Holding
Libertarian views puts you in quite a unique position where you seem to spend
your time being attacked from all sides (granted I do bring it on by getting
involved in some emotionally charged topics) so in the average day I tend to
have debates with the Right on topics such as Gay Marriage, Immigration,
Equality and so on, whilst at the same time having debates with the Left on The
NHS, Austerity and EU Membership to name just a few. Personally I love having debates like this
and I see them as a great way to understand other people’s views as well as challenge
the validity of my own held views.
This double
attack has lead me to see even more similarities between socialists and far
right debaters. I first blogged about how I consider the Far Right and the Left
to be the same ideology a few years ago. The latest similarity I have noticed
is in their common response to a challenging view which I call the Assume –
Anger – Attack response. I should stress that I am not saying that this
response is constant and there are occasionally some well reasoned and well
articulated debates with Socialists however the level of AAA responses seems to
me to be massively higher in the Left and Far Right than in any other group I regularly
debate with (Although Extreme Atheists come close) Essentially the AAA response
goes along the lines of
1)
Assume I understand what you are saying,
allowing my own bias to cloud my judgement.
2)
Get Angry about what I assume you are saying,
this prevents logic from entering the debate.
3)
Attack, Attack, Attack – I have assumed you are
bad so must now attack first.
As an
example, recently I commented on a facebook post, now I should say up front
that I was almost definitely in the wrong as I hadn’t quite understood what the
original post was about – To be honest it was something that was so far from my
view of the world that it never really occurred to me. One of my more left
leaning facebook friends then put on a comment that attacked me, accused me of
taking an opinion that was actually at odds to my own and stated that my views
were actually dangerous. I was obviously confused (This was after all completely
at odds with what I was thinking.) so I queried it and was again met with more
assumptions about what I was saying – Assumptions based on the bias of the
commenter and quite likely the incorrect assumption that I hold Right Wing
social views – I responded with trying to clarify what I had meant and for the
first time it was pointed out that my view wasn’t aligned to the original post,
it went on for a few more comments until I eventually realised what he thought
I was saying and I confirmed that I must have misunderstood. A long
conversation based solely on the fact that he had followed Assume – Anger –
Attack rather than a model that seeks to understand the other side before
responding. I call this the EEE model, Explore
– Empathise – Exchange, based solely on the fact that I wanted three words that
started with the same letter.
1)
Explore, Does the other person see the world the
same as you.
2)
Empathise, Is there an emotional reason they
took this view, why do they feel this way.
3)
Exchange, Now that you understand where they are
coming from you can exchange your ideas.
Maybe if we
all followed this model we could get a lot more understanding and a little less
confrontation.
