Welcome to Asher’s near-daily ramble.
Today, we’re not making any mistakes about my philosophy or its rigor.
Neither sudden course alterations, changes of heart, nor hateful obsessions have colored my moral vision. It has been the same for 30 years, only further refined. And this is what it has always sounded like, to the chagrin of many:
The victimization stance and refusal to take responsibility are neither indications of depth nor indications of suffering, but they are certainly a form of avoidance. Justice is looking at reality for what it is, rather than what we wish it would be, and maturity means coming to grips with this.
The rational mind hates suffering. Taking responsibility for freedom implies making amends. If one has failed to make amends despite the aggrieved’s attempts, the obligation to do so still persists, and other alternatives must be taken. Securing amends requires no more consent than the initial injury. It is not something you can metaphysically divest from yourself by the flick of a wrist or a snarky post.
If one tries to evade such an attempt through deception or concealment, the truth must be stated outright. If one has tried to evade it through an invasion of privacy, then the restoration will take place within this domain. When a problem is recognized as relevant, repair is appropriately carried out in light of its relevance.
One can neither change the past nor how it has affected the injured, which remains always paramount in the face of manufactured claims, distorted accusations, misreadings, misunderstandings, misrememberings, shifting intentions, and contradictory, yet revealing, excuses.
Restitution is the act of making amends for a wrong by taking concrete steps to repair the harm. If opportunities for restitution are proactively trampled on at every turn, so that others may admire the tread, then restitution as an act of compassion becomes impossible by choice.
Sympathy and forgiveness are not equivalent. Suffering is not evidence of innocence. Hardship does not alter the principle of causality. To demand exemption from responsibility on the grounds of hardship is to nullify the very basis of justice; the account would already be balanced. It is not. To seek exemption at the moment of reckoning is to demand sacrifice—the victim’s—so that the perpetrator may remain unchanged.
This common demand is extremely insulting: it is a justification that puts the aggressor’s needs above yours. This must be challenged in every instance, as it is adopted forever. The apology that follows is a second offense and contributes to the original injury.
Respect, gratitude, equality, and good intentions can never be found in the process of apologizing. These things only emerge in the initial choice to refrain from endangering others. This is where the judgment lies.
If an individual habitually converts every consequence into suffering, every criticism into persecution, and every demand for responsibility into an accusation of cruelty, that individual abdicates the possibility of rational discourse. Such a person is not to be rescued.
Such individuals constitute breaches of one’s life’s structure. The proper response is to seal them.
My position remains unchanged. The notion that anyone could exert enough influence over me to alter it is not only unfounded, but deeply misguided. This is what I brought to the relationship when my husband and I first met. This is what I brought to my friendships growing up, and what I continue to bring as an adult. To assert that no one favors this, or that everyone finds it inappropriate, is just as self-deluding as stating that you know that everyone hates you.
It feels solid emotionally, but when confronted with the limits of one’s knowledge and experience, it falls very short. And the application of this observation is the aim of rational discourse and mental health treatment.
Mental health conditions cannot be treated with a relativistic air, one where societal condemnation and fear lurk past the boundaries of the safe space that must never be crossed. Follow-through and healing are not found in constant indulgence as a means of “working through trauma,” any more than you can be sober while still drinking.
Treatment relies on a deep respect for the legitimacy of the individual’s subjective experience while working towards a functional correspondence to the shared reality in which they have no choice but to operate. As that shared reality ceases to be relevant, so then does the dysfunction. You can’t deal with any problem if the problem isn’t really a problem. It just doesn’t work.
I’m not a mental health advocate. I’m just a lifelong patient with a disability that makes me fall short in very nuanced ways that I must always account for moving forward. And these shortcomings aren’t everyday occurrences, but ones that may occur once in a decade, as this one did.
But I present up front that I have a condition, much like the near-identical comparison in this situation: Jessica/Poppy. Across the board, we are very much the same, save for two aspects: our philosophy and our gender. And yet, despite informing everyone that I have the same disorder, that I am disturbed, that it doesn’t make me special, that conflict is more of a problem than with many others who choose to not pursue it at any cost, and that any expectation for me to conform or sacrifice will be met with disappointed, I am not to be believed, validated, or considered.
Instead, I am met with, “I don’t know why anyone would announce that they want to be treated as if they are insane,” which is hyperbole (but not mine) and dismissive. There are very direct reasons for almost all of my actions, and if I’m asked , I can usually tell you at the drop of a hat.
I know why I do everything I do, and everyone in my life, including healthcare professionals, can attest to this. More than one psychiatrist has called me a dream patient because of this ability. The reason I tell people to be fully aware of these issues is not for pity, not for cred, not as bravado, and definitely not for attention. It is done in the hopes that people will treat me fairly in light of these shortcomings, and so that they can make fully informed choices when entering into any relationship with me.
But, still, when I’m disbelieved due to myriad factors that are always irrelevant to me, I am blamed while near identical versions of my identity are cast against me as injured for the same reasons I am injured. This asymmetry is the hallmark of abuse.
I have written at great length about these asymmetries, of which there are dozens, but it was all erased from the platform it was on. It currently remains difficult to access or piece together, but it’s there.
And why did I do that? Because I wanted to turn my hate-boner into a philosophical discussion where I can remove myself and be a smug analyst?
Well, no, I’m not the one who does that; it’s not my style of personal defense, given all the costs that come with it. Your mileage may vary.
