A Lesson in Political Psychology, Research Time, 21/11/2016

Over the next few years in my different writing and art projects, one of the things I’ll do is try to understand the political phenomenon of Donald Trump.

I’ve been doing that on the blog for the last few weeks as I read some noteworthy radical democratic political theorists in the leadup and immediate aftermath of his election.

A traditionally realist depiction of President Trump,
in a contemporary fresco.

As my next big book Utopias comes together over the next few years, reckoning with the nationalist movement and whatever terrors his administration unleashes will provide the book’s context. So, aside from my general interest in global politics, I’m thinking through a lot of the most thoughtful accounts of what Trump means for human society.

One of those comes from Laurie Penny. Ever since reading her book Unspeakable Things a couple of years ago, I considered her a brilliant philosopher as well as an insightful and incisive journalist.

It’s weird in a lot of modern contexts to call someone who doesn’t work as a university academic a philosopher. But I think it’s increasingly necessary for philosophy as a tradition, given the pressures of academic institutions on creativity and social leadership beyond the community of university researchers.

Even in those circumstances, more and more university professors are too overburdened and underpaid to be leaders even in their community. Like too many people whose careers have been wrecked by casualization or automation, the sectors that are supposed to produce knowledge devote increasing amounts of energy to mere survival.

So it’s up to journalists and artists to understand and develop the concepts that bring us to such incredible danger and can save us. To understand nationalism and develop a path to liberation.

Penny’s article “Against Bargaining” is one example of the public, open-access, mass market philosophy that people who oppose racism, bigotry, nationalism, and autocracy need to read today. We need it to feed our minds and keep us sharp. To focus ourselves on the differences that make real differences, the basis of accurate, worthwhile action.

The only reason Nietzsche wasn't a democrat
was because in the 19th century, it worked as
a mass politics, a dangerous kind of social
movement. Today, democracy is about
grooming people to be the ideally best people,
the bravest and most proud. Democracy has
become literally true aristocracy.

After reading Unspeakable Things, I called Penny a Nietzschean, and “Against Bargaining” continues this theme in her work – Donald Trump’s ascent and all it represents (and unleashes) is the most violent explosion of social resentment I think I’ve seen in my lifetime.

Nietzsche wrote about resentment as a seething, creeping social force. It was the cultural attitude that uses hatred to turn weakness into strength. But this isn’t the emboldening hatred of rage at an oppressor. It’s the petty small-mindedness of slimy disgust at anyone who dares to present themselves as your equal.

That’s one context of the attitude of resentment. It’s resentment triumphant, the decadent society of 19th century Europe, Europe at the heart of empire. Imperialism that was popularly justified by a morality of white supremacist racism.

The idea refuses to die. At least in some contexts. Homogeneously white affluent communities within spitting distance of more economically and ethnically mixed districts is one context. Places where no one knows enough non-white people to move their thoughts beyond stereotype and fear.

That petty attitude is also, at an individual level, the perspective of the abuser. He blames you for the violence he inflicts and you accept his narrative. Look at how many nice liberal journalists have written thinkpieces on how multiculturalism and identity politics caused President Trump.

You know what multiculturalism is? It’s living in a mixed community – walking down the street and passing by couples and families of as many possible ethnic and gender combinations as you can get out of a randomizer.

You know what identity politics is? It’s the assertion that your life and cultural heritage has value, especially if that life and heritage has been devalued and abused for generations.

It’s my fault that I’m being hurt because I stood up for myself and demanded that I not be hurt. If I’m compliant, then I won’t be hurt. I’ll be silent. I’ll be good.

To be good out of fear of an authority’s punishment isn’t goodness. It’s fear. The psychology of the abuse victim is to mask the outcome of overpowering fear as moral virtue.

In the face of hard years of violence from the
state and the mob, we'll need to find the
strength to smile.

Here, the psychological has become political. The most dedicated foot soldiers of Trumpism are the online trolls – abusers and harassers who are entertained by provoking more emotionally vulnerable people into mental distress. And who believe their own bullshit when they defend their violent actions as the exercise of their rights to free speech.

