Thoughts From This Week: July 18th
Principles versus pendulum swings.
You’re reading a partially free post from The Black Sheep. To access our private Discord community and all exclusive content—like my guide to stop social media from melting your brain—click here to become a paid subscriber.
The cycle keeps cycling: upsetting current event makes our emotions run high which triggers terrible collective behavior which only begets more terrible collective behavior as a backlash. Will this spiral keep spinning downward or is there a chance for us to break the cycle?
After the assassination attempt on Trump, that cycle started all over again, as some people took to searching for nasty online posts by anti-Trump individuals and trying to get them fired from their menial jobs over it (successfully in several cases). Weaponizing speech and preventing people from earning a living because they posted something despicable about a politician won’t make our country safer, freer, or more aligned with its classical liberal values.
On the contrary, this cycle of current events causing backlashes that cause other backlashes is making everything worse. It keeps people distracted from the serious issues at hand, like an ailing sitting president, and only adds fuel to a hostile climate that contributes to hostile behavior, like the shooting many new supporters of cancel culture were blaming on heated political rhetoric only days ago. If you think that’s heated, imagine how radicalized an already unstable individual might become after watching a parent lose their low-wage job for insulting a politician they already blame for their struggles.
But that’s the cost of tribalism: short-lived wins at the expense of long-term thinking.
But perhaps there’s something more sinister at play behind this broken cycle than just our primitive impulses running wild online. If we want to escape it,