zynart - Tumblr blog

[zynart]

there ARE things we owe to each other

I mean. Yeah, sure. Nobody is *owed* fair treatment and everyone has the *right* to go about life in whatever manner makes them happy without any consideration for the well-being of others or your responsibilities toward society. But I sure as hell am gonna judge and avoid people for it

I always have trouble remembering that: that all the language comes from and all the community online or anywhere is still made up of mostly flawed, often well-intentioned but sometimes disingenuous or bad-faith human beings, regardless of like, subculture dialect or vocabulary set. People will use social justice lingo to justify anything to let themselves off the hook for doing whatever the fuck they want without having to feel guilty. Just like people use the language of academia or religion or philosophy or whatever else, for the same: to have their moral cake and eat it too.

The world is just full of people who do shitty things but still have a conscience. Probably including you and me and most people, really. And it’s maybe just a very human impulse to try find any contorted justification that can enable our selfishness and temptation. That tells us that what feels good or what is easy is actually right. I feel it too. And we just use whatever toolkit of beliefs and ideas is at hand to come up with arguments to convince ourselves. Or we just see someone else phrase it in a way that does and it feels like permission.

“Your identity is an idealized self-image that guides your behavior. Your reputation is the social consensus about how you actually behave.”

And I don’t see that as deliberate. Or not mostly deliberate, at least. Not usually. I think people who do this do believe in what they profess to believe in, generally. Or at least believe that they believe in it. You kinda have to, for arguments spun from them to be able to convince you. Our identities have to align with what we do. And sometimes doing that sucks

I’m not letting myself off the hook here. I know I’m not immune from the impulse to resolve the cognitive dissonance of being weak or selfish in ways I know I can’t actually justify.

But my point is. Twitter is still made up of people, and most of us are flawed and scrambling to resolve those dissonances. With self-care and self-care-adjacent language, the affirmations of self-care and the permissions it gives us is so important and so rewarding, and extending that same feeling to play free safety for your conscience is just *so easy*

But even if I may understand it, I think it’s disingenuous and gross to frame a complete abdication of your responsibilities toward others (such as treating them fairly or with respect) as moral. A moral framework like that is completely inconsistent with my values. And I think it’s inconsistent with the entire philosophy all this language draws from. Social justice in many ways is about our responsibility to each other, about how we owe it to the world to make the world better for others regardless of the luck we’re born into through genes or family or circumstances.

But that’s not an indictment. I don’t think the tens of thousands of people who shared this or those of us that falls into this are bad people. People who use social justice language to justify zero accountability or responsibility to treat others well are just taking the easy way out to resolve the dissonance of a guilty conscience. As humans do. Idk

It’s shitty and corrosive to both the self, that exists in relation to others, and to society, which is built on the idea that we do have responsibilities toward others. As opposed to basically Ayn Rand with trappings of anticapitalism, which is what this is. I mean, talking about the alienation and atomization of people under capitalism has made its way into the Overton window for a while now..

The appeal of Ayn Rand libertarianism is the idea that acting purely in your own self-interest is actually the moral thing to do. It’s about making people not feel bad and feel like heroes for treating others like shit, a free pass to be selfish by absolving yourself of any duty. It’s the most comforting moral ideology possible. And if we see ourselves getting to the same conclusions as Ayn Rand acolytes, that’s not great

if you liked this, feel free to check out my other ‘essays’ on internet/pop culture stuff on my homepage. here’s a selection:

· “book lovers” don’t love anything about books and it’s weird (or, defending classic novels)

· humanity is worth loving, humanity is worth saving

· i trained a neural net on 10,000 irony-poisoned tweets and it just gave me cringe?

· what makes someone good, bad, cancelled, or redeemed? i don’t know either!

· please tell me if you have a definitive answer on what makes someone a bad person

· ok, fine, my social justice politics feel a bit like religion sometimes and that’s ok

· after the deluge (short story) (dispatch from an island state post climate apocalypse)

[back to home]

[zynart]

ok, fine, it’s a bit like religion sometimes and that’s ok

Part of growing up religious is spending all your formative moral and psychological development never dealing with the possibility of an unfair world where pain exists for no reason and people die without getting good things to make up for their pain or receiving the justice they deserve.

There’s a moral crisis when doubts reach a tipping point where all that comes crashing in, and I’m not remotely equipped to dealing with or understanding that, and all its devastating and infuriating implications. I’ve never found a substitute for the calmness of knowing justice would at least be served later by god if not now in life. If god won’t eventually be giving the hurt comfort, how do you reconcile inaction with that, or even the existence of pain with that?

A deterministic view of the world makes me super unhappy. A utilitarian view of the world also makes me super unhappy. Especially when, even with all the doubt from my skeptical conscious self, I’ve never rebuilt an alternative mental framework for any of this. I have nothing yet that could fill in what it’d take to tear out my internalized certainty of ultimate but perfect eternal justice that would right all the injustices of the world. I hope someday I’ll be able to remake myself into someone who doesn’t live every day with this deep pain at the unfairness of it all. But right now, it’s a loss I can’t grapple with.

I think some the psychological intensity and conviction in social justice spaces—not the moral reasoning for social justice movements, which has strong secular arguments, just how some of us here in 2020 live it and act it out—comes from the void left behind as religion receded from my life. I was a believer until my teens. But I’m not sure you even had to be, with how much of how we think and talk is influenced by the assumptions of religious morality. Even as belief fades, you can’t always just remake the basic architecture of your being. It’s not that easy to remake something as fundamental as the concept of eternal justice. Which makes enforcing justice while you can a religious-level imperative.

