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 -
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.
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.
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.
[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)