Chapter 10g: Love Brings Accountability

At the end of the Juneteenth panel she was assigned to watch, the moderator — Gary Bailey, a professor at a social-work school in Boston — says one thing before closing.

He has spent two hours with his panelists cataloguing, in specific detail, the profession's failures. The child-welfare removals of Black and Brown children. Participation in Japanese-American internment. Sterilization of women. Early segregation of settlement houses. The panel has not been reverent. It has been honest. And then Bailey says, in his own words: I reflect on a profession that I love and hold dear. And because I love it, I hold it to a level of accountability. Love, for me, brings a level of accountability.

The love is not the softening that comes after the critique. The love is the reason the critique was possible.

She watches that moment several times.

The book has been doing what Bailey named, in several parts of her own life, without having a name for it.

The book loves the Śaiva tantric tradition she has been studying. It has devoted more chapters to it than to any other single influence. It has also held the tradition to account — has named lineage warnings, flagged moments where recognition did not translate into ethical conduct, refused to let the tradition's internal vocabulary do all the work of justifying what the tradition has done in the world. The love and the accountability are the same gesture. She had not thought to name the gesture.

The book loves the AI-safety work the more honest labs are attempting. Dario Amodei's essays have accompanied her for the year the book was written. The book has also held the field to account — has refused the easy maximalism, named the places where the filter is not being applied, noticed sycophancy without pretending the problem has been solved. The love is why the critique is possible. A critic who did not love the field would not have spent the attention required to see what it is and is not doing.

The book loves her marriage. It has said so in chapters she is still slightly embarrassed about. It has also named where the marriage has been hard, where it has failed, where the work has had to be rebuilt. The love has not been softened by the naming. The love has been sharpened.

What the book has, until now, withheld from this structure is the social-work profession — because the book had, until now, withheld the love too.

These are not one tradition agreeing with itself through her. These are distinct parts of her life. What is shared across them is not a doctrine. What is shared is the posture she has taken, learned from Bailey, applied to each on its own terms.

She came to social work sideways. She had spent her twenties in equity research, her early thirties at the intersection of technology and contemplative practice. The Master of Social Work arrived as a pivot. She had not expected the program to reach her as deeply as it has. She had expected a credential; she received a reorganization.

She loves the profession. She has not said so in the book because she had not, until recently, been in the profession long enough to say so without the sentence sounding provisional.

Bailey's sentence gave her permission.

Because I love it, I hold it to a level of accountability.

She loves the profession and she holds it to account. The profession participated in, and in some registers still participates in, structural harms she cannot pretend away. The profession has also kept a thread alive — across the Hull House period, across the civil-rights period, across the current decade — of people who have refused to be anything other than honest about what the work is for. The thread is thin. It is not the whole profession. It is the part of the profession the profession needs to grow from. The part of the profession the part of her loves.

The mechanics of accountable love, as the book has slowly been discovering them, are these.

Accountable love refuses the exit. The book has watched a pattern, across the last decade, that she has come to think of as the spiritual exit — the person who, having realized the imperfection of an institution she loved, chose to leave and to construct her own, cleaner version outside. She has watched the pattern among people who left churches, left universities, left professions, left marriages. She has watched the pattern produce, with depressing regularity, a second institution that developed its own imperfections more rapidly than the first, because the second was built by people who believed the first institution's imperfections were its fault rather than the predictable result of what happens when imperfect humans make anything together.

The spiritual exit is not love. It is love that has refused the accountability — that has declined to stay in the relationship long enough to do the hard work of shifting the relationship from inside.

This is not a rule. There are institutions one must leave. The Axiom makes a concession to this on the facing page.

In the same period the book has been written, she left a contemplative organization she had been part of for seven years. The Arcane School was a meditation community with theosophical roots. What took her out was not impatience or a failure of appetite for the slow work. What took her out was her eighth-week reading in the anti-oppression course, in which she finally had language for what she had been noticing in the teachings: that the racial taxonomy underneath the cosmology was irreducible, that the architecture carried the nineteenth-century racial science that had produced it, and that no amount of good-faith reframing from contemporary students could compost what was woven into the building itself. She left. She wrote to the group to name why. She did not attempt to build a cleaner version; she took what had been adaptive in her own practice — attention, discipline, the habit of sitting — and carried those forward into other containers.

Leaving is not always the spiritual exit. Sometimes leaving is the accountable thing. The distinction the book wants to draw is not stay always but stay unless the structure cannot be reformed from inside, and when you leave, do not perform the leave as if it settled anything. Leaving the Arcane School did not settle the racial-science problem that ran through its materials. It relieved her of being a participant in the problem. The problem continues without her. Her responsibility continues without her being in the room. Accountable love, in her reading, includes knowing when the love can no longer be the form of accountability because the love would be complicity.

What accountable love never permits is pretending the leaving is an achievement, or that the institution left behind has now been diagnosed completely. The leaving is one move in a longer work. The other moves — paying attention to whom the institution still harms, staying in correspondence with former teachers when correspondence is still possible, writing honestly about what the institution got right and what it got wrong — remain available after the door closes.

Three parts of her life, loved accountably.

She loves the Śaiva nondual tradition her teacher teaches. She holds it to account for the hidden harms in lineages adjacent to her teacher's, for moments it has over-promised what recognition would produce, for moments it has let more charismatic members absolve themselves of ordinary human requirements. She loves it because it named something for her nothing else named. She holds it to account because naming is not enough.

She loves the AI-safety work a specific set of labs is attempting. She holds it to account for the times the work has been instrumentalized, for the times the language of safety has been used to market products that are not safe, for the times the field has not distinguished clearly enough between what it knows and what it hopes. She loves it because it has the clearest understanding of the stakes she has encountered in any technical community. She holds it to account because the stakes do not self-adjudicate.

She loves the social-work profession she is entering. She holds it to account for the child-welfare disproportionality, for the settler-colonial complicity, for the moments the profession has sold out the populations it was formed to serve, for the moments it still does. She loves it because it is the only Western profession she has found whose explicit stated mission is to hold individual wellbeing and social justice together as one task. She holds it to account because the mission and the performance have often diverged.

Three distinct things, each on its own terms. One posture, taken by her, from Bailey. Because I love it, I hold it to a level of accountability. The posture is the filter applied with warmth. It is what she has been doing in the book and had not, until the end of the video, known what to call.

Her professor sent feedback on the growth-plan paper in which this argument first appeared as something nearer its mature form. The professor had said, gently, that the author should not write off private practice in her enthusiasm for macro work. Meaningful anti-oppression work could happen in private practice while the practitioner remained actively involved in social justice at the community level.

The professor had not used Bailey's vocabulary. The professor had modeled Bailey's posture. She had loved the profession too much to let her student walk away from a whole part of it in a fit of macro-purist enthusiasm. She had held the student to account without making the student feel held. That, the author thinks now at the desk, is the practice this chapter has been trying to describe. The book will be better for having a professor's note in it. The book will be better for admitting that the love is the condition on which the accountability is honest, and that the accountability is the condition on which the love does not rot.

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