On the other side of it, why do people seem TOO DETERMINED to turn him into a scapegoat? Most of you don’t sound like you really know him at all.
A blogger I read sometimes talks about his experience with lung cancer (decades ago), where people would ask his wife “so, he smoked, right?” and his wife would say “nope” and then they would look unsettled. He attributed it to something like “people want to feel like all health issues are deserved, and so their being good / in control will protect them.” A world where people sometimes get lung cancer without having pressed the “give me lung cancer” button is scarier than the world where the only way to get it is by pressing the button.
I think there’s something here where people are projecting all of the potential harm onto Michael, in a way that’s sort of fair from a ‘driving their actions’ perspective (if they’re worried about the effects of talking to him, maybe they shouldn’t talk to him), but which really isn’t owning the degree to which the effects they’re worried about are caused by their instability or the them-Michael dynamic.
[A thing Anna and I discussed recently is, roughly, the tension between “telling the truth” and “not destabilizing the current regime”; I think it’s easy to see there as being a core disagreement about whether or not it’s better to see the way in which the organizations surrounding you are ___, and Michael is being thought of as some sort of pole for the “tell the truth, even if everything falls apart” principle.]
+1 to your example and esp “isn’t owning the degree to which the effects they’re worried about are caused by their instability or the them-Michael dynamic.”
I also want to leave open the hypothesis that this thing isn’t a one-sided dynamic, and Michael and/or his group is unintentionally contributing to it. Whereas the lung cancer example seems almost entirely one-sided.
A blogger I read sometimes talks about his experience with lung cancer (decades ago), where people would ask his wife “so, he smoked, right?” and his wife would say “nope” and then they would look unsettled. He attributed it to something like “people want to feel like all health issues are deserved, and so their being good / in control will protect them.” A world where people sometimes get lung cancer without having pressed the “give me lung cancer” button is scarier than the world where the only way to get it is by pressing the button.
I think there’s something here where people are projecting all of the potential harm onto Michael, in a way that’s sort of fair from a ‘driving their actions’ perspective (if they’re worried about the effects of talking to him, maybe they shouldn’t talk to him), but which really isn’t owning the degree to which the effects they’re worried about are caused by their instability or the them-Michael dynamic.
[A thing Anna and I discussed recently is, roughly, the tension between “telling the truth” and “not destabilizing the current regime”; I think it’s easy to see there as being a core disagreement about whether or not it’s better to see the way in which the organizations surrounding you are ___, and Michael is being thought of as some sort of pole for the “tell the truth, even if everything falls apart” principle.]
+1 to your example and esp “isn’t owning the degree to which the effects they’re worried about are caused by their instability or the them-Michael dynamic.”
I also want to leave open the hypothesis that this thing isn’t a one-sided dynamic, and Michael and/or his group is unintentionally contributing to it. Whereas the lung cancer example seems almost entirely one-sided.