The diminishing returns of contrarianism
Why you can't engage in business as usual in the middle of a pandemic
For a brief period of time, whenever an athlete would get caught doing something homophobic — from uttering slurs to writing something inappropriate on under-eye tape — their team’s response was to hold a press conference announcing some sort of collaboration with the You Can Play project. This would be accompanied with a promise to be more inclusive, to increase awareness, to be more understanding and to do a whole bunch of things that would never really be measured or checked up on again.
It always felt like a templated response, the same way a celebrity who got pulled over for driving under the influence would have their publicists announce a trip to rehab. It bothered me that You Can Play was seemingly more eager to rehabilitate the image of athletes than to actually increase inclusion or help those who want to come out. I was incensed by this charade. My sense of moral authenticity was offended.
So, I wrote about it.
And in doing so, I spoke with a publicist that mostly quashed my outrage. She said that sure, it wasn’t the most genuine thing to do, that it might be a show, an exhibition of virtue, but the elaborate pageantry had a positive impact. It showed to a large audience that this type of behaviour wouldn’t be tolerated and wasn’t acceptable. And that kind of accountability — even if it included mostly lip service from the perpetrator — likely had a net-positive impact in terms of social progress.
I intended for my story to challenge a generally accepted idea with a contrary perspective, but it ended up being more of a challenge to the contrary perspective than anything else. In the multiverse of opinion, context and mindset, contrarianism wasn’t the quality I imagined. In fact, in my own pursuit of exposing virtue signalling, I found myself doing the very thing I was criticizing.
That was around eight years ago. In the time since, the currency of hot takes, of written pieces supposedly challenging the status quo, has devalued through sheer oversupply. We used to mock Slate for its recurrent tone of contrarian inquiry, but the entire internet essentially became: Why what you thought you think about this topic is actually wrong.
More recently, platforms have become so politically aligned and committed to feeding their readers exactly what they want to read that contrarianism has been perverted — or perhaps merely evolving to its inevitable extreme — to resemble something that could be more accurately labeled as confirmationism: Why what you thought you think about this topic is actually wrong has become Why what the libs/conservatives think about this topic is actually wrong.
The world, it seems, is all a code to be deciphered, and our guide through the landmines of ulterior motives planted by those with whom we don’t agree are media outlets that supposedly share our values — often at the cost of accuracy, or at least a more faithful representation of the world as it actually exists.
I was reminded of this last week when the National Post published — online and on its Friday front page in print — a story defending Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s pandemic response, titled “Most of Ford’s mistakes were made trying to follow his science advisers’ advice.” The column suggests that Ford’s shortcomings are the result of heeding the advice of alarmists among the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table and not, as evidence makes plain, an ongoing life-costing hesitancy to infringe on the revenues and demands of his supporters and benefactors in business and real estate.
The tone of the story is so smugly self-satisfied with its contrarianism — published at a time when consensual outrage over Ford’s mishandling of the pandemic response has overwhelmed most measurement — that it feels more like the words of a gaslighting abuser than a regular columnist. And ultimately, it acts as yet another reminder of a recurring theme to any insight into our actions over the last 13 months: you can’t continue behaving like you regularly do in the middle of a pandemic.
This is the same shit at which we might normally roll our eyes or maybe retweet on Twitter with an eye-roll emoji. But as the toll in lives, mental health and livelihoods continues to increase, business as usual isn’t a concept to continue. Just as restaurateurs have had to adapt their businesses toward emphasizing takeout and delivery so should other sectors — whether its government or media — alter their approach. The continuance of scoring political points, engaging in polite political corruption or misconstructing reality to fit a perspective in the middle of this crisis doesn’t elicit the same tacit acceptance it usually would.
It stands out and it’s ugly. And its hideousness is only enhanced by how outdated and stale it seems. Gimmicks that seemed old before the pandemic now have an exceptionally foul mould to them in these — I’m sorry — unprecedented times®™©.
Photo by Jonas Kakaroto on Unsplash