Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk by Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke is one of my favorite books of all time. I’ve read it three times, and Brandon reached out to me to see if I wanted to give away some copies. I think this is a must-read book in today’s crazy climate of polarization, dog-piling and ruining people’s lives. So, I said, “Heck yeah! Let’s do this.”
We’re giving away 5 free copies to 5 different winners! Read on to learn how to get two entries in the giveaway.
My relationship to this book
Not to be extra, but this is one of the books that helped save my sanity and possibly my life.
In 2019, I was canceled. Since getting sober in 2012, I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life trying to help others with their mental health. My addiction almost killed me and could have left my son fatherless. But today, I live an amazing life, and I just wanted to pass that on to others through my personal experience and all of the books I’ve read on mental health and addiction.
I had a meteoric rise on YouTube, which resulted in growing my channel to over 100,000 subscribers within about a year. Then, it all came crashing down.
I made some missteps, but I was helping thousands of people, and we had an amazing community where people supported each other. Then, people started making YouTube videos about me accusing me of things that I never did nor said. But that didn’t matter.
The videos with false information about me got millions of views. Within days, I had hundreds of thousands of strangers piling on me and saying the vilest things. They tried to ruin my life, and they even started threatening my mom and harassing my girlfriend.
I’ve never come so close to relapse in my 10 years sober, and I was legitimately suicidal.
This is an experience I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, and it’s difficult to explain to anyone who hasn’t gone through it. I felt extremely alone, so I did the only thing I know how to do: read and educate myself.
I wanted to understand what was happening to me and why people would do this. Why would people pile on me like this after all the good I’ve done? Why would they believe misinformation where there was zero evidence?
Most importantly, I wanted to understand how people morally justified what they were doing. Even if I did what they said I did, how could they justify what they were doing while still feeling morally superior?
Fortunately, Grandstanding by Warmke and Tosi was released the following year and really helped me understand what was going on.
It’s been over three years since I was canceled, and I still have it coming back to haunt me, and I spiral into deep depressions. When it happens, and I just can’t understand, I reread this book as a reminder of how and why people abuse moral talk. I also remember why it’s important that I don’t abuse moral talk and trigger the cancelation of others.
If I’m being honest, it happened again recently. I haven’t been writing or making YouTube videos because I’ve been extremely depressed, and it’s why I read this book again to regain some sanity. And I’ll write about this a bit more in the near future.
This book is extremely important, and I wish I could give everyone a copy. But, since I can’t do that, I got the next best thing, which is giving away 5 free copies.
How to enter
To enter, all you have to do is be subscribed to my substack. Best of all, it’s completely free.
Want a second entry?
For a second entry, follow me on Twitter @TheRewiredSoul and retweet my tweet announcing the giveaway. Do that, and you’ll have two entries into the drawing to be one of the 5 winners.
Deadline
The entries will end 11/8 and I’ll announce the winners in the following days!
About the book
We are all guilty of it. We call people terrible names in conversation or online. We vilify those with whom we disagree and make bolder claims than we could defend. We want to be seen as taking the moral high ground not just to make a point, or move a debate forward, but to look a certain way - incensed, or compassionate, or committed to a cause. We exaggerate. In other words, we grandstand.
Nowhere is this more evident than in public discourse today, and especially as it plays out across the internet. To philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, who have written extensively about moral grandstanding, such one-upmanship is not just annoying, but dangerous. As politics gets more and more polarized, people on both sides of the spectrum move further and further apart when they let grandstanding get in the way of engaging one another.
Drawing from work in psychology, economics, and political science, and along with contemporary examples spanning the political spectrum, the authors dive deeply into why and how we grandstand. Using the analytic tools of psychology and moral philosophy, they explain what drives us to behave in this way and what we stand to lose by taking it too far. Most importantly, they show how, by avoiding grandstanding, we can rebuild a public square worth participating in.