Invalidating Imaginary Injury
Author’s note: This essay was originally published on Medium in 2020; I’m reposting/rehosting it here for my free subscribers since today’s essay is paywalled until Jan 5th. This one is … a little bit raw and provocative? I still stand by its core point entirely; I am not sure whether a new version of this written today would try to be a little more diplomatic, or not.
This essay is not about dunking on Facebook. In fact, I think it’s actively good for opt-in groups/activities/platforms to have their own rules and standards and fences, and for people who don’t like those restrictions to go elsewhere.
But the “we removed this because it doesn’t follow our community standards” thing is a good instance of the class of things I’m objecting to when they happen out in the broader society—when they’re not merely the price you pay to join some small, opt-in enclave, but instead become restrictions that bind us in general.
(Related: Anger As Evidence)
A major part of what I do in the world is run around validating people.
“You’re right to be upset, as far as I can tell. I would certainly be upset, in your shoes.”
“It’s completely okay to have wanted it, and it sucks that you didn’t get it. I don’t think you need to pretend like it doesn’t suck.”
“Nah, this is really cool. Some people can’t tell the difference between their personal taste and objective goodness—I don’t like this much myself, even, but I can tell that it’s really well done.”
“Yes, they were out of line. I’m sorry I wasn’t there when it happened—I would have stood up for you, and it’s shitty that none of the people who were there stood up for you. They should have—you deserved it, and it was reasonable to expect it, and they let you down, and it’s entirely appropriate to dock them points for it. I’m docking them points for it.”
It’s astonishing how often a little bit of validation makes a huge difference. After all, if everyone around you is telling you that you’re the crazy one, it’s pretty hard to shake the anxiety that hey, maybe I’m the crazy one. Another mind that sees things the same way you do—especially one that doesn’t have any particular incentive to, and is therefore less likely to be biased—is a big deal in many situations.
But there’s one thing that I don’t do, and that’s validate things that aren’t valid.
I never offer validation just because it will help prop someone up. Truth comes first. If I need to help someone and I also think they’re in the wrong, I just say that—“Listen, I think you’re wrong here, but that doesn’t mean you don’t deserve some support in general. I don’t want you to ‘win’, but I do want to see if we can somehow make this situation less terrible for you.”
It seems to me that this is actually a rare position to take. It’s a complex statement—“You’re wrong here and, separately, you still deserve to be happy.”
And our society—as far as I can tell—doesn’t do so well with complex statements. The mob as a whole can’t hold on to the apparent contradiction. There’s something like a halo/horns effect, writ large—if you deserve to be happy, then your grievance must be valid, and if your grievance isn’t valid, then you must not deserve to be happy. All the arrows have to point the same way, at least in the dominant common narrative.
This is a problem.
There is a class of hurts that are entirely “in your head.”
The fact that they’re in your head does not make them any less powerful or real. Our thoughts, stories, and beliefs have actual, significant impact on our mood and mental health and way-of-relating with other people. You can think your way into physical stress, crippling depression, and even—given the right mix of preconditions—psychosis or permanent disorder or heart attack or suicide.
But it’s interesting to note that there are lots of hurts which would vanish entirely if—say—you just forgot.
If one of the Men In Black neuralyzed you, and you didn’t even realize that they’d broken their promise.
If you tripped and bonked your head, and you forgot the relationship—and the breakup—entirely.
If you just closed your eyes for ten seconds, took a deep breath, and looked around, and realized that actually, it was a sunny day and you felt good and you were mostly looking forward to the things that were going to happen in the near future and really the only thing stopping you from letting it go was your own decision not to.
Note: it is really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really important that the above not be misconstrued as a recommendation. There are all kinds of extremely important reasons to hang on to things, and remember them—all kinds of stuff that would go wrong with society and with your own personal life if you adopted a blind policy of just letting go everything that could, in theory, be let go.
I’m absolutely not advocating just shrugging and forgetting that you were abused, or just pretending like your heart isn’t broken, or letting go of the love you hold for your deceased friend, or cauterizing the part of you that’s justifiably afraid, or anything like that. Absolutely not. That’s how people end up falling back into the same trap over and over again.
But I am pointing out the fact that these hurts—or at least, a large part of them—are interestingly self-generated. They emerge from our memories, our expectations, our narratives, our assumptions, our beliefs—they hurt because we make some kind of decision to be hurt. Because, on some level, we choose to continue living as if events A, B, and C require that we respond with X, Y, and Z, even though other options do, in fact, exist.
Again, that’s super duper not saying that the right move is to just make that decision a different way via brute force.
(Sorry if you’re getting tired of hearing me underline this part, but I really don’t want to be misunderstood here.)
Often despair or outrage or grief or shock are totally appropriate, both in terms of how humans work emotionally, and in terms of how they influence the social fabric around us. Often, just shrugging it off would be worse both for you as an individual and for the society around you.
But it’s interesting to note that you could, in theory. That you could just wake up and not care anymore. That there are some hurts which are huge and overwhelming and very, very real, which nevertheless exist only because we tell them to, on some level—hurts which emerge entirely from our own thoughts.
You may have figured out where I’m going, with the combination of the above two sections.
While many of the self-inflicted hurts are, in some sense, correct to inflict, there are some which simply aren’t.
In particular, there are some hurts which are entirely imaginary. Hurts where there isn’t any actual external reality which backs up and validates the internal distress, hurts where just changing your mind about how you feel would have no negative impact and wouldn’t undermine any important pillar of how society works.
And in these cases, I think our society is seriously messing up by validating and upholding them. Particularly because our society holds fairly closely to the value that “your right to freely swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose,” and by projecting imaginary stakes, some people are stealing space from the rest of us. It’s like if I was over in a field all by myself, swinging my fists, and you literally ran over and stuck your nose in the way, and then blamed me for your pain, and also everybody else around us took your side, and as a result I wasn’t allowed to swing my fists freely anymore, even when I was all by myself.
Example 1: Uluru
Uluru, also known as Ayers Rock, closed in October of 2019. You can still visit it, but you can’t climb on it, as people have been doing for a long, long time.
Why did Uluru close? The decision was made by the board of the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, which is under the jurisdiction of the overall Australian government, but it was made on behalf of the indigenous Anangu people.
Some of the statements that were cited in print and radio pieces about the closure:
“In the Anangu tradition, Uluru is a sacred place and climbing it is inherently disrespectful.”
“The rock will be resting, so we will feel rested…it is time to let this most sacred of places rest and heal.”
“Blue tongue lizard Lungkata lives right up the top there. He stole meat from Emu, and Emu followed him back to his cave. Emu got very angry and made a fire and it went right up into the cave and the smoke blocked him and he fell down. That blue patch there is where his burnt body rolled down and left a mark.”
I’m about to launch into an objection, so first I should be explicit about a couple of things.
Number one: I don’t think it’s bad that Uluru is closed. I think it’s costly, but there are plenty of things which are costly which are nevertheless worth doing. I’m not advocating that it be re-opened.
Number two: I don’t think individuals and groups should have to justify the norms and standards that they want to install, in their own fiefdoms. I don’t think anybody has to meet some external standard of validity in order to say “this is my property, and on my property you don’t do X.”
To a large extent, that’s what property means. It means you get to decide, period. Doesn’t matter if your reasons are nonsensical, doesn’t matter if your traditions seem weird to outsiders. It’s your house/land/country; barring actual violence and abuse, you can do whatever you want.
But here’s the thing: the Australian government and the National Park board didn’t close the rock because the Anangu people wanted it, and they deserve to make the call, period. They didn’t even close the rock because we, the Australian government, have committed atrocities in the past and want to make it up to them with a meaningful gesture.
Instead, in the bulk of their messaging and communications on the subject, they indicated that they were closing the rock because it is sacred. Because, according to the Anangu, the rock was suffering under the footsteps of tourists, and because the spirits of their ancestors were suffering as well.
This is a subtle distinction. It’s one thing to agree to respect one another’s sacred traditions. It’s one thing to say “okay, I don’t think that’s real, but hey, I believe stuff that you don’t think is real, so sure—we’ll make a trade of mutual respect.”
I wholeheartedly approve of that.
But it’s another thing entirely to agree—“You know what? You’re right. We should stop hurting the spirit of the rock, and upsetting your ancestors.”
The former is prosocial. The latter is epistemic poison.
“It’s considered sacred by the Anangu” ≠ “It is sacred.”
There is no “spirit of the rock.” There was no lizard named Lungkata who stole meat from an emu and was then smoked out of his cave by that emu, leaving a blue stain down the side of the mountain. No matter how hard the Anangu believe that their ancestors’ spirits are crying out in pain as tourists climb to the top of Uluru, they aren’t. It’s just a rock.