I want to be clear that comparison to religion isn’t intended as a way to dismiss social justice work as irrational. I don’t think religion is irrational. I don’t think the passion and zeal of people in the social justice movement is irrational. I think comparisons of social justice movements to religion are often in bad faith, intended to frame it as irrational or dogmatic or oppressive. It’s hard to talk about a hot-button topic when you know what you’re saying can so easily be stripped of context and used to justify more bad-faith anti-social justice takes. But I’m talking among ourselves. Among some of ourselves, even, maybe. Sometimes the passion and conviction comes from deep despair at the reality of injustice and a sense of responsibility to right what wrongs you can. That emotional conviction is powerful.

Which makes enforcing justice while you can, however you can, a religious-level imperative.

Which leaves us all in a recognizable state of burnout from how exhausting and hopeless and slow it can feel. From how every setback to building a more just world creates not just frustration but a despair at great injustice that would go unrectified forever with every passing day of suffering that can’t be erased and every death before justice was served, and that drives the zeal.

For some of us it creates the allure of the revolution, as much eschatology as it is an endpoint. There’s a reason eschatology has been so powerful for as long as we’ve ever existed. The current world is overthrown and a just new rule begins, where that new world has some [varying depending on your views] figure that can maintain it and arbitrate and enforce its sanctity when evil occurs.

And sometimes we can see a focus on it as a way of life rather than a guide to action. I think that’s a root of the frustration “pragmatic” activism has with “moral purity”. There’s already plenty of moral justification, secular and in formal religion, to work for social justice. There’s plenty of powerful secular moral reasoning to back it up. It’s not that I need god or the fear of hell to make us do the right thing. We know why some things are good and some bad. The void left by religion isn’t what led me to the beliefs: I came to those beliefs because they made sense to me. I think that’s the case for most of us.

But the way I feel about it, a lot of the psychology driving how we live it, and how I dwell on whether I have the right thoughts, how I catch myself having a tendency to classify people (both myself and others) immediately on a good/bad binary based off of their entire moral history, like Anubis weighing hearts against a feather.

Both for the outside world, and internally. If god won’t eventually make you pay for your sins, how do you keep living with the knowledge of them? Without the knowledge that an all-knowing god would identify the *objectively* appropriate restitution to hold you accountable, where remorse becomes a matter of conscience and justice will be restored. What if that’s no longer possible? When you’ve only ever known the concept of remorse for having done wrong because it was wrong, because it caused harm, even if that harm would be restored to perfection by an all-knowing god who can tabulate an exact restoration of justice—how does that prepare you for the remorse of how many of the ways in which you’ve wronged people often can never be fully restored?

None of this is dismissing or discounting the importance of the work. I’m just trying to figure out how this collection of moral guidance and beliefs are enmeshed with the void left behind when you lose the comfort of eternal justice by a perfect moral arbiter.

Honestly I don’t really have any of the answers, but I know I’m mixed up in a lot of the “spirituality” underpinning social justice philosophy in a religious sense, which gets packaged into the theory/pragmatic action through just us being primed to want those answers by religion or human nature or whatever it is that dictates our deepest needs, I guess.

[back to home]

[zynart]

[zynart]

posts & essays

· there are things we owe to each other (and calling selfishness “self-care” is a bullshit excuse)

· humanity is worth loving, humans are worth saving

· “book lovers” don’t love anything about books and it shows (or, defending classic novels) (or, call me anti-booktok anti-booktwt)

· ok, fine, my social justice politics feel a bit like religion sometimes and that’s ok

· i trained a neural net on 10,000 irony-poisoned tweets and it just gave me cringe?

· what makes someone good, bad, cancelled, or redeemed? i don’t know either!

· there’s no grand unified theory of morality that can tell me why i should forgive my mother. but i do

· please tell me if you have a definitive answer on what makes someone a bad person

· what makes it all worth it for you? (or: florence welch was right)

· stop complaining about SJWs and try a little empathy

· we spent months locked down, how do we still have no sympathy for the incarcerated?

· how do i explain that determinism makes me so unhappy?

· i just want to become someone who can find something that gives me peace

· virtual night out: pov choose-your-own-adventure night out in cities around the world

· after the deluge (short story) (dispatch from an island state post climate apocalypse)

· poetry piece 1

[zynart]

empathy machines & other-selves simulators

this is an excerpt from the much longer essay: “book lovers” don’t love anything about books and it’s weird (or, defending classic novels)

the concept of the empathy machine was coined, to my knowledge, by roger ebert referring to movies. art forms in general have the power to be empathy machines, compassion machines, tenderness machines, sympathy machines. empathy as feeling what it's actually like to be someone else, compassion as understanding that someone else also feels things you feel, tenderness as feeling seen and empathised with, sympathy as sorrow and commiseration because you see someone else, maybe the exact way you'd define them might be different but let's phrase them clumsily like this. the machine doesn't operate by itself, it needs you to plug directly into it, and the machine works differently based on your own nature and what you put into it and how you engage with it. most art has the capability to be empathy machines for someone empathetic willing to engage enough, but the barrier of entry is different

