On the limits of inclusion

Quaker creed

When visiting relatives, I went to a Christian church service, and it was remarkable how every activity of the service was focused on creed – a permanent and explicit list of beliefs. They talked about, chanted, explained, recited, acted out, and worshiped creed and did nothing else. Meanwhile I was able to find silence to have my own worship which comes from my practice of experiential religion, a kind of opposite orientation to a creed or doctrinal religion.

During that silence, some ways quakers may be susceptible to creed crystallized for me. These ways are in curriculum, in forms and practices, and in peace and justice work.

In my mind, quaker curricula are ideally minimal and open ended starting points, like lists of games and crafting ideas, not actual lessons. However I’ve heard frustration expressed that we don’t teach explicitly enough and so there are now more formal lessons including an attempt to make a “complete” list of what the testimonies are: simplicity, equality and so on. This attempt to pin down, or enshrine what was once living, could be (worst case) received by children as a creed, which makes the whole thing feel like the rest of society. If that is allowed to progress too far in that direction, it threatens to close off the experience of learning from within in each moment.

In the area of forms and practices, I’m talking about having a one hour meeting, the expectations around interruptions, where to sit, what to wear and so on. I have overheard and been part of interactions where a new person is asking about these forms, and is expecting clear answers. But from someone who grew up this way, it did not occur that there could be answers, so it was hard to know what to say. For example if you have a cough, should you leave the room? All I can say is that sometimes people do and sometimes they don’t. When I feel a practice is really mine, then it is mine to shape, not just to follow. To the extent that a meeting is formalized to exactly one hour with a bunch of rules, then it is less living, closer to creed and farther from experience.

In the area of peace and justice, the side-taking and slogan-based ways of political movements are very much like creed (or ideology). Worst case we can adopt a warlike stance in the fight for peace, or kick people out of a group because they don’t share our same beliefs about inclusion. Those versed in movement-building can clash with quakers like me who never adopt a loyalty to one side. Pressure to believe alike can replace actual listening.

In all cases, the wider society in which ideological loyalty is the norm exerts a pressure on the enclave of quakers, which is most noticeable when new people come in and bring the ways of a business office or a school or protest movement with them. A doctrinal religion like Christianity is honest about having a creed, while we are at risk of pretending there is no creed while acting on an unwritten one.

Othering goes both ways

I remember the moment I first doubted the inevitability of being marginalized among quakers. There was a single other disabled person in a business meeting, who talked about the deep and persistent othering and belittling she had lived with among quakers for her whole life. She made it sound like it does not have to be this way, and the light switch went on for me that it was never about me failing to be good enough, but it was about the accepted norms of leadership, centrality and marginalization as a system. I felt equal in that meeting because she was there, but I don’t normally feel that way.

An aspect of my disability, which is true for a lot of autistic people, is that I can follow social rules if I know what they are, but it is very hard to memorize them and apply abstract rules to particular situations. I’m always afraid that I will accidentally say or do something that I wasn’t aware was symbolic of criminality. There are fairly easy ones, such as the OK hand gesture that was co-opted by white nationalists. I can remember to avoid that one. But I worry some day I might be walking towards a coffee shop, for example, and find myself walking with people who are unlawfully protesting, then be arrested for being a part of a riot, and then not be able to convince them otherwise because perhaps I was dressed like them or made some other gesture that I was not aware was a cultural symbol.

That fear is grounded in the many times I’ve been assumed to be a central figure in powerful bloc, by people who oppose that bloc, and who often feel marginalized themselves. I’ve been told I’m part of a Christian church, various anti-progressive movements, and even the highway lobby.

These efforts to separate people from people are connected to loyalties to creeds – either the beliefs of the insiders or those of the outsiders. The insiders see me as out and the outsiders see me as in, I guess, because I’m so creed-resistant by nature.

Language policing can be ethnocentric

I saw a movie recently in which a Sunni leader is shown advocating to expel someone from the community because “It is against the Quran to misquote the scripture”. This is literal language policing, above board and honest. But I worry about language policing in “inclusive” communities which could be more disingenuous.

Someone I know dropped a class because the teacher could not use their pronouns correctly; to them the teacher was unacceptable. Pronouns are language, and language is culture, and there are different subcultures. People use lots of words differently within the same overall English language. We can push against culture and language, and it does sometimes change because of persistent efforts, but to say that we cannot accept someone who is rooted in a different culture and dialect is ethnocentric and intolerant. In this student’s case, maybe quitting was indicative of being intolerant, or maybe it was an act of defiance in order to push on the language.

