If boys are boys, sociocracy governance needs a way to remove members of a circle, and as I learned the hard way, people socialized as man may choose not to participate unless feeling fully comfortable, and the sole presence of the other person may make them feel uncomfortable, then it seems like the best that women can do to adapt themselves to the environment, is to teach girls to protect themselves from being mobbed - by knowing their place in the society and not entering relationships with unequal social capital / implicit power. The learning that has been encoded in social pressure so often made on girls.
On Dec 4th SoFA organizes an online conference on Accountability without coercion - a conference on power & responsibility in self-management.
Following earlier attempts (for example here and here) to bring attention to the topic of mobbing and consenting people out in self-organized groups, I’d like to propose a panel discussion titled: Should we teach girls to protect themselves from being mobbed?
I’d invite for it:
Manon Garcia, a professor of practical philosophy and an author of Living With Men: Reflections on the Pelicot Trial
Monika Kostera, a professor of sociology specialising in humanistic management and ostracism
maybe someone who experienced shunning / passive mobbing / ostracism, or a traumatologist
maybe someone from Amnesty International to moderate the discussion, as an organisation specialising in human rights and dignity/anti-oppression activism.
a person socialised as a man, to represent manhood in the discussion
Please let me know if it would fit the agenda and if I can help to arrange that.
As a clarification, the dichotomy between men and women I learned in the last 3 or 4 years, when I got discriminated. Before that I believed in gender equality.
It’s a mental model which better describes the reality, but does not allow to embody gender equality.
(there seems to be a paradox here, if anyone was into that)
I learned recently about moral conformism - and although already a baby can recognize between ‘a good’ and ‘a bad’ person, would lean towards the former one, and being harmful is universally recognised as bad and so immoral; there are aspects of morality that are not so universal and are shaped by the common behaviours in a group.
An example of this is cheating at a school test. Cheating is commonly considered wrong but if cheating at school tests somehow happened to be common, most would still not do it openly, there are a few who would not do it because they can be caught, and even fewer who won’t because it’s immoral to cheat, even if conditions allow for it. And if they don’t - they put themselves at the disadvantage in the group. So it’s actually considered a correct social adaptation to cheat in such a group.
As someone who was mobbed/ostracized from a consent based group, even though I know I’m not perfect myself either, I’m looking for a confirmation that it is considered ‘wrong’ and unacceptable in Sociocracy as an extremely harmful practice, a group violence that seems to me unproportional to any harm or wrong-doing a single person can do to justify the usage of such means. In social studies it is called a social death, and there’s a reason for that.
It seems to me that it’s becoming increasingly popular in the groups I happened to interact with, to confuse comfort and lack of it with doing no harm and being harmed. So as if morality was being replaced with optimisation for an individual comfort. This, in combination with implicit powers, seems to be very dangerous, like can be extremely harmful for some others, less powerful in the group individuals, who may have nowhere to get help from, whose suffering tends to be ignored and who does not have a power to influence and change social norms. As a woman*, I don’t consider such groups safe for me any more.