To a Young Leftist

Back around the turn of the century Rebecca Walker, daughter of Alice, edited an anthology of personal essays and memoirs called To Be Real. The contributors were too young to be very well known when the book was new and few, if any, have become famous since, but the one whose essay resonated with me was Anna Bondoc (1969-2023). Bondoc is remembered, when she is, as an artist first, a writer second. She wrote about being a conscientious, sensitive, talented individual trying to fit into a group of, to put it charitably, left-wingnuts. I wrote the first draft of this post after reading her essay for the second time, in 2010.

In her teens and twneties Bondoc said she wanted very much to join a left-wing political group, and the others just couldn't stop finding fault with her. When she taught a class, did she try to relate to and bond with the students? Who was she, a privileged Filipina, to try to "make" ghetto students "love" her? If her clothes looked "put together," did that prove that she was "so trapped in the middle class"? When she left her family to serve the movement, was she rejecting her ethnic roots? 

Not so many years earlier, when I was her age, I was having a similar experience with Seventh-Day Adventists, whose politics, such as they are, are so conservative that some Adventists don't even vote. In order to survive this kind of experience it's helpful to understand that religion, politics, or any other ideology that unifies a toxic group are only the flavoring. The toxicity comes from the group itself, independent from whatever they believe. It is a big part of what makes a cult "toxic" rather than just another bunch of people with peculiar views. It is found in secular as well as religious groups. Former associates describe similar things in the inner circles of political parties, like President Nixon and his Committee to Re-Elect the President, or writers' groups, like Ayn Rand's social circle. The beliefs that were originally so important to members of a toxic group get lost underneath the toxic group dynamics. 

It starts when one or more fear-driven, control-seeking extroverts realize that other people care enough about the group's goals and ideals to let themselves be shamed and bullied by criticism of their service to the said goals and ideals. It doesn't matter whether the goal is idealistic and never fully attinable (to be like Christ, to "live the Girl Scout Promise in everything you do and are") or mundane and easily achievable (to get a candidate elected, to get books published or sold or recognized with special awards). Someone who makes a good target for this type of ploy is told, preferably in front of others, that person isn't doing enough or isn't doing well enough. Person feels humiliated. Person apologizes and promises to do "better." Person may cry. The control seekers' self-esteem and sense of happiness surges up, and the person starts living for another chance to repeat this delicious experience.  From this time forward you, the conscientious person who honestly believes the group are trying to make you a (more effective salesman, better representative of the school, sincere fraternity brother, more enlightened Christian, closer friend to the candidate, whatever), can do no right.

If you listen to it for very long, you'll soon be paying a psychologist ninety dollars an hour to try to figure out how you might someday be able to please these unpleasable tyrants. You never will, but for ninety dollars an hour a lot of therapists will wait very patiently for you to reach that conclusion. 

It's not mot ministers' favorite text, but the Bible actually spells out the most loving Christian way to deal with faultfinders. Jesus said, "When you leave, shake the dust off your feet ." (Mark 6:11, Luke 9:5). Don't waste your energy on people who reject you. Save your good will for people who want it.

There may have been, or still be, something you do that tends to isolate you in groups, especially in toxic groups. Thisis probably a good thing, a thing you want to continue doing. For example, you might be comfortable maintaining a healthy interpersonal distance and doing other things that show respect for others. This may be part of your ethnic cultural tradition, your introvert personality, or both. It's not a thing you want to change; the ethnic groups that maintain a good healthy distance tend to have longer average lifespans than the groups where people think they need to be able to smell what their friends last ate to show "friendliness." There are more important things than fitting into groups. 

Instead of following the group, try following joy. Spend time around people who like you the way you are, who have reasonable expectations and who meet your reasonable expectations of them when you meet theirs. At first it may seem that this limits you to people who pay for work you do. Persevere. Real friends will find you. 

You may have to give up some groups altogether. There are social groups where the social rule is that women aren't supposed to be competent or that people of certain ethnic types aren't supposed to be there at all...

Some groups aren't as hostile as you might initially think. You might think that, if people put great emphasis on an interpretation of religious texts according to which their ancestors, and now they, were set apart from others and given special rules to live by, and they had no "missionary" interest in other ethnic groups, those people would not want to see anyone with the wrong kind of face or family name in their meetings. You might be wrong. The Old Testament prophets who denounced intermarriage between Israelites and other Semitic tribes accepted a few foreigners as adoptive Israelites. People who identify as Anglo-Israelites are likely to agree that it's a waste of time to send missionaries to non-Anglo countries, because God has a different plan for those people. What about people whose ancestors came from those countries, who have assimilated into Anglo culture and want to live by the same rules? Some Anglo-Israelites will never trust them. Others may be slow to trust them, but over time they'll agree that non-Anglo people who want to join their church have been, like Ruth in the Bible, destined by God to be part of Israel by adoption. For someone in that peculiar position, the question would be whether the initial caution is merely a question of why anyone not born into "the tribe" would want to join it, or whether it's a form of toxic group behavior. There are "adoptive" Anglo-Israelites and Messianic Jews who are Black. I've never heard of a non-German really joining an Amish community, but in theory, if one sincerely wanted to join, it would be allowable.

