Don’t feed the trolls

by jenna Posted on October 20, 2011

Being the analytical beast I am, I have an intense resistance to emotions I can’t explain or figure out how to manipulate. If I can feel it, I want to be able to understand it, and thereby have more or less of it over time as I figure out how it works and how to get it/avoid it. This works for me most of the time. Sometimes it doesn’t, and learning how to deal with the times it doesn’t has been a long-term struggle of mine.

Last week I think I levelled up.

My partner was on a date with someone else. In accordance with the terms we have in place, he texted me afterward to let me know Shenanigans Had Taken Place. I had the response that I have about 60% of the time, which is a sort of sick feeling of horrible dread. This was quickly exacerbated by my exasperation, as I do not wish to be the sort of person that has this response. I want to feel happy and secure and not threatened and not jealous. I want to be more evolved than this! I started automatically trying to figure out why I was feeling this way this time, the way I usually do. Then I stopped. In therapy, the biggest thing my therapist keeps repeating is for me to quit arguing with how I feel. Just feel it. Sit there and feel bad. Shut up. Feel bad if you feel bad.

So I tried.

And, as almost always happens when I can actually force myself to do this, the bad feeling instantly began to dissipate. I started to feel better. It didn’t disappear right off, but there was a huge lessening of intensity, and in a few minutes, it was about 97% gone. I was chatting with Chaos at the time, and I mentioned all of this, and grumbled about how I hate it when she’s right, and I hate this being the answer.

I’ve been working on this problem for years, since before I started with polyamory. I felt irrationally jealous and threatened when I was monogamous too, and I’ve been doing science to it forever. Change this variable, change that one. Control for the element of surprise. Control for trust. Change who it is, when it is, how it is. And it seems utterly random. Sometimes I feel bad, sometimes I don’t, and while there are a few trends, there’s nothing that reliably prevents me feeling bad.

I told Chaos that I’m about to throw up my hands and call it an uncontrollable hormonal response. Which pisses me off, because I would really like to just stop having it. Which goes back to the “sit there and feel bad” thing. I don’t want to sit there and feel bad. I want to fix it. I don’t want to accept it. “It feels like letting the terrorists win,” I told him.

“No,” he said. “It’s letting the terrorists think they’ve won.”

The penny dropped.

“Oh.”

I wasn’t reasonably trying to fix my problem anymore. I had long since exhausted all the solutions. I was simply arguing. My feelings were wrong on the internet. I was feeding the trolls. The jealousy was baiting me, and I was biting. And, just like those unfortunate folks who find joy in stirring up trouble, when there was no trouble to be found, it went off in search of a more gullible fish.

The literature on depression calls this rumination, responding to distress by worrying over it and picking it apart, and thus enhancing rather than ameliorating it.

I think there is a lot to be gained from analysis and metacognition. Obviously, since I devote a considerable portion of my life to it. But there is a point where you’ve done what you can and you have to just stop and say, “Okay. I feel bad, and I can’t do anything about that, so I’m just going to feel bad now.” And hopefully the trolls will tire of commenting into the void and take their business elsewhere.

Posted in emotion, polyamory, psychology, relationships | 2 Comments

On emergence, relationship entities, and the misnomer “having sex”

by jenna Posted on September 15, 2011

One thing I’ve thought about a great deal, particularly since becoming poly, is the concept of emergence and how it relates to relationships. Emergence, in the context I’m using it, is when a system exists, made up of components, and the interactions between those components become complex enough that a new entity emerges from the system. It is utterly new, something that did not exist before the system, that cannot exist without the system, but that is greater than the system.

A common, if disputed, example is the way that the mind emerges from the brain. In my view, anyway, the mind is something larger and greater than the biological components that have created it. It is those components, but it is also something else, something which can interact with and influence the components that make it up, and interact with the world in a way that the individual components cannot. The pieces have combined in such intricate and complex ways that a sort of leap has occurred. Something new has come into existence.

Relationships between people are the same way. Two people interact with each other, and they do it in nearly infinite ways. A million tiny pieces intertwine in the space between the individuals. Every conversation, every touch, every shared experience, every commonality, every difference. Each interaction forms another connection, and the web grows exponentially as the interaction continues, until one day there is something there that was not there before. There are still the two people and all the things they put into the middle. But now there is a Themness. A Relationship. A living, dynamic, breathing entity that exists of and between them, that can influence their behaviors and be influenced by their behaviors.

When polyamory gets involved, things become exponentially more complex, and hence more emergent. Take a triad as an example. It’s commonly said that when three people are involved with each other, there are four relationships: Kevin and Jennifer, Jennifer and Mark, Mark and Kevin, Jennifer and Mark and Kevin. But I think it’s even more complex than that, because what we rarely pay attention to are the relationships between the relationships. The emergent entities interacting with each other and producing yet more entities. Bear with me, this has a point, I promise. So in our hypothetical triad above, we have:

Kevin + Jennifer = KJ
Jennifer + Mark = JM
Mark + Kevin = MK
Kevin + Jennifer + Mark = KJM
KJ + JM = KJJM
JM + MK = JMMK
KJ + MK = KJMK
KJ + JM + MK = KJJMMK

And on and on, you see. This is not just my wankery, perhaps despite appearances. It really does work this way. It’s more than just me and you and him interacting, the ways we interact with each other interact too, and things get way too complex to explain right quick. Do this enough, and you get more and more and more entities emerging from the ever-evolving mass of interpersonal connections: families, networks, subcultures, cultures, society. All these interact with each other too, and new things emerge from those interactions.

This seems to me to be the way everything works, on some fundamental level. Which makes the potential of the human race and life in general rather staggering, but that’s a point for another day. Here’s where I’m going with this: Emergence is everywhere you look, and I think people understand it on an instinctual level, even if they aren’t as fond of intellectualizing the fuck out of their existence as I am. Yet in many ways we talk as if it’s not true.

Let’s take sex as an example, because, well, what’s not more fun that way? Perhaps the biggest topic of discussion with regard to polyamory is jealousy. Fear. Specifically, fear of my partner having sex with some other person, being wildly enamored of their genitalia, and sailing off to moister pastures, leaving me to cry alone in an alley and buy some cats.

Here’s the thing: “having sex” is an utterly meaningless construct. It has no real meaning by itself, when it’s not populated by people. It’s a vague and enormous category of things, but we often speak of it as if it’s this static activity that we do with every partner. This a gross overgeneralization, one that generates an amazingly large lie that is the foundation of one of the biggest fears we face.

Because sex? Is emergent too. Which means that the thing that emerges between you and me? Cannot happen with anyone else. Ever. Not because you love me so much you won’t let anyone replace me. Not because I place this or that boundary on your relations with others. But because it’s impossible.

The sex I have with Kevin (oh, dear, now KJJMMK is even more complicated) is not just quantitatively different from the sex I have with Veronica. It’s not better or worse along some continuum of this one type of experience. It’s qualitatively different, and not just a little bit. The differences between the two experiences outnumber the similarities by thousands to one. The experiences are so different even down to a pure physiological level that using the same terminology to describe both is a bit erroneous.

The entire concept of my partner “having better sex” with some other person is so fundamentally in error that it doesn’t even make sense when you’re looking at sex as an entity that emerges from the specific interaction of a specific set of individuals. They can’t have sex with me with someone else. They certainly can’t have “better” sex-with-me with someone else. It can’t be replicated by another, because they aren’t me. There is no competition between the entities, because they’re incomparable to each other.

Yet we have to keep using the terminology, really. We have to discuss our experiences somehow, and abstract categories are really all we have to work with if we don’t want to get bogged down in every turn of phrase to the point where communication becomes impossible. I am hopeful, though, that we can find a way to hold the larger concepts in our minds, even if we can’t always articulate them.

It’s frustrating. Words suck, but we’re all stuck with them, slogging along doing the truth-encompassing equivalent of grunting incoherently at each other. At least until our language becomes complex enough that a new form of communication emerges, which given all available evidence is an inevitable occurrence.

Won’t that be an interesting day?

Posted in polyamory, relationships, sex | 2 Comments

In search of advanced morality

by jenna Posted on July 7, 2011

I have the good fortune of being associated with a large number of exceptionally kind people. They have immense empathy, caring hearts, and often impressive introspection and clarity of vision. Thing is, this often makes them act like jerks. I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about why, and I think I’ve uncovered a major mistake they, and we, are making in our quest to be decent human beings.

There’s a Steven Brust quote that one of my friends likes: “Appropriate action means to advance your own goals, without unintentional harm to anyone else.”

