Don't let your 'self' be the lens through which you view the world

I appreciate the title probably sounds a bit wrong, if not a lot wrong. After all, everything we perceive, think about, experience, etc, is filtered through our ‘self’.

I’ll try (and probably fail) to explain what I mean. I’ve seen a fair few articles recently of the “here’s the problem with men” variety. Some of these have been in the MSM and some here on Substack. There are plenty of the other kind too, the whole “here’s what’s wrong with women” kind. These tend not to get MSM exposure except perhaps as targets for criticism.

Taken together they paint a very interesting picture of a kind of sex-war going on in which men and women are lobbing various shells back and forth - and sometimes men (and women) take aim for the ‘other’ side, too.

It’s true that I find most of these articles have interesting things to say, whether I agree with the core thesis being presented or not. I think almost all of them, however aggressively negative about the ‘enemy’ side, actually do have some insights and useful things to at least consider about some aspect of it all. But one tendency¹ I have noticed is that quite a few authors tend to (a) focus on themselves as if they speak for all of the ‘class’ they’re trying to represent and (b) assume most/all of the ‘class’ they’re attacking have the characteristics they’re criticizing.

Andrew Tate, of course, is just a grotesque tit.

There’s the recent ‘mankeeping’ article and also Rachel Drucker’s lament in the NYT asking where have all the men gone? as prime recent examples on the women’s side. Rachel, now in her 50’s, having spent her best years in the porn industry, is finding dating a little bit more difficult than she used to. I believe her job in porn was to analyse and understand what got men hooked and which ‘buttons to push’. She enabled “bury me in a Y-shaped coffin” roles which pander to all the worst aspects of male sexuality, and is now finding it hard to attract a good guy. By her own account, in her own life, she seems to have gone through men like Lizzo at an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. Apparently, men are just not showing up any more.

I sympathise. It’s a real conundrum that one, isn’t it? It’s a really complex problem and I’ve no idea why any good man wouldn’t find her immeasurably attractive and fall head-over-heels for her.

Perhaps her ‘lived experience’ of focusing only on men’s basest instincts might be some factor in the difficulties? Hard to say, and maybe she has some valuable insights on her specialist subject, but that’s not really the issue here. It’s that she’s using herself as the lens through which she views the world.

I’ve already mentioned the apparent impossibility of doing otherwise, but it’s really wrong to extrapolate from our own experiences, however valid, to the general. We have to at least try to recognize our own ‘filters’ and aim for objectivity - even if we can’t really properly achieve that.

I’ll come back to the issue of ‘lived experience’ in a bit, but my alarm bells always twitch a little whenever someone overly relies on their ‘self-lens’ or their ‘identity’ as a means to interpret and understand the world.

I spent much of yesterday going through my history (as far as I can remember it) to see if I’ve ever spent time in what might be called ‘self-analysis’.

I’ve certainly done a fair bit of the “why was I such a twat in that particular situation?” kind of thing. I came to the conclusion that my ‘self-analysis’ usually centred around the, usually not so good, things I had done to others.

I can’t recall ever having once thought about my ‘identity’ or ‘who I am’ and the thought of using any such ‘insight’ as a way to place myself in the world strikes me as a bit odd. That’s not to say it’s never appropriate to take a more class-based ‘identity’ focus - the obvious example being the US slave trade where being in one ‘identity’ class or another was rather consequential.

But as far as figuring out a personal ‘identity’ - nope, never really done that. Maybe I’m just weird and most people spend hours every day poring over their inner feelings and trying to pick them apart. Our current fixation on personal ‘identity’ and endless self-regard and self-focus seems a bit over the top to me.

I also think I have, if I have one at all, a context-dependent identity. Catch me on one day in a particular set of circumstances and I can be irascible, grumpy, and a bit of a twat. Is that my ‘identity’? On another day and another set of circumstances I can be forgiving, placid, and (I think) devilishly charming. Is that my ‘identity’?

Dunno. Don’t care.

