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I think we should talk about loyalty, especially in the workplace, but just in general in our culture.

It is at once overvalued and undervalued in a bunch of ways, and I think we often misplace it.

There's loyalty to authority; loyalty to our group; loyalty to a partner; loyalty to a fandom.

But the thing about loyalty is it's kinda empty until it's tested, and we find out what that's really about. And testing loyalty either destroys groups or strengthens them.

Mx. Aria Stewart

It's fascinating how things break when there's conflict:

Loyalty to authority is often how a lot of bullshit happens to people lower ranked in the workplace. It's the core of the pyramid-structured workplace and its dysfunctions. This is how middle management sells out workers: when their loyalty is tested, they either side with authority, against workers, or they get the boot.

Individual workers are often rewarded for loyalty to those in positions of authority, given chances at promotion and growth. Often to the detriment of their peers: this is the backstabbing politics of some corporate culture.

Loyalty to other workers, not management, is the core of union organizing. We call this solidarity. It’s usually a good thing because it's a counter-force to loyalty to authority. And when it's tested, that's when the union fails or succeeds.

It's also why promoting people out of the union and into management is such an effective way to undermine a union: it puts those loyalties in conflict. Most people crumple under it, and the law in the US at least is aligned with authority once that happens. A manager has to defer to the authority.

Loyalty to our group is generally a good thing: cohesive social bonds are built out of loyalty and trust. They can also be abused: we call this tribalism, or often even more horrific, kompromat, loyalty forced out of blackmail, to achieve evil ends, criminal or political. Organized crime uses this to enforce loyalty. Political parties use this to discipline members.

But solidarity that runs counter to the destructive power structures in our society mitigate them to some degree. This is the core of resistance of oppression.

So much of our marital fidelity talk is really better as talk about loyalty. I'm polyamorous enough to have a big middle finger for ‘fidelity' phrased that way, but I’ve go a huge loyalty to my partner (and friends, I've got an intimate core set of relationships in my life who loyalty to has no conflicts, and who I've got deeply developed relationships to)

Loyalty to our partners means not hurting them; when something tries to drive a wedge from outside, it means standing together. It's the unifying concept between not cheating and supporting each other. It means prioritizing and defending that relationship.

And when it's tested ... that's when marriages really succeed or really fail. So often that's cheating, but it's really about the crumbled loyalty, not the sleeping around.

But there's a dark side of marital loyalty in our culture: we frame all cross-sex relations for straight couples as a threat to the relationship. So many people frame any interaction with someone of the opposite sex as a test of loyalty, they're constantly stressing those bonds. Or, if not, giving up a huge amount of relationship with their community. It leaves us with more acceptable homosociality.

And then there's the times a homosocial relationship comes before a marital partnership. That gets ugly fast: sometimes it means a callous “just dump her, dude", and people do out of loyalty to "the guys”; vice versa, too. "just dump him”, with no regard to the fact that men, too, have emotional lives. The homosocial loyalty over relational loyalty can be incredibly destructive, and even enable abuse.

We’re so bad about talking about loyalty and specifically _conflicts_ in loyalty, and unaddressed, those conflicts are deeply destructive.

In my original post, I mention loyalty to a fandom. This plays a huge part in our culture in the US. Particularly, sporting fandom.

We even have relatively socially acceptable tests of that loyalty — show up on game days in full cosplay, tussle with people cosplaying rival teams — and this is part of what makes that fandom intense and persistent. Those tests of social bonds are frequent but not conflicted enough to stress them, so they reinforce a feeling of belonging. It's powerful. I wish more people could use that power for good. A few sports players do manage to manipulate (mostly a positive sense) their fans into donating to some worthy causes by tying their loyalty to the fandom to doing that charitable work. That's powerful stuff that in other contexts, we could do more of.

That actually points to a common manipulation (that isn't always bad, but deserves awareness): "real X do Y”, where X is a group-member, and Y is something with social proof that serves as evidence of loyalty.

They can be excluding, othering manipulations, or extorting ones. But also they serve to reinforce in-group behavior: “Real engineers test their code before releasing it to production" “Real leftists support their communities”

Back in the workplace: that loyalty to authority has a core of goodness in it; it's not all bad as much as I detest it: people with power can protect us, and that serves us well very often. It's no wonder we short-circuit to trusting people in power. But it harms us relatively often. We need to do it with our eyes open.

@aredridel

I've learned a great deal from the kink community. Dominance and submission are natural urges that some people experience very strongly, and they CAN be acted upon in healthy, mutually beneficial ways when people learn how to be very clear about what they want and what they're doing, with CONSENT.

And consciously channeling those impulses can give people an outlet, instead of just stuffing it down under clueless repression and winding up unconsciously acting it out in weird, unsafe ways with people who didn't sign up for that crap.