Sad Radicals (How Radicalism Produces Toxic, Paranoid, Depressed Subjects)

[mountaineer]

Sad Radicals
Conor Barnes
Quillette
Dec. 11, 2018

When I became an anarchist I was 18, depressed, anxious, and ready to save the world. I moved in with other anarchists and worked at a vegetarian co-op cafe. I protested against student tuition, prison privatization, and pipeline extensions. I had lawyer’s numbers sharpied on my ankle and I assisted friends who were pepper-sprayed at demos. I tabled zines, lived with my “chosen family,” and performed slam poems about the end of the world. While my radical community was deconstructing gender, monogamy, and mental health, we lived and breathed concepts and tools like call-outs, intersectionality, cultural appropriation, trigger warnings, safe spaces, privilege theory, and rape culture.

What is a radical community? For the purposes of this article, I will define it as a community that shares both an ideology of complete dissatisfaction with existing society due to its oppressive nature and a desire to radically alter or destroy that society because it cannot be redeemed by its own means. I eventually fell out with my own radical community. The ideology and the people within it had left me a burned and disillusioned wreck.  ...

As radicals, we lived in what I call a paradigm of suspicion, one of the malignant ideas that emerge as a result of intellectual in-breeding. We inherited familial neuroses and saw insidious oppression and exploitation in all social relationships, stifling our ability to relate to others or ourselves without cynicism. Activists anxiously pore over interactions, looking for ways in which the mundane conceals domination. To see every interaction as containing hidden violence is to become a permanent victim, because if all you are is a nail, everything looks like a hammer.

The paradigm of suspicion leaves the radical exhausted and misanthropic, because any action or statement can be shown with sufficient effort to hide privilege, a microaggression, or unconscious bias.  ...

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[Sanguine]

Really interesting article.  It helps explain why talking to these people is pointless, at least until they open their minds a bit.

As Steven Pinker points out in The Better Angels of Our Nature, nobody in the West has an argument for wife-beating or denying women the vote anymore. Infant mortality rates have cratered, and extreme poverty rates are falling precipitously. With trends like these and more, liberal capitalism appears less like the arch-nemesis of humanity, and more like a miracle machine. It could even be improved by the compassion and devotion of former radicals. It is worth noting that this progress does not mean that exploitation and oppression have been solved; but it does mean that our current society is the only one to have made significant inroads against them.

[goatprairie]

We shouldn't forget that inside many leftists is the urge to dominate others.  While some on the left may have legitimate feelings for improving the lives of others, it is my opinion that many leftists are simply evil people who wish to inflict their evil ideas and themselves on their fellow humans.
When the Bolsheviks took over in Russia, they made things infinitely worse for the average person than whatever the Czars (who were hardly angels) did. Stalin wasn't an aberration of leftism. He was simply a more extreme form of Lenin who was himself an autocratic murderer.
So no matter how well society functions, as long as there are leftists we will have disruptions and leftists (antifa, BLM, Cair) trying to impose their idea of utopia on everybody else.
And as we know the leftists' idea of utopia is really hell on earth.

[GtHawk]

Wait, what? (How Radicalism Produces Toxic, Paranoid, Depressed Subjects)

Isn't this kinda like arguing which came first, the chicken or the egg?