#contradictory leftism

[a-very-tired-jew]

Maintaining the illusion of being a good person

Since 10/7 there has been a consistent thread that the UN is an arbiter of truth, or something, regarding the conflict because it was reprimanding Israel (and has consistently done so in the past). As such, I often heard from activists that because the UN said something it must be accepted as truth. Now with the publishing of the UN’s report of sexual violence on 10/7 and its findings, I am currently seeing various activists backtrack. Suddenly the UN is no longer trustworthy. Suddenly it’s a corrupt entity run by the Jews Zionists and the report needs to be dismissed as Jewish Zionist propaganda.

It’s almost like their endorsement and justification of violent resistance through any means necessary was a fantasy. Any means necessary doesn’t actually mean that. No “good” resistance fighter against a the colonial oppressor would actually commit atrocities against civilians, right? At least, not in their fantasy uprising.

But it happened, and it has been independently confirmed by one of the organizations they’ve routinely turned to. Now many of these have to deal with the cognitive dissonance that they’re actually not the “good” person they believed they were. Their past comments about believing all victims, supporting victims, that sexual assault is a horrific and people who commit it are monsters, etc… all of that is contradicted by this report.

It’s almost like they either didn’t understand what they were actually endorsing and justifying or they’re realizing that they’re hypocrites masquerading as good people for morality points.

[a-very-tired-jew]

I know a few people are saying this is a troll. I'm of the mind it could be a 50/50 chance of troll vs not troll. Why? I'm in a variety of activist spaces and they hem and haw when rape of Israelis by Hamas and associates is brought up. When the first reports showed up in November they quickly went from "believe all victims" to "question if Israelis are actually victims". This position correlates with their repeated justification of all violent resistance is valid (implying that sexual assault is therefore a valid method). Multiple times I saw some version of "Even if Hamas did do this, it doesn't mean their actions are bad. All forms of resistance are valid." I even saw one person even try to say that accusing Hamas of sexual violence was Islamophobic.

These spaces also clamored for victim accounts and denied the veracity of medical personnel and responder reports. Since the latest interviews with hostages have come out about the sexual violence they experienced these spaces have banned anyone bringing it up because it causes cognitive dissonance. Having to justify sexual violence against people is at odds with many of their beliefs. What they have posted is the recently outed as falsified stories by Al Jazeera, and these spaces have not retracted them either. So while this is my personal experience, and anecdotes are not the best evidence, there's enough incidents out there to indicate that even if this is a bait, there are people who believe this.

"sexual assault isn't ressistance" seriously stop trying to conform to western purity standards! we cannot resist zions oppression with people like you telling everyone what can and can't be praxis!!! people are going to have to face conasqences for what their countries do and this type of praxis has been done in the swana region for thousands of years!!!

What the fuck how do I even answer this? How are tankies this wrong about humans?

Chat, is it imperialism to think rape is bad?

[thedandelionresistance]

What is a revolution?

I've seen so many people think of a revolution as a bloody, violent thing. Taking a better society, wresting power from the hands of the powerful with force. Eliminating societal undesirables as the unspoken bonus goal: the disabled who rely on medical supply lines, the homeless who rely on community and state support initiatives, the children already caught in the crossfire of their parents' ownership and the state's enforcement of it.

I've seen fellow leftists - socialists, anarchists - reject the concept of revolution for that reason, and I'm right there with them... except the word revolution is still meaningful to us.

So... what is a revolution?

Is blood the only fuel, or can we find a clean energy source? Can it be so unlike YA revenge fantasies and instead be a tsunami of overwhelming compassion and community? Can it be gradual, ongoing, not a Rapture nor a cleansing but simply a process day by day? Can it be a living thing, breathing with the collective oxygen and dreams of a whole world?

What if a revolution is all the small things? Asking your disabled neighbor what form of help would be most helpful to them and doing what you can. Making (food-restriction-safe) food for people who can eat it. Sharing resources and building social programs that'll catch the vulnerable as the rot in the state condemns it. Sharing freely and fearlessly and not blaming others for the way they cope with a world that is still often cruel when they aren't hurting anyone else. Taking according to your need and giving according to your ability, including with how you take action to take care of others.

rev·o·lu·tion·ar·y

adjective

1. involving or causing a complete or dramatic change.

Things never truly change when power is seized and hierarchies redistributed. Every "revolution" of blood and death fails at its fundamental intent.

But what, then, could be more revolutionary than one step at a time, making the world a little brighter? Call me naïve, call me idealistic, but those who cannot even imagine a better future largely can't make one. (If you can't imagine it because of despair though, let us do that work for you, and we'll bring you with us for as long as you'll come.)

What could cause a more complete change than simply changing how each of us treat other people, bit by bit? What could be a more dramatic change than merely building a home and a hearth, brick by brick?

What could make things better more than never stopping trying to make things better? (Not doing everything right all the time, but just pushing to do as much as you can, whatever that means in any given moment, and forgiving yourself your own flaws and mistakes.)

Our revolution is life lived, not checkbox checked. It lives, it breathes, it feels, it laughs, it cries, it grows. Most of all, it seeks out a thousand thousand other small revolutions and builds communities of change.

That is revolution.

[aorish]

i feel like "leftism" broadly defined is a coalition, best thought not as being between "marxists" and "anarchists" but between two groups that could be called "technocratic communism" and "politics of the oppressed" which are frequently wholly incompatible with each other on almost all major points of doctrine, but which can exist under the same banner so long as it exists a fringe extremist political movement in most countries in the world. Where leftism breaks out of this cycle of infighting and self-sabotage, I largely expect that only one of these two popular currents prevails, but where it continues to circle the drain of irrelevancy, likely both currents can be found even within the same individual activists, who are so torn that they are helpless to notice the contradictory nature of their ideology.

[drdemonprince]

I've noticed a pattern in anticapitalist books I read (specifically I'm talking abt Mark Fisher here, in Capitalist Realism). They do this great anticapitalist analysis etc and then go on to critique their students? and sometimes it's a bit ableist? it's like all the critical thought goes out of the window and they cannot understand the situation because for once suddenly they are in the authoritative position. It always gives me this "I don't understand these kids, back in my day-" vibe, and I see this with lecturers at university too. like Mark Fisher maybe we can think outside the box about your student who "needs" headphones to focus in class "even though no music is playing". and maybe it's not to do with the "Matrix"(????) I'm well aware this was written in 2008 but it's weird that I see this pattern continue today. Not to mention Mark Fisher took part in some ableist studies, and was a guy with questionable intentions on occasion.

it's like you Just said that reducing labour is good why are you calling your students lazy, that's so unprofessional and privileged. I wonder of coincidence that he is anti-meds when his right wing, pro-eugenics, accelerationist friend was addicted to amphetamines.

Or even just the amount of people who have written books about laziness and anticapitalism (excluding you) and just saying the most contradictory shit ever?? or not following their own ideology???

Anyway, I wonder if, when writing Laziness Does Not Exist, you came across any of this and were equally as baffled.

Materialism is just *so* true that high-status academics don't have a vested class interest in seeing their student struggles as legitimate or in recognizing the struggles of disabled people in general. For many edgy academic leftists having the correct opinions is just a way to flex one's intellectual status, not a lived experience they give a shit about. I'm not shitting Fisher in particular in saying this, it's more that it's a really widespread problem in the culture of these kinds of (very white, very academic, very cishet) leftists communities. You see the same kind of thing among some of the Chapo stan types, too, you don't have to be specifically an academic to do it -- lots of people throwing around the r-slur and flexing on how much they have read and doing fuck all for the oppressed people around them. I tend to find it especially common among people who inherited leftism from their (often academic) parents? Whereas leftist communities populated by Black & brown anarchists and working class people tend to fare a lot better in this particular respect.

Note that I'm not saying a person's identities are a guarantee of them being any more radical -- there's lots of liberals lurking in our midsts of all identities for instance -- more that someone's orientation toward power tells you a lot. and unfortunately there is an approach to leftism that puts a lot of stock in either institutional power via the academy, or in a kind of soft power of intellectual authoritativeness that tends to punish anyone who is supposedly less well read, less intelligent, lazy, needs disability accommodations, has trauma triggers, or what have you.

