I somehow found out some person had been accused of something, but was unclear what it was. He was being universally condemned, and I found myself shouting “innocent until proven guilty”. I found myself yelling at some young college coed “this is one of the most important principles of the Anglo-American tradition” (I will note, there are some countries where it is guilty until proven innocent; this is still a thing even today, even in our modern world).
Then I was with a group of people I knew and respected, friends, who were all looking at me somberly. I realized something was wrong. What did I miss, I asked them. One of them, a black woman, started telling me about this terrible man–the man I had been defending, without knowing the details of the accusation–who was a serial killer who tried to strap her to a hospital bed and kidnap then kill her. It was quite obviously a true story.
But my friends were still there. They did not agree with me, but they stayed by me. They supported me. And I realized that the point of loyalty is to help bring your friends around. I was in the wrong, but they were willing to patiently explain to me how, without judgement. Friends allow their friends to be wrong, to support them in being wrong, but to privately TELL them they are wrong. If you cut people loose the first time they fuck up, you cannot influence them for the better. You cannot create a safe emotional space for them to experiment, screw up, learn, and then do better. None of us can. Loyalty means you creating that for them, and them creating that for you.
Without loyalty, the first mistake means expulsion. Without loyalty, you have to live in constant fear of exposure, of being cast out, of solitude. Without loyalty, none of us can really trust one another, because all of us make mistakes. Without loyal friends–or at least an internal capacity to value our selves, and to forgive ourselves–growth is impossible.
My mistake, there, and it is one I think I make often, is placing principle before people, of placing abstraction higher than concrete fact. As I have been writing as long as this blog has existed, you have to have regular perceptual movement, which I have called Perceptual Breathing, from the abstract to the concrete, the specific, the small, the infinitely diffuse.
And I will point out again that the reason the Left is so monolithic is that they are without loyalty. They will cut people loose on the smallest of pretexts. If you don’t march in lockstep with them, you WILL be cast out. For people who need people–which is most people (all people, if you believe Bruce Springsteen)–this prospect is terrifying. This terror, in turn, gets channeled into anger.
I would actually draw a triangle: if you can’t handle your anger, it is introjected as shame. If you can’t handle your shame it becomes fear/anxiety. If you can’t handle your fear, it becomes anger. Trauma survivors go through this loop all their lives, with all three present most of the time, but one nearly always presenting primarily.
In any event, this story felt like progress. Within my own psyche, I need to be able to make, and forgive, mistakes.
In human life, there is an inherent dance/dichotomy between the need for rules, and the need to ignore the rules. If you go too far in either direction you become an unhappy society filled with unhappy individuals.
I had a story I was going to tell, but it’s too personal. Suffice it to say it is possible to be intellectually correct, correct fully and pragmatically within the realm of rules which exist for solid reasons, and still be wrong as far as specific people.
If rules can be broken, they are mutable. If people can be taught over time to follow them, they too are mutable. Somewhere in the sky is the meeting place of all good children. Somewhere in hell is the meeting place of rules that would not bend and children who would not bend.
I don’t know what I’m saying, but I think there is something there somewhere. When I joke that I agree with 90% of what I say, it is because I don’t always know why I write what I write, and because I literally am not sure I agree with what I find myself typing, although in those cases I try to make that clear.