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.
Very uplifting thought- creating free spaces is for sure the best course of action, deeply meaningful even beyond the concept of success and failure.
Even just very small and temporary ones would do a lot, in my opinion.
Part of what makes direct action valuable is that it temporarily creates a space for just doing what needs doing, with less regard to the reality of capitalism and the state.