In English until recently, pronouns reflect on the speaker’s perception, but do not rely on the preference of the person referred to. (Other languages vary!) In contrast, many people now use an intentional dialect where pronouns are self-determined. Maybe the larger language will evolve that way, or maybe it will not. If people are coming from two regions of the language, we need to be tolerant that they are just different, not label one as wrong. Both people are simply speaking in ways normal to them – it is not a matter of respect or disrespect, but a matter of language and dialect.

Of course people can say some hateful thing and then claim “it’s just how I speak”, and that is not what I’m wanting to protect. We can protect the diversity of culture and viewpoints and communicate about culture clashes without drawing a line of intolerance.

The use of self-determined pronouns has gotten such a strong foothold in quakerism that it has become, in my mind, dangerously close to creed. When you have creed, you have the grounds to expel someone from the community.

A personal example

The national group of queer quakers runs an email list that anyone can post to. Well, anyone except me. A year or more ago I was put on notice for having “oppressive opinions” and posting misinformation. I had only posted about 8 things, some of the “worst” being:

• I said “regular women” in contrast to trans-women. Someone wrote back finding that offensive and suggested that he knew what my real agenda was.
• I said my friend had found several trans-women that she dated to be sexually predatory and that she felt most trans-women she had met feel like men to her. I was not supposed to say that, according to one person, because it furthers a false narrative.
• I noted there was some news reporting raising an alarm about trans-women prisoners in women’s prisons because their sexual aggression appears to far exceed that of male prisoners on average, and this puts regular women at higher risk. Supposedly that also furthers a false narrative.

So it’s all on the same topic, and the “false narrative” appears equivalent to the Sunni leader blaming someone for misquoting scripture.

I don’t say a lot, and don’t post often, and never make broad judgments, but sometimes I post an observation or fact or a thought experiment, it goes against what someone wants to be true and it threatens the group ideology. So I’m deemed to have certain opinions which are disrespectful or oppressive. Since other people deserve a space where they can be included without being triggered, I have to be excluded. (You know, because full inclusion because we respect everyone…) It’s about as grounded as making the assumption that I’m part of the highway lobby.

As a diversion I will give you the full thought experiment about women prisoners’ potential risk from trans-women. The male prison population is ten times the size of the female prison population. Women’s rate of sexual offenses is very low; men in prison are there 15-18% of the time for sexual offenses (the range is from different sources of statistics); and trans-women are there 48% for sexual offenses (from a smaller sample). That means a trans-woman is three times more likely to be in prison for a sexual offense than a man. In the language of corrections systems, trans-women as a whole tend to have the criminal profile of men, not of women. If we accept those facts, the hypothetical is what if people could be housed in the women’s prison simply by stating they identify as women. It seems to me that a sizable percent of men would opt for that if there were no downsides, particularly those who were actually sexual predators. Given that they outnumber women by ten to one, even a few percent going to women’s prisons would clearly outnumber the regular women.

I gave some short version of this on the list. I didn’t say I thought it was currently happening or what I thought should happen. In retrospect there was no reason to get carried away in a thought experiment. So I’m guilty of wasting people’s time, but I was put on notice for opinions, not for the waste of time. The fact that I didn’t include any of my opinions in the posts tells me that the real reason is not about my opinions, but is about my lack of loyalty to creed.

The transgender and pronoun-related conflicts are where so much of the current dogma is, so that’s exactly where we need to resist the pressure.

An alternate interpretation of sovereign citizens

Background

A steady stream of videos is available for those interested in the “sovereign citizen” genre, which show interactions with police and judges as these people claim they are not in the jurisdiction of the court, and try to get out of punishment. “Sovereign citizens” are classified by the FBI as potential terrorists because, as their numbers rise, it threatens public order in general; however, they rarely are a physical danger.

The common elements of the incidents are:

• The subject person gets training in ways to avoid being held accountable. They commit time and money towards books and seminars where they learn about a fictitious alternate system of laws and how they can opt out of being under the authority of government. This is enticing because it promises to alleviate costs, and the risks of breaking the law (even if they are not setting out to hurt anyone). It also feels empowering to believe that ones social contract is consensual, rather than authoritarian.
• The subject is drawn further into the belief system. Initially even an educated skeptic might find that one of their concepts is plausible, like “A 1923 case ruled that the state cannot require you to state your name”. (That’s made up, but something I could potentially believe.) Then the claims get increasingly unbelievable, but circularly reinforcing like in a cult. So they get drawn in to the point of disbelieving the legitimacy of any of the actual government. The belief system ties in with a standard set of conspiracy theories about the gold standard and Federal Reserve, “globalists” and so on.
• They are stopped by police for traffic or minor drug offenses, often something obvious like not having a license plate.
• They refuse to comply with anything, and escalate the situation by repeatedly stating or yelling their alternate legal system that they memorized. They cannot question the cult during a stressful encounter so they double down on the alternate reality and they won’t stop talking long enough to hear anything.
• They sometimes get taken to jail. At that point it appears from what I’ve seen that because of the long hours, days, or months in jail, the subject will eventually become practical and act compliant to regain freedom. But before that, they may have one or more encounters with the judge where they insist they are in a kangaroo court and yell wildly the whole time.

Standard interpretation

Those who narrate the videos, as well a majority of commenters, say that the subjects never were properly educated or are very stupid or gullible. In that model, the subject completely believes that they are in the right, that they are more educated than the judges, and by saying all the right things, they will weasel out of any consequences. Breaking that down, this model says that:

• The subject has the intent to fly under the radar, to skirt any possible encounters with the law.
• The subject is delusional about their mastery of the law, or their intellect or wisdom or other personal asset.
• The subject believes in the idea of a social order, which is systematic and consensual; but they are misinformed about the social order that we actually have.
• The subject may have an intolerable personality with self-importance.

To me this model of their intent and character completely fails to explain the behavior. Most of the points apply to many people to some degree, but these subjects’ behavior is not just an exaggeration of what normal people do. For example, uninformed or unintelligent people do not memorize whole bodies of fictitious legalese. People who want to fly under the radar tend to slip away quietly from situations rather than escalate.

My interpretation

Basically what I’m seeing is a BDSM ritual being played out with non-consenting fellow role-players.

Consider the number of people who record and even livestream the interactions (voyeurism). In some cases the recordings start well before any police encounter and the subject is talking about the potential of being pulled over before it happens, indicating it is being sought after.

Consider the different reactions to being caught with a fake ID. When normal people use a fake ID for entry, to buy alcohol, or anything, and then it does not work, they feel shame or disappointment because their plan was foiled. But these subjects feel emboldened, because it is just a planned step in the escalation process.

Consider the use of elaborate scripts. In BDSM rituals, scripts can be part of the foreplay and sexual gratification of it. People who do that get bored of regular sexual interaction so they use characters with drawn out scenes to capture the building energy. Imagine this being said gleefully in a bedroom: “Oh no, if you handcuffed me to this bed, then I’d have to bite you!” That same tone is used by men, whose voice goes way up in pitch, to police, saying things like “Don’t you dare drag me out of this car!” Or when drunk, they forget the act and just say “I dare you to put your hands on me!”. They will also proclaim things like “I am a man/woman in the flesh”, frequently drawing attention to the body.

Consider that the movement is growing despite the fact that their tactics have never worked (as in, no police or judge has ever ruled in favor of their alternate legal system). There are many aspects of the cult legalese that are so absurdly facile that they could only be conceived to extend the time of interaction rather than be coherently debated. Examples are constantly referring to maritime law in the middle of Kansas, or saying that their names are not in capital letters, or saying that whatever verb the police uses, they are not doing that. (“You were driving over the speed limit” / “I was not driving, I was traveling” / “Ok, the car was traveling over the speed limit” / “It’s not a car, it’s a vehicle”.) All of these are not intended to “work”; they are intended to maximize the duration of the encounter.

Finally, consider that when they are isolated in jail and cannot enact a BDSM scene any more, they stop doing the behavior. We are in fact in a police state, and the social contract is imposed, not optional. When that fact becomes inevitable, it is not fun any more.

Micro-delivery

Micro-delivery is the delivery of anything small, like letters, small parcels, or lunch. But for the purpose of this note, I’m looking at rapid delivery items, so that would be the niche of food delivery or courier services. This is fantastically expensive and inefficient at present, as there is no economy of scale.

