okay
purity narratives
they harm you if you accept them; they harm you if you reject them
what to do instead?
we mentioned this topic a few weeks ago as one where we have something important to say. we do think that's true. we're by no means the first to have said it. we also don't have it particularly composed or structured in our head, so this may be kind of rough. we don't see it said enough in English-speaking online communities, so we're going to try our best anyway.
so, our apologies for bringing the religious dimension into this, and we promise we don't do so with an intent to reduce an entire family of belief systems to one topic, but
purity narratives have this problem which is common to a lot of the more dangerous Christian ideas, which is that they're very deeply embedded at the framing level. it's really easy to "reject" them while actually still living by them and spreading them, because the straightforward negation of it is just the same idea again.
the core of the idea is that if you have drawn a line for yourself about purity - "I won't use anything from an evil megacorp", for example - and you've spent time congratulating yourself on your absolute stance, on how perfect it is, on how big a wall you've built up between your heart and the outside world...
... and then, through circumstances beyond your control, that wall is breached
the idea tells you nothing has any point anymore, the thing you did is worthless, you yourself are now on the outside of the wall
and, therefore, this idea adds, you might as well do all the horrible things
you can find that same sort of resisting-but-not-really in the concept of "temptation", which we also find to be very destructive framing. if you tell yourself you are "tempted" by a thing, you are telling yourself to care about doing the thing, but not actually do it.
even a small amount of meditative practice would show you that your feelings towards the thing get stronger and stronger over time.
"temptation" stories only end one way - giving in. it's implicit in the framing. with every small thought you have about temptation, over however many years, you're moving further along the narrative arc of that story that you decided to tell yourself
but there is another option, which is to find a story you like better, and tell yourself that, instead
we're, you know, Buddhists, we mention that by way of disclosing where we come from with all this. that shouldn't be a surprise to people who know us well, but we don't talk about it a lot in public because we're not very practiced at talking about it, other people explain it all much better than we can. it's important here, though, because Buddhism does have strong counters to the harmful parts of these ideas, and we're going to do our best to explain how to apply those counters
there is a Buddhist concept of imperfection
nothing in this world is isolated from anything else. no person and no thing exists separately from the context that brought it into being, nor from the context that it is surrounded by in the present. we may move past our origins, if we choose to, we may find ways to live that involve no longer being controlled by them, but we have been changed nonetheless
and that ... isn't bad
we spoke of a mental "wall", up-thread. we're being literal about that, as literal as any description of internal mind-stuff can ever be. if you are living by the idea of purity, or by the related idea of temptation, you are going through a conscious act of pushing away the things you reject, over time, and with every small act you are putting another brick on that wall, building a partition between emotional contexts, within yourself.
we're plural, we have some serious dissociative stuff going on. if you hear nothing else of what we're saying, please believe us that we KNOW about mental walls and how they work
when you make a conscious choice to reject a thing, to feel feelings of disgust or hate or fear towards it
those feelings take on a structural role within you. each individual act is small, but if you have the same reaction every time it comes up, over time, that adds up to something
and .... that's a problem. like. we don't think it's viable to structure your self as a castle. it is the fate of castles to fall under siege.
this was a very serious mistake our system made from a young age. in our defense, we picked it up from the world around us and the books we read; it's a very common strategy. we do believe it is a fundamentally mistaken strategy.
we've spent the past fifteen years of our body's life reversing course and working to be something else, and we think we've succeeded about that, about as well as such a profound change ever can succeed within a single lifetime.
we still fall into habits from the old way of thinking, now and then. we've uprooted most of the big ones, but that sort of thing gets into every aspect of a person's life, and there's always small tendrils we hadn't noticed, which we only discover when a specific context brings them up. we'll be dealing with this the rest of our body's life
and THAT'S OKAY
we don't need to have no trace of purity thinking inside us. that would be, uh... doing the thing while we're trying to reject the thing, yeah?
