Offend to Persuade
In a world where partisanship acts as the ultimate screen, everyday folks like Scotty and Isaiah clash in endless debates, blinded to the real game.
While we fuss over red vs. blue distractions, power brokers like MJ slip through unchallenged, scoring with insidious laws like AB5 and Ag-Gag that serve their hidden agendas.
"Offend to Persuade" unveils the subterfuge: true nobility needs no deception—join the series to see through the play and reclaim the court.
A Treatise on the Manufactured Division of the American Public
I. The Play
Do we have any basketball fans in the house?
Just in case you're reading this and never got into b-ball, I'll quickly define the term "screen." When MJ wants to take the ball to the hoop, Scotty follows a route that intercepts Isaiah using his body as a blockade — or screen. While Scotty and Isaiah fuss with each other, MJ gets to score.
Simple play. Textbook basketball. And the most elegant political metaphor you'll encounter this decade.
My hope is that this rudimentary allegory helps to explain how most of us are Scotty and Isaiah, fussing with each other, while MJ gets what he wants. While we are fussing in the streets and on the ground, the power brokers get what they want. They make legislation while we fuss. The Blues make AB5, the Reds make Ag-Gag Laws. Both are evil, but they use Partisanship to get Scotty and Isaiah to fuss, while they get to be MJ and take the ball to the hole they want.
They'd like you to think their motives are noble and therefore the "ends justify the means." This just isn't so. Were their motives noble, they would not need to employ subterfuge.
That last line bears repeating, because it is the skeleton key to this entire treatise: Were their motives noble, they would not need to employ subterfuge.
Sit with that. Roll it around your mind. Let it settle into the marrow before we proceed, because everything that follows is an elaboration on that single, devastating truth.
II. The Geometry of Distraction
Here's what makes the screen such a perfect allegory: it is not incidental to the play. It is the-play. MJ doesn't score in spite of the chaos between Scotty and Isaiah — he scores because of it. The fussing is not a side effect; it is a precondition. The screen is drawn up on the whiteboard before the whistle blows. It's designed. It's rehearsed. It's intentional.
And so it goes in the halls of power.
When you watch cable news — any channel, pick your poison — and you see two pundits screaming past each other about some culture war flashpoint, you are watching a screen being set. When your uncle and your cousin can't get through Thanksgiving dinner without somebody flipping the table over pronouns or prayer in schools, you are watching a screen being set. When your coworker in the next cubicle thinks you're the enemy because you vote differently, you are living inside a screen.
The screen is not the point. The screen is never the point. The screen is the mechanism by which the point is obscured.
So what is the point? The point is the ball going through the hoop. The point is the legislation that gets signed while you're arguing on Facebook. The point is the regulatory capture that happens while you're doom-scrolling Twitter. The point is the consolidation of power and capital that proceeds, uninterrupted, behind the curtain of your manufactured outrage.
Let's talk about what that looks like in practice.
III. AB5 — The Blue Screen
California's Assembly Bill 5, for those unfamiliar, was sold to the public as a worker protection law. The pitch was simple, noble-sounding, and delivered with all the moral certainty that the Blues can muster: independent contractors are being exploited, and we're going to reclassify them as employees so they get benefits, protections, and dignity.
Sounds great on the bumper sticker. Sounds like justice. Sounds like the little guy finally getting a fair shake.
Here's what actually happened.
AB5 decimated freelancers. Writers, musicians, interpreters, graphic designers, truck owner-operators, and a constellation of independent professionals who had chosen the freelance life — who valued its flexibility, its autonomy, its fundamental alignment with their creative or entrepreneurial spirit — were told, in effect, that the state knew better than they did how they should work.
The bill didn't protect the vulnerable. It made the self-sufficient vulnerable. It didn't lift people up; it collapsed the scaffolding they'd built for themselves, then handed the wreckage to large employers who were only too happy to absorb a newly captive labor force on their terms. The gig companies, of course, spent $200 million to exempt themselves via Proposition 22. The freelance translator working from her kitchen table? She didn't have $200 million. She had a career she loved, and then she didn't.
But here's the thing that should make your blood run cold: the architects of AB5 knew this would happen. They knew who would be hurt. They knew that the people most impacted would be individual operators, solo entrepreneurs, and small-scale creatives — people with no lobby, no PAC, no war chest. People who don't write legislation. People who are, in this allegory, Scotty and Isaiah.
And while the public debated whether AB5 was a triumph of labor rights or an overreach of government regulation — while Scotty and Isaiah fussed — MJ scored. The institutional beneficiaries consolidated. The power structures that were already entrenched became more entrenched. The people who were supposed to be helped became collateral.
The Blues told you it was noble. But nobility does not require subterfuge. Nobility does not require that you disguise the ball.
IV. Ag-Gag Laws — The Red Screen
Now let's walk across the aisle, because this is not a partisan essay. This is an anti-partisan essay. And the Reds have their own screen game that is every bit as cynical, every bit as calculated, and every bit as corrosive to the public interest.
Ag-Gag laws — shorthand for a collection of state-level statutes primarily championed by Republican legislatures — criminalize the act of documenting conditions inside agricultural facilities. In plain English: if someone goes undercover at a factory farm and films animals standing in their own waste, confined in cages so small they can't turn around, pumped full of antibiotics and living in conditions that would make a horror filmmaker squeamish, that person can be prosecuted. Not the facility. The person with the camera.
Read that again. The person who documents the cruelty is the criminal. Not the person who perpetrates it.
The justification, as always, is dressed in the language of virtue. "We're protecting farmers." "We're protecting private property." "We're protecting biosecurity." "We're protecting the food supply."
From what? From the public seeing what's in it?
If your operation is so righteous that it needs legal fortification against the mere act of being photographed, what does that tell you about the operation? If the "ends" of agricultural efficiency are so noble, why do the "means" require making transparency a felony?
Ag-Gag laws exist for one reason: to protect the profit margins of industrial agriculture by ensuring that the public never sees the true cost of cheap meat. They are not about farmers. The family farmer with 40 head of cattle has nothing to fear from a camera. Ag-Gag laws protect the concentrated animal feeding operations — the CAFOs — the corporate behemoths that process tens of thousands of animals per facility, that lobby relentlessly, and that depend on public ignorance as a business model.
And while the public argues about whether vegans are annoying, whether PETA goes too far, whether animal rights activists are "radical" — while Scotty and Isaiah fuss — MJ drives the lane. Another Ag-Gag law passes. Another state makes it harder for you to know what's in your food, how it got there, and what suffered to produce it.
The Reds told you it was noble. But nobility does not hide behind legal barricades. Nobility does not make the truth illegal.
V. The Symmetry of the Swindle
Here is where most political commentary fails, and where most people lose the thread: they see the screen on one side and think the other side is playing straight.
Blue partisans see Ag-Gag laws and say, "See? The Reds are corrupt. They're in bed with corporate agriculture." And they're right. But then they go home and defend AB5 because their team drew it up, and surely their team's motives are pure. Meanwhile, Red partisans see AB5 and say, "See? The Blues are authoritarian. They want to regulate your life." And they're right. But then they go home and defend Ag-Gag because their team drew it up, and surely their team is protecting honest, hardworking Americans.
Both sides are right about the other side. Both sides are blind about their own. And this selective blindness — this asymmetric skepticism — is not a bug in the system. It is the system. It is the screen.
The power brokers on both sides of the aisle understand something that most of us refuse to accept: the partisan framework itself is the instrument of control. It is not a lens through which you see reality clearly; it is a filter that ensures you only see the half of the corruption that isn't wearing your team's jersey.
Think about it structurally. What do AB5 and Ag-Gag laws have in common? Strip away the window dressing, and both of them:
Consolidate power in the hands of large institutional actors at the expense of individuals. Restrict the freedom of ordinary people — to work as they choose, to document what they see. Were authored and championed by politicians beholden to concentrated interests rather than distributed constituencies. Were sold to the public using the language of protection and virtue. Required subterfuge — misdirection, emotional manipulation, deliberate obfuscation of consequences — to achieve passage.
The surface content is different. The underlying architecture is identical. The Blues screen for corporate labor consolidation. The Reds screen for corporate agricultural impunity. Different jerseys, same play.
