“Handfuls” Intermission – Self-pity and self-righteousness

I interrupt the serialized essay “Handfuls of /dust and Splinters of Bone” for this special bulletin. Quite a few people have written me in response to it. One genre of response I especially appreciate is diagnosis of my moral, psychological, and spiritual illnesses. These diagnoses save me a lot of money on therapists, so a big thank you to these brilliant amateur psychiatrists who are able so easily to plumb the depths of my soul and offer me correction, free of charge.

I want to address two criticisms in particular that came up especially in response to the most recent installment: self-righteousness and self-pity, as they provide a useful illustration of the theme of the essay.

The self-righteousness criticism says that I am setting up a good-versus-evil narrative in which “the system” is evil and I (and my readers) are the good guys, the valiant rebels. In fact the entire essay is a critique of exactly that mindset. I’m not sure how I could have made that any clearer, so why do people still read it that way? I think it shows just how pervasive that mindset is, that we are predisposed to expect, “Here is a new way to distinguish the good people from the bad people.” The idea I’m exploring is “The rebellion against the Party is itself an organ of the Party, yet there is also a different kind of revolution in which we may all participate.” The arc of the essay will arrive at a description of it. I hope this isn’t a spoiler. I wonder if maybe I should have posted the whole essay at once.

Some people also took issue with statements like the following:

Oh, we are not (usually) subjected to physical imprisonment and torture. We are only deprived of freedom and the means to survive. We are subject to spiritual abuse, a relentless interrogation designed to crumble our structures of resistance. Our gifts are rejected, our dreams ridiculed, our work seen as valueless and foolish, our lives as a series of naive, vain blunders. The world deems us incompetent, insane, or irresponsible for our refusal to go along with a program we know intuitively is wrong.”

It reads, to some, like a complaint from someone mired in victim mentality, blaming all his failures on something outside himself. Certainly, there is a moment to say, Stop blaming the world, the system, your trauma, racism, sexism, your parents, and everyone else for your situation. Take responsibility for your life. However, when that advice ignores real conditions, then no one can fully “take responsibility.” One must accurately acknowledge the situation one is in. The situation includes both the conditions of trauma and oppression, as well as the tremendous capacity of life to create and to heal.

Conservatives tend to ignore the first; liberals tend to diminish the second. Ignore the conditions, and exhortations to others to step out of victimhood become heartless, and possibly hypocritical (like holding someone down in the muck while exhorting them to get out of the muck). Diminish the capacity of life to heal, and help for the victim takes a patronizing, condescending tone, and a corresponding culture of dependency. These two toxic stories (“You are to blame for your condition,” and “You are the helpless victim of your conditions,”) mirror each other. Each seeks to establish who’s good and who’s bad.

I would like to confess that my accusers are correct about one thing—there is a note of self-pity, or at least of frustration, in the essay. I wrote the above-quoted paragraph in 2009. At that time, I was just emerging from two years of pretty intense poverty. I’d put everything into my book, The Ascent of Humanity, years and years of research and writing, and monthly sales were often in the single digits. For some periods I was living in kind people’s living rooms and guest bedrooms with my three children. By 2009 things were steadily improving as my work became known, but I was still pretty raw from that experience.

I suppose I could have edited those traces of victim mentality out of Handfuls of Dust, but I chose to retain them in a kind of solidarity. Victim mentality is one of the results of the Party’s assault. And here is a crucial point: the exit from victim mentality (It’s all someone else’s fault) is NOT “It’s all my own fault.” It is not to replace blaming others with blaming oneself. It is to step out of blame entirely. It is to stop searching for fault. It is to learn to see the world through different eyes.

That is precisely the Revolution the essay describes. The Revolution does not merely exchange one bad guy for another. It does not require us to believe that no one is at fault, or that no one is to blame, or that there is no evil or corruption. It simply steps out of that way of looking at things. Us-versus-them is not invalid; it is just limited and limiting. As I said in my introduction to this series, we cannot attain a more beautiful world by victory. There may be victories along the way, but they cannot defeat the us-versus-them, good-versus-evil, self-versus-other patterning itself. Same for exiting victim mentality. Liberation from the enemy cannot be achieved by making oneself the enemy.

The Revolution I speak of extends to every sphere of the human experience, from the political to the personal. It is happening right now. Finally, it is happening.