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| Three fingers point always back at you. |
Accountability is among the most important principles to speak about, to embody, and even to demand of others.
Let's unpack why issuing a demand of accountability upon others must be administered with the recognition: that when we point one finger at someone, our own three fingers are pointing back at us.
The act of "pointing" at someone directs our focus to a single end-point, which is another person (whether during a call-out or a call-in). "Pointing" thus immediately begins in the differentiation of "me" and "you". But this differentiation is not horizontal — the "me" and the "you" are not, in this local situation, on level ground.
"Pointing" transfers us into a position different than the person we are pointing at, and our new position expresses its own implicit message: you are doing something that I and others are not, and what you are doing is harmful. You are harming, and I am not harming in that same way, which is why I’m here to stop your behavior. As such, this position occupies a plane above the person we're pointing at. This "plane" of difference does not refer to the structural-categories of oppression or of privilege to which we broadly belong. No, it refers to the local, conversational, immediate, interpersonal, dialectical, dialogical context between you and another human being. (This dynamic, of course, is influenced by our broader social categories, which must be taken into account in the depth and tactics of our commitment to engagement.)
Stopping someone’s harmful behavior can be achieved either by coercion (the authoritarian, punitive route), and it can also be achieved by instilling in them an organic understanding of the problems in their unconscious and conscious thinking from which their behavior emerges.
The only fundamental difference between the rigid fanaticism across religious-leaders and the rigid fanaticism across woke-leaders is not the presence or absence of organized religion, but the presence or absence of humility. Humility is the function that allows us to embrace our own, individual self as fallible and complicit in oppression, rather than denying this; it unclenches our attack-energy and redirects our attention to the three fingers pointing back at us. And from this embrace changes our orientation towards other who are committing harmful behaviors. We don't approach them as police — we approach them through our shared human potential for growth.
Committing harms similar to those for which we condemn others is textbook hypocrisy, and nothing enables oppression more than masking our harmful behavior under this pretense of purity. We are not gods. We are mere mortals and thus innately fallible. This fallibility of our species assigns to all of us a responsibility to examine how we harm others and to be accountable in rectifying the harm in which we are involved. This understanding is basic pro-social human behavior.
Today, however, "accountability" has been distorted into an axe of demand-making, an axe monopolized by some through a self-perception of being exempt from committing harms and thus any requirement for being accountable to anyone. All this in the name of ''social justice" — a spectacle of infantile narcissism repackaged as "revolution".
No one is immune or incapable of being complicit in evils of oppression. Theories, ideologies, and self-perceptions that designate anyone as somehow, by default, incapable of being an agent of oppression serves only to recycle existing systems-of-oppression by cunningly excluding oneself from accountability for the harms that one reproduces into the world and imposes upon others. It is a type of thinking heard often in the form, "Look, only you are capable of [some type of] fragility, fears of being 'canceled', and having to express humility. These are all issues that you have to grapple with. Not me. I am separate from all that. Even if my behavior hurts people, harms people, or destroys people, it is nonetheless justified based on XYZ criteria. I am the only one here who is entitled to call-out anybody. I am the highest bearer of rank."
On its face, it appears as a theory for equity. In reality, it is a weapon of domination, and it not new, but has been used to establish tyrants and feudal-lords across millennia and to protect themselves from their share of duty in abolishing oppressive-thought by way of restorative justice.
We humans do not exist in the vacuum of pristine 'theories' — especially not theories that attempt to divide human society into simplistic buckets or dichotomies of "good-doers" versus 'wrongdoers' — that designate some as 'evil' and others as 'incapable of evil'.
These dichotomies are not only self-serving and self-righteous, but they are reproductions of the medieval morality of colonialism that draws a neat circle around the 'chosen' set of people who, by default, are incapable of oppression, while incriminating all who exist outside the special circle, based on criteria that are not questionable. ("Since I cannot harm or oppress, then I have nothing to be accountable for. Don't scrutinize my behaviors. Whatever they are, they are entirely justified and rightful).
We do not exist in these convenient thought experiments that "woke" doctrinaires have devised for their own purpose of evading accountability and monopolizing the axe of judgement, punishment and criticism.
We exist in the messy and chaotic dimension of reality, in which mistakes or harms of every variety are inevitable and everywhere suffered differentially by most of the global public, and in which no one is purified by a divine or by oppression as to be incapable of committing harms. Restorative justice springs from this recognition.
In Bad Feminist, scholar Roxane Gay opines about the dangers of this phenomenon, carried out by an archetype that she calls "the privilege police". It is worth quoting at length:
When we talk about privilege, some people start to play a very pointless and dangerous game where they try to mix and match various demographic characteristics to determine who wins at the Game of Privilege...Playing the Game of Privilege is mental masturbation—it only feels good to those playing the game.
