Archives for 5th November 2022

I wrote this in April 2006; for context, I was still living with my parents, with whom my relationship was growing increasingly strained for a number of reasons. While I still agree with the premise that parents should make good-faith efforts to understand their children’s moral reasoning, or to find others to help them understand said reasoning, I would use different language nowadays to construct the argument.

I believe that many things that people consider sacred, such as the (blood-) family, government, laws, religion and patriotism are merely social constructs. They are capable of informing some of our ideas, but they do not define who we are. These constructs have specific sets of ethos, but what happens when an individual born within those paradigms starts to pull away from them? Are they no longer part of that constructed entity because they differ, or are they renegade members of the construct who need to be pulled back in, or are they free agents capable of breaking free of these constructs and forming their OWN alliances with other individuals who are their spiritual kin (in a loose sense) rather than fellow members of a blood-family, or fellow-citizens, or fellow-practitioners of an ancestral religion? The problem with these constructs is that they deny the individual’s free agency in favour of a constructed reality that could be harmful to the individuals within it. There is, yes, a need for a social contract for those able to comprehend it, and punishments and rewards to reinforce those who do not comprehend abstract notions. However, for those individuals intelligent enough and varying enough to break free of those constructs, it must not be so noxious within the construct.

Family is a brilliant example of a miniature constructed society. In Western families, only the parents have voluntarily entered the constructed society. The children they have have not entered by choice, whether they were born serendipitously or if their birth was planned. In most traditionally-run households, the parents are solely responsible for discipline and writing up the social contract that is to be practised in the house. They expect their children to behave in a certain way, and any divagation from their precept (whatever it is) will be met with some sort of consequence, whether it is punishment in a strict sense or a less direct social repercussion. Children in families are far from being free agents. They are completely protected, and are often not participants in whatever the parents’ social contract is. This arrangement is flawed, especially after the youth in question get past the age of twelve, or thereabouts. Families should work on a higher level of moral reasoning if it is possible. A possible conflict of wills arises when the child is at a higher stage of moral reasoning and/or intelligence than his parents. The child will understand things they do not, and might reason on a social-contract or individual-value morality, rather than a community-based or punishment-reward based morality. A parent of a child like this will say ‘If you do not do X as I want it, then X will happen and you will not like it.’ The child will wonder whether the costs outweigh the benefits, or if a parent’s words truly are moral, or are important in the first place. Such an individual will have problems with pat b like ‘Don’t talk to anyone we have not met first’ or ‘Obey us at all times’ or ‘Never talk back’ or ‘Do your homework’ or ‘Wash your clothes’ or ‘Do not go to X place’ or ‘Go to church with us’ or ‘You must practise our religion because this is a Christian home.’ All these commands are difficult for the child to obey, because they are below his moral reasoning level and so do not appeal to him. Conversely, the child’s level of moral reasoning is difficult for the parent to comprehend because it is beyond theirs, and might frustrate them. Anyway, these commands are horrible for intellectually advanced individuals. I hate them, and always have.

(originally written in late 2004, when I was 18. Very minor edits in 2018. Most of my beliefs haven’t changed much in this regard: I am vehemently against disproportionate discipline and oppose privatisation and charter schools as a means to reform education. I still support differentiated instruction and educational support for students of different abilities; no two learners are identical. I am no longer anti-psychiatry and support the use of psychiatric medication for people who benefit from it. For context, I wrote this essay in response to my frustrations with how I was routinely pathologised within the school system and the authoritarianism I encountered from my parents.)

