Fighting Back Against Oppression Is Not The Same Thing As Committing Oppression, And It Is Not Hypocrisy

Fighting back against oppression is not the same thing as committing oppression, and it is not hypocrisy not to tolerate intolerance from others.

That is not what a lot of supposed activism on this website actually does.

Guilt-tripping total strangers based on unfounded assumptions about their lives and experiences? Demanding attention and validation from strangers, as a way for said strangers to prove that they aren't Bad People, by demanding that what amount to personal vent posts be treated as meaningful educational resources on incredibly complex and serious issues? Trying to claim moral high ground over the fictional interests of strangers based entirely on some people's feelings of disgust as the only evidence of harm?

Wanting people around you to feel angry, or small, or ashamed, with no goal besides making someone else feel bad when it makes you feel better about the unfair hurt you've endured?

These aren't examples of activism or progressive ideology. They are examples of hurt people lashing out at easy targets with misidirected anger. They are examples of people engaging in the cycle of harm, when someone has made them feel small, and they chose to look for someone else they've decided should feel smaller as a way to make themselves feel big again.

I'm sure most tumblr users can think of at least a few posts they've seen like this, if not dozens or more.

Not just isolated posts, either, but posts with hundreds to thousands of notes worth of validation from other strangers.

That shit is harmful. Absolutely no one is ever obligated to engage with guilt-tripping, directionless anger that focuses mainly on punching down at one's peers, regardless of the source which originally inspired that anger. No matter how sympathetic someone's pain might be, it is not kindness to validate random cruelty as an outlet for genuine pain.

Engaging in meaningful activism is hard work. Hurting easy targets in the name of righteous causes is easy.

Being a decent person means being willing to ask yourself which one you're doing, and then being willing to step back and disengage not only when the answer is, "causing more harm," but also when the honest answer is, "I don't know."

Activism is not the same as causing harm. The corollary to that is that causing harm is not the same as activism, either.

Oliver Quick wanted friends. He struggled to make friends, and his mom told him it was because he was so clever, and so he threw himself into academics and got into Oxford and discovered that even in a place that was supposed to value Clever People he still didn't fit in.

But Oliver wanted friends. He wanted friends who wanted to be around him, and he didn't want to be around people who took pleasure in tearing him down or people who were determined to label him as a friendless loner who should give up on wanting anyone else to like him for him.

He wanted to connect with other people who wanted him to be happy, and who he could make happy in turn.

And too many people seem to think the message there is that a person who wants friendship but struggles to find it must be inherently creepy. That Oliver deserved to be made fun of, deserved to be looked at with suspicion or labeled a creep who all the Cattons should have been more wary of from the start, just because he was a weird kid whose social skills lagged well behind his peers.

That is not, in fact, the message of Saltburn. Oliver does not represent the inherent creepiness of the average weirdo loner who dreams of being liked instead of loudly proclaiming their pride in not fitting in, anymore than Farleigh or Venetia are meant to send the message that being mixed race or a woman turns people into bullies or predisposes them to cruelty in response to rejection or their own personal pain.

The message is that hurt people often wind up hurting other people, no matter who they are or where they come from. That hurt in any form can lead anyone to lash out as a way to cope with feeling small and angry, but all that does is perpetuate a cycle of further violence and make more people hurt.

That no matter how real and unfair the source of your pain, no matter how valid you are to be angry at something or someone who hurt you, there is no pain or valid anger that grants anyone immunity from lashing out too hard or at the wrong people and becoming one more cruel person who just wants to drag others down too.

That wanting friends, wanting connection and community and enough social power that no one else can make you feel small or afraid, aren't inherently terrible things. That if you don't own your own choices anyway and take responsibility for the outlets you find for your anger no matter how unfairly you've been treated by the people around you, these things can very easily turn into justifications for doing some pretty terrible things of your own.

having a soft small pet is like, you are so vulnerable, you are biting me, I am responsible for your fragile life in almost every way, your knife hands are in my stomach, I love you more than anything, stop eating plastic you heathen, I cannot save you from the slow march of age or explain to you the divergence of our life spans which consumes me

On the heels of my more serious Felix Catton post, I would also like to take a step back into lighthearted hilarity and appreciate Felix's claim to Oliver early on that he takes more after his dad than his mom.

Truly an iconic line, said with all the unshakable confidence of bone-deep misogyny by a man whose personality is basically a carbon copy of his mother's.

i think what most people fail to understand is that curating your online experience doesn't just mean blocking and filtering the things you don't like or don't want to see but that it also (and maybe more importantly) means engaging with the things you do like and want to see. if someone creates something that makes your experience better, let them know! tell them! reblog their things! you get to see/share more of what you like and they get to know that someone out there appreciates their work it's a win-win situation for everyone involved

unfortunately, “it’s complicated” continues to be the correct answer to most questions worth asking. yeah I’m annoyed about it too