a.k.a. V.J.

A flight of fancy crossed my mind during this morning’s commute. I guess you’d call it a thought experiment.

Let’s say the average current-year American encountered a wish-granting genie who presented them with the following offer:

The genie will make the person’s political beliefs, whatever those are, the law of the land. Their vision of what society should be would instantly become reality. But the catch is that in exchange for getting the country they’ve always wanted, the wish recipient would have to permanently give up on vilifying the people on the other side of the political spectrum. They wouldn’t be allowed argue online with dissenters, display snarky bumper stickers mocking their beliefs, make jokes at their expense, share dank memes about them, traffic in conspiracy theories with them at the center, compare them to various totalitarian dictators from the past, or generally accuse them of being evil people with bad-faith motives. The recipient would just have to enjoy the new status quo and forever turn the other cheek whenever somebody else disagreed with it.

If presented with this scenario, I have no doubt that the average person would say they’d readily agree to the genie’s terms. That’s what they would claim in public, anyway. But if they thought long and hard about it, I wonder how many would actually go through with the deal. How many would really be willing to give up on expressing hatred that they’ve cultivated for years, perhaps decades; hatred that may actually be foundational to their identities?

And then there would be those, perhaps a majority in 2023, who would argue that the genie’s stipulation is no big deal because their vision of what society should be, the America they dream of, necessarily involves the exclusion of people who would disagree with it.

And there we are.