Today, I'm reading a bit of Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World.
Does online moral discussion put the weight of changing institutional/systemtic worldviews on individuals? I am familiar with the idealized version of a "good" person, someone who is able to create space immediately around them with their fluid capacity to navigate the language and meaning around systemic ills. I know many people who prize others who won't, don't, couldn't, and have never committed even microaggression. It's not about accountability and recovery from failure, but about purity. The ideal is that pure people resist best.
I have always blamed myself for not being that person. I feel like my immediate tendency to (over)-understand other's views means that I naturally bend very quickly when others are around me. This book was talking about this in the context of 1900s sexual freedom movements. Basically new waves of free love people saying that institutions of love like marriage act as constraints on true boundless love, that kinda thing. It kinda has a flavor where the open exploration of one's purely "appetitive" sexuality is taken as a moral stance of almost using one's singular body to resist the entirety of the institution of traditional marriage. What I was getting is that, as a result, it uses a moralizing (good-bad) framework for rigidly defining how any one person is forced to carry the burden of overcoming the institution. You aren't really good enough at resisting an institution unless you've lived every aspect outside of it.
This is kinda reflected in the differences in how queer folks discuss their own lives inside and outside the communities I've been apart of. Outside of the community, queer people bear the effort of defending their reality, where it feels like rigid definitions are the norm. Gay men introduce the gay scene by talking about how bodies are classified (bear, whatever whatever). Pronouns are demanded as a moral rule. But like, the queer places and parties and people I've known often don't like bodily classification because it just sucks, it feels like walking out of a tight box into a tighter one, and one that is deeply dehumanizing to actual people. And although plenty of places ask for pronouns, half the people at the party have question marks on their nametags. It's normal and necessary to be unsure, and the people I've been around know it.
I think there's a difference between some practical reality of minority communities having to be knowledge trailblazers for their own basic lives, versus any single person believing that it is morally ideal when an individual creates a space of community. The latter is an impossible standard that honestly kinda sounds like media spinning the virtues of influencers more than anything any real person does.
Just for context, one of the reasons why I like this book is because it made me notice how and when social movements around me reproduce the ideological format of Christianity. Specifically the pattern where people create rules that determine who is "good" or "bad", and use guilt-based frameworks for policing others' behaviors and thoughts using those rules. Rather than any other way of thinking about or approaching an understanding of people ("useful" vs "not useful" is the one I got from my therapist.)
It's partly why I've become very tired of what feels like really widespread purity-focused thinking on the internet, especially stuff fed in algorithms. Just a constant and persistent discourse about what is good versus bad, where the line is, and how to react when the line is crossed. I do think it reflects a larger desire that people have to work through their own understanding of their values and themselves, but I think the reason why the drama floats to the top is because of algorithmic monetization.