Safe Space

The internet is not really dangerous. One might suppose it's dangerous in the fear and anger it generates, but everybody who posts on the internet is at a complete remove from the people at whom they're yelling. And that's what makes it such an incredibly unpleasant addiction. There's no immediate fear of bodily reprecussion, so it gives a reasonably composite window into how any given person would act if they could live their lives free from consequences. But after twenty years online, the real life consequences of the internet are beginning to pile up, and it's not going to be any prettier than any twitter thread or unmoderated comment section.

Most people are not really independent. To an extent we all need to belong to a group, and our fear of isolation is such that most people will surrender everything to the group but what the group permits them to keep: their time, their money, their very independence, to be told what to do, because the fear of loneliness is not just fear of loneliness, it's a fear of unprotectedness, that you could be overwhelmed and humiliated by any person stronger than you, meaner, quicker, more selfish, and what if a group of strong, quick, selfish and mean people band together against you and you're all alone?

So we all feel the pull of the group so strongly, and if a group can make you feel pride at being the kind of person who would otherwise worry all the time about feeling humiliated, even being humiliated, there's nothing we wont do for it. If we're an intellectual or aesthete, a person of socialist or identitarian principles, a person of alternate sexual or gender identity, an oppressed minority of any type at all, or for that matter: pride at being a blue collar worker, a professional housewife, a devout Christian, or even a white or male supremacist, the internet gives you both unity and community with people of the same inclination, it allows you to walk taller, shoulders back, head held high, and proclaim that we are what we are, we're proud of it, and anyone who stands in our way is an impediment to pride and self-actualization, ergo, an enemy who needs to be taken out of our way, because they are the reason we've been humiliated until now, and once they're gone, the humiliations will cease.

The only problem is that life is so complicated that the humiliations never cease. 99% of the world feels fearful and humiliated about who they are most of the time, and the specific reasons for that almost don't matter, because they're so omnipresent in the human condition that were it not one sort of humiliation it would almost inevitably be another. Human individuality is diverse enough that anyone who feels pride in themselves is probably feeling that pride at the expense of a different kind of person. It has never been possible for most people on earth to feel happy or satisfied, and if it ever will, it probably won't be for thousands of years yet. We are not meant to feel pride at who we are, the overriding human conditions are fear, guilt, and shame. And those who go through life feeling pride are probably proud because of the relief that they've yielded to the overwhelming temptation to displace their humiliation onto someone else. Pride goeth before the fall, and the last five years are all the testimony we'd ever need to the fact that the more we insist on impossible levels of pride in ourselves, the more the world punishes us for it.

The only true grace left is to understand how people different from us are struggling, and abide the tragedies together; what shred of evidence is there to the contrary that humans are capable of more? Those who tell us that life is capable of being different than this almost inevitably shoot themselves in the foot. If Leftists tell us that life is capable of being better than this, it's not like they can point to the Soviet Union or Communist China, and it's not like they ever would point to the United States with its longstanding very real problems of racism. They can't point to 19th century England or France with their prosperity built on cheap imperial labor. They can't point to Africa where every socialist state went horribly awry. They can't point to Latin America where every socialist state was either crushed in its infancy or went nearly as horribly as in Africa. The only place they can legitimately point to is the almost entirely white states of Northern Europe where immigration laws on their best days are more exclusive than they are in Trump's America on its worst. Right wingers have nothing more they can point to. They can't point to the US which they're constantly bemoaning is in a state of decadent decline, they can't point to Imperial Europe which killed each other by the tens of millions, they certainly can't and wouldn't point to anywhere in the rest of the world, because they don't trust anybody but white people (and just maybe east Asians) to run the world. The only place they can point to is twentyish years in American history roughly between 1945 and 1967, when life was so good for a hundred million white people because the rest of the world required our money and goods because they'd beaten themselves to the same bloody pulp to which we beat black America.

So all either side has to go on is abstract theories that seem to run aground by reality every time they attempt to practice what they preach so loudly. Every time, for more than two hundred years, both sides say 'we had it wrong last time but this time we got it right!', and every time, like Charlie Brown with the football, hundreds of millions of people believe them only for Generalissimo Lucy to land them in the ground. And before it was modern conservatives and progressives, it was Catholics and Protestants, or Christians and Muslims, or Catholics and Orthodox, and before even that it was competing systems of pagan belief. The urge to the mass movement, the pre-determined explanation, faith above knowledge, never goes away, and it's always proven false, brutally, and often all at once after everybody assumes that everything is going exactly according to plan.

So when I hear about safe spaces, The revulsion I feel at the whole concept can't be helped. The world is so dangerous, and for at least a million years, every attempt to make it safer has been such a miserable failure. So far, the only result of these latest social justice projects is to make Donald Trump our President. Safe spaces are just one of a million ways they helped to engineer that breathtaking progressive success. The whole project of social justice in our time is as much a utopian delusion as the Bush Administration's designs to remake the Middle East.

But among all those concepts: microaggressions, trigger warnings, intersectionality, the concept of the safe space is the bitterest pill to swallow, for reasons abstract, historical, and very very personal.

The abstract and historical are very easy to talk about, the personal is very very, almost unfathomably, difficult, as I'll be rendering myself unsafe in so many different ways. I can get through the first two in a short paragraph:

As for the abstract, it's not the Trumpers or the conservatives who will give you what you want, it's the good faith liberals who will do everything you ask of them, if you ask them to cross every i and dot every t, they'll do it all, and just like leftists did in every unstable country from the beginning of modern history, you'll exploit them without mercy until such time as you can get rid of them, and inevitably you will. Whether its safe spaces or medicare for all or dismantling the police forces for municipal security or abandoning unpopular liberal allies abroad, it's only a matter of time now before liberals give you everything, the good as well as the bad, and only a matter of time before you howl betrayal over the smallest minutia of dispute so you can throw us over and rule it all. As for the historical, do Jews really need to answer this? Those who want to be free from ideas eventually want to be free from people. Spaces can never be safe, so it's just a generational throw of a mental stone until the successors to today's safe spaces want to be free of the people who think at all differently.

As for the personal, that's a very different and far more damaging can of worms, but in good faith I'll persevere to make the points so you might understand that this rage is has its reasons, because a safe space is literally impossible for someone like me. What can ever be safe when the greatest enemy is the very walls of your mind? Most people in this debate are already privileged enough to have well-paying jobs, companions through life who love them, families, but even pets are a terrible risk for someone like me whose neurological impairments renders him barely able to get through the most basic organizational task. Long term partners, marriage, children, love as most of you experience it? Fucking forget it. Every absurd attempt in that direction I've ever made has been enough spectacle to last a lifetime.

What can possibly be safe when you literally go through your entire twenties and part of your thirties with a loud voice in your head since you were eighteen telling you that everything from the smallest bad breaks to the largest impediments are punishment handed down from God himself because you did not do what he ordered you to do? What the fuck is ever safe when you have the kind of obsessive compulsion that you spend your entire thirties fighting against a voice in your head that puts all the most irrational and morbid thoughts a human mind can conceive? What is safe when therapist after therapist has told you for decades that your mind, which you were told from the earliest age is a pristine engine with a longterm memory for detail clad in iron, seems to have rewritten whole years of your childhood as completely different from the ways you remember it?

And then there was... that school... no, it wasn't a concentration camp or even an American prison. But the walls of my mind began their permanent warp in a very definite place, and if it began there, it was probably for very definite reasons. It was a cult, and if you did not continually affirm your eery day commitment to its principles, you were automatically suspect of harboring worse secrets: they of course called it 'dirty' as though you were a corrupt cop or a Christian sinner before confession. Interrogation was the norm, and it could happen to anyone at any time. They didn't beat you, but they could and did run you down physically for three hours at a time, and corporal punishment has no meaning if it was not that.

The first year I made all kinds of revelations about me as that were lies because I was sufficiently scared that if I didn't confess to something they would hound me into submission (which they did anyway). The second year I literally began to become convinced I had done terrible things in my past that evidence would point to that I seem either not to have done or to have happened so differently that the reality is unrecognizable from the memory. Halfway through the second year, and fully blown by the third, I was seeing visions and hearing voices every hour of every day, and even on the best days, I will not fully banish their presence until the hour I die. The stories I could tell of both that place and the place in my head would fill three volumes, and any of you who'd not experienced what I'd experienced wouldn't believe it.

So trigger warning? Fuck you. Everything I encounter over the course of a day is a trigger. Safe space? God damn you all to the flames of hell forever and may all of you never know any more respite from agony than I ever have. You self-interested moral midget hypocrites want to live in a safe place so you can oppress and fuck people up and over in exactly the same ways you were once screwed. And whether or not you believe you're better than that, that's exactly what you'll do, just as every other minority who's attained power has since the beginning of time has, because in their heart of hearts, we're all the same - miserable fucks who inevitably forget what brought us to privilege the moment we land there. I've spent the first half of my life getting it from other white males, but my white maleness probably means that I'll spend the second half getting it as a white male from everybody else. It may be a matter of time before insanity causes me to do something regrettable, and no matter how many times therapists, friends, and family tells me I never would, I live every day in morbid fear of it, but rather than blame the illness, you all would say I was a product of my privilege little different than any Trump supporter. And that's only if my life has a second half. One can't help looking up the statistics, and the average American life expectancy of someone with my problems seems to be roughly sixty.

Perhaps it is the fate of everybody's problems to be solved except mine. People who suffer from the severest depression are are often supposed to assume that the rest of the world is as depressed as they. I have always seen people as the opposite. Everyone else seems so happy and cheerful, uncorrupted by waking nightmares. It's only been with real effort that I've come to see that everyone is going through a struggle too, but if your struggles are truly surmountable while mine isn't, what does that make me but the only truly doomed creature on earth? So while there's nothing I can do to stop the tides of history, all my lived experience, all my learned experience, tells me that this is, from its inception, as lost a cause as lost causes get. But the fact that I know so many people willingly giving themselves up to swimming with these tides of pollution; the filth packs my ears and charges my brain, and it can only fill me with disgust.