(repost from 2018)

Content warning: bullying, emotional abuse, food/weight talk

I am constantly beset by the worry that I take too much space. That my entire existence is a nuisance. Because of this, I often find myself consigned to the margins, either by my own reticence or through others’ behaviour. Ironically, I feel profoundly marginalised in communities that are supposed to address and dismantle the systemic marginalisation of those of us who have been pushed to the periphery of society. I am on the periphery of a periphery. Sometimes I wonder if it’s because I don’t sound right, or that I’m not ‘woke’ enough to fit in, even though I’m no Clarence Thomas. I often feel as though I’m in middle school again, being accused of acting white or failing to perform the correct kind of blackness for my peers’ benefit. I feel like an intruder in spaces in which people look like me, but don’t see me as one of them. I worry that I’m not pure enough. Not radical enough. Not loud enough. Not cool enough. I am terminally uncool. Square, nerdy, congenitally awkward. I feel constantly overlooked in discussions about disability and race, even though I have not shied away from discussing the relationships between them. I feel, despite my isolation, that I am somehow taking too much space simply by being there and having inconvenient opinions. I see ‘cooler’ voices amplified before mine. This is not limited to my work in advocacy; as a master’s student, I avoided applying for fellowships and other opportunities within my programme. After all, weren’t so many of the others younger than I was, and therefore more deserving of opportunities? Better for me to withdraw, to focus on my advocacy outside campus instead of intruding. It didn’t help that some people thought I talked too much in class during my first semester. I grew comparatively quieter. I didn’t shut up entirely – it’s not in my nature to do so – but I did feel some pressure to hold back. While I was able to build cordial relationships, there was always the knife-edge fear: I take up too much space. I’m not cool enough. I should just back off and let real people get involved.

I’m 32 years old. I finished junior high eighteen years ago, but I still feel I’m there sometimes, though the consequences are severer.

These feelings have deep roots that extend much further than my involvement in public activism or advocacy. As I previously intimated, it goes back to childhood, back when I grew up feeling as though I were an inconvenience for being neurodivergent. When I was bullied at school, my parents routinely took the side of the bullies unless they were actually inflicting physical pain on me. When I cried out in emotional distress, I was met with ridicule, stonewalling or punishment if they didn’t blame it on Satan. If I felt excluded, I was not to question it; for my parents, it seemed self-evident that I should be excluded, and that my protesting against my exclusion was tantamount to wanting to be the centre of attention for no good reason. Disputing this exclusion was clearly a sign of my being vain and self-centred. My being good necessitated my being a marginal figure. I was not to question, not to feel, not to exist in any substantive way that required that they address my humanity. I take up too much space.

I’m also fat. Very fat. I’ve been fat since I was ten years old, back when I literally Ate My Feelings, pace Mean Girls, because I didn’t know what else to do when I was depressed and dealing with my parents’ emotional abuse and neglect. Ironically, my being mistreated for taking up too much space led to habits that would cause people to believe I took up too much space in other ways. While I no longer binge-eat in the same way, I spent about twenty years dealing with disordered eating as a form of self-treatment when all the pills, prayer, therapy and meditation couldn’t banish the self-destructive demons dominating my thoughts. Doctors berate me about my weight, treating the effects of my self-medication as an individual moral failing. I take up too much space.

I have a hard time initiating conversations, even with friends I’ve known for over a decade. Even though they’ve managed to put up with me for that long and somehow don’t find me repulsive, I feel my initiating contact is an intrusive act. That I am intrinsically repellent and should wait to be approached first. I feel the same way about job applications. I take up too much space.

Even now, nearly twelve years after I have had any direct dealings with the people who inculcated this into me in the first place, I feel compelled to fold myself small and to be marginal for others’ benefit. If others approach me with opportunities, I’ll accept, but I am less forthcoming about seizing them for myself. For doing so requires that I place myself at the centre, rather than consigning myself to the margins and allowing others, who are always more important than I am, to take up space in my stead. For I take up too much space, and always will. The current political climate doesn’t help, either; far-right politicians and their acolytes actively say that those of us who do not fit the mould of an ideal citizen should be eliminated, whether by actively killing us or by persecuting us out of existence through the continual curtailment of our civil and human rights.

