When I’m forced to spend any amount of social time with liberals, especially the more reptilian ones you encounter in academia and managers, especially if they have an explicitly perverted ideology of neoliberalism, and even when they are suposedly best friends, I recognize after not much time that they actually don’t like eachother. They hate eachother. They are jealous, petty and envious. They are all insecure. Their understanding of generosity and sympathy is absolutely reducible to a market relation of exchange for profit in purely inhuman sense, and not even in a progressive social sense of reciprocity. They often dontunderstand that friendship can be good in and of itself, perhaps because they are so alienated and toxic that they’ve forgotten what actual friendship is, and that love is not reducible to material or economic dependence (fantastic scene which shows this in season 3 of Succession, in Italy between Tom and Greg).
I’ve had many ex-liberal friends become communists just because they were so alienated by their liberal friends that they started hanging out more with communists and were like “oh damn these people actually like eachother and don’t try to demean eachother”.
Almost all the communists I know who come to hate eachother do so cos of theoretical and practical political beefs.
a coworker explained to me that he was suing his sister in court because he loaned her money for rent and she hadn’t paid him back. I took a full 30 seconds to respond because I couldn’t fathom treating anyone, leave alone family, so transactionally. it’s not like he needed the money - he was just willing to trash his sister’s life because he felt entitled to.
Yeh when I hear shit like this I’m unable to treat the person in question as really human (in a normative sense). Someone must have really lost - or never had - some really basic moral and emotional capacities to be able to think like that about their sister. People like this need to be terrified into submission and shamed for ever having thought like that, and punished if they did it prior to a socialist society.
Sure. Although we both know as a matter of historical fact that’s very far from always being the case. Reeducation and reform are not inconsistent with facing consequences, taking one’s medicine, laying in the bed one has made, etc. Indeed the latter are likely part of the former imo. For me humans are an intrinsically social and political species, in virtue of our evolution and our capacities, and this determines what our material interests are as a species. When someone is so anti-social to the point of being willing to sue their own sister out of entitlement, they are actively contradicting the interests of humanity. It’s a sign of some of the most depraved transformations of human beings I can think of and should be cursed like the plague.
I think it’s a matter of social conditioning, though, not an intrinsic part of most of the people who behave this way (though this antisocial behavior leaves a lot of room for psychopaths to operate). “one must pay their debts” is ingrained in us as a truism from birth. I suspect many have never even considered the possibility that loaning money itself was considered a despicable act in many societies, or that it’s possible to relate to other human beings in a way that’s not transactional. this fact gives me hope that we can recondition most of these people - we must at least separate them from society and try. if they’re truly irredeemable, throw them in the volcano. but we must hold out hope for the possibility of human growth and change.
100%.
When I’m forced to spend any amount of social time with liberals, especially the more reptilian ones you encounter in academia and managers, especially if they have an explicitly perverted ideology of neoliberalism, and even when they are suposedly best friends, I recognize after not much time that they actually don’t like eachother. They hate eachother. They are jealous, petty and envious. They are all insecure. Their understanding of generosity and sympathy is absolutely reducible to a market relation of exchange for profit in purely inhuman sense, and not even in a progressive social sense of reciprocity. They often dontunderstand that friendship can be good in and of itself, perhaps because they are so alienated and toxic that they’ve forgotten what actual friendship is, and that love is not reducible to material or economic dependence (fantastic scene which shows this in season 3 of Succession, in Italy between Tom and Greg).
I’ve had many ex-liberal friends become communists just because they were so alienated by their liberal friends that they started hanging out more with communists and were like “oh damn these people actually like eachother and don’t try to demean eachother”.
Almost all the communists I know who come to hate eachother do so cos of theoretical and practical political beefs.
a coworker explained to me that he was suing his sister in court because he loaned her money for rent and she hadn’t paid him back. I took a full 30 seconds to respond because I couldn’t fathom treating anyone, leave alone family, so transactionally. it’s not like he needed the money - he was just willing to trash his sister’s life because he felt entitled to.
Yeh when I hear shit like this I’m unable to treat the person in question as really human (in a normative sense). Someone must have really lost - or never had - some really basic moral and emotional capacities to be able to think like that about their sister. People like this need to be terrified into submission and shamed for ever having thought like that, and punished if they did it prior to a socialist society.
if the CPC managed to reform the former emperor of China, I hold out hope that all of these cretins can be reformed.
Sure. Although we both know as a matter of historical fact that’s very far from always being the case. Reeducation and reform are not inconsistent with facing consequences, taking one’s medicine, laying in the bed one has made, etc. Indeed the latter are likely part of the former imo. For me humans are an intrinsically social and political species, in virtue of our evolution and our capacities, and this determines what our material interests are as a species. When someone is so anti-social to the point of being willing to sue their own sister out of entitlement, they are actively contradicting the interests of humanity. It’s a sign of some of the most depraved transformations of human beings I can think of and should be cursed like the plague.
I think it’s a matter of social conditioning, though, not an intrinsic part of most of the people who behave this way (though this antisocial behavior leaves a lot of room for psychopaths to operate). “one must pay their debts” is ingrained in us as a truism from birth. I suspect many have never even considered the possibility that loaning money itself was considered a despicable act in many societies, or that it’s possible to relate to other human beings in a way that’s not transactional. this fact gives me hope that we can recondition most of these people - we must at least separate them from society and try. if they’re truly irredeemable, throw them in the volcano. but we must hold out hope for the possibility of human growth and change.