the magic of books is that they are a special kind of empathy machine that puts you directly inside the mind of another human being, almost like an other-selves simulator. other-interiority simulator, other-inner-self simulator, whatever you'd like to call it. which makes them uniquely powerful as an empathy machine, even compared to other types of art. how it feels to be someone else is the most unbreakable, most fundamental barrier in existence. it's the AT fields from evangelion and the argument for the human instrumentality project, the impenetrability of that barrier is the reason for wallfacers in the three-body problem, its how sufis and ascetics fall in love with god when nobody else but the omniscient can ever ever truly know what it's like to be you and feel what you feel

this can't be conveyed in the same way in mediums like movies or plays where the medium itself is from an external point of view and is viewed through this barrier of the mind, and is harder to convey in structured forms like poetry which may not be able to capture the endless variety of form and expression within our thoughts and feelings and experiences (or, going back to kundera, the freedom of form within the novel as enabling polyphony). i think the closest art forms in that sense may be music, which also has a relative freedom of form and the ability to express depths of feeling both individually and through the interaction of music with words and even the sequencing of tracks across an album, and video games, which may not directly put you in the mind of someone else the way books do and which may at first glance seem like they belong alongside movies in being seen through the AT field but where the difference is that in a video game your character makes *choices* and you feel how it feels to make those choices as an agent — even if you're not inhabiting someone else's thoughts, you're feeling how it feels to be someone who experienced and did certain things and made certain choices. but i think there's still plenty about books that is unique. the empathy machine has to be collaborative, your imagination is a necessary creative or generative aspect for it to be a novel and not just a report of events

booktok/booktwt "book lovers" often act like books have some kind of sacred and mystical power but don't seem to be able to justify this idea in how they engage with literature, beyond this sense of books as an identity signifier or aesthetic or accessory. but books do have a certain sacred and mystical power — that they are invitations, almost portals, you could call them pensieves even, where someone gives you a window into another mind. (not just the writer's own mind — the mirror of books as an empathy machine is how even writing itself is an empathy machine of an activity that asks the writer to empathize up a creation — which is also partly why i think that to be a good writer you should also be a good reader).

in much of online, the idea that any book or piece of media that isn’t personally relatable would naturally be boring and impossible to connect with is so widely accepted that it’s never even really a point of dispute. i want to say it should be, and that we should start disputing it. because i think the magic of books and fiction in general is that it’s a way for you to exercise your empathy muscles. the characters or settings don’t have to be “relatable” for you to be able to relate to it: it’s just about stretching your capacity for empathy a little bit, inhabiting someone different from you with a life different from yours, seeing the world through their eyes, and ultimately learning something about yourself, the world, and humanity as a result. i think it’s important to make this argument forcefully and not let this narcotic view of art — that it’s natural and expected for us to only be able to enjoy art that is relatable, that relatability is a merit and unrelatability is a flaw in itself — not become even more hegemonic.

if you liked this, you might like some of my other pieces:

there are things we owe to each other (and calling selfishness “self-care” is a bullshit excuse) | humanity is worth loving, humans are worth saving | ok, fine, my social justice politics feel a bit like religion sometimes and that’s ok | i trained a neural net on 10,000 irony-poisoned tweets and it just gave me cringe? | stop complaining about SJWs and try a little empathy

what makes someone good, bad, cancelled, or redeemed? i don’t know either! | there’s no grand unified theory of morality that can tell me why i should forgive my mother. but i do | please tell me if you have a definitive answer on what makes someone a bad person

what makes it all worth it for you? (or: florence welch was right) | i just want to become someone who can find something that gives me peace | after the deluge (short story) (dispatch from an island state post climate apocalypse) | poetry piece 1

[zynart]

posts & essays

· there are things we owe to each other (and calling selfishness “self-care” is a bullshit excuse)

· humanity is worth loving, humans are worth saving

· “book lovers” don’t love anything about books and it shows (or, defending classic novels) (or, call me anti-booktok anti-booktwt)

· ok, fine, my social justice politics feel a bit like religion sometimes and that’s ok

· i trained a neural net on 10,000 irony-poisoned tweets and it just gave me cringe?

· what makes someone good, bad, cancelled, or redeemed? i don’t know either!

· there’s no grand unified theory of morality that can tell me why i should forgive my mother. but i do

· please tell me if you have a definitive answer on what makes someone a bad person

· what makes it all worth it for you? (or: florence welch was right)

· stop complaining about SJWs and try a little empathy

· we spent months locked down, how do we still have no sympathy for the incarcerated?

· how do i explain that determinism makes me so unhappy?

· i just want to become someone who can find something that gives me peace

· virtual night out: pov choose-your-own-adventure night out in cities around the world

· after the deluge (short story) (dispatch from an island state post climate apocalypse)

· poetry piece 1

[zynart]

Twitter users are defending their right to assume Picasso was a renaissance artist. Tiktok users think watching any film made outside the US makes you a snob. “Replace classic lit with YA and fan fiction” discourse is flourishing. I think we’re just living in anti intellectual times.

