Keep Talking

This is an exploration of the role of communication in conflict resolution – the benefits of talking and the harms of not talking. It’s intended less as an appeal to people to be better and more as a reckoning with the state of the world I live in and hope to leave one day. It cites conflicts from the SMS community as examples but should still make sense without context.

Prelude

Mankind’s greatest achievements have come about by talking. And its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn’t have to be like this… All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.

– Stephen Hawking, excerpted from a British Telecom advert.

[Interviewer:] Several songs on [The Division Bell], like “Keep Talking”, suggest that all problems can be solved thru discussion. Do you believe that?
[David Gilmour:] It’s more of a wish than a belief. *laffs*

The first time I had to handle a serious personal conflict, one that risked a permanent schism, I came at it with the mindset of “keep talking”. I felt things were mostly the other person’s fault, but I knew there were bad things I’d done and he was also hurting, and I thought everything would be okay if we could empathise and humanise the relationship – make it seem less like the malicious actions of a silent faraway person – if we could keep talking.

The outcome for me and lumardy ended up very bad indeed; there wasn’t much to say after the months of systematic lying to third parties were unravelled and my friendships with them irrevocably gone. I had no idea what was in store at the time I said “keep talking”. It would seem like all the talking we did was for nothing. But I don’t see it that way.

If we hadn’t talked then I’d have no real grasp on what motivated his actions. I would’ve gotten no apologies, and given no apologies, and the amount of unforgiven things, the pain, would’ve been even greater. It makes sense to me that, where it was possible, we improved each other’s understandings, and showed each other positive emotions. It helped me to feel less hate as time went by.

Talking is very hard tho, and I used to be a strenuous conversationalist. He coped with this a few times by not talking, but that made things worse each time, because then empathy and mutual understanding went missing just enuff to give space for lies and othering to take hold, which is what led to the more serious abuse in that situation. As an honest person, it was hard for me to imagine avoiding this abuse by walking away from our initial quarrel, since our problems had been accumulating from past incidents of a similar nature, yet it wasn’t so far gone that full reconciliation was unimaginable. I guess I was fated to try, and to plow headlong into disaster. But I don’t regret keeping talking.

Crying “Abuse”

Many relationships inevitably end with one or both sides trying to forever stop talking. It’s been done to me twice – I’ve reacted erratically when seriously hurt, spoken with emotionally abusive tendencies, and that made continuing to talk to me extremely challenging. We must all weigh the emotional impact of keeping talking, and have the right to stop. We also have the right to tell someone what hurt us, but we must take responsibility to not keep em trapped in a conversation. Sometimes, there won’t be a reply.

That makes sense for personal matters, but where things have been very sus for me is when those matters are spread to third parties. This is when not talking turns from a choice into an abusive behaviour in its own right. This is how things have gone for me:

[in a ban rationale] feel free to respond to this, i’ll read it, but from my end this discussion is over.

[another ban rationale] You have nothing worthwhile to say. You are pawn scum. Goodbye L. *block*

The magnum opus, of course, being someone naming me before thousands of people for “private abuse” and refusing to tell me (or them) what that was.

[You were] banned for abusing your friends

When mountains are made of molehills, the supposed victim has a lot of power to clear things up. But often, as in the two cases I’ve brought up so far, they feel better when a wall of social ostracisation is protecting them and preventing their own actions from being examined.

I have never had such a fear myself. Because to be a good person, I think one should put one’s flaws in the light. Someone publicly complained I hurt em, so we – me, someone representing the plaintiff, onlookers – should talk about it. There is a world where what I did to 1UpsForLife is so bad that I deserved social ostracisation. I’d find it very surprising and the over-sensitivity funny in the context of how badly she’d treated me, but acceptable if there were a consensus. Readers would come to informed opinions, I could learn from others in what ways I’m a bad person, and then I’d feel okay even if I got judged harshly. It’s our duty to decide, once the evidence is on the table, how to serve justice and whom to associate with.

