Escaping the Foucaultian Hellscape: Roger Sell, Mental Health, what Happens Now: A Personal Account

By: Matthew David Wiseman, PhD

Introduction:

Well, I pulled the plug on Facebook, and I would like to offer a personal account of why, and what comes next. It may come as a surprise to you that it has only secondarily to do with data science, propaganda, or censorship. I found that by carefully cultivating my interactions with others, I could actually maintain a reasonably balanced timeline between liberal and conservative views for a very long time. The ultimate problem was not with the site's algorithm or its policies, but with the way the political environment, language use, and propaganda affected the users themselves, and how they began to behave in response.

It has always been easier to accept a provided narrative than to critically analyze events and claims. And here I want to specifically praise a few people who have not given me permission, and so whose names I will only give in part. Olivia F, Matthew U and Matthew D, Bo B, Jared S, Bill R, and Ryan M have been my role-models for how to think critically and how to use social media thoughtfully. But the environment of Facebook made that project increasingly exhausting and time-consuming as the camps became more and more established, more virulent, and less connected to reality.

The question is, said Humpty-Dumpty, which is to be master. That is all.

Part I: 2016 Down the Rabbit Hole

I stand by my 2016 conviction that Trump was a bad choice, but that I could not in good conscience lend a vote to Hillary Clinton, either. I spent the campaign encouraging fellow conservatives to vote third party so as to avoid participating in what I believe is the moral corruption of Donald Trump. A truly unsatisfactory candidate was, I argued, a prime opportunity to register a protest vote to express our dissatisfaction with the major options, something all of my conservative friends talked about frequently. My argument was simple: if now is not the time to vote Libertarian, Constitution, Solidaritan, when was? If not when we acknowledged that our own ostensible party's candidate was so sub-par, then when would we take a stand for more options in the voting booth?

I was sorely disappointed, though not entirely surprised, at the outcome. My inability to make any headway with principled conservative friends in the face of the GOP's reductive, two pronged "Pro-Life, Anti-Socialist" campaign, despite what I believe were its glaring philosophical and practical inconsistencies was extremely disheartening. For the next four years I was accused by conservatives of being a leftist because I laid the heaviest critique on the phony conservatism of the Republican Party, and accused by liberals of victim blaming for arguing that the Democratic Party's poor campaigning and lack of understanding of its own voter base lead to the 2016 loss, among a litany of other accusations from both sides.

The outcome lead me to try and re-assess how I used social media. I spent several months posting very little and trying to be careful, thoughtful, and purposeful. But as our noted polarization increased and tribalism set in, it felt less and less possible to make any real headway. It was not until I announced that I was leaving Facebook a few days ago that I found out how many people appreciated my theological and ideological stand. But this leads into our next section on language and social media: the extremes have drowned out the middle by virulent rhetoric and social intimidation. This is a personal account, so I am not going to go into how the statistics align with this experience, but it is extremely important to note the way the extremes have made it almost impossible to remain, not just a traditional political 'moderate' but any kind of dissident or independent. And none of us is innocent.

Part II: The Prophecy of Roger Sell

Discovering Roger Sell's work was an electrifying time for me. I didn't set out to discover him, I was just browsing the library's catalogue and stumbled across the title Literature as Communication, irresistible to a linguist like me working with literary texts. It sounded like exactly the kind of thing I had been looking for, and with every page I devoured it read more and more like what I had been looking for. And then I reached a section in his introductory chapter which made me stop in my tracks and check the publication date. It was published in 2000, but reading it in 2016, I knew he had seen the writing on the wall before the rest of us had.

Sell proposed his theory of Mediating Criticism as an alternative to the excesses of the Structuralist and Post-Structuralist movements which preceded him, and while I greatly appreciate his critique of the former, it was in reading his answer to the latter that the lightening struck. He warned against a time when:

Emic differentiality is installed as the keystone of sociocultural theory, particular differences of formation come to be reified along lines that are tightly regimental. A person seen as belonging to a certain category of human beings is credited with insufficient autonomy to resist such a positioning, and with too little empathetic insight to approach, understand, and be influenced by a person belonging to some other category. Theoretically inexpressible here, in other words, is the possibility of mediating criticism. (Literature as Communication, 24)

That is, when social, historical, and cultural differences are seen as going "all the way down," as it were, so that different groups of people live in such different experiential world that meaningful exchange is impossible. And the warning is dire:

What hangs upon [mediation] is nothing less than the future of peace and prosperity of the human race. (Literature as Communication, 14)

My blood veritably froze. I heard "fake news" and "alternative truths," I heard spin and critical theory, and I heard an NPR commentator accusing Fox News viewers of living in an "alternate reality." I wondered if the NPR commentator was familiar with the concept of umwelt. The part that made my stomach ache most was that I heard both Democrats and Republicans accusing one another of the same thing, and over the four years that followed I felt gradually more and more buried under the weight of two parallel propaganda machines to the extent that just researching and developing reasoned interpretations of the views that I saw every day on Facebook would have been a full-time job. I saw a political system devolving under the weight of the belief that one's opponents belonged to an unreasoning, unfeeling alien species incapable of meaningful communication with humans. I saw a world where people thought that the film Arrival had good linguistic underpinnings (it doesn't).

Don't misinterpret me or Roger Sell. Neither of us believes in radical individuality. Neither of us would buy into a Jordan Peterson style psychologism. Nor would either of us subscribe to 19th-20th century notions of objectivity. It is quite clear that people and their communication are culturally situated. Hence the need for mediation. What Sell emphasizes is two points: first, all human experience has certain commonalities which serve as a basis for cross-contextual communication. Second, that we are social individuals, and that the Modern and Postmodern heresies tend to elide one or the other of those constituents making us radical individuals (ala Modern Liberalism), or mere cultural nodes (ala Postmodern Leftism). But we are both social and individual, a richer reality by far than either absolutizing philosophy will admit.

But Facebook, with its deluge of information reinforced the view of distance between groups. The positive feedback loops one received for virtue signalling, both of Leftist and Trumpist varieties, the tendency to create echo chambers. Worse yet, the sheer volume of both real information and deeply misleading propaganda which made it so that, practically speaking, it really was impossible to sort out the truth from the error in many cases, because we all have to make a living, be with our loved ones, sleep, eat, pray, and even, on very rare occasions, shower.

Part III: Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsen

Recently, linguistic patterns began to impress themselves on me, and it was a dark day when I noticed the first one. I recognized it and it did not bode well. "The Democrat Party." A seemingly innocuous reference to a political party, so why did my blood run cold when I saw it? Because it can be derogatory to refer to someone as a "Jew," but it is practically never derogatory to refer to them as "Jewish." One is a description and the other is a label. My right-leaning family members began to strongly prefer "Democrat" to "Democratic." They also used "POS" to refer to politicians and criminals, and the context began to make it clear that those referred by the moniker were considered irredeemable, beyond possibility of reconciliation. The usage of both terms was quickly ossifying into technical terms, and they were technical terms of abuse.

I watched even people I respected begin to label their opponents, rather than describing them, and accept elements of conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and voter fraud. And perhaps the worst part of it all was that I deeply sympathized with them. Maintaining mental distance from the overwhelming propaganda bombardment was mentally and emotionally exhausting, and I had frequent lapses in judgment about statements, comments, and links. The whole discourse was spiraling out of control, and my motivated reasoning made it extremely easy to see my way into the propagandistic narratives I was encountering.

Behold

But they were not alone. I have complained since college that "ignorant" had become a content-empty term of abuse used by the ideological left, and while the term itself seems to be used a little less often, the sentiment remains. I am frequently disturbed by how often it is assumed that I agree with the cultural left by mere dint of my education, that because I cannot be categorized as "ignorant," I must be of the "right-thinking sort." Let me disabuse everyone of the misapprehension in one fell swoop: I most certainly am not of anyone's right-thinking sort.

But what was more disturbing to me was the re-labeling of anything that was not left-leaning among liberal views as "right wing." It was a rhetorical move which the speakers themselves may not always believe, but it has devastating consequences. When everything from actual Neo-Nazis to mere Constitutional Originalism is "right wing," and when any undesirable perspective is deemed harmful, racist, and dangerous, it becomes increasingly difficult to take any accusation that someone is right wing seriously, and that includes genuinely dangerous right wing groups. The move is intended to make it unacceptable to hold fairly reasonable and traditional positions, but it ends by accidentally normalizing genuinely harmful ideologies.

