12:30pm May 17, 2014

➸ It's probably not worth it for me to be this angry.

youneedacat:

It’s just that there’s something going on here that I can’t even put a name to, that pisses me off really badly. It’s something that happens when people become so hyper-conceptualized about their approach to activism that they can’t see reality staring them in the face. Where everything becomes an…

I think at least in part this is an issue with American culture (and maybe other cultures that were at least in part Anglo/Saxon in origin), where there is an assumption that “every story has two sides’. You see it in the way U.S. news stories are written: when interviewing someone who is culturally perceived as being more “biased” than usual (and this perception itself is often determined by bias even if this is only sometimes admitted or talked about), there may be a quote from someone with an “opposing” view point. When there is a formally written debate mediated by a newspaper or magazine, the norm is to have two people with “opposing” view points each present their “side”. I think partly as a result of all this, many Americans have been effectively brainwashed, at a subconscious level, to believe that there only ever ARE two “sides” to any debate with little gray area in between, few or no valid positions that might come at the debate from an entirely different direction.

And, yeah, it’s frustrating. I’ve been there where I often seem to be lone person in a particular group of people who sees elements from both “sides” that I think are valid, plus other things that no one else in that particular conversation had raised are also (in my view) valid. And most of the time, in a genuinely civil discourse (for example in an academic context where people may not be as emotionally vested in the dialogue), others merely seem to find this “interesting”…maybe also a little confusing for them but “interesting”. But when people are more intensely emotionally vested, then some people have interpreted the fact that I am not entirely 100% on their “side” that I am therefore the “enemy”, effectively a supporter of the other “side”. And don’t want to hear that there are more than two. And even with discussions where they’re not as emotionally vested, some people will still sometimes pressure me to “take a side” even if just for the sake of the debate.

Yeah I think that’s part of it.

And there’s also sometimes a “you’re with us or against us” thing… and that can come in especially in activist communities where people really are legitimately fighting for survival. But it can become where every debate becomes a survival-level fight, even when it isn’t at all – but it gets that level of I need to win this in order to survive emotional punch to it, that then makes it very hard to just hold a conversation.

Notes: