Hello, good people!
Don’t Believe Everything You Think is a helpful practice for Preemptive Radical Inclusion. We most often mention it when discussing how we have internalized cultural misinformation, bias, marginalization, and oppressive ideas. It leans into how we bear privilege and how systems have led us to think that our privilege is just what is regular, normal; so regular we don’t notice it and don’t believe marginalized people when they point it out.
This practice also includes what we think about ourselves. We must work on both together, for we did not invent any of it. We were taught untruths about ourselves and those around us. As humans in community, we break and repair in community. Beloved Community is a practice, not a destination.
This year (2024) in USAmerica, we are facing fascism by unstable and amoral oligarchs who have come to power using systems of power and oppression against us. They did this in significant part by amplifying harmful ideas, piggybacking on preexisting ideas we (broadly) already held, and manipulating us into believing that we came up with them. We need not have voted for this power shift to have been deeply impacted by the core beliefs instilled in us by systems of oppression.
This is a time of year in the northern hemisphere when there is little sun, much weather, and holidays full of complicated personal family history. Often, it is family who taught us some of the harmful ideas that have played out in recent years. Suddenly, who we are and from whom we came has another layer. This time of turmoil—for some capping years of an experience of inequity and harm in this country, for others a sudden jolt that hope alone is insufficient—might be accompanied by grief and reminders of how our family was or was not present and healthy in our lives. We peek out of denial and into reflection and seek meaning.
This is a time when old messages, put in our psyches and sense of self by people, powers, and principalities reemerge. Some may have been intentionally evil, others may not have known better. We find these old messages arise as if they have a life of their own and can be ignored, denied, or interrogated. I invite you to interrogate. Let me tell you why.
I call them the lying liars, these people, powers, and principalities who inserted these negative, harmful, untrue thoughts into the very core of my being.
Some of the lying liars were those who lied to us about our worthiness, value, strength, and capacity. All of these lies make us vulnerable to criticism and power.
Some lying liars told us how much better we were than others because we were white and/or men and/or straight and/or Christian and/or able-bodied and/or …
Other lying liars told us how we were unworthy because we were women and/or femmes and/or queer and/or trans and/or BIPOC and/or neurodivergent and/or …
Other lying liars made us believe we were unworthy because we were failures, unable to fit ourselves into their personal or mental mold and obey their instructions for control. Those lying liars assessed goodness according to compliance and competence by obedience. They were wrong.
They all learned from the same systems of oppression. They likely held different identities and relationships to these systems, but the systems surround us all.
Some of us hold so many identities that oppressive systems and lying liars target that it can be hard to parse what part of the messages came from where or is directed at whom. “Wait, am I a good guy or a bad guy in this story?” You are in the story. You are inherently good. You have been taught some things that have led you to cause harm to yourself and others. We often act out of habit, reactivity, or belief rather than from the well of goodness that is available to us.
There is no limit to what the lying liars might have implanted in our minds, whether they were individuals intent on harm, or passing on messages of systems intent on control and extraction. But we can interrogate them, those thoughts, and check out if they’re true. More, we don’t have to do that alone. It is a community practice.
The first move in determining whether a thought or idea is true is to notice that it is there. That takes some work, because so much of this is in the background of our minds, quietly directing us when to launch which assumption and then act on it.
The next move is to figure out where the idea came from.
Did it come from those we have now been able to identify as lying liars? The overtly cruel and harmful people in our upbringing or present? If so, those ideas are automatically full of reasonable doubt. We can righteously assume they are wrong and make them prove they are right instead of the vice versa they told us were the rules of this not-a-game.
Did these old messages of shame or unworthiness (our own or others) come from those who thought they had our best interest at heart and did their best but who passed on mistaken and harmful ideas and beliefs they had inherited from their own lying liars? We need to extend our curiosity and limit the power of those thoughts. We can assume they might be wrong and explore other possibilities.
One of the core lies is the lie of individualism, the idea that we must pull ourselves up by our bootstraps even if the boots are worn and straps broken or if there are none. Individualism is part of the ableism that invites non-disabled people to believe that disabled people are responsible for the challenges they face. Individualism is part of what is responsible for a decision: “Sure, people can wear a respirator mask if they individually choose,” but even though it is a hundred times safer when everyone in a room wears a respirator mask, the group feels no responsibility to do so. Individualism is what left some of us with no backbone and others of us no safety, and “you do you” is turning into mask bans.
Getting whole and genuinely free must not be an individual self-care practice. We can and must care for one another in community. We share and repair bootstraps. We remove barriers for those for whom boots alone are insufficient. We must welcome others pointing out where the lying liars misled us. Those lies cause us to harm ourselves or others in ways we do not intend. We need help noticing that. We need help to change.
We cannot become personally or socially whole or move toward ever-increasing justice without community care and loving accountability. Individualism reinforces old lies by limiting our access to new messages and information, and to meaningful, honest, vulnerable, supportive relationships with others.
