Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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I dont really understand how people just kinda…unconsciously move through life. “Politics” is one thing, i don’t really get how people aren’t thinking about their worldview daily. But even beyond that. Love, sex, drink, food, movies, games, etc. I’m not asking why people aren’t like me [in that I have niche tastes like Switchel and Italian post modern novels] but…I suppose I don’t understand why people aren’t curious. They don’t have to be curious in the same way as I am, but I just don’t understand how someone can “just” do something. “Just” read shlock novels and “just” cook the food you’ve eaten youre whole life, “just” play madden or call of duty, etc.
Eh, perhaps I’m jealous. A lot of these type of people seem really content, and I think the lack of contentness is one of the reasons why I’m so stressed all the time. I always have to have more, be better, know more, make more, etc. Nor can I really just repeat things. It’s rare that I’ll ever reread a book or replay a game in the same way. Im constantly looking for new recipes. Why reread Kokoro or Invisible Cities when I have so many books I have to read anyway? So maybe I’m just jealous
self and class consciousness is tough man, especially if you’ve lived that way your whole life, you learned to live like that from a very young age, and furthermore if you have childhood or other trauma that incentivizes you to keep yourself from becoming conscious in order to avoid processing painful memories without a sufficient framework (or social support) to do so. unless you have a material interest, a material need to become conscious, most people don’t, and that’s okay. that doesn’t make them any less rational
on the other hand, jealousy and lack of contentedness seem like internal contradictions for you to work on personally, regardless of how you relate to or interpret others. in my opinion jealousy is a cognitive error taught to us by liberalism, and the correct response is actually something more like inspiration or wonder. in my own personal experience, my feelings of jealousy were derived from insecurity (material, leading to psychological) that i experienced as a young child, and resolving those feelings has made it much easier to not feel jealous of others.
if you feel that the way you interact with things (from what you said, primarily how you consume media) is the only possible way for you, but you don’t feel content about it, i would explore why it is that you feel that way. if you feel that the way you interact with things is truly inferior than the approach of others for any reason, and yet you still feel compelled to interact with things in the way that you do, i would investigate why. and if you’re uncertain which of those two statements is more correct, i would investigate that as well.
i think it’s not enough to just point out errors of liberalism in the fashion of mao and expect them to be magically corrected. if we fully accept the rationality of every human (on an individual and class level), then there are always specific material reasons why we learned to think incorrectly, as it were. in the same way that diamat gives us the tools to investigate the history of society in terms of its internal contradictions, dialectical materialism also gives us the tools to investigate - and resolve - our own internal contradictions, resulting in more correct and less liberal cognition.
sorry for the text dump hahaha. it’s just something i happen to have been thinking a lot about lately.