Mordax et al

skye-writing:

The thing about “X doesn’t exist in a vacuum” is – it’s not wrong, but it’s also not an argument.

“Your desires are socially constructed” isn’t a meaningful critique of said desires. Of course they’re socially constructed. They’re also still me. There’s no “true self” hiding under layers of socialization.

Moreover, I’ve noticed that many people use “your desires don’t exist in a vacuum” as a way to end conversations, not start them. My desires are culturally, environmentally, and psychologically dependent? Okay! Let’s talk about that. Let’s discuss where they’ve come from and why they exist. I’m game for that. Trouble is, a lot of people would rather assume that because my desires aren’t 100% internally generated, they already know my reasons for having them, and those reasons are obvious and easy to parse.

But that’s not the case at all! Human motivations are insanely complicated. It’s not this “stimulus in —> desire out” transaction I see so many people reducing it to. We all live in capital-S Society, true, but every single one of us experiences it differently. We all have personal insecurities and weird families and favorite books and cruel third-grade teachers. My desires and goals and motivations are constructed by a cocktail of everything I’ve ever experienced. Maybe I fetishize [insert fetish here] because of Society, or maybe it’s because a character in my favorite work of fiction had that fetish and I identify strongly with them, or maybe it’s because I came across it at a particularly good or formative time in my life, or maybe it’s both or neither or nothing at all. Point is, I’m not an automaton. My mind is more complicated than that. Everyone’s is.

Have some epistemic humility when it comes to other people’s motivations. Have some compassion. They don’t exist in a vacuum, which is the whole point: you can’t isolate a single variable of their lives and ignore the context of the human being. You are seeing a snapshot of a lifelong film. Your interlocutor is a person, not an instantiation of everything you find wrong with society.