The simple answer is that power and privilege obscures other people's challenges from you, and the desire to preserve one's power (be it actually institutional academic authority or just the status of the person who supposedly knows the most in the room) leads to a lot of oppressive behavior. a lot of these guys that you're talking about believe in communism sincerely but they don't have humility, they believe themselves to be superior to most everyone else. and they tend to be white guys from wealthy families who either do not have any disabilities of their own, or they have the undiagnosed intj mastermind rational flavor of autism that makes you feel incredibly alienated from others but interpret that alienation as a sign of your intellectual superiority. (i had this type but i got better. a little)

[drbased]

A typical healthy consciousness wants two things: firstly, it wants to be viewed as a complete whole, separate from outside influence and fully responsible for everything it does; secondly, it wants the freedom to be able to completely dismiss certain behaviours as not part of the whole under the guise of 'I don't know what came over me!' 'I just lost control' 'I don't know why I did that' etc.

We see this in other people all the time: we all have a friend who insists their relationship problems are never their fault, or a relative who swiftly changes the subject when you bring up their wine-drinking habit. Everyone wants the safety net: I am always me, untouchable and knowable only to me, apart from when I do things that are totally unknowable to me. You see this phenomenon play out in the response to statistics: advertisement is a bajillion-dollar industry which shows that people do respond (like sheeple, if you will) to stimulus and buy the things they're advertised. But every single person, myself included, secretly thinks of themselves as a pure individual, who makes rational decisions and is unaffected by pathetic things such as pictures and words. But if someone has a subconscious personal ulterior motive for consuming certain products, say as the result of an addiction, that motivation stays unknown to them - and it's evident that they very much want it that way.

These two facets are as contradictory as they are complimentary, as are many aspects of this convoluted tangle of concepts we call the 'self'. It is these two facets that make things like advertising work - people have to arrogantly believe that they're responsible for every single one of their behaviours - but the moment you point this out to them and that their spending habits are damaging to them and they should take responsibility for their actions, suddenly you're the bad guy, because you've broken this very important psychological illusion. In fact, one might say that this is the primary illusion that makes up the self as we know it: too much awareness and the person is trapped forever in an existential terror, unable to make any decision because the weight of responsibility is too much; and too little awareness means you may as well be an animal driven by pure instinct. So the psyche constantly walks a tightrope between 'I am me and always accountable for my actions' and 'but I'm not accountable for this action because I don't like what it would say about me if I was'.

A huge social faux pas that leftism enacts is that it removes the safety net of 'I'm not accountable for this action/thought/belief' and instead cuts right through this fundamental illusion of the psyche. Historically, your average apolitical person could be safe in the knowledge that because they've categorised themselves as not racist, any racist jokes they say are not a product of racism, but rather lighthearted fun. They want to be judged on the 'content of their character' and they want the content of their character to be what they've decided, and the only thing they want to be held accountable for. But when you point out that making racist jokes is something that someone of their particular background does, and is typically done to achieve a certain affect, therefore their behaviour fits into a statistical pattern that says something about themselves from an external perspective - something about themselves that they don't like the sound of - they, uhh, really don't like you doing that. No one does, because you've smashed through the illusion that they're making conscious choices from their isolated brain; what you've done is you've observed their precious individuality and put it into a standardised pattern of behaviour. You've, in essence, told them who they are.

And you're probably right: patterns of behaviour, both within one person's lifetime and across populations, tell us a lot more about a person, their intentions and reasoning, than what they will ever want to admit about themselves. Unfortunately, in the case of politics, you can't really get past this hurdle. You have to make the awkward leap of telling people who they are, and pray and hope for the best that the discomfort they feel leads them to try to change their behaviour. But I believe that this is why you can't really change people in a one-on-one argument. You try telling someone something as simple and basic as this: 'the reason why you have a sudden mysterious urge to go the corner shop every tuesday at 7pm is because your husband brings his friend Bill over, and you really can't stand Bill' - they're going to immediately brush you off, and next tuesday at 7pm they'll be musing once again 'I always fancy going on a walk then, I don't know why!' and you'll want to bang your head against the wall in frustration.

