#deprecate

Void, here’s a question for you.

What is accountability?

When thinking about it in an abstract, impersonal way, it seems easy enough. When you hurt someone--which everyone does at least at some point in their lives--being accountable is acknowledging why and how you did that, understanding why it was harmful, and building new healthier communication and behavioral habits so that it doesn’t happen again. It is for the person you hurt, but it is also for the people you have yet to meet, and it is also for yourself. It is so that you can be a better person for yourself and others. But there are a lot of barriers in the way of being accountable. These are mainly within yourself, but they are caused by how the world and other people have treated you. From within yourself, I see three main barriers: Pride, Fear, and Distrust. Hear me out. This isn’t a post to shame these emotions, but to understand them. These are normal human reactions to things, but the better we understand them, the more accountable we can perhaps be.

These three things inhibit accountability.

Pride: The more prideful a person is, the less able they are to believe they have done anything wrong. This is caused by outside forces. If a person is used to being praised for things, especially during formative years, it is very easy to just fall into the mindset that positive feedback is the norm, and negative or constructive criticism is somehow invalid. If most people in your life have always just uncritically loved your art, for instance, and you one day meet someone who criticizes it, the pride that others have cultivated in you over time can really make it difficult to see the truth in what the other person is saying. It’s much easier to just tell them they’re wrong. Pride causes behaviors like dismissiveness, deprecation, and deflection.

Fear: The more frightened a person is, the less likely they are to be able to own up to behaviors in themselves that hurt others, even if they know they are wrong, because of the fear they have of repercussions or punishment. This is caused by outside forces. Our society has always been a fan of retributive justice. How to right wrongs has been a fundamental human question from the moment we realized we can affect other people negatively, and over time, our original question is supersede entirely. ‘What is accountability’ insidiously becomes ‘how do you impose your version of accountability onto others?’ This causes fear, and actually produces the opposite effect. You cannot force accountability. People who cheat on tests or steal from others don’t come forward because they don’t want to be punished. This fear can also simply be a fear of change. This can also be as simple as: “I am going to lie or downplay this harm I have caused, because I don’t want to be disliked.” Fear causes behaviors like gaslighting, manipulation and evasion.   Distrust: The more mistrustful people are of others, the less likely they are to believe that other people are acting in good faith, and the less likely they are to act in good faith in response. This, too, is caused by outside forces. If someone has been hurt badly, and often, by others who have also never been held accountable, they stop trusting that people don’t mean them harm, even when that have done nothing wrong, and especially when they are asked to be accountable. When distrust is involved, accountability is an impossibility, because from the perspective of the one who needs to be accountable, those who want accountability really just want to hurt them, and so the one who should be accountable does the opposite. They decide to hurt first, and minimize injury to themselves at any cost, because they believe no one else will protect them but themselves. If there is no trust between two parties, there can be no resolution. There is instead, war. Distrust causes suspicion, escalation, selfishness, division, isolation, and violence. Even though these obstructions within yourself are caused by other people and situations, ultimately it is up to you to overcome them to be accountable, and to grow. But, not everyone is aware or has the tools to do this. Not everyone has the right knowledge, or much more importantly, is in the right frame of mind to process this information in a healthy way. The emotions of pride, fear and mistrust are not sins in this context, per se, but they are overpowering. They hinder one’s ability to be accountable explicitly because they overwhelm our minds’ ability to feel any other way. These emotions easily are more powerful and able to control people from within, than any outside threat, force, or benign entity. So, we modify our question slightly. We know what accountability should be, but how do we prevent these three hindrances from obstructing it? Void, I do not have all the answers, but I will try. To counter pride: This requires self-reflection, and an understanding that your experience is not the only experience. Once you come to terms with the fact that the one who criticizes you is professing their truth, and that that truth is not there to hurt you, but that it is valid and can be useful to you, you overcome pride. Once pride is overcome, you can use the truth of the other person in a way unclouded by pride, and can be accountable. To counter fear: Moving from retributive to a restorative model removes some fear from our equation. As a society, we should focus on accountability, not punishment. This is not an easy thing to do, but it must be done if our society is to become one of healing, as opposed to one of hurting.  On an interpersonal level, combating fear requires understanding of larger consequences of your behaviors. If you can understand that the initial instinctual desire to evade or deflect the consequences of harm—through gaslighting, manipulation, playing the victim--in fact doubles, triples, and quadruples the harm done to another person, when your initial goal is to be liked, or to diffuse the situation, you quickly see that these tools are maladaptive, and over time produce the opposite effect. Once this is processed within a person, the urge to evade responsibility can more easily be quashed, you can acknowledge the harm done, and accountability is possible.*

To counter distrust: Because distrust is caused by harm, it is the most difficult to overcome. No one likes to be hurt, and it hurts less to believe that it is universal. It hurts less to trust only yourself than to trust other people and then to be hurt again. That distrust is countered by trust is simple enough to say, but too abstract to be helpful. Here you need determination. You need to be determined in trusting people even though you have been hurt in the past. You also need an understanding of the particular, as opposed to the universal. You are not alone in being hurt. That is universal. But humanity is not a monolith, nor is individual human action. Some people have hurt you, but that does not mean everyone will, or wants to. If you trust, you might be pleasantly surprised by the results. There is no accountability without trust. I hope this is helpful to someone.

We won’t put you down if you don’t know these mocking words:

belittle

denigrate

demean

degrade

deride

mock

disparage

condescend

patronize

verb (DÊ prì kāt) to express strong disapproval of // to protest against // to belittle

“Why do you always manage to deprecate everything I say?” you sigh, staring at Loki, as you are sitting in the room, trying to cut each other’s heads off with just your glances.

“Protesting is in my blood, girl.”

“But... Why belittle?” you sigh, and Loki smiles for a second. “Are you seriously doing that on purpose?”

“I sure am,” he laughs. “You should see your face when you are annoyed - it’s priceless. And my only entertainment.”