On Second Thought
Righteousness and Justice in Occulture
On April 7th of this year, my partner Veronica and I arrived in San Antonio with her father in order to view the total solar eclipse that occurred the following day. We had chosen San Antonio not only because it was within the path of totality for this year’s total solar eclipse, but because it was the place where the path of the April 8th eclipse intersected with the path of the annular eclipse that occured on October 14th, 2023, and I figured that symbolically empowered the San Antonio area with special magic(k)al significance. I had some magic(k)al work in mind related to the Word of Hermekate, which has a special connection with the symbolism of eclipses. The above image is based on a photograph I took of the sanctuary inside the Mission.
Throughout my life, I have not typically been a huge history buff, so I wasn’t all that familiar with the historical significance of The Alamo. I learned about it right then and there, as Veronica, her father and I wandered the historical site soon after we arrived in town. As I took in the history, I wondered what the experience must be like from the viewpoint of Veronica’s father, who is of Mexican descent. Much of what I learned gave me pause for thought, especially considering all of the themes connecting the Word of Hermekate to the balancing of power dynamics within the scope of the Aeons.
My initial reaction to the site was one of mild disgust; the Alamo Mission is preserved in the present day as “A Shrine to Liberty”—but of course, the story of The Battle of the Alamo is the story of colonialism, of the seizing of land by a force of foreign invaders. From the viewpoint of Mexico, the story represents anything but freedom. Instead, it represents oppression. The Battle of the Alamo was a major turning point in the establishment of The Republic of Texas on territory that was formerly under the jurisdiction of Mexico. Today, the State of Texas, which almost overwhelmingly votes Republican, is ironically presided over by a governor who spends an inordinate amount of time and money fiercely battling the influx of undocumented immigrants coming into Texas from Mexico; in other words, he’s doing everything he can to “protect” the State of Texas from the citizens of the very country from which this land was taken by force. Given the historical context, “freedom” is an…”interesting” word to use to describe this place.
There was one interesting detail that I picked up that day, having to do with the well-known phrase, “Remember The Alamo.”
The Alamo, which was occupied at the time by the Texian army, was recaptured by the forces of the Mexican army during The Seige of the Alamo, which lasted from February 23rd - March 6th, 1836. In the wake of the seige, Mexican General Santa Anna insisted on taking no prisoners. Given the passions aroused by being forced to fight to the death for one’s homeland, such an approach isn’t that hard to sympathize with; after all, invaders so willing to kill to take his people’s land certainly weren’t showing mercy, and so upon such a victory, why should he show it to them? Arguably, to kill them all would be to give them what they, as the aggressors, deserved. As such, although several occupying Texians surrendered, they were executed on Santa Anna’s orders rather than spared and kept as prisoners. With only one exception—the body of Gregorio Esparza was given a proper burial only because his brother Francisco was an officer in Santa Anna’s army—the corpses of the executed Texians were unceremoniously stacked and burned. It was Santa Anna’s belief that such a ruthless reprisal against the invaders would frighten the Texian forces enough to demoralize them and make them think twice about their colonial project.
Instead, Santa Anna’s decision had the opposite effect: According to a New York Post editorial of the time, “had [Santa Anna] treated the vanquished with moderation and generosity, it would have been difficult if not impossible to awaken that general sympathy for the people of Texas which now impels so many adventurous and ardent spirits to throng to the aid of their brethren".
All ethical considerations aside, the practical reality is that regardless of how completely understandable his orders were, Santa Anna’s lack of diplomacy just may have lost Mexico the war.
How different would history be if he had shown just that one bit of mercy and spared those soldiers who surrendered?
We’ll never know for sure.
Across many of my recent posts here, I’ve frequently advocated for something of a more moderate approach to the prevailing political polarization of these times, especially with regard to how we evaluate various thinkers and writers in the esoteric community. I know this is not only an unpopular opinion, but one which many would consider intolerable, unethical and even potentially harmful. In my previous post, I explored some of this in-depth in the context of Pride month and the left-right political divide, and I mentioned that I’ve been re-thinking and revising various positions I have expressed here even in the last few months. In this post, I wanted to elaborate on what I meant by specifying what some of those changes in my views have been and why those views have changed. As a secondary objective, I’d like to clarify some of the statements I made in the previous post, which I’ll do here because it also happens to support the former objective anyway.
One thing I think I need to clarify is what I don’t mean when I call for greater moderation and less polarization: Although I can completely understand why my comments are likely to be interpreted in such a way, this is not necessarily an endorsement of centrism. The reason I say this is because I am very familiar with the ways in which political centrism ultimately serves the interests of the far right; I understand that in situations where one side of any given divide advocates for a position that essentially amounts to an endorsement of fascism or genocide, to say “Why don’t we split the difference?” tends to give far too much quarter to those working toward such aims. I understand that firm boundaries need to be drawn around fascism because of how readily fascists make use of slippery slopes to advance their aims, especially given how insidious they are.
Lastly, in any situation where we know for sure that we are unequivocally dealing with people who are literal fascists, there’s really no negotiating with them. I think I’ve made that clear enough; for example, after all I’ve seen, I have pretty much nothing good to say about organizations like The Order of Nine Angles. I have never once seen a credible apology for that group and what it espouses. The closest thing to that I have seen was an interview on YouTube channel Legion of Lilith with Cameron Wilder, who discussed his involvement with Atomwaffen and tried to talk it down as “merely” an O9A “insight role,” something he undertook only as an antinomian act serving to force him outside of his social conditioning as a step toward enlightenment. I don’t buy it, for three main reasons:
I’ve been involved in online discussion groups in which he was a member (until he finally got booted) and have also scoped out his Facebook profile (at least when he had one; I can’t seem to find it now and so assume he no longer maintains a presence on the platform), and the kind of rhetoric I saw was undeniably and pretty overtly fascist in nature. Such activity contrasted sharply with the relatively sanitized image of himself that he presented in the above interview; so one image or the other had to be a sham and it’s not hard to imagine which one was the more authentic one because:
Even in the interview, he openly brags about managing to secure a leadership role in an Atomwaffen cell, and that just isn’t something you can fake your way into no matter how strong your “insight role” game is. He served time for his actions in connection with the group, meaning his actions leading up to that point almost certainly involved causing or at least risking considerable actual harm to people.
I’ve spent a long time studying and practicing antinomianism myself and I know from experience that it is absolutely unnecessary to go to such extremes in order to practice antinomianism effectively. There is no good reason to go so far as to get so deeply involved in extremist hate groups in order to meet the objectives of self-liberation that are served by antinomian practice. In other words, to claim such a motive for joining groups like Atomwaffen doesn’t add up.
Some clear lines can certainly be drawn, even on the Left Hand Path—which has such a shady and dubious reputation because of its connections with people like Wilder and groups like O9A.
Lastly, the main place where the aims of centrism tend to wind up advancing the causes of fascist and racist factions is the collective level. At an individual level, the story is different: It is absolutely possible to hold a more nuanced, synthesis-driven, basically centrist grounding in theory while maintaining a solid allegiance to leftward advancement in praxis…which is my main emphasis, and I think there are very good reasons to do so. My hope is to illustrate some of them throughout the remainder of this post.
Aristotle did not say, “It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it;” however, the real quote upon which that popular misquotation is likely based makes an even clearer statement of one of the main points informing my approach to many, if not most, controversial thinkers:
It is right that we ask [people] to accept each of the things which are said in the same way: for it is the mark of an educated person to search for the same kind of clarity in each topic to the extent that the nature of the matter accepts it. For it is similar to expect a mathematician to speak persuasively or for an orator to furnish clear proofs!
Each person judges well what they know and is thus a good critic of those things. For each thing in specific, someone must be educated [to be a critic]; to [be a critic in general] one must be educated about everything.
Nicomachean Ethics, 1 1094a24-1095a
In other words, if we summarily cancel any thinker with whom we disagree—or even with whom we mistakenly believe we disagree—just because someone else steered us away from them, we miss the opportunity to truly understand their actual viewpoints. In so doing, we likely end up losing much of their nuance, which may include some valuable elements, but even more importantly: We can’t truly understand why a thinker is problematic without directly engaging their material for ourselves. I have a couple of prominent examples that will help make my point.
One of the most common arguments one encounters from the right involves critique of Karl Marx and related indictments of communism. One of the most common frustrations of the left is just how often such arguments are made out of context: Pundits and commentators label various political opponents or positions as “communist” when they aren’t actually examples of communism in the strict definition of the term, and more often than not, it is very clear when many right-leaning figures bash leftist ideas that they’ve never actually studied Marxist theory themselves, nor do they bother quoting anyone else who has. It’s straw men all around. Jordan Peterson is especially guilty of this.