[zynart]

empathy machines & other-selves simulators

this is an excerpt from the much longer essay: “book lovers” don’t love anything about books and it’s weird (or, defending classic novels)

the concept of the empathy machine was coined, to my knowledge, by roger ebert referring to movies. art forms in general have the power to be empathy machines, compassion machines, tenderness machines, sympathy machines. empathy as feeling what it's actually like to be someone else, compassion as understanding that someone else also feels things you feel, tenderness as feeling seen and empathised with, sympathy as sorrow and commiseration because you see someone else, maybe the exact way you'd define them might be different but let's phrase them clumsily like this. the machine doesn't operate by itself, it needs you to plug directly into it, and the machine works differently based on your own nature and what you put into it and how you engage with it. most art has the capability to be empathy machines for someone empathetic willing to engage enough, but the barrier of entry is different

the magic of books is that they are a special kind of empathy machine that puts you directly inside the mind of another human being, almost like an other-selves simulator. other-interiority simulator, other-inner-self simulator, whatever you'd like to call it. which makes them uniquely powerful as an empathy machine, even compared to other types of art. how it feels to be someone else is the most unbreakable, most fundamental barrier in existence. it's the AT fields from evangelion and the argument for the human instrumentality project, the impenetrability of that barrier is the reason for wallfacers in the three-body problem, its how sufis and ascetics fall in love with god when nobody else but the omniscient can ever ever truly know what it's like to be you and feel what you feel

this can't be conveyed in the same way in mediums like movies or plays where the medium itself is from an external point of view and is viewed through this barrier of the mind, and is harder to convey in structured forms like poetry which may not be able to capture the endless variety of form and expression within our thoughts and feelings and experiences (or, going back to kundera, the freedom of form within the novel as enabling polyphony). i think the closest art forms in that sense may be music, which also has a relative freedom of form and the ability to express depths of feeling both individually and through the interaction of music with words and even the sequencing of tracks across an album, and video games, which may not directly put you in the mind of someone else the way books do and which may at first glance seem like they belong alongside movies in being seen through the AT field but where the difference is that in a video game your character makes *choices* and you feel how it feels to make those choices as an agent — even if you're not inhabiting someone else's thoughts, you're feeling how it feels to be someone who experienced and did certain things and made certain choices. but i think there's still plenty about books that is unique. the empathy machine has to be collaborative, your imagination is a necessary creative or generative aspect for it to be a novel and not just a report of events

booktok/booktwt "book lovers" often act like books have some kind of sacred and mystical power but don't seem to be able to justify this idea in how they engage with literature, beyond this sense of books as an identity signifier or aesthetic or accessory. but books do have a certain sacred and mystical power — that they are invitations, almost portals, you could call them pensieves even, where someone gives you a window into another mind. (not just the writer's own mind — the mirror of books as an empathy machine is how even writing itself is an empathy machine of an activity that asks the writer to empathize up a creation — which is also partly why i think that to be a good writer you should also be a good reader).

in much of online, the idea that any book or piece of media that isn’t personally relatable would naturally be boring and impossible to connect with is so widely accepted that it’s never even really a point of dispute. i want to say it should be, and that we should start disputing it. because i think the magic of books and fiction in general is that it’s a way for you to exercise your empathy muscles. the characters or settings don’t have to be “relatable” for you to be able to relate to it: it’s just about stretching your capacity for empathy a little bit, inhabiting someone different from you with a life different from yours, seeing the world through their eyes, and ultimately learning something about yourself, the world, and humanity as a result. i think it’s important to make this argument forcefully and not let this narcotic view of art — that it’s natural and expected for us to only be able to enjoy art that is relatable, that relatability is a merit and unrelatability is a flaw in itself — not become even more hegemonic.

if you liked this, you might like some of my other pieces:

there are things we owe to each other (and calling selfishness “self-care” is a bullshit excuse) | humanity is worth loving, humans are worth saving | ok, fine, my social justice politics feel a bit like religion sometimes and that’s ok | i trained a neural net on 10,000 irony-poisoned tweets and it just gave me cringe? | stop complaining about SJWs and try a little empathy

what makes someone good, bad, cancelled, or redeemed? i don’t know either! | there’s no grand unified theory of morality that can tell me why i should forgive my mother. but i do | please tell me if you have a definitive answer on what makes someone a bad person

what makes it all worth it for you? (or: florence welch was right) | i just want to become someone who can find something that gives me peace | after the deluge (short story) (dispatch from an island state post climate apocalypse) | poetry piece 1

[zynart]

posts & essays

· there are things we owe to each other (and calling selfishness “self-care” is a bullshit excuse)

· humanity is worth loving, humans are worth saving

· “book lovers” don’t love anything about books and it shows (or, defending classic novels) (or, call me anti-booktok anti-booktwt)

· ok, fine, my social justice politics feel a bit like religion sometimes and that’s ok

· i trained a neural net on 10,000 irony-poisoned tweets and it just gave me cringe?

· what makes someone good, bad, cancelled, or redeemed? i don’t know either!

· there’s no grand unified theory of morality that can tell me why i should forgive my mother. but i do

· please tell me if you have a definitive answer on what makes someone a bad person

· what makes it all worth it for you? (or: florence welch was right)

· stop complaining about SJWs and try a little empathy

· we spent months locked down, how do we still have no sympathy for the incarcerated?

· how do i explain that determinism makes me so unhappy?

· i just want to become someone who can find something that gives me peace

· virtual night out: pov choose-your-own-adventure night out in cities around the world

· after the deluge (short story) (dispatch from an island state post climate apocalypse)

· poetry piece 1

[zynart]

[zynart]

posts & essays

· there are things we owe to each other (and calling selfishness “self-care” is a bullshit excuse)

· humanity is worth loving, humans are worth saving

· “book lovers” don’t love anything about books and it shows (or, defending classic novels) (or, call me anti-booktok anti-booktwt)

· ok, fine, my social justice politics feel a bit like religion sometimes and that’s ok

· i trained a neural net on 10,000 irony-poisoned tweets and it just gave me cringe?