And yet all of the previous paragraph is dangerous to say, even in the year 2020. There’s a decent chance that I’ll be shouted at or harassed or smeared for saying it—
[Author’s note: thankfully, I was not]
—because people confuse “willingness to respect your right to believe X” with “obligation to validate X in my own head, or at least in my own explicit speech.”
It’s fine for the Anangu to believe a bunch of things that are patently false. I wish they didn’t, but I wish a lot of things I’m not going to get. It’s also fine for other people to make trades of mutual respect, and to agree to follow whatever rules the Anangu want to put into place, when on Anangu land.
But you can follow the rules without validating their reasons for creating those rules. They don’t have to justify their rules to outsiders at all! They can just say “this is how we do things here; if you want to visit us, you can’t climb the rock.”
It’s a much, much worse world if the Anangu have to answer the question “why?” Because that creates a kind of backwards pressure for the rest of us to swallow bullshit if we want to behave in a respectful manner.
If the answer is “let the Anangu declare the rock off limits,” and then people are allowed to object that such decisions must be justified, then one of two things will happen:
Either the desires of the Anangu will be trampled, because their reasons are fundamentally invalid and based on patent falsehoods, and our ability to coordinate and cooperate and make trades of respect will start to unravel because there are invalid and false reasons behind all sorts of things in every culture…
…or we’ll have to start lying through our teeth, pretending to have actual respect for imaginary spirits that do not exist, and raising our children to be confused about what’s actually real and valid.
Nope. Just hold the complicated thought—“You’re wrong here, as a matter of simple fact, and separately, you still deserve to be happy.”
Don’t round it off to “either your traditions are valid and you deserve to be happy, or your traditions are invalid and you don’t.”
Example 2: Nudity
I want to loop back around to the concept of imaginary injury.
The Anangu experience actual pain and distress, when they see people trampling all over Uluru. That suffering is real, and it would be better if it weren’t happening.
One way to take that suffering away is to do what the Australian government did in October of 2019—they forbade people from climbing the rock.
But there is another solution (at least in theory): the Anangu could’ve let go of the false belief that they were being hurt by the actions of others.
The Anangu culture was, in a very real sense, creating its own pain. It was narrativizing and contextualizing entirely independent actions of other people into something distressing and harmful.
In point of fact, other people being on the rock was not hurting the Anangu. The pain was divorced from reality—their claim was that it came from disrespectful trespass, but if you did double-blind tests where the elders and mystics were asked to determine whether outsiders were climbing on the rock right now, based on the outcries of the spirits, they wouldn’t be able to tell. If a hundred people successfully snuck in and climbed the rock in secret, leaving no sign of their passage, the Anangu would have felt no increase in distress. The actual source of their suffering was their belief that people were on the rock, and their belief that this mattered in some metaphysical way.
There were probably some incidental harms that were real, like littering or pollution or erosion or theft—but for the most part, the Anangu were hurting themselves. They were telling themselves that this entirely independent and innocuous action was something that they ought to react to with pain and distress and sadness and worry and outrage.
They decided, as a culture, to define “that empty space over there” as “our nose.” And so, when other people innocently swung their fists through that empty space, the Anangu said “ow.”
This is extremely bad. It’s bad because it incentivizes being in pain as a way to exert influence over other people in the world. It’s bad because it hijacks the norm of “I won’t swing my fists where they’re going to hit your nose” and converts it into something very different from what that norm was trying to be. It’s bad because it’s social ownership of the micro.
(It’s also bad because it’s woven of falsehood at its core, and the further we move into the modern era, the more clear it becomes that every little bit of truth matters.)
And the worst part is, the Australian government colluded with them in this dynamic. They could’ve said “You know what? We should just let them make their own rules. We should cede political control over this territory back to them, since we now believe, as a culture, that we were wrong to take the land from them in the first place. And once it’s their land again, they can do whatever they want, for whatever reasons, and we won’t question it, and we’ll agree to abide by it because that’s how sovereignty works.”
But they didn’t. Instead, they validated the imaginary injury. They nodded gravely as the Anangu elders explained that actually, this inanimate object was in pain, and actually, the spirits of their dead great-great-great-grandfathers were unable to rest. They said “we’re closing this trail in recognition of the fact that it’s time for the spirit of Uluru to rest and heal.” They parroted words they knew to be false, because they failed to recognize that respectful action does not require capitulation of belief.
