Snowflakes, Edgelords, and the Prophetic Book of Mormon

How the story of the Book of Mormon prepares Latter-day Saints to recognize mutual radicalization

Photo by Darren Halstead on Unsplash

America is trapped in the vortex of a downward spiral of mutually-reinforcing radicalization. The far left and the far right take turns outraging each other, and then using that outrage to fundraise and sell ads. Each round leads to greater outrages, and the blast radius expands from the extremes, dragging more and more people away from a moderate, pragmatic, and even apolitical middle in a process of snowballing radicalization.

The weird thing about this dynamic is that, while the left and the right appear to be enemies, they actually depend on each other. The radical left serves the purposes of the radical right by providing a steady stream of provocative, true stories that the right uses as grist to stoke fear and anger in their followers, emotions that can be fairly readily monetized in an online world, and vice versa.

The superficial appearance of a bitter rivalry hides the deeper truth: what extremists on the left and the right are actually doing is cooperating with each other. They aren't enemies. They are de facto partners.

For Latter-day Saints, this is an extremely familiar dynamic because it lies at the heart of the main story told in the Book of Mormon. In a nutshell: a man named Lehi flees Jerusalem with his family before the Babylonian captivity. On the way to the Americas, a rift grows and widens between his older son, Laman, and one of his younger sons, Nephi. Nephi believes in Lehi's visions, but Laman thinks their dad is nuts and they should have stayed in Jerusalem.

Shortly after arriving in their promised land, Lehi dies. Not long after that Nephi flees–taking the family relics with him–and from that point on there are two groups: the Lamanites, who resent the Nephites for fracturing the people and stealing the relics, and the Nephites. Initially, the Lamanites are the bad guys and the Nephites are the good guys, but over the course of the next 1,000 years the morality (and lineage) gets confused.

Finally, in the closing pages of the Book of Mormon, the Lamanites and Nephites are locked in a murderous struggle to the death. By this point there are no good guys anymore. Although the bitterest of enemies, the two civilizations have become mirror images. Ultimately, they arrange a time and a place for the final battle, in which the Nehpites are exterminated and the Lamanites, having finally dealt with their ancient enemy, fall into civil war.

One of the most revered LDS intellectuals of all time, Hugh Nibley, wrote about this in an article called "The Prophetic Book of Mormon", noting that "The polarizing syndrome is a habit of thought and action that operates at all levels, from family feuds like Lehi's to the battle of galaxies," and pointing out that the Book of Mormon's emphasis on this "pervasive polarization" has direct relevance for modern Latter-day Saints, since Mormon (who compiled the record) was a prophet who saw the problems we would confront and curated his text to help us confront them.

The lesson, as I described it in one of my first serious blog posts, is as follows:

What Nibley observed about the polarity described in the final days of the conflict between the Nephites and the Lamanites was that it was a false polarity. With their words they drew passionate distinctions, but in their actions they closely mimicked each other. At every point in their downward spiral they mirrored each other and strengthened each other’s resolve, each taking turns outraging and offending the other. It is true that a single aggressor is enough to create the necessity of defensive action, but that’s not what is depicted as an endless cycle of revenge requiring ever more massive commitment from either side leading to a culmination at Cumorah, a culmination that was arranged by the two parties. Mormon sends a letter to the Lamanite king, the king agrees, and so they march off to the appointed place at the appointed time to finish together the terrible, awful dance they had begun so long ago. The war had been lost long, long before Mormon arrayed his surviving people for their final battle.

A couple of years later, I noticed a particularly strange manifestation of this "false polarity" in another piece about hypersensitivity and internet trolls. This was back in the early days of the successor ideology, the identity synthesis, or whatever we're supposed to call it when "trigger warnings" and "safe spaces" were just starting to permeate the public consciousness.

I pointed out that the left's adoption of a kind of stylized, exaggerated vulnerability seemed calculated to invite trollish behavior. And the right responded in kind, heaping abuse on "snowflakes". In case it's not obvious, I'm not blaming or excusing either side. My point is that, together, we get a kind of weird mutually antagonistic symbiosis.