Thoughts on the current system

As you all know, I am a supporter of public schooling, and I have a lot of strong views regarding education. Even though some of you may consider this view somewhat controversial, I find that it needs to be addressed, as there is quite a lot of disagreement as regards this topic. First, I support public schooling because it is of no direct cost to the parent. Indeed, public school funding does come from taxes. But still, it is not the same as paying for home-school curricula or private-school tuition. Home-schooling and private schooling are not necessarily options for poorer families. If someone lives in abject poverty, she is not going to be able to afford a home-school curriculum (some cost about $500 a year!) or be able to send her children to private school. Unschooling and home-schooling may work for those who have enough money and access to quality books, but what about those who cannot? There is already a large gap between the haves and the have-nots. Why make it larger by abolishing public education rather than merely repairing it? Also, there is the question of ideology and discrimination in private schooling. Private schools reserve the right to admit whomever they choose. They can refuse to admit a poor black child, or a young gay boy, or an atheist, and that students’ parents would not be able to sue. (If that is wrong, please tell me so.) Home school curricula also tend to have a conservative Protestant bias. Even the group of lawyers who defend home-schooling, the HSLDA, appear to be rather conservative in their views. They have lobbied against abortion, gay marriage, ad infinitum. (By the way the conservatism I refer to is social conservatism, not economic conservatism.) There needs to be some balance to all this home-schooling bias. Some homeschoolers’ books seem to inculcate bias and prejudice into them. Parents can use these to perpetuate ignorance into their children and inhibit curiosity and free inquiry, which is what a lot of the home-schooling advocates here try to promote. They learn not to ask intelligent questions, since all they get is pat answers. Example: “Mom, why do giraffes have long necks?” “Because God made it so.” I am not insulting God at all. But if you really want to teach your child science, not pseudoscientific creationism, then you can tell your child, “God made giraffes with long necks because …”. (The purpose of this mini-essay is not to teach pedagogical techniques, so I will stop right there and get back to my original topic.) Home-schooling can be good if done properly, but it can be abused.

Public schooling is a shambles right now. I know that from experience, and I know that from stories that others have told. Students are taught to obey school faculty unquestioningly, even when those people are wrong. They are punished for the most ridiculous things, such as having a pair of scissors, or wearing armbands or t-shirts in protest of a government action. The lessons learned in class are sanitised, and students grow bored easily. (I know I did.) Students are paddled by school administrators simply because they dared to speak out or act out against teachers’ abuses. Minority students (usually black or Hispanic) are singled out and mistreated. Students who would succeed under better circumstances are thrown into “special needs” classes or put on psychotropic drugs such as Ritalin, Wellbutrin, Prozac, and Zoloft because they disrupt the classroom’s social order (in which everyone must basically march in lockstep). I was drugged myself and put in those kinds of classes; I know about this. Believe me, it is hell. I am in no way supporting the actions of public schools now.

The prevailing attitude seems to be, “If you cannot make them sit down, shut up, and regurgitate our drivel, then either drug them up or beat the devil out of them.” This whole idea that is prevalent in public schools is antithetical to the true pursuit of knowledge. The problem is not the IDEA of state-sponsored education. The problem is its execution. If public schools were conducted differently, I would be a wholehearted supporter of them. First off, the purpose of public education must be made clear. It is not there to “socialise” students. It is there to educate. Second, the idea of a one-size-fits-all education must be abolished. I am not an ‘educational communist’ and do not believe that everyone should be kept on the same level. I do believe in a bit of healthy competition. It is preposterous to make a brilliant student do work that is far too easy for her, and ridiculous to make a severely [intellectually disabled] student try to pass a state test that is written for students [students without an ID]. Is everyone as intelligent as everyone else? Of course not. Since there are varying levels of intelligence, motivation, energy, and other personal characteristics, there must be varying methods of education for each student. Even if education is touted to be the “great equaliser”, unequal levels of intelligence and capability will manifest themselves and negate this notion.

