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The Upstream Cause of the Youth Mental Health Crisis is the Loss of Community
(www.afterbabel.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
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I don't think the definition of community is necessarily problematic. It centers on hierarchy and authority, yes. But even most anarchists recognize natural hierarchies. Parents have authority over children because children are not able to govern themselves. Community elders have authority within a community because of their age, experience, and the respect they've earned through longstanding ties to the community. When you need specialized information, about law, or medicine, or how to repair a car, or the difference between right and wrong, you go to a specialist who studied that field and you defer to their authority derived from their study and knowledge. And so on.
Everyone in a community is, or should be, equal as human beings. But not everyone has served the community equally or earned equal respect. Voluntary hierarchies based on duty and respect are not the same as involuntary hierarchies based on coercion. And it's those voluntary hierarchies that bind communities together.
You should learn the difference between deference and delegation, and then learn to delegate choices and research to experts rather than deferring to them. Where doctors are concerned, it could literally save your life and those of your loved ones.
Children, too, should learn to delegate rather than defer. Deference maintains a gap in someone's understanding, and as soon as the parents stop providing that service the child becomes lost. A baby who cries when they feel uncomfortable is already choosing when to cry and when not to cry. They don't defer the maintenance of their body to their parents, they delegate it, and as soon as they are able to control those bodily functions they rescind that delegation.
Deference is always archist. "Natural hierarchies" were an archist lie when it referred to racist and sexist hierarchies and it's an archist lie when it refers to familial, professional, and social hierarchies. Respect is due to everyone, not just to the powerful or to your "natural superiors". Every infant deserves respect, every wife, every teenager, every mentally disabled person. What the fuck is wrong with you that you think otherwise?
Please don't make this a personal attack. They stated their opinion and it wasn't something outlandish or hateful. Feel free to disagree with them, but not in a "what the fuck is wrong with you" way.
As for "respect" specifically. Definitions of that word differ widely. Yours is one that is commonly used, but I personally would rather use "human rights" for that. Of course the default should be to be respectful to each other (which you were not), but it is also a common understanding that respect can and should be earned.
I understand if you disagree on whether, by expecting children to go without respect and people to submit to the natural hierarchy, their comment promotes a form of child abuse. But do you disapprove of the methods or of the choice of target?
If it is the methods, do you want me to report everyone who makes similarly rude statements about fossil fuel companies so you can ask them to tone it down a little? Because fossil fuel companies too are neither outlandish nor hateful. Perhaps even about right-wing politicians? Many of them are hateful, but is it really right for us to act disrespectfully in turn?
If it is the choice of target, then would you please add a clarification to the rules where you outline what determines who is a valid target?
I'm frankly confused about your second paragraph. Do you have a different definition of "definition"? Because I didn't give a definition, I did not mean human rights, and the notion that respect can and should be earned also isn't a definition. I and your "common understanding" only give two different priors for who deserves respect.
Is it so hard to fathom the notion of actually respecting children? Because I mean actual respect. Feeling the same gravitas at your infant child who wants a cookie before bedtime as at a CEO who wants that report on their desk by tomorrow morning when you clock out in five minutes, and vice versa. Just two people who have their own unstated reasons for wanting something that from your perspective appears unreasonable. The only difference is that the state uses its monopoly on violence to enable you to abuse one and enable the other to abuse you.
People will often find themselves in the position where they're forced to accept abuse from others, but that doesn't make it right for them to pass it on, and it doesn't make it right for them to claim that the abuse is fair or compatible with anarchism.
As far as I've seen, it's rare to find someone for who "having earned their respect" isn't code for someone having power over them, and for who "not having earned their respect" isn't code for them having power over someone.
Hi @Tiresia, I have to admitt what I get from your response is a lot of anger over something basically quite simple:
It doesn't seem to me like a matter of rules or whatever, and it looks like a good suggestion as well. Don't you think?
When a moderator makes a request for moderation in someone's conduct, it seems weird to ignore the aspect of them being a moderator. It's not about the rules, per se, but if their request is done from the office of a moderator then that use of authority should be as fair as possible.
As for it being a good suggestion, personal attacks like this, where you're only 'personally' attacking deep-rooted opinions (including ones someone personally identifies with), are valid. For example, you don't need to have a civil debate about whether trans people deserve to pee with a transphobe. If you can win the peer pressure battle, a personal attack is better for everyone involved. Our liberal education has whitewashed history to make it seem like civil debate between neutral people had a much bigger part in progress than it did. Personal attacks are a form of peer pressure, getting people to re-examine deep-rooted beliefs that in a discussion they would cling to as axioms.