And because imaginary injury was validated in this case, others are more likely to imagine themselves injured in the future. Are more likely to project their own psychic noses forward, and claim hurt, and impose costs on other people under the flag of “stop hurting me!”
One of the most commonplace and outrageous examples of this dynamic is compulsory anti-nudity norms. Entirely separate from questions of health and hygiene and self-determination in private spaces—all of which are valid and good—people imagine themselves injured by the prospect of seeing another human’s unclothed body. They train one another—and future generations—to feel disgust, outrage, a sense-of-trespass—as if one person’s mere existence were somehow an assault upon someone else.
Eww, gross! Cover up! How dare you?
This is insane, and costly, and harmful. I’ve written about it at length in the past. But what I want to focus on here is the imaginary injury.
People are actually hurt by other people’s nudism. They experience real and actual distress.
Where does that distress come from?
Their own minds. They have a preconception that seeing someone else’s body will somehow hurt them, somehow corrupt them, is somehow an intrusion into their personal sovereignty that they have some right to not-have-happen.
People choose to be hurt by the sight of someone else’s body. (Or, more accurately, they’re conditioned to believe that it’s going to hurt them/is hurting them, and then many of them never question or relinquish that belief.)
And we should simply stop validating this, as a culture.
Again, subtle distinctions—this is not the same thing as saying that we should abolish anti-nudity norms. I personally think that we should, but that’s a separate topic entirely.
What I’m saying is that we should stop pretending that anti-nudity norms are valid because of the onlooker’s distress.
It’s fine to have preferences that aren’t justified! It’s fine for people to just say “Hey, we don’t like this, and so we’re going to outlaw it.”
(And that’s not even mentioning all the other valid justifications, like keeping a lid on sexual crime and preventing the spread of disease and minimizing distraction and so forth.)
It’s fine for Facebook to take down my photo of me jumping naked into a waterfall because Facebook just doesn’t want to host that sort of thing. Facebook should get to make its own rules, just like I should get to make my own rules if I create a social networking site. Those rules don’t have to make sense—Facebook is opt-in, and if I find the rules oppressive, I can opt-out.
What’s not fine is for individuals to act like someone being naked in their visual field is directly and actively hurting them, and for the rest of the culture to support this delusion. Our collective response to your Eww, gross! should be yeah, so?
Instead, it’s to force people to spend a significant fraction of their hard-earned money on clothes to stop other people from imagining themselves injured—even if you’re just, say, sitting in the sun in your own front yard.
I’m betting there will be people that don’t like either of these examples. I’m betting there will be people that will argue in favor of both [the closing of Uluru] and [anti-nudity norms] as if that defeats the point I’m trying to make.
That’s not the point I’m trying to make. I do think Uluru should be open, and I do think people should be free to be naked, but this particular post isn’t about the conclusion. This is about the process.
It’s about what kinds of strictures are valid. It’s about what kinds of hurt create moral obligation in others. It’s about whether we arrived at “you can’t climb Uluru” and “you have to wear clothes” via a sane and reasonable process.
We didn’t. We could have, but we didn’t.
And these are far from the only places where our culture does this imaginary injury thing, and shunts the costs onto someone else’s shoulders. Just think about the anger over Colin Kaepernick’s protest, or the vitriolic responses to “Black Lives Matter!” Think about how often you see Person A calling Person B a jerk or an asshole or a racist or a sexist because Person A projected a bunch of stuff that Person B wasn’t saying onto Person B’s words.
I do parkour in public spaces sometimes, and the sheer aggrieved outrage that people experience when, from afar, they see me balancing on a rail instead of standing next to the rail, is something to behold. Their faces turn red. They literally shout. They react as if I’m directly threatening them.
We’re imagining injury left and right, these days, and we’re turning it into a weapon. And the thing about weapons is, once they’re made, they can be picked up by just about anyone. You might not personally feel the loss of Uluru, or chafe under the expectation that you put on clothes, but sooner or later there will be some place where your right to freely swing your fist will end because somebody else has a fairy-tale narrative in which it somehow hurts them, even though it doesn’t.
Honestly, it’s probably already happened, and you just didn’t notice it.
80% Aella would/did like this article.