And we keep falling for it because we are so deeply, so profoundly invested in the fiction that our team is the good one. That our MJ is scoring for the right reasons.
VI. The Subterfuge Principle
Let me return to the skeleton key: Were their motives noble, they would not need to employ subterfuge.
This is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a diagnostic tool. It is the single most reliable method available to any citizen for evaluating the legitimacy of any piece of legislation, any political campaign, any institutional initiative.
Ask yourself: is subterfuge present?
Is the true effect of the policy being obscured? Are emotional triggers being used to bypass rational evaluation? Are critics being demonized rather than addressed? Is the beneficiary class being disguised? Are complex consequences being reduced to simple slogans? Is the urgency artificial?
If the answer to any of these is yes, you are being screened. Full stop. You are Scotty or Isaiah, and someone is driving to the hoop while you fuss.
Noble motives do not require concealment. A genuinely good law can be explained in plain language, and its consequences can be described honestly, and it will still garner support because people are not, contrary to what the power brokers believe, stupid. People can recognize a good policy. People can weigh tradeoffs. People can handle nuance.
The reason subterfuge is employed is not because the public is too dumb to understand the policy. It is because the public is smart enough to reject it if they saw it clearly. The subterfuge is not a concession to complexity. It is an admission of illegitimacy.
Every time a politician says, "It's complicated," what they frequently mean is, "If I explained this simply, you wouldn't let me do it." Every time a pundit says, "You don't understand the nuance," what they frequently mean is, "The nuance is where we hid the grift."
VII. The Machinery of the Fuss
Understanding that the screen exists is step one. Understanding how it is manufactured is step two. Because the fuss between Scotty and Isaiah doesn't happen organically. It is engineered with extraordinary precision, funded lavishly, and maintained with industrial-grade infrastructure.
Let's name the machinery.
Media Polarization. This is the most visible component of the screen. The 24-hour news cycle is not designed to inform you. It is designed to activate you. Activation means emotional engagement. Emotional engagement means choosing a side. Choosing a side means adopting a package of positions that were bundled for you by people whose interests do not align with yours. Once you've adopted the package, you will defend it against the people who adopted the other package, and you will do so with the passion of someone who believes they arrived at these positions independently. You didn't. They were sold to you, and the purchase price was your attention.
Social Media Amplification. If cable news is the engine, social media is the accelerant. The algorithms that govern your feed do not care about truth, nuance, or civic health. They care about engagement. And engagement is maximized by conflict. Every time you share a post dunking on the other side, you are running the play. Every time you argue in the comments, you are setting the screen. Every time you feel that dopamine hit of righteous indignation, you are being used — not by the person you're arguing with, but by the system that profits from the argument itself.
Identity Capture. This is perhaps the most insidious mechanism. At some point in the last few decades, political affiliation stopped being a matter of policy preference and became a matter of identity. You don't just agree with the Blues or the Reds — you are Blue or Red. This means that an attack on your party's position feels like an attack on you. Criticism of a policy feels like a personal insult. And persuasion becomes virtually impossible, because people will endure almost any logical contradiction before they will endure an identity crisis.
The power brokers understand this. They cultivate it. They spend billions ensuring that your political affiliation is woven so tightly into your sense of self that you cannot separate the two without feeling like you're losing something fundamental. Because once your identity is captured, you will do their screening for free. You will set the pick on Isaiah without being asked. You will fuss on command.
Controlled Opposition and the Illusion of Choice. Here's the darkest part of the machinery: the two "sides" are not opponents. They are collaborators in a system that requires the appearance of opposition to function. The Blues need the Reds. The Reds need the Blues. Without the other team, there is no screen to set, no fuss to manufacture, no distraction behind which to operate.
This does not mean every individual politician is cynically performing. Many true believers exist on both sides — people who genuinely think they're fighting the good fight. But the true believers are the most effective screeners precisely because they are sincere. Scotty doesn't need to know he's setting a screen for MJ. He just needs to believe he's fighting Isaiah for a good reason.
VIII. The Spectators
There is one more role in this allegory that we haven't discussed: the spectators. The people in the stands. The 20,000 fans who paid $200 a seat to watch the game.
In our political metaphor, the spectators are the broader public — the millions who are not actively fussing, who are not Scotty or Isaiah, but who are watching the game and rooting for one side. And here's the thing about spectators: they think they're participating. They wear the jersey. They paint their faces. They scream until they're hoarse. They feel, viscerally, that their energy matters, that they are part of something, that the outcome of the game is their outcome.
But the spectators don't touch the ball. They don't make the plays. They don't write the contracts. They don't share in the revenue. They pay for the privilege of emotional investment in an outcome that was never theirs to influence, and they go home in the jersey of a team that will never know their name.
When you vote every four years and then spend the intervening 1,461 days arguing about politics on the internet, you are a spectator. You are emotionally invested. You are financially contributing. You are energetically depleted. And you are not materially affecting the outcome.
This is not an argument against voting. Vote. By all means, vote. But understand what voting is and what it isn't. Voting is a single data point in a system designed to dilute your influence. It is not the totality of your civic power. It is not even the most potent expression of it. The most potent expression of your civic power is what you do on the other 1,460 days — and the power brokers have engineered an entire entertainment complex designed to ensure that what you do on those days is fuss.
IX. The Escape
So how do you stop being screened? How do you stop being Scotty, stop being Isaiah, stop being the spectator in the $200 seat?
The first step is the hardest, and it is this: abandon your team.
I don't mean stop voting. I don't mean disengage from civic life. I mean abandon the emotional allegiance that makes you defend your side's AB5 while attacking the other side's Ag-Gag, or vice versa. Abandon the identity capture. Refuse the jersey.
This will feel like loss. It is designed to feel like loss. The machinery of partisanship has been engineered to make departure feel like betrayal, like exile, like losing your tribe. And in a society that is increasingly atomized and lonely, the threat of tribal exile is potent. The parties know this. They leverage it.
But what you lose in tribal belonging, you gain in clarity. And clarity is the one thing the power brokers cannot afford for you to have.
Once you have clarity, apply the Subterfuge Principle relentlessly. Every piece of legislation, regardless of which team authored it: Is subterfuge present? Is the true beneficiary being disguised? Is emotional manipulation being deployed? If yes, reject it. Not because the other team told you to. Not because your team told you to accept it. Because you evaluated it, independently, using the only diagnostic that matters.
The second step is to redirect your energy. Every hour you spend arguing with the other team's Scotty or Isaiah is an hour you are not spending building something outside the system entirely. Every dollar you spend on the spectacle is a dollar you are not spending on your community, your neighbors, your local institutions — the structures that are small enough for your voice to actually carry weight.
The power brokers want you playing their game, on their court, by their rules. They want you in the arena. Because in the arena, you are a participant in their system, and their system is designed so that the only people who score are the ones who drew up the play.
The radical act — the genuinely punk act — is to leave the arena. To stop fussing. To build something they don't control, on ground they don't own, by rules they didn't write.
X. The Last Screen
There is one final screen I need to name, and it is the most difficult to see because it is the screen that protects all the other screens:
The belief that this essay is about basketball.
It was never about basketball. Basketball is beautiful. Basketball is honest. In basketball, the screen is a legal play, the rules are transparent, and everyone in the arena understands what's happening. The game is played in the open.
Politics is not. The screen in politics is not a legal play; it is a confidence game. The rules are not transparent; they are deliberately obscured. And the people in the arena — the Scottys, the Isaiahs, the spectators — do not understand what's happening. That is the entire point.
The last screen is the one that tells you this is all just the way it is. That politics has always been dirty. That both sides have always played games. That corruption is baked in and there's nothing you can do. That the best you can hope for is to pick the less-evil team and cheer hard.
That screen exists to prevent you from ever arriving at the conclusion that the game itself is the problem. That the court was built to benefit the owners, not the players and certainly not the fans. That the fussing is not a failure of the system — it is the system performing exactly as designed.
Were their motives noble, they would not need to employ subterfuge.
Were the game fair, they would not need the screen.
Stop fussing. Start seeing.
A Treatise on the Lost Art of Being Heard — Part II of The Screen Series
I. The Quote That Doesn't Exist
"I was persuaded to change my way of thinking because someone told me I was an idiot."
