It's not personal.
When things aren't going your way, you can almost assuredly count on the fact that nobody, divine or otherwise, is actively plotting for your demise. They didn't set the car into motion that wrecks into you on the highway. They didn't create the weapon used to hurt you. They couldn't control the mental impairment that prompted the slew of hurtful sentiments. Deep down we know this, but we're compelled by our own agency to assign blame.
There's an endless list of things we might think to blame. Blame abstractions like, “society,” “humanity,” “oligarchy,” “capitalism,” “privilege,” “patriarchy,” or perhaps our “sinful natures.” You blame politicians, or really a leader of any sort. You can blame your upbringing, your poverty, and how time or your friends have changed. You can blame your looks. Surely every malfunctioning piece of equipment has taken some level of slurs and hatred for its audacity to fail when it did.
What is the blame for? Is it to protect? Is it to cope? Do we blame simply because it feels good? Is it just a habit passed on unconsciously? Is it out of fears about our own agency? I think blame comes out of a desire to reject. I think it's a response to a challenge we weren't looking for. Your plastic plate wasn't microwave appropriate; it's not a “stupid plate” for melting. The manufacturer wasn't wringing his hands at the prospect of millions of meals getting lightly poisoned.
The larger point about it not being personal is that it's explicitly interpersonal. After we challenge the legitimacy of the inanimate that disappoints us, or rely too heavily on disavowing any virtue of the abstract, we're basically left alone in our opinion. The melted plate isn't going to fight back. There is no cobbled together definition of “capitalism” that's both emotionally compelling and persuasive you're going to hear as you swear under breath at the price of coffee. Thus we start the feedback self-serving cycle of “personal opinions” that our interpersonal relationships either serve or undermine.
It's easiest to see today with politics. We don't need fancy thought experiments and subtleties. Nazis march in the streets. If and when you have no real feeling about that, it should tell you something about just how impersonal their presence registers. If you happen to have identity qualifiers that would be readily attacked by Nazis, I can only speculate, but the problem feels considerably more interpersonal. The irony of their largest press coming from killing a white girl must feel all the more grating.
I'm trying to work towards an explanation for things changing and why they don't. The Nazis get on their feedback hamster wheel. They hook up with other hamsters, now insulated, faux-interpersonal. They're frat bros or feral oligarchs over their feeble kingdoms. They aren't getting into conversations which aren't screaming matches. They aren't invited to the community barbecue to socialize and normalize. Their problems, mental or physical, all get reduced to short-hand “Nazi,” and that's enough for all those concerned.
What scares me is how willing we are to do this to ourselves. We become micro-Nazis about everything. We pledge allegiance to brands and sports teams. We think our school was the best. We'll never examine the problems in our families. We'll never question who we think is to blame or explain why. Our habits are the best habits. Our vices are forgivable, justified. Our love is the deepest. Our faith is the “most personal.” It's the blaring horn of insecure doubt that is terrified of ever raising the questions.
Once you start asking questions, it can be hard to figure out when to stop. There's testimonies I used to read about the faithful and their first moments of real doubt. It was how their parent reacted to one of their gay friends. It was a pastor getting caught doing something obscene. It was a snooty disregard and disgusted face of a friend hating on another friend. It wasn't the, of course named “come to God” moment, where it struck them like a light that they didn't believe It was interpersonal. The people who expressed the views and ideas in the same words looked like something nasty or wrong. The no-longer-believer didn't turn away from God, not just because he doesn't exist, they turned away from shitty friends or family. More explicitly, those friends and family no longer made them feel good or safe in what they believed.
I'm positive I'm mocked for the idea that I could ever truly persuade or manipulate anybody. I'm often a blunt instrument, after all. I put a voice to the things people would rather not think about. How much of my current social life, or lack-thereof, is equal parts my insistence to keep doing so as it is every cliché about getting old and growing apart. I don't make people feel good or safe in what they believe. I make them feel like me, doubtful, frustrated, and loaded with questions that have pretty easy answers as long as everyone is willing to play the same game. And no, that game is not 3-dimensional chess.
