Naming the "Thing"

Finding a name for the weird, worrying stuff happening online

The Thing

There was a Thing happening online. I wasn’t quite sure what to call it. I mean it wasn’t just happening online, there were material impacts in the real world. I couldn’t just log off and leave the Thing trapped in the machines. It was too late for that. The Thing was born online and was spilling from the phones and leaking from the screens and forming puddles so large you couldn’t walk around them. The offline had started reflecting the online, not the other way around. And online was where you could watch it happening in real time, blow by blow. Tweet by Like by Share. The Thing seemed important and intense and I wanted a word for it so I could think about it more and understand.

There had always been versions of the Thing, smaller, awkward, analogue, But all the versions of the Thing had gathered themselves together, stumping towards one another. The thing had accumulated and was getting bigger. It was huge now and ugly and was sitting in the middle of the room and was squashing everything and everybody and would not leave. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly when the Thing arrived, but there it was: indisputedly, indefinitely.

Author’s depiction of the obstinate, unmoving Thing. Did I make it too cute? I think I did, and not angry enough.

The Thing consisted of, well, lots of things. There was the sense of heightened, frenzied dialogue, not just we really care about this issue and are deeply pissed off about it, but several gigantic steps beyond that. There was the outright, unsubtle vilification of any political opponent; there was the assumption that someone with mildly different views agreed with the worst of those with opposing views. There was also a new recklessness with truth. On investigation into various confidently made claims by people you might normally trust, you discovered that people were just making shit up. It was like they weren’t even trying any more.

The Thing was particularly distressing to me because, much as I wanted to believe it was mostly MAGA types doing it, it was happening a lot closer to home. It wasn’t just the right, it was the left as well. It wasn’t inflammatory, ignorant, homophobic, small-minded thuggish Pro-Things versus calm, rational, evidence-loving progressive Anti-Things. Thinginess was everywhere.

The Thing had another dimension as well. Not only was there a new vehemence in belief and rigid certainty among commentators, meaning disagreement was now, more or less forbidden, there was also a new kind of fragility. A sense that many of the loudest commentators could, at any moment, lose it in really serious ways. And that fragility seemed to be growing, passed around as a kind of badge of honour representing one’s commitment to the cause. A sort of If you’re not in constant trauma about the world, do you even care vibe? Much as I am aware that, there are, in many realms, new levels of hardship that people are facing, the expressions of desperation I was seeing did not seem to be proportionate, did not seem to be in real reponse to those hardships, or from those most impacted by that hardship (those people, I suspect, often don’t have time or energy to get into online arguments or make grand political pronouncements).

Cult?

I thought about the word cult in relation to the Thing. I got the sense, that everywhere were these tight, mutually enforcing groups of people love bombing each other for their right-on views and fomenting hostility to those they see as outside their group. In many arenas, you can track the emergence of an increasingly constrictive shared culture and set of values, and a set of rules about what can be said and done. Cults use the repetition of thought-stopping slogans and cliches. The strict character limits of tweets seem precisely designed to encourage these. Pithy, unambiguous or extreme declarations generate far more likes and shares than nuance.

So, cultish for sure, but cults themselves have a couple of other defining features: charismatic leaders and strict membership—they make it hard to join and harder to leave the cult. While I could see a definite us-and-them mentality blossoming online, you are always just one abject apology or mantra of loyalty away from being in the in-crowd. And, typically, in what I was trying to describe, there were the Trump-fans for sure, but on the whole, people weren’t swearing loyalty to a single adored leader or guru. The word cult wasn’t quite cutting it.

Fundamentalism?

I toyed too with the word fundamentalism. There are many characteristics of fundamentalism that resonate with the extreme commentary making its way into bog-standard online discussions. There is, for example, an abundance of people expressing the fundamentalist belief that it is only they and their closest allies who truly understand the world. They alone have been blessed with insight, and everyone else has it wrong. Fundamentalists also hark back to an imagined pristine world where things were in balance, people had a divine knowledge that has long since been suppressed, and life was infinitely better than it is today. We see that with those who imagine a peaceful, idyllic world before, say, the perceived horrors of immigration. Or those nostalgic for the calm nuclear family bliss of happy working men and their contented doting wives before nasty feminists destroyed the good times. As well, there are all sorts of entirely imagined ancient utopias invented by those on the left who desperately want to have something really wonderful to go back to. But fundamentalism, in its purest sense, is about those who believe in and follow a literal interpretation of an important text. Okay, there are the Linux operating model extremists, and the Das Kapital devotees floating in my orbit, and all sorts of religious fundies circling further out, but the literal interpretation of an ancient text doesn’t quite tally with my observations.

