One of the harder things to realize is that the loudest voice of any given thing is an idiot and should be ignored. Part of the problem is we had this asinine campaign to give everyone a voice as if they didn't already have one, but ultimately the incentives of the attention economy or the engagement economy is that we respond to feelings instead of information. It's time to be the adult in the room and tell people with strong feelings that they aren't allowed to have an opinion until they get past their emotions into the real work.
Humans Communicate in Feelings
It's worth stating that everyone has feelings and those feelings are important to have, work through, and communicate about. The human animal is a social ape, and we have strong bonds to maintain and assist each other with. That's good work to do, and having the social skills to build that support structure for yourself and be part of that for others is very important to a happy life.
A variety of things we think we do logically we are doing emotionally and don't want to admit it. Purchases are emotional. We think we need to eat, we need to get new pants because the old ones are ripped, we need this lawnmower to of course mow our lawn. It's not that we don't need those things, it's that they are emotional first because that's how humans operate. Any dive into the psychology of diet, fashion (even those that don't care about fashion are engaging in this thinking, yes), or local community will quickly make it apparent these are purely the emotional activities becoming manifest. No purchase starts logically. Even the word "need" or "want" is emotional.
Many things humans do are like this. Before we evolved language we communicated feelings other ways. Now that we have, much of our effort is to pretend we're better than the animal we are.
What Strong Feelings Actually Mean
Any parent knows tantrums. Any parent knows incredibly powerful emotional displays and has to manage them for another person. Many don't do the work, sure, but no parent is unaware of it.
What many parents don't know is that a tantrum isn't actually meaningful. It's just emotions out of control, a spiraling of the mind into a frenzy. What changes as an adult is that we latch onto something about which we attach the emotion we started with. Perhaps someone said something that upset us. Perhaps someone is espousing a political position that we think is terrible. The problem is us, not the thing.
That's what strong feelings actually tell us: it's all about us. Our feelings are the thing we're expressing because we can't talk about the thing itself. It's not separate from us, we have an identity with it, and we're focused on the identity instead of the thing. It means we actually can't communicate about the thing.
Feelings are Invalid
I had an ongoing quip that Lorna (my wonderful wife) didn't appreciate for many years. "Your feelings are invalid" is a summation of a provocative idea, that in this space feelings are in the way of the truth, in this conversation how we feel is ignorable. This is hard to swallow, but it's actually well known and supported by everyone.
A surgeon is discouraged from operating on a family member for conflicts of interest and emotional bias. A surgeon is also desensitized to gore, but I think the word "desensitized" is wrong. The surgeon has learned where feelings matter and where they should be set aside. While operating on a dying patient, they may joke around with the other operating staff. They may make light of the situation, they may take it utterly seriously, but their feelings will be diminished regardless. That's the important part.
We can do another example that's more visceral. In any emergency, the person calmly and authoritatively leading is the right problem solver to deal with that emergency. It's hard to calm down a riot, obviously, so after someone has caused the panic, the reins are harder to establish, but anyone who can get those reins and navigate toward handling the situation is the one without the strong feelings being communicated at all.
That's what it means that your feelings are invalid. Feelings are for your friends and loved ones to help you work through. Here, in this surgery, this policy discussion, this business deal, feelings are invalid. They're there, for sure, but they will not be expressed or listened to, especially if they're strong.
Strong Feelings are Worse
Strong feelings are even more damning. If you have strong feelings you'd like to express about a political thing, it tells us two important things about you. First, it tells us you haven't done the work to understand it and the space around it to reach out to others that don't share your position. You haven't done the work to know not that you're correct, but what the downsides are or how others believe themselves to be correct in spite of your perspective, and how to communicate to those positions with the appropriate community feeling. The other thing it tells us is that you should be ignored. Again, not by your friends and loved ones, that's what those social bonds are for. The value they bring is helping you work through those emotions, express them appropriately, and master yourself.
No, you should be ignored because your opinion is poison. It is based on emotions that have no bearing on the substance of the thing you want to talk about. Maybe it's a work policy, maybe it's a celebrity statement, maybe it's a news event, it doesn't matter. Your opinion isn't valuable even if I share the position you took up, because it could be that your mother is a tyrant, but a tantrum ruins the credibility of that statement. You must stand separate from your feelings, tall and immovable. Throwing yourself on the ground, even metaphorically, and screaming violently just dismisses your ability for anyone who knows what they're talking about from respecting your position. It weakens your position, because it says that you yourself are weak in controlling your emotions.
That may be harsh, but that is the reality of humans. If you saw a 30 year old man throw a tantrum in a grocery store, you might naively believe you should have compassion for him and try to help. What you will not in any way do is respect them as an adult who can express themselves, because you are already making them a child in your mind and making up for their lack. Why would you listen to them on anything of importance to you?
The Caveat
There is one instance where strong feelings are very important to all manner of policy and debate, and that is if the majority of people feel something in response to a given thing, that is the expression of the social contract, not a person. If a group has strong feelings, that's not enough, the majority of the group needs to feel the same for largely the same reason. That's good signal.
That said, it's difficult to know that, because activists try to speak for groups and they're very loud and they have a large number of people with them that are also very loud. It's easy to mistake that for a large representative statement, but it usually isn't. The majority is never loud. We think we have a lot of counter examples, but we don't. There's a few here and there, but even those are going to be hard to distinguish from group tantrums in most cases. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to find exceptions to this, but even some of the greatest "movements" of the last thousand years have really just been a handful of people with power making an excuse for what they wanted to do anyway.
That doesn't mean it's not possible, it just means if you have something that 80% of the group would vote for (even if it's not a political thing, like if 80% of people at the bar would vote to kick someone out, even for the wrong reasons like he wears a suit or something, the signal is still there and important). We should listen to it because even if policy is against it, the social contract isn't. That can be harrowing, or just times changing, or leadership being out of touch with their people. I've seen it at companies and hobby groups, it's not a political thing. It's a human thing.
What we need to understand here is two things. We need to do the work if we want to move past the "feelings" stage of our positions on things we believe to be important. We need to do the work of understanding the rest of the positions with empathy, especially if we detest them. Problem solving is harsh work. In addition to that, we need to ignore the tantrum throwers, especially the eloquent ones. They're poison to us all.