The game I think I'm playing is a morality saga. The one rule is fairly simple. Try to be honest. When you don't know something, you say you don't know. When you think something terrifying and horrible, you admit it. When you're scared, even for a moment, you acknowledge your momentary fear and see what comes after. To a greater extent, it's a game you can play all by yourself. You can have thousands of non-schizophrenic conversations with yourself. Most of the background activity in your brain is nonverbal. But you can voice the questions and speak to the uncertainty all by yourself. You can admit things in the privacy of your own mind.
If you do this long enough, you will begin to change. After creating a model of interpersonal questions between your different selves, you'll start to develop in the direction that helps you answer things for yourself. What side to pick in a family fight? You have to do the work on what family means to you, what fallout you're prepared to handle, or maybe whether it's really a fight at all or something you even need to bother with. If you really want the answer though, it requires equal parts trying and equal parts honesty. You might discover people often insist they are doing one or the other, which means they're neither.
To try often means actively pursuing something you “know for sure” you do not want to do. I've earnestly pursued “normal” jobs to a greater extent than those around me, and I keep coming back to the same conclusions regarding how I want to conduct my entrepreneurial life. I said everything a womanizing loner sarcastic bachelor could ever say before I fully endorsed being with someone for 5 years. I understand the intimate details of the different perks of fitting into different corporate or social structures, and I honestly want nothing to do with them.
I don't know how to describe the process without calling myself “different.” I hate doing that though. I hate it so much because I don't feel it. I don't feel different until someone bothered to label me as such. I feel older, like everyone. I feel a certain investment in characters and creations, like millions of fans who make pilgrimages a year. I wear clothes, very old boring anonymous white guy clothes, and fix my hair before leaving the house. I speak the language of most of the world. There's nothing inherent in me that should make for a larger push towards trying or honesty. I fall predictably into personality trait assessments and puke and shit and will die alone.
The only thing that makes me “different” is my lack of compelling interpersonal relationships. They've often proven to be lies over time. They've exploited me. They've proven financially destructive. They've caused more mental heartache than anyone truly deserves. And they've been openly mocked and spat upon after an earnest investment. At that point, you just kind of do you whether you want to or not. When any aberration is “the worst,” or some other damning qualifier, the impact of those assessments lose their weight. When no one is contributing anything to your life but increasingly sophisticated lies and fears, you're not playing the same game.
In the world at large, you see the failures of empty assessment and a lack of responsibility to each other in our declining empire. The amount of things that have to go wrong in order for an authoritarian to gain power are legion, but they start at the border between personal and interpersonal. The rich Nazis live lives devoid of poor Nazis. White Nazis have no experience with different colored Nazis. Pundit Nazis spin their hamster wheels as activist Nazis beat their drums. When you need an honest slap or spanking, no one feels qualified or compelled as everyone they know is speaking their language. “The media” can't correct the media's biases and “the oligarchs” are thousands of lobbyist and demagogue ears with their own agendas and distractions.
In the compounding mess of camps and competition, there is no front door with a maze behind to navigate towards some end. There is no “proper dialogue” with someone molded by their feedback mechanism. There is no meeting in the middle between cliches and talking points. You can't debate ideologues. You can't empathize with experiences you don't have a concept of. You get selfish. You turn your confusion, fear, anger, and resentment into a platform to launch into blame and shame games. Gossip takes on a peculiar dignity. You're amazed that nobody's figured it all out like you before.
What's different about the people that do change? Who is the Nazi convert? Who is the Phelps daughter that puts down her “God Hates Fags” sign? I don't think it's as simple as even they describe. They'll claim they were exposed to patience and polite conversation. Someone met their hatred, which they regarded as love or nobility and connection, and showed them compassion they didn't deserve. It's a very Jesus-y explanation. Forgive them, they know not what they do.
I know there's something more. Especially in our interconnected online worlds, we're less than a second away from any tone on any topic we choose. That girl was open in a way her family will never be. The Mormons or Scientologists who quit had a nagging sense of true love going into the brainwashing that finally outshined the darkness. The lonely Nazi's enthusiasm for tattoos only bested by the overwhelming force of his need to belong to something meaningful cutting through the racist bullshit. They're the same, driven by a game of trying to be honest. Whether that's innate or provoked, I don't know. Whether that can be amplified and taught, I have sincere doubts.