we just need to recognize it when we see it, and know what to do about it. we need to have traced over the emotional paths of accepting our own imperfection, accepting that we are a perpetual work in progress, and then re-grounding ourselves in our choice about who we actually want to be, about what we actually want to do about this situation
we don't reject those feelings. we don't mentally yell at them, we don't tell them, get out, you have no place in us. we don't deny them, we don't say you were never part of us. they were part of us. they are still part of us.
we thank them for trying to help, and then we tell them that it's okay, they can rest now. their vigilance is no longer required. we're safe. we're past that point in our life, we're not in danger anymore.
we know ourselves well enough that we are in no danger of losing ourselves.
and that's really what makes it all work: we've taken the time to study ourselves. we've looked inward, we know what makes us happy and what doesn't and why. we know which paths we don't want to go down, because we've seen where they lead and we know we don't want to be there. we know which paths we do want to go down because we know what they mean to us.
that is not easy work. in fact, it's constant work that we spend much of our life on, in one way or another.
we have strict standards for ourselves, which we hold ourselves to.
with very few exceptions, we wear an N95 face mask everywhere we go - the exceptions are based on our best effort to quantify the risks, to ourselves and the people around us.
we will not back down from that, until and unless the balance of the evidence tells us it's no longer important
there have been a couple times when, for various reasons, that wasn't practical and would have involved forms of conflict we weren't up for. we're not proud of that, but here's the thing
a purity narrative would tell us that wearing a mask has no point anymore, after we've failed to wear it even once. it would, in fact, tell us to spend the rest of our life feeling guilty about that, to the exclusion of doing anything else
we refuse to be controlled by that narrative. we've forgiven ourselves and moved on. we told ourselves that we understand that past choice. we don't agree with it, but we accept that we are mortal and imperfect, that these things are fundamental and that that's just how life works.
the important thing is that by accepting the feelings and moving past them, rather than rejecting them, the structure-of-self that we're gradually building is one in which a single failure doesn't destroy us
everyone will have their own metaphor-of-self for what that actually means; we have ours, but it's kind of personal, and also those things tend to have a strong effect just by hearing them, so we're not going to share it here and now
but it's not a wall. it is very much not a wall.
the habits we repeat, the small choices we make over and over, really do end up defining us in the long run, and that's why narrative structure can be such a powerful thing. if you already know where the story ends, .... is it a place you want to be? if not, you need to tell yourself a different one!
you can't just play out a story you already know front-to-back and expect it to end somewhere else, somewhere different from where it has always ended in all the myriad versions of it you've seen around you in the world
so the counter-stories here are imperfection, non-dualism, all that. a lot could be said about those but it's not our intent to advocate for any specific path, and again we're not actually that good at doing so, anyway. we just want to show that alternative stories do exist, and offer it as an option that all y'all can explore, or can remember about.
the structure of online communication platforms, especially anything with a "reshare" feature, tends to heavily prioritize certain forms of human interaction over others. in particular, every major conflict ends up taking the shape of a reactivity storm, even if some other form would be better for everyone. that SUCKS.
so we particularly feel it's important to know what it means to move past purity narratives - again, not to push them away, but to understand them, fully feel them, and then choose to do something else
because WOW does this world, and this social venue, encourage us very strongly to use purity as the sole tool for everything
you know the old joke, "a vice-grip is the wrong tool for every job"?
purity is the wrong emotional tool for every emotional task. there is nothing it does well.
and yet it tries to do everything, it tries to insert itself into every topic, every moment of uncertainty, every decision, every conflict
humans are not separate from each other. the idea that we are is an illusion. even when we express these thoughts solely to ourselves, in the privacy of our mind, we do so using language, humanity's oldest and grandest invention, the product of billions of individual choices by billions of humans before us over, according to the latest anthropological research, possibly as much as a million years.
stories that tell us to try to be separate are doomed from the outset. reality contradicts them, and therefore that structural weakness will always come to the fore, sooner or later, if you go that route.
