Ethan Renoe's Blog

The past few years on my birthday, I’ve been out of the country. 

Two years ago, while I was in Jamaica, my mom and grandma broke into my condo (with their key) and hid cute handwritten encouragement slips of paper all over. 

The next year I was in Mexico for my birthday, and they broke in while I was gone and filled it with balloons. 

This year, due to the explosion of Crumb Hill and my lifelong affinity for creepy things, my mom broke in and hid these little skulls everywhere. 

And I mean everywhere.

I keep opening random drawers and finidng them. Or I have people over and pull out a board game for us to play, and boom — inside the box is a little skull. I laugh every time. She even hid one under my shower drain, so the next time I pulled it out to clean out the hair, sure enough, there was a skull underneath. 

So as they get found, I don’t know what to do with them, so I kind of just leave them all over now. There are dozens of these little skulls all over my crib. And today I was looking at one and realized that one day, that will be me.

I will just be bones. 

And now that’s likely all I will think of as I see these little memento mori’s scattered all over the place. So my house has become a place of goofy reflections on death, which I’m sure was not my mom’s intention when she hid hundreds of skulls all over my pad. 

It’s not a bad thing to reflect on, especially whenever I find myself becoming complacent or comfortable. They now prompt me to ask myself, 

Is this the life I want? 
Am I who I want to be? 
Why am I standing in place?

Ask yourself the same things.

So with zero sarcasm whatsoever, thanks, Mommy!

e

The post how my mom’s funny birthday prank reminded me I’m going to die. appeared first on ethan renoe.

Extreme trigger warning.

For one of their album covers, the Norwegian metal band Mayhem used an actual photo of their vocalist after he had ended his own life with a shotgun. The guitarist had found him and took some photos before calling the police. The late vocalist’s stage name was Dead, and he was obsessed with everything dead, dying and decomposing.

The band took off in the 1980’s and 90’s, with the suicide happening in 1991. Somehow, this did not end the band, who still performs and puts out new music today.

Back in their heyday, Mayhem would try to weed out their crowds, separating the metalhead posers from the real fans. They would open a show with 300 folks in the audience and end it with 50. Because in the first song, they would toss real pig heads into the crowd, or spray animal blood on them.

(Ironically, this reminded me of some of the times Jesus would seem to intentionally shrink His own crowd of followers, getting it back down to just the ‘real fans.’ Why? Because in John 6, He tells them that they must eat his flesh and drink His blood. Jesus, the OG heavy metal star.)

—

As I’ve written about before, people often can’t wrap their heads around a pastor and theology major who also runs a horror project online. How can a Christian make such dark stuff??

Well, aside from the fact that my world has no death, violence, gore, nudity, or demonic stuff….we live in a dark world.

Cops know this. So do paramedics on ambulances and other first responders. Missionaries in countries where they still have witch doctors and human sacrifice certainly do too.

The rest of us just get to conveniently avoid all the heaviness and darkness happening in the world all around us daily. Wherever you are in the world, you’re not that far, geographically, from some really dark, disturbing, terrible goings on. All you have to do is ask the next police officer you see.

We just have the convenience of distracting ourselves with Target runs and commercials that promise the squeakiest of comfy suburban lives, where everyone smiles with perfect white teeth, and God is not there.

I used to wonder why the Bible says in numerous places that “God dwells in heavy darkness.” Shouldn’t God be in light??

Whenever people ask how I can make horror and love heavy metal, I want to ask them what Bible they’re reading, because mine can handle far more than all that. It is exponentially more disturbing than anything Mayhem could produce.

—

The story of the band and the album cover plagued my mind all day yesterday, which I capped off by seeing the new film Weapons, which was phenomenal, but also heavy and dark.

During my nighttime jog afterward, this was all weighing on my mind. What does the dark and heavy stuff have to teach us about God? Why does learning about Dead’s death—and his lifelong fascination with the darkness—make me strangely hopeful?

For one, I think Dead saw something the rest of us miss. Don’t get me wrong, I think he was terribly twisted and pained from traumas in his childhood, and should have received better help than he did. But perhaps he also sees the world more accurately than many of us. After all, every living thing on earth will die—a fact most of us prefer to avoid. The world is a terrifying place.