A movement of people who’ve learned to take pleasure in the psychological pain of others have taken their own will to violence to a mass-scale group phenomenon. Hence Penny’s astute observation – that the vulnerable people who are taking Trump’s ascent best have been those who have already overcome abuse.

People who’ve already worked through the self-cannibalizing philosophy of blaming yourself for the violence you suffer. We are facing today a political movement that literally wants to bludgeon dissent and difference into silence and invisibility. They see disagreement and ethnic, religious, or sexual difference as obnoxiousness.

Maybe you could call it getting uppity.

It’s our duty not to believe them and remember that rights to freedom aren’t meant to defend your attempts at violence. It’s to defend your attempt to be.

What Haunts Us III: We Could Each Become Evil, A History Boy, 12/11/2015

The libertarian ethos is one face of a social phenomenon with many different aspects. If they have a common theme, it’s reactionary conservative movements understanding themselves in the language of freedom, even as they suppress the ability of others to free themselves.

For instance, take the screenshot on the right. It was a comment on a LinkedIn Pulse article I read yesterday morning about the recent protests against racist action and administration indifference at University of Missouri.

I tweeted this yesterday. I have no problem signal boosting this racist.

Look past the obviously racist slurs and you’ll see one sort-of-positive idea. If they didn't like how they were treated at University of Missouri, they could quit and go to school somewhere else.

That's the freedom of the pure marketplace. If you don't like the service at one place, take your business somewhere else. The principle sounds fine on its own, but it simply isn’t suitable for the material realities of many of the people who suffer in discriminatory social systems. 

Maybe you can't physically reach an alternative business to provide some essential service that bars you or creates an unwelcoming atmosphere for you. Like if you need an abortion but must travel hundreds of miles, and can’t afford to take time off work.

If you don’t get a satisfactory arrangement from your employer, says this advocate of freedom, simply quit and get another job. But what if there's an economic recession or depression, and there are no other jobs. 

Or job scarcity turns work-seekers into supplicants to potential employers. The sanctified new liberal value of work is the equality of two people who form a contract as employer and employee. 

Libertarians, influenced by Hayek’s writing, see that equality as undermined by the mob rules and thuggery of labour unions. Workers ganging up on employers to intimidate them. But employers hold power when jobs are scarce and they can turn away applicants on a whim. 

Robert Nozick was actually a very kind man, but his
philosophical ideas inspire people to act with terrible
cruelty. This is an actual, genuine quote from Nozick
sincerely saying taxation is forced labour. It's a
philosophical centrepiece of the libertarian / new
liberal right wing's desire to defund all government.

This is our economy. It has been for some time, and it will be for the foreseeable future. Its inequities fall more sharply, macro-economically speaking, on women. And those new liberal arguments are always trotted out, their presumptions of equal starting positions making perfect sense until you consider how real people actually live.

The argument for total free speech, quite often made on social media battlegrounds, work the same way: a presumption of material equality, when equality is abstract at best.

This is the presumption behind the defence of men who gang up on women on social media, hounding her with insults and abuse, then complain that she’s silencing them by blocking or reporting them. The presumption that we're all already equal, and that my democratic right to say whatever I want trumps my responsibility not to abuse people.

Remember that a member of Reddit's Libertarian forum once told me that moral obligations toward other people oppressed his freedom. This is in Robert Nozick's writing, his radio show example. The excerpt philosophy undergrads rarely receive in their textbooks. 

It’s a repugnant state of mind, this toxic masculinity. But why do I say it haunts me? Instead of just plain disgusting me? 

Because I could very easily have become one of these people who thinks women’s empowerment, even in the act of speaking out, is a violent act toward me as a man. I know how close I came to being a man who hates women.

A lot of the most aggressive members of Gamergate and the Rabid Puppies are young men with social anxiety or awkwardness. Maybe in some contexts, some conversations, they can appear confident. But under that bluster is a very uncertain person. 

They feel uncertain about how they’re supposed to approach women. Maybe they develop feelings for a woman in their circle of friends, but they're too nervous to say anything. And if they overcome their nerves, maybe they're still awkward, strange, and come off creepy. 

