Snowcloning the famous definition of journalism: Dissent is saying something someone you care about does not want said. Everything else is performative contrarianism. If you don’t care about someone it doesn’t matter if they like or dislike you. There’s literally nothing at stake. No work to be done.
If a bunch of people agreeing furiously gather in a room to ”dissent” furiously against people not in the room, whom they don’t care about, that’s…not meaningful contrarianism. You have to risk hurting someone you do not want to hurt, and accept the empathetic hurt blowback on you, and regulate the emotional cascade of the fallout. Otherwise you’re just pumping yourself up for dehumanization and war. You’re fueling a preference cascade expanding in scope into a totalarianism, not learning or growing. Derping your way to death and dumbness.
Kim Malone Scott’s radical candor framework is a good way to remember this.
Care personally + challenge directly = radical candor.
Another way to remember it: Caring is an independent primary variable. You have to care first before agreeing or disagreeing can mean anything. And to do that you have to have a surplus capacity to care beyond caring about yourself, by working the “caring muscle.” Empathy is weight training of sorts. Most people are empathy weaklings.
Making your caring contingent on people agreeing with you is the EQ of a 7-year old, and in adults leads to manipulative insincerity or obnoxious aggression. Otoh, not actually dissenting is just ruinous empathy, even if there’s a lot of theatrical contrarianism going on. Ruinous empathy is stereotypically “soft” and feminine-coded but can take unusual “hard” forms, like joining in macho posturing you don’t actually agree with, but don’t want to challenge directly because you care too much about the approval of your macho buddies. Like a bully’s sidekicks agreeing with bully. Or a mean girls cabal being mean. Or yes-man syndrome. In the short term you’ll have more solidarity and effectiveness. It will feel like you’re accomplishing more by shutting down real dissent (ie with caring about the person).
In the long term you’ll get exponentially dumber and angrier faster than you realize, and slow to a frustrating stall. Classic case of “faster alone, farther together” because a group of non-dissenting people is just a single, lonely group mind.
The dumber part is obvious, but the angrier part is fascinating. Took me years of watching culture wars to understand why people get angrier and angrier but don’t realize it and mistakenly think they’re actually at peace. It’s because anger is an emotion you can’t learn to regulate if you’re not constantly interacting with people you care about but disagree with. Withdrawing into a dissent-free zone is actually willingly infecting yourself with a serious mood regulation disorder. Increasingly you can only regulate your anger by avoiding all contact with dissent. You’re predictably mood-regulated in a predictably shrinking circle, and any venturing out triggers you more and more. So you block out more and more. Your empathy muscles atrophy to nothing. You can’t even deadlift a simple “no” from someone you care about. Eventually you block out the universe. It’s a high energy version of a Bartleby Burnout. An angry raving way of saying “I would prefer not to” all the way to the grave or madhouse.
