2:19am April 18, 2012

I’m really upset.

It’s about the way that… I don’t even know how to put it in words. I’ve tried a bunch of times and couldn’t do it. But the bottom line is that the way a lot of people are trying to fight oppression, won’t work. It’s not just people who use all the ‘social justice’ type buzzwords either. It’s a lot of people. So many that it’s hard to find people not doing it. So many that it seeps into my head and tries to make me do it too, and I can’t be the only one.

Note: This is very long. If it’s too long for you, I’ve tried to bold the most important parts. But I don’t think I did a good job of that either. The harder it is for me to say something, the longer my writing gets. The reverse of how you’d expect it to work, but oh well, that’s how my brain works.

But I can’t tell you what, specifically, people are doing that’s the problem. I know, but I can’t say, because of language problems. And the ways that I flail at it in words are so easily misinterpreted that I think saying it would be more misleading than not saying it.

I can tell you kind of what I see in my head, though. What I see happening to people as a result of the problem, even if I can’t describe the problem itself. Give me some slack here, I’m dealing with a combination of a language problem, and having to swim against a powerful tide in order to write this at all. Even when things sound coherent, it doesn’t mean they came out in a way where readers will necessarily know what I meant.

Especially in situations where other people might have used similar words to mean things totally different than I mean. Or criticized similar actions for totally different reasons. So be careful. My only reasons are the way my instincts – ones I’ve never seen fail when they get this loud – tell me that this is so not the way, that it will never be the way, that it will do so much harm, has already done so much harm.

I see something like a maze. Where every specific problem has a specific direction you go in. Only none of the directions lead towards the solution. When you look in the direction of the solution there are walls everywhere no matter where you are. And when you follow the false solutions, they take you further away from the solution than when you started off.

I also see communities being dissolved, or not being formed in the first place. I see people becoming more and more fragmented. People not being able to interact with people not 'in the know’, whether by circumstance or by long self-education. I see people being asked to break the bonds they do have.

The worst part being that the forces causing this make it seem like the only way to do things. And that makes people get very intense about promoting and defending this way of doing things. There’s an assumption that anyone who questions it is, themselves, defending oppression.

I also see people’s emotions being brought into this and tangled around. Intense emotions that come from long experience of horrible things. And yet the direction they’re channeled into, it feeds that maze, that “this direction is how you respond to this experience” thing.

There’s also this weird analytical thing happening. It feeds, creates, the maze I described. There’s a number of different flavors of course. There’s the stuff that’s really obvious ideology. And then there’s not-so-obvious ideology. It creates an intellectual framework for dealing with all these situations.

And there’s rules. OMG are there rules. Rules that cannot be broken without intense reactions. Some of the rules make sense. Some don’t. But the rules that make sense, the place those rules come from is not from where sense comes from. They come from somewhere else, somewhere in a web of ideas that all fit together, that are consistent, but the consistency comes from something that will turn ethics on its head. They’re consistent with each other, rather than consistent with reality. I’ve written about this before, but… this is a very specific case. And it happens even among many people who are less obviously widgety.

I feel all this reaching inside of me and trying to twist me to fit into it. I feel it every time I read the wrong parts of tumblr. I feel it even when I read many people, on tumblr and off, that I have a good deal of respect for.

It also wants to isolate me like hell. It wants me, in the end, to only work with certain people. People who experience oppression on the basis of the same things I do, at least the most important ones at minimum. So that I am experiencing less of the horrible pain of running into constant proof of a world that hates people like me on a deep level. So that I don’t have to argue with people about whether a problem exists before we can get started trying to solve it. For so many reasons that absolutely are real things and absolutely matter. But that pull me into the maze, further and further from the solution, regardless of how real the problems are. So this can’t possibly be the solution to these problems.

And this – all of this, everything I’ve described, and far far more – it pulls people away from the compassion that has to be at the center of this kind of thing. It maneuvers us into doing the maze’s work for it. I can feel it sometimes, like whispers brushing lightly against my skin, pulling me away, twisting me around, removing my connections to the world.

And the fighting. I’m all for fighting when the time is right. But in these situations it’s different. They’re situations where it seems like it’s called for, it seems like it can’t be avoided, it seems like nothing’s wrong with what happens. It seems like it even to me most of the time. I even participate.

But.

There’s something else about some of this fighting that tells me something is deeply wrong. With that and with everything.

I have a hard time describing certain instincts I have. Like the stock market. Once someone finally explained it to me in terms that I could understand, I instantly saw that however much sense pieces of it seemed to make in isolation… it doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work. It has no foundation. There’s nothing tying it to the ground. It’s a game of musical chairs combined with hot potato. There’s nothing underneath to hold it up. It’s just as bad as sticking a board in midair and calling it a chair, expecting it to not come crashing to the ground the moment you let go.

And that instinct – that tells me something about all this. It tells me not only everything I have just observed. It tells me something else about it all.

The analysis. The fighting. The rules. The responses to feelings. And all the things I was not able to name. They all make sense in certain contexts. They all have plenty of explanations and justifications. But. When they all happen in the real world, they create a system. That system will never lead to solving the problems of oppression. It will, however, lead to all kinds of bad things. It will lead to isolation and fragmentation and dissolving of bonds between human beings, and worst of all, creating more of the exact oppression it’s trying to fight.

I can’t explain the how or why and I am having trouble explaining the what. But I know where it all leads. I know exactly in the same way I could see in a flash that the stock market is built on a foundation of thin air. And what I see, it’s not pretty at all.

There have to be other ways. We have to fix this. Because if we don’t, bad things. Really bad things.

But so far, when I’ve seen people trying to avoid elements of this… they don’t avoid it. They feed things right back into it. Because they’re trying the exact same thing in a slightly different way, and calling it revolutionary. It’s the same kind of maze, just a different shape. It’s attractive and yet wrong.

I have my suspicions about what the problem is, and the general directions of some of the possible solutions.

But they’re not directions I could easily describe.

I have had conversations with someone who’s thought about this in more depth, as she’s been observing the problem for longer than I’ve been alive. And she says that compassion has to be at the absolute center of all of this. And that basic compassion is one of the things this entire approach diverts people from. I see exactly what she means.

I am also pretty sure that there is no way to contain within words or ideas, a blueprint for what to do. Because even without an ideology, words and conceptual thoughts have a distorting power all their own, which can lead a person to set out to do something and in fact do its exact opposite.

But I can say with absolute certainty that something’s got to give because this way doesn’t work. Sometimes I have to avoid reading the wrong parts of tumblr to avoid being encased in this maze. To keep my head out of that way of thinking. Or else I do all this crap too. And it’s so easy to get pulled into it and to see it all as the right thing to do. So very easy. And yet it’s the wrong thing to do. It harms people. It twists everything around backwards and upside-down. But it looks so right when you’re in the middle of it, as if there’s no way it could ever be wrong.

Wow… i actually wrote something. I’m too exhausted to know if it got my point across, or if it said (or at least conveyed to others) a bunch of things I didn’t mean to say. It’s hard when it’s something you’ve been seeing a long time but never managed to describe before. And so you pile on more and more words hoping something will happen or something will click. Not sure how well I did.

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