Maybe that rejection inspires obsessiveness. Maybe instead of nursing some sadness before moving on, they instead foster resentment. Or else talk themselves into deeper infatuation. 

I credit Penny's writing with helping to raise my own
consciousness and understanding of my attitudes and
actions. That's what philosophy is supposed to do.

Men are supposed to be strong, confident, and impressive. Whether it’s with our words, appearance, or some other talent. Why do you think so many men take up music to attract women? We’re taught that we have to act a particular way, and we can win what we're entitled to. Women. Or even a particular woman.

It wasn’t until I read Laurie Penny’s account of toxic masculinity that I fully understood the conundrum that defined my personality through most of my 20s. I thought I had to act in an aggressive, confrontational, showboating way to win the affection of women I wanted, whose affection I felt entitled to only because I wanted it. Even when I'd get so nervous, I couldn't express it.

I thought I should act according to the rules of what I now know is toxic masculinity. But I was really bad at it. And when I tried to act that way, I'd become monstrous. 

I broke that cycle of thought maybe only three or four years ago. Some never do. Some blame the women who reject them for their own loneliness, and become more resentful and enraged. Some think that a woman choosing who she wants to be with, or even just speaking her mind, is an act of aggression toward men and themselves. 

The worst of these men are Elliot Rodger and Marc Lépine. But the same tendency is in so many men who remain twisted by toxic cultures of violent, aggressive, possessive masculinity. Masculinities of control and authority, that see being in authority as freedom.

I could very easily have been one of those people. That’s what haunts me about the modern phenomenon of men hating women. Because when I think about a young woman like Rehtaeh, I don’t just think about the tragedy, the horror, and the cruelty.

I think about how – if my reaction to a few situations leaned just a little bit more one way than the other – I could have become just like her tormentors. Someone who thought she deserved it.

That potential for evil is in me. It’s in many, if not all, of us. And it haunts me to my core.

Another New Feminist Revolution III: Because She's a Great Philosopher, Composing, 15/05/2015

Continued from last post . . . Maybe now you can see why Laurie Penny’s ideas have so quickly become so important to my own projects. From my own position as a blogger with a small following, respectable pageview numbers, and a couple of books either out or on the way out, I’m trying to help change the world through my ideas. 

I’m not as successful as Penny, of course, because I spent my 20s in graduate school and she spent it hustling journalism. Also, I don’t think I would have done as well as she has, or even been able to formulate the ideas I have if I hadn’t taken the path that I did. 

I'm calling it right now: Wollstonecraft, de Beauvoir,
Steinem, Cixous, Penny. She goes on the list.

I started my life as a pretty blinkered guy who thought that status quo was generally alright, and I’m becoming increasingly radical in my political beliefs as I get older. It’s supposed to run in the opposite direction, with youthful, naive radicalism calming down into an oppressive conservatism. The voice that asks contemptuously why you weren’t able to buy a house when you were 25 because I did in 1974.

But if we think that’s the voice of everyone in the previous generation, then we’re just playing into the hands of people who want to profit from the destruction of welfare state institutions. If a young person struggling with debt and wages they can barely live on sees a senior in poverty and spits in their face, “Now you know what it feels like, old man!” . . . Well, I don’t want to become that person.

I don’t want to become that person for the same reason I couldn’t let myself become a man who hates women and thinks that feminists want to torture men. Not just because it’s based on a lie, but because giving in to spite, anger, and revenge is the expression of weakness. 

It’s easy to deal with difficulties by hating the ones who had it easier than you did. The most difficult path of understanding and empathy is the more noble one, and it says a lot about humanity that we’re so hateful and resentful a species. It’s in this sense that I think Penny is very Nietzschean:* she understands that attitudes of resentment and hatred hold us back from progress as societies and as souls. 

* Do ignore Nietzsche’s intense sexism. I do. Nietzsche himself tells you to ignore his sexism, as he sets off those passages in Beyond Good and Evil with an introduction that essentially says that his sexist beliefs are the most contemptible, resentful parts of his own personality, part of what makes him less than the ethical nobility he aspired to be. Would that we could all be so honest with and about ourselves.

