I am the Chaos Police and I'm coming to ignore you
Navigating the tactics of the racists, climate delayers and 'old mate Pete Dutton...and winning!
In 1975 Toni Morrison wrote:
“The very serious function of racism … is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”
I’ve kept this quote in an email folder titled “epic quotes” for about three years and revisit its cleverness often.
Imposing racism on a person or entity ties them up and holds them back (even further) in the race. It takes up their time, resources and emotional balance as they explain and justify, dig out references and experts, and deal with the crazy-making grift and dumb-ass media explosions.
They can’t get on with beating the dominant class at their own game, let alone get on with showing a new way beyond the paradigm.
Sexism does the same. And climate skepticism.
Racism, sexism and climate misinformation are all wrong and destructive in their own right. But I have felt for some time that the perpetrators don’t always seem to fully subscribe to what they say or do. I mean, can Andrew Bolt really believe all three decades of his own daily vitriol? (Some of you might know I used to share a page with Bolt in the opinion section of the Herald Sun for several years, about 25 years ago.)
I have often felt something else is at play. Toni Morrison’s quote has helped me nail what that something is. Racists and bigots et al engage in their inflammatory behaviour - in serious part - to minimise and delay addressing the issue at hand, namely the inequality and separation and their own part in it. It kicks the can further down the road.
And so in recent years I’ve applauded activists like British journalist and feminist Reni Eddo-Lodge who wrote the blog post-which-became-a-book 'Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race'. And Teju Cole, who I once heard explain that no one ever stopped to explain to him how white culture worked. He had to “catch up”. He invites white people to do the same on Black cultural and political understandings. Catch up. We have better - more whole and progressive - things to get on with!
Distraction and creating chaos as tactic
I reckon I first cottoned on to this notion of distraction-as-bad-faith-tactic in the wake of the last US election. Remember Trump’s spectacular 90-minute speech of nonsensical unhinged diatribe that claimed he’d won the election, that the counting was fraudulent, blah-bullshit-blah? It prompted the major networks to turn him off. They literally interrupted the coverage because the ex-President of the Free World was telling dangerous lies. (What will the aliens say in years TK?)
Much debate ensued, if you recall, as to whether these networks did the right thing. I think they did. There was no public interest to attend to; Americans had already voted, so pulling the speech was not going to affect the democratic process.
But the debate also surfaced what was ultimately going on: Trump was creating chaos. It’s what he had been creating all along. And is continuing to create.
Create chaos + name an enemy “out there” + define yourself as Savior = destroy democracy.
I then looked around me. There was chaos-making going on everywhere. The iris-exploding lies bullshit from our leaders (Scott Morrison, Trump, Boris Johnson) was all about creating chaos. It tied up the press and the opposition. It tied up activists.
The conspiracy theories from QAnon, plus the Russian interference in the US election via bot factories such as the Kremlin-led Internet Research Academy did the same.
“Chaos is the point,” declared the director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy. According to the NATO Stratcom Center of Excellence, Russia’s use of social media as a military tactic is the preferred way to win wars now. “The goal is permanent unrest and chaos within an enemy state”. Chaos and confusion fragments, polarises, shreds democracy, causes mass economic and social distress, all of which can ultimately lead to civil war. Not a shot has to be fired by the enemy.
I’ve been thinking about all this in a number of contexts. I’ve found it a helpful lens for both spotting the tactics as well as for navigating a non-crazy-making way forward. For this chaos makes good-faith folk crazy.
Peter Dutton’s “more detail” demands of The Voice = Distraction Tactic
In Australia we have a referendum coming up to vote on amending the constitution to recognise Australia’s First Nations peoples and to give them a consultatory “voice” in Parliament on matters affecting them. I’ll write more about this in coming months; I’m currently absorbing the various perspectives before I do.
But what I will say is that I can now see Opposition leader Peter Dutton’s approach is pure distraction/chaos tactics. It’s bad-faith behaviour.
He’s repeatedly demanding that the Indigenous leaders and the Labor party provide more detail. His line of questioning is strawman fallacy (see below).
Dutton knows that’s not how referendums go. We, the voters, can ONLY vote on the principle; the details MUST be determined by the Parliament afterwards. In that order. Dutton is a member of Parliament. He will get to decide on the detail.