On the more extreme end, it's very common for addicts to come out the other side and realise that they never healed their relationship with their parents, for example; but if you saw that connection at the height of their addiction, would you be able to tell them that? Oh, hell no: in fact, you might even say that this illusion is exactly what enables addiction so effectively within the human mind. The famous adage 'I can stop whenever I want' comes to mind - the person has to believe that their choices are a conscious reflection of their pure, untouched individual personhood. And this spans the entire gamut of human experience, from the cigarette-on-your-work-break to your political leanings, as influenced by your relative levels of privilege.

So, does this mean we're doomed to never change people, politically speaking? Well, I don't really know. On the one hand, society at large has seemingly managed to grasp the concept of behaviours as a result of inherent privilege, not conscious choice. But there's much evidence to suggest a huge, monumental backlash; the right-wing, who have historically clung to this idea that they have this safety net of merely believing they're good people, have now pivoted into a near-neurotic response to this cultural shift. Now, being good needs to be reflected in doing good; merely meaning good doesn't carry so much social capital - and this is something the right-wing completely lost their minds about, to the point where things such as wearing a mask in the pandemic were 'politicised'. The right-wing have always leaned heavily into the nebulous concepts of 'freedom' and 'individuality', essentially signalling to this exact paradoxical illusion of the self: after all, freedom and individuality are concepts that do not and cannot make coherent sense, but are useful safety nets to ensure a perception of onesself as necessarily untouched by 'outside forces'.

Meanwhile, the politics of the mainstream left have been gradually distorted to pay lipservice to the idea of doing good through certain stock phrases, sharing on social media etc., but a comfortable space is being carved out for that same 'need' of plausible deniability within the self. 'Social justice' language that traditionally held the self accountable for unsavoury behaviours driven by forces other than 'conscious choice' has been gradually pivoting to achieve the exact opposite aim of what it was originally used for. The concept of privilege is being slapped on scapegoats, used to legitimise their demonisation - meanwhile those who have the exact same privilege are able to dodge criticism for 'being wholesome'/'being unproblematic' in some nebulous manner (usually by sticking to those stock phrases, following cultural norms/expectations and generally staying out of the limelight, especially if they're women).

Additionally, certain privileges have been given less political/moral weight than others, allowing for people to evade any and all accountability by nature of them belonging to certain oppressed groups - and having that negate their problematic behaviour as a member of an oppressor group. The most nebulous and meaningless privileges have been fast and widely adopted, especially as they allow the person to completely avoid any accusations of 'classic x group behaviour'. In fact, huge swathes of 'classic x group behaviour' are being rapidly done away with.

The core fabric of the leftist argument, the one thing that held a mirror to society and said 'what you actually do says things about you whether you like it or not' are being rapidly unravelled. Is this a sign that this paradox of the psyche is so fundamental to the formation and perserverance of the self that any attempts to shatter the illusion are quickly patched up and explained away? Is this illusion truly necessary for a healthy psyche, or just a typical one? Can we live in a world where everyone humbly admits to the kind of things they would admit in therapy, but on a daily basis? Is this version of the psyche merely a stage in collective human development, and can we grow beyond this? And, more importantly, can we do so in time?

[giggymantis]

Something I find interesting about certain anti-Semitic claims against Israel is that leftists seem to have this need to frame Europeans as the bad guys. Don’t get me wrong, Europeans are the bad guys, but they aren’t the only ones. Jews aren’t European and yet there is a colonial state run by a group of Jews. If you can’t understand both of those at once, something is either wrong with your anti-colonialism or your leftism.

Jews are indigenous to Canaan but Israel is a colonial state, and no, those two things aren’t contradictory.