The ‘identity’ I have on Substack, such as it is, isn’t really totally reflective of the ‘real’ me, either. After all, a lot of the stuff I write is in response to stuff that has got me a bit riled up - and so you see the snark and scorn.

I just can’t be arsed to try and think of any of it in ‘identity-based’ terms.

I do that white-supremacist thing of eye-rolling whenever I hear something like, “as a man, as a woman, as a white person, as a black person, as a left-handed neurodivergent lesbian midget, . . .” as if this, somehow, confers some sort of special authority.

It can confer some kind of insight - definitely it can. Erm, as a man, I will never experience the bliss of a period. Because men don’t get those. Here’s how a kdrama I recently watched approached the issue of the female lead wondering why her stomach is sore and she’s feeling grumpy . . . until she looks at the calendar . . .

There’s no way I can properly appreciate what the hell it must feel like, but having a gently-warming pan of baked beans thrown at me for asking whether my beloved wanted a cup of tea² was enough indication that it was some serious shit.

You’ll pleased (or not) to know that it missed. But it did make a rather nice pattern on the wall. Just Stop Oil have a thing or two to learn, I feel.

To what extent this represents a typical scenario I can’t say, but there has to be some reason why so many men used to take up the brain-numbing pursuit of angling. Better to struggle with the occasional fish than to fend off the contents of a kitchen, cooked or otherwise.

Some ‘lived experience’ is clearly quite informative.

But a lot of the times it’s just personal experience filtered through one’s own personal perceptions that is of somewhat limited value except to that individual alone. One thing that talking about ‘lived experience’ does, though, is that it brings the focus at least partly back onto the self. That’s not always wrong - if you’re a victim of, say, the UK rape gangs (or cultural enrichment as we know it) then your experience is a very valuable thing for others to know about - as horrific as it must be to share that. But one could hardly condemn ‘lived experience’ as a kind of witness testimony to some awful wrongdoing as being an example of a ‘me, me, me’ culture thing.

But that’s often not really how the term gets used. It’s often partly about ‘witness’ testimony, partly about maintaining a victim status, and partly about shutting down dissenting voices.

The recent case in Australia that Janice Fiamengo highlighted is an excellent, although gruelling to read, example of this obsession with the self. If you haven’t read about this case, you should - although steel yourself. A guy, a friend of the woman in question, made some off-the-cuff remark at a party about how this woman should be in the kitchen. It is extremely unlikely that this was meant to be a serious remark - more of a tease, however ill-judged or clumsy. Her response?

She poured petrol on him and set him alight.

But the fascinating thing is how the defence team, and the woman herself, do their level best to bring this round to her as, at least partially, a victim. She said “she was feeling overwhelmed by his presence and didn’t know what to do”

I can’t speak for others, but I always carry around a spare can of petrol and a lighter for those times I just don’t know what to do.

Can’t work out how to use one of those self-checkout machines? Burn the fucker to a crisp.

This story is a particularly gruesome example and probably shouldn’t be taken to try to weave some general tapestry out of the rarest of threads, but other than this woman being a screaming basket-case in secret all along, what are we to make of it?

Again, probably because I’m very weird and strange, but I tend not to take insults all that personally. Most just slip off me - the words duck, water and back spring immediately to mind. I take ‘jokes’ and ‘teasing’ even less personally. Yet we’ve countless examples on Twitter and Notes where people do seem to tend to take even quite ‘mild’ comments, and sometimes mere disagreement, very personally indeed - as if they’ve been attacked.

Lots of people seem to have made almost everything far too personal - too much about the ‘self’.

Side with Israel? You’re a genocide-loving Nazi bigot.

Side with Palestine? You’re a genocide-loving Nazi bigot.

This kind of emotionality is what happens when, as the inestimable bad cat says, you let ideas become you, instead of ideas being things you have. It all becomes rather personal, not to mention emotional, when you let your sense of self become too enmeshed with the ideas you have. There has to be some entanglement, though. Where else does any sense of morality come from, if not from our ideas?

