Part 5: In which I attempt to summarize a strategy I don’t personally endorse, and then complain about it

Now comes the part where I start trying to tie it all together. This section is about clarifying just what, exactly, I think underlies the decisions and behavior of Alexis et al, and the next (and final) section is about proposing alternatives.

That makes this the most dangerous part of this essay. As I tried to acknowledge in the section title, I am fully aware that I’m about to attempt something very difficult, which is to correctly and charitably summarize a worldview that I personally think is wrongheaded (a worldview which I’m calling social ownership of the micro). Please be vigilantly on the lookout for what you think are my mistakes and biases; please hold on to some uncertainty about whether they actually are mistakes and biases.

Given all of that, here’s roughly how I think Alexis et al would describe what it is that they’re doing:

Social ownership of the micro

Greetings, person-who-wants-to-be-a-good-person. We’re glad you’re here. There are a few things you need to know about life as a human. First off, privilege is a thing that exists, and we don’t just mean in terms of race and wealth. When you take into account stuff like neurodiversity and the wide space of disease and disability and the social contexts people grow up in and so on and so forth, there are a lot of ways that a person can be weakened or disadvantaged that other people might not notice or know about or know to validate. Second, every life has moral weight and value. Sure, some people are better than others in a utilitarian sense. But pain is pain no matter who’s feeling it, suffering is bad for everyone, and to the greatest extent possible given tradeoffs, it’s important to watch out for and try to help everyone, not just those who are easy to help or those who seem to deserve it on the surface. Third, there are bad things in life that are corrosive. Abuse tends to be cumulative rather than one-and-done; racism and sexism and classism and homophobia are often more like the death of a thousand cuts than like a gunshot wound; a person who’s got two jobs and three kids and forty dollars in their checking account is going to be experiencing levels of stress and anxiety that will profoundly impact their health, long term, and that’s just going to make the binds they’re stuck in worse. In general, there’s a downward spiral toward an all-is-hopeless attractor, and as a result the people who are most in need of a break are often the least likely to get one. What this means is that, as a person-who-wants-to-be-a-good-person, there are a couple of very simple operations you can run that will help make the world around you a much better place. First, pay attention. Notice the impact of your lifestyle and your actions on other people, and don’t assume that they’ll always just come right out and tell you. Often, you’ll have to work hard to create conditions of safety, and even then you’ll want to actively check in with people rather than thinking that silence is consent and no news is good news. You’d be surprised at how much people will bear without complaint, especially if past experience has trained them that they’ll be ignored (or punished!) if they speak up. Second, take action. When you discover that your actions are creating negative impact on other people, don’t just brush them off with empty words. Put your money where your mouth is—especially if you have extra flexibility as a result of personal privilege. A little bit of conscious effort on your part can often prevent or ameliorate repeated and cumulative damage to someone else. As a concrete example, try dropping the “your mom” jokes, and replace them with something gender-neutral and more sensitive to family issues, like saying “just like my prom night.” What we’re looking to create here is a culture of compassion, communication, and accommodation, and it starts with those of us who have spare resources putting forth effort commensurate with our privilege. The downtrodden among us need us to reach further than halfway—they don’t have the wiggle room to take chances, and they don’t have reason to trust, so they’re not going to reach out by default. They’ve been burned before, and they can’t afford to get burned again. That means that if you want to help, you’ve got to live this attitude, at all times—it has to be evident, provable, and reliable. People have got to be able to see your care, your openness to feedback, and your willingness to change, which means having them front and center in your own life and unashamedly endorsing and rewarding them in your social circles. The upward spiral starts with you.

Thus, Alexis is unwilling to participate in a conversational paradigm which might be coercive to those people who are both most sensitive to that coercion and also least able to muster the courage to object.

Similarly, Cameron is eager to update their social media policy without waiting on an explicit ask that is unlikely to come from those most harmed. Elliott is advocating on behalf of strangers who are probably not going to speak up, themselves. Harley wants Ira to take seriously the possibility that Ira’s emotional needs, when combined with Harley’s own care, might add up to something like covert emotional blackmail. Kelly wants the broader culture to start caring about the personal sovereignty of autistic kids, and is taking up the mantle because autistic kids are extremely unlikely to be able to advocate for themselves.

