The lesser of two evils is a false dichotomy
What I really think about forest fires and owning your shit, politically
I got scolded on Instagram last week. That’s not a new occurrence: I like to wreak havoc on the story, and sometimes people like it and sometimes they really don’t. This time, I reposted a few slides from Clementine Morrigan along with some of my own thoughts. The gist of the original post was that Kamala Harris doesn’t represent a better way forward for the United States than Trump does. I talked a bit about how there are so many other options available to us.
So of course I got a lot of people in my DMs saying all the normal progressive talking points as if I had never heard them before, as if the dominant Leftish media narratives were brand new thoughts they were just having. Kamala cares about trans kids and tRump wants to kill them. If I don’t want tRump or Kamala, who do I want, Jill Stein? Third party candidates aren’t viable in this country. Well of course none of us wants these two options, but these are the options we do have. Would a violent uprising be better, huh?
If you think you are reading some anger here, well, you’re right. I don’t like being talked to this way. I don’t like it when people assume that I have a very high level of ignorance when they talk to me. I don’t like it when people don’t engage honestly or curiously with the things I am actually saying and instead engage with what they imagine I am saying. And it’s true, of course, that the interactions described above all happened on social media, the ragiest and least level-headedness-inducing interfaces of all. But these interactions mirror ones I’ve have many times in real life. When people hit me with this stuff in real life (and they do, very frequently; these are Liberal orthodoxies oft repeated) I tend to just be pretty quiet. I’m generally not really prepared to fend off the onslaught of defensiveness, dismissal, and condescension that saying what I actually think will reap. I’m not interested in a debate most of the time, especially one where my interlocutor is implicitly setting the terms of the debate with no self-awareness of that fact. But I’m getting really sick of smiling and nodding along when people talk about how voting is the best way to use our voice and well what we have isn’t perfect but we should all do our part by writing our senators or hitting the pavement and knocking on doors1.
So here’s what I really think.
I don’t think we are locked into choosing between the lesser of two evils ad infinitum. “The two evils” is a false dichotomy. There are so many other options available to us. And no, I’m not talking about Jill Stein (or even Marianne Williamson, if you can believe it). I’m talking about an entirely different set of premises entirely.
I think it’s evident that the American empire is falling. It’s at once brittle and hulking; it’s not built to be responsively flexible to the big changes that are happening in the world. I think the best use of my time and energy is on imagining, drafting, and living what is next. I also think that empire is evil, period. I’m not interested in taking actions to preserve it. The fall of empire is welcome, even as chaos will certainly ensue (and has already!). The beautiful thing is that we get to choose what happens amid that chaos.
There’s one progressive talking point that that I’ll engage here. It often gets raised as a dismissal of more radical thought, but I’ll engage it in good faith. That talking point is what about the people who are suffering now? They can’t wait around for the revolution. To that I say, good point. To help people in acute need right now, it’s good to do whatever we can. That’s why I don’t reject electoral politics out of hand. I don’t think direct action or mutual aid on their own can help everyone, let alone cut to the root of people’s suffering and need. I think that good policy can help more people more deeply. Of course, the ability to implement policy depends on there being an apparatus to implement it. In the United States, that apparatus (to the extent it was ever effectual) has been falling apart for many decades now. I also believe that it is possible to structure collective living in such a way that we can outgrow the need for hegemon-implemented policy, but that’s a long way off. It’s good that there are people focusing on solutions grounded in the way things actually are right now. That will be true as the empire continues to fall. I also know that my skillset is best applied elsewhere; I’m not practical-minded enough for triage.
I’ve been thinking about forest fires2. (There’s a lot of them happening on this continent these days.) After forest fires, new growth springs forth from seeds that have been planted before the fire. Sometimes the ideal conditions for those seeds to germinate are created by the nutrient-rich ashes after the fire. I think that we are at a stage in the United states where it pays to be thinking seriously about what seeds we are sowing. These seeds are ideological and spiritual ones, yes, but primarily they are seeds of lifestyle and relationship. More some other time on what seeds I think we would do well to be planting.
I think I have an easy time optimistically imagining a future beyond the existence United States because I have been so failed and hurt by institutions and architecture that are in place ostensibly for my benefit. Public school, psychiatry, the justice system, the nuclear family, capitalism… all these and more have done me so dirty so repeatedly for so long that it’s internally logical to conclude fuck a system of domination. (Yes, I am taking it for granted here that the government of the United States is a system of domination.) It might be seen as navel-gazing for me to constantly be coming back to my own biography to explain why I believe what I believe. Maybe so. But I actually think people would be well-served by looking at their personal histories and emotions in relationship to their belief systems.3 I think that people who come from overeducated Liberal places and parents are particularly vulnerable to believing that their views are just the products of carefully and objectively appraising the world as it is. I think that leads to a kind of epistemological arrogance that is very pervasive and very dangerous. If you only look at the Facts as cool-headedly has I have, you would reach the same self-evident conclusion! That kind of thing. It’s never stated outright, but it’s one or maybe two layers of subtext down in a lot of things that are said by a lot of rich Liberals4. When your own emotions and experiences can easily hide within your epistemological framework, it’s easy to believe that your emotions are not playing a part in your thinking, beliefs, and comportment. Maybe it’s even easy to believe that you don’t have them at all.
There’s a trendy, funhouse mirror version of the kind of self-interrogation I’m describing. It’s checking your privilege and unlearning biases and decentering [insert identity marker]5, things like this. Paradoxically, I think that this kind of activity is not self-centered enough and as such is pretty limited in its political utility. For one thing, these activities hinge upon belief in necessarily nebulous concepts like privilege and dubious concepts like whiteness. For another thing, this kind of activity is shame-based. (Check your privilege so you can exorcise it. Unlearn your bias so you can be pure and demure. Decenter your [oppressor identity] so you can crawl toward being less oppressive to the marginalized.) The kind of examination I’m talking about is something more like toddler-like open curiosity about things that are actually observable. Why do you believe what you believe? And why do you believe that? But why? But why?
Open curiosity is generative. It’s also fractal and circuitous, like a Wikipedia binge writ large. Being curious without bounds means you can find all kinds of options that had been unthinkable just a minute ago. And I think that’s what it will take to build a viable future that looks very different from the present. A future that’s good for people and others will be one where people are highly adaptable, highly emotionally, relationally, and socially intelligent, and where people substantially (on a cultural level) give a shit about creation. I know that future is possible. I don’t know what it could look like, none of us really does yet. I just know this Kamala versus Trump shit is not the way there.
I don’t mean to hate on knocking on doors. I have mad respect for people who do stuff like that. Canvassing can be bitter and thankless work; I know this from watching my sister and other dear ones do it. I just deeply don’t believe canvassing and phone banking, etc. compose the One True Way to be political.
I don’t think the United States will fall in a fire-like, one-and-done-event. I think it’ll fall like it’s been falling, slowly squeezed to death by its own austerity measures, bled to death by its military spending, and incrementally poisoned by its own contempt for human life. But all models and metaphors have limitations. Instead of a fire you could think of a nurse log instead if you want to. You’re picking up what I’m putting down.
Shoutout once again to Dr. Karen Maroda’s book The Analyst’s Vulnerability: Impact On Theory and Practice. The thesis is basically that psychoanalysts become analysts for reasons having to do with their roles of outsized emotional responsibility in their family of origin, and that these reasons are usually out of awareness. Further, the role(s) (and the idiosyncracies thereof) that the analyst played as a child in her family of origin have a large impact on the theoretical orientation and favored interventions of the adult analyst. I think some version of this framework can be applied to professions outside of psychoanalysis, even if just for a thought experiment. It’s fun to imaginally try it on realms and professions that are traditionally not at all psychologically-minded. What childhood factors do software engineers all have in common?
And their offspring. On a related note, I think this way of thinking accounts for a lot of the children of rich Liberals who become Marxists: they see that the world is fucked (materially!), so instead of engaging in the kind of cognitive dissonance that Liberals need to do to maintain a belief that the US government is good but has bad apples, they pick up an even more objective alternative.
Read Phil Christman’s essay “How To Be White” from his collection How To Be Normal immediately. And while you’re at it, read the rest of the collection.