· what makes someone good, bad, cancelled, or redeemed? i don’t know either!

· there’s no grand unified theory of morality that can tell me why i should forgive my mother. but i do

· please tell me if you have a definitive answer on what makes someone a bad person

· what makes it all worth it for you? (or: florence welch was right)

· stop complaining about SJWs and try a little empathy

· we spent months locked down, how do we still have no sympathy for the incarcerated?

· how do i explain that determinism makes me so unhappy?

· i just want to become someone who can find something that gives me peace

· virtual night out: pov choose-your-own-adventure night out in cities around the world

· after the deluge (short story) (dispatch from an island state post climate apocalypse)

· poetry piece 1

[zynart]

some other posts & projects

· there are things we owe to each other (and calling selfishness “self-care” is a bullshit excuse)

· humanity is worth loving, humans are worth saving

· i trained a neural net on 10,000 irony-poisoned tweets and it just gave me cringe?

· whispering to the ghost in the machine, asking it to paint me a pretty picture (or, thoughts on AI art)

· what makes someone good, bad, cancelled, or redeemed? i don’t know either!

· there’s no grand unified theory of morality that can tell me why i should forgive my mother. but i do

· please tell me if you have a definitive answer on what makes someone a bad person

· ok, fine, my social justice politics feel a bit like religion sometimes and that’s ok

· “book lovers” don’t love anything about books and it shows (the post that you probably found this blog from)

projects that aren’t posts:

· virtual night out: pov choose-your-own-adventure night out in cities around the world

· gathertown city view apartment at night, for house parties with url friends

· love.exe - a minigame. let the system record how love feels before you’re uploaded to the cloud

· after the deluge (short story) (dispatch from an island state post climate apocalypse)

[zynart]

ok, fine, it’s a bit like religion sometimes and that’s ok

Part of growing up religious is spending all your formative moral and psychological development never dealing with the possibility of an unfair world where pain exists for no reason and people die without getting good things to make up for their pain or receiving the justice they deserve.

There’s a moral crisis when doubts reach a tipping point where all that comes crashing in, and I’m not remotely equipped to dealing with or understanding that, and all its devastating and infuriating implications. I’ve never found a substitute for the calmness of knowing justice would at least be served later by god if not now in life. If god won’t eventually be giving the hurt comfort, how do you reconcile inaction with that, or even the existence of pain with that?

A deterministic view of the world makes me super unhappy. A utilitarian view of the world also makes me super unhappy. Especially when, even with all the doubt from my skeptical conscious self, I’ve never rebuilt an alternative mental framework for any of this. I have nothing yet that could fill in what it’d take to tear out my internalized certainty of ultimate but perfect eternal justice that would right all the injustices of the world. I hope someday I’ll be able to remake myself into someone who doesn’t live every day with this deep pain at the unfairness of it all. But right now, it’s a loss I can’t grapple with.

I think some the psychological intensity and conviction in social justice spaces—not the moral reasoning for social justice movements, which has strong secular arguments, just how some of us here in 2020 live it and act it out—comes from the void left behind as religion receded from my life. I was a believer until my teens. But I’m not sure you even had to be, with how much of how we think and talk is influenced by the assumptions of religious morality. Even as belief fades, you can’t always just remake the basic architecture of your being. It’s not that easy to remake something as fundamental as the concept of eternal justice. Which makes enforcing justice while you can a religious-level imperative.

I want to be clear that comparison to religion isn’t intended as a way to dismiss social justice work as irrational. I don’t think religion is irrational. I don’t think the passion and zeal of people in the social justice movement is irrational. I think comparisons of social justice movements to religion are often in bad faith, intended to frame it as irrational or dogmatic or oppressive. It’s hard to talk about a hot-button topic when you know what you’re saying can so easily be stripped of context and used to justify more bad-faith anti-social justice takes. But I’m talking among ourselves. Among some of ourselves, even, maybe. Sometimes the passion and conviction comes from deep despair at the reality of injustice and a sense of responsibility to right what wrongs you can. That emotional conviction is powerful.

Which makes enforcing justice while you can, however you can, a religious-level imperative.

Which leaves us all in a recognizable state of burnout from how exhausting and hopeless and slow it can feel. From how every setback to building a more just world creates not just frustration but a despair at great injustice that would go unrectified forever with every passing day of suffering that can’t be erased and every death before justice was served, and that drives the zeal.

For some of us it creates the allure of the revolution, as much eschatology as it is an endpoint. There’s a reason eschatology has been so powerful for as long as we’ve ever existed. The current world is overthrown and a just new rule begins, where that new world has some [varying depending on your views] figure that can maintain it and arbitrate and enforce its sanctity when evil occurs.

And sometimes we can see a focus on it as a way of life rather than a guide to action. I think that’s a root of the frustration “pragmatic” activism has with “moral purity”. There’s already plenty of moral justification, secular and in formal religion, to work for social justice. There’s plenty of powerful secular moral reasoning to back it up. It’s not that I need god or the fear of hell to make us do the right thing. We know why some things are good and some bad. The void left by religion isn’t what led me to the beliefs: I came to those beliefs because they made sense to me. I think that’s the case for most of us.

But the way I feel about it, a lot of the psychology driving how we live it, and how I dwell on whether I have the right thoughts, how I catch myself having a tendency to classify people (both myself and others) immediately on a good/bad binary based off of their entire moral history, like Anubis weighing hearts against a feather.