There’s a trend here toward dignifying small experiences (because they might be cumulative or predictive). There’s a trend here toward callout culture (because those in harm’s way often can’t advocate on their own behalf, and people often don’t notice their own transgressions). There’s a trend here toward increasing personal responsibility in the form of a continuous expansion of one’s own personal rule set—what you do and don’t say, what you can and can’t do, what sorts of behavior you will and won’t allow from your peers.

And all of this is well-intentioned, and all of it paves the road to hell.

For me, the clearest example of where this goes wrong is in the second vignette—the conversation between Cameron and Dallas over the Facebook post. When I put myself in Dallas’s shoes, what I imagine saying to Cameron goes something like this:

Look. I see you trying to take some sort of responsibility for the little bit of distress that I experienced, and I appreciate the gesture. But do you see how, if we both run that program, we’re going to end up screwed? Because you’re responding as if my grumps about your picture are your fault, and in response, you’re significantly contorting your behavior to avoid causing similar distress in the future. But if I respond to that as if it’s my fault, then I end up having a symmetrical responsibility to contort my behavior to avoid giving you similar stimuli in the future. In other words, I’m going to have to change the way that I post comments and frowny-faces on Facebook, lest one of my comments be misinterpreted as an implicit request for drastic change that you feel morally obligated to meet. And so now your contortion of yourself has caused me to contort myself, and now we’re both spending a ton of mental resources trying to model and predict the other person, and doing a bunch of costly pre-emptive moves based on those predictions to avoid causing the other person distress. Even worse, your model of me now has to include the fact that I’m modeling you, and my model of you has to take into account your modeling of me modeling you, and so forth. Worst of all, we’re now communicating less clearly and less frequently, because we’re both gun-shy about the communication itself somehow crossing the line into violence. This has to stop!

By pushing for social ownership of the micro, I claim that Cameron is setting up a dynamic whereby people will try to take responsibility for things they cannot possibly predict with sufficient resolution, meaning that all of the well-meaning people will inevitably tie themselves in knots and ultimately end up too paralyzed to move.

The same dynamic is present in the other vignettes. Alexis, for instance, wanted to know whether Blake wanted to end the conversation, but was too constrained by a desire not to constrain to just come out and ask.* If Blake adopted a similar stance, Blake would be too unwilling to cut Alexis off to be honest about wanting the conversation to end. As long as both people see themselves as possessed of privilege and spare resources, and therefore morally obligated (or at least encouraged) to take costs onto themselves for the other’s imagined benefit, they’re both going to be stealing agency and personhood from the very person they’re trying to help—by making unilateral decisions about what info and choices they’ll even allow the other person to be aware of. There’s a Broken We, here—an ironic one, since in trying to proactively care for Blake, Alexis has actually reduced their ability to collaborate and connect.

*There’s also guess culture vs. ask/tell culture stuff in there, but this is part of the reason why I strongly prefer and generally advocate for ask/tell culture.

Similarly, Harley is chafing under Ira’s micro; Harley either feels threatened by Ira’s potential sadness (if the teddy bear is rejected) or responsible for preventing it in the first place. If Ira adopted a similar paradigm, Ira would also have felt constrained, and would never have offered the bear in the first place, despite both a) wanting to, and b) thinking that Harley’s life would probably be improved by it. In the social ownership paradigm, “probably” is not enough—the elevated focus on avoiding the “tail risk” of negative micro reduces social safety, encourages self-doubt and anxiety, and twists ordinary decisionmaking processes toward inaction and paralysis (since “nothing” is seen as preferable to “small hurts”).

