I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how a certain subset of people online have tried to turn selfishness into a radical act. “We don’t owe anyone anything” isn’t just the mantra of hustle grindset bros and women running Multi-Level Marketing scams, it’s become the philosophy of many people who somehow, bafflingly, consider themselves to be activists. I feel like I’m constantly seeing discourse wherein people are fundamentally just defending their right to never grow or change, to never inconvenience themselves, to never give up even the smallest comfort because it’s difficult, and their lives are hard enough already. I understand the sentiment. I’ve had periods of my life where I’ve been very selfish while at the same time identifying strongly as a selfless, self-sacrificing person. But part of growing up is realizing that sometimes we are selfish, and there’s no use trying to justify our every action as virtuous just to avoid confronting that fact. I’ve seen a lot of these recently. I’m going to talk about them. And yes, we’re going to talk about ChiliGate, even though I took so long getting around to this that no one else cares anymore. I’m giving you time to brace yourself.
Part 1: The Gentrification of Self-Care
The fundamental principle of activism is community. The most rebellious thing we can do in a society that sets us against each other in order to keep us under control is to help each other, to protect each other, to care for each other even when we don’t “have” to. It boggles my mind that there are people who consider themselves activists, who (rightly) say that we need things like Universal Basic Income and improved social support, who then turn around and say that we should never be asked to take care of each other on an individual level. Sure, the government should work for the people, but we need to work for the people too. If you justify your every bad behavior by saying “the government should be doing something, so why should I?” you’re letting them win. Selfishness is not a radical act in a world that is begging you to be as selfish as possible.
Radical self-care is a concept with immense value. When Audre Lorde said, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare”, she wasn’t saying that she owes nothing to anyone. She was saying that in order to give people what is in her to give, she needs to be there to give it. Lorde knew the world was better with her in it. She knew that her being there was radical and important, and she knew that society is not set up to protect her in the way it should. As a Black woman, and particularly as a Black lesbian, she would’ve been told for much of her life that the world owed her nothing and that’s what she would get. She owed herself the care and comfort the world denied her, and in doing so radically changed the world for the better. Her act of self-care was a radical act, not just because it was the opposite of what society wanted, but because her existence was a gift to the world.
For Lorde and Angela Davis who also talked about radical self-care as key function of activism, self-care only exists as an extension of their care for their community. That’s not to say you can never do something nice for yourself, never indulge yourself or treat yourself without serving a greater cause. But it is a testament to the deep rot within our hyper individualist society that a term pioneered by Black radicals to refer to community has been coopted to market skincare and bubble bath. We have lost the idea of the self as part of a whole.
I highly recommend the article “Reclaiming Audre Lorde’s Radical Self-Care” by Kathleen Newman-Bremang where she talks about how working as a journalist in 2020 her community came through to support her when she was burnt out from publicly and privately processing so much grief:
“It reminded me of how much caring for others is a form of caring for ourselves. And that I needed to start taking care of myself so that I could show up for my friends the way they showed up for me. And so that I could contribute more to the community I write for: Black girls and women […] If self care feels selfish (which it has for me many times), I go back to its OG intent: self-care is supposed to coincide with community care[…] As ‘new age self-care’ focuses on the individual instead of the collective, it reinforces the very structures Audre Lorde devoted her life to dismantling.”
Seriously, read the article, it’s brilliant. Once you’ve read it, come back to me and we’ll get into the stupid shit.
Part 2: “No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism (so nothing I do is bad)”
So now self-care as a radical act has gone from “in order to make a positive impact in a world that actively wishes me harm I need to care for myself as well as others” to “the world is bad so I need to enjoy myself even if it comes at the expense of others” because in the end our society will find a way to coopt almost any radical sentiment into something that can be used to push the same status quo in a new way to make us feel rebellious for doing exactly what they want. We see a similar thing with the phrase “no ethical consumption under capitalism” which initially meant that no individual is exempt from participating in society and therefore we cannot “individual choices” our way out of it and need large scale reform and now seems to mean “well, anything I do will be bad so there’s no need to try and be better”. I think a perfect example is the conversation around SHEIN.
SHEIN if you don’t know is a fast fashion retailer that is by far and away the largest and most harmful of its kind. Their output and therefore waste is radically larger than any other brand. Their working conditions are abominable, with workers making pennies for upwards of 12 hours of work a day. The clothing is terrible quality, to the point of being actively dangerous (the clothes have been found to have unsafe levels of lead for example) and it has almost single handedly set a precedent of wastefulness and disposal that we’ve never seen before in the mainstream. Now you too can wear an outfit once and let it disintegrate into our water system!