The key word, of course, being unintentional. Intentional harm, while of course not ideal, has (at least) two major advantages over unintentional harm: 1) It allows you to form a coherent concept of self that isn’t batted about by the winds of other people’s responses; 2) it often leaves you much better equipped to actually deal with that harm and do something to ease or abate it. Whereas what I see, over and over again, is a perfectly well-intentioned person inadvertently causing harm, and then being so stunned by the outcome (because they didn’t mean to do that!) that they’re crushed by such intense guilt that they are completely useless at dealing with the pain they’ve caused. So the injured party has little option other than finding someone else to comfort them, or putting aside their injury to comfort the one who injured them.

We need a moral code that is more nuanced than “Don’t hurt people.” Though that’s a lovely thing to want, it’s complete shit as a guide for ethical behavior. Not quite as bad as the Golden Rule for producing misguided actions, but close. The sad truth is that, whether you are a good person or a bad person, you’re going to hurt people. Even if- often especially if- you’re doing the right thing. What separates us is why we do it, and what we do next.

People don’t get hurt by other people doing wrong. We get hurt by other people not doing what we want. Applying morality to that creates an enormous mess that actually actively interferes with acting right, because you’re no longer evaluating your actions within a well-considered ethical framework, but instead by unpredictable or inevitable consequences. And when you are blessed/cursed with the gift of empathy, those consequences can leave you destroyed by guilt, confused about what the hell you’re supposed to do in any situation ever, and feeling completely inadequate to the task of behaving consistently or well.

Instead of striving not to hurt others, perhaps a better way is to strive to be your best and highest self, to act in accordance with your highest wants (which often includes minimizing hurt to others, if you’re a kind person), and to have a reasonable expectation of the outcomes of your actions. Be prepared for that to smack up against other people’s conflicting wants sometimes, because that’s what happens in life. Reside within a place where you know you did your best, so you can avoid wasting time on guilt and shock, and thereby have enough time and resources leftover to actually reduce the harm done, rather than increasing it by withdrawing into a shame spiral that leaves the other person both hurt and abandoned.

This may take some adjustment, as it seems unfair that the best of intentions so frequently produce terrible results. If only everything were as simple as tell the truth and be nice and don’t kill anyone. No one mentioned in the manual that sometimes in order to tell the highest truth you have to lie, and to do less damage you have to hurt. It’s nice to imagine a world where that’s not the case, and it’s not incredibly complex and hard just to be a decent person. But this is where we are, and we don’t have to be trapped in the rules of kindergarten (no offense to Fulghum).

I think we can do better.

Posted in ethics, philosophy | Leave a comment

Thus do we refute entropy

by jenna Posted on April 11, 2011

Several things have happened recently that, together, seem to be pushing me in a direction that is quite surprising to me on one level, and not at all on another.

I’ve always been more interested in neurosis than psychosis. I’ve wanted to work with the “normal” people who are struggling. I thought, even if all the current thinking is wrong and psychotherapy does work for schizophrenia and other broken-forever-brain kinds of diseases, it’s too complicated and too hard for me to understand. I’m realizing faster and faster now that not only is almost every word in the previous three sentences utterly wrong, but that it’s exactly the same shit I’ve been arguing against for pretty much forever. It’s a way to make them other, make them not like us, so we don’t have to accept that madness is a continuum and something we’re all vulnerable to. So we don’t have to think that they are us and we are them and “normal” is not any more real than the hundreds of diagnoses we’ve made up for what’s abnormal. If that scary horrible thing is a “delusion” produced by a “chemical imbalance” (not a trauma perpetrated by us, certainly not), then we don’t have to deal with what it means.

I’ve read a few articles (most notably Bertram Karon’s The Fear of Understanding Schizophrenia, which I highly recommend to anyone with access, or hell, if you want to read it, drop me a line and I’ll send you the PDF) and a book (Blaming the Brain : The Truth About Drugs and Mental Health) that have revealed some really startling information about the evidence for the biological basis of mental illness and the effectiveness of drug treatment, mainly that there isn’t much evidence at all.