The New Public Education and the new childrearing

In fact, I think that public education should be radically different from the way it is now. I envision a large facility in which there are several centres for experimentation and discovery, and teachers serve as guides and mentors rather than autocratic agents of the State. It would be filled with several resources to broaden students’ knowledge about their chosen subjects. Books, computers hooked up to fast Internet, laboratories, many field trips, you name it. It would be a bit like “autodidactism en masse” but it would be tax-funded. Poorer students could take part in this even if their parents could not afford to buy the books and other impedimenta for autodidactic learning because the State would provide it. Students would profit more from this sort of learning since the majority of them would only attempt to do things within their abilities. Of course, this sort of public education would not be compulsory; it would be voluntary. If a parent wished to teach his or her child differently, then it would be possible to do so. I know that there will still be those parents who will insist on teaching their children bullshit but after a few generations of the New Public Schooling and a change in parenting these problems will be decreased. If intellectual inquiry is encouraged, such things as the creationist movement will die out. I believe that real change must begin with our own individual families, as well with lobbying politicians. It is near impossible to change the views of the less-enlightened members of the older generation. But we, as young people, are able to start our own families and inculcate upon our children the importance of human rights. Existing attitudes towards pedagogy and childrearing are the foundations for the ageist beliefs that exist in the American consciousness. The idea of parental supremacy and infallibility is what later informs such unjust laws regarding youth. It is also related to the way in which current public schools are run, except that parental infallibility is converted to adult infallibility. In fact, most anti-youth ideas rise from the wrong-headed doctrine of parental superiority. Every single one of those laws places complete authority on the parent, rather than the youth herself. This attitude towards childrearing is an old one, and is difficult to expel from our collective consciousness because of the prevalence of fundamentalist religion and the constant influence of tradition. It is an attitude that partly comes from the Bible and other religious books (interpreted in a literalist and fundamentalist fashion), and partly from European and American tradition. Several verses in the Bible regard children as property and make it clear that disobedience to a parent’s will is a dreadful sin, not only against one’s parents, but also against the Almighty God. The authors of the Bible are also apparently ardent supporters of corporal punishment…even to the point of killing a disobedient child. Although there are verses in the Bible that could be used to support Youth Rights, the vast majority appear to favour the parent unfairly. If we, the Youth Rights activists, have children and we raise them in our revolutionary manner, ageism will gradually go away. The New Public Education will also aid in the changing of American opinion on childrearing and education because it emphasises intellectual inquiry and curiosity rather than blind obedience and submission.

(originally posted ca. 2017)

There is a pervasive misconception, especially on the right, that using blunt, politically incorrect or offensive language means that an argument is intrinsically valid. Part of Trump’s appeal, for example, is his ability to ‘tell it like it is’, even though nearly everything he says or tweets is a half-truth or an outright lie. It’s less about Trump’s actual honesty than it is the appearance of honesty through his bluntness. If Trump had expressed the same sentiments using more academic language, then he would not have become the Republican nominee two years ago: even with the same ideas, Trump wouldn’t have earned the same reputation he has for being a ‘straight shooter’. I’ve seen other right-wing writers and activists doing the same thing. If they can word something simply enough, people will believe it even if it’s factually wrong or extremely biased. If you’re being politically incorrect, you’re being brave and sticking it to the Establishment, even if the ideas you’re expressing are representative of the status quo or status quo ante, before white male supremacy was seriously challenged in western society.

Of course, using simple language does not make you right, any more than using more complex language makes you wrong. It should be the substantive content of your argument that matters, rather than the delivery, but that isn’t how rhetoric works. This discrepancy between delivery and substance allows people like Trump to tell blatant falsehoods because they ostensibly ‘tell it like it is’.

Relatedly, I think that liberal and leftist activists should strive for clarity when conveying ideas. It’s important to distil complex interpretations of policy and advocacy into digestible chunks for the general public to understand. Public policy is indeed full of subtle interpretations, tangled histories and intricate relationships, but that doesn’t mean that explanations of these complexities must necessarily be convoluted, abstruse disquisitions on the nature of policymaking processes or political theories. In fact, it may take more skill for some political scientists, policy analysts and policy researchers to take complex ideas and make them accessible to a wider audience than it does to avoid code-switching and write solely for their fellow wonks in public-policy and political-science academic journals and websites. That said, however, I’ve seen countless liberal and leftist advocates, including disability activists, routinely framing their arguments in strictly theoretical terms that assume background knowledge that their listeners or readers may not already have.

This entry is not a defence of anti-intellectualism or the wholesale dismissal of expertise. I usually think in theoretical and conceptual frameworks when considering the nature of different public policies and the implementation of those policies. My default thinking tends towards abstractions, words, concepts and metaphors. There’s a difference, though, between the way you may see your field as an expert and the way the general public will interpret it. Unless the people you’re talking to also have a policy, political-science or related background, it’s unlikely that they’ll know about specific ideological frameworks like neo-Marxism, Keynesianism, paleoconservatism or utilitarianism, but they will know about how a policy will affect their ability to breathe clean air, send their children to a good school, protect them and their family from police violence, or work at a job that pays them a fair wage. You can base your explanations on deeper theoretical frameworks, but express them to the public in ways that are more immediately accessible.

