2021-06-19 To Think in Public

Recently, @bob posted a quote from Alive In The Land Of The Dead by CrimethInc.:

@bob

Alive In The Land Of The Dead

This also means that there is no mythical ’They.’ Innumerable radical movements and social critics have relied upon this concept to motivate people by stirring up hatred for the ’evil orchestrators’ of human suffering, the enemies who conspire against us. But this kind of thinking only serves to divide us against each other, and whether we are divided on class lines, on color lines, or according to any other categories, we are distracted from the important issues and impeded in our progress. Our true ’enemy’ is the social forces and patterns at work between ourselves, and it is these forces which we must come to understand and to struggle against.”

An interesting thought. And the article makes this quite explicit. We are all in this together. Rich and poor. All of us. We all feel the pain and the emptiness inside.

The article also makes another point: there’s no point in waiting for, or striving for, or even fighting for a revolution. The revolution has to happen now, and it has to be a joyful adventure. And that in turn means that we have to start with our own lives. Anything else is foolish. There’s no point in exhortations for a struggle if we won’t see results in our lifetimes. There’s no point in rabble rousing and organizing an endless struggle, a fight where victory lies in the far future, nebulous and vague, like salvation, like the afterlife. Therefore, every revolutionary act must be a joyful act, and it must happen now.

But that is not all. We want the revolution to spread. Therefore, we must think and act in public. We must point out the problems we see, we must say how they make us feel, and we must make public the reasons we suspect lead to these problems. And so our thoughts are revealed and our actions gain meaning.

We … who … feel the “poverty” of the existench that modern Western civilization has to offer, must seek out others who are experiencing similar symptoms. … we must construct and publicize … a theory of why human beings act and interact in the ways that they do today, and how this leads to … alienation, disorientation, and exhaustion. This analysis must have effective action of some kind as its … consequence, or else … it will come to nothing.

I’ll try to keep this in mind for my future writings. 😆

​#Philosophy