Multiplicity, Freedom, & Subjectivity vs Civil War

In a country with 335 million people, I'd rather find community than civil war.

The Beat Philosopher is a reader-supported publication by Melissa Nadia Viviana; Author, Activist, Existentialist, & Philosopher. To receive new essays exploring the current problems of our world through a philosophical lens consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Last night I made a joke:

In 2025, I've become drunk with power. I've lost track of all the reasons I've blocked people. But I'm pretty sure I blocked someone earlier just for mixing up their, there, and they're.

A lot of people laughed. But someone responded, quite seriously:

I came to the realization that we may not like what they have to say but at least if we don’t block them, they will hear what we have to say.

And you never know. Maybe you will change their mind.

Not only did I find this mesmerizingly distracting for the rest of the evening, but I think this actually may be exactly what’s fueling our Civil War in America.

Hear me out, because I have to take a small detour first.

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I’ve realized––particularly after this week––that ceasing contact with people on the internet isn’t personal at all. It isn’t about them at all.

It’s the fact that shutting down contact with people is a form of information reduction that is crucial for mental health.

We’re in an information universe, an information paradigm.

We’re on massive information overload all the fucking time.

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That’s all the more clear to me this week because I had migraines and brain fog during the two weeks that Trump’s administration was doing a massive “shock & awe” overload in order to bombard the media, confuse the Democrats, and overwhelm the system.

But that was only the trigger of the realization that it’s always been like this.

Beyond the bad guys and the mainstream media creating non-stop, overwhelming content––Bluesky just announced that they’ve reached 1 billion posts, after going public only a year ago.

One billion posts in a little over one year.

This has given me more clarity than ever––that on the necessity for sanity alone, it's not my responsibility to know what everybody thinks and what everybody feels.

I am under no obligation to process the amount of information that exists in this world.

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Essentially that means, YOUR worldview could be entirely valid. But it’s not MY job to validate you.

And this made me think: what if the fact that we feel compelled to respond to each and every person who crosses our paths is driving us a little insane?

And is, perhaps, even creating the seeds of a Civil War, due to the nefarious flame-fanning of our enemies.

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A month ago, I wrote a sort of random and obscure post on Bluesky that said:

In a world with 8.2 billion humans, you'll lose your mind trying to belong to a consensus.

There's no ground to stand on in the fluctuating voices of sycophants being carried where the wind takes them.

You'll only drift aimlessly until, at last, you find sure footing in the creative freedom of being.

It’s true that I didn’t explain precisely what I meant by this. And I didn’t expect many people to understand it.

It actually came from my observations - mostly on Substack Notes and Threads - that people really expected to reach consensus. They were looking for it. It was the language used in many of their posts (& nearly on every viral post on Threads).

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Every time I log into Threads I try to figure out what it is that I can’t stand about the type of language that’s being used there. And the only thing I could deduce was that people don’t express what THEY feel and let it stand alone as an artistic expression of their own unique being.

Instead, they make demands on other people, in order to reach some kind of consensus. Some kind of conformity.

Some kind of mass agreement.

As if everybody is trying to convince someone else to change, rather than express their own unique worldview as is.

But I have to be honest––what if this is the exact crux of how we got here?

Here in this current paradigm of Civil War between ideologies that always coexisted, but are now coming head to head.

And what if this Civil War was actually perpetuated by social media and by the premise that we should be changing people’s minds?

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A lot of this comes down to the idea that ignoring subjectivity makes a healthier world. This is perpetuated by academia, science, many schools of thought within philosophy––and even sometimes modern psychology.

For two decades, I’ve disagreed with this world view. Because, again, quite simply:

In a world with 8.2 billion humans, you’ll lose your mind trying to belong to a consensus.

Nobody understands things as you do. We’re all operating off of our own experiences and our own mental state. In philosophy, we call this our subjectivity.

Our subjectivity is our personal filter of the world around us. And we exist within it all the time. So every experience that happens objectively will be filtered through our subjective worldview before we can understand or acknowledge it.

Over the past century, many people have used subjectivity as an accusation. Even a synonym akin to bias.

