There is a recurring idea in politics that one’s ideological opponents must be either stupid or evil. Why else would they be doing things I don’t like? Either they don’t know what the consequences of their decisions are, in which case they are stupid, or they know but don’t care, in which case they are evil.
I’m not a big fan of this characterization, despite how funny and satisfying it can be. I just don’t think it’s a very productive way to answer questions or resolve disputes, it puts people on the defensive right away and makes it far less likely that they will listen to your arguments. And if you make the assumption that your opponent is stupid, you'll probably underestimate them. I’ve made several attempts to find a way out of the dilemma, but sometimes I keep falling back into it despite myself.
Take for example my last blog post, on r/K selection. I really thought I'd found a working framework there. But it turned out that both I and the fascists I looked up consider ourselves to be K-strategists and our opponents to be r-strategists. This makes it pretty clear that the r-strategies map closely enough to “Evil” to become something neither side will admit to doing.
Or take the authoritarian approach. I keep coming back to Robert Altemeyer’s work here… he divides Conservatives into authoritarian followers and sociopathic leaders. Well, that’s close enough to Stupid or Evil as to be interchangeable, only adding in the complication that some of them are stupid and some of them are evil and very few are both.
I’ve considered the possibility that the left wing and the right wing are both making rational decisions based on different discount rates of expected future costs and benefits. Thus ignoring environmental damage could be considered rational if the costs would not be paid within your lifetime, for example. But this is pretty much the definition of selfish which is close enough to evil that I can predict both sides will try to pin it on their opponents.
So it occurred to me that maybe some apologetics and counter-apologetics could come in handy here. Why not try tackling the political dilemma with CS Lewis’s trilemma? This was the “Lunatic, Liar, or Lord” approach to the divinity of Jesus which was a feature of his apologetic writings, but was most memorably recounted in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe:
"Logic!" said the Professor half to himself. "Why don't they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn't tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth."
This set of possibilities is incomplete and the various counter-apologetic debunkings have generated a similarly alliterative rebuttal: Mistaken, Misquoted, or Myth.
Looking at these six possibilities, Liar is the closest to Evil in the dilemma, but it helps show why Evil is so lacking in the first place. Knowing that someone is lying does not tell you their motivations, which could be good or evil or selfless or selfish or anything else you can imagine.
Lunatic and Mistaken both correspond to the Stupid half of the dilemma, and they help show how lacking Stupid is as a label here… and, I suspect, everywhere. Someone could, of course, be delusional. And this would not necessarily be something that could be detected at a glance, despite what the professor in the quote seems to think.
I think Mistaken ought to be further subdivided into incidentally, systematically, and wilfully ignorant. There is a large gulf between people who just haven’t stumbled upon a particular set of facts yet, people who need a ground-up education to understand a topic, and people who have the necessary background education but refuse to look at the facts presented to them. Only the first group will prove amenable to argument in the short term. The last group might be unpersuadable no matter how much time and energy you commit… though some of them might surprise you.
That group in the middle, that need a ground-up education to understand something, can be divided again. Some will think they know enough about the topic, because they can’t begin to comprehend how complicated the topic is… this is the Dunning-Kruger effect in action. Some will have chosen to listen to the opinions of experts, and have simply chosen the wrong experts to believe. These are misled… actually, I think Misled might be a distinct enough category to deserve it’s own place in the Mistaken, Misquoted, or Myth counter-apologetic.
Misquoted… well, if you look closely, you might find that someone doesn’t actually believe what you think they believe. This is the biggest objection to Lewis’s trilemma among Christian biblical scholars, who generally acknowledge that the earliest writings about Jesus don’t have any mention of him claiming divinity. Now, modern journalists and historians are far more reliable, and would never make such a simple mistake as concocting a… I’m sorry, I just burst out laughing and couldn’t even finish writing that. Yeah, someone could be misquoted easily enough.
Myth, I think, has little place in political arguments. Generally speaking if I’m arguing with someone about gun control I can be reasonable sure of the existence of both the person I’m arguing with and the guns in question. Unless I’m arguing about phasers.
Finally, it’s worth considering the Lord part of the trilemma. Someone I disagree with might actually be right! It’s hard to believe, I know. But any time you doubt you could be wrong it’s worth considering all the things you’ve changed your mind on in the past. I for one have changed most of my political positions at least once at some point in my life. My opinion on gun control seems to vary with the phase of the moon. My opinions on nuclear power and fracking flip-flop so often that if they could be attached to a generator it would be a sufficient source of clean energy to render both wholly unnecessary.
I’d like to think I’ve been getting better opinions as I go along. Honing in on the truth, so to speak. But to say I’m right about absolutely everything would be to say that I don’t expect to learn anything else ever again, which is a bit of a stretch even for me.
So where does that leave us, on Team Evil or Team Stupid? Adding it up I think that makes it one kind of almost-maybe-Evil, and five kinds of almost-maybe stupid, none of which really deserve to be branded with that label. Along with Team This Question Has A False Premise and Team Actually I’m The One Who Is Wrong. In this game, maybe we should just hope to be rained out.
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