It's On All of Us

Complicity culture is the water we swim in

Sep 15, 2023

The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.— Albert Einstein

It all started because I was thinking about Donald Trump.

I used to think about Donald Trump all the time. I got hired for my first paid writing gig— reporting on federal politics for an online outlet— in the earliest days of the Trump administration. Everyone in those days, whether they had ever paid a single moment’s attention to politics before, were drawn to the news like ambulance chasers. It was all so lurid and horrifying— the Muslim bans, the cronyism, the nepotism, the corruption, the misogyny— or thrilling, I guess, if you were a Trump supporter. And it made great copy. Trump may have been dangerous as hell for democracy, but he was gold for news conglomerates.

These days, though, even the news media have been sobered by the lengths that Trump and his accomplices will go to keep hold of power, up to and including throwing the entire country under the bus. The quality of the reporting on his machinations, and those of his various hangers-on, is better, the analysis clearer. The whataboutism is less prevalent. Not gone, but less common. And I, for one, don’t feel like I have to peek at the news daily between my fingers in incredulous horror for what his latest proclamation— and the fall out that comes from it— might be. Some days I don’t think about Donald Trump at all.

I was, however, drawn to an opinion piece in the New York Times about Trump and his enablers by two history professors, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, based on their recent book about the tyranny of the minority. The two back far enough away from the train wreck to stop exclaiming in horror about the spectacle and instead offer systemic analysis. They compare where we are in America today to Europe in the 1920s and ‘30s and South America in the 1960s and ‘70s to show how, as toxic and dangerous as demagogues like Donald Trump are, they’re only able to succeed because of the many accomplices that aid them. These are not even the Giulianis and the Eastmans, but all of the politicians that passively, or actively, acquiesce to authoritarianism.

Like all of the GOP Presidential candidates save one at the first debate, who stated they would support Trump’s candidacy if he’s the nominee, even though he’s been credibly held liable for rape and is facing felony indictments in multiple jurisdictions for mishandling classified documents and trying to obstruct our electoral system for his own benefit.

“[B]anal acquiescence is very dangerous”, Levitsky and Ziblatt write. “Individual autocrats, even popular demagogues, are never enough to wreck a democracy. Democracy’s assassins always have accomplices among mainstream politicians in the halls of power. The greatest threat to our democracy comes not from demagogues like Mr. Trump or even from extremist followers like those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 but rather from the ordinary politicians, many of them inside the Capitol that day, who protect and enable him.”

Looking at you, Mitch and Kevin. Photo via Vanity Fair

In what might seem unrelated news, millionaire actors Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis have been pilloried on the internet in the last week once letters to a judge they wrote in support of their longtime friend and colleague Danny Masterson were made public. Masterson was tried earlier this year on three counts of felony rape, convicted on two counts out of three, and now has been sentenced to 30 years to life.

I haven’t followed the news around Masterson’s trial up to this point. I could give a crap, generally, about him, Kutcher, or Kunis. But I read a masterful essay by Lyz Lenz over at the newsletter Men Yell At Me about Kutcher and was sucked in. The thing about Kutcher which Lenz lays out so clearly, which makes his story absolutely related to Levitsky and Ziblatt’s argument, is that he’s the Hollywood equivalent of Trump’s crowd of enablers.

The level of outrage over Kutcher’s support of Masterson, Lenz argues, is tied to the type of guy Kutcher exemplifies. “He is not the toxic bro, but he’s friends with him”, she writes. “He supports him. He calls out the nameless, faceless bad guys, but not the ones he’s friends with… He’s the type of guy who benefits from patriarchy while still being the good guy because he’s not as bad as the rest of them. It’s building a life to look good, without actually doing the radical work of being good. He’s #NotAllMen, the ones who don’t actively do harm, but maybe don’t actively do good, either.”

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I learned about the dangers of enabling early because the danger was tragically personal. In families like mine that wrestle with addiction, unless everyone is competing for “Person Most Able to Pickle, Snort, Swallow, or Shoot-up Their Brains Into Oblivion”, the presence of enablers is essential. Those who keep things moving forward, who take care of business, who excuse, justify, ignore, and even sometimes are entertained by the behaviors of their addicted family members.

One addict can wreak havoc on their own life over time, but an addict with someone to continually bail them out and make excuses for them can also take down everyone around them for decades. And if you back up far enough from the horror of it all, like Levitsky and Ziblatt, stop being distracted by the person most obviously causing harm, and look at the entirety of the family system, then you begin to see the ways in which the enablers, as well intentioned as they may well be, are what Lenz names the “cytoplasm” of the whole structure, “the fluid that holds it all together.”