…said no one. Ever. In the history of human discourse. Not once.
No mind was ever changed by being bludgeoned. No heart was ever opened by a fist. No deeply held conviction — however wrong, however dangerous, however maddening — was ever dismantled by someone screaming louder than the person holding it.
And yet. Look around. Listen. Scroll through any comment section, stand on any street corner where a protest meets a counter-protest, sit in any Thanksgiving dining room where the turkey gets cold while the arguments get hot. What do you hear?
Yelling. Relentless, escalating, performative yelling.
There's quite a bit of it going on in our streets and on our forums. When tensions are high and emotions run hot, there is no real hope of reconciliation; there is only the potential for dangerous escalation. We have built a culture that mistakes volume for conviction, aggression for strength, and contempt for moral clarity. We have confused the act of making noise with the act of making a point.
In the first part of this series, we talked about the screen — the mechanism by which power brokers manufacture conflict between ordinary people to advance their own agendas unchallenged. We talked about Scotty and Isaiah fussing while MJ drives to the hoop. We named the play.
Now we need to talk about the fuss itself. Because even if you see the screen, even if you understand the play, you still have to navigate a world full of people who don't. People who are yelling. People who are certain. People who have been activated by the machinery of partisan outrage and who are standing in front of you, right now, at full volume, telling you that you are the problem.
What do you do?
You lower your voice.
II. The Physics of Volume
Before we talk strategy, let's talk physics. Actual, literal, acoustic physics — because it turns out that the dynamics of sound waves and the dynamics of human persuasion follow remarkably similar principles.
When two people yell at each other, neither is listening. This is not a metaphor; it is a physiological fact. The human auditory system has a built-in compression mechanism: when ambient noise increases, the ear adjusts to normalize the input. The louder the environment, the less distinction your brain makes between signals. Everything becomes noise. Nothing becomes information.
This is why you can't have a conversation at a rock concert. It's not just that the music is loud — it's that your brain has stopped trying to parse individual signals and has instead categorized everything as environment. The other person's words become part of the wash. They are noise, not signal.
The same thing happens in an argument. When both parties are yelling, both parties' brains have shifted into noise-processing mode. The words don't land. The points don't register. The carefully marshaled facts and the passionately held convictions are reduced to sonic wallpaper. You might as well be two foghorns aimed at each other across a harbor.
But here's where the physics gets interesting. When you lower your voice in a loud environment, something counterintuitive happens: you become more audible, not less. Not in decibels — in salience. The human ear is wired to detect contrast. A soft sound in a loud environment is an anomaly, and anomalies command attention. Your whisper in a room full of shouting is a needle that pierces the noise precisely because it doesn't match.
This is not a trick. It is a principle. And it works on every level — acoustic, psychological, rhetorical, and political.
III. The Strategy of the Soft Register
Consider this strategy. While the Yeller continues to yell, you speak softly. Each time you lower your register, the Yeller must strain to hear you. At some point, the Yeller hears how foolish they sound and begins to lower their register as well.
Let's slow this down and examine each phase, because there is more happening here than a simple de-escalation technique. There is an entire philosophy of communication embedded in this sequence, and it is one that runs directly counter to everything our current culture teaches us about how to win.
Phase One: The Yeller yells, and you speak softly.
This is the hardest phase, because every instinct in your body will scream at you to match the volume. We are primates. When a primate in our social group raises its voice, our adrenal system fires. Cortisol floods the bloodstream. The amygdala — the brain's threat-detection center — lights up. Every evolutionary impulse you carry is telling you: match the threat. Get louder. Get bigger. Dominate or submit.
To speak softly in the face of yelling is to override millions of years of primate programming. It requires, in the most literal neurological sense, that you allow your prefrontal cortex — the seat of reason, deliberation, and long-term strategy — to overrule your amygdala. It requires that you choose the human over the animal. And that choice, that small act of vocal restraint, is one of the most powerful things a person can do in a charged confrontation.
Because here's what happens when you don't match the volume: you break the script. The Yeller has a script. The script goes like this — I yell, you yell back, I yell louder, you yell louder, we escalate until one of us storms off or says something unforgivable. The Yeller has rehearsed this script a thousand times. They know the beats. They know the rhythms. They know how it ends.
When you speak softly, you hand the Yeller a script they've never seen before. And a person holding an unfamiliar script is a person who is, for the first time in the exchange, thinking. Not reacting. Thinking. And that is exactly where you want them.
Phase Two: The Yeller must strain to hear you.
This is the phase where the power dynamic inverts, and most people miss it entirely because they're too fixated on volume as a proxy for dominance. In our culture, we assume that the loudest person in the room is the most powerful. This is precisely backwards.
Think about every powerful person you've ever encountered — not the performers of power, but the possessors of it. The CEO who speaks barely above a murmur while the entire boardroom leans in. The grandmother whose quiet word carries more weight than her grown children's tantrums. The judge who doesn't raise their voice because the gavel does the raising. The mob boss who whispers.
Power does not need volume. Volume is what you resort to when you don't have power. Volume is the tool of the person who suspects, on some level, that their position cannot survive scrutiny at conversational decibels. Volume is the screen — and here we connect back to Part I — that obscures the weakness of the argument behind the force of its delivery.
When you speak softly, you force the Yeller into a position of physical deference. They must lean in. They must quiet themselves to hear you. They must, whether they realize it or not, adopt the posture of a listener. And posture shapes psychology far more than most people understand. When your body is in the position of listening, your mind follows. This is not mysticism; this is well-documented embodied cognition. The body leads; the mind rationalizes.
Phase Three: The Yeller hears how foolish they sound.
This is the moment of self-awareness, and it is devastating. Because as long as both parties are yelling, the Yeller has cover. Both of you are loud. Both of you are aggressive. The Yeller can tell themselves that this is just what a passionate debate looks like — two strong people going at it. There is a kind of dignity in mutual combat, however foolish.
But when one party drops to a whisper and the other continues to scream, the asymmetry becomes unbearable. The Yeller is no longer in a debate. They are in a performance. And the audience — whether it's the people on the sidewalk, the followers in the comment thread, or the family members around the dinner table — can suddenly see the performance for what it is.
This is the moment when the Yeller either doubles down or dials back. Some will double down, and we'll address that shortly. But many — more than you'd expect — will begin to lower their register. Not because they've been defeated. Not because they've changed their mind. But because the social cost of continuing to scream at someone who is speaking calmly has become higher than the social cost of quieting down.
And that quieting down is the opening. That is the crack in the wall.
Phase Four: Soft words lead to hearing each other.
Once the registers converge — once both parties are speaking at volumes where the ear can process signal rather than noise — something remarkable becomes possible. Not agreement. Not conversion. Not the immediate dissolution of deeply held convictions. Something much more modest and much more important: hearing.
Hearing is not agreeing. Hearing is the precondition for everything that might eventually lead to agreeing, but it is not itself agreement. Hearing is the simple, radical, increasingly rare act of allowing another person's words to enter your consciousness as information rather than deflecting them as attacks.
And here is where the magic of the soft register reveals itself: when people hear each other, the debate becomes dialectic. The competition becomes a conversation. Ideas, rather than continuing to just make noise, can actually be heard. Positions can be examined. Assumptions can be questioned — not as accusations, but as genuine inquiries. Common ground, which was always there but was buried under the noise, can be excavated.
This does not always happen. Sometimes the Yeller will not quiet down. Sometimes the distance between positions is genuinely irreconcilable. Sometimes you are simply dealing with a person who has no interest in hearing or being heard. That's fine. Because even in those cases, something valuable has occurred.
IV. The Audience You Forgot About
At the very least — and this is crucial, so do not skip past it — at the very least, the audience will recognize the foolishness of the Yeller, and your message will come across more clearly.
We spend so much of our rhetorical energy focused on the person we're arguing with that we forget the most important people in the exchange: the people watching.
In any public disagreement — whether it's on a street corner, in a town hall, on a podcast, or in a Twitter thread — the direct participants are almost never the ones whose minds are in play. The Yeller has made up their mind. You've made up yours. The persuadable people are the ones on the periphery: the lurkers, the bystanders, the undecided, the quietly curious. The people who haven't committed yet. The people who are watching the exchange and, consciously or unconsciously, evaluating which participant they want to be more like.
