Time for the (Big) Other

Answering @jadagul​ on Alienation in Social Relationships

Okay this one is pretty long. But also really important.

J:

This is the one I find most confusing, I think. But also most concerning.

A lot of people seem to write about the experience of being trapped in a system that obligates them to follow certain social norms that make them miserable. And my instinctive answer is always “then don’t do that? What do you care what other people think?”

Now sometimes that runs up against a certain sort of hard power; clearly you will care what other people think if they are credibly threatening violence against you. (Although I am sufficiently sheltered/privileged/oblivious to never have actually witnessed an act of violence, and thus to not alieve that violence actually happens, intellectually I’m aware that this is nonsense).

But most people seem to worry about being judged “by people”, as you wrote about eloquently a month ago. And this is a worry that I just don’t understand.

(My favorite story comes from a friend of mine, who was sitting in her cubicle one day drinking orange juice. And someone whom she had never seen before was walking by, and said “You shouldn’t drink orange juice. It will start your middle-aged spread.”

And I’d have a lot of issues with that interaction–starting from the fact that someone started a conversation with me when I was sitting alone minding my own business, moving through the unnecessary judginess, and possibly winding up at the fact that the criticism doesn’t even make that much sense. But my friend was really upset, and when I asked why, she said “I don’t want to stop drinking orange juice!”

I normally tell that story as a joke, with that last bit as the punchline. Becasue the link from “someone criticized me” to “I should change my behavior” just isn’t there in my head).

I think I tend to assume that if people think ill of me, that reflects badly on their judgment, and thus I don’t need to care what they think of me. It’s nice when a catch-22 works in my favor.

It also probably helps that I simultaneously am an introvert with low emotional bandwidth, and find it very easy to make friends. Not having enough close friends to spend time with isn’t a very real-feeling possibility to me, since at any given time I have more close friends than I can actually make time for.

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Heh. I like your idea of a joke. It reminds me of one of Zizek’s favorite jokes:

A man who believes himself to be a kernel of grain is taken to a mental institution where the doctors do their best to convince him that he is not a kernel of grain but a man; however, when he is cured (convinced that he is not a kernel of grain but a man) and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back, trembling and very scared—there is a chicken outside the door, and he is afraid it will eat him. “My dear fellow,” says his doctor, “you know very well that you are not a kernel of grain but a man.” “Of course I know,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken?” 

So I really respect that you only see “hard limits” as going so far in controlling our social interactions. It’s easy to tell a story where your boss cares about every social signal you show, or your parents have a lot of sway over your life so their opinion of you is one of material force. This is true for some people, but it’s very easy to exaggerate. So I’m glad when people can see how much freedom they really have.

But, as you note, people still feel very socially limited. Why is that?

Whenever we are worried when some vague, undifferentiated group of people may socially judge us, in psychoanalytic terms that is fear of the Big Other. The theory here is that early on we imprint “there is a social other out there, and our subsistence relies on it, so we must stay in its good graces” and our brains never really stop thinking that way, even as we consciously become aware of specific people and their specific power (and lack of power) over us.

So what are all the vague forces that judge us for how we perform either our morality or social conformity? God. The Discourse. Those gossiping girls from high school. What would our parents think. What would the children think. The people in the grocery store watching us as our kid cries. Journalists who judge our subgroup. Corporations who sponsor them. The high school reunion.

These forces are all just very vague - it’s hard to prove how our actions lead to their judgment in a way that directly affects us, but it’s also hard to prove it never will. Most people choose some particular force, and obsess over whether it approves of them constantly. At the heart of it, we know we are a good person, but we worry this all powerful force might catch us at the wrong moment out of context and conclude we are a bad person, and then cast us into social abjection. See my Seinfeld review. But does the chicken know?

Now, the Big Other is nothing new. In fact you’d think modernity and the decline of tribes would if anything make it a weaker influence in our life. But the internet may put this into overdrive - we now have exact numbers knowing how many people like us, what activities of ours they like, and what number of people are downvoting us. What influence do any of these numbers have over our life? Unless you’re selling your brand, almost none, but LOOK LOOK THE NUMBER JUST WENT UP has combined our little Pavlovian hindbrain with our Lacanian fear of vague social judgment and it’s just an incredible social addiction most of us can’t escape. Hence my concerns about Twitter Hell.

Which brings us to the twofold answer of “Should we worry about other people?” I think we should care a great deal about what specific people think about us, and whether we have harmed them, and how to avoid harming them. But everyone could do with less worrying about what some vague, undefined group of people think about us, when there is no specific person who is going to affect us directly. (In fact, the worst case is when we care so much what the Big Other thinks of us, that we let that fear cause us to bring harm to a specific person. And that’s when we become the oppressor.)

The difference here can be roughly akin to alienation. Focus on the relationships that are real, and you have real control over. Get yourself out from the judgments of vague groups that may not even exist and how Tumblr followers and Facebook likes will respond to your actions.