Every oppressive system, whether at planetary or private scale, functions this way. They feed and interweave with each other in an overarching culture of complicity which both protects perpetrators and itself creates harm.

From inside the culture, it’s tempting to focus on the obvious harm-doers, the Big Bads, if you will. To approach them as just “one bad apple”, and tell ourselves that if they get their comeuppance then we can all go back to living our happy, harmless lives. Masterson goes to jail. Trump (hopefully) is convicted for his crimes for once in his life, which puts him in jail but also disqualifies him from office. The addict finally goes to treatment and gets sober. The abuser gets barred from contact with his victim. The butcher that mutilates girl’s genitals gets imprisoned. The bully gets expelled. The crooked cop gets fired. The homophobe loses their court case. The murderers get convicted for racist lynching.

But all of that accountability (and you know I am personal accountability’s number one fan) doesn’t actually fix the problem, because the problem is systemic. And the system is us. Each of us participates, either actively or passively, in systems large and small that are built to harm people. None of us can undo complicity culture alone, but all of us doing the necessary work concurrently to interrogate our own participation— our willingness to look the other way, to acquiesce, to enable either actively or passively— and then taking steps to remove ourselves from the unconscious, reflexive, oppressive soup adds up.

We start by naming what is happening, not just at the hands of the Big Bads, but at the hands of everyone, including us. We reject false equivalencies, accept the inevitability of discomfort, and learn how to engage in confrontation constructively. We refuse to believe it’s someone else’s problem or wishing it will fix itself without our intervention. We take responsibility for figuring out how to make different choices moving forward, hold ourselves accountable when we don’t manage it, and look for support in changing and demanding change. We lift up and support others doing this work. We participate. We vote.

Practicing integrity doesn’t simply mean taking responsibility for what we do. It also means owning what we don’t. It means thinking critically about the integrity of the systems that we live within as a whole and what part we play within them. It’s shifting ourselves and the systems we are a part of, slowly but surely, away from harm and towards equity and justice.

Harmful systems are like herpes. Whenever they first infected our world is anyone’s guess, but they’re in it now, deep in the systemic fabric of everything, endlessly flaring up. The best we can do is understand the conditions which contribute to flares and commit ourselves to mitigating the extent of the harm they cause us and everyone we come in contact with.

Before I close for today, I need to say something about justice and punishment, particularly in the case of Danny Masterson. I took the time to read all of the letters of support sent to the judge on his behalf as well as the victim’s statements because I needed to make sure I was offering an informed take on it all. And they pushed so many buttons. The sexual assault survivor in me, the enabler, and the believer in restorative justice all jockeyed for a chance to speak their piece.

I wouldn’t say that everyone should read them necessarily, but I do think they’re instructive in terms of the ways that perpetrators are aided and abetted by the people and systems that surround them.

As outlined in the victim’s statements at his sentencing, Masterson is deeply embedded in the Church of Scientology. That community parrots restorative justice methods by requiring victims to describe the details of the harm they experienced to the person that harmed them, but then Scientology abandons justice entirely by refusing accountability for the perpetrators of harm. Instead, they protect and enable them, while silencing and further harming victims.

Some of the people who wrote letters of support for Masterson are embedded in that community as well, and some are not. And though some of them (only some) acknowledged that Masterson was convicted of a violent crime, none of them named the ways in which they, or the systems that protected Masterson, contributed to Masterson’s ability to repeatedly violate women. None of them expressed any expectation that Masterson would take responsibility for the harm he caused (he continues to paint himself as the real victim) or that his conviction and punishment were just. To a one, they stated that the man who violently raped multiple women was not the man they know. Within the context of an oppressive system, this sort of assertion doesn’t function as an acknowledgment of a complex, both/and sort of Universe. It functions to subtly suggest a paradox, that two people— a violent perpetrator and a loving husband, father, and friend— can’t exist in the same body. And that if the latter is true then accountability for the former should be less.

People are complex. We are all capable of great love and terrible harmfulness. But we don’t prevent harm by focusing on the capacity of perpetrators to sometimes act loving. We prevent harm by insisting on accountability and listening to victims. That’s the only way we build a reality together in which no one is allowed to act as if some people are worthy of love and some of victimization.

No one deserves to be prey. If even one of Masterson’s supporters had stated that then we could be having the wider conversation we should be having, about how Masterson got away with acting as if some women deserve to be prey for so long.

Let Your Life Speak

It's On All of Us

Complicity culture is the water we swim in

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