This is the audience that matters. And this audience is evaluating you on two channels simultaneously.
Channel One: Content. What are you actually saying? What is your argument? What are your facts? This is the channel we obsess over. We spend hours crafting our positions, marshaling our evidence, honing our talking points.
Channel Two: Conduct. How are you saying it? Are you calm or frantic? Are you measured or unhinged? Do you seem like a person in possession of the truth or a person in the grip of an emotion? This is the channel we neglect. And it is, study after study confirms, the channel that carries more persuasive weight with undecided observers.
When you yell, your content may be impeccable, but your conduct signals desperation. The audience sees someone who needs to shout to be heard, and they unconsciously conclude that the position must be weak enough to require the amplification. When you speak softly while your opponent yells, the audience sees asymmetry — and they almost always assign credibility to the calm party. Not because calmness equals correctness, but because calmness signals confidence, and confidence signals that the position can stand on its own without the crutch of volume.
This is not fair. It is not logical. The loud person may be right and the quiet person may be wrong. But persuasion has never been a purely logical enterprise, and pretending otherwise is a strategic error that has cost countless righteous causes their audiences.
You are not just arguing with the Yeller. You are auditioning for the audience. And the audience hires the person who looks like they don't need to audition.
V. The Yelling-Industrial Complex
Now let's zoom out, because the problem is not just interpersonal. The problem is structural. We live inside a system that has industrialized yelling — that has made it profitable, addictive, and self-reinforcing on a civilizational scale.
In Part I of this series, we discussed the machinery of the fuss: media polarization, social media amplification, identity capture. All of that machinery runs on yelling. The entire engagement economy — the multi-billion-dollar apparatus of cable news, talk radio, podcasts, social platforms, and political fundraising — is optimized not for persuasion but for activation. And activation requires escalation. Activation requires yelling.
Consider the incentive structure. A cable news segment where two reasonable people calmly discuss the merits of a policy proposal generates almost zero engagement. Nobody clips it. Nobody shares it. Nobody rage-watches it. It is, by the metrics that govern the modern attention economy, a failure.
Now consider the same segment, but one of the guests is yelling. Or better yet, both of them are yelling. Now you've got something. Now you've got a clip that goes viral. Now you've got outrage from one side and triumphalism from the other. Now you've got engagement — comments, shares, quote-tweets, reaction videos. The platforms reward the content with algorithmic amplification. The advertisers pay premiums for the eyeballs. The producers book the same guests next week and tell them, explicitly or implicitly, to bring the same energy.
The yelling is not a failure of our media ecosystem. It is the product. It is what the system was designed to produce. And we are not the audience of the yelling; we are the fuel. Every time we match the volume, we feed the machine. Every time we yell back, we generate the engagement that funds the next cycle of yelling.
This is the connection to the screen. The Yelling-Industrial Complex is the mechanism by which the screen is maintained. The power brokers don't need to set the screen themselves; they've built a system that sets it automatically, at scale, 24 hours a day, fueled by our own emotional responses. The fuss is self-perpetuating. Scotty and Isaiah don't need to be directed to fight anymore; the fight has become its own economy, with its own momentum, with its own profit motive.
To speak softly in this environment is not just a communication tactic. It is an act of economic sabotage against the attention economy. Every calm conversation is a transaction the machine can't monetize. Every de-escalation is a disruption in the supply chain of outrage. Every time you refuse to yell, you are starving the beast — not dramatically, not heroically, but quietly, incrementally, in the only way that actually works.
VI. The Weaponization of Righteous Anger
Here is where I expect to lose some of you, and I want to be honest about that before I proceed.
There is a powerful, seductive, and deeply entrenched belief in our culture — on both sides of the aisle, in every activist tradition, in every revolutionary lineage — that righteous anger is not only justified but necessary. That the yelling is the point. That volume is a measure of moral seriousness. That to speak softly in the face of injustice is to be complicit in it.
I understand this belief. I do not dismiss it. There are moments in history where the shout, the chant, the roar of a crowd has been the instrument of change. There are moments where silence truly is complicity, and where the raised voice is the only voice that can crack the wall.
But here is the distinction that gets lost in the heat: there is a difference between raising your voice to be heard and raising your voice to drown out. There is a difference between the volume that says "I am here and I will not be ignored" and the volume that says "I am right and you will shut up."
The first is the cry of the unheard. It is the sound of a person or a people demanding entry into a conversation from which they have been excluded. It is the sound Frederick Douglass described, the sound of the enslaved person saying "I am a man." That sound is sacred, and this essay is not an argument against it.
The second is the yell of the already-heard. It is the sound of a person who is already in the conversation but who has decided that conversation itself is insufficient — that the other party must not merely hear them but capitulate to them. That sound is the sound of someone who has confused having a voice with having veto power. And that sound, however righteous its source, is strategically catastrophic.
The tragedy of modern political discourse is that we have collapsed these two sounds into one. We have told people that yelling is always either righteous or abusive, depending on who's doing it and what they're yelling about. The Blues will tell you that progressive yelling is "speaking truth to power" while conservative yelling is "hate speech." The Reds will tell you that conservative yelling is "standing up for values" while progressive yelling is "mob intimidation." Both are performing a sleight of hand: assigning moral value to volume based on the content of the message rather than evaluating volume itself as a strategic and ethical choice.
But volume is a strategic and ethical choice. And the data — the historical data, the psychological data, the rhetorical data — overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that in the context of persuasion, of changing minds, of moving a society toward something better, soft words outperform loud ones by orders of magnitude.
The civil rights movement understood this. The most iconic moments of that struggle — the sit-ins, the freedom rides, the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge — were not defined by yelling. They were defined by an almost supernatural calm in the face of monstrous provocation. The power of those moments came precisely from the asymmetry: the brutality of the opposition against the composure of the marchers. The audience — the nation, the world — could see, with devastating clarity, who was the Yeller and who was the speaker. And the speaker won. Not immediately. Not easily. But decisively.
The soft register is not passivity. It is the most aggressive form of rhetorical combat available, because it forces the observer to evaluate the argument on its merits rather than its volume. It strips the debate of its camouflage and leaves only the substance. And if your substance is strong — if your position is sound, if your facts are solid, if your moral logic is coherent — then the soft register is your greatest ally. Because it lets the substance be heard.
If your position requires yelling to be convincing, ask yourself a question borrowed from Part I of this series: were your motives noble, would you need the volume?
VII. The Dialectic — What We Lost
Soft words lead to hearing each other. Rather than continuing to just make noise, ideas can be heard and the debate can become dialectic. The competition becomes a conversation.
That word — dialectic — deserves more attention than we typically give it, because it represents something we have almost entirely lost in modern public life, and the loss is catastrophic.
Dialectic, in its classical sense, is not debate. Debate is a competition. In a debate, there are two positions, two teams, and a winner. The goal of debate is to defend your position and dismantle your opponent's. The goal of debate is victory.
Dialectic is something else entirely. In dialectic, two people hold different positions — a thesis and an antithesis — and through the process of honest, rigorous exchange, they arrive at a synthesis: a third position that incorporates the strongest elements of both originals and discards the weakest. The goal of dialectic is not victory. The goal of dialectic is truth. Or at least a closer approximation of truth than either party held at the outset.
Dialectic requires something that debate does not: the genuine possibility that you might be wrong. Or more precisely, the genuine possibility that you might be incomplete. That your thesis, however well-constructed, might be missing something that the antithesis contains. That the other person might possess a piece of the puzzle that you lack.
This is why the soft register matters so much. Not as a trick. Not as a manipulation tactic. Not as a way to make the other person look foolish — though it may accomplish that as a side effect. The soft register matters because it is the necessary precondition for dialectic. You cannot synthesize with someone you cannot hear. You cannot hear someone you are shouting over. You cannot arrive at a truth that transcends your current position if you are too busy defending your current position at the top of your lungs.
The Yelling-Industrial Complex has all but killed dialectic in public life. What we have instead is an endless, self-referential loop of debate: positions are stated, positions are defended, positions are attacked, positions are restated louder. No synthesis occurs. No truth is approached. No one learns anything. The loop continues, generating heat and noise and engagement and revenue, and the needle does not move.
