The Forever Box
A brief outline of punitive logic
So I don't know if everyone realizes this, but we all have a "forever box" we mentally maintain. In it you keep the platonic ideal of each kind of bad person, separated away from normal people in order to keep the normal people safe. To be clear, this isn't prison, this is just in your head, a space you keep all the bad people in. To clarify further, it has nothing to do with how you believe that bad things happen in real life. You believe in systems that teach people to behave in cruel ways to each other, you believe in mental health crises that make people act irrationally or in ways people find scary or harmful, you understand the cycle of abuse, and none of that stops you from maintaining a box in your head where all the bad people go. It is an abstract place in your mind, a blindspot in your consciousness, and unless you very intentionally apply the things you believe about how bad things happen in real life, you put people in your forever box when you find out they are a bad person.
It's okay that you have this for yourself. There has to be a space on the other side of all your boundaries where you want someone out of your life altogether. I have people in this box in my head who I know I can't have in my life and it's taken a lot of work to know that that isn't the case because they contain an essential ontological evil. Personal capacity is how you actually determine whether you need to cut someone out or not, but this creates a very murky space.
If you find out that someone used to say homophobic things 5 years ago but stopped, maybe you think that person has had long enough in the box. You don't even think it consciously, you just emotionally sit in the reality that they already, as it were, served their time. Notoriously, white people's capacity to find out that other white people said racist things in the past and decide that they've already learned their lesson is quite powerful, just like straight people's ability to find out someone said or did something hurtful to queer people and decide they've had plenty of reckoning for that already is quite powerful. The trick here is that each observer feels like they're determining how long is long enough but they're actually doing an emotional weighing up of how much this person means to them. Plenty of white people are willing to put other white people who don't mean anything to them in the forever box for being racist and keep them there if they're a person they find distasteful.
Imagine a racist. You just pictured someone you find distasteful. Now imagine your best friend saying something racist. Regardless of whether you would respond by challenging that person, trying to educate them, or ignoring it and pretending nothing happened, the emotional difference here is that you didn't put them in the forever box.
When you are deciding that someone is too inconvenient to have in your life, you will tell yourself that you aren't judging them to be a bad person, that you aren't engaging with the situation on a moral level. When you are explicitly passing judgement on someone and calling them a bad person, you make yourself blind to how you are making decisions based on convenience and capacity. I've had this happen to me, and I've done this to other people. It takes work, sometimes consistent sustained effort, not to turn people into cartoons in your head. Although we know emotionally that bad people go in the forever box, we actually only put abstractions of people there.
Someone who you've abstracted in this way, of course, is just on the other side of an incongruity in social reality, a wall between them and you and whoever shares your perspective and abstracts them in the same way. The forever box isn't actually real unless enough people have been told that you did something bad, and put you in their own box in their heads, and then suddenly it is horribly real, and you are in it. In the forever box you are alone. Crushingly, grindingly, deafeningly alone. You are going to stay here and think about what you've done. This is how the reality of social ostracisation starts to materialise.
Nobody got together to agree on the rules, but the forever box has rules nonetheless:
If you do something bad you go in the forever box.
If you try to help someone get out of the forever box, you go in the forever box. Associating with someone may count as helping them get out.
If you try to get out of the forever box, either by pretending you didn't do anything wrong or defending yourself, you get longer in the box.
Because of rule 1, we always know that people in the forever box are bad people. This is reassuring, but it drives the need for rule 2. Rule 2 creates a social pressure that leads to rule 3.
Rule 3 exists because when you don't personally put someone in your forever box but you know that other people say they're a bad person, you know that standing near them may result in you getting disappeared as well, and so any time the person talks or acts in a way that might be seen as evading or refusing punishment, your fear of that increases and sometimes this will result in you vanishing this person from your own life.
Here I want to explain the idea of having a "sentence" in a space that I've said is forever. This is an effect of the scaling of people's personal boundaries into a social force. If you were entirely cut out by 5 people, but they were the only people you knew, the amount of time that you would spend completely alone is the time until you make new friends, which might not be that hard especially if the 5 people who stopped speaking to you were concentrated together, for example roommates in a flatshare. On the other hand, if 1000 people all swore you off as a bad person, for example an entire neighbourhood or a school, it would at first be very difficult to meet people who didn't share their perspective.
This is why social cliques, like in high school, that put pressure on all their participants to have the exact same view of someone are able to rapidly exclude and isolate someone for whom opinion shifts, but the obviousness of this is also what keeps everyone in the clique under control - that's the rules of the forever box working.
People who derive emotional security from the use of the forever box need the forever box to keep working, and in some cases need for it to never ever ever have been used incorrectly, unjustly, and this means that listening to anyone in the forever box, discussing the legitimacy of them being in there, or sometimes even acknowledging that the forever box exists is unacceptable.
For bigots, the desire to drive marginalized people out of public life is putting the entire group into a forever box. When I said at the start of this that the forever box isn't prison, that was a bit of a fib, because prison is very literally manifesting a physical reality of our shared imaginary bad person space, with sentences to serve painstakingly decided by a lengthy legal tradition and a whole set of professionals so that people can believe in some kind of justice being achieved by putting people there.
When people have been in prison, their access to employment, education, democracy, stable housing, food, healthcare, social rehabilitation are all permanently damaged unless there is incredibly intense work undertaken to fix them, and even then they're unlikely to ever be rich or famous or widely respected unless they were already those things before they went into prison. This is the forever box in everyone's heads working in tandem with the carceral system. There is a full spectrum of partly realised systems of punishment between the abstraction of the forever box in your head and the physical reality of a prison cell, and all of them serve to reinforce class divisions.
When marginalised people describe a sense that bigots want them all locked up, or deported or in camps or just plain gone, this is because they feel the direction of this social pressure, the pressure of disappearance, like a wind that blows softer or harder against them. It is so easy for people not in that marginalised group to dismiss this as exaggeration because they don't feel the wind blowing that way at any speed.
Social media (as in, the specific and intentional design of modern social media platforms) provides us with tools to caricature, abstract and alienate each other, and just like the punitive logic of prisons this functions as a way to use our energies on becoming more divided and so easier to control by the ruling class. At the same time as it makes us more reactive and ready to insult and misunderstand and then ultimate block each other, the people who find it easiest to group together and stick together are the people who feel thrown away and judged - this drives both the modern reactionary trend on social media and the famous "why I left the left" right-wing pivot of canceled celebrities.
What is the point in outlining all of this? Well firstly, to challenge how power currently exists in the world we have to understand how people turn to punitive methods for a sense of justice, because the power that a social system has is often granted to it by people's willingness to believe it can bring them justice. Secondly, once we understand the difference between setting your own personal boundaries and trying to make someone else suffer, we can talk about a better way to create something like justice in response to harm. Then, thirdly, if we can put that into practice in real terms and not turn to the impulse for punishment, we can create a society people actually want to live in rather than one people are scared of being excluded from.