This is a hill I’ll die on: your subjectivity is an inevitability, not a bias.

There is no choice to be subjective. And anybody who has an aversion to subjectivity, will simply create a series of denials.

They won’t inherently “beat it.”

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There’s no way to understand the world around us, without attaching to it the subjective perception that exists within us. Just like we can’t use language objectively. It will always be attached to subjective symbols of meaning.

To understand why this has such a profound impact on people, we have to understand that the human is contained within a subjective home.

We’re housed in subjectivity.

Our eyes absorb information via subjectivity.

The lens we process information through is subjectivity.

Our words, themselves, and the meaning attached to them are subjectivity.

Subjectivity is the beginning point of human consciousness.

And the idea that we can be “objective humans” processing “objective information” in this subjective world is completely delusional.

That doesn’t mean we can’t be rational or intelligent. It just means, all rationality and intelligence exists within a subjective consciousness. And trying to disassociate from that subjective consciousness only creates madness.

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It is the task of modern humans to be both aware of that fact––and also try to exist cooperatively with it.

So for the purposes of this conversation, let’s just say that subjectivity does not imply that you are wrong. It does not imply that you’ve somehow misunderstood the truth.

Embracing our subjectivity is just embracing the fact that we all possess a natural and personal filter based on our experiences.

And some people handle this better than others.

Artists and writers, for example, utilize their subjective expressions to create art that has deep, personal meaning.

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But embracing our unique subjectivity is also an inherent part of sanity.

To reject your own experiences, while seeking meaning would only create internal disconnects. Contradictions. Disassociations from your own mental states and emotional feelings.

Trying to remove subjectivity from subjectivity––will, overall, create a disruption of sanity and mental health.

And, in fact, it will also create conflict, abuse, and wars.

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“But you’re a philosopher” I hear some people thinking.

I’m with Nietzsche on this one:

It’s only those who see subjectivity as an enemy - rather than an inevitability - who will try to belittle the subjective filter that exists in all intelligent human beings.

Nietzsche was one of the few philosophers of his century willing to ignore the claims of objectivity from academic peers.

He wrote:

“Gradually, it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.

Also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown.

He wasn’t the first to see subjectivity behind philosophers’ intentions. Nietzsche also wrote:

How malicious philosophers can be! I know of nothing more venomous than the joke Epicurus permitted himself against Plato and the Platonists; he called them Dionysiokolakes. That means literally–– “flatterers of Dionysius.”

[A Sicilian tyrant whom Plato had tried for several years to convert to his own philosophy].

In other words, tyrant’s baggage and lickspittles.

In addition, he also wants to say, “They are all actors, there is nothing genuine about them.” For Dionysokolax was a popular name for an actor.

And the latter is really the malice that Epicurus aimed at Plato. He was peeved by the grandiose manner, the mise en scène (staging) at which Plato and his disciples were so expert.

At which Epicurus was not an expert––he, that old schoolmaster from Samos, who sat, hidden away, in his little garden at Athens and wrote three hundred books––who knows?––perhaps from rage and ambition against Plato.

It took a hundred years until Greece found out who this garden god, Epicurus, had been.––Did they find out?––

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Nietzsche didn’t run away from his own flaws, his own subjectivity. He found transparency to be the best method in philosophical discourse.

Similarly, from my first philosophy class in college, I knew (against the premise that was being taught to us) that subjectivity was not my weakness. It was my inevitability.

The inevitability that we all possess.

In order to be transparent and honest about what we think: we have to embrace the inevitability of who we are.

Rather than perform for others and create what Nietzsche called the “grandiose manner––the staging at which Plato and his disciples were so expert.”

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So now we return to the person who commented yesterday that I should leave people unblocked in the small hopes that I will change other people’s minds.

I responded:

For me, it's the opposite. I'm not interested in changing people. Or reforming them. As a writer, I'm just interested in saying aloud what someone else feels but doesn't have words for.

In a country with 335 million people, I'd rather find community than civil war.

