"I'm just a fucked up girl who's looking for my own peace of mind. Don't assign me yours."
— Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Personal Boundaries
Previously, I wrote about Honor / Shame Culture, then Dignity / Guilt Culture, then finally Validation / Shit Culture which lacks the self-responsibility element of the first two and thus relies on coercion, lying, and scapegoating, and holds other people responsible for one's own emotions.
As I have said before, because the internet in its current form allows anyone to have a platform — and because there are a wider range of views than you would get if only media professionals were allowed on it — it can be an emotionally intense experience. It is harder both to maintain personal boundaries, and to respect the boundaries of others, than it previously used to be.
Especially if people don't even know what boundaries actually mean — which I suspect is the case. I've seen a few of those "Libs of Tik-Tok" videos where young teachers are coming out to their preschool and primary grade classes about their personal lives and getting that sweet sweet sense of validation from the acceptance of seven-year-olds. In most of these cases, I don't think there is intentional sexual grooming going on, but it does reflect a poor sense of boundaries, disregarding of power differences, and unhealthy role reversal that can prime children to be more vulnerable to actual pedophiles down the road. Most people accept as common sense that adults should not emotionally rely on children, but new young teachers may not intuitively get this — especially if they grew up in dysfunctional helicopter families to begin with — and need to be explicitly taught about personal and professional boundaries as part of standard abuse prevention. Collectivist ideology, however, is inherently hostile to boundaries.
I'm going to carefully spell this concept out, because these days it apparently does need to be spelled out.
The principles and norms of free speech are dependent on, and closely tied into, the concept of personal boundaries. Your opinions and speech are personal — not a part of a collective group project to be managed by woke busybodies, and usually not harmful unless other people make it out to be in their own minds. Boundaries are where you end and other people begin. You are entitled to your own sphere, but not other people's spheres.
A poor sense of boundaries is detrimental to reasonable discourse because it is putting the responsibility of one's emotional wellbeing unfairly on others.
For one thing, if somebody does something you don't like or don't agree with, they're not necessarily doing it at you.
Say, for example, "Alice" is minding her own business on the internet when some creeper sends death threats, unsolicited dick pics, or something generally upsetting. Alice's personal boundaries have been violated and it is reasonable to take recourse. But what if Alice goes to a random blog or podcast of her own volition and finds something she disagrees with that triggers her? That is what the "back" button is for, and it is not a boundary violation. And yet, I've seen where many people honestly see no difference between something unpleasant sent to them personally and something unpleasant they found themselves (or that showed up on their social media timeline).
For another example, "Bob" is a fat person who is minding his own business on the internet when someone harasses him for his weight. Or someone isn't messaging him individually, but posts on a community site deliberately insulting fat people as a group. Both instances are reasonably offensive and say more about the online trolls than Bob or other fat people. But what if Bob is offended and feels microaggressed by someone else posting about their own exercise routine or their own weight loss progress? In that case, Bob — for his own good — should learn to stop internalizing other people's daily lives, live and let live, and take charge of his own emotional boundaries. And yet, current social justice rhetoric states that you can't allow other people to "live and let live" if they are living in apparent privilege at the cost of someone else's marginalization.
For a third example, imagine "Caren" is a stereotypical, unlikeable authoritarian right-winger shopping at the local BigBoxMart and she is fuming at what she sees. She passes by a family of recent immigrants speaking to each other in their first language — don't they know "we" speak English here? A gay couple is holding hands like any of the straight couples — can't they keep that private? Some of the women have short skirts — do they not realize they're immodest and asking for it? Caren doesn't consider herself authoritarian — after all, she doesn't care how people live their personal lives at home where no one else can see them. But it's BigBoxMart! Out in public! Can't someone complain to the manager and Hold Them Accountable? After all, "freedom of speech not freedom of reach!" It's not censorship if BigBoxMart is a private company and not the government! BigBoxMart shouldn't give them a platform...!