Of course, not every personal matter should be brought to the public table. If it can’t stand up to disclosing evidence and arguing cases, then that’s good because it ipso facto means the complaint is groundless. So that’s where my big fear is – when we don’t talk. The rationale then becomes a phantom abuse case, one that doesn’t admit any of my own context and so an ability to interpret my motives. And when humans can’t assess motives, then other people look to them as good and evil. To a 5-year-old, the Russians are bad, or the Americans are bad. It’s the Arabs or the Israelis, because you can’t put yourself in either’s shoes. When you’re older, you can, which is where it gets really dispiriting when you choose not to.

And the people who mastermind the phantom abuse case and impede talking to exert power over me are the ones I’m terrified of because I’m not capable of doing the same back to them.

Cooking up Motives

There is no legitimate reason to ruin the lives of other people. If your wish is to corrupt, harass, and strip happiness away from others, I implore you look at yourself in the mirror and change your ways. How can you be content this way?

– jukatox, about me (tweet)

When you don’t know why someone did something, it’s very easy to fill in the gaps with appeals to malice and good vs evil.

Aside: I’ll reflect a bit on how I’ve fallen into this trap before [CLICK TO EXPAND]

I had a tendency to ascribe malice when resisting being bullied/abused (rather understandably!) and I was okay with doing it when the bully was unwilling to talk, but inevitably felt better if ey was willing, for the reasons I described in the Prelude section. It was easy for me to want to talk to lumardy because I had genuine feelings for him but with a lot of the trash in the bingo community, I used to get indignant about talking to people who went out of their way to hurt me, and settled for secretly shittalking them instead. But any effort by them to replace my presumption of malice with sincere reasoning always won my patience and understanding right then and there, which was in my eyes the big difference, beyond the bullying itself, in how we conducted ourselves.

I’ll first talk a bit about the incident jukatox describes here. Someone had victimised someone and deservedly been banned from their community for a while. When the ban was due to expire, the victim attacked the victimiser in public with an emotional piece about his victimhood and I intervened with a view towards separating them, since I saw it as the victim bullying the victimiser in a place where they had equal right to exist. On a personal level, I suspend judgment on how the victim reacts, knowing I can never really understand how ey feels, and I’m patient with these situations. However, since this incident was public, I felt obliged to intervene because of the unwarranted bullying and social power imbalance against the victimiser. For public incidents like this, justice requires judging facts and taking positions on cases, where in private it’d be insensitive to do so. I’m glad I intervened. I was thanked by the person I’d defended for being “the first person to … put themselves in my shoes”.

That was my motive, anyway. But reading the tweet, I don’t feel like I’m even reading about myself. Not talking creates this schism where I can’t even engage with a criticism about myself because it comes across baseless. I’d expect that to learn about my motive, jukatox would ask me. If open to reconciliation and understanding, the tweet would address me and anticipate a discussion. But rather this comes off as a foregone conclusion.

I find it really weird that so many people choose to behave like this, but I see two reasons for it.

Inherence

The first comes across in these phrases

ruin the lives of other people

strip happiness away from others

which apparently characterise my action of opposing bullying. It makes sense, in that the reaction of the bully here was to lose his happiness. He was much damaged by the person who’d victimised him and relied on the bullying, and the community enabling it, to feel better. Opposition was naturally going to make him feel worse, and he indeed seemed to take it badly – hide his social media presence and declare retirement from the hobby around which he’d been victimised. It was clear from his visceral words that he blamed this victimiser for most of his mental pains, depressions, sleeplessness.

And just as those were reinterpreted as inherent in his victimiser’s actions, the intent to cause pain was reinterpreted as inherent in my actions. This had happened to me before around every situation that was used to socially ostracise me. It seems to me like a consequence of cancel culture that the natures of actions themselves are determined by the emotional interpretations of someone people like rather than by a balanced analysis of motives, reasonable expectations of harm, etc.. For instance, my anti-bullying intervention here was quite similar to my one last year directed at Awesom0city, yet the reaction to it was very different.

