Almost no one is complicit, almost everything is evil
A response/update/reply to this post, from the beginning of my work term.
[epistemic effort: I’ve been thinking about this on and off since I wrote that last blog post and the plan was always to write an end-of-term update.]
Today is my last day of work!!! I am very proud that things have worked out and that I was able to bang this out over my lunch breaks before I leave. Please find below some scattered thoughts, which will hopefully coalesce into something resembling a thesis by the end of the post:
Last month, I went to a roundtable discussion on the challenges faced by women’s shelters in the Ottawa region. I posted my notes here, but for the purposes of this post, the tl;dr is: I realized that ‘politics is just a game and the man in power doesn’t actually have any power to change your living conditions’ reflects an extremely privileged worldview.
But individuals can have a huge impact by volunteering their time to make up for the shortfalls and budget cuts imposed by the state. I began lurking in the volunteer scene in Ottawa, and subsequently realized that it is extremely dumb to look to your work for all of the meaning in your life, when it, in fact, only takes up half of your waking hours, and you can be doing incredibly meaningful (unalienating!!!) work outside them.
Admittedly, Ottawa is a top-tier city for that, as a large portion of the population here are federal civil servants with good work-life balances, and people who are activists, because Parliament Hill (which is like the Canadian version of the White House) is here and that’s where you go for lobbying things. I don’t think there is any city with a dearth of meaningful volunteer positions, though.
At work, I’m lucky enough to be on a project that lets me stare right at the departmental dysfunction. I called the system evil in my last post and I still think that that’s true. But I thought about it some more, and I realized that I don’t know anyone within it who is complicit. My team is trying to fix it. My team is helping another team consult every team here to try to fix it. Spelling it out explicitly, this is what it means:
You can have a system where, no one is complicit, and it is still evil.
Continuing this line of thought, if you are in a system where no one is complicit and it is still evil, then burning it down and starting over will not guarantee any improvement, even if you have the smartest, kindest, best people in place. With a sinking feeling, I realize that what I’m discovering is what the abyss of mistake theory looks like.
Tangent: I wonder whether popular conceptions of what “evil” is shape our worldview. It seems like Manichean stories (i.e. as opposed to Augustinian [archive]) are overwhelmingly represented in pop culture, but can we say that this is what’s reflected in the discourse norms of a Specific Type of Politically Active Person: that evil is an agent, that the climax will be an epic showdown of sorts between good and evil, that willpower is the key to defeating your enemy?
Another good thing about being in Ottawa is that you’re never too many people removed from actual politicians on both sides of the spectrum. As such I was able to get in some actually good, meaningful conversations with intelligent conservative party members, and while they came kiiiiinda close to saying fascist things, they didn’t cross the line and their perspectives are internally consistent and… I… can… see some thought behind them.
I think the biggest difference between me and them is that… well, they’re more conservative. Yeah, yeah. What I mean is that they are restrained and careful to not take risks, and will not mobilize until they are sure that the tides of the people are on their side. They would consider operating in any environment more hostile than that a waste of precious energy.
Of course, what this means is that they’re unable to take any stances that are controversial in the least even if it’s technically in line with increasing the freedom and self-determination of individuals, like ensuring that black individuals are treated as well as white people are by law enforcement and the legal system or providing more childcare options, paternity leave, and societal acceptance for stay-at-home dads so that heterosexual couples who want children are not pressured towards enacting more traditional gender roles. They are stuck with the lowest-common-denominator stuff, like “lowering taxes” and “being tougher on crime”, even though some of those things are objectively bad positions.
But by doing this they get to be in power approximately 50% of the time even though Cthulhu does not stop swimming left. They are correct in saying that if you have a good idea but it starts off with “Okay, if everyone just,” it is in fact an incredibly bad idea in disguise.
To interpret them charitably, they are operating under the philosophy that you will always have a greater impact doing things with your own two hands than trying to change anyone else’s minds when they don’t want to be, or can’t be changed. Now culture isn’t immutable as they are claiming (as far as the subaltern population is concerned cultural change is the only change that they can enact), but it’s true that it’s incredibly hard to change. But that doesn’t mean that you yourself are incapable of helping the people that mainstream politics is ignoring or using as a scapegoat.
So to specifically address the concern I raised at the end of my last post, I do think now that what I’m doing this term bends towards justice for sure. But even if it didn’t, it was wrong for me to write off/not consider simply supplementing some bendiness by volunteering at an org like Soup Ottawa, which is absolutely brilliant in how direct-action-y it is, or not factor in my effective altruism and environmental charitable donations which are modest year to year but hey a few hundred dollars is a few hundred dollars.
And so my actual thesis is this: I need to start putting money where my mouth is on believing that it is always better to attack a problem along multiple fronts, and that there are always, always multiple fronts where you can attack a problem by.
If I’m not feeling as good about my life choices as I want to be, I don’t need to change my job if I can augment another part of my lifestyle to be more virtuous. If I feel deeply ambivalent about the goals that my department is working towards I can help out at or donate money to a charity working at the same problem but being much more effective at it. Reducing a little bit of suffering is better than shutting down because big picture-wise the entire situation is hopeless. I think I’ve been doing this, and missing the trees.
But to end off, here is something that I haven’t changed my mind on this term. My number one priority remains to take care of myself, to treat myself kindly enough that I have the energy required to treat others kindly, because if I stretch myself too thin and become tired and bitter as I grow older that is decades of altruism down the road that will not be done. So I think the best thing that this term has done for me is letting me rediscover something that has made me so happy, that I didn’t realize that I’ve been missing, and that I’ll try hard to bring with me back to Waterloo.
I’m so glad that I spent the term here in Ottawa, even though I missed my friends and family in Waterloo and Toronto terribly. I think grew so much this term and I’ve met so many amazing people. I hope my next work terms will be as great as this one was.