Five magic words for the next time someone tries to browbeat you into compliance when discussing a social issue.
Re-claiming the right to think freely might just be as simple as invoking one short phrase. When you use it to push back, consider it your gift to a culture that's crying out for pushback.
“I don’t subscribe to that.” These are the five magic words that I think will help us all draw a firm line against the ever-present encroachment of people who think they have grounds to use moral leverage in browbeating others when it comes to enforcing compliance on social issues.
The reason I find this phrase so effective is that it draws a circle around you and subtly communicates that your thoughts are yours. They lie within that circle, over which the other person has no control. I love it because you don’t have to raise your voice. Speaking in a calm-but-resolute tone is enough.
When you speak the words “I don’t subscribe to that,” it the grammatical structure of the sentence restores your agency by centering the word “I” as the subject of your own thoughts. It puts the onus on the other person to either back down or to out themselves as a tyrant willing to use overt force to get their way.
And if they do that, there’s a decent chance of them having to hear themselves and register what they sound like. And the beauty is: it doesn’t matter. You’re not saying these words to convince anyone of anything. You’re not trying to win an argument. You’re simply reminding the person: I think differently than you, and that’s that.
While I don’t think this phrase will do you much good in situations where another person is using physical intimidation to get you to say something you don’t agree with, I have high hopes that the phrase can become a useful weapon of self-defense in the culture war, which I think constrains people from two (if not more) directions at once.
For the last decade or so, emotional blackmail has unfortunately grown into an ambient fact of daily life. Once people caught-on to the fact that our online engagement could be weaponized against us to create a kind of mega-scale gravitational current of social pressure, we were off to the races.
But aside from the full-on public ostracizing that comes with cancellation, there’s been a more subtle run-off effect of this social pressure, as people feel more emboldened in day-to-day interactions to set the parameters for acceptable discourse.
My experience of this is, of course, anecdotal, but I don’t think it’s an overstatement whatsoever to say that a certain suite of (so-called) progressive beliefs has hardened into a set of sacred cows that are bandied about as if they’re holy sacraments. Together, they form a very rigid social code.
This code is reinforced across various domains of education, employment, health care, and media. And whether you live in a so-called “red state” or “blue state” in the USA, you’re more than likely able to recite this litany of beliefs in your sleep at this point.
A quick run-down:
Trans women ARE women, full stop. Anyone who questions the complexities or implications of such a sweeping and absolute re-engineering of something as fundamental as biological sex is a BIGOT, full stop. And BIGOTS should NOT be platformed, full stop.
ALL of the world’s imbalance of power results from European colonization against the world’s Black and Indigenous Peoples Of Color, full stop.
There is no such thing as “cancellation” — public shaming and disgrace is simply a means of “holding those in power accountable,” full stop.
Power imbalance defines ALL human interaction, and is the ultimate axis around which ALL relationships revolve.
Members of “marginalized communities” always get to define oppression in purely subjective terms. If a person feels oppressed, they are oppressed and the target of their accusation is presumed to be guilty, full stop.
ALL accusers are to be believed, sight unseen — but only if the accusation flows upward towards someone in a “more empowered position.”
There is no separation between the personal and public spheres. Anything one says in private can and will be used against them by the public at large, which is now empowered to mete-out justice on its own. Extracting the proverbial pound of flesh is not only the right of every member of the public at large, but the responsibility, full stop.
Nuances in art, literature, and language must be flattened. Any speech that contains the potential to be “harmful” is in fact harmful regardless of context, full stop.
Anyone who even questions these tenets is an enemy of progress subject to a modern-day brand of stoning. Anyone who stands with the guilty is guilty by association, full stop.
Anyone who questions these stonings must be presumed to have something to hide and is thus also guilty by suspicion, full stop.
The world divides into good people and bad people, full stop.
Freedom of speech and due process are inconvenient obstacles in the redressing of power imbalances, full stop.
You get the picture. There are more sacred tenets to this belief system. More insidiously, since this is the belief system that has dominated mainstream culture, there’s an equally dogmatic set of tenets steadily gaining ground from the opposite end of the political spectrum.
I don’t like to call the tenets above “Leftist” principles, because I consider them to be incoherent, self-cannibalizing perversions of Leftist values. They’ve also given cover to a similarly virulent perversion of conservative values that will likely displace the worldview I’ve just outlined.
Thanks to the excesses of the views above, people who subscribe to a mirror-image (i.e: unreasonable) strain of conservativism have had a good decade to convince themselves that they, in fact, are now the free-speech champions. That’s sort of tomorrow’s issue to anticipate, but I suspect that shift is coming sooner than later.
Which means that the phrase “I don’t subscribe to that” is going to be just as necessary if and when the current regime gets deposed by a new regime that’s just as slap-happy about curtailing people’s ability to think freely. By all appearances, it looks like we’re all going to have to take a two-fisted approach.
The good news is that people have been primed by ten years’ worth of relentless pressure to comply. I think too much of the public is wise to how this works now, so hopefully they won’t fall for it a second time around. Fingers crossed. In the meantime, I hope you’ll use “I don’t subscribe to that” with impunity.
Time to take back what’s yours. No one has the right to twist your arm into thinking the way they do, full stop.
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<3 SRK