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
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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
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"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
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@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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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*
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So well put, TY. I was in a Buddhist community that fell apart a few years ago over sex, rage, money, power allegations and the process you describe is exactly how it played out. Even with all our training, it devolved into recriminations, mob mentality and tribal warfare.
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Well put. You get right up and close with what it really means to be "evil" and how that could exist as a path for all of us and we chose reactivity over understanding to our ever suffering detriment.
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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
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I was on the REACH panel which was part of the process by which Brent was thrown out. One problem we had was that we couldn't publish our full statement because of legal fears; I think that would have made it clearer that we didn't see the "good/evil" lens as helpful.
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yeah i can't imagine that was a fun position to be in, juggling all the different relevant considerations :/ appreciate the (volunteer, right?) work you guys did 🙏
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