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I hate to be the one who has to tell you, but the random person somewhere in the universe who doesn’t look at the world the way I do isn’t at the top of my list of concerns.

The person who comes across my articles or posts, who doesn’t resonate with what I’ve written, is the least concerning person who comes across my posts.

I understand why this person said what they did. It’s only that what they’re really doing is asking me to sacrifice my own mental health and space for some kind of “higher ideal”––that I may possibly reform someone.

I may possibly do a community service and change somone’s mind.

And I started to think, when was this ever deemed a community service?

And furthermore, is this the premise of our modern Civil War? That it’s our duty and obligation to change other people’s minds?

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In my view, we live on a planet with 8 billion people. I am perfectly aware that 7.999999 billion of them see the world vastly different than I do.

And because I understand that this is a 100% inevitability in a world of human beings who are, at the root, dictated by the whims of subjectivity, I’ve truly grown to craft my sanity somewhere amidst this truth.

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General George S. Patton wrote:

“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.”

He couldn’t be more right.

As far as I’m concerned, conformity is equal to performance.

The ONLY type of conformity that exists in this world are those who perform consensus. Not those who are 100% in agreement with things.

If huge groups of people claim to be in 100% agreement - they are actually intentionally performing for their peers.

And this is why my random post from a few months ago said:

There's no ground to stand on in the fluctuating voices of sycophants being carried where the wind takes them.

You'll only drift aimlessly until, at last, you find sure footing in the creative freedom of being.

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We all exist in a subjective house constructed on meaning from our own experiences and our own worldviews.

That’s not going away. And furthermore, in a country of immigrants - it’s even more inevitable that each generation has more and more life experiences arising in very unique situations.

Even from daughter to mother or son to father.

So, by default, we have our own personal “language.” ––At least, if we refer to language here as a symbol of personal meaning.

We’re always going to speak different languages to each other. The language constructed from our experiences.

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If we can find overlaps and commonalities in our meaning, then we can forge friendships and partnerships.

But if the languages have too little in common, and the language barrier (or meaning-barrier) is too wide, there isn’t really a point in continuing the conversation. It will likely devolve into a battle.

A lot of people don’t realize that. They continue to feel obligated to try to come to some consensus between strangers. Urging people to pave over and erase the differences in order to find conformity.

But I just wonder if this phenomenon was actually created and perpetuated on the internet in ways that it never existed in real life.

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I wrote last night:

It’s funny how, in person, we pass dozens, sometimes hundreds, possibly thousands of strangers per week without changing them or even TRYING to change them.

Before the internet, we didn't even think we should try.

When did it become our job to change strangers who pass us by?

And, more importantly, doesn't this only create more civil war?

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It is not your obligation to change a stranger’s mind.

It is not your obligation to “fix them.” To reform them. To force them to view things the “correct way.” At least it never was when you passed someone on the street.

So where the heck did we even get this idea from?

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I wrote a few weeks ago about how we misunderstand social media to be a public space, while behaving as if it’s a private space attached to our innermost thoughts.

There, I wrote:

The reason people are so antagonistic, protective, and possessive on the internet is because the internet actually isn’t a public space for them.

It is an extension of their mind. It’s a virtual space they hold within their imagination.

And every time they read a tweet, or a post, or a video that disagrees with their worldview, they take it as an intrusion of their private domain.

As if someone walked up to their house, opened the front door without permission, and started reading a conversion pamphlet aloud to them.

No public forum prepared us for knowing what everybody around us thinks and feels. It’s unsettling, terrifying, and uncomfortable.

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Is the fact that some people view the internet as an invasion of their personal minds seducing us into believing we have an emotional incentive to walk up to perfect strangers and demand that they change?

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I organized perhaps the largest march in Savannah, Georgia (which is inherently a small city) for Abortion Rights in 2022. And when the media interviewed me that day, they said to me: “For those who disagree with your intentions or beliefs at this march, do you have anything to say to them?”

That was the weirdest part of the march: people asking me to convince ‘the other side’ to change their mind.

My response to the media that day was to gesture around at the crowd of marchers and say: “The people here don’t all agree with me.”

