It’s Not Thoughtcrime, It’s Tribal Warfare: “Cope” as a gateway to in-group/out-group behaviour.
The great online political battles of the past several years have been revealing in what passes for people’s opinions and, some would say, revealing as to the complete ineffectualness of online activism.
As it became clear that the resistance to the Resistance was not going to prevent president Biden from being elected, and that liberalism, especially progressive liberalism, was on an inexorable rise to power, many heterodox thinkers, some from the right-wing, others from the Marxist left, began increasingly to question the veracity of online actors in the liberal sphere. What crept in was a kind of armchair psychological analysis of the actors, especially of those who work in the media, many of whom have an active presence on Twitter - by far the most pugilistic and publicly well-known forum on the internet today.
Frequently, the word “cope” is used, as in to say something like “that’s cope”, or “that’s just pure cope”, and it’s not at all clear or obvious precisely what is meant by it. Context should matter, but when a word is used simply to code for something psychological, you can assume that, in its generality, it also floats context free above the argument being made.
“Cope”, however, is meant to allude to such things as coping mechanisms, defence mechanisms, and psychological projection. It suggests that some kind of devious psychological work is at play, and in doing so suggests that a kind of fraud is going on. It suggests that because these liberal actors fall foul of inherent contradictions in the positions they take (something that is somewhat unavoidable if you are to simultaneously support liberal capitalism and also promote universal goods for all mankind), the situation must be that they are acting as if the contradictions don’t exist while fully aware that they do, which does indeed sound close to a working definition of negligent fraud. Perhaps, they will say, they’re just cynically acting this way to further their career, get on “the grift” etc…
The truth is, however, that much of this behaviour can be explained in a much more simple way. We don’t have access to the inner workings and thoughts of another’s mind and we never will (unless Elon Musk comes up with something). What we can do is look through history and observe the dynamics of groups of people interacting with other groups and individuals.
Anyone who grew up and went to school and played on a playground has probably experienced what is sometimes known as ingroup-outgroup behaviour. If you were lucky enough to be in one of the “cool groups”, you probably experienced an enjoyable childhood characterized by safety and comradeship. If you were in the outgroup, that is you were not part of a cool group and were an “outsider”, you probably experienced a sense of isolation; a sense that you were attacked for anything you said or did, and a sense that merely arriving at school was enough to see you bullied.
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Unfortunately, this appears to be the natural condition of human existence. If you were an outsider to one of these groups you could spend time trying to understand the psychological workings of individual members of the ingroup, and that may well fuel your intellectual interest for some time, however it would not get you closer to understanding why it is that they’re so mean to you.
The truth is that the individual members of the ingroup probably don’t care for you, on balance. What they do care about is that you’re not a member of the group and/or that you are not displaying behaviours or saying the kinds of things that might be sufficient for you to be granted admission to the ingroup. Group membership carries a cost of admission. The cost of admission is to sign up to the values, the statements and the behaviours of the group and to follow it’s leadership, however tangible or amorphous that leadership may be. Policing of groups can be, and often is, brutal.
On Twitter, while it appears to be merely a collection of individual actors just doing their own thing based on what they think, it’s pretty clear from the way pile-ons work that there are communities of users on Twitter and that many of those communities act in an ingroup-outgroup manner.
If you sit on the outside of one of these major groupings and “throw truth bombs” at them, what you’ll find is that you don’t change their minds at all but instead you become an enemy of the group. What you will then observe is them defending their ingroup positions, sometimes vigorously, and it’s not necessary that they 100% intellectually believe everything that they say. They may be aware of the contradictions of their own positions. The truth is, though, that cognitive dissonance can be a comfortable state most of the time. Human beings do things all the time that, if thought about it carefully, create cognitive dissonance. It’s really only when we’re forced to notice it that we notice it. Just because a member of the ingroup acts like a slippery eel with their opinions doesn’t actually imply that they’re being deliberately fraudulent or running some kind of confidence game. It really just means that they’re good with words; that they can quickly construct arguments on the fly. This, of course, makes them useful to the ingroup.
The fact of the matter is that the intellectual or political content of what they say isn’t the important point. It’s the behaviour with respect to the group that’s important. So, if you go after a member of such a community you’re going to get piled-on by other members of that community, not because you’ve said something they disagree with, but because you have self-identified as “not on their team”. You are, as it were, an intruder into the team’s camp. Intruders are a threat and threats must be run out of the camp. By acting like an outsider you are triggering deep-seated threat-response behaviour.
Being challenged as to your membership of a group, to have a group threatened, or for someone to trespass on group territory is a threat that human beings cannot abide. So whether it’s in real life, in real group territory, or on a seemingly silly digital terrain like Twitter, the result will be the same. The lizard brain demands that the outsider be dealt with, and any action up to and including total annihilation of the outsider will be intuitively felt to be an appropriate response to such a threat.
In the end, you are ostracised, not for thoughtcrime, but for being a threat to the tribe. You have stirred the lizard brain, and reptilian urges are not for the faint-hearted. Be careful out there. Walk cautiously around other tribal territories. It’s less politics, more Lord of the Flies.
