Good morning.
It's 6:34am as I begin this post. I am composing it in Blogger, not MSWord, so I apologize if there are typos.
I'll be blunt. I have a lot of artsy-fartsy Bohemian friends who are mostly reactionary political idiots. 6 years ago, when the Trump presidential campaign started picking up steam, my friends all "tuned in" to politics because it was suddenly in vogue to "be political." And because I had a reputation for "being political," they asked me a lot of questions.
I was undergoing a phase of self-discovery, beginning to connect with socialist and anarchist communities in meaningful and learning, from these essentially dialectical relationships, to unlearn a lot of my own classist, racial, sexual and gender-oriented biases. I learned to distinguish between liberal formulations of weaponized identity and anti-capitalist intersectionality. I learned that I was really more of an anarchist than a socialist. I learned to draw boundaries with toxic people and distance myself from organizations that didn't practice what they preached and tended to replicate the exploitative relationships of political parties and capitalism.
So, increasingly, as an end to the Trump Era seemed imminent, my friends began to like my answers to their questions less, because I was the person saying that the fight wouldn't be over anytime soon, no matter who was in charge, and that the problems that created Trump were structural and institutional. No one wanted to hear that except people who were dedicated to overthrowing capitalism. They wanted to hear that the Biden Era would end fascism. But they don't really understand what fascism is or where it comes from, or how it can mask itself within neoliberal society and operate institutionally as a part of a global hegemony that is rooted in hundreds of years of colonialism and slavery.
In my experience, most people engage in political arguments in bad faith. Fox News has a conservative agenda. MSNBC has a liberal bias. A bias and an agenda aren't the same thing. But if you criticize MSNBC for having a liberal bias, a liberal will strawman you as a conspiracy theorist. There is justification, though, for skepticism with regard to narratives in mainstream media. Saying the words "mainstream media" doesn't make you Q-Anon. It's just healthy skepticism. I think conspiracy theorists are full of shit, but historically, there have been some actual conspiracies. And because a deterministic system can in theory be functionally indistinguishable by observation from a non-deterministic system, some institutions of society that have evolved to preserve ancient power structures like patriarchy and cultural supremacy have a wide-ranging impact on daily life, whether most people want to critically examine that or not. They often don't want to be persuaded, they're not open to it, their positions are reactionary and they are not thinking critically in a consistent fashion. I have found that a lot of people argue from a place of trauma and it's nearly impossible for any kind of rational discourse to take place when a person is unwilling to process that trauma and grow from it into a more well-rounded person. I have benefitted in my life a great deal from therapeutic intervention and therapeutic training. I strive to process my trauma and not let it get in the way of growth. I think it's very hard to get to that point and a lot of people don't get there. This is where I think people need to be accountable for asking for help. But a lot of people don't want help. They impose their trauma experience on the world and anything that contradicts their direct experience is received as an ego-threat. So in their defensiveness they dig themselves further into reactionary positions. When you attempt to logically deconstruct these reactionary positions, you run into a trauma response.
My Bohemian friends are mostly white men. Regardless of their class status, many of them were indoctrinated early on by the Bourgeois State to identify with Bourgeois values, and thus to identify with the interests of the ruling class. They were marginalized by their peers for their eccentricity, their above-average intelligence, and their creativity. They were bullied and humiliated and so they sympathized with rebellion. But as children their formulations of rebellion were often individualistic and self-centered/egotistical. The Bourgeois education system didn't teach them dialectical history. They were left to pick and choose eclectically from thousands of years of traditions and schools of thought. This is encouraged in liberal society, this eclecticism without consistent analysis. Consistent analysis would lead to class analysis, and members of the underclass would stop identifying with the values and interests of the ruling class, and so our system has evolved to erect formal and informal barriers to people tuning into dialectical history. So, my friends are inconsistent. They are neither romantics nor modernists, neither liberal nor socialist, not really anything, but they claim to be everything, because Bourgeois society socialized white men to believe we can engage with anything. And because we don't generally understand dialectical history (though we don't know that we don't understand it) we don't learn from the past.
When my friends, in the same thought, express sympathy for the underclass but then talk about "true meritocracy" and "good elitism," they sound a lot like New Atheism did in the 2000s and increasingly in the 2010s. And as my knowledge of history and my understanding of intellectual continuity has expanded, I realize that much of what they say is a straightforward reformulation of early 20th century progressivism. Now, that word, "progressivism," might be confusing to modern readers. "Progressives," prior to World War II and the public revelation of Nazi atrocities, tended to embrace eugenics, colonialism, and western supremacy. Many "Progressives" of that era thought it was a beneficial and humanitarian thing to remove Native American children from their families and educate them to assimilate into white society as a servant class in domestic and agricultural labor.
So too did New Atheists embrace a similar value set, and so do my Bohemian liberal/pseudo-socialist friends. No, they don't want to herd people into camps. But I've heard them insist on the most illogical assertions like "some people deserve more," which implies an objective measurement of a person's social value, and literally every attempt to create a system like that, whether under capitalism, monarchy, or communism, has been an exercise in oppression wherein a privileged group exploits people with less institutional power. My friends also tend to conflate education and "high culture" with moral behavior. A "progressive" Bohemian friend of mine, who knows that I work with families that have DHS involvement due to child abuse or neglect, made the casual assumption in conversation with me that the children I work with (all of whom are black) aren't exposed to any "culture" in their home of origin. When I tried to point out that this was a problematic assumption (who is he, a white man, to curate and define what is and isn't black culture? And isn't it a fallacious assumption to think that abusers are all philistines?), he deflected and used strawman arguments assuming I was anti-education. I'm not anti-education. I just think it's a legitimate question what kind of social system the curricum of an education program reinforces, and whether certain groups, like billionaires and the bourgeoisie, benefit more from that system than other groups with less institutional power and capital.
This same friend said, of Elon Musk and private space travel in general, that due to the environmental crisis, he felt it was necessary by any means to colonize another planet with the most elite humans that could be selected. He's not concerned with what happens to the billions of people who don't get to go to this hypothetical offworld colony. He frequently, in "political" talk with me, assumes that IQ is a reasonable measure of a person's capacity for moral or ethical behavior, or their value in some way in the context of some social priority. Although he expresses sympathy for socialism, he does not understand dialectical history, and so he conceptualizes social priorities in a manner consistent with capitalism in which they are all in conflict, there are winners and losers, and that's just the way things are. He would never phrase it that way; he's learned more superficially "woke" ways of justifying the oppression he lives in, in order to reduce his cognitive dissonance.
How is this in anyway not an expression of eugenics and colonialism? This same friend claims to want an egalitarian post-scarcity society and is constantly asking me how we get there, but he doesn't like my answers because I tell him he has to question his own elitist biases and join the existing program among anarchists of building communities and mutual aid networks that will provide for peoples' needs when the state and private industry do not, and will outlast capitalism. But it starts with people making the hard choice to change the way we relate to each other, to be less judgmental, less married to our traumas, less unwilling to be uncomfortable or even to admit we are wrong.
