Or, Hey I haven’t hammered home the point about self reflection on why you hate things enough

Would you believe it if I said that the original working title of my video about queer stories and reparative vs paranoid readings of media was “Digust”? The script for what ultimately became a video was titled “Disgust v2” but the original core of what I wanted to discuss got washed away by a different idea so now I’m going to actually unpack what I wanted to write but didn’t feel would make a great video.

Also before we continue, content warning time! This one is heavy by nature of well, being about morals and hate, so I’ll be mentioning some kinda disgusting things including SA and CSA. If those are things you would rather not see mentioned at all, you might want to read something else.

Morals?

Morality is a tricky thing, to different people there are different rules that govern what’s good and what’s bad. To a Christian, the answer is simple – just go with the book and/or what your priest/pastor/religious daddy says and that’s objective morality baby! To a leftist, the answer is likewise simple – just go with the other book and/or what your favourite twitch streamer/twitter microcelebrity/influencer daddy says and that’s leftist politics baby! But as someone who falls into both of those camps, I can’t bring myself to like favourite and subscribe to either objective morals or relativism. I’m naturally curious as fuck, I want to understand things and don’t just take things for granted because someone said it’s a certain way.

Drawing on both Christian ideas and leftist ideas, I guess I’m going to take a trip down morality lane and look at what’s wrong with progressive/leftist/socialist/twitter ideas on right and wrong.

Disgust?

For our first stroll into morality lane, let’s talk about why I started at the word disgust. Disgust felt like a good word to represent the idea that if something feels gross, it must somehow be immoral. Pedophilia is wrong¹ because it’s disgusting, incest is wrong² because it’s disgusting, queer people having happy and fulfilling lives with the people they love is wrong³ because it’s disgusting. Now obviously I agree that the first two of those three items are in fact wrong, but basing it purely on disgust is the absolute wrong way of going about it. By being led by the negative reaction of disgust, we can be lead to believe that queer people like me just existing and not being suicidal is itself something disgusting and hence wrong. Disgust is an emotional reaction, and often emotions are something we should be listening to, but like any authority, they should be questioned and properly understood. Are we going to start saying that pickled cabbage is now morally bad because some people find it disgusting? Clearly this is absurd, but when it comes to less obvious areas of moral judgement we can be mislead and manipulated into positions that themselves are absurd.

Morality is soup with cornstarch poured in

Inconsistent. If you are wanting to thicken a soup, you have to mix the cornstarch into a slurry first before putting it in, otherwise you will get an inconsistent and lumpy soup. Morality, however, is not something you can easily make consistent no matter how much cornstarch slurry you pour in. That’s just not how people seem to work. Scratch a republican/Liberal/insert right-winger here and you’ll find this first hand – good ol’ Scotty from Marketting knows that sexual assault is bad because his family has women in it but he’ll brush an alleged assault under his purview under the rug, Mr Florida Orange knows that dodgy business deals are bad when the Bidens do it but builds a property empire on falsified business records, and for some variety, the Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church knows pedophilia is bad when he accuses queer people of it but hides CSA under his watch by moving pedo priests around to help obscure their crimes. Have I made the point yet?

But it’s not just the people on the right that are a lumpy soup, look inwards and be honest: are you yourself truly consistent in how you apply morals in your life? I know I’m not, even though I try and be. And that’s okay, trying is what’s important. To quote spider-man because I guess that’s my life now, “I can’t save everyone”.

And to paraphrase an orthodox priest my mum likes, god gave us the free will to decide to do what’s right and to figure out what that means.

Michael Jackson – Black or White

I will admit, since last listening to this song in primary school, I barely remember what it was about. I think it’s like, about racism⁴? But anyway, I just wanted a funny but relevant title to this section about… black (and) white thinking.

Black and white thinking is antithetical to putting to use that god-given ability to figure out what’s right and do that right thing, because it involves splitting everything into a dichotomy of good and bad, us and them, correct and wrong. Not fully agreeing with someone? that’s basically being satan tbh tbh. And that’s the problem with online discourse, particularly on the left. There’s this idea that there can be and there is a Correct take on every issue, especially social justice, and you’re a -phobe, -ist, or [bad term] if you deviate from the Correct take. I would contend that the only correct take is that you shouldn’t question someone else’s humanity. Beyond that, you can usually apply critical thinking and have respectful discussions (not debate, i fucking hate debate omfg) about the best way to proceed with things.

So what’s the process to get the Correct take? A mess of people swinging around their emotional reactions and social clout, with a sprinkle of parasocial relationships and turning their brains off to build the dichotomy of the Correct take and the evil take. Flatten the messiness of reality and bake it into a pizza of simple morality – believe the right things and take your opinion from the right people and you’re good to go.

Flight of the Assigned Helicopters At Enlistment

In my video that diverged from this whole line of thought, I looked at Isabel Fall’s I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter as a representation of people refusing to read the story in front of them, going into paranoid reading instead of being more kind and having a reparative lens instead. Here I think it would be illuminating to look at why people might fall into a paranoid reading to illustrate the point around being manipulated into believing someone’s take even if it’s a pretty bad and unhelpful take.

The core of what people found wrong with Fall’s short story was the title. Yes. They had a strong emotional response to the title and started posting that it was transphobic. Instead of looking at the story, actually reading it, people saw the provocative title and didn’t do anything else. On the one hand, yeah fair, if you’re triggered by the title, I understand not reading it. But on the other, surely someone would be able to actually read the thing everyone’s shitting on and explain “oh it’s a metaphor and commentary on the weaponisation (literally) of gender that could be triggering to some” to the twitteratti? I feel like this was a case of people seeing others disgusted by something and deciding that that itself was a good enough moral judgement of a piece of art they never bothered to consider themselves, rather than questioning why people find it disgusting. Sometimes, the disgust is justified, sometimes it’s not. But closing yourself off like that is a defense mechanism if we’re being super charitable, and missing an opportunity to grow at worst. Challenging art is challenging because it makes us question our beliefs in a safe way and helps us understand ourselves and the world around us in a different light. I would much rather people create art about confronting topics and discuss them through text on a page, than by going out into the world and hurting real people. And that is what I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter truly was – a challenge to rigid ideas of gender, toying with a very literal weaponisation of gender in a confronting way.

Another instance of dichotomous thinking is the common belief that fiction is reality and liking something in fiction is always linked to liking that in reality. I’m not going to plant a flag on the opposite side of this and say that fiction never has any correlation to reality, but the link between the two is far more tenuous than many people paint it. Society is far more complex than that and relying on emotions that draw us to extreme positions is always going to end badly. Have people already forgotten the satanic panic, the conservative pearl-clutching over violent video games, and almost every fandom argument from the past 20 years? Seemingly, yes.

The End?

Ultimately, the thing that’s wrong about online discourse and online leftism broadly is an emotion-driven plague of dichotomous thinking. Emotions are not inherently bad but accepting them as the arbiter of morals is a quick way to make your lumpy soup even lumpier. Emotions should be respected, we don’t want to hurt people inadvertently, but we can’t base ourselves solely around what some people take offense to or find disgust in, else we mimic the right-wing fuckers who want to censor every book that paints their project of repression in a negative light. Simplicity is comforting, but doesn’t reflect the messy reality of being human and existing in the societies we’ve built.