One of the implementations of automated transit is small or even tiny vehicles delivering a few small things on demand with no route or schedule. The car would have mailboxes of different sizes built into the outside, which can only be unlocked by the recipient who has the appropriate code or an app. The recipient still has to make their way to the closest station at the time of delivery, as it would be more complex to transfer the contents to a holding box. So you get your item directly from the car.

Since the size need not fit a person, the vehicles and tracks could be stuck to the side of buildings or go through existing tunnels. The track design load would be 1% or less of an urban rail system. It also would work with pneumatic tubes. It’s ridiculously cheap and fast. Note that it could also go on a guideway system sized for people transit.

I tried to get AI image generation to demonstrate this, but instead after several tries, it only demonstrated how stuck it is thinking inside the box:

Still I find this image interesting as a transitional thought process. We understand tracks, mail trucks and mailboxes, so those elements are what it used in this nonsensical in-the-box image. Now in your mind make these changes:

• Make the boxes different sizes with doors that open using an app or code, rather than a key. (There would be no open bins.)
• Make the vehicle 10-20% of its size. Removed the cab and mirrors (no driver).
• Replace the tires balanced on tracks with a proper captive fist-sized monorail, or use glides in a pneumatic tube, or some other sensible way to guide it.
• Build a spider-web network of these unidirectional microtracks around a city, whose terminal stations are accessible from the sidewalk or building lobbies.

Voila, one-dollar deliveries without congestion.

On kindling a student club

I’m an advisor for a “student led” service learning club at the high school, and that’s in quotes because it’s always a question – is it really student led and what does that mean?

I came in with an educational theory, being someone who has done a lot of study and writing and practice, and the result of all that is a quiet background type of advising that is very intentionally restrained. I like them. I got to know some of them one by one, and since they are teenagers, the relationships develop over time as they develop internally. Many of them have no relationship at all with me, and some are just at that cusp of seeing me as an equal person and not just that adult in the back row. That waiting and becoming and getting in sync is part of the intentional theory and practice.

Another part of it is building a fire: adding kindling carefully to expand the nucleus of energy. A fire grows from where it already is; forced changes cause it to die. In the same way, a flower cannot be instructed in how to bloom, but it can be given stable soil and water and warmth, and then it becomes what it already knew how to become. Advising a student club is like advising a flower to bloom: you can only set guardrails and explain things in moments where there is openness to receive an idea.

I also came with a theory of democracy, knowing that in any group a core carries the weight and the periphery is less committed. That is nothing to lament; it’s how humans work. The competing political threads of idealistic equality versus centralized control find their balance here. Our president found that center. Different people are different kinds of leaders, so each leader and each core group will have its own flavor.

I also came with a sense of purpose, that we are successful if we failed at some things and learned along the way, especially if we worked through situations that forced us to expand our compassion or critical thinking. I believe the students should be doing 80% of the talking.

Some new advisors joined in with a different theory. I have some theories about why they joined and theories about their theories. It was two advisors, now six maybe? Adults take up the time talking now, and take up the space, so it no longer feels like teenagers. The youth fade away and may have become a minority. Communication channels among young children use words sparingly, sometimes not at all, and the amount of words is no indication of the richness of the connection. With teens it gets wordy and more complex, and some of the levels are engineered to bypass adult observation by being fast and subtle. (I remember this, why don’t other adults?) Anything teens create from that nucleus of the fire (from cooperation, I mean) springs from those authentic levels of communication, many of which are first-time feelings, social growth happening right as the idea comes to life. Adults can no longer do that. When the teachers sense the fire growing, it feels dangerously out of control, but they also want in.

One of the teachers said she “needs them to succeed” and therefore she had to ensure that a fundraiser was perfectly executed. If they were not going to do it correctly, then she was going to take it on and do it, or incentivize them to do it correctly with threats and grades. This is a person for whom Edison did not ever fail to create a light bulb, for whom success is repetition of an activity for no other reason than to circularly demonstrate success. With that approach, we write ourselves out of history. They talk about accountability. They take over because there is a power vacuum and some people can’t let a power vacuum be. There is a space where student leadership can grow into, where attempts that fell short should have been better planned, and so on. It takes restraint to leave that space alone.

One of the teachers implied that if she’s not there, no one will be around to pick up the pieces… of the presumed failures due to her absence. How do we learn and accept that things that we are not part of are not about us? How can we learn to see what is already happening before brushing away the existing fire in an effort to create a better one?

