Obedience and the R-Word Mind Virus

The disturbing proliferation of this one unpleasant word says more about the state of society than you might know

My initial problem was that I didn’t know whether it would be more distracting to actually use the word or to avoid it. Which tactic would detract from my point more than serve it?

Ultimately I don’t think it will matter too much. You’re going to see it in a bunch of screenshots and you can already see it inside your head simply because I’m talking about it. How about this: I won’t type it out any more times than is necessary, but by way of a trigger warning or content advisory notice or however best to say it: You are going to see this word.

You may think this is a strange topic of discussion just a couple of weeks after the Elon Musk did a sieg heil at the presidential inauguration of a man who has expressed fondness for Hitler. Why would I spend any time at all on the R-word? Well, you actually just answered your own question. The fact of it being seen as no big deal is the point.

First, let’s talk a bit about slurs, and censorship, and self-censorship.

There are a lot of ways in which we talk about or around words without saying them. In a practical sense, this is absurd. There are a number of methods of euphemism that lie on a scale of obliqueness: From “The (first letter)-Word” to replacing most of the letters with asterisks, to replacing just one of the letters with an asterisk, or if you really want to make damn sure everyone knows what you’re alluding to, replacing one or some of the letters with stylised versions of that same letter.

Mother Goose & Grimm

To be explicit, what is really the difference between Retard and Ret@rd?

The paradox is that you’re trying to hide the word for courtesy sake while making it as absolutely clear as possible which word you’re referring to, for communication sake. There is no way to do both of these things.

The fact is that true censorship isn’t the reason we do this. It’s not a practical consideration. It’s a courtesy consideration. It’s something much closer to why you cover your mouth when you yawn or say “excuse me” when you belch.

Ideally we wouldn’t even need to allude to words that cause harm or distress, but we inhabit a world in which offensive things exist and people use them, and we need to be able to describe that world without amplifying its harms more than absolutely necessary. If you’re talking about Pewdiepie having one of his notorious heated gamer moments and you’re telling someone about what he did, it’s just preferential from a human decency perspective to say “Pewds yelled the N-word” than to match him syllable-for-syllable even if the mental image it evokes is identical.

I still think it’s absurd to use some letter-replacement trick if you are directly calling somebody something. I mean, the ideal scenario is you take your dear gran’s advice to heart and say nothing, but if you absolutely must, then I think you should fuck around with your whole chest before getting to the business of finding out.

That said can we agree that there’s something so absolutely fucking childish about this:

Matthew Yglesias, everyone’s favourite both-sides-have-a-point guy, Substack’s most popular “Stay Calm and Keep to the Centre” pundit, is attempting a funny, here. Look, I see what he’s going for, he’s making fun of the people who call other people that word by saying “actually, it is you who that word describes, and now that you’ve made it okay to say it, I can use it against you!”

I don’t hate Matt Yglesias. He’s a technically skilled writer whose opinions I find roughly 60% “fair enough I guess” and only 10% “dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” But a comedian, he ain’t. If you view this through the comedy lens that I’m charitably applying to it, it’s not really skewering the type of people who type this word in full. What he’s doing is mocking a certain type of person for one behaviour by using the fact that he kind of agrees with them about a different issue.

The replies to his tweet from his fans should help clarify.

Noah Smith of the cleverly titled Noahpinion blog is another generally inoffensive centrist freelancer who I know next to nothing about but he doesn’t seem to be a piece of shit. He doesn’t seem to have any huge controversies hanging over his head. I don’t think I would have ever heard of him if not for the fact that he’s often mentioned in the same breath as Yglesias, and part of my research for this piece was to investigate the usage of this word by this specific type of person, and well…

This is Noah Smith’s favourite word. He uses this word like he breathes. Noun, adjective… I’m sure he’d find a way to use it as an adverb or a conjunction or a pronoun if he could. He yells it instead of “achoo” when he sneezes.

Here’s the thing: Most cases of generally otherwise inoffensive people using this word only tend to spring up over the past couple of years. It’s not even a Trump era thing, it’s a second round Trump era thing. The types of people who enthusiastically voted Trump three times for the most part have never cared about open slurring on the internet (I wager they’re a lot more careful about it offline though) but the way open season has been declared on it lately is new.

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Bluesky?

Dave Rubin, in contrast, is someone who uses the word in every other tweet as though he’s got some kind of app on his phone that warns him if he’s about to post something without it…

…but Rubin is a piece of shit, if you’ll excuse me for insulting the intelligence of shit, so it’s easy to believe that’s just regrettably one of the twelve words that fit in his vocabulary. What feels new is seeing actual semi-respected journalists taking up the call.

I said semi-respected. You don’t see Bob Woodward busting it out. You don’t see Jake Tapper and Lester Holt yukking it up at the news desk like a couple of frat boys. No, the types of writers slinging this around are of quite a familiar class…

By and large, it’s the Pollux crew. And when you see the pattern you start to kind of get a sense of why it’s happening.

People aren’t merely imagining that this word is experiencing a resurgence. People have noticed enough to do studies and found that it’s a true phenomenon.

Unsurprisingly, once again, much of the blame can be placed on Elon Musk.

