When collectivity is confused with compliance

In No is Not a Lonely Utterance, I consider how and why collectivity is sometimes confused with compliance.

One example: I communicated with a student who made a complaint about bullying and harassment by a lecturer who was also the convenor of her MA programme. The other students on the cohort agreed his conduct was abusive. But they positioned her as being “selfish” for complaining because “their education was now being disrupted.”

Complaints can be treated as causing disruption not only to the person who acted abusively but to everyone who accepted the abuse as a condition of access.

When those who complain are understood to be setting themselves apart, collectivity is confused with compliance. It is assumed that for more people to access education, those collective resources, you should not complain about the conduct of those who provide these resources. It is an assumption that comes from somewhere (or someone). Those who abuse the power given to them by institutions often do what they can to convince other people that the only way they can continue to access collective resources (often treating themselves as one such resource) is to accept their conduct.

Even if this point sounds extreme or overstated, what I am describing is all too common.

That a person acquires more power the more other people are invested in them is obvious. What is less obvious is that power, once so invested, ends up seeming less concentrated or more diffused. When “powerful people” are brought down, it becomes clear that power does not reside in just one person, magically, as a possession. It becomes clear that every Weinstein has an army of assistants, giving that person access to other people whose careers are made dependent on saying yes. We learn that those who said no, who refused or complained, were likely silenced by another army, this time of lawyers, through secret deals, sealed by NDAs.

But mostly they are not “brought down.”

Some people stop themselves from being “brought down” because of how many other people would go down with them.

An abuser can appear not just as charming but as being for a collective.

Held up by one.

When compliance with a collective is deemed necessary for being in it, those who are not compliant are treated as being individualistic. And yet, my research has taught me, that ...