So, ive been thinking about how my trauma effects my politics. This may shock some of you, but a lot of my radicalizing experiences were pretty fucking traumatizing. Resistance is part of how i cope, how i keep from killing myself, how i get up in the morning after all the shit I've survived. I am under no illusions that I am emotionally healthy.
But that doesn't just go one direction. How do we define and explore the pathology of boot licking, of continued obedience, of feeling perfectly fine and like it's 'just another day and wow yeah something scary must be on if the US marines are deployed down the street, i hope they get the bad guys soon!'?
Because this is a dangerous delusion. It is blatantly and violently counterfactual. So what the fuck? Pathologically stable attachment? Hypersucceotability to delusion?
How do we figure out what a healthy person and healthy context for them to exist in would even fucking look like?
I don't just want to call the pathologically compliant names here¹. I want to figure out what breaks a person like this so we can fucking fix it. I want theories with actual utility in something adjacent to the situationist tradition.
¹'boot licker' is perfectly suitable and requires no further theorizing. Not that I don't also want to call them that.
Bigotry, supporting movements that go against your interests and cause violence aren't necessarily personal failings, it's the result of bourgeois society and our capitalist superstructure and them instilling these values through education, media, communities and so on.
This doesn't apply only to reactionary thought, but also to """truths""" we happen to take for granted like current political economy and mode of production (nobody talks about it anymore and just accepts capitalism as granted, and anti-capitalists are closer to anti-consumerists and reformists), nationalism, electorialism, morality and so on.
Despite how horrible they can be, they're as much of a victim of the system as anyone, and the only way to make them see the truth is to have them experience it for themselves. Same applies to delusional progressives.
I live in Europe and lately I started noticing huge difference in a perception of reality between people living in urban areas, small villages and suburbs. The last group seams to exhibit more antisocial behavior patterns and "me against the world" mentality. And in combination with "self-employed" it can easily turn to pathological levels. The digital age doesn't make it easier either and it got much worse since COVID.
There is no doubt in my mind, that alienation as a part of neo-liberal project is the main weapon of the oligarchs in their struggle to crush us. This is probably not a hot news for most of you, but for me it has been just a relatively recent observation.