Too many people have become self-appointed privilege police, patrolling the halls of discourse, ready to remind people of their privilege whether those people have denied that privilege or not. In online discourse, in particular, the specter of privilege is always looming darkly. When someone writes from experience, there is often someone else, at the ready, pointing a trembling finger, accusing that writer of having various kinds of privilege. How dare someone speak to a personal experience without accounting for every possible configuration of privilege or the lack thereof? We would live in a world of silence if the only people who were allowed to write or speak from experience or about difference were those absolutely without privilege.
When people wield accusations of privilege, more often than not, they want to be heard and seen. Their need is acute, if not desperate, and that need rises out of the many historical and ongoing attempts to silence and render invisible marginalized groups. Must we satisfy our need to be heard and seen by preventing anyone else from being heard and seen? Does privilege automatically negate any merits of what a privilege holder has to say? Do we ignore everything, for example, that white men have to say?
We need to get to a place where we discuss privilege by way of observation and acknowledgment rather than accusation. We need to be able to argue beyond the threat of privilege. We need to stop playing Privilege or Oppression Olympics, because we’ll never get anywhere until we find more effective ways of talking through difference...Privilege is relative and contextual. Few people in the developed world, and particularly in the United States, have no privilege at all..It may be hard to hear that, I know, but if you cannot recognize your privilege, you have a lot of work to do; get started.
As I described above, the act of pointing at someone (no matter how you do it, whether by calling them out or calling them in) immediately and inherently creates a power differential. One is now positioned as an authority or arbiter issuing a demand or a request, and the other is now the object of one’s authority or arbitration. But the act of first acknowledging one’s own complicity and harms is itself an act that can abolish or (at least) reduce this inherent differential — it can have the impact of ‘leveling’ the ground on which both of you stand, arrive at, and inspect the situation.
Why, though, does it even matter to abolish or reduce this differential? Why should any of us give a damn about how the other person feels? After all, they’ve committed a harm of some sort, so they must suffer! Right? The punitive mind is unconcerned with what becomes of the human entity with whom one is engaging. The punitive mind simply wants to 1) issue a citation, 2) have the ‘harm-er’ submit to our command, and 3) perhaps even disappear. But repression of harm only displaces, relocates, and reshapes harm; it does not abolish the roots from which it emerges.
In other words, coercing or forcefully commanding someone to stop a behavior might in fact change their external behavior around you, but it will not change the unconscious bedrock, which will inevitably result in this person recommitting that same behavior upon others, or, perhaps later, even once again upon or around you.
If your goal is to organically induce in someone a change—so that they can function independent of your commands and coercion, and thus allowed to operate as a human being—then your goal is restorative justice. Restorative justice is concerned not with the incarceration, the repression, the sequestration, or the erasure of people who are committing harmful behaviors; it is concerned with the endeavor of how to actually change the mental or ideological sources of those behaviors.
(As an essential disclaimer, none of this applies to people who maliciously issue harm. Nor does it apply to those who commit bodily or mental traumas and abuses, for example sexual assault. To put it plainly, those who are assaulted absolutely do not bear the responsibility, ever, to ‘heal’ or ‘restore’ their violators; they have only the autonomy to decide for themselves whether to do so. This entire ‘recipe’ of ego-management is primarily applicable upon those who are not committing such profound evils, whose effects are sexual assault, murder, genocide, and other crimes-against-humanity. For cultivating approaches of restorative justice towards such people, a societal effort must be devoted and it is far beyond the scope of this essay.)
And that — that engagement with the human mind is tricky and complex, because now we’re in the territory of concern for human psychology, and human psychology is messy and largely subjective, together which requires a highly-patient, highly-creative, highly-nuanced, and highly-personalized approach towards the goal of harm-stopping/restoration. It requires tailoring our approach around that person’s needs, absolutely not in order to marginalize the victim(s) of this person’s harm and to center the person committing the harms. No, far from it. We meet the person being harmful ‘where they are at’ in order to determine how to create the optimal plan that ultimately results in a fundamental change of this person, so that those being harmed will never again be harmed again (at least by this person).
Now, pointing at someone, changing someone, restorative justice, none of this is about primarily and directly engaging with someone’s behavior — it’s about engaging and maneuvering and dealing with their ego.
Ego is the warehouse of our dignity. Ego instructs us to act in self-defense, in moments that we sense an unfairness upon ourselves. But the ego can also be unrefined, so that it cannot interact openly with the rest of our reasoning-faculties in order to distinguish between a true act of unfairness and an act that we do deserve: it can cause us to reject an accusation or charge or challenge of rightful and accurate grounds. The ego can exist so unrefined that it becomes the factory of this intransigence or even of self-importance, arrogance, and other baser human ways-of-knowing.
And so, restorative justice begins in the recognition that “pointing” at someone (again, whether as a call-out or a call-in) naturally interacts with the ego of the person at whom we’re pointing. If that person is highly developed in the domain of humility, then their ego will be very slightly effected and thus their internal defensiveness to your “pointing” will be highly regulated, and their external response to you will be something like open-mindedness (appreciative, accountable, softly inquisitive. We who point must make space—somewhere, at some point—to receive genuine inquiry from the person we're pointing at, if that person remains un-convinced and open-minded. Your authority is not self-justifying. Authoritarianism itself is defined as an act of issuing a demand without providing consensual justification. Justification is essential. We who do the pointing absolutely bear the responsibility of showing the other person that our charges are just and rooted in reality, not rooted in arbitrariness, ulterior agendas, bias, or revenge.).