We can and must support one another and hold up what is good, strong, and beautiful in one another. We must replace the words and ideas of those lying liars with love and accurate reflection of human worthiness. This can come from those who know and love us and now have our best interests at heart. This can come from peers on our journey to resist the onslaught of oppressive systems that lie to people with any privilege that they could leverage the privileged parts of themselves to become safe in a country following into fascism if only they let go of those more vulnerable.
We are told there is a ladder that, rung by rung, determines hierarchy, and some are high enough to be safe these next four or ten years and some are not. I promise—none of the people reading this blog post are safe. The ladder doesn’t reach any of us.
Fascism will lie and manipulate all of the lies we inherited from systems of oppression to try to convince you over and over that if you capitulate just this little bit, you will be secure. We must know in our bones that this is a lie we will fall for again and again unless we are intentional to be vigilant to counter it. Unless we are willing to let others help us excavate the untruths tangled in our minds, they will continue to come out in our behavior,
We must replace the words of the lying liars that lead us to make mistakes and cause accidental harm with a more accurate representation of reality. Doing this will equip us to move toward justice, not run from threat. When we replace the lying liars’ explanations of how the world works, we can replace it with how the world truly works and could work if we collaborate and manage fear and shame.
Beloved Community is a practice, not a destination.
For a time in your life, it may have seemed that the lying liars couldn’t stop squelching your goodness. So many of us, regardless of social identity, have battled the ongoing pain and brokenness of childhood harm. These liars pop up so often, don’t they? But you can stop letting them live in your head unchallenged. As quickly as you would reach out to a child or loved one to tell them that their harmful idea about themselves is not true, let others reach out to you. This is part of how we get free.
And when someone reaches out to you to let you know that a harmful idea you have about them is not true, lean into integrating that. Don’t lapse into resistance because of denial or let yourself freeze because of shame (that, too, is a tool of the lying liars,) but use it as a moment to talk back to whatever lying liars taught you in the first place.
It is a choice to turn to one another more than the ideas and stories of those who taught us. We can choose to help one another, love one another, lift our individual and collective goodness, and replace false thoughts with curiosity and positive reflections. From our places of privilege, we must replace them with truths we share and bear witness by centering those most marginalized and not believing everything we think.
This means that I, as a white person descended from 400 years of English colonialists in New England, must attend to new learning and center, not my ancestors who painted themselves heroes, but those my ancestors destroyed. I must learn how the culture of white supremacy clouded my capacity even to notice how I cause harm because of the lies my mind believes. Even if it was the lying liars who taught these lies to me, even if they loved me dearly, it is my body the lies are enacted through. I am responsible for what I do next.
It also means that I, as a fat, neurodivergent, queer, nonbinary trans person, must be able to partner with cisgender people willing to stop making assumptions and judgments about my life and simply learn about it. Folk who are willing to believe me as I share the consensus of what my community experiences and needs. There must be cisgender people willing to unpack patriarchy and lies about sexuality being a thing of shame and pretty privilege, and neurotypical people willing to explore the ableism that comes from believing a particular type of brain is the Right type. The minimum is for people to stop limiting my freedom. The Beloved Community would be an ongoing experience of growth, learning, and loving accountability to move toward justice.
Inclusion isn’t the goal, and Preemptive Radical Inclusion is a set of tools that help us all move toward reducing harm. The goal is justice and liberation.
Sometimes, when I introduce myself, as in the paragraphs above, someone will say, “Why do they have to list those things about themselves? It’s none of my business. I don’t want to know that.” That might be your perspective. If it is, this might be your next learning task. Why, in an increasingly unsafe environment where people are targeted for holding unfavored identities, would it become essential to talk about that? If your response is “Identity Politics,” may I suggest that it’s a thought for you to excavate and examine where it came from? There has always been identity politics. That’s what No Irish Allowed was. Identities in power trying to hold onto power.
We do not have to, and must not, believe everything we think about other people. We can hold space within which they can be their authentic selves as we move away from beliefs that lie about their lives. As we learn what is true and right, we lean into becoming an ally in every way possible, an accomplice against agents of harm.
We also do not have to, and must not, believe everything we think about ourselves. These are both necessary. We must seek out and uncover our inherent worthiness together as we, from our places of privilege, learn from the emerging consensus of a people what it is to live in a culture, a country, and in relationship with us in these times. Learning and unlearning in relationship and telling the truth about our goodness by living it as well as we can together will move us forward toward justice, then liberation.
When we excavate and interrogate our thoughts, we are people who can claim this benediction and blessing,
to love your people, and let them love you.
CB Beal (me) has been writing and teaching using the framework of Preemptive Radical Inclusion for over a decade. Would you like to read more about this here? Let me know.
Do you have ideas about how we can engage the lying liars in our heads in a way that grants grace for growth and takes the power out of old, lying, shaming messages to begin to replace them with messages about the wholeness of your heart and capacity to do good? I would love to read them here.
As always, respectful conversation. My blog posts here are like we are sitting around in my living room. We engage one another with kindness and curiosity, seeking to bear witness, not to win points. And on posts like this one, we are careful, if we name harm, not to describe it in detail so that we don’t cause further harm to others.
Love, me
(this is an updated and reposted version of this 2017 piece. November 12, 2024)