I am Human, and Nothing Human is Alien to me

In the light of the release of ‘Framing Britney Spears’ documentary, portraying, what seems to be a perpetual tragedy, Spears’ life, I decided to make a little YouTube search and ran across a fan-made documentary series, and the story of Spears’ life shook me.

The documentary reveals the truth about conservatorship that Britney Spears has been forcefully kept under by her family for the last 13 years. The conservatorship meant that Spears couldn’t make any legal decisions on her own, was restricted in her movements and could not have control of her own finances.

Though I can’t make any claims with regards to the legitimacy of all the facts described in the documentary, I know one thing for sure: it was heartbreaking to watch her life unfold with no people she could trust around her and being treated like a walking dollar sign.

There was this moment in the video where she was at a petrol station, late at night, exhausted and shuttered to pieces, having a quiet moment of peace after a recent breakdown, that resulted in her shaving off her hair. A moment where she could pause and take a breath… only to get disturbed, yet again, by paparazzi trying to take a shot of her.

Her words:

‘Please, please, guys, don’t’ —

sounded like a desperate cry for help that got yet ignored for the sake of insatiable greed.

This made my heart sink and made me wonder…

Is it okay to be a bitch sometimes?

I found myself wondering, would it have been better if she had smashed the cameras out of those paparazzi’s hands with the umbrella she was holding?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not the person to promote violence, but I kept on wondering, why she wouldn’t do something about them. The whole time she was so sweet, so friendly to the oppressors, to the people who were robbing her of her freedom, of her basic human right. Was she conditioned by society to be nice, to be a ‘good girl’? And how many of us still are?

The coping mechanism

With all that dirt poured onto a person, with the feeding-frenzy public cruelty, one becomes a walking zombie… numb to any feeling.

Watching the footage brought up the memories of the time when as a teenager, I was going through a year of being bullied at school. The freezing, all-encompassing sticky fear that chains you down into submission and despair.

And was it the whole class that turned against me? No, they were just two teenagers steering the dirt — yet it’s curious to see how little others did to stop the bullying. Were others blind to the situation? Or was that the fear of standing up for someone, going against the current and risking getting “ostracised by the tribe”? Or was it a secretly enjoyed primal animal desire to finish off the weak and the suffering?

Why did Spears’ celebrity peers do nothing about her situation? Were they busy with their lives and simply unaware? Were they secretly jealous of her worldwide fame and success?

Or were they fearful to offer her a helping hand?

This made me think of Jordan Peterson’s take on human nature:

‘Well, if you’re harmless you’re not virtuous, you’re just harmless, you’re like a rabbit; a rabbit isn’t virtuous, it just can’t do anything except get eaten. That’s not virtuous. If you’re a monster, and you don’t act monstrously, then you’re virtuous. <…> The hero has to be a monster. But a controlled monster. You have to be a monster, so you could say ‘No’. And you need to learn it, because part of how you regulate your interactions with other people is to negotiate, and you cannot negotiate unless you can say ‘No’. So you have to develop your inner monster a little bit. And then that makes you a better person, not a worse person.’

This resonated with me deeply… However, writing this and thinking about that time of my life brought up some other memories — the memories of the times when I, myself, was unkind and cruel to others, following the crowd and not being my best self.

Are we all monsters?

So why are we cruel to each other? Is this a desire to feel superior to someone else? A wicked status game? Plain envy? The pain you can only understand after being on the other side of oppression?

In the same interview, Jordan Peterson argues that it isn’t about the good we can do, but the harm that we can inflict. He continues by stating how the most horrific events in history are also about us:

‘I think my experience was, when I took that seriously, which meant understanding how that was about me, you know? That Auschwitz was about me, the Stalinist camps were about me. Then, well… that reorients you.’

He continues that it’s a deep part of the “shadow idea” and that the part of the idea is taking the sins of the world onto yourself.

The same idea pierces through the words of Dr Maya Angelou, an American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist:

‘I’d like everybody to think of a statement by Terence. The statement is: “I am a human being. Nothing human can be alien to me.” If you can internalize at least a portion of that, you will never be able to say of a criminal act, “Oh, I couldn’t do that,”— no matter how heinous a crime. If a human being did it, you have to say, “I have all the components that are in her or in him. I intend to use my energies ​constructively as opposed to ​destructively.”’

I’d say it is a miracle Britney Spears is alive today, given the hardships she had suffered and the events she had to go through. Thanks to the efforts of her loyal fans and decent lawyers her conservatorship has been terminated after 13 long years.

Despite the happy ending, when I’m looking at Spears’ Instagram feed I can’t shake off the feeling of sadness, as if witnessing the woman who had been robbed of so much joy and the prime years of her youth…

The world is full of kind and beautiful people, but even good people do bad things. We all do, and we grow through experience.

Watch out for evil and fight back with dignity and poise.