A dress that's making a new
activist in New Brunswick
every day. So some very
beneficial outrage for us all.

And as I’ve said, Penny understands the limits of anger. So much of the horrors in the everyday moments of modern life, especially the modern lives of women, find their genesis in systematic causes. When a harm is born from an intention, and the intention was itself the spontaneous genesis of the harm, then we have a reason for anger, revenge, and punishment. 

But patriarchy is a concept which distills a massive system of gendered oppression of both women and men. Women are oppressed in all the ways that we now know are obvious: they are objectified into things whose only value is in how they please others, particularly men. Men are oppressed in being twisted into hateful, raging, abusive, violent beasts, taught to blame women for the violence of their own desires, which only makes them even more violent toward women. 

A morality of retribution, of punishment for wrongs committed, is not appropriate to deal with patriarchy in this sense. We are all complicit in the socialization of gendered oppression, and we can’t punish everyone in society. Fighting systematic injustice requires healing, not punishment and revenge. When you have to heal the entire world, only restorative and reparative models of justice will work.

Advocating for the reality of systemic causation is the ontological and epistemological aspect of the current fight against new liberal ideology. My own government in Canada, the Conservative Party of Stephen Harper, is the most pure embodiment of new liberal thinking I’ve ever seen, and that I think the world has ever seen.

The Minister for Aboriginal Affairs recently said in Parliament, completely believing his own words, that when an Aboriginal woman is murdered, it is simply an isolated crime, and that when an Aboriginal teenager commits suicide, it is simply an isolated failure of a single family. This is an example of the refusal to see systemic causation. 

The politics of restoration, healing, and love as community organizing within flexible social networks is the endpoint of my giant work of political philosophy in progress, the Utopias project. It’s the set of principles that we have to pick up going forward if we’re going to fight and defeat the injustices of our own era. 

And I’m not delivering this from some lofty position. Then I’d just be one more cis-gendered straight white man with an awesome beard authoritatively telling people how to fight authority. 

I really would like to see some future Doctor Who lead
actress influenced by Penny's style for her costume. It
would be perfect for the aesthetic Doctor Who will
likely try to go for in the 2020s and 30s, when the
current largely female fanbase starts working in
television production, just as Davies' and Moffat's
generation of fandom did.

Laurie Penny has arrived at the same organized anarchism of healing in love through the mess of her own experiences as a journalist and activist, wandering like a vagabond Doctor through the marginalized places of our society and describing them to the safely housed masses. 

That she and I have come to such similar ideas through our very different paths and methods is a sign that my own thinking and writing can, in some small way, help articulate a revolutionary idea that is already in the popular consciousness. Maybe I can wake a few people up, or at least nudge them a little bit more, into changing how they conceive themselves and their lives, and changing how they live and treat people accordingly. 

That is what philosophy is for. I find it a little awkward writing about my contemporary as a research source. My education was in philosophy, a tradition of old white dudes stretching back centuries. But philosophy at its best has this uncanny power to change the world through thinking and writing, the influence of ideas to enlighten. In speaking with this highest power, Laurie Penny has shown herself to be a great philosopher.

Another New Feminist Revolution II: Overcoming Anger, A History Boy, 14/05/2015

Continued from last post . . . It took me a while to understand all the implications of systematic causation’s reality. I’m saying this as a person who wrote, and will release through a major non-fiction publisher, a book of ecological philosophy.* Systematic causation is simply difficult to understand.

* Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, available from an online bookseller with a major global forest’s name sometime this August. 

We’re accustomed to actions being generated from intentions, from personalities and acts of will. This is the conception of action that descended from Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. When I was working on my doctorate, I encountered the field of action theory, which centred on a very human model of what it was ‘to act.’ How could such a profoundly human thing like a framework to marginalize and oppress the already vulnerable not be intentional?

Anger is powerful and cleansing when you let just enough
of it through you. But it can easily cross its point of
soul-toxicity.

