The Issue Is Not the Issue: A Complex Systems Approach to Political Discourse

• In Event: Incivility: Understanding and Fixing Disordered Discourse

Abstract

While political discourse can be one of the greatest assets of a nation whose foundational right is freedom of speech, it has in the United States and elsewhere become increasingly overwhelmed by contempt, anger, mistrust, alienation, and intensifying tribalism – sabotaging the ability of our nation’s citizenry to engage meaningfully with those of differing political perspectives, distorting perceptions, and changing us and our society for the worse. These dysfunctionalities have become especially prominent with the ascendancy of digital social media, and are at the heart of understanding misinformation and disinformation that further infect and undermine the national polity.

This paper treats complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory as a useful, potent tool for analyzing digitally-mediated political discourse. It argues that the tools and metaphors of CAS theory uniquely suit our crucial need to understand layers of dysfunctional discourse more clearly and the downward spiral that dysfunctionality imposes on the nation’s viability. A CAS approach to probing dysfunctional political discourse suspends attention away from civic or social issues underlying the conversation, and towards the underlying social mediation of the conversation. That social mediation of issues can become more prominent or influential than the issues that are mediated – a reversal that not only obscures and prevents meaningful debate about the issues but currently seems structurally guaranteed to worsen. It certainly spurs in political conversation a natural signal suppression (my weaknesses and my opponent’s strengths) and amplification (my strengths and my opponent’s weaknesses) but also creates a greenhouse for misrepresentation, misinformation, and outright disinformation. This deterioration of discourse inflicts a cost on society that is both astonishing and unnecessary and has so metastasized to have become an existential menace in its own right.

Interpreting political discourse as a CAS with certain definable and testable properties can expose latent patterns that fuel dysfunction and merit broader recognition and scrutiny. The paper positions established CAS constructs in a discourse context: a heterogenous population of autonomous agents (individuals and political groups) in dynamic if intermittent engagement with one another (in this context, through social media), in an ecosystem defined by rule sets for interaction (whether procedural and defined by media outlets, or emotional grammars discussed below), feedback loops (such as comment threads in social media, along with political developments), and self-modification of the overall system alongside discontinuous transitions (e.g., new polarization, narratives, elections, or other political events). The paper defines and introduces additional important constructs into the CAS interpretation of political discourse, including emotional grammars, discursive transactions, epistemic frames, parallax, and identity threats. With these constructs, the overall CAS interpretation enables a realistic, microgenetic focus on the mechanics of polarization and its escalation; and it incorporates emotion and cognitive appraisal theory as paramount to explaining dysfunctional patterns and to examining how individuals contribute to increasing polarization, especially including accusatory or hostile discourse. The paper employs parallax – discerning an object in one location suggested by light refractions, when it is really located elsewhere – as a metaphor to explain that both emotion and cognition are implicated in fundamentally misreading and responding to political discourse cues and thus in distorting feedback loops that escalate acrimonious dysfunction.

The paper argues that the cumulative effect of parallax-impaired feedback loops not only damages political conversation, but degrades it into conditions whereby each side (for example, left versus right) holds convictions that the other side poses existential risks to the nation. CAS theory helps explain why those convictions can become self-fulfilling: adaptive systems adjust and modify agents (humans and political factions) within the system to make them more aligned with the system. People trend into divergent polarities that intensify misrepresentation, create layers of misunderstanding, and shroud the ability to summon collective wisdom required to face national shortcomings and challenges.

The paper’s complex adaptive system framework seeks to organize myriad factors of political discourse in a novel, constructive, and holistic manner. It describes current empirical and published quantitative research on epistemic grammars in political conversation using discourse analytics. It proposes recommendations motivated both by real-world reconciliation commissions in war-torn countries and by the field of cognitive behavioral therapy to pursue what has been called an emotional reset to the conditions of conversation in the national polity.

Author

• Eric R Hamilton, Pepperdine University