Moreover, when the left sees this, there are also almost always allegations that such misrepresentation is being done intentionally; it’s often asserted that the parties responsible for such distorted presentations are obfuscating the truth on purpose and that this is all part of their scam for controlling the narrative.
I’m not saying it isn’t that, or at least that it isn’t sometimes that; however, there’s also room for it being a genuine example of the right’s blind spots. Why do I say this?
Because the left has them too.
As much as the left gets annoyed at the right for attacking false understandings of Marx, the left seems just as committed to misunderstanding figures like, say, Friedrich Nietzsche.
One of the clearest examples of this is his concept of the Übermensch, which has developed strong associations with Nazi ideology. It is true that the concept did eventually inform the Nazis’ philosophy and practices surrounding racial superiority, but what many people don’t realize is that the Nazis’ implementation of the concept is based on a misrepresentation. Nietzsche wasn’t even alive anymore by the time the Nazis took his idea and credited it with inspiring their policies, and the reason it was distorted was that Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, intentionally gave it her own supremacist spin. She, alongside her husband Bernhard Förster, was the racist, and as her brother’s literary executor, she edited his works in order to twist them into more directly supporting the racist views of herself and her husband. The Nietzsche so adored by Adolph Hitler was, yes, another straw man.
Now, this doesn’t necessarily vindicate Nietzsche from the leftist point of view; even with the necessary adjustments to the concept accounting for his sister’s interference, the concept as truly espoused by Nietzsche still retains some elements the left would have a hard time working with: It still advocated against the egalitarian ethos which is such a central pillar of leftist thought. It still upheld an essentially classist perspective and pointed to some arguably supremacist prerogatives.
However, there is a lot of context to be taken into account, and to say that the concept is an easy and straightforward one to properly understand is also simply wrong. To this day, academic philosophers debate what the concept really entails and the degree to which Nietzsche’s statements about it should be taken literally. Further, beyond what Nietzsche himself intended, it’s also entirely possible to begin from his own understanding of the concept and make adjustments to it for oneself in order to render it more workable, palatable, or applicable to leftist purposes. In terms of theorycrafting, this would be something like building a chopper from the parts of a more conventional, factory-made motorcycle. Why not?
While we’re on the subject of adaptation, leftists very often do the same thing with regard to Marx: There are many leftists who acknowledge that there are some problematic aspects of Marx’s theories, that they don’t really work in praxis the way he envisioned them doing, and that adjustments are thus necessary in order to apply his theories in the real world. For example, the argument is often made on the left that communism can’t really be critiqued because it hasn’t yet been established; when critics of communism say it has never worked, what they really mean is that the steps leading to it have never worked. Marx himself asserted that in order to move from capitalism to communism, a transitional stage called “the dictatorship of the proletariat” must serve to dismantle capitalist structures. In theory, Marx supposed that this form of government would eventually fall away and give rise to true communism. What critics of communism are pointing to when they cite the examples of the Soviet Union, China, or Cuba as evidence of the failure of communism is more accurately a statement that Marx was probably naive to believe the dictatorship of the proletariat would ever actually fall away.
At any rate, my point being: As political polarization grows more extreme, those standing on either end of the divide tend to dehumanize and otherize their opposition to such an extent that they apply different standards to their opponents than they do to themselves: Some leftists “cancel” Nietzsche and write his entire philosophy off as untenable while clinging to Marxism even as they acknowledge the need to modify it in order to apply it; and the opposite often holds true on the right.
In the wake of it all, nuance can often disappear entirely; the quality and sophistication of thought on either side suffers as a result, and people on both sides blind themselves to promising solutions simply because they’re seen as part of the machinery of the other side.
Meanwhile, there are anarchists who will happily synthesize experimental and radical theories out of elements borrowed from both Marx and Nietzsche, who each held inherently contradictory views that—in their pure form—simply cannot be reconciled.
The only way they manage this is by “coloring outside the lines,” which requires two things:
Holding a truly open mind that does not reject any ideas out-of-hand, uncritically, or on a wholesale basis.
