Intent, Interpretation, Invention

Over the decades, particularly the last decade, society has evolved. In most cases, this is good. Progress. Enlightenment. Empathy. Certainly, there are numerous cases where the opposite has happened. Who would have thought that nazis would see a resurgence. Instead, I want to focus on the positive. Don’t worry. It’s still me. This concerns how our messages are conveyed and received by our audience. Particularly the latter.

Most of us have learned that our perspective of the world can be different than that of others. I hope that most of us are working on that. Opening our minds. Trying to see how others view the world. Learning from their experiences and trying to make the world a better place for everyone, not just us. This is empathy on a grander scale. The needle of freedom and acceptance and tolerance moves ever forward. We try to talk to each other as equals. We listen to each other. We learn from each other. We… oh who am I kidding?  This is America.

We’ve all heard someone use the excuse “that’s not what I meant”. Maybe a dude tried to compliment a woman, and it came off as creepy. His INTENT was a compliment. But it came off as sexist. That’s the INTERPRETATION. For the most part, intent is no longer really relevant. How a message is received is perceived as more important. It doesn’t matter if the dude said something as innocuous as “I like your hair”. If it made the woman feel uncomfortable, we as a society have decided that he must be stoned to death. Well, whatever the Twitter version of that is. I can actually understand where they’re coming from on this. Keanu knows that I’ve said things that were misinterpreted. But by that point, the damage is done.

What I don’t get, however, is the invention. That’s when people flat out make shit up. If you say “I like cookies and cream ice cream”, and they hear “people who like chocolate chip ice cream are pedophiles.” In no rational universe could those two dots be connected. This shit happens all the time. I’m autistic, so there have been countless times when I’ve said something that came across very differently than it was in my head. I get that. But these inventors? They’re just lying. I don’t know if they are lying to themselves, but they are certainly lying to you.

You see it in politics all the time. Person one says that gays should get married. Person two responds with “So you’re saying that gay people should sodomize children on national television.” Uh. No. That’s not even close to what they said. I think it’s a form of the strawman logical fallacy. A way of misconstruing someone’s argument to an absurd level, and then criticizing that absurdity. Maybe it’s a lack of critical thinking. Or maybe, just maybe, people have just stopped listening to each other.

I have a theory. A lot of people have already made up their minds on certain issues. If you’re for legalizing marijuana, no after school special is going to change your mind on it. If you consider abortion to be murder, that’s it. You will never evolve on the subject. I think people have started making up their minds on what people are GOING TO say. Like, they’ve already decided what you’re going to say next, so they are preparing rebuttals to that, instead of listening to what you actually say.

Why, though? What do they get out of it? How does blatantly inventing something help? Is it motivation to be outraged? Have we gotten so desensitized, that anger is the only thing we still feel and inventing you saying something that angers you is what gets you out of bed in the morning? Have we become so trapped in echo chambers, that the chambers have now shrunken to fit each person individually? I don’t get it.

It’s gone beyond having rational discussions on disagreements. Now we’re spending time considering whatever batshit insane version of what was heard, by someone who clearly is not being honest with anyone. I can’t find any constant. It happens across racial divides. Across the political spectrum. Regardless of religious beliefs. Well, there is one constant. Age. This type of argument style is almost exclusively that of young people. I think that growing up on 10 second clips has minimized their attention span to the point that they can only process one thought at a time. If you say something that does not conform to the thought they have, fuck it. We’re going to talk about their dumb thought anyway.

People love to make clickbate articles about how GenZ is killing (insert thing here). I think they have killed rational thought.