Brief: Post-Election Online Survivor Group Dynamics
The post-election online chaos has a lot in common with what can go wrong in online survivor groups. Matthew tracks how opportunities for connection and solidarity can crater into gravity wells of recrimination, trauma-dumping, moral outrage porn, and the rise of new influence hierarchies. Not just because of differences in politics and values and temperament—but because of inequality and privilege.
A meditation on the difference between building a boat to sail in vs. a boat in a bottle, on considering the second arrow, and on when to log the fuck off.
Show Notes
Mutual Aid Hub
MORAL OUTRAGE PORN C. Thi Nguyen and Bekka Williams
The Second Arrow — Sutta Central
Log the Fuck Off with Amber Frost, Matt Christman, & Ben Fong
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Hello, everyone.
Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
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Today's very brief brief is called Post-Election Online Survivor Group Dynamics, and as you'll hear, it begins with an extended analogy.
When I was working primarily on stories about abuse in religious communities, I would spend a fair amount of research time observing and interacting in Facebook groups set up by abuse survivors.
This was an amazing tool that people could use to find each other and share experiences from across great distances and sometimes even different generations of the same religious organization.
And, you know, therapists who work with cult survivors will commonly say that finding other fellow survivors who have left the same group is one of the most powerful things you can do for your sanity and your dignity because they can reflect back to you this familiar pain that's so difficult to describe to other people that so few people can understand.
And at the same time, they can share the ways in which they've come to a fuller understanding of themselves and what happened.
So all of that felt extremely constructive and generative and healing.
But, what I also saw with almost every group I was in was that for as much as participants had these shared life stories, tensions would arise from the fact that everyone arrived with different experiences and perceptions tensions would arise from the fact that everyone arrived with different experiences and perceptions Everyone was in a different part of their processing and healing arc.
Some had left the group only days before.
But, some had years under their belts and maybe even the benefit of therapy plus all of their new experiences.
Some needed their rage reflected back to them.
Some needed comfort.
Some wanted to discuss new ideas.
Some people were recruiting others for legal action against the religious group.
And others were there with the hope of redeeming at least a part of their experience in the group as having been helpful.
And of course, everybody is just thrown in together with no real guidelines, no real sense of where everybody is coming from.
And without being in the room with each other, social media does what social media does.
It prods and triggers people asynchronously across time zones, values, and temperaments.
And what this seemed to drive people towards was this ethos of participants lecturing each other, questioning each other's values, and offloading unprocessed trauma on each other.
And I think the most common fault line was between people who felt that the religious group was irredeemable and those who continued to appreciate its teachings or values.
And that first group insisted that the religious organization should be demolished and would accuse the second group of being apologists.
Group two was betraying survivors and laying the groundwork for the abuse to continue.
It was hard to argue with that.
But sometimes something even stranger happened.
Hierarchies began to form in these survivor groups, which ostensibly were dedicated to emancipation from hierarchy.
Leadership positions were often seized by those who had the stickiest takes.
These were the posts that created the most engagement, not because they were the most useful or informative, but usually because they drove outrage.
And the thing about the outrage was that it was unimpeachable, totally justified.
The participant was speaking out of personal experience and pain, and who would argue with them?
They were speaking their truths.
They were speaking truth to power.
And when they got positive feedback, it wasn't simply their truth or feelings that were validated.
It was also their affect, their tone, their ability to inspire or to stir the pot.
Now, full disclosure here, this is not something I steered clear of because as I was coming into my own understanding of the cult literature, as I was doing my own work, I also used social media to test and demonstrate the effectiveness of my communications, often without any real clarity about what that effectiveness actually meant.
And I am as prone to audience capture as anyone else.
Now, years later, I came across a paper by philosophers T. Nguyen and Becca Williams called Moral Outrage Porn.
And in it, they describe parts of this online tendency.
It's not that the moral outrage is wrong or inappropriate.
It can be essential to motivating people towards change.
But then also, it can cross a line into becoming its own content, divorced from consequence in the world.
So, moral outrage could be necessary and Could become a morbid but pleasurable indulgence, granting feelings of vindication that were separated from the moral responsibility of helping to improve a situation.
So it was tragic to begin to realize that the hierarchy of posters had obscured the more democratic possibilities of the group.
And even more tragic was the realization that some users had risen to very controlling heights, paradoxically, commanding unequal levels of respect and deference.
Sometimes they were also group moderators and that gave them real autocratic power and the excuse to police comments, for example.
And the defense for this behavior, if it ever had to be made, usually revolved around claims or perceptions about how much experience, especially traumatic experience, the person had gone through.
And I think this exemplifies what philosopher Ofame Taiwo calls the politics of deference, in which leadership is assigned by perceived identity rather than through an evaluation of skills.
It's a politics that evolves out of a noble sense of wanting to honor and listen, but But it can run into this problem of focusing on the individual's story to the exclusion of the group need.