It seems like it should be such an easy dunk for anyone who considers themselves remotely progressive. Slave labour, climate disaster, lead poisoning: anyone with any moral fiber should surely be against this on an ethical level, right? Even if they were to purchase from such an abominable company for whatever reason, surely they would feel shame around that and not admit to it, let alone defend it. How could they?
“Criticizing Shein is classist because poor people deserve nice things” is the kind of attitude you would expect from a dystopian novel. The “self-care” in this situation is buying yourself new clothes despite the fact that your income wouldn’t support luxury purchases. They see this as a radical act, that poor people can be fashionable now when they couldn’t afford to be trendy before, that we can now consume as much as a wealthy person. But it’s not radical. Even if you ignore the fact that the people most rabidly defending Shein on the grounds of class solidarity aren’t poor, they’re justifying their own excessive purchasing of outfits they throw out after one wear by saying this evil has to exist, so it’s fine if I participate—society doesn’t want poor people to be unable to consume. Quite the opposite! The fact of the matter is, poor people don’t need constant new outfits, just like rich people don’t. It’s unfair, and it’s unfun, and it’s still true. The real poor people in this situation are the garment workers making pennies a day. And I’m not perfect—this year I started buying fast fashion again for the first time in years because I moved to a country with none of the large thrift stores I was reliant on back home, and I currently teeter on the edge of the poverty line. But even though it felt like a somewhat justifiable evil at the time, I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t evil. If I’d set my mind to it, I could’ve found another way to get my work clothes and sweaters, or not bought cute clothes because I was sad. I did it anyway, and now it’s done, and I won’t try and turn it into something it wasn’t. I think we should all learn to just admit when something we did wasn’t good. Buying Primark sundresses because I was depressed in a new city wasn’t self-care. It helped me temporarily, but it hurt the community, and it hurt people who did nothing wrong. There’s nothing radical about it. It’s selfishness, not self-care, because there was no care involved.
Here’s another terminally online example. Ana Mardoll was a prominent figure in a specific type of online disability activism that that I tend to find unhelpful at best and offensively infantilizing at worst. Ana Mardoll was the archetypal “tenderqueer”. He crowdfunded for his mortgage, he said it was ableist to expect writers to also read, the usual. Someone harassing him then revealed that Ana worked at Lockheed Martin. As you can imagine, it all kicked off from there. To be fair, people were looking for a reason to take someone famous for their Holier Than Thou “woke-scolding” off their pedestal, and this information was revealed by people actively harassing him. I am also against widespread online harassment campaigns. However, that’s about as fair as I can be.
Ana said that he got the job through a family member and it was a unique arrangement that let him work part time with benefits from home, which is very difficult to get as a disabled person. But that’s the thing: of course it’s unfair that disabled people are forced to make sacrifices to survive in a world that was never built for them. But at what point is it not our sacrifice to make? At what point does the damage we do outweigh the damage done to us?
There’s levels to this construct of victimhood as something insurmountable that exempts us from any obligation. It doesn’t matter that gifted programs have a proven detrimental impact on the “normal” kids, that they put a bandaid over the bullet hole of schools abandoning any kids that get left behind, that studies show that if you tell any randomly selected group of kids that they’re gifted learners they’ll outperform the other kids because being given that attention and reinforcement is the most important part, that the system was, in fact, built to harm other people. None of this matters because it made the kids in the program (who might have ADHD!) feel bad. It doesn’t matter that SHEIN is poisoning the planet and its lead filled clothes are made by slaves, because some of the people buying those clothes might be too poor to buy anything else. And it doesn’t matter that Lockheed Martin is killing Black and Brown people globally, because they provide jobs to people who might have a hard time getting one (as evidenced by the truly shocking number of people who admitted they worked at LM or similarly evil companies in Ana’s defense). Accepting our marginalized identity means never asking us to improve. We owe each other nothing, self-service is radical, and anyone who criticizes or confronts us is directly attacking our identity.
There is a reframing we see when people are confronted with the harm of their actions, wherein they say that, because they were put in the position to do harm, they are in fact the true victims. When do we recognize that just because we are put in an unfair position doesn’t mean we have a right to be unfair ourselves? You will be asked to sacrifice things that others don’t have to for others who have it even worse than you. And sometimes, you have to do it. Or at least not defend so passionately your right not to care.
Part 3: “No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism (so nothing you do is good)”
One thing I have noticed is, like self-care, many people who seem to exist only online have taken terms that were meant to describe actions and watered them down to justify passivity, to fuel endless discourse at the expense of anything ever getting done. As Vibe Connoisseur said to me on tiktok, “They want us to be isolated atomized lonely people because that’s the only situation where we remain morally pure…any social interaction that take place ideally would happen in a vacuum for them, or not at all”.
So this brings us to ChiliGate.
To summarize for anyone mercifully less online than me: A woman saw her young college aged neighbours were ordering takeaway every day. She liked them, and thought they might like a home cooked meal, so she made them chili. She didn’t ask them for anything, they were excited about the chili (because they were college boys, a demographic who pretty much universally love chili), and she posted this feel-good neighbourly moment on twitter. The outrage was swift and overwhelming. Criticisms ranged from the pseudofeminist (“she’s reinforcing gender roles by taking care of grown men!”) to pseudo class conscious (“maybe the reason they ordered takeout is because they can’t afford bowls!”) to pseudo anarchist (“watching your neighbours behaviour is the surveillance state!”) until it eventually, inevitably, ended up where discussions on twitter so often end up: ableism. Yes, the autistic woman who made chili for a group of college guys ordering pizza every night was, in fact, upholding dangerous pervasive ableism. The boys might (all, somehow) be autistic and only be able to eat pizza. They might not have a social script for turning down chili! They might have social anxiety and feel embarrassed that someone was watching them and judging them. It’s like pushing someone’s wheelchair without asking. Once again, ignore the fact that she was the one actually in the situation who knew these guys, and probably would’ve realized if they had such crippling agoraphobia that they couldn't handle the social interaction of taking chili. Nevermind that they loved the chili and were excited when she gave it to them. And of course, definitely don’t think about the fact that harassing an autistic woman for days or weeks over her perceived misreading of a social situation when she went out of her way to overcome her own social anxiety to do something nice for people who almost certainly were not autistic might be the bigger, more damaging act of ableism than giving some guys chili. No, what matters is that they didn’t ask, and she did it anyway, which ruins these people’s self-concept of being good, community-oriented leftists, because they know deep down that unlike her they wouldn’t do anything nice until they were asked. Frankly, I’m not sure these people would do anything nice even if they were. Everyone making excuses for why a good deed wasn’t really good, evil even, to tell themselves that they are actually the superior ones for never doing anything for anyone. Claiming you care about community-oriented values, mutual aid, socialist or communist principles means caring about other people. Point blank, period. Caring about other people means you do things even if you don’t owe anyone anything. Actually, I’d go so far as to argue that it means you do owe people. If you live by the principles these “activists” (at least one of whom was literally a landlord lmao) claim to, it means you owe people whatever it is in you to give, however imperfect that may be. She gave them chili and asked for nothing in return. She didn’t claim to be a saviour fixing all their problems, she noticed an area of potential need and filled it because it was a nice thing to do. That’s what community is. Community is also accepting the chili your neighbour kindly gave you. You don’t like chili? Give it to someone who does. Give it to someone on the street. Hell, even throw it out, but recognize and appreciate the kindness of someone noticing you and caring about you, because it’s becoming increasingly rare.
Part 4: Oversharing
When I was 16, my mom got cancer. She recovered (mostly), but we didn’t know in the moment that she would. I was overwhelmed. I felt entirely responsible for my family, for my two siblings, for my parents. I skipped school to clean the house for when she’d come back from the hospital, I did my homework in emergency rooms. I didn’t tell my teachers or ask for extensions because when I tried to tell my English teacher he cut my off before I could drop the “my mom has cancer” bomb and said he doesn’t give extensions, period, and it was our responsibility to manage our time, and I took that to heart. For the next year and a half I lived by that code of not asking for anything, of bearing the weight by myself, and like these people I completely identified with and prided myself on my self-sufficiency. But you know what? I was not strong and silent. I was miserable, and instead of just asking for help I lashed out. I ruined friendships with people who would’ve gladly helped me if I’d been willing to ask. I was resentful of the responsibility no one had asked me to bear. I hurt myself and let myself be hurt time and time again because at least it was noble to suffer. I didn’t realize at the time that I was making everyone around me suffer too, because I was too caught up in my own misery to realize that there was no real value in it. But one day a friend of mine, with whom my relationship had always been fraught, showed up with her mom at my door with a meal they had made for the family. And I took it. Another week my neighbour showed up with lasagna. My mom’s friend came by with pasta. Sometimes the meals weren’t very good, and we didn’t finish them. We even laughed at a few of them. I think there was at least one (I think it was supposed to be cannoli?) that we didn’t eat at all. But every single one of them touched me so deeply. At the time I was starving myself because I didn’t think I deserved to eat because it felt selfish with everything going on. But when someone went to the trouble of making us food? When they brought it over and asked nothing in return? I had no choice but to accept it, and it was such a relief every single time. And I never asked, and never would’ve asked, but they did it anyway. I don’t know if any of them realize just how much it meant to me, or that I still look back on that first meal my frenemy’s mom made us to this day. I still remember opening the door and seeing them there with a glass pan I don’t think they ever asked me to return. Now, I don’t think those guys were teenagers with dying mothers, I doubt the chili will touch them quite as deeply. It doesn’t have to! The point is that there is a lost art to the imperfect gesture, to the simple favour, to the act that however simply or even sloppily says “I was thinking of you and wanted to make your life a little better”. As one of those etiquette experts in The Washington Post said, “Do we really want to cut that off, just because there might be waste? Altruism can’t always be efficient, and do we want to cut back on well-meaningness?”
Part 5: “If I can’t be happy, no one can”
In the end, I think most of the people complaining about things like ChiliGate are a lot like I was at 16—latched on to their suffering as an immutable, unchangeable fact, an inevitability. A lot of them have, like I did, moralized their misery into something noble and virtuous, clinging to their position as a person who suffers as proof that they have been wronged and are therefore incapable of wrongdoing. You see it a lot in people who cling to various labels (“I’m literally neurodivergent and a minor”) when confronted, or who bring up every tragedy of their past when shown someone who seems happy, because they have tied their misery to inextricably with their identity that they believe it is what makes them a good person, and anyone happy must be a bad one or they too would be miserable. (This isn’t to say that everyone who strongly identifies with their marginalized identity is simply making themselves miserable, but there is a specific genre of specifically white people online who seem completely unwilling to do anything to improve their situation and then get angry at anyone who has). An easy example of this is the precursor to ChiliGate, CoffeeGate.
Daisey here tweeted that she enjoys drinking coffee and talking with her husband every morning. And people took it personally.
Hundreds of people said that she was privileged and wealthy because she made time to talk with her husband, people calling her a trust fund baby, telling her to get a job. It’s so telling that the people who believe that they are living this way solely because they don’t work, who think that this joy can only come with financial stability, are telling them to get a job so they can be as miserable as the rest of us. We can’t fathom a world in which someone else’s happiness can be attainable, that we could make time for people we love, that people might care enough about each other to prioritize them even when they have other responsibilities and burdens to bear. Anyone who is happy doesn’t deserve it, because I am not happy. I’m not saying the woman isn’t privileged to have a job with a flexible schedule and a home. But I also think that if this woman worked 9 to 5 and rented a shitty apartment she and her husband would still find time to talk, because the real privilege that these people hate so much isn’t her free mornings or her bungalow. It’s that she has a husband who loves her this much. And even when they learned that they both work full time, that they’re middle class at best, that the garden in question is just a shitty front lawn right by the street that they planted flowers in, that privilege is still there, and that’s what they’ll hate her for. Because, as the late great bell hooks said, “Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives.”
Part 6: Conclusion
What it comes down to is that a lot of people feel abandoned. And most of us have been, in one way or another. But the solution to abandonment is not to turn isolation into an identity, or even worse, an ideology. I think we see that in the attitude people like this have towards others. For example, the most vocal anti-children people I think fundamentally show a complete lack of community, that individualistic rot. If you believe everyone is responsible for themselves and that accountability is the be all and end all then of course children are a nightmare, or a “parasite” as I saw someone describe it this week. Babies aren’t responsible for their actions, they can’t take care of themselves. None of us really can, but at least as adults it’s easier to pretend we do. Kids confront us with the reality that we all, at some point, have been dependent on others. Those most loudly proclaiming that they owe people nothing can’t face up to the fact that we are all here because someone, somehow, however imperfectly, took care of us. None of us got here on our own, even if it feels like it sometimes.
YES! So well put, as usual!!
agreed with all of this; i wrote an essay for class about what i called “political victimhood” (idk if it’s ever been called that before but regardless) and there was a lot of what i was writing about in here, you worded it way better than me though. great job