“To What End”: A Personal Introspection of Online Activism, Moral Scrupulosity, and Rippling Consequences
I have been spending my summer working on my upcoming book with Thornapple Press, “Love Rebels: Radical Relationships for Radical Activists”, which means I have been wrestling a lot with my philosophies and ethics. I’ve been reading books like “Excluded”, by Julia Serano, and “Jesus and John Wayne”, by Kristin Kobes De Mez. I’ve been participating in organizing meetings for tenant unions and mutual aid strategies for addiction harm reduction. I’ve been volunteering at the local animal shelter and getting to know my neighbors.
In summary, I spent a couple of months wholeheartedly procrastinating by doing every possible task besides writing the book.
When I first sat down to work on “Love Rebels”, I initially felt intimidated and overwhelmed, full of imposter syndrome. After all, who was I to speak on such matters? Sure, I am constantly organizing various projects or participating in direct actions, but I’m usually not the Face for such things, so I’m not a Famous Activist in that way. Why would my thoughts on finding a healthy balance between living your ethics and being in sustainable relationships be valuable to anyone who wasn’t me? I continued to second guess myself while I found all kinds of other work I could contribute to and pretended I wasn’t just twiddling my thumbs.
Once I sat down to write, though, I found that I had a lot to say. I’ve been an activist of some kind for my entire life, and I’ve learned a lot during the process. I’m still learning every day, both from experience and from listening to other movers and shakers in the wide world of activism. I have grown a lot, from sobbing my eyes out as a child because I couldn’t do enough, to overextending myself trying to right every wrong as a young adult, to sobbing my eyes out as an adult because I couldn’t do enough, to finding serenity in recognizing that the only person I can control is myself, but that changing myself was revolutionary. It’s been a rough path, with a lot of anxiety, depression, addiction, disassociation, and suicidality. I am lucky that I had the love and support to break through all of that to be the person I am today.
I can probably sum up how I assess my responses to injustice (now at the advanced age of 40) with the phrase, “To what end?” When I am called to act or speak in a situation, directly or indirectly, I now run the filter of asking myself what the purpose is for getting involved. What is my ultimate goal? Who is my audience? Is what I want to say or do genuinely helpful, or am I serving my ego by performing activism publicly? Will this multi-paragraph Facebook response change any minds, or am I just angry and want to lash out? Is this the best possible way for me to reach my end goal?
As I’m sure you can imagine, I write a lot of things I then sigh and delete instead of posting, and then I go for a walk instead. I listen to some music and process my feelings, while also putting myself into a new environment and getting my blood pumping physically instead of emotionally. Basically, I exhaust my physical body, distract my mind, and then allow myself to come back to the situation to see if I still feel the need to speak up. Sometimes, I still do, but I can be more patient and specific in the language I use, a little more likely to extend aggressive good faith explicitly and vocally. And often, I realize that this conversation or debate doesn’t really need to hear from me.
My mental health has never been so improved, especially after getting kicked off Twitter for impersonating Libs of Tiktok. I know people talk about touching grass as a dismissive eye-roll, but genuinely, touching grass was really good for me. Ultimately, this whole process made me a better, more nuanced activist.
The thing I realized is that internet activism is sometimes extremely useful for rallying folks or raising awareness, but more often, any good cause you may want to support will get dragged into the hell of navigating constant fights instead. I can’t count the number of amazing communities online that I’ve seen explode because self-righteous posturing was treated as more important than being invested in each other. Horizontal infighting over methodology and language, often in the public sphere of social media, is rewarded with substack subscriptions and speaking gigs — there is a financial incentive to stay angry. But to what end?
I was similarly an activist in brand and identity for over 10 years of my adult life, and it was like a drug. I got such a rush when I called someone to account online, spelling out the ways in which they were misrepresenting their positions or being hypocritical with their behavior. I could point at someone who I had decided was causing harm and yell at them, and people would stand behind me and agree with me! It felt so powerful, like a paladin of social justice. I powered myself up with sanctimonious lectures, making sure to do them publicly so I could get showered with praise for my labors. It felt like I was doing something good. I’m sure sometimes good was achieved, if incidentally.
Here’s the problem with that approach, though. When you have placed yourself on a pedestal of moral correctness, you are constantly aware of how unstable that pedestal is, and how easy it is to fall off. In order to save face and stay up top, you have to constantly defend yourself, even against people who are actually trying to give you perspective. You are anxious all the time, questioning the motives of people around you, questioning your own motives but then realizing, even if you ask yourself, “To what end?” and don’t like the answer, you have to double down on social media in order to not show weakness. You cannot allow for nuance, because that destabilizes your pedestal. It becomes increasingly hard to trust people, and it feels overwhelmingly lonely.