This failure to understand how the genesis of actions could be anything other than the individual’s will is the dynamic of thinking that provokes hatred in regard to feminism. Feminist hatred, done correctly as Laurie Penny does, is a rage toward particular men who embody the sexist norms that permeate so much of our society, and the forces and concepts that twist us all into patriarchal shapes. 

A man who harms women deserves anger from two justifications. 1) He harms women through his aggression in violence. 2) He harms women through his idiocy as he acts uncritically, with no attempt to develop real empathy or knowledge of how uncomfortable or frightened women become around him. 

Such a man – the idiot – can become violent towards women if he becomes convinced that the reason women turn from him is not his own way of carrying himself, but in the corruption of women themselves as a species. Because this is their essential and definitive message, this is why I hate Men’s Rights Activist groups. They interpret their mistakes as her evil.

I’ve been such an idiot before, so self-absorbed and unable to conceive that he might make a mistake with someone, that he leaves only a wasteland where there were once happy memories of old friends. 

Yeah, this sure turned into that kind of post. 

If a Men’s Rights Activist group found me at one of my most vulnerable moments, I don’t know what I might have become. I won’t say they definitely would have ensnared me, but I can’t say for sure they wouldn’t have. But instead, at a time when I felt lowest, I actually found love. 

That’s why I almost cried when I read Penny’s second chapter of Unspeakable Things, “Lost Boys.” It’s the chapter that showed me how deeply and perfectly Penny understood systemic causation, the processes that shape human action and society that are beyond all our conscious intentions. This is a feminist perspective that not only understands when to be angry, but also when not to be angry, when a woman must be compassionate.

Let me tell you a story to illustrate. 

You know what they say about small minds . . . 

Once, I put my foot in my mouth on Facebook talking about trans activism before I really knew much of anything about trans activism. I was subject to an enormous pile-on from friends of mine who did know slightly more about trans activism,** but who spent all night yelling at me on that thread, treating my every attempted apology as a fresh provocation.

** I’ve since learned from another friend who knows a whole lot more about trans activism than anyone else I know that my question actually hit on a subtle ideological schism in the trans activist community about advocacy methods. I still sounded pretty douchey when I first asked the question, though.

When one of my now-former right-wing friends read through this exchange, he used it as an opportunity to show me the true colours of feminism, the left in general. They were only interested in taking my dignity from me, forcing me to live subject to constant abuse or fear of violence. The left would take my freedom away, he said.

Of course, that’s just what a privileged person would say at the prospect of losing their privilege: they’re going to throw on me the oppression and violence I’ve been throwing on them for centuries. He didn’t say this explicitly, obviously, but his basic message was that feminism’s goal was women treating men as men have historically treated women. It was a movement to punish, a vengeful attitude.

Until you read Penny talk about how boys and men are twisted by patriarchal social norms and frameworks of thinking until violence dominates their souls. Either we give in completely and embody all the worst possible sexist traits a man can have, or at least most of them. Or we resist, simply because violence isn’t in that individual’s soul to the same intensity as a proud date rapist, and are tortured by social pressure to dominate despite our individual nature. 

This is how you understand systemic causation, the power of a presumption into which you’re socialized from birth. If the teenage girl driven to anorexia and suicide by constant sexual violence and bullying is a victim of patriarchy, then so is a Men’s Rights Activist or the most aggressive #Gamergater. 

Perpetrators of violence whose roots are in systemic causation are victims too, twisted by forces more powerful than they are into demons. And they don’t even know enough of this force to perceive it as it mutates them. Punishment and revenge miss the true cause of destruction. Only healing and educating can fight a systemic cause. . . To be Continued.

Another New Feminist Revolution I: Ethics Adequate to Systematic Harm, Research Time, 13/05/2015

I never thought I’d like Laurie Penny’s writing quite as much as I do. Actually, I’m rather a latecomer to her work. I only discovered her after Phil Sandifer complained about a snarky comment she made about Clara’s storyline in Last Christmas.

