1:09am April 19, 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.

youneedacat:

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.

I feel like these examples are circumstances where we gain some insight by stating the problem in a rather simple fashion.

For example, feliscorvus’ case deals with a problem with the measurability of a group’s goals. If your group comes together to produce strictly testable and measurable results, it is impossible for the group to become more important than its output.

I would suggest that, the less concrete and measurable the impact of a project, the more susceptible it is to this problem. See Komen. If Komen were an organization exclusively dedicated to raising money for cancer research, it would be relatively simple to say ‘this group is not achieving what it sought to achieve’. But once it branches out into intangible values like ‘awareness’ that lack any effective form of measurement or comparison with more concrete results (is a dollar towards ‘awareness’ better spent than a dollar towards cancer research?), the project can take on a symbolic/emotional value that can sustain it past its point of effectiveness.

A project that exists for the sake of existing is going to necessarily be quixotic in some fashion, I think. The people with authority either can’t or won’t evaluate the project in the metrical terms that would spell the project’s doom, or at minimum call for a complete reorganization.

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As to the phenomenon of splintering that youneedacat discusses. This is a directly social phenomenon. From how it’s described, the following factors are prerequisite:

-there must be a meaningful amount of conflict within the group regarding the identity that the group is formed around

-the conflict cannot be, or is not (for some practical reason), addressed explicitly or formally; otherwise, the aggrieved members would presumably either settle their grievances or formally separate from the group

-the conflict fails cannot be or is not addressed informally outside of the context of the group; for example, privately calling out a remark someone made in a board meeting to their face and being rebuffed

I don’t know if this is useful at all, but I feel like a way to model the patterns inherent to these sorts of breakdowns could be useful, even with very simple models. Being able to categorize the sources of issue can I think help us more quickly recognize potential problems in future situations.

You could be right. I can’t really tell. But it feels “off” somehow. Like there’s a common thread running through all of these situations, and it’s not being addressed in this way of analyzing these things in these specific ways. Even as if this way of analyzing things pulls further away from what I was talking about. Not that I can blame anyone, as my own ability to communicate about this stuff has been far less than clear.

I can’t be sure if this is it. But I think I was trying to describe an ethical component missing from all of these situations, and you’re analyzing them as systems of social interactions or goals, each flawed in separate ways. They might well be flawed in those ways too, but whether they are or not, it’s not what I was trying to get at. (And I don’t think that fixing those things would fix the problems I’m seeing.)

Notes: