The End of Forgivness - Your Death Will Not Save You

[Lemmingwise]

some of the shit they say is hilarious due to the climate today

What kind of things do they say?

 

[Wallace]

The problem isn't that forgiveness is dead, the problem is that it is being selected against. There is simply no incentive to forgive.

The current state of politics is built on grievances. I have suffered harm, it was undeserved and unfair, therefore I am entitled to sympathy and compensation. Grievance becomes the social currency used to purchase attention and influence, and if you want to keep your seat at the popular kids' table, you need to keep spending--and keep earning. Entire cottage industries have arisen to determine the exchange rates between grievance and social currency. In this context, forgiveness would therefore be tantamount to throwing your money away. Forgiveness effectively means giving up your grievance and getting nothing in return--or perhaps even worse, as you are letting those evildoers who harmed you off the hook.

Grievance politics is seductive because it absolves you of responsibility. It allows you to pin the blame for your failures and unhappiness on someone else, or a caricature or cultural boogeyman. Hillary Clinton, for example, certainly does not blame herself for losing the election; it's the fault of Putin or Comey. Grievance politics feeds off this kind of sloth when it soothes the pain of disenfranchisement by encouraging the venting of uninhibited rage and resentment. It validates one’s sense of personal virtue by finding an emotional cause to champion or a scapegoat to murder. It offers magnificent strawmen to burn to the ground in a blaze of indignant self-righteous frenzy. It allows you to leverage our ideals of fairness by declaring yourself a helpless victim in the face of evil oppression.

Of course, given the short attention span of the Twitterati, you need to remain aggrieved if you want to stay relevant. The market for attention is saturated, and the competition is fierce. Winning the game of grievance politics requires you to constantly suffer, or at least articulate a claim to suffering. This in turn selects for those who are the most willing to exploit others in order to gain more woke social capital: in other words, it selects for sociopathy. Zoe Quinn, for example, certainly does not grant forgiveness. The culpability of the accused is irrelevant; they are guilty, period. Surely you wouldn't be so gauche as to give aid and comfort to a racist or a transphobe, would you? Thus, those who would speak for moderation or forgiveness are further silenced.

Using grievance as a venue for social change is not new. The Declaration of Independence contained a long list of grievances against King George III. The works of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Fredrick Douglas are examples of using the arts to mobilize sentiment against legitimate grievances. What has changed is the focus on the individual suffering, no matter how hard the aggrieved push themselves as a member of a victimized identity. The increase in identity politics along with grievance makes fixing these problems impossible, because identity politics not only rejects attempts at bridging the gap between groups, it sees such acts of cooperation as a threat to their aggrieved identities. Identity politics is effectively zero-sum in this regard.

This all circles back to the idea that forgiveness is selected against, because people want to continue to be aggrieved. The social gain that comes from crying about your suffering simply exceeds the suffering itself, especially when your suffering is artificial.

 

[KimCoppolaAficionado]

The problem isn't that forgiveness is dead, the problem is that it is being selected against. There is simply no incentive to forgive.

The current state of politics is built on grievances. I have suffered harm, it was undeserved and unfair, therefore I am entitled to sympathy and compensation. Grievance becomes the social currency used to purchase attention and influence, and if you want to keep your seat at the popular kids' table, you need to keep spending--and keep earning. Entire cottage industries have arisen to determine the exchange rates between grievance and social currency. In this context, forgiveness would therefore be tantamount to throwing your money away. Forgiveness effectively means giving up your grievance and getting nothing in return--or perhaps even worse, as you are letting those evildoers who harmed you off the hook.

Grievance politics is seductive because it absolves you of responsibility. It allows you to pin the blame for your failures and unhappiness on someone else, or a caricature or cultural boogeyman. Hillary Clinton, for example, certainly does not blame herself for losing the election; it's the fault of Putin or Comey. Grievance politics feeds off this kind of sloth when it soothes the pain of disenfranchisement by encouraging the venting of uninhibited rage and resentment. It validates one’s sense of personal virtue by finding an emotional cause to champion or a scapegoat to murder. It offers magnificent strawmen to burn to the ground in a blaze of indignant self-righteous frenzy. It allows you to leverage our ideals of fairness by declaring yourself a helpless victim in the face of evil oppression.

Of course, given the short attention span of the Twitterati, you need to remain aggrieved if you want to stay relevant. The market for attention is saturated, and the competition is fierce. Winning the game of grievance politics requires you to constantly suffer, or at least articulate a claim to suffering. This in turn selects for those who are the most willing to exploit others in order to gain more woke social capital: in other words, it selects for sociopathy. Zoe Quinn, for example, certainly does not grant forgiveness. The culpability of the accused is irrelevant; they are guilty, period. Surely you wouldn't be so gauche as to give aid and comfort to a racist or a transphobe, would you? Thus, those who would speak for moderation or forgiveness are further silenced.

Using grievance as a venue for social change is not new. The Declaration of Independence contained a long list of grievances against King George III. The works of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Fredrick Douglas are examples of using the arts to mobilize sentiment against legitimate grievances. What has changed is the focus on the individual suffering, no matter how hard the aggrieved push themselves as a member of a victimized identity. The increase in identity politics along with grievance makes fixing these problems impossible, because identity politics not only rejects attempts at bridging the gap between groups, it sees such acts of cooperation as a threat to their aggrieved identities. Identity politics is effectively zero-sum in this regard.

This all circles back to the idea that forgiveness is selected against, because people want to continue to be aggrieved. The social gain that comes from crying about your suffering simply exceeds the suffering itself, especially when your suffering is artificial.

Which is why laughing at these idiots is honestly important. If you can turn "impotently crying about imagined victimhood" into a joke, the incentives shift.

 

[heathercho]

@Secret Asshole - If you live like progressives want you to, you are a coward who deserves that world.
This is a culture war, so if you're willing to just surrender, then piss or get off the pot.

Otherwise live in defiance and fight for the world you want.

 

[Kaiser Wilhelm's Ghost]

“It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.” - PG Wodehouse

This quotes always spoken to me when it comes to apologies. I will apologize in private as needed, or when I am clearly at fault. But I will do no such thing when it comes to public apologies and baying mobs or people trying to use it to their advantage.

 

[Secret Asshole]

@Secret Asshole - If you live like progressives want you to, you are a coward who deserves that world.
This is a culture war, so if you're willing to just surrender, then piss or get off the pot.

Otherwise live in defiance and fight for the world you want.

War is knowing when and where to pick your battles. I'm at the lowest rank with the lowest amount of power in an enemy stronghold. Frankly, what you're asking me to do is a suicide charge into right into bayonets naked an armed with a rock. I'm not a fucking moron. I'm not going to go to bat just because I think 'Latinx' and 45,000 genders are fucktarded and run my mouth. There's a huge conservative in the science department. He's extraordinarily smart and has been there for decades. The problem is his arguments and debate make sense. He's also thought provoking and controversial with other topics as well and makes you think.

If I decide to stick around and get to that magical place (If), I will be far stronger, have infiltrated enemy held territory and be in a position of authority, strength right in a place where it is literally impossible to remove me. Also, I've done presentations on John Money and the horrific shit that he did and its relation to modern perceptions of gender and how its all based on a lie. In front of a very liberal audien....well, they were pretty much all Indians, Africans and Asians. So they were pretty traditional. Look, white people don't want to STEM anymore, what the fuck do you want me to do about it.

But that's the best. Because John Money is a walking fucking horror show and giving an academic lecture about him...is...perfection. Like, if you want to report me for shitting on the father of 'Gender as a Social Construct', I'll just point out he was a horrible fucking monster that would have violated any modern suite of ethics in research, and caused two people to kill themselves. And was also a pedophile. Try to explain that to Title IX. Nobody is going to move on that shit. Because you'd forever be known as defending a pedo and a child molester. Plus we in the hard sciences don't like baby shit social scientists. So people hate this shit already. Just not many people know about John Money and his relationship to modern gender theory and how gender as a social construct was founded under a horrific lie.

So yes, I've made calculated moves. I've revealed the horrors of where this notion came from and how the foundations are entirely corrupt and have never been conclusively proven. And that's what you do. Strategically, you give people the truth of the world and show them how certain extreme progressive ideology is hypocritical, false and founded by monsters. Then that information and truth gets spread. That horror gets burned into your mind and there's nothing so visceral as a monster.

Plus, it amused me to no end that I put trigger warnings on it. That shit was fucking hysterical to me.

 

[Lemmingwise]

Plus, it amused me to no end that I put trigger warnings on it. That shit was fucking hysterical to me

Reminds me of David Foster Wallace, who said that Kafka's neighbour reported that he laughed hysterically almost every night as he was writing his books on essentially modern horrors of bureaucracy. That strange overlap between horror and comedy. The heart of the clown world meme.

Just curious. Ever done lectures on Alfred Kinsey?

 

[Kaiser Wilhelm's Ghost]

If you think this is what I'm talking about, you are absolutely wrong. What I'm talking about is a simple whisper ending your life. I'm talking about how having the wrong ideology bars you from payment providers, hosts, the internet itself. How mob-like rule is tacitly endorsed by mega corporations and even some cities. See Berkley and Portland ANTIFA.

I'm talking about the lecture I got 3 days ago from a title IX committee that defined leering as sexual assault or harassment. Fucking looking at someone wrong is now a reportable offense.

Nobody gives a fuck about rainbows on whoppers or gilette commercials or where some tranny takes a shit. I'm talking about an obsessive minority that has effectively and successfully silenced the majority with the weight of the biggest companies on Earth behind it. They don't want your forgiveness. They want you gone. I'm talking about suicide rates for men not seen before in history. I'm talking about men and women being isolated from each other because they're too fucking terrified to do anything because if a third party decides to be a tattle tale, they both lose their jobs.

I am talking about an ideology where there is no penance, there is no forgiveness, there is no sympathy, there's just eradication. And its not on the fucking internet anymore. Do you know how many people I know of who dread being alone with female students an hour after class? Or seen with them when the sun is setting? Or want to have an office that's visible from ten different directions so they have a witness? This shit is not on the internet. Its real. The fear is fucking real. I've seen a guy fired because he gave an external gmail account and a student accused him of harassing her with it. Despite there being no record of it, he was gone. Fired.

It goes far, far beyond Twitter. These people don't just take it there. They take it to your life. They call family, friends, whomever they can get their hands on. No apology matters. Begging doesn't matter. Zoe Quinn accused a game dev and he was fired in 30 seconds. There were no questions asked, no investigation. Just boom, gone. A whole career instantly destroyed because of accusations by a known sociopath, but backed up by every major media outlet in this country. Then he becomes a blood sacrifice and its still not enough. That should be national news. #MeToo results in a suicide. Nope. Doesn't play to their narrative. He was an abuser anyway. But we'll never know, now will we?

This has gone beyond Twitter. I can laugh at woke campaigns flopping on their face. Woke media fucking up. What I can't laugh at is those billion dollar companies propping up these very real people who ruin lives because other people are scared they'll be next. I look at this shit everyday. I had a male colleague pull me aside late at night because there was an obsessive, highly competitive student who wanted to talk to him and he needed me as a witness. I've had a female colleague have to clarify that she 'wasn't one of those' feminists. If you think this shit doesn't exist outside the internet, you're the one who is on crack. Billions upon billions are backing this up. Propping up this mob minority to force ideology onto us. Especially tech. Facebook fucking admitted it would ban you from its crypto if you had the wrong opinions. Try apologizing to a faceless creature and try to get your bank account back. Good luck.

There are people out there who can destroy your life with a lie. And once they're caught: Nothing. Your only recourse is a lawsuit, if you could afford one. You're just assuming I'm talking about fucktards. Nah. I see this shit all the time, and have been warned about it by higher ups, male and female to watch your ass (in general to me and my colleagues). They didn't want to say it, but you sure as hell knew what they implied.

That anyone could say anything about you, and there was fuck all they could do to help you. You could apologize, get down on your hands and knees. Nothing. You were gone. So I live in this atmosphere. I can't take a break from the internet and 'get away' from it.

I've been ruminating on this subject since last night and I tend to agree with you that the rot has set in to society.

The Christian right, especially the Evangelical elements were always up their own asses and hypocritical when it came to how they reacted to certain situations, which is why I stopped identifying with that particular group and moved slowly more towards the centre politically over time.

Part of it was the realization of adults being hypocritical, and when I was younger there was a certain anger towards that overly religious right. However as time has passed I've seen value in the more noble aspects of what they stand for and thankfully not everyone is this hyper-moralized version.

The fundamental aspects of Judeo-Christian society and tennants are good, and as much as we like to denigrate aspects of it, the majority of people accept it as a moral good even those who aren't directly religious or believe in it, or at least some aspect of it.

As for the subject of forgiveness I think that shaming and public shaming is a fundamental part of the human design and experience in some way shape or form. It is a part of what makes us, us, and for good or for ill I don't think that we can change it, rather try and assess what causes it and hopefully be fully aware enough to self moderate it. We've come a long way from the traditional punishment of public stoning and executions, witch trials, and the like, but that element of puritanicalism exist in all people left or right and despite what anyone says it doesn't have an assigned political leaning, it just manifests itself.

Now in some cases it is good to have public shaming, or at least it was traditionally, because it was meant to act as a warning rather than a preventative. Don't get overly drunk or you may end up in the stocks, don't cheat on your husband, or you may be forced to live with a scarlet letter, etc.

Most people in non-life or death situations survived those ordeals and it did have an albeit minute moderating effect on behaviors or at least acceptable social behaviors. (I contend that outrage at an act is expressly reserved for those who either turn it into a public display or those who find out about it privately and then seek to counteract.)

Also in terms of forgiveness, I think that it was more accessible to people, with the reservation that no matter what you will always have someone or some people who would remain judgmental of your past transgressions what ever they might have been. I think part of that is down to the act of social exchange that people naturally participate in, where we give everyone a baseline modicum of social respectability and people either gain or lose points through their actions. (Not far off from a personalised Social Credit score ala Chinese, except its based on individual moral judgment.) In cases of major social failure, there is a very fine line between being able to recover, and not being able to recover and I think in some parts that really depends on the individual.

What I will say is someone who has their social respectability score reduced to zero, will have to work much harder to get that back up to a salient level and even then it will have some permanent damage because people don't forget.

Now I think the biggest major difference between our timeline periods even up to the latter end of the 90's is that you still had potential anonymity which was the great equaliser. What I mean by this is that you could leave the place of your major social faux paux and start a new life somewhere else, somewhere new, and with an essentially with a clean slate, providing the sins of your past didn't catch up with you.

Now the major difference was the explosion of the internet and accessibility.

For one, it connected the so called hive mind of these types of personalities that adhere to a fervent belief, (neo-puritans, witch hunters, SJWs, whatever,) and enabled them to co-ordinate and commonly target in ways they were never able to before.

Secondly it removed that sacred veil of potential anonymity. Because the internet has for the first time in human history allowed the recording of the details of the individual life in real time. This is a feat that while fragmented, is a first in terms of our world history for the entirety of humanity that this sort of personal lasting record has been made available to us and weaponized by predatory people. As a side effect it has made it effectively impossible to live anonymous of any past wrong doings that have been recorded to the internet for posterity.

That means there is no hard reset of the social respectability any longer, you can't outrun your past, and it will live with you forever.

What I'm hopeful for is adaptation, the younger Zoomer generation seem to not give a shit about stuff on the internet, and I think the more people embrace that as the norm, the more the social justice cudgel loses its capacity, though only time will tell, we're only 30 years in to uncharted territories. So who knows.

Funnily enough, I work with a lot of foreigners (Persians, Indians, Pakistanis, Albanians, Russians, Poles, Chinese, etc.) and they really don't follow the political correctness of America. It really is a distinctly Western thing and some of the shit they say is hilarious due to the climate today. However, when I teach, I treat students like Ukrainian Politicians treat Polonium. I keep my distance, don't get too involved and watch my ass.

Sad thing is I'm mostly centrist in my beliefs, not super conservative. But whatever, I'm a survivor. So I'd do what it takes. I usually keep my mouth shut and go with the opinions of the higher-ups. You never know when some cunt is going to stab you in the back to climb that ladder.

It's been a great pleasure of my life to work with a variety of people from different social strata, and I'd have to say that some of the funniest in terms of social commentary are Nigerians, they don't give a fuck who they offend.

The Chinese are lovely and racist in the weirdest of ways, like some of the stuff they say you'd expect from an absent minded five year old, black people made of chocolate, etc.

Russian in my experience are all on the spectrum in some way shape or form. They're lovely people, but I've never actually met one that I'd say was normal or even weird normal.

Sadly modern day academia has gone from bad to worse. I remember fondly my first year English professor, she was this old battle axe who had tenure so didn't give a fuck, she taught because she enjoyed it, and what she said and would tell students about impending issues to free speech and the changes that would be coming in the next five years to academic requirements, censorship, everyone would laugh at because it sounded so unreal.

She was right.

I also had a biology professor who was pretty based in private, once he knew you were on the level, he'd be willing to talk about actual science like the bell curve and racial differences, mainly with a view on how things could be done to help developing countries.

They were only around 5 conservative types (I use that term loosely, because it means centre left now as well) at my University, all the rest were well established left profs, or clawing their way up the academic ladder. I had a few run ins with particular professors, but it wasn't the sort of academic background then where you had to keep your conservatism a secret.