blighttown

Everyday mundane social interactions can be seen as acts of coercion

caveats

I've wanted to make this case for a while, and I've been afraid I'd be able to really frame my argument well. This is a topic that is really important to me, so I may return to it later if my argument here is too poor.

I also don't want to make too strong of a case here. I'm definitely not saying the following: hard determinism is correct, we have no free will, people are operating with malicious intent, and minor social interactions are all awful. I'm mostly not making those points.

intro

So, with all that out of the way, what do I mean? In my mind, every single social interaction has some component of coercion to it. I'm going with the non-violent definition of coercion here:

to compel to an act or choice

For any given social interaction, there are a few components:

Let's discuss these individually.

The expectation to respond to a statement

This one is straightforward. If I come up to you and say "Hello there, how are you today?" you are forced to make a decision. You can respond more or less any way you want. You can choose not to respond. But what you cannot do is choose not to have that initial interaction, or choose not to have to make the choice of how to respond. It's not as if finding a response to "how are you today" is difficult. But effectively your choice is between "respond to the script" or "be rude." (I suppose you could also invent some lie and run away. "Oh no, my phone is ringing and my wife is due any day! No time to chat!" But that hardly seems like an improvement.)

As I mentioned in my caveat, I don't mean to imply this is bad. I'm certainly not saying that people should not come up to me and say hello. But the mere fact that I must either respond appropriately or look rude and weird means that I did not really have a choice in first matter. ie, the matter of determining how to respond. My choice comes into play after that; determining what my response may be.

The implied expectation to appropriately reflect the emotions of the speaker

I worry that this part is a bit difficult to convey with text alone. Luckily, I have a video aid: the I "like turtles kid". Take the 18 seconds to watch the video. It's really something beautiful:

I'll just pause to say I absolutely love this interaction and I love this kid. I want say it's possible that all my conclusions about the interaction are incorrect, and the kid was just nervous. But, think about this for a second. What's really going on here? I would argue that when the reporter emoted so strongly, she was effectively telling Jonathan how he was supposed to respond to her question. That's part of what made the question a softball; she asked him a very easy question, and then prompted with her body language and tone how he was supposed to respond. He was supposed to enthusiastically agree that he loved his face painting and loved being at the fair. Or something like that.

But Jonathan, my hero, refused to let his train of thought be broken, and he refused to allow himself to be infected external emotion. I'm sure that we got a brief but unadulterated view of his private thoughts: he likes turtles. I'm playing up the humor a bit (and it is a funny situation) but I've thought about this kid and this scenario a lot.

Jonathan did not respond to the prompted question, he responded presumably with whatever he was already thinking about. I bet he was thinking about turtles. I'm not joking. I'll bet he was sitting there thinking about turtles. Maybe how they looked, or their behavior. Something along those lines. Jonathan also completely ignored (or failed to perceive) the body language and tone of voice cues. His affect was flat; he didn't just fail to reflect her body language and tone back at her; he seems to have failed to realize that her tone was itself a set of instructions. To translate her body language and tone, we might say that she communicated something like the following: "Alright, I'm acting really enthusiastic, so you're supposed to do that to! But don't think about it intellectually, just let my enthusiasm trigger an empathetic response so that you also natively feel enthusiasm, and then respond with the same enthusiasm I just injected into you."

This semi-humorous phrasing might sound odd to people, but I am trying to convey a serious idea; a lot of body language and tone are implicit. It can be awkward and weird to take the implicit and make it explicit, but I think it's helpful here.

Now the "I like turtles" example is a bit extreme, but I think this happens all the time. Imagine you meet your friend at a bar, and he asks you how you're doing. With a sad, exhausted tone, you say "I had a long day at work." Your friend knows to respond with something sympathetic or commiserating. He has a choice regarding just how he expresses that concern. Maybe he makes a joke. Maybe he buys him a beer. Maybe he expresses a really concerned tone and asks if he wants to talk about it. But the direction from the speaker is clear; he has (in some metaphorical sense) instructed the recipient how he should respond to his statement.

