#ontological wrongness

[hyperlexichypatia]

This survey of why parents are estranged from their adult children is such an interesting illustration of how neurobigotry functions in society and interpersonal relationships. People accuse their estranged family members of being Mad/neurodivergent, because Madness is synonymous with being at fault in a relationship. It's considered inherently Reasonable and Justified to cut ties with a Mad/neurodivergent person -- especially an untreated-by-choice Mad/neurodivergent person -- because to be Mad/neurodivergent is to be inherently wrong, inherently unreasonable, inherently burdensome, inherently the one who is not abiding by the social compact.

Or as one of my friends put it, "Mental illness exists as a sociopolitical concept of ontological wrongness."

One of the pervasively enduring aspects of neurobigotry is that people who have been abused by neurobigotry will, instead of rejecting neurobigotry, simply accept it and turn it around on their abusers. People think they're really onto something with "No, it is my abusive parents who are mentally ill and need therapy" or "No, it is the people in power who are mentally defective" or "Racism/capitalism/bigotry are the real mental illness!"

But you can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools. Pathologizing your parents doesn't correct the power imbalance of being pathologized by them, and using pathologization as a way to convey wrongness is still reifying pathologization and neurobigotry.

The context of family estrangement reminds me of this thought process I started about the construction of "cults." When the anti-cult movement began, it was centered on family members of people who'd joined new religious movements. The premise that people who joined religious groups their families didn't approve of were victims of "cult brainwashing" who needed to be "rescued" and "deprogrammed" (against their will, of course) was a tool of controlling families trying to deny their (usually) adult children's right to freedom of religion and general life choices. The idea that "cults" caused family estrangement was an integral aspect of the moral panic around them.

But over the decades, the stigma on "cults" has shifted. The contemporary anti-cult movement is fueled by people who grew up in abusive religious communities and chose to leave. It's applied as often to older, larger, established religious groups as it is to newer, smaller ones. While the original anti-cult movement largely centered on parents trying to control their adult children, the newer anti-cult movement largely centers on adults who've broken away from their parents' control.

Except. Except. It still uses the pathologization framework established in the 1970s. It's still a reversal -- No, it is you, the parents, the church, the authority, who are the Mentally Ill, the cult, the deviant, the ones in need of being fixed -- rather than a rejection or reframing: Actually, young people should be free to choose their own path in life.

It's not only applied in relationships between parents and children -- it's even more commonly invoked in breakups between former friends or partners. People feel the need to establish which party was Mentally Ill and Needed Therapy as a proxy for which party was At Fault in the breakup. In reality, breaking up doesn't necessarily mean either party was At Fault, but it's more socially acceptable to say "We had to break up because he's Mentally Ill and Refused To Get Help" rather than "We just didn't get along." Discussions of bad and badly-ended relationships are just constant rounds of uno reverse allegations of Madness/neurodivergence.

One of my least favorite examples is trying to "rebut" the neuromisogynistic trope of "Women are crazy" with "Men cause women to become crazy." Why are you validating "Women are crazy" by trying to "explain" it? Why are you accepting the premise that "crazy" is a bad thing? Why are you reifying the idea that being "crazy" has to be "caused" by something "bad"? If a man says "I broke up with my ex-girlfriend because she's crazy!" why validate the neuromisogyny with "No, you're crazy!" or "You must have made her crazy!" instead of challenging it with "What's wrong with being 'crazy'? What does that have to do with anything?"

If someone says "I stopped speaking to my child because they refused to seek therapy," why validate the neurobigotry with "You're the one who needs therapy!" instead of challenging it with "Why is their choice whether or not to seek therapy any of your business?"

