(uh, content warning for discussion of suicidal ideations. I dunno if you prefer advance warning for those, but. Erring on the side of caution, since I don't know who else is reading. ...also, uh, content warning for Nina referencing an internet meme mocking over-the-top manliness.)
Masochistic epistemology works fine for me, actually! I seem to do better with passively absorbing terminology from being around certain kinds of discussions than with deliberately setting out to learn it. But yes. I think this stuff is not helped by the large number of people who do repeat "the more it hurts, the more you need to hear it" to both themselves and everyone else. We've had friends who were sensible about a lot of other things get ensnared in this fallacy. One of them, when we pressed them on it a little, admitted that some of their thought patterns might be left over from a really bad therapist they once had, who was all about "if it hurts, then you're making progress." (Not in the sense of "letting dissociated feelings come back in is painful," but in the sense of "you are delusional and I will destroy your delusions, and it will hurt but you must do it.")
The Catholic deconstruction is something that... I think we sometimes forget more than we should, because we were never to the point of being really, really devout; some of us were already questioning the dogma when we were 8. But one thing that is clear in our memory is that the aspect we most had to get rid of, because we found it unendurable, unbearable, literally unlivable, was the idea of original sin and of redemption from that sin only being possible through Jesus. (Who didn't even cleanse you of your original sin, because that was impossible, but just sacrificed himself to make it so that you wouldn't be punished for it. If you lived virtuously, anyway.) And when I say it was "unlivable," I mean... well, it's dramatic, but so is my origin story, but when we believed those things were true, we wanted to die so we could get rid of the badness that was inside us and could never be washed away. It also dovetailed too much with our mother's attitude that every mistake we made was proof of an innate badness in us that could never be cured or cleansed, which also made us feel like we would be better off dead. We felt guilty all the time just for existing, but then if suicide is a sin, the only thing you can do is just continue to live with this innate badness that can never go away.
(Sidenote from Saffron: We've definitely met Catholics who are decent people! We just... the majority of us just don't mesh with the dogma, or with Christianity in general, and the few people in here who do practice some form of it go for more esoteric varieties. Also Julian likes traditional Mass because she finds comfort in the ritual and... sense of being in touch with something ancient, I guess. So yeah, just wanted to clarify that we're not saying Catholics are all bad or anything, we follow the "no religion or politics" rule with most people we talk to in daily life anyway.)
We had to constantly fight and beat down those ideas when they intruded into our thinking, to be wary of them when they masqueraded as other things... And then social media's most warped ideas of social justice put up their damnedest battle to make us discard those instincts and let original sin and innate badness back in under different names, even when our instincts screamed in revolt. There were always clever explanations by glibber people for why we should be feeling disturbed or upset and why we had to embrace the worst of it in order to become A REAL HARD-CORE MOTHERFUCKIN' SOCIAL JUSTICE NAVY SEAL WITH OVER 9000 CONFIRMED KILLS AND WHAT DID YOU JUST CALL ME, YOU LITTLE F*GGOT!!?!
(...Nina, good lord, what are you doing up in my replies at this time of the night.)
So, like... I guess I find it interesting, in a weird unpleasant sort of way, that a lot of people who *say* they've left Catholicism or Evangelicalism behind, the... infrastructure, I guess, still seems to be there. And I know I'm definitely not the first person to mention this and far from the most insightful, but yeah, a lot of people on social media, younger ones especially, seem to have an "original-sin-shaped hole," like some people talk about a "God-shaped hole." But one of the differences between us and them is that it doesn't really seem to... bother them in the same way it bothers us? Like, we occasionally look at what some of our friends with Tumblrs are reblogging and some of the stuff they reblog, for "their own enlightenment" or whatnot, if we were looking at that stuff constantly it would have made us feel like we should have disembowelled ourselves as painfully as possible, like, YESTERDAY, as the ultimate apology for the horrendous sin of our existence. We wonder what the difference is between us, and our friends who can just roll with that stuff and only occasionally say "oh, I'm clinically depressed, yeah, but I'm not suicidal." The Imaginary Tumblr User In Our Head says that this is an Us Problem, a very, very bad Us Problem, in fact, that can only be remedied by returning to Tumblr and consuming as much "enlightening" content as possible. Meanwhile, I'm over here thinking it's possible to be pro-social justice, to even work on organizing and carrying out the actual WORK work of social justice, while still thinking this is a Them Problem and not actually an Us Problem.
...and then sometimes we run into self-proclaimed Marxists who apparently hate everything they deem "identity politics" and have a brief crisis over "OH FUCK, DID WE PICK THE WRONG SIDE."
But yeah... There is some kind of difference, somehow, between people who find the idea of an innate sin, an innate stain on the fabric of your existence, to be repellant, and people who are comfortable with it. People who might possibly slot easily into a Tumblr-progressive worldview because it offers them something that they found familiar and comforting. I often think (messily and imperfectly, but still) about how it might come down to the difference between a worldview centering rightful beliefs, versus a worldview centering rightful actions. The difference between morality as holding the correct ideology versus morality as walking the correct path. And maybe it's vain, but I think that thinking of morality as walking a rightful path, in the sense of the actions you take and how you cultivate your relationships with other persons around you (including choosing NOT to cultivate certain ones) is more difficult than an ideology where you're considered Okay if you just swear allegiance to it. And a lot of people on Tumblr, like you mentioned, do not know how to form a sense of ethics and choose their values on their own, without being told what to do by others.
...of course, while I say it's a more difficult path, the fact that I ended up on it often feels more to me like a form of weakness than a strength. Especially when arguing with the Imaginary Tumblr User In My Head. Because there were certain ideas and ways of conceptualizing certain things that made me have a reaction like "HOLY SHIT WHAT THE FUCK NO, YOU ARE DUMPING POISON DOWN MY THROAT, GET IT OUT OF ME, GET IT OUT OR IT'S GOING TO KILL ME." ...well, uh. except that part of my Origin Story is that I woke up from an in-system coma at a time when a lot of people here felt like they were crumbling under pressure to engage in certain Discourses (tm) and were starting to feel, again, like their existence might be an abomination, and I kicked and screamed and thrashed and fought and spit out the poison.
But the fear that feeling that way is Actually proof of an extreme badness in us, is something that keeps coming round and round again like a bad penny.
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branchandroot
Dumping too many of my issues at 3 AM, whee
Date: 2025-09-20 07:32 am (UTC)Masochistic epistemology works fine for me, actually! I seem to do better with passively absorbing terminology from being around certain kinds of discussions than with deliberately setting out to learn it. But yes. I think this stuff is not helped by the large number of people who do repeat "the more it hurts, the more you need to hear it" to both themselves and everyone else. We've had friends who were sensible about a lot of other things get ensnared in this fallacy. One of them, when we pressed them on it a little, admitted that some of their thought patterns might be left over from a really bad therapist they once had, who was all about "if it hurts, then you're making progress." (Not in the sense of "letting dissociated feelings come back in is painful," but in the sense of "you are delusional and I will destroy your delusions, and it will hurt but you must do it.")
The Catholic deconstruction is something that... I think we sometimes forget more than we should, because we were never to the point of being really, really devout; some of us were already questioning the dogma when we were 8. But one thing that is clear in our memory is that the aspect we most had to get rid of, because we found it unendurable, unbearable, literally unlivable, was the idea of original sin and of redemption from that sin only being possible through Jesus. (Who didn't even cleanse you of your original sin, because that was impossible, but just sacrificed himself to make it so that you wouldn't be punished for it. If you lived virtuously, anyway.) And when I say it was "unlivable," I mean... well, it's dramatic, but so is my origin story, but when we believed those things were true, we wanted to die so we could get rid of the badness that was inside us and could never be washed away. It also dovetailed too much with our mother's attitude that every mistake we made was proof of an innate badness in us that could never be cured or cleansed, which also made us feel like we would be better off dead. We felt guilty all the time just for existing, but then if suicide is a sin, the only thing you can do is just continue to live with this innate badness that can never go away.
(Sidenote from Saffron: We've definitely met Catholics who are decent people! We just... the majority of us just don't mesh with the dogma, or with Christianity in general, and the few people in here who do practice some form of it go for more esoteric varieties. Also Julian likes traditional Mass because she finds comfort in the ritual and... sense of being in touch with something ancient, I guess. So yeah, just wanted to clarify that we're not saying Catholics are all bad or anything, we follow the "no religion or politics" rule with most people we talk to in daily life anyway.)
We had to constantly fight and beat down those ideas when they intruded into our thinking, to be wary of them when they masqueraded as other things... And then social media's most warped ideas of social justice put up their damnedest battle to make us discard those instincts and let original sin and innate badness back in under different names, even when our instincts screamed in revolt. There were always clever explanations by glibber people for why we should be feeling disturbed or upset and why we had to embrace the worst of it in order to become A REAL HARD-CORE MOTHERFUCKIN' SOCIAL JUSTICE NAVY SEAL WITH OVER 9000 CONFIRMED KILLS AND WHAT DID YOU JUST CALL ME, YOU LITTLE F*GGOT!!?!
(...Nina, good lord, what are you doing up in my replies at this time of the night.)
So, like... I guess I find it interesting, in a weird unpleasant sort of way, that a lot of people who *say* they've left Catholicism or Evangelicalism behind, the... infrastructure, I guess, still seems to be there. And I know I'm definitely not the first person to mention this and far from the most insightful, but yeah, a lot of people on social media, younger ones especially, seem to have an "original-sin-shaped hole," like some people talk about a "God-shaped hole." But one of the differences between us and them is that it doesn't really seem to... bother them in the same way it bothers us? Like, we occasionally look at what some of our friends with Tumblrs are reblogging and some of the stuff they reblog, for "their own enlightenment" or whatnot, if we were looking at that stuff constantly it would have made us feel like we should have disembowelled ourselves as painfully as possible, like, YESTERDAY, as the ultimate apology for the horrendous sin of our existence. We wonder what the difference is between us, and our friends who can just roll with that stuff and only occasionally say "oh, I'm clinically depressed, yeah, but I'm not suicidal." The Imaginary Tumblr User In Our Head says that this is an Us Problem, a very, very bad Us Problem, in fact, that can only be remedied by returning to Tumblr and consuming as much "enlightening" content as possible. Meanwhile, I'm over here thinking it's possible to be pro-social justice, to even work on organizing and carrying out the actual WORK work of social justice, while still thinking this is a Them Problem and not actually an Us Problem.
...and then sometimes we run into self-proclaimed Marxists who apparently hate everything they deem "identity politics" and have a brief crisis over "OH FUCK, DID WE PICK THE WRONG SIDE."
But yeah... There is some kind of difference, somehow, between people who find the idea of an innate sin, an innate stain on the fabric of your existence, to be repellant, and people who are comfortable with it. People who might possibly slot easily into a Tumblr-progressive worldview because it offers them something that they found familiar and comforting. I often think (messily and imperfectly, but still) about how it might come down to the difference between a worldview centering rightful beliefs, versus a worldview centering rightful actions. The difference between morality as holding the correct ideology versus morality as walking the correct path. And maybe it's vain, but I think that thinking of morality as walking a rightful path, in the sense of the actions you take and how you cultivate your relationships with other persons around you (including choosing NOT to cultivate certain ones) is more difficult than an ideology where you're considered Okay if you just swear allegiance to it. And a lot of people on Tumblr, like you mentioned, do not know how to form a sense of ethics and choose their values on their own, without being told what to do by others.
...of course, while I say it's a more difficult path, the fact that I ended up on it often feels more to me like a form of weakness than a strength. Especially when arguing with the Imaginary Tumblr User In My Head. Because there were certain ideas and ways of conceptualizing certain things that made me have a reaction like "HOLY SHIT WHAT THE FUCK NO, YOU ARE DUMPING POISON DOWN MY THROAT, GET IT OUT OF ME, GET IT OUT OR IT'S GOING TO KILL ME." ...well, uh. except that part of my Origin Story is that I woke up from an in-system coma at a time when a lot of people here felt like they were crumbling under pressure to engage in certain Discourses (tm) and were starting to feel, again, like their existence might be an abomination, and I kicked and screamed and thrashed and fought and spit out the poison.
But the fear that feeling that way is Actually proof of an extreme badness in us, is something that keeps coming round and round again like a bad penny.
-Istevia