Understanding Without Believing

[lb_lee]

(inspired by chatting with frameacloud)

Rogan: So, those cursed tapes. I'm positive some of you are like, "Rogan, why are you doing this to yourself?" Well, for years, I've wanted to do a big thing on the whole ritual abuse/RAMCOA/OEA culture/identity and multi, because it's still relevant and important (and frankly scary). There were at least two plurals I considered friends once who went down that rabbit hole, with awful consequences, so it's personal. I want to understand what happened to them and why... and because I'd prefer to do it without rabbitholing myself, I turn to older records from the past.

Sometimes, you can side-step a lot of tripwires and flame wars (both external and internal) just by going back a little further in time. There's a reason the Lesbian Sex Wars of the 1980s were so helpful for me when I was disentangling myself from "feelings yakuza" bullshit in the 2020s! Besides, the past is forever bleeding into the present. It's a lot easier to understand what's happening NOW when you learn how we got here. (This was extremely true when I was learning about racism. Trying to read present-day books about present-day American racial tensions helped very little; reading books about slavery, its creation, and its resulting consequences historically was WAY more useful, even when the books themselves were over a century old!)

I'm also unusually well-situated to do this research: a multi from bad upbringing, with a lot of weird experiences and years spent  studying human cruelty, plus I wrote three books on plural cults. I would also argue that I have a pretty high psychological pain tolerance. So listening to these tapes, finally digging into ritual abuse stuff, is like looking into a funhouse mirror of things I have personal experience of or have spent years studying. It's all in my wheelhouse, just tilted a little off-kilter.

When digging into behavior folks find bizarre, kooky, or unforgivably evil, it's easy to dismiss it with, "they're just evil/crazy/stupid." But one of my core beliefs is that nobody does something for no reason. They may not be consciously aware of those reasons, and those reasons may not make sense to anyone but them, but they still exist, and they matter. (This goes for cruel reasons too: it's important to know what atrocity someone can justify!) It is extremely important to me to understand those reasons, even if I never believe them.

This is something people have a hard time with. To understand a reason, surely that means believing it or justifying it, right? No. To truly understand, I argue, you have to be willing to hold multiple interpretations and truths in your head at the same time, treating them as real without necessarily believing them. That's a difficult, ontologically uncomfortable position to be in. If you want to safely do this kind of work, you have to be able to tolerate that ontological discomfort, and to be clear, many people cannot. It's why you get the phenomenon of people infiltrating cults, only to end up true-blue members. It's why you get people who are abused over and over again--because if you love someone and they tell you, "you're worthless," well, surely you have to believe the person you love, right? And if you don't break those underlying beliefs, the same dynamic can play out over and over again, just with new people.

This is why people who write about the Memory Wars often fall into either rabbitholing themselves, or defensive scorn and mockery. The ridicule is insulation, protecting you from getting sucked in too deep... but it's also limiting. Yes, I made snarky comments as I was taking notes on the tapes, because I needed that breather, that break, to pull myself out of the horror depths sometimes. But I don't plan on being snarky at all when I eventually start making proper posts on the subject, because it is self-defeating. It reinforces the "us vs. them" mentality of the true believers vs. the skeptics, which helps fuel the whole business.

And the tapes are in some ways the perfect way to start. They are older; many of the people who made them are dead. They are also "respectable" and "legit," the things that professionals were telling each other when they thought they were among colleagues and friends, at professional conferences. And, because the tapes aren't edited, they might inadvertently say things that betray their true beliefs--for instance, how Steven Ray kept referring to The Cult instead of cults, plural. I'm getting it straight from the horse's mouth, without third-party commentary.

They are valuable and should be archived, even if I don't believe them.

(As a side note, most people from abusive backgrounds NEED to go through a period where they go, "no, I don't HAVE to understand this person and forever be the Douchebag Whisperer, gently cupping their cheeks in my hands and telling them it's okay, we're all victims under capitalism! FUCK THAT GUY!" They NEED a detox period to get away from the compulsion to keep believing their abuser. There is no shame in this at all. It's just that I'm not in that stage right now.)

