AERIAL VIEW
So many people we know are getting into fights in social media platform like Facebook, Twitter wars, Instagram arguments and Snapchat squabbles. What begins as an ideological dispute has ended in bitterness.
People are provoking others, demanding those who do or don’t support their candidate leave their networks, cutting ties with friends and family and all because of political differences.
People perceive the stakes this Goa elections to be very high. To be sure, political philosophy does matter and does carry high stakes. However, the partisan struggle for the control of the state apparatus by this or that temporary manager doesn’t matter as much as election season seems to suggest.
SURAJ NANDREKAR
Editor, Goemkarponn
The biggest victims of the elections is the friendship. To support their favourite politicians this election, we have seen several friends become enemies due to ideological differences.
While some support BJP, some support Congress while others have supported local outfit Revolutiinary Goans.
So many people we know are getting into fights in social media platform like Facebook, Twitter wars, Instagram arguments and Snapchat squabbles. What begins as an ideological dispute has ended in bitterness.
People are provoking others, demanding those who do or don’t support their candidate leave their networks, cutting ties with friends and family and all because of political differences.
People perceive the stakes this Goa elections to be very high. To be sure, political philosophy does matter and does carry high stakes. However, the partisan struggle for the control of the state apparatus by this or that temporary manager doesn’t matter as much as election season seems to suggest.
You might be being manipulated, and friendships and families are actually too precious to throw away for transient reasons.
It’s a pity to cause permanent rifts and so unnecessary. The people who rearrange their personal relationships for the election imagine that they are taking control of their lives. They don’t seem to realize that they are actually letting strangers control their lives—strangers who care nothing for them in a system that actually seeks to divide people so it can conquer them.
To permit politics to fundamentally alter something so important as friendship is to give politicians more importance than they deserve.
Now, of course, there is a proviso here. If there is someone in your network who is deliberately trolling you, harassing you and goading you to respond, the best possible response is to block them. Not talk back. Not engage in a tit for tat. Just quietly block, without drama or announcement, much less denunciation.
Most public people I know have blocked as many as 100-plus people over the past year, simply because this election season has been so contentious, with the alt-right and alt-left (who oddly agree on so much) battling it out on social media.
Blocking is the far better path than engaging them. Vicious back and forths on the internet can be life-consuming and draining. People who are trying to do that to you deserve exclusion from your conversation circle.
Apart from these cases, it strikes me as pointless to hurl someone out of your life because of political differences.
First, by denying yourself access to different points of view, you risk isolating yourself from a critic who might teach you something you need to know, maybe about anything in life, but maybe even about politics.
Most critically, to isolate yourself, hate others for their views and regard people with different points of view as less deserving of dignified treatment, plays into exactly what the political system wants for you to do.
But Aren’t They Aggressors?
A counter to my point was offered by a friend of mine last year. Speaking as a libertarian, he said, he regards anyone who supports some government action—even just casually and without much thought—as wittingly or unwittingly contributing to an opinion culture that supports rising political violence.
The only friends he believes deserve the time of day from him must hold steadfastly to his voluntarist perspective, else he regards them as a direct threat to his life and liberty.
Now, this strikes me as vastly too severe. The truth is that most people who support some government action do not regard themselves as violent people. They believe that they are favoring something that is good for others, perhaps fostering the better life for the community.
For example, if a person favors higher spending on public education, they believe that they are pushing for policies that are good for others, not calling for violence against taxpayers to support unworkable programs. How can you possibly persuade them otherwise if you cut off all ties?
And it’s not just libertarians who can be this way. A good friend of mine was a casual lefty and, like most from his tribe, he was dead serious about the issue of unemployment and corruption by Dr Pramod Sawwnt government. I had no idea until the subject came up over coffee.
I was merely disagreeing with him, however cautiously. But somehow, he had come to believe that anyone who disagreed with him bears some responsibility for corruption.
He was letting politics control his life and even determine his friendships. Both of us are spiritually poorer as a result of this friendship loss.
The politics of identity is causing precisely these sorts of irrational and pointless splits among us.
What Is the Point of Friendship?
What the libertarian and the lefty I mentioned above do not realize is that they are guilty of the same error of allowing politics to invade the conduct of their lives and determine the conditions of their personal happiness. Once this kind of thing starts, there is truly no end to it.
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