It's hard to say I ever tried to be honest before I started writing. I was an overwhelming-feeler. I always felt like I couldn't act like I wanted, respond as needed, so I would freeze or panic or cry. I had a minor-bully close my locker and give me shit in middle school. I cracked and cried to a teacher when all I wanted to do was slam his head in the fucking door a few times. He was smaller than me. I'd been a bully in the past. But I was at the mercy of the forces that molded me to fear the repercussions of getting suspended or getting the shit beat out of me at home. I was paralyzed, helpless, and afraid. I never would have tempered my feelings thinking about what kind of shit he might've been going though at home to turn him into an asshole. I never would have sat down and prioritized what his words meant to me. I could only react. But, we're talking the beginning of 6th grade, what's your excuse?
My moral claim rests on the idea of being the change you want to see. If I'm a special open node willing to get lost in the details and depersonalize and analyze and take risks like every converted Nazi, the environment we inhabit together has to stand for those principles. I can't smile and nod with you. I can't pat you on the back while you dive deeper into your insecurities. I can't be your friend that celebrates self-destruction and calls it the pretty name we've all agreed to not pick apart. I want more people to respect their time like I try to. I want more people to feel they've chosen their sacrifices, and not been forced to adopt unjust ones. I want people to genuinely feel what's worth celebrating every day in their darkest moment even if it's a random funny thought as you're dialing the suicide help line. My entire worldview rests on the idea that honesty and objective truth not only exist, but are as easily pursued and achieved with the single choice to do so.
You don't have to label words you don't like or understand in damning tones. You don't have to shortcut someone's existence because they remind you of the monster under your bed growing up. You don't have to turn every opportunity and exercise of pursuing the truth into someone else's fault. It's not a “gift” or “magic” that “saves the world.” It's you choosing to save you from yourself. It's you joining other people to create interpersonal environments that do the work of showing wanna-be Nazis how to behave a different way and fit in elsewhere. “Aberration” can become “creative expression.” “Negative” can become “opportunity to work though.” The compulsion to censure or erase honesty doesn't mean stop talking and fall in line. It doesn't even mean retaliate in spite and hatred. It means keep trying and keep being honest. It will be the loneliest place you can ever be. And I don't know if or when I'll ever be able to articulate why, but it's the most important thing I think you can ever do.
When things aren't going your way, you can almost assuredly count on the fact that nobody, divine or otherwise, is actively plotting for your demise. They didn't set the car into motion that wrecks into you on the highway. They didn't create the weapon used to hurt you. They couldn't control the mental impairment that prompted the slew of hurtful sentiments. Deep down we know this, but we're compelled by our own agency to assign blame.
There's an endless list of things we might think to blame. Blame abstractions like, “society,” “humanity,” “oligarchy,” “capitalism,” “privilege,” “patriarchy,” or perhaps our “sinful natures.” You blame politicians, or really a leader of any sort. You can blame your upbringing, your poverty, and how time or your friends have changed. You can blame your looks. Surely every malfunctioning piece of equipment has taken some level of slurs and hatred for its audacity to fail when it did.
What is the blame for? Is it to protect? Is it to cope? Do we blame simply because it feels good? Is it just a habit passed on unconsciously? Is it out of fears about our own agency? I think blame comes out of a desire to reject. I think it's a response to a challenge we weren't looking for. Your plastic plate wasn't microwave appropriate; it's not a “stupid plate” for melting. The manufacturer wasn't wringing his hands at the prospect of millions of meals getting lightly poisoned.
The larger point about it not being personal is that it's explicitly interpersonal. After we challenge the legitimacy of the inanimate that disappoints us, or rely too heavily on disavowing any virtue of the abstract, we're basically left alone in our opinion. The melted plate isn't going to fight back. There is no cobbled together definition of “capitalism” that's both emotionally compelling and persuasive you're going to hear as you swear under breath at the price of coffee. Thus we start the feedback self-serving cycle of “personal opinions” that our interpersonal relationships either serve or undermine.
It's easiest to see today with politics. We don't need fancy thought experiments and subtleties. Nazis march in the streets. If and when you have no real feeling about that, it should tell you something about just how impersonal their presence registers. If you happen to have identity qualifiers that would be readily attacked by Nazis, I can only speculate, but the problem feels considerably more interpersonal. The irony of their largest press coming from killing a white girl must feel all the more grating.
