Tactful Bystanding

Photo by Rineshkumar Ghirao on Unsplash

“Canada’s response over the past few years [to the various atrocities that have been and are being perpetuated] has been consistent, predictable, and deeply inadequate. By now, Canada has perfected the art of tactful bystanding, present in language, absent in consequence. Ottawa has expressed concern, called for deescalation, and urged all parties to respect international law, but it has avoided naming responsibility and evaded confronting its closest ally. Canada criticizes outcomes while refusing to challenge the very system that produces them. This is simply appeasement dressed up as diplomacy. While statements are issued, the systems that produce these horrors remain untouched, leaving ordinary people, Palestinians, Venezuelans, Iranians, and now Cubans, to bear the consequences.” (Source.)

First, congratulations to Anne Kamath and Umer Azad for coining what is instantly my choice for word/phrase of the year and probably decade. ‘Tactful bystanding’ is a work of pure descriptive genius. I don’t know how many people I encounter on the daily who’re hiding behind tactful bystanding, but, figuratively, it’s a fuckton (or is it fucktonne? I can never remember). Sure, I suppose I could trawl for days/weeks/months through endless pages of Reddit comments and pick out a few dozen representative statements and then do some sort of statistical analysis and come up with some kind of number (plus or minus three points, nine times out of ten), but after all that would the number be sufficiently more precise and accurate than ‘far too fucking many’ to make all that labour worthwhile? I doubt it. I mean, I certainly could be wrong—the answer could very plausibly turn out to be ‘surprisingly fewer than expected, thank fuck’—, but I’m not about to do the work and find out. (Besides, I’m utter shit at arithmetic and I’d probably just get an absurdly surreal and obviously incorrect answer like -22,873.0005% somehow.¹)

In any case, tactful bystanding is something I’ve become increasingly aware of over the last several years, although I never managed to come up with such an incredible name for it. Awhile ago, for example, I had the idea of collecting some of those Reddit comments (anonymously) and organizing them into a post called “What The Frogs Are Saying As They Boil Alive” but I decided against it for being mean-spirited and not constructively educational. Plus, not being able to do any (proper) statistical analysis means I’m extra cautious when making arguments about how things ‘seem’ to be. In other words, such a post would have been mere lashing out, which is certainly tempting but hardly defensible and definitely not helpful—not to mention at least some (perhaps most) of these comments are from trollbots, and engaging with them as if they’re real people is one of the schemes and scams the losers who run trollbot-farms want us to fall for.

To be sure, I don't think tactful bystanding as a political position is anything new. It is, at least as far as I understand it, exactly what Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was referring to when he talked about his issue with 'moderate' whites: "First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action'; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a 'more convenient season.' Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."

But in any case, every time I see a post yowling and yammering about ‘how is [politician/branch of government/technoligarch/celebrity/influencer] getting away with this?’ or ‘whatever happened to [the rule of law/legal precedent/playing by the rules/sense of fairness/integrity/etc]? Doesn’t anyone care? Isn’t anyone thinking of the children?!’ or ‘bOtH sIdEs’ or ‘bUt HeR eMaIlS’ or ‘don’t let them distract from the #EpsteinFiles!’ or ‘If you didn’t vote, I don’t want to hear from you’ or ‘it’s a big club and you ain’t in it bub’ or ‘remember when the Panama Papers came out and nothing happened? Pepperidge Farm remembers’ or ‘millennials when the eighteen trillionth ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ crash happens: first time?’ I want to reach through the internet and repeatedly flick that (assumed) person’s fucking eyeballs like marbles until they wake the fuck up.

