Pick Your Battles: a Shame Story
A new article on the burdens we put ourselves under: https://gfsc.community/pick-your-battles-a-shame-story/
How are your guilty pleasures, guilty treasures and filthy habits?
Do you berate yourself for enjoying luxuries in a world of poverty and suffering,
For taking a holiday while others have back-breaking labour every day?
Too much perspective can make anything we do feel trivial, and anything we don’t do feel like negligence
I love to play The Sims.
When I heard EA Games had been bought by the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund (notorious for human rights abuses),
I deleted it and turned my back on it.
A friend asked, who gains from denying ourselves comfort? Others have pointed out the game has always been progressive, an ally of LGBTQIA folks.
How much do we need to sever our connections to ethically tarnished media?
Been to a Wetherspoons lately? Watched Amazon Prime? McDonald's? Barclays? Tesco? Ikea? YouTube? Consumed soya? Palm oil? Quinoa? Shrimp? Pistachios?
So many of the things we've made a part of our lives are tied to exploitation, oppression, anti-union activity, and other corporate monstrosity.
But how many of us can afford to boycott all of them?
We all make exceptions and excuses.
Because we have to.
Some of us have work which relies on Amazon web services, social groups built around Meta's WhatsApp and Instagram, or live with disability which makes the
unethical companies a lifeline.
We all draw our own hard lines as to which of these transgressons are beyond the pail.
By necessity, for comfort or convenience, we all make ethical compromises, and often turn against others who don't compromise in quite the same ways.
Joyful Militancy, by Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery speaks of “the pleasure of feeling more radical than others and the worry about not being radical enough”.
Personal feelings of guilt and blame fracture our attempts to work together.
Yes, the companies we must use fall short of our own standards
But until we can build something better, we have to rely on the flawed products and systems of capitalism.
It's easy to think that everyone you want to work with is trying to be left-wing in the wrong way. Picking the wrong fights. This kind of thinking leaves us divided.
The entire topic here is guilt, or shame.
None of us can live up to a standard of perfection, and the bad feeling this produces is an obstacle which keeps us down, and keeps us from working together.
Traditionally Lent is a time of self-examination and repentence.
I've heard of churches which have dropped the word 'sin' altogether, and speak of the shame we are under, and of the chance to be forgiven from shame.
That's a perfect reframing.
Shame is precisely what we put ourselves under when we let guilt reign over us.
It suits companies well for us to look at personal shame and guilt, rather than collective responsibility.
BP introduced the idea of 'carbon footprints' to shift responsibility from corporations to individuals.
There are no good choices, so we struggle under the weight of shame.
Meanwhile, profits increase.
Yes, we use bad systems and services.
Yes, these are bad corporations.
But until we build something which is better, and which works, and which people come to of their own volition, we need to tolerate compromise and disagreement.
You decide where your limits are. As the good book puts it:
“All things are permissible, but not all things are beneficial.” (1 Corinthians 10:23).
If we live with that in mind, and we might be able to work together long enough to make things actually better. Even if I eat meat and you buy from Disney.
(You should still keep off X and Harry Potter, though).
Geeks for Social Change
