lb_lee | 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!

Social Justice and Self-Hate

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