[centrally-unplanned]

Hello. Our discussion the other day left me confused about what exactly you consider the term "Leftism" to mean. So as a clarifying example, would you describe the USA Democrats as a "Leftist" party? Thanks

Starting at the direct level, the democrats in the US contains leftists but is not wholly or primarily leftists. Its dumb US stuff, since its a harshly two-party system both republicans and democrats are actually a grab bag of coalitions. At different times the democrats are either cooperating with or opposing their own leftist faction, so its contextual.

I don't find this framing too useful in the modern era honestly. Like yes, Hegel was *sigh, ugggh* right, human preferences are diverse but aggregated social dynamics work such that a 'left-right' binary emerges in almost all socieites. However, its not what self-identified capital-L leftists tend to mean, they treat Leftism as a cohesive, cross-country faction distinct from conservatives, liberals, etc. This made sense at the end of the 19th century - opposition to imperialism, support for expanded franchise, legalizing unions, etc, made a unified political platform in Europe. But political faction aren't a constant, its downstream of the political, social, and economic forces of the day.

These days I don't see a strong "leftist" political party in the same way of much note. On some topics is because its too diffuse - oh leftists support queer rights? So do most liberals, so do a lot of conservatives even, progress on queer rights wasn't wholly or even primarily a leftist achievement depending on the country. On others its because its way too specific - are the german environmentalists shutting down nuclear power plants to prop up coal plants leftists? They think they are, to me they are fools. For an issue near and dear to me, left-NIMBYs think they are preserving their communities, I think they are gatekeeping low income housing and degrading our cities. Are the leftist for queer rights also NIMBYs? What do they think of open borders? There isn't a coherent platform of leftism even within countries, let alone across them.

(A lot of this is because the goals of 19th century leftism were achieved in many fronts, though certainly not all - expanded franchise, end of imperialism, large welfare states, etc. Those solutions ofc brought ther own problems and history marched on)

Instead I view modern capital-L leftism as primarily a cultural thing - lots of Against Capitalism energy, but when you are in office debating budget allocations between transport modalities or immigration regulations suddenly that energy provides contradictory answers. It does exist, im not saying its all vibes; instead when analysing the political party of country X, its not a simple question. The Democratic party in America has its left moments and it has its liberal moments and its straight-up right moments; the Socialist Party of France has had gone back and forth on what that actually means because it turns out governing is hard, and has done a ton of conservative stuff in its day.

I suppose it is worth mentioning that for some forms of leftism it *is* all vibes - no actual plan for obtaining and utilizing political power, just vague hand-waves at ~revolution~ that is never going to happen and would probably be a disaster if it did. This isn't the majority by any stretch, its often an insult hurled at actual leftists who absolutely are doing real work. But they do exist - they aren't political figures at all, and I don't consider them worthy of discussion; they can continue writing their mislabelled fiction. (The right, of course, has this faction too) So i don't factor these people into an analysis of capital-L Leftism any more than I have to.

[catinafigtree]

I think that the reason that some Muslims see leftism and feminism as contradictory to Islam is because they see it as a means to political power and not as a religion

[ultramaga]

It's because Leftists hate art except as a weapon. They see everything as political, even history, which must be rewritten to serve the immediate needs of Leftism. Ask the average Leftist if they ever loved JK Rowling, and they will deny it, and many will genuinely remember only hatred - despite endless contradictory posts.

This is why Hollywood and the BBC both suck. They are woke. They demand endless class warfare - race against race, sex against sex, forever. An eternity of Hell in the name of Utopia.

I'm getting so sick of major female characters in historical media being incredibly feisty, outspoken and public defenders of women's rights with little to no realistic repercussions. Yes it feels like pandering, yes it's unrealistic and takes me out of the story, yes the dialogue almost always rings false - but beyond all that I think it does such a disservice to the women who lived during those periods. I'm not embarrassed of the women in history who didn't use every chance they had to Stick It To The Man. I'm not ashamed of women who were resigned to or enjoyed their lot in life. They weren't letting the side down by not having and representing modern gender ideals. It says a lot about how you view average ordinary women if the idea of one of your main characters behaving like one makes them seem lame and uninteresting to you.