Oh wait, maybe "Caren" is actually an authoritarian left-winger fuming about other people's "multiracial whiteness" or lack of pronouns in bio or shipping a rival fandom pairing on TwitFace. How offensive! Don't they know "we" are having the wrong conversation? Can't someone complain and Hold Them Accountable for their unfettered speech and microaggressions? After all, "freedom of speech not freedom of reach!" It's not censorship if TwitFace is a private company and not the government! TwitFace shouldn't give them a platform!
Whether "Caren" is on the right or the left, she thinks only the expressions that reflect her own in-group should be visible in public. Anything else ought to be hidden away and feels like a personal insult — even though, in reality, the other BigBoxMart shoppers or the other TwitFace users are just living their own lives and not thinking of Caren at all.
Again, because the internet allows people to make their personal lives publicly visible like no other time before, maintaining that separation of one's self from other people, and taking responsibility for one's own emotions, just takes more discipline than it used to. Other people's personal lives are not the same as ours, a lot of what we don't want to see is publicly visible to an unprecedented degree, and we are just going to have to live with it.
Oh, and talking about "platforming" controversial viewpoints as if it's a special favor, is disingenuous and just plain dumb when the "platform" is open to anyone to begin with.
You get this discourse about Substack itself. Some pundits are fuming that anti-cancel culture blogs are allowed on it (and have found success with it). As a free speech platform, Substack allows pro-cancel culture blogs too! But for people with a Validation / Shit mindset, it's not enough to have a place at the table — they demand to have the entire table.
This is the point where the Authoritarian Left tends to have a lot more success than the Authoritarian Right. The Authoritarian Right, in general, tries to project a strongman persona and tends to downplay the role of their own emotions, so they're more easily called out on their crap. "You're a tough guy, huh? Then you shouldn't be threatened by opposing opinions having a place at the table. Put on your big boy pants and deal with it." The Authoritarian Left, on the other hand, tries to project vulnerability and victimhood. "What's this? You will literally die if you don't get the entire table? Oh, I am so sorry for the harm! I promise to reflect and do better and hold myself accountable..."
Waking Up From Woke: Strongman Worship, Horseshoe Theory, and The Pettiness Is the Point
The "live and let live" mindset of separating one's self from other people's selves is common sense for many (if not most) people, but presents a special conundrum if one believes that disagreement (or even silence) is in and of itself an act of oppression. People who fear the free expression of their peers and their neighbors this way seek protection from (and ultimately identify with) people with actual power. Strongman worship is by no means exclusive to the Right. "If I don't like how you express yourself, I get to show you the door. And by "I", I mean Disney and Raytheon and Amazon and Twitface and BigBoxMart..." The last few years have shown an incredible realignment where the C.E.O.'s pets and "temporarily embarrassed billionaires" are nominally on the Left rather than the Right.
There was a lot pointing and laughing at a fairly recent Salon article claiming communist overlords like Mao and Stalin were actually right-wingers rather than left-wingers because they were bad guys, and only the right can be bad guys, ergo Mao and Stalin were right-wing. It's hilarious because the writer almost gets it. George Orwell would have some thoughts — and he actually did, at the end of Animal Farm.
In theory, being "on the left" means pushing back against existing power structures, as opposed to being on the right and wanting to maintain them. But what, specifically, are "power structures" anyway? The definition makes a world of difference.
Personally, I used to be a big believer in Critical Theory — the ideology behind what is colloqually called "wokeness." Overturning the hegemonic power structures? Heck yes! I had assumed "power structures" was something to do with actual power — such as corporate monopolies, and overreaching government surveillance, and threats to civil liberties, and the protection racket that is health care access being tied to employment in the U.S.A.
But that reminds me of a scene in Tite Kubo's manga and anime Bleach where Sosuke Aizen, the villainous master of illusion and manipulation, lures the warrior Toshiro Hitsugaya into an apparent battle between them. Hitsugaya takes a stab at the person he assumes to be the evil overlord Aizen... only to realize, to his horror, that he just stabbed his innocent friend Momo Hinamori.