I'm trying to work towards an explanation for things changing and why they don't. The Nazis get on their feedback hamster wheel. They hook up with other hamsters, now insulated, faux-interpersonal. They're frat bros or feral oligarchs over their feeble kingdoms. They aren't getting into conversations which aren't screaming matches. They aren't invited to the community barbecue to socialize and normalize. Their problems, mental or physical, all get reduced to short-hand “Nazi,” and that's enough for all those concerned.
What scares me is how willing we are to do this to ourselves. We become micro-Nazis about everything. We pledge allegiance to brands and sports teams. We think our school was the best. We'll never examine the problems in our families. We'll never question who we think is to blame or explain why. Our habits are the best habits. Our vices are forgivable, justified. Our love is the deepest. Our faith is the “most personal.” It's the blaring horn of insecure doubt that is terrified of ever raising the questions.
Once you start asking questions, it can be hard to figure out when to stop. There's testimonies I used to read about the faithful and their first moments of real doubt. It was how their parent reacted to one of their gay friends. It was a pastor getting caught doing something obscene. It was a snooty disregard and disgusted face of a friend hating on another friend. It wasn't the, of course named “come to God” moment, where it struck them like a light that they didn't believe It was interpersonal. The people who expressed the views and ideas in the same words looked like something nasty or wrong. The no-longer-believer didn't turn away from God, not just because he doesn't exist, they turned away from shitty friends or family. More explicitly, those friends and family no longer made them feel good or safe in what they believed.
I'm positive I'm mocked for the idea that I could ever truly persuade or manipulate anybody. I'm often a blunt instrument, after all. I put a voice to the things people would rather not think about. How much of my current social life, or lack-thereof, is equal parts my insistence to keep doing so as it is every cliché about getting old and growing apart. I don't make people feel good or safe in what they believe. I make them feel like me, doubtful, frustrated, and loaded with questions that have pretty easy answers as long as everyone is willing to play the same game. And no, that game is not 3-dimensional chess.
The game I think I'm playing is a morality saga. The one rule is fairly simple. Try to be honest. When you don't know something, you say you don't know. When you think something terrifying and horrible, you admit it. When you're scared, even for a moment, you acknowledge your momentary fear and see what comes after. To a greater extent, it's a game you can play all by yourself. You can have thousands of non-schizophrenic conversations with yourself. Most of the background activity in your brain is nonverbal. But you can voice the questions and speak to the uncertainty all by yourself. You can admit things in the privacy of your own mind.
If you do this long enough, you will begin to change. After creating a model of interpersonal questions between your different selves, you'll start to develop in the direction that helps you answer things for yourself. What side to pick in a family fight? You have to do the work on what family means to you, what fallout you're prepared to handle, or maybe whether it's really a fight at all or something you even need to bother with. If you really want the answer though, it requires equal parts trying and equal parts honesty. You might discover people often insist they are doing one or the other, which means they're neither.
To try often means actively pursuing something you “know for sure” you do not want to do. I've earnestly pursued “normal” jobs to a greater extent than those around me, and I keep coming back to the same conclusions regarding how I want to conduct my entrepreneurial life. I said everything a womanizing loner sarcastic bachelor could ever say before I fully endorsed being with someone for 5 years. I understand the intimate details of the different perks of fitting into different corporate or social structures, and I honestly want nothing to do with them.
I don't know how to describe the process without calling myself “different.” I hate doing that though. I hate it so much because I don't feel it. I don't feel different until someone bothered to label me as such. I feel older, like everyone. I feel a certain investment in characters and creations, like millions of fans who make pilgrimages a year. I wear clothes, very old boring anonymous white guy clothes, and fix my hair before leaving the house. I speak the language of most of the world. There's nothing inherent in me that should make for a larger push towards trying or honesty. I fall predictably into personality trait assessments and puke and shit and will die alone.
The only thing that makes me “different” is my lack of compelling interpersonal relationships. They've often proven to be lies over time. They've exploited me. They've proven financially destructive. They've caused more mental heartache than anyone truly deserves. And they've been openly mocked and spat upon after an earnest investment. At that point, you just kind of do you whether you want to or not. When any aberration is “the worst,” or some other damning qualifier, the impact of those assessments lose their weight. When no one is contributing anything to your life but increasingly sophisticated lies and fears, you're not playing the same game.
