Earlier someone I would have called a real life friend of 12 years blocked me after their friend called me a “boot licker” for pointing out that Bezos didn’t exploit employees who optionally choose to work for Amazon and that if people didn’t want the service he offered they wouldn’t buy from Amazon, thereby making them the trillion+ dollar company they are. I’m not quite sure how anyone can argue with those facts, which might account for why he blocked me.
What’s interesting is this man repeatedly and consistently over the many years I’ve known him presents himself as something of a spiritual leader who preaches love and tolerance and yet here we are with him unable to love and tolerate me and my different views. Way to show your hypocrisy there bud. 😂
I texted him after he blocked me because sometimes people simply don’t want to interact on social media and are drawing a boundary in one dimension without drawing a boundary in another. Alas, that was not the case here and he said, among other things, “I’m done hanging on with hope, I’m done trying to show and convince, I’m done with the mental masturbatory rhetoric loops that go no where.“
I find that response telling. Firstly, he wasn’t engaging in the debate, it was merely transpiring on his wall where several of his friends either debated or attacked me and/or my ideas which means he wasn’t engaging in any “mental masturbatory rhetoric loops” to begin with and yet sat there whilst his friends called me names.
What is more telling, however, is that he felt like he needed to be “hanging on with hope” or that he needed to try to “show and convince” me of anything. That demonstrates a real lack of acceptance and a desire to not receive our friendship as it was for what it was and instead, a desire to change me into something that fit his narrative more than my authentic nature.
As someone with many classic liberal values, this occurs to me as the opposite of liberal. There’s no true tolerance in this position and there certainly isn’t acceptance. It indicates at the very least a desire to change me if not an actual need in that domain. Instead of my so called “friend” being in relation with me freely where we discuss ideas openly and in good faith for the joy of sharing ideas that might expand one’s view of the world — which is what I’ve been doing — all this time he’s somehow been wanting to change who I am or what I believe while waiting for me to come around to his way of thinking.
I don’t prefer generalizing because generalizations lack the nuance that accounts for individuality and the uniqueness that drives us as people. However, I find myself in a position now of seeing this so called friend who truly never was my friend as representative of a type of people whom I’ve apparently collected hundreds (if not thousands) of in my feed over the years.
They present themselves as tolerant and open minded but when push comes to shove and their ideas are challenged to the point of straining their tenuous hopefully connection based on some need to fix me, instead of making a simple request to stop discussing something and to acknowledge we won’t ever agree about the topic at hand, they instead either themselves or via the proxy of their friends name call and trot off as if I’ve violated them in some way such that they become disappointed.
Yet I think the disappointment is not disappointment at all, rather a lack of acceptance of what is which, at its core, is the opposite of tolerance. The left, for all their espoused openness, has moved away from this value and as they sit there and accuse people who don’t claim to be on the left of being intolerant, they themselves reveal their own hypocrisy in the process.
This of course isn’t surprising to me now after reading this 2014 Pew Report years ago which found that roughly four-in-ten consistent liberals on Facebook (44%) say they have blocked or defriended someone on social media because they disagreed with something that person posted about politics. This compares with 31% of consistent conservatives and just 26% of all Facebook users who have done the same. The same report revealed consistent liberals are more likely to stop talking to someone because of politics. Roughly a quarter (24%) have done so, compared with 16% of consistent conservatives and around 10% of those with more mixed political views.
When this study first emerged, I found it a bit shocking, but it seems study after study reveal the same results in various ways over the past 8 years as this Medium article points out using data from almost 2 dozen different studies showing the so called tolerant left is actually less tolerant.
Good to know my experience matches the statistics, but also sad. From my perspective, as someone with a more centrist ideological perspective, I find it far worse when so called liberals who claim to be open minded and tolerant reveal their hypocritical stance and demonstrate they’re less tolerant than those they condemn as they sit in judgment of other’s while, in some cases like my former friend, they apparently “hang on” for years waiting for their “friends” to change and become something that fits their prescription rather than accepting them for who they are, as they are, which is what tolerance is really about.