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Aug. 17th, 2025 08:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
numinousdread Checking in with people I followed on Tumblr a few years back feels weird, because I've basically replaced my old Tumblr circles and so there are certain parts of left Tumblr culture I am not exposed to. So people will be making critiques that I agree with of ideas and topics that preoccupied me years ago, and I get this sense of exhaustion and relief that I've left. If I had stayed there I would have to contend with these repetitive conversations, either people aren't engaging with these criticisms in a way that helps them develop their ideas, or new waves of people are entering the convo and making the same mistakes.
Part of me does feel like-- I've grown a lot intellectually in the past seven or so years, though maybe that's a bit vain and ego-defensive. I could have done a lot more work to read the type of intellectually challenging texts I feel help me grow, and I'm ashamed about that. But there's only so much growth you have available to you within a context where you're engaging with such a small slice of take-havers (who are in turn mostly engaged with each other), only so many conceptual tools for analyzing the world you can get and facts you can be exposed to. Plus that slice of Tumblr people don't really have a developed theory of ethics or justice or epistemology. That feels so corny and self-serious to express, but I genuinely think it's part of the problem, and that engaging with more formal philosophy would help people think better. Or maybe it wouldn't, and people would just get confused by a bunch of fiddly technical shit and become more insane.
Anyways, I feel like I'm genuinely still developing my ideas on certain topics and not purely beefing with the ghosts of discourse past. And I've entered more intellectually diverse spaces that give me new models for thinking, in terms of ranges of topics and ideological leanings of participants. I don't feel like "the master of the discourse" who can easily out-argue the people around me and is just continually surprised at how sloppy and complacent people around me are. I feel sloppy and complacent, and like I'm operating on a lower level than a lot of participants in certain convos, and that motivates me to do a better job at thinking, or to just let them hash it out and not assume that I'm so smart that I'm gonna win this one.
And re: the ideological diversity-- there's an imaginary Tumblr user in my head who is like wait a minute, dark hinting/dog-whistle alert, that means you are on the chud Internet, why are you on the chud Internet, and that's not so. But also like, if someone hears me say I can be in a Discord server with someone who thinks capitalism is awesome or that government regulation does more harm than good or whatever, and goes "Omg, that means you're letting them get away with it", then idk that's their problem. I am not going to shame a right-libertarian out of libertarianing (nor should they shame me about supporting the welfare state), and engaging with right-libertarians can help me grow intellectually and also learn the skills to live in an ideologically diverse society (which I already had to do).
Like, I remember going to an anarchist conference in 2017 or 2018, and some ancap guy came by mistake, and my response to him was disquiet and fear. Not "Oh this is a silly set of beliefs to have", not "Ugh one of these dudes, can't wait to hear about seasteading", not pity for him getting trapped in a belief system that I regarded as wrong and harmful. I was scared of him, even though he was perfectly polite and even willing to talk to me. And I just think that was an irrational fear, and the level of discomfort I felt around "ideological enemies" made it harder for me to engage in society, learn more about why they believe that stuff, or have a conversation where I explained my views and hopefully gave the impression that not all leftists are insane or stupid. And I think I feel comfortable with feeling that level of disquiet around a fascist, but not an ancap. And that's compatible with thinking that their proposed society would have major glaring issues or thinking at least some people are ancaps because of character defects, ignorance, and/or motivated reasoning. You can think someone is wrong about a lot of things without having your heart rate increase when they enter the room.
If you find right-libertarians step on your triggers a lot or just think they are dumb and/or evil and you don't want to be around them in your personal life, then you do you. (Like, maybe they advocate for ending programs you find important and you predictably get upset by trying to argue for their importance, maybe you can't stand people who vocally dislike leftists, maybe they just remind you of your racist gun nut uncle, whatever.) But I've drunk the liberal "freedom of association" Koolaid on this one. You should make this decision for yourself and not because of social pressure.
And tbc... I don't think the experiences that have helped me grow are like, necessary for avoiding stagnation. There's a better version of me out there who just read a bunch of philosophy or wrote a bunch of essays, but I'm not them. There's a lot of self-improvement that I abandoned in favor of short-term pleasures or just had trouble getting motivated for because it felt too big and threatening to my self-image.
But I'm proud that I grew at all, in my undisciplined way.
Part of me does feel like-- I've grown a lot intellectually in the past seven or so years, though maybe that's a bit vain and ego-defensive. I could have done a lot more work to read the type of intellectually challenging texts I feel help me grow, and I'm ashamed about that. But there's only so much growth you have available to you within a context where you're engaging with such a small slice of take-havers (who are in turn mostly engaged with each other), only so many conceptual tools for analyzing the world you can get and facts you can be exposed to. Plus that slice of Tumblr people don't really have a developed theory of ethics or justice or epistemology. That feels so corny and self-serious to express, but I genuinely think it's part of the problem, and that engaging with more formal philosophy would help people think better. Or maybe it wouldn't, and people would just get confused by a bunch of fiddly technical shit and become more insane.
