The world tells me I am its creature

Splittings* by Adrienne Rich

Even as culture seems to get more homogenized via television, radio, and the internet, forces driven by power or money (or perhaps more honest interests) seek to divide us, in order to conquer us and be gifted our vote or the contents of our pocketbooks.

Most of us share core values. We want a day’s work to mean something, we want productivity to be rewarded and incentivized and those who are down on their luck or sick to have a safety net. We want our autonomy respected. We want criminals and corruption punished. We like entertaining stories and watching good actors and reading good writers. It’s in the details that we differ. Those who exploit these minor differences to drive wedges among us are using an age-old technique called “splitting.”

Defense mechanisms are psychological techniques we use all the time to decrease the internal stress of living in the world. Mature defenses like intellectualization or humor help us cope with death, horror, a mean boss, or bad traffic every day. I once got off the phone with an insurance company refusing to pay for a needed treatment, and I swore a blue streak. My coworker quipped, “guess you need to put $5 in the swear jar.” I laughed. It didn’t help the problem at all, but it helped us cope with it.

When I see governments and politicians do inexplicable, and in my view, horrible things, it helps me to look back at other horrible things governments and politicians have done. This is intellectualization. LBJ lost a Texas democratic senate primary to Pappy O’Daniel in 1942 and swore he would never be out-cheated in an election again. Six years later he won the primary (and thus the Senate seat, as the Democrats were the only important party in Texas at the time) with the margin of 87 votes out of around 988,285 after a recount. 202 of the votes were from “Box 13” in Jim Wells county and showed up in the recount six days after the election. The votes, 200 for Johnson and 2 for his opponent, were placed in alphabetical order and all in the same handwriting. Elections today, for what it is worth, are much more secure, with multiple fail-safes and audits. Since they are managed at a state and local level the mechanisms differ and the reporting on the elections is complicated, this enables bad actors to sow doubt and confusion about their results.

Despite the corruption in his past LBJ managed to be a credible president who stood up when Kennedy was assassinated, enacted the most sweeping civil rights legislation of the 20th century, and bowed out when the disaster of Vietnam made him untenable for re-elect.

This is not a defense of LBJ. He was, in many ways, a bad person with some good qualities who rose to the occasion when needed. The only things that protect us from the numerous bad people who ascend to power are norms, checks and balances, and democracy. He tried to unite us and make us more equal, as most successful presidents have done over the long and bloody history of the United States. Democracy isn’t always great at picking good leaders but it is efficient at weeding out the bad ones when they fail spectacularly in their time.

News coverage and clicks pay. Advertisers, product placement. There are more clicks when we are angered or afraid, and when we are inspired and thrilled.

I am choosing
not to suffer uselessly     and not to use her
I choose to love     this time     for once
with all my intelligence**

If the newscaster is trying to make you angry, rather than explaining the facts, if he or she is telling you what you want to hear and not a nuanced version of reality, they are not newscasters, they are propagandists and splitters. Scientists must hedge a bit or else not be accurate — propagandists use this against proper scientists all the time. Nuance on a personal level (for example a vaccine gives you a bad allergic reaction so it’s a better medical decision for you not to have that particular vaccine again, however your daughter has no reaction so should keep getting the shot) is different than on a population level (a vaccine is generally safe and effective and reduces hospitalization and death).

How do you recognize splitting in the wild? Mask mandates don’t work 100% due to the realities of life and work (conference rooms, foggy glasses, needing to eat), similar to glove hygiene (ever see a fast food worker handle your money with gloves then handle the food?) but they make sense in certain venues…as a medical student in Texas where there was plenty of TB we always went to see the TB patients in N95s. A good carpenter wears a respirator to keep out sawdust. It’s a good idea to wear an N95 in fire country with poor air quality. It’s sad though because someone with a cold or COVID does make the world less virus-laden by staying home or masking up properly if they have to go out. It’s just physics. Droplets carrying virus particles get stuck in the electrostatic fibers of the mask. It shouldn’t be political, but people desiring to split groups from each other made it political, when it should be us against the virus, not us against each other.

If someone is opening their news program or substack post with “Mask mandates are assaults upon freedom and our self-expression” or “if you don’t wear a mask all the time you are a monster who wants to kill people” they are both splitters.

I think we should stand together, because we mostly share values, and value each other, and work through those details together via liberal democracy. Learn to recognize splitters and where their money and influence comes from. Maybe you don’t want to join in.

Razib Khan wrote on twitter (X) about a loosey-goosey modern translation of the Iliad that “one reason i read stuff like the iliad is to obtain a window upon an alien mind. really dislike it being made “relevant” and “contemporary.” I agree with him.

Homogenization always leads to splitting. Understanding one another and working together for shared values is a higher level defense mechanism. We should appreciate the alien mind and also hold dear our values of freedom and autonomy, and learn from each other.

*This is not another Oppenheimer post haha

**Splittings poem in full here