Bad faith
Here everyone's real ethical, perfect judgment? How hilarious, farcical.
NOTE: This is a repost of an audio essay I originally uploaded to my podcast. Since revamping the direction of the podcast, the essay has been moved to the Obscure Arts section of my newsletter.
đ¨ cw: transphobia, racism, and bigotry of all sorts
My dog, Castor, is a hound.
I mean that metaphorically, of course, but possibly also literally, as I suspect that he has a different father than his siblings. That can apparently happen in the dog world; female dogs ovulate multiple times while in heat, so more than one male can sire a single litter. Pollux is a herding dog through and throughâAussie shepherd and Aussie cattle dog togetherâbut Castor seems more Basset than blue heeler. Even though Bear and I have seen pictures of the boysâ parents, I think their mama might have some âsplaining to do.
Pollux is my ADHD Velcro gremlin, but Castor is a dogâs dog. Sort of like a manâs man, but the canine equivalent. Castor is the platonic ideal of Dogâ˘âfriendly, protective when necessary, and a bit of a charming pest when it comes to ladies of both the two-legged and four-legged persuasion. Heâs a perfect gentleman thought, my Castor, always respectfully giving distance when asked, but that wonât stop him from being a bit of a, wellâŚhound about them.
âHeâs a lover, ainât he,â one of the dog park regulars laughs as he vigorously rubs Castorâs belly. Castor is indeed a lover, and an indiscriminate one at thatâof belly rubs and pets. âCâmere, sweet boy, and give me some sugar,â he coos as Castor pops up like a jack-in-the-box to lick his face. âThatâs right.â
I take my boys to the dog park every morning, mostly to run off their 6-month-old herding breed puppy energy, but also for socialization. Theirs, and mine, if Iâm being honest. Being a full-time writer doesnât allow for much human interaction, and I donât want to get out of practice.
âCastor,â I admonish as he jumps up again. âOff.â
âOh, heâs fine,â says the dog park regular. I donât know his name, but I do know he has a beagle-pit bull mix named Buster. Iâm slower to learn human names than dog ones.
âYes, but Iâm trying to teach him some manners,â I say, chagrined. âI canât let him skate by on his charming personality, you know.â
Busterâs human laughs. Today he is wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the Roman numeral III superimposed on an American flagâa symbol of the far right militia group the Three Percenters. âItâs all right,â he says. âKeeps him sweet. Just like his mama.â
I know Busterâs human about as well as I know most of the other dog owners at the park, which is to say I know far more about their dogs than I do their actual lives. Iâve always known Busterâs human was of a conservative bent, mostly because he has a car sporting a Letâs Go Brandon bumper sticker. Iâm usually going as heâs coming; itâs too hot to stay outside much past 8:30AM, which when he and his crew like to stroll in.
But today is the first day the humidity has broken all summer, and Iâm not averse to letting my boys play a little longer. Or me, for that matter.
âI don't know,â I reply. âI think Castorâs mama was a good times party girl because Iâm pretty sure heâs got a different dad from the rest of his siblings.â
I point out Pollux to Busterâs human, and tell him a little bit about how littermates can come from different sires. I know he wasnât talking about the boysâ actual mama when he called her sweet, but Iâm nothing if not good at deflecting dirty old men away from perv toward paternalistic. Socialization practice.
We chat a little about our lives. Heâs a retiree, an Army veteran who grew up in South Orange, New Jersey. The longer Iâve lived in North Carolina, the more Iâve come to realize that the South isnât any more culpable when it comes to racism and bigotry than other places in the United States. In fact, the vast majority of the conservative crackpots Iâve met here come from elsewhere. As a former New Yorker and a Los Angeles native, I used to say that people go to LA to be found, and New York to find themselves. Now that Iâve been in North Carolina almost a decade, I think I can add that people move to the South to fuck off.
Well, white people move to the South to fuck off.
âAnd what do you do?â Busterâs human asks me.
âIâm a writer,â I reply. âI write fantasy books for teens.â
âNo way!â he booms excitedly. Then he eyes me with suspicion. âYou donât put that sex shit into your books, do you?â
I know where this conversation is heading, but Iâm curious how Busterâs human is going to take us there. "What do you mean?â
âThat transgender nonsense,â he growls. âDid you know in California they passed legislation mandating schools teach that rot to kindergartners?â
I do, in fact, include trans and non-binary characters in my books, but Iâm less interested in defending what Busterâs human calls the trans agenda than toying with him. A little.
âThatâs not true,â I reply.
âIt is,â he insists. âYouâre not reading the right sources.â
âI was born and raised in California,â I say in a mild voice. âAnd my family is still out there. I would certainly know if the children of my friends and family members were being indoctrinated in schools.â
Behind Busterâs humanâs eyes, I can see a sort of recalculation happening. Slow and sluggish, like the spinning wheel of death as an ancient computer tries to load a program it hasnât opened in a while.
âWell, itâs true in Virginia,â he says, changing tack. âIn Loudoun County, Virginia, a girl was raped by a transgender and when the father went to the school board to protest, they hogtied him and threw him out! Itâs true,â he insists, anticipating another correction. âYouâre just not seeing the right news.â
But I donât engage him on the veracity of his story. Heâs expecting that. He wants that. He wants to get riled up and argue. So I engage him at face value instead.
âThe father didnât go to the police?â I ask.
Busterâs human is taken aback by this question. Again, I see the spinning wheel of death behind his eyes. âWhat do you mean?â
âIf my child were raped, the first place I would go would be to the police department, not the school board,â I say. âI mean, what could the school board possibly do? They canât arrest the perpetrator. They canât bring a criminal to justice.â
He can now see the logical hole in this story heâs gotten from the right sources. âTheyâre more invested in covering it up,â he says, but I hear hesitation and uncertainty in his voice now. The online warriors he tries to confront donât argue like me, and heâs confused. âThe police and the school board.â
âAll cops are bastards,â I say lightly.
I can tell he recognizes this as a leftist talking point, but he canât disagree with me now. So he moves on to another one of his buddies, and in the middle of their conversation, the other receives a phone call.
âProbably his wife,â Busterâs human sneers. âThe old ball and chain.â He turns to me. âWhat about you? I bet you keep your man on a short leash.â
âNot at all,â I smile. âPeople used to pay me for that, and no one, not even my partner, gets it for free.â
His face goes blank, the blue critical error screen flashing across his features. Several more moments pass before he finally laughs.
âYou have a sense of humor,â he grins. âI like you.â
I smile back. âI have to go,â I say. Iâve toyed with him long enough. âItâs later than I thought. Nice talking to you though.â And itâs not a lie.
âYou too.â
The thing you have to know about me is that Iâm a troll.
A lot of you probably already know this; Iâm nothing if not contrary when it comes to the books I write and deliver. Expecting X? Well too bad, Iâm going to serve you ăš instead! Some of this is intentional, but truly, my Gemini Venus is quite loud.
Being a troll has served me well most my life. I tend to take everything at face value, even if I suspectâor knowâthere is more left unsaid. Because of this, Iâm hard to offend, or even rile into frustration. Even though I am visibly not white, I seem to escape the worst of the racist microaggressions I see leveled at my BIPOC peers. I attribute that to being a troll, honestly. Thereâs something about me that makes it hard for insults or bigoted attacks to find purchase. Iâm slippery. A slither-outer, like the Wizard Howl.
Looking back, what I used to call a charmed existence was probably partially due to the fact that Iâm a slither-outer. The moment I suspect an expectation is placed before me, I swerve to avoid. I am hard to pin down. It makes me a terrible debater, but it does make me an excellent diffuser of tension.
Busterâs human is one of the more extreme examples of how Iâm able to skate through life based on my charming personality, but people like him are becoming less and less rare these days. And it has nothing to do with ideology; Iâve interacted (and socialized) with people on both ends of the ideological spectrum, and they increasingly all have the same thing in common.