Another example I encounter frequently among my friends as well as people I don't care to associate with is a very basic logical fallacy, an appeal to "human nature." "That's just the way things are. It's human nature." This is a common trope but it has no basis in science. The most elementary statement in science is "We do not know." I submit that no human has enough objective knowledge of human nature to reliably say what human nature is and what it is not. We know from evolutionary science that human nature is subject to change based on environmental and social factors. That's really about all we can say. Appeals to human nature lack the intellectual humility of honest skepticism, and they usually are employed as thought-terminating cliches that reinforce a negative and pessimistic worldview and the dominance of exploitative, abusive and coercive structures, like patriarchy, racism, colonialism, and cultural supremacy. We don't have other parallel universes readily observable or a computer system sophisticated enough to model hypothetical societies, these systems are too complex for systematic modeling. There may be some things that due to material constraints are beyond our knowledge. Science is still the best way of obtaining knowledge about the physical universe. But that doesn't mean universal progress is inevitable. Our existence is precarious and, unless you believe in an afterlife, ephemeral. And even if you believe in an afterlife, you should still treat other human beings with dignity in this life. Even if you sometimes wonder if your entire experience is a simulation and you question what is real, you should still treat other human beings like they are real and their lives and dignity matter more than whatever ideal you have about how society should be structured or "who deserves." Hell, to me, is a society where that is even a legitimate question. There is no material, physical need to even pose that question or take it seriously. It's entirely ideological. It doesn't consider structural disadvantages or disability. It's classist and ableist and only creates alienation, resentment and violence.
Cognitive dissonance is the biggest barrier to critical thinking. It's uncomfortable to be wrong. Most people don't want to be wrong. I believe the things I believe today because I spent a long time wanting to be wrong, reading things I disagreed with, and trying to militant deconstruct my own classist and racial and patriarchal biases. That is an ongoing process and it is often uncomfortable. I am also at a point in my life where I am comfortable with who I am and experience very little shame. I have worked through a lot of my trauma and continue to work on it every day. And as a result, to be blunt, most people come off to me as immature and to some degree developmentally arrested due to trauma. The people with intellectual humility in my life tend to make the most growth. I respect their intellectual humility, their honest skepticism, more than I respect the pseudo-socialist/crypto-elitist (and highly judgmental) politics of a lot of my friends.
If more people approached life that way, we'd have post-scarcity now, and it wouldn't take some hypothetical advanced technology. Human beings have agency. We are in control of our relationships. Through collective action, we can form non-abusive relationships. We just have to stop being so judgmental and focus our attention on the top-down abuses committed every day by the ruling class and the Bourgeoisie, in service of neoliberal hegemony and its underpinnings in a crypto-fascist police state.
It's 7:27am now. I'm signing off. I have to shower and then go to work cleaning up after the ravages of a fundamentally unequal society.
Addendum:
7:45am. I don't technically have to go to work yet. I sometimes go early (when I wake up early) because it helps me organize my day, but I'm not obligated and I don't get paid for that time. And writing a little more will help me process some of the things I'm frustrated with so that it doesn't impede my ability to ameliorate some of the worst outcomes of life under neoliberal hegemony.
I ate a bananna this morning. I hate eating in the morning, I have to force food down. I usually just eat a little yogurt or a piece of fruit or two. I might have an apple later. I don't exercise. I weight 30 more pounds than I'd like to. I'm often exhausted and I have a hard time managing my emotions. I don't pretend to be any kind of moral paragon. I do think a lot about ethics, probably more than most people, because I have to make very impactful decisions and prioritize things in a way I'm not always comfortable with. I have a job that requires me to use state power to protect vulnerable children, and it's the closest kind of work I can find to any ideal I hold, but I also see the continuity in the child welfare system from slavery and colonialism. I can't deny I am part of a coercive system. We all are, and the best we can do is be honest about it and organize our own communities in a way that affirms the dignity and safety our institutions do not. The ideal of the nuclear family isolates a lot of victims from observation and monitoring by kin and community members. A lot of the neglect and abuse I see would not happen in a more communalist society because more people would have their eyes on children. I can't launch a revolution by myself, the world doesn't revolve around me. I have privilege. If I try to use it for good, I have to be careful not to reinforce it. I need other people to hold me accountable. Sometimes accountability is hard. It's not always comfortable. But we've been there already in this post.
