When conservatives dump on the progressive narrative about microaggressions (i.e., accidental faux pas against marginalized folks), their reactions to apparent leftist hypersensitivity to discriminations doesn’t make such injustices go away. Any avoided problem stays in place.

When progressive decry such pushback as “racist” or “privileged”, their reactions to conservatives or independents expressing their need for self-determination and liberty doesn’t make such essentials for functioning go away. Indeed, they persist louder.

When using the law as a complainant/plaintiff against a defendant, avoided details will undermine actual justice. Anything avoided of importance is sure to come back and bite you in the ass.

Avoidance culture covers that set of social norms that privilege evading awareness or engagement of others with whom one affects. Often to avoid what feels uncomfortable to face, but also to avoid what cannot be cognitively processed in the moment, or for any other reason to steer clear from matters of importance.

Defunction: alienation & avoidance norms

Avoiding reality rarely makes that reality go away. If that piece of ignored reality affects your needs, then your need gets impacted without your awareness or engagement.

That’s a good reason not to perpetually numb your pain. Your pain only exists to warn you of some threat or threats to remove. Left in place, such threats provoke even more pain.

You best avoid social norms privileging avoidance of the uncomfortable. Lest you grow alienated from life itself. Connection involves some momentary discomforts. Endured discomforts lose their sting when resulting in meaningful growth.

Instead of sensitivity to the affected needs of others, these set of norms rationalize the acceptability of overlooking others in pain. It expects impersonal norms to be enough. Or to trust hyperrationality norms that expect others to conclude the same as themselves, which avoids how reality actually works.

Such avoidance is a key element of toxic legalism. Which correlates with unresolved needs, compromised wellness and suffering pain.

Examples: 

1. Demonstrating an intent to simplify complex matters into palatable soundbites, to the point of evading uncomfortable details one would prefer to ignore.

2. Being dismissive toward the views of others by characterizing a weakness in that view as emblematic of the whole idea, as grounds to not face strong points in that view.

3. Investing more focus (consuming limited time and energy) on one point over another, effectively missing what that other point could offer.

4. Accepting motivated reasoning to rationalize not investigating further, effectively reinforcing blind spots.

5. Easing needs or relieving pain from unresolved exposed needs, while ignoring the likely consequence of perpetuating the problem as those needs persist unresolved, compromising functionality while seeming to fix the problem (which can then be blamed on the individual for not properly applying the avoidant solution).

6. A relatively simple conflict requiring discipline and uncomfortable sacrifices to settle gets characterized as too complex to solve, if only to bypass such discipline and sacrifices. And sometime to preserve the familiarity of the conflict over the fear of the unknown.

7. Citing established norms and routine procedures as reason enough not to fully address a problem, preferring not to upset the status quo which likely has elements necessary and best preserved while also including elements to be excised for the sake of resolving needs more effectively.

8. Denouncing any attempt to understand all sides to a conflict as "bothsidesism" or "moral equivalency" that avoids identifying and addressing the inflexible needs of one or more sides.

9. Heralding one side in a conflict that more effectively conveys its message, or gets it out to a wider audience, to the point of dismissing any helpful critique of any opposing side, regardless of the intent of any of the sides.

10. Overgeneralizing to avoid dealing with messy details. Like when the Trump admin overgeneralized about gender affirming care (which does have some excesses worthy of critique) as mere gender ideology, to avoid the nuance of gender diversity. Or when the Biden admin overgeneralized the need for porous borders to avoid the messy details of vetting an overwhelming volume of immigrants (include some who present a threat to others).

11. Argumentative "debating" to appear as if interested in investigating the facts but actually to assert one's own beliefs and dismiss or disparage contrasting beliefs. Video titles on YouTube manifest this when one side claims to "destroy" or "crush" the other side, without addressing all the relevant nuance involved. Avoidance works with adversarialism to REACT and not RESPOND to inflexible needs. See conflict porn. Contrasts with the wisdom that there is less reason to debate when you can vulnerably relate.

Factors

• adversarialism

• bandwagon effect, groupthink

• constrained cognitive bandwidth shrinking presence

• convenient simplification to oversimplification

• de-intellectualize or "dumbing down" complicated matters

• delegate to expertise

• diffusion of responsibility

• discomfort coping

• emotion suppression or repression

• epistemic reductionism

• hyperrationality

• life can be too busy to attend to every detail

• normalized alienation

• overthinking avoidance suppressing useful reflection

• overwhelming stimuli

• perfidy and other deceptive modes

• pisticentricity (low epistemic reliability)

• privileged avoidance

• relevant content dismissed as irrelevant

• social norms privileging evasion

• diminishing awareness using:

• ...biased assumptions

• ...cognitive biases or distortions

• ...propaganda techniques

• ...loaded language/terms

• ...defense mechanisms

• ...logical fallacies

• arguing under the veneer of "debating"

• hyperbole for overgeneralizing what is to be avoided

• empathy nullified or squashed

Propaganda privileging avoidance

“Do you think Israel has the right to exist?”

Does the United States have a right to exist? If so, do the original sovereign tribal nations in this land have a right to exist, independent of the United States?

See how this goes to the core of the question? Do a people fleeing religious or ethnic persecution have a right to invade another land and take it over for their own benefit?

If so, does that confer to them a right to oppress that land’s original indigenous inhabitants? Does sympathy for their past endured oppression excuse oppressing others? Hurt people hurt people?

Can they then justify it all in the name of their beliefs and still honestly claim to be democratic? Do they then vilify any original inhabitants who resist such occupation as “hostiles” or “terrorists”?

Like many Israelis, I too am a dual citizen. I am an enrolled member of the Oneida Tribe of Wisconsin while also a U.S. citizen. But my loyalties are more to the liberty of everyone to freely resolve their needs, despite any manipulate elites of any government.

Does any socially constructed state have a “right” to exist? Or do the people have a right to security and sovereignty and other innate needs regardless of their government? Jefferson suggested as much 250 years ago in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Or doesn’t liberty matter anymore?

All this to draw attention to the social norms in Israeli society privileging avoidance. Such as avoiding awareness of how it has become an Apartheid state similar but not the same as South Africa. And avoidance of how its actions in Gaza can be characterized as a genocide, usually by emphasizing exception and evading any uncomfortable critique.

Would it be antisemitic or anti-Zionist to stay silent and let Israeli society implode from the catastrophic consequences of such privileged avoidance? Has Israeli culture devolved into what some scholars identify as a victimhood culture?

Is the familiar pain now felt preferable to the less familiar pain feared? Will not that pain eventually intensify from reacting to it now with privileged avoidance? Is that wise?

Refunction: responsive engagement path

Need-response counters such avoidance norms by incentivizing us to relate to each other’s publicly affected needs. Instead of complacently reverting back into our silos, we can break out of our isolation and engage each other, to honor the needs of others as our own.