Anyways, I feel like I'm genuinely still developing my ideas on certain topics and not purely beefing with the ghosts of discourse past. And I've entered more intellectually diverse spaces that give me new models for thinking, in terms of ranges of topics and ideological leanings of participants. I don't feel like "the master of the discourse" who can easily out-argue the people around me and is just continually surprised at how sloppy and complacent people around me are. I feel sloppy and complacent, and like I'm operating on a lower level than a lot of participants in certain convos, and that motivates me to do a better job at thinking, or to just let them hash it out and not assume that I'm so smart that I'm gonna win this one.
And re: the ideological diversity-- there's an imaginary Tumblr user in my head who is like wait a minute, dark hinting/dog-whistle alert, that means you are on the chud Internet, why are you on the chud Internet, and that's not so. But also like, if someone hears me say I can be in a Discord server with someone who thinks capitalism is awesome or that government regulation does more harm than good or whatever, and goes "Omg, that means you're letting them get away with it", then idk that's their problem. I am not going to shame a right-libertarian out of libertarianing (nor should they shame me about supporting the welfare state), and engaging with right-libertarians can help me grow intellectually and also learn the skills to live in an ideologically diverse society (which I already had to do).
Like, I remember going to an anarchist conference in 2017 or 2018, and some ancap guy came by mistake, and my response to him was disquiet and fear. Not "Oh this is a silly set of beliefs to have", not "Ugh one of these dudes, can't wait to hear about seasteading", not pity for him getting trapped in a belief system that I regarded as wrong and harmful. I was scared of him, even though he was perfectly polite and even willing to talk to me. And I just think that was an irrational fear, and the level of discomfort I felt around "ideological enemies" made it harder for me to engage in society, learn more about why they believe that stuff, or have a conversation where I explained my views and hopefully gave the impression that not all leftists are insane or stupid. And I think I feel comfortable with feeling that level of disquiet around a fascist, but not an ancap. And that's compatible with thinking that their proposed society would have major glaring issues or thinking at least some people are ancaps because of character defects, ignorance, and/or motivated reasoning. You can think someone is wrong about a lot of things without having your heart rate increase when they enter the room.
If you find right-libertarians step on your triggers a lot or just think they are dumb and/or evil and you don't want to be around them in your personal life, then you do you. (Like, maybe they advocate for ending programs you find important and you predictably get upset by trying to argue for their importance, maybe you can't stand people who vocally dislike leftists, maybe they just remind you of your racist gun nut uncle, whatever.) But I've drunk the liberal "freedom of association" Koolaid on this one. You should make this decision for yourself and not because of social pressure.
And tbc... I don't think the experiences that have helped me grow are like, necessary for avoiding stagnation. There's a better version of me out there who just read a bunch of philosophy or wrote a bunch of essays, but I'm not them. There's a lot of self-improvement that I abandoned in favor of short-term pleasures or just had trouble getting motivated for because it felt too big and threatening to my self-image.
But I'm proud that I grew at all, in my undisciplined way.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-10 05:23 pm (UTC)Oh yeah, Contrapoints coined a term (or maybe just popularized one?) for believing something is more likely to be true because it feels threatening or painful. She calls it "masochistic epistemology". Idk if you're familiar with that term, and it may be too academic philosophy-speak for your tastes, but I remember her explanation being impactful for me.
And yeah, I do think there are some tendencies within leftist culture (especially online?) that can be off-putting to a lot of leftists. Socialism is a pretty big tent, and the alternatives people envision (and how they think we should get to them) are pretty diverse.
Dumping too many of my issues at 3 AM, whee
Date: 2025-09-20 07:32 am (UTC)Masochistic epistemology works fine for me, actually! I seem to do better with passively absorbing terminology from being around certain kinds of discussions than with deliberately setting out to learn it. But yes. I think this stuff is not helped by the large number of people who do repeat "the more it hurts, the more you need to hear it" to both themselves and everyone else. We've had friends who were sensible about a lot of other things get ensnared in this fallacy. One of them, when we pressed them on it a little, admitted that some of their thought patterns might be left over from a really bad therapist they once had, who was all about "if it hurts, then you're making progress." (Not in the sense of "letting dissociated feelings come back in is painful," but in the sense of "you are delusional and I will destroy your delusions, and it will hurt but you must do it.")
The Catholic deconstruction is something that... I think we sometimes forget more than we should, because we were never to the point of being really, really devout; some of us were already questioning the dogma when we were 8. But one thing that is clear in our memory is that the aspect we most had to get rid of, because we found it unendurable, unbearable, literally unlivable, was the idea of original sin and of redemption from that sin only being possible through Jesus. (Who didn't even cleanse you of your original sin, because that was impossible, but just sacrificed himself to make it so that you wouldn't be punished for it. If you lived virtuously, anyway.) And when I say it was "unlivable," I mean... well, it's dramatic, but so is my origin story, but when we believed those things were true, we wanted to die so we could get rid of the badness that was inside us and could never be washed away. It also dovetailed too much with our mother's attitude that every mistake we made was proof of an innate badness in us that could never be cured or cleansed, which also made us feel like we would be better off dead. We felt guilty all the time just for existing, but then if suicide is a sin, the only thing you can do is just continue to live with this innate badness that can never go away.
