Not Like The Others

Perhaps the greatest difficulty with moral (or moralized) distinctions is that they can make it difficult for a person to portray what they are doing as being different from what other people do, without also making the case that is it better.

I've been noodling on this idea recently, because I was considering what is sometimes termed the crab mentality. The metaphor was first laid out me by my father, who was using it to explain what he saw as dysfunction in the broader Black community. I've run into it several times since then, and a recent article I was reading on Aeon about "momfluencers," and other forms of family-based influencers.

The common thread is that whether people are comparing a group to a bucket of crabs or noting how people will make questionable choices to satisfy a craving for online engagement and material resources, the critic rarely includes themselves in the actual group of people being criticized. When my father first told me of the crab mentality, he was one of the crabs attempting to break out of the bucket, and being pulled down by others. When Ms. Sebag-Montefiore notes that people will share their children with the world in order to garner attention for brands and material comfort for themselves, she pointedly exempts herself from all of it: the "sharenting," the quest for validation and money and, most pointedly, the quest for self-esteem via buying the "right" brands.

There isn't anything wrong with this, of course, but the moralistic tone that attaches to metaphors like the crab mentality or noting "I have decided that I don’t need their products, or their inspiration. I don’t need to see how they live their lives to know how I should live mine," carry the whiff of condescension. Simply because they do. If I have a place in a crab mentality, I suspect that it isn't that of the bravely non-conformist crab. (I don't know what role a cranky, curmudgeonly crab might have in it.) And what's shielded me from influencer culture is mostly a faint disdain for youth that's (perhaps ironically) persisted from my own youth. But I'm not sure that I understand how to describe my own life choices as simply being different, because they work for me, rather than better, because I'm somehow a more ethical person.