First a background of events, but I'm not trying to transcript the discussion, I want to ask more about the aftermath. Read here my long winded self indulgent words
Today I was talking to my mom about the Murican response to covid, specifically omicron (we are south Asian immigrants living in 🍔).
I was talking about how it was utterly egregious how the government completely abdicated responsibility for handling the pandemic beyond just saying "we have a massive stash of vaccines we won't share, come get one."
Personally it makes me really angry at how there is no political will to share vaccine patents (in corporate controlled America), and my mom got mad at me and started spouting various liberal media talking points about how we just need to vote and vote harder to beg for incremental change, and Biden and the Democrats really want to help, they just can't, etc etc. And so I got really frustrated at this point and pointed out all the countries with functioning public health systems that handled the pandemic well, most notably China.
And at that point she lost her composure and started yelling at me about how China is a large and destructive imperialist country that wants to conquer territory and dominate the world, and I also lost my composure at just the sheer cruelty of the western corporate run economies sitting on piles of vaccines, you can believe so much in electoralism but who exactly can I :vote: for to share vaccine formulas and production, and I just got quite emotionally overwhelmed by this.
And my mom started telling me about how I was stupid for caring so much and being so emotionally affected by world problems that I can't change, and how I should disengage from reading and studying world current events because I was too emotionally invested in them.
So, the thing is, I think she might be partially right.
She's (and our family by extension) is a well compensated labor aristocrat and we live moderately comfortable lives in suburban America. And I'm finishing up a college degree that basically says "I deserve to stay in the middle class" that will let me get some pointless and soulcrushing corporate yuppie scum job to pay my bills. If we so choose, we do indeed have the privilege of ignoring the outside world and just hyperfocusing on individual career bullshit and our own family, we can just be "apolitical" and just grind for my own future middle class American life.
I get that my mom's view is very individualist; when can an individual ever "change anything" on political scales? Political power exists within organization only. And it seems like the conditions simply don't exist for me to be able to really change anything outside of helping a few people with the meager and comparatively tiny amount of capital I can accumulate from a life of PMC bullshit labor. I can make a few people's lives a little better, but I can't do anything about the barbaric system that dispossesses people and destroys lives.
I know I'm just a self centered petit bourgeois whiny piece of shit whining despite my life being privileged and comfortable that I'm isolated from the life or death day to day nature of politics beyond sympathy and solidarity. As immigrants to this barbaric country that puts its boot upon the global south, we happen to be near the top of the imperial pyramid and reap all these benefits coming from exploited and destroyed lives below us. I feel like I'm being told to just ignore this reality of what the world is, of our position within the world, privileged and isolated from the struggle. My mom yelled at me for not being able to get out of my mind just the awful nature and reality of where we're standing and whose backs we're standing on.
And from a mental health standpoint, yeah it's pragmatic, if you want to be somewhat happy or be a good family member in this depressing ass world. I don't know, when I think about all this, I just feel so directionless, I don't know what reason I have to just go along with this dumb crap of just grinding and working in some job where I will just be oiling some corporate gears on peddling addictive and exploitative technology to poor people, doing nothing actually meaningful for society besides helping some dumb company produce their branded widgets. I spend all this time studying (and the pursuit of knowledge is interesting) but I will be entering the workforce soon, then why am I doing this, who am I doing it for? Family? It is such a depressing and empty world, the number one and largest success of the western system is to just pacify us and relieve us of our ability to do anything but consume, consume meaningless entertainment, consume misery, consume toothless political show of elections, consume hope for socialist politics but with no meaningful organization or power to accomplish much of anything, living in a deeply reactionary place. I study Marxism because I want to understand how the world and economy really works, and I want justice and common prosperity and development for every human. Apparently that ends up being pathological? We live in a sick society in this western country but our mother country is much worse due to western economic imperialism.
What can I do, what should I care about? Am I supposed to just tune out of the happenings and causes of the world and just focus my life on one or two people I love? But what if they leave me, then I have no meaning here.
I hate nihilism, but I feel like I utterly lack power or agency and electoralism people hang on to because it gives them the illusion of having power and something greater than them but in murica they are being duped into endlessly :vote: for the black hole that is the democratic party.
Help, anyone feel similarly, any reflections, thoughts, responses? Scold me, rip me to shreds if you like for being a whiny fuck, sympathize with me, whatever, I just want to hear other people's thoughts.
Thank you so much for writing that out. One thing:
I do tremble at injustice, sometimes to the point where I am temporality just consumed by indignation at the sheer injustice of imperialist capitalism. My mom said that it's childish or whatever to get mad about this because there's nothing I can do. I'm just kind of stunned at how people can compartmentalize their life like that, it's so hard for me to just somehow ignore that context and awareness; ignorance really is bliss. The injustice makes me sad and angry. It really triggers my empathetic feelings and I'm written of as sick and psychological because I am mentally disturbed by this. Why is it seen as my immaturity for me being angered by this? Are they right? Is it really immature to get angry at these systemic injustices because I don't really have any power to fix it? I suppose it's possible they're right from a pragmatic standpoint but we are empathetic, emotional beings, and my commitment to Marxism is because I want to understand the world.
No, they're not right. They're not really trying to be right. Trying to be right involves being self critical, examining the evidence, evaluating it, and seeking out more. The only approach to philosophy that I've ever seen commit to that principle is dialectical materialism.
Something that exacerbated my own struggle was my relationship with my mom. She thinks much the same way as your own mom. She simply refuses to think about the injustice of the world or her place in it because it's disturbing and unsettling. Eventually I just had to realize that changing an older person's ideology doesn't happen overnight, it's not easy, and it might never happen. To most people, their sanity and sense of place and stability will win out over serious objections. I think it's a pretty natural defense mechanism.
The anger and empathy you experience for others isn't at all childish. There's nothing childish about being able to honestly evaluate the cruelty of imperialism and capitalism in a global and historical context and feel the emotional brunt of it. I brought up the Che quote because I feel like the opposite is true. I ultimately became a communist because of and not in spite of my empathy for people. Because I can't just write off the suffering of others. Because I find the idea of learning about how the world works and choosing to make peace with it an unconscionable decision. I've likened the experience of becoming aware of the global cost of the imperial opulence to seeing Cthulhu. Once you've seen a glimpse of the eldritch horror in all it's glory, you just can't unsee it. Liberalism in many ways is an attempt to deny the emotional self for the sake of what is "rational," i.e. simply accepting the system as it exists.
It's helpful to find people in your life that are willing to support your empathy, even if they aren't committed communists of some kind themselves. There are more people, especially young people, than you might think that are open to dreaming of a better world. I'm very lucky to have several close friends that have all been making the same political journey together, and a wife that understands and supports me working through all kinds of stuff, both personal and this sort of larger grieving for the injustice of the present. It's hard though to accept that your parents have a limited view of the world that their mental well-being requires not changing, especially if you still live with them or spend a lot of time with them. Certainly not an envious position.
Joining an org, even if it's not necessarily an explicitly socialist one can be a good way to meet people and connect with like-minded people.
Ah thank you so much that really helps me. I will dwell on it more.
As others have said you're on the right side morally, you are also right that you cannot change these destructive institutions alone but that doesn't mean we are entirely powerless. Look around at all the labor mobilization going on right now, donate to strike funds if you can join a picket line if there are any near you.
And lastly don't feel guilt at the material conditions you were born into, you didn't choose that any more than I chose to be born dirt poor.
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Yes, I can understand it as a survival instinct of just drowning out your senses to stay sane and grind, but yeah, it's just running away from reality and picking up some nihilist bullshit