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?
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
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