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Daniel Robert MacPherson

"I Am Legion, For We Are Many."



"Believing the survivor" (in the legal sense) without evidence, attaches other people's actions and experiences to the survivor, that don't actually belong to them, incidentally dehumanizing everyone involved for the sake of tribal "group solidarity". This makes the accused immediately guilty - not of anything they actually did to the survivor - but of all the things that have ever been done to The Group and its members. It matters less to The Group what actually happened (or happens) to Ford, than Ford's utility as a symbol for its attached agenda. It follows then, that anyone who withholds judgment of Kavanaugh before evidence is available, becomes guilty, by association, not of refusing to take Ford seriously, nor of trying to shield Kavanuagh from proper legal inquiry - actions that would warrant outrage - but guilty of standing against The Group and disbelieving all the crimes, trauma, and anguish it has collectively experienced, EVER (to include theoretical suppositions about future rape culture). This fact becomes clear when skeptics of the specific case against Kavanaugh are accused of promoting "rape culture", "toxic masculinity", and unreported abuse. The specifics are devoured in an amorphous mass of generalities that resist all attempts to define any specific guiding principles. In fact a conspicuous pattern emerges in which the Group's application of specific facts increases in proportion to those facts' degree of utter irrelevance. The facts are relentlessly ignored UNLESS they are being assigned to people and situations they have no solid connection to. Alternatively, the traumatic sex abuse of one individual Group member is meticulously and emotionally emphasized when shaming any Group opponent who was not even remotely involved. The whole of humanity is conveniently divided into oppressed and oppressor by the power of The Group. The great underlying travesty in all this is that the seriousness of any given specifics (which directly stems from the objective value of the individuals involved) fluctuates based merely on their utility to the Group, instead of being serious in their own right. As the value of specifics change relative to the Group's goals, the value of the people behind those specifics (accuser and accused alike) incidentally also change. The Group becomes more important than truth or even the value of its own individual members. Specific facts are devoured by irrelevant generalities, and general legal and moral principles are lost in the overemphasis of unrelated specifics. Interestingly, and tragically, what this insanity does to specific facts, in that their individual importance is ground up in the general momentum, it does also to people. The ultimate crime in sex abuse is that it devalues the individual person by violating their sacred dignity and inherent worth. It treats the one-of-a-kind person as having no more value than their physical and sexual utility to another person's goals. It says "you don't matter for who you are, only for how you subjectively relate to others who manage to hold power over you". The abuse you experience matters because it happened to YOU. Period. That is all the reason that is needed for it to be very serious and consequential to the universe and its Author. It doesn't matter because it could happen to others. It doesn't matter because of "toxic masculinity". It doesn't matter because Trump is President, or Kavanaugh is the SCOTUS nominee. It doesn't need anything else to matter. It matters because it happened to you. And you are enough. Your value is transcendently and objectively assigned to you, and it's greater than the sum total of your parts because you are loved by One who is greater than all. His regard for you trumps all others (even your own) and transcends any and all painful physical or emotional realities. When pain is projected onto others or someone else's pain is co-opted, it isn't for the sake of truth or justice (in fact truth and justice have to first be violated to make it possible), it is instead a symptom of believing the Lie that makes abuse so devastating: you alone, don't matter. What abuse (and more generally, sin) does to marginalize an individual's value, membership in The Group perpetuates. It offers a faceless class, movement, gender, race, or political party to blame for your pain. This feeds the lie that you will feel less unworthy if someone pays for your marginalization. But the truth is that it is possible to heal without justice, just as it is possible to fully satisfy justice and yet never ever heal. This is actually a good thing, because of what it says about where human value lies. It lies beyond the grasp of any abuser's touch. It is not material. Our value is not in what is done to us by others or even what we do to ourselves. It is inherent, objective and transcendent. An abuser doesn't take away a part of our value that then has to be regained. The value has always been there. It is believing the lie that comes with the abuse, that causes the deepest, ongoing pain. If this is true, then no amount of justice, vengeance, political victories, social engineering, or lawsuits will do an ounce healing. Conversely, no amount of abuse or injustice can withstand the healing power of knowing what our value really is and where it lies. This is not to say that justice shouldn't be done. Only that if we try to use justice to heal, we'll be left empty. We'll also risk doing injustice to others in our pain-laden pursuit. The Lie creates a black hole in our self worth that can't be satisfied by anything except the Truth. In addition to an unlimited source of 'devils' upon which to do "justice", The Group offers false community which locks in the Lie in a much more subtle way. It is false community because any healthy community acknowledges and celebrates your inherent value as a human being, not on what happened to you or on your class identity. If The Group cared about Ford's value as a person, and if all people are equally valuable, then they would be just as concerned with Kavanaugh's "right to be believed" as Ford's. Instead, Ford is valued for what she can do for The Group, not dissimilar from how an abuser values a victim for what the victim can do for them, at the expense of the truth of the victim's actual value. The Group marginalizes the sacred individuality of its members and steals their specific experiences to feed itself and its agenda, and its members' Lie-induced feelings of unworthiness are in turn assuaged by The Group's attention, feeling like they're valuable enough for someone to "care" about them specifically. But all at the expense of their unique transcendent worth (by only dealing truthfully with the suffering and pain specific to them, nothing more or less, in the name of "solidarity"). What The Group offers, actually makes healing less likely because it treats people differently (Ford and Kavanaugh) based on what's happened to them rather than the truth of their inherent worth.

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