rant of the day: better does not require perfect

[tielan]

I'm so fucking tired of the argument that those of us fighting for a better world - climate change, economic reform, social reform - have to give up everything that we already have or we're hypocrites.

We do not need to detach ourselves from the world as it exists in order to fix it.

Every person in the history of humanity whom we admire for doing something great did it from a position within the broken system they were trying to make better. The abolitionists worked in the midst of a society that had been built on slavery. The suffragettes protested from a position of privilege as women of wealth and property. Even today, unionists use the jobs they already have as leverage when trying to enshrine fair rights for the worker.

You know who told them that the system worked okay and didn't need changing because things just were the way they were? That they should give up everything they had or they weren't really in the fight?

The laggards, the luddites, the naysayers, the people who we look upon now as small-hearted, mean-spirited negging nellies who've always tried to hold back what was for the bettering of society.

The people on the wrong side of history.

Yeah, our footprint isn't neutral. We were born into a system that grinds others beneath its wheels and there's no way of avoiding it. The meanest child born in the western world today has benefited from the taking of native lands, the sweat of slavery, the unacknowledged work and effort of the women in our society. And that's just for starters. There's no way to undo what we've benefited from - not today, not even if we had all the power in the universe.

But we need to push back against the idea that if we can't do it perfectly, then we shouldn't even bother trying to be doing better. That kind of purity mentality is toxic enough in fannish discourse; but it's flat-out poison when put upon those who are just trying to improve the world.

The people saying that those pushing for an acknowledgement of climate change need to be perfectly green first are the kind of people who say that because they can't be perfect they shouldn't even bother trying to be good.

We don't have to be perfect to do better.

Comments

[lynnenne]

Well said.

[tielan]

Thank you! It's been pissing me off for a while, because the argument turns up all over my local FB group whenever there's anything about climate change: "Well, you'd better give up your car and your phone and your electricity, because that's all contributing to the global situation!"

I finally said it in a reply to a comment and it felt good to have something to fight back with.

[beatrice_otter]

Yes, absolutely!

[dewline]

Thank you for pointing this out to me!

[tielan]

Thank you for reading!

[tielan]

I think it needs to be said as a counterpoint to all the "you should give up everything that makes civilisation then if you're trying to save the environment" bullshit that's out there.

Thanks for the rec and the link!

[rmc28]

Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, is the way I've heard it phrased.

Or, my mother's (which she got from someone else, whose name I forget): if it's worth doing, it's worth doing badly.

Incremental improvements are better than none at all, and we all live and have to work within flawed social and economic systems. Insisting on individual purity does nothing except divert time and energy and hope from the collective, systemic effort to the individual pursuit of (near-impossible) perfection.

(Sometimes I drive a car; I'm considering flying for a weekend away; a lot of the time I order from Amazon; sometimes I use single-use plastic straws and bottles; because in the world I'm living in, those are the best options I have for the problems I'm trying to solve and it's always more complicated than those with "simple" answers think.)

[havocthecat]

Look, fuck everyone who hates single use plastic straws, I'm sorry. My dad had dementia, he needed them not to aspirate the liquids he drank BECAUSE HE FORGOT HOW TO SWALLOW, and did you really want my mom, a full-time caregiver who was struggling with the love of her life HAVING DEMENTIA and who couldn't afford to hire a 24/7 caregiver having to clean out a metal straw with a tiny little brush?

Not everyone can give up single use plastic straws. If you can, great! But fuck everyone who wants a total ban. Fuck them. Sometimes you really, really need goddamn single use plastic straw.

I have issues. For good reasons.

[rmc28]

Yup! Absolutely!

[havocthecat]

Thanks for understanding that I was agreeing with you very, very vehemently. I reread my original comment and maybe saw how, uh, intense I got and, well. I'm glad you didn't misinterpret anything I said.

[tielan]

Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, is the way I've heard it phrased.

Yes, exactly that.

The problem is that I think that our current discourse has gotten to the point where we're going to have to make the situational points that human progress - social and economic and technology - has been made in the broken pieces and sometimes rotting stagnation of what came before. Purity culture is silencing and sidelining a lot of people, and we simply can't afford that anymore.

[kass]

AMEN.

[tielan]

*bows*

[havocthecat]

That's how all his critics fucking shut down Al Gore back when he tried to raise awareness of climate change back in 2006. Look, the man isn't perfect (none of us are), but he was right.

I feel like we should all do what we can and strive to be better! What's wrong with that?

(This is me long-windedly agreeing with you.)

[tielan]

It's an argument that's been used to silence people for a long time, only now we can't afford the silencing and the sidelining.

So many fights are grinding to a standstill because people are too scared of having ever been wrong to try to make things right for the future. And that's partly because of the lie that we have to already be good in order to work towards better; we're all of us failed and broken and mired in the problems we've created and which our society has entrenched. That doesn't mean we can't be better - in fact, I hoped that by reframing it for things like slavery, suffrage, and equality it would help people see that the real enemy - those who we see as ultimately wrong - were the ones insisting that people exist perfectly before they do anything improving at all.

[devilc]

Imperfect doesn't mean "unimportant" or "unimpactful"