It turns out that when postmodern critical theorists talk about dismantling "power structures," they are really talking about their peers and neighbors being able to individually live their own lives, make their own choices, and express themselves as they please outside the limits of Critical Theory. These everyday people who just don't feel like "decolonizing their bookshelf" or whatever are thought to have "power" one would normally associate with governments and corporations, and yet they are also thought of as too fragile to handle the one true truth of postmodern critical theory. It is the fascist trope that the enemy is both too weak and too strong.
Honestly, it took me a while to catch on to this. In the early 2010s, GamerGate appeared to set a precedent that politically-motivated harassment in the arts, entertainment, and hobby world was worth widespread media coverage and condemnation. But then, over the next few years, I noticed that similar levels of harassment coming from the social justice left went ignored by the same mainstream media and academia — or worse, was praised and its victims blamed. Mobs targeted and accused people of bigotry, fascism, or domestic violence apologia based on imperfect or pastel-styled artwork, or liking the wrong TV show, or preferring rival characters or 'ships in fandom. (To be fair, fandom shipping wars — that is, disagreeing on which fictional characters ought to end up in a romantic relationship — have always been a stupid rabbit hole of arguments and drama in fandoms. But it is specifically within the last few years that these arguments have taken on a hyper-moralistic and weirdly socio-political dimension.) There is a total lack of self-awareness in these harassment campaigns. How dare this writer or artist contradict my personal preferences objective social justice — they're a crypto-fascist!
The phenomenon of denigrating individuality and policing people for the most trivial aspects of their personal lives is a feature, not a bug, of postmodern critical theory. On Tumblr and Twitter, many rank and file, individual young fans who support "woke" social justice causes are also supportive of free expression (at least when it comes to apolitical hobbies and personal tastes) — but the mainstream media, academics, and other verified influencers who arguably speak for the "woke" viewpoint have been pretty firm on the idea that there is a politically right way and a politically wrong way to approach art, writing, hobbies, fandom, and other personal aspects of life. And too often, the people who get to define "right" and "wrong" are the most vindictive and accusatory scolds in the room.
Joe Rogan has come to represent something more: the terrifying power of normal people to like the things they like.
— Kat Rosenfield in New Statesman
Having had brushes with right-wing cults in the past, with their similar dynamic and emphasis on policing hobbies and entertainment, the pettiness is intentional. If you internalize the idea that you can't be trusted to handle your most personal and trivial likes and dislikes, and that you have to be constantly "held accountable" for things that are completely harmless by a reasonable person standard (also known as, you know, adiaphora), and that you constantly have to "interrogate" your own daily life and private thoughts through the eyes of others, you lose the ability to think for yourself in the bigger issues.
If you fall for it, you don't question why unsubstantiated (and shown to be astroturfed) media narratives about anti-corporate "Bernie Bro" harassment are to be taken at face value, but hundreds of actual receipts of concrete and corporate-enabled "cancel culture" firings and blacklistings get the "nothing to see here" treatment.
You don't question why women (of any race, really) minding their own business are guilty of complicity with power and "white women's tears" when they object to activist intrusion in their personal lives, but white women connected to actual power and who want to censor the internet for everybody are to be viewed as unironic paragons of virtuous maidenhood and damsels in distress who need to be sheltered and protected from any disagreement.
You don't question why "believe all women" gets dropped like a hot potato when the accused is a political favorite.
You don't question why the theory of coronavirus being leaked from a top-notch Wuhan laboratory is supposed to be more racist than lurid speculation about culturally specific Chinese culinary practices.
You applaud MSNBC for their pure "leftist" bona fides when they condemn fact-based due process and the presumption of innocence for a designated political scapegoat, but don't question those "leftist" bona fides when MSNBC also pisses their pants over the idea that a universal health care advocate has a chance at being elected.
