Culture – Knowingless

Blame-Game Theory

Growing up, my world was complementarian, which is a fancy way of saying everyone was waaaaay too into gender roles.

We viewed men as stronger, braver, and less prone to irrational emotions. They were the federal head; the point of representation for their families. I remember asking my mom why we were moving states if she didn’t want to move; she said she must submit to the decisions of her husband, and her husband’s decision was to move.
I remember our pastor’s daughter sleeping in a bunkbed at home at the age of 22 because she was required to always have male headship, and thus couldn’t leave her father’s house or go to college until she had a husband to take on that role.
These are two easy-to-convey examples, but there’s a thousand more that manifested in tiny, insidious ways, that I can’t do justice to in this short an essay.
Men could be pastors and elders in the church, but not women. Men were the gender that God had created to symbolize His relationship with His bride, the church; in this symbolic sense, men were to women as God was to mankind.

From the outside view into my old culture, the patriarchy ends there. Men, in charge, oppressing women.

But this view of male rulership also put a lot of pressure on men, and so the standards and punishments for them were higher. My father was an ordained minister and served as an elder in a church; he taught that eldership was contingent on having believing children. If someone under his headship screwed up, like hypothetically renounced her faith and did sex work, the formal consequences went to him, and he’s now no longer allowed to be an elder.
The financial success of the family lay entirely on the man – he was expected to work however much it took to support his family (and stay-at-home-wife), which often could grow quite large. Any decisions for his family were his, and if anything bad happened, it was entirely on him.
Social consequences for cheating were also incredibly harsh. Whenever we had our Biannual Adulter Reveal, the offender was stripped of any church leadership or removed from church entirely, and his offense was quietly made known.

The story of Adam and Eve reflects this – Eve fucked up first, and spread the fucking-up to Adam, but as Romans 5:12 says, “just as through one man (Adam) sin entered into the world, and death through sin, so death spread to all men, because all sinned.” This is what men were taught – that they lived in the symbolic role of Adam, and that when shit hit the fan, they were the ones responsible.

I suspect this is how most traditional gender role systems work. I once spent a long layover in Saudi Arabia and had a discussion with a man about their gender roles. I told him that in the US, people feel bad about the way women are treated. He seemed taken aback – women are queens, he said. Men’s role is a burden; all the pressure is on them. Women’s domestic lives are lighter – they are protected from external threats, and get to live in a softer internal bubble. He viewed the pressure on men as a huge, forgotten element, so important that all the restrictions women suffered were worth a release from that pressure.

In ye olden times, everything was scarier. People starved, killed each other, and died from teensy adorable infected scratches way more than today. When people are competing for resources, threats to the family increase drastically, and the role of men becomes way more apparent. The “male strength and responsibility” extends an expectation that they die for their country and family – or at least use their bodies at higher levels of risk. I mean, we still have a compulsory draft for men and not women. I’m dangerously getting close to spouting random theories about evolution here, but I suspect that men are physically stronger than women for a very good reason – males were subject to literally stronger physical pressure than women throughout our evolutionary history. Male strength is a living example of the weight their male ancestors had to bear in order to keep surviving.

I suspect that most people were more chill with the patriarchy in the past because the whole “men go to war” and “men have to earn enough for their family or else” thing made being a man way less exciting, and the benefit of safety for a woman, as touted by the Saudi Arabian man, was actually a way more important thing to have.

But the world got way safer – and when men stopped dying, maybe their advantages started looking way juicier. If you and your friend have had a delicate responsibility equilibrium that allows you to fight unique types of foes, and then your friend’s foe disappears, you might look over your shoulder and go hey, wait a second, why do you get to vote and I can’t?

Responsibility is weird. Ultimately there’s no free will and agency is a trick of the light, but we seem to have particular rules for when and where we throw responsibility at something. Sometimes we throw responsibility at the environment, and sometimes at the person. This seems to be mostly based on whether or not throwing responsibility at a person is effective. If someone is depressed, shouting at them to get less depressed isn’t going to work. Eventually our culture seemed to figure that out and now considers the individual mostly blameless. It does seem to work in other cases, though – if someone is very lazy, shouting at them to be less lazy can sometimes work. This also appears very clearly in moral shaming – if you go out and murder someone we consider it your fault, and you are bad, and we take the magic ball of responsibility and put it directly into your dirty, depraved arms.

Responsibility placement seems to occur along political divides, too. Conservatives tend to see everyone holding their own glowing ball of responsibility, while liberals see the responsibility in the environment and the cruel, unchangeable past.

We also seem to have different standards per person or role. We put the glowing ball of responsibility way more into the arms of people in power – people like to say Trump is an asshole more than they say Trump probably has dementia. Cops are held deeply responsible for every mistake they make, while the people they pursue are often far worse than the cops themselves. Basically nobody puts the glowing ball into the arms of kids – in the world of children, it’s their environment that’s aglow with fault, despite their brains being equally responsible for their movements and words as any adult. The placement of responsibility corresponds strongly to power in the environment, but gets a bit messed up with moral violations; we’re ok with the environment being responsible when an impoverished man steals a loaf of bread, but less ok with it being responsible when he steals an old woman’s medicine to sell for heroin.

Responsibility is not uniformly a good thing. It tends to occur with power, but increases pressure and consequences for failure. Having responsibility placed in the environment can be an incredible relief – to have a doctor say we know what’s been causing your mood swings, to marrying a very wealthy person, to being taken care of, to your suffering not being your fault, to don’t worry Eve, sin didn’t enter the world through you.

In my old society, men were formally and strongly given the glowing ball of responsibility. This was great, and it also really sucked. It sucked bad enough that I’m not totally sure being a woman was worse than being a man.

I talked a bit about the ‘men being expected to go die’ thing, but there’s another aspect here too.
The nature of holding the glowing ball of responsibility means that if things are hard, it’s your fault, and you’re less likely to complain or try to institute systemic change. It means that your pains are more invisible, because it starts and ends inside of you. When you hold the glowing ball of responsibility, it doesn’t even cross your mind that you try to make the world change – no, what’s happening is yours. Yes, Eve gave you the apple, but the world entered sin through you. There is no room to blame others. You need to be stronger. You need to handle this. Your weakness is yours.

When the glowing ball of responsibility is outside of you, you search for change through others. You don’t consider this a weakness, and thus there’s nothing to be ashamed about. How can society change? You are fine with taking those antidepressants. When things are hard, the world could be better. You shouldn’t have to live like this. Your pains are visible, because making progress requires noise. You need to have higher standards. Your boyfriend shouldn’t be abusive, so you’re going to break up with him, and then speak loudly about signs of abuse and things you shouldn’t put up with and then join facebook groups where you affirm each other and list things you love about yourself.

These two modes have drastically unequal visibility from the outside, which means if you had an equal amount of suffering between men and women in a society of traditional gender roles, this would look like a society in which women suffer more.

The fundamental divide in my culture of traditional gender roles was the allocation of responsibility,and I see no evidence that our current culture is doing much different. Everywhere I look, in our advertisements, in conversations at parties, in our movies, I see men held self-responsible and women as environment-changers.

This is a bit of a meta-problem. Both roles create issues; men tend to be stoic/emotionally repressed (it’s my fault), in greater positions of power (i need to work harder/provide for my family), generally over women. Women tend to view themselves as more helpless than they really are (society is the problem).

But society’s answer to this isn’t to lower the amount of responsibility we give men and raise the responsibility we give women, or even to just acknowledge the responsibility gap at all, it’s to blame the issues that arise from the responsibility gap, on the side of the gap that is built to accept responsibility – men.

Patriarchy? Men’s fault. When women support it, we say they’ve simply internalized the messages of men, and then pluck that glowing ball of responsibility right out of their dainty little hands.
Victim blaming? When we decry suggestions that women alter their behavior to reduce risk of assault (though appearance influences catcalling), we’re shoving responsibility straight into the environment.

There’s almost no body acceptance movement for men. Advertisements portray men as either the butt of jokes or muscular and handsome. Why? The attractiveness of a man is their responsibility. Contrast this to one out of a billion ads for women where their feelings about their attractiveness are taken out of their arms and placed directly into the environment. It’s also easy to find articles that place responsibility in the environment by listing ways workplaces can be more woman-friendly. If women aren’t in enough powerful roles, society’s reaction is to place the fault outside of the woman. Reversely, I tried to find articles on how to make women-dominated workplaces or housekeeping advertisements/communities more male-friendly, but I couldn’t find any.

I want to be clear: I don’t view either of these modes as inherently worse than the other. Both I need to work harder and The world should be better to me have benefits and drawbacks that fluctuate according to a thousand tiny variables in a highly complex system. I’m glad women are speaking out about the difficulties in their life. I’m glad men are conditioned to take responsibility. I’m not glad that these modes seem to be so consistently gendered.

Changing responsibility lines can feel really wrong. Right now we have the narrative that men have wronged and oppressed women. Men are the responsible party, and women are the victims. To change this narrative can feel both like absolving the guilty party of blame (maybe what’s going on isn’t totally your fault, men) and placing blame on the side of the victim (maybe you should push harder for raises and report rapes more often, women). This can feel really horrible.

So my suggestion isn’t to do this, exactly, but rather start expanding the options we give people. Maybe we can consider men fully responsible, but also stop shaming them, and say it’s okay if they want to blame the environment, or be weak – we can talk about how men need to protect women from other men, and also that it’s okay if they don’t want to do that. Maybe we can allow women to feel blameless if they want to, but also say it’s okay to suggest steps women can take to increase agency in their own lives, or take on responsibility themselves. We can simultaneously allow articles on “how to make the workplace kinder to women” and also “how wearing a longer skirt at night might reduce your risk of sexual harassment.”

And to be clear again – I don’t mean to minimize what women have gone through. I remember with great pain what it was like to be a woman in a complementarian household. I watched my mother unable to separate from her abusive husband because the pastor told her she needed to submit and pray more. I remember my parents’ horror when I suggested that I didn’t understand why I should go to college if I was only meant to be a housewife, and that maybe I didn’t want to have children. I remember crying myself to sleep when I was ten, asking God why He’d made me a girl and not a boy, because I had so many dreams I would never be able to fulfill, because I was ashamed at being so emotional. I remember refusing to cry for years, because I wanted to be respected like boys were. I hold visceral empathy for every woman who’s had to wear her gender like chains.

What I do want to do is also evoke empathy for the countless men who marched off to war, often barely more than children, dying in bloody fields far away from home. Or the emotional stifling that readied men for their role as protectors – don’t express your emotions. Do your duty. If you can’t earn enough to feed your family, you’re not worthy of a family. Or the homeless men nobody helped because men should be able to care for themselves. The lack of sympathy or emotional assistance men find in their social lives. Just because my role as a traditional woman sucked balls doesn’t mean roles as traditional men don’t also suck balls. After all – through Adam, sin entered into the world.

I also don’t view the role of women in my old upbringing as ‘victims’ of men. Women reinforced gender roles just as much, if not more, than the men did. They were just as complicit, and absolving them of blame here is doing exactly the same thing that gave my culture justification for putting them in that role.

Lastly, I don’t mean to imply that history has always been fair. There’ve been wide fluctuations in both safety and women’s rights in cultures throughout history, and it seems silly to assume they’ve always evened out into a fair trade. I do think that the gender divide in history was probably fairer than popular narrative implies it is, and there’s plenty of times in history I’d much rather have spawned as a woman than a man.

Dancing vs. Dancing

It took me a long time to realize that people actually liked dancing to EDM, and weren’t just doing it because there wasn’t another option. It took me even longer to realize that what people were doing when they were dancing wasn’t the same thing I was doing when I was dancing – that the two types of dancing were so different in motivation that I feel weird calling them both ‘dancing.’

Type 1 music tends to be repetitive, with low variation and high attention to texture/layers, with emphasis on beat. It’s played for the purpose of inducing trance states, and for strong social cohesion – like a crowd all jumping together. Images of dancing to this type of music typically depict groups.
This music is also submissive to the dancer. The music operates like a minimalistic framework, and the dancer invents moves to decorate that framework; the dancer dances over the music, or on top of it.

Type 2 music tends to have high variation, with higher emphasis on melody and emotion. This is the type of music often used for dance performances, for expressiveness/poetry reasons, and is much more individualistic – depictions of nonchoreographed dancing to this type of music usually are of only one or a few people. This music dominates the dancer – it informs the dancer how to move, and ‘good dancing’ is measured by how well the dancer can manifest this music into physical reality. The dancer dances under the music.

