I hope we can rediscover wrongness. Mere wrongness.

From In 2023, Let’s Rediscover Wrongness by Jesse Singal.  The subheading is Not every difference of opinion is an urgent threat.

I occasionally mention the dangers of catastrophizing every disagreement, every event.  Words are not dangerous.  Beliefs are not dangerous.  Actions can be but not words and beliefs.  We criminalize specific actions, not beliefs or speech.

My concern is based in the observable correlation between authoritarianism and people trying to amplify danger.  In a functioning healthy constitutional republic, all decisions are checked and balanced and constrained.  We progress in increments.  

There are costs to such an approach but it is strategically robust as it ensures consent of the governed.

The only way to get around the measured approach to things is to claim existential danger.  If authoritarian advocates can make the case for extreme danger, then they can, at least temporarily, escape the bonds of checks and balances.  

All the misallocation of capital associated with Zero Carbon, all the mandates and forced compliance with Zero Covid, all the defunding, deplatforming, and cancellation associated with Zero Hate Speech - all are examples of illegal actions undertaken without consent of the public under the guise of a dangerous emergency.

Here we are, three years into the Covid-19 pandemic with the current variant having very low lethality and yet the government every six months reauthorizes "An Emergency" owing to the powers that they are able to use under an emergency which circumvent all our institutional checks and balances.

And we have seen just how catastrophic has been that unconstrained exercise in authoritarianism has been.  Deaths, illnesses and economic damage from the "emergency" policies out of all proportion to the actual purporter emergency.

From Singal's article.  A plea which I endorse.  

In 2023, I hope we can rediscover wrongness. Mere wrongness. Wrongness untethered from other accusations. Not everything that is wrong is dangerous or evil or bigoted. Sometimes people are just wrong. A big part of human life is arguing over who is wrong and attempting to nudge this whole ungainly human enterprise toward rightness, a few painstaking microns at a time. It’s harder to do that when the pitch of everything is so shrill.

The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of people who believe crazy things don’t hurt anyone. No one is going to bomb an airport over Ancient Apocalypse. Even the truly deranged QAnon conspiracy theory, which does posit an international conspiracy of pedophiles, has produced only a blip’s worth of real-world violence. In the vast majority of cases, wrongness is just wrongness. People can usually believe wrong things without being dangerous, and in fact billions of people do hold religious beliefs that make no logical sense without becoming violent zealots.

Some ideas can be credibly described as dangerous, or as likely to lead to bad outcomes. But it becomes harder to make this argument when everything is called dangerous, from, well, Ancient Aliens to non-condescending journalism about bigoted figures. Harm inflation has really taken hold of a lot of public intellectual life, and it has led to a certain boy-crying-wolf dynamic that makes the world seem fuzzy and exhausting. If everything is dangerous or violent, then nothing is. 

I do think a lot of this has to do with the attention economy. The aforementioned Guardian article probably gained a wider audience from couching Heritage’s concerns about Ancient Apocalypse in the language of danger and threat and deplatforming than it would have if he and his editors had gone in a more sober direction — both from readers who agreed with the silly premise and those who rage-shared it because of the provocative headline and subheadline.