I have this weird issue. I tend to be non-conformist. I notice the performance of societal roles. I am more painfully conscious when I have to perform societal roles myself.
The first time it became a real problem was when I started practicing medicine. You just can’t be yourself in the consultation room. Doctors have to be chameleons. They have to adapt themselves to the patient and “perform” a dance that contributes to healing. And I couldn’t get myself to do that.
I had this peculiar philosophy. I didn’t want to answer things with confidence when the science itself was uncertain. I didn’t want to act like I’m caring when I didn’t really care. I didn’t like wearing the white coat. I didn’t like playing the doctor role. It felt like a lie.
Why is this performance necessary? Because human beings are irrational. We don’t use logic to operate. We use social cues and emotions and biases to operate.
A doctor has to appear smart, because otherwise the patient will assume the doctor is incompetent. And so on.
I changed myself. I rationalized the performance in ways that made sense to me. The consultation room is a special place where you have to prioritize healing and no other philosophy matters. So, some “lying” was okay.
It didn’t stop there, though. Leadership needed performance too. You’ve to be chatty when you’re really tired, you’ve to lead with vision when you’re lost, and you’ve to inspire even the people you are angry at.
And I rationalized that too.
The world really needs leaders so that we can change it for the good. And we can’t let philosophy come in between.
What’s this philosophy, you might ask. It is a form of anarchist thought. Anarchists want every human being to operate through their own agency, as capable and rational beings. The performance of leaders and doctors could be seen as “manipulation” by anarchists. At least that’s what I used to think about these.
That this philosophy is utterly impractical, is the strongest argument I have discovered against anarchism.
Human beings are human beings. They’re not perfectly capable beings. They like being led. They rely on a shoulder to cry on.
Yet, the anarchist dream is too deep in my mind that I’m not been able to get rid of it.
I work closely with a person who does plenty of successful activism. He was telling me how when he goes to meet decision makers he carries a box of chocolates or some gift like that. To me this was unacceptable bribery. These were dark tactics to get what we want. But his logic was undeniable — the world needs to change and that was more important than any purist philosophy.
That is the difference between an anarchist and a socialist or a pragmatist. An anarchist cares deeply about the means to the end. The socialist cares only about the end and wouldn’t mind a bloody revolution. The pragmatist would be okay with some shortcuts.
Let me make it more clear. I want the world to be more rational, egalitarian, honest, and so on, and I don’t like using the tools of today’s oppressors to reach there. And psychological manipulation (power games, etc included) are part of those tools.
Inside my mind it is the same that I apply to consultation room and management positions. I want people to get better without me having to employ the wrong tools.
The places where this creates problems are infinite.
I can’t stand my extended family members and their routine patriarchal performances.
I can’t stand companies/organizations and their bullshit capitalistic policies.
I can’t stand academicians. Not a bit. Their jargon and their credentials and their ways of claiming exclusive rights to discuss what they’re discussing. Their hypocrisy and their exclusive focus on their careers and publications. But more irritatingly, the reverence with which others look at academicians. The way people go “Oh, wow! This person is from IIT! (/Harvard/Oxford/blah blah blah)”
In my first visit to JNU, I was fuming about the opulent waste of resources that it was and Swathi had to put a lot of effort into shutting me up.
When people say “OMG! This was published in Nature (or Lancet or whatever)” my blood boils.
There could be other emotions contributing to this too. Envy, superiority complex, know-it-all complex, all of that.
But if you believe me, the biggest problem for me is the societal roles and the unquestioning conformity by everyone to those.
I realized this today when I was attending a public health writing workshop by Nivarana. I was listening to people talk about how to write a story, how to write in simple language, how to pitch, etc. And I was struggling with the “performance” that journalism was.
There is a particular societal role for a journalist. They’re supposed to be arbiters of truth. They are supposed to write in a particular tone, one that conveys a sense of reporting of the truth. The reader, on the other side, is expected to play the role of taking in the truth without question.
In light of the shit-show that Indian journalism today is, I’m particularly disillusioned by the performance of the journalist role.
There is a rigid script that journalists follow. You start out with an uninformed audience, you introduce certain hooks, you establish authority through some expert testimonial, and you conclude the narrative in a particular direction you want the reader to go in.
My philosophical discord is with how everyone buys this shit. Truth isn’t packaged as neatly as journalism makes it out to be. And behind every piece of journalism there is a human playing the role.
Like judges in courts. They’re performing too. Acting like some wise ass.
Yet human beings are like “this is how it has to be!”
No. This is just a particular social order created in a particular space and time.
Why am I writing all this?
Because I am tired with my philosophy. I want to go beyond and be like regular humans. Earn some brownie points in the human world. And even though I am deciding to do that I think my philosophy and my pain is valid. What I write may not be meaningful to everyone or be added to the anarchist library. But I hope that there will be at least a few people who resonate with this particular sub-niche of agony.
How will I rationalize journalism then?
One way is to think of it as mass education. Like teaching, but at a larger scale. As an intermediate strategy till people are able to educate themselves.
Another is to imagine it as fiction. I mean, I don’t have a problem with fiction because it comes with a label that it is a performance art. Perhaps journalism can be seen as a performance art. The sentences and the style can give joy to the readers. Make it about creating art.
A third way is to think of it as reclaiming spaces. But of course this makes sense only if we put under-represented ideas and thoughts into those spaces. We can’t play by their rules and call it reclaiming. It maybe possible to cleverly subvert the rules and reclaim the spaces.
tl;dr is that I’m struggling to practice anarchist philosophy and forced to rationalize the performances of societal roles to be able to thrive.