Thread by @Delafina777

I've been thinking a lot about falls from grace, embarrassment, being called out/taking criticism, and social rituals and have some thoughts that have finally coalesced.

Bear with me (or mute the thread if you don't want it clogging up your feed, because it's going to be long and we're doing detours through a bit of neuroscience, sociology, Leviticus, and Depeche Mode).

So there are two conversations that I've been hearing a lot, generally offline, in my circles. 1) why don't people just APOLOGIZE when they screw up? and 2) we've got to find healthier ways to deal with people screwing up.

And those are actually flipsides of the same issue. On one hand, people's refusal to apologize, or their tendency toward fauxpologies, can be kind of baffling from a distance. What's so hard about a good apology?

And despite the reputation of the internet as harsh and unforgiving, I've found that when you DO apologize sincerely, and show that you understand why what you did was harmful and detail efforts you're going to make to remedy the harm, people are actually very forgiving.

You're always going to get a few people who don't forgive and are loud about it, but for the most part, people will are like, "they've apologized and are trying to do better, give them a chance." And assuming you follow through, your critics often become your defenders.

On the other hand, most of the times when I have actually apologized, I've been apologizing on behalf of a group (usually a company), I've been doing so with other people, and it's often been for stuff I didn't actually do or decide personally. So apologizing was easy.

I'm just as bad as most people when it comes to owning my own behavior and apologizing for it. So, why don't more people do it? Because it's hard. And why's it hard? Well, we'll get there.

And the flipside of this is a growing sense of unease with the pedestal people who gain some amount of celebrity for speaking on an issue get put on, and the level of perfection/ideological purity expected of them, and how hard and fast the inevitable fall usually is.

To be clear: the problem isn't that people are upset when someone they viewed as an ally/role model/activist leader/etc. says or does something that betrays their ideals, fails at intersectionality, or whatever.

The problem's more complicated than that. The problem's that it seems like at some emotional level we expect people who've been marginalized/oppressed/disempowered to understand all forms of marginalization/oppression/disempowerment.

So when gay white men engage in subtler forms of racism or misogyny, it feels like a profound betrayal. You're *gay,* you've been marginalized, how can you fail at sympathy and understanding for people who are marginalized in other ways? Same if a black woman's transphobic. Etc.

And in some senses, the profound disappointment is unreasonable. All of these forms of prejudice are normalized in our society, or we wouldn't have to be fighting them. We all have to *work* to be aware of them and engage in them less. And they're all different.

When you're affected directly by a form of prejudice/marginalization, obviously you get sort of a head start in being aware of it and understanding it. But even so, it takes self-education and work and self-examination.

So the fact that we expect people who are speaking publicly about one form of marginalization to not screw up on any of the others is probably unrealistic. Each one has different jargon, ways bias plays out, etc.

The safest way to avoid putting your foot in it is probably to avoid talking about forms of marginalization you don't personally experience or haven't devoted a lot of time to understanding. But often we expect activists to talk about more than that.

And people's fall from grace usually comes not from screwing up, but from doubling down when they have.

So we're back to why is it so hard to own up to mistakes? (And I'm going to assume here that what we're talking about are mistakes--ignorance and bias coming from ignorance rather than informed malice.)

There's management training going on at work and of course there's a lot of discussion about giving feedback and having difficult conversations. And one of the books a lot of people are reading talks about how humans in general are really bad at taking criticism.

As in, criticism is experienced as social threat, and triggers an acute stress response -- that is, you get a fight/flight/(freeze) reaction to it, because your brain actually processes it as threatening.

And whether you do so out of compassion or out of pragmatism, I think it's really, really important to acknowledge that and take it to heart. Sit with it for a few minutes and internalize it.

Because NOT acknowledging it has maybe led to some societal practices that, in light of it, look at best unrealistic in their expectations and at worst, deeply unfair.

Like, among the soft skills expected of employees is being able to give constructive criticism and to be able to take feedback well. And that's considered a base competency and BACK UP AND STOP ACTING LIKE THAT'S ON THE LEVEL OF "PRODUCES UNDERSTANDABLE EMAILS."

"Can communicate clearly in writing," sure, you go to school for at least 12 years for that; "can complete tasks," sure yeah of course; "can easily, mindfully, and gracefully overcome their limbic system's natural response to stress in high-pressure situations," ummmmm

I mean, put simply, this looks to me like a main reason why the entire system of performance reviews as it exists at most companies is traumatic and largely ineffective at actually getting people to be better at their jobs.

But I digress. Point being: humans are terrible at taking criticism. That's natural, that's understandable, that's part of being human.

On the other hand, humans also engage in behavior that hurts other people, and in order to deal with that, we have to be able to be made aware we're hurting other people, we have to accept it as true, and we have to attempt to remedy the harm we've done.

Which involves being criticized. So how do we reconcile those things?

Well, okay, why do we experience criticism as threatening?

It's a type of social threat. As in, it threatens our connection to other people. At a very base level, it looks like we're worried that criticism means people don't like us any more and won't let us be part of a group.

So what do we need in order to be able to listen to and process and act on criticism, rather than rejecting it and being angry/hurt by it?

We need security that it doesn't indicate an irreparable break with groups we care about being part of. We need to know how to repair it.

This is where I think it's really a problem that social media and internet interactions have raced far ahead of social norms for them. We can fuck up in front of what feels like the entire world, and we don't have a lot of good models for what to do next.

So part of dealing with it is embracing embarrassment. Embarrassment's actually a good thing, and I think we as a society need to be better about supporting people who show it.

Embarrassment, as that excerpt above is talking about, is actually a GOOD thing. It reveals that you care about other people and relationships. We shouldn't be afraid of it, even though it's not pleasant, and we shouldn't be afraid of showing it.

Oh yeah, I promised you some Depeche Mode.

You wear guilt
Like shackles on your feet
Like a halo in reverse

I sort of love the image of a halo, a thing that's elevating and around your head, where you think, sliding down to be around your feet, preventing you from acting.

Guilt is good. Guilt is about what you've done, and prompts you to try to fix it. The problem (and the thing I think most of us are afraid of) is when guilt turns into shame (about who you *are*). Because actions are easier to change than identity.

Shame is toxic. You shouldn't feel like *who you are* is a problem. Guilt's healthy. We should all recognize that things we do are sometimes wrong, sometimes harmful, and that we should find ways to do better.

And I think the danger is that if you don't DEAL with your guilt, if you don't find a way to discharge it, it spoils. It goes bad. It turns into shame. "I've done something bad" becomes "I am inherently bad."

And once you're there, once you believe that there's something fundamentally wrong with you, that you're not a worthy person who sometimes does bad things, but a bad person, well, the impetus to do better might go away.

So, ok:

1) We're going to screw up.
2) We're going to get criticized for it.
3) We're going to feel embarrassment in response.
4) If we accept/own that embarrassment, we're going to feel guilt.
5) We don't want that guilt to turn into shame.

Okay, here's where we're going to get into Leviticus. Bear with me. Rabbi Yohanna Kinberg was talking about this Friday night in relation to this week's Torah portion, which is what got me thinking about it (and h/t to her for the Depeche Mode lyrics).

So the interesting thing about Leviticus is it has a reputation for being all about guilt and sacrifice and legalism and it's easy to assume, oh yeah, that book is judgy as fuck.

And it's easy to assume that the text is trying to INDUCE guilt, loading on ritual after ritual, and trying to make you feel guilty for failing in ritual obligations.

But if you actually read it, by and large, the position of the text--and the point of the body of ritual--is actually the reverse. It doesn't assume you're a bad person who needs to be punished, and that you're intentionally sinning.

Most of it assumes:
1) You're going to screw up without meaning to, or even realizing that you screwed up.
2) At some point, you're going to become aware that you screwed up.
3) Because you're basically a decent person, you're going to feel bad that you screwed up.
4) Now what?

It assumes that you're going to attempt to make reparation to anyone you've harmed by screwing up. I mean, that's just basically taken as a given. You're a decent person, so OF COURSE you're doing to try to fix it.

What the text is largely concerned with is okay, you screwed up, you realized you screwed up, you did everything you could to fix it, and now you're still feeling guilty about it, so how do you deal with that guilt?

(And in my personal interpretation, again, the question is how do you deal with guilt so it doesn't turn into shame? And on the public level, how do you signal, okay, I think I've done everything I can do to fix this?)

And that's ultimately what most of the sacrificial system is for: discharging guilt. Because guilt's ultimately a type of debt, right? So the ritual is a way of saying, I believe I've done what I can do to repair the harm I've done, and I want to formally discharge this debt.

But here's the interesting component: it's public.

And we were talking about that--what must it have been like to have a central, public ritual continually going on where all your neighbors, everyone in your community, were pretty regularly performing a ritual acknowledging that they'd screwed up?

I mean, that pretty much normalizes and takes the shame out of it, right? It's a day that ends in Y, so people screwed up. Maybe it's not you today, but it will probably be tomorrow. It's everyone. It's a normal part of life.

You're not a bad person, different from everyone else, marked out permanently as especially bad, or trying to hide that you're secretly bad. You're just like everyone else.

And part of this whole system is the requirement for what's known as tochehah, criticism/rebuke. As in, you're supposed to criticize your neighbor when they do something wrong. Which sounds kind of nasty/judgy.

But in a society where screwing up, fixing it, and publicly discharging your guilt about it is normalized, where the judgment is of the behavior and not of the person, where the assumption is they didn't *know* they were doing harm, this isn't an attack, it's a favor.

It's saying, "hey, I'm sure you weren't aware that this thing you did was causing harm, but it is, so I'm letting you know so you can deal with it."

And I feel like, especially online, maybe the doubling down and the terrible knee-jerk reactions have to do in part with the fact that we're good at the rebuke portion, but we don't have a lot of set paths of what the called-out person does next.

And because it's hard to think when we're embarrassed, we react out of emotion and self-protection.

What the ritual of sacrifice as a way to complete the process of repair/atonement did, I think, was provide a map. First you make reparations with the person you hurt, and then you do some other stuff, and you end with a public acknowledgment of both guilt and atonement.

And having done that, you're reintegrated. You're not a pariah. It's okay, what you're feeling right now is okay, this isn't the end of the world.

And any roadmap can become just going through the motions, of course. Any ritual can become empty of meaning, just for show, and ultimately useless.

But that's also, I think, why it involved sacrifice. After you've spent resources repairing the harm you've done, you spend a bit more. You pay up your debt, and then you pay a fee for having incurred it in the first place. A reminder not to do that again, or maybe a pledge.

So, I dunno, I look at toxicity online and the fracturing of communities and a thousand fauxpologies and I think part of the problem is that tech's supercharging of our ability to interact with each other isn't matched by structure for HOW to do it. For norms. For etiquette.

And maybe we need more structure. Maybe we do need rituals of repair and atonement. Maybe we do need those road maps.

I don't have good answers for what that looks like in 2018 in online spaces.

I just think there's a reason that we have guidelines for what to do in other situations that make it hard for people to think, and maybe we need them to get past the unthinking reaction to criticism.

And I'm not trying to excuse bad knee-jerk reactions here. I'm just trying to be pragmatic in terms of how do we get to places where we ARE listening instead of reacting--to defuse the fight/flight reaction.

Anyway, tshuvah, roadmaps for repair/atonement/return. I think we need more of them.

The end.

Postscript: I'm sure that many communities, online and off, have thought about this and do have codified practices around it, and I'd love links to that stuff. I'm not saying no one's doing this. I'm just saying most of my circles aren't, and most of the internet isn't.