Both for the outside world, and internally. If god won’t eventually make you pay for your sins, how do you keep living with the knowledge of them? Without the knowledge that an all-knowing god would identify the *objectively* appropriate restitution to hold you accountable, where remorse becomes a matter of conscience and justice will be restored. What if that’s no longer possible? When you’ve only ever known the concept of remorse for having done wrong because it was wrong, because it caused harm, even if that harm would be restored to perfection by an all-knowing god who can tabulate an exact restoration of justice—how does that prepare you for the remorse of how many of the ways in which you’ve wronged people often can never be fully restored?

None of this is dismissing or discounting the importance of the work. I’m just trying to figure out how this collection of moral guidance and beliefs are enmeshed with the void left behind when you lose the comfort of eternal justice by a perfect moral arbiter.

Honestly I don’t really have any of the answers, but I know I’m mixed up in a lot of the “spirituality” underpinning social justice philosophy in a religious sense, which gets packaged into the theory/pragmatic action through just us being primed to want those answers by religion or human nature or whatever it is that dictates our deepest needs, I guess.

[back to home]

[zynart]

there ARE things we owe to each other

I mean. Yeah, sure. Nobody is *owed* fair treatment and everyone has the *right* to go about life in whatever manner makes them happy without any consideration for the well-being of others or your responsibilities toward society. But I sure as hell am gonna judge and avoid people for it

I always have trouble remembering that: that all the language comes from and all the community online or anywhere is still made up of mostly flawed, often well-intentioned but sometimes disingenuous or bad-faith human beings, regardless of like, subculture dialect or vocabulary set. People will use social justice lingo to justify anything to let themselves off the hook for doing whatever the fuck they want without having to feel guilty. Just like people use the language of academia or religion or philosophy or whatever else, for the same: to have their moral cake and eat it too.

The world is just full of people who do shitty things but still have a conscience. Probably including you and me and most people, really. And it’s maybe just a very human impulse to try find any contorted justification that can enable our selfishness and temptation. That tells us that what feels good or what is easy is actually right. I feel it too. And we just use whatever toolkit of beliefs and ideas is at hand to come up with arguments to convince ourselves. Or we just see someone else phrase it in a way that does and it feels like permission.

“Your identity is an idealized self-image that guides your behavior. Your reputation is the social consensus about how you actually behave.”

And I don’t see that as deliberate. Or not mostly deliberate, at least. Not usually. I think people who do this do believe in what they profess to believe in, generally. Or at least believe that they believe in it. You kinda have to, for arguments spun from them to be able to convince you. Our identities have to align with what we do. And sometimes doing that sucks

I’m not letting myself off the hook here. I know I’m not immune from the impulse to resolve the cognitive dissonance of being weak or selfish in ways I know I can’t actually justify.

But my point is. Twitter is still made up of people, and most of us are flawed and scrambling to resolve those dissonances. With self-care and self-care-adjacent language, the affirmations of self-care and the permissions it gives us is so important and so rewarding, and extending that same feeling to play free safety for your conscience is just *so easy*

But even if I may understand it, I think it’s disingenuous and gross to frame a complete abdication of your responsibilities toward others (such as treating them fairly or with respect) as moral. A moral framework like that is completely inconsistent with my values. And I think it’s inconsistent with the entire philosophy all this language draws from. Social justice in many ways is about our responsibility to each other, about how we owe it to the world to make the world better for others regardless of the luck we’re born into through genes or family or circumstances.

But that’s not an indictment. I don’t think the tens of thousands of people who shared this or those of us that falls into this are bad people. People who use social justice language to justify zero accountability or responsibility to treat others well are just taking the easy way out to resolve the dissonance of a guilty conscience. As humans do. Idk

It’s shitty and corrosive to both the self, that exists in relation to others, and to society, which is built on the idea that we do have responsibilities toward others. As opposed to basically Ayn Rand with trappings of anticapitalism, which is what this is. I mean, talking about the alienation and atomization of people under capitalism has made its way into the Overton window for a while now..

The appeal of Ayn Rand libertarianism is the idea that acting purely in your own self-interest is actually the moral thing to do. It’s about making people not feel bad and feel like heroes for treating others like shit, a free pass to be selfish by absolving yourself of any duty. It’s the most comforting moral ideology possible. And if we see ourselves getting to the same conclusions as Ayn Rand acolytes, that’s not great

[back to home]

[zynart]

humanity is worth loving, humans are worth saving

(yes we are. we absolutely are. and cynicism and nihilism is lame)

i was dwelling a lot on that idea a lot this afternoon about my views of humanity and my conviction in us, inspired by the central theme of the show and movies, which is that maybe loneliness and yearning for connection is the most human possible feeling, and that most human beings are to some level closed off from human connection that there's a hedgehog's dilemma among humanity — that fear of connection, fear of being seen as a mirror of what you most fear about yourself/fear of hurt from both vulnerability placed in others and the inevitability of change/the inherent inability to ever be truly known when human minds are fundamentally separated from each other — is inherent to humans