The Narrator

The second reason is the presence of third parties who declare authority over a conflict they’ve taken a side on, and speak for the other side. In third-party conflicts, I expect to listen to both sides to try to understand and then reconcile their points of view, before taking a position on it. On the contrary, the way it’s gone on issues around me is that third parties host calls to “inform” crowds about my motives.

I remember Jpep in particular declared his presence in “almost all” interactions I had with someone as a reason to believe several lies he expounded on my relationship with em. I’ve struggled to come to terms with letting such a parasite be a close friend. A friend told me to only be friends with people one-on-one from now on to avoid this but that feels implausible given how humans live. Anyway… from these voices being present and mine being absent, I see how narratives such as those in the jukatox tweet arise.

The only way to know what someone is thinking is to listen to em. And yes, that does entail listening to a lot of liars. I’ve seen people struggle with this many times (e.g. Jpep on lumardy, Jpep on Tareq, multiple bingo players on EquivocalGenius) and argue for dismissing everything someone says on the grounds of being a chronic liar. But a liar is not a different species of human; most things a liar says are still true and their motives can be related to. And they convey a lot of clues that, altho it may stress out an already insecure person to have to engage with and risk believing the wrong thing (particularly when said person had been fooled before by the speaker), still give indispensable insight into, particularly, the motives of the speaker. They’re certainly a better source than what someone who hates someone says about that person (duh).

I have a good record in fairly representing the views of those I’m in conflicts with to third parties, and so have yet to turn anyone against anyone else, short of the publication of one serious evidence-based abuse case. I reject the use of private places to poison people against each other and I put a lot of faith in people to judge for themselves after evidence is established as best as possible, and accept their informed opinions regardless of whom they side with. By contrast, every conflict that’s led to me being ostracised has been due to an ego-led self-defence wherein a perspective to make me look as bad as possible was presented in order to give the “victim” the best chance of survival as possible, at least, survival in eir own mind.

I have to pause to emphasise this – when I talk about how I’m reluctant to make friends again and more inclined towards suicide, it’s from appreciating things like this. What I just described is a losing strategy, and predicts that I will keep losing in this way, at great personal cost. Yet it’s a weakness I will be stuck with for the rest of my life, because I’m too old to learn deeply ingrained traits like the ability to manipulate people into hating other people.

Stakes Is High

I’m sorry, was that in your opinion?

– A scene from The Good Wife that I can’t embed but illustrates this section nicely.

Liar Liar

I think it’s good to encourage the expression of opinions, for example, everything I’ve said here. I’ve characterised some individuals in my writing, and the purpose is to explain how their actions look to me, one person with one perspective. They’re not supposed to be declarative. I’ve noticed an increasing trend whereby if I give a characterisation that’s widely disagreed with, the response isn’t to accept the perspective or discuss it with me but to take it into evidence to try to convince others that I’m lying.

This was apparent to me particularly surrounding JeffCompass. When I wrote about him, I wanted to give my perspective on his actions around sensitive mod matters, from my position as suffering from them. I didn’t expect anyone to interpret them as declarative, or with any persuasive intent beyond expressing my feelings on it that had previously been suppressed by the regime. My fault in talking about Jeff wasn’t that, rather the overly free airing of suspicions of malice. He reacted by feeling like a bad person, ascribing the feeling as inherent in my words, and sympathies for him led to the characterisation that I was lying, QED.

There wasn’t at any point a discussion with me about how reasonable my words and actions were, and that’s essential to the strategy. Every unilateral opinion is more likely to be far from the truth, and it’s supposed to converge via talking – the input of diverse perspectives, and compromise. That’s what I anticipated would happen next each time I wrote about Jeff. The deliberate denial of discussion in order to dig at someone’s statements, ascribe malice to them, and make responding impossible, is a classic manipulation strategy.