I wanted them to know that I didn’t even ask for consensus amongst the thousands of people who came to my marches.

Photo by Michael Justiz, taken at our Abortion Rights March in Savannah, GA

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Consensus wasn’t the intention of my march.

Convincing people to change their beliefs wasn’t the intention of my march.

The very first amendment of the constitution claims that we have freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

But Roe v Wade fell under a premise of a religious concept. A premise that I neither believe in, nor even makes sense for my own spiritual worldview (I believe in reincarnation).

By asking me to change a Christian’s mind in order to exercise my own freedom over my body, they had inverted the entire premise of America.

I have no obligation to snuff out a Christian in order to exist freely in this country.

I reject that premise fundamentally.

And if I truly believed that it was now my task to wage war against Christians in order to win my own freedom, this absolutely would plant the seeds for a Civil War.

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So let’s be clear: it’s not now and has never been my job, as an American, to force my neighbor to see things the way that I do.

Consensus was never the point of America. We were never supposed to hold the same ideas to be true.

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It’s not my job to battle their worldview and change their mind in order so that I have the right to exist.

I wanted to exist in an America where my neighbor could privately hold a view and make choices for their lives… that I didn’t need to care or approve of.

So why should I ask my neighbor for their approval on when and how to have my own children?

I marched because I, myself, already had my mind made up. And I wanted to express my position.

But that position need not cancel out any other view. All of my neighbors are still free to hold their views and to rule their own lives.

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In 2022, I knew that standing confident and secure in my own worldview, whether others agreed with it or not - was actually an essential part of freedom and peace.

Confidence & security in one’s own worldview is the only place where multiplicity is free to exist.

If we require other people to change in order to make us feel secure;

Or if we require their validation or approval in order to possess self-esteem… then we will constantly create conflict.

A huge chunk of conflict in this world is motivated by the need for validation and consensus.

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What I knew to be true was that two people with different opinions does not equate conflict.

But two insecure people who need to change each other - will always and invariably create tension and long-lasting war.

And someone out there with nefarious goals is well aware that this is true. Fanning the flames of our differences, leading us to believe that we have to cancel each other out in order to, ourselves, exist.

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I wanted to live in an America in which my neighbor didn’t give a fuck that I disagreed with them. That no consensus was required of me. That I was free to live my life and hold my views as I wanted to.

But likewise, I was perfectly willing to give my neighbor that same distinction!

And if my neighbor was a peaceful person, this not need disrupt our lives all that much.

In a country with 335 million people, I'd rather find community than civil war.

I don’t view my position as a writer to be a battle between my opinion and others.

I speak my truth––one possible truth in the universe––because that’s who I am.

And it’s my job to represent that truth as transparently and securely as I can.

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If I, indeed, live in a free country, that won’t be a problem here.

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This isn’t only a matter of left vs right. During Trump’s first term, we know how often cancel culture took the internet by storm.

The problem was, cancel culture was not built on a noble premise.

It was premised on a wildly crazy idea that mobs can be a legitimate tool IF they’re righteously attacking “a bad person for holding a wrong view.”

And I ask, once again: in a free country, can it ever be legitimate to collect a gang of pitchfork & torch-holding mobs––as a tool to stop our fellow citizens from, what?

“Holding different opinions?”

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Yesterday, a neighbor who was born and raised in Switzerland asked me a hypothetical: “IF I thought the election was truly stolen, would I not storm the capitol as was done on January 6th?”

I said, “Listen. I don’t care about democracy enough to become the person who stormed the capitol on January 6th. If democracy requires me to become that type of person, or to have that type of malice and violence - then, Goodbye America. You’ll find me relaxing on a French Caribbean island, enjoying my dogs and my coconuts in peace.”

I’m not interested in being part of any Civil War. I’m not interested in violent mobs of any sort.

For any reason.

Not for some “noble defense” of democracy.

And not for any petty substitute.

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But there are philosophical reasons behind this. Remember, mobs are created by self-appointed “gatekeepers of truth.”

They’re looking for a false consensus that will never exist in a subjective human structure.

