34
What do you say to people who think that making things better is naive and delusional?
(hexbear.net)
You know, the types who think leftism is unrealistic and pure utopian idealist fantasy
I don't understand these types. The type that seem to sneer at the idea of making the world a good place. If it were up to them we wouldn't build shelter from the rain or invent cures for diseases. When the world is shitty, you make it less shitty, that's the whole point of life or you might as well be miserable and live like a cow who has made peace with the slaughterhouse instead of trying to escape it.
I'm tired of people who pathologise good things and have a weird boner for hardship
"The world sucks. Grow up and leave rebelling against reality behind!"
I'm tired boss
I wonder the same thing about folks like that. Idk if there's one explanation that fits them all. Maybe some are mostly fine under the current system and they lack empathy and imagination so they genuinely don't care and can't understand why you do. Maybe some do know things are shit, even for themsleves, but acknowledging it means they have a responsibility to be part of changing it. And that's too much for them to bear. And even if they wanted to, they don't know how.
Everyone's favorite Red Sails article gets into something close to this regarding why westerners so easily and readily believe absurd nonsense about other nations
Maybe it doesn't explain every instance, but I think some sort of strange coping mechanism like this explains some of it. Its easier to think you and the change you want is naive and silly and God's in his heaven and all's good enough in the world than to face the implications of what the change you're yappin about would entail.
And with my parents, family, and other people of that generation specifically I've found them to be very nihilistic and giving no fucks about much that's not in their immediate sight. They didn't grow up with powerful working class institutions. And all they know and have been told about unions, radical political parties, communism, civil rights and social change is "they all fail - best to focus on yourself".
Oh, I realized you ask "what to say". Not "why do you think..."
Idk. I wish I knew. But I think knowing why they think that could help with figuring out how to get them out of that hole. Maybe they need to be presented a real path to change, or a path that feels realistic to them.
I wish I had an answer for you. It's all of our jobs to figure it out.
It's all good my syntax can be all over the place sometimes.
But yeah it's a tough one.