A while after that, I found some older articles of hers, and eventually decided to order her book Unspeakable Things because I had read some glowing reviews of it, I felt like reading a good modern political polemic that had some heft to it, and it was only $13. What was truly the dealbreaker that made it inevitable that I would read it is that it contained her personal, and very powerful anorexia narrative.

Some women who have been very important to me have struggled with eating disorders, and when I remember the most severe and intense moments that I’ve shared, I still wish I could have been more than a mute awkward witness unable to think of anything to do other than shudder or run away.

Yeah, it’ll be one of those blog entries. It might turn into a long series too.

I don’t want to discuss the details of how Penny’s first chapter affected me, its philosophical analysis of the identity and self-conception of the anorexic, where the central case study was herself. That will always be a little too personal, though her words did open some old scars on my soul. 

No, what impressed me most as a philosopher about Penny is that she has so easily expressed the fundamental principles of the only possible virtuous response to systemic cruelty into her action, her writing.

A few days ago, I discussed how the struggles of the contemporary era are not shaped by the intentional planning of a set of influential people in the leadership of institutions like states. States themselves are subject to impersonal forces of a global economic machine – enormous and incredibly fast flows of material, energy, information, currency, and concepts. 

We are caught in forces that determine more of what we think and do than our intentions do because those fluxes constrain what we can even conceive of. The constraining concept that Penny attacks with philosophical analysis is what’s usually called patriarchy.

This is patriarchy as a concept, a framework of thinking that shapes what a person believes is possible for one to be. Such frameworks perpetuate themselves because a community with a shared framework of possibilities for life will socialize successive generations into that structure of thinking.

It is pretty clear that a message from this sequence of
Last Christmas is that an older female companion is
not suited for the TARDIS. But I wouldn't call this an
intentional message, any more than I'd say the same
about the nigh-indefensible abortion theme in Kill
the Moon. But as you'll see tomorrow, anger and
blame is not the proper response to non-intentional
actions.

It is a living philosophical concept.* Patriarchy is not the only such concept that exists or could exist. It’s just one framework concept, one theme that a personality could live out. Most of us have many such themes, but most of us share the patriarchy theme.

* Richard Dawkins would call it a meme, but that idea gives no sense of the genuine material power of thoughts. Dawkins always has been a bit small-minded for my liking. 

Patriarchy isn’t a set of beliefs that people hold and act on, which cruelly treats women as inferior creatures to be controlled in some way. No one prefaces every comment that maybe you should grow your hair out like a proper girl with the thought “Now I will take control of you, enslave you, put you in chains to my desires!” And not everyone who says such a comment is a man. Sexism – sexist attitudes and behaviour expressed intentionally – is blameworthy, is worth punishing. Patriarchy is not.

And if people act like everyone who perpetuates patriarchy in human society is worth punishing for it, they just don’t understand what patriarchy is. They don’t understand systematic causation, and think the only kind of causation is the direct and indirect. In the human context, direct causation would be intentional, planned activity. Likewise, indirect causation would be accidents, bad luck, plans going awry.

Patriarchy is neither. It, like all philosophical concepts when people start living them out, is a presumption of the range of possibilities in a feedback loop with whatever particular morality and life expresses and perpetuates it. Patriarchy may be perpetuated in human behaviour, but only because the concept itself structures your actions. It’s a philosophical concept – a thought with the power to think you.

Laurie Penny understands systemic causation. I know it because she describes exactly, and expresses through her daily public conversations that we can all read, how to fight a concept. 

That’s why I categorized this post as Research Time, even though I never picked up Unspeakable Things as a possible Utopias source. Now that we have the public knowledge to understand the systematic dynamisms of material, informational, and conceptual flows, and how those flows determine human intentions as the possibility ranges of our self-conceptions, we can use our power to think of new ways to live to actually overcome framework concepts. 

Free your mind, and your ass will follow. Conceive, as comprehensively as possible, an alternative way to live, and you will start to live it. Expressing that new philosophical concept in your daily life will make you a role model to others. I conclude Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity with an explanation of just such a model of activism. Penny’s approach is just such a model of ethics. To be Continued . . .