It seems like cultures tend to lean towards either Type 1 or Type 2 dance music at different times. The swing and disco eras of dance were heavily Type 2, while Burning Man which I just got back from seems to think Type 1 music is the entire universe.

I’m very curious about Type 1 dancing. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to do it – when I try to dance to Type 1 music, I find myself ‘seeking out’ instruction from the music and feeling frustrated when I don’t find any, and I have no urge to move my body (what I feel like is) independently from the music.

I’m also curious about why certain types dominate cultures at different times. What does it indicate about the culture? How did it come to be?

Examples (Mostly popular western music) (also my own opinion, yadda yadda):

Type 1
Boris Brejcha
O-Daiko
Colin Benders

Mostly Type 1
Toulouse
Satisfaction
Duhan

Mid?
555-5555

Mostly Type 2
Üsküdar
Abracadabra
Hiathaikm

Type 2
Human
She Wants Me Dead
Take Me To Church

Dating: Accordions Vs. Sitars

The accordion is much easier than it looks.

Each left handed button is an entire chord, and it’s arranged in an easy-to-memorize pattern. You pick it up, press down, and it booms with harmony. The instrument is constructed that you only need to engage with it minimally to get the song you want out of it.

Similarly, ‘accordion style’ partners are easy to play – engaging in a relationship with them is simple, and you need to engage with them minimally to get the ‘song’ of a good relationship out of them.

Accordion relationships don’t cost you a lot of energy. I don’t mean energy as in ‘they don’t talk a lot,’ I mean energy as in ‘they perform actions that make relationship-specific aspects with them very easy’ – such as excellent communication or being self-motivated about exercise or whatever it is that’s necessary for your relationship to function.

Aspects that might bump someone towards the ‘accordion’ side of the spectrum are things like equal status to you, physical and emotional stability, identity independence (separating their self worth from their relationship with you), independent wealth, or their own social network.

The Sitar

Have you ever played a sitar? It’s leagues more difficult than an accordion. Not only do you play one note at a time – no easily organized chords – there are dozens of strings, and just holding the instrument properly is a lesson in itself. The process of using the sitar requires understanding the instrument well, and engaging with it closely is an integral part of making it sing. The accordion may feel like ‘playing a song,’ but a sitar feels like ‘playing the instrument.’

Sitar partners are high cost – in that functioning in the relationship takes a lot of energy. Mental or physical disabilities, unresolved childhood trauma, poverty, significant introversion, jealousy, or practical dependence can all contribute to being a sitar partner, as maintenance of the person themselves must be done before maintenance of the relationship.

Of course internal factors can contribute too, such as having very specific needs in order to feel satisfied in a relationship, requiring high amounts of actions in order to feel safe in the relationship, and sometimes general stuff like insecurity, perfectionism, or neuroticism.

The accordion/sitar spectrum is also not the same thing as casual vs. committed relationships, or compatible vs. incompatible preferences. Casual relationships can still require a lot of energy, and incompatible preferences can take very little energy to handle, if lubricated with good communication and self awareness.

Now, this might start to sound like I’m calling Accordions ‘desirable and good’ and Sitars ‘undesirable and bad’,

but I want to steer away from that sharply. Inheriting a lot of money from a relative might push someone towards the ‘Accordion’ side of the spectrum, and getting into a car accident might push them towards the ‘Sitar’ side – frequently a partner’s cost is affected by things entirely outside of their control, and having these things happen to a partner probably doesn’t affect how much the relationship is ‘worth it’ or how much you love them.

The benefits of Accordion partners might sound ideal, almost romantic, but I think a lot of people find relationships to be like the Sitar – it’s only fun when it’s hard.

Sitar partners have the ability to provide an intense sense of specialness – if they require a lot of energy to date, then you are set apart from others more distinctly by being the one to spend that energy. Not just anybody could/would spend all this energy! They also lure in people who feel they need to feel like they must work hard to feel like they deserve love from the other person.

There may also be a greater sense of satisfaction and meaningfulness when progression is made in the relationship. And often, the sense of ‘suffering with someone’ is tragically romantic and incredibly bonding – often we feel sharing our pain is a core component of achieving intimacy, and comforting a suffering partner – and being comforted by them in turn – can make you feel fused to each other so completely that it soothes that gnawing itch of constant aloneness. Such is the appeal of unhealed wounds.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone explicitly verbalize that they are looking for a partner who will cost them a lot of energy, but it seems very obvious from observation. For example, a few years ago I watched the dating life of one of my old roommates – she shifted through a lot of attractive, easy-to-date men, only to end up disappearing to love/take care of someone who was extremely high cost – aggressive and neurotic, with a few mental disorders. It took me a while to realize that she hadn’t been duped – she was doing this deliberately, and this is what she wanted. She didn’t date him in spite of the fact he was a Sitar, she dated him because of it.

I don’t think that any pairing of Sitar/Accordion Sitar/Sitar Accordion/Accordion is bad at all, but it does seem difficult for people who’ve ended up in the relationship rather accidentally, and not because they were actively seeking it like my old roommate actively sought it.

I’ve seen a few people who prefer Sitar partners date an Accordion partner and end up a bit unsatisfied. Usually their complaint (not explicitly verbalized!) is that of lack of passion – their Accordion partner is a little boring, or just friendly, or cold. And the other way around is just as bad – people who prefer Accordion partners are unhappy when they date Sitar partners, and the experience for them is exhausting and often feels like an unnecessary distraction, or a chore.

I think that often, in both of these scenarios, the people would still say their relationship is ‘worth it.’ Once you cross the familiarity threshhold, there’s no going back really until other factors break the relationship down from the inside, or they deal with it and grow old and die. The best cure is prevention.

This is why I think learning to explicitly identify the kind of labor you want to put into a relationship –

without judging that desire at all – would be very useful, because then you can avoid getting into a mismatched relationship in the first place. This may be difficult, as I suspect most people would tell themselves they want an Accordion one, because that seems like the ‘right’ answer.

I think the reason for this is that Sitar relationships tend to feature more intense points of unhappiness, and there’s a big “unhappiness is bad” narrative going on, and it’s nearly taboo to say “unhappiness can be fulfilling and meaningful.” Go watch a tragic movie goddamnit.

And sometimes people who want a Accordion relationship end up dating a Sitar partner – often because they feel that they would be a bad person if they let the difficulties affect their love for someone, or out of a sense of duty, or an unawareness that Accordion partners are an available option, or because they failed to recognize early enough that their partner was a Sitar. I usually see this in people who are so passively nice it ends up being a defensive maneuver. I belong in this category.

