My working title for this as a draft was “The Problems of Narrow Focus, and Making the Best of a Bad Situation”, but the title came from a label I created for the post, and serves it much better, in my opinion.
This post will just be a few brief comments about specific episodes from my life.
The first is a friend in high school who thought, because he was focused on welcoming new technology and I was focused on changing people and the planet to be kinder, more caring, and more - dare I say it - loving, that he was living the Robert Kennedy “Some men see things as they are, and say why. I dream of things that never were, and say why not”. As I look back at all the disasters the new tech he was welcoming have brought (misinformation/disinformation, racism and other bigotry plagued AI, use of tech to kill in new ways, doxxing and associated forms of attack, etc), I - with my desire to change people to be better so the tech didn’t matter (i.e., whatever the tech was, it would be used for the betterment of all - and developing new tech would be better welcomed) - was right and he was wrong.
He was complacent about how the tech would be used, and thus was morally complicit in the abuse that tech enabled.
The second is someone I knew decades ago who thought she was “clever” by saying she changed her PJs twice a week (in an era when people in my culture typically wore the same sets of PJs - pyjamas - to bed each night for a week) because the PJs were stored under the pillow and thus not aired, whereas I said hang them up and air them each day. The problem was not so much the difference of approach, however, as that she, driven by a sense of insecurity, then tried to shut me down.
That shutting down of different approaches is part of what enables the continuation of sexism/misogyny, racism/white supremacism, etc - it is not so much that it is harmful in itself (although it is), but that it contributes to a “psycho-social soup” where change for the better is resisted, making people complicit in the perpetuation of abuse - by being complacent about existing abuses, wrongdoings, and shortcomings.
At its worst, this complicity by complacency has enabled centuries of vile personal abuses.
The third is a variation of an attitude I have written about previously, which is lumping all children under the one umbrella - in the case of this example, wrongly assuming all boys have tendencies towards being mischievous or even cruel. At one stage in the film “Lincoln”, the lead character makes a comment about a 16 year old who maimed his horse to avoid fighting in a battle to the effect that: you don’t kill all 16 year old boys for cruelty, as you wouldn’t have any left.
Rubbish.
The noisier, crueller examples gain more attention, but that does NOT mean all boys are mischievous or cruel - some can be quite gentle, caring, kind, and inclusive (and the others can often learn be better).
But tamely going along with that trope makes one complicit in the silencing and/or hiding/making invisible of those who differ from that trope, and thus one is complicit by complacency in suppressing better people.
My next example is from management - although this is largely based on my experience in engineering, where for many decades engineers assumed that because they were good at technical calculations it meant they were also good at human skills such as management.
Again ... rubbish - and self evident rubbish at that.
The skills required in each area are clearly different, but those engineers who meekly went along with the assumption that, as they aged, they should leave doing what they possibly loved and move into a boring, even damaging role “because that’s the way it is” were (a) amathiac, (b) repeating errors I’ve outlined above, and (c) enabling interpersonal abuses as people started trying to manipulate and back stab their way up a hierarchy “because that’s the way it is”.
Their complacency about their life path makes them complicit in both inadequate or even incompetent management, and abusive behaviour.
(I think a friend and I who said no to that career path in the 1980s may have been some of the first resistors to that assumption in this neck of the woods.)
Finally, and related to the previous example, those who assume politics is about power, not service. To get elected you do have to be (a) noticed by voters (name recognition, etc), and then (b) persuaded that you are a better choice than others, but how you do that is key, as is being true to your ideals once you are elected.
The quest for power can be a major problem: I have seen good people think they have to behave in stereotypical ways to gain power, and two political parties (neither of which I am, or have ever been, a member of) lose their way on this and stop listening to people they should (and one no longer exists because of that).
In interpersonal actions, I have seen motions reworded from human rights based appeals into attack motions.
Those people have accepted the status quo, and thus perpetuated it.
But I have also seen people working for change, challenging the status quo, and behaving in a way that would make the character Jed Bartlet from “The West Wing” proud.
But this issue also applies to those outside political parties.
The conservative press is currently beating the drums against change to get rid of negative gearing - because keeping it is in the interest of the rich who those media outlets seems to serve.
Those people who have been complicit in keeping or wanting negative gearing have also been complicit in creating the housing crisis that has boosted homelessness and caused largely untold human suffering.
They complacent compliance with a trope that they also could be rich has made them complicit in an abuse of human rights that attacked the vast majority of Australians ...
Our actions can have consequences beyond our immediacy; it therefore behoves us to think a little, and make sure we are not being complicit by complacency in problems elsewhere ...
Possible flaws
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.
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Note that I am cutting back on aspects of my posts - see here.
(Gnwmythr is pronounced new-MYTH-ear)
Remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, to mind our Mӕgan, and to acknowledge that all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering” (just as binary gendered [men’s and women’s] sporting teams are either both given the gender descriptor, or neither).Copyright © Kayleen White 2007-2024 NO AI
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