Beat the far-right at its own game. Be clear. Provide solutions that are easy to understand. You don’t have to insult people’s intelligence and condescend to them, but it is important to make sure that the people you’re talking to don’t require a degree in public policy or political science to understand what you’re advocating for.

(reposted from 2018)

Racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, disablism and xenophobia are forms of existential aggression. Existential aggression is behaviour that indicates that people don’t deserve to live, or who live under a permanent subaltern status, by virtue of what they are. Note that I said what they are, rather than who they are; this kind of aggression is based entirely on categorical groupings and not on individual traits.

Existential aggression is a term I’ve coined to refer to patterns I’ve seen repeated over and over again, but with no clear, agreed-upon name to describe the interrelationships between these forms of ostracism. Bigotry and prejudice don’t seem to capture the suffocating, annihilating force that is existential aggression. Eliminationism comes close, but not all existential aggressors necessarily want their victims to die. (One could argue, though, that they want their victims’ self-concept to be altered to fit their criteria for being a Real Person, which is possibly a form of death.)

Existential aggression is rooted in essentialist thinking. Essentialism, at least within a social context, is the idea that everyone exhibits transcendent, immutable traits that define their personhood, value and position within society. Authoritarians tend towards essentialist thought to define who should rule and who should serve…or be eliminated, for that matter. These attitudes result in a Manichaean worldview in which the forces of good must defeat the forces of evil, and goodness and evil are defined by people’s existence, rather than by their behaviour. I’ve discussed the relationships between Platonism, essentialism and authoritarianism in “The Problems with Closed Systems.”

Examples of existential aggression on an interpersonal scale include

• Deliberately refusing to use names, pronouns and forms of address that a trans person has asked others to use
• Referring to immigrants, especially undocumented ones, as ‘aliens’ or ‘illegal aliens’, in casual speech

Larger-scale versions of this phenomenon include

• Refusing to grant legal recognition to LGBTQ people’s identities or relationships with other consenting adults
• Directly allowing employers to fire people because of their race, gender, sexual orientation or disability
• Xenophobic or disablist immigration laws
• Eugenics, especially negative eugenics
• Genocide

Far-rightists and their radical centrist enablers have their particular hobby horses of hate: religious fanatics’ fulmination about gay marriage and trans people using public bathrooms; so-called men’s rights activists’ rants about their inability to assault women with impunity; and white nationalists’ ardent desire to cleanse western countries of non-white people. That said, however, I suspect that the correlation coefficients between one form of existential aggression and another are not zero. Time and time again I see white nationalists expressing misogynistic, disablist, homophobic and transphobic views. Right-wing Christian fundamentalists may focus their ire on anyone who falls outside their idealised gender roles, but it’s not uncommon to see them haranguing about Muslims and undocumented immigrants. When you believe that there are some people who are less human than others, it’s likely that you may extend this reasoning to other groups, too. Websites where alt-righters and other hatemongers congregate are brimming with vitriolic attacks on all manner of people, from feminists to trans people to members of ‘weird’ subcultures.

