Pragmatic Leftist Theory

As someone who’s combative and self-righteous myself, I get those folks, honestly. I could very easily be a crusader in their vein. The ever-ongoing escalation against those who think they can ‘get away’ with just a little bit of assistance towards bad causes? “Fuck them! They deserve nothing! Humiliate them, ostracize them, cast them out!” The voice of God in your head is overwhelmingly, and it feels good to do so, to beat back every little inkling of evil trying to worm its way into normality.

On the other hand, that’s exactly why I try to police my own worldview for that. I’m tetchy and still largely insufferable on politics on a personal level, but that level of insufferability and tetchiness is more… universal to my character, than particular to my political views. Wish I could say I’m working on it, but the truth is I’m just trying to make it through the next day at this point, lmao.

And the truth is, there is some point to that voice - tolerating things normalizes them. But if your idea is to tolerate no evil views in the people you talk with, you will very quickly end up in the same situation as religious monastics and hermits - or inquisitions. You have to pick which evils, and what intensity, are worth going nuclear on, instead of whiting out massive groups with a broad brush, unless you're willing to do what monastics, hermits, and inquisitions do. And I would venture to say that... none of those are particularly good or moral choices.

Once you let that combative self-righteousness dictate how you see the world, everyone becomes an enemy, and that's not productive, healthy, or moral. It becomes a self-feeding isolation, an ouroboros of purifying and intensifying hatred, and… honestly, my entire ideological journey has been away from that, save an acquired hatred for libertarians around 2017. I had a taste of that self-righteous spiral early on in coming-of-political-age, thrill and all, and I still didn’t like where it went. It’s not good for anyone.

At the end of the day, I get their core point, that there are some things that you have to draw the line on - the idea of total tolerance or total left unity is a pipedream; injustice to the oppressed. But at the same time, so is total purity and correctness.

At some point your worldview has to account for the fact that most people are just trying to keep their heads down and get by, and so are you. The notion of infinite heroism, of infinite struggle against injustice, infinite wisdom, infinite discernment of good and evil, feels good, but is incoherent, impossible, and itself, unjust. You have to see that people are capable of being wrong, even horrifically wrong, but not always fundamentally broken so much as just trying to keep themselves afloat in the horrific melange that is our upbringing, our lives, and our environments.

I’ll brawl with folk all day long over issues I think are important, and I think they’re distinctly wrong over. More than I should, honestly, and almost certainly more savagely than I should. I absolutely go bare-knuckles on every point I feel is important, and that... sometimes leads to asymmetric views, where I can view someone as "Good fellow, sometimes has bad views that need to be confronted without softballing the implications, but don't we all?", because what's a little vicious disputation between gentlefolk and scholars? And they view me as "Insufferable foul-mouthed aggressive shithead", not necessarily incorrectly, lmao.

But shutting out people entirely has to be dire, a matter of values - or at least information hygiene. Take the learning moments where you can. Most people may not be directly convinced by an argument or ten, but their trajectory can be shifted by exposure to more correct views.

And for that matter, we should hope ourselves to be shifted to more correct views wherever we may be wrong.