"Picking a side" in the Middle East plays into the hands of the "enemy"

plus, Meta has bloody scraped four of my books

I have been overwhelmed these past three weeks with the awareness that we are now in the *thing* we have been warned about and have feared.

The *thing* is sometimes termed the metacrisis - all the intersecting crises in the world today, plus the human mindset that caused the crises in the first place, which also informs our inability to solve the crises (indeed, the inherent fact we make it all worse each time we try to fix things).

I won’t tick off all the crises here. But “more global wars” and “insanely devastating and cruel murder and genocide of innocent humans” are most certainly among them, while the mindset that keeps us so stuck can be paraphrased as “separation”. We have rendered ourselves separate from nature, each other, our more beautiful nature. We create an “other” out there as “enemy” when things get tricky. We overlay everything with a binary divvying. We gridlock our entire civilization in a right v wrong paradigm. And so on. You know the drill. You are in this *thing*, too.

Dire evidence of this separation mindset has been on display on social media and on various news platforms these past three weeks. I wrote briefly here on October 17 about where I was sitting with the Middle East horror and mostly emphasised the importance of …not jumping into a binary mindset as a response.

Australia-bound, Israel, the meaning of No and ...all of it

I ran some of the insights from this post on Instagram and Facebook and woah if I wasn’t thoroughly bludgeoned with binary mindset in the comments and in my DMs.

• I got abused for not speaking up enough (I, like others in the public eye, got dozens of messages from randoms and even some friends demanding, angrily, that I use my platform to speak out on the issue and that I was a “disappointment”; my abusers seemingly failed to read my post, listen to my podcasts on the matter, etc¹). This columnist in the New York Times makes similar points to mine, writing that reactionary social media is “sloganeering masquerading as moral clarity”.

• I got abused for speaking up at all. You know, all the usual stuff hurled at women that tells us to stick to our narrow lane or wheelhouse (in my case, I am allotted sugar, anxiety and some climate activation²), plus abusive messages about how I don’t understand the issue (which was my point in my post, and which also ignores that I perhaps know a little more than some, based on the fact I was in the region a year ago to study exactly the issues now at play).

• I got abused for being pro-Israel.

• I got abused for being pro-Palestine.

The New York Times put together a video that further highlights the perils of this “Pick a Side” mentality:

The journalists write in the accompanying materials:

“The insistence on picking a side threatens the public’s ability to take a holistic view of what is happening, to recognize and acknowledge atrocities irrespective of their perpetrators and to honor and mourn those who lost their lives. If truth is the first casualty in war, empathy is the second³.”

As I articulated in said posts, I am pro-citizens. And the enemy here is the Israeli Government (and the whole geo-political superstructure that props it up) and Hamas terrorists (and…the whole geo-political superstructure that props it up).

I took the opportunity to make the point (one that emanates from my wheelhouse, I believe) that engaging in “right v wrong”, “us v the enemy” infighting plays right into the hands of the ultimate enemy. While ever we are bickering with each other, these narcissistic, angry men (and they are all men), representing nefarious geo-political superstructures, continue their carnage. It works perfectly for them that we remain distracted and angry with each other.

This is not fence-sitting. This is not avoiding. This is not giving my “middle-class affluent” followers an excuse to not be engaged (which is what one follower accused me of). This is called being discerning. This is called ensuring we are morally grounded and ready to act when the moment comes. This is called contributing the right kind of noise…the noise that will reach the right people and not get drowned out in the dark hell-holes of META. This is called creating a space for a constructive and full engagement.

This is called me being a responsible “influencer”.

I issued an invitation to my community to quit the bickering and try the subtle art of sitting in the discomfort of complexity and pain before acting or voicing up. But the bickering in the comments just vomited forth⁴.