These tendencies are not limited to the right, though I do think existential aggression is primarily the province of the right. I’ve noticed people on the left acting as though members of traditionally privileged groups are essentially bigoted, regardless of their own personal beliefs. A random white person may or may not be an ideological racist. European ancestry doesn’t make people automatically hateful. Having ancestors from continents other than Europe doesn’t make you automatically more credible or ‘woke’, either. Yes, white people benefit from systemic racism in the west, but it’s important to distinguish between social pressure and individual people’s behaviour and feelings. I’ve seen countless articles, tweets and Facebook statuses that imply that having a marginalised status makes you more enlightened. It doesn’t take much countervailing evidence to show this isn’t true. Ben Carson and Herman Cain wouldn’t be Republicans, anti-feminist women would be complete non-entities, and Milo Yiannopoulos wouldn’t have made a brief career out of terrorising other marginalised people. I’ll even make this personal and say that this applies to my own mother. My mother is a black Trinidadian immigrant who moved to the US in the late 1960s and spent the remainder of her childhood and adolescence in Queens. You would think that these demographic markers would make her an enthusiastic Democrat, right? Wrong: she hasn’t supported the Democrats in twenty years and is a Trump supporter. She likes Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly just as much as any other hardcore conservative Republican does. When my parents became evangelical Christians, they also became Republicans. I don’t think the assumptions made by people on the left about race and ideology are nearly as dangerous as those espoused on the right, but they’re still traps worth avoiding. People’s awareness of systemic oppression is dependent on their self-awareness, curiosity and attention to current affairs. Some people may sense that they’re being treated unfairly, but may not be able to articulate exactly why. Because they don’t have an explicit framework, either self-created, acquired or both, to explain their mistreatment, they may not use the correct ‘woke’ language du jour.

Existential aggression is dangerous because it focusses on people’s presence rather than their treatment of others. Simply existing is not a threat; mistreating others is. Be wary of any belief system that promotes existential aggression over good works.

(reposted from 2018)

(Content warning: I talk about some hurtful things in this article, like killing and discrimination.)

If you’ve read the news over the past few years, you may have heard about authoritarianism and wondered what it is. Authoritarianism is the idea that having control is more important than meeting people’s needs, telling the truth or being fair. Authoritarianism is dangerous because it thinks that letting some people have power is more important than caring for other people. Everyone should have the power to make a difference, not just a few people. Here are some facts about authoritarianism and why it’s bad.

1. Authoritarianism has been a problem throughout history. Historical authoritarian leaders include Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Nicolae Ceaușescu and Idi Amin. Some modern leaders like Donald Trump, Kim Jong Un, Bashar al-Assad and Rodrigo Duterte have also acted in authoritarian ways or have said they like authoritarian thinking.
2. Authoritarians say things are right just because somebody says so. That somebody can be God, the government, their parents or themselves. Saying ‘Because I said so!’ is not proof. Anybody can say things, and sometimes those things can be wrong. For example, some people believe that God made the universe and everything in it less than ten thousand years ago. That’s wrong. Scientists have found rocks, fossils and other items that are millions of years old. If you want to say that something is a fact, you should prove it. You can prove things with research, stories and other kinds of evidence.
3. Authoritarians think that it’s OK to treat people unfairly because that’s just the way things are. They don’t think that problems like racism or sexism matter, because it’s more important to have control than it is to be fair. This is dangerous. Real people are hurt by racism, sexism and other kinds of mistreatment. The world isn’t fair, but we can still make it fairer.
4. Authoritarians also think that it is possible to know everything about reality. This isn’t true. We can’t know everything because the universe is always changing. Living things like plants and animals change over time to adapt to their environment. We are constantly learning new things about the universe and how it works. That’s what science is about. That’s also what being human is about. Being an intelligent species means that we can learn about the world around us and talk about what we’ve learned. We can’t know everything, but we can try to know as much as we can.
5. Authoritarians think they have all the answers to everyone’s questions. People may have some answers, but nobody has all the answers.
6. Some authoritarians think that you should do what they say, not what they do. This is because they think having control is more important than being fair or kind. Some politicians say that being gay hurts families, but these same politicians will cheat on their partners.
7. Authoritarians think that it is OK to punish people for not agreeing with them. In the Soviet Union, Stalin killed people or sent them to jail because they didn’t agree with him or the government. Black Americans in states with Jim Crow laws could be hurt or killed because they spoke up against their states’ laws. (Jim Crow is a nickname for laws passed in the United States that banned black people from being in the same areas as white people. Keeping people separate like this is called segregation.) Martin Luther King was killed by someone who thought Jim Crow laws were good.
8. Authoritarians don’t believe in civil rights. Many of them think that certain people deserve to be treated badly. Hitler killed millions of Jews and Roma because he didn’t think they were real people who deserved to live. Some people in the United States want to stop Black, Native and Latino people from voting. There are people who think that women should not have the right to vote or have jobs because they think men are smarter than women.