Conversation

QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
2. brent, the guy who ran the mini-cult i was in inside the rationalists, got kicked out of the rationality community, but it wasn't because of the cult. it was because a sexual assault accusation was levied against him anonymously in a medium post
Quote Tweet
microsolidarity
@micro_solid
·
just published: a conversation with @QiaochuYuan about his experience with cults & community heartbreak (how community building can go terribly wrong) anchor.fm/Microsolidarit
5
4
54
QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
the cult stuff came out while everyone was publicly discussing the sexual assault stuff, mostly on facebook that i know of. it looked very bad. everyone got very mad at brent, righteous anger out the ass. he seemed like an evil bad guy who hurt a lot of people, some very badly
1
25
QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
the sexual assault accusation was written by someone i knew and trusted, i didn't have any reason to disbelieve it, that's not what this story is about. this story is about how everyone insisting that brent was evil made me feel *less* safe talking about my experience
1
1
29
QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
the truth was that i never saw brent as evil and i still don't. i was hurt by him and i saw other people being hurt by him worse and i still didn't and don't have the heart to see him as anything other than deeply tortured and in unimaginable pain
1
1
33
QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
"evil is illusory; in its place is myopic, selfish desperation that would be (safe and) good, instantly, if it knew how" is not abstract or hypothetical to me. i saw that myopic, selfish desperation in brent, i'm sure others did too, i couldn't unsee it
Quote Tweet
QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
·
@meditationstuff uses the phrase "myopic selfish desperation" to talk about "evil" and i love it, so concisely descriptive; here i'm focusing on the myopia meditationbook.page/#54
Show this thread
Image
5:43 AM · Mar 21, 2022Twitter Web App
47
Likes
QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
Replying to
@QiaochuYuan
and it *did not feel safe to publicly hold this position* the way people were talking, i didn't believe that people would be on my side or support me if i publicly stated that i did not see brent as evil, nor did i want to, nor did i see it as a necessary step to justice
1
36
QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
the extra twisty thing is that *this is the sort of thing we were trying to do in the cult*: elaborating on a way of understanding the world in which the concept of "evil" would no longer be necessary *i still believe in this*, and i didn't trust people to understand that
1
31
QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
particularly, i felt like i understood the ways in which brent's terrible, harmful behavior flowed directly from his pain enough to understand that *this was the sort of thing i was capable of too*; that whatever "evil" actually was it was in me also
1
1
37
QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
in letting themselves be taken over by righteous anger on our behalf the mob completely missed their chance to actually understand our experience. not a single person who was in the cult has ever publicly written directly about what happened, that i know of
1
1
31
QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
i came to see from this whole situation that understanding someone's behavior is not the same thing as forgiving or tolerating it; that sometimes you don't have enough resources to help someone and you have to triage; that sometimes triage means kicking someone out
2
1
39
QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
i also came to suspect that a lot of the desire to "help" was more like a desire to feel and/or seem like a good person and not a bad person. i lost a tremendous amount of faith in righteous anger and in mobs. the fact that it's addictive is a warning
1
1
45
QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
again, does this story have any direct relevance to the Current Subject of Discourse? i continue to have no idea. but i have an opinion and this story is part of how i came to that opinion, and i thought sharing this story would be more illuminating than sharing the opinion
1
27
QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
i can't speak for anyone else who was affected but the only thing *i* wanted as a "victim" in this situation (in quotation marks because i didn't and still don't see myself that way) was to have my entire story listened to non-judgmentally. that's *it*
2
34