Musk has never been shy about using it but recently it has become one of his favourite words of all time. The most famous human being in the world still needs the type of attention that the troubled kid in the back of the class making fart noises in his armpit craves. And as we all remember from classroom politics when the alpha dickhead says something that gets attention all of his dickhead minions will quickly follow suit.

Anyone over 20 or so will know that the politics of this word have changed in the public perception over a relatively short time. Short enough that the shift occurred during the course of my career, and I’m only middle-aged. I clearly remember during my time with Cracked when the comedy staff began a conscious project of de-R-wording the archives. I can honestly say that there was never any mean-spirited, downward-punching intention behind the use of the word in comedy, and we certainly wouldn’t have used it against someone who was genuinely intellectually disabled, but in retrospect—something that we could have realised earlier with some deeper thought—that’s just the same weak and nonsensical argument you’d use to defend calling a straight person the F-slur. Arguably, maybe, even worse than directing those words against their primary target, because by using them as casual insults against people they don’t apply to you’re more directly demonstrating why you think it’s bad to be a certain type of person.

Still, it’s only within a couple of decades that the word has been truly taboo—it might surprise you to learn that “mental retardation” was still the proper clinical term for intellectual disability in the United States up until the passing of Rosa’s Law in 2010—and I think that goes a long way to explaining why this word is the trial balloon. It’s fresher.

Recently NY Mag wrote a long feature covering the youth of MAGA world. While it’s often said in a semi-serious manner that right-wing kids just want to be allowed to say slurs, it’s something that is explicitly stated by an interviewee here.

You have no trouble accepting this from a bunch of private school nepo children of politicians and lawyers, but why would journalists be jumping on board? Two things that journalists ostensibly possess—a code of ethics and a vocabulary—are both appreciably absent from the resurgence of the R-word.

Consider this: It’s actually just an extension of the Great Capitulation.

There is absolutely no question that major media has been engaged in a contest of spinelessness in the face of the far right’s historic power grab. Ranging from mere favourable coverage to bribes disguised as court settlements, traditional media and social media have been falling over themselves to prove their loyalty, for two main reasons: It’s great for ratings, and there’s an element of survival instinct in the face of a President who has vowed to litigate the first amendment into nonexistence to destroy media figures he dislikes, and his deputy (or master?) Elon Musk, who has vowed to wholly dismantle and replace traditional media with something in his own image.

And, as usual, it is the most invertebrate of the independent journalist class, the real elites, the opinion-for-hire, go-with-the-breeze Twitter Files types who are most eager to leap on the slur-broadcasting “yes, boss” train.

It might seem like too small a thing for me to be claiming there’s some sort of method in this, and it might not even be wholly conscious, but how do you describe this kind of behaviour if not as some sort of virtue signal? I mean for people who view a lack of empathy as a virtue.

Elon Musk does. Musk, who is almost certainly some kind of prescriptive sociopath, frequently describes empathy as a “suicidal” emotion, a term he cribbed from a white nationalist psychologist/Dollar Tree Jordan Peterson named Gad Saad.

To Musk and the rest of the tech oligarchs, humanity at large is nothing more than a math problem. A complex system to be solved and engineered. In this view, the social engineers and the political authoritarians share a common enemy: the people’s tendency to collaborate and organise, a tendency that is driven by empathy and viciously opposed by the kind of Ayn Rand derived libertarian philosophies that dominate much of Silicon Valley.

There is no slur word—as far as I know, no word of any kind—that you’re not actually able to say in the United States. It’s a pretty important amendment, so important that they made it the first one. It even comes before the one that says you can own infinity guns, that’s how important it is. Nobody was legally or physically prevented from saying this or any word at any time during any of the non-Trump presidencies. Thee is nothing about that that changes with Trump’s re-election. There many be social consequences for saying these words, but that also doesn’t change. Trump is powerless to alter that, as per that same amendment. It is objectively and demonstrably false to claim that you’re “now allowed” to say these words, or that you weren’t before. This new proliferation, this fad, this contagion, only makes sense as viewed as a virtue signal. It literally cannot be explained any other way.

It’s kind of funny and kind of ironic here that another term Musk frequently uses to describe empathy—a “mind virus”—actually applies more readily to the proliferation of open slurring as a way to signal obedience to the regime. Put aside how cruel it is and think about how weird it is.

How weird it is for random, open, petty, forced, and deliberate cruelty to spread like a contagion online. How weird it is for people to eagerly put out this signal no matter how awkwardly they have to work it into a sentence like they’re painting lamb’s blood on their doorframes. How desperately they’re trying to compel each other to comply and obey. How weird is it that this guy says he’s proud of Matt Yglesias for saying the word?

Make no mistake, this is a trial balloon. The recentness of the R-word’s entry into the lexicon of utterances outside of common decency is the only reason that it’s the one being tested out now. It’s the canary in the coal mine. The worst thing for us to do right now is capitulate and abandon our empathy. Don’t let it slide and think “at least it’s not the N-word,” because, first of all, then you’re ranking people according to who is more acceptable to slur against, and secondly, if you let this one go then soon it will be the N-word.

Or many other words. And then it won’t just be words.