Toxic groups don't usually flaunt their toxicity. In fact, because the sociopathic extroverts who make these groups toxic need victims to kick around, toxic groups may be positively evangelical about bringing new people in. Only after making some sort of commitment to join the group do people find out that the role for which they've been recruited is "victim." In some toxic groups everyone but the big boss bully at the top of the bullying order is predesignated as a victim.

Left-wing political groups have a special potential for toxic relationships with introverts because, as Bondoc found out, one of the original Communist Party's tenets was that it's not fair to Real Proletarians that intelligent, sensitive, creative introverts exist. Being an introvert on the Left is like being a German Jew working for the Nazi Party. It may be good for a lucrative contract for a while but, eventually, the rest of the group will remember that they hate you. The first thing to do about this specific stituation is to realize that, although introverts can be classical liberals, belong to liberal religious groups, pursue liberal education, or be liberal donors, we really have no place on the left wing. Moderate and independent are as far leftward as we can go. "Liberal" accurately describes people who opposed persecution of anyone who had any association with the Communist Party, but it describes the Communist Party themselves about as well as "black" describes falling snow. Because we were born with enough working brain cells to see through the Big Lies of Marxism, if the Marxists ever get the revolution they want, we will be liquidated. 

Anna Bondoc described herself telling her leftist friends how she'd alienated her family, given up her home and allowance, to promote their causes, and getting criticized because she was "cut off from her roots." Oh, people. That kind of story wasn't even about politics. It was an adolescent thing. Part of growing up is separation from parents, demonstrating independence. Once that's done, most young people whose parents are still alive are able to reconnect with their roots. A really liberal older woman would have acknowledged Bondoc's commitment to the group, first, and then acknowledged that the next step toward emotional maturity, after establishing independence from parents, is reconciliation with parents. 

One of the dictionary definitions for "liberal" is "generous." That's a good test for whether people who appeal to our liberal ideals are liberal, or merely leftist. (Or, in a religious context where the "liberalizers" are those who want to flout the traditional rules, weak characters who weren't up to the challenge of breaking unhealthy or extravagant habits.) 

This does not mean that they always condemn only with faint praise. There are things that fully justify liberal outrage...

* slavery, human trafficking, child abuse, anyone but an individual who chooses to do "sex work" making any profit from such "work"

* government mandates that people buy things

* marketing toxic products

* sweatshops

* restaurants that ignore health regulations and sell food that makes people sick

--to name a few. Real liberals save the outrage for those who deliberately, repeatedly, do harm to others, and have very little of it left to waste on the way their colleagues tell their personal stories. They criticize liberally--early and often, but with charity toward all.

One of the goals of a liberal education is to help people understand the difference between, say, "an allegedly scientific book that encourages people to do things that can have very harmful effects" and "a popular book that's not all that great, but the worst thing it really does is leave people who bought it feeling cheated." So, real liberals don't waste time bashing bestsellers. We observe that it was cool that a poor single mother in an adverse economy was able to write a series that sold like Harry Potter, even if we also observe that, for all their drama and movie effects, the Harry Potter books are not as satisfying to the intellect as the Narnia books. Real liberals' criticism of anything is likely to describe what the thing is and who is likely to find a use for it--and only rarely will that be "nobody," or even "people who are not aware of how much better something else is." Real liberals never want to ban or burn books; always and only to write better ones.

Short pieces, likewise. A member of a group writes something. Naturally others want to read it, or hear it read. Someone in the group didn't read it carefully, or let per mind wander during the reading, but feels obliged to give tongue anyway. Therefore there will always be occasional idiotic reactions to things people write. But if it's all pick, pick, pick all the time, the group is or is becoming toxic.

One common toxic group dynamic, in long-term groups, is that young talent can feel more threatening to older group leaders than a rational person would believe possible./Robin Morgan was actually banned from publishing in one magazine, in the 1970s, because she was a professional writer who'd found a clear and distinctive voice. The left wing's targeting a "proletariat" whom Marx stereotyped as unthinking, unfeeling, deliberately made stupid but unlikely ever to recover the use of their minds, makes left-leaning political groups especially prone to this type of resentment of talent, and, consequently, the choice of talented people as victims.

Isn't it suicidal for groups to attack their most promising young members, to punish the artists and writers who want to serve the cause with vicious "You only got that published because of your privileged background" hatespews? Of course it is. Marxism never did appeal to the rational minds of people with liberal educations. It's all about the emotions of selfish, greedy, materialistic people, so if you have a sensitive creative soul that actually cares about, e.g., your students who are NOT a big dumb lump of "proletariat," who have individual talents and feelings and thoughts some of which are similar to yours, do not look to the Left for moral support. Marxism was designed to appeal, and will always appeal, primarily to people who care less about whether the cause ever succeeds than about whether they've appeased their cravings for control today.While denying that either emotionality or spirituality matter, Marxism runs on emotionality, and is a favorable field for very sick emotionality.