One of the saddest things we can witness in today's world is the falling apart of what we call "politics", "polity" and "policy". The tendency of poltics to turn into bickering, of polity to turn into a synonym of an alienated world, and of policy to turn into vaguely defined manifestos, shows the disconnectedness of efforts in this world, and the disaffectedness most people affect about it. One might hope that about plural issues plurals would be better, given we know about the disconnection with us, that we can't be disaffected about. One might hope wrong.
Plural politics is largely as self-obsessed as any other brand of "activism". That's not because the people who do it are evil, but because they are unable or unwilling to see that producing "content" about how we're unfree can't free us; contente production is part of the chains. "Acitivism" as a business lives, like any other business, from differentiation and product creation, and with activism you do that by distinguishing yourselves from other activists, twitter conflicts and all that. "Syscourse" is great for ongoing salesmen of plural activism; it allows them to sell their brand of politics, be it "acceptence" or "refusal", both are equally empty.
Now I do obviously see that people who promote acceptence of all people are better in their position than the fake-claimers, but they are also the same people who bring up the debates in the first place. I do think that there is at least some responsibility here, that the reason why fake-claimers can talk about this stuff all day is because they can get a reaction out of people. Now that's not a reason _not_ to react to it; but it is a reason to call out this mechanism and not be excited about creating "content" that educates people about topics which were only ideological nonsense to begin with. And I sadly see too many people too excited about this stuff. This excitement to be correct will never win us anything.
The worst part of "activism" as an exercise of self-branding is the tactic of talking down to people, including ourselves. We really aren't that naive, that willpower allone will change the world, that "positive" believes and attitudes will do us good, that the better life is just a vote away, are we? But if we want to sell to others, not that what we do might be necessary but possibly pointless (what is the truth), but a gread effort that will create a better world (what we want to believe), than we better be good at lying to ourselves first before we start lying to others. That's what seems to us at the core of the false activist hope, of the deep embeddedness of fake smiles in 21st century activist life styles. If we want to do anything beyond lying to ourselves, we need to get rid of this fake smile; we must gain the courage to cry.
Because even that, as absurd as it sounds, is a lot more serious to our situation. If we embody the state of mind that the world led us to, we will be able to understand the world a lot better than if we try to hope ourselves out of it. Obviously, crying also won't make things better, but neither does "remaining calm" etc. What we actually need to do is see where our actual power lies, not where we hope it does.
If we take the fact that we live in bureaucraticed democracies seriously, we need to take seriously both parts: that we are bound up in institutions; but that we're also responsible, to some extent, to the mess we're in. What does this mean practically?
All the typical descriptions of how we're bound up in institutions is correct, and even understates it, since you have to add to it the priviledge of communicating about these very inequalities - educational and social privilege, the privilege of being able to do certain things, learn about the world, gettin out of the house or talk to people on your own etc, that squarely favors abled, connected people in poltical matters, and that positions even them in institutions (poltically, economically, culturally etc.) they don't have much power about. What possible actions they have, is in the limited choices prestent to them by their limited imagination and the limited times in their every day life they actually make a conscious decision. And we are dependent on those people and institutions; without them, we can't survive, since even if we were to have shelter, food and clothing apart from them, and not need any communication with others to survive at all, our life would still be at risk by the forces of society that want us dead. For plural politics, this means we have to be very careful. We can't just wish this stuff away.
The other part is however, that we can't ignore that there is, however limited, an element of democracy here; and that is that most people actually want to keep it this way! The important thing to remember is that any democracy is only as good to what you want as are the people and your ability to persuade them; otherwise, democracy can appear tyrannical, as it is putting its will against you, the minority. We might be completely in the right, and still loose fairly by the rules. That doesn't make the other side right; but it means that our appeal cannot use the appeal to the very subject of democracy which opposes us. We cannot talk to an imagined "people" or "public", we have to understand that realistically, the public is not on our side, and that that's okay. We can't fight for that. We cannot fight politically for people being nice to us, or being our friends. But we can argue for having rights.