The thing that blindsided me the hardest was this: The main evidence that I knew of, from my intro psych and neuroscience courses, for the biological basis of schizophrenia, was the presence of enlarged ventricles and an excess of dopamine receptors in the brains of schizophrenic patients. What my many textbooks and professors failed to mention was that the brains we were talking about were those of medicated patients. We give them brain damage to shut them up and then we use that damage as evidence that they have an incurable biological condition. AWESOME.

A month or so ago, we had a speaker on campus representing the Hearing Voices Network, a user-run network of self-help groups for people who hear voices. One of my professors wrote a book, Agnes’s Jacket, about HVN, a group here in Massachusetts called Freedom Center that does the same thing, and about first person narratives of madness in general. It’s an amazing book. I found myself crying through most of it, both because hearing how isolated and ignored and silenced all these people have been is heartbreaking, and because the way out that they found, that they made, is so utterly inspiring.

The central philosophy of all these groups is to take the other members at face value. If they heard it, they heard it. If they saw it, they saw it. If medication works for them, it works. If it’s real to them, it’s real to you, and that’s the end of it. They don’t say “delusion” or “hallucination”, they say “experiences that others don’t have”. Because when you’re trying to understand a human being, what is real or not real in the world does not matter. The only thing that matters is what’s real to them. Telling them that their experience isn’t happening makes no difference to their experiencing it. We believe what we see and hear, that’s the way humans work, and no amount of saying “that thing you hear isn’t there” makes us stop hearing it.

They don’t ask snoopy questions or grill anyone. There are no rules save doing no physical or verbal violence. You do what works for you, and if you want help, you’ve got it.

I’ve said a bunch of times over the years that if I ever win a billion dollars and can do whatever I want, I’m making a real-life Callahan’s (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, get to the library posthaste, for God’s sake). That I would make a place where people can come with what they have and be what they are and ask for what they need and find solace. How amazing, how gorgeous, how staggering that all these people, these crazy impossible unfixable “chronically mentally ill” people who “can’t take the point of view of another” have done just that.

Callahan’s is real. And I’m realizing that, despite everything, more than anything, I want to be part of it.

Posted in biological basis of behavior, books, madness, pharmacology, psychiatric survivor movement, psychology | Leave a comment

A poly analogy

by jenna Posted on February 25, 2011

In trying to explain the eternally difficult concept of the ridiculously loaded and not-quite-right word “mine” when used with regard to people, I came up with this analogy, which, the more I think about it, is turning out to be pretty representative of how I do poly.

In the metaphor, my partner is like a house. In my case, a very open, welcoming house. He lives there, it’s his house. But I also live there, and so it is also my house (and conversely, I am his house, and the relationship is our house, but that all confuses the issue, so let’s stick with this part for now). Not mine-not-yours, but mine just the same. In order for me to feel safe living there, I must have some ownership of the house, some assurance that I’m not just crashing on somebody’s couch, this is my home.

Other people also live there, or stay there occasionally, or pass through for a night and move on, depending on intimacy levels. And depending on how my partner communicates with me when he spends time with other people, it can feel joyous, like I can hear happy sounds from down the hall and it makes me happy, or it can feel terrible, like I’ve been booted out into the snow and I am barred entrance to my home, or it can feel like a deeply traumatic betrayal, like it was all an illusion and I was never safe, even though I thought I was.

The interesting thing about this analogy, which started out as a conversational expedient, is how well it extends to how to act.

I would expect, for example, that if my partner were to let someone stay awhile (start another relationship) or invite someone to move in (become seriously involved), that he would choose someone who would fit in well and be respectful of the other inhabitants of the house – up to and including him, I might add. That he would evaluate them on that basis, and that the structure and fullness and balance and harmony of the house would be major considerations in those decisions.

Of course, not everyone that becomes involved with him moves in. Some are overnight or weekend guests that then go on with their lives, some come by once a year, what have you. For this, I expect a less full evaluation of fit and consideration. And I want my house to be a place where people can come to stay while they’re in town, or sleep over if it’s too late to drive, or come in from the rain for solace. But I still expect that in exchange for that solace, they won’t, y’know, set the house on fire. (This rule, I believe, is colloquially known as don’t stick your dick in the crazy, but it works for vaginas too.)

The best thing about this whole idea is that it feels to me like it provides an understanding of what a relationship is to me, and therefore avoids the need for a list of rules of behavior, because of course you don’t bring someone into a house you share with others and let them loose with a baseball bat and some lighter fluid. Of course you talk to the other people who live where you live when change is occurring.

