[FRIAM] How democracies die

[steve smith]

On 11/9/24 9:06 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>
> Someone I know decided to legally change their name (not their gender) 
> when they were relatively young.   Their family (young and old) simply 
> refused to respect this change, and to this day continues to use their 
> given name.  It’s malicious and I see it causes pain.  It seems to me 
> the discomfort with trans people in part comes from refusing to revise 
> knowledge and let people that wish to divorce aspects of the past.   I 
> am not sure whether this is a preference or a cognitive limitation of 
> the people that do it.  I think some of both.
>
And I know (of) several people who have entirely turned their backs on 
their families of origin, sometimes just on their parents, other times 
on specific siblings, and other times the entire nuclear family-of-origin.

In most cases, as best I can tell, this was not over any singular 
incident or grievance but in fact a pattern of the group entirely 
denying the reality of the individual?

It seems more rare for an individual to be excommunicated from the 
(family) group entirely, just avoided/shunned somewhat (e.g. 
Q/MAGA-ranting uncle given the wrong time for T-day dinner so those who 
want to leave early can avoid him entirely).     I suspect those who 
extracted themselves from the toxicity of their family-of-origin so 
completely knew something the rest of the group was willfully ignorant 
of about themselves.

I've been "threatened" by others' self-image/identity before... 
sometimes because it is a belligerent, threatening identity (e.g. 
EricS's "performative cruelty" admonition), and sometimes because it 
reflects back to me something about myself I don't want to see 
(including possible streaks of "performative cruelty").   But in the 
long run, I think it has provided me with some reflective guidance on 
"who *I* want to be" (whatever that agentic-free-will concept grounds to).

The current fetish for (toxic-levels) of alpha-masculinity 
(Trump/Rogan/Musk weird-energy-triumvirate?) seem to be (everything) 
phobic...   I have ideated on each of their brands of "success" (wealth, 
power, influence, physical prowess) and even obtained 
little-fish/big-puddle quantities from time to time, but fundamentally 
it did not satisfy (or maybe the grapes were just sour?).

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