Kindness/Cruelty, Morals/Ethics: What We Tell Ourselves and What We Tell Others: Part 1

When I was a child I was told a great many lies, some by friends and family, others by society at large. Part of the reason I have a grudge against Disney is because they sold me a lie that it took until my 20’s to recover from: “Some day my prince will come.”. Society even supports this lie by saying “there is someone for everyone”, seeding the sense of inadequacy that develops from failed relationships and a lack of relationships. The sense of inadequacy that companies and marketing campaigns use to sell you things, and society blames you for, while ignoring that their messages mainly target white women and tell men they also don’t have to do anything as a partner will magically appear.

In anime the latter LITERALLY HAPPENS…but I can’t seem to find a gif for it so -

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Now before I go all Fight Club on you (ha ha, get it? Cus satire?), the point I am making here is that we are raised with conflicting messages, messages meant to soften the full body blow that is the world we live in, maintain us as productive members of the social unit, and leave us imagining that even in a zombie apocalypse, we’ll all hold hands, pitch in, and make things work. 

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Or not.

The other reason the above gif works is because just before the events it depicts, Robert Carlyle and his wife were sat at a table having dinner with an elderly couple who had let them and a few others hole up in their house to protect themselves from the zom-sorry, those infected with the rage virus. They were trying to ‘make it work’. On that note, another lie I was told was that kindness is always repaid. What was built in my little mind in contrast to the stark and later bleak reality was the idea that the universe always rights itself, bad people are punished, and good people are rewarded. The universe DOES right itself, our definition of ‘righting itself’ however is wholly human (individual even) centred, and what we forget is balance in the universe does not necessarily mean balance for US. Anyway, the notion that all will work out the way we want in the end is part of the trick that keeps society functioning and the point from which I would like us to break things down: kindness/cruelty, morals/ethics, the lies we tell ourselves and the lies we tell others. To make things a bit easier to follow we can imagine that on the one hand we have kindness/cruelty and morals/ ethics, and on the other the lies we tell ourselves and the lies we tell others. They all overlap, because the lies we tell ourselves and others are often about kindness/cruelty and morals and ethics. In short, we tell ourselves lies about how kindness, cruelty, morals and ethics function in the world to keep ourselves functioning in the world, and we tell others lies about those same things in order to keep both ourselves and others functioning in the world. Thus the web is spun.

So going back to the example I opened with, children get sold the idea that they will eventually find love, marry and have kids. In addition to sparing children the harsh reality that it may not turn out that way or could possibly turn out that way but unhappily so, adults feel like ‘good’ people for shielding children and themselves from the idea that maybe, but not absolutely, unhealthy relationships are all that lies in store. Because society has trained us that being alone is bad or means there is something wrong with you, so heaven forbid you wind up ALONE (cue scary reveal music). Also, it is assumed that if you are alone you are not helping to perpetuate society by HAVING CHILDREN, which is the other, more basic reason children are socialized to marry and have children.

So back to kindness/cruelty. We are all raised to believe that people are inherently “good” or kind and that when you are in trouble, someone will always help you. We believe in the Good Samaritan, the kindly bystander. What we ignore is that they are the exception and not the rule as our notions of good, bad and normal are in reality constantly shifting. Part of this is because ‘good’,’ bad’ and ‘normal’ are terrible words, empty in meaning and excellent place holders, and part of this is that as place holders they are filled with a general, but not mutually agreed upon understanding. They can mean everything and nothing at the same time. 

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A good (ha ha) example of the issue with kindness/goodness is a form of the bystander effect. While training volunteers in Egypt to work against sexual harassment, a trainer showed a video of a crowd on a train platform in the UK. The idea was to show the volunteers how mass mentality works, and argue why it could work to stop harassers in public spaces. A group of actors had been hired to enact a pick pocketing to see how non-actors would react. The actor very obviously took the other actor’s wallet out of their pocket with the latter pretending not to notice, and in the video, it is clear that non-actors noticed, but no one said or did anything. Now we all like to imagine that if in that situation, we’d stop the pick pocket, but we know in our heart of hearts that is just not very likely. To be clear, I am saying UNLIKELY, not IMPOSSIBLE. We are more likely, as a second reenactment of the pick-pocketing showed, to do something when someone else does something first. This brings up the notion of discomfort; people are not comfortable in the moment of the situation when faced with ‘do something’ and stand out or ‘stay quiet’ and follow the crowd. At the same time, we do not like the idea that we are more likely to follow, or to seek permission to do something in public, or that maybe we just don’t care, so we tell ourselves that we are not that person, and that if a stranger needed help, we wouldn’t hesitate to act. Here’s some more proof for you.