[skullinahat]

god... the obviously evil character design trope is so fucking funny every time. when they try to pull the "omg they were secretly a villain all along" twist and its wowwww i could have NEVER guessed from how they're the only character in the entire cast with half lidded eyes and a sultry voice and the evil music and the slutty outfits and the

[redheadedfailgirl]

I am so fucking tired of monogamous people getting to make broad statements about monogamy being an ontological, natural thing that a person is but polyamory is apparently something people choose to do and are usually bad at and foolish for doing. Genuinely it is so disappointing when people actively choose not to examine why they are so comfortable with monogamy and continue choosing it, because they would learn a lot more about themselves if they decided to do even a little bit of introspection. I chose polyamory. I know why I did that, why I enjoy it, what would have to change for me to stop enjoying it, and what I can expect from it in the future. I don't think the majority of monogamous people can say the same.

[j2zara]

I hope this isn’t too dark of a joke but I do think fucking j3 and being trans is the main reason j4 isn’t stuck in like the second wave era of feminism

[chamerionwrites]

My take on a lot of people with supposedly ''''''progressive'''''' politics is basically the same as my take on a lot of the fundamentalist christians I grew up around, namely: nice enough people on a day to day basis, maybe even strikingly kind and generous people (to certain specific folks under certain specific circumstances), absolutely cannot and will not trust 'em as far as I can throw 'em

[hiraeth-found]

Something shows itself when there is damage, a cut, something to which normal, creative plasticity gives neither access nor body: the deserting of subjectivity, the distancing of the individual who becomes a stranger to herself, who no longer recognizes anyone, who no longer recognizes herself, who no longer remembers herself. These types of beings impose a new form in their old form, without mediation or transition or glue or accountability, today versus yesterday, in state of emergency, without foundation, bareback, sockless. The change may equally well emerge from apparently anodyne events, which ultimately prove to be veritable traumas inflecting the course of a life, producing the metamorphosis of someone about whom one says: I would have never guessed they would “end up like this”. A vital hitch, a threatening detour that opens up another pathway, one that is unexpected, unpredictable, dark.

Ontology of the Accident, Catherine Malabou

[vestiges-of-light]

.

[intertexts-moving]

soo many of u guys on this website are like. offputtingly angry and vicious and slavering at at the mouth to gloat at bad things happening to some nebulous incarnation of 'rich evil people'.

[textualviolence]

I think there's nothing in the world that makes me feel like a rabid dog more than people who claim to be engaging in postmodernist deconstructionism and actively just fucking aren't.

[apocalyptic-dancehall]

i think the scariest thing i've come across on the sexypedia is that bandit heeler is in the white twink humanization category

[scarletfasinera]

Khonshu is not “explicitly evil” nor is he a force of pure good will but actually he is a secret third thing

[mikkeneko]

I've been musing a bit on that one post that went around during the recent holiday season, to which someone added their family tradition of Present Practice. My god! Imagine actually telling kids what behavior is expected, instead of expecting them to intuit it and punish them when they get it wrong!!

Separate post because this topic is a little tangential to that, but I think it does a great job of unearthing one of our very well-hidden internal biases, which goes as follows:

Good people don't need to be taught.

A good person (in this case, a good child) shouldn't need to be told to be gracious and grateful when given a gift. A good child should just know that a holiday tradition of gift-giving is a social performance to strengthen family bonds and that personal preference or genuine reactions are secondary to that performance. A good child should just know how to value gifts, how to express thanks, how to praise and compliment. No caretakers in their lives should need to put any effort into instructing or modeling these things.

Good people should just know how to be good. If they were really Ontologically Good, their inherent goodness would simply intuitively guide them to correct behaviors. If they can't do that on their own, in a vacuum, in the absence of cues, that's a sign of their inherent moral lack.

.

.

...Which all sounds very reasonable and obvious, and surely a mistake that only fundie christian families would make! Except that people in the social justice sphere also do this all the time. It's not anybody's job to educate you. It's 2024, how do you not know this already? If you were a Good Person, you wouldn't need to be taught. You would simply intuit the correct philosophies and gravitate to them according to your superior internal moral compass.

If you were a Good Person, you would already know that everything you were taught by your family and/or background was wrong. You should have rejected it already. You should have cut off your family, your heritage, everything about your childhood and upbringing that was Bad and Wrong. You should have known it was all a lie.

