11:39am December 24, 2013

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

youneedacat:

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.

Yes. And someone is going to call this tone policing or telling oppressed people to be nice to their oppressors.

madeofpatterns:

youneedacat:

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.

Yes. And someone is going to call this tone policing or telling oppressed people to be nice to their oppressors.

Of course they will. And those are real things, but this isn’t that. The problem is that anything from the outside of the ideology must be an attack, and any attack must be defended, and there are stock ways to defend oneself from such ‘attacks’, and the way you figure out which one to use is by matching the post against a limited set of patterns and seeing which one is the closest. That’s not what it feels like at the time, it all takes place with barely a thought as to what’s going on, but that’s what it is. I know. I’ve done it.

At any rate, I’m not talking about any of that, nor am I saying oppressed people shouldn’t have boundaries. I’m an oppressed person who fights oppression and cares about boundaries and isn’t always polite and doesn’t think you always need to have a perfect tone, and all that.

I’m saying that being incredibly, incredibly rigid about who is in and who is out and why, and demanding that everyone adhere to norms they’re not even aware of (or even that people retroactively adhere to norms that didn’t exist at the time they’re being evaluated against them), is one of many really toxic things about the way some of these communities are structured.

And I also know there’s a lot of diversity in these communities, and some people are being more rigid than others. Rigid, for lack of a better word, I don’t have a lot of words now to write a ten-page essay on what I mean. But the people who are the most rigid, create norms that even the less rigid people fear they must follow, for fear of being excommunicated from the only community they see that offers them the chance to fight the oppression that may well be killing them at the moment. That’s why I find this entire mentality so toxic to community and to oppressed people who are in the most vulnerable positions and most need this fight. It’s like a “get in line, or else” and the “or else” is there, even if it’s not always stated.

And people splinter and splinter and splinter until there’s no communities anymore, just factions fighting against each other for reasons that are completely ridiculous when you actually look at them. Like, what happens is that one person will get excommunicated for a disagreement with someone else. It may be minor, may be major.

Then there’s the ultimatum, you’re either with us or against us, with hir or against hir. And then some people defend those doing the excommunicating, others defend the person being excommunicated. And now you have two communities. And a lot of words are said and a lot of horrible things are done, because everyone involved is fighting for their life, as they see it (well they are fighting for their lives, as a whole, but in this particular fight, they are usually fighting over something fairly minor that will not kill them directly or probably even indirectly), and tensions rise higher and higher and higher. People say horrible things because they think they’re fighting a worse battle than they’re fighting, and they see the other side as the ultimate enemy.

And then there’s a point of no return somewhere in there, where the factions simply can’t reconcile because too many horrible, unforgivable things have been said and done on both sides. (Everyone on each side is blamed for the behavior of everyone else on the same side, so each person bears the collective guilt of everyone on their side, in the eyes of the other side.)

And then this happens again. And again. And again.

And people don’t like it. Well some people actually thrive on it. And some people may not thrive on it but it suits their particular agendas. But most people don’t enjoy this process at all. But if anyone notices that this is the absolutely inevitable result of the norms in these communities, then they don’t say so, for fear of starting another shitstorm. (I feel like I can weather any shitstorms saying these things causes, and I think I can also get away with it more than some people could, although I know that’s not infinite. I’d rather say it and remind people there are other ways to be, than be silent and watch the same toxic shit happening over and over.)

If you’re going to have a community that works then you’re going to have to accept, or at minimum tolerate, a wider diversity of opinions. That doesn’t mean tolerate things that should never be tolerated. But it does mean that you have to accept that other people are going to have ideas that make you very uncomfortable, and you’re still going to have to work with those people and make compromises rather than always pointing fingers and shouting about how horrible a person they are. It’s utterly impossible to have the kind of unity of opinion that the more rigid communities demand. Impossible. Can’t be done. And shouldn’t be done. I’d be terrified if such people gained any actual power in the world.

That doesn’t mean compromise on everything. But it does mean accepting a much wider range of opinions than most people in these communities accept. It means making some really really hard choices about what things are deal breakers and what things are not, and not making those choices merely on the basis of what pisses you off. It means distinguishing between things that should never be done, and things that may be bad, but may also be necessary to tolerate to some extent for a community to grow and change. It means making distinctions between horrible terrible awful things that kill people, and things that just piss you off. It means not always relying on your tendency (and most people in these communities have it) to be able to draw a tangled set of lines between something that just pisses you off, and something that kills people, and declaring that this means they’re the exact same damn thing and that what pisses you off is by definition what kills people. That’s an intellectual move a lot of people pull, and it’s dishonest. Not always intentionally dishonest, but certainly self-deceptive at best.

And I know these things inside and out, so you can’t tell me they don’t happen just like that.

Mind you, just because something isn’t as bad as something that kills people or does something else really terrible, doesn’t make it not bad. But it does mean that you’re going to have to accept people doing these things in any community that’s worth the name community. You have to have diversity of opinion, you have to have diversity of education, you have to have diversity of outlook. It’s a mistake to try to change everyone’s actions by forcing them to take on the exact same worldview that you have. It won’t work and it results in lots of bad things that may not be intended, but are nonetheless bad. Like lots of the things I describe above.

And you also have to stop reacting on the basis of emotional response to these things alone. I’m the last person to tell people to totally put away their gut reactions and emotional responses. But the kind of community I’m talking about… it immobilizes people by encouraging them to feel the most dramatic feelings, have the worst responses to those feelings, in response to things that are deemed bad. And this really really hurts people who are emotionally not doing well already because of having to deal with oppression on a regular basis. I’m not describing this well right now so I’m going to stop. But there’s a thing there, and I don’t know how to say it. Other than that this community dynamic involves encouraging people to have, and display, extreme emotional responses to things, whether they are already prone to such responses or not. And also, encourages people to judge the badness of a thing by the extremeness of their emotional response to it. (And in turn, if you want to stop someone doing something you have two basic choices, talk about how it kills people or talk about how it emotionally devastates you, and that creates horrible situations inside each person, and not just between one person and another. Can’t explain fully right now, only getting the tip of the iceberg.)

Anyway… you can’t have a real community without diversity of every kind, including diversity of opinion, and also you can’t have it without flexibility of all sorts, and willingness to change, and a lot of other things that simply don’t exist in these communities. You also can’t fight oppression without these things. So in addition to doing all the bad things described above, these communities are ineffectual, to boot.

And yeah I’m not talking about any of the things you mentioned, but of course you knew that. (I’m sure there will be some reason that what I’m talking about is unfeasible or something. But the community dynamics I’m talking about are unfeasible for any community that wants to either get anything substantial done, serve its members, or last.)

Notes: