Who-ness, longform
None of us have access to the everything of someone else, and this is more beneficial than dangerous.
We're all figuring out our lives. As outside observers, we tend to look to moments of magnitude to decide someone is a "good" person or "bad" person, but it's also in every decision — or lack.
Part of why I started here, in the snap, is that this is where our patterns accumulate. That "good/bad" person label doesn't come from tests of magnitude. The outcome isn't the defining happening, but the accumulation of decisions-made that find a stressful moment of expression.
The definition comes from all the little decisions someone makes every day, that get set in their various cognitive links and cascade at moments of magnitude.
What we don't seem to appreciate culturally is that the thing we learn the deepest, is the thing we regret the most. It is not a practice of always-perfect that makes us respond at points of magnitude in ways that ripple out with the least amount of induced pain. What really helps us at those moments of magnitude is our reflection on the everyday moments that align us to who we hope to be. Regret makes us more vigilant for the parts we hadn't previously seen, or understood the ramifications.
If someone can't regret, they can't learn. You can't regret if you aren't self-aware, never take time to rehash the past, or parse through more thoughtful takes around it. You can't regret if you are always rewriting your experience as the hero. You really can't regret if you are causing bitter pain and still framing your actions as heroic. You are missing the point of 'hero' if a goal for me and mine means anything done to others is...fine.
It's intimidating to think that there are no little decisions. I think part of that intimidation is the expectation that perfection is expected. That's not where we started; the US Constitution literally states "a more perfect union". Think of it like Zeno's paradox. Continually getting half way there, you can never bridge the last half. Perfection is not the goal; getting closer is. That's what I think they meant by 'more perfect'.
Breaking it down
Who-ness is comprised of environment, reaction, and response.
Environment is part Earth, and part people. People's work affects the Earth. Our replicated patterns affect it more. It's the cumulative effects, not the singular actions, that shift the Earth. People's intent on affecting our little spot on the Earth, and convincing other people to contribute to getting those things done is all so deeply intertwingled we can't effectively compartmentalize it.
Reaction is our emotions and trust. They affect and are affected by environment and response. Again, so deeply intertwingled we can't effectively compartmentalize. Response is our embedded information and cognitions. It is entirely dependent on environment, the information we have access to, and our reactions give the first information scents. It can't effectively be compartmentalized.
I've modeled them in chunks as a memory and approach tool. Outside, autonomic, first-blush thought — a tiny little timescape that happens in milliseconds.
But they are tiny little timescapes that we can affect, and it becomes easier to see how and where if we understand the root of the complexity: outside, autonomic, first-blush thought.
If the world seems really, really hard to navigate: it might be the world, it might be your reactions, it might be preset conditions in your response. Chances are it might be a little bit of all three — because they are intertwingled.
If someone believes that oil is a hero, they can't see what it's doing to our environment and society, and their anger sparks at hardships that they literally cannot see because of their response states. BUT their anger is sparking. If they can reflect — if they can sift through the anger, their responses and information, and understand that the anger is more due to dissonance than some provided-narrative 'because', they have a chance to realign.
This is true agency: the ability to change our minds. Not according to someone else's predefined logic and set of included/excluded information, but according to our own thoughtful, reflective, and non-heroic critical thinking, triangulation, and scientific method. It's the willingness to have been wrong, and the hope in ourselves that we can more closely align with who we wish to be. It's the ability to suss out the manipulations, and earmark all the pushed information and behaviors as a potential thing to avoid. It's the confidence in our own processing chain, understanding, and information to not fall for the manipulations again, consistently, or in a way that defines it as irrevocable.
When the social environment insists that we can't change our minds or have different ideas, agency is being removed.
Very few of us engage with free will, because it's really hard — it makes network information look easy. Free will requires the engagement of everything in this book, and then some. A precursor to free will is agency.
Bad actors
Who-ness isn't in the singular mistakes, it's in the patterns. You can't see a 'bad' person coming from a glance; all our stereotypes and -isms are (in my opinion) simply expressions of wishing to avoid the pain of our bad actors. They prove the bad actors exist; not that you can see them at a glance. There is a part of me that seriously wonders if the expectations that someone just needs to look or sound about right was leveraged as some long-ago standard to support the sluiceway acceptance of bad actors. It gave them an auto-in, just like using dark-skinned people for slaves gave an auto-in for social status expectations and dynamics.
In other words, I wonder if we've been generationally set up to accept bad actors; that if some of the qualities of leadership we look for are predefined to be more prevalent in manipulative people.
The insistence of perfection in others is in the bad actor toolbox. They use other's one-off imperfections to cause scandal and obfuscate their own continued patterns of malfeasance (an aspect of siloing). They shift what 'perfect' means so no one can ever hit the mark (e.g., goal post moving).
Bad actors will take any quality of empathy and acceptance, and set themselves and their actions up to align with those qualities. They are taking the simplicity, confirming adhesion, and then showing how their horrible actions adhere to your stated belief. The subtext is that you are either just as horrible as they are, or a hypocrite, or too confused to have any relevance to the discussion.
Which is all a long way of saying: who-ness is important, and it can't be aligned in a moment. The moment-based signals are not true. Always-perfect doesn't allow for exploration and remediation. A moment can't actually surface our bad actors, except maybe at their most egregious behaviors (e.g., murder) — which can also be the expression of someone at the end of their rope with a persistent, unshunnable bad actor. People can and do change all the time; but bad actors like their results, so the patterns develop and can be sussed out.
But if bad actors have the narrative, they set the conditions to support their continued desires. They are always, always, looking to get information set ahead of a point of contention to avoid it. If someone has a similar desire; if more bad actors control the narrative: the more everyone has to follow the behaviors of the true bad actors. The behavior ripples out.
The hardest part is that our bad actors are manipulating information. We can never stop thinking if we want to avoid them. We must avoid black boxes, continually learn, and know how to question what we learn. We must directly engage with our own who-ness. All this takes time and energy, which our current society says is lazy — you need to hustle. Environment is very much a part of what we have to engage; we can't continue to accept it as something beyond our influence.
bad actors, environment, reactions, response