For all its parody-worthy stiltedness, traditional PR boilerplate was a direct line of communication between orgs and public. The orgs knew how to produce it with a straight face, the public knew how to decode it while making their jokes and laughing at the cringe. It worked.
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How do you actually make continued gains in the story of “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” The arc doesn’t bend itself. It’s like Moore’s law. Beneath the natural seeming trajectory there’s very strenuous active human effort.
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With Moore’s law, the 18-month doubling period of transistor density wasn’t a natural law. Every few years techies had to rethink large parts of the semiconductor stack to keep making the gains. The tricks that worked in 1970 ran out of juice by 1980 and new tricks were needed.
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The “arc of the moral universe” has had a huge number of diverse actors curving it over centuries. Royal-born Buddha 2500y ago, religious leaders like John Wyclif in Europe in pre-modern times, Gandhi in the 1910s-30s, black leaders 1950s-70s... each pioneered new tactics/models
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2020 is no different. It needs a new playbook. But it also needs the same old sincerity of purpose alloyed with deep self-awareness, critical self-scrutiny, systematic doubt, compassion even for the adversary/oppressor. The privilege of bending the arc is hard-earned.
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Changing history does not come cheap. You have to destroy and recreate yourself. The personal histories of past social justice leaders makes that much clear. They were *far* harder on themselves in pursuit of inner growth than they were on those they fought or the world at large.
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I personally am not a huge fan of Gandhi. I think he got lots of things wrong intellectually, philosophically, and morally. But damn the man made sacrifices and lived his “experiments with truth” in extreme ways. I couldn’t put myself through a fraction of it. Gotta respect it.
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That phrase is important. If your social justice work isn’t a set of real, rigorous “experiments with truth” (Gandhi’s autobiography title, in case you don’t recognize the phrase, one of the few books in the literature I’ve read), you are not bending the arc. You’re grifting.
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Gandhi stub. I don’t want to overstate his role in the global story here. He’s just a key reference point for me personally for obvious reasons. To be Indian you have to sort out how you feel about Gandhi, just as you have to do that re MLK if you’re black https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1295040796593283072?s=21 …https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1295040796593283072 …
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While we’re on the subject, most stuff expected of white people like the white fragility book, is bullshit. Probably the biggest thing for white people to do is realize that these battles that are live ones for many groups, are deep in the past of European history for you.
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To the extent you can unconsciously enjoy many freedoms others must consciously craft, that ability rests on battles fought hundreds of years ago for you. There are basically no groups currently living that did not at some point in the past have to fight for justice.
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Social justice is not a minority story. It’s a universal story. All humans must at some point fight for justice because all humans are capable of being monstrously unjust to others. It’s the same fight. The fight against monsters includes the fight against your inner monster.
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This is the meaning of “nobody is free until everybody is free.” The hard part is recognizing that this is not just something to preach at the currently privileged, oblivious of the poisons in their freedoms. It’s a call for the currently oppressed to face their inner monsters.
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End of conversation
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