My maiden name is Irish in origin. My father was quite the raconteur. My German mother was one of twelve children. Talk was a very big thing at home and it seems to get me in plenty of social hot water.The above is an excerpt from a comment I made in a discussion of Oscar Wilde's talk inspired his rise and led to his downfall. At some point, I saw comments on Twitter by Natives indicating that Natives just walk up to people and talk to them and how that's normal on the reservation but gets them weird reactions off the reservation.
Both the Oscar Wilde piece and the comments by Natives helped me make my peace with my long history of being very chatty with anyone and everyone and this going weird and problematic places for me at times.
I think that Natives being willing to talk to anyone on the reservation is likely related at least in part to the fact that tribes are often quite small. Humans are designed to be able to mentally process a group of around 150 members and you start seeing more social problems when a group exceeds that size.
Most modern peoples live in communities much larger than 150 people. There are only so many hours in the day and larger groups simply lack the ability for all members to be adequately acquainted with one another for casual familiarity to work well as a default expectation.
It works because you probably are, in fact, actually familiar with them. You probably know roughly "who" they are -- about how old they are, what kind of work they likely do, who some of their relatives are. You have substantial context that helps foster conversation and help it not go sideways.
In larger communities, whether online or off, that kind of casual discussion clashes with the lack of actual familiarity. Larger communities and older cultures develop elaborate formal protocols for how to interact with a great many people you barely know at all to prevent disaster given that there is a great deal you do not know about them and have no right to know.
This lack of personal familiarity and SAFE casual conversation with X amount of people may well be what accounts for a sense of loneliness in so many people. Humans are a product of our social environment and our biology is optimized to function well in a group of a certain size and MOST humans no longer have that.
I think one of the reasons that both Natives and people from small towns complain of others fetishizing them is because, at least to outsiders, they seem to have that communal experience that so many others long for but lack.
People who don't understand what is involved in establishing and maintaining that sense of community just know that Natives and people from small communities generally have something psychologically and emotionally that they lack. And it leads to broken and abusive expectations that such people can simply supply them with this thing they lack basically for FREE.
It's a form of theft and abuse by people who have never developed the social capital required to get those needs met, probably do not comprehend that it involves developing social capital and can't be arsed to bother with that much effort. They just know you are satisfied in some way they are not and they want you to hand over what they hunger for while giving nothing back in all too many cases.
I have had this done to me, so my firsthand experiences inform that interpretation of events. I am all too aware of just how horrendously abusive some people can be when they get this idea in their warped minds that you somehow now "owe" them emotional service for free.
It takes fifteen to twenty hours per week, week in and week out, to establish and maintain an intimate relationship. If we aren't spending that kind of time together, you are NOT a serious romantic interest of mine.
If you think that the occasional social interaction with me makes me your one true love or something, all that tells me is you are not qualified to be my next great love. In a word, you are too shallow to be of any real interest to me.
Formal cultures are typically heirarchical cultures. From what I gather, Japanese language is rife with all kinds of means to constantly signal how close two people are and which one is "senior" to the other. Japan is an old culture and very densely populated. Unsurpisingly, it is a very formal culture.
Small towns and tribes and the ideals of some religions are rooted in the idea that we are all "equal" in some sense or other. Each person matters.
In a small community, someone who is a child today may be mayor at some point in the future. Treating them disrespectfully because they don't currently have power is a good way to have that come back to bite you when they gain power at a later date.
So small communities have practices that honor the idea that our limited interactions today need to be rooted in a larger reality -- a reality that encircles the whole of both of our lives both in terms of time (from birth to death) and in terms of experience and social connection -- that we are both much larger than this tiny point of contact at this moment while one of us buys an ice cream from the other.
Formal cultures are trying to strip away those details and find some means to be polite, respectful and decent without dealing with the whole of both people's lives because there simply aren't enough hours in the day. Religion seems to give pushback and tries to remind people to intentionally try to remember the whole person, even if you don't know what that is, to try to mitigate the ways in which interacting with someone you don't know well can go bad places.
Sometimes people get inculcated with this idea that who is "on top" matters a great deal and if they have been mistreated while "junior" they may do two things:
- Try to insist they are on top any time that is at all reasonable.
- Be more or less abusive to anyone "below" them.
This ends up being the bane of my existence. I think the crux of it is that they think I am trying to tell them "I have no plans to be your bitch because I intend to treat you like my bitch" when I am really saying something more like "It's rude and inappropriate to treat anyone that way. I won't take your shit. I expect us BOTH to be respectful and decent to each other like people with manners are supposed to do."