I’ve always felt, when it came to veto and other matters like it, that all of that confusion and memorization could be avoided if true understanding could be reached. Much like memorizing 10 formulas instead of one that contains the information in all 10. (You only need the ideal gas law, y’all, for real. Ahem.) If you really understand the one, you can derive the others as needed.

If you understand the house, you don’t need a rulebook. Just a brain, and some compassion and awareness of where you live. Which is part of the criteria, incidentally, for living in my house. Isn’t it nice how that works out?

Posted in polyamory, relationships | Leave a comment

Relationship chemistry

by jenna Posted on September 17, 2010

Most of y’all know that I’m a psychology major. Perhaps fewer know that I’m minoring in chemistry. When I tell people this, the most common reaction is “Bwuh?” Some reconcile it by going “Ohh, you’re pre-med, so it’s practical.” Which is true, but really I just like chemistry a whole lot. This mystifies other psych majors, which mystifies me, because it seems to me that anyone who doesn’t see why I’d like both either has never taken a chemistry course, or seriously lacks imagination. (XKCD does not have this problem.)

Electrons are people. My first inkling of this was in the very basics, when we were learning about the atomic particles in general. As soon as my professor explained protons and electrons to me, I thought, oh, so the proton is the popular kid in high school, and the electrons are the rest of us. So, for me, positive charge became charisma, and negative charge became compassion. The electrons want to be near the proton, and the proton likes them too, but really only can keep a few of them nearby, because y’know, it’s just one person. So the magnetism keeps the others nearby, where they jockey for position and move in and out of the space that surrounds the proton, and pair up and split up and live their little lives, having relationships.

Some of those relationships are more satisfying than others, some so much so that they induce the electron to leave the proton and move on, others more transient and less compelling, if still quite worthwhile. Go up a level, and atoms have relationships. They make bonds of varying characteristics and strengths. Groups and networks form and reform, and so on, you get the idea. Molecules have relationships. Cells have relationships. Tissues, and systems, and human beings, and groups of human beings, and the human race and other species, and life and the universe. Everything is everything else, you see, and everything has relationships, and they all sort of work the same way.

So today I was in therapy, and discussing my recent surge of happiness and how I feel like I’m really thriving right now, firing on all cylinders and everything is just going very well. And she commented on how I managed to make some connections at Yale this summer, and am likewise connecting with lots of people right now, if on a pretty superficial level. She thinks this contributes a lot to my general sense of balance and happiness.

I’ve never placed much value on those kind of connections. They are transient and shallow, and as such, how much worth can they possibly have? But now I’m thinking, maybe a lot. Maybe not individually, but as a whole, maybe they do contribute significantly to my life.

Covalent bonds, which I have always conceptualized as long-term intimate relationships, are formed when two atoms get together and share their electrons. Each one puts their contribution in the middle, and those things form a bond, just like when people invest in each other and offer a significant part of themselves to a relationship, it holds them together.

Ionic bonds exist between ions (charged atoms). One atom gives up an electron (and so is positive), one gains an electron (and so is negative) and boom, they are in lurve. These seem kind of like kinda-dysfunctional-but-strong relationships, or those hot sex relationships with lots of (HA!) chemistry. It’s weird and not as healthy, but damn if you don’t want to be with them at all times anyway.

When hydrogen is in a covalent bond with an electronegative atom (like oxygen), the electrons often hang out more with the other atom, leaving hydrogen feeling a little lonely, so it hooks up with other electronegative atoms (in a less powerful way than a covalent or ionic bond, but still pretty strong). This one is where shit starts getting really poly. Like the hydrogen, you know, for a totally random example, is dating a programmer, and it keeps going off to code play video games be with oxygen, so the hydrogen gets on OKCupid, and is all I’m going to find someone different! And then it finds another programmer, because it can only fuck geeks, and before you know it there’s like 5 oxygens nearby, each part of their own molecule, and hydrogen is getting laid enough that it’s kinda cool with the situation.

Hydrogen bonds, incidentally, are what hold our DNA together.

So, these three I’ve been pretty cool with. They’re significant, they’re important, they’re worth maintaining. And though of course they aren’t really permanent, they’re not super temporary either, so they have the illusion of being permanent.

