Anyone have any advice on just kind of hating people in general less? I look at people, I know they’re huge on religious doctrines and societal models I have no place in, and I just can’t see any good in them worth considering. I try to go outside and connect with people, but everyone looks like a 4channer, or someone two slights away from becoming a 4channer. I can’t restrain the fear or loathing. It’s like the past twenty years have reduced my very capacity for compassion and my capacity to respect anyone period to molten slag.
Heteronormative society and all who uphold it fucking blow, but I’m expected to keep it in my pants re: how and when I take it out on them.
i have a similar issue at times and i've found embracing a buddhist mindset has helped me with this. i think buddhism and marxism are pretty compatible worldviews, even if they seem very opposed at first.
to cut straight to the answer to your question: try to replace hate with compassion. when you find yourself expending mental energy on hating a specific group of people (bourgeoisie, CHUDs online, etc), remind yourself that 1) they are not content with their inner lives and that's why they behave in a way that makes you hate them and 2) they are suffering due to capitalism, even if they're suffering is different in both kind a degree from yours. even the "winners" in this system are miserable (e.g., elon musk. the richest dude on earth is also deeply unhappy)
note the emphasis on teh word "try" in the previous paragraph. you will fail at having compassion for your enemies, and that's ok -- you're only human and you need to have compassion for yourself as well when you fail. just making the effort will make you less hateful and angry
Death to America
this is basically my answer as well. something about reading Debt made it click for me.
hmmm i read that book years ago, before i really either solidified my understanding of marxism or opened myself to buddhism at all. can you elaborate on what you feel the connection is between Debt and using compassion as an antidote to being a hate-pilled leftcel?
Death to America
it gave me context to feel a compassionate through-line for human existence and appreciate more the historical development of global civilization from a pretty materialist lens. as applied to my personal history, having a lens to view the development of judaism and christianity as an expression of cultural response to material conditions and in relation to debt and economic relations gave me a way to psychologically distance myself from feeling a need to negotiate with the religion as an insider. approaching it from a historical materialist perspective, i think graeber also unintentionally paints a convincing portrait of the interaction of technology, capital, people, and the psychological traumas people inflict upon one another. i had been raised to be generally compassionate in principle, but by relatively ignorant and poor practitioners. in other words, graeber's approach to history and the specific content that he focused on to develop his theory of debt as a panhistorical economic driver and instrument of power and recurring example of a superhuman (larger than a human can successfully reason about concretely) abstract that drove humans to think more abstractly about everything. that last part, along with a materialist approach to integrating history, filled in the gaps that I had from understanding Marx as applied with less eurocentrism than Marx was capable of.
this is very insightful, thank you for sharing! i think i need to go back and read debt again now that im no longer as much of a baby leftist
Death to America
GOOD post