I think personally the big thing leftist thought has done for me is gave me the mental toolkit to unlearn the idea of “ meritocratic/meritocracy”. We don’t live in a remotely fair world and the idea it is in any sense fair and justice is disproven in just about every leftist text, thinker, speech, figure throughout history. We get some hints about it in religion text (Speaking as a Christian) but we don’t really see how to break it down outside of personal virtue and kindness (which are cool and good but not a scaleable solution).
I really think it super dope that leftist thinking give you the tools to understand and see the Matrix we live. I also really like how it shows you ways of addressing it.
What are things you think leftist thought has improve your life? Big or small?
It's made me genuinely nicer, since I'm way less likely to blame people for being "incompetent" at stuff when I know the game is rigged against everyone.
This factor unlocked a huge skill of mine, I'm actually really really good socially, I just had to realize that I acrually do deeply care about every single person that isn't evil. It's easy to be a person of the people when you genuinely love the people
the game is rigged against everyone.
Not against everyone. :capitalist-laugh:
Now a lot of the man-made horrors are no longer beyond my comprehension.
Being a liberal was horribly frustrating as bad things just kept happening, seemingly for no reason and you saw yourself as well as a host of rational, well-intentioned people banging your heads against the wall of bourgeois "democracy" to no avail, not understanding why everything kept getting worse and worse.
Being able to understand why the world is awful doesn't remove the pain of actual material bourgeois politics but it spares you a lot of of disappointment from trying to fight it in the marketplace of ideas.
On a more personal level a leftist understanding of capitalism has inoculated me against a lot of toxic and harmful attitudes. I don't blame myself for my dreary personal financial outlook, I blame capitalism. I don't fall victim to scams because I can smell the bullshit.
I don’t fall victim to scams because I can smell the bullshit.
There are so many grifts trying to make people believe that they can be little rent-seeking junior capitalists receiving passive income for buying in. :cryptocurrency: :dumpster-fire:
Landed me an autistic GF who special interests esoteric leftist theory who I love very much
I hate not understanding things and it has brought a resounding clarity to the corruption, contradiction, and absurdity of politics. The things Liberals have to constantly dismiss to maintain their political views, and the unapologetic evil of conservative politics that have been a blight on humanity ever since their inception.
It is water of life. but it is also a constant reminder that I can't be too happy with how things are.
That's what got me there, a lifelong compulsion to get to the bottom of shit. If I'm living in a world imma figure what the hell makes if tick, then I found man-made horrors beyond our comprehension and here we are.
It makes me excited to see people in their natural element when unburdened by capitalism. Like I know someone who would be a good doctor, another who'd be a great musician, and a couple of talented artists.
I'm better able to separate what people need to do for work and the people themselves. I get to see and value their humanity.
0.000% of Communism has been built. Evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself sad. He is starting to suspect Kras Mazov fucked him over personally with his socio-economic theory. It has, however, made him into a very, very smart boy with something like a university degree in Truth. Instead of building Communism, he now builds a precise model of this grotesque, duplicitous world.
He's just like me fr :lt-dbyf-dubois:
I do relate to other points in this thread but there's something to be said in favor of knowing I'm not alone in misery I guess
yea im undeniably happier but occasionally the feeling creeps up on me regardless.
I don't have to feel like there are huge voids in my understanding of very large issues anymore, which does bring me some measure of inner peace.
Just as an example: I remember being a young, ignorant lib and being expected to accept the baseline narrative of "North Korea = crazy and evil", but being frustrated by never really having any context or understanding whatsoever. It was so maddening to feel like there was just this huge wall of fog over the whole situation. Nobody talks about the "Forgotten War" in Korea, no one ever mentioned that there was no "North" or "South" Korea until the US made it so, nobody talks about the countless thousands of Koreans the US incinerated, or why they did so. At least now I can in some way be consoled by the knowledge of what's actually going on.