Bad faith.
Bad faith as I use the term is a bit hard to define. To me, bad faith is a form of willful, malicious misunderstanding when it comes to any sort of orthodoxy that has the potential to contradict, undermine, or simply contrast with my personal morals and ethics. Or in the words of this (now suspended?) Twitter prophet:
Bad faith has become increasingly prevalent everywhere these days. Iâm not on social media much anymore for this precise reasonânot because I fear any personal repercussion, but because I find myself losing my equanimity. Becoming irritated. Turning into that old man who yells at clouds.
In other words, Iâm getting riled up.
As Iâve mentioned before, Iâm your classic pain-avoidant enneagram Type 7. The instant I find something tedious or uncomfortable, Iâm out. I donât shy away from negative emotions like sorrow or rage, but what I refuse to do is willfully linger in them. Sadness that overstays its welcome turns into wallowing, while anger that refuses to leave turns into bitterness and resentment. Both manifest as defensiveness, a posture born of an insecurity that those who indulge in bad faith seem desperate to avoid.
And weâre all so insecure these days. Why shouldnât we be? The planet is rapidly, catastrophically heating up to unsustainable levels, the world seems to have collectively ignored the existence of a raging pandemic, late stage capitalism is fucking everyone left, right, and center except for the 1%, etc. etc. The pillars of existence we have taken for granted, our sense of security, our sense of stabilityâall gone. Of course weâre fucking insecure.
In times of uncertainty, itâs human nature to close ranks, to revert to clannishness and tribalism because that is the quickest and easiest way to figure out who is safe. In the days before social media, that would have been our immediate communityâour friends, our family members, those we interact with on a daily basis and with whom we share society.
But nowâŚwe sort ourselves along moral lines.
And let me be clear, itâs a false morality. Itâs moral posturing, not any deeply held belief, that binds us together. The performance of the correct ideology, the correct adherence to groupthink, the correct gestures and markers of righteousness. Social media doesnât help either. Now we can self-sort, filter out contrasting viewpoints, allow the algorithm to serve us personalized content that doesnât challenge us.
I have my own ideas about right and wrong, of course, and a lot of bigotry espoused by the people around me is personalâpersonal against my race, my ethnicity, my sexuality, my gender identity, my mental illness, my neurodivergence, my disabilities, etc. And yet. And yet. None of that bigotry is personal, or rather, most of that bigotry is not personalized to me. That doesnât excuse the bigotry, but it does make it easier for me to take it at face value. To shrug off the offense and continue to troll.
But itâs harder to do that with those I consider my own.
I have a problem with Orson Scott Card.
And that problem is that I not only like his work, but found them at a deeply formative part of my reading life.
Itâs not something I necessarily feel comfortable admitting in certain company, and by certain company, I mean my peers. The left-leaning, largely college-educated, (mostly) well-intentioned, generally middle class members of the literati with whom I share publishing spaces. My own, as it were. My people. The ones with whom I close ranks in times of uncertainty.
Because what does it say about me that I know just what a horrid person Orson Scott Card is and still find meaning in his work?
My very first Card novel was Speaker for the Dead, which I read in my early 20s. I had obviously heard of Enderâs Game beforeâin fact, it was one of those âsuggested optional readsâ on my summer reading lists in middle school, but I never read it, preferring to read Rebecca and I Capture the Castle instead. But my roommate at the time loved the Ender books, and because I trusted her taste in books, I read Speaker for the Dead.
To say that this book was life-changing for me is both an understatement and hyperbole. At its core, Speaker for the Dead is about empathy, about striving to understand the otherâthe literal alienâabout making reparations to those you have wronged, and to love someone where they are.
It seems so at odds with the persona Orson Scott Card has come to be.
Rereading these books now, I can see the seeds of his bigotry, especially in the unrelenting heterocissexuality that runs rampant through these stories. But none of it is overt, or evenâI thinkâconscious. There are passing mentions of queer identities, and while I suspect some deep-seated, subconscious bias, the main characters textually accept the âotherâ at face value.
