Image by Markus Spiske.
The Mental Health Industrial Complex and its bastard child Pop Psychology wield tremendous power, power that is often invisible. Ever since smartphones conquered the universe in the early 2010s, there’s been an explosion in armchair psychologists and their memes. Among other resultant linguistic crimes, I’ve noticed a serious uptick in the use of the term “boundaries” in reference to personal relationships—everybody talks about having healthy boundaries, setting boundaries, maintaining boundaries, etc.
As with all lingo that can trace its popularity directly to the increasing dominion of computer tech and (anti)social media over our personal lives, I find this terminology to be extremely suspect; I wish to interrogate it.
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First, there’s the pathology of nationalism—boundaries are borders. While the ideology of classification originates as a curse of agriculture, with its plowed grids of factory fields, the existence of inexorable national borders is something that arrived with the twentieth century. Modern states are little more than mercenary enforcers in service of Capital—the only force (entity?) permitted to move freely across national boundaries. Policing these borders is crucial; the machine has to keep most of the poor folks on the other side of the wall in order to successfully exploit the ones who are allowed in.
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Most indigenous languages of the region now known as northern California don’t really use words for what we call “the cardinal directions.” Think about that for a second—an entire region, with dozens of distinct languages, where people didn’t conceive of direction in the linear terms of north, south, east, west.
Like all aspects of indigenous cultures, the characteristics of language grow from the peoples’ relationships with the land. Northern California has a widely varied geography. As such, its indigenous (human) languages typically describe direction relative to notable landmarks, e.g. “mountain-side,” “upriver,” and such. This form of cognition perceives the fluidity of geographical borders and boundaries.
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In tribal cultures, which are genuine communities, the boundaries between self and other are not cognitively fixed.
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Even in the rigid racial caste system of Amerika, defined in large part by economic stratification, there’s something to be said for existing in the in-between spaces. Being of mixed heritage, and therefore not fully belonging to one race/culture or another, gives one a multi-sided perspective that is not available to the pure-bred. However, it also comes with some unique challenges. For one thing, so-called “bi-racial” people in this country have higher rates of depression. I’m not surprised; mixed heritage attracts heavy doses of rejection and bullshit from all sides.
In my case, being what the old-school eugenicists referred to as “tri-racial,” I look ethnically ambiguous; though I’m obviously not white, neither blacks nor Natives necessarily identify me by sight as one of their own. Strangers—primarily white people—are often vexed enough by this ambiguity that they’ll inquire about my “nationality” at the first opportunity. If I refuse to answer, as I often do, they tend to get upset, as if I was the asshole asking personal questions of somebody I just met. This bizarre obsession is an impulse I’ve never fully understood, but I get the basic idea; they need to know what box to put me in so they can properly transform me into an exoticized object, and identify my place in the racial hierarchy.
Case in point: one night I was standing outside a club here in Oakland, minding my own business, when a drunken young blonde stumbled over and asked me about my race. I smiled, said nothing, and kept smoking. She then made a quest of discovering the answer, which culminated in her and a bunch of other random gentrifiers standing around me in a circle like I was a zoo exhibit, all of them trying to guess my race. Since I refused to answer their questions or even speak to them, they were reduced to attempting to gauge the accuracy of their guesses by my reactions. Some of them even asked me if I understood English.
If this episode sounds surreal and revolting, that’s because it was; however, I also found it rather entertaining to watch so many strangers make fools of themselves.
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The fear of “racial pollution” is at the heart of contemporary Amerikan fascism. The Great Replacement Theory™ took only a couple of decades to migrate from the neo-nazi fringes to primetime television. Fear of miscegenation is as old as Amerika; apparently, the boundaries of white bodies are supposed to be inviolable.
I’m convinced that most white nationalists would freely murder black and brown people if they could do so with impunity. They long to penetrate the boundaries of our bodies with bullets; many of them have spent years turning their homes into firearm depots in preparation for an anticipated “race war,” a term that’s going to be their alibi for genocide… that is, if they’re not stopped.
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Bodies, psyches, and relationships are permeable things. We sweat and protrude and devour, we think and hear and learn, we are changed by our interactions with others.
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The civilized maintain a formidable conceptual boundary between themselves and the rest of the living world; there’s us marvelous humans on top, and every“thing” else underneath. The idea—or rather, the reality—that the rest of the living world can and does communicate with us is regarded as quaint superstition at best, and madness at worst.
They can think what they want; trees talk to me all the time. Once I was on a hike, and a tree off in the distance hollered at me. I went over to investigate (Okay bro, I’m here, what’s up?), and discovered a geocache container wedged into a deep hole formed by the tree’s roots. My friends and I were so fascinated with examining this treasure box that it didn’t occur to me until years later that the tree had probably summoned me in the hope that I would take that goddamn thing away. Fortunately, trees are patient; someday I’ll go back and put that plastic anomaly in the trash where it belongs.