I’m trying to convince myself that I deserve to be here, too, but there’s a lot I have to work through before I get there.

If you’re a disabled member of the professional middle class—or even the working poor—it can hard to get the support you need if you don’t have relatives or a spouse to do it for you. Although many disabled professionals make too much to qualify for benefits, they make too little to pay for services like housekeeping without going into crushing amounts of debt. That’s my story in a nutshell: I’ve had to go into an absurd amount of debt to get the education I needed to be able to work, accommodate myself, and offset my lack of family wealth.

My flavour of autism makes it harder for me to do a lot of repetitive, physical, “low-skilled” jobs. I put “low-skilled” in quotation marks because cleaning, cooking, building, and other manual tasks do require skill, but they don’t get you paid very much. I’m much better at abstract and symbolic work: writing, analysis, design, conceptualisation, and research. The kinds of jobs I can do usually require at least a bachelor’s degree, so it was impossible for me to get a full-time job before I graduated from college. I paid my bills with government grants, scholarships, student loans, and whatever money I could get from paid internships and freelance work. I don’t regret going to college and grad school, but I wish that I weren’t forced to go into so much debt. Most of my tuition was covered through scholarships—I took out loans to pay for rent, food, transportation, and other expenses. I haven’t been able to build up savings because of all the loans and credit cards. I live paycheque to paycheque.

But if I hadn’t gone to college, I wouldn’t be able to find a job at all despite being able to work. I can’t do retail. I can’t do food service. And with my back problems, construction, manufacturing, and maintenance are right out. I would have had to go on disability to cover my expenses and receive support. I don’t want to go on disability, since I’m able to work. It’s a difficult slog to get disability payments, too; most people are denied on the first round. And if I were to get on disability, my housing choices would be limited. Social Security doesn’t pay enough to cover the rent costs in most cities, and it takes years—sometimes a decade or more—to qualify for Section 8 housing vouchers. In a nursing home, I’d lose my rights, autonomy, and dignity, so that’s not an option, either. I’ve been estranged from my family for fifteen years, so going back home to my parents wouldn’t work. (Living with my parents was a lot like being in an institution anyway.)

There doesn’t seem to be room in public policy for disabled people who can work and need support at the same time, unless those disabled people are also poor. I do not want to be in poverty. I’ve been struggling financially over the past few months, and I’ve hated every minute. I was poor for most of my twenties, and it was miserable. I want to be professionally successful and get the support I need with things like housekeeping without breaking the bank. Is that too much to ask for? Apparently so, since every home-care benefit I can think of is means-tested. I meet the criteria right now, but what if I get a job that pays me well? (And by “well,” I mean, “I’m able to pay my rent and bills and have a reasonable amount of disposable income.” I don’t expect to become rich, at least not in this lifetime.) Then I’m left high and dry.

(ca. 2019)

The ideas of Karl Marx and his ideological descendants are not and should not be the sole foundation for left-wing political thought. They’re certainly not the sole foundation of mine. I am not a Marxist. I have never been a Marxist. This is not the same as saying that Marx was wholly wrong; I think his ideas about worker alienation, for example, are useful in describing people’s relationship to their labour. I do not, however, care very much for his predilection for teleological explanations. Is it necessarily true that workers will eventually rebel against their capitalist overlords and establish a workers’ paradise, or is it merely your ardent desire that they do so? Is and ought are two different phenomena. The problem with prognostications like Marx’s inevitable dictatorship of the proletariat is that there’s no proof that the proposed events will in fact happen. I do consider myself left-wing, though, since I am largely egalitarian.

The following ideas, presented in bullet-point format, are an attempt to articulate my particular flavour of leftism.