There are other valid ways to put on peer pressure, whether it's inviting envy by having a happier life, whether it's building friendship and rapport until they're open to trying to something out, or whether it's a reward in the form of bragging rights, prestige, or upvote karma. But this time this one felt right.
I was recently reading Emma Goldman's account of her travels in post-revolutionary Russia. Something that stood out to me was her experience at a meeting where Bolsheviks dominated, and a non-Bolshevik asked for the floor.
I think your intuitions about peer pressure are invariably true - it is a powerful tool for social and political change. But it is a very poor tool for ensuring that the achieved goals are worthy. I often wish civil debate between neutral people had a much bigger part in progress than was the case.
I don't expect you to engage in good faith debates with transphobes or politely protest oil companies, but @solo is neither of those things. If you consider their post and comment history, I think you'll find you have a lot more in common with them than you might expect. One of our goals here is to grow great things through cooperation, but each act of verbal abuse adds to the toxicity of the soil. When it comes to cooperation, often it is less important that people agree with you than it is that they like you and trust you - and being able to disagree with someone without unfriending them is a powerful skill to develop.
tl;dr: Peer pressure is a normal and healthy part of communication. You use it in this comment and it is baked into this website through the karma system. Using it for disagreement and not just conformity is important to keep groups attached to meaningful values. I don't think "What the fuck is wrong with you" is unfriending, and I think that sort of harsh peer pressure can be and was justified by its context. I think you're mistakenly arguing against peer pressure in general and absolute terms when your issue is specific and one of degrees.
Indeed it is a poor tool for determining whether the intended goals are worthy. That's what the entire rest of the comment that people have been systematically ignoring is for. Condemnation is the sledgehammer in a suite of construction tools, itself unable to tell whether it is in the right place doing the right thing, but justified (or not) by it context.
And, like I said, upvote karma is peer pressure. People can see at a glance how many people will see something and how many people agree with it in a way that becomes a self-fulfilling Keynesian Beauty Contest. If you truly believe peer pressure is wrong, then the lemmy architecture is fundamentally hostile to you. If an invective adds toxicity to the soil, then the soil here is full of lead already.
But the reason civil debate between neutral people has so little part in progress is because nobody is truly neutral, not because so few people choose to be civil. Marxism works well as a model for society because people are by nature hypocritical. Philosophy, culture, and social groups are a layer of topsoil, vegetation, and human structures covering the mountains of what we think benefits us personally over the course of our lives. Argumentation can redirect superficial flows, which occasionally allows for a key watershed moment where your way of life is redirected onto another plausible course, and that course over time changes the geography. Sometimes that redirection means taking a sledgehammer to a wall.
I agree that it is easy to cooperate with people when you only care about liking and trusting them. That's how you get social groups and movements that are entirely detached from reality, a bog of stagnant water. If you want a social group to have sensible, actionable beliefs rather than descend into circlejerk, you need the members of your group to be systematically willing to cause offense when it improves the group's ability to interact with the outside world. And for them to be systematically willing, you need to react positively to them doing so. Otherwise, over time, the detritus and resistance builds up in that channel and it clogs up, and the flow becomes stagnant or goes elsewhere.
When you ask me to choose people liking and trusting each other over processing disagreement, you are not opting out of peer pressure. You're simply using (soft) peer pressure to enforce group norms that are about cameraderie rather than beliefs.
I do not consider the application of peer pressure to be outside the scope of good faith argument, otherwise I would not be on this website with its karma system, I would not reply to you when you talk about whether or not people will like me, and in fact I would not be able to communicate with anyone. I don't feel like @solo is an enemy or an unfriend, just someone who needed a wake-up call.
I don't see saying "what the fuck is wrong with you" after someone says something horrendous as abusive. I would personally genuinely appreciate that kind of clarity if I said something that revealed a fucked up underlying attitude, when accompanied with a sensible explanation. It's an emotive way of saying that you're noticing something deeply wrong with someone's worldview, and opens up the talk in that context. And honestly, I doubt you or others on here are unfamiliar with that sort of usage and don't partake in good-faith invectives yourselves on occasion.
Honestly, I think that maybe y'all have talked yourselves into a corner arguing against peer pressure and invectives in general when you really only disagree with how (and whether) it was applied in this instance. I could be wrong, but that's my impression.
That's correct - I'm not arguing for a blanket ban on invective, just its widespread and inappropriate use. Persuasive argument has better long-term results than peer pressure.