None of the subsequent books in the Ender saga ever reach the emotional impact of Speaker, especially as the very concept of a âSpeaker for the Deadâ as it exists in these books is an act of atonement on Enderâs part. After causing the genocide of the Bugger race, Ender travels the universe in search of a new world for the Bugger Queen to repopulate her people. During his travels, he acts as a Speaker for the Dead for the various colonies, telling the stories of the lives of the deceased without judgement, the good and the bad altogether. What is a Speaker for the Dead but a someone who gives voice to a stranger, to make them human and whole before your eyes? What a beautiful demonstrationâno, celebrationâof empathy.
This notion of empathyâas an act of transforming both the reviled and the adored into a person with complexities and nuanceâwas profound. Too often I think we think of empathy as the ability to relate to another, but to be honest, thatâs too simplistic of an understanding of empathy. That reading of empathy leads us into the trap of believing we can only empathize with fictional characters who resemble ourselves because how can we ârelateâ to people unlike us?
Do we see the problem here?
As of this writing, about three publishing Twitter Discourses⢠ago, there was an ongoing brouhaha about âcomps,â or "comparative titlesâ in the industry. I have my own thoughts about comps in general as both a former editor and an author, but what caught my attention was how the conversation quickly became focused on the usage of identities as comps. As in, there would be no comp for a queer BIPOC fantasy with X disability because no such book exists. (Iâm keeping the example as purposefully vague as possible.) To me, that is not only a misguided understanding of how comps are used within the industry, but also a reductionist view of oneâs own creative work. To reduce oneâs artistic output to oneâs own marginalizations is not only shortsighted, but devalues the readerâs capacity for empathy.
Of course, this false notion of empathy doesnât come from nowhere. The higher ups in publishing reduce absolutely everything to margins in a profit-and-loss statement, taking the barest, most simplistic reading of data and extrapolating conclusions about potential success in bad faith. But nothing disheartens me more than seeing members of my own âgroupââmy peopleâdo the work of gatekeeping for those in power. We unwittingly become enforcers of a status quo when we buy into ideas about identity-as-comps, when we police each other about the ârightâ way to be queer, to be brown, to be disabled, etc.
All cops are bastards.
Even when we are the cops.
ěą! (Ugh!) is one of my favorite BTS songs, not only because itâs hype af, but also because it gets right to the heart of the bad faith epidemic that plagues us. This song came out in early 2020, and the problem has only gotten worse. I always think of Sugaâs sarcastic barsâ
ě´ęłłěě 모ëę° ëëě ěŹęł ě íë¨ě´ ě벽í ěŹëě´ ëź
ě기ěë¤
Here everyone's real ethical, perfect judgment
How hilarious, farcical
âbut the deeper we get into this atmosphere of bad faith, the more I think of RMâs verse where he compares this misguided angerâthis outrage (ëśë ¸, boon-no)âwith human waste (ëśë¨, boon-nyo). With sewage.
ëśë¨, 돴ę´ěŹ ëë¨ íě´ěź
Human waste, indifference, youâre a team.
In other words, outrage and indifference go hand in hand.
The problem with bad faith is not only that itâs malicious, but itâs also a way for us to avoid accountability. It feels better to get riled up over the online moral fracas du jour than to do any of the meaningful labor to actually improve things for real people. At best, itâs a way for us to engage in bare minimum performative activism that is functionally useless; at worst, this outrage impulse can be exploited by those with less-than-honorable intentions.
And this is the real, true danger of this culture of bad faith weâre living in. That we cannot take anyone at face value, that we must always be suspicious of anotherâs intentions lest they turn out to be yet another milkshake duck, that we cannot trust each other. If we cannot trust we each other, we cannot build coalition, community, or change. Bad faith only begets bad faith, a toxic ouroboros that canât be broken except by grace.
I think about grace a lot.
Iâm an atheist, but I was raised Christian and I live in a western society heavily informed by white Christianity. When I mention grace, Iâm really talking about the concept in a spiritual context, not as an synonym for elegance or goodwill. Growing up, I was always told that we were saved by Godâs grace, that he loved us despite our unworthiness. As a child, I had no real understanding of what that meant, but as an adult who is no longer Christian, I think I have a better handle on the notion.
To meet someone where they are, at face value, without judgement, with neither condemnation nor absolution, is grace.
As with the concept of empathy, I think the idea of grace gets simplified these days. If to empathize with someone is to relate to them, then to give someone grace is to make excuses for their behavior. But I donât think thatâs true; you can give someone grace while still holding them accountable for their behavior. The way Orson Scott Card can simultaneously be a horrid person who writes about the profundity of empathy. The way bigotry against anyone not white, cis, able-bodied, or heterosexual can be both personal yet not personalized.
The poet John Keats once wrote in a letter to his brothers about a conversation he had about art and a state of mind he termed negative capability, that is, âwhen a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.â I can hold two contrasting thoughts in my head at once without cognitive dissonance because I can let myself exist in a state of negative capability. Funnily enough, I first came across this concept not in a college class about Keats, but in The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman when I was 12. If we could learn how to better exist in states of negative capability, then maybe grace and empathy would come easier to us all.
But there are other obstacles to be considered. The fact that we donât really understand what it means to be accountable for anything is one. What does accountability look like when someone violates the moral codes weâve placed upon ourselves? This is the question posed by cancel culture that no one seems to be able to answer. What is accountability? Is it punishment? Is it reparations? And does accountability allow room for actual growth and change?
I donât have any answers, not really. Only more questions, and an existence where I hold all the uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts together, without justification and without judgement.
I wish I could say Busterâs human is more thoughtful, measured, or any way less bigoted when I see him next, but he isnât. I knew he wouldnât be, but I also didnât think I would change his mind with one conversation. We exchange pleasantries the next time our paths cross, the talk between us still easygoing and friendly.
âThatâs right,â he coos at Castor, who jumps up to cover his face with kisses despite my admonitions. âHowâs my sweet boy?â
âAn asshole,â I say. âHeâs learned the power of saying no to me like the teenager he is.â
Busterâs human laughs. âHeâll grow out of it,â he assures me. âWe all do.â
âDo we?â I ask lightly. âI donât think Iâve changed much since I was a teen.â
âWell maybe thatâs why you write for them.â Busterâs human gives my dog a vigorous belly rub, much to Castorâs delight. âYou still remember what itâs like. Youâre still young.â
âIâm thirty-seven.â
âNo shit?â He eyes me in surprise. âYou donât look it. But then again, I hear Asians donât show age like the rest of us.â After a split second, he looks contrite. âSorry, was that racist?â
I smile. âYes. But itâs okay. Iâll tell you the secret to eternal youth.â I lean forward conspiratorially. âItâs sunscreen. And soy products.â
âDoesnât that stuff have estrogen though?â He looks skeptical.
âSo does dairy.â I shrug. âSo, what will it be, sir? Eternal youth? Or sex hormones in your food? Honestly maybe you should worry about Big Farming instead of the trans agenda.â
It takes Busterâs human a moment to realize Iâm teasing him, but instead of getting riled up, he meets me where I am. âWe all make our choices, I guess.â
Choices. I think about the choices I make every time we share the dog park together. I could choose to call him out more directly on his terrible beliefs. I could try to change his mind. I could bully him into losing every argument with reasoned logic. But what I know I canât do is convince him of the humanity of the other with words; I can only encourage him to empathize by socializing together. By simply existing, I challenge his preconceived notions and nudge him into a state of negative capability.
âWe do indeed,â I say, calling my dogs back to me. âWe do indeed.â
credits
Downtown Glow by Ghostrifter Official | Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
I Walk With Ghosts by Scott Buckley | Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
ěą! by ë°Šíěë
ë¨
Produced by Supreme Boi
Written by Supreme Boi, Suga, RM, Hiss Noise, J-Hope, Icecream Drum
BTS Black Swan Lofi by smyang