• People do not have identical abilities, backgrounds or proclivities; however, these differences do not require anti-egalitarian policies to maintain social equilibrium. Anti-egalitarianism based on group characteristics requires adopting a number of a priori assumptions that can be disproved easily with one or two social interactions. If you do deal with people categorically in a way that under- or overestimates them, then you may incur negative consequences from that erroneous assumption. It’s therefore optimal to adopt a politically egalitarian strategy to avoid fucking this up. There are some good explanations from game theory that show egalitarian or cooperative strategies to be better evolutionary strategies than adhering to a version of “nature, red in tooth and claw.”
• I am a staunch individualist. That doesn’t mean I’m a libertarian or a fan of laissez-faire capitalism. I believe that each person has their own needs and characteristics that are distinct from those around them. An individual’s traits should not be subsumed by group characteristics if the characteristics associated with the group are inapt to describe that individual.
• I value cooperation and humane social policy.
• I am not immune to bias. You are not immune to bias. There is no such thing as total neutrality. We as a species have irrational tendencies deeply embedded in our lizard-brains. Bias is unavoidable, but you can question it. And by all means, you should.
• Rights are, or should be, granted or rescinded based on the potential to materially harm another person’s existence. Allowing a same-gender couple to marry does not materially affect heterosexual couples’ existence; the latter can still marry and enjoy the same benefits they did before same-gender couples’ relationships were granted legal parity. Murder, rape and child abuse, however, are forms of material harm. Note that I include direct psychological harm as a form of material harm; I don’t find Cartesian dualism useful here. Emotional abusers inflict real, long-lasting effects on their victims.
• I don’t think “natural rights” exist in an absolute sense. Humans created them. That’s not to say that human rights aren’t important, but that societies had a role in determining what those rights should be. We do not need to use Platonic forms to define what we believe is right.
• I am vehemently anti-authoritarian. And no, expanding the rights of one designated group to match those of a group that has always had rights is not a form of authoritarianism.
• I am pro-women, anti-racist, pro-LGBTQ, anti-disablist and anti-xenophobic because of my individualism, not in spite of it. “Mexicans are rapists” is a ridiculous generalisation. “Black people aren’t very intelligent” is an invidious and poorly substantiated claim.
• I’ve become convinced that ontological debates about people’s identities are useless parlour games in the broader scheme of things. Debating the validity of someone’s gender identity, for example, is not particularly productive when more powerful people threaten people’s material existence. Let’s spend less time on how trans people will hypothetically destroy womanhood and more time on how authoritarian conservative politicians are hell-bent on abrogating women’s rights to control their own bodies. Even if we use a favourite reductio ad absurdum argument, like “I identify as an attack helicopter,” who cares? Does Attack Helicopter pose a direct threat to you by virtue of their identity?
• I see the utility of group-based strategies to stop people from lumping people together and judging them categorically without knowing their individual circumstances. Strategies like affirmative action/positive discrimination, diversity recruiting and sensitivity trainings should be aimed at ultimately creating a society in which people are treated as unique individuals, not members of a stereotyped conglomerate. To stop unwarranted stereotyping, you have to recognise that said stereotyping actually exists. Ignoring it won’t lead to real change. That said, however, I am uncomfortable with the tendency towards elevating group identities over individual ones. This applies both to the left and to the right, though I obviously find the right-wing variety far worse. Certain conservatives, reactionaries and libertarians may protest that they care more about individuals than groups, but these very same people will complain that they’re not allowed to make claims about women’s unsuitability to work outside the home, black people’s low intelligence or the International Jewish Conspiracy. People like Richard Spencer and other blatant white supremacists may be the nauseating of the lot, but at least they’re intellectually honest about their use of crude categories to unfairly stereotype people. I also believe that negative categorical stereotypes can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies that create positive feedback loops that continue inexorably until people have enough sense to disaggregate the people unfairly lumped together.
• I do not think that privilege or oppression are static categories. I don’t believe in the eternal battle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, white people versus “people of colour,” or God and Satan. Rather, I see these relationships as fluid, spatially and temporally bound phenomena. (Yes, I put “people of colour” in dick quotes this time. I use it out of convenience, but it is not my favourite term. Since language intended for others should be understandable, I’m often stuck using words I’d rather not use instead of inventing my own.)
• When people talk about “opposing capitalism,” they should be clear about what they actually mean. What we understand as capitalism contains a number of different concatenated ideas. Creating for-profit businesses does not require enslavement or worker exploitation; the idea that maximising profit before other concerns can very well lead to those human-rights abuses. If, however, economic policy is connected with the idea that people are entitled to full and fair participation within a given society, then it stands to reason that slavery and labour-rights abuses are inherently unacceptable. Neoliberalism is an even vaguer term; for some people, it appears to have developed the meaning of “thing I don’t like.” I’m hardly a supporter of laissez-faire capitalism, but I’m not a communist, either. I’m not against profit-making or the exchange of money for goods, but I am opposed to the idea that rampant social inequality should be acceptable. “That’s just the way it is” is a terrible defence. Yeah, that may be the way it is, but is that how it should be? Sometimes you really want the ought in an is/ought problem.
• We exist within overlapping, often mutually reinforcing contexts; there is no one objectivity, but the confluence of several observed and experienced objectivities and subjectivities. We don’t know if an entity exists outside the known universe that defines reality, rather like the distinction between positive and negative space in art. (In this case, the known universe would be the positive space, while the reality-definer would be the negative space.) There’s no proof that one exists. I’ll agree that there is a consensus reality, since there are observations that have been corroborated over and over again across time. This is why I believe in the existence of natural phenomena like gravity, evolution and global warming. If I talk about objective reality, I’m technically referring to the consensus reality whose characteristics have been uncovered through empirical findings.

