#relational self

I have discovered in my exposure to modern discourse that many people are constantly accusing others of being afraid to debate.

For a long time, right and left wing thinkers both have accused one another of being unwilling to debate each other and frankly I find it fascinating that it somehow manages to look like they're both being honest. How does that make any sense? Well, firstly, they're not being honest, but with algorithm induced echo chambers having become the norm of social media, this truth becomes easy to avoid.

I want to draw attention to how this phenomenon in our culture indicates how accusations of cowardice have become a nigh universal characteristic of today's social, moral, and political discourse. The problem I have is that to make this phenomenon intelligible, two possible explanations appear. The first is that we are all cowards. Yet in the era of polarized politics, often turning to violence in shrill protests that feel off. The second, and I think, more likely explanation, is that everyone has been led to believe everyone else is a coward by those aforementioned echo chambers, and this has in turn cultivated recklessness in our culture.

But in what way do the shrill accusations of cowardice permeating public discourse prove we are victims not of a deficiency of courage but an excess? The answer is that we are constantly being fed confirmation bias instead of dialogue. Media on both sides picks and chooses what of the other side it is willing to display. I've seen left-leaning documentaries display right-wing crowds by picking out the obvious crazies. However, I've also seen right-wing influences show off their intellectual superiority, picking arguments with random students on university campuses. Combine this with social media only ever showing people what they want to see, and the result is that the only thing you see of your adversaries are radicals and fools.

But what happens if you never see your opposition at their best? If all you see of them are people whose views lack good reasons, should they have reasons at all, who seem to prefer imposing their will with violence or who vilified their opponents before arrival. The result is that one comes to think their position is obviously superior. Once one believes this much, any debate with their opponents becomes not only unnecessary but inappropriate. The other is either an imbecile or a lunatic. Arguing with them is like debating a seagull.

It is this attitude, one i discovered in myself, and now in people close to me,that I've come to be most afraid of in watching our politics unfold. And it is this attitude that i call reckless. How is it reckless? Because it has the effect of destroying reason. People don't avoid debates out of cowardice, like everyone wants you to believe about their adversaries but not themselves. Rather, debate is considered pointless. It is not feared but derided. To be willing to debate is to give the other side space to speak, and 'obviously', they're evil.

Aristotle argued that recklessness was the excessive vice that corresponds to the virtue of courage, or Andreia in Greek. For all Aristotles faults, his theory of virtues stands as one of his strongest contributions to philosophy. However, now I must critique Aristotle, for he argued recklessness was closer to courage than cowardice, the deficiency vice. Modern discourse shows that this is an untenable conclusion. It was likely Aristotles elitism, an attitude that cripples much of his thought, that led him to conclude what he did about recklessness. From an aristocratic standpoint, engaging conflict is always better than fleeing from it. However, the recklessness of modern democracy shows that it is not less distant to courage than cowardice.

Recklessness is present in modern discourse because the danger is no longer being observed but assumed. People lash out at Phantoms, to say anything at all is to invite attacks from those who are constantly on the defensive. We do not hear what each other says. We anticipate enemies. We do not debate because we believe there is no debate with the others. Their ideas are unconditionally dangerous, they can't be argued with, they simply must be fought. Modern discourse is civil war by, for now, less violent means.

i've been thinking and i think i have a theory about avpd based on all the things i've been reading and listening to lately.

i think avpd consists of/comes to be because of these things:

initial traumatic experience (that included some kind of rejection or ostracization)

no healthy way to process trauma or co-regulate with anyone

dissociation from the "real you" (it is associated with shame due to initial trauma, but also perhaps out of self-protection)

coping mechanism to make up for dissociated "real you" (masking, agoraphobia, social anxiety, co-dependency and/or enmeshment ("safe person"),...)

relational self via the "real you" remains underdeveloped or not there at all (so this could be b/c of masking, not engaging at all, ...)

lacking experiences of being "experienced by another person" as described in the infamous article/study as well as this post and this post.

this then spirals into the known avpd symptoms

disclaimer: this is just a list with things i want to do for myself not medical advice or some tried and tested key on how to solve avpd or anything like that 😭

Terri Apter in the Times Literary Supplement. The complexities of Laura Ingalls Wilder

From The New York Times: (via 3quarksdaily)

A group of students at Cornell, born in Asia but raised in the United States by immigrant parents, were instructed to keep a diary. They struggled to recall the events of their own daily lives when they were later quizzed about them, remembering fewer details about their experiences than their Euro-American counterparts. Qi Wang, the Cornell scholar of “cross-cultural” cognition who conducted the experiment, speculated that Asians were not more forgetful but that they had, perhaps, filtered out the contents of their own stories, deeming them unworthy of being encoded as memories in the first place.

The novelist Gish Jen cites these findings in her curious new book about Asian and Asian-American narratives, “Tiger Writing,” as an explanation for the “notably un-self-centered” approach of her father’s memoir. The account, which he started writing when he was 85 years old, offered few details of his own grandfather’s “appearance or personality or tastes — the sorts of things we in the West might include as a way of conveying both his uniqueness and his importance as a figure in the narrative.” It instead described at great length the number of doors in the house where her father grew up and whether they were open or shut — concentrating not on his individual self, but on the context within which that self was situated, and by which it was constrained. The world he describes is not, as Jen puts it, “a modern, linear world of conflict and rising action, but rather one of harmony and eternal, cyclical action, in which order, ritual and peace are beauty, and events spell, not excitement or progress, but disruption.”