In my view, these mobs-of-consensus are in a war with subjectivity - and with freedom itself.

Since consensus isn’t a natural phenomenon––mobs that require conformity in order to feel secure––actually require performance.

They require people to be too afraid to share their unique views because they desperately want to fit in with the narrow culture created by “the gatekeepers.”

(And this is why Threads bothers me just a little bit).

But even in a public forum that encourages consensus, that doesn’t mean that people still won’t hold private views. It only means they won’t feel comfortable saying those views aloud.

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Do I think that a part of the far right backlash in 2024 was caused by the gatekeepers of liberalism in 2020?

Absolutely!

We all saw how it demoralized our own party at the same time as the opposite side was getting stronger and stronger.

And there have been many fallouts since.

A lot of people were turned off to politics and tuned out by that demand for singularity. That idea that we all have to agree, we all have to come to the same conclusion.

The idea that we all have to see things through a single lens.

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And considering that we’re inherently subjective - it's actually a kind of madness of sorts to believe that singularity is possible in a free country full of the most subjective creatures on the planet––human beings.

Many of whom were actually born in different countries to begin with!

We’re never going to see the world from the same perspective, because we all come from very different backgrounds.

By trying to force people to abide by a singular view, we’re basically saying, “I don't care about your experiences.”

And how, in a country of immigrants, are we going to create peace and cooperation by the premise, “I don’t care about your experiences?”

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But more importantly - I believe that cancel culture was fueled on a premise created by our enemies.

For over a decade, Russian bots and trolls have used keywords and search terms to target specifically divisive topics and fan the flames.

They showed up in what could have been normal conversations––saying absolutely ridiculous things––

Just to create combative responses and feelings of anger and frustration amongst everybody.

And it worked! They did it to me multiple times. And I’m sorry to say, I fell for it at least a few times.

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Listen, there are always going to be people who privately feel the way that they do in this world. And because you have access to their private feelings on the internet, you will know those things.

But unless you want to create George Orwell’s Thought Police, you’re never going to rob people of their private opinions.

It’s valid to focus on policy changes in government. It’s valid to work on our rights when written into policy.

But it’s not possible to walk around trying to police random strangers’ personal views.

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The foreign-led bots, unfortunately, know this. They know that trying to change other people’s private domains [their minds] is really an attack on their freedom.

And it can ONLY create civil war.

Freedom doesn't mean consensus.
Freedom doesn't mean agreement.
Freedom always allowed for disagreement.

Freedom means multiplicity.

So inevitably, invariably, if you have a country that includes a variety of people from different backgrounds, you are going to have disagreement and multiplicity.

And that’s the price of freedom.

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The past decade of social media culture has created a brand new phenomenon - an invention of conformity within freedom.

Somehow we’ve convinced ourselves and others (or propaganda, itself, has convinced us) that we’re living in a society that demands consensus.

And that it’s our moral superiority to bully and pressure others to change in order to prove our worth within this culture.

Once this premise was created, it led people to think that if they came across someone on the internet who they disagreed with, it was their right and their moral obligation to try to change their mind.

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But while the phenomenon of mob consciousness fades (as every fad does), there’s a quote that stands the test of time: “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.”

What the propagandists know is that by telling everyone to go around and bully people to change their mind - you actually only solidify that their mind is now resolutely made up.

What you have to understand about how subjectivity operates within the human mind: is that people make up their minds, by and large, via their own personal experiences.

A random stranger bullying someone against their own experiences is probably not going to change them.

But it can make them feel hurt and defensive. And possibly outraged. Or even turned off to the conversation.

Bullying people doesn’t change them. But it can make them tune out and close up.

Is it any wonder that the 2024 election had many Americans feeling unresponsive and listless?

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This is how suppression in autocratic governments work.

You don’t change people, you make them afraid to speak out. Afraid to express themselves and participate.

But there’s no guarantee that we become an autocratic government. Because the stage before autocracy is actually Civil War.

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Did you ever wonder why Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney joined forces - despite having completely different worldviews?

