Originally written Nov 8, 2021, lightly revised. Nothing has changed.
I have a confession to make.
I have no idea anymore how we are supposed to stop bad things.
It feels like some insane inversion of effort effect has set in now, where the more effort we put into speaking out and protesting and organizing, the more it just encourages bad things.
I don’t know how to convince someone how to experience the basic human emotion of empathy. -- Kayla Chadwick
I remembered this quote last night and I think at the heart of it, this is it. We have a society that views empathy with disgust and calls for it cause for rebellion.
The mistake we made is that the problem is partisan only by degrees. We have become so accustomed to this lack of empathy that we don't even see it as long as it's polite enough. One side is loudly and violently so, so that the other can continue to be quietly so.
Trump called immigrants rapists so that Biden could laugh at college students for wanting health care or an escape from debt. Persut frothed about Muslims so that SDP could defund the Migri.
It's all just degrees of performance. This is how liberals give cover to fascism.
But it is also I think that we have become so disconnected and overwhelmed by the sheer breadth of harm.
None of us are without sin, and we reflexively fear empathy because if we truly embraced it, every part of our society would have to change.
We live on a mountain of bones.
We have all been forced into complicity with one of the monstrous systems of exploitation ever devised by man, and it is utterly invested in us not questioning that complicity, because if we truly held all human life to be of worth, the whole thing would have to come down.
And so it seems like an eternal uphill battle, an impossible, Sisyphean task, to ask people to care about the simplest things, the most obvious things ... because if I care about this, where would it stop? How much of my life as I know it would have to end, if I start caring?
So no, the fact the star did a hate crime is not enough to get them to stop watching their favorite show because if it was, they might have to stop watching damn near every other show, and chuck the monopolist service that hosts it, and the coltan-powered device they watch it on, and on and on.
"There is no ethical consumption under capitalism" is not an excuse to go "well then I guess I can't do anything then."
It is an acknowledgement of the sheer breadth of the horror we have built, the monstrous machine that grinds blood and bones to make our bread and circuses.
The system of the world is one of endless exploitation at every level, and of endless layers of abstraction and spectacle, to keep us all from tearing it apart in mad horror.
And we are as terrified of that prospect as any of the ruling class. The needed change is beyond fathom.
The unfortunately very natural inverse response to "well, if I start caring about one thing, I'll have to care about all of it" is just "if I can't care about anything, I can do anything".
And thus the inverse effect. Telling people the thing is horrible just fires up rebellion.