this thread is about a lot of things, and we don't want y'all to understand it as narrow in focus. our thoughts on imperfection affect everything in our life. they could affect everything in your life, if you choose to let them, but that's up to you.
it's risky, then, to mention any single inspiration. it could reduce the whole topic in your mind, as a reader, to just that one thing. that would be a mistake
but there is a particular conflict that's playing out this year which made us feel that now is the time to share these thoughts
it's a crossroads that a lot of people are facing right now, not just us, and we just think... whatever choices everyone makes, you deserve to have this perspective available in making them
it's this
we do not reject large language models. we have no interest in large language models.
we do not use them, we have not used them voluntarily and there is no future in which we will. we'll fucking go to trade school for four years and learn to be a machinist instead of a programmer if that's the only way to avoid the fucking things. we don't think it'll come to that, but that's the choice we've made.
but importantly, we refuse to give the idea any power over us.
we refuse to be defined by these things, we refuse the idea that our life from now on is supposed to be about getting angry at them.
we do have a lot of anger about them, about what they're doing to the artistic discipline we love and have spent our life on, but we also understand that they can never take who we are away from us, no matter what happens, and so we are able to move past those feelings.
the anger is the easy part, though, we know how to turn anger into a sustaining force. we're activists, and what that means is that when we see injustice, we do not accept it, we dedicate our lives to fighting it. so the anger is fine
the hard part is the fear. we're afraid that Nazis will kill everyone we love and that this technology, by spreading conflict through every community at once, will help to do that
notice that it's not the application of the technology that scares us. it's fucking useless shit, frankly, and anyone who can't see that is too deep in it. sorry :/
it's the fact that everyone we know is fighting everyone else over it. that is a lasting, serious harm. the way we make each other feel is real, possibly the most real thing there is.
we can't dismiss that fear, because it's well-founded
but there's something else we can do with it. we can tell the fear: we hear you. your goal is to deliver a warning, to tell us what we care about, to tell us what we have to lose. we have received it. we take it seriously, our strategy treats that danger as a priority, we don't know if we'll win but we know we're doing the best we can.
we can thank it, and let it go.
we don't need to deny that the feelings exist. that would be counterproductive. it's important that, whatever process we use, that process involves actually feeling things. otherwise we get a backlog of pent-up feelings that we can only deal with by building that wall higher and higher, and on a scale of decades that wall becomes an entire partitioned-off emotional state, the other side of the wall becomes an entire other person. don't do that to yourselves.
we're not suggesting that any use of purity narratives leads to dissociative memory issues; that would be ridiculous. it's just a thing that can happen, when the stakes are high enough, when it's done consistently over a long enough period of time, when the underlying neurology is predisposed to it, when there's enough pain involved. that's our personal history, probably not yours.
but building that wall isn't a good thing, even if its harms wind up being less than that for you.
you have to feel things, or else you they keep accumulating. no matter how successfully you push them away, the absence of those feelings becomes part of you, part of your structure, and it's a structural weakness.
the way to deal with this sort of thing is to feel it, first, and then once you've fully indulged it, ask yourself what you want to do about it.
we're repeating ourselves, so that tells us it's time to wrap this up. like we said - we're not good at explaining this. that's due to lack of practice; spiritual beliefs are a private thing, and we don't talk about it very much.
there's a whole side thread, about how this relates to queerness, which we didn't go down because we don't know how to weave it into our core point today. you'll have to imagine that for yourselves, if you want it
but if you have one take-away, let it be this
you can refuse to let a thing control you, without denying its existence. this does not mean you have to compromise on what you believe or who you are.
it does not mean you have to admit the thing is good if it isn't. some things are just bad, that's real!
it simply means you have to practice certain emotional tools
and those tools are quite powerful ones, that can really improve your life, if you let them.
please let them. 💜
[the fedi version of this post is the thread at https://adhd.irenes.space/@ireneista/statuses/01M4BYEFK0TH0K3EV8D2MCZ5F7]