Fanaticism

It has been my reading of recent writing on fanaticism where I feel like I’ve hit gold. Fanatics can believe in anything: it’s the way that they believe in it that makes it fanaticism. Tick. Cults and fundamentalist religions are fanatic, but so too are other groups without women in pinafores, or leaders or ancient texts. This was what I was after: a word that could explain both the purist tendencies in MAGA, in the Taliban, in Gloriavale and the purism in social media meltdowns and blow-ups among people who identify as being on the left, those who speak eloquently and often of tolerance and kindness while exhibiting morality-fuelled viciousness.

Fanaticism and sacred values

The most important defining feature of fanatics is that they hold sacred values. Paul Katsafanas has developed a formula for what makes a value sacred rather than just, you know, believing in something. According to Katsafanas, a value counts as sacred for the believer if it meets all these conditions (Katsafanas’s terms with my take on his explanations):

1. Inviolable— you’re not allowed to sacrifice the value for another;

2. Incontestable—you’re not allowed to even think about trading or sacrificing the value; and

3. Dialectically invulnerable—even if there’s rational, logical, safety, common sense, or other really good reasons to trade the sacred value for another, nothing will change your mind. Even if upholding the value is harming you, you won’t budge. The value is all.¹

Fanatisicm, fragility and group identity

Holding a sacred value is a necessary but not sufficient condition of being a fanatic. Fanatics are also fragile, and this is because they see the sacred value as so tied up with their identity, any disagreement with the value is taken as an existential threat. That makes you vulnerable in multiple ways, a disagreement becomes an attack against not just everything you believe in, but against you. You, personally, believe you are in danger from dissenters. Disagreement might just kill you. The fragility, argues Katsafanas, is also in relation to the value itself. It’s not enough for the fanatic for their sacred value to be roaming the world happily alongside other competing values. Fanatics believe that the value itself cannot exist unless everyone adopts it.

A final marker of a fanatic is their group identity, those who share their sacred value are in their group, and everyone else is outside the group². Their loyalty is clear, the delineation absolute. “Even lone actor terrorists,” points out Ruth Rebecca Tietjen “such as Anders Breivik and Brenton Tarrant, claim to act in the name of such a (real or imaginary) group”.³

Fanaticism and contagion

I want to explore more, in another post, arguments over whether and how social media is revolutionary in the way that it can spread fanaticism. I think wildfires might be glacial compared to how quickly an idea, no matter how rotten or wrong or regressive, can bounce around the ether, getting bigger, louder and more unhinged. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s just a matter of scale. Maybe five malicious village gossipers could ruin someone’s life as thoroughly as any million-strong misogynistic pile-on does. It’s worth thinking about anyway.

I think my favourite of Katsafanas’s writing might be this passage, where he explains how fanaticism can be contagious. It explains to me why extremism these days feels less fringe and more familiar. I read it with recognition. Aaah, I said, to the Thing from a safe distance away, I see it now. Hello Fanaticism.

“But how could something like fanaticism be contagious? Well, suppose you wanted to design a mechanism to produce fanatics. You would need to make people experience their own identities as fragile: you would need to get them to think that their identity hinges on total devotion to some value; and you would need them to think that this value is threatened. Then the people would be strongly motivated to maintain and protect this value; and they would see those who don’t accept the value as enemies, as an out-group that needs to be struggled against. And the stronger you can make these tendencies, the better you would be at creating fanatics”.⁴

1. Katsafanas, Paul (2023). An Introduction to the Philosophy of Fanaticism. In Fanaticism and the History of Philosophy. London: Rewriting the History of Philosophy. pp. 1-18.

2. Katsafanas, Paul (2019). Fanaticism and Sacred Values. Philosophers’ Imprint 19:1-20.

3. Tietjen, R.R. (2023) Fear, Fanaticism, and Fragile Identities. J Ethics 27, 211–230.

4. See 1.