Forgive me, but I'm reading through r/qanoncasualties, I've been watching the QAnon documentary on HBO, and I've listened to QAnon Anonymous for at least a year. I find the subject totally fascinating. QAnon is like this twisted mirror image of socialism.
Basically it looks like this creepy fucking boomer named Jim Watkins and his weird shitposter son Ron created QAnon to bring more traffic to 8chan, which they own but which has never made any money for them. (I'm far from an expert on QAnon but the documentary makes a compelling case, let's say.)
I've seen the first three episodes of the documentary, where people are starting to literally kill each other over QAnon, and the Watkins' boys just don't fucking care. This may even go beyond CIA-level psychopathy, or is at least at a similar level. Meanwhile, r/qanoncasualties has story after story of friends and relatives losing their fucking minds, their jobs, all their relationships, and often killing themselves because of QAnon. It's just absolutely insane.
I've also spent maybe about two years "studying" (listening to podcasts on) Zizek and started drifting toward Marxism at around the same time a lot of these people were turning to QAnon. I haven't lost any close friends or family because of this, but it's definitely strained some relationships. (All of my close friends and relatives are either liberals, Berners, social democrats, or even beyond.)
When normies or liberals talk to QAnon people, they clearly think that the QAnon people are insane (although to some extent the average American believes in at least some parts of QAnon—including me, if Jeffrey Epstein counts as being part of QAnon, although I can't recall ever hearing a QAnon person mention him).
When normies or liberals talk to Marxists, does the same reaction take place? Do they just deploy horseshoe theory on us? Would they prefer to talk to QAnon folks over Marxists? Do they think that Marxists, who point to systems as the main issue, are really the same as QAnon folks, who blame all the woes of the world on a shadowy cabal of Satanic pedophiles?
To sum up: how do your non-Marxist / non-anarchist friends and family treat you when you talk about politics?
There's certainly something to be said about Marxism making you really see the man behind the curtain, except there is no man and it's just systems that people pretend don't even exist. Feels like Lovecraftian horror, where the more you Understand the World the more it drives you insane.
I haven't lost any friends or family either, but for the most part I avoid talking politics with them. I'm not shy about my views if brought up, but I tend to not bring it up because I know it makes the relationships strained. It does come across as a bit crazy, but the difference is that it's more like Cassandra than QAnon. I'm almost always right about what is going to happen, it just sucks being right and nobody listening to you and then the same thing repeats forever, and everything you're right about is something profoundly awful.
Being a Marxist has not actually helped much with my predictive abilities, but of course that's because I just haven't gathered enough data—right? For months I believed that Biden would lose the election. Shortly before it took place, I concluded that Biden winning would be the most ridiculous scenario of all. But until the South Carolina primary, I was also dumb enough to believe that Bernie would win the presidency. I just hedge my bets now and say that things seem likely or unlikely. It seems unlikely that the Democrats will hold onto congress in 2022, given what happened in 2010 and 1994, but who knows?
I googled to see where that quote came from. I'm not a Disco Elysium player but I appreciated it.
Yeah I'm not talking elections more as like, long term trends. Regardless of who won, I'm sure you predicted that the camps are only going to get bigger. The Cold War with China is going to heat up. The rich will get richer. Covid will do nothing to stop any of these trends, despite everybody talking about "the new normal," there will be no "roaring 20's" because the rate of profit continues to decline and the average American has less than $500 in savings, etc etc. That's the kind of cursed predictive knowledge that I'm talking about.
Also yeah if that quote resonated with you at all I would highly recommend you give the game a try. It's a very cathartic experience in a strange way, and superbly written.
I mean, yeah, those are mostly a given, even though dice-rolls are involved with everything. If you ask a liberal to imagine the future ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now, I think it would be rare for them to say anything positive. Or if they did, they would do so knowing that it sounds absurd and oddly brutal to declare that in the year 2121, McDonald's will still be serving up french fries, and Democrats and Republicans will still be taking turns privatizing every last aspect of American existence (even though this is possible). But as Marxists we also at least hope that as capitalism collapses and workers around the world organize, that we can live to see a world in which there is no poverty.
edit: people keep talking about Disco Elysium here so I'll check it out.
They're a given to you because you understand marxism, libs really don't think things will get worse. It's part of their pathology, the optimism and blind faith that technocratic solutions will save us from racism or climate change. Theyll think, yeah housing is bad right now but we just need a couple tweaks to fix it - definitely not an overhaul.
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