We all know difficult people whom we must love. In the age of democracy, we are forced to engage with people that directly and indirectly oppose our political objectives. We may wish to think sweet nothings in our minds that we are all on the same side but are separated by minor preferences, however on minor examination of modern politics we see that the political climate has incredibly divergent philosophies of the purpose of family, society, education, government, etc. In light of this environment, we are bombarded with a tyranny of midwittery which comes in the form of worldviews, morals, and beliefs rooted in politics rather than any traditional religion or philosophy. To prepare your sanity and heart for the 2024 madness, I figured we could explore some bad habits of thinking together.
C.S. Lewis coined a very useful phrase for our discussion: Bulverism. Lewis goes on, “Some day I am going the write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father – who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than the third – “Oh, you say that because you are a man.” “At that moment,” E. Bulver assures us, “there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.” That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.”
This quote should immediately bring several past conversations around the nature of politics, reality, and religion to mind. Your social identity, gender, race, or any other characteristic you possess automatically disqualify your opinion. For example (relevant for our time), “If you aren’t a woman, you have no right to have an opinion on a woman’s right to choose [an abortion].” We assume that a white man cannot speak on racism or a Christian has no say in public education, because of course the only reason they would want to have a say is to impose a certain list of conniving machinations that only exists in your mind solipsistically.
Bulverism is a scourge that not only helped create the discourse of the “Twentieth Century,” as Lewis claims, but also dances across the nations as a metaphorical power of the air. Psychologizing your enemies, without sufficient evidence from past language and behavior, allows you to manifest an ethereal nonperson who possesses all of the evil traits that all imaginary people in that group possess. Engaging with such talk is useful to train the will in patience but otherwise is an act of insanity.
Why is this so common? God knows more than us, but we can have our own thoughts on the matter. We live in an atomized society, a fact well known to most men in our time. Some of the consequences include things pertinent to our discussion. The Reality Crisis, delved into with great detail in Spencer Klavan’s book How to Save the West, permeates our discourse. Information comes from sources outside of our personal circle; much of what we believe to be true is always being questioned for its validity, and older ideas are all on the chopping block.
With the advent of common use AI, fabricated videos, speeches, and writings can appear to the untrained eye as the real deal. On one wavelength, information is easily invented out of whole cloth. Unfortunately, AI is not the origin of this problem. The West’s commonly shared mythos and worldviews of old now receive unbridled skepticism. What we are left with are ever shifting opinions; Truth as anything approaching objectivity has been reduced to materialistic and scientistic concepts. We no longer wrestle with the abstract realm from a common vision because pluralism has dominated our culture.
Television and internet media has long since split up the population by narrative. Competing stories about the purpose of nearly every key part of life have separated the population along pseudo-religious and political lines. This creates de facto silos from which few eyes peer out of or into from any other place. This Guardian article lays out the point well. People on both the right and left have no idea what the other side’s beliefs are, especially in a statistical aggregate of preferences.
Our great god of political discourse, solipsism, dominates our discourse by engendering self-absorption and Bulverism as the default hermeneutic (a method or theory of interpretation) of the day. Solipsism, according to Webster’s Dictionary, is described as: a theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing. While this may seem too technical for our scope, I would like to make the case of its relevance.
Bulverism as a common phenomenon supports this claim. Bulverism relies upon one assuming that one’s own imagination of another person is the reality of another’s perspective and belief based on guilt by association and circular, self encapsulated reasoning. If we analyze our political adversaries purely by what we imagine that they think we are engaging in solipsistic behavior. I will grant that this is incredibly fun to do but acts as a dangerous vice. Where else would we get incredibly wild memes about our political enemies from?
Solipsism will continue to dominate our imagination of the political landscape until we are driven from the echo chambers of non reality into the real world around us. This does not require the internet to collapse, however a crisis may accomplish the same goal to a somewhat lesser extent. When your neighbor is someone you must cooperate with in order to flourish, it follows that alienation should subside. They become a real person to you. Suddenly, inventing narratives about people’s beliefs in your mind will start to cause you issues in real life; it is antisocial behavior. Like ill-intentioned gossip, solipsism invents new details about a person and perverts your perspective of the real man. In the real world, we can profit through engaging with the real person; a nonperson can do nothing for us.
So a solipsistic view of someone is generally just putting them in the most convenient, simplified box according to your worldview, and failing to give credit, understand, or update your view of them in a positive sense?
I've seen this plenty in Internet culture and as you've said, memes. I waste my time on the Internet, and I love a good meme painting someone I don't like as the devil as much as the next fellow, but I agree that this is more comfort behavior than useful. In every day discussions with real people, politics don't need to come up. Politics is a thing that represents your core values and beliefs, but that will show up in other actions and conversations. You can realize the coworker you work best with is politically the polar opposite of you, but in the context it doesn't matter one bit.
There is definitely a place for snap judgements in life (rapid/temporary solipsism?), but the comments section on the Internet is not one of them.