The people in power like this arrangement. Go back to Part I — go back to the screen. The last thing the power brokers want is for Scotty and Isaiah to stop fighting and start talking. Because if they start talking — really talking, dialectically, with the possibility of synthesis — they might arrive at a synthesis that includes the recognition that they have more in common with each other than with MJ. They might realize that MJ is the only one scoring. They might leave the court together.
Dialectic is dangerous to power. Yelling is safe for it.
Every time you lower your register, you are not just de-escalating a conversation. You are creating the conditions for the one thing the power structure cannot survive: ordinary people discovering, through honest exchange, that they are on the same team.
VIII. Practical Applications — The Art of Speaking Softly in a Loud World
Theory is fine. Strategy is better. Let's talk about how this actually works in the situations where it matters most.
At the dinner table. Your uncle says something about immigration that makes your blood boil. Your instinct is to snap back, to correct, to lecture. Don't. Ask a question instead, and ask it quietly. Not a gotcha question — a genuine one. "What do you think should happen to the kids?" Not as a rhetorical trap, but as an actual inquiry. Your uncle may have an answer you haven't considered. He may not. But the question, asked softly, opens a door that the lecture slams shut.
On social media. Someone posts something inflammatory. You craft the perfect takedown. Before you hit send, ask: who is this for? If it's for the person who posted it, save your energy — they won't hear it. If it's for the audience, reconsider the tone. The most shared responses to inflammatory posts are not the cleverest dunks; they are the calm, factual, almost bemused corrections that make the original poster look overwrought by contrast. Be the person the audience wants to agree with, not the person the audience is exhausted by.
At the protest. You believe in your cause. You are marching. Someone from the other side approaches, and they are hostile. The crowd around you is chanting. The energy is electric. The temptation to match the hostility is enormous. Resist it. Not for the hostile person's benefit, but for the cameras. For the bystanders. For the historical record. Every movement that has achieved lasting change has done so not by outscreaming its opponents but by presenting a contrast so stark that the audience can no longer remain neutral. Be the contrast.
In the workplace. A colleague is aggressive in a meeting, dismissive of your idea, loud in their opposition. Do not rise to meet them. Respond at half their volume. Watch the room shift. Watch the other attendees — the ones who haven't committed to either side — lean toward the person who seems more in control of themselves. Watch the aggressor either moderate or isolate. Either outcome serves you.
With your children. This may be the most important application of all, because children learn by observation, not by instruction. If your children grow up watching you meet yelling with yelling, they will internalize the lesson that volume equals power. If they grow up watching you meet yelling with calm — if they see you lower your register when the world raises its, if they see you refuse to let someone else's emotional state dictate your own — they will internalize a different lesson. A lesson about sovereignty, about self-possession, about the difference between reacting and responding. That lesson will shape every conflict they navigate for the rest of their lives.
IX. The Paradox of Softness as Strength
We live in a culture that conflates softness with weakness. This is a catastrophic error, and it is worth spending a moment understanding why.
Softness requires more strength than loudness. This is not poetry; it is biomechanics. Yelling is easy. Yelling is the path of least resistance. Yelling is what happens when you stop controlling yourself. It takes no discipline to scream. It takes no training, no practice, no restraint. A toddler can yell. Yelling is the default state of a human being whose higher faculties have been temporarily overridden by their adrenal system.
Speaking softly in the face of provocation requires the active engagement of every cognitive resource you possess. It requires emotional regulation. It requires strategic thinking. It requires empathy — not agreement, but the ability to model another person's mental state well enough to communicate with them effectively. It requires patience. It requires courage, because softness in a loud environment feels vulnerable, and vulnerability in a hostile space is terrifying.
Every martial art on earth teaches this principle. The untrained fighter tenses up, swings wild, expends energy frantically. The master relaxes, conserves, redirects. The softness of the master is not the absence of power; it is power so thoroughly controlled that it doesn't need to announce itself. The master doesn't need to yell because the master doesn't need you to be afraid. The master is operating on a different level of the game entirely.
This is what you are doing when you lower your register. You are not surrendering. You are not appeasing. You are not being passive. You are operating on a different level of the game. You are playing chess in a room full of people playing checkers, and the fact that you're moving more quietly does not mean you're moving less decisively.
X. The Quiet Rebellion
Let me tie this back to where we started — to the screen, to the fuss, to the system that needs you loud and divided and emotionally spent.
The power brokers have built an entire civilization-scale apparatus designed to keep you yelling. The media is tuned to provoke you. The algorithms are optimized to enrage you. The political parties are structured to inflame you. Every institution that profits from your attention has a vested interest in keeping your register high, because the higher your register, the less you hear, the less you think, the less you synthesize, and the more useful you are as a screener.
To speak softly in this environment is not a communication preference. It is an act of defiance. It is a refusal to participate in the economy of outrage on the terms that have been set for you. It is a reclamation of your cognitive sovereignty from systems that have been engineered to hijack it.
Every time you lower your voice when someone raises theirs, you are doing something the system cannot easily process. You are introducing a variable that the algorithm didn't model, that the producer didn't script, that the power broker didn't anticipate. You are breaking the play.
In Part I, I said the radical act is to leave the arena. Here in Part II, I want to amend that. The radical act is not just leaving the arena. It is remaining in the arena but changing how you play. Because the world needs people who care enough to stay in the fight but who are wise enough to fight differently. The world needs people who refuse to fuss. Who refuse to yell. Who refuse to let someone else's volume set their register.
The world needs people who understand that the softest voice in the room is the one the room will strain to hear. And a room that is straining to hear you is a room that has, for one precious moment, stopped yelling.
In that silence — in that brief, fragile, hard-won silence — everything becomes possible. Ideas can be heard. Synthesis can occur. Common ground can be found. The screen can be seen for what it is. MJ can be identified. And Scotty and Isaiah, for the first time, can turn to each other and say: "Wait. Why are we fighting?"
That question, asked softly, is the beginning of everything.
Stop yelling. Start being heard.
A Treatise on Cognitive Conscription and the Courage to Think Alone — Part III of The Screen Series
I. The Opening Insult
Allow me to open by saying: I intend to insult and offend EVERYONE.
Not some of you. Not the other side. Not the people you already disagree with, so you can sit back comfortably and nod along while I take shots at your ideological opponents. No. Everyone. You, specifically. Whatever group you belong to, whatever banner you march under, whatever acronym you've stitched onto your identity — I'm coming for it. And I'm coming for it not because I hate you, but because I respect you enough to tell you something that your group never will: the group does not care about you.
If that stings, good. Sit with it. We'll get to the balm, but the sting comes first.
In Part I of this series, we named the play — the screen, the mechanism by which power brokers manufacture conflict between ordinary people to advance their own agendas. In Part II, we explored the fuss itself — the yelling, the volume, the Yelling-Industrial Complex that monetizes our outrage and ensures that debate never matures into dialectic. We talked about how to stop being Scotty and Isaiah. We talked about how to stop fussing. We talked about how to lower the register so that ideas, rather than noise, could be heard.
Now, in this final installment, we have to talk about the thing that makes the screen possible in the first place. Not the power brokers. Not the media. Not the algorithms. Those are mechanisms. The thing that makes all of them work — the raw material, the fuel, the foundational infrastructure of the entire apparatus — is the Group.
The Group is where they recruit Scotty and Isaiah. The Group is where the volume gets calibrated. The Group is where your cognitive sovereignty goes to die.
I despise groups. And before you decide what kind of person that makes me, let me show you what kind of entities groups are.
II. The Universal Diagnosis
Political Parties care about power, not progress. Citizen groups care about power, not progress. Unions care about power, not progress.
And so on.
And on.
And on.
Corporations care about power, not progress. Religious institutions care about power, not progress. Advocacy organizations care about power, not progress. Professional associations care about power, not progress. Fraternal orders, alumni networks, ideological movements, fan bases, online communities — power, power, power, power, power. Not progress.
The theme is clear. And the theme is clear not because I am cynical, but because organizational dynamics are as predictable as gravity, and just as indifferent to your feelings about them.