First Try

On the jukatox tweet… it’s very unclear to me which parts of my bullying callout merit the interpretations she gave them. Nobody talked to me about the callout so I have absolutely no idea what they think, nor do they want to know why I did it.

When I wrote that callout, I felt guilty in the days after. I felt like I got the gist of the action right, that it was better to speak against bullying than not to. But how I did it was riddled with questions. Should I have compared the victimisation to my own for example? I had motives, like to try to help give the victim perspective with which to help himself, and to put into context why I thought his bullying was unwarranted. But there are possible unintended harms, like minimising what happened to him. Likewise, was I putting myself above him where I could’ve stuck to the situation at hand? There’s a lot of nuance to explore and learn from, and the input of many people is best for that. Talking also helps better establish intent and take back mistakes.

This kind of intervention is a lot to get right and I often get it wrong. But why? Because we’re not talking. Not talking raises the stakes, because you have one shot to get your message right. Most of these situations unfold on Twitter, with an oppressive text limit and no edit function. Nobody ever gets it right first try, which is why in practice nobody ever intervenes in flagrant bullying situations like these. The reaction to Awesom0city last year was a good example of this.

In my position as a victim of ostracisation, it’s been key for me to let this go. That is, to set free my anxiety about how I’m seen by those people who read my words, written in high-stakes situations, and draw a negative conclusion without trying to talk to me about them. I have a lot of pain to express from being victimised repeatedly, and I can’t get my words right by myself, but I know it’s not my choice that they are unilateral.

Silence and Polarisation

In my personal conflicts, talking was the great valium that smoothed this over. Mutual forthrightness around feelings and an appreciation of the emotional state of the other person helped things be handled in a sensitive way. One great regret I have is exploding at lumardy in a time he was trying to make things up to me, out of my totally (selfishly) uncontrolled feeling of victimisation. If I had then lost his patience to engage then that would’ve been just. With 1Ups, it was inevitable that I would have a bad reaction. Her deployment of silence in sensitive situations raised the stakes in just this way. I did lose her patience immediately, and that was okay. However, it became abusive when it escalated into a public issue. Her refusal to let anyone explain her actions to me, combined with moderators’ refusal to hear why I treated her the way I did, raised the stakes. I had to defend myself in public, and still have an unchanged understanding of her bad actions towards me. There’s a deepening alienation wherein my only outlet for discussion is these public contexts that would ideally be inappropriate because there’d be better ways.

In the wider online world, the stakes of communication have been escalating in this same way, and it feels like Twitter is to blame for a good bit of that. Political polarisation is entrenched by the character limit and the popularity contest and ratio-ing. Conflict has become increasingly slung around in documents that are too long for most to judge fairly and wherein judgment and side-taking is done by proxy of friendship or parasocial relationships. This reluctance to talk to the opposite side seems like a major reason for the stress of conflict so many now feel.

Fair Trial

I had a discussion with Warspyking in which I set out an alternative way forward, based on, yet again, talking. I think good outcomes to conflicts can be achieved via arbitration particularly, which involves setting out cases, evidence, appeals, in a conversational form ahead of an impartial arbiter (and opt-in audience), rather than the current norm of social actions that are conceived in secret and based on manipulation, that is, the deliberate withholding of information, plus gamification of abuse into winning a popularity contest between supporters and opposers. This reminds me particularly of Mlarvitar’s strategies, the use of a single set of tweets to set up my defence, before I had even made it, with an interpretation of lying and malice, and then the pivot to a strategy of using a personal discord to convince a dozen people to hate me.

