The Skeptic's Guide to Insensitivity Training

Ida Tarbell, the American 19th-early 20th century researcher, biographer and editor of McClure's Magazine, had to calm her staff whenever the owner of the magazine (Samuel McClure) drove everyone mad with his unpredictable bi-polar behaviour. 

"Try not to mind" Ida advised her staff in a soothing voice. An investigative journalist and a biographer conversant with human psychology, Ida seems to have been something of a Stoic philosopher. Her rational moderation would be helpful in today's workplace.

Corporate workplaces compete with each other to be "sensitive" by forcing employees into "training" (as China did in communist-revolution days, through self-criticism and re-education camps). Corporate training too boils down to compulsory self-criticism through "customized coaching" meant to produce "cultural competency" and curb inappropriate behaviour in the workplace. The key bad-words are bullying and harassment. Words that should ring alarm bells for employees are coaching, training, and "building trust". When employers tell you they are going to build trust -- mistrust them. 

This corporate team-building is Sensitivity Training, which aims to promote diversity even as it enforces uniformity. Never trust a thing that is being its opposite. Better to do the real opposite, which in this case would be Insensitivity Training.

How would Insensitivity Training work? Mainly it would do exactly what Ida Tarbell recommended: practice not minding things that you can't change anyway. We're meant to tolerate differences in the workplace? That would seem to mean stop minding that everyone's not the same. Some will be a pain, some delightful, some in-between: diversity. 

Rules of Insensitivity Training

1. Resist group-obsessing about skin colour, ethnicity, and diverse ableisms.

2. Forget "identities".

3. Drop the word "racism" (especially after the adjective "systemic"). Also drop "harm" and "stigma".

4. In the name of freedom of expression, appropriate whatever you like. (Let's call it intersectional creativity.)

5. As far as respect is concerned, respect the right to privacy.

6. Let no manager harass and bully you into giving up your right to introverted non-participation in group whining and parroting.

7. Understand that the core of democratic liberal humanistic civilization is about acknowledging other people's right to express opinions you despise. Then, ignore them. 

8. While it is unkind to express hate, there are times when hearty dislike is unavoidable. 

9. Forget micro-aggression, make your just aggressions adult-sized. Share them when appropriate, and then retreat into dignified silence.

10. Don't get drawn into competitive victim-narratives.

11. Embrace the Enlightenment ideal of merit. Who wants to live in a shabby, meritless world of self-obsessed equitable mediocrity?

12. Claim your inalienable right to walk away from invasive staff meetings to the safety of your own desk. 

Can we talk?

"Can we talk?"

No, we can't.

"That's unfortunate, from a communication point of view."

You might reveal wrong positionality. Or say something triggering. You might cause harm (meaning: harm me).

"Might I? Powerful me! Is a positionality the same as a position?"

No. It's obviously got three more syllables' worth of dimensionality.

"Oh. I still don't see why we can't talk."

Okay, let me itemize the reasons. Check off those that apply:

    fake news (everything I don't believe in)

    wrongthought (yours)

    disfavoured opinion

    microaggression (yours)

    you might use non-correct neopronominalism

"Uh ... no, that doesn't sound like a thing I would use in any form."

You see? Bullying. And you're meritocracy-adjacent, which is harmful.

"No, I'm reality-adjacent, and I'm meritocracy-immersed. Sorry about that. But your attitude is negative. Couldn't we just get along?"

Well no ... add that to the list of reasons not to: toxic positivity. 

 

I'm not sleeping, I'm revealing my peaceful positionality

A one-day stand -- Visiting the Museum of the De-platformed

The phrase "one night stand" originally referred to a one-night engagement by a performer at an entertainment venue. 

On another time-scale, fame seems to last but a single "day". The heyday of someone famous can vanish in a flash to be replaced by infamy when attitudes change --when different "influencers" do the influencing.

Distinguished people whose busts once stood in museums, or their statues in squares, are suddenly "cancelled". For them a city needs a new type of history museum that highlights the vanishing past: the Museum of the De-platformed.