In the world at large, you see the failures of empty assessment and a lack of responsibility to each other in our declining empire. The amount of things that have to go wrong in order for an authoritarian to gain power are legion, but they start at the border between personal and interpersonal. The rich Nazis live lives devoid of poor Nazis. White Nazis have no experience with different colored Nazis. Pundit Nazis spin their hamster wheels as activist Nazis beat their drums. When you need an honest slap or spanking, no one feels qualified or compelled as everyone they know is speaking their language. “The media” can't correct the media's biases and “the oligarchs” are thousands of lobbyist and demagogue ears with their own agendas and distractions.
In the compounding mess of camps and competition, there is no front door with a maze behind to navigate towards some end. There is no “proper dialogue” with someone molded by their feedback mechanism. There is no meeting in the middle between cliches and talking points. You can't debate ideologues. You can't empathize with experiences you don't have a concept of. You get selfish. You turn your confusion, fear, anger, and resentment into a platform to launch into blame and shame games. Gossip takes on a peculiar dignity. You're amazed that nobody's figured it all out like you before.
What's different about the people that do change? Who is the Nazi convert? Who is the Phelps daughter that puts down her “God Hates Fags” sign? I don't think it's as simple as even they describe. They'll claim they were exposed to patience and polite conversation. Someone met their hatred, which they regarded as love or nobility and connection, and showed them compassion they didn't deserve. It's a very Jesus-y explanation. Forgive them, they know not what they do.
I know there's something more. Especially in our interconnected online worlds, we're less than a second away from any tone on any topic we choose. That girl was open in a way her family will never be. The Mormons or Scientologists who quit had a nagging sense of true love going into the brainwashing that finally outshined the darkness. The lonely Nazi's enthusiasm for tattoos only bested by the overwhelming force of his need to belong to something meaningful cutting through the racist bullshit. They're the same, driven by a game of trying to be honest. Whether that's innate or provoked, I don't know. Whether that can be amplified and taught, I have sincere doubts.
It's hard to say I ever tried to be honest before I started writing. I was an overwhelming-feeler. I always felt like I couldn't act like I wanted, respond as needed, so I would freeze or panic or cry. I had a minor-bully close my locker and give me shit in middle school. I cracked and cried to a teacher when all I wanted to do was slam his head in the fucking door a few times. He was smaller than me. I'd been a bully in the past. But I was at the mercy of the forces that molded me to fear the repercussions of getting suspended or getting the shit beat out of me at home. I was paralyzed, helpless, and afraid. I never would have tempered my feelings thinking about what kind of shit he might've been going though at home to turn him into an asshole. I never would have sat down and prioritized what his words meant to me. I could only react. But, we're talking the beginning of 6th grade, what's your excuse?
My moral claim rests on the idea of being the change you want to see. If I'm a special open node willing to get lost in the details and depersonalize and analyze and take risks like every converted Nazi, the environment we inhabit together has to stand for those principles. I can't smile and nod with you. I can't pat you on the back while you dive deeper into your insecurities. I can't be your friend that celebrates self-destruction and calls it the pretty name we've all agreed to not pick apart. I want more people to respect their time like I try to. I want more people to feel they've chosen their sacrifices, and not been forced to adopt unjust ones. I want people to genuinely feel what's worth celebrating every day in their darkest moment even if it's a random funny thought as you're dialing the suicide help line. My entire worldview rests on the idea that honesty and objective truth not only exist, but are as easily pursued and achieved with the single choice to do so.
You don't have to label words you don't like or understand in damning tones. You don't have to shortcut someone's existence because they remind you of the monster under your bed growing up. You don't have to turn every opportunity and exercise of pursuing the truth into someone else's fault. It's not a “gift” or “magic” that “saves the world.” It's you choosing to save you from yourself. It's you joining other people to create interpersonal environments that do the work of showing wanna-be Nazis how to behave a different way and fit in elsewhere. “Aberration” can become “creative expression.” “Negative” can become “opportunity to work though.” The compulsion to censure or erase honesty doesn't mean stop talking and fall in line. It doesn't even mean retaliate in spite and hatred. It means keep trying and keep being honest. It will be the loneliest place you can ever be. And I don't know if or when I'll ever be able to articulate why, but it's the most important thing I think you can ever do.
