Ideology Does Not Make a Community
Ideology Does Not Make a Community
Reminders that help me maintain empathy for the people I disagree with
This entry is a bit less about gender and more about how ideology turns communities into cults and my personal reminders for maintaining empathy with “the other side.”
When I came to the realization that I was going to detransition, part of the process was recognizing unhealthy relationship dynamics in the trans community. But I also came to realize that it wasn’t only the trans community that had cult-like aspects to it… pretty much every ideologically-driven community has them to some extent.
Over the years of being involved in activism, I felt like I was slowly losing my ability to show compassion to people who had led different lives than I have.
I talked about how I felt like my passion in activism was being driven by an anger at declared “enemies” rather than a love of my fellow human beings, and I wasn’t okay with it. It made me feel depressed and hopeless all of the time over things that I couldn’t control.
I’ve written before about how my being “peaked” started with my opposition to “cancel culture.” I didn’t oppose it right away, though. I was very involved with cancel culture beforehand. Other activists convinced me that deplatforming someone with privilege was an acceptable way to enact justice. It simply had to be done in order to protect the oppressed people of society. Even if it was just someone who was using the “wrong” word, if they weren’t immediately shut down, we were clearly failing at being properly inclusive.
If we had stopped at exercising our own free will by simply blocking someone and personally choosing not to engage with them, there wouldn’t have been an issue. That’s not how things went down though.
People would not only refuse to engage with someone; they would also contact their employers, have their events cancelled, interfere with their ability to make money, and make them feel afraid for their lives. Some would post personal information online by seeking it out and compiling it all in one place for the purpose of harassing them… and then claim that they weren’t doing anything wrong because the information was freely available on the Internet.
It didn’t even stop there. Not only would this be directed at the person who had been cancelled, it would also be directed at anyone who refused to cut ties with that person. If you refused to go along with the cancellation, you would also be “cancelled.”
The problem, of course, is that we’re all human beings, and we’ve all done something problematic at some point in time. We can’t keep up with every single thing that someone has done wrong. (Although some of us sure as hell tried. I ran a similar blog to the one in that article, and I also regret it.)
Most of us can’t even keep up with the constantly changing ideals of what is considered morally acceptable in the first place. When it got to the point where something as simple as using a term that other people deem morally unacceptable (whether I disagree with them or not and even whether I’m part of the group that “owns” the term or not) became grounds for ex-communication, I really started questioning whether or not I was being fair to others.
I let go of a lot of the things that I really loved over the years. For example, I stopped watching the Vlogbrothers (John and Hank Green) on YouTube after people on Tumblr started nitpicking everything John Green wrote in his novels and pulling things that either of them said out of context to make them sound “worse” than they were meant to be. I couldn’t understand why people were choosing to target people who did so much for charity and put so much good in the world.
I wasn’t forced to stop watching their content, of course, but when all of your friends are spending their time, at best, mocking the people you like and, at worst, painting them as bigots, it’s hard to keep enjoying it.
That said, we are living in a world where “problematic” things are happening all of the time. We’re also living during a time where the Internet records everything you do. Something you say today might be fine, but if you gain clout ten years down the road from now, people are going to dig through your Internet history and find everything they can to use against you.
If you intend to live a life where you never engage with media that involves ‘morally unacceptable’ people or content, you are never going to engage with anything.
I’m digressing, though.
The point is that trying to be “good” all of the time is pretty much impossible.
When someone is cancelled, they are expected to engage in public confession of their sins and essentially beg to be forgiven. It’s not that apologies are never warranted when someone hurts someone else, but it’s very obvious that, in today’s climate, the amount of hoops people have to jump through in order to even have a shot at being forgiven is disproportionate.
What really turned me off of cancel culture was when people started to point out how the same leftists who talk about defunding the police and prison abolition are doing exactly what they claim to oppose: surveilling the every move of people they think are “bad”, waiting for them to mess up, and then pouncing on them, doling out punishment with no trial, and then claiming they only did it to protect the community.
The hypocrisy was too loud to ignore.
One alternative to retributive justice is transformative justice.
Transformative justice, briefly, is a process where no one is “punished,” but where each person is given the chance to share their version of events, talk about what led to the harm occurring (and sometimes whether it was actually harm), and then the community finds ways to prevent it from occurring again. The idea is that very few people in the world do harm out of pure malice, and it is rarely a single person’s fault for the harm that occurred. Many things contribute to a single act of harm — environmental, familial, societal, etc.
I don’t think every person who reads this blog post is going to agree with the idea of transformative justice, which is fine. I’ve tried to move on from the part of my life where I expect everyone to agree with me. But I thought I’d share three ideas that I use to help guide how I react to perceived injustices now.
I remind myself that harm is rarely as simple as an abuser-survivor dichotomy.
Most abusers are themselves survivors. This does not mean they aren’t responsible for the harm they have done; it’s just an explanation that helps me understand why the harm occurred.
I can’t speak as to how I’d react in every single instance of harm (especially now that the word “harm” doesn’t seem to mean anything half of the time). But I no longer participate in vigilante actions that could cause people to lose their income; I don’t dig up their old tweets; I don’t make fun of people for how they look; and I don’t encourage violence.
I’m interested in defeating ideas, not people.
I try not to hold individual people responsible for systemic problems.
It’s true that there is power in numbers. The more people that we organize in order to bring change to society, the more likely we will be to succeed. But we’ve gone wrong by holding individual people “accountable” for problems that won’t be solved even if they complied.
Snapping at someone who bought a puppy from a pet store isn’t going to bring down puppy mills. Shaming people for eating beef isn’t going to bring down the meat industry. Targeting a nonbinary teenager on the Internet isn’t going to affect whether or not gender identity becomes prioritized over sex as a protected characteristic in law.
Not everyone is going to care as much as I do about the things I care about. It’s authoritarian of me to think that they have to. And, further, punishing them for not caring about it is not going to change their minds. Psychologically, it’s just a bad persuasion tactic to take.
I want to tell the truth, but I don’t want to scapegoat others to make a point.
I try to avoid an us/them mentality.
This is probably the most difficult for me. I have had this dichotomous idea of the privileged versus the oppressed drilled into me for more than a decade. Of course, I still believe that there are privileges afforded to certain types of people and that other types of people experience oppression because they lack certain in-born characteristics. But I no longer subscribe to an “identitarian” philosophy (where someone’s identity as an oppressed person unilaterally makes them more credible).
I also try not to make sweeping statements about any group of people, oppressed or not. Black-and-white statements about what others “always” or “never” do will immediately put them on the defensive (and they’re rarely true).
An idea I once heard when I was trying to cultivate empathy for people I disagree with: If I had had the same childhood, the same family, the same upbringing, the same education, the same environment, the same friends, etc., as the person I disagree with… I would believe the same thing that they do.
It’s not as simple as just presenting them with the information that I think they need to change their minds. Persuasion is much more nuanced than that. Sometimes it involves systematically — but kindly — breaking down their walls and having open discussions with them until you come to a mutual understanding.
Dismissing someone as my enemy will only reinforce their belief that I am dangerous.
I’m not perfect. You’ll be able to find examples of me violating my own principles if you look hard enough. I have years of being taught to do otherwise that I am trying to overcome, and a history of being convinced that everyone is out to get me that goes back to my childhood. My nervous system automatically reacts to what it recognizes as a threat (wrongly or rightly), and it takes time to learn new habits.
But I do know that this is how I want to move forward with my life, and I’m sure that if I keep reminding myself what I actually believe in and concentrate on what I truly want to put into the world, I will begin to change.