Peer pressure through abuse is exclusionary - you may get compliance, but more often you simply turn people away from your group or cause. This creates the group phenonmenon of 'evaporative cooling' where more moderate members of a group leave and the group becomes smaller and more insular, which harms the group’s ability to interact with the outside world.
The argument you're responding to sounds very similar to Bakunin's "In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker" distinction between types of authority. Your disagreement with them also seems semantic rather than substantive. I don't want to get into the weeds of your argument, only to point out that it appears to be a minor disagreement between people with similar values.
We exclude fascists, but I don't want to encourage a particular anarchist orthodoxy, or even an anarchist orthodoxy on this instance. We're openly welcoming to liberals here. Good ideas can come from anywhere, and the problems we face are large enough that we need large coalitions to fight them. Practicing disagreement without dissolution means both our ideas become more potent and our movements grow larger.
I would say that is empirically incorrect, at least in our current world. Many activist movements have seen far better results when they forgo reason and started inconveniencing others.
Evaporative cooling is a contributor to people leaving a movement, but empirically people also get drawn to movements and people when they act provocatively. This is a public forum, this conversation is also a play to anonymous lurkers, and I hope there are people who are surprised and intrigued by the notion that it is so natural for children not to defer to parents' authority that accepting parental abuse is dumb.
Those people that get drawn to a movement are often unaware or disagree with its tenets, sparking more discussion and re-evaluation, re-heating the mixture. If you try to go for mass appeal, people will walk away disillusioned that nobody here seems to actually believe the punk in solarpunk. Similar to how Clinton lost voters by seeming to take politically disgruntled people that voted for Obama for granted.
I disagree that it is abuse, though, and I would not want to abuse people for the sake of popularity or ideological pursuasion. If you're not arguing for a blanket ban on invectives, then I'm curious what makes you draw the line that this is abusive when other invectives wouldn't be.
This is a quote from another comment by the same OP under this post:
It is literally arguing for accepting abusive behavior from group authorities for the sake of group cohesion. That is the sort of authority they want parents to have over children and elders over parents. Accept abuse so you don't rock the boat. Stay with abusive parents because they deserve to raise you even if they are abusive. Stay with abusive community leaders because the community deserves to persist so it can abuse more people into the future.
That is not Bakunin.
I am not an admin or a mod. Treating my comment like an acceptable part of the discourse does not mean encouraging (a particular) anarchist orthodoxy, as long as similar discourse is accepted from people with different political leanings. I wouldn't describe myself as orthodox either, I just don't like abusive relationships. It is not my intention or expectation to scare them off, just to get them to re-evaluate deeply held beliefs.
I honestly blame the current unpopularity of the left (the proper left) as a political movement among the general public on this attitude. Being willing to water down your supposedly deeply held philosophical convictions for the sake of appealing to centrists makes it look like the convictions are just a charade, and that any promise you make, no matter how ideologically driven, can be traded off for just a little more influence. As labor parties in the UK, Netherlands, and elsewhere were happy to demonstrate in 1980-2018.
Disagreement without dissolution can be a useful skill when you're making practical decisions under time pressure, such as in a coalition government or a friend group deciding what movie to go to. As a user posting here out of my own urge for politically meaningful conversation, I am not under time pressure. If this thread ended, I would find another. I can disagree without dissolution, it's just not what I'm here for. If you happen to know anywhere that does encourage discussion that seeks to dissolve disagreement, I would love to know about it.
And if you do want this to be a safe haven for liberals, then I wish you luck 7½ years from now when you're asked to please not say that library economies are a fundamental part of solarpunk because it would scare off moderates and reduce AOC's chances in the Democratic primaries. Solarpunk is already being co-opted as the new cyberpunk - an aesthetic with a vague 'rebellious' tween attitude engaging in 'green' consumerism and YIMBY-ing state-subsidized corporate greenwashing with all their might.
You would be right, an openly solarpunk Democratic senator and primary candidate would be very potent and indicate a very large movement compared to what solarpunk is today. And maybe you would have practiced disagreement without dissolution so much that you would even be proud and happy to see the movement grow so far.
According to your sayings, you appreciate personal attacks.
The way I see things, pseudo-rational arguments don't make a position justifiable.
The thing is, I used constructive arguments to build up to the invective. If you just use an invective without context you're just yelling at people. But if you think using invectives/personal attacks is not justifiable, good job stooping to what you perceive to be my level, I guess?