I think people have a misconception of the kind of work I do. They think it ends with a kid being removed and placed in a loving foster home. They don't realize that a lot of what I do involves monitoring children in foster care to ensure that they are not re-victimized, since kids in foster care are statistically more likely to abused than other children. Some foster parents have good intentions but need support to deal with the kids' behaviors. And some foster parents are in it for the money and do the bare minimum. It's very hard to get the court to change a child's goal ffrom reunification to permanent legal custody or adoption with another caregiver. We try our best to stabilize dysfunctional families by connecting them with services so that the kids can come home and their families can be independent of system involvement.
We do this because this country has a long, long history of removing minority children from their homes, ostensibly for their protection, not returning them, and assimilating them as slaves or servants. There is, in my field, a well-known and much studied disproportionality of black children represented in the child welfare system and in out-of-home placement that is only explained by both formal and informal systems of structural racism. It's true in Philadelphia, where there are a lot of black people, but even if you go out in the counties to places where black children are a more extreme minority, you still find that they are over-represented in the child welfare system. This is because the State polices black lives more than white lives. If you are poor and black in America, you live in a police state that is very often beneath the notice of higher-status people in society. I am not black. I grew up in a mostly white suburb. The black people I knew in my community were of a higher class status than the majority of black people. My neighborhood was not as routinely surveilled by police. That doesn't mean abuse and neglect didn't happen there. It just didn't get noticed to the extent that the State notices it in minority and lower income communities. No one on the block I grew up on except the elderly received food stamps or enough public benefits to merit social workers coming to their home and getting involved in their lives, which would have exposed them to more surveillance, but even then, the biases of the social workers would likely insulate white people and upper class people from the kind of scrutiny applied to minorities and lower class communities. This is not my opinion or a "belief," it's a well studied phenomenon in my field of practice. I am as close to an expert as a lot of my friends will meet on this subject. But they don't like what I have to say about the real reasons we observe this. Because it challenges their assumptions about child neglect and abuse, which are rooted in classist and racial biases.
Some people from lower income communities and/or minority groups internalize oppression. They see deviant behavior around them and they locate blame in individual moral failing more often than they take a systematic view of oppression. If they made it out of poverty they judge other people for not having done so. They write them off as lazy or unmotivated or lacking ambition. They tend to assume criminal nature rather than environment and disparity is the cause of most crime. Is it any wonder that the United States locks up so many people in prison for nonviolent and trivial offenses? This is a society of our own making. The prison-industrial complex dominates because Bourgeois culture has established an ideology based on Calvinist assumptions that shame, humiliation, and punishment will motivate people to behave morally. But what actually happens is that these systems further alienate a critical mass of people, and regardless of the behavior of any individuals within that collective group, the collective suffers unjustly. It is true that some people are pathological abusers. They will abuse in any situation, and even in an anarchist society, communities would have to sanction these individuals and find some way of preventing them from hurting other people. But the majority of people who commit crimes are damaged individuals. They are not pathological abusers who would abuse in any given situation. A lot of them didn't get the support they needed when they needed it, because they or their families, or their communities, were assumed not to "deserve it."
Prisons create more crime. Police create more crime. These are not "opinions" or "beliefs." They are direct observations of cause and effect. We can't sit around waiting for some magical technology or supernatural intervention to solve social problems. It starts with being less judgmental and more willing to take other peoples' perspectives.
My insistence on material safety and dignity comes from the social work code of ethics. It's not necessarily an "anarchist thing." Anarchists support it, but it's the way I was trained to help people. If I allowed myself to go back to the judgmental and biased person I was before I took on the work of deconstructing these things, I would not be able to help people. I would perpetuate the abuse. So I cannot, and will not, do that. But please don't confuse that for ego or a need to be right. That's not where it comes from. It's not how I live my life. I'm done with that. I used to live that way, and it only made me angry. It's better to be able to engage in non-hierarchical relations and grow from that than to assume hierarchy is inevitable. And that is an anarchist position. It starts with the way we treat each other.
It's 8:13am. I'm going to work. Peace, love, and solidarity.