Every few months I have an hours-long call with my oldest friend. He’s one of my favourite friends to talk with, but he’s also, in his words, very conservative. It never came up when we used to live close to each other, but something’s changed in the 10 years since I moved away. And it’s not good.
Our chats have always been interesting because we’re on the same level in terms of how we think about stuff: We both like considering and talking in depth about the intricacies of everything, exploring the deeper properties of how x interacts with y, and what that personally means for us as people. Most of the time, words pour from us freely, with points coming up, being thoroughly explored, leading to new ones, the cycle continues, and it’s good. Reflecting on concepts using new ideas that we’ve formed on our own accord, stemming from things we’ve found interesting, and crucially, totally unique to us as individual people.
But I’ve learnt that there are things I simply cannot mention, trigger words and phrases that set them off on an unrelated political rant, walling off entire topics of discussion. Because after that, all I’m hearing are right-wing talking points.
Gone are my friends own thoughts, replaced with the same stuff I’ve heard regurgitated infinitely, the same thing you can hear from a million other places. Voicing someone else’s opinion, using someone else’s terminology, phrasing things in ways distinctly different to how my friend usually talks, but familiar to anyone who’s heard it all before, from other mouths.
Even if I hadn’t heard these exhausted statements before, it’s obvious that they’ve come from somewhere else. My friend doesn’t have any personal experience of, say, how “universities are forcefully pushing students into becoming transgender”. They may tell me they reached this conclusion “based on their own observations“, yet they’ve never gone to uni, and I’m their only university-educated close friend. Clearly this is not an idea they could have arrived at themselves.
This is not a disagreement of opinions, we have those all the time; that’s what makes it interesting, that we’re so different. This is something else entirely. It’s as though there’s a 3rd person listening in on our conversation, suddenly censoring topics they don’t like by shouting words of panic. That’s when I realise that I’m not talking to my friend anymore, I’m hearing this 3rd person instead.
When that happens, then, unlike the rest of our discourse, the point isn’t to explore an idea with me, it’s to tell me copy-pasted data. It’s predictable and unnuanced, the last thing you’d want in personal conversation. This makes it incredibly boring.
It also means that, for example, a conversation that mentions some other culture and what we could learn from it has to stop, because now it’s a one-sided rant about how primitive that culture is, and how they’re completely alien to us while still having an apparently alarming effect on the safety of our minds/money/children/etc.
I can’t reference a news outlet because, I’m told, they’re now a left-wing propaganda machine. I can’t mention minority groups because their marginalised status is now a trendy form of privilege. I can’t talk about children because something something extremist brainwashing.
With each new conversation, the number of topics we can freely discuss shrinks.
Gone are the inspection of subtleties, replaced with a roadblock to further thought. My friend can’t think about the details, because they’re too focused on being a spokesperson for these endlessly repeated opinion dumps. That’s not a theory, that’s an observed and replicable effect that I’ve seen in them: It plays out like this every time, the old conversation derailed and abandoned, the roadblocks preventing personal reflections, someone else’s ideas blocking access to what my friend has personally thought and felt.
I do what I can to avoid this. Over time I’ve learned to avoid certain words, phrases and topics, so as not to trigger them. And I try to anchor them back to their own humanity by saying things like, “that’s ok, but I’m thinking more about x in a more personal context, like how it personally affects us, as in me and you“. Or, “I think we have ideas here that we both know quite well, so maybe we could go back a bit and explore y because that seemed quite new and interesting“. I don’t like knowing that I have to control and contain the conversation, and it’s hard to stay completely engaged when my hand is always above the record player, ready to catch the needle and place it back into the groove after it skips out again.
And like I said, most of the time our chats are wonderful, like we’re collaborating to make something that neither of us could have dreamed up on our own, sitting back and listening to the music we’re creating together. But I still have to keep my hand above that needle.
And I tried, initially, to explore these ideas with them. But they’re empty, there’s nothing to them. No answer to the enduringly fascinating question of “why do you think what you think”, because the roots were born in someone else. There’s nowhere to go with that. They’re not describing a tree of their own thoughts, they’re telling me about a fruit they saw in someone else’s garden, after they scooped out their own personal feelings to make room for it. But the fruit is empty: not a juicy peach, but a hollow coconut. They’ve filled themselves with these bare husks, impossible to explore because there’s nothing beyond the outer shells.
But no, they know the reasoning behind what they’re saying… just give them half an hour to find that article again.
I feel robbed, cheated out of more interesting chats with my mate, more of an emotional bond, more intellectual discourse.
And for what purpose? What does my friend actually get out of it? All it seems to do is make them perpetually angry about things that they’ve never experienced, and aren’t personally affected by. It gets in the way of their opportunities to talk about as broad an array of topics as their own mind would allow (which is a lot, because they’re a clever person). It stops them from being able to see cultures, experience feelings, consider ideas, empathise with actual people, because all of these things have been reduced to symbols, representative of something else, no longer valid in their own right, no longer worth connecting to.
So I wonder, is that the point? The true intention that they’re evidently oblivious to, the real purpose of the people their listening to? To erode their identity, make them a walking mouthpiece for someone else’s opinion, rapport replaced with replication? Is my friend now host to a parasite that silences them, replaces emotions with data, cuts them off from deeper connections with those who live outside the infected herd — was that the original intention? And could my friend ever recognise what they’re doing to him?
And what’s interesting is that, despite all their overly-voiced concerns about how the “extremist left” is constantly on the attack, it’s them who’s turning the tide of conversations to something that more resembles hostility than friendly discussion. It’s certainly not me, an actual liberal person, far removed from what my friend is trying so hard to indirectly tell me I am. I’ve never been affected by anything they’ve said — saddened for sure, by the slow death I’m witnessing in them — but they’re more easily triggered than any SJW parody.
My own actual motivations and interests are obvious, they come up all the time in our chats: I want to empathise more with people, understand them better, and hopefully learn more about myself in the process. I’m not interested in erasing freedoms or imposing opinions, I think it’s far more fascinating to let people express themselves in their own way. I don’t care if you don’t align with my idea of how you could be, I just want to see you as you are.
So maybe that’s all I can do for my friend: To see them as they are now, even though big parts of them are now inaccessible, replaced with recycled components from someone who gave them ideas and behaviours to conform to. Maybe they’re somehow happier now, and maybe there’s more to their decision to take this path, more than I can see; more than simply being angry and walled off, playing host to a very apparent parasite. It doesn’t make sense to me, but that’s how they’ve chosen to express themselves, so perhaps the best I can do is accept that… but I’ll still miss them.