Now imagine a similar scenario. Imagine you meet your friend at a bar, and he asks you how you're doing. With an upbeat, enthusiastic tone, you say "I had a long day at work." It's the same exact set of words, but clearly your friend takes a different understanding. Probably you either love your job, or you're moving up the ladder, or something. And you've also told him how to respond to you; this time, with enthusiasm.

My argument is that this happens almost all the time when people speak casually People aren't speaking with you, so much as dancing with you. Or perhaps call and response is better metaphor? One speaker makes a move, and some prescribed responses are all that is appropriate. I was really, really confused the first time I went to church (I was about 20) and witnessed call and response. The prompting and the "coerced" responses of the crowd made me uncomfortable, but now I'm thinking that the call and response of a church service is much closer to normal human interaction than the "I like turtles" kid. People are always suggesting an appropriate range of response with their tone and body language. People are always imply, with their body language and tone, how you're supposed to respond to a given prompt. Like before, have no choice here. They go along with the prompt. They can respond rudely. (eg: "Leave me alone and don't talk to me") They can do something absurdist that flips the social convention. But most people (except perhaps our hero, the "I like turtles" kid) cannot choose to simply continue with their original train of thought. That is where the coercion comes in here. Whether verbal or nonverbal, once someone has prescribed your behavior, you are free to choose your response. But there is no choice in the matter of needing to make that choice, or needing to make a response.

The normal social conventions of everyday interaction.

This one is much simpler, so I don't think we need to spend too much time on it. When someone asks you "how is your day?" -- you are not free to respond just however you like. You can't (without some social penalty) run away screaming, start reciting a poem, pivot to attempting handstands, start shadowboxing. Yes, you could do these things in some strict philosophical sense, but in practical terms you cannot do these things. You might get hit in the face, or socially ostracized, or perhaps committed or arrested depending on how strangely you're acting out. Notably, there there really only two kinds of people who would respond in the way that I've described; people in some sort of prank show, showing off for an audience .... or the mentally ill. And that's about it. The first group is making a joke out of the demolishing of social conventions, whereas the second group probably cannot fathom them in the first place.

I think this is notable. Yes, you could choose to look crazy by reacting in weird ways. But the fact that you just cannot respond however you like is evidence of the mundane coercion of everyday conversation. The range of your responses have been predetermined. You should be prepared to make a lot people uncomfortable if you're mentally ill, or just terrible with body language, or autistic, or something else. Even minor little infractions in this area can make people very uncomfortable. You broke the rules; perhaps you're dangerous.

conclusion

So I want to return to my prior point. I don't think this coercion is malicious, or even all that unpleasant much of the time. But it's ever-present, and you don't have real choice in the matter; just some wiggle room. Except the "I like turtles" kid. I suppose in that moment he was freer than most of us.

I'm not sure if I've done the topic justice. This is something I've always struggled with, and I've never heard anyone put it into these terms. I don't know if my description is useful for anyone else, or if it will just sound confusing and mentally ill. I've struggled with this so much that I've adopted what can only be described as pathological patterns of behavior. Back when I was in college, I would actually fail to defend myself against accusations. This was a conscious choice; I knew that if I protested too loudly when defending myself, I would be giving an additional, implicit emotional clue about the facts of the situation. In other words, I would be (in some sense of the word) emotionally coercing someone into believing my innocence, when really they should only determine that from the facts. This turns out to be the completely incorrect approach. People look for your emotional cues to determine innocence just as much (or more!) than they look at the facts. Rather than leveling the playing field, I simply held myself back. And almost certainly, no one registered this as virtuous, liked I'd intended. I'm sure I just seemed weird.

Lately, and much more pathologically, I've just been shutting down when people greet me with an emotional cue. I responded to people better when I was younger. Now I just find I can't manage to reflect their enthusiasm back at them. To me it feels like I'm being disingenuous. But for the people I do this with, they just think I don't like them. For most people, it seems that a poorly-formed response ("I like turtles!") would have been better than no response. I'm not sure what the answer is, except that I think I'm just going to need to "go along for the ride" with people more often. I'm just not sure if I can actually do it.