Curiosity Is A Liberation Practice
Stop getting in the way of people's intellectual growth for the sake of your own insecurity.
This post was originally shared on Facebook.
The more simplistic and uncritical your thinking is, the harder and scarier it is to be in the world, and the easier you are to manipulate.
Being able to hold nuance and complexity, to be in the presence of genuine difference - even difference that is foulsome to your spirit - and still be able to form a clear opinion, to have a truly informed position and to argue for that position effectively, makes it easier to be in the world because you do not stake your approach in a need for your ego to survive. Survival means you can't make any mistakes, survival situations require you to be certain about being right 1000% of the time, and because of that, you cannot question your responses to things. You cannot you take a pause. But if you don't need to do that, you can feel confident in your ability to observe, to take in new information and compare it to what you already know, evolve, and adapt to that new information and circumstances. Determining certainty, and seeking stasis, is likely an evolutionary trait that helped us make it through ages of megafauna carnivores and a lack of sophisticated medical care, but we don't need that shit all the time now, ok?
This is the rub of breaking down biases and unwinding the underpinning beliefs of structural oppression. A lot of people who buy into bigoted beliefs do so, in part, because they are very strongly fear-driven, they seek to control and punish others out of fear of being subjugated as they have subjugated others, and, in addition to that, have usually never been given the tools or the space to develop for themselves a more complicated, compassionate, nuanced view of being a person. Trauma (including hoarding or inheriting wealth), age, biological brain injury (like, say, COVID...) can accelerate and compound this even further.
If you grow up in an authoritarian world, authoritarian communities, in authoritarian, obedience-driven culture(s) and space(s), if the contours of your most intimate relationships are largely driven by compliance and a fucked up understanding of boundaries and sovereignty, you never actually learn how to creatively engage in the world and develop genuine compassion. Emotional intelligence requires nuance and complexity -- compassion, too, requires the ability to think clearly and logically, and to make consistently moral and ethical determinations. It's like teaching children not to hit or be abusive with each other because they feel upset and out of control of their emotions or something in their environment: a lot of people still have adult smash-it reflexes, to be frank, because our entire planet's menageries of oppression are built on them staying in place. That's why the likes of Ben Shapiro, etc., are so often failed creatives: they are incapable of being able to critically engage intellectual paradox, and they smash things they don't like because they are angry other people can express themselves fully when they cannot, or choose not to, because they're power-hungry c!nts.
The reason why I stopped being so antagonistic with people (or have tried to be, sometimes I get overloaded and I lose my temper fr; also hello, kneejerk PDA responses) politically is because I realized that I was *extraordinarily* fortunate that - from the literal crib - even my ain't shit adoptive parents made sure I had access to the ability to learn how to think critically and creatively. They made a concerted effort to ensure I could articulate, argue for, and truly understand my opinions, and I know that is not the case for the majority of Americans. American culture does not allow for it most of the time, unless you are very self-motivated, you have talent that is perceived as being useful to empire, or you're born into a wealthy family (I got a full house here.)
That is not to say Americans are stupid by any stretch: it's actually quite the opposite. I think most people are, in fact, intellectually capable if given the right tools and the right environment. I think equitable education and the right to access self-cultivation for the joy of it -- which is what the academy really should be -- would change the world and is a divine gift, and a righteous and ethical imperative.
This is one of the things I love most about being Jewish: we educate our fucking children and encourage them to think critically, that is...literally a part of the gig, of being Jewish, anybody who has skimmed any Talmudic commentary can tell ya that, lol. (And this is why I'm an anarchist and pro-Palestinian liberation, because the only thing Jews are not allowed to question, is Israel, and I think that's a joke, tbh.) It's because of my upbringing that my education, both at home and in practicality, were both extraordinary and very privileged. They had little 10-year-old me debating Bush era policies at the dinner table, ok? I was free roaming in the adult section of the library before I could have gotten my license. I read Plato when I was 8 and understood what I was looking at. Had I had more support and less bullshit to contend with, I feel VERY confident in saying that I would've been one of those 17-year-olds getting a doctorate and passing bar exams and shit way back when. But Gd knew I would be an insufferable shit if I was allowed to persist in the world of ivory tower elitism, so I got my Chiron in Leo in my 1st house and a 6th house Capricorn N.Node. It balanced things out pretty well, I think.
Anyways, all of this is to say: you gotta understand that even in the age of the internet, information and knowledge are two VERY different things. The contents of a library mean nothing to an illiterate person, and, just because someone is illiterate, does not mean that they are foolish, incapable, or unable to grasp something intellectually. That is DEEPLY colonial thinking and reflective of this loss of creative dynamism and higher order cognition in *you*, too, friend. Which is why I encourage folks to read, because if you read enough, you'll eventually figure out that books ain't everything.
If *you* don't want to educate your neighbors: that is ok. I am not telling you that you MUST do anything. What I am saying is that you cannot and should not engage people in a way that discourages their intellectual curiosity just because you're mad they're ignorant and you feel like they shouldn't be anymore, or at this point in time, especially if they're not catching on as quickly as YOU think they should. Think about speaking to a child that way: I'm angry at you because you don't yet have the skills to do X or Y, or understand ABCDEFG. That's horrid, right? Well, fucking stop doing that to adults, too, you mean-spirited motherfuckers. That's why we're behind on human progress.
There is a difference between genuine, malicious obtuseness and weaponized incompetence, and folks who are trying but ignant assed from here to kingdom come but willing to develop understanding & critically engage. It is pretty easy and straightforward to identify maliciousness/weaponized incompetence most of the time, because the perpetrator will edge your tolerance in hopes of provoking rage and a "fuck it, never again" response that makes you look irrational and feel irrational, and its purpose is to undermine trust in your own discernment. Those folks know exactly what they're doing and deserve to be kicked in the metaphorical and rhetorical crotch, when they go low, you go lower. But that is not at all the same as folks who just don't know, who will tend to express contradictory views with a certain amount of awareness that maybe there's something they're not seeing, and who are able to articulate to you something like, "Yeah, I see what you're saying - [can reflect what you're saying back to you in their own words] - but,..." - and then whatever it is they've got on their mind. It might be faulty, you might disagree, it may be premised entirely in tomfool dick nonsense. But they will keep asking questions of you and of themselves. THAT is the difference. You have to actually talk to people so they can learn how to ask meaningful and relevant questions! That is a set of SKILLS! You did not emerge from the womb with that shit installed! Stop getting in the way of people asking questions because you are a git who wants to feel superior!!!
You either believe folks can learn and grow and change, or you don't. And if you don't, I want you to question how much *you* have actually changed as a being, before you go making shit harder for the rest of us trying to sprout a better society up in this bitch, ok? OK.
Besos and shabbat shalom, y'all.