It linked my hobbies and passions together along their interdisciplinary/intersectional lines. Growing up I was interested in everything but there's no way to go beyond empty appreciation unless you hyper-specialise in that field academically. Dialectics and historical materialism really brought all of those things into context. I can be a scientist whose work links through the humanities and a humanities nerd grounded in materialistic modernism.
Like you say, it helps a ton with dismantling the ideas of an already-just world that are instilled into us. I mean at its core, it's examining society through a scientific lens. The Just World is a major fallacy that doesn't withstand being examined, and a lot of related elements of personal mindset follow from that
In a just world, everyone gets what they deserves and deserves what they get. So if most people are cruelly exploited and the world is just, then most people must be bad enough to have deserved their lot in life. In other words, a belief that this world is just requires misanthropy in one form or another. Being people, I think we can all see some potential drawbacks to categorically hating people. Misanthropy was absolutely a barrier to my personal growth in the past
At a more fundamental level I guess, there's been a shift in how I perceive morality. I had to learn not to try to ascribe a moral status to every last person, thing, technology, and action. I'm not really sure why it was such a compulsion for me, but all the people I grew up with seem to do it too. Maybe it's just binary morality that demands that, but it was exhausting
The Just World is a major fallacy that doesn’t withstand being examined, and a lot of related elements of personal mindset follow from that
In a just world, everyone gets what they deserves and deserves what they get. So if most people are cruelly exploited and the world is just, then most people must be bad enough to have deserved their lot in life.
I don't know that people really ever really totally reject those premises, or if they do only in so far as it applies to or benefits what are "Real People" in their own mind.
Everyone here is fully aware of & willing to agree to these propositions in almost any situation regarding the Economic; but as soon as you get to the question of "how should people be regarded socially", it's full-on Calvinist Bootstraps mode.
I agree that there's a pretty common "fuck you, got mine" mentality about emotional growth even within leftist spaces, but I'm not as sure about the Just World Fallacy lingering part
I mean, I'm not sure I ever see anybody get what they deserve. The relationship between what I assess somebody to deserve and what they actually get isn't even inverted; it's nonexistent. Instead, I think it might have more to do with the complicated landscape of hierarchies of oppression
What I think you're talking about - writing people off as lost causes - makes more sense in the figurative trenches of social politics. To start with, it's complex to analyze a system where everyone is exploited, but in categorically distinct ways that also, often are distinctly better or worse than each other. Within that clusterfuck, I think most of us have some experience with trauma from people with power over us, and can get defensive over our right to cut ties with those people.
Add, to the complicated subject and many of our personal stakes in it, the extremely human temptation to be sanctimonious, and you get a whole lot of "lol, incels are never gonna fuck" bullshit that manages to both denigrate ordinary people anxious about their social prospects, as well as denigrating the abuse victims they wind up having a whole quiver-full with at the end of the pipeline
I don't have much to add, but I do want to say that I think you've probably got the better articulated position.
Well thanks :meow-hug: it's very relevant to my personal life, and I stay eager to talk about it
If you believe that the world would be basically okay if people were just nice and reasonable
I do believe that but I also believe that if everyone was reasonable they would just do socialism
I stopped being suicidal. While finding it hard to get a job (in that I haven't in six years) and stuff still affects me, it's no longer entirely my fault. My dad raised me on neoliberal individualist brainworms, but also demanded perfection. I failed a lot. That said, I still feel pretty powerless to change either my circumstances or the world's.
tbf part of what keeps me going is spite. Whatever gets me to tomorrow.
Capitalist individualism is a fuck, and drives people to beat themselves down because they feel like a failure. I'm glad you're able to feel better about yourself, comrade.
It has protected me from the cognitohazard of "This billionaire entrepreneur disruptive innovator guru genius works that hard to be rich, why haven't you?"* :brainworms: and made it easy to see just how easy it is to fail upwards when someone is born in the correct class. :soypoint-1: :my-hero: :soypoint-2:
To paraphrase C. Wright Mills, I can see how my personal troubles are connected to public issues, which alleviates some of my guilt towards it.