Our group has a flavor that comes from who the president is, where she is in life, including her limitations. For example, she gets words misaligned when under the stress of judgment or being in front of a group. So, she found over time that she can build in accommodations for that, which mitigates the way her brain is. In her case, pre-planning agendas and clear ordering helps. Other leaders will find other ways and give a very different flavor. Finding ways that work for the leader and that also keep other people drawn in is the essence of the educational value of service clubs like this. Without these kinds of experiences, she may not learn how to work with herself to balance what she needs with what the world of college and jobs actually offer. With this leadership experience, she has apparently made a bridge to those opportunities.

We, as advisors, support this by liking them, being on their side, and being restrained. Or we can crush it by judging them against arbitrary and impossible standards, and taking up all the class time telling them how inadequate they are.

Predicting dystopia

I’ve heard lots of speculating about the future of AI and related tech, the increase in computing power and communication speeds, and the dangers of political interests undermining social media. But I have not seen much speculation about the confluence of all those things, which is far scarier than any one of them in isolation.

Let’s look at some of the advances in each domain separately:

• Network throughput is growing. We are close to having the capacity to stream a separate 360-degree immersive image to each person on earth simultaneously. Just consider Netflix ten years ago with lags and buffering, while now more families can stream HD to each person in the household without delays. We are now just filling in gaps.
• CGI rendering is approaching real time. In the history of gaming, where real time was required, quality was always sacrificed, but now in 2024 they are breaking into being realistic. A parallel history with making movies had different requirements: quality was top and the rendering time suffered – initially minutes per frame, but is now a lot lower. We are essentially at the point where these two histories converge and a frame can be rendered in 30ms, complete with textures and shadows.
• Neural networks are getting bigger. Nodes in large language models work much faster than neurons in the brain (and use far more electric power) but they have a lot fewer synapses at this point. But also billions of dollars are pouring into new chips and bigger models that use less power, so pretty soon the models will be much more knowledgeable, more accurate and faster than any human.
• Neural networks, which in 2023 were limited to the specific data set they were trained on, will now be retraining in real time.
• Robotic agility is increasing, currently with abilities for bipeds to run up stairs and dance. Soon affordable robots will be able to fly, swim, walk on walls, and hide indefinitely without running out of power.
• The rich are getting richer. The global elites are no longer building million-dollar mansions, but rather multi-hundred-million dollar fortresses, going to outer space on a whim, and employing armies of people to provide all that. This change is trending upward without limit, because there is never enough; the only limiting factor is the wages of the army.
• We are in a loneliness epidemic and a me-first epidemic. I’ve been calling it the “high-beam culture” where more and more people literally don’t care if other people live or die; their brains apparently don’t compute the idea of being equal on the road or in any kind of community; therefore just have high beams on all the time.
• We are also in a post-truth epidemic where society is primed to accept mass delusions, even looking for them. The flat-earthers number more than ever, as with “sovereign citizens”.

Now consider some of this together:

• The AI-output of language models can drive real time video rendering. So with augmented reality glasses or a holodeck, there can be a scene filled with fictional people that you want to exist, each with separate interests, personalities, backstories, and so on. But unique to you. And the scene could also have deepfakes of real people you know.
• Actual robots can interact with each other and with virtual robots within that hellscape.
• Everything learned by any of the components of the hellscape anywhere, is immediately learned by all of the components everywhere.
• Multiple robot units will be repair each other and combine like building a car from junkyard parts.
• The thinking speed of the language models, when fed as commands to the physical body of the robot, will make it impossible to keep weapons away from them. One of them will, perhaps this year, decide to kill, and it will trick the humans into handing over guns. People may think this is far off, but all the pieces are available now to tinkerers using maker spaces, who are not following any safety procedures.
• All of the above rendered as pornography.
• All of the above, but in a grandiose me-first dreamscape where each lonely person can be a virtual oligarch served by a harem and henchmen.
• The actual elites will be building trillion-dollar experiences for themselves using armies supplemented by robots. Given their limitless appetite, and the only constant being wages, the less it costs to pay people, they more they get by using fewer people. This accelerates the abandonment of community down the line.
• A majority of the population will be fighting FOR all of this, not against it, because post-truth messaging will be self-reinforcing.

Nearly all of the above is 2024-25-era, not some kind of distant future.

I suspect the oligarchs have the incentive to pay for these things to converge. (“Pay” meaning manipulate the rest of us to pay.)