Basically, my point is make sure you research the instruments you buy beforehand, so you can learn to recognize signs of whether it will easily make you a beautiful song or if it will make you bleed as it slowly absorbs into your flesh and you don’t know anymore whether it is you or the instrument who is shedding those tears.
But hey, I respect the intensity.

The Amory Spectrum

In discussions about monogamy and polyamory, I find I’ve recategorized the two ideas into something that feels more functional for me, and I accidentally try to use them synonymously with the original words. This ends up getting pretty messy, so I’m going to do the obvious thing: invent more words and then explain them!

(there’s a good chance someone has already written about this somewhere.)

Presenting: The Uniamory/Multiamory Spectrum

Your position on the Uniamory/Multiamory spectrum depends entirely on how many restrictions you place on your partner’s romantic/sexual behavior. It doesn’t matter what restrictions are placed on you, or what your partner actually does, or what you actually do, or the functional habits in your relationship.

You are uniamorous if you have rules, expectations, or agreements placed on your partner that state they cannot engage in relationships besides you.

You are multiamorous if you have no rules, expectations, or agreements about your partner’s romantic/sexual behavior with people besides yourself.

Remember this is a spectrum, going from lots of rules (no flirting) to medium rules (you can kiss but no sex) to no rules (you can do literally anything you want). For fun I’m going to provide the Amory Spectrum:

0. Exclusively uniamorous; all extrarelationship romantic/sexual expressions are disallowed; no flirting, sexting, nude photos; can include forbidding being alone for too long with other people or ‘leading them on’; usually uncomfortable with watching porn or expressing attraction to others
1. Predominantly uniamorous, only incidentally multiamorous; all obvious extrarelationship romantic/sexual expressions are disallowed, but leniency for flirting or engaging in light touch. Acceptance of expressing attraction to others and porn use.
2. Predominantly uniamorous, but more than incidentally multiamorous. Most extrarelationship romantic/sexual expressions are disallowed, but with strong leniency; can include approval of nude photos, kissing and light petting, or attending sex/nude/kink parties (as a couple, without interacting with others). Most camgirl’s partners fall within this category.
3. Equally multiamorous and uniamorous: Includes swinging, having threesomes, and occasionally allowance of very casual/occasional extrarelationship interactions, but with disallowance of any serious or regular extrarelationship interactions.
4. Predominantly multiamorous, but more than incidentally uniamorous: general extrarelationship romantic/sexual expressions are allowed with several rules, such as strongly enforced relationship hierarchy, and can include regulations of number of partners allowed, the frequency of their interactions, or moderate restrictions on their sexual activities
5. Predominantly multiamorous, only incidentally uniamorous: the majority of extrarelationship romantic/sexual expressions are allowed with few rules; can include light prescriptive hierarchy or minimal regulation of sexual behavior.
6. Exclusively multiamorous: all extrarelationship romantic/sexual expressions are allowed; no rules or requirements are instituted, and no prescriptive hierarchy is instated

Also: rules for the purpose of sexual safety, such as getting tested regularly or using condoms, do not count towards the multiamory spectrum.

If you date someone for twenty years with no rules about what they can or can’t do, but they never actually get involved with anybody else, then you are multiamorous but functionally monogamous.

If you prefer relationships that tend to be functionally monogamous, you can actively search for monogamous partners while both of you remain multiamorous.

If you insist that you and your partner will only love each other forever, that neither of you even experience the desire for others, and you also have rules that your partner can’t act upon desires even if they do have them, then you are both uniamorous and monogamous.

If you have no rules about your partner’s behavior but they have rules about your behavior, then you are multiamorous dating a uniamorous person, in a monogamous relationship.

Uniamory instituted out of fairness does not count; if you are level 6 multiamorous but dating someone who is level 2 uniamorous, and your partner agrees to not take advantage of your level 6 leniency because it wouldn’t be ‘fair,’ and instead acts as though you are level 2 uniamorous too, then this does not make you uniamorous.

Polyamory and uniamory aren’t really compatible, but sometimes you see poly relationships that rank low on the amory spectrum. If you consider yourself poly but are a 3 on the amory scale, then you might be on the uniamorous side of polyamory.

Basically, I think putting “restrictions placed on partner” into a highly defined, separate role to be a strongly illuminating way of looking at relationship structures. Frequently I find people citing monogamous motivations to explain their uniamory implementations (e.g., “We’re level 1 monogamous because neither of us find anybody else to be attractive!”)

Internet communities: Otters vs. Possums

Most of my friends have been on the internet, and I’ve spent many years as part of various internet communities, many of which I have moderated as either part of the mod team or the sole creator. (this also applies to irl communities, but the pattern is more obvious with online ones)

There’s a pattern that inevitably emerges, something like this:

Community forms based off of a common interest, personality, value set, etc. We’ll describe “people who strongly share the interest/personality/value” as Possums: people who like a specific culture. These people have nothing against anybody, they just only feel a strong sense of community from really particular sorts of people, and tend to actively seek out and form niche or cultivated communities. To them, “friendly and welcoming” community is insufficient to give them a sense of belonging, so they have to actively work to create it. Possums tend to (but not always) be the originators of communities.
This community becomes successful and fun
Community starts attracting Otters: People who like most cultures. They can find a way to get along with anybody, they don’t have specific standards, they are widely tolerant. They’re mostly ok with whatever sort of community comes their way, as long as it’s friendly and welcoming. These Otters see the Possum community and happily enter, delighted to find all these fine lovely folk and their interesting subculture.
(e.g., in a christian chatroom, otters would be atheists who want to discuss religion; in a rationality chatroom, it would be members who don’t practice rationality but like talking with rationalists)
Community grows to have more and more Otters, as they invite their friends. Communities tend to acquire Otters faster than Possums, because the selectivity of Possums means that only a few of them will gravitate towards the culture, while nearly any Otter will like it. Gradually the community grows diluted until some Otters start entering who don’t share the Possum goals even a little bit – or even start inviting Possum friends with rival goals. (e.g., members who actively dislike rationality practices in the rationality server).
Possums realize the community culture is not what it used to be and not what they wanted, so they try to moderate. The mods might just kick and ban those farthest from community culture, but more frequently they’ll try to dampen the blow and subsequent outrage by using a constitution, laws, and removal process, usually involving voting and way too much discussion.
The Otters like each other, and kicking an Otter makes all of the other Otters members really unhappy. There are long debates about whether or not what the Possum moderator did was the Right Thing and whether the laws or constitution are working correctly or whether they should split off and form their own chat room
The new chat room is formed, usually by Otters. Some of the members join both chats, but the majority are split, as the aforementioned debates generated a lot of hostility
Rinse and repeat—

One problem is when Otters misinterpret Possum ideology. In Otterland where everyone has Otternorms, everyone is welcomed with open arms no matter who they are, and it takes seriously grievous offenses to get rejected from Otterland.