Are these definitive statements? Hardly; I’m hesitant to make declarations that may or may not hold true in the face of new, controverting evidence. Anti-authoritarianism, egalitarianism and individualism are the closest things I have to core beliefs, but otherwise, they’re subject to change and refinement over time. I find that I can’t keep myself trapped in a thought-loop without wanting to break out of it.

(originally posted in 2018)

This post is part of a series of posts in which I’ll attempt to translate philosophical ideas into understandable language to reach a wider audience. I firmly believe that big ideas are, or should be, open to everyone.

Everyone can learn things about themselves. They also have the right to learn more things in a way that works for them. Unfortunately, some people think that because of who some people are, they either can’t know themselves well or don’t have the right to learn new things about themselves or the world around them. In 2007, Miranda Fricker wrote a book, Epistemic Injustice, about how people ignore others’ knowledge and prevent them from getting more knowledge easily. Epistemic is a fancy word referring to how we know things, how we learn, and how we see others’ knowledge. Epistemic injustice means that people don’t respect your knowledge because of who you are. It also means that because of who you are, people don’t give you the tools for you to gather knowledge for yourself. This happens to people who experience discrimination or have less power in society, like women, people of colour, people with disabilities, immigrants and LGBTQ people.

Here are some examples of how people encounter epistemic injustice:

• Students with disabilities can deal with epistemic injustice because they are not given a good education that helps them learn more about the world in ways they can understand. At school, people learn important strategies for communicating with other people, gathering learning, and communicating that knowledge. When people don’t learn those skills, it is harder to talk about what you are going through and what you need. Some people think wrongly that people with disabilities can’t use these tools effectively.
• Some people may not take women’s complaints about sexual abuse or harassment seriously. This means that the people who abused or harassed them won’t get caught and will keep hurting the women who complained. Some people think that women don’t know when they’re being mistreated and that they’re overreacting when they are. This is unfair because women can tell when they are being treated badly and have the right to have their boundaries respected.
• Poor people often go to schools that don’t get much money. Because there isn’t enough money to pay teachers or get good textbooks, students may not learn as much. They won’t have the tools to explain their experiences as well as people with better educations.
• Doctors may not take people of colour seriously when they tell doctors about their problems, like pain or illness. This can be very dangerous because not treating people’s pain or illnesses can kill them or put them in danger. These doctors think that people of colour cannot know how they are feeling, but white people can. This is racist. People of colour can know themselves just as well as white people can.

The problem with epistemic injustice is that it makes it more difficult for people to communicate and advocate for their rights. When you’re not being listened to or don’t have ways to talk about what you need, it’s hard to have those needs met. This means that you may not have the healthcare, education, housing, relationships, laws and policies, or services you deserve. As activists, we should work to make sure that people are listened to so we can get what we need. Everyone deserves to be included in the community, and part of that means listening to them and giving them the tools to talk about what they need to be included.

References

Fricker, M (2007). Epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

(reposted from 2018)

This is a follow-up post to ‘Why Conservatives Look Hypocritical’, though I actually started thinking about the issues with closed systems of thought before writing the previous article.

