Social Media: The Villain Factory

Social Media: The Villain Factory

It may lack the grotesque twist of swallowing toxic waste or injecting some quantum serum, but social media has nevertheless become modern humanity's primary, real-world source for villain origin stories. The story format on social media, that of heroes dominating bad guys, has become so ubiquitous that I'm not sure anyone even sees it anymore. It's just how social media works now. These absurdly never-ending, win-less attack and defense scripts have become the vibrating commodity of today's social economy; the ether through which views, likes and replies are earned. Today, the vilification of others has become an addictive cultural habit.

This interaction requires only one thing to function, villains.

And oh, there are so many villains chugging off the assembly line. So many people, organizations, and companies to hate. A smorgasbord of detestation made to order.

The insinuation of every commenter, every Tweeting hero, is that if only this bad guy wasn’t so dense, could understand the truth, could see what I see, the world would be a better place. That's how it goes in story-telling. The virtuous hero sees the truth, while the villain lacks some critical detail of fact or humanity and ignorantly commits to misdirected action regardless—the big, dumb dummy. Therefore only one choice remains, the villain, steadfast and unchangeable, has to be beaten. Broken. Ruined.

And breaking villains feels so good. Mmmm, revenge.

In a modern world of polarized, cynically powerless participants, fighting to break villains from safely behind screens must serve as some kind of emotional salve for a widespread psychological disorder in 2023 - because most social media users seem openly willing to give up what they say they really want to get more of it. These discrete comments—individual expressions of free speech—while largely ineffective and futile, do have a profound impact at scale. Times hundreds of millions of users they serve to erode the functionality and strengths of our society, thoughtlessly costing humanity's unity, future, and prosperity by fracturing, alienating, and shredding our chances of overcoming common challenges.

This drive to vilify and attack strangers we disagree with represents the common person at our absolute weakest and least intellectually compelling. Because what we all want is for the world to be better, and ultimately we wish "the other side" just agreed with us.

The shape of the machine

On Twitter, unless one pays, one has only 280 characters to explain a point, which is really just a convenient excuse never to have to apply the effort to meaningfully explain any point.

What is telling, however, is that insults fit perfectly in that space. Demeaning comments, name-calling, snide condescension, passive-aggression, and ad hominem attacks all seem designed for purpose. Form fitted.

But not understanding. Not empathy. Not context. These don't fit. At all. To come even remotely close to engendering an understanding of something or building empathy with another human being one has to cheat the system, work against most social platforms' core functionality. Break the basic UX. Hack the model by stringing together what is nevertheless never enough sequential posts to expand the dialogue into some cryptic breadcrumb trail of inconveniently broken thoughts. "Unroll, please." As such, Twitter, for example, is a failure. Always has been—day one. Even when the Blue-Checkmark-Bellied Sneetches were happy with how many people agreed with them and Sylvester McMonkey McBean was still somewhere else making electric cars. It was destined to play its role in undermining humanity's ability and willingness to understand and empathize with one another.

So, not surprisingly in the slightest, like watching dominoes fall, Twitter, Facebook, and the "fun-sized" form-factor of televised news stories designed primarily to look appealing on the shelf are all leaning into hatred, outrage, and anger because these, and not any of humanity's unifying, positive, constructive attributes, behaviorally drive the majority of engagement on these platforms - and make more money.

Poor human beings, so emotionally weak as we are, so easily baited by the wan validation, the occasional drop of dopamine that comes from vilifying others, we all fell for it. Effortlessly. In the greediest and laziest of ways. People get vilified. Vilifier gets likes. Likes feed addiction and continued access to more.

Go ahead, open Twitter. Right now. You will be hard-pressed to locate a handful of comments that, no matter how intellectually articulate, are nevertheless intentionally designed to be the social equivalent of "Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah," or a punch to the throat. Even the most restrained tweets are often mere passive-aggressive disguises for the humiliation of their targets.

The vast majority of tweets that wind up in our feeds, even, or maybe most disappointingly, those authored by "big, respectable, important people," nevertheless resort to the least impressive examples of human communication I know of. This behavior is so ubiquitous that leaves me to believe the very machinery of this exchange, the platform itself, is intentionally designed to poison us. Triggered and empowered by social media, this cynical insult culture, we, the "Nyea, nyea, nyea, nyea" crowds have become victims of a machine that has shaped the addiction and our tactics.

The Origin Story

I wrote screenplays for many years. But as a kid, in my earliest attempts, I was admittedly not very good at writing compelling villains. Those early stories resulted in superficial villains, characters who were just "evil people."

"They call him The Grip, he’s a mobster. He has huge hands, get it?" I'd say, "Whatever, why are you asking? He's a bad guy."

But as these characters fell flat, failing to fill my young stories with meaningful stakes, I was slowly forced to accept a fact that didn't come easily.

That there is no such thing as a villain.

Villains don't exist.

There is no such thing as a villain. Villains don't exist.

Villainy and evil are merely our own interpretations. And the villainous acts that feed those interpretations are outcomes of something much more profound and meaningful, something core to the human condition of all characters. Something we all share.

