#it is also when the rules of the religion punish you unnecessarily for making normal decisions that should not cause turmoil | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

leviathan-supersystem · 6 years

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Do you think SJ types tend to be more insistent on enforcing their group norms than average people, or do SJ people just care about different things (i.e. SJ people object to stuff that most non-SJ people find relatively normal and harmless, but a non-SJ person would behave similarly if she encountered something that she found objectionable?) I feel like SJ people --do-- overtly emphasize the enforcement of group norms, but also every culture encourages people to punish offenders against norms.

yeah, i do think that SJ culture has unusually strict, and unusually heavily enforced group norms- part of my criticism of “anti-authoritatrianism” as a framework was based on how that framework led to sloppy analysis of the problems in SJ culture. i read that one article which compared it to religion, and said the problem was “preaching and punishment”, which just seems vastly oversimplified to me- any functioning group is going to have group norms which are routinely broadcast (”preached”) and will have dis-incentives for violating those norms. the problem isn’t the existence of rules and punishment, the problem is poorly designed rules and poorly calibrated punishments, and in the SJ scene especially excessive punishments.

now, someone might argue “hey doesn’t that prove pretty much that authoritarianism is bad regardless of whether it’s imposed hierarchically” and okay, that’s a good point! BUT i think that the analysis of “anti-authoritarianism” is lacking in nuance, and leads people to the overly simple answer of “we should get rid of all the rules”, which ultimately wouldn’t be the right approach, imho.

okay, going off my own personal history: a looooong time ago, circa like 2006/7 i was your standard 4chan fucko, and didn’t see anything wrong with making fun of people for being mentally disabled, or fat, and it was essentially due to the influence that the incentive system of the tumblr SJ culture that i knocked that shit off, and came to an understanding of why that was wrong.

so while there are certainly aspects of the tumblr SJ incentive structure which are poorly designed or overly harsh, in my own personal experience, there were/are aspects of it which were beneficial, which bettered me as a person, and which generated more healthy social norms than other communities.

and if all the toxic, poorly calibrated, and excessively punitive aspects of SJ culture were to be corrected, leaving only the functional, beneficial parts, what would be left would still be a fairly comprehensive and strict set of rules- if we were to just go the “anti-authoritarian” route and abolish all the socially regulatory aspects of SJ culture, we’d be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. we need to go a more nuanced route of trying to analyze social regulations to ensure that their social benefit is outweighing their cost in the form of punishment.

rather than taking the route of dogmatic social authoritarianism or libertarianism, we need to find the right balance between the two which is necessary to move forward toward a better world. abolish laws which unnecessarily regulate benign behavior, while creating new laws to address currently unaddressed harmful actions. reduce punishments when the cost of the punishment is excessive and is outweighing the benefit of the law, while also recognizing that punishments which are too weak aren’t able to operate effectively as incentive systems.

in order to achieve this, we’re going to need to create more formalized systems of debating and voting on social regulations- though i think in some ways, we can already see those structures emerging organically, and we just need to foster their growth.

#Anonymous

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