But their world and their mental models cannot seem to process that. They seem to have no mental slot for "We are both equals in some sense and both should be respectful because we are human. Full stop."
So sometimes they insist over and over and over on trying to force me into the one-down position and I decline over and over and over while they just begin losing their shit over what seems to be their assumption that I plan to do the crapping instead of taking the crap.
I am not trying to insist that they must take the one-down position. Me refusing to treat someone as one-up is not me trying to say "I'm the person entitled to do the shitting and you are the toilet." No, it is me saying "Treating someone like a toilet is NOT NICE behavior. I won't take your shit, thanks."
Sometimes such people also just will not let me walk away from them. So it ends up being a huge headache because they are like the Hounds of Tindalos and you will regret the fact that they EVER laid eyes on you. They will make SURE of that.
I think if you are nice to such people, they think you are being deferential and signaling that you are one-down and will VOLUNTEER to kiss their ass and when it doesn't go that way, in their utterly warped minds it's like you STOLE something from them and they want it back.
Kind of like when humans make the mistake of feeding monkeys in the wild and sometimes this leads the monkeys to conclude that humans are in the one-down position and owe them tribute and must keep feeding them.
I think this culture clash may well be a factor in Europeans coming to American soil and feeling entitled to take over and run everything: Natives made the egregious mistake of being NICE to these folks and Europeans interpreted it as something along the lines of "Well, clearly, YOU are our servants and have no rights!"
My understanding is this sort of thing was a factor in how The Crusades went as well.
Middle Eastern peoples had the experience that if you kill the charismatic leader of a movement, you essentially stop the movement cold, at least for a time. It takes time for a new leader to arise and for them to regroup.
So they thought if you just "remove the head of the snake" so to speak, the invading crusaders would be stopped. But that wasn't effective because the crusaders were part of a larger heirarchical organization.
So when you killed the leader, someone stepped in to take their place, whomever was next in chain of command. And then they would send word back to Europe and a NEW commander would be sent down to fill the vacated role properly.
So this heirarchical aspect of European culture was not just problematic for Natives. It was also problematic in the Middle East and I think it was problematic for kind of the same reason: Both Natives and Middle Easterners didn't have that mental framework and didn't expect the outcome they got for how they interacted with them.
I think this also ties to psychosocial elements where some kids get raised with a lot of disapproval and end up with a seemingly bottomless need for approval. My understanding is this is kind of an issue in Japan where teen suicide rates are very high.
In the densely populated, tiny island state of Japan, there are limited physical resources. So there is a lot of social pressure for people to conform and achieve as the least worst answer they have found so far for making this work and it deprives some people of desperately needed acceptance, warts and all, and latitude for making mistakes while they are young so they can learn from it and grow and sort out how best to navigate them being them in the world.
Most people with this craving for approval seem really hard to reach. Any attempt to tell them "Why do you care whether or not I approve?" seems to be taken as disapproval or criticism. From an emotional stuckness point of view, this seems to be a Chinese finger puzzle. The real answer is to relax. But from a logical perspective, you just can't get there from here. So you need to start looking for another path, because this is not it.In English, the word love covers two distinct and separate things that are socially related in a cause and effect manner and I think it causes a lot of confusion.
As a verb, love means treating people really, really well and doing right by them. As a noun, it means having a strong feeling of fondness for them, so strong you might want to have sex with them or even marry them and have children.
People sometimes FEEL a personal fondness for me and seem to think something like "WE are IN LOVE" when the reality is I did nice things for them, so THEY feel fond of ME but it all too often does not lead to them feeling obligated to be good back. It all too often results in them deciding I am their bitch, I OWE them more feel good experiences and some people have been horrendously abusive to me over the fact that I am apparently the best thing that ever happened to them.
It is sometimes really hard to get it through to such people that I do not have any personal fondness for them. In fact, I wish they would drop dead because that seems like the ONLY hope I have of escaping their abusive shit.
I end up deeply resenting the fact that I was good to them and all it gets me is abusive bullshit because the relationship feels good TO THEM and they are amazingly screwed in the head.
And I think that initial meeting where I talk with them in a friendly fashion because of my Native and Irish roots is where some of these things go wrong and can't seem to be unfucked thereafter. From that first contact, the way I just TALK with people seems to signal more acceptance than some of them have ever had.
I've basically become a recluse who sits at home and blogs. I don't have a solution for how to be me in a world full of amazingly screwed up people who feel WONDERFUL around me and go out of their way to make my life a living hell because of it.