7:06am December 24, 2013

This isn’t based on anything recent, though doubtlessly it’s going on all the time.

I worry a lot for the members of communities that have strict ideological standards for membership. Because they think they are joining a community – a group of people that help each other out, among other things. And instead…

Too many times I’ve seen people treated as if, because they have done something wrong according to the ideology, even said the wrong word, then they will always be a horrible person beyond redemption. Even people who basically bow down and grovel and promise to change forever don’t get treated well ever again. People who don’t do so, have no chance.

This can happen when you do something against the ideology. I’ve also seen it happen to people who have been discovered to, years ago, have done something against the ideology. I’ve seen it happen to people who are grappling with difficult inner questions that lead them to wonder how true the ideology is – people who need support figuring things out, not condemnation. And I’ve seen it happen when people don’t instantaneously understand and agree with a complicated and difficult ideology they’re unfamiliar with.

Sometimes the ideology is right, sometimes it’s wrong. Sometimes people really have done something pretty bad. But no distinctions are drawn. A person who said the wrong word because they didn’t say a word that didn’t exist at the time they said the wrong word, will be treated the same as a person saying a slur. Intentions and motivations won’t be taken into account because that gets in the way of automatically condemning people.

One type of person drawn to these communities are extremely vulnerable people who are looking for a way to make the world better for someone like themselves. They see and automatically fear the ideology. They see what happens to people who go against it. If they don’t run away immediately, they are likely to take up the ideology fervently, hoping that in doing so they won’t get on the wrong end of it. I’ve seen it happen too often. There’s a tension there, in between the words, a fear driving the apparent condemnation of others, a fear of being condemned themselves.

This is no way to live. And this is no way to have a community. Communities have to be more flexible. Have to be focused on people more than ideas. Have to care what happens to their members, not live in fear of who will be the next scapegoat.

I worry so much when I see communities forming split after split after split. Irreparable splits that will never be healed. Friendships destroyed forever. Over what? Someone said the wrong thing, someone condemned, and people take sides. And it happens repeatedly and so often that groups of people who were once all friends with each other, lie shattered beyond all recognition in the space of months. Is this worth ideological purity? Is this what you set out to do, when you wanted to find a way to help end oppression? There are other ways. You don’t have to do it this way, you don’t have to live in fear, you don’t have to make vulnerable people living on the edge, even more on the edge, you don’t have to destroy the support networks you’ve worked so hard to create.

All you have to do – and it’s hard, and it’s not remotely easy, but it’s possible, people do it all the time – is change your priorities. Put people before ideology every time. This doesn’t mean don’t fight, this doesn’t mean don’t work against oppression. It just means, there are other ways to work against oppression. People do it all the time. You just don’t see them, because they’re giving your ideology-bound communities a wide berth, they know what destruction it wreaks to do things that way, and they don’t have the time or the energy to spare getting involved in something like that.

But there’s a huge world out here, beyond either your ideology-driven communities or their immediate adversaries, and it’s out there to find ways to do things beyond these ways. Because… If you see what you’re doing from a distance, really see it, you will see that it ends in nothing but infighting and destruction, turned in and in and in on itself, communities destroyed, friends destroyed, people destroyed, for the sake of an ideology that isn’t even working.

I know my words could be taken up by your immediate adversaries too, but they’d be wrong to do so. They’re just as destructive, in the exact same ways.

But I mean all of this in all seriousness. I’ve seen too many people get hurt. I used to be one of the ones who shouted the ideologies the loudest to avoid becoming a victim of it, and it didn’t save me in the end, and my ethical qualms about this way of life grew until I hit a breaking point. And I know I’m not the only one. At all. Who was doing that. I see people doing it all the time. It takes one to know one.

You just can’t have a working community that goes out of its way to attack its own members for such tiny infractions, and form schisms with barely more provocation, and the damage done is terrible. Immeasurable. The people who really want to hurt you barely have to, you’re doing it to each other so well.

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