Is our consent really necessary?

[apophenia]

I didn't actually want to start a thread with this, but I figured it would have been out of place in a light-hearted thread. I'm using Ronja's quotation not in any way to comment on Ronja, it just happened to be a convenient expression of what seems to be a platitude of doubtful truth. And I'm not promising to feed and nurture this thread, but I found the following two statements to be at odds, although not as directly as I would like. Anyway, see if you feel these two statements can be reconciled, and if so, how.

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."

This is usually attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, but Wikiquote says [otherwise]...

...I don't really care who said or wrote it - it's good anyway.

Shunning can be the act of social rejection, or mental rejection. Social rejection is when a person or group deliberately avoids association with, and habitually keeps away from an individual or group. This can be a formal decision by a group, or a less formal group action which will spread to all members of the group as a form of solidarity. It is a sanction against association, often associated with religious groups and other tightly knit organizations and communities. Targets of shunning can include persons who have been labeled as, apostates, whistleblowers, dissidents, scabs, or anyone the group perceives as a threat or source of conflict. Social rejection has been established to cause psychological damage and has been categorized as torture1.

— Wikipedia, Shunning (social ostracism)

1 Ojeda, Almerindo (September 30, 2006). "What is Psychological Torture?"

[Svartalf]

Actually, it all depends on a variety of factors.

Shunning as a social management measure hass a twofold aim
a) prevent contact between conformists with the rulesbreaker, so that whatever they do won't "catch"
b) Induce discomfort in said rules breaker to induce them into conforming to the common norm, and the perspective of such discomfort to deter other members from breaking said normss.

How much of a torture it is, and the measure of "consent" one must give for it to be effective depends on the overall social context, and the individual's dependence on said social environment.
If the shunning group constitutes the whole of the person's social network, and/or he feels he needs said framework for his existence and sense of identity, that is indeed pretty efficient, which is why that method works fairly well on JWs who are alreaady otherwise disenfranchised, and faithful mormons who may be afraid of striking out among 'gentiles'.

If the individual has a strong sense of self and is ready to do without the environment of said group, well, the group is losing a member and the person must be ready to be a hermit or to rebuild his social life from scratch.

[Thinking Aloud]

Being ostracised / shunned / rejected / cast out isn't necessarily the same thing as being made to feel inferior. It could depend on that person's dependency on the social structure from which they'd been excluded, and even then they may not feel inferior. Some people, on being rejected, do the Biblical thing and shake the sand from their shoes as they leave.

So while a sense of inferiority could result from being ostracised, it doesn't necessarily follow. It would be down to the individual(s) involved.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Maybe I'm a simpleton, but I've never spent too much time worrying over the opprobrium of others. I moved around a lot in my youth, and learned self-sufficiency early, so while shunning or condescension bug me, I'm pretty quick to make my peace with however my social milieu chooses to deal with me, and move on when needed.

I suppose then that I agree that an inferiority complex requires the co-operation of the goat; but I don't give it much thought, because I'm comfortable in my own skin and don't rely on others for my sense of worth.

[FBM]

Being ostracised / shunned / rejected / cast out isn't necessarily the same thing as being made to feel inferior. It could depend on that person's dependency on the social structure from which they'd been excluded, and even then they may not feel inferior. Some people, on being rejected, do the Biblical thing and shake the sand from their shoes as they leave.

So while a sense of inferiority could result from being ostracised, it doesn't necessarily follow. It would be down to the individual(s) involved.

That's the way I see it, too. But I do think there's an accusation of inferiority implied with ostracism, even if it's only a tacit one.

Culture has a lot to do with it, too, I think. I think it's easier for Western people to deal with ostracism, because we tend to be more individualistic on the whole. Here in Korea, group acceptance plays a much stronger role in one's perception of self-worth. We've recently had a spike in teen suicides attributed to bullying, with ostracism (or threats of) being a key factor most of the time.

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent? I think that's a bit of rhetoric designed to encourage people to decouple their feelings of self-worth from peer opinion. I don't think people consciously consent to feeling inferior, but if one is insecure to start with, one may be more vulnerable.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

You'll see a couple of my comments in sigs around here that sum it up for me. I've laughed at people who have tried to control me for a long time now.

