Loftwings and Demons

I want to be more effective in my activism, but there's definitely a sense I have that effectiveness in one area seems to invariably come at the cost of effectiveness in other areas, and that it is very, very difficult to strike the right balance. And maybe striking the right balance is not even possible, and we are always tasked with choosing between things that are unbalanced and unsatisfactory, because we live in an inherently unbalanced world.

To give an example, I have had to learn to be a less uncompromising person in order to be a social person, because to be too uncompromising is to isolate oneself, thus making it impossible to coordinate one's actions with others.

At the same time, I have observed ample demonstrations of the cost of compromising with one's ethics for this purpose, where one compromises and compromises with others to be more socially connected and thus more effective, but by doing this, effectively compromises themselves out of any worthwhile ethics, thus making themselves less effective in accomplishing their goals.

Thus their actions cannot effectively bring about any worthwhile goal, because they either no longer hold any worthwhile ethics, or believe that their willingness to compromise will convince others to adopt their more worthwhile stances. When rather, a willingness to compromise, a willingness to wait, can be used to compromise away those ethics, to forestall them, forever.

And I do not bring this up merely to express negativity for the sake of it, but because this is something I think is important to think about, because perhaps through that thought we can identify ways to avoid some of the pitfalls in these thorny choices.

A lot of mainstream TV and movies specifically promote "Western" values and especially the values of the United States government as inherently superior to all others. Specifically, this media promotes capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism regardless of whether it's geared towards liberal or conservative consumption. In short, a lot of media is simply sugarcoated propaganda. This is especially true of children's media, and why "it's just a children's cartoon" is not a valid argument for a piece of media not containing embedded political values. Quite the opposite, actually. The whole point of children's media containing such values is to help ensure the absorbsion and adoption of those values by the future generation. The point is to get to them early, so these values become their default.

Now, the people involved in creating this propaganda are not necessarily aware that that is what they are doing. Indeed, many of these people may consider themselves apolitical or even countercultural. But their awareness of their place in the machine is unnecessary for the machine's usage of them. The machine functions in a way such as to elevate those most useful to it while suppressing the rest.

Some examples:

Star Wars - The depiction of the Ewoks employs a number of incredibly racist tropes, including depicting them as cannibals and them accepting C3P0 as a god. The colonialist aspect of the core worlds in the prequels like Coruscant is purposely obscured by making the Separatist government headed by Sith puppets and relegating things like the genocide of the Geonosians to a relative footnote outside the movies.

Star Trek, especially modern Star Trek - While Star Trek has always had implicit militaristic undertones (considering their supposedly peaceful mission of exploration they sure are involved in a lot of wars and their ships are sure decked out to the teeth in weapons), the last seasons of Picard and Discovery especially doubled down on this. Also Picard has a white saviorism arc involving the romulans that it never even bothers to resolve.

Avatar: The Last Airbender - contrast the narrative choice to depict the oppressed Jet and Hama as incredibly evil and, in Hama's case, irreedeemable, to the narrative's treatment of Zuko and Iroh. The narrative never treats Iroh as an actual villain, and Zuko is not only given a redemption arc, but becomes ruler of the Fire Nation at the end of the story.

Avatar - the white savior fantasy in space. The white savior fantasy is inherently colonialist.

Legend of Korra - basically doubles down on the colonialist and imperialist apologism of its predecessor. Also adds a copaganda angle.

I think that the belief that opposing viewpoints are necessarily more likely to cause people to think more deeply about their positions is very misguided. What causes people to think more deeply about their positions is being exposed to arguments or complexities they haven't fully thought of before. Opposing viewpoints can be (and often are) one or even all parties strawmanning the other. Opposing viewpoints can be the same 101 level arguments you've heard a million times already. And they can be vastly unequal in quality or seriousness. Devoting oneself equally to examining a blatantly contradictory or false argument as one does a logically or factually rigorous one is to construct a false equivalence of merit, to allow "but we just can't possibly know" or "everyone is equally at fault" to justify apathy and inaction.

What I think is too often overlooked is the effort to better justify one's own position. Because even when we are correct, correctness is not enough. It is important to understand our own position and understand the world around us well enough to know what we should do, not just what we should believe. It can be all too easy to convince ourselves that we have nothing left we need learn about our own politics, either to refute it or to fully embrace it.