I wrote all those hundreds of posts, about 8,000+ in eight months, which, wow… to highlight everything I observed was unfair about my situation. Hundreds of them dealt with the everyday nuances of perceived reactions to a very real grievance that was being actively ignored. A grievance whose attempts at collection do not require consent of the other party, though I can’t enforce it and don’t want to. They go through periods of various asymmetrical aspects, all of which are on full display now.
One of these was the idea of “maximum benefit of the doubt.” Many individuals make pleas for the maximum benefit of the doubt when they do anything and everything, always in isolation from each other. I do not do this. But it is very believable when someone who constantly calls for it accuses me of “wanting” maximum benefit of the doubt when I clearly won’t give it to others.
I never wanted this. I don’t need it. If I needed it, I’d ask for it. I haven’t.
It’s really that simple.
There is something I don’t believe we have sufficiently dealt with in the discourse surrounding interpersonal and social abuse. It seems there is so much focus on avoiding it, detecting it, and fighting back against it, as people charge into moral battles armed with ethereal forces present only in their minds.
This needlessly righteous view is so individualistic that it’s limiting. It’s not that we must care for others, but that we must pay attention beyond our own imagined narrative that we shape for ourselves, one we’re told to be the hero of, as if that’s self-esteem.
Abuse doesn’t only manifest in direct actions towards someone. Manipulation isn’t only present between two people, one-on-one, in isolated instances. While triangulation and poisoning the well are examples of third-party involvement, they remain oriented toward direct interaction between two people, limiting their scope.
But I have always been aware of a much larger scope, and it’s been extremely eye-opening and frustrating to see how little credit it gets over these last 17 months of socioemotional torture.
There is also the manipulation and abuse that occur when, in our day and age of selling ourselves on camera to everyone, including our friends, we turn to the ever-present audience. In times past, this required talking to an actual group of people, and did exist in obscure fashions across message boards and chat rooms. Today, it is in a full renaissance as people use cameras more and more to control their narratives.
Which, incidentally, is one of the core reasons access to and use of such devices is being heavily regulated. Control of our own lives can be very dangerous, both for others, for those who enforce the rules, and for ourselves.
When someone broadcasts a social media post, or an intimate camera-facing video, or whatever else, they are communicating to an unseen public audience, and in that communication, there also lies manipulations. And they are small, subtle, and seemingly innocuous, which makes them nearly undetectable in the hands of a skilled communicator who studies them.
For example, the phrase I just talked about: “they want maximum benefit of the doubt while affording no one else the same.”
I, of all people, apparently, wrote this exact same sentiment repeatedly at least 9-10 months ago, and yet it surfaces again, but not by my keyboard.
When I wrote it, it was because the person I was talking about would literally demand, in their own words, the “maximum benefit of the doubt.” And that’s usually a clean assumption, one would think, but it isn’t. This is also why I try to point to examples of things happening, which always produces verbose texts.
They’re not as exciting, but they’re extremely accurate.
But likewise, if someone appears to be trustworthy or in a position to know the truth, when they say the same phrase, “they want maximum benefit of the doubt while affording no on else the same,” much like me—or worse, “they demand maximum benefit of the doubt while giving no on else any” which heightens it emotionally—it implies that the other person actually asked for it.
But, in my case, I never did!
Because it’s so implicit in the language, it’s usually missed or glossed over. Not doing so requires an uncomfortable challenge. One must go out of their way to ask, “Did they actually say or do that exactly?” which, unsurprisingly, I ask a lot.
Likewise, when someone says, “they refused,” it implies that the other person actually refused. The verbs used indicate the activities off-screen, and so, with careful choice, they can suggest a character of events that weren’t there. “Refused” requires being asked, not simply taking it down after being shamed.
I can say quite confidently, from indirect experience, that to the minds of people who operate very much by shame, this may seem like a refusal, and so they may use that word, but the reality is that a request must actually be made for someone to refuse it.
One of my methods of social inference is to pay attention to the words used to describe things that happened elsewhere, and then pay very close attention to what is being implied, so much so that I construct the possible scenario in my mind. I do this with every utterance, but this one quickly results in an off-screen narrative that starts to align, or never quite aligns. Both of these observations act as barometers for the truth.
Other people rightfully call these insinuations; however, I have recently observed that term used in exactly the same way. What’s being claimed as insinuation was never insinuated. It’s a clear statement of fact, which disqualifies insinuation by definition.
When statements of fact off-screen are described as insinuations to a disproportionately wide audience elsewhere, it should be a clear sign of narrative abuse. Unfortunately, vilification usually discourages those who may have the most stake in the situation from engaging in the process of checking or asking the questions I tend to ask.
It goes similarly for others’ intentions, implied or otherwise, especially regarding their position. Manipulative abusers can transform a legitimate grievance into something ridiculous simply by a few choice words that suggest a different scenario off-screen. The damage and false reality this fosters is amplified when they can say it not just to 3 or 5 people at a time, but to hundreds, even millions of people, from the moment they post it to years later.
This seems very overlooked to me. It hasn’t been very long that any one of us can creepily turn towards an ever-present audience, as if our friends are some sort of investment in support that we can call upon to… well, craft a compelling narrative with us. What I just described is narrative abuse, and so far, it remains unseen in most people’s eyes because we’ve become so accustomed to the warping of social reality our phones have pushed.
It’s time, however, that it be seen for what it is, and how the very nature of these warped mechanisms disqualifies certain activities from ever being practiced ethically. I will be writing more on this in the future.