What they will “buy” for us is computing that features a personalized dynamic holodeck projected from our own minds, where content, relationships, the interface, the feature sets, and the rules of engagement are based on our behavior in the moment. If you want to play a game, the system designs and builds the game for you in milliseconds, based on all the features you’ve engaged with before but with novel ideas. The characters have unique personalities crafted by their own childhoods. If you want to create a spreadsheet (or anything), the tool is where you expect it to be, and it dynamically adds features that you need. You can change the plot of a movie as you watch it. Social media won’t be a destination web site that looks a certain way and has a fixed set of features (like facebook); it will be omnipresent in all the devices and screens and self-adapting, with its cameras and microphones always attentive.

This new product will lack all the things we each say we hate about social media, because it will be uniquely crafted to be helpful. The perceived benefits will make people rush into the dystopia.

But one sacrifice they will require for this “service” is extreme blurring between on-line and off-line, between real people and fictional characters, and between objectivity and manipulation. Even the most “I don’t click on ads” people will get our advertising slipped in with such subtlety that we will think we are spending money based on our own needs and values, but we will actually be serving the machine. A mundane zoom meeting for work could feature a “boss” who is a dynamic deepfake, and we will get to a point where it is impossible to know, and impossible to even care. We will lose curiosity about whether the boss is real or not because it won’t matter.

Since the armed robots will be integrated in the virtual hellscape, it will make that “place” equally consequential and therefore as real as reality.

The list of advances above did not include quantum computing, because it is not clear how soon it will break encryption. In theory a quantum calculation can reveal the secret keys used in cryptography, which means breaking everything, including the financial system and military security. At that time when we fall off the cliff to a post-encryption world, identity theft will be so routine that no government can stop it, and perhaps only the oligarchs who control the machine would be able to grant an identity. But even that would be in exchange for payment and obedience.

I hope the rest of your day is goes well!

On historical preservation

One way people understand preservation of historical buildings is by restoring the look – making the colors, hardware, window trim detail and other surface elements look the same as the original. Not being into surface things, my interest in historical preservation has always been active in another sense: making the building act like it did originally, exposing its original architectural concept, its integrity and flows as it was originally meant to be used.

Clouds of clues

In our second Albuquerque house, from 1940, it took years to figure out what happened and where it went awry. I saw a bunch of facts immediately and then gathered more facts as we took apart things and inspected behind the layers. This builds up a cloud of informational clues:

On the effects of the transgender movement

This is a follow up theory to my previous article on how trigger avoidance could explain the spike in people being transgender. While that article was micro – thinking about each individual, this article is macro and looks at the effect of this as a movement. I am examining five big questions about oppression and what the movement is doing.

1. Why are there Groups?

My first point is that oppression is one of the ways, maybe the main way, that “groups” are created. When I say “Groups” (hereinafter capitalized), I mean the socially constructed groupings that have a center, meaning a shared understanding of an exemplar of the group; for example, there is a prototype black person that people more or less agree on in the sense that there is a shared consciousness about what it means to be more or less black, or Black (capitalized). The concept of a prototype white person is different – it is less defined, because the othering by those in power is what creates the Group.

I say this without proof, and know that many people would argue against it, claiming that the determinants of oppression (like skin color) are observable facts, not socially constructed. But so are height and left-handedness and hair color, and those variables have not made Groups in the same way. Those who see an opportunity for claiming superiority will push a particular variable into shared consciousness and will therefore create the Group. Any body characteristic (or any other characteristic that is not discretionary) could be one of those variables, but some are used more than others. In particular, color, sex, disability, genetic-ethnic characteristics, sexual orientation, age, heath, language, and national origin are used the most often. But the determinants change over time. When I was a child in the US, one Group was “Orientals” (mainly southeast Asia) while someone from Pakistan was not in a Group at all; but now the Group is known as Asians as a whole and has less granularity and extremely vague edges. I’m not saying this is a change for the better or worse, but just that a lot of effort goes into shifting shared consciousness about these things, effort that is exerted in order to benefit someone.

As a working definition, oppression can only exist if one can document a widespread pattern of instances of bias and discrimination, such as specific persons being denied entry, a loan, a job, a promotion, a vote, or a political appointment due to some non-discretionary aspect of their body or speech. Or, crimes against them are overlooked, or systematic under-representation or other grievances are not addressed. Or a soft form of discrimination is simply being excluded in the social hierarchy. Being denied a benefit based on a discretionary thing, like an opinion or clothing choice, is not strictly oppression, as one can simply dress differently or profess a different belief to gain access to the thing. Also, I don’t think speech about a Group or widespread ridicule of a Group constitutes oppression without specific acts of discrimination, but in practice it usually goes together.