Do you know what makes an exaggerated pose of vulnerability that much more persuasive? Some actual abuse. And do you know what makes an exaggerated pose of truth-telling iconoclasm that much more persuasive? Someone trying to suppress your speech. As I wrote at the time: "this replaces discussion with something like performance art". The snowflake left and the edgelord right weren't really arguing with each other. They were, instead, building the engine that would kick-start the cycle of mutually-reinforcing radicalization.

None of this was pre-planned or even intentional. Sure, I wouldn't be at all surprised if some folks, along the way, have figured out that as long as you're cashing out on outrage, you really need to keep the feuds as hot and loud as possible, but in general the coordination between the lefty snowflakes and the righty edgelords is functionally cooperative. This isn't a matter of collusion. It's just a matter of incentives. Calling out the other side’s worst behavior gets clicks. So does responding transgressively with your own bad behavior.

I wrote these posts (the ones I just referenced) in 2012 and in 2014. By the time Trump showed up on the political scene, I was prepared to recognize his entrance as one more gigantic escalation in the ongoing mutual-radicalization that had been slowly gathering steam for years, for decades if you looked for it carefully. In early 2016 I wrote a post in which I identified the left-ward shift of journalists dating to the 1970s and the rise of Rush Limbaugh as the origin of "a feedback loop of mutual polarization".

This 2016 post is probably the exact moment where I pivoted from identifying as a conservative to identifying as a right-liberal. As I wrote:

A two-front war is every general’s nightmare, but that’s what we have. As a committed conservative, I have two goals in mind. The first is to advocate for policies that I believe will make our country–and the world–better. I believe that all human beings deserve first and foremost the fundamental right to life, and so I am pro-life. I believe that free markets empower our economy at home and lead to poverty-eradicating growth world-wide, and so I am a capitalist. I believe that power tends to corrupt, and that corruption leads to misery and injustice, and so I support limited government. For these, and other reasons, I am a conservative. But I also believe that it is possible for decent, reasonable people to differ with me on these issues and/or to have their own legitimate agenda with their own competing priorities. And I believe that resolving the conflict should happen in a social and political atmosphere of tolerance, respect, and peace.

My fear, at the time, was that Trump was not some kind of singular distortion in American politics but, rather, just a continuation of long-running trends. If that was true, I wrote, "as bad as you think Trump is, there is room for things to get much, much worse if the underlying political dynamics don’t change."

This is what led me, with co authors Jeffrey Thayne and J. Max Wilson, to coauthor the Latter-day Saint Radical Orthodoxy Manifesto in 2020 where we wrote about a "polarization… driving members of the Church to spiritually dangerous extremes." As I wrote in a post describing the origins of the manifesto:

[I]n many ways, the struggle between left and right is illusory. They are not fighting against each other; they are fighting with each other in a kind of grotesque dance of mutual rage. Every offense justifies a new offense in retaliation.

Outrage is intoxicating. It is the lesson of the Book of Mormon, as explicated by Hugh Nibley (which I read as a young missionary in 2001), that gave me the anchor to resist and the lens to see the insidious pull of radicalization. My response isn't really about me. It's about my tradition.

In the same post where I explained the origins of the Radical Orthodoxy Manifesto, I cited an address by Patrick Kearon to Ensign College students rejecting polarization:

If we think of the poles on the North Pole and the South Pole, we think of them as freezing and largely desolate places,” Elder Kearon said. The climate there is freezing and inhospitable to the vast majority. The same can be said for the poles of social and political opinion. … Let’s move away from our poles, and come together and make peace.

In another cheerful 2020 piece, This Is How It Begins to End, I cited non-LDS Christians like David French and Timothy Keller, then my favorite Hugh Nibley article, and then current talks by Latter-day Saint leaders like The Culture of Christ (which argued that the culture of Christ must transcend all earthly cultures) and Love Your Enemies (which restated the Church's commitment to the liberal value of rule of law and suspicion of partisanship).

Of course many others–-both non-LDS and non-believers–-have spotted exactly the same dynamic of mutual polarization. The conclusion is not original. Not to me nor to Latter-day Saints. But "the prophetic Book of Mormon" with its story of a false polarity is an especially stark aspect of the Latter-day Saint tradition that may help us to be particularly able to spot that dynamic as it continues to wreak havoc in our civil society.