Zurtlespace

“France has no friends, only interests.”

-Charles de Gaulle

De Gaulle’s famous rejoinder to Clementine Churchill, who implored him not to hate his friends more than his enemies, is a characteristic feature of politics (and crime, for that matter); the situation is always fluid. Goals and priorities shift, alliances form and dissolve, and the map of the world is rewritten.

Much the same can be said of social justice, broadly; the landscape of identities and factions perpetually balkanizes into ever more fractious inter-sectional sub-groups, and the broken pieces coalesce into new alliances and confederacies, only to fall apart again from the inevitable internecine conflicts, mirroring our political topography with alarming accuracy. In this environment, close comrades can become hated enemies almost overnight. It’s a marvelous social sandbox that could probably teach us a lot about the nature of loyalty, faith, and group psychology, for those who can stomach the unremittingly pathetic show.

This Boschian tableaux is having a Orwellian effect on the very language that we use, and our attitudes toward it. An expanding set of discrete words and phrases are increasingly becoming the proprietary property of specific groups of people, and the usage of such verbiage by non-members has become an action worthy of censure. The result? The lexicon of available words with which to communicate our thoughts with clarity and precision (not to mention, creativity and joy) is narrowing and approaching a precipice. Soon, we won’t be able to talk in any way but in the anodyne, corporate, HR-compliant manner, with approved, proper, and exclusively permitted diction and syntax denuded of all meaning, content, interest, or personality—all packaged in the cowardly, evasive, and inoffensive passive-voice, of course.

No, the irony of that last phrase is not lost on me—I am a product of my environment, after all.

Even worse is the exclusive associations certain words and phrases now have with specific groups and factions; words such as problematic, or degenerate, for example, words that I adore for their evocative nature, can be taken by some as implicit confession to membership of, or sympathy with, the social justice or white supremacist causes, respectively.

Newspeak is looking less and less novel.

But there is one word whose current usage I find more insidious than most, and that cuts to the heart, lies at the root, of the problem.

Ally.

The term is ubiquitous in social justice circles. Article after article can be found discussing the importance of being a good ally, instructing how to be a better ally, advising acceptable diction for allies, and explaining to potential allies which privileges they need to check if they wish to claim the coveted mantle. It is a mark of distinction that many are eager to receive as recognition of their efforts towards their cause of choice, and as proof against accusations of impropriety—allyship is seen as a social prophylactic, however imperfect.

Note the imperious tone of condescension and superiority that pervades every word of the above pieces. The title of ‘ally’ is used interchangeably as both carrot and cudgel to motivate desperate people, fearing for their reputations, to conform to the entitled demands of resentful activists, to massage their fragile psyches in a perverse public display of ego validation.

But why do such people desire allies? And who desires to become one?

Ally is a political term, used to denote a person or faction with whom we share common cause, at least for the moment. This shift in usage from the political to the social context is implicitly divisive, in a multitude of ways. Requisite declarations of a common enemy aside, the most destructive aspect of its increasing usage is the encroaching redefining of our interpersonal relationships. Such relationships, once predicated on friendship, are increasingly devolving to mere alliances, to everyone’s detriment.

Friendship is a recognition of goodwill and the common humanity between two individuals. Such acknowledgment obliges us to respect the individual rights of others and to deal with them as we would ourselves—it is the basis of the golden rule. Allies have no such obligations; all they require is a common cause, and, more importantly, a common enemy. It is a pragmatic relationship of political convenience, requiring no particular bonds of loyalty, decency, or respect.

And so the desire to both create and beomce an ally reveals itself; becoming an ally, though a more precarious position subject to the control and judgment of others, is easier than establishing friendship, and can substitute for same in the minds of the weak and the insecure. It’s pathetic, but such cultivated weakness has become a characteristic of our culture, a society dominated by tech and finance companies whose primary profit centers are best expanded by encouraging social and financial behavior that nurtures and enables the most self-destructive habits of the socially inept and misanthropic, creating more such people in the process (the subject of another article).

And we all understand this as a society on a fundamental level. There is a reason why children’s programming and media—books, comics, video games, cartoons, and beyond—overwhelmingly stress the value, desirability, and positive enduring power of friendship, of love, of the utility and necessity of social connections and bonds.

Allies do not need to be friends, and that is dangerous outside the realm of politics (and even within, if we are being honest).

Alliances are as dangerous for the allied as they are for the enemy, possibly more so, for at least the declared enemy knows where to watch for threats. A relationship based on political expedience is a mutually distrustful one-way street, capable of being unilaterally discarded the moment it is no longer politically useful.

The individual nature of friendship is not an accident—groups cannot become friends, as that relationship requires individual identities; identity groups, ironically, do not, and cannot, have this characteristic. It should come as no surprise that as society brings greater focus on identity groups and focuses more of its conversation through that lens, the emphasis on alliance over friendship becomes more pronounced.  The result: people, rightly or wrongly, are coming to view politics and ideas as greater threats to their relationships than religion, race, or class.

The increasing usage of ally as a position of status, and the insistence on the expansion of this paradigm by the self-styled trend setters, taste-makers, and thought leaders who most benefit from possessing throngs of thralls clamoring for their nuggets of approval, motivates people to view and use each other as stepping-stones on the paths of their ambitions, with a concomitant tendency to view relationships as primarily political, rather than personal.

And to make all things personal, political.

The more we trend this way as a society, and individually, the more we will see each other as tools for our personal use, rather than as people deserving of, if not respect, then common, basic human decency.