TV’s Graham Norton Show always wraps with an audience member, dwarfed by a red recliner, attempting to entertain the host with a brief story. Norton watches them on screen, smirking, his hand poised above a lever. If he feels bored or petty, the story ends abruptly as he launches the storyteller’s feet over their head.

The schtick has suspense, humour, pathos. We touch that lever vicariously and wish for an equivalent mechanism out here in the real world because—honestly—we all encounter people who we wish would shut up. When their noisy opinions grate against our genteel ones, it’s anything but funny.

So we organise ourselves into tribes—increasingly, virtual—to shelter our opinions. Few leave their tribe anymore to mingle dangerously with people who might challenge their beliefs.

American journalist Bari Weiss once interviewed high-profile folks who “are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject.” She later left the NY Times and became one of those confounding figures herself, committed “to the belief that setting up no-go zones and no-go people is inherently corrupting to free thought.”

If the group labels someone really, really scary, we get a groupthink pass to ignore them.

A reader’s comment on the Times’ recent profile of Weiss illustrates our boobytrapped landscape: “I will personally weigh in on the side of extreme trepidation in aligning myself with anyone who aligns herself with the likes of The Federalist Society, Musk, Thiel, etc. It’s one thing to speak truth in the face of groupthink (bravo!); it’s another to lose track of who the really, really scary people are.”

Ahhh. If the group labels someone really, really scary, we get a groupthink pass to ignore them. And not just them—anyone who talks to them. After all, there’s no reasoning with monsters.

Never mind that if you swapped those named deplorables with people the commenter approves of, millions of others would express identical trepidation.

One man’s monster is another’s mate.

We have the same instinct here. No sooner did our right-of-centre government appoint new human rights commissioners than Graham Nortonesque pundits placed them in the red chair.

Yet anyone, at any moment, could be flipped into irrelevance or infamy for listening to the wrong person…

Yes, Stephen Rainbow is a longstanding LGBT activist, but his beliefs challenge some of his allies. Object to someone questioning a conversion therapy petition on social media? Get squeamish addressing the awkward aspects of championing one of the world’s least gay-friendly regimes?

Then Stephen must be a heretic; flip the chair!

Melissa Derby has devoted her academic career to improving Māori children’s education—that’s true—but she’s irreverent enough to joke about identity politics.

Pull the lever!

Concentration camp survivor Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

Yet anyone, at any moment, could be flipped into irrelevance or infamy for listening to the wrong person, questioning the wrong dogma, or reaching the wrong conclusion.