It was because they were both aware of the security vulnerability of the United States.

That our enemies had fanned the flames of Civil War for over a decade - making Americans feel foreign to each other.

United we stand, divided we fall.

Both Harris & Cheney wanted to put aside their differences in order to be stronger against our enemies.

Unfortunately, it seems like it was too late. Musk & Trump fanned the flames of petty differences and won the election anyway.

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But one thing we can glean from where things began and where they currently stand:

At the end of the day, trying to change people often makes them dig their heels in and become more resolute.

So after ten years of civil war propaganda, Americans are more divided than ever. And more certain that they have no commonalities between them.

Pressuring people to change is the fuel of Civil Wars.

While letting people peacefully hold their personal worldview - within their personal territory of freedom - is the only way to stop the fighting.

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Civil War forces people to think that it’s “us or them.” That we have to cancel eachother out. That we can’t co-exist. It has to be me or you––and one of us is going to have to die before the other will change.

For that reason, it’s a bit ironic that every time we come across another person on the internet who views the world differently - and we convince ourselves that it’s our “moral duty to pressure them to change their mind” - we both fail to change their mind––and we perpetuate our civil war consciousness further.

Part of that was instilled by bots who fanned the flames for over a decade.

Part of that was that our enemies understood something about our own psychology better than we did.

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What if the desire to change people’s minds––to demand conformity––alluring as it feels temporarily, is actually the very thing that is creating an ideological backlash in this country?

By demanding conformity, we get even less of it than we ever had.

Instead, we only fan the flames of division.

We instill stubbornness and resoluteness, instead of cooperation.

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Conformity is a losing battle that wounds people, but doesn't actually accomplish much.

If at the end of the day, people are still going to think what they're going to think. And we're just going to battle ferociously… then sure, maybe I'm going to wound you or you're going to wound me.

But for what? What's the point? What's the end game here?

Wounding each other is the only compensation. Certainly we accomplished no lasting change or peace.

And that’s what has driven me to block and avoid, rather than lash out.

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I’m not saying that my philosophy is the only thing that protects democracy or freedom (we’re in an overall much more complex problem right now). But I do know that by me desiring to exist in a single space that houses my view––

Desiring to exist as a singular representation of me––

Not as a weapon or a tool to cancel out other people’s right to exist.

But by me simply existing as I am. Here. In my space. On my side of the internet.

(Often behind a great big block list of people I don’t have a desire to fight with…)

Well, at least I’m avoiding humiliating, demoralizing, and putting down people.

Yes, I still disagree with a lot of people.

But that’s a given. Not an insult. That’s an inevitability. Not someone targeting you.

By me ceasing contact with people, I’m only saying we need to find our rightful places on different sides of the internet in order to maintain peace here.

Fighting isn’t going to get us to change. It’s only going to wound us both––for no valiant reason.

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Marcus Aurelius once wrote:

“How much trouble he avoids by not looking to see what his neighbor does or thinks––by looking only to what he does, himself, that it may be just and pure.

The part of the good man is not to peer into the character of others, but to run straight down the line without glancing to one side or the other.”

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In this world, it may take people lifetimes to learn that there is no humanity that can be conformed to each other.

Humanity and conformity are antithesis.

What you can do is suppress people.

What you can’t do, is make them identical to you.

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As long as you have humans, you’re going to have differences of opinion.

Conformity symbolizes triumph only in its ability to suppress differences on the surface. But certainly, you’re not transforming them.

In fact, it’s quite possible that you’re ultimately making things much, much worse.

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Questions For Discussion:

1. If we don’t have a moral obligation to change strangers, do we have a moral obligation to change ourselves? Our family? Our friends? Or our government?

2. Is there a way to create internet spaces that help us co-exist, rather than perpetuate needless war?

3. How much time should we spend on people who don’t agree with us? Is there a method for understanding when the conversation has reached a non-productive point?

4. How can we be more confident in our worldviews, so that we don’t see other people’s differences as a threat to our own unique ideas?

5. Can we create techniques, within our subjectivity, of finding common ground with people who come from a very different set of experiences?

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