(Specifically, I want to ask those who seem to believe the point of Trump’s white supremacist fascism is to ‘distract’ the judiciary and various other supposed checks and balances so he doesn’t have to face any serious consequences for trafficking and raping children: are you still going to be saying it’s all a distraction after Trump brutally genocides millions or even billions of people on his way to being self-crowned the self-proclaimed God-Emperor of Earth? Like, how much more ‘truth’ about Trump and the rich and their shitlicking bootheels can you handle do you need before you understand ‘the truth’ by itself doesn’t make any palpable fucking difference? Because if by ‘truth’ you mean ‘prosecutable evidence,’ I’m real sorry to inform you that there is no amount or kind of ‘Truth’ that can every come down from on high—so to speak—and prevent or stop an atrocity or put someone in prison. For example, it is a vrais true fact that there is a legal case to be made that every American President since at least Harry Truman² is guilty of some kind of extremely serious and historically-documented law-breaking (things like indiscriminate bombing of civilians, trafficking drugs and weapons, extrajudicial assassinations, extra-legal warfare, torture, and so on). Nevertheless, the only ‘American President’ to ever spend any time behind bars is Jefferson Davis. (Interestingly, he was imprisoned for complicity in the assassination of Lincoln and spent two years in prison, but he wasn’t actually charged with anything because the Johnson government couldn’t figure out what exactly to charge him with; on Christmas 1868, however, it ceased to matter because Andrew Johnson granted a full blanket pardon for all rebels. #bipartisanship))

I mean, what are people genuinely hoping for by piling into every ‘news’ article with these kinds of comments? Does anyone honestly believe one day some selfish ratfuck like John Fetterman or Mike Johnson is going to read a really ‘spicy’ internet comment and suddenly slap their forehead and exclaim, “My gosh! What a complete boob I’ve been! How could I not have realized?!” Or are these comments more of a defensive self-satisfying “well, at least that poem doesn’t apply to me now!” kind of thing? To be sure, the answer is mostly irrelevant except to perhaps the poster’s psychologist, because merely pointing out there’s a gap between morality and legality, regardless of how often and shrilly the pointing out is done, will accomplish next to nothing; in precisely the same way no amount of ‘awareness’ of whatever problem (breast cancer, racism, combining mint and chocolate, climate change, pollution, wealth inequality, etc) will ever be sufficient in and of itself to solve said problem. Not one single house fire ever went out because a whole stageful of celebrities came together with the #courage to post, “guysssss pls dont look away k? this is not a drill <3” and everyone else was enough of a #bossbabe to like and share.

Tactful bystanding, it seems to me, is only ‘useful’ as a shield for sniveling cowards to hypocritically hide behind, or sociopathic predators to use as a dishonest deflection from their immorality and complicity; in both cases the purpose seems to be to gain protection from the consequences of their actions.

Here’s a relevant passage from one of the most educational books I have ever read, The Unconscious Civilization, by John Ralston Saul, published in 1995:

“There is a general sense that our civilization is in a long-term crisis. It can be seen from the political or social or economic aspect. From each angle, the same crisis can be seen differently. I would argue that it took on its actual economic form in 1973, when a first wave of political crises led to an oil supply crisis. We have been in a depression ever since. It doesn’t resemble a 1929-style depression, but then depressions have always been different, one from the other. Ours has been softened and evened out thanks to the life preservers gradually put in place by society after 1929 in order to give us time to manoeuvre and act should such a disaster repeat itself. It did, in 1973. Now, given our inability over the past two decades to deal with an unbreakable chain of unemployment, debt, inflation and no real growth, we have drifted farther and farther out into a cold, unfriendly, confusing sea. The new certitude of those in positions of authority – those out of the water – is that the certain answer is to cut away the life preservers.

This might be called a childlike act. Or one of unconsciousness so profound as to constitute stupidity.

How is this certitude possible? Well, the view from inside the public and private technocracy is one of relative calm. This is a place where the structure continues to grow, particularly in the private sector; particularly in the internationalized private sector. The technocracy has developed an argument that now dominates our society according to which ‘management’ equals ‘doing,’ in the sense that ‘doing’ equals ‘making.’ They have based this argument on a new economic mythology. This in turn is dependent on such things as the glorification of the service economy, a legitimization of financial speculation and the canonization of the new communications technology.