It has been despairing to watch. Beyond the footage we’re getting of what’s happening on the ground in Gaza, I’ve been shocked by how some progressive Right media (particularly here on Substack) have taken such a tunnelled approach, conflating anti-semitism with anti-Zionism. Bari Weiss’

The Free Press

platform has been disturbingly unbalanced (to put it mildly). I’ve also been shocked by the extent to which the Biden administration has cemented themselves to Team Israel, regardless of humanitarian ifs or buts. Ditto by their vote against a UN resolution calling for an immediate humanitarian truce in Gaza, which saw 120 nations vote in favour. I’m equally perturbed by the fact Australia abstained (while Opposition leader Peter Dutton has said we should have joined Israel and the US in voting it down). You might want to listen to this 7am podcast that explains things.

I turned social media off for a week, but then felt I needed to bear witness to where the world I live in - and am trying to save in my own small way - is at. I also feel it’s crucial that we all protect our nervous systems from the ugliness that social media enables and exposes. Finding the balance between the two imperatives is tricky. But it becomes a little easier to navigate with spacious thinking, a better understanding of the broader issues at play and…a kind, like-hearted community.

And so I decided to interview a sound mind amid the rabble and get a perspective that provides a better understanding.

Anand Giridharadas

is a prominent former foreign correspondent and New York Times columnist who’s just published the book The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy. He joins me on Wild this week to talk about how we can navigate the complexity of the world better. He focuses particularly on the Left, for reasons we go into in the pod chat.

One of the points Anand makes - both in his book and in our chat - is that we have been led to believe, dangerously, that there’s no point trying to persuade people to reason and balance, and that our only avenue for our ire and frustration (and desire for better outcomes for humanity, ultimately) is to attack and bifurcate. In fact, the geo-political superstructure has consciously conspired to make us think this.

Anand tells the story of two Russian women sent to the US ahead of the 2016 Presidential election by Russia’s troll farm, the Internet Research Agency, or IRA. They were there to “gather evidence of conditions in the United States for a project to destabilize its political system and society, using the rather improbable weapon of millions of social media posts”. The IRA was responsible for more than 6 million tweets, 76 million engagements on Facebook and 183 million on Instagram that spread disinformation in the lead-up to the election and that commentators argue led to the Trump victory.

But Anand shows that the aim of the Russians was not to install an extreme-right leader in the US, per se. It was to create chaos, “to whip up anger at the truth” and “to amplify the worst cultural tendencies of an age of division: writing other people off, assuming they would never change their mind, and viewing those who thought differently as needing to be resisted rather than won over.” A report by the research firm New Knowledge provided to Senate investigators described similar goals: “to undermine citizens’ trust in government, exploit societal fractures, create distrust in the information environment, blur the lines between reality and fiction, undermine trust among communities, and erode confidence in the democratic process… The troll farm wanted Americans to regard people with different views as immovable, brainwashed, disloyal, repulsive.”

Anand quotes scholars at Clemson University who became prominent analysts of Russia’s campaign: “The IRA knows that in political warfare disgust is a much more powerful tool than anger….

“…Anger drives people to the polls; disgust drives countries apart.”

The IRA is not an isolated force for chaos here. Driving people apart is the modus operandi for most nefarious entities in the world today. As I say, separation is the mindset that got us here and it’s the mindset that is stopping us from progressing out of it. It is what, in the final wash, will take us down.

Many have written on how these forces operate across an entire civilisation and I will be interviewing a bunch down the track on Wild. But in the meantime (and again I issue but-as-an-invitation) we can choose NOT TO PLAY INTO THE HANDS OF THE ULTIMATE ENEMY.

Or, to put it in less adversarial terms, we can choose not to add to the very problem we are trying to solve.

For those of you interested in better ways to solve things…the rest of my Wild chat with Anand goes into techniques he’s investigated for better persuasion, as gleaned from A.O.C.⁵, a cult deprogrammer and more. I reckon many of you here will get a lot out of it for use in your own lives. There are some great hacks to be had!

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Some other observations from the week

My books are being used to train generative-AI systems by Meta, Bloomberg, and others.

I’ve just learned four of them are among the 191,000 books from around the world that were used without permission to train these models. Several lawsuits are now being brought against Meta by writers such as Sarah Silverman and Michael Chabon who claim that the use of the books amounts to copyright infringement.

There is one silver lining in all of this Chat GBT hoo-ha - it will never achieve anything close to supreme sentience or singularity because, as a team of researchers have just predicted these programs will run out of high-quality reading material by 2027. Without new text to train on, AI’s recent hot streak could come to a premature end.

The marriage diatribe continues

You might have caught my Wild podcast rant about What I Think of Marriage. Rebecca Mead writes to a similar point in her New Yorker essay this week titled The Marriage Plot.

Marriage is a vast subject, being an institution that informs our most important social structures—including the tax code and the disposition of intergenerational wealth—while also circumscribing the idiosyncratic goings on within (households).

Mead argues that marriage is a surprisingly unexamined subject, at least by professional philosophers. Is marriage, she asks, “what you only do when you do not ponder it too much?”

The West’s fertility crisis

Somewhat related to the current marriage obsession, I’m also observing a lot of interest in the declining population in the West.

Aporia

covers what is happening in wealthy countries and makes various points that I find interesting, including:

There is evidence that parents in wealthy countries are over-investing in the few children they have. For cognitive development, educational achievement, and other life outcomes, genetic influences and random environmental events matter far more for children than the influences of parents. Contrary to the beliefs of modern upper-class parents, children do not need a private school, expensive summer camps, or the finest day care to thrive. As long as children have a safe, loving environment, good nutrition, and access to a decent education, there is little that parents do in wealthy countries that has a permanent impact on children. Most families in economically developed nations might benefit more if they redirected some of the time and attention they spend on intensive parenting toward having an additional child.

Thoughts?

An Andrew Tate update

Because we had all been wondering how his parallel universe was going…

“Findom” is the new chapter in masculinity free-fall

I’m fixated by this phenomenon captured in a new short documentary called Alpha Kings - teenage boys who make a living by role-playing financial domination, known as findom, on the OnlyFans app. These boys openly offer their services as financial dominants and get paid (by strangers) to say things like “I want you all to fucking like the fuck out of my live. Sit here and spam it.” And, “While you’re spamming it, fucking pay me. I want you all to go broke tonight”. One of the filmmakers says:

“What was fascinating to us is how these kids felt, given the current economic climate, given the rapid shrinking of the middle class, that this was genuinely the best opportunity for them to achieve the trajectory of the American Dream that isn’t really possible for Gen Z in the way it used to be. We were also interested in the fact that it was a group of boys who all did this together, in a kind of social-bonding way.”

Me too.

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The war crimes being committed, the bombing just now of a refugee camp in Gaza, the statistics coming out about the number of children being murdered, the powerful imagery of millions around the world calling for a ceasefire, the apparent disregard for the Israeli hostages, as well as the anti-semitism going on is too wrong, too much, too unfathomable, too big to comprehend. I’d love you to share any respectful actions that can be taken, commentaries, explainers and wisdoms that might help us all here be the most responsible, engaged citizens we can. I’d ask everyone to be persuasive but not aggressive while putting their ideas forth and to be forgiving of each other as we try to find ways to fathom and respond to the atrocities. How we treat each other in this moment is certainly one thing we can control. Let’s honour this.

Sarah xx

1. And forget to respect my agency and the fact that I am not a community service.

2. Wonderfully, before being abused for writing about philosophy and politics, when I started writing about sugar, anxiety and climate stuff I was also told I was not allowed to have an opinion on such things. I was told to stick to the lane I’d occupied before all this…which was philosophy and politics! (I studied both at university and worked as a political journalist throughout my twenties). Damned do, damned don't.

3. I presume the authors here do mean to say that humans are actually the first casualty of war…

4. I have chosen to direct the people who wrote me the angry, accusatory DMs to this post by way of a response.

5. Who continues to follow me on Instagram! She is not, I’m happy to say, one of my trolls screaming at me in my DMs.