On Ancillary Justice and identity

[missroserose]

As I mentioned before, I very much loved Ancillary Justice, in part because of the multilayered approach - the story works very well on its own, but there are a lot of Big Ideas addressed both overtly and subtly, and so many crunchy questions of ethics and morality and technology and culture to debate. The aspect that caught my eye the most, though, was how a little over midway through the book, it also became a parable about identity.

Quick recap, Breq (in conjunction with the entirety of Justice of Toren) has been gradually realizing that Anaander Mianaai, Lord of the Radch, is working against herself. That is, Mianaai inhabits multiple bodies in much the same way the Justices do, and Justice of Toren has now encountered two sets of Mianaai with distinctly different agendas - one actively working to promote the current order, and one dedicated to radical reforms if not outright revolution.
Awn, one of Toren's favorite lieutenants, has found herself caught in between the two agendas. This particular passage, from chapter 16, was what jumped out at me:

"I can offer you," said Mianaai in reply, "the opportunity to prove her innocence. And to better your situation. I can manipulate your assignment so that you can be close to her again. You need only take clientship when Skaaiat offers--oh, she'll offer," the Lord of the Radch said, seeing, I'm sure, Lieutenant Awn's despair and doubt at her words. "Awer has been collecting people like you. Upstarts from previously unremarkable houses who suddenly find themselves in positions advantageous for business. Take clientship, and observe." And report was left unsaid.

The Lord of the Radch was trying to turn her enemy's instrument into her own. What would happen if she couldn't do that?

But what would happen if she did? No matter what choice Lieutenant Awn made now, she would be acting against Anaander Mianaai, The Lord of the Radch.

I recently came across a wonderful metaphor for consciousness in (of all things) Come As You Are. Nagoski describes our minds as being like a flock of birds - at any given time you have your ideals, your assumptions, your values, your emotions, your opinions of the world, the information given to you by your senses, your feelings about that information, your memories, all flying at once. When they're all in harmony with each other - when they're all on a level and all agree with each other about which direction to fly - all is well. When some are in disagreement, however - when past actions disagree with your values, or when you receive new information that's at odds with your assumptions of how the world operates - this causes cognitive dissonance, which can be uncomfortable enough to eventually alter our values and thus the direction of the entire flock. In extreme cases, where traumatic events take place and our flock goes all over the place, we end up paralyzed. But most of the time, it's not that extreme; we continue on, and eventually resolve the dissonance by changing what we can -
whether that's our behavior or our beliefs.

But how often have we accidentally entrapped our friends within that dissonance? How often have we, in not wanting to address our own shortcomings, put those we care most about in a no-win situation? I think particularly of romantic relationships, because they're so emotionally fraught and full of scenarios where our feelings don't live up to our values. Say a partner breaks up with us; we believe that they're an individual and have the right to pursue their own happiness, so we do our best to keep our chin up and bravely soldier on. But breakups hurt; social disconnection hits at our very core sense of self-worth (not to mention our more primal fears of survival, as social connection is fundamental to that survival). Then some weeks later - long enough for us to have gotten over the worst of the sting, but nowhere near long enough to have recovered entirely - someone we care about approaches us and tells us they've been wanting to see our former partner romantically, and is that okay with us? We're faced with a dilemma - no, emotionally it's not okay with us, but to say so means admitting our humanity and our vulnerability on this point, not to mention demonstrating that we're not living up to our vision of ourselves as someone able to Get Over Things. So we say that it's quite all right, thus setting our friend up for precisely this kind of failure - if they take us out our word, we resent them and possibly lash out at them later; if they don't, they're as good as saying they don't trust us. Either way, disconnection.

I think this is one of the biggest reasons I find teaching yoga so rewarding. My emotional integrity has improved by leaps and bounds since I began practicing regularly; something about the meditative aspects of yoga really helps me acknowledge and be more compassionate towards the parts of my consciousness that don't align with who I most want to be, and the physical activity helps to defuse the stronger emotion and get that part of me flying in line with the rest of the birds. I hope that, to some extent, I share that same feeling with my students; it's the kind of small-scale change that can have a huge effect in a person's life, and perhaps even ripple out to have positive effects on everyone around them.

Comments

[lilysea]

Thank you for this post. ^_^

[missroserose]

You're welcome! I would love to hear your thoughts, or perhaps about your experiences with your flock of birds, if you feel like sharing. :)

[asakiyume]

I'm nodding at what you say about yoga. Yoga combines physicality (which is so important and so missing from a lot of people's lives) with meditativeness, and meditativeness is a great cure for the fevered thinking that a lot of people I know, including myself, spend time engaged in, especially when they're trying to untangle problems like the one you describe in your example. Rational thought can get you places; it can really help--but sometimes not. The meditative aspects of yoga are a way of wiping the board clean of all the mental calculations and attempts to solve equations.

[missroserose]

Another fascinating bit from Come As You Are (for a book primarily about sexuality, I'm finding an awful lot of interest in the parts that aren't directly about sex) talked about the value of physical activity as a means of completing the stress cycle - that is, when something hits our fight/flight/freeze buttons, especially if the latter is the option we go with, we're left with a lot of residual energy that needs to be released. Hence why we sometimes get the shakes after a traumatic experience. But given how most of us suffer from chronic stress - small-to-medium annoyances that nonetheless kick our systems into overdrive whenever we think about them - it's worth finding some kind of outlet for it. Some people meditate, some make art, some sing or have a primal scream session; exercise is one of the most widely available and accessible means.

I like what you say about rational thought. It is super helpful!...except when it's not, and then it's super not. I don't think it's a coincidence that everyone I know who's a fan of exercise has used some variation of the "wiping the mental slate clean" analogy, whether they run, or swim, or lift weights. One thing I've heard said in yoga class about savasana: "We spend an hour tiring out your body to free your mind for a few minutes." So true.

[ivy]

But how often have we accidentally entrapped our friends within that dissonance? How often have we, in not wanting to address our own shortcomings, put those we care most about in a no-win situation?

Oooh, ow. (That is to say, the answer is "a lot".) I've improved substantially over the years at not asking questions that I'm not genuinely okay earing the answers to, but even so, there are a lot of social traps where what we want and the expected thing are not at all the same, and so we do the expected thing, with painful results. Poly is the most common place where these sorts of conflicts arise for me, but not the only one.

[missroserose]

Yeah, I think of this as a particularly alluring pitfall for folks like us who're generally pretty good at living up to our ideals, and have a lot invested appearing to live up to our ideals. It's genuinely hard to say "no, I'm not okay right now, I'm human and I'm having feels and I need some time."