We're not allowed to hate others, but we can despise them

Is it okay to openly despise the despicable? To call out what's offensive and ridiculous?

An article in Quillette describes the "training" foisted on employees in the Office of the Ombudsperson of BC. When one press-ganged participant raised questions about the partisan "decolonizing" language being used, he was attacked and shut down by the two-spirit trans trainer. (No, I don't know what two-spirit is either ...)

It seems that in public service jobs adults are treated like delinquent children. (At the same time, actual children are brought up to believe they're mentally ill, with quite a range of phobias, anxieties and traumas to choose from, and if they haven't had any actual trauma in their lives they can always fall back on an inherited "inter-generational" or societal one. 

"Ombuds-" is Swedish for investigator of complaints, but only some kinds of complaints get investigated. In the BC government training session there was a complaint against "hate" and against white supremacy (which, confusingly, you're obliged to hate. ) You know you've encountered white supremacy when you see someone "being on time”, and displaying “manners” or “perfectionism.”

We've all noticed how workers today feel entitled to be late, rude, and incompetent, but those who point it out are being "bullies". Regarding punctuality, remember the phrase "90 percent of success in life is just showing up"? (I'm not going to mention which comic first said it, for we're definitely supposed to hate him.) Now employees don't always turn up (note how often BC Ferries sailings are cancelled due to staff absenteeism). But "being on time" is white supremacy, right?

Children too are taught that if they put down their smart phones and do their school work in school (i.e. their job), they are being victimized and subjected to emotional trauma. Literacy and education are colonialist bullying. "White" values.

There are despicable prejudices folded into all this -- in the way kids are brought up to be fragile instead of resilient and workers are ideologically brain-washed through "training" (bringing to mind Maoist re-education and "self-criticism" camps?) 

Woe betide the employees at the Ombuds Office training who questioned whether trans men who identify as women and are still sexually attracted to women, are lesbians? If you express surprise at this imaginative use of definitions, you're guilty of hate. That means no one can beg to differ or freely exchange ideas, because that would be hate speech and hate speech (aka speech somebody else doesn't like) must be censored. 

So to preserve their jobs, commentators don't "hate" other people -- though they can't help but despise a lot of them.

From "Do Humanities Care About Academic Freedom?" in City Journal: "the three parts of the trio of free inquiry, intellectual diversity, and civil discourse are antithetical to the new holy trinity of diversity, equity, and inclusion."

How should we judge medical laboratories that rely on cruelty, and the medical data they produce?

It's time for everyone with a sense of compassion and an interest in medical science to pay attention to the annual World Day For Lab Animals: it's time to reject outdated animal-based methodology in disease research. 

April 24th is the World Day For Animals in Labs --  https://worlddayforlaboratoryanimals.org/.  Please also check out the Animal Defence and Anti-vivisection Society based in Vancouver, BC, to find out why cell culture, stem cell, in-vitro study and computer modelling imaging techniques are the way forward:  https://adavsociety.org/

These techniques are explained at https://www.uwindsor.ca/ccaam/ (Canadian Centre for Alternatives to Animal Methods). Many labs in Europe are pursuing the same types of alternative research, the better to advance effective medical treatment. In the U.S. the Physicians Committee For Responsible Medicine (nonprofit) provides a wealth of detail: 

https://www.pcrm.org/

Canadians appalled at the immense cruelty toward over 4 million animals used in lab research, including over 120,000 per year "subjected to severe pain", can contact their MPs to voice their concern. 

They can also email Francois-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, at  ISI.minister-ministreISI@canada.ca.  

The Danger of Safety-ism

If only experts would stop telling us how mentally ill we all are. 

"Mental Illness a Growing Threat Among Teens" is a headline we read daily. Apparently it's what readers and listeners want to hear; media outlets poll them to find out and then give them what they want. For hits and ratings, mental illness is rated highly, topic-wise. 

