Entitled to the Internal Tangle: how working through want makes us human

Part I: Intentional Background

For the last five days I've been reading Anne Leckie's fantastic Ancillary Justice. It's been blowing my mind in all types of lovely philosophical and fictional ways. Seriously that book is an intellectual back-bending inversion and we need that kind of upending fiction. Read it!

But this afternoon it brushed against a nerve whose sensations I've been trying to work through for the past month or so:

For a month I've been trying to write a post that sums up my feelings about desire/thought/intent and how they don't matter or at the very least how they are ancillary to the real world action and behaviors we choose to take.

In January 2010 Kinsey Hope made a satirical post about intent being "magic". The follwoing year Melissa McEwan at Shakesville put up the first post in a two part series about how seeing intent as magic can cause communication to be harmful. (I'm wildly paraphrasing here). Since then so many radical corners of the internet has been touched by the powerful words implied in these posts:

Intent is not magic.

It does not absolve the doer of damage and it does absolutely nothing to resolve, heal, or otherwise take accountability for the effects of the resulting harm. Reconciliation can never start from "I didn't mean it". Because as an adult human person you are expected to do the hard, but deeply human work of navigating how to respect your own desire/wants/thoughts while maintaining respect for others.

Now it's important for me to give this (poorly sourced) background and my take on it because it's crucial to what I am trying to draw out here. The reason intent is not magic, is because it has little to no direct power over how we act and communicate. For the most part, our conscious (not necessarily logical/sensible!) minds determine how we act and interact. The effects of intent are indirect at best.

Intent isn't magic, and in many contexts straight up doesn't matter. As Leckie's extremely utilitarian  protagonist Berq says "Thoughts that lead to action can be dangerous. Thoughts that do not, mean less than nothing."




Part II: The tangle that makes us human

All actions have consequences. As humans in community with other humans; as socially sophisticated animals, it's our evolutionary imperative to anticipate and strategically reduce the harmful consequences of our own actions.

Every moment of our waking lives (and probably a good portion of dreams), we experience a complex tangle of thoughts, desires, wants, and wishes. We all must weed through this tangle to figure out how to act.

Let me give you an examples of my own navigation of this process:

For me a huge part of being genderfuild is engaging in a process of choosing how to follow up on my many and seemingly conflicting desires to express myself. I consistently have to chose from a tangle of erratic desires. These desires often buck lessons I learned about gender, behavior, and societal expectations. And sometimes I come to the conclusion that things I thought were in conflict are in fact not.

But thing is, the internal process that brings me to act and express, it belongs to me. It is part of what makes me me. In fact, I'm willing to take it even further than that. It's part of what makes me human. Take this process away from me and I am less human. Take this process away from anyone and they are dehumanized.

The processes that we go through, whether conscious or unconscious, swift or slow, to determine which of our wants we are going to actualize and how is a process that belongs to each us individually. Because the simple fact is (barring any drastic nuero-tech advances) nobody else can be in your head deciding which of your thoughts mean action, and which mean nothing.

Human = Human

Today I read this heartbreaking and fantastically honest article about poverty, disability, and value. Seriously you should read it!

Every op ed piece I read defending food stamps or other benefits bend over backwards to point out the majority of recipients are employed. The majority are good people. Good people work.
But I do not work. I am autistic, and being the autistic I am means I am real world, social model disabled. I do not work because I cannot. There are a dozen hypothetical ‘what if…’ or ‘should be…’ scenarios in which I could hold down a job, but that is not my reality.

Work and the willingness/ability to work is a shitty metric for how to value a human being. Actually scratch that, trying to ascribe value to humanity is fraught and dehumanizing.

But we do it every day in examples just like Bridget cites above. We do it every time we try to figure out if someone is a good/bad person. No one, however different or amoral they seem to be acting, can ever fail at being a person. I admit that there're people who's humanities I have trouble relating to because of my personal ethics and energy levels. But my failure to recognize their humanity doesn't mean they're not still very human.

Value and humanity have nothing to do with each other. A human is no more or less a human because of what they can or can't produce or do. When we treat people's capacity for productivity as a metric for value, we dehumanize and erase people who produce less.  Treating productive people as if they are more valuable is how we get the idea that so called geniuses are allowed to be assholes, or the notion that famous artists (like  Roman Polanski) should be absolved for their abuse & dehumanization others; as if the value of what they produce in some sick calculation, outweighs the humanity of those the abuse/dehumanize.

I've written about the falseness of work's supposed dignity-bestowing qualities. Reading Bridget's article today really hit home to me how misguided it is to think that "jobs, jobs, jobs" is the best and only answer to the problems of poverty.

Financial independence through "honest work" is too simple and inappropriate a goal for feminism or any other anti-oppression efforts. It throws people like Bridget under the bus completely and ignores unpaid forms of labor (like parenting). It also devalues community and family interdependence which have long been an invaluable survival resource for many poor people.

Jobs are not the (only) answers to the disempowerment of women (or any group). Employment fails to address the complexity of concerns faced by people who are unable or even unwilling to "work" in the traditional sense.

I'm personally at the intersection between sick and difficult to employ. I don't have the physical energy to work most jobs full time. Specifically I don't have the energy to work in most forms of education, direct action politics, social work, or customer service which are the only things I am qualified for/interested in. In addition to the problem of energy I also don't want to work full time on someone else's dream, even if it is a dream I believe in and want to collaborate on.

I have a regular commitment to and faith in my creative process as a writer. Writing is one of the few things I do consistently have energy for. I am sick today and still working on it. But it is work, albeit work not currently ascribed much value by our society.

My ability to do writing work consistently doesn't make a me a good person or even a good writer. It demonstrates my commitment and consistency (qualities prized by capitalism and the culture of productivity). And I don't deny that there is an impulse in me that encourages pride such consistency, but consciously, intellectually I know that the amount and quality of work I do has absolutely nothing to do with my worth as a person.

I'm still the same amount of human and that shit is invaluable.

I don't need to be jaded to do good work

In radical conversations I've had other activists let me know that they're shocked by my 'optimism' and that soon I too will become jaded like them. I am surprised every time this happens. I think I can sort of understand from whence this cynicism comes. It comes from burnout and overwork and years of frustration. Activism is frustrating work and doing it in unsustainable ways over the long term can create this cynicism.

Part of the reason I can't be jaded is because I need the work I do to be satisfying and sustainable. Now before you go calling me decadent and depraved for saying so I need you to know this: I have a non apparent disabilities that affect me whether or not I am working. I need my work to be satisfying and sustainable or else my personal disabilities will make doing them impossible very quickly.

So no. I don't need to be jaded.

I am dead set against being jaded. My long term survival depends on avoiding the repetitive stress of cynicism. 

I'm not going to be jaded but I am going to continue finding more specific and radical things to take issue with. This doesn't mean I won't be angry or that my anger will be worth any less or be any less powerful. I strive to apply my anger as strategically as possible. I recognize anger as a powerful tool to make change but the bitter of cynicism can make us insensitive to how it affects those we apply it to. This insensitivity can make work faster but it also makes it hostile and sloppy.

Being optimistic takes my time and my energy and it makes the necessary good work slow. But its the best way I've found to keep my compassion intact. I'm not going to do it faster if it means moving forward without acknowledging the humanity of those who don't work with me.

Whether they benefit or oppress us, we all live inside the same systems, to approach anyone as if they are not worthy and capable of your collaboration is elitist and needlessly divisive. 

What jaded people see (and perhaps misunderstand) as my optimism isn't as simple as they think. Before I begin any sort of strategic politics I accept the failure of that act before I begin it. I never feel entitled to the success of the things I write about or go into. I hope for it. I'm frustrated when I am misunderstood. I do fight my ground but I see that in the act of doing so I also give way my right to success. Bringing an idea outside of my head invites its failure and even while locked in a well reasoned argument, I try to remember and accept that such failure is a possibility. Because my worldview and brain function are different from everyone else's.

In my mind people who are jaded or cynical, just can't handle the failure of the things they believe. They aren't leaving room in their worldview for people to have have difference experiences and come to different conclusions. And believe me. I understand this I have been there and am there with them when I hear someone who is saying something or doing something I find absolutely atrocious and dehumanizing. My immediate reaction is to write them out of my world. But, when I can, I work to undo such erasures.

There is difference between accepting the possibility of failure cynically, or with an open heart. Someone who is jaded comes into whatever they are coming into with the full expectation and bitterness of not getting what they want. The person who accepts possible failure with an open heart comes forward with full knowledge that their efforts may fail, but in contrast to the jaded person, they are at peace with the idea that they might not get what they want and still view the endeavor as worthwhile and valuable.

If I can't ask for things to change without accepting that I might not get what I want then I am not ready to move ask. If I move forward without accepting the potential failure of my actions, disappointment can become toxic. It takes time to reach this level of acceptance. I don't work on all of the projects I want to because of it. But I take more time with my politics because they need room for optimism and failure. My politics need room for all humans and all possible humanities.

No use for the obtuse (when writing about the less privileged)

Yesterday I straight up walked out of a poetry reading on a college campus. I found the content of one of the readers repulsive and degrading. He was using "washed up" strippers and sex workers as props to create a post apocalyptic fantasyscape and that was not okay with me.

I am a huge fan of post-apocalyptic fantasyscapes. But the use of sex workers as the primary prop to do so made me gag a little. Okay, a lot.

Old white novelist guy this one's for you:

First off newsflash: sex workers are people yo. Please don't use them, or assume that based on the services they provide that they as a group of humans can be treated as a stock of stereotypes to paint a more sleazy setting. You were probably thinking something on these lines: oh yea I want some sleaze, I'll just use some sex workers, they don't mind being used and dehumanized right? They won't mind or have any more thoughts or personality. It's their job to be used so they won't mind! Sir, fuck you. For your sake and for the sake of your readers I hope you learn how to write better in the future.
                                                                                  WRM

In particular this guy's description of the older, desperate-eyed, drug fiend, stripper with "buckshot tits" who would kill you for your money or for drugs, was the moment I knew I had to leave. I couldn't take it anymore.

On the bright side. Two women also walked out during the reading of this same piece.

But both this reader and the one previous read content that leaned on cultures they knew nothing about in order to create bombastic "entertaining" content. The first white cis male reader opened his set with a poem called "Slaves" and featured prison imagery and language reminiscent of what I guess he thinks is the ghetto or prison.

But his poem didn't say anything or reveal anything new or enlightening about the history of dehumanization forced on certain people in our culture. It did nothing to critique the prison industrial complex and the culture of captivity we've forced so many (people of color) into.

Or maybe it did say something. Maybe I'm just not educated enough to have heard his critique. I guess in well off academic circles it's enough just to mention or hint at the forces which violate the lives of so many. Maybe I don't get such subtlety

One of the reasons I am afraid that I will never understand or fit into academic or prestigious schools of writers is because I choke on the implicit. I have no use for the obtuse. I find it clumsy and grating when a poet or writer talks about those of lower status without acknowledging that they have an agenda.

Some advice to those who wish to write about people who are more/differently marginalized than them:

If you're going to talk about people with less power than you be clear, otherwise you are hiding the fact that your voice is more valued by society. When you are confusing or clumsy with these people's narratives you are reinforcing the exact same skewing of value by not clearly stating what you believe. By not writing about these people with their full humanity in mind (not just the affectations you've stolen from your stereotypes) you are erasing these people just by mentioning them. You are rewriting their stories over to top of their very real lives.

And that is a big fucking shame.