If you were a Good Person, you should be able to find the correct way yourself. You should be able to seek out the proper educational resources, and distinguish them from bad advice leading you astray, and make sense of them all according to your own internal moral code.

If you were a Good Person, you would have found your way by the proper, dignified, official channels, not by reading a comic or watching anime. You shouldn't need entertainment or art to guide you. You should just know.

And if someone can't do these things on their own, in a vacuum, in the absence of cues, that's a sign of their inherent moral lack.

[metamatar]

everytime you bring up the hostility lesbian/bisexual/queer spaces have had to trans women there's a bunch of people who will attempt to play the terminology game and say well that's not what it means to be lgbtq!!! those people are doing it wrong! as though the objection is made at the ontological level rather than the historical. you just want to be good, endlessly unimpeachably good instead of actually engaging with the material conditions that make a community an unwelcoming space for a trans women. and im not even touching how much of even the academic construction of these ideas has historically been transmisogynist.

[prokopetz]

Not posting this as a reblog because I don't want to screw with somebody else's notes, but the whole "theological implications of Tolkien's orcs" business has some interesting history behind it.

In brief, a big part of why the Lord of the Rings Extended Universe™ is so cagey about what orcs are and where they come from is that later in his life, Tolkien came to believe that orcs as he'd depicted them were problematic – albeit not because of, you know, all the grotesque racial caricature.

Rather, he'd come to the conclusion that the idea of an inherently evil sapient species – a species that's incapable of seeking salvation – was incompatible with Christian ethics. Basically, it's one of those "used the wrong formula and got the right answer" situations.

In his notes and letters, Tolkien played around with several potential solutions to this problem. (Though contrary to the assertions of certain self-proclaimed Tolkien scholars, there's no evidence that he ever seriously planned to re-write his previous works to incorporate these ideas.) In one proposal, orcs are incarnated demons, and "killing" them simply returns them to their naturally immaterial state; in another, orcs are a sort of fleshy automaton remotely operated by the will of Sauron, essentially anticipating the idea of drone warfare.

Of course, this is all just historical trivia; any criticism of The Lord of the Rings must be directed at the books that were actually published, not the books we imagine might have been published if Tolkien had spent a few more years thinking through the implications of what he was writing. However, the direction of his thoughts on the matter is striking for two reasons:

Tolkien's orc conundrum is very nearly word for the word the problem that many contemporary fantasy authors are grappling with fifty years later. They want epic battles with morally clean heroes, and they're running up against exactly the same difficulty that Tolkien himself did – i.e., that describing a human-like species who are ontologically okay to kill is an impossible task.

After all the work he put into solving this impossible problem, one of Tolkien's proposals was literally just "what if they're not really killing the orcs, they're just sending them to the Shadow Realm?"

[trans-androgyne]

omg you’re so right men are not dangerous to women at all so i guess i can totally go out alone at night all by myself and if i get raped by a man it will surely mean nothing and i should keep trusting men and think there is nothing wrong with them 😍😍😍

Trusting every strange man in the dark ≠ understanding that men aren’t ontologically evil, OR necessarily your personal oppressors, which is what I am saying. Women have literally killed or gotten killed men (especially men of color) that THEY have privilege over on some axes due their fear. So yeah, there is a way to fear men too much. This is how you get radical feminism. This is how you get TERFism. It feeds hate groups like MRAs to be genuinely hated for the way they were born. And it’s not how you progress actual intersectional feminism. To do that, you have to heal your relationship with men. I’ve been raped by men. I’ve been abused by men. But I understand that, while the societal conditions men are raised under (patriarchy, rape culture) contributed, it happened because they’re personally terrible people, not because they were born male. Acting like it is can lead you to dismiss the fact that women can pose just as much of a danger if they’re similarly terrible people. So, I’m working on healing my relationship with men. When you’re ready, you should too. I promise you it feels better than being uneasy for the rest of your life.

[clearestbluest]

adhd is real