My first experience with political activism wasn’t invigorating—it was completely alienating.
I was a freshman in college, and I joined the Redwood Action Team at Stanford (RATS) for a city council meeting in Mendocino—a coastal town north of San Francisco. We were there to protest the logging of the Northern California redwoods.
At the time, an environmental activist named Julia Butterfly Hill was living in one of those redwoods. We called her on a cellphone, and she gave us a pep talk, on speaker, from her redwood tree.
It was exciting… but something didn’t fit my expectations.
The people we were protesting against looked like humble people, not the greedy caricatures of corporate loggers I’d imagined. They were with their families, and many looked like migrant workers. I thought to myself: I don’t want to be on the opposite side of those people. I want to be on the same side as the trees and the people. The way these lines are drawn doesn’t make sense.
That was the end of my involvement with RATS, and for a while, with politics.
But that was also the beginning of my fascination with integrating different perspectives—which eventually led me to The Black Sheep, and recently led me to create Faces of X, a series of short videos that integrates different perspectives on divisive social issues.
Throughout history, thinkers from ancient Greece to China have practiced the art of contemplating different perspectives to find a more comprehensive view. But in America today, we can hardly interact with different perspectives, let alone integrate them. Viewpoint diversity is treated as a weakness rather than a strength.
Our media often gives us binary choices: pro-vax or anti-vax. Pro-choice or pro-life. Woke or anti-woke. Choosing one or the other leaves insights off the table. Vaccines shouldn’t be taken always, nor should they be taken never, so the question isn’t “pro-vax or anti-vax?” but “under what circumstances should vaccines be taken?” Regarding abortion, most Americans don’t identify with purely “pro-choice” or “pro-life,” but instead favor varying degrees of limits. And with respect to wokeness, oppression is often real and unfairly ignored, but also often misidentified and weaponized to push counterproductive solutions.
In response to binary thinking, there can be a reflexive both-sides-ism, but the best solutions are not always halfway between extremes.
Meanwhile, in the so-called heterodox space, much “nuanced AF” thinking—in the words of incisive commentator, Meghan Daum—quickly devolves into a knee-jerk contrarianism just as pernicious as the old orthodoxies. Someone I recently met at Pamela Paresky’s gathering of Thought Criminals actually called it “heterodox orthodoxy.” At what point of cultural adoption does “heterodoxy” cease to deserve that label?
We’ve learned how to do equal-opportunity criticism—critiquing both progressive and conservative viewpoints—but what about equal-opportunity praise? What about taking insights, no matter where they come from, and integrating them into a bigger picture—in a way that doesn’t devolve into superficial both-sides-ism?
That would be truly nuanced AF.
This was precisely the challenge I faced in the redwoods: how to integrate the perspectives of the activists and the loggers. And that’s precisely the challenge I take up in Faces of X.
Faces of X is a series of videos that seeks to integrate different perspectives on divisive social issues—like capitalism, gender, and race. Each video “steel-mans” different perspectives on the issue. (Steel-manning articulates the strongest version of a perspective, as opposed to straw-manning which articulates the weakest.) Then each video attempts to integrate those arguments into a synthesis. Synthesis goes beyond both-sides-ism because it engages with different perspectives without assuming they’re equal. Eventually, a synthesis becomes a new thesis in our evolving understanding of reality.
So, how might we articulate a synthesis perspective? Let’s take a look.
Faces of Gender stars Buck Angel, a speaker, entrepreneur, and sex educator who underwent a female-to-male transition decades before it became popular. Buck is now at the center of a hotly debated question of trans identity and its relationship to biological sex. He’s been canceled by the younger contemporary trans community for questioning youth medical transition and highlighting de-transitioners.
In Faces of Gender, he acknowledges that he has been harsh, but because he cares about the safety of trans youth. His words attempt to integrate progressive insights into a synthesis view:
Here’s the key section from the synthesis (4:21-4:44):
I think we’d all love for everyone to feel comfortable in their bodies. But the truth is: no one feels comfortable 100% of the time–especially not teenagers. There will always be people for whom gender transition is the right path. And—to the extent that we create a culture where more people feel more comfortable in whatever body they inhabit—that path will be chosen with greater confidence.
The point is not that gender transition is not the right path for everyone, which is obvious to the point of unhelpful. It’s that we must create conditions where the choice to transition is influenced less by insecurity and profit-driven over-medicalization, and more by people’s actual otherwise unresolvable gender dysphoria—which might make gender transition a less common choice.
The first release of Faces of X includes abortion, gender, and race. But the potential pipeline is infinite. I’d love to produce Faces of Guns, Faces of Feminism, Faces of Artificial Intelligence, and more.
Like anything, synthesis can be weaponized. Some perspectives are inherently un-integrate-able. “Abortion never” and “abortion always” don't play well with other perspectives—other perspectives are morally unwelcome. We must be discerning about which perspectives we’re integrating, and how we frame the sides of the debate.
But for most controversial issues, it’s unlikely that one side is entirely right. It’s also unlikely that all sides are equally right. It’s more likely that most of us are partially right, and some are more right than others. That doesn’t make for a great tagline, but it avoids the pitfalls of tribalism and both-sides-ism in pursuit of the most comprehensive view. Our view will always be partial, and we can always strive to see more faces of reality.
It is said that the root cause of our interrelated crises—from hyper-polarization to biodiversity loss to runaway AI—is our inability to see reality as a whole. We live in a media environment that divides us into warring tribes and fragments reality into seemingly disconnected parts. In its own small way, Faces of X seeks to cultivate our capacity to perceive the wholeness of reality.