But there is always more to learn. And also, even when we do want to better understand political positions we don't hold, understanding them through the lens of people holding those positions actually discussing their details outside of an explicit debate or overt attempt to portray opposing viewpoints can be a lot more valuable. Also, opposing viewpoints approaches tend to set up false dichotomies, vastly oversimplifying the diversity of beliefs people can hold.

Anyway, I think the main idea here is that the opposing viewpoints structure is just not a good way to better understand beliefs, whether they're your own or others.

I think having a lot of pragmatism in life is very necessary, but I also think that people sometimes mistake the path of least resistance for pragmatism, and I must say, these can be, and often are, two entirely different things.

I'm neither pro nor anti-natalism since I have deep misgivings about both, but I will say that the biggest practical concern is pro-natalism and also the 'pro-natalism for me but anti-natalism for thee' crowd. There isn't now, nor has there ever been, a significantly large number of people who believe in universal anti-natalism. It's just not a thing. It's not a meaningful political threat.

Sometimes you will be right, and sometimes you will be wrong, but that will not necessarily have any impact on whether people believe you or not.

But it should.

I think it's actually not true that celebrities and the powerful are somehow always changing for the better but the average person who I have a grudge against is forever tainted and evil. Even if I'm not willing to forgive someone for what they've done to me, I acknowledge their capacity to change for the better, and I hope they will so they won't hurt other people like they did me. And I think ordinary people are actually more likely to improve themselves than people who expect to have a massive following of adoring fans/syncophants regardless of what they say or do. Somehow I just think that enormous amounts of unconditional adoration just tends to make people worse, actually.

It's important to be able to clearly articulate the actions you think are good or evil, and not just the people. People do a lot of things: some good, some evil, some morally neutral. The actions that are ascribed to people are sometimes falsehoods or half-truths, to serve either the purposes of positive or negative propaganda towards them. Thus different people will have different conceptions of whether a given individual is good or evil, even outside of any disagreement in politics or philosophy (which is also quite common).

To talk of good and evil people is a flawed shorthand to refer to what does have a moral evaluation: action. In fact a person can never be good or evil, they can only choose good or evil, and choosing one at one time does not preclude choosing another at another time. One symptom of allowing this flawed shorthand to guide our judgements is to be unwilling to acknowlege when actions one considers good are done by people one considers evil, or actions one considers evil are done by people one considers good. Another is an undue worry over whether oneself is good or evil, rather than evaluating the different actions one chooses separately. Just as others cannot staticly be good or evil, neither can you.

It is natural to have both positive and negative emotions to other people, both those you know personally and those you know of only from the reports of others. But it is important to distinguish these feelings from your moral evaluation of others, because it is fine to like or dislike people for behavior that is morally inconsequential or even morally neutral, but it is a problem to ascribe great good or evil to such inconsequential or neutral behavior.

Basically, I think we do both ourselves and others a disservice when we ascribe good and evil as a function of being rather than of changing action, or when we allow ourself to conflate personal feelings with moral judgments.

It's neither more ethical nor more practical to be agreeable than it is to be disagreeable. I think realizing that is an important step to managing interpersonal relations of all sorts.

People may fight with you less if you are a doormat, but they may also trust you less if they realize that your agreement is not genuine. They may also find you more boring if you behave more like a mirror to them than an actual full-fledged person. And if they don't, they likely don't care about your needs and wants. These are probably not the type of people you'll benefit from consistently being around, but they are nonetheless the people who will find this trait most appealing.

Alternately, you may get more positive attention if you are particularly abrasive and disagreeable to people you anticipate others will find unsympathetic, but oftentimes even the worst people are disparaged for reasons that have nothing to do with their real crimes. Often the most insulting things to say in society are the least incisive in terms of taking people to task on what they've actually done wrong. And in terms of practicality, unpleasantness towards others can of course be offputting.

These are just a few considerations when thinking about handling conflict, of course. But it's worthwhile to consider that there is no one right approach and that it can be easy to go wrong on both ends of the spectrum.

I often see the sentiment expressed that a person cannot afford to worry about others if they have their own problems. And I have to say, that in my experience the opposite is true: when I focused the most on myself, that worry spiralled larger and larger, interfering even with my ability to address those personal issues that were so important to me. And even small failures might loom large in my mind, making a mountain from a molehill.

But now that I do occupy myself much more with doing what I can in the face of the enormity of the problems our world faces, I have also been able to better address my own personal problems before they overrun me.

It turns out that that the more practice you have solving problems, the better you become at it. And that caring for others can also help you better care for yourself.