Conspiracies

I think there are some topics out there where it’s just better to acknowledge that my viewpoint on it isn’t going to shift much and instead I’m being open about my asks/requests, and that’s also to say that there may not be a point in history where I take the topic less personally. Some level of detachment seems to often be the objective of being “spiritual,” but I also feel like self-knowledge in situations should be a huge priority.

At this point in time, using any “aesthetics” connected to any sort of mass industrialized genocide and really any reference to something like that—I just don’t entirely understand it as an artistic choice. It doesn’t mean that free speech isn’t free and that people can’t choose what they want. Certainly people have deeply disagreed with some of my art and other actions over the years. Loudly advocating for censorship isn’t equal to simply showing up in situations and saying “well hey, if you were trying to be a good friend and advocate to me/marginalized people./etc in this situation, I hate to say it, but you weren’t doing it successfully.” There are always a variety of choices available to us. When a friend or even a larger group of people keeps telling you that doing, saying, repeating or supporting something is harmful to them, I wish we’d all be more open to listening out of love and community motivation rather than insisting that our free movement and expression is being impeded for one moment.

What a lot of people don’t fully understand is that things are rarely just fun conspiracies or thought experiments. Words become things, thoughts about reality start to manifest confirmation bias about that reality occurring around you. I’m not sure how to explain this in a more scientific way. Those thought processes eventually start to elicit next dictated actions for how to behave in realtime.

Further, a lot of “dictatorial” imagery has become co-opted by people who support “freedoms,” but don’t necessarily support community accountability to one another—only unlimited assumed rightness of action, innocence or goodwill. And that’s a problem too, because love and community do not grow without boundaries and without the acknowledgement that humans, can, do and will cause harm to one another when in an enclosed space. While we aren’t responsible for the management of other peoples’ feelings; when requests are made to us to alter behavior because something is hurtful or harmful, just as we should follow that in a one-to-one relationship, we should follow that in community with one another as well.

Impact is not the same as intent. How our behavior and choices land is just as important a point as our intention behind it--which a lot of people besides ourselves can't always interpret effectively apart from the action taken. And as I said above, little in life or humanity is just a fun abstraction or a thought experiment. Humans have real histories, interactions and traumas that drive them on a day-to-day basis. Nothing in the world is just an abstraction.