Polarisation Isn’t Persuasion

(Note: This article was originally published to JamieMcSloy.co.uk on March 8th, 2020. I’m going through an old backup of the site, which has hundreds of posts that aren’t currently uploaded. As I’m working hard on updating the site – and releasing The Vault, letting these old posts be the daily posts for a while.)

Polarisation Isn’t Persuasion

Let’s talk quickly about a bizarre misnomer that floats around on Twitter.

The subject of discussion is polarisation. The misnomer is that polarisation has anything to do with persuasion.

When you persuade people, you turn them towards an opinion that you share, or that is helpful for you.

In its most basic terms, all persuasion follows this path:

1. Thesis
2. Antithesis
3. Synthesis

Where your opinion is one, their opinion is two and you persuade by finding common ground by which you build an argument and convert your recipient to the cause.

Polarisation is practically the opposite of this.

Polarisation is what you do to repulse people who you don’t want to attract to your cause.

It’s late and a Sunday evening, so I’ll leave going into this further for another day, but ultimately, you can draw some conclusions from this.

Among them:

1. Most of the political pundits you see are morons
2. Many of the people who are trying to get attention on social media are, in fact, social media attention whores and nothing else. If it looks like one and quacks like one, it’s probably a duck
3. A person who thinks they’re persuasive based on the amount of enemies they have is also an idiot.

Generally speaking, the amount of people who have “enemies” and “haters” is far lower than they make out; if you do things deliberately to “polarise” then you’re inviting people to think you are an idiot. When they do, you haven’t made an enemy.

To round this up quickly, the funny thing about the common polarisation stuff you see is that it’s repulsive, (and not in a good way,) to 99% of people.

So if you read a tweet or see an Instagram picture and you think, “This isn’t clever, it’s just socially retarded…”

… you’re probably right.