Disputes with a scarecrow. Ivan Belyaev - About a polemic on the Internet

It has long been clear that the truth is not born in disputes, but only relations deteriorate. This has always been noticeable, but even more clearly manifested in the last year, when opponents of the attack on Ukraine, in fact, did not particularly argue with the supporters of the war (many do not want to enter into such conversations, and they will not even listen to their ideological militarists), and instead only fiercely and without much benefit argue with each other. I myself participate quite little in network disputes (mainly the shore of my nerves), but at the same time I read them quite a lot. Not at all claiming a universal recipe for correcting morals, I will still draw attention to two circumstances that seem important to me to conduct a polemic on the network (not counting, of course, that no one canceled the usual politeness).

First: the dispute is better to lead with a living interlocutor, and not with a straw stuffed. Try to narrow the mental image of your interlocutor, addressee or object of criticism before himself, and not expand him to infinity, not to identify him with some constructed social group. A huge amount of energy on the Internet just goes to gluing and overlapping the same wretched labels: “white coats”, “good Russians”, “left”, “remaining”.

Do not overload any particular replica with meaning

Of course, any person has a lot of identities. I have dozens of them who are aware of myself and hundreds of those that I can attribute to me if I wish. The situation is exactly the same with you. But precisely because there are a lot of these identities, a person is not equal to any of them. If we more often understood that a living person on the other side of the screen is first of all his own thoughts, views and life experience, and not ascriptive, as sociologists would say, status, then we would more often speak with a genuine, and not imaginary interlocutor (by the way, in full -time communication, it seems to me, it is given much easier). But in practice, on the contrary, I see how some famous commentators completely deprive them of a private situation, turning almost into a separate social institution.

Second: do not overload the meaning of a single replica with meaning. Of course, complaints of “eruption from the context” are a favorite moisture of demagogues, and each person should be more responsible for what was said or written, but it would be nice to accept a new information reality. Even ordinary people, as they say, nouns can produce a huge amount of content. Moreover, this applies to public speakers. Any individual phrase can sound evil, provocatively, ambiguous or simply ridiculous, at the same time it is completely not a political testament for centuries. Most likely, somewhere else the same thought is depleted deeper and better, sometimes it is quite possible that the author disavowed his words or apologized, and Facebook or Twitter is worn for weeks with some screenshot.

In a sense, both of these points are combined into one. It is worth proceeding from the presumption that any text or commentary on your screen is only a single, and by no means an exhaustive statement of one private person, and not speaking it with the lips of the social group of "emigrants who want to be large Ukrainians" or "Russian liberals who condemned the war in Ukraine, but somehow not abruptly enough." Awareness of this particular will allow where it is better to formulate your claims or objections, and moreover - with this attitude it is much easier to simply squeeze further and not enter into disputes at all (and this, by the way, is also by no means the worst that you can do on the Internet).

Ivan Belyaev - Journalist Radio Liberty

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