A total willingness to at least engage with and entertain controversial ideologies in order to deconstruct them and scavenge them for useful parts.
Similar to anarchists—who often have a bad reputation among those who don’t understand actual anarchist theory at all, and who are also sometimes given a bad name by people who adopt the label ignorantly and as an excuse for destructive behavior—the Left Hand Path has developed a similarly dubious reputation for roughly analogous reasons. From a certain point of view, those who walk the Left Hand Path are the “anarchists” of the esoteric community—a label which does not inherently imply a lack of ethics or conscientiousness.
In light of the application of the standard esoteric context, as practicing magicians, Left Hand Path initiates share the above two qualities with anarchists while adding a third:
An ability and willingness to hold various perspectives at different times—even inherently contradictory ones—based on shifts in context and the need of the moment. An example might be holding basically collectivist values on a wider social basis while applying more individualistic values to oneself on a voluntary and solitary basis.
Ethically Evaluating Esoteric Leaders
To bring the focus back into alignment with the core Dark Twins topic of esoteric Initiation, the reason I went into the above analysis is because there are many notable parallels that are applicable in occulture—perhaps even more so, owing to the fact that, at least in theory, solid magicians should be able to deal in nuanced thinking, capable of synthesizing their own philosophical constructs, and flexible enough to apply adjustments or total shifts in context at will. However, the prevailing state of online esoteric discourse sometimes seems to forget this. Even more critically, in our online discourse, we seem to readily forget that even if we ourselves may still need to grow into such skills, many of the authors we discuss are nonetheless master magicians and can often run circles around us in such a regard. We’re often just as ready to apply our one-size-fits-all filters to well-known occultists as we are to misunderstood political philosophers, and to shun a given figure because we have some disagreements with their politics, and sometimes to write them off without ever actually engaging with their work for ourselves.
Sometimes this form of ostracism-by-proxy is more appropriate than others, of course. As I said, I am pretty much ready to disregard basically anything connected with The Order of Nine Angles, but that’s also because I’ve gone out of my way to look into them and haven’t found anything redeeming at all. Meanwhile, the horrifying things I have seen to be connected with them are severe enough that it’s not even worth flirting with their brand of occultism, which proudly advertises itself as “Left Hand Path,” but for some fairly nuanced and subtle reasons, would not really pass muster as an authentic Left Hand Path tradition anyway.
Speaking of Left Hand Path, Dr. Stephen Flowers is a good example of what I’m referring to.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen him referred to as a fascist in some pretty derogatory ways, his name scornfully smeared in gleefully-delivered jabs and snipes. The only supporting evidence I’ve seen for such claims tends to fall into three main categories:
Claims based on his erstwhile affiliation with the Asatru Folk Assembly (AFA), a known hate group. These claims are usually based on hearsay or outdated/incomplete information. They tend to show up in years-old Reddit comments. The reality is that when he realized Stephen McNallen was racist, he ended his affiliation with AFA, and has also clarified via several statements that the allegation that the AFA retains the copyrights to the runic works he wrote under the pen name Edred Thorsson is false. His wife is Jewish, so he’s definitely not sympathetic to Nazism or any ideology derived from such roots. Naturally, given the factual inaccuracy of these claims, they tend to be perpetuated by people who have either received such claims secondhand and trust them without actual investigation, or perhaps by people who have looked into the matter and trust the same 6 year-old Reddit threads I’ve seen in my own investigations. To make a long story short, this stuff is mostly just born of gossip and a resulting superstitious avoidance of his work. There might be good intentions behind this, but that doesn’t make them any less misinformed. This category is simply foolish, especially when partaken of by people who unironically call themselves magicians.
Conclusions possibly drawn from comments he has made in books (I haven’t read all of them) or on social media about “the decline of Western Civilization,” views which do tend to be associated with overtly fascist ideologies, but frankly, also tend to be associated with out-of-touch Boomers who are set in their ways, don’t really mean to be hateful, and just aren’t willing to bring their views up to date with contemporary ideas about chauvinism and racism. From my understanding, his politics do veer toward the conservative, but this is something I don’t see as inherently damning—not the way many self-proclaimed leftists do, anyway. I’ll explore some of this later in this post.