[...] Many are surprised that this management elite continues to expand and prosper at a time when society as a whole is clearly blocked by a long-term economic crisis. There is no reason to be surprised. The reaction of sophisticated elites, when confronted by their own failure to lead society, is almost invariably the same. They set about building a wall between themselves and reality by creating an artificial sense of well-being on the inside. The French aristocracy, gentry and business leadership were never more satisfied with themselves than in the few decades before their collapse during the French Revolution. The elites of the late Roman Empire were in constant expansion and filled with a sense of their own importance, as emperor after emperor was assassinated and provinces were lost. The Russian elite of the two decades preceding 1914 – both traditional leadership and the new, rapidly expanding business class – were in a constant state of effervescence.

One of the tricks which makes this sort of closet delusion possible is that the very size and prosperity of the elite permits it to interiorize an artificial vision of civilization as a whole. Thus, ours takes seriously only what comes from its own hundreds – indeed, thousands – of specialized sectors. Everything turns on internal reference. Everything is carefully measured, so that heartening ‘body counts’ of growth or job creation or whatever can be produced. Truth is not in the world, it is the measurements made by professionals.

A few weeks ago I had a long conversation with the deputy minister of finance of a Western country. He allowed as to how many people outside—by which he meant outside the elite—believed that we were all caught up in a general, uncontrollable crisis. And that many attributed some of the blame to the international money markets, which were seen to have declined—through lunatic expansion—into a purposeless myriad of speculations upon repeated levels of paper unrelated to real production—unrelated, that is, to [Adam] Smith’s ‘useful labour.’³ The problem, the deputy minister said, was that each of these new money market mechanisms had its use within the financial system. Each was therefore useful. Not merely an exercise in speculation. He was, however, unable to relate this financial system to any broader idea of the economy or the society.

He also said that he himself had come from a poor family; that he had done well, as had his brothers and sisters. He therefore had difficulty believing that there was a crisis anywhere except at the margins of society. That his family’s success might be related to the life preservers put in place after 1929—those protections against drowning that he and others were now cutting away—or that other people, not so fortunate as he and his family, might still need some help staying afloat, was beyond his interiorized, childlike vision of society.

The statistics of our crisis—which are available to all of us, as they are to this deputy minister—are clear and unforgiving. Yet they pass us by—in newspapers, on television, in conversations—as if they were not reality. Or rather, as if we were unable to convert knowledge into action.”

And it seems to me that the very closely related concepts of tactful bystanding and management by entitled children (if I may summarize what John Ralston Saul wrote in such a way) are also very closely related to another thing that’s been pointed out to me (I don’t remember where or by whom, unfortunately), which is learned helplessness. ‘Officially’ learned helplessness is, more or less, the theory that when someone’s actions have no effect on their circumstances they get depressed about how much they apparently suck. The pop connotation is something more like a half-serious belief that we’re taught by society to be generally incapable. (In other words, the connotation is just the phrase learned helplessness taken literally: as if the curriculum was designed to teach people to be useless).

For what it’s worth, while I don’t think there’s a literal roomful of people somewhere explicitly conspiring to subtly corrupt education systems around the globe in order to ensure people are too ignorant to understand what’s going on, it seems to me to be entirely true that in general the modern education system works very hard to get people to only learn what it decides is ‘safe’ to know (in exactly the same way Apple locks down their phones to better exploit protect their customers) and forces an individual’s formal education down such narrow lines of specialization that the end result—a state of ‘learned helplessness’ in which most people are in fact generally useless outside of the few things they need to know for what they do—is pretty indistinguishable from a global conspiracy to keep us dumb as fuck.

