Yes, I’ve come across that a lot. Another variation is that when you tell the story of what’s happening and why you want their help, they will agree with everything you say and agree how shocking it all is and say that they will help…but they don’t. For one reason or another, they keep putting it off…fail to follow through… eventually you realise it’s never going to happen, but you’ve wasted heaps of time that could’ve been used to find other sources of help, because you believed them, and months later the problem is still there. I have now realised what is going on is that they think privately you or the person you want to help is wrong, but that it’s important for you to get it off your chest, because you don’t really want practical help, you just want to let off steam.

I think that — as well as what at first glance looks like its inverse (not sure I can describe it, but it at first glance looks like the polar opposite of the “please everyone” thing) — comes from mixing up… something social and something political, hard to figure out how to describe it.

It’s the reason a lot of self-advocacy groups that are effective, will have a separate social group. Because the moment that being liked by your friends, and agreeing with them political, become equated, you’ll get people who sacrifice the political in order to keep their friends, and people who deliberately try to piss off everyone in sight for its own sake because they think that’s what being political or radical means (and seriously believe that they must be in the wrong ethically if they’re nice to people, or if people, and/or just whoever they deem powerful, like them socially).

So both of those things seem like two sides of the same messed-up coin to me, but apparently create a lot of fervent opposition to each other between people who sacrifice all politics to keep their social ties, and people who sacrifice all social ties for politics. I’ve weirdly enough seen both me and laurentius mistaken for both (and I think both are massive versions of the same essential error).

Honestly, I think there are a lot of organizations that manage to coast along and keep a decently high profile while doing minimal work, because people feel good about themselves when they donate to or join them. I guess that’s kind of a cynical way to phrase it, so elaborating: I think it’s very common for people to look around them at all the problems that exist in the world, and despair because they don’t know what they can do about them, and/or the only people who are in a place to do anything about them have huge amounts of money and power, far beyond what most people can ever hope to have. Many organizations and charities give the impression that if you join them or give them money, you’re helping to be part of the solution (a lot of them phrase it explicitly in those terms) and gaining power to make actual change through that organization, implying that it has or can potentially have the credibility, money or power to do things about issues that many people are concerned about. It helps people feel like they aren’t helpless, like they aren’t at the whim of powerful politicians and corporations, that there is hope after all.

And there’s nothing wrong with that in itself– with wanting to grasp at what seems to be a light because you’re desperate to find *some* way to make a difference in a world that seems unbearably unfair. And there are some organizations and charities that really do stick to the promise of doing what they do, and succeed at it, to greater or lesser degrees, but there are way too many that are just good at giving people the illusion of having power and the chance to make a difference– there’s little connection between the one end where they’re soliciting memberships and donations, and the other where they’re supposed to be taking concrete action but don’t. The best you can say for some of them is that they give people a chance to make connections with others who are like-minded.

Another big problem we noticed was the issue of leaders who thought they could find some perfect “compromise” position in which they could somehow please everyone, and/or leaders who didn’t want to take the chance of acquiring a bad reputation, anywhere. The “let’s keep everybody happy” leaders tend to either end up making statements that are so vague, ambiguous or wishy-washy as to mean nothing at all, or seeking ways to please their “enemies” and making statements that will keep them at arm’s length (while selling out huge parts of the community they’re supposed to be helping, but hey, as long as you’re never a controversial figure with the powerful people and none of them dislike you, that’s the only thing that matters, right?).

Another way that leaders like that operate is to kind of make themselves a background figure while gathering a bunch of “minions” around themselves, and inciting them to be the ones who do the “dirty work” which could make them unpopular in some communities. An example of this we’ve seen is people who constantly make emails or blog posts telling people to “write to X politician about this issue,” while never actually writing anything themselves.

Some people seem to have this idea that it is possible to challenge existing power structures without powerful people getting very angry that you’re trying to take away some of that power from them, or at least distribute it around more evenly, and attempt to force you back into your “proper place,” and I just… don’t think that can ever happen. Generally, in our experience, it also tends to be the more privileged members of a community who do this, those who can almost “pass for normal” (whatever the “norm” is considered to be, for the given thing) and whose lives and safety aren’t threatened too directly by the attitudes and structures they want to challenge. We definitely see this in the autistic community, a lot of it. Not to say that every single person who’s in that position is going to believe it’s possible to bring about change while keeping everyone happy, but almost everyone who holds that view could be described that way.

And it does make it damn near impossible, in some communities, to find any place where there’s real self-advocacy going on.

Some people are very proud of their granfalloons indeed, and spend a great deal of effort defending them — whether those be organizations, or nations and ethnicities, or religious groups.

And the thing about a granfalloon is that it doesn’t have to do anything useful! Insofar as it as a purpose, that purpose is just to make its members feel good for belonging to it.

(I wonder if he invented the word “granfalloon” by combining “grand”, “fallacy”, and “balloon”: something proud, foolish, and inflated with its own self-importance.)