[thebleeding-heart]

I have to laugh when people who live in cities tell me it’s too hard to go vegan. You think I live within an hour’s drive of a Whole Foods? A Trader Joe’s perhaps? A place with vegan takeout that isn’t just the one tofu dish from the local Chinese restaurant? I don’t. But I make do with what I have because the alternative is murder.

I know many people struggle trying to go vegan for various reasons, since we are all in such different circumstances, and I respect the struggle. I won’t say going vegan is easy, because many times it’s not. We’re just asking you to care. To take some time out of your life to do the research and align your actions with your beliefs as much as possible. Just give an honest effort. It’s all any vegans are asking you to do. Complaining online about how you (or more often, others) “can’t go vegan” (meaning you aren’t even aware of the definition) isn’t activism. And if for some reason you must eat meat to survive, why in the goddamn hell would you scream at vegans for asking others not to? If you gave a shit about animals you would advocate for the same.

Changing our consumer habits certainly won’t destroy capitalism. It won’t even really dent it. But why wouldn’t we at least make an attempt to reduce the harm we cause? Eating dead bodies every day is one of the most obvious manifestations of violence to normalize. How will we ever free ourselves when our entire culture normalizes slaughtering others and using them as commodities because they are different from us? How can we destroy all oppression when the very basis of oppression dominates our everyday lives?

[headlessmind]

the other day i was talking to my singing teacher about politics and she was like "oh wow you've really moved to the left a lot" and i had this realization that the pandabear made me forget how to hide my political opinions in front of others..............

[whitehotharlots]

There are other ways to understand stuff

As I’ve mentioned before, I am ambivalent toward vaccine mandates. Like most other aspects of our disastrous response to COVID, mandates could, in theory, serve to stop the spread of the disease and save lives. But in practice, like every other aspect of our response, they are all but guaranteed to be enforced in a selective and half-assed manner that will have little to no positive public health outcomes but will instead further empower some of the worst human beings on earth while further ensuring that the masses continue to understand the world and themselves primarily according to how they despise the other side. But even if I was firmly in favor of mandates, I like to think I could recognize that some people would have trepidations, and that having these trepidations did not necessarily make these people hateful idiots who deserve to be punished. One need not believe that Bill Gates is injecting us with microchips in order to have misgivings toward Pfzier, after all. A healthy skepticism of the for-profit medical industry was practically a bedrock of American leftism until, like, 10 months ago. Surely this means we should be uniquely capable of understanding the reservations of others, that we could attempt to persuade them over without resorting to mockery, recrimination, or outright hatred...

Ugg. Ugg ugg ugg. 

Perversely, I can’t help but imagine how this all would have played out if Trump won the 2020 election. It’s feasible, if not probable, to think that the roles would be 100%, seamlessly reversed, with Dems criticizing the naivety of the MAGA rubes who allow themselves to be jabbed with poison just so they can validate the egomania of their leader. After all, our august Vice President straight-up admitted that she’d be very distrustful of any vaccine that was made available while the Bad Orange Man was still president. Her supporters would likely have listened to the wisdom of this Fierce Kween and followed suit. 

If we’ve learned nothing else from this pandemic--and we haven’t--it’s that Americans are incapable of understanding any issue outside the lens of partisan politics. There’s nothing beyond R’s and D’s. I cannot fathom a more self-destructive approach to public health messaging than to frame it as partisan political issue, but such was inevitable; we simply lack to ability to communicate in any other manner.

Now, I know the response you’re already starting to type out. I’ve smoked weed and I’ve taken Philosophy 101. The personal is political. There’s no such thing as a non-ideological belief. Every statement imbricates, reifies, and--uhh--deconstructs hundreds of basal assumptions that only the deepest of graduate students are capable of articulating. That’s some Big Brain shit, and you should be proud of yourself for thinking it.

But please note I referred not to ideology but partisanship, and the latter concept is significantly dumber than the former. If anything, our insistence of politicizing all aspects of our comprehension has rendered us even more incapable of recognizing or interrogating our ideological biases. Partisanship is a team sport. It’s not coherent. It’s very frequently contradictory. And it’s the only means we allow ourselves to understand any aspect of our wretched, collapsing society. 