My point is, when you consider these three concepts together they make a very compelling argument: the reason so many things are getting worse and so few things are getting fixed is because in general there are two kinds of people in the world, dear reader my friend: those who manage and those who are managed, and neither group knows very much of anything useful beyond the narrow confines of their career (or job) requirements. Thus, when the managed notice and point out civilization-breaking issues like climate change or wealth inequality, the managers—who either aren’t (directly, immediately) affected or don’t care about such "externalities"—do pretty much the only thing they know how to: tell the employees to shut the fuck up and get back to work. And since the ‘actions’ of either the managed or the managers aren’t capable of solving—or even changing anything—, the cycle of weaponized incompetence inevitably repeats, perhaps at a louder volume and in a harsher tone, and around and around we go. Everyone ‘participates,’ with increasing panic and frustration, and nothing ever gets resolved.

And so my suggestion (for those who actually want to get off Satan’s bodacious hellacious carousel) is, to the managed, stop waiting for someone ‘in charge’ to come to the rescue, because—like New Orleans after Katrina—the people ‘in charge’ would very much prefer to lock you in instead of help you out. To the managers, my suggestion is you come out of your boardrooms and conference calls and re-establish direct contact with reality, if only because I’m pretty sure surviving the apocalypse will require you to be capable of more than locking yourself into an automated underground pedo palace survival bunker and re-prompting the AI every time it doesn’t stroke your ego hard enough.

In closing, I’d like to pose one of my all-time favourite questions to both the managers and the managed. This question was asked by the legendary asshole and musician Lou Reed, after a reporter asked him if he was happier as a blonde than as a brunette (Lou Reed had just dyed or undyed his hair). Since it’s a question, it obviously can’t answer your concerns or tell you what to do, but I nevertheless believe it can be an excellent motivator that, like chlorine in a pool, will help clear up some of your shit real quick:

“Are you happier being a schmuck?”

P.S. I realize, dear reader, that the tone of this essay is more mean-spirited than most. I get awful close to directly insulting whole groups of people, which is something I said I’d never do (although in my defense, I did my best to keep anything derogatory directly related to what might be called job descriptions rather than personal traits. In other words, I want to make it clear that the labels ‘manager’ and ‘managed’ (and ‘schmuck’) are not categories like ‘women,’ ‘men,’ ‘black,’ or ‘white’; they are labels intended only to describe what people do, not who they are). If anyone feels like I’ve directly insulted their humanity, I sincerely apologize; that was not my intention.

However, I’m not going to rewrite this in a more conciliatory or gentle tone, because this childish horseshit of pointing fingers everywhere but at yourself seriously pisses the fuck out of me and, more importantly, I think it’s a serious enough problem to warrant a pretty pugilistic wake-up call (as Killer Mike said: “Top of the mornin’; my fist to your face is fuckin’ Folgers.”). So, you know, get off your ass, dear reader: this shit isn’t directly your fault (probably), but it is your responsibility as an adult to help clean it up. (And if you’re not an adult, it’s your responsibility to learn how to be willing and able to help. Because I’m pretty sure the only real, critical difference between children and grown-ups is that a grown-up knows how to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions (or inactions), and then actually fucking does. Adults know the buck at least occasionally stops with them, and they don’t try to hypocritically and cowardly pass it off to someone else; they just accept their responsibility and get to fucking work.⁴)

1 In Grade 7, I had a math teacher who asked something equivalent to, "using what you have learned in this unit, create a question (and answer it) that demonstrates your comprehension of the unit topic" for one of the unit tests. Dear reader, being the unsubtle try-hard I am, I came up with a question I couldn’t answer, spent the rest of the period trying anyway, and then, humiliated, handed in an unanswered (possibly even unanswerable) question. As far as I remember the teacher was professional enough not to piss themselves laughing in my face, although even back then I don’t think I would have blamed them. When I was asked why in the holy hell I didn’t just phone it in like everyone else (something that was, in hindsight, clearly expected and understood by everyone else), and I think I said something like, “I wanted to do a good job, and prove I knew what I was doing,” as I silently wrestled down a panic attack about how my entire fucking future just burst sliding into first because I was so obviously an idiot without a single fucking working neuron. The more things change, eh?