Here is what happens to every group that has ever existed, exists now, or will ever exist. It follows a trajectory so reliable you could set your watch by it, and it goes like this:
Stage One: The Cause. A group forms around a legitimate grievance, a genuine need, a real problem that demands collective action. The founders are sincere. The energy is pure. The mission is clear. At this stage, the group is a tool — a means to an end, a vehicle for the cause. The people in the group care about the cause more than they care about the group.
Stage Two: The Structure. As the group grows, it needs infrastructure. It needs leadership, funding, communications, strategy, logistics. It needs an office. It needs a website. It needs a budget. It needs people whose full-time job is running the group. Reasonable. Necessary. And the beginning of the end.
Stage Three: The Inversion. At some point — and this point arrives with the quiet inevitability of a Tuesday — the group stops being a tool in service of the cause and becomes a cause in service of itself. The mission statement stays on the wall, but the actual operating priorities shift. The first question is no longer "How do we advance the cause?" The first question becomes "How do we sustain the group?" How do we maintain funding? How do we retain members? How do we stay relevant? How do we justify our existence for another fiscal year?
This is the inversion. And once it happens, the group's relationship with its stated mission becomes decorative rather than functional. The mission is the logo on the jersey. It's the branding. It's the story the group tells the world — and tells itself — to justify the continued accumulation and exercise of power. But the power is no longer in service of the mission. The mission is in service of the power.
Stage Four: The Conscription. This is where you come in. Because a group that exists to sustain itself needs soldiers. It needs people who will donate, who will volunteer, who will march, who will post, who will argue, who will fuss. It needs Scotty and Isaiah. And to recruit them, it needs to do one thing above all else: it needs to make you feel that the group is the cause. That to question the group is to betray the cause. That your loyalty to the organization is the same thing as your commitment to the principle.
This is cognitive conscription. And many of us have been cognitively conscripted to fight in a battle of someone else's choosing. Not a battle for the cause we believe in, but a battle for the continued power and relevance of the organization that has branded itself as the cause's sole legitimate representative.
When we step back from our emotional and financial investments in groups, we can process their manipulations for what they are, and not what they portray them to be.
III. The Hardest Case Study — And Why I Chose It
I could illustrate the dynamics of cognitive conscription with easy examples. I could talk about political parties — everyone already suspects those are corrupt. I could talk about corporations — nobody's going to fight me on the proposition that Monsanto cares more about shareholder value than about farmers. I could pick soft targets and make comfortable points, and you'd nod along and share this essay and feel very smart.
But that would make me a coward. And worse, it would make me a hypocrite — because the entire thesis of this series is that the power brokers use comfort and tribal allegiance to prevent you from thinking clearly. If I only challenge the groups you already distrust, I'm setting a screen of my own.
So let's talk about Black Lives Matter.
Let me be precise about what I mean, because the phrase "Black Lives Matter" has become one of the most semantically overloaded expressions in the English language, and precision matters when you're walking through a minefield.
There is the statement "Black lives matter" — a moral proposition that should be as uncontroversial as "water is wet." There is the movement — a broad, decentralized, multi-generational struggle for racial justice that long predates any organization and that encompasses millions of people who have never attended a meeting or paid a membership fee. And there is the organization — a specific institutional entity with leadership, structure, funding, and all the organizational dynamics I described in the previous section.
These three things are not the same. The conflation of them — the deliberate, strategic, weaponized conflation of them — is one of the most effective screens operating in American life today. And it is being run by both sides simultaneously.
IV. The Foolishness Over Which Lives Matter
Let's walk into the minefield.
The foolishness over which lives matter is perhaps the most perfectly engineered piece of cognitive conscription in modern American discourse. And I call it foolishness not because the underlying issues are foolish — they are deadly serious — but because the framing of the debate has been designed, from both directions, to ensure that no productive conversation ever occurs. The framing is the screen. The framing is the fuss. The framing is MJ's path to the hoop.
Here is how the screen works:
The person who hears that one adjective of life matters "more" than another is the goal of the power brokers. Read that carefully. The person who hears the word "Black" in "Black Lives Matter" and processes it as a comparative claim — as a statement that Black lives matter more than other lives — is not arriving at that interpretation independently. That interpretation is being fed to them. By pundits. By memes. By algorithms. By the entire machinery of the fuss that we've spent two essays dissecting.
"Black Lives Matter" is, grammatically and logically, a statement of emphasis, not exclusivity. It is the rhetorical equivalent of saying "Save the Rainforests" — a statement that does not imply "and burn every other forest." It is the equivalent of a doctor running into a waiting room and saying "This patient needs help" — a statement that does not imply that no other patients matter. It is a statement of triage, of priority, of urgent focus on the part of the body that is currently bleeding.
But the power brokers don't want you to hear it that way. They want you to hear it as a ranking. Because a ranking creates a competition. And a competition creates a fuss. And a fuss creates a screen. And a screen lets MJ score.
Now — and here is where I offend the other side of the room — could the originators of this organization have used more persuasive, rather than antagonistic, terms for the movement? Absolutely. The principles of Part II of this series apply here with full force. If the goal is persuasion — if the goal is to change minds, to build coalitions, to move the needle — then the register matters. The framing matters. And a framing that requires a footnote to explain what it doesn't mean is a framing that has handed the opposition a weapon.
This is not a moral judgment. It is a strategic observation. And it is one that the movement's own evolution has ratified, as we'll discuss shortly. The point is not that the founders were wrong to be angry. The point is that anger, however righteous, is not a communication strategy. It is an emotion. And emotions, untempered by strategic thinking, are the raw material of the screen.
Could those opposing them think before they criticize? They absolutely can and should. The reflexive leap from "Black Lives Matter" to "they think they're better than us" is not a thought. It is a reaction. It is the amygdala firing, not the prefrontal cortex processing. And it is exactly the reaction the power brokers need, because once you're reacting, you're not thinking, and once you're not thinking, you're fussing, and once you're fussing, MJ is halfway to the hoop.
Both sides of this particular fuss have been conscripted. Both sides are fighting a battle that serves the power brokers more than it serves either side's stated values. Both sides have allowed the organizational framing to override the moral substance. And both sides would benefit enormously from lowering their registers and asking a simple question: "Wait — what do we actually want here?"
Because what both sides actually want, if you strip away the jerseys and the slogans and the organizational branding, is remarkably similar: a society in which the circumstances of your birth do not determine the arc of your life. That's it. That's the common ground. It was always there. But you can't see it through the screen.
V. The Maturation — And What It Teaches
Now here is where I give grace, because grace is owed.
The Black Lives Matter organization has been transformed in the same manner as the great Revolutions of the past: from the inside.
This is a crucial point, and it is one that both the organization's defenders and its critics tend to overlook, for opposite reasons.
The defenders don't want to acknowledge that transformation was needed, because acknowledging it means admitting that the earlier version was flawed. The critics don't want to acknowledge that transformation occurred, because acknowledging it means updating their position, and updating a position requires the kind of intellectual honesty that the Yelling-Industrial Complex actively punishes.
But the transformation happened. And it happened in a way that is both historically predictable and genuinely admirable.
Every major social movement in history has followed the same arc: ignition, radicalization, internal conflict, maturation. The American Revolution began with pamphleteers and ended with a constitutional convention. The labor movement began with wildcat strikes and ended with collective bargaining frameworks. The civil rights movement began with bus boycotts and ended with legislation. In each case, the agitators who lit the fire were eventually succeeded — sometimes willingly, sometimes not — by the builders who shaped the flame into something sustainable.
This is not a criticism of the agitators. The fire needed to be lit. The grievance was real. The urgency was real. The anger was real. But fire, left unstructured, consumes the house it was trying to illuminate. The agitators do the necessary work of saying "this is intolerable." The builders do the necessary work of saying "here is what we build instead."
For the most part, the agitators that sought division within the Black Lives Matter organization are gone and have been replaced by seekers of change. People who understand that lasting transformation requires coalition, not confrontation. People who have learned — through trial, through error, through the hard education that only organizational growing pains can provide — that the soft register is more powerful than the loud one. People who have matured from yelling to speaking, from debating to engaging in dialectic, from screening to building.
I'm sure to have offended many with that. But hush, child. The truth will set you free.