so to contextualize the rest of this post i’ll describe things i’d been thinking about today. evangelion rebuild 2.0 and the ending of that movie, the choice that the characters make there. the ending of life is strange and the choice that you make there (i said fuck arcadia bay). and then the mirror examples, that one episode of angel where angel becomes human, or the ending of final fantasy x. every piece of fiction where people face a choice between saving someone they love and saving the world and they say fuck the world. even when it makes no sense and even if it means they and you both will die soon enough in a destroyed world anyway, even when it’s morally indefensible and unquestionably selfish. every time that question comes up, it’s so obvious what the right answer *should* be, but how human is it to just choose wrong anyway? that’s what i did when i had to choose and i said fuck arcadia bay. at that moment i felt such a sense of connection with what it meant to be human

in the original neon genesis evangelion it’s an argument between a worldview that it’s the inherent flaw of human nature, which would mean that the ideal vision of heaven is all-as-one where all humans exist together in kind of a hivemind free-flowing soup of minds (or with how little we know ourselves, that maybe even worldview is just being so afraid of connection that you’re afraid to reach out and try unless it’s with the safety of it being complete and universal and inescapable)… or whether what is special about humans and the most human thing possible is humans choosing, with full knowledge of the fear and hurt and inability to ever be known and the inevitability of change with passage of time and death, to put fear aside and connect with others

that latter view has long been the frame of thought where i feel most tender and optimistic toward humanity and individual human beings as creatures of grace. what takes away times where i feel jaded or cynical or fatalistic or disgusted or hopeless, which it is easy to be. often when people talk about being proud of humanity is pride at collective humanity and amazed at what the human race could achieve working together, but that’s barely part of the equation for me. it’s just that one single core aspect of the human soul, that every day humans choose to put aside all that fear about things that are right to fear and just choose human connection anyway. better to have loved and lost than never loved at all isn’t a platitude or an expression, it’s a summation of the most fundamental element to being human — its just that it’s not only about romance, it’s about all love — for friends, family, children, pets, characters in fiction, music made by others, art created by others, memories with others

(this made me google that phrase, to learn more about this phrase that puts the deepest truth about being human into 13 words, and turns out it’s by tennyson writing about the sudden death from a cerebral haemorrhage of his friend— or maybe more, we don’t know, but it’s besides the point that it was someone that he loved dearly — arthur henry hallam, who died aged 22 when tennyson was 23. and it’s a line from a 2,916-line, 133-canto poem titled “in memoriam a.h.h.” that he spent 16 years writing. 16 years where the pain didn’t stop. they met each other as teenagers, knew each other for about 3 years, and that was it. when he finished that poem after 16 years, he’d lived almost half of his life with that pain. he’d lived with that loss for almost five times longer than the time he’d had with him. and he still felt it was all worth it. it was better to have had the honour and privilege to feel that love, even at the price of decades of pain, than it would’ve been if he’d never gotten to feel that love at all)

caring about anyone is opening yourself up to a world of hurt in so many ways outside your control and humans are the only beings we know of that actually has that knowledge but we choose to care anyway. we have children, we attach to family, we form friendships, we fall in love, we even get emotionally attached to pets with short lifespans and emotionally invested in fictional characters

animals don’t have that knowledge. it’s easy for me to imagine many rational beings or sentience that could have that knowledge and optimize toward the pain-minimizing path of closing off completely and dying off in a generation. if pain is the price we pay for the ability to live and feel things and love things, is the price of entry worth it at all? i think most versions of a fully realized consciousness that wasn’t human would think that it wasn’t worth it at all. nonexistence over pain feels rational. but we don’t make that choice. human beings choose over and over and over to love things. and when i think about it, it makes me feel proud and giddy even for inherent human nature, it makes me feel in love with the concept of people with the same butterflies, and it makes me a firm believer that we should exist and humanity deserves to exist

one could say that it’s very stupid to love. it's very stupid to make an active commitment to inevitable future pain. it’s suboptimal for an entity that optimizes to avoid debilitating, all-consuming pain in a world where the passage of time can never stop and loss is inevitable, where there is literally no possible ending in which there isn’t an ending. and it’s kind of a miracle that we choose to do so, billions of people, every day

if you liked this, feel free to check out my other 'essays' on internet/pop culture stuff on my homepage. here's a selection:

· “book lovers” don’t love anything about books and it’s weird (or, defending classic novels)

· there are things we owe to each other

· i trained a neural net on 10,000 irony-poisoned tweets and it just gave me cringe?

· what makes someone good, bad, cancelled, or redeemed? i don't know either!

· please tell me if you have a definitive answer on what makes someone a bad person

· ok, fine, my social justice politics feel a bit like religion sometimes and that’s ok

· after the deluge (short story) (dispatch from an island state post climate apocalypse)

[zynart]

some other posts & projects

· there are things we owe to each other (and calling selfishness “self-care” is a bullshit excuse)

· humanity is worth loving, humans are worth saving

· i trained a neural net on 10,000 irony-poisoned tweets and it just gave me cringe?

· whispering to the ghost in the machine, asking it to paint me a pretty picture (or, thoughts on AI art)

· what makes someone good, bad, cancelled, or redeemed? i don’t know either!