Another problem is that it’s just plain exhausting, feeling like you constantly have to be processing the past, the present, and the future, along with every terrible thing happening around the world at all times or you’re a bad person. It’s an impossible goal, and an unhealthy one. I was doing some research on high-control religions, reading the book “Leaving the Fold” by Marlene Winell, when I began to recognize some of my own knee-jerk reactions in the text. One example:
“A frequent discovery is that the world can be a good and wonderful place. Former fundamentalists laughingly talk about participating in “worldly” activities and finding that nothing happened! It was not so terrible. In fact it is a great relief to let go of the image of Satan prowling around trying to ensnare you. It’s nice to have different kinds of friends. It feels good to belong to the human race, to be at home on Earth, sharing basic human struggles, being part of society, caring for the planet. It’s great to go dancing, have a cocktail without guilt, see a controversial play, and generally enjoy life without constant censorship.” Page 142, Leaving the Fold
As someone raised Pagan, who is now an atheist, I didn’t understand why that sentiment felt so familiar… until I began to consider my relationship to activism. I did feel, as a public figure who engaged in activism online, like I had to have a statement on every injustice. If I spoke up about one thing, I would hear demands to speak on five more, which I would then research so I could speak with knowledge on the topic. Soon I felt like I could never look away from social media, or from tragedies unfolding, because I genuinely believed that taking a break was for complicit cowards. Did this internal pressure lead me to be a better activist? No. Did it make me suicidal and addicted to substances? Yep.
It was a major pattern that I recognized in the community around me. There was a devastating number of friends and acquaintances who were dying: from suicide, from overdoses, from physically and emotionally taxing themselves past the point of sustainability. So many of them were fierce advocates for the marginalized and destitute, and yet they felt hopeless and alone. For how invested they were in their communities, they didn’t feel safe asking for resources and support of their own. So many communities relied on mutual aid networks to survive, yet there was always some group that had fallen from grace, now seen as “hostile” and “antisocial”. What was happening? Where was the disconnect?
None of this gelled quite so thoroughly until I became a mentor to an Evangelical teen. As part of my self-education to understand the culture they were raised in, I began to read some particularly toxic Evangelical material, both unadulterated and stories from people who had left more problematic sects of the Church and deconstructed. I kept hearing repeatedly “I felt scared”. “I felt scared of going to Hell”. “I felt scared of what people at my Church would think”. “I felt scared I wasn’t a good enough person”. People in this situation felt constantly doomed, like they needed to be performing “goodness” and “faith” 100% of the time, and even then, they might still burn in Hell forever. Nothing was ever ENOUGH.
One of the things I learned about that really changed how I relate to that feeling of anxiety and guilt was learning about religious scrupulosity. It’s a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder that can manifest in many ways: as invasive thoughts about hell, a need to repeatedly repent or confess, constantly second-guessing your actions and thoughts, combing through past words and deeds for things that may upset God or your Church.
Substitute “Twitter” and “Discord” for “God” and “Church”, it’s what I felt about activism.
This is when I learned about moral scrupulosity, which is a type of moralistic compulsion. Looking back, I was anxious all the time, sleeping restlessly, unable to concentrate on work or household needs, consumed by navel-gazing about whether I was “good” or not. I lived in terror of doing or saying the wrong thing and being ostracized by my community. I felt like I had to be rigid about “right” and “wrong” actions, oblivious to the ripple effects of my “demands”. I closed myself off to feedback and critique, which meant my own personal growth stagnated. I may have been performing “good activist”, but I wasn’t contributing in any sustainable way outside of online bickering about semantics. Ironically, moral scrupulosity often made me so scared of misstepping that I would more often do nothing so I didn’t fuck up, yet that lack of action was also an action! I drove myself to a state of despair.
When I took a step back to ask myself, “To what end?” about my online activism, I realized that I was effectively patting myself on the back, seeking acknowledgment for being “righteous”, and trying to be one step ahead of anyone who might seek to accuse me of not caring about “the issues”. I was spending so much time doing that, I had nothing left over to give to people actually in need to help, usually time and money. Not only that but this kind of activist bullying often was weaponized the most strongly against people who were also marginalized. I wasn’t fighting “The Man”. I was fighting myself, and my “community”: at least, the people who were assigned as “my community” because we shared a hobby or an identity. No wonder I was perpetually stressed out.