He gets accused by a lot of Heathens of, to use their own terminology, “making shit up” about the runes while passing said “made-up shit” off as authentic Viking tradition. Since I’m not a Heathen, I can’t comment authoritatively about this, and based on my experiences with reading Lords of the Left-Hand Path, I can speculate as to where such critics are coming from and acknowledge that I see this is a distinct possibility. I think he could have been clearer and more careful in Lords of the Left-Hand Path about presenting the historical traditions he’s calling “Left-Hand Path,” because while he does state near the beginning of the book that what he’s doing is applying a current and contemporary set of criteria to retroactively label historical contexts, his language later in the book sometimes suggests a blurring of those lines. I can totally imagine him being similarly unclear in his works about runes, sure. That being said, I also have enough of an appreciation of the Left Hand Path perspective for which he is well-known, where such “personal gnosis” is totally valid, to basically expect that he’d be okay with developing novel practices around ancient contexts; if he hasn’t always been clear or fastidious about properly differentiating his personal gnosis from historical fact, that’s a definite misstep and he probably should have been more careful, but it’s not as bad as being an outright fascist. I know how reconstructionists are and this would be a definite boo-boo for them, but I’ve personally never really found reconstructionism appealing and one reason is that I think getting too hung up on faithfully replicating ancient practices largely misses the point of practicing magic(k) or living a truly magic(k)al life. In other words, I can see room for some of these folks to lighten the fuck up. Then again, I recognize that the goals of many reconstructionists have more to do with faith than with something more akin to sorcery, and I also don’t mean to yuck someone else’s yum. I get the beef. But that doesn’t make him evil.
A lot of this sort of prejudicial shunning is at least partially understandable with an appreciation for the fact that occulture is, indeed, being actively infiltrated by overtly racist and fascist agents and it’s often best to err on the side of caution; but one reason I bring this particular example up is because it recently came up for me in the case of someone who openly acknowledged once studying and walking the Left-Hand Path themselves, but still seemed to be operating on misinformed opinions and to have ultimately landed with those who seek to “cancel” Flowers. I never thought I’d see such a thing, to be honest. It was enlightening, though—and it revealed to me some of my own blind spots. Most interesting of all, to me, was how I reacted to it.
I’ve been openly critical of the Left Hand Path myself, pointing fingers in particular toward the Temple of Set in posts like Sic Semper Tyrannis! and Hermekate and Setamorphosis. One of the main points I’ve criticized is the Temple’s elitist admission policies and the potentially supremacist ideology that seems to inform it. As I’ve admitted, one of the main reasons for this is that I was once a hopeful applicant to the Temple and never made it in, while I think I should have (and more than one former member has agreed with me on that point). In light of such experiences, I felt unfairly excluded and openly insinuated some negative and toxic intentions for such exclusivity.
Now, in retrospect, I realize that I may have been mistaken in such assessments, and the reason just may be that I’ve frankly been naive about the reputation of the Temple and its more prominent, public-facing members. I realized that I’ve probably been overestimating the general open-mindedness of the occult “scene” at large, and failed to realize just how sharply prejudiced some people still are against them. It wasn’t until I was the recipient of some fairly vitriolic criticism of the Temple and the LHP—from someone who was even open-minded enough to have read the same books I have—and who still ended up falling victim to the most negative stereotypes circulating about the same—that I fully understood:
The Temple has very good reasons to be extremely cautious. Mobs with pitchforks can come from the most surprising quarters, let alone people superficial and ignorant enough to form negative opinions about them without having investigated their literature in good faith. Their elitism may not be as much about snoot and arrogance as I once thought; to be fair, I did acknowledge the impact of public scorn and various manifestations of “Satanic Panic” as reasons for their caginess, but even so, there’s a big difference between intellectually grasping such a need and actually facing such prejudice down.
After all the energy I had previously spent criticizing the Temple, when the fire came my way, I found myself jumping to its defense…and now I feel foolish for having posited many of the criticisms that I did. After the engagement in question, I came away thinking to myself: “I’ll be damned. Aquino was right.”
People in mobs just can’t be trusted, even in many cases when those mobs believe themselves to be well-intended. All human beings are apt to project our Shadows onto the things we misunderstand, and this tendency is amplified in groups. In the very same stroke, not only did I learn just how stubborn this tendency is in others, but I also saw clearly—as if in a polished black mirror—that I’d done it myself…to the very same people.
Talk about humbling.