These connections I was talking about in therapy (see, I did have a point) have always seemed to me, like, ohh, London dispersion forces. Since electrons run around all the damn time, molecules sometimes get electron heavy in one part and electron light in one part, making them a little bit positively charged here and a little bit negatively charged there, just for a little while until the electrons move around and even out some. These create what are called temporary dipoles, and the molecules, y’know, sit with each other at lunch, and occasionally post on each others’ Facebook walls, and say hi in the passing period, and give each other their notes when they miss class.

They influence each other. If one atom is kinda passing by in a certain mood, it reminds the other atom of something, and it gets in another mood, and maybe that makes it attractive to the first atom and so they fuck in the on-call room and then go about their day. Everything fluctuates because everything is connected, and we all go around influencing each other and changing each other and forming little fleeting connections.

I haven’t valued these little connections that much, but now I’m thinking maybe I should. Maybe London dispersion forces aren’t so insignificant, and they are just as much a part of what makes the world the way it is as the bonds that get more press. Maybe my little connections make me how I am, too.

(Apologies to all the real chemists who may read this and feel about my first-semester-orgo interpretations of things the way I felt about that guy on Breaking Bad who called HF a strong acid.)

Posted in relationships, science | Leave a comment

Why psychology?

by jenna Posted on July 10, 2010

One of the big parts of the grad school (or med school, or job, or anything) application process is answering the big “why” question. It seems like it would be easy but it’s really not. Condensing your life purpose into words is hard, and finding words that don’t sound ridiculously generic (“I want to help people!” “Running gels fulfills my soul!” “I LOVE TYPING!”) is harder. I’ve given a lot of thought to what I’m going to say when I’m asked the inevitable question, and I still haven’t come up with anything that totally satisfies me.

Today I read a Warren Ellis thing about writing and where ideas come from, and this is actually the closest thing I’ve seen to my why, so I’m going to try to go with it here in hopes of isolating some things for future use.

The stuff he says about information, how he bombards himself with it and it synthesizes into new stuff, this is just how I feel. Except my information is specifically people. The more people I know in life, the more things start to click back there, in that weird back-brain that does all the connecting work. I don’t conceptualize the stuff that comes up from there as ideas, exactly, though I suppose that is what they are. A better word for me is epiphany, which is a big word, but it feels pretty goddamn big every time. Every now and then I have this giant OH moment that retroactively explains about a thousand things that I didn’t understand at the time, and each one alters my philosophy going forward.

I go along in my life, making relationships and reading books about relationships and people in general, and taking psychology classes, and all of this is fun and rewarding. Learning bits is pleasurable on a day to day basis and I could happily do it forever, but it’s not why. Which is why, I think, whenever I try to say it as my answer it sounds generic. Because it is generic. While psych is the most fun usually, I have the same basic feelings in any subject I find interesting – chemistry, calculus, literature, all these are fun to get bits of and put in my head. I get small zingy feelings in most of my classes, and reading stuff on the internet, and watching TV. Learning is a drug, and I get high from it from time to time. But it’s not the big giant thing that I can point to and say: Here is my purpose. Here is the thing that drives me forward when I’m too tired, the thing that makes every hardship on the path completely worthwhile. Here is why I will never give up.

The real reason are those moments of glorious brilliance. The absolute flying high, everything-is-connected-holy-shit-yes-this, right now I am a god and I Understand moments. It’s the click that reverberates throughout every moment of my life before and after. Every time I have an epiphany (which Wikipedia defines as “a flash of holistic understanding in a prepared mind” and that is right) and I can see it light up connection after connection, blazing into a web of YES THIS IS IT until my mind is on fire, I know this is why I’m alive.

Yesterday we went to a grad school thing at Harvard and we had little discussion groups going on, and this one girl said that she often feels like she will be perceived as scattered, because her interests are so varied and she can’t explain how they link up to each other, but they do. I told her that the way they link up is her. In a way, that’s what is the uniqueness of a person – they are the synthesis of a unique set of things. They draw in all these seemingly unconnected things and connect them. That is their genius, and their power, their divinity and sovereignty. They are bombarded with information, and they put all that together and then BOOM. A new thing.

We are the emergent phenomena of the universe. And that’s why.

Posted in psychology | Leave a comment

The original false dichotomy

by jenna Posted on June 1, 2010

We have a problem.

