I don’t write much on here. But every once in a while I have a desire to collect my thoughts.
Over the past couple weeks the idea of how to be effective in dealing with oppression has come up in a couple different ways in my life, through a couple different partners. It also comes up a lot online, on Facebook I see a lot of anger out there, often justified anger, but anger that to me feels directed in suboptimal ways.
I think it’s natural to feel a sense of powerlessness in this world. To take myself as an example, I care a lot about species extinction. The ongoing mass extinction caused by global climate change and other environmental disasters is a huge problem, and one that is largely outside of my control. Realistically, how many bottles I recycle or eating less meat isn’t going to be outcome determinative on this one. A lot of problems are like this, where the individual action of one person is insufficient to change a system that’s causing problems.
So what’s left for a person to do?
One answer might be nothing. Accept that you can’t change the world, and just try to enjoy yourself while it crumbles. But while I think this is a logically coherent answer, I think for a lot of people it’s infeasible. It’s impossible to just turn off the part of yourself that cares about these things.
The alternative I feel like is working towards building movements. Interacting with people who interact with people, and so on, that create change on a larger scale.
And for me, it seems like the first place to work on movement building is oneself. A lot of people come into activism with problems. Because many of us have suffered, we have empathy for those who suffer, and that can be a great strength. But the pain we’ve gone through can also be a weakness. Pain can leave people irritable, easily triggered by people that disagree with them, and prone to black and white thinking. I’ve dealt with all of these problems myself.
It can also be easy to develop a negatively biased world view, because often the world is pretty terrible. That makes it all the more important to not see it as worse than it really is.
The self in relation to others though is a particularly important nexus of change though, because people place more weight on actions that cause them to feel negative emotions than positive ones. If I snap at a man and call him as an oppressor, or dismiss his ideas by telling him to “check his privilege” that’s damage that’s not easily undone. Fairly or not, he will often judge me for that one moment of weakness and judge the issue I’m talking about similarly. He won’t necessarily understand that comes from a place of pain from repeated abuse from a subset of men.
So I feel like the importance of building love, tolerance, and understanding, not just for other oppressed members, but also for people who may not immediately understand our cause is undervalued.
After the self, building relationships seems next most important. Building strong bonds that help insulate ourselves from individual stressors, triggers etc. and build our ability to effectively share ideas, and help others build themselves up and their capacity to influence others in a positive way.
It may sound really sappy, but I think building love is the ultimate way to build a movement, to change the world, and it’s something that is so fundamental that it’s often not talked about or thought about as much as it should be.
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