No one in the world sees themselves as a villain. Ever.

No matter how apparently "evil" or destructive we believe another person is, you can be sure theirs is not the story of a villain, of a bad guy, of evil. Theirs, like ours, is the story of a hero. Seeing oneself as a "villain" runs wholly counter to the human condition. To the truth of our birth and psychological makeup.

Everyone - everyone - is the hero of their movie.

Everyone - everyone - is the hero of their movie.

And this obvious, core detail is something that is totally lost in the vast majority of discourse and debate today. A detail that one must acknowledge and embrace if one ever hopes to change anything. No matter how much you may abhor the ideas or decisions of another person or group, denying the basic fact that like you, they view themselves as heroes means you cannot understand the person and therefore maybe more profoundly will never find common ground sufficient to change their mind in your favor. Ever.

I am making the assumption you wish to change minds of course.

Take yourself for example. For good reason, you of all people see yourself as a hero. The protagonist. In quiet moments sometimes maybe you look at your face in the mirror, you look into those resonantly familiar eyes and see the innocence and honor of your existence. You feel love for so many people close to you. And even for some people you don't know. You're a good person. You have weathered a lot. You can remember all the injustices that have happened to you in your life. Some of them still pain you today because you've been so misunderstood and mistreated at times. Unfairly. You carry the wounds of that mistreatment and injustice. It still hurts when you give it power. So you try not to. You reflect on how hard you've had to work in your life. How much dedication it has taken to achieve the things you've accomplished that you're most proud of. Sure, there was a bit of luck along the way. Not enough, that's for sure, because you still have big goals as yet unmet. They are good, noble goals. Some of them are your own; goals you've carried it seems since childhood or that have grown from new wishes. Other goals weigh heavily on your shoulders from a sense of responsibility that has come later in life. These are important because they involve helping others. And through all of this, you don't ask for much. You wish for it sometimes but you know it takes hard work, and in the end, all you have is you. Even so, there have been people in your life who lent a hand and helped you. Showed you understanding and support. Maybe gave you something valuable. And for that, you were so grateful. Those moments reminded you to return the favor. And you can remember times you went above and beyond to be selfless and do something for others to improve their lives. Life can be hard. You know this. And it's rarely been fair for you. But you have made it this far by persevering and sharing when you could. You're a good person. You're on a difficult journey full of light and dark, joy and sadness. Prosperity and strife. It all ebbs and flows. But you're a good person. And you're doing your best to navigate through this life.

Oh, sorry... did you think I was talking to you? Actually, I was talking to the person on social media you most hate. The person you last ascribed as an awful person, an asshole, weak, gullible, or selfish.

Well of course you thought I was talking to you. Everyone does. We all do.

And obviously, I was talking to both of you. All of us. And that's the point. We are all that person at our core.

So don't forget that when you open the darn app.

The Way

I assume you’re not so simplistic that you wish to speak only to people who already agree with you. That you rather have the courage and intention to try to make a difference.

If so, you need to change minds. Turn others’ minds in your favor. And, yes, openly face the possibility that yours may be the mind that needs to change. That degree of openness is a requirement. None of us are right about everything. We are all quite wrong about all sorts of inconvenient things.

Changing minds is a transition. When helping others see your point of view, how can you hope to draw a line to point B if you don't even see point A? If you can't accept the starting point, the point of universal human experience, you have no hope of passing the first step, of engaging successfully in debate, or even of structuring a compelling or convincing argument. If you don't accept that the other person is a hero like you, you've already lost. If instead, you succumb to the view that your journey is more valid somehow, you might as well be standing miles away yelling insults at your adversary for not happening to stand where you are.

Such a position tends not to attract one to a new point of view, does it.

Accepting that this "adversary" is a hero requires empathy. Not sympathy, not agreement, but understanding and empathy. It means you must strive to see the world as this would-be villain sees it. You must briefly let go of your own judgments and opinions, let go of your worldview for a time and immerse yourself in the hero's life and backstory of this adversary without cynicism. Accuracy is impossible of course - too many key plot points and story details will be missing. So you must role-play, find in yourself respect for this person, and find in your own story the experiences that might lead you to a multi-verse model of this person's current state. Such a thing requires you to become an actor. To open yourself to this other's way of thinking. To ask questions. It may feel like an alien mindset, but it must be colored with details both imagined and from your own experience.

It’s hard to come face to face with someone you wholly disagree with and visualize the movie they must see. In fact when we disagree, the very idea that we would submerge ourselves sincerely in the object of our hatred, to give ourselves over to that person's hero movie, can feel abhorrent– sickening even. You feel rather compelled to wholly invalidate their movie, to deny that such a movie should exist, to reject that their movie has merit, that their movie is in any way just as true and as important and as righteous as yours. Because yours is a story of goodness, and theirs is clearly a story of badness. So instead you dismiss such a character by ticking the old familiar boxes: "dumb," "liar," "uneducated," "fooled," "in denial," "gullible," "nasty," "emotionally stunted," "phobic," "selfish," and "evil." Ticking boxes is easy. And dismissive. It's one of the key tactics social media posters rely on near exclusively. “Gotta break the villain. Gimme my views and dopamine, thanks. 'Cause honestly, the alternative is too much work.”