[Audley Strange]

Being ostracised / shunned / rejected / cast out isn't necessarily the same thing as being made to feel inferior. It could depend on that person's dependency on the social structure from which they'd been excluded, and even then they may not feel inferior. Some people, on being rejected, do the Biblical thing and shake the sand from their shoes as they leave.

So while a sense of inferiority could result from being ostracised, it doesn't necessarily follow. It would be down to the individual(s) involved.

That's the way I see it, too. But I do think there's an accusation of inferiority implied with ostracism, even if it's only a tacit one.

Culture has a lot to do with it, too, I think. I think it's easier for Western people to deal with ostracism, because we tend to be more individualistic on the whole. Here in Korea, group acceptance plays a much stronger role in one's perception of self-worth. We've recently had a spike in teen suicides attributed to bullying, with ostracism (or threats of) being a key factor most of the time.

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent? I think that's a bit of rhetoric designed to encourage people to decouple their feelings of self-worth from peer opinion. I don't think people consciously consent to feeling inferior, but if one is insecure to start with, one may be more vulnerable.

I think we are missing something emergent here in this regards sense of community which is not as obviously predominant in the more urbanised West. However one could consider being fired from a job a form of ostracism, a serious one with similar consequences as being shunned by a tribal leader. However when I speak of emergent, I'm speaking of things like game guild membership, social networks where being ostracised, kicked, defriended or unfollowed can have dramatic real world consequences as we are beginning to see.

[Ronja]

... see if you feel these two statements can be reconciled, and if so, how.

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."

This is usually attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, but Wikiquote says [otherwise]...

...I don't really care who said or wrote it - it's good anyway.

Shunning can be the act of social rejection, or mental rejection. Social rejection is when a person or group deliberately avoids association with, and habitually keeps away from an individual or group. ... Social rejection has been established to cause psychological damage and has been categorized as torture.

— Wikipedia, Shunning (social ostracism)

This is based almost solely on my own experiences: I have been the target and/or witness and/or perpetrator of one-on-one, many-on-one and/or group-on-group psychological bullying and have also experienced one-on-one shunning.

I see a clear difference between someone trying to appear cooler, richer, smarter or in some other manner "better" than me and/or manipulate me to doubt myself on the one hand and someone refusing to acknowledge that I even exist on the other. In my shunning experience, a teacher in our kids' school did not look at me or answer my "Hello" at all - I was completely invisible to her for about a year.

For me the shunning was fairly easy to pretty immediately see as plain and simple bullying. And I know that bullying is not my fault but the fault of whoever chooses to do it (because someone who wants to bully will always find an excuse). So I felt no connection between my self-worth and her shunning. The situation might be different if I were surrounded by people who all do it. I did feel anger and frustration, certainly, and sorrow, too, but if the other person is behaving like a monumental ass, that's not my shame.

The long-term psychological bullying, which also happened during my grown-up years, was much worse, because it started with luring me to trust, like most narcissists do. The transition from what seemed like appreciation and encouragement was so slow and gradual that waking up to that someone / some many who looked like (a) friend(s) had become anything but took time, and that time was filled with confusion and self-doubt. Finding out that they had done the same to at least four other people before me, in the same context, helped a lot - put things in perspective, if rather shockingly (one of those four ended up in a mental institution and a second one came damn close).

Nowadays I hope that I am experienced enough to recognize the situation when I encounter a message that can be condensed to "You should be different for me to accept you" and see it for what it is: a lie. It does not matter whether the person or group sending the message believe in it themselves - it's still a lie. Because I was born and have grown up to be sufficiently far off from so many psychological averages that people who tend to feel/think that there exists One Right Way of Being (or pretend to do so for lulz) are highly unlikely to accept me, whatever I do. So there's no point IMO in wasting any time on them - getting away from them or limiting their access to me to a minimum if I cannot completely escape is good enough. Life is too short to waste on meaningless strife, which I would be extremely unlikely to win.

And that is a choice, and it is my choice. Therefore: nobody can awaken unwarranted/unhealthy self-doubt in me, if I do not open the door for that.

I would much rather spend my time and energy with and for friends, anyway. Like on RatZ.

[hadespussercats]

That first comment does seem to me to be a nice bit of victim-blaming-- if you feel bad because someone put you down, it's your own fault-- you consented to it.

It's the same trouble that comes with any number of practices that are supposed to make someone feel empowered-- with empowerment comes responsibility, and with responsibility comes the possibility of blame.