But then this was the issue when it came to sexual harassment in public spaces: bystanders rarely if ever ACT, and they were even siding with the harasser. What the volunteers were being trained to do was change the flow of the tide so that more bystanders than not would stop the harasser versus support them or blame the harassed. 

These kinds of issues also unfold in more personal settings. Take the classic example so common that if it hasn’t actually happened to you, you have most likely seen it in your favourite tv series: a woman goes to confide in her friend that she is being sexually harassed[1]. She is visibly scared, but her friend, instead of comforting her, asks her if she was sure what she experienced was harassment. The friend then proceeds to downplay the story, suggesting to the woman that maybe there was some sort of misunderstanding or surely the person didn’t mean for their actions to be perceived as harassment. Congratulations: here is a lie we are telling both ourselves and others. We do not want to shatter our belief that the world is a ‘good’ place filled with ‘good’ people, we do not want to see our friends and family hurt, and we want to impart that utopia to our friend through convincing her that maybe it didn’t happen the way she thinks it did, and urging her to go back to the mental state she occupied before the incident(s) occurred. In peddling this fiction, we are reinforcing a social norm that promotes toxic masculinities and femininities, and we are shielding ourselves from the idea that terrible things may happen to us and our loved ones, or that we may be the perpetrators of acts that cause others pain. The reality however is that we are all guilty of causing pain, and it is only when we face this reality head on that we can begin to take apart why we do these things, how we can change, and maybe how we can heal the wounds inflicted on others and those visited upon us. Then maybe reality will seem less terrible, and we won’t want to hide ourselves and our loved ones. 

I could delve into these ideas further but there are too many things to unpack that would take us down many many side roads and into early retirement. Mainly what I was aiming at here is to get us thinking about how we could rethink what we do and how it impacts our own lives and the lives of those around us. Don’t be the silent bystander. Read your children the original Grimm’s Fairytales or stories where the princess saves herself (I am ashamed to admit I don’t know any off the top of my head, but I suggested Grimm because at least the prince loses the odd limb or gets derailed from his quest making it a bit more realistic). Take your friend at their word when they tell you they’ve been harassed/assaulted (I’m frowning at you Jussie Smollet.) Next time, I will try to tackle morals/ethics. Wish me luck and bring paracetemol. I’m off to watch the Promised Neverland.  

Anime - Tech - Games - VR

[1]In this hypothetical the women is indeed being sexually harassed and there is no ambiguity. If you are wondering what defines sexual harassment you can read Gunilla Carstensens 2016 piece ‘Sexual Harassment: The Forgotten Grey Zone’ and/or watch the BBC clip ‘Is This Sexual Harassment’ (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06x0jv5)

The Cause

Here at The Turn Left, we’ve thought a lot about causes. Name one and we’ve mulled over it, gotten involved in it, attended conferences on it, or penned scholarly papers about it. No matter what it is, it’s in a long line and someone from the cause in front likely said, “Wait your turn”. You know the activists I mean: the environmentalists who don’t think it’s the right moment for LGBTQ+ rights or LGBTQ+ activists who refuse to acknowledge misogynoir.

So, we decided to have a 'chat' about causes. Are they really mutually exclusive?

Myriam: The more time I spend in cause-based life, the more I find that whatever rifts come between activists have only somewhat to do with The Cause. We recreate the idea that there is so little space, money, time, or resources that it is impossible to truly share equally. This is the lie our institutions tell us and precisely the lie we fight when we ask for equal rights or safety for minorities.

Inevitably, when passionate people come together, they disagree. In activist communities those disagreements become huge debates over white privilege or misogyny—both of which do play huge roles in how we speak to each other and decide what actions to take. I find that we hide personal spats behind the big ideas. Sometimes, it really is a simple failure of humanity between colleagues that no one apologizes for. Sometimes, it’s a betrayal of one cause for another. More often, it’s both.

Every time, however, it’s almost impossible to tell the difference. I always find myself relieved to be in an activist space in the beginning. The political correctness eventually does start to flake off after long hours painting signs. Each time I find myself asking: Why do we still believe the lie?

Sandra: I see what you mean about this idea that resources are perceived as limited. This could be a holdover from the 'spaceship Earth' idea touted by Buckminster Fuller (see Adam Curtis’ documentary All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace), but I think it also makes us realise that HOW terms and concepts come about is also problematic. For example people have to identify under the term 'minority' for their grievances to be legitimised in the eyes of large bodies such as the government (see the work of Saba Mahmood).