(Sidenote from Saffron: We've definitely met Catholics who are decent people! We just... the majority of us just don't mesh with the dogma, or with Christianity in general, and the few people in here who do practice some form of it go for more esoteric varieties. Also Julian likes traditional Mass because she finds comfort in the ritual and... sense of being in touch with something ancient, I guess. So yeah, just wanted to clarify that we're not saying Catholics are all bad or anything, we follow the "no religion or politics" rule with most people we talk to in daily life anyway.)
We had to constantly fight and beat down those ideas when they intruded into our thinking, to be wary of them when they masqueraded as other things... And then social media's most warped ideas of social justice put up their damnedest battle to make us discard those instincts and let original sin and innate badness back in under different names, even when our instincts screamed in revolt. There were always clever explanations by glibber people for why we should be feeling disturbed or upset and why we had to embrace the worst of it in order to become A REAL HARD-CORE MOTHERFUCKIN' SOCIAL JUSTICE NAVY SEAL WITH OVER 9000 CONFIRMED KILLS AND WHAT DID YOU JUST CALL ME, YOU LITTLE F*GGOT!!?!
(...Nina, good lord, what are you doing up in my replies at this time of the night.)
So, like... I guess I find it interesting, in a weird unpleasant sort of way, that a lot of people who *say* they've left Catholicism or Evangelicalism behind, the... infrastructure, I guess, still seems to be there. And I know I'm definitely not the first person to mention this and far from the most insightful, but yeah, a lot of people on social media, younger ones especially, seem to have an "original-sin-shaped hole," like some people talk about a "God-shaped hole." But one of the differences between us and them is that it doesn't really seem to... bother them in the same way it bothers us? Like, we occasionally look at what some of our friends with Tumblrs are reblogging and some of the stuff they reblog, for "their own enlightenment" or whatnot, if we were looking at that stuff constantly it would have made us feel like we should have disembowelled ourselves as painfully as possible, like, YESTERDAY, as the ultimate apology for the horrendous sin of our existence. We wonder what the difference is between us, and our friends who can just roll with that stuff and only occasionally say "oh, I'm clinically depressed, yeah, but I'm not suicidal." The Imaginary Tumblr User In Our Head says that this is an Us Problem, a very, very bad Us Problem, in fact, that can only be remedied by returning to Tumblr and consuming as much "enlightening" content as possible. Meanwhile, I'm over here thinking it's possible to be pro-social justice, to even work on organizing and carrying out the actual WORK work of social justice, while still thinking this is a Them Problem and not actually an Us Problem.
...and then sometimes we run into self-proclaimed Marxists who apparently hate everything they deem "identity politics" and have a brief crisis over "OH FUCK, DID WE PICK THE WRONG SIDE."
But yeah... There is some kind of difference, somehow, between people who find the idea of an innate sin, an innate stain on the fabric of your existence, to be repellant, and people who are comfortable with it. People who might possibly slot easily into a Tumblr-progressive worldview because it offers them something that they found familiar and comforting. I often think (messily and imperfectly, but still) about how it might come down to the difference between a worldview centering rightful beliefs, versus a worldview centering rightful actions. The difference between morality as holding the correct ideology versus morality as walking the correct path. And maybe it's vain, but I think that thinking of morality as walking a rightful path, in the sense of the actions you take and how you cultivate your relationships with other persons around you (including choosing NOT to cultivate certain ones) is more difficult than an ideology where you're considered Okay if you just swear allegiance to it. And a lot of people on Tumblr, like you mentioned, do not know how to form a sense of ethics and choose their values on their own, without being told what to do by others.
...of course, while I say it's a more difficult path, the fact that I ended up on it often feels more to me like a form of weakness than a strength. Especially when arguing with the Imaginary Tumblr User In My Head. Because there were certain ideas and ways of conceptualizing certain things that made me have a reaction like "HOLY SHIT WHAT THE FUCK NO, YOU ARE DUMPING POISON DOWN MY THROAT, GET IT OUT OF ME, GET IT OUT OR IT'S GOING TO KILL ME." ...well, uh. except that part of my Origin Story is that I woke up from an in-system coma at a time when a lot of people here felt like they were crumbling under pressure to engage in certain Discourses (tm) and were starting to feel, again, like their existence might be an abomination, and I kicked and screamed and thrashed and fought and spit out the poison.
But the fear that feeling that way is Actually proof of an extreme badness in us, is something that keeps coming round and round again like a bad penny.
-Istevia