But if you simply decide someone is a villain, that their movie or character lacks the features necessary to be worthy of your understanding, in that desperately critical decision, you just set in stone that whatever wishes you might've had to change this person's mind are doomed; you set the playing field with the highest likelihood that the target will respond in kind with a defensive move. Only an exceedingly patient, mature target could resist blocking an attack. And whatever hope you may have had to give them what they needed to change and thus achieve the goal of aligning them with your views was a complete waste and will never come to pass. You shut the door when the least you should have done is leave the door open in ambiguity. But ambiguity is hard because ambiguity might be interpreted as you being wrong. And that can't stand, right?

For some of us, with our noses rubbed in the mud that we ignorantly surrendered any chance to make progress, we will feign that "they weren't worth it anyway." You know, because the tick boxes. But that's just a weakness. A lack of commitment. A defense mechanism. And dishonest.

Respect and empathy don't just need to happen when we already agree with people. And it doesn't just need to happen when the topic we disagree on is of low consequence to us. Empathy in those situations is easy. Barely registers a reading on the meter frankly. And it's not an indication that we are empathetic or capable of respect.

Nor does disagreement equal disrespect. But all too often disagreement is seen that way today by a generation that has been weaned on clever snark, take-downs, and insults as a measurement of self-worth.

Rather, respect and empathy matter most when they're hardest to conjure; when you're the only one engaging in it. When it's all one-sided, and you feel you're being attacked. That's when empathy and respect actually matter.

The TEST

Do you know how to engage in a respectful debate without polarizing sides? I bet you think you do. I bet you think you can easily.

Let's test the theory. Take a topic you have a strong, set opinion about. Something that triggers you. I know you never get triggered, but let's imagine you do. Let's take vaccines, say. That should do the trick.

Can you face your most triggering opponent, the one that you deeply disagree with, and can you be genuinely respectful; can you truly be empathetic? Can you role-play and find the sincerity and humanity in their point of view? Can you acknowledge those parts of their argument that are true? Because there is always some part of every argument related to a complicated subject that's true. Can you bear to acknowledge and reinforce those parts openly? Can you imagine and understand their hero's movie without passing judgment and ticking the boxes, assuming they're stupid, uneducated or gullible? Can you envision an understandable, honorable origin story for this person? In other words, can you become them? Do you worry that allowing that bit of acceptance could reveal a kink in your own worldview? Can you hear them out and ask questions, not meant to embarrass, condescend or passive-aggressively humiliate but to understand their deep concerns for or against genuinely? Do you speak to them in the way you might wish if the roles were reversed?

I'm willing to bet most of us will fail this test miserably.

Congratulations, we're tools of the machine. The owners of our social platforms love it when we fail this test. When we devolve to fighting and insulting with condescension and outrage to humiliate and stoke anger in others - further polarizing them away from us while increasing "engagement" and thus platform profitability. Good job lowering yourself to the level of intelligent beasts. Cha-Ching! Even when pressed to fix social platforms of misinformation, toxicity, and expressions of hatred, like the odds on a Vegas slot machine, social media is always tuned to ensure you aren't genuinely encouraged to take the higher road. Taking the higher road may be better for humanity, but it's not as profitable.

The Stakes

The sheer lack of effort being applied to understanding one another on these platforms chokes me. It's virtually non-existent. I deflate every time I see a powerful, important person succumb to such thoughtless vilification. And that’s almost always.

Someone has to be bigger. Someone has to stand firm against that futile, addictive pull. But such a thing is so rare. Thus I believe that we, our society of increasingly polarized, multiple personalities, are breaking inside. We are not healthy.

And this at a time when humanity is facing so many challenges: natural disasters, geo-political threats, pandemics, equality and rights issues, the environment, war, insidious misinformation, new technologies that none of us, and I mean not even the people inventing it, are ready for. When has breaking up into little, warring factions with resultantly less collective intelligence ever been the way to solve a problem?

You solve challenges by coming together. By bringing together the smartest of us, the most humane, the most innovative, the most experienced—the best of us together, no matter what borders, cultures, or ideologies, we may be behind. Then work together to solve these problems.

We solve problems by combining strengths. Not separating them.

As an individual, I've had many disagreements in my life. I can't count or remember them all. Some have been deeply painful and pushed me to emotional records—scant few I have handled as well as I wish. But I know that I have never in my life solved a problem contentiously by insulting, fighting, suing, or canceling. I may have employed these darker, destructive tactics at times, and I may have selfishly "solved" a problem in some sense, but only by leaving casualties and lost opportunities behind.

In essence, by failing my best self-image.

We need to do better. We need to honor humanity’s mutual heroism. In the end, every best solution requires participants to come together. To work together constructively. To find commonality. That requires maturity, respect, empathy, and understanding. First and foremost, it requires resisting the thoughtless urge to vilify those you disagree with.