lb_lee | Social Justice and Self-Hate

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Social Justice and Self-Hate

GUIDE: The moment that "stick" is taken away... think about it! If you aren't threatened with punishment, what will drive you to succeed? To make those phone calls? To make that list? To get through that list? And what will happen if you don't do the things you're supposed to do? [...] What if you found out that voice had no power over you at all? What if you didn't believe that you were going to die if you do what it told you to do?

STUDENT: Well, I think I would just do the next thing on the list.

--Cheri Huber's There is Nothing Wrong With You: Going Beyond Self-Hate, published 2001 by Keep It Simple Books, pg. 71-72

Rogan: I've talked a little about how I had a social justice meltdown in 2020. COVID accelerated it but didn't cause it. What caused it was that the philosophy just wasn't tenable.

That philosophy went like this: Inside you is an oppressive monster, just waiting to do terrible things. You must NEVER question its existence or malice; to do so only proves the point. You must constantly be on guard, constantly second-guessing all your motives, to keep that monster in prison where it belongs. You must view that monster as an insidious disease to be eradicated. (But you probably won't, because secretly, you LIKE and WANT to be a monster, you disgusting shameful creature.)

If you think this philosophy sounds a lot like an abusive family, or a shitty religion, then yes. You are correct. And it did indeed take advantage of those scars I have, but it also brought a new twist that made it catnip to me, by making my self-hatred into a cause not just for personal purification, but GLOBAL LIBERATION. Apparently I just couldn't resist the idea that I could hate myself into making the world a kinder, more loving place!

This procedure was COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from every other noble cause I had come around to, all of which followed the same process: I encountered someone involved with it, or read a book about it, went, "Oh, that makes sense!" and started learning about it. If it continued making sense and was workable, then I started incorporating it into my daily life. Guilt, shame, and pressure were not required! I just naturally did it! I enjoy learning, and I think that's true about most people!

The funny thing about the monster philosophy was, IT MADE ME WORSE at the very cause it claimed to SUPPORT. If you're second-guessing all your motives constantly, good luck getting anything done. And then, when you inevitably fail, the monster philosophy only says this proved your monster is EVEN WORSE, requiring EVEN MORE control, making you even LESS effective.

STUDENT: But what if I want to do something that's harmful?

GUIDE: Wanting to do something and doing something are two entirely different things. There's no need to act just because you have a feeling.

STUDENT: But what if I want to act?

GUIDE: Your questions come from a belief that you are inherently bad, and that if you don't control yourself, you'll be bad. [...] At some point, now or later, you're going to have to risk BEING YOU in order to find out who that really is. (Huber, 123-124)

Eventually, I've come around to believe that this social justice monster idea is broken on purpose. It's a perfect perpetual motion machine of eternal struggle: you are forever fighting and striving against oppressive evil within and without, and your failure only makes you continue fighting and striving EVEN HARDER. It's dramatic, and from the outside, it can even appear noble. And because it will never succeed, you get to do it FOREVER. Who could ever criticize a desire to improve the world/yourself? (Because the social justice monster idea equated both. The idea of imperfect people doing imperfect things that nevertheless was "good enough" was like Kryptonite to this idea of eternal purity and struggle.)

Turns out the monster was just me all along! Well, dip me in flour and fry me in grease!

Even once I realized that I was doing this, it was SO HARD TO STOP, because to quit or question was a sign of moral failing, which meant letting the world slide into darkness and tyranny. It felt like being tangled in a net where every attempt to fight my way out just made it tighter! (And then struggling out of the net became the next Eternal Noble Struggle.)

As I was trying to detox from social justice monster poisoning, my old Buddhist self-hate book was the ONLY FUCKING THING that seemed to work. Buddhism isn't my thing, but by god, Buddhists seem to understand self-sabotage and communicate it to me better than anyone. And sure enough, over time, as the pressure eased, as I quit struggling against my inherent failings, I found myself naturally relaxing and the net naturally falling away, especially as I didn't don jack boots and run around torching houses and beating puppies.

The social justice monster idea said that without constant vigilance and self-hatred, I'd NEVER DO GOOD AGAIN. But of course that wasn't true. After a brief detox period, I... went right back to my old way of doing things. I just naturally set myself to learning more, the way I always do. The only difference was that now, I focused on stuff I WANTED to read about the subject, rather than what I felt I HAD to read!

So what did I find myself wanting to read? History books. Biographies of people long dead, or essays from people forty years ago on struggles I wasn't even alive for. Fiction by whatever group of people I wanted to learn more about... and preferably fiction that wasn't FOR or ABOUT me. I wanted to remove myself from the picture, lose the self-consciousness that social justice monstrosity encourages, and just... read a fucking book. Older books were especially good for this, because they just plain didn't use the language I now had a flinch response to! (And they also gave me the context for what came later on down the line.)

It's been FASCINATING to realize how much guilt and shaming is involved with this work, how compulsory it seems to feel! The whole thing falls apart with reading older books; it's impossible to claim, "You just don't want your delicate feefees hurt," or "You can't handle the truth," when I'm reading an old book about the psychology of Nazi doctors committing genocide, or the lives ruined in the Lesbian Sex Wars. It's clear that actually, I have a decent tolerance for heinous things, most of the time. I just have an extremely low tolerance for being sneered at.

