bad if you’re not trying to win a war. To be focused on the present moment, which includes the past and future, is to clean the dust with the knowledge that the dust will come back, that you cannot win because this is not a battle. And this is hopelessly joyful.

Pierrick Simon

07/05/2024

my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr

(do not hesitate to reach out)

Bluesky: @pierricksimon.bsky.social

Twitter: @PhiloTranquille

NOTES:

1Found on https://citydesert.wordpress.com/2018/01/11/housework-as-a-spiritual-discipline/ accessed in April 2024 ; Adapted from: Dana Velden “Finding Yourself In the Kitchen”, originally published on Rodale Wellness, September 4, 2015

The Trustful Approach: an Introduction

The trustful approach is a philosophical exercise that teaches you peace of mind and confidence in the face of political disagreement and social discord.

How can we live with the shocking behaviour of some of our fellow citizens? Everyday, people show commitment to beliefs and deeds that we think are wrong. When they are morally wrong, we feel utterly bewildered by their conduct: how can we make sense of it? “What are they even thinking? How dare they?” From our point of view, the minds of the people who engage in those wrongdoings feel strange, incomprehensible, and hostile. While thinking about how far they have fallen, we feel powerless. It seems impossible to get through to them. And over time, all of this wears us down.

We need tools to address how stressful this experience is. Like many negative experiences, it can come to dominate our lives, if we’re not careful. This can make us the worst versions of ourselves, leading us to betray our own values, including the values we accuse others of disrespecting.

I would like to propose a philosophical exercise designed specifically to deal with this feeling of moral shock. My idea is that if you practice this exercise regularly, you will be more resilient in the face of those challenges. They will feel less bad, and be less disorienting. You will be able to meet those instances of bewilderment, without losing all of your peace of mind, energy, and focus. At the same time, I recognize that those unpleasant experiences are important to our sense of morality, and so I have taken care to design the exercise in such a way that it doesn’t entail compromising on our values or letting go of legitimate indignation.

The exercise in question is called the “trustful approach”. In a sense, it is about trusting yourself and trusting your opponent more. But the devil is in the details. It is not about compromising on one’s values. The exercise is essentially about becoming aware of the rumination we engage in when we try to understand what someone was thinking when they did or said something wrong. There are certain things that are important to notice about this state of mind. Noticing them brings a lot of clarity to the situation and frees your mind from unnecessary suffering.

So here’s how you practice the trustful approach: the most important thing is to notice when you are in a state of moral shock, and to try to contemplate that emotion with as much curiosity as possible. Contemplating this feeling leads you to observe this desire that you have of knowing what goes on in the mind of the offender who said or did something wrong. This moral shock feels like a frustration of that desire. Crucially, you can pay attention to the various interpretations that come to mind as to what the offender was likely thinking. How you interpret what they meant to do or say. You are paying attention to the process of trying to fulfil that desire, of trying to find closure through hypotheses. In particular, you can be mindful of the way you form such hypotheses, how you linger on them for moral support, and how you discard them, as you eventually become dissatisfied with them. Over time, you will learn to realize how strangely inept those interpretations can be, since often their only virtue is to promise that they will finally put your mind at ease – by uncovering the secret motive of the offender – and they routinely fail to live up to that promise. But in order to realize this, you need to become adept at noticing two key aspects of the experience of moral shock.

Indeed, upon paying attention, you need to perform a double clarification of your experience. Paying attention to these feelings leads you to uncover two ambiguities that you can dispel.

The first clarification answers the question “Am I shocked or am I surprised?”. Though shock should be understood as a form of surprise, it is not necessarily reducible to the kind of surprise we experience when something goes against our expectations. Firstly, the shocking behaviour might have been fully expected, and we still feel strongly about it. Secondly, if all we cared about was predicting the future, we would respond to the offence by simply revising our expectations as to how the offender is likely to behave in the future, and then move on. However, what matters when we are shocked is not that a predictive expectation failed, but that a moral expectation was breached. Moral standards dictate how one should behave, not how one is likely to behave, so it is no wonder that we do not easily move on. No matter how much information we gather or guess about the offender, moral shock can always renew our curiosity: we can always ask “But how could this be?!” and truly mean it as a question. This allows rumination. Moral standards are there to convince people to do better, and are able to create new expectations. “I still expect you to do better.” Thus, the desire to know what they are thinking is marked by a fundamental ambiguity: are you trying to read their mind or are you trying to shape their mind? Are you truly wondering what they think or are you arguing with them inside your head, expecting them to change? It is good to become aware of the fact that your curiosity towards the mind of the offender is underpinned by a desire to repair the norm that was disrespected, bringing with it the hope of getting them to admit what they did wrong and the despair of thinking you might not be able to. Neither this hope nor this despair are appropriate during rumination, as rumination is not a proper way to reach people and change them.

