Recognising that someone is hostile to you is itself treated as the hostile act.
Anton states it as "the enemy calls you its enemy for recognising its enmity". The move converts a description into an offence: the objection to being treated as an enemy becomes the proof of enmity, so there is no form of words in which the objection can be made. He adds a variant in which predicting a consequence is treated as wishing for it.
In practice
- A department that documents another's obstruction is accused of poisoning the relationship.
- An employee who says a colleague appears to be undermining her is disciplined for the accusation rather than the conduct.
- Possible explanations
- The proposed explanation is that describing another party as hostile is itself a hostile act in the sense that it withdraws the presumption of good faith, so a group that depends on that presumption treats the description as the offence.
- In its favour
- The structure belongs to a recognisable family, in which the response to an accusation is treated as evidence for it, and that family includes the Kafka trap.
- Against it
- It is a polemical formulation about political opponents, rests on selected examples, and the charge it identifies can be made in either direction, which the formulation does not allow for.
- Standing
- A polemical formulation about political opponents. The structure belongs to a family in which the response to an accusation is read as evidence for it, and that family is described from several political directions under different names.
- Subject
- Communication & Media
- Essay
- Theories of what stands between an event and its audience