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7:03pm April 18, 2012

➸ "You don't need this junk. You need a cat.": There's lots of ways to do things right, but so little variation in this particular way of doing things wrong.

feliscorvus:

youneedacat:

Something that strikes me about that really long post I finally wrote last night. Is that there are so very many ways to do things right. Varying by context, culture, all kinds of things. But the mentality I’m talking about makes it sound like there’s only one way, even when on the surface it…

It’s interesting…I am pretty sure I know what you’re getting at (in this and the previous post it refers to) but not because the words you’ve written add up to it. More like I can see what you’re pointing at, and if I’m seeing it accurately, it’s simply not the kind of stuff anyone could write a literal description of. Rather, it’s the kind of stuff that ends up popping out at you once you’ve observed certain patterns over and over and over again.

But anyway, I do think the stuff-in-question here is somehow related to that other thing you were talking about a while back about avoiding “activism as a person’s primary identity” (or something along those lines). That’s only one pattern of many that can end up destructive. Another one is where like…a bunch of people come together to cooperate on a very important project, and things go well for a while (meaning that useful things get accomplished) but then it’s like a switch gets flipped. And then the project starts turning into an “end unto itself”, in the sense that the continued existence of the project becomes a higher priority than what the project was created to do. And all this is happening on a level that isn’t generally obvious to the participants at all.

Yeah it’s definitely those things. It’s also this thing where people are meeting together to do political/ethical stuff based on identity categories. And then people have conflicts with each other based on precisely which of those identity categories they fit, and the response to those conflicts is to build ever tinier identity categories filled with people who at least theoretically understand their experiences. (With, of course, some of the identity categories being more important than others to individual people.) And when everyone retreats into these smaller and smaller categories, then things fall apart around everyone without most people even noticing.

And there’s also these social tendencies within this whole setup that I haven’t figured out how to describe yet, if it’s even possible. It has to do with the ways in which people determine that it’s not safe anymore to be around this specific person or group of people. And I’m not talking about like… bullies and stuff. I’m talking about mistakes that have to happen, are totally unavoidable, and drive people to retreat into the smaller categories.

And all of these things I just mentioned form the shapes of what happens in the maze I was talking about. But I can’t describe them much more clearly than I already have.