Perhaps more often than experiencing someone's remarkable regulation of their ego, many who are (or feel) “pointed” at will also feel ego-inflamed and thus express defensiveness of various degrees. From such defensiveness can emerge vitriolic or other counterproductive behaviors, behaviors that occur for the sake of self-preservation (pain-avoidance).
Thus, beginning our act of “pointing” first with a sincere, personalized method of explicitly acknowledging, inventorying, or even itemizing our own complicity(s) — this can in fact abolish or reduce the local (in that specific context) power-differential, which can therefore keep or make calm the ego in whom you’re pointing at, which thus creates at least a small window into their broader open-mindedness and open-heartedness. It is your most essential yet quiet task to tango with and expand that window.
Most often than not, those of us who are doing the pointing are more complicit (if not in one context, then elsewhere) in the very types of harm for which we’re pointing at others. Discovering this about ourselves, however, requires a militant and instinctual commitment to integrity, whose (perhaps) byproduct is the humility through which we pause our reflexive judgments of others in order to first examine ourselves and to recall how others have treated us during moments in which we are ourselves made mistakes similar to the person we are now pointing at. Our personal experiences with being pointed at can serve to inform how we might or might not approach the person we’re now pointing at.
We don’t have to stop pointing at harmful behaviors. But our own survivals depend on learning how our (own) self are fallible and complicit in oppression. We must begin every act of “pointing” by recognizing first our own three fingers, which direct us towards self-examination.
This shift in itself is one of the fundamental features of restorative justice, because the act of grasping strongly onto the ways in which we ourselves—the “pointers” in various situations—are complicit in evil thus forces us to engage with the ‘other’ through tenderness. But “tenderness” is not Victorian, Elizabethan politeness; it is not simply the act of being soft-spoken, smiling, and presenting a 'sweet' facade; it is, instead, the softening of the heart and the unclenching of our attack-energy. This softening and unclenching naturally emerges after a deep realization that we have and are responsible for similar injustices, directly or indirectly, on peoples near or far.
If I'm going to call you 'in' for an oppressive behavior that you committed, then I might begin, for example, by telling you how I have utterly failed to fight adequately to stop our own US military from dropping bombs—bombs that my tax-dollars, my legislative and social silence, and my voting-choices innovate and deploy—on millions upon millions of innocent Black and Brown peoples abroad, whose remains are piled-up in places that my American privileges shelter me from ever having to enter, witness, or confront.
I might begin by sharing how I have routinely committed a dereliction-of-duty to use my power as an able-bodied, not-homeless, not-incarcerated, not-undocumented American towards stopping the crimes of unspeakable horror that occurred right under my own sphere-of-control, before I position myself as a moral-authority and thus as though I am any better than you.
The goal of restorative justice is to make harm-stopping into a mutual, collaborative effort. Our understanding (but not our specific words) must be: “I am as human and thus as imperfect as you, but I am also just as worthy of being treated with embrace, rather than a lash. Yes, we are different, but somewhere in that difference exists information on how we can tailor our approach to resolving each other’s harmful behaviors. Let’s work together to understand each other and to build personalized plans for one another’s approach to harm-stopping.”
Some will reject this clarion call by declaring, “I am oppressed, and thus I am tired and suffering. So, I cannot expend the energy required for all these gymnastics”.
And I would agree.
Those with a boot held directly upon their windpipe cannot and must not attempt anything other than liberating their urgent suffering.
Yet, very few people are 24/7 and 100% in every domain of their lives incapacitated and incapable of the thoughtfulness required to engage in this way. Indeed, some human beings are in fact permanently and absolutely incapable, due to profound oppression or disability.
But not everyone is. And it is up to those who are—who are at least for a few minutes, at least in one small arena of their lifestyle or neighborhood or day or week—willing to truly embody and to truly enact restorative justice in order to engage with the “gymnastics” described. Those who cannot engage as such still bear at least the imperative to locate and designate someone who can.
This is a difficult and unpaved road. But our choices are simple: either lock away and genocide those who we designate as ‘harmful’, or restore them by recognizing that we commit harm, too. Through this, justice becomes a bidirectional pursuit of being healed ourselves while healing others.
The choice, for any conscience-bearing and effective activist, is simple.
I will leave you with perhaps the most important words written in the history of revolutions, from Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago:
“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
...the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us it oscillates with the years. And even within the hearts overwhelmed with evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.
And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an un-uprooted small corner of evil...It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.”
Perhaps I’ve gone mad, or perhaps I’m hopeful, or perhaps those are the same dispositions necessary for a vision of possibility; regardless, I move one step beyond Solzhenitsyn in that final sentence: I believe that it is possible to heal harmful ideologies out of most people.
Yet, still pronounced and unanswered remains our heaviest query: who among us is radical enough for this work?