Possums with Possumnorms don’t have this system. In Possumland, not sharing the core culture is all it takes to get kicked out, and it’s not considered a grievous offense.

So when Otters enter Possumland, they see someone get kicked out, and get upset that Possums treat “dissenting thought” as a “grievous offense.” Possums, of course, don’t view it this way at all. They think the people they kick out are great and would love to interact with them in every context… outside of Possumland.

Otters and Possums tend to get into the “is elitism good” discussion – Otters will generally say things like “I want an inclusive and tolerant environment” and “I don’t want people to have to watch their every step” and “The thought of testing or filtering people for being good enough for admission here makes me really uncomfortable.” Otters tend to have experienced a lot of rejection in the past, and don’t want anybody else to suffer that feeling.

Possums are on the other side, saying “but you can’t just have a free for all,” or “this community is here for a specific purpose and it’s ok to get rid of people who don’t want it” and “I like having strict admission standards” and “we shouldn’t have to tolerate people who actively detract from conversation”

I think at the core of this is Otters interpreting Possum censorship as something personal, because their standard for feeling a sense of belonging is just ‘human decency’, and it’s difficult for them to empathize with a motivation of exclusion based on things beyond ‘human decency.’

—

I don’t really have a point with this, but I am interested in methods we can take to help preemptively solve this inevitable Otter vs. Possum clash and the dilution of group members. One idea is to have a periodic ‘chat splitting,’ where every 3-6 months (or when membership hits a certain number) there is a new forum/chatroom made, and people have to choose which group to join. This would help separate the Otters from the Possums in a way that is inevitable, thus hopefully creates no hard feelings. It could also be a giant explosion of drama, who knows.

Also, possibly normalizing the social differences between Otters and Possums and loudly labeling chatrooms by their spectrum on the Otter-Opossum scale. That way, if someone knows they’re stepping foot into Possum territory, they know that being kicked is more likely, and it’s also probably not personal at all.

There’s also lots of ways to try to filter out Otters from joining in the first place, like tests for entry, interviews, and trial periods. Otters tend to have little problem finding cultures in general to join, as they aren’t very selective, so I don’t think keeping Otters out of heavy Possum territory will actually be problematic for them at all.

Also strongly adjacent reading: Well Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism

How I Lost My Faith

I was homeschooled my whole life by a professionally evangelist father and a stay at home mother. My media was censored, my computer use secretly monitored, and my friends vetoed if they were not also sufficiently close to the Christian homeschooler sphere.

My science books derided evolution as a baseless idea. I was taught that the founding fathers were Christian and founded the United States for God. I attended a Ken Ham seminar. I protested abortion clinics. We switched out Bill Nye for a Christian version. For years we had Bible study 5 nights a week and went to church 3 times a week. I managed to get all the way to adulthood without once uttering a swear word.

I believed in Jesus and the Bible with all my heart – but this wasn’t an unquestioned belief. We studied ‘logical Christianity’, and I had many nights where I would discuss my doubts about Christian philosophy with intelligent theologians. I was surrounded by people from the Church who were open to any question, invited doubt, and presented answers in gentle, rational tones.

I wanted to be rational. The existence of other heretical, yet devout religions served as a huge, constant warning light to me in the back of my mind, and I feared that whatever fooled them might be fooling me now. I was aware, somewhere, that I might be wrong, but I had a lifetime of mental systems with which to handle that. I debated constantly. I studied atheist arguments and had my own refutations to everyone. I thought I knew.

I lost my faith shortly before I turned nineteen, and it wasn’t any one thing that did it.

I mean, I guess there was one thing that did it, but an echo in the mountains does nothing if there’s not already a bunch of snow built up and ready to fall.

Losing my faith was horrifying and painful. I refer to it as my

‘faith’ and not my ‘religion,’ because religion is a word we use from the outside, as the observer watching the person bowed in prayer. For me, the person bowed in prayer, it was my faith, and to call it a religion feels like it undermines the meaningfulness of the feeling of “loving God”.

Nearly-nineteen, sitting there in that dorm room, I could feel my faith slipping away from my fingertips, and it was like trying to avoid a car crash in slow motion. No, no no no. I scrambled for answers, but all the ones I had studied so well suddenly seemed far away. I cried out to God to save me, because I couldn’t do it myself. It was a desperate, last plea to my beautiful savior and friend, and the silence I got back was utter despair.

The life I had known died right there. The way I knew the world – my education, my society, my purpose, my understanding of ethical behavior, of sex, obedience, submission, logic, origin of the universe – all of it crumbled around me and I suddenly knew nothing.

—

People sometimes ask the question of why it took so long. Really I’m amazed that it happened at all. Before we even approach the aspect of “good arguments against religion”, you have to understand exactly how much is sacrificed by the loss of religion.

People in bad relationships rationalize all the time. Relationships give a sense of purpose, of meaning, love, and stability. Breaking up really fucking sucks, and requires laboriously putting the pieces back together. We all tend to put off breakups for far too long, and we all probably know someone (maybe us) who has come up with a thousand reasons why the relationship is ‘actually fine’ while their life is getting slowly poisoned.

Expand the notion of a ‘relationship’ to your ‘entire life story’ and ‘connection to your entire community,’ and you might understand exactly why Christians are coming up with a thousand reasons as to why their faith is ‘actually right.’ Our brains are incredibly talented at making us feel like we have logical reasons to avoid pain and social exile.

Onto the arguments.

Christianity isn’t ‘wrong,’ really, or not obviously. For every objection I raised, there was an answer. It sometimes wasn’t an amazing answer – but then, science isn’t always full of amazing answers either. After enough questions and answers, I formed a general structure, complete with patterns and themes, “around” my sense of self, if you will oblige the metaphor. My mechanoid belief structure worked. With it I could deal with my community, my life, and my existential questions.

