Lamentation:
I think we are generally in agreement about "what needs to be done". What's needed is a dialogue with people in general, working with social groups, organizations in ways that are in touch with reality & people’s needs, extroverted and not introverted as anti-establishment politics tend to be.
As for how that happens it is a case-by-case thing, it is different where i live, it is different where you live.
It is a tough job anywhere for sure.
At different points in my life I've engaged with different activism activities.
Some of them were totally alienated & insular, like anarchist blackblocs, it is just angry young heroics which the cops use to their own benefit, the public in general thinks you are just a hooligan, then you get teargassed and run away.
Others, like anti-war demos, were very big & public with lots of people, but nothing got done, it was just symbolic wanking.
Most recently I was involved in an anti-racist network.
Like I said, everyone is a star, if you remember, you can see it in their eyes, you know, we are all alive and breathing growing parts of the universe, everyone is special. But at the same time so many people I talk to and interact with, whenever politics gets brought up, they believe in political leaders and parties, they believe in a church, or they talk about money, dreaming about buying a better car. So many people are fucking obsessed with shopping, people can't stand still for 5 minutes without pulling out their cell phone and texting someone. A lot of people are hypocrites, smiling when they don’t mean it, hiding themselves from you because they are scared. A really large chunk of people are blatantly racist, classist, sexist, etc. But out of the rest of us who say we are not, there is so much unconscious shit going on.
Something that pisses me off is how people treat waiters, clerks, people in these positions, it is so demeaning. And its mostly subconscious I think. It is like the way rich people treat their servents, you know, and the rest of us are allowed to rent a servent when we go to a restaurant or shop, so we ape the way the rich treat the servents, this shit is internalized into so many people. And I catch myself doing it to sometimes. Even though I was a clerk for a while in college and I hated the way some customers thought they could treat me.
Very few things make me as depressed as the way parents treat their kids, when I see them together in public. It is twisted mental shit.
I mean if you really open yourself up to what is going on in the world, if you really imagine and empathize with the fucking catastrophes, war, living conditions, working conditions, it is so insane, you know it's difficult to deal with. So we shut ourselves up and don't deal with it. We are self-occluded from the large part of reality which is so unbearable. And this is I think a kind of mental illness, it is just like a schizophrenic who hides part of himself because he can't deal with them; these parts of himself hide underneath and affect him subconsciously. We are armored.
In my life I have been mentally unwell.
But the sickest shit is that someone will pay 50 000 dollars for a car or 500 euros for a handbag when people are dying of hunger, i mean it is depraved! And the people who cant afford the car, a lot of them feel jealous when the car drives past, they would like one too. I have known a lot of people like that. Or they buy a 5000 dollar car instead, these are the compensations that satisfy us. Yes yes we know Bruno, but we are not the sick ones, lets talk about it on barbelith.
The sickest shit is that people elect governments that send people to kill other people, buy weapons. Yes yes we know Bruno, but we are not the sick ones, let's talk about it on barbelith.
The thread was basically trying to point this out. We are sick. Everyone is. Right. I know I am pretty sick a lot of the time anyway. I can see it in most people, right. You can say I am just projecting it, I would reply it is something we all internalize; reality is more dialectic, we pull it in and project it back out, back and forth.
It is a real weight to bear if you know this about sickness, and if you forget for even a second that at the same time as being sick, everyone is a fucking special loving person trapped in a shit world, then you get arrogant and misanthropic - and i have been these things at points in my life, that is in itself a mental illness too. It's pretty sick if you take for granted that you are not sick, that you are not also a subconscious carrier of the things you think you disagree with.
My point in starting this thread was to acknowledge that there is a certain measure of elitism involved, when at first you realize how fucked up everyone is, including yourself, and you have to deny our mode of living, you have to say "i will not be the passive sick person society is trying to mold me into, i will try and make a difference"... I mean that is clearly what Marx did, the guy sacrificed his health and years of his life in trying to solve the riddle of history, how to change this shit. And what so many social activists and revolutionaries did all over the world. There is a certain measure of vanguardism involved. You have to push for change. And not everyone will do this. Many people never will.
So what can we do about it? Really that is the only question worth asking. It wasn’t what the thread was about at all but it is the only thing of any worth. All I can say is appraise the historical conditions, oppurtunities and needs and apply the correct force in the correct place, align yourself. Make yourself stronger, more able, help others do the same. Learn to communicate as well as you can, both listening and talking.
How do you spend your time? Bruno leaves. |
