{{post I was replying to}}

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justice-turtle:

Well, it’s not scientific, but I can think of maybe 2-3 people (including me) who started out fairly far to the right and are now pretty far to the left, and one person (you) who started out left a ways and has stayed there. The rest of the people I follow whose… political trajectories I’m aware of, which is maybe a dozen or so, seem to have started out sort of… mildly leftish-centrist and have moved further left with time. Like, there’s – I know there’s a norm of teenage rebellion and finding your own path, but my impression is that wide swings across the ideological center are fairly rare and may involve some kind of conversion/aversion experience.

(Bear in mind here that I’m very depressed, so this next part, I’m probably being more of a catty little bitch than is called for. But – like, I think we’ve discussed, you tend to run into a thing where people are like “Well, nobody is born feminist/whatever, we have to learn, go easy on us?” I genuinely don’t recall if that’s ever been me saying that, and like I say I could be totally wrong, but… like, my completely unsupported impression is, that kind of remark comes more from people who were born centrist, have liked to consider themselves quite left-wing progressive, and are just finding out that they’ve got a long fucking way to go and are feeling defensive about it? Like, pulling an example out of the air, somebody says “you know g*psy is a slur, right?”, and instead of “oh shit! no i didn’t know, sorry!”, they reach more for “don’t judge me! i couldn’t have known!” it’s… like i say, i could be full of shit, but for me myself, that identity-thing of “don’t judge me, i didn’t know any better” got lost somewhere around the same time as “gayness is a SIN”. i mean, i still don’t like being seen as a fuckup, i imagine nobody does, but my mental image of people who say “nobody is born knowing whatever” is of kids who… still have that belief in their own Moral Rectitude, you know? who have never yet had to integrate into their identity the fact that they are A Person Who Can And Does Fuck Up. who feel like they need to defend the idea that they couldn’t have done any better, defend their… their honor, and that’s their go-to excuse because idk it fits their world paradigm or whatever.)

(sorry. i say “kids”. given that this conversation involves a discussion of authors younger than me having their shit together, and that you also are quite a lot younger than me, that’s probably a bad choice of words. but i’m failing to come up with a better one. :P)

again. large grain of salt. possibly a barrel of salt. or a very large crystal. a hunk of salt. i’m tired and depressed and pretty sure i’m not being terribly articulate. but that’s my impression: most people our age have started out pretty centrist, and i’d bet the ones who overgeneralize about “nobody grows up far-leftist” are included in that centrist-moving-leftward group.

Hmm. The thing is–and I know I often elide this–I don’t think I was exactly raised far-left per se. Like, there were groups (the ones that come to mind are black people and gay people) where people talked positively about them, but you never seemed to actually meet any. Trans people were mostly not on our radar, and when they were they were mostly viewed with vaguely benevolent confusion.

But I was raised left enough that when I did meet full-on social-justice folk, they didn’t feel foreign. I wasn’t exactly raised in SJ culture, but the place I was raised was…adjacent, somewhere close enough that SJ proper felt of-a-piece with it.

>>they reach more for “don’t judge me! i couldn’t have known!”<<

For me, personally, while that reaction is correlated with childhood because I hang out on the Internet more as an adult, I think the main distinction is actually speech vs text. Offline!me’s* primary reaction to conflict is fight; Brin’s primary reaction is flight. My first emotion when called wrong is anger, but given a short time (usually short enough that textual communication will inherently give it to you) the anger is overwhelmed by fear. “If I crush the opposition they’ll stop hurting me!” becomes “As far as I can tell, I have never managed to successfully crush anyone, and I have no reason to think this will be the exception. Trying and failing to crush them will only prolong the fight and its associated pain. The only way of ending a fight that reliably works for me is complete and unconditional surrender, so that’s what I should do.” (Now that I’ve spent a lot of time in that frame of mind where my cowardice can shine through, I can even manage flight reactions in offline conflicts sometimes.)

(Apparently a lot of people are more the opposite? I mean, I guess they must be, or we wouldn’t have stuff along the lines of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. In a twisted sort of way, I suppose the existence of opposite people helped me; while I haven’t managed a 100% perfect record, I learned very fast that I could avoid a lot of fuckups by staying very quiet, observing, and letting other people make beginners’ mistakes for me.)

*My legal name would be less clunky, and I wouldn’t mind you knowing it, but I’m writing this publicly.

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Tags:

#it’s not really Learning to Accept That I Can Be Wrong #as much as #Learning It Is In My Self-Interest to Pretend to Accept That I Can Be Wrong #(people who are not motivated primarily by self-interest confuse me and I am often tripped up by them) #(what do you mean you’re professing [insert political stance here] because you think it’s correct) #(and not because you fear social repercussions for not supporting it or because it would benefit you personally?) #(how does *that* work?) #reply via reblog #our roads may be golden or broken or lost

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