When other people attacked (why did God of the Bible kill innocent people?), I could fend off their assault on my structure with little pew pew shooty ‘don’t judge god with human morality’ guns (which had been preemptively installed by a sermon at age 12). I viewed things from my structure. My primary focus was building, maintaining, and defending my structure.

What the nonreligious get wrong a lot of the time is the idea that if you can just lead a Christian along the right logical path, they will realize that they are wrong. This is generally bullshit. Christians (and humans in general) are incredibly talented at organizing their structure in such a way that logic works to their favor. If a ‘good argument’ could bring down a Christian’s faith, then it would have happened a long time ago.

What brought down mine was not a good argument. It was a semi bad one, in hindsight, or at least weak in the idea that Christians have figured out some defense guns against it. I won’t specify it here, mainly because I’ve talked about it elsewhere and it would be too identifying.

What the argument did do was, for the first time, allow me to consider that maybe I was wrong.

If you’d asked me before to “consider you’re wrong,” I would have answered that “I have! All the time!” I would insist that I seriously considered other view points. I genuinely believed that “I was wrong” was an option in my mind.

But it wasn’t really, not like this. The argument jolted me so badly that I saw my own worldview from the outside, and it was all suddenly apparent to me how much patchwork I had needed for my defense, how teetering it was, all of the rationalizations I had pulled and twisted every which way. I was living in a structure built for defense, to which function came secondary.

Did it function? Yes, but I’d never before seen how ugly it was.

—

There are a few things I think that prepared me for this event. One is that for the last year or two I had increasing exposure to nonreligious communities. Somewhere deep down in subconsciousland, I began to realize that, ethically speaking, they weren’t much different than me. I could look at an atheist and feel, deep in my bones, that they were smart, that I could have been born them, that they were aware and thinking just like I was, and they didn’t seem to be evil.

I was “exposed to sin.” I saw people sinning (being gay! stealing a pencil! premarital sex! swearing!), and they were happy and fulfilled, sometimes even more than I was. Christians talk about “being a witness in word and deed,” but this is exactly what the nonChristians were doing to me.

The combination of reducing religious exposure and increasing nonreligious exposure was like starting to spend time away from an “abusive relationship” in the company of “new friends.” Even though I had no conscious intention to “break up,” somewhere subconsciously, the thought of leaving became a more viable option, less terrifying.

I’d also seen a LOT of atheistic arguments against Christianity. I could refute each one, but it took a little bit of effort and rationalization each time. This caused me to (again, very subconsciously, I never would consciously have admitted this) associate ‘effort and rationalization’ with my belief system, which primed me for leaving.

The argument itself had a few traits that made it a good trigger. One was that I hadn’t heard it before, and thus had no preconstructed defenses to ward it off. I wasn’t near my Christian community, so I didn’t have a pastor to quickly refute it for me.

Second is that the argument was nontrivial. It didn’t challenge something like a minor biblical inaccuracy, it challenged the very nature of God himself.

—

I was already primed, environmentally, to feel safe stepping outside of my structure, and a new argument was just the right thing to jolt me outside.

Once I saw my structure from the outside, that was the end of it all. There was no way I could step back into it, even if I wanted to. I left, and without me inside to hold it up, it crumpled into a thousand pieces that I could never put back together. I felt naked.

For a year I tried to salvage the ruins and ended up clothing myself in some ideological remnants like deism and evolution denial. Eventually I turned full skeptic-atheist, and then a few years later ended up attracted to zen, or a system of thought that seems similar to zen.

—

Belief systems aren’t “the things we’ve logically concluded about the world.” They are structures that give us a way to interact with our environment.

I can interpret my previous religion as something which allowed me to function in the environment in which I was raised. It’s amazing that something so motivated by function can result in beliefs that feel incredibly real. I have memories of sobbing on my knees, alone in my room except for the presence of Jesus. To me, my faith from the inside was powerful and tangible.

But it was this internal passion that was the necessary fuel to keep the teetering, haphazard structure of my belief intact. Religion would never have survived if at least some people didn’t feel it with all their might.

—

If you want to ‘deconvert’ someone, view it as if you want your friend to leave an abusive relationship. All you can do is be there for them, give them love, acceptance, and a safe space. Sometimes your friend might be receptive to arguments about why their relationship is bad, but usually they’ll just be defensive. Maybe one day they will leave, maybe they won’t. Remember that the relationship, no matter how bad it is, is fulfilling something for them. Try to be that fulfillment for them.

Sacrifice-blindness

I just read a comment on an Uber fundraising page for a lady with cancer. It said, “Uber should provide healthcare for all drivers instead of doing gofundme pages!”

I’m not here to debate whether or not that would be better, but rather to point out a phenomenon of sacrifice-blindness.

My friend sent me an article today about a kid falling out of a window on LSD. She doesn’t like that I do LSD. I told her that LSD was really safe and that more people fall out of windows on alcohol. She said,
momlsd

Frequently we point out things that are Good Ideas Motivated by Goodness, such as:

*Everyone should have access to health care
*Nobody should fall out of windows
*Avoid war no matter what
*Jobs should pay enough to cover all basic financial needs
*Terminal illnesses should be researched and cured
*Nobody should be racist
*Our culture should be protected from criminals
*We shouldn’t have our freedom infringed
*Provide the homeless with housing
*We need more after-school programs
*Employers should provide medical benefits to employees

I don’t disagree with the desires expressed by all these things, and I suspect almost nobody would. If I could press a button and magically everybody gets health care without any cost to anybody, I absolutely would.

And I don’t mean to make this an argument against the individual ideas expressed. Whether or not universal healthcare should be instituted is a whole different idea. What I am arguing is to eliminate sacrifice-blindness.

I am on a birth control that puts me at significantly increased risk for stroke. A few years ago I would have never considered taking this birth control, because “avoiding all things that increases health risk is a Good Idea Motivated by Goodness.” Good health was paramount above everything.

But really? Above everything? Even all the positive benefits the birth control pill gave me? By blindly accepting this rule of Goodness, I failed to consider what I was sacrificing to follow this rule – medication that would improve my quality of life. And once I stopped to actually consider the practical results of the options I was facing, my choice changed.

