One of the big hurdles faced by “pure” philosophy in times of acute stress - whether the stress is personal or cultural, whether the philosophy is social theory or ethics or etc - one of the big hurdles is that people under intense, acute stress come looking for answers, direct, concrete answers. This is understandable. We are under stress, and we are grasping for a way to relieve that stress, as quickly as possible (followed by “as thoroughly as possible” and “as efficiently as possible” and “as safely as possible” in some mixture of distant second-and-beyond place; “quickly” tends to take the massive immediate lead for hopefully obvious reasons).
Problem is, due to the nature of the beast, philosophy trends heavily towards answering in the form of further questions. Not just the Socratic method; that’s an example, certainly, but also in questions designed to prompt more analysis, more introspection and examination. More consideration. Even when it comes to the “read theory” instructions that leftist agitators are constantly throwing out like fire and forget hand grenades (and for some people, “read theory” is itself a thought terminating platitude, more on that in a second) the theory in question trends towards asking more than answering: how will you incorporate these views into your praxis? What does this look like? What does this mean to your community, to you, to your interrelated web?
But when you’re under acute stress, you’re not usually looking to be set up at the starting line of an introspective quest. You’re looking for answers. You’re looking for concrete, actionable pieces which will help alleviate the stress as quickly as possible.
And so what frequently happens is people under stress coming to philosophy, coming to theory, and grabbing on hard to foundational axioms - but rather than using them to build a foundation of understanding, treating them as complete answers because they feel that way. Turning them into thought terminating platitudes. This is how you’ll find someone up there on a Junior-scale soapbox, responding to someone else’s pain at the hands of their own acute stress with “the suffering is the point” and “the purpose of the system is what it does” and nothing beyond that, but their fringe halo of listeners nodding safely, “so true bestie” and that’s another answer dispensed, another truth doled out, discussion over because the purpose of the machine is what it does, problem solved who else needs to hear it now?
And obviously this has a tendency to leave one of two types of people in the wake: either they accept the cliche and embrace it as their own, perpetuating that cycle, or they are left bewildered and still hurting.
Because the actual point of these observations, these axioms, isn’t to provide a stopping point, it’s to provoke more exploration, more investigation, more questioning. To hang up a sign reading “inquire within”. To push the querent into asking things like “so what does the system DO” and “whom does it benefit and how” and “how do we (begin to) shut it down” and further layers, to encourage us to synthesize a working worldview and take action on it - but, ironically, that requires something counterintuitive when you’re looking to make the stress go away.
I have no idea how to tag this. I wrote it during a painsomnia waking stretch after watching a couple of these hurdles smack acquaintances in the (rhetorical) face; there’s a reason that’s the choice of example I went with, and so on. Maybe I’m just writing this to vent, I don’t know. I’ll tag it after I get some sleep, probably.