Lost Someone to Their Politics?

A name comes up or you catch their post on a feed and you feel the door in you swing shut. You'd say you'd lost them to their politics and I'd like to ask you something before you let that stand as the whole story. If that person collapsed tomorrow would you go to their funeral? Most people if you ask them would say yes. They'd grieve and they'd stand at the back and something in them would break a little bit. Which means the word lost is doing work it hasn't earned.

Someone who'd still come to your funeral and you to theirs is not lost to you. So look again at what actually happened and at who did the losing. Now I'm not here to relitigate the politics. I'm not taking sides on a position itself and I won't name it. I won't weigh it. What I'm interested in is the pattern and the shape of a rupture like this because in a great many of these stories the shape gives away something the participants can't always see.

You say you can't talk to them anymore but can't is rarely true. You could pick up the phone. What you mean is that you won't pay the cost of contact with a person who won't be changed by your opinion and that's a more honest thing to feel and say. But it's a very different thing from I can't and the difference is where this particular episode lives and notice what their politics or their political position has come to mean.

It's almost never a tax rate or a policy mechanism or a position on some technical or obscure question. It's what you now believe they would let happen to you or people like you if it came to it. The disagreement got translated somewhere along the way into a verdict about their character at the deepest possible level. What they'd permit, who they'd sacrifice and that translation feels like clarity but often it's just the cover story.

For almost all of human history you couldn't leave the people you came from because your survival ran straight through theirs. The same hands that drove you mad in the evening were the hands you needed at harvest in sickness in winter so the bonds outlast a disagreement they had to. You could despise your brothers every opinion and still stand beside him at the harvest because leaving wasn't an option a body could afford.

Now we've quietly dismantled all of that. Our bonds are largely emotional now and they're held together by feeling alone and a bond held by feeling alone can be put down the moment the feeling sours at no material cost to us. We're amongst the first people who can simply walk away from each other for free and freedom that cheap does something to love that nobody warned us about and we were never prepared for. So let me put the uncomfortable possibility to you.

In many of these ruptures the politics didn't cause the ending it permitted it maybe it caused a quickening because because if politics can break a relationship the relationship was already thin already a duty an obligation that you'd been carrying without quite admitting that you wanted to set it down and it was something that ran on history and guilt more than on any living warmth. And then the politics arrived and handed you something you'd been missing for years a reason to leave that no one could fault you for including yourself a blameless exit a righteous one you didn't end a friendship or a relationship out of coldness you took a moral stand you took the high ground and that's a story you can now live with the other story the truer one in these cases is much harder to say out loud there's a sentence underneath a lot of these estrangements the one almost no one will let themselves finish.

I've wanted distance from this person for years and I never had a reason wholly enough to take it there was nothing there that I could justify walking away that's the reckoning that the politics let you skip because wanting to leave someone simply because the bond was empty feels like a failure of love a thing to be ashamed of but leaving them over what they believe feels like a moral virtue it feels like integrity so the belief becomes the alibi for a desire you couldn't otherwise justify and the tragedy isn't that you left sometimes leaving is right the tragedy is that you never had to find out which thing you were actually doing it helps to be honest about how many of our relationships are actually carried by warmth and how many by inertia a lot of the people in your life are there because they were always there the relative that you were born next to the friend from a version of you that ended 15 years ago the bond that kept going because stopping it would have required a reason and there was never a good enough one these are not bad relationships not exactly they're just relationships nobody ever re-chose and they run on history and a relationship running on history alone is a quiet low-grade obligation you've been paying without examining until something gives you the virtuous grounds to stop paying that's the kindling the politics is only the match think about how this looks from the inside the inherited belief that to love someone is to share their values that the relationship is a kind of mirror and the closer the reflection the more real the love once you believe that a deep difference doesn't read as only a difference it reads as desecration the mirror has now cracked and a cracked mirror feels like a broken bond and because politics has absorbed so much of what used to be sacred became the place we keep our sense of good and evil now but other places emptied out a political gap lands with a force the actual stakes could never justify you're not reacting to a policy you're reacting to what feels like a moral defilement of the bond itself that forces very real and it's exactly the force that makes the politics such a convincing cause and also conveniently a perfect cover the way out of the confusion is to pull apart two questions that are fused into one the first do I object to this person's politics the second do I want this person in my life now those are genuinely separate questions and you can answer them in any combination you can find someone's views appalling and still want them at your table you can agree with someone completely and still want them gone from your life but when you let the questions stay fused answering the first lets you skip the second entirely you get to say it's about their politics and never actually face the truth which is I don't want them in my life or just as often never face I do still want them and I'm throwing it away over a proxy separate the two and you actually have to choose that's harder it's also the only honest way through there's a deeper thing here too and it's about you more than them a self that can only stay bonded to people who match it has never actually been tested as a self it's only ever been confirmed if every person you keep is a person who agrees with you you've built a life of beautiful mirrors and a life of mirrors will tell you you're real without ever once having to prove it love that needs sameness to survive isn't love of a person it's love of your own reflection wearing their face so it's always worth asking it's very valuable to ask these sorts of questions in the grief are you mourning a human being who is in fact still alive and still reachable on the other side of a phone call or are you mourning the reflection of yourself you used to see in them and can't see anymore lost was never the right word and their politics was for a lot of us never really the reason somebody's still there the question is whether you'll let an opinion stand in for a decision you'd rather not make in the open keep them or release them but do it is the actual thing it is picture of the name one more time the door you closed then ask the two questions separately and very slowly and refuse to let the first one answer the second you may find you object to everything they think and still want them in your life you may find you want them gone and it has nothing to do with politics at all either way you'll have done the one thing the easy version let you avoid you'll have chosen as yourself in the light of truth if anything in this episode made you want to explore more of what you just heard i've made it very easy for you to do so in the show notes there's a link to access a book called before approaching the threshold which is the gateway into this work alongside this you'll also receive free 14 day access to the atlas an intelligence trained on everything written and recorded in this body of work and it's there to think alongside you on whatever you're actually sitting with both are free to start and as i said the link to access them is in the show notes this was michael laurier and you're listening to the architect speaks