Paraphrasing Albert Einstein, 'It’s an optical delusion of consciousness to believe there are separate things. There’s one whole that we call ‘Universe,’ and our task is to develop our capacity to perceive it.'
Since my experience in the Mendocino redwoods, I’ve returned to politics. I now have a way to put people and trees on the same side—by steel-manning their perspectives and integrating them into a more comprehensive view.
The next time you’re arguing with someone about some hot issue, consider: under what circumstances is what the other person saying true? What if your views are not completely clashing, but somehow complementary? How might you integrate your views to create a bigger picture?
The first release of Faces of X includes capitalism, abortion, gender, and race. But the potential pipeline is infinite. I’d love to produce Faces of Guns, Faces of Feminism, Faces of Artificial Intelligence, and more. What Faces of X video would you love to see?
Watch the Faces of X series, and share it with someone you’d love to find synthesis with: www.facesofx.org.
Any time I've had my mind changed about something substantial, the epiphany always hit several days (or months) after the event that precipitated my reconsideration of a given issue. It seems I am incapable of being persuaded on the spot. I think it is because I first have to go through an internal process wherein I pose point against counterpoint, sort of resembling the dialogues in your videos. (I used to have a job running a floor buffer in a large hotel lobby for two hours every night. Highly recommend. The monotony and steady white noise really lend to the contemplation of weighty matters.)
Also similarly, the result has rarely been that I "switched sides" (except maybe twice). Rather, I usually arrive at some reframing of the issue. Based on conversations I've had, I suspect a large number of people have never had this experience. So I certainly see the value of compellingly modeling the process of rumination leading to a reformed perspective. Will it fall on deaf ears? I don't know. I need to better understand the forces that keep us deadlocked in our perspectives. Now, where is my floor buffer?
Such an outstanding article, Stephanie! A round of virtual applause for you! 👏👏👏 Faces of X is exactly what this country and the entire western world need right now! I’m so glad you let me know about this series! Most political and social issues are NOT simple or binary. Reality itself is multifaceted and contains many sides. We need to put all the pieces together to see the whole puzzle. Your example of when you we’re working with those activists in the Redwoods and you thought you guys were taking on a greedy corporation but it turned out to be a bunch of ordinary, working class people including migrants from Latin America working as loggers to make a living and put food on the table was a perfect illustration of this truth! I’ve encountered this many times both in my studies as an up and coming historian and looking into the big political issues of our times especially the Israel-Palestine Conflict. It is definitely essential we build a more all encompassing world view because reality is complex. I will give a couple examples of each. I’ll start with the American Civil War. The Civil War is one of the most important events in our history that shaped us a nation for generations to come. But it is very poorly understood by your average person. This is because it’s seen in one of two ways. Either it was the good and noble South just fighting for their states’ rights against the evil and tyrannical federal government in the North or it was the good and noble North just fighting the evil South who committed treason to hold human beings as property. The truth is that the American Civil War was fought over both of those issues and many others. While the Confederacy was (typically for its time) a slaveholding society where black people were second-class citizens, there we’re 3,000-6,000 black Confederate soldiers and sailors. It should also be known that thousands of black and mixed-race Southerners volunteered their services to the South when the war broke out and supported secession as they saw the South as their home just like their white counterparts. By the same token, while the abolitionist movement was going strong in the North, Northerners generally agreed slavery was wrong and black people who lived in the North were free and did not have to deal with slavery, the North was by no means a racial utopia. In fact it was just as racist as the South. Ever heard of the 1863 New York City Draft Riots? This was when angry mobs of mostly Irish immigrants reeked havoc on the Big Apple for several days. Guess what it was partly caused by? Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The Irish did not want to have to compete against free blacks for jobs. Their was horrific violence against black Americans during the riots including a black orphanage being burned to the ground, a black man being hung and set on fire and random black pedestrians being beaten to death by angry feral mobs. Not to mention, you know where the first Jim Crow laws were implemented? In the North! Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison and their fellow activists fought against streetcar segregation not in Alabama, Mississippi or Kentucky but in Massachusetts in places like Portsmouth, Salem and Boston. The other historical example I would use would be the Israeli War of Independence in 1948. While it is certainly true the Jewish state was in a fight for its survival and that the surrounding Arab countries and most of the local Arabs had intended to strangle the newborn state in its cradle and horrific war crimes were committed against the Jews by the Arabs, that’s only one side of the story. There were also war crimes committed by Jews against the Arabs this would include looting, rape and mass executions (such as the massacres committed at Deir Yassin and Lydda). Nor did the Israelis always engage in good faith negotiations with the Arabs. I would also note that there many cases of Palestinians who had fled trying to return to their homes and property and the Israeli soldiers who had since conquered their land would turn them away. I will now use a couple examples from American politics. I support gay marriage and LGBT civil rights 100% but I also believe in religious freedom protections. I don’t believe the government can say, force a church to officiate a gay wedding, a baker to bake a cake for a gay wedding or a DJ to spin their sick beats at a gay wedding if these parties choose not to. The public in turn is free to do a free market boycott (which I would join). I would also use the example of immigration. I firmly believe in reforming the immigration system, giving amnesty and a pathway to citizenship to all undocumented immigrants who don’t have a criminal record, raising the immigration quota, abolish ICE and returning to legacy INS, and starting a temporary guest worker program. But I also believe we need to build a wall on the Southern border, keep the diversity lottery and all the requirements that come with it, increase funding for the border patrol, bring back the Remain in Mexico Policy and Rapid DNA testing for illegal immigrants, and end the use of sanctuary cities. Again, love what you're doing Stephanie! Keep up the incredible work!