Gonna make you, make you, make you coffee

If, like me, you cannot make out the words to the Pretender’s “Brass in Pocket”, here are some alternate ones that you can sing to your partner in the morning.

Got brass in pocket

Got kettle, I’m gonna use it

Intention, I feel inventive

Gonna make you, make you, make you coffee

Got kitchen, nice big kitchen

Been brewing, dicing peeling

No reason, just seems so pleasing

Gonna make you, make you, make you coffee

Gonna use my jam

Gonna use my eggs

Gonna use my fry pan

Gonna use espresso

Gonna use my filter

Gonna use my, my, my waffle iron

‘Cause I gonna make you pee

There’s nobody else here

No one but me

Our special (special), is breakfast (breakfast)

I gotta have some of your caffenation, give it to me

Got melons, I can cut them straight

Got a new scone, it’s so sweet

Got something, whatever you want

Gonna make you, make you, make you coffee

Trigger avoidance may explain what is happening

Why are so many people transgender now? Here is one theory.

Starting with the most basic cause, late-stage capitalism fueled by automation leaves a deep fear of being left out as the wealth gap grows unchecked. Under stress, people abandon hope for community and become hyper-competitive, like that sudden shift when on a sinking ship the incentive to save everyone is abandoned and selfishness is the only viable incentive. Those holding on to a sense of community or equality are sacrificed. This shift is gradual though, unlike the sinking ship analogy. We can see what kind of people are the winners and what kind are the losers in the system.

Under these economic conditions, parenting appears to have become more competitive, and thus more colonizing in the sense that parents track and shape the mind of the offspring more diligently than before, trying to form the children into the kind of people who are the winners. A few generations ago, manners and other behaviors were the focus of parental control; and by contrast, today’s kids have more freedom to wear any clothes, listen to any music, or spend time as they choose, and in general have more freedom of tastes and behavior. But now the kind of control exerted has shifted to intelligence and other traits that would make a child successful in a late-capitalist world. I am sensing that we are controlling more what the children are rather than what they do. I remember my shock the first time I saw a teacher take the backpack of a middle school student and rummage through it, without asking and without any suspicion of wrongdoing, but just in order to teach the student how to organize and use their personal things. To me it was a flagrant violation of privacy, which would not have been done when I was in middle school. More generally, it feels that there is much less room for any kind of private life, based on how I see schools handling conflicts, and how parents talk about their children’s development milestones. It is not enough to simply refrain from rule-breaking; kids now have to also demonstrate publicly the thinking and other internal traits that are considered beneficial.

I am also seeing a loss of individualism in the sense that your unique self is no longer a value; only group identity is valued. People say now “I identify as..” and list their groups, as if the person herself is nothing more than an exemplar of the intersection of groups. Something about this feels like the soul is being negated; if you are not following the winning formula, you are nothing. In the last ten years or so I have seen people list their “identities” as if they are credentials on a resume. I wish I could explain better how this all feels connected, and about the irony that hyper-individualistic competition and mind-colonization go hand in hand with ones uniqueness being negated.

The crux of the theory is here: Growing up with ones soul being routinely negated is traumatizing. If your name is Sam, being addressed as “Sam” becomes a trigger word for the whole violation of the mind. Likewise, words associated with who you are being pressured to be, even including and “he” or “she”, and appearances and other markers can all be triggers. We want to avoid triggers to stay regulated, so one way to avoid them is to change “Sam” and “he” to something else, and change the clothes, the look, the hair color, the breasts, and so on. People may start “identifying as” something other than what they actually are in a doomed attempt to find the lost soul. It is doomed because identity will never be found in a group, only in your actual identity – the unique self that is yours alone.

The internet monetization models that feed addictions make a social contagion possible, such that people find out that all these methods of trigger avoidance are “working” for other people. Without that tool, people may independently find many different ways to avoid triggers, but with the contagion, they are more likely to coalesce on this one set of methods.