[native-to-entropy]

Another component here is that single-use items are not necessarily contradictory to a fully circular material economy. Currently, most plastics are petrochemically derived, but we know how to make bioplastics, and there's ongoing research to improve them! We can imagine a sustainable, technological world in which disabled people can thrive.

Also... anyone being ableist-veiled-in-misunderstood-leftism about prepared meals and straws of all things, genuinely does not understand the harms caused by *everything else* in modern industrialized society. Do you live in a building that depends on design, environment, and renewables for all heating and cooling? And own absolutely nothing made by underpaid laborers? Probably not, so don't shit on disabled people just trying to eat their lunch. We can continue improving the sustainability of our society as a whole without shaming individuals for taking the only option available to them.

Some people don’t want to hear this but sometimes accessibility is not sustainable or eco-friendly. Disabled people sometimes need straws, or pre-made meals in plastic containers, or single-use items. Just because you can work with your foods in their least processed and packaged form doesn’t mean everyone else can.

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

Fear of Conflict

“Truly it is not a failing in you that you stiffen yourself against me and  assert your distinctness or peculiarity: you need not give way or renounce yourself” — Max Stirner

Whenever more than a few anarchists get together, there are arguments. This is no surprise, since the word “anarchist” is used to describe a broad range of often contradictory ideas and practices. The only common denominator is the desire to be rid of authority, and anarchists do not even agree on what authority is, let alone the question of what methods are appropriate for eliminating it. These questions raise many others, and so arguments are inevitable.

The arguments do not bother me. What bothers me is the focus on trying to come to an agreement. It is assumed that “because we are all anarchists”, we must all really want the same thing; our apparent conflicts must merely be misunderstandings which we can talk out, finding a common ground. When someone refuses to talk things out and insists on maintaining their distinctness, they are considered dogmatic. This insistence on finding a common ground may be one of the most significant sources of the endless dialogue that so frequently takes place of acting to create our lives on our own terms. This attempt to find a common ground involves a denial very real conflicts.

One strategy frequently used to deny conflict is to claim that an argument is merely a disagreement over words and their meanings. As if the words one uses and how one chooses to use them have no connection to one’s ideas, dreams and desires. I am convinced that there are very few arguments that are merely about words and their meanings. These few could be easily resolved if the individuals involved would clearly and precisely explain what they mean. When individuals cannot even come to an agreement about what words to use and how to use them, it indicates that their dreams, desires and ways of thinking are so far apart that even within a single language, they cannot find a common tongue. The attempt to reduce such an immense chasm to mere semantics is an attempt to deny a very real conflict and the singularity of the individuals involved.

The denial of conflict and of the singularity of individuals may reflect a fetish for unity that stems from residual leftism or collectivism. Unity has always been highly valued by the left. Since most anarchists, despite their attempts to separate themselves from the left, are merely anti-state leftists, they are convinced that only a united front can destroy this society which perpetually forces us into unities not of our choosing, and that we must, therefore, overcome our differences and join together to support the “common cause”. But when we give ourselves to the “common cause”, we are forced to accept the lowest common denominator of understanding and struggle. The unities that are created in this way are false unities which thrive only by suppressing the unique desires and passions of the individuals involved, transforming them into a mass. Such unities are no different from the forming of labor that keeps a factory functioning or the unity of social consensus which keeps the authorities in power and people in line. Mass unity, because it is based on the reduction of the individual to a unit in a generality, can never be a basis for the destruction of authority, only for its support in one form or another.  Since we want to destroy authority, we must start from a different basis.

For me, that basis is myself — my life with all of its passions and dreams, its desires, projects and encounters. From this basis, I make “common cause” with no one, but may frequently encounter individuals with whom I have an affinity. It may well be that your desires and passions, your dreams and projects coincide with mine. Accompanied by an insistence upon realizing these in opposition to every form of authority, such affinity is a basis for a genuine unity between singular, insurgent individuals which lasts only as long as these individuals desire.  Certainly, the desire for the destruction of authority and society can move us to strive for an insurrectional unity that becomes large-scale, but never as a mass movement; instead it would need to be a coinciding of affinities between individuals who insist on making their lives their own.  This sort of insurrection cannot come about through a reduction of our ideas to a lowest common denominator with which everyone can agree, but only through the recognition of the singularity of each individual, a recognition which embraces the actual conflicts that exist between individuals, regardless of how ferocious they may be, as part of the amazing wealth of interactions that the world has to offer us once we rid ourselves of the social system which has stolen our lives and our interactions from us.