Part of the issue is that social ownership of the micro relies on something akin to equality-of-outcome rather than equality-of-treatment. Success in the social ownership paradigm is defined by whether or not other people actually avoid negative micro, and not by your own personal effort or integrity or adherence to social norms. That’s very, very different from a framework like NVC, which has similar motivations and intentions but describes a process to follow rather than a benchmark to achieve. In NVC, your locus of control as a person-who-wants-to-be-a-good-person is internal—are you doing the right things? Approaching conversations with the right mindset? When the micro is socially owned, the locus of control is external, and your sense of progress or self-worth is subject to chance and unfairness and human capriciousness and you can be drained dry via a sort of Hufflepuff trap that morally obligates you to continuously throw resources into a black hole.

As if that wasn’t enough, there’s this whole other, completely separate problem that’s equally terrible, and that’s the way in which the social ownership paradigm incentivizes suffering. In a world where a significant number of people behave like Alexis et al, there is power in being either more offended or more vulnerable. If you are seen to be suffering, or even just thought to be suffering, others will take active steps to change their own behavior to accommodate you. It follows, then, that both immoral actors who are willing to manipulate and moral actors who are susceptible to economic pressures and operant conditioning—

(i.e. everyone)

—will find themselves experiencing pain and outrage more frequently, since the experience of pain and outrage is now an effective method for bringing about change in the behavior of the people around you. We’ve already seen glimmers of this kind of dynamic in the social justice sphere, where there is sometimes an implicit moral hierarchy with the most aggrieved and downtrodden at the top, and the most privileged at the bottom. The more legitimate one’s claim to suffering or damage, the more seriously one’s requests/demands that others change their behavior in response are taken.

Which, by the way, is not a fundamentally bad thing. It’s a marginal problem—a question of costs and benefits and when one begins to outweigh the other. I’m not arguing that our society shouldn’t prioritize its efforts according to need—not exactly. I’m trying to say something more subtle, like “hey, there’s a slippery slope here that we should be aware of.”

I’m trying to point out that there is a pendulum swing, and that although this direction has created marginal utility for a lot of people, we’re likely to go too far unless we consciously prevent ourselves from doing so.

I’m trying to gesture toward the fact that, once victimhood becomes weaponized, everyone else necessarily becomes more callous, meaning that the subset of victims who aren’t exaggerating their pain get heard and cared for less and less and less.

I’m trying to say that the people who are benefitting the most from this shift in the social dynamic should not be the ones we look to when we’re trying to decide how far is far enough.

I’m trying to say that the heuristic “care most about those who are most in need” is Goodhart-vulnerable, and that ultimately the balance that results in the greatest good for the greatest number probably leaves some people out in the cold, and that we shouldn’t be so focused on the truth of their suffering and abandonment that we drive the whole society off a cliff of codependency and moral culpability.

These are hard things to say. There are social pressures against saying things like them, and those social pressures exist for good reason—for instance, I predict at least some of the people reading this are currently thinking something along the lines of “this sounds an awful lot like a privileged person trying to justify continued systematic oppression, and not having to put forth effort to rebalance the scales.”

And the fact that a certain kind of person has that thought or says that sentence makes sense, in context. The type of person who would have that thought is exactly the type of person who’s been responsible for our moral growth in this arena so far—they’re the type of person who bothers to notice and prioritize the disenfranchised, and who creates pressure to break society’s pendulum away from its current stuck point.

And entirely separate from the question of whether or not it’s true that I’m a lazy privileged person trying to justify inaction, sentences like that have worked in the past decade. They’ve provoked change. They’ve become a useful tool—sometimes even a weapon—and of course someone On The Side Of The Downtrodden would raise that tool again in this specific case. In the grand scheme of things, it’s that person’s job to keep ringing that bell, sort of like how fiscal conservatives keep sounding the alarm over debt and deficit, or how climate scientists keep shouting about carbon emissions.

But that perspective—the perspective that unconditionally prioritizes the marginalized—needs to be part of the calculus, not all of it. It’s data, not a conclusion. That’s how these sorts of conversations work—it’s understandable that people on a given side of the disagreement might want their own narrative frame to become the narrative frame, but that doesn’t mean we should let it actually happen.