A Mason's Work

So next in our sort of dark rhetoric series of episodes is the idea of tone policing.

And so when you are in a conversation, particularly one that gets kind of emotionally heated or

has a strong emotional investment, you will hear people get upset, right?

They will say things with a ton of emotional content.

One of the things that the master sort of manipulator will do to essentially kind of ruin that conversation in a lot of ways is attempt to police the tone.

And they will say things like you will want to manage your tone here, you are getting emotional.

Or perhaps we're all too emotional here and we're not going to be able to move the conversation forward.

They will essentially do this in a way to assert a couple of things.

First, by essentially delegitimizing anybody's emotional sort of responses in the conversation, you are flattening the conversation and

removing a ton of perhaps information data about what people are experiencing in terms of the suffering that they face at the hands of some of these opinions that might be coming out or some of the conversation that might be occurring.

They will also essentially in doing this work to control the conversation and abstract it from from the impact.

And by doing that, you essentially create this perception that you are automatically the authority in the space by telling everyone else to basically calm down in the conversation.

You are elevating yourself as some sort of third party impartial judge of the conversation.

And in doing that, any opinion you might have now has more weight because you've been given that social authority role of being the person in charge of the conversation or in control enough of their emotions to essentially be able to control the rest of the dialogue.

But this is subversive as well because what it does is it essentially is a cheat to to hijack the conversation out of the place where it's perhaps, you know, difficult but useful and move it to a place where you are essentially acting as an arbiter or somebody's acting as an arbiter of the conversation in a way.

Again, that they may not have the sort of moral standing to do so.

This is part of a technique to delegitimize people's participation in conversation so that you can effectively maintain that control, maintain the status quo, perhaps do all of the conflict of avoidance stuff, right.

And get out of the overall conversation.

So when you see this, when you see people tone policing or trying to do that kind of stuff, what you want to do is is understand that while they may be uncomfortable, that is in many ways, their problem.

Right. So you're allowed to have an emotional response. You're allowed to express that response. Anyway, you see fit. You're not free from the consequences of that emotional expression at the same time as it arises.

You can acknowledge it. Say, listen, I am heated because this really hurts or I am upset because this is really caused me a lot of anxiety or what have you.

And in that process, allow the emotional content to exist alongside a reasonable and rational conversation as well that does not diminish either of those things.

When when somebody is uncomfortable with this, you know, the sort of counter position here might be, listen, I'm sorry, you're uncomfortable with the emotional content of this conversation.

But it's irresponsible not to acknowledge the fact that I feel this or they feel that and those feelings are equally legitimate, even though it may not directly apply in its entirety to the rational conversation.

As you work through this stuff, as you see it come up, just be mindful. And a lot of cases where, you know, you may have this, this sort of person who wants to assert this emotional control over you in a conversation.

You know, you can reposition the conversation to a different party. You can find these alternate strategies and there's, I'm sure there's several, we might be able to explore to essentially get around some of this kind of tone policing stuff.

And as we go through the rest of the dark rhetoric series here, you're going to find that a lot of these are just essentially projected insecurity from the person who's applying these techniques.

And if you find yourself applying these techniques, I would encourage you to go and evaluate the places where you feel perhaps less than and how that's showing up in the way you interact with others.

We'll get over more and more of these and over time. You'll find that these kind of techniques become great pointers for how you might pursue some self development.