I do speak up, mind. In fact, I speak up reasonably often. But I take my time with it now. I research before I speak, with multiple sources when possible. I read all the receipts, multiple times, and take notes. I take pains to understand if I’m punching up, or punching horizontally. I reflect on if I’m the right person to have a vocal opinion here, or if I am more useful signal boosting the voices of people who are actually involved. I seek to be in right relationship, rather than right, to paraphrase from Ashtin Berry. I just don’t do it reactively anymore.
Recovering from moral scrupulosity is hard. I still find myself wondering if I should join this boycott or share this video of horrific violence. I still struggle with weighing the immediate results of my stepping up, and who might be impacted by the ripples. I still wrestle with how to be supportive when two groups I care about have contrasting and yet both reasonable community values. Asking myself, “To what end?” allows me a reasonable mantra to examine and meditate on before I act, allowing me to self soothe that sense of immediacy, that desire to control others through emotional demands, and instead speak up about what I plan to do, how I intend to show up. I allow space for things to be complicated, even if that frustrates people I care about. I have my own strong opinions, still — now, though, I don’t see that being in contrast to my mindful actions.
Now that I’m actively in recovery for this behavior pattern, I see it so often on social media. It’s not a surprise — algorithms reward conflict, after all, and public figures who make activism part of their brand are often pushed to feed the algorithm with as much conflict as it can handle. Social media has now also blurred the meaning of what makes up a community, lumping people together as a “community” but who have built up no trust or investment in each other. It’s a lot easier to be self-righteously and loudly angry at someone you don’t know, who you don’t have to interact with every day, and when you don’t have to bear witness to the day-to-day impact of your words. Social media also makes it very easy for misinformation to spread like wildfire, far beyond the reach of any recanting of said misinformation.
Social media activism is increasingly the high-fructose corn syrup of direct action and it kills me. It breaks my heart because I completely understand the drive to engage in that way. There’s power in it, there’s clout in it, there’s sometimes even money and opportunities in it. But it’s also all empty calories, and you have to keep feeding the beast to keep it from devouring you instead. Being in a constant state of dysregulation like that is bad for your nervous system!
Now, I ask myself, “To what end?” before I say something online. I think about it. I sit with it. I consider the potential consequences and decide whether I’m willing to take that risk, if what I want to say feels SO important and SO needed that it’s worth possible bad faith backlash. I am no longer scared of conflict because I don’t see it as “bad” anymore. Conflict is an opportunity for me to listen and learn from another perspective, and that’s a wonderful thing. Being “wrong” isn’t terrifying to me anymore because I know I am surrounded by loved ones who will kick my ass when I need it kicked. I also know when I do speak, it is with intention and from my heart, not a compulsion to be “good” in the eyes of social media.
At the same time, I have become comfortable with the fact that not everyone is part of my community and that not all feedback is in good faith. Community is about mutual care, mutual accountability, and mutual responsibility. Sometimes I will reflect on someone’s feedback, talk to my therapist and my accountability buddies about it, and will conclude that it’s more about their relationship to the world than mine. That’s ok, too, I’ve been there. We’re all learning.
Instead of being avoidant due to panic, nowadays I choose my community carefully, with flexibility. My community includes my close friends, but it also includes my neighbors and the people I organize with offline. It’s the people I would go out of my way to step up for, whether they need de-escalation or a cup of sugar. My community has some fuzzy boundaries, but it is a group of people who are invested in me and who I am invested in. We listen to each other and care about each other. Sure, there’s a lot less “glory” in it, but I am much happier and I feel like I’m living my ethics much more honestly.
I don’t know if this essay? reflection? will be helpful to anyone else out there in the world. I see a lot of incredibly charged conversations happening in my circles and on the national stage as we get close to one year of genocide in Palestine and another Presidential election that feels like teetering on the edge of an abyss. I know I have found some peace that has enabled me to doggedly offer signal-boosting and financial support where I think it would be the most useful. I remember that the only person I can control is myself, and I let my actions model what I want to see from others. I don’t let my moral scrupulosity drive.
Sometimes I fight, and sometimes I step back; I am always confident that I am doing my absolute best with the information I have, while recognizing that I cannot have all information on everything ever. I give myself the grace I extend to others.
And before I enter the arena that is social media, I ask myself, “To what end?”