2 I mean, keep a tight hold on a grain of salt or two because I’m no lawyer, but here’s the list of the Presidents (and the most consequential moral oopsie-daisies they’re responsible for and yet have suffered practically or actually no negative consequences for, as far as I’m aware): Eisenhower (military industrial complex), Kennedy (nuclear arms race), Johnson (Vietnam war), Nixon (treason), Ford (excusing treason), Carter (deregulation, Camp David Accords), Reagan (neoconservatism), Bush I (neoimperialism), Clinton (socio-economic warfare against ‘supercriminals’ (ie, the poor and usually non-white)), Bush II (neoconservative imperialism, mass surveillance), Obama (deportation, drone assassinations), Trump 1.0 (white supremacy), Biden (Israeli genocide), Trump 2.0 (extra-concentrated white supremacy, fascism). You can also almost always roll-over at least some of the immoral/illegal bullshit of a predecessor onto their successor: for example, Clinton carried on Bush I’s racist imperialism (eg, 'free' trade), and Obama carried on the mass surveillance of American citizens of Bush II, just as Biden carried on Trump 1.0’s white supremacist immigration policies. Furthermore, deregulation is pretty close to being the first and most important task on every president’s agenda, but I put it on Jimmy Carter only because I didn’t want to repeat myself. (Ditto why I didn’t include ‘violent racism for money’ even though that’s practically the whole entire reason America exists. The intellectual foundation of American politics has been, since day fucking one: we hold these truths to be self-evident, that being rich is better than being poor and being white is best of all, and thus everyone should be as free entitled to pursue being as rich and white as they can be, no matter who or what gets in the way!)

3 From earlier in the book: “As Adam Smith put it: ‘There is one sort of labour which adds to the value of the subject upon which it is bestowed; there is another which has no such effect.’ The former is ‘productive,’ the latter ‘unproductive’ labour. Smith clearly places management in the unproductive category. ‘The labour of some of the most respectable orders in the society is, like that of menial servants, unproductive of any value, and does not fix or realize itself in any permanent subject, or vendible commodity, which endures after that labour is past, and for which an equal quantity of labour could afterwards be procured.’ Smith, of course, is realistic: ‘But there is no country in which the whole annual produce is employed in maintaining the industrious. The idle everywhere consume a great part of it.’ His argument is that the industrious produce the fund which finances the whole community. The idle—those not engaged in ‘useful labour’—live upon the industrious. This includes the unwillingly idle—the unemployed. But he is not talking about them. They are not in a position to cost our society a great deal. He is referring above all to the managerial class of his day—the aristocracy, the courtiers, the professionals, the land and property owners (who live off rent income), the bankers and so on. In other words, he is talking about our technocratic managerial elite. It must exist. But how much of it can the industrious among us support? The answer might be that 30% to 50%—the current level of the managerial class in our society—is far too high; that the management of business along with the financial and consulting industries—all of which are extremely expensive and increasingly so—are a far more important factor in keeping the economy in depression than is any over-expansion of government services."

4 I’m not saying these things are directly related, but it is striking (to put it almost dishonestly mildly) that at the same time there’s be a growing trend toward ignorant and hysterical childishness in our society and particularly in our ‘management,’ we’ve also seen the rise of a shockingly deep and widespread pedophilia conspiracy among that same group. But whether it is mere correlation or actual causation, the sheer fact that largely the same people are raping children, raping society, and raping Nature for nothing but their own selfish gratification and will only break a sweat when DOGEing dodging all responsibility for the evil and ruinous consequences of their actions (and that these same lunatic losers also believe themselves to be morally and genetically superior to the rest of us) seems to me to be a pretty big fucking clue about their worth as a ‘ruling’ class of ‘elites.’