8:10am August 29, 2012

Why ideologies are destroying the world and doing the opposite of anything you could ever want, and only getting out will ever help in the end.

One of my readers contacted me privately to explain what was going on. And they were right. I’m just too muddled from being sick to have seen it. But even of what I start out saying pisses you off, try to read to the end because what I’m talking about is possibly more important than you’d think at first.

The problem isn’t me or something around me. The problem is ideology.

The problem is that when you contradict a deeply held ideology you’re asking for trouble.

That is especially true when you contradict it in a way the people in its grasp (because it is a grasp) haven’t seen before.

They don’t stop to wonder if they’ve seen it before. They don’t stop to wonder anything. Their mind engages in a curious set of maneuvers and gymnastics, possibly even outside of its own sight. Meaning they’re not always even aware it’s happening.

So instead of looking at what you’re saying. They look at what you’re saying that appears to match an accepted pattern they’ve seen before. Their minds, in the grip of that ideology, proceed to reduce an entire complex set of ideas and observations, to something that’s easy. Easy because it’s an acceptable contradictions.

Acceptable contradictions are contradictions that the ideology already has a response for. A response that will, surely, put you into your place, along with all the people they see as just like you. Even if most of those people have ideas you have problems with too. Your ideas must be just like theirs. Just exactly like theirs. Because that means the ideology is now free from having to be contradicted.

And all of this goes triple. Or more. If what you’ve said not only contradicts common beliefs under the ideology. But also contradicts fundamental pieces of the ideology. Pieces of the ideology that would shatter the ideology to pieces if they were understood even partially.

Note that shattering an ideology to pieces doesn’t mean that a person without the ideology won’t agree with parts of beliefs or actions the ideology happens to like. It just means that rather than a rigid framework of ideas held together tightly and allowing little to no major deviations with that structure, it’s coming from a deeper source.

Ideology also means that you’re being controlled by a system of ideas. Almost as if it was alive and using your brain for its own purposes. And using you to transmit itself to other people who will now be controlled. Sound ugly? It is. It’s one reason I don’t do ideologies. By which I don’t mean I have an ideology about being against ideologies. Things don’t work that way. Head that direction and you’re going to be in for a world of trouble, and cause trouble for others. Too often people like the words of people outside ideologies, and then make ideologies of those words without going beneath the words to the places ideologies don’t go.

Any ideology trying to do good, will do the opposite of its goal.

One of the things that mean is that anti-oppression ideologies are oppressive. They don’t fight oppression. They ensure it. They also ensure that the minds of those trapped in them will go around in such busy little circles “fighting oppression” that they’ll never notice the contradiction. Or anything else that was right in front of them.

Which is why you get little situations like the following: I post a link to someone who is clearly well on her way to getting out of an ideology that is very popular in these parts. And at least two or three immediate responses from different people say “Oh come on, this is basic stuff you’re not getting.”

I suppose when I said there was a lot of depth to what was going on, I inadvertently led them to believe that they would be witnessing some example of what, within the ideologies that they were wholly or partially trapped at the moment of reading this, passes for more advanced thinking.

More advanced thinking, within an ideology, usually means thinking that’s harder to do. That takes more ideas to get to, more intellectual sophistication. It also usually means, not being something that contradicts the basic information that even newcomers to the ideology know better than to contradict. (It’s okay for advanced ideological thought to contradict the basics, but only if it clearly gets there by the intellectual steps and basic values recommended by the ideology.) And it definitely means that it shouldn’t look, even superficially, like one of the same things said by clueless privileged people, in the case of this particular ideology.

But outside ideologies, depth is measured in a different way. It’s measured by proximity to… something that has no name, and will never have a name, nor an idea, nor anything else like that. Something that will never be included in any ideology. Something that is a requirement for things like ending oppression.

Ideologies pull people in the extreme other direction. Therefore all ideologies, even (hell especially) anti-oppression ideologies, ensure that oppression will continue. (And anti-ideology ideologies are their own version of a mindfuck. So please don’t take what I’m saying and turn it into one. I’m always dismayed when I see people doing things like that.)

Anyway. A person trying their hardest and most sincerely to get out of ideology once they have realized how damaging it is to themselves and others to remain there. Will always, at that moment, be exhibiting more depth of thought than anyone who is currently so bound up in an ideology that they can’t see the damage they are doing by remaining there. And if you can’t even see the difference between thoughtfully exiting a tool of oppression and parroting privileged nonsense, you’re probably in the latter situation.

Being in an ideology doesn’t mean being trapped forever. It can even at times, happen for the duration of seconds. And there are gradations of being trapped too. It can be harder to get out the longer you’re staying there, though. Because your mind is used to traveling along those patterns of thought and it can get snapped back up in it easily.

But the door is always open. The ideology doesn’t want you to see the door. But it’s there. Always. There’s no need to stay. And even realizing the ideology is doing harm, or that you want out of it, is the first step out of that door.

The ideology will scream at you though. They act almost like they’re alive. That’s what makes them so insidious. So once you start to take a step away, it will tell you every possible reason that you are doing the wrong thing. And once you see someone else starting to step away, the ideology will tell you they’re doing something terrible and it will tell you why.

That’s the other thing I wasn’t reckoning on. It’s not just that what she said superficially resembled a so-called “101 thing”. It’s that she represented stepping out of the ideology, and ideologies like to clamp down on their members when they see that. Including playing up all the “really obvious” arguments against… what she wasn’t actually saying. That’s what it means sometimes when you see something and your head fills with “BUT DOESN’T SHE EVEN KNOW THAT THIS AND THAT AND THE OTHER THING IS TRUE?!?!!” Sometimes. Sometimes it’s perfectly reasonable indignation. Discerning the difference is important.

Ideologies aren’t big on discerning differences in any situation. They will tell you that twenty different people, from different backgrounds, with different motivations and experience, saying roughly vaguely similar words, or doing roughly vaguely similar things, are all doing the same thing, all have the same effects, and all require similar responses. The ideology I’m confronting here will sometimes make distinctions, but generally only across boundaries of oppression and privileges. And then even making that distinction when it’s not the most important distinction. But not even always making that distinction. Generally even when ideologies make distinctions, it’s in a way that is so rigidly applied that it becomes, itself, roughly the same as not making distinctions.

Anyway. Depth of thought recognizes depth of thought in others. People who want to exist outside of ideologies are finding each other. And talking to each other. And working out ways to get out. And helping each other get out.

Right now the world needs as many of us doing this as possible, not just to end oppression, but also because ideologies are destroying humanity and as much of the planet as possible. The only ways to salvage things will be found outside of ideologies. And that’s more important than — anything, because everything ideologies promise will be moot anyway if nobody’s around for it.

It almost makes me wonder if, when we are gone, ideologies will remain and snicker to each other about how they really showed us.

Ideologies aren’t the last thing people need to step out of either. They’re kind of a specialized, complicated version of something every person does every second of every day. (The few who don’t will surely excuse me for saying this. Because they know full well how much work it takes to stop. And they know that if I don’t say everyone, some people will think I mean them as the exceptions, the ones who just naturally don’t do it. Nobody naturally doesn’t do it, it’s deeply ingrained in people. Even neuro-atypical people.) And that is tell themselves constant, neverending stories.

These stories go on pretty much perpetually. While some people have more layers than others, we all have many layers. And that is many layers of insulation from the real world. We see very close to only what our stories allow us to see. Other aspects of reality (and yes, there is one) only get through with great effort. And like ideologies, acting from within stories results in situations where you set out to stop oppression and tell yourself lots of stories about how you’re stopping oppression, and you oppress instead without even noticing. And like ideologies, stories are killing all of us and may yet succeed.

Fortunately, like with ideologies, there are ways of getting out of stories. Permanently. I don’t know every way to do this. Not up front where I can talk about it. But I know I’m in the process of stepping out that door myself. And I know that people have done it fully because I’ve met them. And I know how to tell the difference between someone claiming that (including people who believe it has happened, when they’ve at most peeled off a layer or had a temporary experience) and someone for real. (Which also requires being able to discern the difference between stories originating within a person, and stories attached to a person falsely from the outside. Yes that actually happens. I’ve seen it.)

One of the big things I am learning to do right now is to break up stories. To create moments when they aren’t there. From what I’m told, when that becomes a habit, it becomes more than moments and it becomes more often. And for myself, as many people, the first story to break up is “I don’t tell myself stories.” I thought I didn’t, because someone who thinks a lot like me goes around saying she doesn’t. That the way my sort of neurology means having trouble coming up with certain kind of ideas and holding onto them, and exists in a very sensory-based state, is the same as not telling yourself stories. It’s not. That person actually tells themselves more stories than a lot of people do.

Breaking up stories just clears your head enough to start looking at and removing the layers and layers of mechanisms underneath them. The mechanisms that create the stories, among other things. This involves constantly evaluating yourself ethically in an as objective way as possible, and learning to stop doing things that do harm.

It involves trying to act as much as possible from love and compassion for everyone. Including yourself. But by love and compassion I don’t mean like… feeling all soft and fuzzy about everyone. Real love and compassion are actions, not emotions. They come from the deepest places in the world.

They don’t even preclude anger or even violence, but there’s a huge difference between anger and violence coming from your ego and anger and violence coming from the depths of love. And it is very easy to tell yourself stories that obscure the difference. Just as it’s easy to tell yourself stories that obscure the difference between compassion and a banal kind of niceness that just wants to avoid conflict (but actually does harm to others). See why stories and ideologies are destroying the planet? And see why it’s important to apply discernment to what you hear and do rather than treating all instances that look the same as the same?

