I was alerted to a piece of social commentary recently that perfectly captured the exhausting reality of modern political discourse. Have a read for yourself:
Being a centrist just means you don’t culturally identify with the right, even if you agree with many right-wing policies. It’s the ‘I’m not like other girls’ pick-me brand of politics.
She thinks it’s a short post critiquing centrists, claiming that being a centrist simply means agreeing with right-wing policies but refusing to culturally identify with the right. The author dismisses the vast majority of people, as the political equivalent of the “I’m not like other girls” pick-me brand marketing that's usually assigned to the women who support men in women's spaces, races, places, and faces.
It is a deeply cynical take, but a sociologically fascinating one. It perfectly illustrates a cognitive trap that has thoroughly hijacked the public square, something I’m going to forever call the Category Error Projection.
To understand why our civic dialogue feels so broken, we have to look at the mechanics of how people like the author of that post are viewing the world. They are fundamentally misinterpreting the actions of others because they are applying the wrong mental framework to the situation. They get everything wrong because their thinking requires almost everything to be put in the wrong category.
The Mechanics of the Error
A category error occurs when you take a concept belonging to one logical category and apply it to a completely different one where it doesn’t belong.
Harking back to my explains-all catchphrase, Just another day living in the Transvestite Jihad on Planet Psychopath, the popular contemporaneous category error is made by assuming men (whose sexual arousal is based in transvestism) is they are actually women because they wear lipstick and frilly knickers, and that somehow this is the exact same thing as the social contagion of autistic gay and lesbian teenagers living through an extremely homophobic social media meme. Confusing the two is to make two category errors at once- quite the feat! One might suspect the author is strongly aligned to this religion where not encountering a category error is grounds for deep suspicion, and to encounter or create more category errors is to be ever more correct. The Intersectionality of category errors, if you will. Insert laugh react emojis here for tragedy maxxing.
Anyway, in this case, the error is confusing politics as a social identity with politics as utility. My conclusion here is the condensation of years of observation of deliberate category error.
The author of the post views political engagement entirely through the lens of subculture and aesthetic brand marketing. To them, one’s political stance is the jersey worn to signal which team one belongs to. Therefore, they commit a massive category error when they look at someone who evaluates policies on a case-by-case basis. They assume this objective approach belongs in the same category of social signalling that they operate within. She’s not just Good when she makes this statement, she’s the Goodest who ever Gooded in the whole history of Gooding. It's the bread and butter of virtue signalling. These people are infinitely more image conscious than they are class conscious. Probably entirely blinded by the cloud of luxury beliefs they can afford, monetarily, to hold.
Add psychological projection to the mix, and you get a potent misunderstanding because the highly tribal partisan cannot conceptualise engaging with political ideas without it being a play for social status, they project that exact motivation onto the independent thinker. They look at someone who refuses to adopt a partisan label and conclude: “You are playing the identity game, you’re just playing it in a sneaky, self-serving way.”
While everyone has the opportunity for self-awareness, it’s not an option for those who suffer from Category Error Projection. Textbook collective narcissism, they cannot leave the ingroup and must perform to whatever rules their ingroup constructs. Every performance is an act of devotion to the ingroup, and I can’t help but imagine that she either transgressed and acknowledged that centrist positions exist in a massive majority, or, much more likely, a friend faltered, and this is a public admonishment and policing of behaviour, “Sure, Becky, centrists exists, but they’re practically Far Right. You’re not a centrist, are you, Becky? FREE PALESTINE! TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN!” We have found a psychopath of Just another day living in the Transvestite Jihad on Planet Psychopath. Yes, she is they.
Aesthetics vs. Utility at the Coalface
This mindset is entirely divorced from the reality of getting things done.
When you move away from the performative outrage of the internet and step into the realities of regional planning, infrastructure delivery, balancing a municipal budget, making sure we get a hospital when planning for a new population of 300,000 people, the ridiculous grovelling and begging and ideological tagging advocacy requires (believe me when I say logical and reasoned business cases aren’t enough by themselves) all the boring stuff I actually have to do in the real world of practical politics, the hyper-fixation on cultural labels instantly falls apart. Today I will spend no less than TWO HOURS discussing the crappy pavement outside the Red Lion Hotel in Kilmore, and the preservation of the brick wall outside JJ Clancy Reserve, and a subdivision in Broadford which will now include the permission of an additional “small dwelling”. This is how the world works and moves through time. Oh, and potholes.
The boring problems of centrist politics do not care about cultural identity. You have to evaluate the issue on its merits. Sometimes the correct solution requires fiscal conservatism, sometimes it demands robust public intervention. Mostly it is a quiet game of negotiation and trust in delegation, hoping the delegates aren't incredibly corrupted by this nonsense.
To the hyper-partisan, this looks like cowardice or fence-sitting, but to the pragmatist, it is simply the rigour of problem-solving. It is the refusal to let the assessment of a practical issue be clouded by the emotional demands of a political tribe.
The nutjobs still have their inputs here. There are loads of Intersectionality-as-Religion policies informing us in all matters. This week we’re reminded of them with the handcuffing of dying teenager Henry Novak- a perfect demonstration of ridiculous policy in procedural decision making that is driving the collapse of civilisation in the UK. I have a draft of my thoughts on that, I think other centrists are getting to the idea of the core problem, and we’re going to start dismantling the two decades of Intersectionality-as-Religion, and the hyper-partisans are mortally afraid of losing ground. Perhaps that was the origin of the tweet? Timely.
The Discipline of Objectivity
There is a Stoic discipline in refusing to let the mob define your categories. Marcus Aurelius often wrote about the necessity of stripping away the rhetoric and the assumptions of the crowd to see things exactly as they are:
Make for yourself a definition or description of the thing which is presented to you, so as to see distinctly what kind of a thing it is in its substance, in its nudity, in its complete entirety-
The tribal mind hates this nudity. It demands that every idea be draped in the colours of a specific faction so it can be easily categorised as friend or foe. That’s what all those flags are about.
When we encounter Category Error Projection in the wild, we are witnessing a fundamental inability to understand that some people are simply playing a different game. The partisan is speaking the language of aesthetics while the pragmatist is speaking the language of utility. I think that’s why it’s integral for the former to change the definition of words rather than concoct too many new words of gibberish- it requires the utter destruction of pragmatism to achieve the aesthetic, and they are more than happy to destroy an entire civilisation along with the pragmatism in pursuing their brand marketing social status.
Until we can recognise the difference between someone trying to solve a problem and someone trying to fit in, our civic discourse will remain trapped in this endless, unproductive cycle of performative brand marketing, and the endless horror it produces.
Thank you! Super interesting! I also find Jonathan Haidt’s Elephant and Rider model really useful for thinking about this.
In this model, the Elephant is emotional and associative. The Rider is analytical and rationalizes after the fact. People’s judgments are always driven by the Elephant first (see also the book by the Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow")
Very good.
Have restacked several times, with excerpts.