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Is there a greater boundary violation than the splitting of an atom?
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Shopping for lovers via websites and apps is match-making by algorithm—romance as multiple-choice test. This is a fundamentally industrial model—classification based on division. The apotheosis of the divided self is the isolated individual in front of a screen, disembodied and separated from all physical contact. We’ve been colonized by tech, turned into cyborgs; our boundaries of self are both defined and violated by machines.
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TechnoBabylon has colonized our physical beings with industrial pollutants, everything from micro-plastics and mercury to endocrine disruptors and dioxin. Cancer rates have skyrocketed in the last hundred years as a direct result of the total toxification of the environment; our bodies are now habitually violated by murderous, mutated cells, just as the land itself is infected with cancers of metal and cement. In such a world, how can the concept of boundaries have any meaning at all?
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While “personal boundaries” can be a useful metaphor, it ultimately obscures the real issue, which is the nature of civilization. The problem is not that victimized people have poor boundaries, it’s that we live in a system that consistently produces large numbers of abusive assholes.
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The physical and sexual abuse of women and children is endemic to this culture. It’s normal. What does it mean to have “healthy boundaries” in a culture that manufactures predators as a matter of course?
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I have an auntie who works with sex-trafficked youth. Their origin stories are straight from hell. Those kinds of experiences create a skewed view of reality, one in which love, attention, and affection are conflated with violence.
Recently she and I were discussing abusive relationships, and she put it this way: they never punch you in the face on the first date. Abuse and controlling behavior are things that escalate over time. Abusers insinuate themselves; slipping past boundaries is their specialty. Whether it’s conscious or not, they have strategy, tactics, and techniques, which abusers use because they work. One of their most effective tactics is getting their victims to blame themselves for the abuse. Emotional violence is a common and effective method of control, but if it fails, physical violence is rarely far behind.
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With the proper resources you can transform your house into a fortress of bars, locks, and surveillance, yet anyone who is committed to breaking in can still make it happen… especially if they’re cops.
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Back in 2015 I briefly dated a bisexual woman who spent her late teens and early twenties as a BDSM prostitute. Prior to meeting her I’d always written off kinksters as aliens from Planet Pyramid. So, despite being a member of the last generation of the counterculture, I never bothered to learn much about its satellite universe of kink; this woman gave me a window.
In listening to her, it was not so much the activities that fascinated me as the intricate taxonomy of her self-definitions of sexuality & gender. The internet-based identitarian scenes have long since metastasized into Real Life, creating a complex array of cybernetic identities with fanatical adherents. When she rattled off the terminology of her particular cult, it sounded to me like a dizzying string of x-rated computer code.
How could such a rigidly categorized self be anything other than fractured?
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A few years ago—the first time I got sick of hearing about boundaries—I said this in a conversation with a friend, and it remains true: a boundary that you are not willing and able to enforce is not a boundary; it’s a hope.
If I chalk a line on the cement and threaten to kill you if you cross it, then you cross it and I don’t kill you, not only has my boundary been crossed, but I’ve also shot my only bluff; I’m now at your mercy.
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There are a whole lot of women in prison for enforcing their physical boundaries, i.e. for killing their abusers.
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Because I refuse to use a smartphone, I have to find out about app trends from other people. I first found out about TikTok back in 2019 when I was still working with junior high students; they were all obsessed with it. It’s only gotten more popular. I don’t see the appeal, but I also wasn’t nursed on the mind-altering drug of an interactive screen.
TikTok is owned and tightly controlled by a company based in China, which means it’s basically a data-mining app for the Chinese government. The culture of Zero Privacy initiated by the internet over the last twenty years has become so normalized that every TikTok aficionado I’ve spoken to has had the exact same response when I mention that the app is most likely a tool of international espionage: they shrug their shoulders, then make snarky comments about China being welcome to their frivolous viewing history.
It wasn’t very long ago that people in this country were so incensed by Nixon spying on his domestic enemies that it resulted in his resignation. Now, people think nothing of providing a foreign government with their personal information.
Then again, this is the same population of people who have demonstrated few qualms about freely spreading covid, a frequently lethal infection. So much for boundaries.
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The phrase martial arts is an English rendering of the Chinese term wushu (fun fact: Bruce Lee may have been the first to coin the English phrase in print). The term is composed of two characters: wu, meaning military/martial, and shu, meaning art/skill/method/technique. The character wu is constructed of two separate radicals: zhi, which means to stop, and ge, which means weapon (dagger/spear/lance).
In other words, according to Chinese thought, that which is martial is that which can stop weapons.
Whether we’re talking about abuse by individuals or by institutions, if you want to “maintain healthy boundaries,” you’d better be willing and able to stop weapons… including those of the state.