[mariaiscrafting]

I’ve finally realized why I like Internet Ruined Me the most out of the E-Girl Trilogy. It’s because this song is the one that seems the least satirical and the most genuine, and that genuineness makes it the most heart-wrenching.

Let me explain.

As most of us can probably tell, the E-Girl Trilogy is supposed to mostly serve as a satire of various stereotypes Internet guys in their 20s nowadays can oftentimes fit into- that is to say, incel or incel-like behavior, casual misogyny, lacking in social skills, befriending women only for romantic/sexual benefits, unacceptance of any self-blame, arrogance, etc. However, despite the many things that have led us to that conclusion of satire- 

Wilbur’s own explanation of his songs, his derisive attitude towards people who can relate to certain lines or verses, the word choice when describing the stereotypes in these songs -I always figured some part of the songs were genuine. Maybe Wilbur’s writing about the kind of man he used to be. Maybe he’s taking true emotions or stories that influenced YCGMA/MIWB; given some of the thematic similarities across the albums/collections, I wouldn’t doubt it. 

But out of the E-Girl trio, Internet strikes me as the one with the greatest degree of that genuineness. The melancholy isn’t just a characteristic of the narrator that the song plays with, via rhythm and word choice. Wilbur doesn’t sound like he’s actually making fun of most of the things he says in this song. There are a couple lines where Wilbur, the creator himself, makes fun of the narrator, as exhibited in the wording and delivery of “I know you want 6′4″ but one foot more and I’ll almost be tall enough,” and of, “sexual enough, but not enough to scare me.” But for most of the song, the character/narrator simply relays his thoughts, and where there is any derision, it sounds more like self-loathing than Wilbur, the creator, deriding the character. It’s so different from the jovial tone of Your New Boyfriend, or the structure and sarcastic tone of I’m in Love With an E-Girl. When Internet’s narrator makes fun of himself, it’s not really making fun; it’s just... sad.

I guess what I mean is that Internet feels more introspective than the other two songs because this isn’t a guy hating on another guy; it sounds like a guy who just hates himself. Maybe that’s why this song makes me want to sink into the nearest cushion, close my eyes, and clear my mind whenever I hear it. As someone well-acquainted with self-loathing, this entire song makes so much sense to me. Not in the sense that you might think; I don’t relate to the misogyny or particular brand of depression inherent to men my age who are disillusioned by life and feel aimless (oftentimes leading to radicalization, whether that be into leftism, the alt-right, taking the red pill, etc), 

What I can relate so much to, is the judgement of one’s self in such a negative light, and then stating those judgements as if they were merely neutral observations. This kind of person knows every single destructive behavior they partake in and every single addiction they have that makes them a useless member of society; they don’t have enough will to change or get rid of them, but they do have enough mental energy to detest themselves so deeply for them that the statement “I fucking suck” seems as neutral a fact as “the sky is blue.” This kind of person wants desperately for the person or people they’ve attached themselves to to care about them, or show them any ounce of attention, so they go to invasive, destructive lengths to get that attention. They know what they’re doing and thinking is insane, and they know they’re a threat to their self and to others because of the destructiveness of their actions. This kind of person sometimes flips into arrogance out of self-preservation, which seems contradictory to the self-loathing, but is just a natural product of the self-aggrandization of one’s own thoughts to such an extent that you think everything you think is fact.

It’s a kind of miserable I get, and every time this song has looped while writing this, I’ve gotten one step closer to realizing the meaning behind every single word in this song. I used to think it was just another satire, another caricature of the kind of sad, almost-incel most people make fun of now. But, no. This song is so much more than that...