So, ive been thinking about how my trauma effects my politics. This may shock some of you, but a lot of my radicalizing experiences were pretty fucking traumatizing. Resistance is part of how i cope, how i keep from killing myself, how i get up in the morning after all the shit I’ve survived. I am under no illusions that I am emotionally healthy.
But that doesn’t just go one direction. How do we define and explore the pathology of boot licking, of continued obedience, of feeling perfectly fine and like it’s ‘just another day and wow yeah something scary must be on if the US marines are deployed down the street, i hope they get the bad guys soon!’?
Because this is a dangerous delusion. It is blatantly and violently counterfactual. So what the fuck? Pathologically stable attachment? Hypersucceotability to delusion?
How do we figure out what a healthy person and healthy context for them to exist in would even fucking look like?
I don’t just want to call the pathologically compliant names here¹. I want to figure out what breaks a person like this so we can fucking fix it. I want theories with actual utility in something adjacent to the situationist tradition.
¹’boot licker’ is perfectly suitable and requires no further theorizing. Not that I don’t also want to call them that.
My 5c:
We are not all the same and our priorities very quite strongly depending on our experiences, character (scale between fearful and curious), current state of mind etc. Most of the people are not particularly interested in freedom or justice and prefer illusion of stability, as they have no confidence, that they can function without hierarchical structures. In order to defend that illusion (of stability), they are ready to lie or do unspeakable things, because without the illusion they would be forced to confront their deepest fears of inadequacy and fear of death, as the root of all fears. Our capability to lie to others and to ourself is arguably one of the main engines of civilization (we call it “Abstract Thinking”) and for the masters of lies it is simply too easy to rationalize actions, situations and atrocities and construct imaginary worlds, where every convenient shit is justified.
As long as that fearful majority thinks that it has something to lose (status, comfort, future…), they will defend status quo (hierarchical, boot-licking structures) with tooth and nail.
We all have some of it inside, to different degree.