Infinity Biscuit wrote:But seriously mainstream culture treats me like garbage and literally puts my wellbeing and even life in danger constantly. Is there a specific reason I shouldn't advocate for its overhaul when people like myself and people significantly worse off than myself are in this situation?
Well, I don't think it's my place to tell you how you should deal with your problems.
But it seems like the kind of mindset that could really easily lead to feeling alone and alienated in an evil world, and seeing most other people as at best less enlightened than you and at worst cruel and perverse barbarians who live in evil and misery.
And that doesn't strike me as something terribly good for a person's emotional health.
Civil War Man wrote:On the topic of mixed messages and rejecting the mainstream, one thing that can get confusing is how, when a minority culture goes unacknowledged or lies strictly outside the mainstream, it is being marginalized. But when aspects of that culture begin to enter the mainstream, it's frequently attacked as the majority attempting to co-opt the minority culture.
So the target we are attempting to hit is one where these cultures are acknowledged as being something that is not abnormal while simultaneously recognizing them as something wholly distinct from the mainstream. It leaves an incredibly tiny window with absolutely zero tolerance for error.
There's something about that mindset that I can't put my finger on that makes me really uncomfortable.
I think it's related to a similar unease I feel about the concept of sexual orientation, especially the way it seems to fashionable to turn every possible permutation of sexuality into a sexual orientation (bisexual heteroromantic! queerplatonic!).
I suppose the best way I can put it is filing cabinet thinking. Real human society is a gloriously messy mix, but the modern mind doesn't like that, it likes consistent easily interpreted systems where everything is neatly divided and classified and in its box. So where real human sexuality is an incredibly complex soup of desires and motives it likes to divide humanity into this biomedicalized filing cabinet system of sexual orientation where there's a box for everyone and everyone is in a box. And cultures similarly get treated as boxes with hard boundaries that are to be defined and policed. In the real world of course cultures incorporate stuff from other cultures all the time and reinterpret it and integrate it and produce all kinds of mixes and hybrids, but the filing cabinet mindset doesn't really like that vital messiness.
Of course, this originally started out as systems of control (and in the case of the "cultural appropriation" thing still seems to be one, just with the terms flipped - protecting the intellectual property of the less powerful boxes from being pirated by the more powerful ones, instead of protecting "civilization" from debasement by the inferior barbarism of foreigners and subjects). Sexual orientation is derived from a classification system for disease. Cultural exclusivity is derived from the desire to define one's own culture in opposition to others and police its boundaries against foreign ideas and promote your own culture at the expense of the foreign which is defined as inferior. Liberal versions of the same ideas dispense with this aspect of the scheme, regarding what originally was the privilidged standard as simply one box among many, but retain the basic structure originally inspired by the desire to define and police.
And this thought system is, like nationalism, both divisive and homogenizing at the same time. Because the integrity of the boxes requires at once eliminating or ignoring inconvenient continuities between the boxes and eliminating or ignoring inconvenient differences within them.