· there’s no grand unified theory of morality that can tell me why i should forgive my mother. but i do

· please tell me if you have a definitive answer on what makes someone a bad person

· ok, fine, my social justice politics feel a bit like religion sometimes and that’s ok

· “book lovers” don’t love anything about books and it shows (the post that you probably found this blog from)

projects that aren’t posts:

· virtual night out: pov choose-your-own-adventure night out in cities around the world

· gathertown city view apartment at night, for house parties with url friends

· love.exe - a minigame. let the system record how love feels before you’re uploaded to the cloud

· after the deluge (short story) (dispatch from an island state post climate apocalypse)

[zynart]

humanity is worth loving, humans are worth saving

(yes we are. we absolutely are. and cynicism and nihilism is lame)

i was dwelling a lot on that idea a lot this afternoon about my views of humanity and my conviction in us, inspired by the central theme of the show and movies, which is that maybe loneliness and yearning for connection is the most human possible feeling, and that most human beings are to some level closed off from human connection that there's a hedgehog's dilemma among humanity — that fear of connection, fear of being seen as a mirror of what you most fear about yourself/fear of hurt from both vulnerability placed in others and the inevitability of change/the inherent inability to ever be truly known when human minds are fundamentally separated from each other — is inherent to humans

so to contextualize the rest of this post i’ll describe things i’d been thinking about today. evangelion rebuild 2.0 and the ending of that movie, the choice that the characters make there. the ending of life is strange and the choice that you make there (i said fuck arcadia bay). and then the mirror examples, that one episode of angel where angel becomes human, or the ending of final fantasy x. every piece of fiction where people face a choice between saving someone they love and saving the world and they say fuck the world. even when it makes no sense and even if it means they and you both will die soon enough in a destroyed world anyway, even when it’s morally indefensible and unquestionably selfish. every time that question comes up, it’s so obvious what the right answer *should* be, but how human is it to just choose wrong anyway? that’s what i did when i had to choose and i said fuck arcadia bay. at that moment i felt such a sense of connection with what it meant to be human

in the original neon genesis evangelion it’s an argument between a worldview that it’s the inherent flaw of human nature, which would mean that the ideal vision of heaven is all-as-one where all humans exist together in kind of a hivemind free-flowing soup of minds (or with how little we know ourselves, that maybe even worldview is just being so afraid of connection that you’re afraid to reach out and try unless it’s with the safety of it being complete and universal and inescapable)… or whether what is special about humans and the most human thing possible is humans choosing, with full knowledge of the fear and hurt and inability to ever be known and the inevitability of change with passage of time and death, to put fear aside and connect with others

that latter view has long been the frame of thought where i feel most tender and optimistic toward humanity and individual human beings as creatures of grace. what takes away times where i feel jaded or cynical or fatalistic or disgusted or hopeless, which it is easy to be. often when people talk about being proud of humanity is pride at collective humanity and amazed at what the human race could achieve working together, but that’s barely part of the equation for me. it’s just that one single core aspect of the human soul, that every day humans choose to put aside all that fear about things that are right to fear and just choose human connection anyway. better to have loved and lost than never loved at all isn’t a platitude or an expression, it’s a summation of the most fundamental element to being human — its just that it’s not only about romance, it’s about all love — for friends, family, children, pets, characters in fiction, music made by others, art created by others, memories with others

(this made me google that phrase, to learn more about this phrase that puts the deepest truth about being human into 13 words, and turns out it’s by tennyson writing about the sudden death from a cerebral haemorrhage of his friend— or maybe more, we don’t know, but it’s besides the point that it was someone that he loved dearly — arthur henry hallam, who died aged 22 when tennyson was 23. and it’s a line from a 2,916-line, 133-canto poem titled “in memoriam a.h.h.” that he spent 16 years writing. 16 years where the pain didn’t stop. they met each other as teenagers, knew each other for about 3 years, and that was it. when he finished that poem after 16 years, he’d lived almost half of his life with that pain. he’d lived with that loss for almost five times longer than the time he’d had with him. and he still felt it was all worth it. it was better to have had the honour and privilege to feel that love, even at the price of decades of pain, than it would’ve been if he’d never gotten to feel that love at all)

caring about anyone is opening yourself up to a world of hurt in so many ways outside your control and humans are the only beings we know of that actually has that knowledge but we choose to care anyway. we have children, we attach to family, we form friendships, we fall in love, we even get emotionally attached to pets with short lifespans and emotionally invested in fictional characters

animals don’t have that knowledge. it’s easy for me to imagine many rational beings or sentience that could have that knowledge and optimize toward the pain-minimizing path of closing off completely and dying off in a generation. if pain is the price we pay for the ability to live and feel things and love things, is the price of entry worth it at all? i think most versions of a fully realized consciousness that wasn’t human would think that it wasn’t worth it at all. nonexistence over pain feels rational. but we don’t make that choice. human beings choose over and over and over to love things. and when i think about it, it makes me feel proud and giddy even for inherent human nature, it makes me feel in love with the concept of people with the same butterflies, and it makes me a firm believer that we should exist and humanity deserves to exist

one could say that it’s very stupid to love. it's very stupid to make an active commitment to inevitable future pain. it’s suboptimal for an entity that optimizes to avoid debilitating, all-consuming pain in a world where the passage of time can never stop and loss is inevitable, where there is literally no possible ending in which there isn’t an ending. and it’s kind of a miracle that we choose to do so, billions of people, every day

if you liked this, feel free to check out my other 'essays' on internet/pop culture stuff on my homepage. here's a selection:

· “book lovers” don’t love anything about books and it’s weird (or, defending classic novels)

· there are things we owe to each other

· i trained a neural net on 10,000 irony-poisoned tweets and it just gave me cringe?

· what makes someone good, bad, cancelled, or redeemed? i don't know either!

· please tell me if you have a definitive answer on what makes someone a bad person

· ok, fine, my social justice politics feel a bit like religion sometimes and that’s ok

· after the deluge (short story) (dispatch from an island state post climate apocalypse)