Buckminster Fuller had to convince people to think of Earth as a self-contained ship in space just so that people would start being more environmentally conscious (or so Adam Curtis tells us in All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace). I think activists don't always educate themselves outside their given cause, adding to your point and making it easier to keep things personal. There's nothing wrong with being personally attached to the cause you are pursuing; I prefer that to people who are just 'there', but it is super important to do the background reading. That enables you to see how things are interconnected and maybe avoid this hiding of personal spats behind big ideas. 

At the same time I think the latter point may involve an element of selflessness people do not always possess. We are living in an age where people have the freedom to express themselves in new and different ways (and reap the sometimes horrifying consequences), but what I find myself wondering often is how to translate that expression into action that those in power will actually respond to. We get very bogged down in the details of what and how we want things to change for our given cause, and in so doing fail to see the commonalities with other causes. So maybe the problem is that there is so much information out there that people do not always realise the ways in which resources are not limited? Maybe it is also the argument made about people becoming trapped in their own bubbles and not actively seeking people who have different ideas? 

Myriam: I agree, there’s a lot of history and theory that goes alongside movements. I am worried here, though, about the division between those who read and those who do not read. Movements often prize those with education over others and it doesn’t always protect the movement from division. Those leaders should be careful what knowledge is treasured and not allow their movements to be divided along lines of privilege. 

To be clear, I’m not looking down my nose at reading. I don’t know where I’d be without the books I’ve had access to. I just want to keep in mind that book-learnin' is yet another way we divide our efforts. There are many different ways to learn and we should use them all. Chief among those is empathy. How many training manuals are there out there for empathy? I know the works of Paolo Freire and bell hooks aren’t chiefly concerned with empathy but there must be others like them whose work has been translated into dozens of languages.

There are a lot of bubbles and echo chambers. We should have more exposure to different models of governance and organization…and find ways to build consensus properly. We are socialized to seek hierarchy, to reproduce hierarchy. Or even that the best will naturally rise to the top, to trust in the meritocracy. We dive deep into our causes because we have seen that this is not true: we don’t all start life with equal chances at success so how can we really tell who is the best?

We need to train ourselves to think differently, to plan differently. It scares me how difficult it is for me to break those simple patterns in my own work. Who can we learn from?

Sandra: This can be dangerous territory as this is how some people see the divide between left and right extremes in the US—those that read and those that don’t. I am not saying that this is what you are talking about, but I just wanted to be clear for our readers’ sakes. I wonder though—if everyone read to atleast a certain minimum, would we still call it a hierarchy or try to pursue one? What if we ensured that everyone read the same things or atleast the same variety of things?

Absolutely reading is not the only way to learn—knod at Tim Ingold and embodied learning (see his book The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill)—but sometimes when people have different experiences based on, for example, skin colour it may be a medium that has to be relied on. There are still some experiences people cannot have, and that is where both reading and talking to people can be helpful. In that sense, what if we all knew how to build/make things? What if we engaged in more projects that involved learning through doing/experiencing alongside people who were different to us in some way?  

I agree entirely that there should not be a division between those who read and those who do not, and there may be a bit of ego that needs to be overcome there. There is an assumption that people cannot communicate or that if they can they can do so only to certain point. So how do we overcome this? And what about how people divide themselves over causes? I admit I have my moments of preferring animals and environmental work over working with humans, but that has yet to stop me from working with humans. How do we get to a point where the majority of people can see the overlaps between the environment, the feminist struggle, struggles of peoples of colour and so on until the end of the list?

Because it is all bound up in the personal, what people have read, and what they believe the world to be. It may also boil down to what some are willing to do in the realm of acceptability. There is what people do so others see them doing it, and what people do and think for themselves...aand suddenly we find ourselves in the territory of morals and values which is a whole other conversation.

Myriam: Practically, I think we have to start making cooperative spaces. We have to train ourselves to think differently. That may mean expanding our realm of experience with other people’s stories, written or otherwise. That may mean actually taking or crafting courses that focus on building consensus and facilitation. Learn from the moments in history where goals and leadership were shared rather than the moments they all fell apart. 

Personally, I’ve wanted to learn more about federations of the First Nations such as the Iroquois and other systems of governance. There is more to history than what happened in Ancient Greece and Rome. Not to discredit the classics, mind you, we just need to create more space for the actual history of the WORLD. 

Everyone I’ve ever met in politics or activism is tired of the way things are but so few take the extra step to make actual changes. In some ways, we need a complete system overhaul: decentralized leadership, mentorship, consensus building, and ALL the trainings. We have to learn what the new world can look like if we’re trying to build it. Boldly going blindly with only the status quo behind us is too slow going. For the poor, the marginalized, the economically vulnerable, we have no more time to waste.