The second clarification answers the question “Who believes what?” Because rumination based on moral shock thrives on the ambiguity between trying to read the mind of others and trying to shape the mind of others, it becomes difficult to remember to whom the values and beliefs that you ponder actually belong. The process of realizing that you are fundamentally trying to regain confidence about the validity of the norm that the offender disrespected should culminate in the realization that these values and beliefs you are considering are yours, and not that of the offender. Instead of realizing that, we tend to come up with “incredulous interpretations” of the deeds and words of the people who offend us. Interpretations marked by utter disbelief that they could be motivated by different values or beliefs. For instance, we might hastily hypothesize “They knew it was wrong but they did it to hurt me” or “They knew it was wrong but they did it to attract attention”, which is incoherent since this premise “they knew it was wrong” consists essentially in attributing to them the values and beliefs that we have, and that they manifestly lacked in the moment of doing something wrong. In other words, we refuse to let go of the idea that the cause of their behaviour can be understood using our beliefs; we refuse to believe they could think differently. This influences how we interpret the justifications offered by the offender. We interpret them in an incredulous way, refusing to consider that they might be a sincere expression of what motivated the offender, while at the same time hoping they can serve as an accidental confession that we are right. The fact of the matter is that people are usually more than happy to communicate their true motives, as far as they understand them, since they are very proud of those motives. Those motives are based on their values and beliefs, how could they not be proud of it? On the contrary, the incredulous approach allows us to ruminate on our own, because it allows us to fantasize that in committing the offence, the offender paradoxically recognized the importance of the norm that they disrespected, which makes it so taking seriously their point of view and how it differs from ours completely superfluous. In this situation, rumination feels like a great use of one’s time. But it is unhelpful, as it promises us that we can relate to the offender, while creating the conditions that make it impossible to relate to them, thus increasing the feeling of despair, the suspicion that the offender can’t be reached and reasoned with.

In summary: The trustful approach is practiced by mindfully paying attention to the feeling of moral shock. This feeling features a frustrated desire to know what is happening in the mind of the offender. This desire has to be examined and clarified in two ways. Firstly, “Am I shocked or am I surprised?” Shock is not always the kind of surprise that has to do with a failure of predictive expectations. It is about moral standards. Therefore, shocked curiosity can only be satisfied by knowing what to do with the situation. Can I change this person or is now not the right moment? Secondly, “Who believes what?”, when knowing the mind of the offender is caught up in trying to change the mind of the offender, it becomes difficult to keep straight who believes what. We easily forget that the offender has different beliefs. This creates a lot of needless confusion. In the end, I learn to trust my values and beliefs more, and to not be insecure about them in a way that leads me to produce incredulous interpretations of the justifications people give of their actions.

This entire exercise brings peace of mind by stopping the cognitive machinery that gets activated in order to call out the offender and change their behaviour, even when there is no plausible path to achieve such a thing. Thus we can save our energy until we find the appropriate forum to mobilize those efforts. Since the exercise prevents us from generating inept hypotheses and distrustful theories that we cling to for relief, it means that once we have found this forum, we are in a better position to change the minds of other people, and/or to have our own mind changed in the attempt, because we are primarily attentive to the way they are thinking, and not to the way we wish they would think.

P.S: Though I do practice this exercise myself, and it does me a lot of good, all of this is still very experimental, and I am always trying to refine the design and the pedagogy of the exercise. This is why I need people to test it out. 

If you want to give feedback on this article and how it introduces the Trustful Approach, you can do so by filling out this Short Google Form that asks a handful of specific questions. It does not require that you have tried the exercise yet, only that you have read about it.

If you have practiced the Trustful Approach and would like to give me feedback about it, here is a more open-ended form to do so.

In any case, if you are interested in any way, (for instance, if you are willing to give it a try but are still unsure how to go about it and would like some guidance), please contact me at this email address: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr . I am very open to any feedback or any dialogue about this.

Pierrick Simon

01/05/2024

my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr

(do not hesitate to reach out)

Bluesky: @pierricksimon.bsky.social

Twitter: @PhiloTranquille