Something I’ve been doing some research into of late is autism, and I found myself relating quite strongly to a comment by one person on YouTube about being uncertain how to behave as a young person, and trying to work out - more or less - “how to behave” (incidentally, I thoroughly recommend Jessica Wildfire’s “Unlikable: A Guide for Different Minds”).
I’ve touched on my struggles to comprehend the inanities and strangeness of normative social rules for behaviour elsewhere (and that will be very prominent in my autobiography, if it is ever completed), and am struck by the learning that society as a whole can get from minorities and those who dwell on society’s fringes - whether neurodivergent, challenging of gender norms, or those radicals who believe in peace, justice, and equity - you know, anti-racist etc campaigners like Nelson Mandela, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, and the people listed on my heroixes page.
In my opinion, much of what passes for “normative social conditioning” is a lie - the stated/claimed reasons/justifications are not the truth: it is actually about either ways of behaving that make life easier for others - which is , in some circumstances, valid or perpetuation of patriarchy and other elitist suppression and control measures - which is NEVER valid.
The battles I had in the 1980s against the one manager in my work experience who was, in my opinion, psychopathic were examples of that.
He was unsettled by my failure to toe the “unwritten rule” (in his mind) that the new (neoliberal) way he was introducing was the way things were supposed to be - again, in his mind.
Some of this was also formalising the perpetuation of past abuses. As an example, he wrote a memo about expectations of overtime as one climbed the hierarchy. I converted the pays and expectations to hourly rates, which clearly showed the expectations effectively reduced the hourly rate, and wrote a memo back to him thanking for his offer and declining to accept the offered reduction in hourly rate.
He was not pleased.
And he didn’t know how to respond.
He had grown up in a world where one did what one’s olders (not elders! - parents, bosses, etc) said without question - which is how abuses such as bullying & other abuses of new apprentices etc were perpetuated (a perspective I was aware of at the time, incidentally).
Now, since then we have actually got evidence (finally!!!) of the harm done to health by long hours and high stress in the workplace (e.g., here), but at that time those of us who were trying to make the world a better place (i.e., activists) had to do so on the basis of principles, not objective evidence of what was obvious.
I’d like to give one more example of that boss not knowing how to respond.
In the late 1980s I actually quit one Sunday evening so I could start working as a contractor - which would have been more money for me (and quite bad in the long term, looking back from the other end of my career), and he rang to convince me not to quit. I agreed (giving me about eight hours of unrecorded unemployment :) ).
A few years later, however, he asked me to leave permanent employment and start to work as a contractor.
Under the changed circumstances those few years later, me working as a contractor was far worse for me and far better for the company (under various tax changes).
I challenged him as to when he was lying: “you can’t say it is better for me to work as a contractor now and also that it was better for me not to work as a contractor back then: which time were you lying - then, or now?”
He lacked the honesty, and possibly the awareness, to admit that circumstances had changed: he expected me to be a mindless puppet and humbly and gratefully allow myself to be <expletive deleted>.
(I took pity on him after a minute or so and suggested “Or are you saying circumstances have changed” - and it was the speed and evident relief in his facial expression and body language that told me he didn’t have that basic awareness.)
He was bad enough - and the formal reprimand he had put on my record was later quietly removed by our HR department over its manifest wrongness - but what really got my goat was the attitude of colleagues who did buy into this stuff - as exemplified by some who had been sent to do his dirty work and - as the euphemism for neoliberalism goes - “have the hard conversations”.
(I just had a thought: maybe that was also his inadvertent acknowledgement of my having bested him too many times?)
Not all colleagues became willing sock puppets - one older colleague joined with me in refusing to go into the expected sequence of promotions in management, choosing instead to stay in technical roles at a time when there was no consideration of that being a valid career choice. (A year or so later, a formal structure was developed where people could choose either to be technical, or management - and we now have a few career pathways as the new, healthy norm.)
Those who became willing enablers and puppets, however, were disappointing - and their actions ended a few friendships/potential friendships.
Those other willing enablers and puppets are one of, if not the, biggest of the unacknowledged problems of the perpetuation of wrong doing in the world at the moment.
Consider the following:
“The oppressor would not be so strong if he did not have accomplices among the oppressed”.
Simone de Beauvoir, “The Ethics of Ambiguity”
the problem of “anticipatory compliance” that Timothy Snyder wrote about in "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century" (pub. Vintage Publishing, 2017, ISBN 978-1847924889 [Amazon]), and that I have touched on in the following posts:
- https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2019/04/life-cycles-age-business-world-and.html;
- https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2019/06/giving-up-power-and-anticipatory.html;
- https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-problem-of-giving-in-to-evil.html;
- https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2019/04/on-leadership.html;
- https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2019/05/what-im-currently-reading.html;
and, while I’m at it:
- https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2020/05/on-dentists-and-professionalism.html; and
- https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2021/03/p-and-other-miscellaneous-thoughts-on.html.
There may be limits to the activism you undertake (for instance, having dependent may make going to protests where you might be arrested problematic), but I consider it well worth resisting evil in whatever ways you can, where and when you can, and, I submit to you, Dear Reader, that not being an active enabler is one such choice to very deliberatively consider.
Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider:
- there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”;
- I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.
If you appreciated this post, please consider promoting it - there are some links below, and there’s also Instagram and Mastodon.
Vote Yes for the Voice in Australia - see this backgrounder.
Finally, remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, and to mind our Mӕgan.