Sandra: You know what? I think WE are the solution to this! In a serious vein though, what specifically would training ourselves to think differently look like? I think looking outside the histories taught in schools is crucial, especially as it enables us to think about the different ways we have come to be where we are socially and politically, and it reminds us that we are dealing with issues and modes of being that are not linear but hypercomplicated.

To push your points further, Greek and Roman history and philosophy have varying influences on global historical trajectories, and overshadow the impact of Indian, Arab, African (plural) and East Asian histories to name a few. Also, this ties back into your earlier points about empathy and destabilising hierarchy, which then ties into ongoing attempts to decolonize different institutions alongside decolonial projects. Moving towards existing groups and organizations, maybe it would be helpful for groups who target multiple ‘causes’ to re-stress the overlaps between all causes, to coax people out of their specific corners? To teach across and around rather than top down? Everyone IS tired, but in addition to not acting people often do not know how to act, or think their actions won’t make a difference anyway (another issue touched upon in an Adam Curtis documentary). 

I sometimes think of it like a post-apocalyptic world: everything has been supposedly destroyed and torn down, but people still carry the structures and institutions of the ‘old’ world with them. They cling to them for a sense of stability and comfort. When I was a child I was asked to design my own country and government. So, how would we, as a plural, hybrid, hyper complicated people, design our own country? A system overhaul means stepping into the unknown and the potentially unknowable, but we can’t know where that boundary lies if we do not try to step across it. 

Avoiding Social Gaffes and Environmental Disasters

Has the political climate got you down? Anxious about hurricane season? Worried about the carbon footprint of avocado toast?  Well, sometimes we feel that way too. Allow us to soothe some of your concern with the following primer on how to be a decent human in the pre-Apocalypse.

What is Kombucha* Anyway?: Social Exchanges

-          Try to see everything from more than one perspective. This is called empathy. It will serve you well.

-          Introducing yourself or being introduced to someone is always a good point at which to ask someone what they wish to be called or what pronoun they prefer.

-          When people ask how you are, it is usually polite to reply and ask them how they are as well. This includes non-verbal communication such as e-mails. It is also a good idea to listen to what they say when you ask.

-          If you have a burning question that you are afraid to ask because it may be offensive, perhaps it is better asked to Google first. Google, DuckDuckGo, not 4chan.

-          If you are having trouble paying attention to what someone is saying to you, repeat what they are saying to yourself inside your own head.

-          The only way you can consider someone an exception to a race, gender, etc, would be if you had ACTUALLY MET every single person in that category. In other words, it is NEVER ok to call someone ‘an exception for your [insert category here]’. Be proactive and meet more people who are different from you.

-          Potentially problematic burning questions aside, it is a good idea to ask people questions about themselves. It is generally not problematic to ask questions like “What kind of music to you like?” or “What kind of hobbies do you have?”. “What are you?” or others like it are not acceptable questions. Do not phrase questions to confirm your assumptions.

-          Fruit is exotic. People are not.

-          As much as is possible, do the things you say you will do. People, friends, and Cambridge Analytica will appreciate it.

*Kombucha is essentially living tea made from scobee cultures and herbs/spices du jour. The point being: it’s good for your gut and hopefully these tips will be too.

You Can’t Hug Your Child with Nuclear Arms: Environmental Care

-          Try to avoid plastic if you can. It suffocates animals, poisons humans and doesn’t die.

-          The portable shetafa/bidet will change your life.

-          You’ve probably heard you should use coal, gas and oil sparingly. You know what else should be on that list? Water. For examples see Cape Town.

-          Reusables are your friend. The takeaway shop won’t look at you too weirdly if you show up with your own containers for food. Anyway, they’ll eventually stop looking at you weirdly.

-          Building or making your own things can be fun. Chances are it will save you money.

-          Invest in things that last and/or can be repaired. Outdoor clothing companies are grand at mending things you buy from them. We can encourage more to follow suit if we reward those companies with our money.

-          Electricity is a luxury that we share with our neighbors on a grid. Always know where your fuse box is, and maybe look up how the wiring of basic household objects works.

-          Toolboxes are handy. No not just the ones for building websites.

-          It really is a good idea to learn to grow your own food. Plants have natural complements that can make less work for you, act as a repellent to pests and replenish the soil.

-          Make use of public transportation. The more you use it, the more you have a right to complain and force local governments to make them better.

-          Vinegar, sometimes with baking soda, can disinfect, clean and unclog most things. Also good for deodorant and mosquito bites. There are alternatives to many if all of the toxic products that you may have for cleaning. They are healthier for you, your pets, your tiny humans and the environment. Have a Google, enjoy yourself.

-          While we are on the topic of things toxic, here’s another freebie: lemongrass, citronella, eucalyptus and lime oil make good general repellents. Much safer for you than DEET.