He has been given ALL the details and briefings - more than required - on two seperate occasions.
The kind of details he is asking for are creating fear in Australians who aren’t across constitutional law. The question might be moot and ridiculous and
”unanswerable”, but once asked, the fear is planted and confirmed.
Conclusion: The “more detail” approach is more about creating distraction and chaos than genuine enquiry.
BTW: And to this end, I admire the The Voice crew and the Albanese Government for not getting riled up by it all, not being distracted and letting things descend into chaos. Have you noticed the same?
These tedious things are also about distraction and chaos:
Social media commenters who drop Covid and vaccination bombs into posts about, say, climate change, or what I ate for breakfast.
Chinese “spy” balloons…perhaps?
Many ultra-woke and anti-woke debates. My chat with Rob Henderson goes into this a bit…he cites the “defund the police” campaigns and polyamory as examples of distraction tactics.
JAQing - “Just Asking Questions”. This is something the guys from Decoding the Gurus talk about. It’s when bad-faith operators drop contentious points into conversations or online forums under the guise of innocent enquiry. Dutton’s “just asking for more detail” tactic is an example of this.
Strawman arguments. These involve misrepresenting an opponent’s position to make it easier to refute. It oversimplifies an opposing view or disregards inconvenient points in favor of points that are easy to argue against. I know some people get stumped on this, so I’ll spell it out:
Person A makes a statement Y.
Person B restates person A’s claim in a distorting manner.
Person B attacks the distorted version. Distraction!
Statement Y becomes a false or invalid stance. Chaos!
So an example might be:
Person A: Bicycle infrastructure should be expanded because cycling is a sustainable mode of transportation.
Person B (the strawman): We should not build bike lanes because cyclists run red lights and endanger pedestrians.
Here, the tedious strawman ignores the positive aspects of the real issue of bicycle infrastructure. Then, it focuses on the minority of cyclists who don’t follow traffic rules. Person A gets tied up in refuting or explaining or GAWD WHAT JUST WENT ON THERE…and pfft the valid point is distracted away into unnavigable chaos.
I’m sure you’ve been strawmanned recently? Got an example? I find it super helpful to retell the argument using the structure above…
Solution = Walk away from the distraction!
The Romans threw bread and circuses at the masses to distract them from the despotic measures they were implementing. Racists, bigots, conspiracy theorists and scared conservatives who don’t want their pedestal kicked out from under them throw irrelevancies and detours.
We don’t have to take the bread or the circus. We can go bake our own loaves and throw our own party. You might note, I rarely respond to distraction bomb-throwers in the comments of my social media. I rarely bother to even block or ban the tricksters. Because such effort sees me falling for the tactic.
If the intent or the upshot is to distract me from better work and contribution, I just..let it go. It’s a fine line, of course. I have felt it my responsibility to write about the lies of Prime Ministers, clarify that Hillary Clinton did not store children pizza shop basements, and I have spent months years breaking down climate disinformation.
To ensure I don’t buy into the chaos-making I do find it useful to be aware of all of the above, to know how to identify the tactics and ignore them judiciously. And I’ve also started using the line “catch up” when confronted with climate JAQ’ers. Or, “go read my book”.
Sarah xx
Great post. i think we could add 'both sides' - frequently deployed to platform racism, sexism, and all manner of misinformation. Your insta-stories regarding desire to interview Jordan Petersen has had me fearing 'both sides' and distraction was encroaching upon the Wild podcast. It's a difficult space to navigate!
I'd love to hear you speak with Anand Giridharadas, Sarah. The space of dialogue and use of energy is fundamental to social movements - a podcast convo on this topic would be 🔥
Thank you for this, Sarah. It helps to know about these crazy tactics. I’ve experienced crazy-makers in my work life and wish I knew back then how to name it and how best to deal with them. I found myself often baffled and lost, like “what just happened?”
I came across similar definitions to the crazy-maker in Bo Seo’s book, “Good Arguments”. He says that both in the world of debating and in life we come across the Dodger, the Twister, the Wrangler and the Liar. He offers advice on how best to deal with each one e.g. stay the course, pin them to a position etc. Well worth a read.