Social activism and type (anecdotal)

[Rusal]

A retrospective look at my activism experience a few years ago (related to prostitution and human trafficking victims) and how three women (EIE, EII, and SEI) fell naturally into different roles within the organization.

EIE: a teacher by profession. She was the one in charge of organizing the group in the sense of writing down everyone’s number and keeping the schedule. Natural public speaker in that she could express her feelings easily and reach empathetic understanding with other people; she thrived when in contact with others. She didn’t seem interested in finding new ways to analyze social phenomena but the same couple of emotions would suffice to keep her mobilized for weeks. This tendency also prevented her from reading too much about the topic that made her enter the organization at first. But again, why bother reaching intelectual understanding when you have emotions to keep you motivated and carry those like atemporal understanding of what is at stake? A nice person who worked teaching adults who we were not able to finish school when young.

EII: a journalism student. This one actually had more depth to her activism in that she would link what she saw to bigger and original patterns. For that reason, she ended up (together with me) behind the ‘ideological’ material the group put out. A less nice side of her was that she was too much focused on personal maladies, how people in her life were being unfair to her, etc. She would write these massive walls of text that circulated the group giving detailed explanations of her grievances. In the end, she developed a paranoia against other memebers that was not healthy to the group. She might not have been at her best at that time so I only got to see limited aspects of her.

SEI: Interesting how quadra-related preferences drive you to your place in an organization. Although I can sympathasize with someone, the thought of dealing with heavier emotions deenergized me, it felt like a repetitive drill where nothing new could be found and that failed at giving me any satisfaction. I was enlivened when I contributed from a place that required depersonalized analysis (where “woman” was a figure that could be replaced with any other of the same type) and finding new perspectives to communicate. The publishing of a piece on the treatment of prostitution in the media, for instance (I had good synergy with the EII in this) In retrospective, I focused on communication, decoding processes and desatomazing floating perspectives to present them to a wider audience. The EIE and the EII might’ve had me as somewhat disconnected and not really ‘into it’, like I could leave at any minute.

With time, the curse of the Alpha social activist struck and I started to see people failing to serve a ‘pure’ objective and becoming mean-spirited. I resented some I had considered my friends and I did leave.