Taiwo says that what is needed instead is a politics of construction.
So, recovering from a cult was bad enough.
But what happens when this recovery tool exacerbates sleep disorders and attachment traumas?
What happens when it burns all of its benefits away?
I knew some people who said that they'd wished they'd never found the groups, that it would have been better for them to simply heal on their own.
So, maybe you can suss out that this is a very long and detailed analogy, as I flagged up at the top.
Everyone who knows what the second Trump presidency means is in a kind of survivor group, I think.
But unlike with the groups I'm remembering, there hasn't been any honeymoon period of generalized connection and mutual support.
And, as with the groups I'm remembering, everyone is coming from different places.
Some are convinced that the party must be stripped down to the studs, but others hold out hope that it can still protect them or give their lives meaning.
And of course, new crops of influencers and mini demagogues are emerging.
Full disclosure number two...
I'm a leftist who believes the Democratic Party is irredeemable.
As insurmountable a task as it seems, I believe there's no real option but a rebuild, beginning with going back to school and reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire.
But I'm not so disenchanted by democracy that I'm going to forget that I share space with liberals who I love but who I believe are mistaken.
Both of those things, the conviction that everything must change and the ability to live with those who can't imagine changing everything, have to coexist for me.
As with survivors of institutional abuse, everyone is or will be impacted differently by this post-electoral storm because we live in an unequal society fragmented by the casino of capitalism.
Not everyone in a cult has a terrible time, after all.
Some have padding, but others are in existential danger.
In the US right now, Arab Americans and their allies are forced to watch their kin be genocided on livestream.
Trans people are going into hiding.
People with ambiguous documentation are rushing to protect family members who might be deported.
Or they have to seek preemptive reproductive or gender care.
Or they work for Health and Human Services and they're waiting to be fired by RFK Jr.
on January 20th.
Or they're waiting for a knock on the door from the Matt Gates QAnon goons.
Of all of the tensions I noticed in survivor groups, this difference was the most inciting.
The differences in privilege.
There are temperament differences, too.
I mean, it's never good when anxiously and avoidantly attached people are sharing space.
And there are profound values differences, too.
Political differences.
And those are difficult to negotiate.
But the thing I always thought could be clarified, or at least seen more clearly, was this privilege problem.
If only people could recognize that they were entering a space of inequality, where people were sharing different immediate needs and objectives based upon the unequal vulnerabilities exploited by the cult, or in our present situation, capitalism writ large, they might be able to listen to each other better, maybe even support each other, or at the very least, stay out of each other's way.
Because honestly, what is this online life for?
Are we really going to continue to let it make our lives worse?
I'm reminded of how the Buddha allegedly talked about the second arrow.
The first is the traumatic event.
Something happens to you.
Something happens to your community.
But the second arrow is the rumination and the judgment.
The social media overlords have strung the bow and notched the arrow.
But who will draw the string and let it fly?
Now, as with most spiritual teachings, this can be taken to a stupid place in which all afterthoughts about having been in a cult or having woken up to a GOP trifecta and Matt Gaetz as the AG nominee, these are mere ruminations that we should stoically dispense with.
Now, that's not the point as far as I'm concerned.
The point is to realize that there is a space between the first arrow and the second.
And in that space, we might have more choices than we think.
But what is that space?
And where is it?
And here's where I remember something that Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House said on a Jacobin panel called Log the Fuck Off.
He described online discourse as a weird simulation of in-real-life discourse and actions.
In the old days, he said, if you wanted to sail somewhere, you had to get together with a group of people with a diverse skill set, and you would build a boat.
You worked together, you argued over the details, you collected materials and tools, and you got a lot of splinters in your hands.
But when you do all of that work, or what passes for work, on Facebook or Twitter, it's like you're building a ship in a bottle at a very small scale.
And it's a ship that goes nowhere, ultimately, even if it feels intricate and fascinating.
It's a ship in a bottle sitting on the desk of Elon Musk.
Where he just looks at it, half bored, half interested, and sometimes he gives it a shake just to fuck things up.
We deserve more than this.
All of which is to say that the online aftermath doesn't have to colonize the material aftermath.
With survivor groups, there are definite possibilities for solidarity and mutual support online.
And I'm sure we'll continue to find that and feel it in pockets here and there.
But I think it's also good to feel and to detect when that begins to go south.
When you feel moral outrage sour into moral outrage porn.
When you realize that you're standing on the archery range and the second and third and fourth arrows are coming.
When you realize the ship you've built is in a bottle for someone else's amusement and profit.
I believe we can feel these things and learn when to log the fuck off.
So in light of this, the first link in the show notes, there will be others, but the first link will be for mutualaidhub.org, which maps out local organizations throughout the U.S. that facilitate community pods for food sharing and delivery, for temporary housing, child care, translation, navigating government services, and also emotional support.
