Today, someone sent me a link to this article, saying that it hits on a lot of what I’ve been writing about recently. The author, credited simply as David, writes about identity, inauthenticity, and being seen as queer enough. It is a smart critique of identity politics, particularly the neoliberal preoccupation with and corporate co-optation of being real or valid in the pursuit of authentic queerness.
One line I read again and again:
It’s a (liberal) fantasy to insist that internal subjective reality magically transcends material circumstances.
This is exactly it. This is the problem. The phrase, tangentially related, popped into my head: Subjectivity is not god.
Reading the first few paragraphs of the article, I felt like I was standing at the beginning of a landslide. It felt cartoonish, like someone who can feel the ground below them starting to give out, and they’re fruitlessly kicking their legs in a desperate attempt to stay in place rather than tumble down with the wreckage. I wanted to close the browser window and run away.
Why do I feel so averse to something I agree with, or least could be fodder for deeper reflection? Why does this happen so often when I read articles on this topic?
I tried making sense of the landslide imagery swirling around my mind. I thought about the phenomenon of preference falsification, in which, as a result of external pressure to conform, people publicly express that they support one thing (a political party, an ideology, etc.) while privately maintaining a dissenting perspective. Writers of various political leanings have pointed to the this phenomenon as a reason why Trump won in 2016, and speculated it would propel him to win in 2020. This pressure to conform can be a result of an authoritarian government, which seems intuitive. But, it can also result from social or cultural pressure.
Under the right conditions—one person starts dissenting who inspires another to dissent, then another, then on and on—a cascade occurs. The illusion of consensus breaks down under exponential accumulation of alternative perspectives. People become unencumbered by the pressure to conform and, instead, authentically speak their mind. What comes next, naturally, is destabilization of the established order.
It feels like we’re really hitting a cascade lately in “the left”. In my small sphere of influence, I feel like I was somewhat early in speaking out, starting back in 2017. I think having a small sphere of influence is what enabled me to, really. So why the desire to stop myself from freefalling, especially if I already sort of have?
The desperate lyrics of the song I’m listening to, Untitled Soul by Lady Lamb, feel like a too-apt, almost cinematic accompaniment to my impulse to run from the collapse-feeling prompted by the article.
Oh, lover, won't you hold me in your hands?
I'm a little worried I am all that I have
And I want to be good and I long to be loved
I wanna live, can you understand?
I am fightin' a villain inside of my head
It wants the crown, it wants the title to my soul
I want to be good. I want to be good. I want to be good.
Some days I kick myself for not being immediately honest in 2012 when I first dove into social justice culture. I saw its abuses and inconsistencies. I saw where it failed to reconcile its own contradictions. The criticisms I have now are near-identical to those I had in 2012, just written down publicly. Nothing has ever fully changed my mind. Still, I towed the line.
I wanted to be good. Good meaning just, compassionate, morally aligned. Yet the relational behavior always looked (was) bad. Instead of seeing the dysfunction of the religion as something villainous, I believed it must have been me. My ignorance, maybe. Or more apt, likely, my privilege. Heretical inclinations fighting for my soul when I needed to be saved by externally prescribed doctrine. Every day was an internal war of Good and Bad.
I am always stunned at how people can be in a committed relationship with a belief system. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me. Nuns are the brides of Christ. Why couldn’t I be married to my own faith? The divorce certainly has been excruciating, and now I’ve got to see my ex-spouse become a national celebrity, a corporate idol.
I’ve been slowly accumulating dissenting opinions on neoliberal identity politics for years. I found Mark Fisher’s Exiting the Vampire Castle back in 2017 and I thought I was going to explode of relief the first time I read it. Even still, I lived a sort of double life. I kept performing. I thought: Maybe I can fight against call out culture but still maintain a belief in everything else. I could say that the relational abuses were inexcusable, but the core tenets of the faith were correct.
The last few weeks have made me recognize beyond a shadow of a doubt that I can’t do that. I can’t buy into the dogma. I feel allergic to the vocabulary and the semantics. I can’t reform something that is fundamentally unmoored, untenable.
Since writing publicly about neoliberal identity politics and critiquing social justice discourse for the first time in a long while, I feel absolutely consumed by shame. I feel a way I haven’t felt since probably 2018, the last time I was making my criticisms public.
Truthfully, I have gotten almost no pushback. So why am I so ashamed?
Why do I want to stop reading this article?
I’m wondering if it’s an ego thing, maybe even this sort of self-shrinking-response to competition. Do I feel in competition with those who write on this topic? Not exactly. But when I look honestly at myself, it’s something close. It forces me to confront the ways I failed myself. I failed to trust myself. I became a fearful parrot.
When I read people’s eloquence and incisive execution of critical thought, I am forced to see how I abandoned an immutable anchor within me. I couldn’t tell you what that anchor is, really. I think it’s something like discernment, or a compass aligned with something greater than me, though I’m not sure where that compass came from and I doubt the veracity of intuition these days.
I imagined leaving doubt behind was what I had to do to be good. I convinced myself that there was something so bad within me, that I could not possibly be good without submitting myself to this worldview. What happened instead of relieving myself of doubt, is that my natural predisposition to question turned inward; I doubted everything about my own experience, from thoughts to relationships to sensory perceptions.
So often when I sit down to think through and write about my critiques of this ideology, I realize how trapped I am inside of it. I’ve trained myself to filter politics through a lens of my own personal, internal experience. I process the world through feeling rather than intellect. It is painful to confront that limitation. It feels like I’m trying to run but all I’ve learned to do is crawl. It feels like I’m lefthanded but I learned to write with my right, and now I’m teaching myself to use an atrophied part of me that once could have been learned without effort if only I had the right teacher.
When I write about my experience in this ideology, I don’t often ground it in explicit examples. And even if I did, anecdote is limited, right? I recognize that. I dismiss my own arguments constantly because they seem like a lot of emotionally charged labeling and theorizing without much evidence.
I try my damnedest to use what paltry knowledge I have of political theory, history, philosophy and social science. But fuck, it’s just not enough. I realize now how afraid and overwhelmed diving into those disciplines made me feel, though I’ve always craved exploring the depths of them. It became a game of push-pull, almost like anxious-avoidant attachment. I want to learn, but I’m afraid of what might happen if I make myself vulnerable to the experience, so I run away.
Maybe I’ll be confronted with how stupid I really am. On a personal psychological level, I have a lot of wounds around intelligence. I’m really trying to retrain the learned impulse to put out trauma porn nowadays, so I won’t go into why that is. All I’ll say is that is at least one source of my irrational avoidance of articles, books and podcasts that put words to ideas I’ve had for years. I don’t want to touch content that makes me consider the subject of my own intelligence, whether it is confirming I have none or that I do.
When I think back on myself at age 18, I see clearly how I abandoned the pursuit of truth for the pursuit of being good. I see how my insatiable desire to dissect—or maybe more honestly, to be a contrarian asshole who refused to be confined in any part of my life—was subsumed by the desire to be good. I see now, that being good is a more polite way of saying wanting to be right. I wanted to be right.
I’ve been anguishing the last two weeks. Writing about the topic of identity politics makes me feel so resentful and then I spiral into existential dread and guilt. I’ve been asking myself: Molly, if this hurts so bad, why the fuck do you keep doing it? Put your head down, make rent, and try to build a career for yourself.
In a recent meltdown, it dawned on me. It’s because, once again, I want to be right. I see what’s wrong with what I’ve been swimming in. I’ve been saying it for years, I tell myself, and I need to say it more loudly, more unabashedly than ever before. I need more people to realize what I’ve realized.
I cannot fall into the same trap.
If there is anything life has been trying to teach me, I think, it’s that the pursuit of right is a fruitless, egoistic attempt to dominate what is true. And being aligned with truth is actually a process of submission, not dominion.
Watching the cascade, I fear we will all root into yet another cliff that will eventually give way to yet another landslide. I fear it all being so crowded I lose myself again. I wonder what might happen if I jumped off entirely, rather than making a home on a new edge. I wonder if such a thing is possible, or if my late grandmother’s advice is the most sound I’ve ever received: Finite minds should not try to understand infinite concepts.
Nevertheless, I’ll try my damnedest to free fall, aiming for true rather than right.
This piece was so amazing to read because it put words to my own frozen ness, too. I really resonate with what you shared about being trapped within an ideology and I really do feel the shame as an internal control mechanism that I use to silence myself — keep myself “safe” — and so I don’t share anything at all. This really does feel like an attempt at purity, an intervention in being discarded, a desire and an attempt to belong in a place / culture where there actually is no belonging. It’s been especially devastating because I am a writer (or at least used to be) and I used to write about my political frame to process it but I just don’t anymore. I have almost just kind of watched my own ability to articulate my own thoughts get flatter and flatter — and that is how I know that this is Not Freedom at work. I still spend some of my time in lefty spaces and I try to set a tone of imperfection, of “it’s okay to ask questions other people will judge”, and invite in play and dissent, but it is difficult because I feel so outnumbered, even though everyone there hates it, too, even if they don’t know that they do. I am looking forward to reading the readings you linked to, and am exploring Joyful Militancy with a book club now and I like that book a lot, too.
Also resisting the urge to be right is just really good advice for all relationships and for emotional sobriety in general so I just think you’re onto something here.