I have been trying to write this post for years, and I feel like I’ve never managed to get even half of the scope of it at once. It’s hard to hold in my head, and even harder to say in words, but I feel urgently that I have to try, because the consequences are so dire and so widespread. So I am going to try, and I ask that you try your hardest to listen, because this is important.

We have a problem.

We humans conceive of ourselves in negative space. Our first concept of self is not “this is me.” It is “this is not you.” I am not you. I am me, and I know that because you go away and I am still here. You are tall and I am short. You are a boy and I am a girl. You are black and I am white. I create myself by pushing you away, making you other in order to make myself me. This, I think, is probably necessary. It is also the root of a virus that will wipe humanity from the earth if we don’t find a way to mitigate the damage.

We perceive things in the abstract. We must. To do otherwise is madness – we would quickly go insane from the information overload. We have stereotypes and biases and shorthand because they work, and we need them to cope with anything outside our own personal houses. This, too, is necessary, and this, too, is horribly dangerous.

We have a problem.

The process we go through of dividing the world so we may be individuals and understand our surroundings makes us blind to what is really there. It enables us to be callous in ways that we are pretty much incapable of on a personal level. It helps us dehumanize others, categorize them, and judge them in ways that are not only unfair, but often catastrophic. If they aren’t people, if they are a group, they stop existing in our personal landscape and start existing as an abstraction, one that we freely castigate, deride, and, all too often, decide it’s okay to kill.

We all know this, but even that knowledge suffers from the same issue. It’s a problem that they have, not us. I don’t do that, they do. I am an honorable person, I wouldn’t harm anyone. That’s what the bad people do. The bad people who are other, who are not me. People who are more like me are better than people who are less like me, because I know I would never shoot someone in the face, no matter how much I disagree with their life philosophy. That’s something bad people do. Where by bad, of course, I mean not like me.

This probably isn’t news, but we certainly act like we’ve forgotten it: No one thinks they are the bad guys. To the people you think are the bad ones? You are the bad one. And the thing about it is, you’re both right. Because you have forgotten, at least from time to time, that that abstraction you hold in your mind is not the reality. It is a representation made up of a whole slew of shorthand that is meant to help you hold the world in your mind. Acting as if the abstraction is the reality is what makes us bad guys. All of us. I am the bad guy. You are. We all do this.

We have a problem.

When I have a category in my head that holds millions of people – say, Muslims – and the news comes on and I hear that a Muslim person has murdered a bunch of people, what is the next step? Is it that someone committed a horrible act? Is it even that one Muslim committed a horrible act? Or is it that Muslims commit horrible acts? That the Islamic faith breeds murderers? That it is my job to speak out against Islam? That Muslims are intrusive murdering fucks who won’t leave me alone and let me live my life in peace?

What if more than one of them do it? Is it okay now? How many have to do it before it’s okay to change my mental abstraction from “people who believe X and Y are Muslim” to “people who believe X and Y are killers” to “Muslims are killers” to “religious people are killers”?

I get how the chain goes and why it’s sometimes difficult to defend the opposite position, particularly if you’re personally affected by situations that seem to lend truth to some or all of the above statements. But, just for a second, try changing “Muslim” to “American”. Are Americans intrusive murdering fucks who won’t leave other people alone and let them live their lives in peace? I bet you a whole lot of people think so. Are they wrong? Or are they guilty of abstracting too hard and forgetting about the actual majority of us who haven’t and probably won’t ever kill anyone at all?

The first step in every chain I can think of that ends in an act of violence is not “I believe in a deity” or “I am a black person” or “I am a man.” It’s “I am not you.” The first step to harming another is making them separate from you. The further removed they get from you, the easier it becomes. The further they are, the less present and real are the consequences. Their pain is as abstract as they are, and we care less and less about them the more different they become.

There are no really easy answers to any of this. We have to make abstractions, I think, at least I haven’t been able to come up with any better way to do things. Our incoming information makes use of yet more abstractions. But I can’t seem to get my head around the notion that perpetuating the abstractions is the way to fix this. I can’t believe that attributing responsibility for any of this to some group or other and deciding they are at fault for the problems we are all facing right now is the way to find solutions.

We are all at fault. We are all responsible.

It’s true that religious extremists kill people. It’s true that atheist extremists kill people. It’s true that political extremists kill people. What is the common factor? Hint: It’s not God.