And the truth is this: the ability of an organization to recognize its own failures, to evolve beyond its founding excesses, to replace its agitators with its builders — this is not a weakness. It is the single rarest and most valuable thing an organization can do. Most groups never manage it. Most groups calcify around their founding energy, defending their original posture long past the point of strategic relevance, because the cognitive conscription of their members won't permit self-criticism. The members have fused their identity with the group, and so the group's evolution feels like a personal betrayal.
The fact that BLM has undergone this transformation — imperfectly, incompletely, but genuinely — is something that both its supporters and its critics should study carefully. Supporters should study it because it demonstrates that loyalty to the cause and loyalty to the organization are not the same thing, and that the cause is better served by an organization willing to shed its earlier skin. Critics should study it because it demolishes the lazy narrative that the organization is forever defined by its most provocative moments, and it demands the intellectual honesty of engaging with what the organization is now, not what it was then.
VI. The Other Offenses — All Lives Matter and the Meme Trap
Let's offend the other side of the room now. Equal-opportunity offense, as promised.
Those hearing "Black Lives Matter" and reflexively shushing the speaker with "All Lives Matter" — you are being manipulated with memes and false syllogisms.
Let me be specific about how.
"All Lives Matter" is, on its surface, an unimpeachable moral statement. Of course all lives matter. No sane person disputes this. And that is precisely what makes it such an effective weapon — not an effective argument, mind you, but an effective weapon. There is a difference. An argument engages with the substance of the opposing position. A weapon neutralizes the opposing position without engaging with it. "All Lives Matter" is a weapon disguised as an argument.
Here is the false syllogism, laid bare:
Premise 1: All lives matter. (True.) Premise 2: "Black Lives Matter" implies that only Black lives matter. (False.) Conclusion: Therefore, "Black Lives Matter" is a statement of supremacy that must be corrected. (Invalid.)
The entire logical structure collapses at Premise 2, which is a misreading so fundamental that it can only be sustained by one of two conditions: genuine misunderstanding, or deliberate distortion. And after years of the phrase being explained, contextualized, analogized, memed, debated, and dissected in every conceivable forum, the "genuine misunderstanding" explanation has worn thin. What remains is deliberate distortion — or, more charitably, the kind of willful non-engagement that happens when your team's talking points have become more real to you than the words coming out of the other person's mouth.
This is the meme trap. A meme, in the Dawkinsian sense, is a unit of cultural information that replicates itself through imitation. "All Lives Matter" is a meme — not in the internet-joke sense, but in the original sense: a self-replicating idea that spreads because it is catchy, because it is emotionally satisfying, and because it provides its host with a feeling of moral righteousness that is more rewarding than the cognitive effort of actually engaging with the opposing position.
When you say "All Lives Matter" in response to "Black Lives Matter," you are not making an argument. You are running a meme. You are executing a line of code that was written for you by someone else and installed in your cognitive operating system through repetition. You feel like you're thinking. You're not. You're processing. There is a difference.
And the people who wrote that code? The pundits, the politicians, the social media strategists who packaged "All Lives Matter" as a response? They don't care about all lives. They care about the screen. They care about keeping Scotty and Isaiah fussing. They care about ensuring that the conversation about racial justice never matures beyond the slogan stage, because a mature conversation about racial justice would require examining systems and structures and power dynamics that the power brokers have a vested interest in keeping invisible.
VII. The Uncomfortable Truth — You Are ALL Wrong
Truth be told, you are ALL wrong.
Not half of you. Not the other side. All of you. Everyone who has reduced the most profound moral question of our time — the question of whose suffering we attend to and how — to a battle between three-word slogans. Everyone who has allowed organizational branding to substitute for moral reasoning. Everyone who has chosen a team in a game that was designed so that the only winner is the person who isn't playing.
You're wrong because you've accepted the frame. You've accepted that this is a competition between "Black Lives Matter" and "All Lives Matter," and you've picked your side, and you're fussing, and meanwhile — meanwhile — MJ is driving to the hoop.
Here is what neither slogan captures, and what both sides would understand if they lowered their registers long enough to hear each other:
Life matters.
Not as a slogan. Not as a bumper sticker. Not as a clever reframe designed to split the difference and make everyone feel included. As a foundational, non-negotiable, axiomatic moral principle from which all policy, all advocacy, all collective action should derive.
Life matters. Human life matters. Animal life matters. Every form of sentient existence that draws breath or grows toward light or navigates this improbable cosmos on whatever terms it was given — it matters. Not because a group told you so. Not because an organization branded it. Because it is the bedrock truth beneath all other truths, and if you need a three-word slogan to remind you of it, something has gone very wrong with your moral architecture.
But — and here is where the principle meets the practice, where the philosophy meets the pavement — the lives that need help THE MOST RIGHT NOW are the ones requiring our laser-focus.
This is not a contradiction. This is triage. This is the doctor in the emergency room who treats the patient who is bleeding out before she treats the patient with a broken finger. Not because the broken finger doesn't matter. Not because the broken finger's pain is invalid. But because triage demands prioritization, and prioritization demands the courage to say: this, here, now, is where the bleeding is.
And if you cannot look at the data — the incarceration rates, the wealth gaps, the health outcomes, the educational disparities, the use-of-force statistics, the housing discrimination, the lending discrimination, the employment discrimination, the environmental racism, the maternal mortality rates — if you cannot look at that data and identify where the bleeding is, then your slogan, whichever one it is, is not a moral position. It is a costume. It is the jersey of a team that you wear to feel like you're in the game while the power brokers score.
VIII. The Group Problem — Revisited
Let's return to the thesis, because the BLM case study is not the point. It is the illustration. The point is the Group, and the Group's relationship with the individual human beings it claims to serve.
Here is the deepest, most uncomfortable truth this essay has to offer, and I need you to hear it at the softest possible register, because it is going to feel like an attack on something you hold dear:
No group has ever loved you.
Your political party does not love you. It needs your vote. Your union does not love you. It needs your dues. Your advocacy organization does not love you. It needs your donation. Your social media tribe does not love you. It needs your engagement. Every group you have ever belonged to has valued you precisely to the extent that you are useful to the group's continued existence, and not one inch further.
This is not because the people in these groups are bad people. Many of them are wonderful people. Many of them care deeply, personally, genuinely about the causes they serve. But the group is not the people. The group is the structure. And structures do not love. Structures optimize. They optimize for survival, for growth, for power, for relevance. And they will optimize right over the top of you the moment your individual interests diverge from the group's institutional interests.
This is why cognitive conscription is possible. Because the group has convinced you that your interests and its interests are identical. That what's good for the group is good for you. That your loyalty to the group is the purest expression of your commitment to the cause. And as long as you believe this, you will march when the group says march, donate when the group says donate, fuss when the group says fuss, and never once ask the question that the group cannot survive: "Is this actually working? Not for the group. For the cause."
The cause is not the group. The cause existed before the group, and it will exist after the group dissolves or transforms or implodes under the weight of its own organizational inertia. The cause is bigger than any group. The cause is bigger than any slogan. The cause is the thing that made you care in the first place, before the group got its hands on your caring and shaped it into something useful for the group's purposes.
And the cause — every cause, every legitimate grievance, every genuine moral imperative — is better served by individuals who think clearly than by groups that think collectively. Because collective thinking is not thinking at all. It is consensus. And consensus is not the product of rigorous inquiry; it is the product of social pressure, emotional contagion, and the very human desire to belong.
IX. The Individual as the Unit of Change
If groups inevitably become self-serving, and if cognitive conscription is the mechanism by which groups maintain their power, then what is the alternative? Isolation? Disengagement? Every person for themselves?
No. The alternative is something much harder and much more powerful: voluntary, temporary, purpose-driven collaboration between sovereign individuals.
Let me unpack that, because every word matters.
Voluntary: You choose to participate. Not because you were born into it, not because your identity demands it, not because the social cost of leaving is too high. Because you evaluated the collaboration on its merits and decided, with your own mind, that it serves the cause you care about.
Temporary: You participate for as long as the collaboration serves the cause, and you leave when it doesn't. No guilt. No accusations of betrayal. No identity crisis. You are not the group. The group is a tool. When the tool stops working, you put it down and pick up a different one.
Purpose-driven: The collaboration exists to accomplish something specific. Not to perpetuate itself. Not to grow its membership. Not to build an empire. To solve a problem. And when the problem is solved — or when the collaboration's approach to the problem has proven ineffective — it dissolves, and the individuals who composed it are free to form new collaborations around new approaches.