Preserve Human Life No Matter What is a frequently touted Good Idea Motivated by Goodness, but we don’t act according to it. We drive our families around in cars, putting them at risk of car accidents and death. Realistically speaking, the law we follow is more like Preserve Human Life As Long As It’s Mostly Convenient For Us.

And this is fine. Outlawing LSD to preserve safety might be a Good Idea Motivated by Goodness, but it ignores the sacrifice made for this – human autonomy in their own safety and all of the benefits of LSD.

Now, you can look at this evaluation and make a choice, and I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong. If you’re fully aware of all of the things you are sacrificing in order to gain “nobody falls out of a window,” then I cannot blame you, and now our discussion switches to one of personal value.

With the example of Uber and medical benefits – would it be a Good Idea to make Uber provide benefits to its employees independent contractors? Yes. But what would we be sacrificing in order to make this happen? Would this raise the cost of Uber, making Lyft a better option and putting Uber drivers out of business? Or making it less affordable for poor people in communities to have easy transportation? Or raise the barrier of entry for people who want to be Uber drivers, thus reducing the number of potential income sources that a desperate person might need to feed their family? Would requiring Uber to give out healthcare actually end up hurting poor communities the most? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe even if it did, it would still be worth it. But whatever our final choice, let’s not be sacrifice-blind.

I find that in the majority of political discussions I see, parties from all sides engage in sacrifice-blindness in pursuit of touting Good Ideas Motivated by Goodness. I suspect that if everyone knew exactly what would be sacrificed if their idea was actually perfectly implemented, people would agree with each other much more often.

The Context Of Equality

Equality is a pretty word, but for a thing that everyone agrees upon is desirable, nobody seems to agree on what it looks like.

I want to divide equality into two concepts – context and contextless.

Contextual Equality is equality that tries to equalize the outcome while taking into account all the associations of the situation – history, culture, demographic, etc. – or “contextual body.”

For example: Joe and Marsha go to high school. Joe has a hard life – abused by his parents, a learning disability, not a morning person. Marsha has a pretty good life – loving parents, intelligent, eats vegetables.

Joe and Marsha both fail a test and come to the teacher begging for a retake. Should they be treated equally? Maybe – but contextual equality would take into consideration the fact that Joe’s failure of the test is more understandable, and that allowing him to retake the test would be more helpful to him. Marsha has no good excuse for her failure – she has everything going for her already – a good ‘contextual body’ – and refusing her a retake might be the best option.

Contextual equality is behind ideas like power structures, privilege, and affirmative action. It does not view human interactions as happening in isolation, but rather more like two huge contextual bodies summarized in a small point of contact. Calling a black person a racial slur is worse than calling a white person a racial slur, because black people (in the US) were enslaved and white people weren’t. Contextual equality is less for equal treatment and more for equal outcome – if the treatment does not result in similar outcomes, then we must modify the treatment to get everybody in the same position by the end.

Contextless Equality is the exact opposite. It doesn’t care about the surrounding history and culture, it cares about a process that works independently from the personal stories of the people going through it.
Contextless equality would say that Joe and Marsha should both be denied or approved the text retake. Sure, maybe Joe would benefit more, but that’s not the point. The point is to give the children an escape from the weight of their contextual bodies, an environment where it doesn’t matter. It encourages solidarity and community between children by treating them the same, and to promote the feeling of fairness. So many aspects of the world are blind to your personal stories, so getting used to it now will help later on.

Contextless equality is behind ideas like blinded hiring practices – hiding the names on resumes to prevent bias in hiring for jobs. It’s behind standardized testing, behind tolerance of all religious clothing regardless of the oppression it might symbolize. It is more for equal treatment, not equal outcome. It cares about the interaction itself, and whether that interaction is consistent with all interactions. It views the contextual body as irrelevant.
—

I think the solidarity that comes out of contextless equality is underappreciated by the more liberally minded. Have you ever entered a system where your past didn’t matter, where the standards for you were the same as they were for everyone around you? Various forms of ritual does this – religious ceremonies and military training, for example. Cutting off your contextual body can be incredibly freeing and allow strong bonding with those around you.

I also think the empathy and recognition that comes from contextual equality is underappreciated by the more conservatively minded. Privilege and discussions of power aren’t always an attempt to shame, they’re attempts to recognize and comfort those who feel unheard. It’s how people with ‘worse’ contextual bodies voice their hurt at the difficulty of being around people with ‘better’ contextual bodies.

I personally suspect that intimate interactions are better done with contextual equality, and large systemic interactions are better done with contextless equality. The strength of contextual equality is that it is warm, personal, and it’s very difficult to maintain that effectively on a larger scale. The strength of contextless equality is that it promotes a sense of systemic unification, which can seem very cold when seen close up.
This is why I like the idea of blind hiring practices (contextless and systemic) but not affirmative action hiring practices (contextual and systemic). It’s why I like using trigger warnings with my friends (contextual and intimate) but not telling my friends they should just deal with it like everyone else (contextless and intimate).

I think usually those who look like they’re against equality are really just for a different sort of equality than we are. Most humans want good shit, in the end.

Facts vs. Truth

Years ago, a very liberal media source interviewed my very fundamentalist Christian father about his very fundamentalist Christian views on homosexuality. The outcome was a well-edited mash of audio-visual tricks that made my father look like a buffoon, saying and responding in uncharacteristic ways that highlighted the stupidity of what he was saying.

I did not feel sympathy. Even if the interviewers were not directly and literally honest, they communicated the “truth” behind his words – that of judgement, of intolerance, of irrationality – which I knew, from living with him, that he actually did feel – calling gay people ‘fags’ and ranting about the ‘gay agenda’ in private. In a way, I thought the interviewers sacrificed literal facts in order to reveal a greater truth. After all – my dad presented ‘literally’ would have showed him selecting his words carefully, making use of persuasive rhetoric, making his position look reasonable – and I believed that his position was obviously not reasonable. So really the interviewers, through their artistic use of interpretation, were actually doing good work with their alternative use of facts.

Several months ago I was stalked and chased down some deserted alleys in Istanbul. When the man charged at me, I screamed, and he stopped and fled, without touching me. When I told the story to my neighbors (who were going to help me translate to the authorities) they insisted that I lie and say the man had grabbed me – because if he hadn’t touched me, no crime had been committed and he couldn’t be prosecuted. And since we knew he was bad, and that he should be prosecuted, we should be dishonest about the literal facts in order to truthfully illuminate his badness.