The "mental illness among teens" narrative feeds the reluctance of teens to grow up and be self-supporting -- it seems too dangerous. Did Covid lockdowns teach them to shun employment just as they reached adulthood and governments were pouring out free money to help people stay home? It was no training for independence.

Youths no longer drive (climate change), no longer find after-school jobs (prefer online gigs), nor if they go to college, find student housing (rents too high). Do they even become students? Apparently colleges might put them in range of "harm" due to hearing opinions in class that differ from their own. "Anxiety and depression" lurk in every lecture hall and library, where unwelcome ideas might be encountered, and discussion relabled as bullying ... 

(Check out Heterdox Academy for lots of current detail on that: https://heterodoxacademy.org/)

Young people refuse to put their security-blanket smartphones down. For them, if something can't be done by swiping, it won't be done. Scrolling is a soother, the contemporary version of the thing their mothers put into their mouths in toddler-hood. Are today's thirty-somethings still toddlers? Many seem to want the gender-fluidity of toddler-hood; take that away and you're "marginalizing" them. Maybe because you're a privileged white Boomer? 

As small children, these twenty- and thirty-somethings spent a lot of time in daycare centres; maybe the over-exposure to non-family "carers" in early childhood fed into a generational fear of adulthood? You learned in daycare to sing-along with a group, in preparation for singing in secondary school from the correctness song-sheet. Now you might be shamed and cancelled if you deviate from it. 

Better to stay home and watch Zoom (sounds like the childish noise you made with the toys in the daycare centre). The place you were banished from in early childhood (home) now seems your "safe place".

If you can't tolerate working and striving, you won't tolerate novel ideas or diverse thought. In their own day, the baby-boom generation despised the narrow-minded "establishment". Independence mattered, and they were lucky: it was easy to find jobs, afford rent, run an old beater of a car and leave home. They valued free thought, free verse, free love, they marched for Earth Day and Banning the Bomb, started communes, discovered pot, turned vegetarian. Now, they look upon the non-works of grandchildren and despair -- or shake their heads in puzzlement.

Not all youths are hiding in basement lairs of course. Some are excelling at STEM or becoming artists or studying History (learning to take the long view). Maybe it won't matter in the end because everything practical will be done by robots. The robots' intelligence may be artificial but they won't get anxious and depressed while they watch and monitor us through digital surveillance. 

Now that will be real danger.

Exclude the Exclusion Ambassadors ... please!

Some publishers employ "sensitivity readers" (editors) to police language in manuscripts which might make readers "feel unsafe". 

Sensitivity editors' role is actually to make publishers feel safe from attack by woke would-be censors. For that purpose, publishers now hire "Inclusion Ambassadors".

Bret Easton Ellis's latest novel came in for editorial correction* when his publisher's sensitivity readers complained it “was not a ‘positive’ portrayal of homosexuality”. 

Clearly, many classic books are in need of re-writing so that people can feel safe reading them. Readers don't want to be ambushed by the notion that there are more ideas in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy.

Some books that seriously need to explain their attitude:

Black Beauty, for not supplying a positive portrayal of horse-abusers

War and Peace, for a non-positive portrayal of a Napoleonic war

Far From the Madding Crowd, for being negative about crowds

Animal Farm, for implied criticism of farmers

Wuthering Heights, for insensitivity toward people with fear of heights

Treasure Island, for casting aspersions on pirates

The Mill on the Floss, for stigmatizing people who can't afford dental care

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for not portraying "them" as a young woman or trans person 

Where's our freedom of expression, once it's edited away by publishers? Like Eeyore of Pooh Corner said of a lost thing:  "Somebody must have taken it. How like them."   

                   ================================

PS: A disclosure -- I've never read Bret Easton Ellis's novels* but I might now, for who can resist an author who says "I do not want to write anything with a fucking cell phone in it"?                                                                                         I'm sure tired of reading stories full of them, with characters who do nothing but talk on them, text with them, scroll through them, take pictures and solve murders with them ... So please, edit phones out, thought-pruners. ...