Authoritarian ideologies tend to be closed systems; that is, the totality of the universe can be explained within a self-contained framework. There is also a preference for fixed ontological viewpoints; if a phenomenon does not match the predefined category, then it either does not exist or is an aberration to be reclassified or shunned. The cosmological views of authoritarians exemplifies a tendency towards preferring closed systems as explanatory frameworks for the creation and behaviour of the known universe, even in situations in which mainstream science has reflected the existence of open systems. Most gallingly, people who adhere to these ideologies claim that they, and only they, have access to objective truth.

There is no single objectivity. Rather, truth exists at the centre of several overlapping objectivities and the subjectivities through which those objectivities are observed. I think there is, or can be, broad consensus in many areas, but this is not universal. Philosophically, I lie somewhere between deconstructionist postmodernism and modernist reductionism. This is not a rejection of the concept of objective reality or the scientific method; rather, it is a rejection of ultimately subjective views that merely pose as objective. I am loath to oppose the concept of objective truth entirely; to do so is dangerous in this era of fake news and alternative facts. I am hesitant to call myself a hard relativist, since I do think there are some universal moral principles that can be shared across space, time and history. I do not think, however, that those moral principles should require the denial or suppression of people’s self-determined identities or consensual relationships. Prohibiting murder makes sense, since depriving someone of their life causes them obvious material harm. Being in a same-gender relationship, however, causes no material harm on its own if the participants have voluntarily entered said relationship.

In traditionalist Christianity, there is a transcendental platonic ideal of reality that God has instantiated, and the disconnection between that ideal and the current state of the world is reflected through the theological concept of sin.

For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23).

Humanity’s unwillingness to comply with God’s commands vitiated this perfect order, leading to entropy. The ideal state of God’s perfect creation is also used to define objective truth. It is Plato’s transcendental world of forms transmuted into Christian orthodoxy. (I discussed this concept in more detail in ‘Why Conservatives Look Hypocritical’.) For example, same-gender couples deviate from ‘God’s plan’, and the only reason why such relationships exist is that humans are still suffering from the consequences of Adam and Eve’s original sin, and either choose to be LGBTQ or are deceived into queer personal or relational self-concepts by Satan. There is no room for the legitimacy of queer relationships or identities. Views that are discordant with the precepts of conservative or evangelical Christianity are treated as false because the Bible says they are. The Bible is routinely used to prove itself. This is circular reasoning. This circularity makes it difficult or impossible to accept scientific discoveries that more accurately explain the world. The conservative evangelical worldview is a closed system. Adopting a viewpoint that is sealed off from contradiction actually indicates that the viewpoint in question is less objective than it is claimed to be. It is also questionable whether the view of any conscious, intelligent being on its own can be truly objective. You can’t determine whether something is objective or not if you can’t even falsify it.

Religious belief is not necessary to hold these kinds of views, though it can certainly help. Ayn Rand’s Objectivism presents itself as an ostensibly libertarian ideology, but like other conservative and authoritarian philosophies, it draws from absolutist definitions of human experience to form its most deeply held tenets. For Objectivists, truth is defined outside human experience and cannot be legitimately contradicted by people’s own observations. Objectivism seems as though it is compatible with a scientific, logical worldview with its insistence on understanding the truth and avoiding subjective bias; however, the idea that objective truth can exist outside human experience is in and of itself a biased viewpoint that brings in a number of a priori assumptions. Like fundamentalist Christianity and other dogmatic religions and philosophies, Objectivism considers only philosophies permissible within its framework to be true; everything else can be discarded. Under strict Objectivist interpretations, for example, transgender identity cannot be valid under their strict definitions of what biological sex and gender are. The late Thomas Szasz, a libertarian psychiatrist, believed that transgender identities were blatantly delusional rejections of biological reality¹. In the notoriously transphobic missive The Transsexual Empire, Janice Raymond quotes Szasz to help bolster her position:

Thomas Szasz has asked whether an old person who desires to be young suffers from the “disease” of being a “transchronological” or does the poor person who wants to be rich suffer from the “disease” of being a “transeconomical?” (Szasz 1979). (Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire, in Cristan Williams, ‘Tumblr TERFs Fire Back’)

