Wondering how best to deal with the Sacred Canopy and False Consensus Effect
No, I don't share your opinion about the Bad Thing that happened, but I'm scared to say so
The 'Sacred Canopy' is a fancy sociological term for an artificially constructed framework that imposes an imagined order on a chaotic world. We'll get to that.
The 'False Consensus Effect' is just a posh term for the human tendency to assume that people in our circle must surely think similar things as we do about stuff - especially stuff that seems to have a moral valence. It's about fitting in and also reflects the dynamic famously described in the story of The Emperor's New Clothes.
Both of these concepts have been manifesting in my personal orbit since Donald Trump and his unusual henchpeople took office.
It has felt annoying, but also awkward.
Everyone with a thinking brain can now relate to the discomfort of pushing back on 'academic leftishism' - with all the rhetorical heft that it has brought to bear on social interactions between those who have never sought to question the suffocating nature of thought and language policing.
Eric Kaufman puts it well in this interview:
"I kind of see the anti-racism taboo of the mid-60s, which many people commented on at the time, as kind of the big bang of our moral universe. And it is the center of our moral universe. And in a way, without addressing that, the strength of these taboos—the way they can then be borrowed by initially feminists and then by the LGBTQ movement—the power of these taboos means that they have the ability to shut down conversations, to make you radioactive."
I know that feeling well ...
My sense of what's going on is less that most normal people are true believers in this suffocating moral cladding and more that they are unthinking, due to ambient phenomena; namely the Sacred Canopy and the False Consensus Effect.
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Someone in the US wrote me a heartfelt apology on behalf of the 'stupid half of the country' after the recent election.
I would not have expected this person to be a Trumpkin, but I was slightly taken aback by the outpouring of shame that they clearly felt the need to share.
What made it feel personally awkward was that these kind of sentiments feel threatening to the harmony of a relationship if you do not reciprocate.
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