You don't question why the mainstream media was quick to demonize Millennials as an "entitled" generation of narcissists and spoiled brats for for wanting decent pay for decent work, only to praise them for their social conscience when they started playing CEO's pet and cancelling their peers for disagreeing with them on cancel culture itself (hoo boy, more on the generational thing later).
"The Left," in fact, is defined for you by people who are invested in the idea of maintaining the actual real-world power structures just like a traditional right-winger would. And Orwell's farm animals looked at the humans, and then at the pigs, and then at the humans, and then at the pigs, and they could no longer tell any difference between them.
Professional Boundaries and Enabling Abuse
Validation Culture can get really bad when the self-appointed victims, or activists who claim to speak for the marginalized, are in real-world positions of power over others.
When people in the midst of trauma (such as rape survivors) or people under authority (employees to employers, patients to health providers, children to adults) are told they don't deserve to have a separate personal life or personal boundaries in the context of these asymmetrical power relationships, that is a huge, huge red flag for grooming and abuse. And in any kind of professional counseling relationship, expecting the client to validate the provider — rather than the other way around — is an abusive in and of itself.
The CEO of Edinburgh Rape Crisis recently drew attention for saying female survivors who only want to work with other biological women in the wake of the assault, are "bigoted" and need to be "challenged" from "unacceptable beliefs" as part of their counseling process, and they need to "reframe" the trauma because "you can’t go back to life before" and "therapy is political."
Just... holy horseshoe theory, Batman. That sounds like a page right out of Bill Gothard's big red right-wing book of victim blaming. No, really. Spot the difference in the treatment of sexual abuse survivors as an opportunity for cult reprogramming and moral chastising.
On Persuasion, Sally Satel's "When Therapists Become Activists" points out a similar disturbing trend where counseling trainees "are being taught to see patients not as individuals with unique needs, but as avatars of their gender, race, and ethnic groups."
According to Abigail Shrier's "How Activist Teachers Recruit Kids", California teachers advocated stalking and surveilling middle school kids' Google searches outside of schoolwork in order to initiate secret conversations to make kids open up to them about gender and sexuality issues and persuade them to join the local GSA chapter. As opposed to, you know, just having a regular opt-in GSA club available. It is considered a detriment if the kids go back to having a normal life and to playing with their friends who thankfully accept them, rather than staying with the GSA club indefinitely to plump up its numbers. Also, the parents are kept in the dark and treated as the bad guys out of the convenient assumption that they will be dangerous and unsupportive. Convenient because activist adults can separate and alienate the kids from their parents this way.
Recently, social justice activists criticized the BBC for publishing an article quoting cisgender lesbians pressured into sex with transgender women on social justice grounds. Toxic activists stopped short of condoning rape itself, but made tons of seething passive-aggressive, MRA-like comments as though a woman's private sexual orientation is up for public moral condemnation. A social conservative nowadays might tell a lesbian "I disagree with your lifestyle" and call it a day, but social leftists won't let go — they see sex as a social commodity to distribute to and validate the most marginalized, and that individuals must "interrogate" themselves for their "biases" in the most personal and intimate aspects of their own lives. Even if that aspect is an immutable characteristic, like being attracted exclusively to the same biological sex.
"Feelings, insights, affections, it's suddenly trivial now... The personal life is dead in Russia. History has killed it."
— Dr. Zhivago (1965)
That is one of the unfortunate endpoints of Validation Culture. Everything has to be about collective identity and about upholding the cause — individual humans and their real needs or personal prerogatives can never be first. In theory, Validation Culture is about valuing emotions after a long run of reason, logic, and rationalism being overvalued. In practice, emotions are denigrated unless they fit into Validation Culture's own system of logic and box-checking. Power differences are considered only on a distant, theoretical group level — not on a face-to-face, real-world individual level. Personal boundaries are just one more oppressive construct that needs to be disrupted and dismantled. Therefore, in Validation Culture, a rape or abuse survivor is just another unenlightened cog in need of re-education and character building — not a unique, individual human with their own problems. "Healing" gets redefined as learning to love Big Brother.
Next up: How Did We Get Here?