Even when I had a serious and thoroly proven abuse case to bring, I prepared myself to defend it. I had made the case by myself, so I didn’t doubt that parts of it were wrong and should be challenged. I anticipated my abuser appealing and endeavoured to submit corrections. When arguing to ban him from a community, I expected to be interviewed, to hear how the moderators understood my case and be able to draw their attention to what was important. The stakes are very high indeed if you, as the author, have to get your readers’ nuanced interpretations right first-try. Yet absolutely none of this happened. With the profound lack of talking that took hold in these 2022 cases, it seemed to me that most actors’ intents were to win power over others, whether in self-defence or for malicious reasons.

Centrism

A small afterthought – not only do I think talking is the way to resolve conflict, but also compromise. My positions on issues are often contrarian because they lean towards a middle-ground in resistance of the extreme positions people often take owing to polarisation and side-with-friends, us-and-them mentalities. This was very obvious with Urbani, wherein I was calling for him to be punished back when moderators wanted to be friends with him and then calling for someone to stop bullying him when they changed their minds and wanted to hate him. I had a similar thing happen regarding EquivocalGenius, leading to the infamous dissonant GoldenDevil comment that I was defending my “friends” (whom I’d participated in banning).

These positions are not intentionally centrist, rather they’re my heartfelt, natural positions, but they do come from my innate urge to put myself in every side’s shoes and so naturally strike a balance in handling situations. There is always a lot of overlapping ground that people can meet to a compromise in, if they just loosen up from their polarised positions.

Stop Talking

But the other side of how Warspyking characterised banning me was this:

sometimes you can’t find a two-party solution. Sometimes the greater good must be prioritized. Sometimes awareness doesn’t make it fixable. Sometimes good people can’t even see their error. Sometimes you need to signify severity and encourage people to help themselves.

There’s a dangerous outcome wherein you decide someone can’t be talked to, and effectively dehumanise them forever. It’s not for nothing that this sometimes happens. It’s easy to imagine, like, a vexatious conversationalist, one who talks in circles and never compromises. It’s very widespread in personal relationships. It’s possible for talking to just be exhausted.

And I can’t be arsed to carry on in this debate that reoccurs, oh, when you say I don’t care but of course I do, yeah, I clearly do

– Arctic Monkeys

I think the key reason to stop talking is exhaustion. On a public level, this should be established patiently and mercifully; you would really give someone a chance before declaring ey can’t be talked to, because dehumanising someone in public context is a gravely damaging move. In general, people don’t change deep down, conflicts repeat, and so ongoing talking, ahead of staying out of each other’s way if necessary, are crucial for harmony.

Much of my pain is from this. This is my perspective on some of the reasoning that was used to dehumanise me in this way:

It was hard for me to understand why people were scared of arguing with me considering I reliably didn’t let their stances affect how I thought of them as people, and very often acknowledged my errors in serious conversations. And with what many of them went on to do, I felt betrayed and couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t just talk to me. I supposedly can’t be talked to, but I don’t see why from the evidence.

I feel let down; I feel this vicious cycle of suffocation of conversation very deeply, stemming from the initiatives of those whom I have fights with to bring consequences on me yet avoid accountability, inevitably relying on manipulation (secrecy, etc.) instead. The deeper this goes, the more strained communication becomes, in the form of misinterpreted tweets, and escalating ostracisation, whereby everyone can talk about me and judge me except me.

I left everyone behind because I didn’t want to get betrayed again or lose anyone else in the vortex of not talking. I’ve always struggled with candid communication that hurts feelings and the need to filter my speech, and my coping mechanism has now become no filter and speaking my thoughts to an extent I hadn’t before. I have to let go of worrying about my words when nobody will give me the space to explain myself. Because there is nothing I can do to stop an ever widening set of people, from lego and rudhira 2 years ago to jukatox 2 weeks ago, from thinking the worst in everything I say.

If ever I stopped anyone from talking to me, say right after I exposed em for abuse or became petulent over their behaviour, I came around eventually. Unilateral communication and 280-char tweets can’t ever be understood as intended, but it’s not my choice for it to be unilateral. It feels like everything I suffered was caused by not talking.