Ψήφοι
posted by Infra on January 20th, 2013
I know that I’ve written it here, and I’m confident that people know that I meant it: I’m not one to lead. I’m not someone to follow. That’s why I’ve written things the way that I have, here. The aim has been, and I think has always been, to provide what can help others to help themselves. An educator, maybe — if the borderline arrogance of that phrasing can be forgiven — but not a teacher. As I’ve pointed out in the past, the two aren’t the same.
But that raises a question.
What if people follow you, anyway?
I don’t think that people are sheep: it’s an attitude that I’ve railed against in the past, and I still hold to that position. I don’t think that people need to be led. That they’re incapable of leading themselves. I believe in people too much to take that view. But that doesn’t change the fact that it might be what people want, and that they might choose someone who wants that position least of all.
There’s that line from The Dark Knight: “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” But I’m wondering, these days, if a person has to be in a leadership position for that to happen. If, instead, that it might be enough to speak. And that once you have, you’ve set something in motion that you can’t disown.
Especially if you’ve ever used the word “we.”
Especially if you’ve ever connected with someone else’s pain, and put it into words that they haven’t been able to say.
If people have acted out what you’ve suggested — if it’s informed their lives, or changed them in some way — is turning away an option, no matter how much you want to, no matter how much you want to avoid the position that they want you to take? (And if there’s a non-voting majority, because there are no names that they want to vote for on the ballot, wouldn’t you be creating the same kind of situation that they face, by refusing?)
I guess that the matter is this.
It isn’t that I wouldn’t accept that position. It’s that I’d want to accept it for the right reasons. It’s that I wouldn’t want to play a role in anyone’s self-deception, in obscuring their self-knowledge, or in taking away their own capabilities. Those, I think, are the risks of leadership: of becoming someone else’s self, by proxy. And that’s something that I never want to do.
I suppose that that’s the problem. I don’t think that I’ve ever had a role model, so I’m not entirely sure — Hell, sure at all, if I even have the beginnings of an idea — of what a role model would be like. Or of what the difference between that, and becoming someone else’s self, by proxy, would be.
Even the therapist whom I’ve written about: she was more of an inspiration than a model, to me.
This, in the end, is why I’ve wanted certain kinds of acknowledgment. Why I’ve insisted upon voice. Not to determine people’s actions, or to determine people’s choices, but because I need to know that if they’re going to offer some kind of position to me — friend, leader or otherwise — they’ll be able to remain independent. That it will be power with, not power over, and not power from. A sign that it won’t be a zero-sum game.
Without that, I can’t be confident that I wouldn’t be a destructive force, even if with the best of intentions.
And that, ultimately, is why it has to be up to them.
001: humbition,
January 20th, 2013 at 7:42 pmI should say something.
I have found your perspective very valuable on certain topics of gender et cetera, and I haven’t entirely let you know that. In the last discussion at Clarisse’s with Sam and Hugh, I found myself feeling that you had a very precise epistemology and analysis behind everything you were saying, an epistemology I agreed with at the core more than any of the others’. But I did not choose to put that into the conversation, and I wish I had let you know in some way at the time.
I don’t know how people would follow you in those respects. I thought a lot of what you were saying was not being received or fed into the conversation. I suspect people thought you were saying something similar to what you were actually saying, but far more superficial.
I hold a lot of my thought and analysis close to my vest. I am always trying to fit it to the conversation at hand so as to deepen it a little bit, and especially to expand the range of what can be talked about, in the belief that it is what people feel that they cannot talk about, or what they are afraid to talk about, that operates as an unconscious cause of what they do. Perhaps that is a more grandiose statement than what I actually think, but I do think something in that direction. I don’t mean something as simple as freedom of speech, since I don’t want to encourage certain types of speech at all; I mean that people need some way of talking about their own experiences and what they encounter, though hopefully this can be done in a way that respects and honors self and other.
But I am constantly rethinking everything, and every so often I pretty much leave the blogosphere, sometimes wishing to leave it altogether. However, I cannot let you think that you are not appreciated.
002: Infra,
January 21st, 2013 at 3:05 amI don’t think that’s grandiose at all — I think that it’s what a lot of us are trying to do, in the best way that we can. Both for others and for ourselves. And I don’t want to leave you with the impression that I haven’t appreciated your comments, either. Both in the past, and now.
There’s leaving, and there’s leaving, though.
Changing the way that my life is arranged doesn’t mean that I won’t, in some way, still be around.
Or that those changes will be the obvious ones. No decision is final until it’s been carried out, after all. And they’re rarely irreversible.
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