During my junior year of high school, I was a member of the student senate, and we were deliberating about the need for more parking near campus. During the 90s, we were still in the era where kids found freedom through cars, and everybody who could get one, had one. The only problem was that there was not a lot of parking available near campus.

But one of the thoroughfares that abutted the school, Race Street, was wide and had ample room for two-way traffic and another lane of parking on the school-side of the street. The city council, however, was not willing to allow this, suggesting that adding parking there simply wouldn’t be safe.

This caused a bunch of us kids to go to the next city council meeting to create “good trouble” with a substantial presence while some of our more eloquent peers made their best pleas. The last one to speak, Chad, a sophomore, approached the desk where speakers were to sit as they gave their pitch, only he didn’t sit down.

Instead, he grabbed the microphone and said, “I’m not going to sit down because I’ve heard this chair is dangerous. There’s no evidence that it is, nobody has ever reported being injured from sitting in it, but there are still people who believe that they will be injured if they sit in it.” He paused and stared at the city council members, waiting for his cleverness to settle over them.

With a few final sputters of rebuttal, the council relented and conceded that nobody had ever been injured on that section of Race Street, and in fact, there hadn’t been any reported automobile accidents in the vicinity of the school because of the reduced speed limit and dense surrounding residential neighborhood. We students got our parking, and with it our perceived freedom. I can only assume Chad is a successful lawyer somewhere now.

Be careful – it isn’t safe to sit there. (Image retrieved from here and comes courtesy of Plastic Lines.)

So, the other night I’m having dinner with a friend and his son, a 24-year-old college graduate, about to start a master’s program in education so he can become a high school teacher. God bless him.

We were talking about the state of higher education, and I was musing about some of the common narratives and recent attacks on academia by the Right, and specifically that of the supposed indoctrination campaigns that happen in classrooms across the country. To be clear, I’m sure this does happen in isolated instances with a handful of activist professors who have misinterpreted their core job duties. But these are instances of the proverbial ‘exception that proves the rule.’

I work at one of the most left-leaning public campuses in the Southeast, stocked full of liberal professors. Having been here for almost a decade, I know of no credible accusations of indoctrination from any student about any faculty member. Now, some faculty are certainly guilty of buying into the culture war issues du jour, but that is less a case of indoctrination than one of unbridled idealism.

I shifted from my concerns about the state of academia to the television series everyone has been raving about recently, Adolescence. In it, there are a few scenes that discuss the “manosphere” and Andrew Tate, specifically its/his effect on impressionable boys and young men, something my friend’s son agreed was a real problem in his own social circle.

And at that moment something clicked for me: if anyone is being indoctrinated, it’s those who have been sucked into the orbit of these noxious platforms and its “influencers” – for what is an influencer in today’s moral economy if not an indoctrinator?

Young men came out strong for Trump this last election, and that was in no small part due to the influence of the viper pit on the Far Right, including the alt-right, white nationalist, Christian nationalist, QAnon, xenophobes, misogynists, and conspiracy theory peddlers across the social media dungeons of cyberspace.

But as this very thought rattled through my head as I sat across from my young dinner guest, I realized that I was only perpetuating the cultural divide through my reductionist and dismissive categorization of those who get sucked into this orbit.

My classmate, Chad, would’ve said that we need to control the narrative without casting blame or engaging in the vilification of the people we seek to win over. He didn’t accuse any council member of ignorance; he didn’t even attack their ideas. He simply produced a simple and indisputable thought exercise that demonstrated why the dominant position was off base, inviting those whom he hoped to convince of his position to cross over in their own time. And they did.

To address this social problem, we need to recognize that we’re amidst an instance of “Moore’s paradox”: that it’s much easier to admit that you were wrong than that you are wrong. Any argument intended to win over people – and especially young men in the orbit of the manosphere – must provide an easy exit from past thinking deemed detrimental to society to future thinking that benefits democracy – and be available and accessible to each individual in their own time. This won’t lead to a sea change per se, but perhaps a slow shifting of the tides if we allow for this possibility.

It’s all about messaging. If you control the narrative, you control perception. But you can’t seize control of the narrative, you must earn it. If you won’t meet people where they are, then they won’t give you the opportunity to win them over.

This matters at the macrolevel (society), the meso-level (higher education), and at the microlevel (perhaps our field, but more specifically the students we engage with every day). But ultimately, this is about leisure – the manosphere is an attempt at the intentional reordering of the spaces of leisure for a generation of boys and young men. This inverts Chad’s thought experiment – in this instance, we know the seat is dangerous. How do we encourage them to find somewhere safer to sit?

Marco Esquandoles
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