My point is that we have an idea that sometimes facts aren’t the same as truth. That even if you say things correctly, you might give a false idea, and that sometimes saying things incorrectly is necessary in order to creatively reveal the true nature of reality. We sometimes forgive dishonest portrayals as necessary, particularly if we feel strongly or morally about the outcome.

It’s why we tolerate/love mockery and satire, or impassioned and exaggerated speech. It’s why we’re okay setting aside the ‘rational fact checking’ parts of our brain when ‘badness’ is happening – because deep down, we feel the facts no longer matter. Facts, even if true, can be misleading, can slow us down, can catch us in petty arguments over statistics or history, can distract us from things like protecting gay people or prosecuting would-be rapists. They can be used as weapons against us – if you’ve ever had a debate with an obviously-wrong person who is more technically informed than you, you know this frustration. Facts do not equal truth, at least not deep down in our gut.

And I don’t mean to say that this is bad or good. Was it a bad or good thing that I agreed to lie to the police about my stalker in Istanbul? I don’t care about whether or not this was moral – this is not the question I am trying to answer. Shutting down “caring about facts” has its benefits and drawbacks. All I am trying to say is that we do this. All the time. And to pretend that facts are facts are facts and that we only care about facts is an outright lie. Facts are useful when we can wield them for good, and misleading or distracting when others wield them for bad. We frequently care more about the feeling of truthiness, not the feeling of factuality, because truthiness always feels morally right, and sometimes facts feel morally wrong.

And so when I see outrage and disbelief about how people can support Trump after he repeatedly lies, contradicts himself, or displays a general disinterest in factuality, I feel like those outraged fail to understand this key concept. People supporting Trump are sacrificing facts in order to illuminate their ‘deeper truth’ in the same way I was sacrificing facts when I supported the pro-gay interviewers, when I lied that my stalker had touched me. They genuinely feel that the liberal agenda is ruining the country, and that sacrificing literal accuracy is a minor detour on the path to saving themselves and America. They are doing exactly the same thing that we do, except against us.

It is not a war of fact against fact, but rather truthiness against truthiness, with facts being used as weapons against each side.

If we want to step away from this, we have to be consistent. If I want to condemn Trump supporters for being tolerant of his lies, then I have to stop sympathizing with the pro-gay interviewers and I have to defend my father’s presentation of his views as he gave them. I have to tell the police the truth, even if it means a would-be rapist goes free. If Trump supporters do not get to pick and choose their own truth, then I don’t get to pick mine either.

Onwapathy

“Privilege” is a word that makes me feel a little icky, and every time someone brings it up in a conversation I get a bit defensive and skeptical. The concept feels too much like a scapegoat for responsibility, or a guilt inducer for the fortunate. And if you send me any mail after this telling me I’m a SJW who is shaming those with privilege, I will shoot you in the face.

But I want to try to understand it as sympathetically as possible, and I wasn’t able to until I noticed a specific feeling in myself in regards to my friend Josh.

Josh is extremely handsome (cis white male). He’s charismatic, friendly, confident, a world traveler, and gets laid. A lot. I feel happy for him. He’s got a great lot in life and is doing well.

But I noticed a funny response I had sometimes when he told me about his adventures, particularly when he said things like “You can just go talk to strangers, it’s easy!” or “And then I shook his hand and he offered me his basement to stay in for a week.” It was kind of a negative feeling, but I brushed it off.

I made friends with this (white cis) girl named Brittany. She had easily 9/10 looks – pouty red lips, huge blue eyes, blonde hair, button nose. People begged to photograph her. She worked for an agency and did product promotions. She exuded sexuality. Every time I was out in public with her it was like I was invisible – men swarmed to her and paid attention to me only to be polite.

And that funny response in my brain happened again when she said things like “Oh I’m sorry you hate your nose – I really hate my crooked tooth!” or “Haha I got invited up to his penthouse but I said no, you know how it is”.

In conversations with them I found myself trying to point out exactly how lucky they were. I said things like “You know, other people can’t just talk to strangers like that with the same results,” or “Nobody actually notices your crooked tooth, and my nose is super obvious.” I had the sensation that they weren’t fully aware of their extreme fortune, and over time I realized that this semi-frustrated feeling I was having towards Josh and Brittany was probably the same thing people felt when they talked about privilege. What I had been trying to do in conversations was get them to check their privilege.

And why did it feel so bad? What was the source of that discomfort and frustration when I sat there listening to Brittany talk flippantly about being hit on by a smalltime celebrity for the third time? Definitely some of it was jealousy (and I suspected for a time that people upset about privilege were just jealous), but that didn’t explain the entire picture. With time, empathy, and security my jealousy reduced, but that funny discomfort didn’t.

And I realized that my discomfort came from a specific phenomenon I wish we had a word for – “when someone feels as though they understand you but you feel as though they don’t understand you.”

I’m gonna call it One-Way Sympathy for now, and shorten it into this horrible conglomeration “onwapathy” and I’m going to use it and you’re going to deal with it.

My displeasure didn’t come from Josh having a great life, it came from Josh having a great life and assuming that I could too if I just did what he did. In his expression of this idea came a fundamental lack of understanding of what it was like to be me. In implying that he understood me, he was assuming that there was no further understanding to have, and by doing so he shut down the exploration of avenues I felt were unexplored – and that hurt. When I expressed insecurity with my physical body and Brittany tried to empathize by comparing her tiny flaw to my huge one, I felt bad. I felt unable to tell her that she didn’t understand. I felt onwapathy. And it’s not their fault – they were trying hard to be sympathetic. They just didn’t know.

I think when people express outrage about privilege they’re usually just trying to communicate onwapathy. They just want to feel understood.

Now I’m still skeptical of the word ‘privilege’ because it’s used in an accusing way, a way that implies wrongdoing or obligated atonement on the part of the privilege. I don’t believe in being ashamed of fortune or doing anything to counteract privilege, but I do believe in communicating the way you feel, especially if you feel misunderstood. All I really wanted from Josh and Brittany was an acknowledgement that things were harder for me than for them – that introverts have a harder time talking to strangers, that a crooked nose is a lot worse than a crooked tooth. That was it.

So I vote for eschewing the concept of ‘privilege’ for the concept of ‘onwapathy.’ It’s gentler, less accusatory, more communicative of feelings rather than aggressive moral principles, and I think brings us closer to the thing we all want the most deeply – to be understood.