Between sovereign individuals: People who have not been cognitively conscripted. People who retain the right to question, to dissent, to disagree with the group without being branded as traitors. People who understand that their loyalty is to the cause, not to the organization, and who are prepared to hold the organization accountable to the cause even when the organization would prefer not to be held accountable.
This is what the great Revolutions looked like at their best. Not the institutionalized phase — the ignition phase. The phase where individuals who cared about something came together, accomplished something, and then dispersed back into their lives, carrying the change with them. The problem is not collaboration. The problem is permanent collaboration — the group that outlives its purpose and becomes its own purpose.
X. The Laser-Focus
We've been in the weeds. Let's come back to the surface. Let's come back to the thing that actually matters, the thing that got lost in the fussing and the yelling and the group dynamics and the organizational politics and the slogan wars:
People are suffering. Right now. Today. Not in the abstract. Not as a talking point. Not as a fundraising appeal. Actual human beings, and actual living creatures, are experiencing actual suffering that could be reduced by actual action.
And the question — the only question that matters, the question that cuts through every screen and every slogan and every organizational agenda — is: Where is the bleeding?
Not "whose team identified the bleeding first." Not "which group gets credit for bandaging the wound." Not "what do we call the patient." Where is the bleeding, and how do we stop it?
The lives that need help the most right now are the ones requiring our laser-focus. This is not a political statement. It is a medical one. Triage is not ideology; it is the most rational, most compassionate, most effective framework for allocating limited resources in the face of unlimited need.
And triage requires something that no group will ever ask of you, because it threatens the group's existence: triage requires that you look at the evidence with your own eyes, evaluate it with your own mind, and direct your energy where it is needed most — not where the group tells you it's needed, not where the slogan points, not where the algorithm leads, but where the actual, documented, verifiable suffering is greatest.
Sometimes that will align with your group's priorities. Sometimes it won't. And the willingness to follow the evidence even when it diverges from the group's narrative — that willingness is the difference between a conscript and a sovereign individual. Between Scotty running someone else's play and a person who has stopped fussing long enough to look at the scoreboard and ask: "Who's actually winning this game, and is it any of us?"
XI. The Synthesis — Bringing the Series Home
In Part I, we named the play: the screen. The manufactured conflict between ordinary people that allows power brokers to legislate, consolidate, and score unopposed. We learned to ask: Is subterfuge present? If yes, you are being screened.
In Part II, we addressed the fuss: the yelling. The industrialized outrage that ensures debate never becomes dialectic. We learned to lower our register, to speak softly, to create the conditions for hearing and being heard. We learned that the softest voice in the room is the one the room will strain to hear.
Here in Part III, we've confronted the machinery of conscription itself: the Group. The entity that recruits Scotty and Isaiah, assigns them their positions, tells them who to fight, and calls it a cause. We've learned that the group is not the cause, the cause is not the group, and your loyalty belongs to the principle, not the organization.
And now, standing at the end of this series, let me offer a synthesis — a single framework that weaves all three threads together:
The power brokers set the screen. The media amplifies the fuss. The groups conscript the soldiers. And the individual — the thinking, sovereign, uncaptured individual — is the only force in the entire system capable of breaking the cycle.
Not the individual acting alone. The individual thinking alone. There is a difference. You can collaborate without being conscripted. You can join a cause without joining a group. You can fight for justice without wearing a jersey. You can care deeply about Black lives, about all lives, about life itself, without reducing that care to a slogan that someone else wrote for purposes that may not align with your own.
The screen only works if Scotty and Isaiah agree to fuss. The yelling only continues if both parties keep their registers high. The group only has power if you give it your cognitive sovereignty.
Refuse all three.
See the screen. Lower your register. Think for yourself. And then — only then, with clear eyes and a quiet voice and a mind that belongs to you and not to any organization — look at the world and ask: where is the bleeding?
Go there.
Not because a group told you to. Because you saw it yourself.
XII. The Final Word
I promised at the top of this essay that I would insult and offend everyone. I hope I have delivered. I hope the people who champion BLM are uncomfortable with my analysis of the organization's early framing. I hope the people who champion All Lives Matter are uncomfortable with my dissection of their false syllogism. I hope the partisans on both sides are uncomfortable with the suggestion that their group does not love them. I hope everyone is uncomfortable.
Because comfort is the screen's greatest ally. Comfort is what keeps you in your seat at the arena, wearing the jersey, cheering for a team that doesn't know your name. Comfort is what keeps you fussing with Isaiah while MJ scores. Comfort is what keeps your register high and your thinking low and your cognitive sovereignty in someone else's pocket.
Discomfort is where growth happens. Discomfort is where the screen becomes visible. Discomfort is where the yelling starts to sound foolish. Discomfort is where the group's grip loosens and the individual's vision clears.
I didn't write this series to make you agree with me. I wrote it to make you uncomfortable enough to think. If you've read all three parts and you're angry at me, that's fine — as long as the anger is yours and not borrowed from a group. If you've read all three parts and you disagree with me, that's better — as long as the disagreement is the product of your own reasoning and not a reflex installed by a pundit. If you've read all three parts and you want to argue, that's best of all — as long as you're willing to do it at a low register, with your own mind, outside the screen, in the spirit of dialectic rather than debate.
Life matters. All of it. And the part of it that is bleeding the most is the part that deserves your attention the most. Not your group's attention. Not your party's attention. Not your slogan's attention.
Yours.
Were their motives noble, they would not need to employ subterfuge. Were the game fair, they would not need the screen. Were the truth on their side, they would not need the volume. Were the cause their real concern, they would not need the group.
Stop being conscripted. Start being sovereign.
Stop grouping. Start thinking.
The Telos of The Screen Series
We've spent three essays naming the machinery. The screen. The volume. The group. We've dissected the plays, exposed the players, and mapped the architecture of a system designed to keep you fussing, yelling, and conscripted while the power brokers score.
But machinery is all it is. Machinery in service of obscuring a truth so simple that it needs no organization to champion it, no slogan to brand it, no party to platform it, and no volume to deliver it.
Here it is. At a whisper. Where it belongs:
Life matters.
Human life. Animal life. Whatever photon-based blip-forms are navigating this improbable cosmos alongside us on terms we haven't yet learned to recognize. Life — all of it, in every expression, at every scale — is the thing that matters. Not the group. Not the party. Not the brand. Not the jersey. Life.
That is the telos. That is what every screen is designed to hide from you. Not because the power brokers disagree with it — most of them would nod along if you said it at a dinner party — but because a population that truly organized itself around the principle that life matters would be ungovernable by the current rules. You cannot cognitively conscript a person whose loyalty is to life itself rather than to an organization. You cannot screen a person who refuses to fuss over adjectives when the noun is bleeding. You cannot manipulate a person who has decided, quietly and finally, that the suffering in front of them is more important than the slogan above them.
But the principle is not complete without its corollary, and the corollary is where the courage lives:
The lives that need help the most right now are the ones requiring our laser-focus.
Not eventually. Not after the next election. Not after your group's strategic priorities have been met. Not after the other side admits they were wrong. Now. Today. Wherever the bleeding is worst, that is where your hands belong.
This is not a comfortable principle. Comfort says: attend to the suffering that your team has approved. Comfort says: wait for the group to tell you where to look. Comfort says: all suffering is equal, so no particular suffering demands your urgent attention, so you are free to do nothing and feel righteous about it.
Triage says otherwise. Triage says: your resources are finite, your time is short, and the bleeding is not distributed equally. Triage says: look with your own eyes, not through the filter of a party or a platform or a pundit. Triage says: go where it's worst, not where it's convenient.
The screen exists to prevent you from performing triage. Because triage requires clear eyes, and the screen is designed to blur them. The volume exists to prevent you from hearing where the cries are loudest. Because triage requires listening, and the yelling drowns everything out. The group exists to redirect your energy from the bleeding to the brand. Because triage requires sovereignty, and the group requires conscription.
See through the screen. Lower the register. Think beyond the group. And then do the only thing that has ever actually mattered:
Find the life that needs help the most right now.
Go there.
Help.
Life matters. Act accordingly.
F. Tronboll III
Share