I've been feeling like I fucking brainwashed my self and honest to god sometimes I feel like I'm just a red version of Nazi. Before you hit me I don't think we're as bad as Nazis but like.....I don't know. Sometimes I wonder if we're wrong and we actually are just like jealous of the wealthy and the world is indeed a fair, equitable place where you can become prosperous if you work hard enough.

I think I struggle with these doubts a lot because I went from being sucked into the whole 4chan reactionary thing just from a "contact high" from when I still used that shitty website but it never felt right to me and when I read Estranged Labor I'm like "wait this dude spittin straight facts, more than (((da jooz))) nonsense" and pretty much instantly abandoned my old worldview and felt really lost until I discovered all these fucked up websites and well...now I got a bunch of communist songs in my likes. Sometimes I just feel like I went in the opposite direction, and have to wonder if it's even possible to arrive at an objective "truth" or model of the world, and if a lot of the reasons why Marxism seems intuitively correct to me are largely born out of my own particular experiences, which always feel to me like they can't be all that common. It all just seems so obvious now but I still think: "what if I'm we stretch the truth and make shit up in the same way reactionaries do?"

I don't know. I sometimes feel like I'm not right in the head when I think shit like "damn landlords should be thrown into a pit" or "billionaires aren't human" or "dead cops, dead cops, army of the rich, we'll piss on your grave, won't be your slave!" because of how extreme it is.

I mean I can't really function at work anymore, I just think all this shit is absurd. It always feels like, "are people just dumb or blind? Do they not get it? I got it even before I read theory!" and then I just feel like I'm off in my own unreality where billionaire pedophiles blast off into space during a pandemic and everything really sucks.

I think I'm just going to pick up reefer.

  • grouchy [she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I'm absolutely terrible at reading theory (as in I'll sometimes get the urge and read 3-5 pages, nod, then put it down for months), but there's an early paragraph in Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed that may be relevant here?

    Sectarianism, fed by fanaticism, is always castrating. Radicalization, nourished by a critical spirit, is always creative. Sectarianism mythicizes and thereby alienates; radicalization criticizes and thereby liberates. Radicalization involves increased commitment to the position one has chosen, and thus ever greater engagement in the effort to transform concrete, objective reality. Conversely, sectarianism, because it is mythicizing and irrational, turns reality into a false (and therefore unchangeable) "reality."

    Not sure if this is elaborated on later. I get you though, I often feel the same way after a lifetime of thinking "extreme = bad, moderate = good", especially when I remember how thoroughly convinced I was that my worldview was right. It's hard to reconcile how "obvious" everything seems now with how blindly confident I was before. One of the things that helped was realizing just how many of the people from history* I genuinely admired/respected were actually socialists or communists and just completely misrepresented by popular media. Knowing how much propaganda we've been wading through our entire lives without even being conscious of it, I think these feelings are probably natural.

    * or even contemporary figures like Hayao Miyazaki, whom I vividly remember being consistently framed as some sort of super lib when he was first introduced to mainstream Western pop culture