As in almost everything I seem to be thinking about these days, I see things that have gotten way out of balance. Whether I’m right in that, or whether that’s a useful perspective, I don’t know - but it’s a conclusion I keep coming back to. There’s almost no balance in anything of cultural import. Easy to speculate like this - far harder to figure out exactly how to bring things back into balance.

In the case of the woman who thought that setting someone on fire was an appropriate response to a bit of banter we have to ponder how someone who wasn’t dissecting kittens as a hobby when she was a teenager could even do this? Daughter number 2 had this to say :

I mean it's not anywhere near the fucking ballpark of rational, reasonable responses. In fact it's not even in the same galaxy as the ballpark.

Yet could we not say almost the same thing about the reaction (from some) to being told that “a man is not, and never can be, a woman”?

And there are plenty of other kinds of examples of responses to things that we could also mention. A nice spot of TDS for dessert, anyone?

The level of extreme reaction (although admittedly not as uber-extreme as setting someone alight) we see, the hyperventilating, the meltdowns, are just way out of proportion. Perhaps not as far as being in another galaxy, but definitely in another solar system.

It’s pure narcissism; to assume your point of view is so important, so right, that anyone who does not share it is some kind of evil monster. And it’s definitely beyond batshit weird to film yourself having a meltdown for millions of random people all over the planet.

It seems to me that any successful society, or group, or relationship, requires at least some component of wilful self-abnegation; to realize that you and your opinions (for they are just that - opinions) are not the centre of the universe.

It’s the foundation, I think, of any truly successful marriage - the husband submits to the wife, and the wife submits to the husband, in equal measure.

Another way of stating this is that it’s the husband’s job to make his wife happy, and the wife’s job to make her husband happy.

Of course we can quibble at the words used here - and have some pointless intellectual debate about whether one can (or should) ‘make’ anyone else happy, or whether ‘submit’ is the right word, and so on, but I think we all understand the sentiment behind these imperfect ‘meme’ type phrases.

The equal measure part is the key here. If the wife is doing everything to accommodate the husband and he’s just enjoying the free ride, so to speak, then it isn’t going to work - he’s not fulfilling his half of the contract.

It’s not (erm, obviously) as simple as that - it’s going to require a fair few hits and misses and some real communication to get it all right - but the willingness to make it work has to be there - on both sides, and in equal measure.

The ability to compromise in a relationship requires an element of self-abnegation.

Most of you will have seen the graphic reflecting the difference in diversity of viewpoint between the ‘left’ and the ‘right’

This is a fascinating graphic and, if correct, indicates that the ‘red team’ overall are going to find compromise a much easier thing to achieve in general. Is this because the reds can be said not to have integrated their ideas into their personalities as much? Is this indicative of less emotionality? We all know that the ‘blue team’ tend have hissy fits all over the place and use emotion as a means of control. They tend to be the ones shunning others for voting ‘the wrong way’.

I don’t know whether I’m right here, but I suspect that the more you focus on yourself the less able you are to properly appreciate the ‘other’ and to welcome the other. If you make everything about how it affects you - and letting your emotions get all out of control and filming it is a symptom of this - you’re going to struggle with finding any kind of realistic path forward in a complex world where people are definitely not always in universal agreement over some issue.

We need to try, as much as anyone possibly can, to not let your self be the lens through which we view the world. The graphic above might indicate this process is going to be far easier for one ‘side’ than the other, but I don’t properly see how we’re going to move through the current vicious stalemate that seems to currently exist, together with its associated level of hatred, without dialling back the ‘personal’ a bit.

1. Tendency means a tendency and it also means “not all” just to point out the obvious for those whose obvious meter broke a while back

2. True story, believe it or not. I suspect it was more along the lines of “I’ve been feeling like crap all day and only now, now, are you asking me if I want a cup of tea?”. And before any feminist brainlets go on about “women in the kitchen”, I love to cook and do more than my fair share of it. Although I will admit that perhaps, on that day, I ought to have been a tad more sensitive and maybe insisted she put her feet up on the couch with a hot water bottle, a box of chocolates, and a soppy movie, whilst I did everything. I did, eventually, get the message