I am sick of this notion on the left, never spoken but often implied, that whomever is most offended is most correct. No. Go fuck yourself. You might be full of shit, and I’m not going to assume you’re right and I’m wrong just because you’re squawking at me. I would hope that you would hold me to the same standard, and dismiss my own bullshit when it shows itself.
Everyone is a messy, complicated person, trying to live in a messy, complicated world, operating on imperfect information and making decisions with a brain that mostly runs on hormones and emotions. We are all–all of us–flawed, limited creatures. We do the best we can, and that’s all we can do, and sometimes we make mistakes, but sometimes that mistake is assuming that we can see other people’s failures perfectly when really we’re only seeing the distorted reflection of our own.
You may think someone did something wrong. And in thinking this, you may yourself be mistaken. That horribly oppressive thing you just saw someone doing might actually be a completely innocuous or even healthy behavior, mediated by a context you were too busy huffing outrage to notice. Have some humility, and be willing to accept that your deeply held moral convictions do not give you magic powers of perception. Before you fire off on someone, consider that you may not have all the information. Consider that their concerns, while not your concerns, might be as valid and important as your own. Consider that nobody has a monopoly on truth. Consider that anger can be righteous, but very often it is not. Consider that love and compassion are almost never a bad choice.
There is a sense in progressive spaces–and this may be true of conservative spaces, I don’t know because I don’t hang out there–that we must all agree on every moral question. Of course nobody raises their hands and says “Yes, I’m the unreasonable asshole who destroys friends and slanders loved ones because we disagree on the appropriateness of using a particular word,” but let’s be honest, we’ve all seen it happen.
And it just so happens that the step which we’re expected to be locked to tends to be the one that promotes a maximal restriction on what is considered acceptable conduct, while somehow simultaneously promoting minimal standards of personal responsibility. If someone throws an absolute tantrum over nothing, we can’t tell people to suck it up and be adults because society is unfair or whatever. We’re not able to ask people to keep some perspective and exercise discretion and emotional self-control because personal responsibility is a neoliberal plot or something.
It simultaneously privileges the individual subjective experience above all else, while demanding a collective effort to curate that experience. This is a contradiction. It cannot function over the long term. And hey, check out what’s happening on social media these days: it’s not functioning!
More and more people are cutting off, backing out. Because it is literally impossible to function in a society where we are all responsible for the emotional experiences of everyone but ourselves.
I’m sick of the self-flagellating notion that if someone asserts that you’ve made some kind of moral error, that you must immediately back off of whatever you were doing, ask for forgiveness, and then adapt your conduct to whatever the accuser demanded of you. And if you don’t, then you are ::crash of thunder:: PROBLEMATIC. This ethos has no room to admit that maybe the person who is claiming offense is doing so for disingenuous reasons. Nor can it admit that maybe someone who is being sincere is nonetheless being unreasonable.
And then the weird, nasty wrinkle that makes all of this even worse is that somehow, once someone is being PROBLEMATIC, you can do whatever you want to them to vent your rage, and it’s perfectly acceptable. You want to violate someone’s privacy? Go ahead, they earned it. You want to spread rumors around that they’re a pedophile? Go ahead, that’s totally cool. I mean, it doesn’t really matter if they actually did something wrong. It only matters that you think that they did! Isn’t that great? I mean, horrifying?
I used to be as earnest a go-getter about this stuff as you can imagine. But now, at the ripe old age of 29, I feel like I’ve been fighting for a thousand years, and losing every step of the way. This corrosive, bitter way of thinking and behaving is killing us. We’ve made so much progress, and we’re in danger of losing it all because of a backlash that we on the social left will trigger with our own strident intransigence. Empathy for the people we disagree with is important. Cutting yourself off from anyone you ever have an unpleasant dealing with isn’t the answer. By all means, curate your online experience however you like, but this unending holy war mentality has got to stop.
If anything gives me me hope, it’s Stein’s Law: ”Things that can’t go on forever, don’t.”