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· Dec 28, 2021

@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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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*

Paul Crowley

@ciphergoth

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.