It’s us.

We have a problem.

Posted in society | Leave a comment

This is what they call a “hell level” in gaming circles

by jenna Posted on March 15, 2010

Big News, Everyone! We are animals who commercialize our animal urges to get Stuff! Did you know that men fuck because they are rampaging sacks of hormones who want to get everyone pregnant? And women fuck to keep men around to protect them from the big scary world and also buy them purses? Oh, and of course we choose mates who complement us genetically so that we can have awesome perfect offspring?

It’s true! That’s why we need books with long cliched titles to tell us that Men and Women Are Different! Because they are! And I have 17,429 studies about monkeys to prove it!

Come on. When is this going to stop being news? When can we move on to the next part? Of course there is a genetic component to choosing sex partners. Of course we evolved certain preferences to ensure propagation of the species. Of course men and women are different. When can we start talking about how men are not only different from women but different from each other? When can we start talking about all the reasons everyone has sex that have nothing to do with love or orgasms? Or that does have to do with love and orgasms? Hey, I’m flexible.

Every morning at school when I’m desperately caffeinating myself awake, I listen to this radio show. I like some of it, and the DJ is entertaining, but it frequently devolves into this oh so irritating “commentary” on gender roles, and it’s the same shit I have to watch on sitcoms and hear in commercials. Men are blundering retards with enormous uncontrollable penises, and women are nurturing and emotional and fabulously intelligent but physically weak so we must harness the penises and use them to give us what we need. Mmm, do I love some sexism with my coffee.

It’s all, “How do I control my man?” and “What are the best ways to spy if I think they are cheating?” and “Men have a man code that precludes us telling our wives what goes on at bachelor parties” as if everyone in the world is still taking part in these cookie cutter, role-based relationships where amused tolerance is the height of success and actual forthright communication is unthinkable.

It’s times like this I really start to understand the pissed off feminists or race columnists that tell newcomers they are sick of giving them Racism 101 classes. I’m getting really sick of Relationship 101.

You guys, it can be better than that. It already is so much more than that, if you bother to look. Even the most basic entry-level relationship is infinitely more complex than this Caveman-meets-Sarcastic-Nurturer model. Let’s level up, already.

Posted in relationships, sex | Leave a comment

KYOO sounds like a radio station

by jenna Posted on October 5, 2009

I’ve decided to take the middle road for now regarding the whole psychiatry vs. psychology thing, by deciding not to decide. I refer to this in my brain as the KYOO plan (keep your options open). I’m going to major in Psychology and minor in Chemistry, which will allow me to be eligible for either med school or grad school. Perhaps I will apply to both and see who takes me, and then decide. In any case, I feel better with that load off my mind.

Of course, this means that I’m staying in my physics class, which has only made me cry four times this week, so it’s improving. It’s maddeningly frustrating, but yesterday I did manage to figure out something by myself that I don’t think I would’ve a month ago, so perhaps all these rumors about it changing your brain are true.

I was telling Chaos last night that all my classes have distinct personalities.

CHEMISTRY: “Hey, remember that math thing you learned in 4th grade? You can still use it!”

ME: “What math thing?”

CHEMISTRY: “You know.”

ME: “Uh…no I don’t.”

CHEMISTRY: “Well, I’m certainly not going to tell you things you of course already know.”

ME: “…”

.

PHYSICS: “Here, just turn your brain sideways and I think everything will be clear.”

ME: “But I don’t think my brain is supposed to do that.”

PHYSICS: “Yeah it is, just turn it. Here, use this fork.”

ME: “But..hey, ow! Wait! STOP IT.”

PHYSICS: “Just relax, you’ll feel much better if we can just…” *YANK*

ME: “OW!”

.

NEUROSCIENCE: “Here, memorize this.” *Hands me a stack of information slightly taller than me.*

ME: “I don’t think I have enough room.”

NEUROSCIENCE: “Sure you do, it’s easy. Just stuff it in there.”

ME: “But it’s 17 times the size of my head.”

NEUROSCIENCE: “Just keep squishing it down, it’ll fit.”

ME: “My head is too small!”

NEUROSCIENCE: “PUSH HARDER.”

.

PSYCHOLOGY: “Hey, you look tired. Want to just sit and chat about brains and sex?”

ME: “YES.”

Posted in academia | Leave a comment