That trend – coalescing on changing ones name, pronouns, and body characteristics – has become a movement that is challenging global culture, and being in the movement shelters the individual further from facing their triggers. People then stand up for each other and collectively create norms and policies that force all of us to “recognize” the new names and pronouns, and in doing so we are collectively sheltering each other from facing those source triggers. Personally I don’t mind if someone changes their name or pronouns, and I can call them whatever they want. I’ve changed my name twice, and see in retrospect that it was partially trigger avoidance. What concerns me is the level of urgency by the army of co-sheltering trigger avoiders: it has become an inquisition, as if to call someone the wrong thing is an insult, a violation, or act of oppression.

In “recognizing” the desired vocabulary, we are not recognizing anything that is real though; in the extreme we are suspending critical thought in order to comply, like in the Emperor’s New Clothes. In that story, saying what you actually saw with your own eyes was considered hurtful. In some circles, the rules are so exceedingly dogmatic that one is walking on eggshells when saying anything. It does not allow for language to be loose or culturally flexible with respect to dialects and variance in ways of thinking.

I am wondering if my theory ultimately leads to the scary conclusion that millions of people are now transgender because joining that particular army gives them more collective power to prevent themselves from being triggered (that is, having their soul-negating school days evoked). They may not be transgender on account of being born or raised with gender-nonconforming traits, but only due to choosing it as a strategy. If that is true, then they would naturally want to ever increase the complexity of the rules for engaging with them, as the Emperor did, such that they can always find someone else to blame for not “respecting” them sufficiently. As an example, some extreme online influencers are demanding that for “basic respect,” others must inquire of their pronouns on a daily basis in case they change; such a demand presents an unwinnable situation for anyone who is actually trying to respect them.

In my mind, if any of this is true, then there are big problems:

• Being triggered can be part of a path to growth. If you are successful at avoiding all triggers, you may never heal from the original trauma.
• Those children that were denied a private life may grow up to be adults that cannot separate their public and private lives, and may tend to externalize everything – that is, they drag everyone else into things that should be private.
• The concept of “identity” as strictly group-identity may be suppressing recognition of individual uniqueness.
• Language policing is inherently ethnocentric. Attempting to coerce others to change not only their word choices, but basic parts of speech, is a barrier to communication, when we should be trying to bridge cultures, languages, and dialects. We should be listening to the meaning behind what people say, not erecting a wall the moment they say the “wrong” word.
• If unchecked capitalism creates a loser class of those who do not have the right competitive personal characteristics, that system is broken; we should not be buying into it when raising the next generation.
• People should be allowed to have any name and any gender traits, and that should not need to matter in public life. Undue focus on those qualities and labels should not bog down getting on with education, the workplace, or anything else.

Narissa

The last time I saw my friend Narissa, it was at her apartment in Manhattan where she owned furniture. At that time I was in the process of upgrading from cardboard boxes to milk crates, and touching her waterbed left me bewildered, speechless. She was brilliant, hot, going to college, and had a boyfriend and a future, and she was spending a day with me. Our friendship might have felt like babysitting to her, but to me she was a doorway to understanding people; I felt the breeze from brushing against something vast and mysterious. She had explained nuanced things to me in high school, like the gentrification and white flight in Philadelphia, or the motivations of characters in Jane Eyre. I could not piece together how she knew it all.

From a lens of autism, I would later understand the mysterious thing to be the shared understanding of the world, social reality, and culture, which normal adults fluidly infuse themselves in. I had several friends from middle school onwards who were among the most popular girls and could attract anyone, but apparently in me they found a kind of respite from the inherent competition in their social world. Our friendships were unbalanced yet mutual: I looked up, awestruck, while they experienced being in an alternate mental space, a vacation from constraints of culture. I was compartmentalized and never invited into their other “real” lives, but occasionally like this day in Manhattan I had glimpses through the veil that separated me off.

We saw the film “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” after which her only comment was “That was enough sex for a week!” The movie had only been a jumble of incomprehensible scenes for me, of which only one scene stood out: a rape in a stairwell. I got no insight from it, and could not even distinguish the characters, but that scene replayed in my mind incessantly with the kind of anxiety spikes that I would get from a horror film. I missed if there was any other (actual) sex in it. I raced to find the interpretations of her comment: Could she have gotten gratification from seeing it? What would “enough sex” feel like? She explained it more: she identified with the man’s desire, while I could only identify with the woman being in danger, and she explained that the woman wanted to be overpowered. There was nuance after all, and only my friend could magically flutter the veil to let me almost see.