Of course, this same naivete of mine applies in both directions. In the example above, I had naively overestimated the relative tolerance of fellow occultists toward the LHP, but I’ve also seen some stark examples recently that I may also have naively underestimated the relative harmfulness of other figures.
For example, I’ve learned that my post from last year, The Rainbow Flame, hasn’t aged well—in that I casually cited John Michael Greer’s observations regarding the symbolism of the most current form of the Pride flag—in a post meant to express sympathy with the LGBTQIA+ community. Now, I knew Greer tended toward the conservative side, in that I’ve read one or two of his blog posts where he heavily criticized the left—in ways that, to be honest, I at least partially agreed with. That being said, I don’t really know all that much about him beyond a couple of very limited anecdotal glimpses. I have never followed him on social media, bought or read any of his books, nor read more than those one or two blog posts. As such, I didn’t have a full picture of his thinking or who he is as a person.
Then, this morning, I saw a post made by Marco Visconti in my News Feed, referring to Greer as an “ecofascist and conspiracy nut” and including a screenshot from Greer’s Twitter feed (or was it Threads? Same shit, really, but I digress), all of which made me do a double-take and flash back to last year’s Pride post.
In the comments, Visconti elaborated:
He paired both Greer and Stavish together, lumping them in the same basket.
Now I have to wonder, because I’ve made mention of Stavish more than once on this site, and in fact, I also mentioned one of his recent social media posts in The Rainbow Flame. Again, I did so with a considerable familiarity with Stavish’s political views, and even acknowledged that despite my respect for many of his views regarding Initiation, I don’t agree with his political views. I totally see where Visconti is coming from here because I’ve probably felt a lot of the same heebie-jeebies he has.
One difference is that I’ve worked—albeit briefly—with Stavish, and I ended up landing on a compromise with him: While I don’t share his political views, I’m also not quite willing to summarily cancel him. I took the same attitude regarding Greer, albeit without the same deeper familiarity with his views.
Now I must ask myself some hard questions:
How much harm do people like Mark Stavish and John Michael Greer actually do? Should I cancel them, too?
Nuance
To be sure, the questions closing the above section are open questions to me. Just as I revised my views of Aquino, deciding some of my past judgments have been overly harsh due largely to my own naivete, I have begun to re-evaluate my views of people like Stavish and Greer, acknowledging that some of my past judgments about them may have been overly forgiving, due largely to that same naivete.
It’s a sword that cuts both ways.
On the one hand, I’ve drawn my own very clear lines regarding The Order of Nine Angles and people like Cameron Wilder because at that level of proximity to extremism, people are regularly ending up dead. It’s definitely nothing to fuck with. On a similar note, it’s also well-known on the left that the far right works quite a few pipelines toward radicalization, many of which draw from politically conservative positions that, in and of themselves, aren’t necessarily all that extreme, but which do come with potentially extreme consequences. On their own, many of these Republican boomers might be basically good, if not misguided people, which might be kind of gross but also innocent enough; on the other hand, these are people who are going to vote for Trump, who is expected to throw himself behind Project 2025 if he’s elected; in other words, they may just be confused people, but they’re about to vote in favor of Christian Nationalist fascism. Also, a lot of these misguided Boomers were the very same people who stormed Capitol Hill on January 6th, 2021.
So, relatively “innocent” but foolish political stances could still have extremely dark and troubling results. I dig it, I do.
Still, I question whether or not completely cutting oneself off from such people is the best answer. Distancing oneself from such stances is understandable, but it is also true that the more we reinforce such differences, the more we widen the already tense and considerable polarization that characterizes political discourse, and the ultimate consequences of that are likely to take the form of increasing extremism on both ends. This has the potential of the all-out ignition of the proverbial tinderbox forming between the poles. Even if founded on loyalty to one’s ethical principles, dehumanizing one’s political opponents ends up developing into a form of blind prejudice and stereotyping, which is arguably no different in essential character from discrimination and dehumanization based on racism or classicism.
What’s the difference between calling someone a piece of shit because they vote Republican, and calling someone a crackhead because of their race and the neighborhood they live in? From an ethical standpoint, people who engage in the former are likely to justify their attitude on the basis of potential harm, but does changing the reasons for delving into an essentially hateful position make that position any less hateful? If hate is so unethical, then is it really ethical to respond to hate with hate? Nevermind its impact on the intended target; what does hate do to the people who harbor it, whatever their reasons might be? If hatred is an essentially corrupting force, does aiming it at hateful people justify its impact upon the person doing the aiming? If it’s so inherently toxic, is there any good reason to hold hate in one’s heart for anyone?
Like General Santa Anna, we may feel justified in indulging in such vengeful motives—but will the outcome serve our purportedly righteous aims in the end?
There’s one other thing to consider: The basic type of thought error leftists are engaging in when they make the decision to uniformly rebuke anyone and everyone on the right. When such stark battle lines are drawn, important unintended consequences can creep in.
In the previous post, Pride and the Left Hand Path, I called into question the tendency of the left to go so far in seeking to prevent harm that we back ourselves into reactive corners that give too much power to the right to define us: When they zig, we zag, and we even begin to police fellow leftists to be extra careful what they say and do in case their actions or statements inadvertently fan the flames of right-wing extremism. I gave some examples: “Don’t use certain phrases because they’re now being used as dogwhistles by the alt-right; don’t make certain kinds of jokes because they might encourage bad actors to engage in hate speech, etc.” In retrospect, there’s another example I failed to mention, which I was remiss to overlook since that post was supposed to be a Pride-themed post:
During my time engaging with the transgender community, I noticed some pretty severe reactions to anyone even mentioning the term “detransition.” From what I could tell, doing so at all resulted in an inordinate amount of friendly fire; if you openly discussed “detransitioning” in any kind of favorable light, you were almost certainly about to get thrown under the bus.
Why?
As I learned, it’s because there’s a very strong push coming from transphobes to overinflate the relevance of detransitioning; the fact that some portion of trans people end up regretting their transitions years later has been seized upon and blown out of proportion in order to whip up transphobic sentiment. That’s a really shitty thing for transphobes to do, and it’s an underhanded tactic. The resulting harm is regrettable, to be sure.
Nevertheless, detransitioning does happen—and if it’s important for us to be sympathetic to the mental health consequences of preventing people from transitioning and living a life true to themselves—if the public at large is expected to be sympathetic to the anguish of gender dysphoria—then it’s just as important to validate the experiences of those who detransition. They may make up a small minority among trans people, but trans people make up a small minority of the general population, yet are expecting the rest of the world to make considerable social adjustments for their sake. So, shouldn’t the trans community, in turn, be willing to make similar considerations for their own relative minority group? The entire argument the transgender community rests upon in seeking social change is that society at large bears a responsibility to take action in order to alleviate the suicidal drives that result when their identities are suppressed and marginalized; shouldn’t they, in turn, take action to alleviate the pain of those who wind up experiencing transition regret?
The hostility toward detransitioners—on behalf of the actions of bad actors, which no one on the left could possibly control and for which they are ultimately not responsible—is truly ironic in that sense.
Again, the question arises: How responsible can one person be for the potential actions of others? How many layers of culpability should we hold accountability for when we act in the world?
Reuters published an insightful article about this: Why detransitioners are crucial to the science of gender care. It tells the story of Dr. Kinnon MacKinnon—a transgender man who himself once considered the word “detransition” to be unspeakably taboo, and who faced scathing vitriol from fellow members of his own trans community when he dared to open up scientific inquiry into detransitioners.
While emotional reactions are completely understandable, are they truly sensible in the end? This is yet another reflection of the story of General Santa Anna: Passionate sentimental objections are eminently human, but like humanity itself, are often an imperfect and regrettable way to make sound decisions.
It’s easy to default to shorthand—to rely on relatively unconscious heuristics to guide our ethical decisions on autopilot. When we know certain viewpoints can lead to harm, what’s the right thing to do?
Who are “the good guys?” Are there objective reasons to conclude that “the left is always right?” Where does the possibility for harm end and the potential outcome of good will begin?
What are the final consequences of our decisions to either tolerate or push back against the opposing political viewpoints of others?
Are the final consequences knowable?
I leave you, dear reader, with this clip from the film Charlie Wilson’s War—one of my absolute favorite movie scenes which serves as a potent reminder to me that our powers of perception are ultimately limited, and that in the grand scheme of things, we’re bound to be basically clueless about the farthest-reaching outcomes of any set of circumstances. It’s important, I think, to keep such things in perspective: