Sarah Schulman

It is unethical to hurt someone because we have been told to do so. We are required by decency to ask both the complainant and the accused how they understand the situation. And this, I truly believe, requires an in-person discussion. Asking hard questions and creating an environment in which complexities can be faced is, after all, what a real friend does.

When anxiety is at the wheel, we tragically project, blame, and then separate. We flee reality, which is the fact of conflict as part of life, rather than confront difference and expand our understanding of ourselves.

Human life, being mortal, is inherently filled with risk, and one of the greatest dangers is other people’s escalation. It can hasten the inevitable end before we’ve had a chance to really begin. It can be a terrible waste of life and potential. Being the object of overreaction means being treated in a way that one does not deserve, which is the centerpiece of injustice. Yet, protesting that overreaction is often the excuse for even more injustice. There is a continuum of pathology in blame, cold-shouldering, shunning, scapegoating, group bullying, incarcerating, occupying, assaulting, and killing. These actions are substitutions for our better selves, and avoid the work of self-acknowledgment required for resolution and positive change. Refusing to resolve conflict is a negative action, yet many families, cliques, communities, religions, governments, and nations choose this option all the time.

Refusing to speak to someone without terms for repair is a strange, childish act of destruction in which nothing can be won. Like all withholding, it comes from a state of rage, and states of rage are products of the past. As some say, “If it’s hysterical, it’s historical.” By refusing to talk without terms, a person is refusing to learn about themselves and thereby refusing to have a better life. It hurts everyone around them by dividing communities and inhibiting learning.

Certainly I am not a practitioner of doing nothing. There is little more destructive than the passive bystander allowing cruelty to be freely imposed. I’m the opposite of a Buddhist, as I believe in action. But there are all kinds of actions: some are designed to acknowledge and reveal the sources of conflict and pain in order to resolve them, and some are designed to obscure those sources so that resolution/change can never occur. Which one we choose, of course, is related to how we see ourselves and others, and what we don’t see about ourselves and others. There is no evidence that time heals all wounds, or even most wounds; instead, it freezes unnecessary enmity and makes it harder to overcome. Time allows perpetrators to forget the pain they have imposed.

We know that usually a traumatized person has been profoundly violated by someone else’s cruelty, overreaction, and/or lack of accountability. The experience could be incident-based (rape by a stranger or being hit by a drunken driver), or it could be ongoing over a long period of time (being constantly demeaned and beaten by a stepfather, paternal sexual invasion, alcoholic or mentally ill parents), or systematic (intense and constant experiences of prejudice, denial of one’s humanity, deprivation, violence, occupation, genocide). The traumatized person’s sense of their ability to protect themselves has been damaged or destroyed. They feel endangered, even if there is no actual danger in the present, because in the past they have experienced profoundly invasive cruelty and they know it is possible. Or in the case of ongoing systemic oppression, they receive cruelty from one place, and project it onto another.

“Overindulgence” is a deprivation of constructive attention, a refusal to teach social/life skills, a refusal to teach self-regulation in social situations, a refusal to teach how to distinguish between wants and needs. Desires are indulged at the place where needs are starved. This is the abandonment of the child, and the responsibility to parent, disguised.

All human beings, by virtue of being born, deserve care, recognition, protection, fairness, and opportunity.

Unfortunately, groups that rely on perfection, the good/evil dichotomy, and are motivated by a paralyzing fear of ever being wrong, often deny that mental illness/distorted thinking is in play. Bad families, bad friends, negative communities, and supremacist identities hide and deny contradictions, and rely on the projection of blame onto others to maintain their cohesion as perfect. Pervasive depression gets called sadness. Anxiety that is so severe as to control one’s life gets called upset or difficult or sensitive. And no one is allowed to talk about why any of it is happening.

The police are often the source of violence, especially in the lives of women, people of color, trans women, sex workers, and the poor. And the police enforce the laws of the United States of America, which is one of the greatest sources of violence in the world. US foreign policy is enforced by the military who are a global police, and domestic order is enforced by the federal, state, and city structures of policing. The law is designed to protect the state, not the people who are victimized by the state.

If someone wishes to alter a relationship, they must discuss it with the other person, negotiate the change, and listen to the other person’s account. There is no ethical way around it.

The business of psychological studies is a messy one. There are so many and they contradict each other, but like poetry, they can stimulate thought.

We should not isolate, denounce, and punish people for being human.

While perfection is never achievable, positive change is always possible. Resolution doesn’t mean that everyone is happy, but it does mean that perhaps fewer people are being blamed for pain they have not caused, or being cast as the receptacle of other people’s anxieties, so that fewer people are dehumanized by false accusation.

There is something inherently stupid about gentrified thinking. It’s a dumbing down and smoothing over of what people are actually like. It’s a social position rooted in received wisdom, with aesthetics blindly selected from the presorted offerings of marketing and without information or awareness about the structures that create its own delusional sense of infallibility. Gentrified thinking is like the bourgeois version of Christian fundamentalism, a huge, unconscious conspiracy of homogeneous patterns with no awareness about its own freakishness. The gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free.