Self-hate is invested in convincing you that you are an awful person, that deep down inside you there is some Horrible Thing. Why? Because it stays in chage that way. It can just say BOO! and you'll jump back and do whatever it says.

But you can call its bluff simply by saying, "BRING OUT THE HORRIBLE THING. SHOW IT TO ME."

But self-hate can't do that.

And the more it cannot show you the Horrible Thing, the more it will dawn on you that MAYBE IT DOESN'T EXIST. (Huber, 132-133)

EDIT: I have added a bibliography for people trying to escape social justice monster jail!

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I came of age in the monster model of social justice, coupled with the related "questioning anyone with more Oppression Points than you is a manifestation of your monster." (The fact that I had been Insufficiently Oppressed for being queer was why I stayed the heck away from the campus queer groups in college; some part of me was aware this wasn't healthy.) The moment that broke it for me was a book called "decolonizing trans/gender 101," which stated outright at one point that white nonbinary people cannot be discriminated against for being nonbinary because the gender binary is a product of white supremacy.

Which was so ridiculous on its face that it finally shattered it all at once for me, the realization of "PoC can be *wrong*; maybe I do not have to abrogate all of my critical thinking to partake of social justice." And I got significantly *more* willing to partake of social justice after that. (I did finish the book, but ended up with a very strong sense of "no, this person is wrong about many, many things.")

I've done the reading thing too, with fiction and representation: I do not like post-apocalyptic fiction. It does not actually matter how much good indigenous representation there is in this post-apocalyptic book; I still don't like post-apocalyptic fiction. Which was another "and everything is now shattered at once" moment-- I seem to deal with these realizations by subconsciously building them until my worldview just... shatters, leaving something new in its wake.

the realization of "PoC can be wrong;

It always surprises me when people say this like it's a revelation -- we're people, not, IDK, angels, of course we can be wrong. I sometimes wonder if someone somewhere mangled "POC being wrong doesn't justify racism" into "POC are magically always right." I would probably need the resources to go back to school and research a thesis to have any actual answers to that question.

Quick, never put Clarence Thomas and Malcom X in a room together or the universe might detonate! If they both must be right and they disagree, it’s like putting buttered toast on the back of a cat and then dropping it!

That poor whirling cat!

Whirling racial justice cat, powering the whole Atlantic seaboard with its cognitive dissonance

In my experience the thing that got mangled is "Believe people about their own experiences," which is often said as "listen to PoC," and gets applied *way* more generally than it ought to be.

Yeah, I fell into that trap as well, and started clawing my way out once I found people outsourcing their common sense to me about plural stuff that didn't pass a basic sniff test. (No, friend, you shouldn't believe any nonsense someone tells you about being plural just because THEY'RE plural.)

That makes sense.

“white nonbinary people cannot be discriminated against for being nonbinary because the gender binary is a product of white supremacy.”

That is FASCINATING; I can follow the person’s logic, figure out how they got there, and it makes total sense as long as you never actually talk to real people about their experience and stay solely in your theoretical sky-castle! But it’s also so baldly, obviously wrong in ways even a middle-schooler could recognize. (Like, “the stereotypical homophobe with a tire iron DOESN’T CARE what your gender identity is. They care you’re a faggot.”) What a beautiful summary of exactly this kind of nonsense.

Thank you for this post! I think it opened some doors in my mind.

You might like Scrupulosity Comics. (I've transcribed a few of them over on my Tumblr, and the untranscribed context is over here.)

Oh man I heard about those but never had a link! My brother Bart was Edward Cullen but the concept remains evergreen!

[Janusz]

This is a good post. The way I escaped the toxic social justice mindset was partly articles from Viewpoint Mag, partly making contact with "taboo" headmates, and partly following a blog that criticized the excesses of tumblr cultural appropriation discourse. I am particularly thankful to all of them for helping to snap me out of it.

Link for the blog?

@/memecucker

Edited 2024-08-19 22:46 (UTC)

That philosophy went like this: Inside you is an oppressive monster, just waiting to do terrible things.

That is an awful awful concept and I am so sorry you had to wrestle with it. I'm glad you've defenestrated it. It sounds like the worst combination of original sin and "we are all capable of good actions, bad actions, other actions, etc."

hugs you warmly

I’m not sure I defenestrated it so much as tried to befriend and understand it (another thing the social justice monster idea really doesn’t like—devil diseases don’t deserve such things!) But it bothers me way less these days.

That's a really interesting perspective.

The Younger Kid has pointed out that in being supportive of their "somewhere on the nonbinary spectrum" identity, I actually sound like That White Guy talking about social justice issues. So I am working on not being quite so performative in my support. And also not teasing so much in that parent-teasing-teenager way.

It’s tricky! I think having an overzealous early stage is just kinda normal honestly.

I feel like publicly posting about this process shows you've gained a lot of trust for yourself.

Yeah. Definitely in a lot better place on this than I was a few years ago. It doesn’t feel like confessing to a mortal sin, I can just post about it!

This is really relevant and we're glad you posted this, because it's helped us put alot of our own beliefs into a perspective that we've never thought of before :) We just started deconstructing our own relationship with social justice and reading this helped give us a bit of understanding and context to what we've been feeling or struggling to put words to understand 🙂

I'm glad! It seems a lot of people I know are or have been dealing with this, but while I've seen analyses of the phenomenon from abuse and religious standpoints, I hadn't seen the self-hate angle tackled yet and that was key for me.

I wanted to remove myself from the picture, lose the self-consciousness that social justice monstrosity encourages

This also helped me break out of an SJ-inspired self-hate spiral that I experienced last spring. I won't go into details here (I might, at some future date, on my own blog), but it was related to my role as a White Lady In Fandom.

I was talking about it with a fannish friend, and they suggested that I find at least one creator of color to support on Patreon, because, in their words, "as a patron you will be faceless and not obtrusive/it will not be about you." While not everyone can afford to throw money at YouTubers, I could, so I did. And it reminded me that there are probably other ways to support marginalized people that don't involve "proving" what a supposedly good ally I am, since (as I have discussed with you before), I deeply resent the social pressure to "prove it."

"You just don't want your delicate feefees hurt," or "You can't handle the truth,"

I think that assertions like this one are so insidious because there is some truth to them. Sometimes avoiding uncomfortable realities because one wants to avoid emotional distress is the wrong decision and does have negative consequences for oneself and others! But it can easily cross the line into "if it causes you emotional distress, it must be good and helpful" which can be a tool of self-harm and interpersonal harm.

This whole post was very good and I'm glad that you made it.

Yup! The power of being an anonymous patron/fan/customer is great for that! Just removing yourself from the picture.

And I mean, yes, the statement can be true... but in those cases, if someone's avoiding them that hard, getting nasty about it probably isn't going to succeed. (To be clear, I don't think gently holding someone's face in your hands and explaining in perfect Nonviolent Communication will work either. Sometimes, unfortunately, all we can do is just walk away from someone and accept that only they can do the work.) I'm not arguing whether the statements are TRUE or not, I'm arguing whether they WORK or not.

I'm not arguing whether the statements are TRUE or not, I'm arguing whether they WORK or not.

That distinction... actually makes a lot of sense; thank you for elaborating on it.

There are lots of things that can be true that don't work! Sometimes, trying to force the "truth" on my brain just makes it MORE unlikely to do the thing (easy example: doomscrolling current events may tell me the truth about bad things, but it also makes me way less likely to DO anything), so I try more to be like, "Okay, what will actually WORK?"

> But you can call its bluff simply by saying, "BRING OUT THE HORRIBLE THING. SHOW IT TO ME."

We've had this kind of interaction with system members. We used to be afraid of some of us. Turns out, when we stop suppressing them, when we let them front and see what happens, they're way less scary. They're still messy and bring scary feelings, but we can connect with them, if we dare. And then we can figure out how to work together.

I'm thinking of this because we've actually met a therapist recently who wanted to tell us that as a system, we must contain bad manipulative evil headmates, therefore we must accept control from the outside and we can never just trust ourselves as a group...

A few years back, this might have worked on us. But we've found that giving the scary ones a chance, betting on their...personhood? Not-just-shittiness? Mutual goals?, works for us. It helps us move forward, together. Being afraid and avoiding just kept us stuck. And in this case, it might have gotten us stuck under the thumb of a manipulative therapist, while he was pretending we were being protected from the evil headmates.

So I'm thinking this might be a decently common manipulation tactic? It's just weird how the social justice movement manages to spread this thought without one specific person being the manipulator. We've also gotten stuck in the social justice monster theory in the past (pretty sure that syscovery un-stuck it for us) and nobody explicitly told us that, we just kinda picked it up from internet osmosis. Glad you made it out and can share about it now.

Edited 2024-10-09 10:14 (UTC)

Mori: Yeah, I feel absolute confidence that no multi is better off accepting that kind of bullshit control from a therapist. Even if that level of life abdication was a good idea (it is not), what happens if shrinkydink gets hit by a bus that night?

Judy Castelli was hardcore about how multis need to become the authority on their own experiences, to know better and more about themselves than any doctor, and by god she was right. A
Even if you DID have Satan himself in there, and even if somehow only Mighty McShrink could handle him, a therapist can’t always be there!

We have admittedly had a couple entities in here that required special measures... but all required US, not a therapist doing the work for us.

As a system with a formerly labeled 'evil/bad/problematic' member who we rejected for years, fueled by the social justice monster...things only improved for us as a whole when we started treating that member like a person. Now we all get along well and are healthier for it. Nobody is perfect, and feeling like we had to be to the point of suppressing and blaming another member for intrusive thoughts was dangerous and hurtful for all involved. 100% agreed it's a decently common manipulation tactic others use. We're glad to recognize it now.

Also that therapist sounds like a sack of shit.

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Social Justice and Self-Hate

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CW for really shitty therapy

Re: CW for really shitty therapy

Re: CW for really shitty therapy