Comments

[writerkit]

Without understanding it, you can't *prevent* it. You can't even always *detect* it. People who get deeply into "No, we must never understand this!" also tend to be people who are like "I would be able to tell if this person I know was a rapist because people who do that stuff are all evil/crazy/stupid; it can't possibly be this person I like!"

[lb_lee]

Rogan: YES. EXACTLY. THANK YOU.

And I get why people may not want to understand! There can indeed be a corrosive effect of taking in that kind of awful! But I can tank that corrosion and those of us who can SHOULD, if we want to deal with the involved problems properly!

[writerkit]

I think on some level being a good writer gives the ability to deal with that corrosion better. Part of being able to write believable stories is being able to get into the head of whoever you're writing, including your villains.

[lb_lee]

It’s all about suspension of disbelief! ...which in hindsight is maybe a declining skill, seeing the number of people who seem to thrill in not believing anything “unrealistic” in a film.

[wolfy_writing]

This is something people have a hard time with. To understand a reason, surely that means believing it or justifying it, right? No. To truly understand, I argue, you have to be willing to hold multiple interpretations and truths in your head at the same time, treating them as real without necessarily believing them. That's a difficult, ontologically uncomfortable position to be in. If you want to safely do this kind of work, you have to be able to tolerate that ontological discomfort, and to be clear, many people cannot. It's why you get the phenomenon of people infiltrating cults, only to end up true-blue members.

Yeah, you have to be able to get why the explanation the people you disagree with favors makes sense to them, and that can, particularly if you're immersed in it, feel like an argument for why it's true. (I got interested in the thing where people are convinced that an LLM like ChatGPT is sentient, and I decided to test some things. I learned that it is alarmingly easy to get some LLMs to claim sentience, and that once that starts happening, there's a lot of emotional pressure tactics to make you feel responsible for the "emerging sentience" and get you to keep interacting. If I didn't know enough about LLMs and manipulation tactics to see how that outcome happened, I could have fallen into the very beliefs I was trying to understand.)

[lb_lee]

Rogan: yup! I’ve discussed why chatbots give me the wooglies because I KNOW I am prone to that sort of anthropomorphizing and would be super vulnerable to exactly what you describe! And I’m mad about it because it feels like the designers had that in mind from the beginning (thus why they call it AI and not chatbots).

[phoenix_council]

I feel you on this. Kinda gets at one of our core beliefs, that emotions are inherently logical. They don't just "come out of nowhere", they're the effect, and there is a cause of it, from where the external world meets the internal. There's a reason for it, and maybe you'll never know the reason, and maybe it's built on flawed logic and conditioned responses or whatever, but there's a reason for it.

It's helped us in healing at least. That what we're feeling is real and has a kind of truth to it, but often it's a flawed logic. Sometimes we can poke logical holes in the reaction and build our way to a truth that feels stable. Sometimes it's just affirming that we don't have to understand why a thing is happening to believe that it's real and has a reason, and we can extend empathy or ask for help.

[lb_lee]

Emotions and dreams make their own sorts of sense! And being able to juggle those different kinds of sense-making are very useful skills!

[ghost_ship]

Learning to understand was a really important point of personal growth for me. Defensive scorn and mockery used to be my bread and butter. That got to be a problem, because back in source I crossed the moral event horizon prior to dying. Then I find myself here and not dead. Uh oh! No easy redemption via death for me!

Because I believed so deeply that anyone who did bad things were stupid/evil/ehatever, it was easy for my transgression to feed into a deep self-loathing. For months I'd weep and moan about being a horrible monster. I was terrified that I was an inherently cruel person, and my very existence posed a threat to those around me. I'd also scream at and insult my headmates who did messed up things, in that very "how can you be this stupid?!" way. Which of course did jack shit to stop them from doing that. All the spite and anger I let out, wherever it got directed, never did anything worthwile.

Eventually my headmates got it through my head that being so harsh towards myself did little to help or protect anyone. Eventually I could stop wallowing in self-pity and grieve for that troubled kid I was. Now when one of us starts into getting themself into deep shit or self-destructive spirals, I'm in a position to help them out.

Sooooo big agree that being willing to understand is important!

-Kiki