I'm thinking of those ideas of positive thinking helping someone battle cancer-- so if you feel bad about getting sick, you can feel worse because feeling bad will only make you sicker. (Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about this-- but I haven't read the book yet. I think Ronja might have?)

And I don't see the difference between being made to feel inferior by an individual or being shunned by a group. Shunning is a practice that marks its target as inferior. That's the whole point.

I've been shunned, frequently over the years. It was most painful in elementary school, because I had no coping skills. I got better at dealing with it, but it wasn't until I formed a kernel group of friends that I felt I could rise above it, that I didn't care what the rest of the world thought. In other words, I needed a measure of social acceptance before I could claim I didn't care about social acceptance.

I've dealt with shunning more recently, among work colleagues and some family. And while I have the toughness of thirty-plus years of being a weirdo to draw upon, it still makes me feel... less worthy. Even if I know it shouldn't.

So, yeah, Eleanor offered up a nice mantra as an ideal. But I don't think it's true.

[Ronja]

I needed a measure of social acceptance before I could claim I didn't care about social acceptance.

.

I left that part out so my post would not grow any longer, but maybe I should not have. Because that is essential. We need to be loved first to learn how to love ourselves. And from genuine self-love (which is neither obsessive self-centeredness nor uncritical self-congratulation) grows the strength to relatively coolly observe and tackle what otherwise could be excruciatingly painful emotionally.

I will be grateful to my paternal grandmother for as long as I live for what she gave me during my first two years: an indestructible core of certainty that I am worth loving. Even when my parents later behaved their worst and I was viciously bullied in school for seven years straight, I carried the feeling "their hurtful words are not about me, really" somewhere underneath it all, and that probably saved my life.

Granted, I had to do a lot of excavating and cleaning away mental rubble before I found my way back to Annu (so to speak), but without her I likely either would be dead or have a borderline personality disorder. IMO chronic anxiety is an easier "life sentence" by far, in comparison.

[apophenia]

I'm going to hop in briefly.

First, Hades' remark that you highlight leaves open the interpretation that you are deriving your protection/support from a different source, one that isn't threatened/absent, not that one could choose not to be affected if one were to lose all sources of social acceptance. You can change the course of the river, but it's still going to reach the sea. I recently was faced with ostracism from a group of people that I had regularly socialized with for 10 years. Feeling bad about it had nothing to do with consenting or not. It's like saying that if a loved one dies we can choose not to be emotionally affected by it. We are a social species, and when social attachments are disrupted in unexpected or undesirable ways, we can't choose to be stone — the choice we would have to reverse to be unaffected is the ones we already made, in the past, and over the course of time in choosing to build that person or group into our world. When the shunning happens, it's too late to unring that bell.

Anyway. I don't do brief well. I have more to say about that, but I'll move on. I'm reminded of a feminist mantra I picked up in college which urged that we can't choose the emotions we feel, but we can choose how we act on them, or how we respond to them. This again seems to imply that the type of noble response embodied in the quote is not damage prevention or damage stopping, but simply damage control. We may cope remarkably well in the face of adversity, but coping well, and not feeling it are two different things.

[hadespussercats]

"We may cope remarkably well in the face of adversity, but coping well, and not feeling it are two different things."
Yup.

Sorry to hear about your recent experience, apophenia. I don't know if this matters to how you feel, but, it's their loss.

[Ronja]

"We may cope remarkably well in the face of adversity, but coping well, and not feeling it are two different things."
Yup.

Sorry to hear about your recent experience, apophenia. I don't know if this matters to how you feel, but, it's their loss.

.

"It's their loss" - is that one of the sentiments/attitudes that can make the difference between coping well in the face of adversity and caving in to "believing" the adversarial message (at least temporarily)? I feel a bit of a dunce with this theme, because I cannot make myself see how someone who looks down on others and/or bullies could be anything but a loser. Be they one or a group. Sure such a person or group can sometimes appear to "win" on the surface of things, but IMO the only thing they won was an emotionally poorer and socially/creatively more limited life for themselves - which is no win at all.

[apophenia]

It's okay. Turns out they were just blowing smoke because they didn't like what I had to say. Their threats to exclude me never came to pass. But between the time of the threat and realizing it was an empty threat, I had some very uncomfortable emotions.