Which is why if you care on a really deep level about ending oppression, keeping humanity alive, not destroying the planet, the rights of any group of people, and you want to be able to truly do the most you can about it, you’ll be wanting to get as deep down into reality — as far away from ideologies and stories — as you are capable of.

Fortunately, even though everyone has stories, everyone is real. And we can get help from each other. And from those deep parts of reality that every one of us is connected to. There’s not a single universal way to do this right, although there’s plenty of ways to do it wrong. But everyone is connected to everything they need to be, if they really want to change and be changed in these ways.

But it requires being prepared for possibly the hardest things a person can do. Much harder in some ways than finding an ideology and learning all these thought mechanisms that will ultimately do everything you don’t want them to do.

Because often there is no possible way to get rid of these story-generating mechanisms than to be forced into a position where it’s give them up or suffer horrible things or die. Because giving them up can feel like death — can feel scarier than death, a terror so strong it drives you into shutdown worse than anything autism can throw at you. And sometimes extreme circumstances are the only thing that does it. So if you commit yourself to this, on a deep level, you’ll AFAIK inevitably find yourself in extreme circumstances. It’s possible to give these things up without those circumstances, but not possible for each person to give every single one up without those circumstances happening somewhere along the line. The circumstances may be internal or external, but they are grueling. Which is why crises often have that seemingly paradoxical habit of deepening people.

I think personally I’m long past the point where I can walk away from that chain of events. At least it seems to be so, and I’ve been told it by others. Sometimes I’m thankful for that and sometimes I curse it. But it is what it is.

Part of getting rid of stories involves realizing how little you know about anything. That’s the comfort of stories and ideologies, they make you think you know things. And with fewer and fewer of them… you realize more and more how little you know. But you see more and more, I suspect, because all that knowledge you think you have, obscures your ability to see what’s in front of your nose. Which is, again, what’s oppressing and killing us.

There also seem to be times that I have no control over, when stories lift away. And things happen. That’s all I’m going to say. More than that would impose stories on things that are too important to have stories imposed on them. And after those things happen, I’m changed. In ways that are of benefit to me and others. I’ve learned not to even look for things like that, but they serve all kinds of important functions when they happen.

A word of warning: Everything I’m saying has an opposite. An opposite that can be referred to by the exact same words. That is because the deepest parts of the world deflect words utterly. And as words and thoughts for that matter, approach those parts of the world, they form themselves into paradoxes and contradictions. So I’m sure someone could take words about this and form them into something that perpetuates stories and ideologies and encourages people to avoid depth. In fact I see people do it all the time. So don’t assume someone using similar words means similar things.

To figure out what a person really means, you have to see more of them than their words. That’s necessary. It’s not possible to do so otherwise. Whether that means knowing the person. Or looking at the patterns formed in between the words. Or just knowing in general how to recognize depth, usually at least, when you see it. This is why context isn’t just window dressing, it’s vital. For everything. You can’t make good decisions just based on words and ideas. And you can’t make good decisions without context. (And yes, even if your most conscious form of thought is in words, the stuff beneath it isn’t. By necessity. Because the human brain simply doesn’t function entirely through words even if your conscious awareness functions best through them. There is always a part of you that can tell these things, but a lot of people aren’t in the best contact with it, or may even be under external pressure to totally ignore the contact they have.)

Everything I’m talking about is possible to find elsewhere. It’s basically written into the fabric of the world and of human nature in a wide variety of ways. So it’s not necessary to find writing about it in words, in order to understand it. If you listen the right way, with the most important parts of who you are, you’ll find it wherever you look, in a less flawed form than you’ll find it filtered through my mind and my language resources.

And all of it comes from the most important places of the world you could possibly pay attention to if you actually want to end oppression or keep the planet (or people on it) alive or answer any big ethical question that ideologies try to answer. Because those ideologies all ensure the opposite of what most people who adopt them, actually intend to happen. Anything that forces you to stop seeing what’s around you isn’t going to get you out of any problems. So before you find some point that your ideology, whatever it is, can quibble with me on, really think about it. Because whether I’m right about every single little piece of what I wrote really isn’t the point.

And if not, the necessity of the times is driving a lot of people to take a real look around nd reconsider ideologies and look for deeper answers. We have been separated from each other for a long time, figuring this stuff out on our own, but we are finding each other. Not to build a new ideology (if anyone does that with my words I want to slap them until they stop) but to help each other get out of these things. Out of ideologies. And out of stories. So that we can actually take a look around us and work on solutions. And so that each of us can function in our communities to help actual people in a way that won’t just make the matter worse. If you ever want to step out the door, look around and if you look hard enough I’m sure you’ll see other people trying to get out. Just be careful of jumping into new ones over and over because that’s… not getting out at all, it’s just changing shapes. And every little bit you actually get out of things like this, helps.

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