But second, I realized that if I’m going to believe in this Jesus person, I have to believe that He wouldn’t be scared off even by the metal band Mayhem. Or the film Weapons. Are not all those creative folks made in His image, just like you?

If you’re a Christian, you must believe that yes, Jesus could indeed visit even the most dark and twisted parts of humanity, from the Gulag, to the Nazi concentration camps, to the animal blood-spattered Mayhem concerts. It doesn’t mean every Christian needs to visit, or even dwell there, but they have to acknowledge that it all exists. We worship a God of the real and the honest, not the fake and the imaginary.

We humans may try to scare God off, but it won’t work. Many moments may feel utterly God-forsaken, but we have not managed to come up with something so awful that He leaves for good. The world keeps spinning. You may read stories like this and feel hopeless and heavy and dark, but remember, this has been happening all along—and God is still here.

In many ways, I think God is nearer to the tortured singer Dead than He is to the cheesy commercial presenting an aesthetically perfected humanity. God’s closer to the atheist philosopher Nietzsche who wrestled with God, than to the happy-clappy praise music that pretends nothing is wrong (and contains usually at least one heresy).

Which one is more honest?

—

It’s important to close with one last note.

In John 11, Lazarus has died. Jesus’ response is not to stay away from the yucky death stuff and avoid it. Jesus does three notable things: He goes toward Lazarus in his tomb. He weeps, showing that even God is absolutely devastated by death. And He calls Lazarus out of the grave, showing that there are indeed things more powerful than death.

Even Psalm 18, which mentions God wearing darkness like clothes, later says that ‘my God turns my darkness into light.’

God is not afraid of the darkest parts of humanity.
God is not afraid of your darkness.
But God will not leave you there.

e

The post the God of the heavy & dark appeared first on ethan renoe.

Questions for Mr. Ethan Renoe from Chaklunsky Visti

How did it all begin? What was the first image, word, or sound from which Crumb Hill was born?It began with me just experimenting around with Midjourney, and I quickly came up with the idea for a fictional town where all the scenes take place—Crumb Hill.And tell us — is Crumb Hill a real town in the United States, or your own invention?It is a real town in rural New York, though I’ve never been there, and didn’t know about it until after I started the account. So it was initially from my imagination, but happened to be a real place too!I live in Odesa, and Putin is trying to kill us all. Sometimes, one really does want to move somewhere — even into an imaginary town. Do you think Crumb Hill would suit me as a place to live?We welcome everyone, but once you come, you can’t leave!How would you describe Crumb Hill in a tourist guidebook? What sort of town is it — in mood, inhabitants, strangeness?It’s very damp, but the people and most of the beasts are good. To learn more about the inhabitants, grab the new book, a guide to all of them!And how many are employed in the manufacturing of skloz’kozhvaly sepulka-beasts?I’m not sure what this means….Who has inspired you? Perhaps David Lynch? Howard Lovecraft? A radio show like Welcome to Night Vale?
To me, Crumb Hill feels like the graphic novel Arrival by Shaun Tan — and like one of my own nightmares, in which the same town reappears again and again.I was mainly inspired by your nightmare. I haven’t read/heard/seen any of the others. Which AI tools do you use? Midjourney? ChatGPT? DALL·E? Runway?Midjourney and KlingWhat matters more to you — full control or the unpredictability AI brings? This question was crafted by AI itself — it was very eager, hence the awkward phrasing.I’d say 70% control, 30% randomness.Crumb Hill looks like you took old photographs from the 1930s and filled them with monsters. Why this particular aesthetic? Was it a conscious choice?I think there’s something especially spooky about vintage, old things. An old house will always look scarier than a brand new house. Probably because it houses more ghosts. New things haven’t had time to gather enough ghosts yet. That’s probably why horror films are just now starting to have 80’s feels: that era is now old enough to acquire ghosts. (c.f. It Follows, Stranger Things, etc.)Do you create both the texts and the visuals yourself?I write all the book text with zero AI. I make all the visuals with the aid of AI. But no other humans are involved. Though many gracious people have sent me their music to use in the videos!Lovecraft often wrote: “horrific, blasphemous, indescribable beings…” I’d say Crumb Hill is what he never dared to put into words. Did it excite you too — the whole thing where you had to imagine all those creatures in Lovecraft’s stead?Yes, it’s always exciting to come up with new images, videos and stories!Do you want your creations to become a household name — like the Cronenbergs from Rick and Morty? So that people would say: “Oh God, I dreamed of some chukhni from Crumb Hill last night.”Yes, that would be amazing!How do your books sell? Do people buy them? Have you ever held a signing in a bookstore? Who are your readers?They sell on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and most places online you can buy books! Lately they’ve been selling well, as more and more people discover Crumb Hill, and I’m so grateful! Seems like my readers are basically anyone interested in spooky stuff; the biggest fans also get the humor of the project too and comment funny things, because they GET the idea!What’s the strangest question you’ve ever been asked?This one. Jk, probably all the people who think Crumb Hill is demonic or satanic, despite there being no gore, no violence, no spiritual or demonic things, no nudity, no rituals, and I have three degrees in Christian theology.Your books will likely reach Ukraine in about ten years. But their eerie reputation has already preceded them. How would you advertise them to a Ukrainian reader?I am not familiar enough with Ukrainian culture to say for sure! Maybe something about the foggy, old-school aesthetic being similar to some images I’ve seen from Ukraine?What truly annoys you about AI?Sometimes it just doesn’t get what I’m trying to get it to make, no matter how precise I am in my descriptions.Are you familiar with Ukrainian artist Borys Grokh?
His most famous piece is “Russian warship, go f… yourself.” But he also paints strange creatures — wild, predatory — that simply wander through city blocks, staring silently, not attacking anyone. It feels as though the two of you dreamed the same nightmare.
Which artists or writers feel like kin to you — like you’re dreaming in the same world?I don’t know him! I really don’t know, to be honest. I try to make it as original as possible!Is AI a threat to artists, musicians, designers? Or is it a useful tool in the hands of those who already build new worlds?I think it’s comparable to what cameras did to painters: did they eradicate the need for painters? Or did they simply create a new form of art and visual design?Writer Daniil Andreev once said that after death, a creator enters the world they imagined.
How does that idea strike you? Would you want to remain in Crumb Hill forever?That would be interesting! I would hope to have more color.

e

The post 19 Questions about Crumb Hill appeared first on ethan renoe.

Recently a friend made me watch the first Terrifier film, and I’ve never regretted anything so much in my life.

I’ve been a fan of spooky things as long as I can remember. In high school, I’d spend free time writing spooky, weird stories. But there have been some things I’ve seen that were so unnecessarily over the line with gore and violence and torture that they jacked me up. I went through a phase of trying to be as jarring and intense as possible too, with many stories containing graphic violence and gore.

But I had mostly moved past this phase in late 2023, when I started Crumb Hill, a little town out in the middle of nowhere, filled with monsters and hooded figures and monsters and more! There’s a place called The Dimension, where you don’t want to get sent, and where the monsters typically come from. It was an Instagram page at first, with pictures and captions that built the lore around the town.

I wanted the pictures to be as horrifying as possible, with captions that either added to the history, were spooky and mysterious, or were laugh-out-loud funny.

Now that it has been taking off and hit 50k followers across platforms, I’ve ironed out more of what I want Crumb Hill to be, and one goal is that it will be a ‘clean’ horror world.

After watching the first Terrifier film and then reading about the two sequels, as well as handfuls of other horror films that have messed me up in the past, I’ve decided that that level of gore and torment is unnecessary.

It is possible to get genuine fear and intrigue without being so horrendously gory and violent. This is what I want to achieve with Crumb Hill: A world that not everyone can stomach — not because of gore or violence or nudity or profanity — but just the pure terror and spookiness.

There are many paths to fear besides violence, and I want to explore them:

Putting things where they don’t belong, or connecting creatures that shouldn’t be connected. Monsters. Framing things in ‘the unknown’. Plus playing on people’s general fears of deep water, heights, clowns, dark woods, creepy children, hooded figures, and so on.

It will force us to get more creative! I want it to be scary and engaging enough for adults to authentically enjoy, but also for a parent to feel comfortable sending their teen to see in the theaters (if it hits that point!).

I laugh when people comment on how ‘demonic’ or ‘satanic’ Crumb Hill looks, but they’re really just commenting on the aesthetic. As a Christian myself, I know that Crumb Hill is far more tame than the Bible is when it comes to gore, torture, sex, et al.! hah! That doesn’t mean we need to engage in more of it and fill our minds with that sort of thing.

(For more on why horror is an essential element of the Christian faith, read  this post )

So thanks for joining in this journey of exploring the many paths to fear! We’ll be taking the paths that avoid violence, gore, satanism, demons (but still having some spiritual elements…we live in a spiritual world after all!), nudity, sex, and profanity, because there’s already too much of that in the world and we don’t need to add to the heaviness! We can find horror without its disturbing elements, and have fun along the way!

Thoughts?

e

play the games, buy merch, read the book, all at www.crumbhill.com

The post Why I started an (actually scary) clean horror world appeared first on ethan renoe.

when Gramms had her hip surgery,
it wasn’t good, craft coffee,
a single-origin light roast pour over,
ready for me in the flickering fluorescent waiting room,
it was the bad stuff,
the burnt and cheap and stale stuff
that kept us awake.

when we shot across the deserts
of America in the middle of the night,
fleeing to California for the winter,
it wasn’t the third-wave shops
open at 2:33am to keep us going;
it was the gas station pot
sitting out since noon.

the good, craft coffee is good and delicious
and marketed well.
it’s cozy.
it’s a man who’s never had dirt under his nails.
it’s someone who is nice at you but a little pretentious.
but the bad coffee, the real stuff,
the stuff that tamed the West beside open fires,
ready in bus terminals and hospitals and break rooms,
as black and burnt as Gehenna,
of questionable origin —
keeps the world spinning like a top and shows up
like a vigilante.

e

The post in praise of bad coffee appeared first on ethan renoe.

We’re 1.3 months into 2025, and statistically most resolutions have been abandoned, if not outright forgotten. All the talk of resolutions is pretty exhausting for the weeks before and after January first, and my goal is not to beat the colloquial horse even more. 

This year I came up with a different idea: Instead of goals or resolutions, I came up with five rules.

These rules don’t have any goals attached to them, but inevitably—because of what they restrict, encourage, or forbid—they will get me closer to where I want to be. 

The problem I’ve always had with goals or resolutions is that they are aspirational, or hopeful. Like, Yah, I hope to get there or accomplish this, but there is no daily instigation driving me in that direction. 

Another way to put it broadly is, my goals were to Save money, Eat healthier, and Spend my time more productively. But instead of stating those as broad aspirations, I came up with daily rules to guide me toward getting closer to those three areas. So my goals were:

No eating after 10pmNo eating out aloneNo TV or movies aloneNo buying anything I don’t needNo spending money on alcohol or sweets (parties and gifts OK)(Bonus goal) Make a podcast, a video, and a blog every week, and write book #12 in 2025.

So you can see how those would help daily nudge me toward the three broader goal areas. 

And I have built-in grace too, so that if I break one of the rules once, it’s not over and I give up. For example, last night I was busy until 10pm and couldn’t even eat dinner until 10:30 so of course I let myself eat dinner without guilt. The rule was more to prohibit needless late-night snacking.

If I’m traveling, the rules may become more flexible as well. But the way my mind works, having these guides installed in the back of my brain like bowling bumpers to constantly bump me back in the right direction has been super helpful. They have pushed me toward having better habits and being more productive. 

For example, if I was out and had a spare hour, I’d often drop into a thrift store to burn time — not because I needed anything, yet I’d always end up buying a couple things I didn’t NEED before. But no more!

The one that has made the biggest impact has been restricting my TV intake. I would come home after the gym and eat dinner while watching something. But dinner takes 15 minutes and an episode is an hour, which often becomes a second episode…… and so on. So now my dinner takes 15 minutes and then I’m back to being more productive or reading a book, etc. 

The resolution focuses on the end, while the rules focus on how you get there. 

Plus, many resolutions require a lot of motivation to conjure up and make happen. Rules like mine put boundaries on things I’m already doing, or restrict them in healthy ways. You won’t need to come up with 365 days of motivation, you just need to abide by the rules you make for yourself.

For my brain, that just clicks better. 1.3 months in and my rules are still very much in play for me! And it’s not too late for you to come up with some rules to guide the rest of your year! 

Let me know what you think of.

e

The post Forget New Year Resolutions. Try New Year Rules. appeared first on ethan renoe.

For 33 years I took my health and fitness for granted. Until about two months ago, when I rolled down into a core extension exercise and it felt like someone had lit my pelvis on fire.

“Nope,” I said.

I hadn’t felt anything like that before, but assumed I had just pulled one of the myriad muscles tangled up down in that region. So I waited a few days and sure enough, it didn’t go away.

A week passed but the pain didn’t, so I decided to have a doctor look at it. He touched the area and said, “Oh yah, I can feel it!” Over the entire duration of the hernia, I never once felt it. There was no bulge or hole. I have no idea what he felt, lol. But he did.

This led to another doctor who scheduled the surgery and it was scheduled for a month out. I moped and complained about the entire thing—how I couldn’t lift very much, and I couldn’t run and my actions were all very limited because of this little thing.

For those who don’t know—like me, until two months ago—a hernia is a little tear in the abdominal wall. If it’s big enough, your intestines may push through in a little bulge. One girl who I mentioned the surgery to said, “I hope your hernia removal goes well!” I laughed because it’s not removed so much as patched with a mesh net. Again, I would have said the same thing three months ago. So now you know!

Anyway, I griped and bemoaned my situation. I saw fit dudes running on Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube and burned with envy. Were they doing anything extraordinary? No, they were going for runs—something I’ve done for decades.

All of a sudden, I realized how much I adored running, how much I took it for granted when I could do it. But now that life was over and I was an elderly man, crippled by a hernia, I would never feel the sweet concrete beneath the soles of my shoes.

Was it a month of dramatic complaint? Yes, of course. Have we met?

But it really made me realize just how much I had always taken for granted, particularly in the area of fitness and activity and all.

I began grilling myself, How could I ever skip the gym or stay inside for a run while perfectly healthy?? Why would I ever have done that?

This whole post can be summed up in the old adage, “You don’t know what you have till it’s gone.”

And fortunately for me, this hernia was a very temporary and un-serious setback for two months. But it became two months of being reminded just how great a healthy, pain-free body is. Two months of wanting to move and run fast and push myself and sweat.

So the day after Christmas, bright and early, my mom drove me to the hospital and they knocked me out and patched me up. Recovery was simple, and now ten days later, I’m mostly pain free and back to normal, just with two more bellybuttons.

I still can’t work out at max capacity (I’m only allowed to walk and bike), but I have never been so excited to hit the gym hard and push myself and sweat and go till failure. I can’t wait to pound the streets with my running shoes and feel the euphoria of exhaustion that descends like a blessing afterward.

Would I have this gratitude and drive if it weren’t for the hernia? Most likely not. I probably would have been pacing through the same stale cycles as before. Before I had the longing to get after it.

So I’m grateful for that little tear in my abdominal wall, reminding me just how good I have it and how hard I should push it.

New year, new me, new abdominal wall.

e

The post I’m glad I got a hernia. appeared first on ethan renoe.

Two of my close friends have something in common. They are both very messy. I love them dearly, but their houses look like Cocaine Bear went on a rampage — first on Amazon, buying everything in sight; then in the house after it all arrived.

Both homes seem to be on a pipeline from Amazon, receiving odd home goods, kitchen gadgets, skin products, bathroom inventions, electronic innovations, newer pillows, storage hacks, clothes, athletic performance gear, etc.

One of them told me once, “I like to have some nice things sitting around the house, so when dates comes over, they’ll notice and infer things about me. Leaving nice things around is like dropping hints about the type of person I am.” The friend pointed out an electronic toothbrush standing on its charger, which would highlight good oral hygiene. It stood on a maxed-out counter full of soaps and perfumes and hair products and lotions and a million other things that actually prevented the bathroom from looking ‘nice.’ (My interior design inclination is toward minimalism and hiding as many of these things as possible!)

The mindset of these friends, in other words, is that ‘adding more nice things to their homes will make them nicer.’ You can see the logic. 

More nice things = More nice home.

In reality though, subtracting many of the things from their homes would actually make them appear far nicer and more comfortable to guests. Subtracting many, many things…….

I realized that this is true, not only of the interiors of our homes, but the insides of us. While I may not be guilty of a messy home, I am certainly guilty of a cluttered soul and mind. I often think that adding just the right podcast will cure me, or one more book will be the magic fix I’ve been looking for. It always seems like it’s out there, just the one more magic thing that will finally be it. 

But nothing we could add to ourselves will ever be the solution. In his book Forty Days to a Closer Walk with God, Christian contemplative writer J. David Muyskens wrote,

Spiritual growth is more about subtraction than addition.

Most of the great spiritual practices are matters of subtraction, not addition: when one fasts, they subtract food; in silence, one subtracts noise and distraction. When Jesus was in the desert for 40 days, He modeled both! And when we imitate this annually in Lent, we practice giving something up rather than adding something in.

Maybe this is why Marie Kondo blew up in popularity a few years ago, because she had actually tapped into the ancient notion of joy through stripping away.

Perhaps what you need, like my friends’ houses, is to remove some things rather than to add. Maybe you need some more negative space, some more unfilled margin. Some more silence. 

I operate the same way about productivity: I need to always be outputting, or else what am I doing with my life? But what if the purpose of life is not to be as productive as possible, but as present as possible? That would require some subtraction.

If our days are so chock full of stuff, how on earth is God supposed to speak into them? More space is needed.

Maybe you don’t need to add more things to improve your life; maybe you need to subtract.

e

The post subtraction, not addition, is the key to the spiritual life appeared first on ethan renoe.

I’ve taught through Psalm 1 several times and each time, it’s just like taking a bath in wisdom. The first verse shows a descending progression. There are actually three progressions happening simultaneously, but one is from wicked people to sinners to mockers/scoffers. I used to be puzzled by that last category; how could a scoffer be worse than a wicked person?? Why is that what it builds up to? Are the people who laugh at stuff the worst of us all?

Later I realized that the laughter is akin to that of the Joker; when someone has lost sense or ability to even reason for morality; all evil or ethics are just a joke. They cannot be rescued because it’s all funny; evil is funny. Sin is goofy.

Humor makes evil more evil.

A while ago, an artist pointed out that a dab of blue makes white look more white, like a cleaner sort of white.

But interestingly, a dab of blue added to black makes the black darker. It makes it look like it’s even more black.

How can the same color make something look both brighter and darker?

Today at my senior care center, I went to visit a sweet old man named Merlin. I walked into his room and found a nurse feeding him breakfast. They both looked up and Merlin said, “Oh he’s here to pester me! This is the guy that comes around to pester me!”

Initially, I was stung for a moment, thinking, why wouldn’t he introduce me as the person who comforted him through his wife passing, or has read scripture with him? But then I smiled, realizing that the humor he added to our conversation was a sign that he liked me more and we were getting closer.

You don’t joke with people you don’t like, or don’t know very well.

The humor made the sweetness of my ministry even sweeter. It made the goodness gooder.

And we all know that humor is good. And it takes a second for us to realize that humor can sometimes be bad — that we can avoid depth, or desensitize ourselves, and so on.

Humor is like blue — it can make the evil more evil by desensitizing it to reason or rationale. It can rob us of depth or attunement to right and wrong.

But it can also transcend the heights of goodness. The blue of humor makes the highs of life higher — no one would want to be at a good place in life but never laugh.

God gives us the blue paint of depth and height.

Maybe it’s also a reminder that life is not black or white; perhaps it is blue.

e

Day 100 of 100 Days of Blog

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They’re not monsters….

Yesterday I read a post on Instagram that stuck with me for several hours — enough to make me return to it to comment that evening.

It was a very typical post for a leftist/liberal type person. (I won’t cite it verbatim because I’m not trying to blast one side or the other. I don’t care which direction anyone tilts)

She addressed her post on the first slide “To the undecided voter.” Then employed a metaphor of choosing a doctor: Suppose you have two doctors. The first is well qualified, respected by their peers, has a good surgical track record, and no malpractice lawsuits. The other has numerous malpractice lawsuits, no respect from their peers, and no history of practicing medicine.

Which doctor are you choosing??

It was a very thin veil.

And it would absolutely not convince any undecided voters either way, though it did receive a full standing ovation from the comment section — people who already agreed with her. Aka, not-undecided-voters.

It bugged me that her post received such laud, despite the fact that it clearly preached only to the choir of her peers and had no nuance or even a remote understanding of people who see the world differently than her.

It had no understanding of how the fact that Trump is seen as an outsider to politics is actually a positive, because he’s seen as a disrupter of a broken system. He’s not a politician like his ‘peers.’ It made no mention of the lies or shortcomings of the first ‘doctor.’ Etc.

In effect, it treated undecided voters like myself as if we were stupid. Like,

Oh gee, I can’t believe I didn’t look at it like this! Yah, I should vote for the first doctor! She’s perfect and the other one is terrible!

Now, I know it sounds like I’m ripping this poster apart, but Conservatives have their moment in the crosshairs coming, because both sides are equally guilty of seeing opaquely exactly side of every issue. Neither side takes a moment to think that the other side could possibly have a modicum of reason for thinking the way they do.

So one thing I commented is for her to Google ‘ideological Turing test,” an idea I encountered recently. Just as the Turing Test attempts to see whether an AI bot can convince a reader that it’s human, the ideological test does something similar, for humans with differing ideologies. It asks whether a Democrat can convince a reader that they are really a Republican, or vice-versa.

Basically, the test took hundreds of people and they would be divided into four categories:

Republicans defending why they’re Republicans;
Democrats defending why they’re Democrats;
Republicans trying to convince the reader they’re really Democrats defending their views;
Democrats trying to convince the reader they’re really Republicans defending their views.

Make sense?

Then, anyone on the internet can take the test and see if the latter two categories were successful in sounding like their ideological opponents. You just vote on whether you think the paragraph is Real or Fake. Does the author actually believe what they are writing, or are they pretending to be the other side?

If you can convincingly defend the other side, then you probably have a better view of how they see the world and can at least better sympathize with their perspective. The girl who wrote that Instagram post would have miserably failed the ITT, like some of the prompts who had outlandish representation of their opponents. For instance, some Democrats pretending to be Republicans wrote things like, “I love guns and beer and just want my freedom to do whatever I want.” They had a caricature of those who believed differently than them, and it was obvious they had never really had many conversations with their ideological opponents, or listened to diverse news sources.

Again, the same could be said of Conservatives who call others snowflakes or libtards. This gross mischaracterization is a two-way street! And it is not helpful!

I thought the idea of this Ideological Turing Test was brilliant. If someone can’t adequately represent both sides fairly, then they show their hand: that they are victim to an ideology. They only get their news, wisdom, ‘facts,’ and views from one-sided sources. You can tell when someone is neck-deep in Fox News and the Daily Wire, OR MSNBC and CNN.

This is different than the person who reads a lot of diverse sources and thinks through an issue from both sides. Who listens to Ben Shapiro and then Ezra Klein. Who weighs pros and cons of both, does their best to get an accurate take on an event rather than a one-sided, spoon-fed narrative, and then decides to lean toward the Conservative side, or the Liberal side.

This person still ends up in one camp, but it was after taking both sides seriously.

And that’s an art form that needs to be resuscitated in our country. There’s so much shouting with our earplugs in that we don’t even consider that the other side could possibly be reasonable or moral.

That’s what was lacking in that Instagram post, and why it annoyed me so much: She wrote as if the answer was so obvious that anyone who disagreed with her was like someone going to a malpracticing doctor who wanted to kill them. It was evident that she had never taken the other side seriously.

And for the third time: this is just as true of countless Conservatives as well. It’s not a one-sided issue, it’s a human issue.

So ask yourself honestly, could you pass the Ideological Turing Test? Could you convincingly argue for the other side? If not, chances are, you haven’t humanized them enough to see why they may think the way they do. Or maybe you haven’t been exposed to thinkers (not just soundbytes) from their sphere. Maybe you’re just listening to echoes bouncing around your own bubble.

I’m not saying you need to change your mind or vote differently. But I am saying you need to take both sides seriously — there are brilliant people voting both ways. And you need to love your brothers and sisters across the aisle. We are all humans with imperfect knowledge just doing our best.

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Day 97 of 100 Days of Blog

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