The worst trend on the other side is the one that finally precipitated my leaving the platform: a wild over-confidence and lack of self-criticism. My recent interactions with ideological leftists have been characterized by a degree of certainty which is almost never justified, and which calls to mind the Dunning-Kruger Effect. As many of you may know, I have an anxiety disorder, and odd as it may sound, encountering a wildly over-confident ideologue is one of my major triggers. The sheer force of certainty and righteous indignation they carried with them gave me elevated heart rate and blood pressure, vertigo, long-lasting anxiety, anger, indigestion, and on rare occasions full-blown panic attacks. They could assume their ideological frame to an extent that was bewildering. It was hard to even imagine how someone could have so little doubt of their own position. Even communicating was hard because they could not understand how warped and narrow their views were. Even attempting to explain to them my own views tended to lead primarily to confusion. It was quickly evident that we were not using language in the same way.

What may be most disturbing is that everything I have said thusfar is political. And not in the sense that one might say all public life is political, but in the strict, state-and-party sense. Government is important, but it should not dominate our lives this way, like a religion. In fact, it has taken over practically all religious conversation. And of course theology has implications for government, and Christianity is inherently ethical and has implications for how we treat the poor and the immigrant. But what I was seeing more and more on social media was the reduction of theology to the political sphere. The emphasis has ceased to be that God became Man that Man might become God, as St. Clement says. Our hope ceased to be because "To me, to live is Christ and to die is gain," it ceased to be the Hope of the Resurrection. I am deeply afraid that the Christianity of Facebook does not know the courage of the martyrs who went to their graves knowing that they would rise in glory, but rather it is merely the confidence of demagogues who believe in some petty, temporal revolution which will inevitably degenerate under the weight of human sin and physical entropy. Where we were once at risk of a purely spiritual religion which knew no public policy, we are quickly sliding into a religion of public policy without even a memory of the spirit. Christ as mere social reformer is an abject failure.

I want to be clear here: none of this impugns anyone's intelligence. That is the thing about motivated reasoning: the smarter we are, the easier it is to make a convincing case for a falsehood. In fact, this idea that differences are insurmountable obstacles to communication is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more we believe that we cannot communicate, the more we fail to even try. The more we cease to try, the more we self-insulate and create distinct language communities which use the same words in increasingly different ways, but do not recognize that they are speaking different languages. Translation is only possible when we admit that we do not speak the same language. It has historically been a point of pride for me that I was able to translate when people were miscommunicating with each other. But it quickly became clear over the course of 2020 that I was being swept away in the tide, and my mental health was the first to drown. I had to get out.

Part IV: How Now Shall I Live?

So what's next, now that I'm Amish? Within hours of deciding to get off Facebook, my wife told me there was a noticeable improvement in my attitude. Within a day, she could see an improvement in our 2.5-year-old Wendell, as well. I'm singing more and making more puns, which is a mixed blessing. I'm less preoccupied and give more attention when people are talking to me. My attention span while doing research is longer, and I feel less anxious. I actually feel like writing again. I told Carrie that Borscht was clearly invented by vampire to make it harder to tell whether or not someone is eating blood.

First, I'm going to be writing more in this format: long, complete thoughts that I now have the mental space and time for. I am going to resurrect our Catechesis Project, basing it on the questions my dear friend Rachel, who is considering converting to Catholicism, wrote our for me. I finally feel as though we can produce another issue of The Scholastic again. Perhaps over Christmas. I am not going to transfer personal social interaction to another social media platform, because part of the problem for me was the sense of a social obligation to post things regularly. My private friendships will be private again, in shared Google groups and private chats, emails, phone calls, and once COVID is over, hopefully the local pub as well. I want to focus more on Bible, theology, and language, rather than mere ideology and American politics. After just two days I already feel myself healing. I am becoming a whole person again.

Carrie and I are making concrete plans about fund-raising for the Fellowship so we can move forward on our calling. We have a list of three important contacts, and are going to start drafting emails to them on Monday. I sent my mom a birthday wish-list, and made real progress on my application for an academic fellowship for this summer. And for the first time since March, my stomach feels settled enough that I think tonight I could enjoy a drink of the bourbon that's been sitting forlornly on the shelf.

I know this is all starting to sound terribly self-congratulatory, and maybe it is. I have decided that it is something I need to get off my chest, even if it turns out to be a bit over-the-top. I feel a new day has dawned. More important than anything, I can think clearly again now with fewer voices shouting in my head. If I am going to be shut up in my house due to plague, I shall at least insist on being shut up properly like a hermit who meets with God, not staring anemically into my Palantir like Denethor shut up in his tower. If I am going to exile myself to the wilderness I shall insist on raving like a prophet: Come out of her, my people! And let every man deliver himself from the wroth of the Lord.