Though Objectivists claim to stand for free and open societies, adopting ideologies that disallow people’s self-determination is an intrinsically illiberal act that bears a greater resemblance to authoritarian extremists than it does other philosophies rooted in classic liberalism or progressivism. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a right-libertarian philosopher, holds similar attitudes towards the nature of knowledge and objectivity. His epistemological beliefs are a secular analogue to the closed system of conservative Christianity; he believes that knowledge occurs within a defined space, that a priori conjectures can explain phenomena just as well as, or better than, empirical methods, and that falsifiability is not a valid way to disprove a given phenomenon. Again, ideology is used to seal people from competing viewpoints. It’s rank hypocrisy for people from this political school of thought to claim that liberals are the ones advocating for censorship. Authoritarian extremists, whether right or left, are the ones who cordon themselves off from opposing viewpoints. Conservatives’ and authoritarians’ claims that liberals and leftists are the ones solely responsible for ignoring inconvenient facts are a form of projection. Creationism, ‘intelligent design’, global warming denial, Lysenkoism and other erroneous ideas stem from the a priori assumptions of those who think that authority trumps reality.

Furthermore, authoritarians tend towards conflating current political realities with ideal states. This leads to the framing of such retrograde views as patriarchy, ‘scientific racism’ and homophobia as iconoclastic positions that are being suppressed by the anti-free-speech Marxist elite. Since institutional sexism, racism and other forms of discrimination have been a reality for centuries, then they must be part of the natural order and should be upheld. Neoreactionaries, one of the intellectual precursors of the alt-right, are an extreme example of this phenomenon. Many of them, like the aforementioned Hans-Hermann Hoppe, have espoused anti-democratic views that are predicated on a given social order, like modern forms of monarchism and feudalism, with corporate CEOs serving in place of hereditary monarchs. In Democracy: The God That Failed, Hoppe offers his ideal method of abolishing democracy in the United States:

Thus, rather than by means of a top-down reform, under the current conditions one’s strategy must be one of a bottom-up revolution. At first, the realization of this insight would seem to make the task of a liberal-libertarian social revolution impossible. For does this not imply that one would have to persuade a majority of the public to vote for the abolition of democracy and an end to all taxes and legislation? And is this not sheer fantasy, given that the masses are always dull and indolent, and even more so given that democracy, as explained above, promotes moral and intellectual degeneration? How in the world can anyone expect that a majority of an increasingly degenerate people accustomed to the “right” to vote should ever voluntarily renounce the opportunity of looting other people’s property? Put this way, one must admit that the prospect of a social revolution must indeed be regarded as virtually nil. Rather, it is only on second thought, upon regarding secession as an integral part of any bottom-up strategy, that the task of a liberal-libertarian revolution appears less than impossible, even if it still remains a daunting one (Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed, p. 288).

Peter Thiel, the Trump-supporting co-founder of PayPal, is also well-known for his dislike of democracy, preferring a modernised version of feudalism or oligarchy. (In fact, Thiel presented at a conference run by Hoppe back in 2016. Past presenters at this conference include Richard Spencer, the notorious Brooks Brothers-clad neo-Nazi who was punched on camera, and Jared Taylor, a white nationalist ‘academic’.)

Accepting the the world’s messiness is a difficult task. As pattern-seekers, humans crave order. We want explanations for how the world works, and the closed epistemological and cosmological systems that authoritarians propose are extraordinarily tempting. Unfortunately, the answers that authoritarians provide aren’t real answers. ‘Because I said so’ is the answer of an incompetent parent who thinks that might is synonymous with right; it should not be the guiding principle of a cosmological, epistemological or moral viewpoint. There are other methods we can use for understanding the world around us that combine the data from our senses, intuition and reason.

1. This is actually untrue; numerous brain studies have shown potential differences in the organisation of trans people’s brains versus those of cis people, including this 2016 study. I will note that some of the language used to refer to the trans subjects in this study is outdated. Moreover, even if there were no physically identifiable differences between trans people’s and cis people’s brains, it does not necessarily follow that trans people’s self-perceptions are invalid. ↩