This is probably one of the biggest issues for so many people pretending to act politically: that actually, they only want to have personal friends. Political allies aren't friends, necessarily; and the biggest difference precisely is, that while you can pick and choose who you consider your friends, who you want to be around with etc, you cannot choose your allies. Alliances are objective; whoever supports you, how ever much you otherwise hate them, is you ally. In correction of a false saying one might even define: An ally is the enemy of my enemy. It is a purely oppositional term, and always relative to something I want that is not granted of me.
By not understanding this, and putting people off who might be useful allies for not being friends, we ourselves limit our power needlessly. And by creating alliances based on how "accepting" someone/many is, and not on legal or political agreements and disagreements, we might make alliances with people that could become a political liability, even if they might be nice. All of this has been observed coundlessly many times in many different movements. Plural activism doesn't need to repeat these mistakes.
So what to do instead? Very simply, organzation, actual institutional organization, bureaucracy. Yes, you heard me right. The way out of constant personal infighting is to set up a complaints office. I'm not kidding. But what does this mean concretely?
It means, that we ought to keep our personal friendships and fights out of the public sphere, and not constantly bicker on social media, and instead set up a kind of "plural union" that would outwardly represent our interest. In that union, there can be as many debates and syscourse and other nonsense, but importantly, none of it can be published. No influencing, not public social media accounts, no ad money. Anyone who does that stuff should just be thrown out. Instead, after all the unpreventable internal fights, there should be a simple majority vote on the matter. If you win, you win, if you loose, you loose; the other side can try again next year. That's it. This organzation than can have an outward line, that we can defend if we agree with the purposes of it; we don't need to agree with all parts of it, and don't need to defend those parts, but we also shouldn't publicly criticize it to get attention; instead, we can talk this through internally, write some texts about it, and publish them a few months after when it calmed down.
Obviously, that can't prevent people with very different interests splitting off and forming a new organization. That's just fine, all organizations had to deal with it. In fact, if this org would not have basic good procedures (such as elections for leadership and public policy stance) it would be good to break away from it. But one could hope that these breaks then would be actually based on something substantial, and not on people not wanting to be friends.
Is this nice? No. Having to create such an organization is not "nice", it would be better if we could set up flat hierarchies, no necessary internal elections etc. But we have to ask, how we can actually get power. And I am afraid that in this world, we need to adapt to it if we want to change it. That doesn't mean finding it nice, that doesn't mean not seeing the control paradox etc. We don't need "oversight committees" or anything like that; we just need a place where at the end, we can vote on our disagreeements and not bother people outside of it with stuff that otherwise might turn them against our flimsly little demand to have some rights and not be discriminated against in the first place. If we actually live in a democracy (which is at least half true in many places in the world), we need to be better in securing a public image against the public that supports the kind of world we live in (again, no romanticization of democracy, it's an analytical category, not just a dream!), and having some kind of organization like this that could do that is sadly necessary, I don't see another way without further needlessly destroying our own power, as little as we still have of it in this world, and be it only by others pity or self-interestedness.
Is this likely to happen? No. I know that myself. It didn't happen for trans rights either - I'd really like a trans union where I could just vote instead of constantly having to argue with people I don't know on social media. But even if I have no confidence, I can have hope, far-fetched hope. It doesn't satisfy me, it doesn't make me "happy", or "hopeful", it does create no substitute for the cry that is my view of the world and our incompetence to do something about it; but it is at least a direction to go in. It may direct my anger over my own responsibilty of this mess of a world in a direction of not being as completely pointless as it appears for itself to be.
(And no, that's not an empty reflection, I actually think such a union should exist and should propose policies to bring to political parties in various contries, such as inclusion in various non-discrimination acts, get funding approved, find representation on comittees etc; we don't have as much social capital and skills to build it, but would be thankful if it were to ever come around, would join in and try to give advice on these analytical questions as much as we can.)