*Originally Published 2016*
In no way is this list exhaustive. I've been downhearted, angry, in complete disbelief about a lot of the following and because of this combo I really have a hard time figuring out how to make them better. Sometimes systems just seem too big and people too invested to actually make noticeable improvements.
1. The relation between health and beauty
Why do we think that these two things go in tandem? Seriously, beauty products are not health products nor are beauty treatments health treatments. Let's let people be people and choose how they want to express themselves without attaching moral health trolling to those choices.
2. Valuing money over lives
At the base of it, money is paper or bits of code that WE assign value to. It doesn't have value outside of the systems which we create and reinforce and continue. Lives do. How have we set up a system where it's impossible to value something that is intrinsically valuable over something that is artificially/instrumentally valuable?
3. Nationalism
This goes ALL ways. Everyone who feels like they have to stay in a nation to try and make it better. Everyone who wants to re-take a nation to bring back "the good old days". Again, nations have no meaning outside of what we give them. I think I wish we all had open border policies across the world. I mean, I warrant no extra special treatment because I came out of my mother's womb at a particular location in the world nor because my mom lived within an artificial human made set of boundaries for a certain number of years. Why do I get more things than someone not born in the US or Canada? Why do I have more of an obligation to those countries? All of it strikes me as a nationalism that I'm not okay with it and creates divisiveness over actually helping PEOPLE.
4. Competition vs Collaboration
So we stack capitalism as if competition generates the best results but then also have this idea that you can do more and be better with collaboration (as long as it's internal to a corporation or a sports team). The way we've set up capitalist/corporate systems, we give being competitive (to the point of generating a monopoly if possible and of course preferring money to lives see above) an edge over anything that's collaborative or works as a co-op. Why have we biased everything in favor of adversarial approaches? The idea that competition makes things better is not generally more supported than the idea that collaboration does but generates a lot more collateral damage along the way.
5. Humans are not rational
We know we aren't. We know a billion different ways that we aren't. Can we stop idealizing this idea of rationality and building policies and such that support it as they do real damage to people? Marketing would not be the multi-billion dollar business it is if we were rational. Social psychology would not have a list of over a 100 biases if we were. Also, given that "rationality" is a construct which tends to support status quo ideas, it has real and harmful effects on marginalized groups both in dismissing them, their experiences and arguments as irrational and reinforcing arguments that support the continued oppression of people.
Finally, why do we value rationality to extremes anyways? I remember when my grandmother was ill and senile (and dying no matter what medical interventions happened), doctors would do things against her will because she was irrational. The fact she was irrational didn't lessen her duress about it at all. The harm done to her was if anything greater than if she was rational. Why does it matter that she was making irrational choices, they were choices that felt good to her?
6. Men are emotional
I don't mean in the they can be happy, sad, etc sense. I mean that we, as a society, value men getting angry. They get angry often and are righteous about it and we are okay with this. Why did we somehow separate anger from other emotions and declare it rational? Also, why do we not expect and teach men to control their anger (which expressions of can get incredibly harmful to others in ways that happiness or sadness generally don't) the way we expect and teach mean to show no other emotions?
The doubling harmful part of this is if women are angry about things that don't typically anger men, women are being emotional and irrational but men don't face the same standard of when their anger is rational or reasonable.
7. Individualism, Intentions, Blame and Merit
In this, I really mean when we think individuals have a responsibility to act differently. We (more so in the States than other places I've lived) have this idea that an individual should only be required to change their behaviour if their behaviour was the sole and immediate cause of a problem. So if it's not directly your fault that someone else doesn't have the ability to feed themselves or avoid being shot by police, there is no obligation on you to act differently.
And then, we examine what makes something your fault, we default to examining what your intentions were. I really do not understand how we improve systemic issues without all taking ownership of the fact that we live in them. I didn't do anything to get the rights of a US citizen or the privileges of being white but that's exactly part of why they are problematic.
Systemic oppression is going to reinforce itself across multiple institutions and spheres of influence. Of course one action doesn't make it go away, it's a multi-faceted problem. However, no counteraction means we see the status quo strengthening. We have obligations to make other people's lives better even when we didn't do anything directly to create the system because not doing so does make their lives worse. It cannot be about individual's intentions or blame but about collaboration and an onus on everyone to make the world even slightly more kind to more people.
This whole idea of you can have a one to one correlation between an individual's actions and their responsibilities for redress can only be supported as fair and just if we already live in a merit based society (even them I'm not convinced it works well).
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