Policing Ourselves

When the Mob is in your Living Room...and your brain stem

I tend to think of myself as outspoken. If there is something that needs to be said that absolutely no one wants to say, it is usually me who ends up saying it. It can be tiring to be the canary in the coal mine. It is often very lonely. No one wants to hear about the bumps underneath the rug.

I recently was part of an interaction where I sat and watched someone I love get shut down for making an off-color joke. Nothing terrible. A little cringe. A middle schooler would have blessed it as comedic gold. As quickly as the joke landed in the room, it was shut down. There was no threat of violence, but there was a threat. The threat was reputational, moral, and implied.

It was an immediate distinction separating good, compassionate people and bad people, who use their words to cause harm.

What surprised me the most about this situation was how fast I moved to shut it down. Out of fear for the person I love, I policed them. Out of fear for myself, I policed them.

It was unspoken, a quick disparaging look from across the room. Enough to bring shame, to stop the moment. The fear that I felt was visceral because the threat to connection was real.

I have spent all week ruminating on this situation, ashamed that in the small moments of my life, I chose to protect my reputation over a person. I wanted to be seen as a compassionate person with the “right beliefs” and in the process, I compromised my most fundamental values, which are courage and freedom.

This moment brought me to a moment a year ago, while I was working in an office in a social work setting. An older woman was sharing about a trip she had gone on many years ago, and she had a critique of the country in which she had visited. She started to explain an issue that she had while visiting and she paused her story and said to me, “Don’t worry, I am a liberal” before she continued. She assumed I was a liberal because she perceived me to be a good person even though we had never spoken about politics.

I was shocked because it was so clear that she was afraid of me. She was afraid that I might think that she wasn’t a liberal because she was saying something different than liberals usually say. She was afraid that if I thought she wasn’t being a good enough liberal, I might verbally shame her. She was afraid that I might be the voice of the Mob, and come after her family, her livelihood, and her reputation. She was afraid that I would cancel her. It was beyond virtue signaling, it was an outright declaration.

Nothing that she said was even controversial. It was a healthy observation of a system out of whack.

She, like many of us, got the memo that being liberal is the right way to be because it is where the good, kind, compassionate people go. It is the defining line. You either vote liberal because you are a good, loving person, or you vote conservative because you are a bad person who hates people who are different than you.

This is a temptation of the ego. This is an attempt to feel safe inside ourselves and our understanding. People are too complex for this kind of simplicity.

In this black-and-white world where people are either on the “right side of history” or “dragging us back into the past,” there is no room for nuance. There is no room for the beauty of healthy debate or a place to express your fears that progressing for progress’s sake might take us too far past our limits. The conversation is cut short out of fear that someone, somewhere, might be harmed if those dangerous thoughts ever found themselves spoken.

We are policing each other and policing ourselves.

There is no criticism that is considered kind. There is no critique that is allowed.

The ideas are no longer what is dangerous, it is the person voicing the ideas who is also dangerous.

This is not to say that the criticisms of the Right are wrong. Stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason. Their critiques are often callous and come across as cruel. They seem unnecessarily brazen and often make huge sweeping statements about people who have been historically left behind or mistreated. It is not a mystery why someone who considers themselves caring would want to distance themselves from a movement like this. It is not a mystery why people would be turned off by this kind of rhetoric.

AND…

It is possible for someone to love humanity deeply and to disagree about how they would like society to function.

It is possible to love humans deeply who think differently than you about what the most compassionate thing to do is, without making them wrong or evil.

It is possible to love humanity deeply and to wrestle with the gray areas of what that means in a larger sense of our world.

It is possible to love humans deeply and not want to pull them from the pulpit for saying things that sometimes feel hard to hear.

It is possible to love humans deeply while not wanting to be an advocate for every cause that comes across your social media feed.

It is possible to love humans deeply and not identify as a progressive.

Policing ourselves and everyone else is tiring work. It means constant vigilance. It means never letting your guard down, to your own perceived biases or anyone else’s. It means living in fight or flight at all times. It means that you can’t trust yourself or your instincts because you believe the water you are swimming in is so poisoned that you are a threat to yourself and everyone else. It is an exhausting way to live, which is another way of saying that this is unsustainable.

Almost no one can live under threat while also flourishing.

Convincing someone that they are a threat doesn’t take much convincing because we all know we are capable of harm. We have all harmed others. We have watched others harm others. We have watched society harm others. Part of the argument is correct. People have been harmed in the making of the modern world that we live in.

But part of the argument is incorrect. It is not all harm. It is not all loss. It is not just nihilism in the pursuit of Utopia. There is so much beauty and goodness in this brokenness. Wonders are happening every waking minute of the day. Tiny miracles are happening all across the world, today. Right now. For every different kind of person. Miracles do not discriminate, people do.

As I write this, there are fresh strawberries to be picked and flowers in bloom and babies being born. People are falling in love. Trash is getting picked up and buses are (relatively) on time. Miracles.

As I finish writing this, I can click post and publish this in a free society and not go to jail.

A miracle.

All is not lost.

Last week I was at the Chiropractor’s office with my daughter and I saw something pop up about the debates. I said what I really thought. I watched his face come alive as he poured out his thoughts and opinions and we had a tender moment of sadness for the state of things. I could feel his physical release at the freedom to speak. I would not post about his business. I would not harm his income or his family. I held the moment of agreement and disagreement. I felt it too. It was in public. It was not a whispered phone call to trusted friends.

It was a little scary.

It felt good.

In a more perfect world, where no one has the moral high ground, curiosity is king.

Good luck out there, and Godspeed.

❤️

For a few great resources on this:

An amazing book by Nellie Bowles: The Morning after the Revolution

A short article for understanding IFS for political differences

Anything by the Free Press but mostly Bari Weiss’s Ted Talk on Courage